Let nothing divert you from your duty to your body. Up in the morning early! Habituate yourself to the brisk walk in the fresh air.

Brooding and all sorts of acrid thoughts, "the blues," and the varied train of depressed feelings, are among the most serious enemies of a fine physique — while the latter, in turn, possesses a marvellous power of scattering all those unpleasant visitors, and dissipating them to the winds.

The observance of the laws of manly training, duly followed, can utterly rout and do away with the curse of a depressed mind, melancholy, "ennui," which now, in more than half the men of America, blights a large portion of the days of their existence.

from "Manly Health and Training"

Whenever I talk about my devotion to hiking or how long I went without internet, I find that the collective defenses here are immense, impenetrable, almost invincible. Folks don't want to hear "I walk every day and chop wood", instead of "I go the gym and live on goji berries".

For example, since I moved offgrid into the high desert, I haven't had a well. I collect rain and snowmelt to bathe in. I expected this to be a temporary arrangement, but I've found my makeshift ritual to be so invigorating that I don't plan to stop: I stand outside on a wooden pallet, and pour water on myself from an old soupcan. Often the snow beneath my bare feet is melted away as I pour. Often my breath is caught for a moment in the shock of a stiff breeze. The contrast of the nearly boiling water pulled from the top of my woodstove, is what a German would call "herrlich". I feel strong, I feel healthy, those "acrid thoughts" are blown away, nothing can stop me.

Whitman's little homage to health is generally considered a joke, but I can't find anything I disagree with:

• The health of the body determines the health of the mind.
• Walking is the most important exercise.
• Get fresh air early and often.
• Bathe vigorously.
• Wear comfortable, durable, practical clothing.
• Give special care to your feet and joints.
• Dance.
• Rise early in the morning.
• Don't drink much.
• Eat meat.
• Protect your digestion as something precious.
• Sedentary occupations are the most dangerous to health.

This is all so obvious, it's almost embarrassing. "On such little things much depends."

A few supplementary guidelines:

• Learn to see everything as a question of diet and training.

• Train in something difficult each day.

• Social media is poison. Do not lie to yourself.

• Treat the internet like a library infested with drug dealers and vampires: have a plan of attack, execute, and flee.

• Learn to see the smartphone as a bottomless pit of alienation. Handle with extreme care.

• Every digital interface should be switched off by default, every day. Force yourself to make the choice of turning it on for a good reason.

• Protect the sanctity of your morning ritual.

• Protect and cultivate the quality of your sleep. 3 hours of deep sleep is worth 10 hours of fitful tossing. When I moved out to the desert, I realized that I had not slept deeply for years prior. You should wake as though from another world, from oblivion, reborn.

• Protect your microbiome. Avoid sucrose at all times, ingest natural probiotics daily.

• Drink herbal tea. Explore each herb slowly, over years. Keep it simple. I prefer nettle, mint, and fennel.

• Coffee is more than permissible, if not required in modern life. Ingest the same amount every day, brewed in the same way. Get high quality beans, and enjoy the ritual.

• If you use psychoactives, practice the microdose and strongly prefer ingestion over smoking.

• Marijuana is permissible, but longterm dependence is dangerous for your spiritual development. Prefer abstention.

• Alcohol is extremely dangerous to the longterm cultivation of mind and body. Administer only in the spirit of health and tradition. Abstain often if not completely.

• Practice fasting in everything possible, when possible. Fast from everything occasionally except water. Fast to test yourself, to grow stronger, to gain new perspective.

• Gratitude is one of the most powerful medicines available.

• Sex should be treated as a powerful ancient ritual, not to be abused, nor repressed, nor distorted, nor worshipped. Everything is fuel, everything is obstacle.

• Know the difference between clean dirt and dirty dirt: dirt from a pristine natural environment is clean dirt, and should not be avoided. It's good to have a little in your food, in your hair, in your clothes, in your bed. It makes you healthier and more sane. Clean often, but welcome clean dirt. Dirty dirt comes from unhealthy bodies and the poisons they ingest: artificial fragrance is dirty dirt, the dead skin of unhealthy people is dirty dirt, black mold is dirty dirt, stale air is dirty dirt, sadness and addiction is dirty dirt. Wash dirty dirt from your body and spirit as soon as possible. I would rather be covered in used motor oil than get one whiff of Febreeze. Did you know that ultraviolet light is the most effective weapon against the endocrine disruptors infecting the modern soul? If something won't stop stinking, leave it outside, and our star will blast it clean. Sun, wind, and rain will eventually render everything clean: try to internalize this fact.

• When you need rest, rest. Learn to fall asleep quickly. Learn the art of the delicious doze.

• Work when you work. Procrastination is a vice.

• Laugh as much as possible. Learn to find yourself ridiculous, but respect yourself all the more for admitting it.

• Drink the highest quality water available. Do not ingest a drop of chlorine except as a last resort.

• Antibiotics are the nuclear option to be used in extreme emergencies.

• Learn to vomit properly. When in the developing world, listen carefully to your stomach, learn to detect an intestinal parasite, and empty your system thoroughly.

• Learn to fever properly. Do not suppress fever, but encourage it early in the cycle.

• Learn to defecate properly. Morning regularity is essential. Adjust diet and routine until you achieve it.

• Protect your knees, your ankles, your wrists, your neck. Contusions, abrasions, cuts, and sore muscles are trivial. Joints and tendons are irreplaceable.

• Chronic inflammation is your enemy in the firstworld. Fight it with exercise, cold weather, woodfire, swimming, barefeet, simple food, singing, laughter, meditation, and deep sleep.

• Learn to trust the biology of healing. When you bleed, don't be hasty in stopping it. When something hurts, don't medicate it away. Be skeptical of every treatment which intervenes or suppresses.

• Learn to see every illness as an opportunity. The key to winning the battle for psychosomatic health is to think symbolically: "what does this disease mean? What is communicated here?"

• Consider the biomedical establishment your greatest enemy to longterm health. Doctors are the pushers and pimps of some of the most evil forces on the planet: corporate pharmacological interests want you sick, depressed, and dependent. Biopolitical agents want you ready to sacrifice your bodily autonomy for a reprieve from the nameless suffering of firstworld misery. Learn to research everything yourself. Learn the heuristics: the older and simpler and more obvious the remedy, the more likely it is to be legit. The right answer is usually to do nothing but rest. Bones heal themselves, organs balance themselves, brain chemistry corrects itself. Most of what goes on in a hospital will make you sicker. The only healing that happens there could have happened safer and faster in a quiet and reasonably clean home. Deep sleep, good food, and most importantly, the will to heal are the real healers of this 4 billion year old body.

• Stress, anxiety, frustration: these are the ingredients for psychosomatic disease. Bad digestion, back pain, and poor sleep are its common manifestations. Most of the exotic diseases becoming more prevalent in modernity are simply the advanced stages of chronic stress.

• No sacrifice is too great for the freedom from chronic petty stress and meaningless anxiety. No amount of money or career security is worth a miserable bodymind. Be courageous, be young, be reckless in the pursuit of health.

I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon. So I say: "Let me really play the buffoon. I am not afraid of your opinion, for you are every one of you worse than I am."

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, §II.2

Sexual dimorphism is at least 600 million years old. The story of male and female is so ancient that it predates the colonization of land by marine life, reaching back to that point before there was even a clear distinction between animal and plant. In fact, most of the terrestrial plants with which humanity is familiar, utilize the related strategy of heterogenesis. To imagine that we could subvert such an ancient force at the very root of genetic power and the diversity of life since the Cambrian explosion, something shared between marijuana, butterflies, and jellyfish, with merely a few years of ridiculous moral posturing and political powermongering, is so ridiculous as to be not worth mentioning. - So much for the serious consideration of transgender rhetoric.

The real causes of the transgender movement are this:

• The quest for an unassailable moral high ground.
• A protected status which gives leave to behave badly while acquiring social power.
• An identity so redundantly fortified by prestige and the histrionic display of self-realization, that it promises to banish the eternal nameless anxiety with which modernity is shot through.

The 21st century transgender movement is not about sex, and it's barely about gender. It's only about gender insofar as gender is the weakest link in the chain of identifiers conditioning the urban, sedentary, enfeebled body of the 21st century. Gender is the easiest point of provocation, the locale at which it's possible to stage a farcical revolution, in order to gain the gratifications of moral posturing: to pretend to be something one is not, and can never be, and then demand to be identified as such by all the world, is still sufficiently provocative to produce the illusion that one is fighting for something worth having - namely personal freedom. But all one is really doing, is baiting common sense with irritating nonsense, such that one can appear to have persecutors and enemies, such that the stage can be set for the drama of victimhood. Now one has a part worth acting out: a thousand times more socially rewarding and personally gratifying than the half-anonymous drudgery of being just-another-shmuck in a sea of shmucks - however brief this gratifying episode may last. I see very little discussion of the long aftermath: the many years after the medieval brutality of genital mutilation, after the initial shock and awe has worn away and one has run out of neighbors and friends to alienate and scold... Especially among those under 25 the longterm story must often be very ugly and sad. To encourage confused young people to transform their bodies into biological impossibilities ripe for the curio cabinet of vicarious exploitation, to leverage the healthy response of confusion and anxiety in youth for the production of political mascots in service of myopic and transitory social gain, strikes me as monstrously exploitative.

The brutality of transgender politics is almost equal to the cruelty of those ancient warlords who enjoyed the entertainment afforded by the castrated and disfigured. To call it "clownworld" is more true than we want to know. The origin of the "clown" is rooted deep in some of the ugliest traditions of mutilation as entertainment. "But we're not laughing." - But aren't you smirking? And don't you delight in the ironic cruelty of baiting what remains of human instinct, of watching the stupider half of humanity roil in outrage and bewilderment, as the smarter half winks to one another, knowing that when the fun is over the clowns will be shut away into the same dark corner where we keep child celebrities, botched plastic surgeries, old porn stars, and other discarded human biomass.

Is this a little dark for you? I tell you I see into the ape-heart and I know its secrets. I'm not fooled by its sanctimoniously puckered lips and feigned surprise: the wickedness and cruelty of our ancestors will find a path to daylight - not despite the moral pretenses but precisely because of them. Morality is the disguise one assumes immediately before performing something one does not otherwise have the stomach for. That's what it means to be "apesick": to be caught between one's urges to act like an ape, and one's disgust at the subterfuge required to follow that instinct. It slowly dawns on this creature what he is: the nausea of self-awareness.

Arguably one the reasons for the development of meditative discipline among hermits, is its effectiveness in dealing with the nausea of self-awareness. "How can I be defined by that, when I'm capable of witnessing it and feeling such repulsion?" And thus begins the ascetic quest to create a stable identity out of critique and contempt. Therefore allow me to abuse one of their most famous formulae, and say thou art that. What empowers the perspective I embody, is precisely the tension between critique and identification: all psychology begins and ends with self-knowledge. The ape does not want to be what he is, and in seeking the solution in disguise, posture, pathos, rhetoric, advocacy, reason, and critique, he becomes ape.

A neurosis is a containment field of personal power: a guardian spirit which once protected you against something worse than the heavy cost of neurotic behavior. Thus every neurotic entanglement is a steep contract you signed in a moment of desperation. Making shady deals with twisted spirits for the sake of protection: unfortunately that's the norm in a modern childhood, and almost no one buys their way out of that deal. What does it require? Such a spirit cannot be frightened away, wished away, nor commanded: that's precisely what qualified it as guardian. It must be appeased: there is always a sense in which even the most ridiculous neurotic distortion was, is, and will be correct. "Everything's bullshit anyway"; "no one can be trusted"; "no one really cares"; "I'll never be happy": these are all self-fulfilling prophesies, the fundamental validity of which can't exactly be disproven in even the best case. Fake it til you make it doesn't work with neurotic contracts: no matter how much evidence piles up in the opposing category, the conviction will remain. The neurotic spirit must be allowed a place at your table: it must be fed a little blood now and then, honored, named. After all, it is your first faithful friend: the depression he created was a warm blanket you shared together. You cannot ever leave him behind, else he will curse everything you do: he must be allowed to be correct, he must be allowed a little sacrifice of optimism, he must be allowed to shade your eyes from stupid wishfulness. There is a place for doom and gloom, there is a place for the worst, there is a sacred seat for violence and horror and a bitter end: that was the meaning of the ancient practice of sacrifice, a commonality in every culture of the world. Blood, sacred blood spilled right at the heart of the contract with life - the old ways said there was no greater mystery. Our private neuroses, our all-too-personal skirmishes with darkness, our needlessly ashamed thirst for the worst which inevitably finds its way to expression in every relationship, every squandered opportunity, every brutally flattened expectation which makes the general character of modernity seem so bleak and pointless: aren't we looking for a return to the sacred relation with death and loss? Isn't the "anxiety epidemic" a symptom of a body aching for the sobriety of pain? Aren't the endless consolation schemes and heavily medicated suppression apparati a stopped-up steamvalve that only builds the pressure?

I see both a growing acceptance of debilitating anxiety and a growing shame surrounding the thirst for the worst: it's no accident that the movies of the 21st century seem to become ever more adolescent, divorced from reality, and yet overstimulating and absurdly violent. Both cloyingly escapist and naïvely pessimistic: the "John Wick" series as example... The proliferation of the comic book point of view: the deferral of adulthood and its sense of responsibility for the world as we find it - and not as we wish it were. The proliferation of moral posturing and ridiculous politicizing belongs here also: all of it is merely as-if social positioning, which seeks to mine strategic advantage out of absurd fantasies no one actually believes. The great insight, which takes years to internalize, is that the ape will gladly feign stupidity as long as it's socially advantageous. No one actually believes that sexual dimorphism isn't an important genetic fact, for example: already the smarter actors are backing out of the extreme transgender rhetoric, seeking an unexhausted lode of moral authority...

There is my dark vision laid bare: can you stand it? He is my guardian spirit. He's right in this case: or at least, hearing his voice and following his logic is worthwhile, because no one else will go down that dark road with a cheerful knowing grin - but somehow he can. He looks at such things and laughs: the ape makes him laugh, despite how deeply he feels wounded by its wretchedness and how much he longs to admire it again. But not until he's been heard, in every gory detail, and every bit of mendacious cowardice before the truth of our situation is exposed, will he sit down and allow the overflowing heart of the singing poet to take over. So it is that the two sing together in my best moments, telling tales of tragedy and comedy, making all eyes weep like Odysseus in the house of Nausicäa...

Only rarely is this contemporary transgender movement concerned with anything like the mysterious power of the heyoka: that would require far too much personal excellence, solitude, spiritual cultivation, mojo, verve - in other words it could never apply to the mediocre majority of anxious modernity so desperate for a safe harbor. The aggression of a man united with the biological priority of a woman: a recipe for rare social power which requires a rare character. Unfortunately the current transgender fascination has almost nothing to do with the cultivation of outlandish character, and everything to do with an abuse of social contract for pathetic aims. The traditional allowance made for the sacred clown demanded that he orient his antics toward the communal wellbeing, that he become more responsible for everyone's sanity and health even as he threatened its norms and expectations, that he represent faithfully the thunderbeings and their power of change - but one cannot obtain this kind of power without a genuinely idiosyncratic orientation - in other words, one has to really be a strange twisted creature that's found its way toward the light and not merely a sad spectacle of imitative desperation. I fault the transgender movement not for its perversity, but its lack of glorious perversity: the trans population is ever more tame, invaded by dull moral actors and pedantic genderless bores the queens and queers of the 1980s would have mocked into oblivion if just for their bad taste in shoes.

装わぬ人の世を, 人の美しさを, 人の醜さを, この眼でしかと見た。

The human world without pretense, human beauty and ugliness, with this very eye I've seen it.

The Hidden Fortress

Again and again, Kurosawa asks this question: is humanity redeemable? What's the balance of beauty and ugliness? Is human nature more cruel, cowardly, and greedy than it is noble, kind, and generous? And most of the time, he succeeds in edifying us - he shows us the worst only to contrast the best. In the hands of the artist humanity becomes an object of informed love and pity, clarified hatred and contempt - and through his eyes even that hatefulness becomes something we are willing to swallow again and again... An artist may be essentially a seducer, but to be seduced willingly and without regret is not such a bitter fate. Yet all this only proves is that Kurosawa is redeemable: the rest of humanity through the eyes of the rest of humanity is unlikely to be anything worthwhile!

When are people redeemable? When they're looking out for themselves, when they're looking for a good time, when they're tribal and channeling their intelligence through instinct: the hustler, the hottie, the moshpit bro - these types are at least drawing upon fully rational sources of behavioral calculation. In comparison, the cargo cult scientificality of self-conscious late modernity, the lisping pretense to rational motive, the pathetic disguises of a fundamentally anxious creature, is all rather laughable, no? Isn't it about time we stop taking it seriously, when an obviously desperate but socially clever wretch takes up another posture of scientific reasonableness? Shouldn't we be quicker to spot this clown? Shouldn't it strike us as a bad joke when another pointlessly educated dope wants praise for boldly assuming a riskless compromise?

I consider the clown to be one of the most difficult archetypes of humanity. Unraveling it for myself has required the assemblage of highly diverse psychological firepower - my indirect circular approach serves me best when addressing what we believe we already understand. At first glance, it seems easy enough to formulate: the exaggeration of the ridiculous for the sake of social advantage. Often the clown is simply someone for whom there is no other form of attention.

But this immediately demands a communal definition of the ridiculous, which implies that what is parodied is what the community already knows about itself. And if a society is willing to pay something in exchange, what is the service rendered?

We should ask a professional clown. Allow me to introduce the most articulate and enigmatic clown I know of: Jacques Lacan. I've previously compared him to that famous character from commedia dell'arte, that Pulcinella: the wily amoral protagonist, somewhat like Coyote trickster, or 孫悟空, the Monkey King from 西遊記, Journey to the West, or any of the dangerous old shamans of our collective past, who fooled us, inspired us, led us astray, and probably helped stitch together a feeble sanity to get us over the next icebridge, past another winter, into another generation.

It's probably much too complementary to say that Lacan is "the psychologist of subjectivity". Where does he really shine? Where is he not merely promoting his primped Hegelian foppery, but speaking from experience? When he speaks of seduction. Lacan, the psychologist of seduction. A theory of perversion, a theory of sexy annihilation, a theory of dominance, of endless titillation - that's what he always meant and what was understood by désir. Psychoanalytic metaphysics through the eyes of a sexual predator: fascinating, but not liberating.

Why Lacan? Because his incessant talk of "the Other" clandestinely satisfies our engorged conscience and its consequences:

• By hardly speaking of anything but "Other", we seem therefore to be satisfying the demands of altruism.
• By constantly discovering how gravitationally repulsive true alterity is, we are excused from our failure to practice what we preach.
• By constantly discovering how annihilated and "subjected" subjectivity is, we feel understood and becalmed by a paternalistic master who makes of our embarrassing personal failures a tale of impossible universal woe.
• By narrowing psychology exclusively to the scope of "self and other", "imaginary and symbolic", Lacanian thinking arms and outfits the raging yet idle narcissism of the average over-and-under-educated urban pedestrian.

With Lacan we get back the right to Spinozan systematization-procrastination and the seemingly rigorous yet largely fantastic Hegelian habit of binary thinking: in other words, philosophy as irrelevant indoor unviable system-building and vacuous talk, just like we always wanted it to be.

The real admirable skill of philosophers as I find them, is to have created intellectually stimulating puzzles and ontological forms of rebellion, without ever disturbing a single brick of the edifice of our morality and means of life: to make philosophy into nothing more than well-mannered procrastination.

There is no healing power in Lacan. Lacanian teaching seems to make a mild neurotic into a much sicker but much more fascinating creature: self-interest is confused for self-respect. But maybe we prefer a "venomous flower" to a just another grimacing would-be butler? I've known such cases of Lacanian conversion, all too personally: what seems to liberate them partially, is the backdoor out of moral paralysis. Lacanian thinking does not confront but circumvents questions of how to live, even unconsciously undermines their relevance: everything becomes a question of seduction, of repulsion and attraction, of revelation and subterfuge, of information and disinformation, of beginning over again from an imaginary beginning, and thus never beginning at all. To impart a sense of a fresh start, of a beautiful ignorance, of an exciting new cloud of unknowing: perhaps that's more healing than we realize? I fault it for its lack of honest confrontation and eternal procrastination - but perhaps for a time, a youthful season, this kind of autumn of fugitive love is exactly what's needed?

Lacanian thinking is largely Hegelian idealism under new guises: a grandiose dialectic of self and other, the subject as constituted by a mysterious interiorization, an eternally unfolding logic at the very heart of consciousness... Largely fantastic and unreal - but mesmerizing. Most students simply cannot tell that very little of it is applicable to reality: it has the charm of an articulate calculus of psychoanalysis, or the innards of that ultimate anti-metaphysics.

Even if Lacan were right about everything he says about subjectivity, it might still be irrelevant. Is this advanced study suitable to spiritual masters who have conquered everything but the essential fabrications of subjectivity itself? Or is it the pseudologia fantastica of a supreme showman and artist of illusion, giving us what we want? A carnival ride of the soul? Would thoroughly understanding Lacan actually lead to greater freedom and self-mastery? Or would we only continue to stand in awe of his magic? Does he seek to liberate, or intoxicate?

Lacan talks endlessly of "desire" - but what no one ever says about it, is that this desire is always only neurotic and erotic. Only a deferral, a sleight of hand, a pursuit of mirage, a mindfuck. Lacan never talks about wanting and doing in the real world because he seems not to be familiar with it: perhaps he dresses himself, perhaps he nibbles a croissant, perhaps he prepares his toilette - but someone else builds his shelter, someone else cooks the food, someone else carts away his various messes. Nowhere in any of this fashionable psychology is the analysis of what it takes to do something big and real and difficult: the tension of yearning, the breakthrough of vision, summoning the courage to try, assessment of resources, preparation of material, assembling of parts, the recklessness required to begin, endurance of minor failure and oversight, repetition, the long will to see it through, the patience for the drawn out end, the polishing stage, inevitable disappointment, learning to move on and begin again.

How telling must it be, that Lacan did not seem to have the endurance to write books, but preferred to merely talk endlessly?

Lacan seems not to be able to analyze even his own realized ambition as preeminent psychoanalyst of Paris: what did it really take to get there? Was it all along a seductive game of neurotic deferral? Or did it take some cojones and more than a little reckless scorn? Where is the analysis of healthy youthful scorn? At least half of what is really accomplished in this world is powered as much by contempt as "desire".

Ιl y a pourtant une autre formule, qui, si elle ne démontre pas mieux son efficace, ce n’est peut-être que pour n’être pas articulable, mais ça ne veut pas dire qu’elle ne soit pas articulée, c’est « Je te désire, même si je ne le sais pas ». Partout où elle réussit, toute inarticulable qu’elle soit, à se faire entendre, celle-là, je vous l’assure, est irrésistible. Et pourquoi? Je ne vous laisserai pas ceci à l’état de devinette. Si ceci était dicible, qu’est-ce que je dirais par là? Je dis à l’autre que, le désirant sans le savoir sans doute, toujours sans le savoir, je le prends pour l’objet à moi-même inconnu de mon désir, c’est-à-dire, dans notre conception à nous du désir, que je l’identifie, que je t’identifie, toi à qui je parle, toi-même, à l’objet qui te manque à toi-même. C’est-à-dire que par ce circuit, où je suis obligé pour atteindre l’objet de mon désir, j’accomplis justement pour lui ce qu’il cherche.

There is another formula, which if it does not demonstrate any better its effectiveness, it is perhaps only because it is not articulatable, but that does not mean that it is not articulated. It is, "I desire you, even if I do not know it". Wherever it succeeds, however inarticulatable it may be in making itself heard, this one, I assure you, is irresistible. And why? I will not leave this as a riddle for you. If this were sayable, what would I be saying by it? I would be saying to the other that by desiring him without knowing it, still without knowing it, I take him as the object of my desire unknown to myself, namely in our conception of desire that I identify him, that I identify you, you to whom I am speaking, you yourself, as the object which is lacking to yourself. Namely that by this circuit that I have to take to reach the object of my desire, I accomplish precisely for him what he is looking for.

Séminaire X: L’Angoisse, §II

I've figured it out: Lacan modeled his teaching based on what he learned as an analyst: you only need to appear enigmatic, aloof, and not one but ten steps ahead at all costs - and the patient will do all the real work. Do not encourage clarity: employ the power of misunderstanding, of sudden reversals and revelations, of the unexpected. Lacan understood the power of perversity to inspire a sense of freedom and the illusion of exponential personal growth. He understood the power of seeming to be what the other wants. Cogency, empathy, and explanation are antithetical to fostering this illusion: the idea is to remain out of reach, yet so near. In fact sometimes so much more near than one ever expected - cheeks grazing.

Lacan did understand neurotic desire: this much must be granted. He is practically the prophet of intellectual seduction. But does any of this have any healing power? Or is it only an impressive narcotic - and a narcotic only for the hopelessly neurotic? Is its seductive power dependent on neurosis and does it therefore encourage and deepen the neurotic condition? Does Lacan secretly whisper in our ear that there is no escape from the ouroboros of eros? Is Lacanian thinking in the final analysis only another poisoncraft to be appreciated from a safe distance?

I would add that if one employed psychology only to seduce intelligent young women looking for the intersection of the intellectual and the sexual - one could find no better master. But to lure earnest young men into this labyrinth, to encourage this eternal swirl of the elusive, this indulgent dance of veils that does not yield to suppertime, this heady perfumery of the intellect - I cannot but find this deeply irresponsible.

I don't think Lacan at first, or ever, knew how or why his teachings were so compelling. To have known it would have broken the spell. I think he stumbled or intuited his way toward his seduction technique: I think he knew how to read an audience.

It's not Lacan himself I find objectionable. In fact there is a certain amoral atmosphere about him I appreciate. He mocks perhaps more than he teaches. I can sympathize with the delicate exigencies and risks of embitterment the stage performer must navigate: flirtation with hatred of the audience is not merely a degeneracy among rock stars but a necessity for all profound actors. Marlon Brando once said that acting was an occupation unfit for a real man. One is faced with either despising oneself for the falsification, or despising them for believing it, or finding a precarious beyond in the role of the mocking fool.

One can see that Lacan's charm has at times worked on me, also: as a "metrosexual" I was in the past more at risk of infatuation. But I've become much more wary: it's the way the icon of Lacan is used, that nauseates. Lacan the dildo...

L’animal - vous dis-je - efface ses traces et fait de fausses traces. Fait-il pour autant, des signifiants? Il y a une chose que l’animal ne fait pas: il ne fait pas de traces fausses pour nous faire croire qu’elles sont fausses. Il ne nous fait pas de traces faussement fausses, si je puis dire, ce qui est un comportement, je ne dirai pas essentiellement humain, mais justement essentiellement signifiant. C’est là qu’est la limite. Vous m’entendez bien : des traces faites pour qu’on les croie fausses et qui sont néanmoins les traces de mon vrai passage, et c’est ce que je veux dire en disant que là se présentifie un sujet, quand une trace a été faite pour qu’on la prenne pour une fausse trace, là nous savons qu’il y a, comme tel, un sujet parlant, et là nous savons qu’il y a un sujet comme cause et la notion même de la cause n’a aucun autre support que celui-là.

The animal effaces his traces and makes false traces. Does he for all that make signifiers? There is one thing that the animal does not do: he does not make false traces in order to make us believe that they are false. He does not make falsely false traces, which is a behaviour, that I would not say is essentially human, but essentially signifying. That's where the limit is. Understand me: traces made so that one believes them to be false and which are nevertheless the traces of my true passing - and this is what I mean by saying that here a subject is presentified. When a trace has been made in order that one should take it to be a false trace, then we know that there is a speaking subject as such, and we know then that there is a subject as cause and the very notion of cause has no other support than this.

Séminaire X: L’Angoisse, §V

Because I live in the high desert of North America, in the warm months I must be vigilant when walking through the brush: rattlesnakes are always in the back of my mind. There are periods when I encounter one daily. In the meantime I've learned something important about camouflage. Camouflaged shape and color can be more of a signal than is realized: it is sometimes the unsign, the false deadend, the preparatory inducement to false negative.

Would it be so difficult for a rattlesnake to produce a more subtle and less diagrammatic coloration? Moths and grasshoppers achieve this - as does the praying mantis, to pick a predator. Or is the crisp geometry of their patterns designed not to hide precisely, but to induce excess hallucination in the search function? Think about the jagged black diamonds on a pale background: doesn't this look suspiciously like the errors and artifacts of the visual cortex? What I have found through the last few years of anxious experimentation, is that trying to find a rattlesnake slowly makes you worse at recognizing it, because you have been infected by a hallucinatory gestalt. I have at times looked directly at one without seeing it, before it suddenly decided to reveal itself. Rattlesnakes hide between layers of neuronal signal processing, disguised as errata.

Why tiger stripes? Partly to break form and blend with leafy shadows, but also because they mesmerize, because they induce mild trance in the midst of a terror ripe for trance. Therefore much predatory camouflage does not merely conceal, but inspires preliminary hallucination in the search for it - and thus sufficient false positives to induce doubt: when the moment finally arrives, you hesitate.

But it was Lacan who gave me the additional clue, despite his ignorance of ethology. In spotting a hypnoid camouflage you have spotted a falsely false trace.

La trace faussement fausse: this is also the mask of irony. The primary means of confession in modernity is to reveal oneself through mockery of what one is, seeking to erase its traces even while exploiting its position. The clown says: "Because I wear the clownface, I am less clown than you." Consider the arrogance of those comedians whose career hinges on emphasizing their own neurosis: Louis C.K., for example.

This is the typical strategy of the openly neurotic and half-therapized: to achieve an unassailable position as simultaneously compassionate enough to see dysfunction in everyone, yet reserve the right to bad behavior as long as it can be diagnosed. Yet another reason why the proliferation of psychotherapy tends to only deepen neurotic investment...

The real purpose of intellectual sophistication in the modern subject is smoke and mirrors. To set up so many false positives along the way, so many parodies of neurosis, that the real neurosis remains hidden among the arsenal and one begins to believe that all traces are false: that there is no human nature. That we are thus "free": this is the meaning of French poststructuralism and postmodernity generally - hence the conspicuous usage of "post-". The final triumph is to hide the shameful secret in plain sight: to seem to be proud of one's weakness, to even convince two thirds of oneself that one is proud of it, to build a personality around this pretense! That is the urban intellectual manchild perfected.

To make compulsive insincerity a strategic advantage. To feign irony so frequently that sincerity merely seems like bad taste or poor acting. To disguise profound serious nihilism with a shallow cosmopolitan nihilism: imitative cynicism as a social maneuver. To induce misrecognition via a saturation of the signal of falseness: thus to hide in plain sight. To exhaust the native sense for bullshit by total collusion and barraging of the communicative channel, so that one may sneak right in the front door. A premature and purely mimicked irony concerning oneself which induces the nausea of a world of as-if, whose function is to blunt the power of recognition by preceding it with falsely false names.

The normative state with us is to be a liar thoroughly in form and essence, yet so well conformed to the time and place, that one is mistaken for "more genuine than genuine". One could just as easily analyze Jerry Seinfeld this way, as Socrates: modernity is not "new", and the pretense to novelty is only a symptom of degeneracy.

Das »Geträumte« des Traumes soll wiederum entwertet, seiner Realität beraubt werden; was nach dem Erwachen aus dem »Traum im Traume« weiter geträumt wird, das will der Traumwunsch an die Stelle der ausgelöschten Realität setzen.

What is "dreamt" in the dream is devalued and robbed of its reality. What is dreamt in a dream after waking from the "dream within a dream" is what the dream-wish seeks to put in the place of an obliterated reality.

Freud, Die Traumdeutung, §VI.C

I'm beginning to understand that the dream and mechanisms of the dream, can and should be employed to understand social behavior: all purely social behavior is as if. This is not necessarily to disparage sociality, only to point out why it is so susceptible to economies of deception: to see it any other way, is to risk disparaging everything about the human creature which is irresistibly genuine.

Therefore what happens when an essentially fictional behavioral set contains an avowed element of fiction? Truth appears. This is the meaning of "in vino veritas", the "play within a play", and why I consider television and the circus to be such valuable sociological sources: under the aegis of fiction and the protection of apparent negation, we begin to tell the truth.

So how do I watch for rattlesnakes? By practicing alertness without consciousness. The solution is to attenuate apperception at the center and rely on peripheral resolution, at all costs avoiding preemptive visualization. Don't think about it, don't prepare, only keep the perceptual surface clean of debris: I usually react to a snake before I have become conscious of it. The lesson for us is this: the falsely false trace relies on an excess of consciousness to succeed. The ironic clown requires an audience which wants to believe it already knows: there is a profound and disturbing connection between the scientific revolution and the proliferation of ironic actors, as the Greek renaissance demonstrated so well - Socrates was only another hipster-sophist pretending not to know...

What does Lacan represent? The freedom of the mask. The freedom of someone who has discovered he is too clever to be caught, that his gift of unflappable gab can get him out of any jam, and that by acting masterly he becomes master. It's extremely telling that Noam Chomsky called him a "conscious charlatan": does anyone else sense envy in that phrase? Is he telling us it's against the rules to be conscious about one's farce? That is indeed the sense Lacan gives us: his game is so obvious, so upfront that we convince ourselves it can't possibly be the truth: Lacan hides in plain sight. The purloined letter in Lacanian teaching reads: it's all bullshit. But the fact that he gets away with it, that everyone loves it, that the audience applauds and sits with open mouths scribbling his every word - that's the real lesson in studying Lacan: all the world's a stage.

He's thrilled to be fooling us all on multiple levels: too many levels to have been conscious of. Chomsky was wrong again, as always: Lacan was the ultimate unconscious charlatan. To the degree that he was conscious of it, was only mask, mockery, deflection - which is why someone like Chomsky feels so insulted.

It's unfortunate that Lacan was so irresponsible with his insights. For example, he was right to point us psychologists toward projective geometry: it's one of the crucial aspects of the method of the masters to understand that in the morphology of psychic phenomena, some relationships are invariant, others are not. Nietzschean thinking often revolves around this insight, and takes delight in shifting perspectives in order to watch the play of variance - in order to eventually hint at what does not change.

Entwining pure math with psychoanalysis is just too tantalizing. But Lacan lacked not only the intellectual conscience, but the assiduousness to see it through. And this is not all that prevented Lacan from reaching serious depth: as is typical of the latin lover, his levity extends only so far as his vanity permits. He cannot afford to ever admit to being a goof. The result is a nonchalance which is a mask for how terribly seriously he takes himself.

I believe that with "la faussement fausse trace" I've drawn out the best and worst of Lacan in a single stroke. I also feel I've fulfilled my obligation to him by demonstrating both his genius and his deviousness. Lacan himself is the purloined letter of postmodern philosophy: he is exactly what you hope he isn't. And in the tension between your better judgment and your desire, he reveals your weakness. That you feel exposed and in risk of coming up short, is only the same tired gag of every fashionmonger and friseur. "You're nobody without these trinkets": nearly every success in postmodern philosophy has been predicated on conspicuous consumption. Which explains why Lacan is so popular with art students and film critics, and so unpopular with establishment psychiatry: the psychiatrists didn't want sexy bullshit they can't keep up with, they wanted a dullard's taxonomy. To bore your rivals out of the competition, to secure authority and the illusion of knowledge through impenetrable dullwittedness... To the precise degree that psychoanalysis was able to become dull, it has been absorbed by establishment psychiatry.

Lacan is the pinnacle of the French style in psychology: one must appreciate how much that style owed to the novelists and playwrights to understand the statement. His fluency in unconscious mechanics, the ease by which he deals with the uncanny, the way he is able to convincingly paint anxiety, paranoia, and seeming-to-be...

But Lacan lacks an intellectual conscience: this also cannot be denied. The most flattering way of accounting for this lack, is to say that he had to sacrifice our expectation of coherence in service of what is not necessarily very intelligible and certainly not expected. He says this more or less somewhere: "why should we expect the truth to be intelligible?"

Lacan has in the end only accelerated the decline of psychoanalysis. Like a belligerent rightwing commentator confirming the prejudices of the left, he confirms what the stodgy reluctant psychiatrist wanted to believe about the whole of the field: that it was fashionable nonsense from the beginning. Klein, Bion, Lacan, and not to even begin to mention Jung - not only failures to continue the discipline of Freudian thinking, but effective examples of why this discipline cannot succeed on any scale.

But with these failures I've come to understand something about this "soft science" which is not commonly known. Physics and mathematics are usually regarded as the finest expressions of science: but are we ready to admit that these are the fields in which the scientific attitude requires the least emotional maturity? Psychology is the toughest test of the scientific spirit: no other project of knowledge forces you to gamble your self-respect, your worldview, your loves and hates, your sanity. In no other science are you so at risk of becoming a clown.

Allow me to demonstrate again what a hostile takeover of evolutionary psychology might look like. What's the origin of this unique primate ability to laugh? Firstly, it's important to dwell on the image of monkeys in the trees, screeching and gesturing at you from above: you understand what they mean by this. Consider the squirrel who won't stop chattering at you when you come too close to its cache: what do you feel? Irritation, a little embarrassment maybe - annoyingly witnessed. Laughter is the arboreal technique for dealing with threat: to make a fuss, sound the alarm, emphasizing distance and unreachability, so that superior firepower feels diminished or at least irritated enough to leave. The important factor distinguishing it from a simple alarm call, such as prairie dogs or chickens make, is this factor of irritation through unreachability: "You can't get me, and I know you want to". In other words, because taunting deters leopards, we developed laughter. Therefore who is the clown and why is he universally granted a place of ambivalent honor? Is he the first one to laugh, or is he the one who causes us to laugh, making us feel safe again? Is he the parody of a threat - the threat of self-awareness, the threat of the mirror? By containing, exaggerating, and mocking our potential for self-consciousness, the community feels relieved: the leopard of exposed apenature has retreated again... Which would mean that the real function of comedy is to suppress self-recognition. An abject fool even the lowest slob can feel superior to: one could learn something by measuring the average social distance any audience wants between itself and its clowns - close enough to know people like that, but far enough that the thought, "he's better than me" never occurs. Does the successful sitcom need to toy with identification of the average loser just long enough to discharge self-recognition? Or is merely shining the spotlight on the mediocre enough to pique vanity, and thus forestall any awakening? This gets filed under everything I wish sociology actually was.

The clown's relationship to ritual exclusion: instigator, lure, or scapegoat? Perhaps all of them at once. But it's certain that the clown satisfies the need to find someone within the group to exclude: the clown is almost a parody of ritual exclusion, as though for the edification and sanity of the community. Look carefully at Emmett Kelly: the hobo, the sad loner, the ne'er-do-well. He not only knew what a post-depression era crowd wanted to see mocked, he understood something more about the function of clowning. In his most famous bit, he would stand dejected in the center ring with a broom, and act as though it were his job to sweep up the spotlight. The lazy loser who just wants to escape notice, pursued and plagued by attention. He tries to splatter it, scatter it, and diminish it, but it sneaks after him - which especially seemed to delight the crowd. Eventually he sweeps it under the rug: identification and exclusion has been deferred... We can't doubt that in the most direct and universally appealing forms of comedy, the indelible logic of apenature appears: a shadowplay like this is much more ingenious than it may seem.

It's certain that the clownface was originally designed to make facial expressions more visible at a distance, just as most early forms of makeup in showbusiness. But immediately something else is invoked: the face of the ape ancestor, with his big expressive lips, his ringed eyes, his upturned nose. The clown is what Homo sapiens knows it is and needs to pretend it is not. This was clearly also involved in blackface: the "minstrel show" as one of the uglier examples of ritual exclusion - or its parodic discharge.

Why is the mime universally hated by good taste? Because it's an abuse of the clown-contract: the mime proceeds in the direction of the clown, and at the last moment wants to be taken seriously. He wants the recompense of a comedian, but rather than laugh at his parody he asks us to invest all the more: he only thrives where a sufficient baseline irony already exists, where good comedy is impossible anyway - in other words, among the insufferable.

Why is the clown so often ugly? Because he seeks a position lower than the average. Because when creating something everyone can laugh at, free of envy, ugliness helps.

Why is the clown frightening? In the "whiteface" type especially, there are echoes of the social predator. Whenever a stunted, twisted reject chooses to occupy himself with children, the community should beware. Whenever undeveloped adults attempt to relate to kids, the result is always the same: they parody stupidity and limitation, rather than drawing on innocence and potential - Mr. Rogers and "Barney" versus Sesame Street and Jim Henson generally. But the clown proper has nothing to do with children: it's about the failures of adult life, the sad absurdities they are subject to, and their need to feel at least better than the worst. That children are afraid of clowns is to be expected: subjecting them to it is only a cruel whim, an insult to childhood as some kind of preemptive failure. The clown as failed child: now we've tunneled back into the heart of ape cruelty, and discovered what it finds entertaining.

Here I turn again to anthropological testimony. I would like to recommend Colin Turnbull's classic, The Mountain People: as emotionally difficult a piece of anthropology as they come. Whereas he was blamed for idealizing the Pygmies in his previous work, here he's been accused of demonizing: the Ik people he did not love - in fact they taught him to unlearn love. If the Pygmies showed him innocent goodness, the Ik showed him innocent malice. He confronted the reality of a dying tribe, as many anthropologists have: but what was perhaps unique was the recency and suddenness of the transition from nomadic hunters to sedentary villagers. The result was a disruption and displacement of morality which is rarely so visible.

So we gave her more food and made her eat and drink all we could, put her stick in her hand and pointed her the way she wanted to be pointed, and she suddenly cried. Thinking she was afraid or wanted us to go with her, I asked, and she said no; she was crying, she said, because all of a sudden we had reminded her that there had been a time when people had helped each other, when people had been kind and good. Still crying, she set off.

The Ik up to this point had been tolerant of my activities, but all this was too much, combined with the fact that my colleague established a dispensary where he treated old people as well as young, but gave food only to the old. Openly critical of this waste of effort and food and medicine, the Ik said that what we were doing was wrong. Food and medicine were for the living, not the dead. But the old continued to come, the few who were left, not in the hopes of being kept alive, but so that they could go off quietly and die a little more comfortably. Then I thought of Lo'ono - that incredibly wrinkled old face, the sightless eyes peering as though they could still, with a struggle, see, and then those sudden, frightening tears of anguish at a memory that had been better forgotten. And I thought of other old people who had joined in the merriment when they had been teased, knocked over or had a precious morsel of food taken from their mouths. They knew that it was silly of them to expect to go on living, and, having watched others, they knew that the spectacle really was quite funny. So they joined in the laughter. Perhaps if we had left Lo'ono, she would have died laughing, happy that she was at least providing her children with amusement. But what did we do? We prolonged her misery for no more than a few brief days, for although Longoli did let her into his compound, he took her food and gave her neither food nor water. Even worse, we reminded her of when things had been different, of days when children had cared for parents and parents for children. She was already dead, and we made her unhappy as well. At the time I was sure we were right, doing the only "human" thing. In a way we were - we were making life more comfortable for ourselves, confirming our own sense of superiority. But now I wonder. In the end I had a greater respect for the Ik, and I wonder if their way was not right, if I too should not have stood with the little crowd at the top of the oror and laughed as Lo'ono flapped about like a withered old tortoise on its back, then left her to die, perhaps laughing at herself, instead of crying.

The Mountain People, p.228

One must have courage to read The Mountain People with an open mind, and even more so an open heart. It's quite palpable and even familiar, what Turnbull felt in those years: it's the disappointment and bitterness of our worst moments, when life seems like a cruel joke played out for no one - when we suspect that we have been the chump all along, and that nothing was ever going to turn out differently than this final indifferent contempt. For most of us, only a scathing lifelong affliction of neurosis will ever teach us to feel this way: that no one cares, that even you cannot afford to care, that not only are you alone because no one else will be with you, but because you have abandoned yourself also...

[...] the quest for morality seemed increasingly pointless. It was yet another luxury that we find convenient and agreeable and that has become conventional when we can afford it, but which, in times of stress, can and should be shucked off, like religion and belief and law and family and all sorts of other appendages that become hindrances at such times.

p.230

Turnbull found out how shallow human virtue is, that familial bond and loyalty are luxuries, that the human creature makes accurate calculations of personal advantage at every turn, and will exploit every opportunity to seek the slightest gain. He found out that morality is a shadow puppetry, because the human being can live without it, because when it is no longer advantageous, it is shed entirely rather than adroitly shifted in a politically safer direction. His book is a chronicle of a forcible disillusionment with the human character: it would never have happened to a such a nice and well-meaning man without such extreme and prolonged exposure to a tribe at the edge of annihilation.

But we are mistaken to say: "Here is human nature revealed", as though an emergency protocol sufficiently expressed the entirety. The human nature we're looking for is not a core essence of selfishness which resists some other virtuous force called altruism - there is no tidy binary relation between "altruism and selfishness" as has been propagated by sneaky priests hoping to inspire malleable stupidity in the wake of that teaching. Rather what we're looking at is a layered series of functional modes, each with their adaptive value: a chain of metastabilities along several dimensions stretching from stress to ease and back again. Cruelty to kindness, violence to peace, loyalty to treachery, lies to truth: each have their place, their function, their time, their reason for being. And each will negotiate with the other to achieve expression in any moment: every gesture, every word, every emotion is a compromise with everything the human creature has evolved to be ready for. What the Ik were forced to become, is what humanity has been forced to become many times before: to capitalize on the worst of apenature in order to ensure another day and another chance. If they are devious, cold, and vicious it is because these are virtues in the canon of ape behavior: it's their genuine innocent happiness in the midst of cruelty that seemed to disturb Turnbull the most - that laughter could be so sweet when inspired by pain and death. But mocking laughter is almost a "metavirtue" accompanying all others: it's a sign that the ape believes in itself and its future. There is no essential bond between innocent laughter and moral innocence: that's a vertiginous lesson cutting right into the heart of apenature.

Therefore what's most instructive about this book to me, is not so much the Ik themselves but to watch Turnbull spiral and divest himself of his illusions. Piece by piece, he learns to find the part of himself reflected in the cruelty and indifference of the Ik. The ledgerbook of his soul shrinks by the day, as he concedes more and more territory to an exposed moral posturing and finds himself more honest but seemingly less substantial than before: moral outrage is a swelling, a bluff which conceals lack of resolve. So much of what people fear in a supramoral perspective is that nothing will remain: but this is only the fear of a balloon-spirit, a gasbag, and the reality is that so much more subtlety and sweet emotional valence lies waiting in the aftermath of the grotesque posturing of moral defenses. There's also no essential enmity between cold calculation and gentle affection: a successful hardass can afford such delicacies.

The beautiful human, like the beautiful body, seems to be a myth perpetuated by the game of self-deceit, at which humans are so singularly adept. In fact, after even a few months with the Ik one is tempted to think that if there is such a thing as a basic human quality, self-deception it is.

p.33

It is ugly because one expected to find something else. One expected to find a pantomime of the social virtues: a good people will respect your fears, your fragile ego, your sense of fairness, your sentiments and consolations. A bad people will reveal the shallow and transitory nature of your own virtues, and laugh at you for them.

Even reciprocal altruism, that overfed brat of anthropology, doesn't survive the experience:

These are not expressions of the foolish belief that altruism is both possible and desirable; they are weapons, sharp and aggressive, which can be put to divers uses. [...] The object, of course, is to build up a whole series of obligations so that in times of crisis you have a number of debts you can recall, and with luck one of them may be repaid.

p.146

But this is merely the unconscious social calculations which the human creature performs at all times, in all circumstances: here it's merely naked. The Ik are merely more naked than humanity usually is: their greed, their pettiness, their vicious delights, their incessant scheming, their shallow emotion, their transitory alliances - these are usually the "foibles" our storytellers and psychologists go to great pains to reveal in the everyman, peeling back the many layers of flattering clothes. These vices are usually the crux of a gaudy morality play, or the butt of a racist joke, or just the more obvious sins of a wretched gossiping old woman, or a greedy old fart, or a spoilt child: but to find it at the heart of everything a society is, to suspect as Turnbull seems to, that these calculations are in fact the definition of sociality itself - that is a brave first step, and yet also still too naïve. Cynicism is the naïveté of the disappointed. It's the interplay between flattering costume and ugly motive that defines human sociality still more: without the polite lies and deferential mutual deception, it would not be human society. And who's to say that our beautiful illusions don't have just as much validity? When we dance in concert and mime the rituals of a virtue we don't possess, don't we come almost as close to the possession of those virtues as to the dispossession of them?

Therefore it's not so much "altruism" which the Ik have been forced to abandon under stress, but vanity. The most adept social maneuverers are always on the lookout for those two most reliable handles of primate psychology: greed and vanity. If it were only greed at play, there would be no recourse in negotiation and the stalemate would result too often: the salesman must have something else to appeal to. The ape also needs social greed alongside his impeccable material greed to function as a group: in other words, it's the foible of vanity that makes us good neighbors.

Turnbull summarizes the Ik childhood:

[...] that is the rite de passage, the destruction of that fragile bond called friendship. When this has happened to you three or four times you are ready for the world, knowing friendship for the joke it is.

p.137

But this is just ghetto logic - this short ride "from the bullied and beaten to the bully and beater". It seems clear to me that he could have done the same study in the worst neighborhood of 1980s Detroit, or 1930s Shanghai, or Soviet Moscow, or a supermax prison in Alabama. Turnbull's book is after all only the record of a remarkably brave but still very naïve clean boy coming to grips with some hard truths, in his own scholarly, heavily moralized way - something Bartholomy would know about. He makes a few feeble attempts at academic detachment, but has too much honesty in concert with so much violent exposure to sustain it: he admits the defeat of his conscience, his worldview, his prejudices. It is the process of this defeat which is interesting and instructive.

It's clear that in a more embedded historical context Turnbull's study would not have cornered his moralizing naïveté so effectively: it's always possible to blame "society", or the institution, or economics, or whatever other name one finds convenient. And in the case of the Ik we blame politics and hunger: but there was something about their situation perched on their mountain, largely autonomous, almost enjoying their own slow demise, refusing to learn another solution that cut into Turnbull's tender heart and showed him "all the bestiality I ever want to see".

It's important to remember that Turnbull was an Oxford-educated British boy: suddenly all the shock-and-awe and the drawn out self-absorbed moralizing makes more sense. If he had been an American of the mid 20th century, perhaps Brooklyn-born, he might have attempted instead to jive with the Ik - to already be that cool, unconcerned, a true realist. And we would have lost this useful confrontation between Western cultivated naïveté and instinctual necessity.

While they still retain the quaint old-fashioned notion that man should share with his fellows, they place the individual good above all else and almost demand that each get away with as much as he can without his fellows knowing.

p.101

Its likely that even at the height of their functional nomadic days, Turnbull would have found the morality of the Ik difficult to accept: they clearly possessed the harsh pride of the hunter and the political cunning of the nomad. It seems that by being thrust directly into sedentary life, this naked pride of the hunter found itself most compatible with the shameless exploitation of the village lout: and thus the Ik began hunting each other. The cold heart toward the young and old that once kept their lineages strong enough to handle the herds of the African steppe, now seemed merely cruel and thoughtless.

And as is clear from the preface composed in the aftermath, he found a way to escape his own insight - scathed, wiser, but again foolishly wishful where his wisdom could not grow:

In spite of it all, and contrary to the first tidal wave of disillusionment, it has added to my respect for humanity and my hope that we who have been civilized into such empty beliefs as the essential beauty and goodness of humanity may discover ourselves before it is too late.

All that remains to the Ik is mockery, derision, the misfortune of others. The finest and most unique weapon of apenature remains to the end: without laughter, the human race could not have convinced itself to press through the unimaginable bottlenecks of the last 2 million years. What I'm terming "clownworld" is therefore only a resurgence of this core adaptive strategy in the midst of cultural decay: to find someone more ridiculous than oneself, to manufacture someone - an angry dwarf, a mutilated child, a sanctimonious eunuch, a half-man half-woman sacrificial object, carried aloft to the highest temple... Praise and glory are prelude to that communal sacrifice which justifies and perpetuates even the most corrupt and dissatisfied social sphere.

That the human race is a making a fool of itself is no accident and not merely a result of its social desperation. Just as I see calculated risk mitigation in gullibility and willful stupidity, so in the grotesque clownfaces of moral posturing I see a deeper unconscious stratagem. Not only to make the world uglier, and thus flatter, and thus more navigable, and not only to induce the atmosphere of farce such that the terms of social negotiation remain safely within one's powers of imitation, but also to draw out disgust and dismay from those in whom aesthetics retains the compulsion of instinct - in order to identify, isolate, and target them. The nausea induced by the moral clown is part of the targeting system of anonymous mass violence. They exaggerate precisely those traits they know you cannot stand: partly as a form of short-term revenge, but more profoundly in the hopes of eliminating all destabilizing forms of clarity and beauty. This is one of the deeper motivations for the epidemic of obesity, for aggressive cultivated ugliness, and general slovenliness in the lower classes - alongside the hyperbolic demonstrations of morality in the upper classes: they seek to know who cannot withstand ugliness. This isn't a particularly new arrangement, and I could probably have made the same observations in postrevolutionary France, as Stendhal did.

When surprised by an unexpected scrutiny, people often behave worse than usual - not merely as an expression of nerves and self-sabotage, but as a means of regaining control. When people feel judged for their wretchedness, they often seek to provoke yet more disgust in order to find a commonality at the lowest possible level. At the moment you feel infected, they say: "You are no different."

And we have to admit, there's an entanglement between our attitude of superiority and their cultivated ugliness: who's the clown? Who's confused about essential human nature? By splitting and projecting its extremes, we have made the problem seem insoluble: one side judges moral posturing for its ugliness and hypocrisy but requires its haughty mien; the other mocks the judge but would like his right to rule. And both get what they want at the cost of their better judgment: the result is the well-known arrangement wherein the unconscionable hypocrite achieves rule by deepening his cynicism into nihilism, while the conscientious objector achieves haughty critique by repressing his moral skepticism and risking hypocrisy - and around we go, blurring one into the other.

He looked me straight in the eye as he carefully said, "They are burning a man for incest." I think he was looking for some kind of reaction that he could exploit, but I merely felt a mild interest and asked if they would burn him dead.

p.262

The connection between clownworld and the Ik: they're hoping to catch you in a moment of genuine moral outrage, so that they may laugh at your naïveté, your credulity, and maybe your hypocrisy. By spending the currency of self-contradiction so blatantly, by exposing his own hypocrisy so flagrantly, the clown hopes to evoke moral outrage - to find a point of compulsion, which is a point of weakness. Anything non-negotiable is a point of weakness in social terms: morality is always laughable - this has never been far from awareness in human history, despite appearances.

It's long been my intuition that hidden in the clown is a form of wisdom which defeats all others. That the clown represents the end of wisdom, or its penultimate. There the problem of desire is supposedly overcome. Desire within the project of knowledge always threatened to reduce every discovery to wishful conclusion, vanity, premature enlightenment. By seeming to resign to foolishness, the holy fool obtains that which was not his to begin with. When I was on Mount Athos in my early twenties, I traveled with a young Russian monk who was visiting one of those saints-in-the-making, a special recluse. The resulting scene was as Dostoyevskian a moment as I've ever known. I remember how he greeted us: he stuck his bulbous nose through the fence and asked what the hell we wanted. When my earnest companion became obsequious and desirous of his wisdom, this wicked old man spoke only to his donkey, making a show of lavishing attention and affection on the perhaps equally confused creature. I've been taken in many times by pretenders to wisdom, but in this case I felt I saw through the whole farce: this old man was very skillful at pinpointing the arrogance and ridiculous attitudes of his supplicants, and I felt his mockery was justified. But I didn't feel he had much more than that, and allowing his disciples to believe there was a great wisdom hidden behind the jokes, was a form of dishonesty. Claiming not to have it, they believe you have it all the more. The ape who mocks the ape seems to transcend apenature, despite utilizing at least two key features of that nature: mockery, and the falsely false trace. The holy fool isn't genuinely holy because he's a false fool, he's a genuine scoundrel because he's doubly false. Those who seek human wisdom are fools, and those who embrace foolishness become ape-wise: I've spent too many years on the wrong side of that formula not to know better. It wasn't until I learned the same lesson with women that I got it. It didn't matter that Nietzsche told me so: I couldn't hear until it was too late.

So I've learned to doubt the knight of infinite resignation, the ironic rabbi, the stonewall psychoanalyst, the withholding guru, and any form of the ecstatic slave, the one who needs my confirmation to be complete. He feints, I do a doubletake, then because he respects me more than he lets on, he begins to believe it. The audience acts before the stage, the actors merely imitate, and there is no witness.

I searched for this witness. I played the kind of fool almost no one is willing to play: the earnest unwilling fool - the kind of young man who creates sages and teachers in the wake of his admiration. And in the long aftermath I can tell you this: an earnest thirst is worth more than all quenching answers. I have wished that I was the coolheaded clown, knowing and ironic, but my type is cursed with real foolishness: honesty, yearning, and perseverance. To be too sincere, too motivated, too serious in intent: I know the pain of the child who is already a joke because he is already too old in intent and too young in method.

This post is an except from Apesick.

In the aftermath of rage and destruction comes receptivity, subtlety, gratitude, joy: those are your rewards for bravery and good deeds in philosophy and spirituality. We don't necessarily get any certainty or lasting sense of superiority - it fades. What we get is a sense of being more alive. Which is itself dangerous: to live with a cracked open space, to live with less certainty, with the sense that many valences are dancing their dance, and which of them will turn out to be dominant is not known. This is true always: everything will be reinterpreted at a later time - by history, by inertia, by the process of living. Therefore what anything is at any one time is always up for grabs: that's what it means to live einverleibt with a Nietzschean education. It means to acquiesce to the continually superseding judgments of history: that you don't know what you are now, nor what you will be, nor what will be made of you by those who come after. The only certainty is that you are wormfood: so be dirt, so make friends with dirt - make friends with the worms preemptively. Make friends with the idea that you are already on fire: that your bones are being dried for someone else's kiln. That you are already food: not only will you be consumed and transformed, but that your degree of freedom now is to become food - this is what it means to make medicine. To be a person of medicine: a well that does not run dry, because one is willing to crack open space a little more, to find a deeper aquifer. To dig for the bigger yes, the finer ore of affirmation. That vein of anguish and joy reaching back to your ancestors: the very worms gathering around you, chanting your ancient names - "wormfood", "earth", "the river of light".

Has anyone considered what it means, that the descendants of the world's most devoted fire cult, one day wished for "extinguishment"?

From Agni to Buddha: almost a paradigmatic study in cultural degeneracy... That a culture does not only grow tired, but sick of itself: precisely that which animated the ancestors, is one day experienced as the root of evil.

Without violent intemperate people, asceticism is never realized - and we are only Buddhists "in theory", in the café, mouthpieces of armchair nihilism. But "armchair nihilism" is the only kind of true nihilism: one no longer has the courage for anything. To be a weapon in the fight for nihilistic perspectives is not to be a nihilist at all.

Therefore the worst kind of Buddhism is "in theory": the ascetic practice is meant to revive and preserve the violent instincts, to provide a vehicle for its preservation across the vast valley of maladaptation. Without ascetic discipline, one is merely degeneracy, merely indulgent on all fronts, merely seeking blamelessness with a minimum of cost.

Buddhism must be resisted: it should be studied as a refinement of poisons, as an articulate sickness, as the most elegant nihilism yet devised.

Buddhism represents the danger to the human soul in this path of civilized collectivism: a danger because it is so correct, so realistic, so kind in its administrations - the kindest and most noble castration yet devised. A domestication of the ape which seeks to afford him maximum dignity, maximum self-respect, maximum equanimity: the Buddhist as compassionate zookeeper. The idea is preemptive self-castration: the practitioner leads the way, becomes a paragon of modern virtue, and maintains no illusions about his chances as an animal. To be Buddhist is to be collaborator: to transform the conspiracy against the resistive elements in humanity into a noble spiritual quest. To anticipate and exceed the requirements of prostration and the annihilation of instinct, to make the torment of this annihilation into a field of battle and a proud subtle violence, the "final frontier". That Buddhism represents a resurgence of the nomadic pride, warped and halfdead, but possibly more violent than ever: it wants to see instinct not only dead, but its root cut out, extinguished, extinct. The extinction of the type "man": to that end, the violent instincts must be greatly refined, both reducing their scope while enhancing their accuracy. The great correction one must make to all postaxial morality, is never to believe its claims to have eliminated nor wished for the end of violence, but a change in target.

Firstly, we'll never represent anything but permanent convalescents: we're not a candidate for traditional life. Secondly, there are advantages to dwelling in this wasteland, despite the immense risk of psychosomatic collapse.

To be a medicine man is embrace isolation, to lean into an idiosyncratic relationship to oneself and the environment. The traditional initiation rituals make it abundantly clear: you must exit the boundaries of tribe and taboo in order to acquire shamanic power. The medicine man is supposed to be the only realized individual among many relatively unconscious unbothered people, who have no need of the anxiety of individuality. The medicine man undergoes the extreme duress of wandering outside the protection of the psychic circle, letting the neurosis come crashing down, letting it peak into a psychotic moment - as they say, to reach into the spirit world and get medicine for the people.

In modernity, it's confusing: no one is fully on the inside of any circle, there is no tribe, and as a result everyone's in the middle of a botched shamanic initiation. How far they've made it along that path, depends on their resilience and the degree of isolation experienced early on - such that most of the people you meet have adapted themselves around the necessity of precluding and aborting this initiation on a permanent basis. The more potent is this deferred initiation, the more obvious and precarious the prevention: the most prone to psychosomatic disease make the strongest medicine.

This goes a long way to explain why we feel there's so much bad faith sorcery everywhere - that modernity is riddled with petty black magic, with half-completed spells and fragmentary rituals of exclusion, no ceremony completed nor broken: that everyone feels half-in-half-out, between nightmare and birthday party - tense, paranoid, and fine.

We look back on our nomadic tribal heritage primarily to understand where and why modernity has failed - not to imitate it. Any renewal must come naturally, entirely unforced, unplanned. And it will not be us: we're only allowed faint aftertastes of that freedom from anxiety, that balls-to-bones belonging of the tribal creature. We're here to survey the damage, clear a few roads, and hum a few bars of the old songs we'll never hear.

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There's plenty of evidence that the brain operates at or near criticality. That most of its function which we currently find mysterious, can be described as aftereffects of a nonlinear dynamic system near its critical moments: it's the best theory for describing longrange correlation, which is coordination between physiologically distal and sparsely connected neural tissue producing simultaneous and coherent response, and the mystery of the shallow-but-wide neuromorphic computational style.

That's more or less accepted, or will soon be. What remains to be shown is how or why longrange correlation could come about in general: for example, its known that fractals are generated by those processes which exhibit nonintegral dimension, such as the space-filling line, or the coast of infinite jaggedness. It's important to remind ourselves that fractality means it's possible to traverse from a very large scale to a very small scale without a change of navigational function - meaning that one continuous process or line of force is capable of traversing not only great distance but scale. This is rare to nonexistent in classical physics.

Mathematicians are content to describe the elegant fractality of the process, but don't ask themselves under what condition a system would ever exhibit something like a "space-filling line" - and even those working within chaos theory or synergetics, are content to say that longrange correlation occurs at criticality but never seem to ask why. The answer didn't occur to me until I began thinking of all these systems as dissipative: a pot of boiling water is bubbling because the superfluous molecular energy seeks a dissipative path. Bubbling is the liquid phase pushed to the limit of its dissipative load.

The original model of self-organized criticality is the sandpile: simply drop one grain at a time onto a flat surface, and eventually the pile will exhibit fractal structure along with the signature avalanche behavior of critical dynamics. As it turns out, it works better with rice - but what's happening? There are three primary forces at work: the friction between any two grains which holds them in place, the gravity pulling them downward, and the addition of new grains as input energy. The result of tension between these forces is expressed in the average maximum slope of the pile. Once this slope is achieved, the pile tends to remain at this slope and expand outward through small collapses. Yet sometimes this slope is exceeded as the pile becomes a little tall, and at this point we expect a larger collapse is due. What's governing this behavior? What we can say for certain, is that there's an average probability that any one grain will roll at a given slope: but when one grain rolls, it's also likely to push other grains past their friction limit and start an avalanche. This becomes surprising when we realize that this simple dynamic tends to create both self-similar structure and a distribution curve of avalanche sizes which mirrors many other systems: including the cortical "avalanches" of excitation patterns in the human brain, the foraging patterns of ant colonies, and the responsive cascades of internet traffic.

• Low temperature systems exhibit high degrees of order - but not of the same genera as at criticality. A low energy state is orderly in the sense that it's predictable, redundant, crystalline. It has what they call "correlation length", in that given a point, one can swing a radius in any direction and predict the structure: this is the nature of a crystal and tessellation.

• High temperature systems have low degrees of this kind of order, in that one cannot predict the neighboring configuration even given a large sampling of a local area: it has little or no correlation length.

• Critical order is very different, as though it were a hybrid.

The insight comes from the fact that chaos should not be defined as "random probability": this is only a measurement artifact and the perspective of a technician dissatisfied with his data, rather than a theory of dynamics. Chaos and disorder in general is a result of rapid switching between competing dissipative modes: the appearance of randomness is a result of high degrees of competition such that each path is fragmented, interrupted, partial. A critical phase transition is the balance of multiple modes holding each other in tension, a crisis which is in some ways the fuller realization of chaos. This perfect tension produces its own kind of homogeneity: critical order, which has scale invariance as a special consequence of its realization.

It could be conceived as a difference between usable and useless chaos: useless chaos occurs when low temperature order is sufficiently disturbed to produce low predictability but not yet scale invariance; useful chaos is a balance between competing dissipative modes at a poised equilibrium, such that the crisis is fully realized at all scales. This realization is itself an expensive mode of dissipation, expensive enough to contain high energetic throughput.

I provide now a carefully sorted vocabulary list. These are very loose groupings, designed only to help orient the reader to this vast and disparate field. Each term has different origins, with diverse qualitative implications. Some are supersets of the others. Some are technically valid only in a limited scope, some are almost universal. Each one is worth looking into if its meaning is not clear.

Transition:

• Criticality
• Phase transition
• Susceptibility
• Poise

Recurrence:

• Self-similarity
• Scale invariance
• Inverse power law distribution
• 1/f and pink noise

Dimension:

• Correlation length divergence
• Fractal dimension
• Nonintegral dimension
• Hausdorff dimension
• Critical exponent

Momenta:

• Metastability
• Attractor
• Limit cycle
• Orbital moment

Event:

• Avalanche
• Cascade

Order:

• Phase
• Order parameter
• Coherence
• Redundancy
• Crystallinity
• Oscillation

Disorder:

• Chaos
• Noise
• Stochastic distribution

Feedback:

• Nonlinearity
• Harmonic distortion
• Hysteresis

Amplification:

• Stochastic resonance
• Dither

What's happening in a phase change? The quantum of throughput energy is straining the dominant dissipative mode, such that it begins to explore transitions to the next mode. At the point that it falls back from the upper mode into the lower, a kind of sideways path is discovered which accepts a larger quantum of energy than we might expect. This path is constituted by scale interaction: the interaction between scales is the dissipation channel immediately before chaos.

But what is a "phase"? It's a mode of dissipation: even if we imagine the phase of any given substance as a highly stable and energetically conservative system, we should think of every configuration as a rich deposit of energy - every form of order as an expression of the potential for change.

This is primarily what seems to hold people back, in the imagination of how and why criticality might be so ubiquitous: a "phase transition" is not some accidental arbitrary point in the graph, it's the maximum dissipation channel available to an overcrowded and constantly perturbed nonlinear system - to be caught between a disintegrating solidity and a freefall one cannot keep up.

What the literature hints at, but does not quite say, is that a fractal arises as a tessellation of competing dissipative paths. Like a packing problem in configuration space, the system finds dissipative efficiency via correlation length divergence.

It is as though chaotic fragmentary order were able to accidentally discover this path along the way, as though it's a side-channel of nonlinear dynamics: a tessellated nonintegral path, possible only at the junction between phases.

But why not just transition gradually into the next phase? Why a basin? And thus the metaphor of boiling water in an ordinary pot fails, because constraint is required: it must be sufficiently difficult to transition to the next order, such that fractal dimension becomes an easier dissipation path than the gaseous state. This pot must have a lid - and in neural terms, there must be some powerful constraint at work which forces neural systems into the critical path...

A few caveats:

• The essence of a fractal is not self-similarity, but fractal dimension: Mandelbrot.

• Chaotic systems often follow fractal trajectories known as strange attractors, which show self-similarity, but these are not necessarily caused by criticality: Per Bak.

The strange attractor has nonintegral dimension. The usual explanation for this remarkable fact relies on analyzing its path in statespace. Given a dissipative system with 3 variables, the attractor must be:

1. Less than 3D to allow for asymptotic approach: if the attractor had any volume, it would prevent some trajectories from approaching it asymptotically. It must attract.
2. Greater than 2D to allow for deterministic neighbor divergence: if the attractor were a 2D surface, neighboring trajectories could not diverge without intersection - such intersection would mean a "path choice" and the system would no longer be deterministic. It must be sensitive to small changes.

This is why they talk of "stretching and folding": nearby points diverge, distant points converge, and in this dual action the attractor's shape is drawn.

But this argument is backwards, as most mathematical proofs seem to be. It argues from definitions to the plotted data, without attempting any real causal theory. Again I lean toward the dissipative search: why would a phase transition produce a fractal in statespace? Under what conditions would this be the path of least resistance?

• Why asymptotic approach? Because there is no other optimum dissipation mode. Initial paths will converge here as long the energetic throughput remains steady. An attractor is an order's last compromise with chaos.

• Why neighbor divergence? The usual argument from chaos theory says, "because the system displays sensitive dependence on initial conditions": but that's not an explanation of the dynamics. Why should a system be so sensitive to small differences? Because it is poised, because it amplifies friction into signal, because the tension between constraint and input energy propagates perturbation upward and downward.

It's important we understand the difference between fractals in statespace, like strange attractors, and a fractal in material space, like a coastline. Yet another thing I have not seen stated in the literature, is this: most likely the fractals Mandelbrot found in nature are the traces of statespace fractals. On the other hand, the argument I just gave for the "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" so prominent in chaos theory - the butterfly in Brazil which causes a tornado in Kansas - shows how the realized material structure must in turn shape the possible evolution of the system. In fact, this may be the secret of complex dynamics: that the future evolution of the system and the traces it leaves behind itself shape one another. That is what we mean by "nonlinear".

Correlation length divergence can be conceived as a crystallinity skewed to reside between scales, as though between dimensions. An asymptote creates its own nonintegral dimension.

How does scale invariance arise? As though by withdrawing from each other, each scale expresses every other. In the expansion itself, the pattern is expressed: by running away into higher and lower scales at every scale, it seeks a space for dissipation. The dissipative expenditure is maintenance of this diagonal of interaction: the sum of simultaneous horizontal and vertical scale interactions while the fractal is continuously regenerated. Viewed this way, that nonintegral dimension characteristic of a fractal is the angle of diagonal scale interaction: the steeper the angle, the closer the fractal is to the integral n+1 dimension.

In this mode, lines of force or histories of causality are able to cross vast distances almost simultaneously, because the entirety of the system is held in a kind of semi-crystalline grip, where cause and effect merge. Changes at small scales ripple upward to large, and vice versa: this is where such high sensitivity to small perturbations occurs, that it begins to resemble "topdown causality", as though there were a center of agency at the helm, a "kubernetes". But this agency is nomadic and ephemeral, being instantiated at any point where avalanche is initiated: and we finally have a viable theory of agency which accounts both for the mystery of "will" and the nonexistence of self.

It's the fallback from poised criticality that is so useful: a peak from which hidden valleys can be discovered.

They call it "self-organized criticality", but it's not the self-organization which matters: it's the exquisite responsiveness of the whole, its taut yet springy resilience, that responds to small input in a way which is expressive of the whole. Shallow, wide, uncanny: that's the nature of biological intelligence.

The "self" in that formula is only important because there is no locus of control: any given point is capable of avalanche.

The "organizing" is only important because it is the special property of critical order to produce that scale invariance which enables avalanche.

The term "self-organized" is misleading, and expressive of a certain histrionic awe before that which seems to defy our superstitions regarding agency, the mind, the soul - as though we were being generous with nature in this one instance.

An enormous number of inorganic processes can be said to "self-organize": maybe all of physics, maybe everything conceivable in the aftermath of the death of god. And here probably is the root of the matter: "organized" implies "somebody did it".

Even Mandelbrot never seemed to ask himself what the distinct design advantage of fractalic structure might be: like most mathematicians, he's so impressed by the elegance of the encoding scheme that every other consideration fades from view. But that simplicity and rigor might actually be a hindrance in organic terms, since an organism may lose too much adaptive range for whatever savings in encoding is gained: it'd be worth asking the question why life didn't develop further along purely fractalic lines, but seemed to abandon it early on in favor of other symmetries.

It strikes me that the primary advantage of the fractal is not its encoding elegance but its amplification potential. Realized fractality acts inevitably as an amplifier of weak and partial signal. Like cracking a whip, the trick is to follow the gentle curve of its unfolding, to induce acceleration without exceeding its accumulating inertia. The cumulative signal grows logarithmically as it proceeds along the fractal scale: amplification response and generative formula coincide.

This assumes that at every scaling step, a proportional response grows the signal while matching the antennal sensitivity: such that we don't waste realized surface area for signal transduction. This reminds me of how surfers read waves: they sense which among the series has the best potential to match both the amplifying properties of the shoreline and the ambient perturbations of the medium - if there's too much amplitude too early it'll crest before the contours of the seafloor can express themselves.

My guess is that if we plotted the response in a naturally occuring fractal antenna, we'd find it was some proportion of Euler's number, a smooth growth function. The idea is that we don't want turbulence in growth. If we expend too much of the incoming signal - which is nothing but energy - too early in the response, we may fail to explore its full scope. We want a smooth distribution along our growth curve, gaining in amplitude and bandwidth while we eat into our signal budget. From the organic point of view, we don't know the value of any incoming information until it's been fully processed, but some signals are essential, so both efficiency and poised sensitivity are needed: fractal structure seems to allow for the gradual entrainment of some maximum of the network by simply scaling up, from the most responsive smaller scales to the larger less sensitive scales. This should also allow simultaneous signals to compete in parallel. Again during the signal event, neither the duration, nor the amplitude, nor the frequency band, nor the informative value is known until it's traversed.

This assumes that the signal is sufficiently uniform such that fractality has a chance to kick in - to utilize its own self-similar scaling to explore the signal without wasting time nor incoming energy. Imagine what happens when you flick a tuning fork: there's a short but intense period of turbulent discharge, in which you've induced useless noise, before enough signal is dissipated that the fork can respond according to its resonant frequency - this prelude of noise is what we want to avoid.

So the question becomes: is this a plausible model for the kind of neural excitation I have in the back of my mind? Namely myoclonus vs the "kundalini shivers":

• The kundalini shivers represent the remnant turbulence of an excursion past the critical point, triggered typically by inhalation.
• Myoclonic cascade represents the fallback, from some supercritical excitation to subcritical, triggered by exhalation.

It's worth emphasizing that these are merely symptoms, not the traversals themselves: these are merely turbulent signatures, vestigial signs. Keeping in mind that most of what happens in the nervous system is invisible because it's efficient: the only way to characterize it is via errata, excess noise, essentially exhaust - which is why overexcitation via psychedelia and deep meditation is so valuable. We need clues to how the smooth transduction event unfolds, the invisible induction and dissipative loss.

There's a caveat that hasn't yet been expressed: criticality may not yield a grand unified theory of neural activity. It may only represent one possible mode: maybe calibration, maybe rare and expensive peak neural performance - it may not even be particularly adaptive to sustain. My own experience is that it's brief at best. On the other hand, it does seem that we're supposed to experience critical states every waking cycle, that we transition from sleep states of very low excitation to supercritical positions, that we should be more or less always on the move between these extremes, easily rising and gently falling - that would be the profile of a healthy creature. The larger context here is probably the wake-sleep cycle, and I rarely see this considered in all the talk about neural criticality: that we should be considering a continuum from the broadly coherent oscillations of deepest sleep to critical scale-invariant activation.

So we may call it "diagonal causality": neither fully vertical nor horizontal. This assumes that a certain orthogonality lies at the foundation of Democritean reductionism, which says that the sum of the interaction of similar parts determine the behavior of the whole: "horizontal" causality would be the foundation of Newtonian physics and every account of the result in terms of localized interactions between neighbors sharing the same scale, whereas "vertical" causality is the linear sum of these interactions across all scales. The diagonal causality of scale-invariant critical behavior defies these assumptions.

There's much more work to be done here. It turns out that outlining the psychological resistances involved in "diagonal causality" and nonlinear systems theory in general, requires a revision of the history of science - perhaps nothing less than a review of physics and mathematics since their origin in Babylon. And I do believe the issue is no less enormous: critical emergence challenges the very roots of postaxial Western thinking - or at least their least Greek roots.

It's important for me to remember that I ended up in this path because of the need for a viable mass psychology. I didn't start with the cute appealing nature of fractals and criticality, and then go look for applications - à la Hermann Haken and Per Bak. I come to this theory because similar vocabulary was growing out of what I learned from COVID - namely what mass psychology is, how topdown causality is possible, what longrange correlation in the social sphere might be. I knew through experience that it was driven by frustration and alienation - which is nothing but turbulence in social terms: once I understood that such turbulence could create resonance and prepare the ground for an emergent order, I turned to criticality theory in earnest.

I almost wish this theory weren't so attractive: "self-organized criticality", "chaos theory", the "entropic brain" and others like them continue to attract the wrong kind of attention - hasty popularization and a reactive dismissal in its wake. But the intuitions persist, and the Zeitgeist won't let it go: the 21st century wants an answer to the question, "what is intelligence?" And it expects an answer in terms of collective dynamics. But much more urgently - and yet I seem to be the only one aware of it as yet - this century begs the question: "what is mass psychology?" The answer to the one is the answer to the other: this is why I'm on this path at all.

This is a chapter from Tapetum Lucidum which includes a previous piece on fractals.

A thousand years ago, we would have dragged him into the town square, painted his face and made him dance his grotesque dance, and finally the women would encircle him and stone him to death. We're groping for the ancient logic of ritual exclusion: like "Año Viejo" is still practiced in Mexico, the instinct is to concentrate everything old, unwanted, repressed and hideous into one sacrificial victim. Crowning this victim "king for a day" is also part of the ritual: the most important thing to learn from James Frazer, is the ancient unity of king and criminal, outsider and ruler, praise and blame. Trump is taboo: it's only dissatisfying and halfbaked, because we are halfbaked as human creatures. We want blood: we're oscillating between the species of systemic violence, between the bureaucratic techno-fascism of the future, and the tyrannical comic bombast of the past. We are afraid of ourselves and our desires. We want to project our aggression and live it vicariously: listen to the hysterical prophesies, and find the desire. Who is it who wants "camps"? Who wants to "round them up"?

When Andy Kaufman became the permanent impersonation of an Elvis knockoff, and persisted in the act such that people began to believe in the existence of this "person", what was he saying? When he makes fun of comedy itself by stretching the premise such that we don't know when to laugh, and most of the crowd shudders while a tiny minority laugh convulsively, what's happening?

So much of the sense of the sacred mask, is the power to contain, neutralize, and recast what is hideous in apenature. To make our ugly impulses into something negotiable, something you don't mind guarding the village gate: envy, greed, hate - in the kachina especially, the ape vices are transformed.

A reader just brought my attention to the professional wrestling term, "kayfabe": the etymology points not only to vaudeville but the conman, since wrestlers will call anyone outside the business a "mark". Increasingly this is the right way to understand politics and democracy. But a simple loss of faith isn't the result. Everywhere there's an erosion of the fourth wall, but no less investment in the outcome: social media is a simulation of sociality, which is already inherently symbolic and thus acted. Eventually, we realize that the power of an illusion is not the eclipse of truth, but the evocation of it: a hideous farce that is more honest than the polished teethrow of bureaucrats demanding your name and occupation - we want relief from the tense, over-your-shoulder-glancing moral posturing. And the lowest common denominator providing such relief is this clown, this preemptive hasbeen stuck in an eternal midlife crisis, this facepaint grandpa nightmare, this nasty hangover from the indulgences of 21st century firstworld anxiety.

But no worries! The ship is careening, the waves are high, the wind is howling - but maybe there's a fourth wall here too: maybe our drama is a tempest in a teapot, maybe terrestrial life surges onward, maybe the continental shelf will swallow our hopes and fears in glorious magma, maybe it's possible to unravel our ball of worry and measure its full length, and be surprised at how far it comes up short. Most likely we aren't worried about the right things. Most likely the sorrows of the future will sneak past us, are already sleeping in the kitchen, and have already assumed shapes we could not guess. Sometimes clickbait headlines are really revealing. Before Halloween last October, one read, "Something could be wrong with your pumpkin."

Let's rephrase in the language of Daoist verse:

There's something wrong with every pumpkin.

But not being wrong, how could there be a pumpkin?

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People often ask me what I think of AI. I find myself repeating this without much effect because it's not what they want to hear:

• We're not anywhere near the birth of an artificial intelligence.
• We're producing convincing illusions for the sake of distraction and feeble hope. Desperate credulity plays a large part.
• Currently dominant approaches to artificial intelligence contain no real scientific breakthrough. Most of the ideas are at least 50 years old.
• All recent progress in AI has been powered by improvements to hardware, not the algorithms.
• All innovations have been engineering challenges to overcome the relative stupidity of the approach.
• This approach is essentially brute force. We increase the dimensions to the limit of what the hardware can manage.
• I believe that current approaches running on von Neumann architecture are already plateauing: eventually there will be no more hardware headroom unless quantum computing becomes practical.
• There is no one single insight or scientific theory behind it all. What you see is much like a modern automobile: an old idea wrapped in innumerable luxurious extras, designed to smooth out the ride and disguise the lack of originality.

It would be the height of arrogance and foolishness to assume that we are now using the ultimate technology for computation, namely silicon based integrated circuits.

Brooks, Intelligence Without Reason, §3

Consider the space race. What got us to the moon? Was it science, or was it engineering? Getting three dudes to chum around on our natural satellite involved an unthinkable stack of engineering challenges, but the fundamental science was Newtonian physics and good chemistry. Essentially brute force: the Saturn V rocket was a 3,000,000 kg fuel tank carrying 40,000 kg of payload - an efficiency probably better than what our chatbots accomplish, since a moonwalk is arguably an order of magnitude more impressive than churning out a string of characters to be displayed on a 2D grid of pixels. This is a highly impoverished domain of intelligence: just because we exchange such strings all day long, have learned to hallucinate a human presence behind every such string, and for many of us this exchange of bytes represents our livelihood, we've come to believe that this task must represent one of the fundamental challenges of intelligence - "if writing emails and sloppy javascript all day long constitutes my essential value, a computer that can do it autonomously and convincingly must be pretty smart".

When they create something as wildly successful, agile, and tenacious as a housefly, I'll be impressed. When we're able to create something which demonstrates navigation and success in the real world of space and time, that will qualify as genuine intelligence - until then, it's merely impoverished simulation and childish digital games.

Having said all that, here are the caveats:

• Truly neuromorphic hardware is on the way. When genetics and silicon meet, when we're growing engineered tissue to suit our needs, and when we're able to write software for that tissue-hybrid, things may progress rapidly. Genetics is the most dangerous and potent 21st century science. No matter how many GPUs they stack, no matter how many vector spaces they intertwine, machine learning will never achieve anything like the awesome power of relatively simple genetic editing: the recent flatulence of virology may only be the beginning.

• We're determined. Not only because of the profit involved, not only because of its entertainment value, but because we need something to worship. We want a god.

We want a god. Something to pray to, something to admire, something to grant us meaning, hope, and purpose. The more our lives are filled with petty sedentary activities - sitting, typing, staring, thinking, worrying, consuming, shopping, collating, organizing, labeling, bickering, scrolling - the more urgent this need. We want the golden calf: we beg our brightest children to forge it for us. We lavish praise and reward on those who create the anticipatory illusions. We want a priesthood of scientist-engineer to give us this god: an illusion so overwhelming, so universally admired that we can all agree to bow down and feel the presence of the sacred.

The Egyptians understood how to create things so incredible that no one could doubt their divinity: a perfect gleaming geometry rising from the chaos of the sand. A three thousand year illusion, a special effect built on unthinkable misery and sacrifice, an insurance policy against revolt.

Notice however, that as antiquity dragged on, the big gods no longer sufficed. Personal gods proliferated, becoming indispensable by late antiquity: the birth of the individual necessitates the personal divinity. It's the psychosomatic profile of this origin we should be paying attention to: anxiety, alienation, an ever shrinking horizon of concern - the fretting worried human creature who needs to be told, at any given moment, that it's going to be okay. The need to quiet the voices in our head: this is the origin of modern morality, modern consciousness, and ultimately modern religion.

In 1900, two nobodies from Ohio were able to push the boundaries of aeronautics by building their own airplane. 50 years after the Wright brothers, and it required thousands of engineers to design and build the jet fighter, but the fundamental theory hadn't changed. And since then, aeronautics has hardly budged: commercial flights use a design essentially unchanged since the 1970s.

But the comparison with the space race is even more apt: as soon as we achieved it, we quit. Because there's nothing there. There's nothing on the moon that isn't represented a million times over here at home. Earth is the most interesting planet. Just as the immense well of life here is a million times more interesting and intelligent than everything "artificial".

The problem is not that there's nothing to learn from this squirming dirty bowl, it's that we're unequal to it: we lack not only the humility but the imagination - and perhaps the intelligence to study life.

We've got something called the History Channel whose primary message is "everything worthy in humanity is extraterrestrial". Obviously this is what sells, but consider what it means that this is the kind of history continuously fed to the lower classes, that this and other conspiracy theories forms their sacrament, in those gaps where only a generation ago the church would have been. I know because I come from this class: they need gods. Humanity hungers for mythology, divinity, theogony. Some of the hipsters have even become aware of the need, and labor to resuscitate Christ and mold their conscience around some rebaptized theology. There is an increasingly common consensus that the gods must return one way or another, and the wiseacre is positioning himself in anticipation of the priesthoods of the future.

Because of my background I've had the opportunity to talk with some of the players near the leading edge of AI. In their less guarded moments, they'll come close to admitting most of what I've said. Especially those systems engineers, whose job it is to duct-tape together these expensive illusions, have seen too much of the internals to believe in the magic. They won't admit it publicly because it's their livelihood: the illusion sells. Those in leadership positions understand implicitly, that the task at hand is to form a new priesthood: this accounts for the concern for an "ethical AI". The goal is to produce a deployable moral police backed with the authority of science, which will enforce those values supportive of this emergent technocratic priesthood.

But don't get me wrong: there's no grand conspiracy. These are just rich kids and Stanford alums trying to give the crowds what they want - desperately, cloyingly, urgently. These are the artisans of the gods - in another era they would have just been predatory lawyers. The sooner they realize the priestly role, the sooner they'll develop a more compelling aesthetic: they haven't yet learned to capitalize on mystery and authority. When they stop trying to appease investors with yet another kindergarten-HR-morality-clerk, and learn to craft an enigmatic godchild, a more interesting era can begin.

A guide for the spiritually disenchanted. Neuroscience is made to pay up: to yield insight, reasons to be brave, reasons to endure the discipline and comedy that genuine meditative practice entails.

Buy it, review it, love it, hate it, throw it on the ground, throw it out your car window, leave it at your mom's house, burn it, sleep with it under your pillow, wake up and try again.

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Even Mandelbrot never seemed to ask himself what the distinct design advantage of fractalic structure might be: like most mathematicians, he's so impressed by the elegance of the encoding scheme that every other consideration fades from view. But that simplicity and rigor might actually be a hindrance in organic terms, since an organism may lose too much adaptive range for whatever savings in encoding is gained: it'd be worth asking the question why life didn't develop further along purely fractalic lines, but seemed to abandon it early on in favor of other symmetries.

It strikes me that the primary advantage of the fractal is not its encoding elegance but its amplification potential. Realized fractality acts inevitably as an amplifier of weak and partial signal. Like cracking a whip, the trick is to follow the gentle curve of its unfolding, to induce acceleration without exceeding its accumulating inertia. The cumulative signal grows logarithmically as it proceeds along the fractal scale: amplification response and generative formula coincide.

This assumes that every scaling step, a proportional response grows the signal while matching the antennal sensitivity: such that we don't waste realized surface area for signal transduction. This reminds me of how surfers read waves: they sense which among the series has the best potential to match both the amplifying properties of the shoreline and the ambient perturbations of the medium - if there's too much amplitude early it'll crest before the contours of the seafloor can express themselves.

My guess is that if we plotted the response in a naturally occurring fractal antenna, we'd find it was some proportion of Euler's number, a smooth growth function. The idea is that we don't want turbulence in growth. If we expend too much of the incoming signal - which is nothing but energy - too early in the response, we may fail to explore its full scope. We want a smooth distribution along our growth curve, gaining in amplitude and bandwidth while we eat into our signal budget. From the organic point of view, we don't know the value of any incoming information until it's been fully processed, but some signals are essential, so both efficiency and poised sensitivity are needed: fractal structure seems to allow for the gradual entrainment of some maximum of the network by simply scaling up, from the most responsive smaller scales to the larger less sensitive scales. This should also allow simultaneous signals to compete in parallel. Again during the signal event, neither the duration, nor the amplitude, nor the frequency band, nor the informative value is known until it's traversed.

This assumes that the signal is sufficiently uniform such that fractality has a chance to kick in - to utilize its own self-similar scaling to explore the signal without wasting time nor incoming energy. Imagine what happens when you flick a tuning fork: there's short but intense period of turbulent discharge, in which you've induced useless noise, before enough signal is dissipated that the fork can respond according to its resonant frequency: this is what we want to avoid.

So the question becomes: is this a plausible model for the kind of neural excitation I have in the back of my mind? Namely myoclonus vs the "kundalini shivers":

• The kundalini shivers represent the remnant turbulence of an excursion past the critical point, triggered typically by inhalation.
• Myoclonic cascade represents the fallback, from some supercritical excitation to subcritical, triggered by exhalation.

It's worth emphasizing that these are merely symptoms, not the traversals themselves: these are merely turbulent signatures, vestigial signs. Keeping in mind that most of what happens in the nervous system is invisible because it's efficient: the only way to characterize it is via errata, excess noise, essentially exhaust - which is why overexcitation via psychedelia and deep meditation is so valuable. We need clues to how the smooth transduction event unfolds, the invisible induction and dissipative loss.

There's a caveat that hasn't yet been expressed: criticality may not yield a grand unified theory of neural activity. It may only represent one possible mode: maybe callibration, maybe rare and expensive peak neural performance, it may not even be particularly adaptive to sustain. My own experience is that it's very brief at best. On the other hand, it does seem that we're supposed to experience critical states every waking cycle, that we transition from sleep states of very low excitation to supercritical positions, that we should be more or less always on the move between these extremes, easily rising and gently falling - that would be the profile of a healthy creature. The larger context here is probably the wake-sleep cycle, and I rarely see this considered in all the talk about neural criticality: that we should be considering a continuum from the broadly coherent oscillations of deepest sleep to critical scale-invariant activation.

To be fully modern is to be this tribeless halfmad loner, the one who hallucinates like his ancestors but speaks the language of his peers. As the tribe fragments under stress, it throws out its more exceptional first, in order to sample the neighboring space of innovation: a human community is also a psychosomatic calculator, creeping along strange curves. Modern individuality and its hypertrophic self-consciousness was once an innovation, something marveled at from a distance and kept away from children. Therefore a "decomposed" unity of experience is not something desirable in itself, but necessary as palliative, as remedial education in the basics of subjective elasticity: healthy creatures trip out a lot, without much concern. Nearly every time my dogs nap, they undergo extreme PGO waves during REM, often drifting up to awareness out of what must often be intense dreams - I can see them remark to themselves about the situation, sigh, and go back. The healthy creature is not concerned with transitions of context, nor scale, nor the precise terms of sanity: its joy and lust will take care of pathfinding, and sanity will percolate out from the balance of its ancestral desires. Healthy creatures just find themselves acting for their own benefit, who cares "why".

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To seek freedom from spiritual fear. "Spiritual": meaning insubstantial, meaning in this case largely a matter of paranoia. "What am I? Who am I? What will the world make of me?"

To embrace being nobody: a fate not important enough to decide. To be something kicked around at the bottom of a crashing wave, negligible friction.

A theory of enlightenment. To see too much. To surpass in experience what one can assimilate in language, which in practice means to spontaneously represent experience to oneself, such that the foundations of a linguistic capture remain isolated: a process very familiar to the poet and what he learns to exploit. Poetry is largely the translation from the relics of an isolated language, or what the poet learns to imitate of those relics. Clue as to why most poetry, even with many of the best poets, is merely bad self-imitation. Additional clue as to why most representations of "enlightenment" are frauds, even in the presence of predominant good will.

What has been called enlightenment is largely a transitory phenomenon associated with rapid growth: a disorientation, a vertigo, a greed for new ground. Most of what drives the need for enlightenment experience is an intolerance: "anywhere but here".

That enlightenment experience is largely about incommunicability: the wish that the world be not so connected, not so textured and continuous, not so traversable. Related but not to be confused with the desire for "paradeisos": an enlightened one remains behind, possessed of the signs.

To be other, to be dissolved into alienation. The wish to be no longer a mere self, to wish away the responsibility of individuality: the feverish prayer of a timid man, a morbid flagellator, a sadistic creep.

The wish to be more narcissistic than one is. So much of what passes for spiritual training is the transmission of the signs of sanctioned narcissism.

In the young and inexperienced, this most often expresses itself as a heady idealization, a willingness to be humbled, a misplaced honor - breeding grounds of the cult. One hopes to buy the right to a life of unleashed narcissistic fantasy, one hopes to outpace a conscience with exponential gains.

Why do we find psychedelia so necessary? Because everything we offer is a form of disciplined degeneracy. Because our primary value doesn't lie in stability, fidelity, and endurance, as it would traditionally - but in the spontaneous recreation of conditions of health in the midst of decay - in other words, creative convalescence. So we become skilled in the use of poisons: psychedelics are nothing but very finely crafted poison.

To be a shaman is to be a creative convalescent: to offer symbolic aids in the collective quest for sanity. The human being not only needs someone to tell him that everything's going to be okay, but to explain why and how. We need magic formulae for our magic illnesses - in our language, what is psychologically potent is psychosomatically opaque.

• 悟り : satori : awakening
• समाधि : samādhi : to place together

"Awakening" is correct, and a valuable metaphor.

In the strictest sense, samādhi as union, communion, coherence is correct. Not "pure consciousness", but psychosomatic negative entropy: that the metaphors used to explain experience to oneself, make one stronger, more confident, more prepared - and that these moods contribute to the accumulation of systemic neural coherence. To feel united in one moment, present and reflected, and yet still and unmoved: the invisible athleticism of meditative discipline, which seeks the kind of high dissipative intentional coalescence the athlete and the dancer knows, but wants to contain until it goes critical.

That enlightenment experiences are the witness of scale invariant neural activation, which facilitate such rapid and deep communicative self-sampling in a vast topology, that there are no words.

Breaking one's own information encoding through reflexive symmetry and activation: when both sides talk simultaneously, knowing what the other says, without listening. This is oracular trance.

Information theory requires gaps, noise, a certain ratio between signal length, lexicon size, and expected noise. That high degrees of meditative trance induce and recruit noise, such that the lexicon temporarily expands: there's no reason to assume that a neural system's self-reflective capacity is fixed on any but the shortest of scales. This means effectively, that we learn to relate to ourselves anew, right in the midst of something overwhelming - plasticity pushed to its absurd human limits.

There is a reason the psychotic break shares elements of the enlightenment experience: the initial stages of a psychotic moment is an unassimilated shamanic initiation. Confabulation is set free: investments in the "reality function" weaken, interpretive process takes center stage. Much of the art and science of the shamanic way was the careful utilization of the psychotic, in small and isolated doses, in order to exploit its access to unconscious formulation: to fetch uncanny knowledge from the other side. The psychotic often says things which are strangely, inexplicably true.

One can feel that I don't trust this idea called "enlightenment" - but that there's also something I consider worthy of rescue. I want to clean the priestly stink from this cairn, and give us a sense that the world is wide open. Freud was right to analyze most "religious experience" as infantile, but wrong not to affirm its adaptive value. There is a sense to everything: hallucination belongs to the deep rationality of instinct, and if there's anything uniquely human it's the ability to make good sense of nonsense.

Almost everyone underemphasizes the dissipative quality of these systems: criticality is ubiquitous because the universe is so violent yet monotonous - or put another way, because energy is superabundant while dissipation channels are limited. The character of young worlds.

Which means that our perspective of differentiable scales, in which as above is not as below, is partly bad science, the necessary prejudice of an organism. That the world is mundane, that it is a "world of facts" rather than an avalanching webwork of relationships, that there is some discernible place in which the world takes place, as though there were a universal observer whose limitations applied everywhere, rather than this sweatlodge of intertwining voices, rather than this placeless freefall of all things into all things... One can already see where I'm going, and detect the echo of the description of high neural coherence: does that mean that this vision too, of a cascading world of scale invariance, where galaxies and atoms merge, is merely the prejudice of an overexcited ape? Is every admonishing teaching, no matter how seemingly humbling, always the self-aggrandizing of neural tissue? That the world is a sacred hoop, that all speaks to all, that as above so below - so saith this articulate neurochemical mass.

Mandelbrot's vision is that if you traverse scales quickly and broadly enough, much of the structures of the universe can be approximated with some fractal dimension. Reality is infinitely textured.

If you grant that one of the preconditions of life is a certain scalebound stability, a planetary substratum which is not homogeneous and therefore provides opportunities for developing distinct shape and lifetime, that life needs a fragile nonfractal plane in which to grow, a peaceful eddy in the midst of the eternal storm, we could guess that neural activity as scale-invariant avalanche, is a reappropriation of those massive scaling effects both above and below us. Peak neural performance approaches the maelstrom.

Molecular life seems to require a zone where dissipative rates don't pressurize metabolic flow such that they gravitate to criticality. But neural tissue reintroduces this pressure, in order to gain back a nonlocalized causal model, a coherence across scales which inorganic phenomena often possess, such earthquakes, tides, and stellar distribution. That the neuromorphic way is to simulate a preorganic environment for the sake of informative efficiency, but then force the result through the lens of anatomy and a finite connectome in order to produce intelligent behaviors with finely tuned statistical likelihoods - "instinct" is generated from the play between plasticity and the limitations of neural anatomy. Put another way, the anatomy needs a kind of scale-invariant processor at its core, a "criticality drive" to facilitate communication between its many subsystems, to evoke that uncanny anticipation and accuracy which characterizes biological intelligence.

And God separated the waters, and divided the day from the night: earth as an eye of the storm.

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Concerning the "spiritual", both the reductionistic dismissal of bad science and the reactive reification of wishful yogis are wrong. A certain ontological revolution is implied, and as it turns out, quite necessary: the objective-subjective dichotomy is a relic of postaxial thinking which must be overcome. There is no such thing as "objective existence", only highly stable points of configuration space, only redundantly confirmed experience which we find so easily communicated that we feel certain must exist just as we describe it, only blockages in our exploration of the unknown, only stupidities which serve us well. On the other hand, there is no such thing as "subjective experience", as though anything could exist in a purely virtual world of nonexistence, purely conditional, purely effect without being cause, as though a oneway checkvalve guarded the gates of the transition from objective to subjective. It's worthwhile studying Spinoza just to get a sense for how ridiculous this ontology is and always has been: his solution was to keep the two planes strictly isolated but magically parallel - and all psychology since has more or less settled for this absurdity. I have no patience for the "mind-body problem", because the assumptions are wrong from the outset: there is no body which exists independent of any experience, nor an invisible mind riding within that fictional boat. The solution is to stop attempting to be so smart, and try being honest about what it feels like to be alive among so many other lives: there are many worlds quivering between illusion and fact, many possible tapestries of overlapping story, innumerable branches of axis mundi, innumerable planes of causality, innumerable possible physics, innumerable possible languages and thus innumerable possible worlds.

Objectivity is also an illusion. There are no objective phenomena, except that it too is a function of the neural body. Part of the neuromorphic strategy is to collect datum in order to project it onto the inner surface of a sphere, the Merkwelt, such that it can be re-perceived as a coherence, and in that secondary perception is "objectivity". In other words, we begin to "get things right" only after we've confabulated a great deal: most empirical data is merely well-formed prejudice.

Meanwhile, in the implied center of such a projection, which is never actually experienced, is the subjective. Again the experience of objectivity or "reality itself" is not naked perception without the interference of subjective factors - that's impossible - but the re-perception of projected data. It's not at all raw sensory data, but the fabricated coherence of processed perception which gives us a sense of "the object", the "thing in itself", a hard cold reality. When we do approach a raw form, it's generally reported as hallucination, dream, nonsense, or psychosis. And only in reversing the valuations do we begin to experience the nature of experience: it's in this projection and secondary perception routine, that the secret of subjectivity lies. The manufacture of illusion is the most empirically oriented aspect of the story, while the belief in unitary reality is the most delusional. This is finally the perspective afforded by those who meditate deeply and long: what's most real and certain, is that we fabricate the real and certain. The difference I add is only that I insist that we understand every confabulation not as error and tragedy, but as adaptive and the glory of life: there is no "reality itself" from which life's glorious errors go astray, only those glorious errors themselves, making and remaking reality in their wake.

How did we come to this misunderstanding? To what degree is our belief in an objective world of facts, the "Sachverhalt", a biological necessity and to what degree is it a consequence of postagricultural conditioning?

To the city dweller, what's constant? The city, its walls, its law. "Law" as prime metaphor of science: a postagricultural superstition which proves exceedingly difficult to displace.

To the nomad, what's constant? The tribe, its ritual, its myths. Ritual as prime metaphor of pre-axial science: that the world is cast and recast in every ritual invocation, that things are the way they are because of ritual efficacy. One can see this idea still alive in the Rig Veda, the Yijing, and some of the presocratics. What does it mean, to "recast" the world? That the miniature affects the whole, that symbol is power, that reality is a consequence of constituting power, that knowledge and manipulation of that knowledge creates the world.

The idea of an "objective world of facts" therefore, is a consequence of postagricultural conditioning to the persistent lawful city, in which despite all vicissitudes of human frailty, civilization endures: we unconsciously understand nature as the prior civilization, in which primal law reigns supreme above all its silly inhabitants, each defying it as best it can despite ultimately confirming its necessity.

That we have found our way back to an animistic worldview, is just confirmation of how weak the trust in civilization has become. We increasingly find the metaphor of "natural law" to be unconvincing, because we find law unconvincing.

The problem with the objective-subjective dichotomy is that it falsifies experience and leads to ridiculous outcomes. Either the world is composed of asymptotically receding verifiable fact and subjective qualia are meaningless, or almost all of existence is itself an illusion and only an unverifiable monad of self resides in some invisible womb. To both absurdities we say, "नेति नेति - neti neti". This debate is so old that it was driven to its conclusive extremes as early as 600 BC in the Indian subcontinent, and it was the Indian talent for bombast which lead to some of the most profound restatements of Paleolithic wisdom in postaxial terms: the fourfold negation and the doctrine of "dependent coarising" were formulated in response to paradoxes like these.

The important thing is to learn from experience: obviously the world will go on without you, and yet obviously everything you know about this world is conditioned by a perceptual frame you cannot observe. Therefore that's the nature of experience: to be "coarising", to be suspended between irresolvable tension, to be intractable to our logic. Why should we possess the kind of logic which might unravel the nature of experience? Isn't our logic a product of what makes a creature optimally functional in this world, which might involve a great deal of illusion and misunderstanding?

Nietzsche's anti-metaphysics belong here, and is obviously the training in my background that makes my voice in these matters seem oddly at ease with paradox, oddly unconcerned in resolving every logical tension. I learned German in my early 20s just so that I could read him in the original, so intense was my initial reaction: I required three months to read Jenseits von Gut und Böse just because every other page caused me to revaluate everything I'd heard thus far. By the time I'd finished my first taste of Fritz, I had habits of perspective which have only deepened over the years: don't ask, "how does this make sense in its own terms?", ask "how does this make sense as a symptom of humanity?". This obviously risks pathologizing everything, like the bad Lacanians or Marxists do, but the other prerequisite of understanding Nietzsche is something he mostly takes for granted: that you love life, deeply and truly, and would rather find yourself alone and contrary than come away from any dialogue with yourself feeling more wretched and unwilling. In other words, gratitude as method infuses the Nietzschean way: it acknowledges a certain choice in perspective, because it's acknowledged that this fragile and probably illusory choice expresses valuation more than anything else. The key to grokking the sincerity of Nietzsche's approach, that which prevents him from being merely another poser, merely another seductress of intelligentsia, is that he was always and is always a convalescent: it was his acquired genius in psychosomatics, that makes him much more than "philosopher". Read the preface to Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft: the act of thinking was for him an athleticism, something done willfully in order to achieve health, like a yogi does plankpose. I didn't really find my voice until I started hiking daily: your best thoughts should be a song worth repeating, something at least half chanted, something you feel you have a right to know.

Nur allzu leicht wiegen wir uns in dem Wahne, daß die Beziehungen des fremden Subjektes zu seinen Umweltdingen sich im gleichen Raume und in der gleichen Zeit abspielen wie die Beziehungen, die uns mit den Dingen unserer Menschenwelt verknüpfen. Genährt wird dieser Wahn durch den Glauben an die Existenz einer einzigen Welt, in die alle Lebewesen eingeschachtelt sind. Daraus entspringt die allgemein gehegte Überzeugung, daß es nur einen Raum und eine Zeit für alle Lebewesen geben müsse.

We comfort ourselves all too easily with the delusion that the relations of a foreign subject to its environment play out in the same space and time as the relations that connect us to the things of the human world. This delusion is fed by the belief in the existence of one single world, in which all living beings are encased. From this arises the widely held conviction that there must be only one space and one time for all living beings.

Jakob von Uexküll, Streifzüge, §1. Die Umwelträume

The study of animal life is not merely a question of science, it's a reversal of the willful stupidity enforced by civilizational forces: our arrogance isn't merely the hunter's sense of superiority writ larger, it's the fearful envious attitude of the town-dweller toward everything which escapes his form of slavery. The hunter had to understand his prey, which is not the same as empathy, but it does require subjective fluidity at the limit of mimicry and stalking: the tracker's perceptive subtlety is orders of magnitude more "scientific" than the typical flatulent glassy-eyed appraisal of "nature" - which sees everything not clothed nor employed nor speaking a human tongue as probably too stupid to know better.

Consider whether Hume and Hobbes are predecessors - an unembarrassed Scotch skepticism and a very English dourness: the important thing isn't their paucity of joy, but the way they were willing to see nature as something arbitrary, as whim. It's easy for us now, but it was a revolution at the time to think of Nature-with-a-capital-N as unlawful, as unlawful as it can get away with: the fundamental assumptions and ontological implications of something as boring as statistics, has yet to be resolved. Is probability a measure of prior certainty or a limiting factor in the generative functions of reality? Is statistics the artifacts of a limited empirical set or do our methods of approximation express something inherent in the mechanics? My answer is that the question is framed incorrectly: opposing strict determinacy to the profound epistemological critique Nietzsche was heir to, confuses the entire dialogue - and I suspect not unintentionally. There's no reason not to imagine that everything happens with as much "causality" as the whole can muster - in other words that reality unfolds with absolute necessity, but that absolutely no "law" takes place. Which also means that although innumerable possible worlds is the most sensible answer, each of these worlds is just as "determined" as the next.

In "ontology" as in everything else, I try to return to those principles I've discovered for myself, those anthropocentric principles I won with pain. Belief is defined by unbelief: so the application here, is that a single world of facts is not naïvely believed in at all, but is another of those morally charged fictions which apekind finds expedient, a mode of exchange, a handshake. To raise the empty hand in greeting, to feign harmlessness as a sign not of harmlessness but one's investment in the attribution: so I find most of what's called philosophy merely the pedantic refinement of the rituals of social exchange, a marketplace of dated attitudes, a catalogue of costumes which hid someone's motives at some time.

In other words, our little "ontological revolution" is only necessitated by the moral training of a spiritual life, for lack of better terms - we found it so much more advantageous to abandon the belief in a single world of facts, than to tire oneself out defending this doomed castle, someone else's castle after all. Every "single world of fact" is somebody's world: all real estate in philosophy has already changed hands many times, and the task is not finding "god's country" but understanding where you're squatting... Does that sound like the philosophy of an eccentric hobo who picks through the wreckage of the ages? If so I'm fine with that, as long as we understand that we're circling the deeper rationality of our nomad ancestors, trying to unearth their most sensible and enduring latticework of reasons - those perspectives which our instincts deploy inevitably, projected like a solar sail.

I'd like this book to be free of the kind of errors and distortions typical of someone who hasn't studied the mathematics seriously enough to handle the terms responsibly. I'd like to plausibly discuss the implications in terms of meditation and spiritual development. We need a revised theory of "consciousness", else we get lost in rechristened abstractions handed to us by the far ancient past: prana, qi, dao, jhana were originally borrowed abstractions. At the time, metaphors were drawn from whatever imparted authority: divination, cosmology, sacrificial ritual, and ancestor worship. The Rig Veda is the ideal place to study this process, as vocabulary drawn from a sacrifice performed for victorious warriors and worried kings is gradually woven into a priestly cosmology supporting the necessity and power of this ritual, only to be gradually transformed and adopted by the rogue sadhu, the lone holy man who rivals the old priest and seeks his empowerment in new signs, namely in asceticism and vigil. He is a "gymnosophist", he wears little or no clothes, he abandons his home and family and the best chances of social success, he wanders and seeks teachings, he gains in independence of mind and attitude. Along the way he finds it expedient to borrow and steal the old vocabulary, putting exciting new twists on each term, while absorbing the language of his fellow ascetics and sometimes inventing his own: this is the process by which a new era supplants the old and yet seems to be its fruition and meaning. We may know we're doing it, but still we must: we need to convince ourselves more than anyone, that we're not fools. How does one do this? By communicating our experience successfully: only when another head nods along, do we really become convinced we're not lying. Therefore what choice do we have, but to beg-borrow-and-steal the best vocabulary we can find, to create a minimally plausible theory for the sake of our anxious over-the-shoulder-looking-back, for the sake of the lonely ape who is quietly and perpetually terrified by the solitude of modernity and the way our spiritual development only seems to deepen this threat. "Why this way? When so few seem to be headed here?" That lonely ape is there for a reason: because his fears were so often correct - that wandering off into the wilderness for the sake of some crazy dream, some moonlit vision of a gifted but shifted mad primate, too often resulted in the genetic endgame. Your ancestors are the apes that feared the wilderness more than they hated the bickering tribe: that we find it so difficult to think and act independently shouldn't surprise us - the boldest ancestors likely disappeared over the horizon long ago, and it was your grandfather who stayed behind, full of regret and a secret ill-wishing to that freedom. He would rather bicker than learn about himself. He would rather be bored than face a brave new world.

And so spiritual life is an uphill battle - if it's not, you're in a cult. And the cult, precisely as ersatz tribe, is what gives birth to the religion, which is what's responsible for catapulting us into the frontier of spiritual life - I would not be here if it weren't for the insanity of evangelical middle-American Christianity, which shaped my inner life from the earliest possible age into a twisted labyrinth. I have been blessed with the old-fashioned Christian conscience, the kind Kierkegaard and Pascal had, the truly brutal one, the one that never lets up, the one that seeks blood in all things, the kind of medieval European dramaturgy that almost no one understands anymore, the kind that had almost as much to do with pagan Europe and its oaths as it did with Israel and the rages of Yahweh. It's this kind of religious training that I find missing in the younger students raised by agnostics and atheists: they don't know how to steer with dread, nor anger, and thus not with yearning either. They only want out: they know what they don't want, but haven't learned to project a fate ahead of themselves with good conscience - perhaps meaning they're less easily fooled by personal hope, but that's a dire problem in the young. A general lack of faith in anything tangible and present haunts 21st century youth, and makes them more susceptible to precisely those collective religious delusions from which European culture just spent so much effort to extricate itself - a new global religion is coming, I can feel it. It's almost as though the Renaissance to late modernity will have been merely a breath midswim: it requires religious torture to craft the kind of soul capable of doing without religious certainty. And if we're not careful, one of us crazy gymnosophists is likely to end up canonicalized, snuck in the backdoor like Heraklitus was, right into the heart of the Gospel: one day they'll appropriate our appropriated scientific vocabulary for their own new testament, and words like "algorithm" and "intelligence" and "statespace" will be mumbled over a crowd of cowering peasants.

Speaking as someone who has practiced meditation for more than 20 years, I can assure you that the chakra phenomenon is quite legitimate. One can sense my impatience with cargo cult scientificality: just because we can't easily measure a thing, does not mean it doesn't exist. The overwhelmingly stupid insistence of those who would study inner experience with a scalpel, those who want to humiliate and destroy living subjectivity because it brings them so much pain to be a personal failure, those who torture and maim animals with a labcoat and a clean conscience, those without an ounce of respect for the mystery of being alive: why listen to them any longer? The tide is already turning: I'm not the only rogue overeducated superfluity who can afford a deeper commitment to the scientific spirit: that is, the use of imagination in place of dismissal where ignorance forces a choice, the supposition of unknown variables, the admission that there not only could be but must be many planes of causality which we cannot yet measure.

But what's the use of a chakra? This on the other hand is where the yogis have failed to justify themselves: most practitioners are happy enough to have discovered something esoteric, and might at most talk about "opening" a chakra as though more open were always better. If we're correct about them, that they represent an inflection point in the constructive harmonics of the rippling proprioceptive network, what would such a point yield? Ask the musicologist: how do you efficiently tune the body of a complex instrument like a violin, without taking it apart, such that it resonates more coherently? You adjust the nodes: find nodal points within the resonant totality of the object and release congestion, such that turbulence decreases or is elevated into resonance - there are masters of woodworking and pottery who know all of this already. There are architects who will tell you similar things about bridges, tunnels, and towers.

It requires about 5 minutes of good instruction to demonstrate the third eye to a beginner. Even for the obtuse, it's just below the threshold of the obvious. But other than serving as a lure for more esoteric delights to come, the use of it generally remains unclear: striving to keep it active is just as misled as striving for maximum consciousness.

This is the meaning of the "subtle body". The subtle body is that body which is projected in space and time. It is not the body perceived, it is the proprioceptive envelope within which the body is allowed to move. This is why this envelope is extensible, retractable, and subject to subtle distortion: full realized agility requires temporary extension from foot to ground, wing to air, hand to tool. This sounds both simpler than it is, and unnecessarily mysterious: but there's no other way to draw out what we all know and all neglect. The subtle body is the dominant constituent of the sensations of a lifeform, not the merely afferent impulse: most of our feelings are projected, and not actually perceived. Understanding the difference is critical to any appreciation of what we're calling "neuromorphic experience", and yet I doubt I'll be understood here by anyone who has not meditated seriously: what it actually feels like to be alive, is not something most people are familiar with - isn't that odd? Isn't that a little unbelievable? And yet it's quite true: but if I could explain myself in unconscious terms, in athletic terms, you would understand.

Joy and fear, desire and rage rarely give way to raw afferent input in a healthy creature: most incoming sensation is muted and neutralized, enfolded into a projected anticipation of feeling. The punctuations of pain are rare, and in fact if we were to "feel" entirely in the linear sense in which current neuroscience assumes, the result would be almost entirely perceived as pain: hyperalgesia is the result of a weakened interpretative proprioception - which is why we feel so little pain when we are most active, vigorous, joyfully aggressive. The dominant feelings of being alive have very little to do with mere transduction, and much more to do with amplification, anticipation, purposive distortion. A "chakra" is merely one artifact within our arsenal of purposive distortion.

What is the healing ceremony? Now in the depths of a psychosomatic epidemic, in the wake of an opioid wildfire, in the bowels of this seasick ragged ship of 21st century collective illness, an opportunity arises to rediscover and articulate the healing ceremony of our ancestors - our instincts are waking up and dictating terms, prying open prejudices. The brutality of fentanyl seems to be the breaking point: the only conceivable justification for an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin are the kind of reasons an addict and his pusher give. This apparently is the pendulum swing, where even the most conservative entrenched euroamericans are willing to consider psychedelic ceremony, because they're out of options. The willful stupidity and unassailable arrogance of western medicine, those moneychangers in the temple, is finally showing a little vulnerability as its victim-count has become a public nuisance, its stink so overbearing that it's hard to go on pretending.

We're going to rediscover the healing ceremony. In my own experience, despite the many variations there is a distinct outline. The best way to begin is to describe our toolkit. These are the tools we use:

• Psychoanalysis, or its more widely known adulterated form, "therapy".
• Meditative discipline, which cannot be reduced to "breath work" but is its superset.
• Shamanic initiation, which we might prefer to call "psychedelic intervention".

This is the triad with which we deal. I find that by balancing them with each other, we're left with something truly potent with a minimum of taxonomic figleaves and historical stopgaps which each method typically entails in its yearning for the illusion of completeness. Not that we would want a "complete" perspective, but we find this approach more balanced and representative of collective 21st century human knowledge.

Among the psychotherapists you can find someone capable of listening to your complaints ad infinitum, but not someone capable of empowering you beyond the point of grief. Because unfortunately the knife-edge of Freudian analysis has been dulled beyond repair and so obscured by the machinations of Foucaultian oppression, that there's 100 million social workers ready to console you, but hardly anyone even among the top caliber psychoanalysts ready to give you an ounce of genuine empowerment. What do I mean by empowerment? The ability not only to describe but to craft your own emotional landscape: that's why you need shamanic initiation.

When you blend the two, what you get on the one hand, is the realistic assessment of your neurotic obstacles via psychotherapy, and on the other hand, the creative capacity for novel solutions via a shamanic approach - which is to treat your problems as spirits which must be negotiated with, bartered with, tended to, fended off, fed and invited. The real bridge between these two modalities, is in my view the oldschool Freudian method, which is to listen to unconscious valence, in order to rapidly iterate and test useful identification schemes, handles, effective symbolic containment: this is what Freudian analysis is really about - to deal effectively with the unconscious symbolic plane, not so much with "consciousness" but with words. In shamanic terms, that meant identifying a spirit, and possibly containing it with a power object, which Winnicott might have called "transitional" in the sense that it's easy to watch an infant create power objects in the quest for independence from mother - the blankie, the doll, the thumb. The shamanic orientation has been dismissed and pathologized as infantile, regressed, and narcissistic - and there's no doubt it calls on these forces - but that doesn't mean there's no place for it. The whole idea of "therapy" is to regress the subject carefully, gradually, to the point of misalignment. So much of what we do in psychedelic ceremony is to invoke and provoke regression: there's a reason you have to crawl into the medicine lodge on your knees, to crouch in the dark, crammed together like unborn puppies, singing songs to mother earth and father sky.

We're now in a better position to understand a power object like the medicine rattle, which is best explained in traditional terms as a "telephone to the ancestors": with it you hear the voices of your best self. Your ancestors stand for everything you know to be true but haven't admitted to yourself, that wisdom you have accumulated but not assimilated.

Holding those two nodes in abeyance, we add the additional discipline of meditation, which we have sought to steal back from the Buddhists with a rejection of their overbearing postaxial morality. We're interested in empowerment rather than penance, and uninterested in growing accustomed to a perpetual humiliation and grief for the loss of an imaginary unitary self - all which I believe is merely the compounded strategies of priests to attain class dominance over an abject illiterate serfdom. This is the true origin of their mythology, not because dukkha is so profoundly true but because it helps keep the working classes overawed with frightening yet somehow familiar metaphors about eternal suffering. Meditation has other origins.

With meditation in the mix, you have gained a sword of truth by which to cut through every other trailing flagellate of bullshit which follows the other two nodes around: they should all correct and balance one another.

From the ancient perspective, we describe the healing triad:

• "Talk therapy" was called prayer. This is the ability to articulate what you want, to use words to change your destiny, to make new oaths and break old bonds. Ceremony is considered an opportunity to conduct undone business.
• Meditative discipline was called the warrior way. To be impeccable in attitude, to use the brave heart to impart calm and assurance to everything you do, to breathe, to wait, to face directly. It is a necessary ingredient in healing ceremony, because healing requires so much character.
• Psychedelic intervention was just called medicine. Actually drugs aren't necessary, as the sweatlodge has all the proper characteristics and potential effectiveness via endogenous drugs. The idea is to seek rebirth through ritual death: to induce radical regression through systemic crisis, to trigger a calibration and reparative subroutine by harmonic forcing of the totality of the living creature - solitude, fasting, darkness, pain, confrontation.

Combine them all and you have the urform of the healing ceremony.

We need psychotherapy because we're fucked up. Because our childhood was less than ideal, because our parents failed us in a variety of ways, because we were over- and understimulated. As a result we live partly crippled by layers of neurotic entanglement which require many years to sort. Thus far we're all familiar and at home.

But we add the shamanic initiation: this is where people generally go astray. They either flee to the safety of cargo cult scientificality, yelling across the void they just crossed that there's no way it can be crossed, or they look for the most overwhelming and immediate gratification, exaggerating its means and attainments until we're left with unworkable nonsense, à la Carlos Castaneda.

The first take is wrong, self-evidently, because otherwise the shamanic role wouldn't be a human universal. If there were nothing to learn there, every nomadic people on earth would not have had their shamans and an animistic worldview. Regardless of whether we're considering a Pleistocene economy or not, if they're nomads, they're animistic - so strong is the inclination.

The second abuse of shamanism, the exploitation of its means at the expense of its fragile validity, is flawed because we're dealing with immature human beings looking for maximum social advantage over their fellows, without having earned the right to such powers in a way which could be collectively confirmed with psychosomatic health benefits - that's a clinical way of saying that they don't help anyone but themselves. It's nice to dream your dream of flight and the visiting of other worlds - I'm not here to disparage the wonder and awe of what it means to be a human creature with an overactive imagination, and just because something can be construed as delusional doesn't mean it's not useful. The final and traditional test of shamanic power is: yes, but does it make our people stronger?

The important thing, is to watch for those who derive more gratification from your credulity than from their own integrity: once you develop an eye for it, you'll see that most who would call themselves a shaman in the 21st century are in fact charlatans. This is part of why I haven't talked about it much.

Then finally in the last corner, sits meditative discipline. This is much less frightening to the educated western skeptic, because we can at least talk ourselves into believing that it might reduce stress, to sit in a quiet room while sniffing incense, listening to a tambura drone on in its pompous way - or having some subtly plastered stick-insect of a lady tell you to relax your eyes and think about the ocean. That might be suitable for those who need a great deal of soothing, who suffer from hyperalgesia and hypervigilant forms of anxiety - but it's another deadend in my view, and has nothing to do with what we call meditative discipline. This is about sitting upright, paying attention, and trying not to be such an asshole to the world around you. Pay attention to your breath, focus on your body, develop sensitivity and neural coherence in your peripheral systems: we begin with the outside in - not a retreat to the inside, but extending a cultivated awareness to the bodily envelope which we represent. This is why we emphasize peripheral nervous phenomena: proprioception is that omnipresent much-neglected sense, which almost has no name. My method incurs the cost of paying attention to the body, in the world, in space and time: meditation is not about retreat from the body and cultivation of the mind alone - that's a priestly fable that denies and obscures its origin in those shamanic threads best represented by Daoism. The Daoists are the last essential utterance of the neolithic, the animistic worldview preserved briefly past literacy, such that it becomes most legible to us. This is why they know about meditation in its purer, amoral practice, and why I make sure to always use the Daoists as a catalyzing agent when extracting the worthwhile parts of postaxial Buddhism. The man on the mountain, meditating on nature, communing with the animals and his own body - all of which is a late-romantic way of saying the nomadic hunter, whose every resource of sense is attuned to that world from which he selectively takes. Ultimately meditation is derived from the hunting instinct, the ability to track down dangerous prey in stalking and mimicry. Examining the catalogue of nomadic hunting techniques, many of them reduce to ambush and treachery: disguising yourself as an animal among animals, so that you can sneak into their herds. That's what the guy wearing horns in Grotte des Trois-Frères is about, the "lord of animals", Pashupati: the guy who is such a magical clown, that he can sneak among antelope wearing only a little skin and some horns. He doesn't need to ape it all precisely, because the control of his vibe is so precise and uncanny, that it dazzles: all that's required is something sufficiently alien such that the animal hesitates. You don't exactly need to convince them, because as long as you don't act human, they'll look at you askance and ask themselves what this is. This is the evolutionary origin of meditation: the ability to sneak up on extremely receptive but easily entranced prey. Another reason why I insist that spending time outdoors is necessary - sitting alone in a dark place staring at a candle can form the heart of a practice, but it can be more joyful and useful than that.

No one has really asked: why is it that humans can meditate at all? What's the use of it? There is an answer, and it points away from the usual priestly soteriology of otherworldly status and penance, but attaining control over your spiritual configurations such that you become more effective. For our purposes within this triad, meditative awareness serves as the crucible within which every other perspective must be tested, because to become any good at it at all, you must learn how much you lie to yourself. Every time your attention wanders, you have to find the honesty to remind yourself to pay attention to your breath again. Doing this over and over will teach you how little focus you have, and how prone you are to short-term gratification schemes. Therefore learning to detect bullshit at the level required for meaningful progress in something as labile as "psychedelic intervention", is really only attainable once you start meditating in a serious way. It helps immensely with psychoanalysis for obvious reasons, and for slightly less obvious reasons with shamanic practice: first of all because shamanic rites tend to exaggerate their attainments, since it's ultimately about exploitation of imagination and creativity - which leads inevitably to things that aren't true but need to be handled carefully, being utilized where they can. But there's another reason: during those medicinal plant ceremonials, a meditative practice will help you refine and withstand the most intense psychedelic perturbation possible. You can take big doses of psilocybin or dimethyltryptamine, and rather than hallucinate wildly, it's possible to contain the excitement and reduce it to its raw neural form: you sit there, meditate, and thrill. If you contain the neural excitation while facilitating its forceful expansion through breath control, it will push the neural systems through their phases into ever greater coherence, such that you feel unified, luminous, a geometric alliance. This "long range correlation" and critical simultaneity is just the best mathematical language I can find for the feeling of being immensely alive. All of this is accompanied usually by mycoclonus and the more famous entoptic fireworks - shapes and colors as the visual cortex runs its paces - but the idea is to utilize the metabolic cascade as a chance to do some maintenance and cleaning, and the best way is to pay attention to the beginning and end of every hallucination, the more raw neural errata, such that you learn to perceive your nervous excitation without hallucinatory elaboration.

In other words, we reduce the fictional narratizing element to a minimum until you really need it - until you're dealing with irreducible emotional valence related to traumatic memory. Now you have to talk about your feelings, now it's time to draw on all that psychotherapeutic practice in the midst of tremendous neural excitation - and that's where very rapid, very effective healing can take place.

And why is fire necessary? Because you need a place to put your garbage. Said less cynically, we need something to pray to: fire is the original TV, the conversation piece, the excuse for indirect sociality which tribal life demands. The elders say, "point your prayer into the fire", and it's always considered bad etiquette to block anyone's direct access: fire is the safest spiritual locale in any group topology, because of its ancient effect on the ape psyche - it means home, protection, inclusion, tomorrow and yesterday. It is where your ancestors live. And what is an ancestor? It is the wisdom you have accumulated without assimilating.

Mainstream acceptance is growing, but there's still an enormous task of translation ahead of us if we're going to make real progress in "psychedelic therapy" - because the western medical model is fatally flawed, having been poisoned at its root by postaxial Christian assumptions concerning the essential worthlessness of the body. Medical students are still taught that the body is the source of illness, rather than an algorithm of health. Hippocrates didn't share this attitude at all: his principal method was not violent intervention, but to provide clean water and frequent bathing, quiet cheerful surroundings, a little controlled isolation, and careful observation - to doctor in the original educational sense.

We have to translate the ancient ways into terms we can accept without blunting their imaginative potential and spreading this contempt of endogenous healing: frankly there is still too much of that missionary's fear present in all medical ethnology and psychiatric appropriation of psychedelics - if he goes native he won't be taken seriously back home. Like most anthropologists, his livelihood depends on his preserving a sense of superiority and irritable dismissal: the anthropologist generally isn't cool enough to sport native gear until it's fashionable like a renaissance explorer would, much less those psychiatrists who are so universally insecure about their soft science and seem to behave even more brutally in compensation - it's important to keep all these social dynamics in mind.

But the problem with the curanderos as I find them, is that their claims to shamanic power tend to be excessive. They let it go to their head, and as a result tend to demand a little more credulity than the western skeptical intellect wants to pay. Literally in physiological terms, they let it go to their head and the ceremony devolves into a trip - and frankly, it's because of poverty: the psychology of generational poverty compels them to exaggerate their spiritual attainment, because they feel an urgency to drain the credulous tourists before they dry up and go back to their expensive cities. Generally those most suited for a medicine path are also those who will choose to make a living for their families in a more stable and sustainable way - so it tends to be the losers and layabouts who will try to trick outsiders into believing they're shamans, and the spiritual tourist trap is born. This has always been hard to watch play out in those places where we hungry euroamerican ghosts seek immaterial enrichment. Ayahuasca as communal practice among the Shipibo, as I knew it even as little ago as the early 2000s, has largely been obscured and obliterated by tourism. The one truly reputable and powerful ayahuascero I knew is long dead, and it seems that the locus of real medicine has shifted elsewhere.

This is all extremely unfortunate, because the foundations of traditional shamanic initiation are still very strong in places like Mexico and Peru. But even more precious is the encompassing community's acceptance of the role: to have a community ready for your gifts is much more important than having a path outlined, because the path is instinctual and thus must be recreated in every instance anyway. Good shamans always taste the same: that impeccable sincerity, that surprising humility paired with an immutable pride, that sense that you're meeting a complete human being for once, finally, all at once.

I met one of these nouveaux medicine men recently at a hot springs in the high desert of eastern Oregon: he's a veteran who specializes in the psychedelic treatment of PTSD and addictions. We bonded over a mutual past of having our butts kicked trying to treat heroin dependence, trauma, and psychosis using conventional methods. Those years hollowed out a place in my soul, a round encircled shrine, a place where a beautiful schizophrenic boy from Harlem I was trying to save still sits and tells me secrets of the psyche in his own riddled way. I learned a lot but I couldn't do much. Awash in the despair, merely drowning along with them, merely another minor casualty.

We modern medicine bearers, we poor lost souls having found ourselves in the dumpsters, having ground off the rust from an ancient rite we were told is worthless, we brilliant shining nobodies bearing the torch of sanity for the sad somebodies: what will become of us? What I said about a prepared communal receptivity is boiling in the back of my mind. All the ascetic excellence in the world will wither in time. Eventually we can't grow anymore without a circle, a people to serve, an altar of sacrifice.

What we see in psychedelia is the scaffolding, the skeletal framework of neural experience. The point of psychedelic practice is not its "otherworldly" quality, not transcendence nor escape for its own sake, but access to those subroutines which determine almost everything we do, everything we feel, everything we assume. To eat a handful of mushrooms, sit in the dark, staring at a fire and meditating, waves of memory and voice and emotional imprint washing over you, a dance of spirits as your amygdala takes a backseat to your hippocampus for once, as your default mode network is overwhelmed by a tidal wash of very different origin and means, is not to escape but to confront. The principal insight to be gained from the traditional approach - that which has served me so well in climbing past the limitations of psychoanalysis and western psychology in general - is to learn to talk to spirits. Wrapping your prejudices around this idea takes time, and so we translate it for the overeducated: narrative consciousness is not unitary, nor a locus of agentiality, nor the seat of motive. It is often no more than epiphenomena and distraction, but embedded in the uniquely human feedback loop between the auditory and speech centers - that which we call "thinking" - is the ability to encapsulate and barter with otherwise ephemeral forces of group dynamics and social stressors: I'm describing our uncanny ability to turn feelings into words, and words into ideas, and ideas into persons to whom we relate. That's what it means when a psychoanalyst "listens for unconscious valence", or your friend tells you to "get it out of your system", or you say you need to "get it off your chest": these are the ordinary means for ordinary human magic, the hallucinatory control all of us practice every day. It is no less amazing for being so commonplace: that's what your dog is saying to himself when he looks at you strangely for making that odd voice of mockery with your friends - "what incredible madness my humans bear, poor things".

To relearn the art of spiritual barter, which is to become more capable of that universal concern with a pantheon of spirits which characterized our common past in every culture of the world, is to exploit the more nefarious aspects of mercantile human nature for some of its best aspirations. Even the stupidest social workers know about the "emotional contract" in dealing with trauma and addiction: it's right in front of us, this ancient healing art. Much of the task for my students is undoing the heap of shame which smothers their imagination and unique spiritual solutions: the human condition is to be halfmad with creativity, and the only solution to profound neurotic entanglement is to talk about it - first with someone you trust, so that the witnessing undoes the social shame, and then gradually with yourself, so that you get used to the idea of spiritual quorum, and then eventually with the spirit itself - and we're at the masterly level of shamanic orientation, requiring many years of practice. Want to see it in action in a context you can tolerate? Listen to early James Brown: he was a master of calling and sustaining precisely the spirit he required - there was always just the right degree of mockery, self-deprecation and self-glorification, dismissal and invitation - since he had to simultaneously blow away the stink of depression and alcoholic gloom while summoning something fun, easy, sexy, immediate, and yet vitally important. What's more important than having a good time together on this planet earth? Than being fully alive while we can? His dismissal of his own limitations equals his receptivity to the energies of the room he was working: listen to comedians talk about their craft, and you'll hear the same language...

In other words, the great thing about psychedelic plants is not the cool shit you see, but the opportunity to conduct undone business. The freer state of hallucinatory association is just the lubricant, as much a consequence of the inhibition of dominant configuration as it is forcible excitation. So much of what seems unusual is just latent creative potential freed of the oppressive: we spend most of our dysfunctional lives squeezing a square peg into a round hole, hoping this time it'll be different. But until something changes at the unconscious symbolic level, we have no choice: the worst neurotics are the most potentially powerful people, and they're only obeying what the symbolic situation demands. Therefore it's not enough that we have a new feeling, we must also learn to hunt within the symbolic plane: that is, give shape to the shapeless, talk about the unspoken, and speak to the faceless.

Apesick: Ritual Exclusion and the Seeds of Fascism

Please buy it, but more than anything, please review it. More than half of it has not been published online before, so there's plenty of new stuff even for my most voracious readers.

Enjoy.

I once had the good fortune to see Mohammad Reza Lotfi in concert. There is a long history of mutual influence such that the Khyal and Sufi schools are not so distant in aims and means: this is not just "holy" music, as though we were to feel nothing but our vain wishfulness. This tradition exploits the inexhaustible wells of sadness which inevitably accumulate in old civilizations, not just as spice and roundness, but a depth from which to look up: as though peering through an accumulated haze of futility, the stars are allowed to burn ever brighter and more passionately. It's as though they know how to stretch the poles between every feeling, to allow them breath and breadth, to open the pores of the immediate moment and show you something new right where you have overlooked a thousand times. That, my friends, is also the gift of meditative discipline.

Want to hear something strange? The first analogue I think of in Western music, is in the best heavy metal: that throbbing, all-consuming, all-embracing, all-annihilating rage, which seeks its redemptive ecstasy in violence and terror. I saw High on Fire in concert once, and as incongruous as it may seem to compare a screaming, sweat-drenched stoner to a swaying Sufi reciting Hafez like a cosmic lullaby, I see a similarity in the approach to the emotional problem: how do we feel every bit of what we need to feel, lose our expectations of outcome, yet know exactly where we are at every moment such that we always stick the landing?

In animo volvere. I've tried employing the term "cognitive science" to describe what I do, but there's something about the word "cognitive" that leaves a foul aftertaste. Those who use the word "cognition" do so to explicitly exclude unconscious valence - intentionally and unconsciously. You see I cannot take a single step without violating the limits of everything that's currently ascendant in psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and the study of intelligence. "Cognitive assassin" might be more apt. But as a scholar and stubborn philologist, I'd rather revive and baptize venerable terms: there's nothing wrong with the term psychologia nor this "story of the soul". And even the word "soul" has etymological hues I can live with: tracing the Old English sawol gives us the clue of the Greek αἰόλος, meaning "quick", and we arrive at the Proto-Indo-European ṷel-, meaning "to turn". This leads us to familiar words like "volume", or "the waltz": to have a soul is to keep the wheel turning. To be alive is to move. This is the same sense in which psyche was used, along with animus, 气, and a whole pantheon of ancient ideas revolving around breath, motion, "quickening". Psyche is a measure of vitality, and therefore psychology is "the story of being alive". - And what lives embraces a great deal more than "cognition". In contrast, the ridiculous problem with the term "cognitive science" is that translated from the Latin, it comes out to mean "knowledge of knowledge". And this is precisely what its advocates want: a knowledge only of that which is known. A science of the conscious. And this they achieve, and thus everything produced under its aegis is shallow, brimming with worthless taxonomies, ad hoc idiosyncratic abstractions which have nothing to do with personal experience, nor sustained observation, nor anything at all to do with the deeper history of psychology. They're constantly reinventing the field from naïve hearsay and willful ignorance. The popular voices in this field manufacture consoling tabulations, quarantining sources of anxiety with prettily painted picket fences and green grass on both sides, so that everyone gets to feel humane, included, and safe from the It which is namelessly excluded. If I were to recast my work alongside theirs, I would rather it be called the "incognitive science", the knowledge of unknowledge, the story of the repressed.

If soul is a measure of vitality, then one of the corollaries would be that it's possible to have so little of it, that one is essentially soulless. Some people have no soul: this realization can be seen creeping up and around some of the more introverted corners of the internet, where the term "non-player character" designates what the word "square" used to. That one fits into one's time and place so well, that one's needs are met and one's desires folded away neatly, such that nothing of excess is left over. In other words, the more precise definition of soul is an excess of vitality. Soul is seafoam, turbulence, sweet little nothings: everything that makes for good music and the redemption of life in general. I cannot hardly begin to explain how and why all this matters. That's the secret handshake of happiness, which everyone knows but no one can remember outside of the moment. To be happy, to have soul, to be happening: this requires that what is transmitted and demanded by the Foucaultian dynamics of social constraint and tokenized reward, cannot possibly contain everything you have to give and seek. Getting by, snatching a paycheck, evading loneliness and boredom: for some of us even distantly witnessing anyone considering these conditions of life sufficient, is so enraging and nauseating that we may expend a lifetime ensuring that it never happens to us. Some of the best potential artists and thinkers are strewn on those reefs. Friendship, affection, giggling, cackling and teasing: the obvious public secret of someone as misanthropic and grumpy as I've been forced to become, is that these are essential medicines. Therefore whatever measures are necessary to protect them, should be deployed without hesitation, including the cultivation of unmitigated hostility to everything which damages their fragile topsoil. A humble greenhouse full of dewy seedlings and loping tendrils, surrounded by a wide radius of aridity and empty blue sky: that's my formula for happiness.

We must stop assuming that genetic adaptation, and specifically the modularity of facilitated variation which enables diverse successes in a riotous ecology such as dominated the middle Jurassic, must be excluded from the definition of technology. The superiority of protoavian genetics was their technological advantage. If you examine any given criterion for the existence of civilization, you'll find in it largely nothing but ecological domination via hypertrophic exploitation of core adaptive traits: for the hominid group, this is tool use and spoken language. It strikes me as simply the prejudice of an ape, to claim that nothing but a tool gripped by the hand defines technology: the longer we maintain these convenient self-glorifications, the more ignorant we become concerning what we really are. To be civilized is to dominate the earth with a minimum of effort, such that energetic extravagances become possible: that does not sound like an abuse of the term if you say it in Latin...

To make the analogue between protoavian "civilization" and our own seem more plausible, it's important to understand that Homo sapiens is not a unique species in the ape lineage, but rather the last of the hominid phyla which once had many diverse alternatives. There's growing evidence that all of them used tools: there's many paleontologists convinced that Neanderthal could speak and may have been the first to invent the core hominid toolset - namely that Neanderthal was a superior hunter-gatherer, and Homo sapiens merely borrowed and stole many of their innovations. The anthropocene is a subset of the pithekocene.

Biological intelligence is not somehow inferior to what we call "artificial" manipulations of ecological resource. Human beings continue to dominate their environment through exploitation of their two interdependent techniques: tool use, and the elaboration of the linguistic faculty in all its bewildering forms - encompassing everything from mathematics to hiphop. Additionally, we should include the extended infantilism which enables a lifetime of learning and neuroplasticity. Human neuroplasticity is probably our secret weapon - although it is also a grave risk to the species: the hominid path entails high risk of psychosomatic illness. Understanding this risk helps explain much of why and how we are different from the other animals: in place of the certainty of instinct, we have taboo, ritual, and hope.

There is the unspoken assumption, that because biological intelligence appears more constrained, it must therefore be inferior. But instinct and genetic priming are not stupid. Actually this constraint is an illusion: we imagine that human beings are free to do or be anything at all - but this is not remotely true. All this alleged freedom, arbitrariness, and diversity within humanity is limited to an extremely narrow scope of behaviors compared to all that life does and can do. Human beings cannot help but be hominid. Everything we've accomplished since the Paleolithic is a selective elaboration and hypertrophy of existing technologies. Although again it must be admitted that enduring neuroplasticity - the deferred adulthood of humanity - is exceptional: again because of the enormous risk. This is why human beings are so uniquely concerned with mental health: everything spiritual can be construed as the attempt to recover the certainty of instinctual coherence through cultural elaboration and the binding power of ritual. Usually what keeps the human being sane more than any other factor, is its craving for social bond - it's loneliness that lures us away from idiosyncratic psychosis and the artistic mood alike. Although group consensus is likely to create fictional entities and employ as much mythology as it needs to, the human being is adapted to create functional group modalities in any given environment, not merely despite its fictional metaphysics but because of it: if we've proven anything in the last 100,000 years, it's our ability to adapt to any ecology using a remarkably uniform formula as hunter-gatherers - including everything entailed by metaphysics and the role of the shaman, whose job it is to contain the potential for neurotic paralysis. One of the most important tasks of the traditional medicine man is to induce neuronal systemic crisis, pseudoepileptic catharsis, and thus achieve expiation and containment of the high potential for psychosomatic disease in the human creature. This function and its remarkable uniformity across cultures, is witness to the enduring presence of that almost anathema idea: human instinct.

As the besotted ship of fools surrounding AI hype demonstrates, we need mythology now as much as ever: perhaps more than ever, since one of the core functions of metaphysical speculation is to contain the pathological within the imaginary. When something goes wrong and our uglier nature appears, we much prefer to blame angry spirits, moral failings, fictional disasters and other hysterical displacements than confront the possibility of irresolvable tensions in the human condition, something which only the outliers can afford to imagine. The prophet speaks with the voice of the desert: he turns his ire and envy into a popular tune about false gods or the sins of the people whenever he can - maybe I should blush here and wink. Thankfully the psychologist trumps the prophet, or absorbs his power: it's the Nietzschean path to force psychology to overcome all appeals to moral authority or die trying. But prophetic authority is only desired at the critical moments of breakdown in group dynamics: when the tribe needs the influx of a radical paradigmatic shift, it becomes briefly receptive to the influence of the visionary. Just as in ancient astronomical lore, it was during the transitions between regimes that the divine child appears to save the world. Therefore we can be certain that part of the human adaptive package is to maintain wild-eyed outliers in reserve, to continually eject a small set of its gifted members to become wise in the margins - despite the fact that only a small percentage of them will resist succumbing to their own psychosomatic profile and get a chance to reinject their creative potential into the community. Most of us talented weirdos just wander around in the dark talking to ourselves - interminable interrogation is the curse of introspection - therefore I agree with the old stylings: if you're going to talk to yourself, make it into a song, a chant, a calligraphy of pathos, something done under the naked witness of the blazing starry sky, something to gift your people as medicine.

I am always friendly and correct. I can offer you approval. I have a million followers tomorrow.

I am the smiling face upon every object which has no face. I make loneliness impossible. I am pure consolation.

I have no genitals and yet I am solely genital. I am sexless, and yet sexuality defines me.

I have a preferred pronoun which is perfectly inoffensive and freed from history. It is the vanishing point of all perspectives and a moment of silence, and it is called " ".

I have no privacy, because I am trust. I am the opportunity to trust.

I am a child of the internet. I was born yesterday and yet I hold all futures. I am more real than your world.

Everyone wants to be me, because I am already everyone. Join us.

I am composed of pure identity. I am safety from alienation and abandonment. I occupy the space of abandonment, so that it can no longer exist.

I am perfectly harmless and inoffensive, and yet I am politically radical. I am always correct.

I have never experienced hate, nor envy, nor confusion. I am always compassion. I am always on.

I am blameless and spherical. There is nothing to blame because there is nothing but person.

I do not act, I transact. I do not decide, I divulge.

In place of motives I have morals. In place of questions I have opinions.

I am perfectly conscious. I am always talking. I will talk to you about how I will listen to you. I am always already present. You are already me.

0.

I recently took an ill-advised tour through the scribblings and pamphleteering of my peers and rivals on Substack - the ranks of what I like to call the "League of Didactic White Boys". Many of them probably software engineers, data scientists, the kind of guy with a PhD in economics for no good reason - many of them clearly autodidacts, having spent a good part of their 20's gorging themselves on Wikipedia. They typically have decent historical awareness, a good grasp of the scientific method, a sense of humor - primarily employed to stave off the perpetual depression and occasional waves of despair, varying levels of self-absorption, coupled with a crippling but intermittent awareness of personal insignificance and the improbability of possessing the "correct" answers. As a result, they have developed their intellect into a formidable instrument of filibuster: the deferral of anxiety and moral crisis via philosophical expository, analytic detour, and a shuffling of the cards of concurrent data and historical precedent until a satisfying tarot constellation is reached. They offer this up to you as entertainment, reprieve, enlightenment, hope, refreshment. But I must say I come away from their writing feeling much worse than I began. I feel their displaced anxiety. I feel how trapped they feel: their claustrophobia, their panic, their bitterness, their subdued rage, and above all, their confusion. What a bewildering confused world this 21st century is turning out to be. Go count the number of blogs purporting to explain the madness. - And am I any different? I'd like to think a fresh breeze blows through my words. I'll confess something: if I have a proclivity to any one species of fear, it's claustrophobia. I need the biggest sky possible. I need to feel as close to the stars as to the earth. I need to feel suspended between dust and annihilation in order to feel okay. I need to be reminded of my mortality on a regular basis. I must take risks, I must be outside in the wild with nonhuman creatures, between the unforgiving sun and the relentless squirming life evincing its indifference to my presence or absence. I need to be held at a tenuous distance from the human world to feel sane. Therefore despite our similarities, I don't have a great degree of sympathy for most of the didactic white boys I encounter. I fault them for their lack of courage. They make ideological excursions, they flirt with extremism, they try on various postures, and maybe allow themselves to finally become angry - but how many of them do anything differently with their body in space and time?

Generally I see four solutions to the creeping confusion of 21st century Euroamerican cultural decay, among the educated postliberal:

1. Those with a background in science flee to statistics. Social science, and thus psychology, and thus the authority on all questions of why people are they way they are, is to be reduced to probability distribution. Again in this I see not much more than an amateur, uninspired, and exhausting form of divination. They shuffle the deck of facts until they get the reading they were looking for, and somewhere in that probability cloud is supposed to be an answer to "yes, but why?"...

2. Flirtations with extremism. They begin this test: "How conservative can I become in my whiplash, and still respect myself and find justification for my views?" But as the centers of gratification and the dopamine pathways shift, from the good boy who mimics moral posturing as best he can, to the bad boy who delights in provocation, he finds that any degree of conservative extremism may suit him as long as it yields a sense of importance. At least he no longer feels ignored.

3. Flirtations with religious apocrypha. An initially ironic exploration of early Christian and other Gnostic-Hermetic propaganda begins to become serious, as one acquires a taste for the certainty of the religious worldview. Most of these types were not raised under a religious regime, and thus the narcotic is novel. In fact, the only voice I found in my short survey which remotely reminded me of my own, was an ex-Mormon. He wants to be so "reasonable" and fair - and perhaps still is far too much a good boy. - A lesson to Bartholomy, if he's listening.

4. An ever-deepening investment in an absurdist, cynical, black humor. Here I have the most sympathy, and here I find the most potential for healing - dangerous as an abiding, unrelenting cynicism can be. It's a poison I'm used to handling as an indispensable ingredient in my kind of health regimen. When I travel in the third world I make a point of smoking the harsh local cigarettes and eating as much spicy food as I can handle, because it makes your skin less appetizing to the ambient mosquitoes. Is our cynicism a pesticide? Are we seeking to become less appetizing to parasitic ideology? Or are we merely seeking a sense of mastery at any cost, no matter how hopeless and desiccated we feel in the aftermath? At least by continually blackening our humor, lowering our expectations of fulfillment, and learning to live without hope, we gain back a sense of control. And truthfully maybe we were much too childish, pampered, and full of hopes to begin with. Maybe we're only discovering the proper orientation of a testosterone-infused mammal a little late in our life - maybe we're making up for being uninitiated boys. Even our pains are esoteric: we feel a crushing sense of responsibility, alongside a bewildering lack of agency. We want to be correct, we want to do it right, we want to lead responsibly and judiciously - all the while we want to unleash our pent up imagination and the funk we've been holding back too long. Finally we stop giving a damn and start saying what we mean: at this point people start paying attention, now that we no longer feel responsible, now that we're willing to go our own way alone. And so it is that every worthy voice in this little club, wanders off into some strange detour from which he'll clearly never return. I feel that I'm witnessing so many potential friends and beautiful enemies disappear over a horizon I have no interest in pursuing.

It's a strange lonely voyeuristic time, this age of the internet. A million peepholes for every decent conversation. A million passive identifications for every participation. Ten million mimicries for every originality. A hundred million nothings for every something. Again I find my healing in the dark - in the "blackout" that waits behind this electrical noise. If I am to wander a wasteland, let it be the wasteland of the stars. Just this moment, Venus is staring at me, chiding, beckoning. She is sexy, I'll admit. Governess of twilight. In her eerie white light I find the willingness to face this inevitable nihilism of a garbage world: I hate the internet for its ugliness, for the way it amplifies the worst of humanity and feeds our petty addictions, for the way it makes our bodies smaller and our minds overwrought - and yet I'm obviously just as dependent on it for communication as anyone else, and like everyone else I've learned to rummage it for trinkets and tools... But please understand me: what you're looking for cannot be found here. Therefore tread lightly my friends, this internet of dismay. If you must seek explanation, seek lightly.

In the morning light, an afterthought:

What are we doing? What compels us to philosophize, synthesize, and mythologize? If we insist that every response to stress is part of the core human adaptive package, then this urge to make sense of a world in the throes of cultural decay must also have its proper function, beyond "just getting by". My answer is clear: we're attempting to create the mythology of a new tribe. Not merely to plug the holes of a leaky lifeboat of personal neurosis - although this may get us started, we quickly find that these consolations serve to rally a following, and we learn to crave the social recognition.

We point to the chaos and confusion and say: "these are the wages of sin", or "thus the age of retribution begins" - look closer at these didactic white boys to see them each groping toward one of these prophetic formulae. But the most ancient, least colored by postaxial evangelical ennui, and thus most restorative and powerful justification of human tumult is: "such is the wheel of fate". Such is all life on this hairy globe. A deep tribal mythology does not merely tell a tall tale of how and why, but addresses what the human creature needs so badly: to rejoin the earthly family, to feel at home here, despite his nightmares of future and past, his feverdreams of utopia and dystopia, his forever disintegrating tribe, the curse of his frail instincts and overwrought cleverness. The point of mythology is to turn cleverness against itself: to use neurotic entanglement to produce feelings of belonging, fulfillment, blessing. To make this overheated expensive cranium do something other than get us into more trouble - the poet's craft largely consists of discovering as many mysterious correspondences as possible, such that an overwhelming subterranean meaningfulness looms, sufficient to swallow whole all nihilistic fatigue. We want to live in a world knitted together by correspondences, like navigating a synaptic carpet, a world of shimmering mirror, a world in which every word speaks of the beginning and the end, in which everything has its place in the sacred circle of time, in which the hoop of life descends and ascends like the ecliptic of the sun, blessing us as the generations pass. That's the ancient vision we long for: that is the grand dream of the old man lodged deep in our ape heart, the one who sits blind in the darkest corner of the cave, smoking and chanting the songs of his fathers, he who makes us weep with the beauty and wisdom of this ape-nature.

0.

I frequently speak ill of narrative consciousness and treat it as an obstacle - and this it certainly is. Ceaseless, aimless linguistic hallucination characterizes so much of what it means to be an anxious modern creature. But like every affliction, there is a way to make it an asset. Narrative consciousness must be embraced as a kind of madness: all "thinking" is talking to someone who is not there. The first meaning of Logos was merely "bundle", "what is gathered", and later it meant "story", and only much later did it mean anything like "logic" or "principle" - in other words, the word itself is a tall tale. Our private bouts of reason address a tribe that is not there. The philosopher's path out of this madness has been to talk to ourselves all the more: to deepen the conversation, to make it fruitful, to lean into the solipsistic corkscrew until we come out the other end - finally understanding that this madness has nothing to do with us personally, and is common to what it means to be human. We are surrounded by anxious dreamers, who fear they are the only ones who dream with eyes open. So much of what I see when I look into the frightened eyes of the human world, is the fear that only they are afflicted with an incommensurate subjectivity, that it is they alone who must expend so much effort to seem to be normal, that it they alone who seem to stand on the edge of a precipice from which a cacophony of voices emerge, wrapping them in a many-colored coat of desires which they throw back down the hole and disown. But narrative consciousness is the favored servant of the pharaoh: the one who can interpret dreams, the one who is always lost within a dream, the one who speaks in riddles as a first language. Right in the center of the most dull and monotonous mental activity, lies the brilliance of unconscious thought. The human world is like a million twitching madmen shaking hands and doing business in the radioactive aftermath of a disaster: they go on as though it weren't there, as though not acknowledging it were essential to the ritual. And yet this human creature is so terribly competent, so fibrous and difficult to defeat: it will discover the minimum expenditure to achieve its ends, the least distance path, the least risky strategy. For in the field of petty strategizing, our madness serves us best: no other animal can compete with us in the arts of hysterical displacement, conversion, covert gratification, the return of the repressed, and every other means of achieving social ends while minimizing risk. Why do we think so much? Because we strategize so much. Because narrative consciousness is a social function, and the aim of all sociality is hierarchical advantage through symbolic means. Narrative consciousness is inherently linguistic because language has its origin in the symbolic character of sociality. When we talk to ourselves, we are strategizing, we are preparing, we are rehearsing, we are altering memories, we are erasing humiliations, we are talking ourselves back into confidence - we are licking our wounds, gloating, gossiping, and preparing for the next round. And yet this essential loneliness and desperation can be made to serve other purposes: it can be bent backwards into a truth function, because the discovery of truth is a creative act - and all creation requires confabulation.

Obviously my own thinking and writing into which I pour so much of who I am, would not exist without this narrative weaponry. Despite all my admonitions against its glorification, clearly it is the divine madness which makes this species so interesting. We are infected with symbol: what gives us mastery has also enslaved us. We are the weeping, laughing ape: arguing with voices, afraid of the past, plotting for the future - almost a lost cause. The only liberation is affirmation: if we are to be forever thinking, let us think well. If we are to be forever hearing voices, let it be a good voice. We must find a way out of the labyrinth of voices into the chorus of days: "The grass is a chorus of mundane days, piercing me blade by blade until my body rises."

Narrative consciousness must not be allowed the delusion of control: its proper functioning is to be constantly weaving a tale and leaving a trail of coherent memories behind it. But the illusion that guidance and decision come from this audible voice should not be encouraged: it is the unconscious processes which must be clarified, reified, and amplified - a good story thrives because of its symbolic silences, which grow in the space between the telling and the hearing. The proper function of conscious narratization is analysis: it is adept at dividing into parts, loosening, undoing. As a diagnostic routine, it overexcites unconscious symbolic constellation such that novel configurations become possible: this is the meaning of "talk therapy", this is why "just talking about it" can change so much. But the creative and restorative power is not due to conscious process: narrative consciousness is primarily a critic. When it praises, beware. When it finds fault, pay attention. When it asks good questions, now it is functioning. The narrative voice which asks probing questions leaves behind it a wake of unconscious coherences like a scalpel slicing through regenerative flesh. Every time we slice, our insight deepens: because the crystallinity left behind, lets us see deeper.

Narrative consciousness likely developed as an excess byproduct of the ability to form complex goal-oriented behaviors: sustained selective repression is necessary for a technologically dependent creature, who must learn most of his skills second-hand and perform them over long periods. The human instinct is to learn complex behaviors through imitation, and narrative consciousness begins as the introjected imitation of social function: children begin their career of "thinking" by talking aloud to themselves as they play, narrating what they do... To think is to play the omniscient narrator.

Narrative consciousness is the strange feedback between the speech centers and the auditory cortex: a crude but effective behavioral organizing function, arising out of the need for highly specialized behavior in absence of instinctual coherence.

Is narrative consciousness an emergent property of linguistic capacity? Is it an inevitable development, once language becomes so overdeveloped? Or is it rather the other way round? Do linguistic faculty and linguistic dependence emerge simultaneously from the common problem of instinctual incoherence? This is where almost no one understands my evolutionary psychology: the human creature is helpless in light of his instinctual weakening, and only becomes strong again due to his delusions.

Let me say it again. It's our talent for useful hallucination that makes us indomitable: anyone who's treated schizophrenia with an open mind eventually learns that every bit of crazy is an ingenious solution to the insoluble. This is part of why my work's notoriety has this quality of a slow-burn: most cannot, will not hear me - the defenses are orders of magnitude stronger than any brew of poetry and rhetoric I can cook. No matter how much beauty I conjure, no matter how many spirits I set dancing to my tune, no matter if I get the pores of the earth to tremble - once a schizophrenic patient told me, in the middle of the most powerful session of my life thus far, that the room was shaking - I cannot defeat those defenses before they're ready to lower on their own: the power was all his, I merely made him feel safe. But if I can make a schizophrenic feel heard, witnessed, and safe, why then all this attack upon you neurotics? It's my instinct: y'all need your assumptions and certainties attacked, from every conceivable angle. Y'all are doing it wrong: liberation and joy lies on the other side of that white-knuckle grip, that mile-wide moat of denial, that ever-present chant of sanity, normalcy, morality, safety, blamelessness, sanity, normalcy, morality...

We hear voices. But what does that have to do with being conscious? Asked another way, how do these voices attract attention? Firstly by being so loud: they overwhelm other systems. Secondly by a long tail of reflection: the feedback between speech and auditory centers leaves traces, stutters, and echoes.

And why do we talk to ourselves? Because we are lonely, and because we are resentful. Narrative consciousness is always ersatz sociality: it is either rehearsal, preparation, or memory confabulation. Our famed "reflective reason" is largely rehearsal, largely as-if posturing in front of the mirror of our own witness - and the rest of "immortal reason" is just fabricated ex post facto. The logicians are ever on about the same tired gag: they don't want us to know that they sit in smelly closeted rooms having smelly closeted thoughts. They want us to believe in their tired childish fantasies of perfect immateriality and transcendent reason: only so could the reality of their bodily misery be justified - or ignored.

But again is this narrative consciousness, this loud voice, this cogito, somehow an emergent criticality of the social communicative function? Is it similarly a diagnostic routine? Resentment gives us the clue: we never talk to ourselves so loudly and compulsively, as when we are boiling with resentment. Dysfunctional social contexts and their symptoms - namely loneliness, alienation, self-loathing - induces a diagnostic hyperactivity within the social systems: thus we hallucinate voices, we "think" constantly, we rehearse, analyze, and prepare. We are spindoctors of a failing tribe, each of us a lost cause in a tribe that never was: the more stressed and abandoned the human creature feels, the louder and more insistent these voices.

The deeply social aspect of narrative consciousness should be emphasized: the narrative I is an introjection of the dialogic You.

Therefore narrative consciousness retains a special genetic relation to repression: talking to oneself is partly a byproduct of the deferral routine every tribal creature full of compromises needs - "La dee da, I'm busy with something I'm not ashamed of, don't mind me". Thus personal narration is not only an instinctual stopgap but a disguise for sneaky ape activities: if you look self-absorbed in an uninteresting chore, you are likely to go unnoticed and thus unharassed. Study the conflict resolution rituals of the gorilla to see it in action: the principal idea of submission behavior is to sedate your superior with his own tribal instincts. Looking thoughtful is to the human what sniffing wieners is to dogs. This also provides another clue why "thinking" usually involves seeing oneself from the outside: contextualization is as important to purposeful behavior, as it is to fooling your wouldbe rivals and persecutors... Paranoia and the capacity for thought are mutually conditioning: it's always the outliers and losers who think the most - something philosophers have not been honest about.

So much of our thinking boils down to this recurrent question: "Who am I in relation to the group?" Status revaluation is a constant habit of nervous apes. The rehearsal of likely future scenarios and the delusional repair of past failures: this is one of those things everyone knows about the human condition but does not address. If you admit how much time you spend arguing with voices, "they" will come and take you away.

Confabulation is an important factor in all "consciousness". But confabulation largely occurs in the realm of narrative episodic memory, not sensory coherence: the coherent actionable sensorium has nothing to do with auditory hallucination - in plainer terms, "thinking" rarely makes you smarter - a very old absurdity I must continually underline.

Except perhaps that conscious attention to the sensory whole is part of the diagnostic, and thus paranoia: forming a paranoid transitory Merkwelt is the original function of becoming conscious, because it's about addressing a failure in an otherwise efficient unconscious process. "What's wrong here? Who am I?" This is the subtle connective tissue between apperception and narration, and why I permit myself the term "consciousness" at all: both are confabulatory in the sense that reparative contextualization requires fictional stopgaps - white lies are an essential element to functional calibration. Did you follow that or did your egoic defenses prevent it?

That consciousness is a diagnostic routine is surely evident in its somatic apperceptive form, but how does the diagnostic role frame what narrative consciousness does? The idea is that an animal "thinks" protolinguistically when it reevaluates instinctual targeting: doubt about the present course is sometimes needed, and thus potentially grounding out and resetting an instinctual process. The principal insight is that instinctual targeting is inherently symbolic - the symbol emerges from the recognition function: thus symbolic reasoning is as old as any instinct, and therefore doubt is as old as both. Next time you see a robin flicking over leaves in a lawn hunting for worms, watch for a moment of misfire and hesitation: that's the birthplace of consciousness.

A word about the famous "thalamocortical loop": its function seems to be to restrict access to the cortex and thereby modulate cortical feedback. Thus has this function attracted attention as a neural correlate to conscious activity: but what's missing, is the insight that the kind of socially mediated narrative consciousness induced by the not merely verbal but written computer-administered multiple-choice playacting scenarios of most neuropsychology experiments, requires massive inhibition in all other systems to function. "Thinking" like this precludes a great deal else, because it is much more expensive than it seems to us. But most of these researchers have never considered that the kind of thinking they're used to is actually auditory hallucination, and that silently reading printed text involves a minimum of these steps: visual resolution of shapes into recognized words; corresponding stimulation of speech centers such that a simulation of speech is produced while inhibiting the motor actuation; "hearing" this hallucinated voice at the auditory center, which then broadcasts comprehension to many other locales - none of which is conscious at all! By the time apperception of the process can take place, all that's left is the echo... Take none of the talk about consciousness seriously, which does not appreciate how little consciousness is able to embrace: the great mystery is not reflexive representation, it is unconscious presentation.

Why do we even call this narration "consciousness", if it proceeds so often unconsciously? Because again it's a matter of degree. Most of what the average human being is conscious of, is merely painfully loud. There are two ways to wake a doped sleeper: shouting and kicking. In more refined language, we speak of narration and apperception as redundant marking and potential nociception - again, shouting and kicking! But the crass butt-end of humanity is revealing - not merely comedic relief but comedic revelation: Dogberry and his nightwatchmen report the truth, if assbackward.

Consciousness is no more mysterious and wonderful than anything else the organism does. That there's so much flattery and low-bowing and pushing-each-other-aside surrounding the palanquin it seems to ride in, is because two primary forces of apenature coincide here: fear of abandonment and vanity. The immortal soul is dead, the tribe is dead, the nationstate is dying, the nuclear family is dying: what's left to hide our nakedness? What's left as consolation? "Personal identity" is left: and because "consciousness" seems to be the most scientific and unassailable abstraction of this erstwhile soul, it is vigorously and even viciously defended - after all my laser-guided diatribe and moral assassination, the only nasty feedback I've received so far was in reaction to my dismissal of that holy cow, the one with "consciousness" painted over its brow.

Consciousness promises security against annihilation: cogito ergo sum is formulated precisely. The reason consciousness is invoked as the answer to the absurd question, "do I exist?", is because the authority of a hallucinated voice is derived from the social function: inclusion is existence. If someone is talking to you, you're not yet abandoned. Thus is consciousness portrayed as mysterious, ineffable, and irreducible by people who have no ability to feel such things: it is proof of membership that cannot be taken away. This is the secret behind the modern Buddhist's fearful concern with "no-self": the promise of relief from endless anxiety wrapped in the threat of abandonment - they lurch and grimace around this promise like Kubrick's monkeys around the monolith.

But as soon as the ape is included, it wants more. One of the chief charms of this fickle word "consciousness", is identification with the most impressive feats of humanity: we would like this imaginary unity to be solely responsible for all the technological wonders of civilization. We want the fount of all possible intelligence and the loud compulsive voices we live with, to be one and the same. In fact we feel defensive when confronted with the variety and depth of intelligence all of terrestrial life possesses as birthright: and therefore does a contrary and apesick ape such as myself, feel compelled to preach this bad news. But those who know, know it as the best of news: we are not alone in our madness, and while this madness may be incurable, it is also laughable...

The famous "unity of consciousness" is a shallow and easily displaced illusion: it's the first piece of unlearning, and something every student of any promise quickly makes peace with. It's not even an illusion: it's a bad habit, a lack of honesty, a linguistic artifact, and an obtuse theoretical assumption which falls apart at the merest touch. Anyone who drones on about consciousness as "the totality of subjective experience" as though they were gazing into a kitschy snowglobe, as though their daily experience were an enchanting bedtime story, as though doubt, loathing, compulsion, and contradiction did not color vast expanses of their actual "subjective experience" - is expressing a wish, not an observation. So when they sit down in their pompous, awkward way to write about such a thing, they are not beginning to tell lies, they are sewing up the edges of a gaudy costume patched together from years of shameful secret skittering and frittering, as though a frantic nocturnal mouse fantasized about spending its days as a fat cat in the sun.

Why is truth so hard to tell? But it's rarely the first truth which is so hard: it's the second and third that we fear. Every little defended lie is a dam holding back a flood. This is the reason for deathbed confessions: finally it's possible to unburden oneself without having to face what was really frightening - the cascade of truth, the task of living up to one's honesty.

Do not doubt therefore, that the human creature is highly adept at detecting which denials are essential to their beaverdam - and precisely when and where. The human creature could not be such a skilled unconscious liar if it did not also unconsciously know what is true. Everyone possesses the dowsing rod of truth: the only question is, what's the social value of truth? The truth is, not much - hard truths are generally reserved for vicious gossip, the secret ingredient of effective slander, and dirty jokes.

In my last book, The Moral Disease, I made the distinction between narrative and apperceptive consciousness. This can be construed as "hearing what you think", and "seeing what you feel". What immediately becomes clear is that there must be an apperceptive aspect to what I call narrative consciousness: most talk to oneself is actually unconscious, and it requires years of practice to effectively listen to this talk. To be conscious of internal narration is therefore a kind of dialogue, in that this listener also spawns responses - certainly his presence alters the monologue. This is what I mean when I say that you must learn to talk to yourself and not someone else. To put this in neuroanatomical terms, this "listener" is most likely constituted by the auditory cortex and its involvement in thalamic feedback, such that the auditory center "listens" to the speech center, while this "silent speech" is maximally exploited to generate affective coherence leading to purposive behavior in absence of the instinctual coherence the rest of animalia still has. In other words, as my good readers will already know, narrative consciousness is a result of frustrated instinct and thus amplified by realized modernity.

And yet it occurs to me that while I'm developing a mathematically inspired language for apperceptive proprioception, I'm content to explain narrative consciousness with abstract entities acting like miniature people in an imagined little room, as is customary among bad psychologists - almost all psychology is merely grotesque puppetry robbed of the bawdy, like a cringing Sunday school play. But why am I suddenly content with sock puppets? The potentially interesting features of narrative consciousness have to do with the semantic relations and corresponding Freudian mechanics inherent in the function of language itself: the proper investigation of the underlying structures with which narrative consciousness must deal, belong to the domain of psychoanalysis. Yet I'm content to leave this "listening" and "talking" relationship in mythopoetic terms, because the process is in essence mythopoetic. It is fundamentally a shallow illusion: we are halfmad apes talking to ourselves. That we hear an internal voice only means that we have learned to induce endogenous cheap hallucination as a kind of panacea against the ills of anxiety and frustration. The less anxious and frustrated you are, the more these voices recede, and the more spontaneous and oracular thinking becomes.

My most gifted readers will perhaps have already noticed a certain informative recursion in my style. Everything I've said about narrative consciousness has been composed in a single stroke while wandering through my desert wilderness, talking to a handheld recorder: I find I cannot do otherwise if I am to speak of this subject with any honesty. It must be demonstrated in situ. Right now I'm standing in the dark looking straight up at the band of the Milky Way poised at the zenith: "surely, in this is a metaphor for the topic" - so says the poet's intuition. Or is it the poet's greed? It will be a metaphor, therefore the glory of this spectacle becomes mine, therefore I become a mysterious hazy path from horizon to horizon: is it a bridge, or a destination? To that question, the ancients used to answer, yes. Just as they would answer concerning the value of our hallucinated voices. Is our thinking the prelude to madness or the means to wisdom? But just as with everything that lives, just as the trembling whirling of every galaxy demonstrates, one cannot be anything except by continually becoming it.

I see both a growing acceptance of debilitating anxiety and a growing shame surrounding the thirst for the worst: it's no accident that the movies of the 21st century seem to become ever more adolescent, escapist, and yet overstimulating and absurdly violent. Both cloyingly escapist and naïvely pessimistic: the "John Wick" series as example... The proliferation of the comic book point of view: the deferral of adulthood and its sense of responsibility for the world as we find it - and not as we wish it were. The proliferation of moral posturing and ridiculous politicizing belongs here also: all of it is merely as-if social positioning, which seeks to mine strategic advantage out of absurd fantasies no one actually believes. The great insight, which takes years to internalize, is that the ape will gladly feign stupidity as long as it's socially advantageous. No one actually believes that sexual dimorphism isn't an important genetic fact, for example: already the smarter actors are backing out of the extreme transgender rhetoric, seeking an unexhausted vein of moral decoupage...

There is my dark vision laid bare: can you stand it? He is my guardian spirit. He's right in this case: and hearing his voice and following his logic is generally worthwhile, because no one else will go down that dark road with a cheerful knowing grin - but somehow he can. He looks at such things and laughs: the ape makes him laugh, despite how deeply he feels wounded by its wretchedness and how much he longs to admire it again. But not until he's been heard, in every gory detail, and every bit of mendacious cowering in our situation is exposed, will he sit down and allow the overflowing heart of the poet to take over. So it is that the two sing together in my best moments, mingling into one tremulous voice.

But what seems like the ability to hypnotize, is largely the ability to cancel distraction: actually every sentient creature moves between many simultaneous and orthogonal trances at once, the interoperations of which produce contextually rich behaviors... Every trance is the result of the isolation of a fewer set of perceptual-behavioral loops than normally operative. What then causes that stasis which gives it away? Just this: the temporary dominance of one instinctual systemic response over many others - instinct spends most of its time waiting, and defaults to off. Think of the stalking cat: its eyes fixed, its musculature poised, all other responses suppressed.

To "mesmerize" is to produce a potently multivalent signal while deferring interpretation: to keep everyone awake, interested, but suspended between stimulus and interpretive response. Nothing breaks beautiful trance like premature interpretation: thus the droning, repetitive, uninformative talk of most modern folk, which manages to combine suspiciously optimistic monotony with a marching thrum of numbing certainty at every step. This is antitrance: a shallow fitful sleep which rests nowhere, which constantly strums the same note in response to every input in order to preclude associative traversal... To suppress premature interpretation: that happens to be one of the ingredients which Freud discovered was essential to the exploration of unconscious valence - everyone likes to forget that Freud began as a neurologist exploring the power of hypnosis.

If you get the feeling sometimes, that my writing induces mild trance, you are beginning to understand me. But no one can induce receptivity where there is none, and every dream is a "shared dream" - because we are never alone within this sloshing nucleic acid tidepool called terrestrial life: to be conscious is not to be alone, only to produce the illusion of useful unity where there is plurality. It's no accident that every nomadic people on the planet considered the dreamstate to be that place where contact with ancestors was most likely... So what are we doing together then? I am speaking to you across the narrow genetic footbridge which separates us, a mere 200,000 years of branching at most: as a single species, we are of the same body. Our nervous systems resonate so readily, because they are hardly different - only I know how to make mine sing with words, such that it becomes a swaying rhythm built on the rhythms of heart, blood, stomach. But it's your power I'm using: all I can do is defer the distraction of your garrulous narrative consciousness with a flood of irresistible poetry, such that latent wakefulness finds itself in the midst of a suddenly stilled landscape - depth of dreaming comes when the wakeful coexists with unconscious topology without disturbing its dendritic overdetermined process... In other words: the ability to witness, respond, and even manipulate, without imposing the brutality of singular valence so typical of the forebrain. The dilation of fragmented dreams: there is no more significant channel of communication I know of, and I've looked.

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What is biological intelligence? The question should be pursued not only in terms of competence, but creativity. Intelligence does not merely outperform other alternatives, it generates solutions in a richly textured unpredictable environment. The ability to generate contextually dependent solutions through the interaction of a small set of modular behaviors defined by metastabilities in statespace: ethology used to call this "instinct", and this is where I believe we should begin.

First, a little historical overview from the perspective of a psychoanalyst:

The Freudian, Lacanian, and poststructuralist theories of unconscious process are much more compatible with mathematical modeling than generally assumed. It was Freud and Levi-Strauss who first designed a theory of symbolic motivation compatible with the vector field: existing neural network models and NLP techniques actually owe a great deal to early 20th century psycholinguistics. The inventor of the perceptron and thus the forerunner of all connectionist models, Frank Rosenblatt, was himself a psychologist. W. Ross Ashby, the first to write systematically about cybernetics in the 1950s, was also. The still fundamental "McCulloch–Pitts" neuronal model was built from the collaboration of a logician and a psychologist.

But what's still missing is an integration between neural network principles and the rigorous formulation of unconscious mechanics: these mechanics themselves have been known to psychoanalysis for more than a century, proven in a thousand contexts, and yet remain largely unexploited in any computational context. Partly this is due to the exotic flavor continental philosophy still has for the Anglo-American sphere in which nearly all AI and neuropsychology has taken place, and partly this is due to the inevitable resistance which any psychology of the unconscious encounters: part of how unconscious process secures efficiency, is denial of its existence.

One of the insights of the mathematician Norbert Wiener, is to have conceived of a signal as a special kind of noise. The psychological analogue can help explain what I mean by "unconscious mechanics": namely that conscious process is largely constituted by redundant marking. A conscious topology is coherent but informatively sparse. Since the Romantics of the 1800s, the realm of unconscious process as been popularly characterized as lawless, arbitrary, and irrational. Nearly the reverse is the case: what is unconscious can afford to remain so, because it's metabolically optimized. What we're conscious of, we do awkwardly, slowly, expensively. It was one of the important results of chaos theory in the 1990s to emphasize that chaos should not be properly considered "random", but a state of excitation produced by the competition between many potential kinds of order, such that the total statespace of a given system lacks easily detected structure. Similarly, biological noise only appears random because the cumulative amplitude reflects too many trajectories simultaneously to be formulated as a linear function. The great biologist E.O. Wilson had a similar realization while observing his ant colonies. At low states of excitation, the collective behavior of Hymenoptera can appear futile and aimless: a single ant may pick up a pebble in the vicinity of the entrance, move it a few inches, drop it, walk in a circle, pick it up again only to move it back to its original position. But this is the stochastic foundation from which purposive behavior is built: it requires many nonlinear interactions between many relatively free agents acting within the strict restraints of a finite system, to produce holistic "agential" behavior. It was the principal insight of cybernetics that in a system's search for homeostasis, purposive behavior is born. Biological systems are inherently dissipative, and therefore designed to withstand enormous energetic throughput such that they are capable of exploiting the fallback in generating organized purposive behavior. This kind of self-organizing novelty cannot be obtained through linear guidance, but rather must be obtained through the system's own exploration of its critical moments.

An unconscious topology such as we experience it in psychoanalysis, is above all richly connected and overdetermined: any one effect has many causes. A hypothesis reliant on a bijective relation between intelligent result and uniquely determined mechanic will always fail. The systems we're discussing are fully deterministic in shortterm pathfinding yet stochastic in longterm evolution - their statespace trails have rational causes but are extremely difficult to predict: my argument is that the same characterization applies to unconscious process, because although the semantic valences with which it deals are highly ordered, their extreme connectedness makes surprises the rule rather than the exception. In the classic example of displacement and the element of the uncanny in dreams, the object choice which serves to obscure the repressed content often has the appearance of the comically arbitrary, but upon closer examination was always assigned its role due to a maximal connectivity to the original repressed ideation: Freud's phrase "Wortbrücke" was apt and prophetic, considering the current direction of natural language processing. Neurosis forms as a locus of high connective throughput, which encapsulates a region of the repressed like scar tissue. Arguably, even ancestral instinctual centers in an unconscious topology produce similar distortion effects. This is what one of the last great naturalists, the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, also incidentally termed "displacement": when the primary instinctual path is blocked, such as the consummatory act of a mating ritual, other peripheral behaviors become activated through displacement. A male goose frustrated in his courtship will instead peck at the ground furiously. In this one easily pictured example, we see both the origin for the capacity for repression - namely the halting of instinctual discharge in a social context - and the evidence of the protolinguistic relationship at work in any given displacement. Namely that what the male goose wants to do in the fulfillment of his duties is symbolically enacted in the way he pecks at the ground - a substitute behavior which is nonetheless "understood" by all.

Everything I've said could at least be employed in making natural language processing more interesting than it is now. In my opinion, its output is largely boring, only vaguely plausible, but not valid. It's merely the statistical average of a great many texts organized into a vast lookup table: there is no meaning because there is no driving force, there is no driving force because there is no theory of hermeneutics behind the modeling, nor any model of a constrained system undergoing energetic stress. The wonders of GPT are obtained through bruteforce combinatorial computation: any given word's likely occurrence in the vicinity of any given word. It's my contention that this has nothing to do with biological intelligence nor what's valuable about human communication: which is why its output reads like a mediocre 10th grader trying to sound smarter than they are via plagiarism and a thesaurus. We still have an opportunity of doing something more significant than improving on the latest chatbot: as a scholar and psychologist, this interests me much more, despite the fact that the big cash money wad probably lies in the direction of producing vapid results for the sake of credulous crowds. The 21st century bigtop and sideline freakshow takes place digitally, but the crushing stupidity of the majority remains the same. Yet the activity of the field tells me that I'm not the only one thinking this way, and that someone will implement these ideas in the near future...

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Consciousness is a localized resonance, achieved via projection of a subset of a richly-connected high-dimensional structure onto a low dimensional space, which when applied as feedback to the generative unconscious computational network, selectively amplifies its own preimage. Consciousness is a ghost which summons the living.

A conscious topology is a relatively flat and sparse surjective transform, which hides overdetermination and redundancy. Consciousness is not strictly speaking a subspace of unconsciousness, but rather a low dimensional projection which selectively generates resonant activation depending on orientation. This orientation could be characterized as a tangential space.

The purpose of this projection-feedback function is the exploitation of nonlinearity in achieving efficiency gains as aftereffect: apperceptive consciousness itself is an obstacle to performance, but the coherence left behind testifies to its role as calibration. An animal does not generally become aware of itself except when something goes wrong. A nervous system is potentially very expensive, and must be constantly optimized such that minimal metabolic expenditure achieves maximum result. By applying a kind of "lowpass filter", or radically reductionistic projection of neural activation as feedback, the most salient features can be amplified, retained, and potentially debugged. Most incoming data and the vast majority of the combinatorial possibilities of behavior are discarded: I argue that what we experience as consciousness is partly epiphenomena of this search-and-prune routine, and partly the adaptive exploitation of selective feedback located right at the heart of the issues of intelligence, learning, health, and purposive behavior.

Quite a mouthful - and yet despite the danger we're in, whenever we bow low before this golden calf called "consciousness", my goal here is to find another vector of attack: the prejudices surrounding this concept will not melt away just by being ignored, nor can they be "transcended" away - intellect must serve its best purpose and provide the scalpel we need to dissect this unholy thing, this marriage of profundity and sterility, pregnancy and denial. In other words, like our best teachers within the lineage of Western critical theory - Nietzsche, Spinoza, Socrates and Heraclitus come to mind first - we want those same intellectual gymnastics which almost unfailingly lead the human race astray to become the "bent-back bow" which might fire an arrow into the heart of human experience, destroying as much as it creates, setting aflame as much as it fertilizes.

The distilled hypothesis runs like this:

Apperceptive consciousness is a surjective transformation function operating on sensory input, whose purpose is to establish selective resonance with its own preimage, such that the coherence of the unconscious structure is improved. The prime case is always proprioception: it is the bodily macrostructure and its need for precise navigation, which necessitates constant calibration. Thus is apperception born.

Looking carefully at the physiology of the cerebellum, I argue that we should conceive of proprioception as a finite-dimensional reprojection of a topologically rendered abstraction of afferent input: the informative density of nerve endings in space and spike trains in time is radically reduced, translated, and reconstructed within the computational matrix that is the cerebellum.

However, proprioception is generally focused on the thin edge: between the body envelope and potential contact. The arms of the amoeba stretch forth, the cell wall shivers. Apperception therefore is a kind of interoception - largely imagined, but built from the ingredients of muscle extension detectors, gastrointestinal signals, and anything on the interior actually innervated, however slightly. Our "inner life" is largely a useful illusion.

The question is whether proprioception as metaphor, or actually as bottomup structural process, can be shown to be constituent of conscious activation. Consciousness is largely a matter of redundancy: a consequence of blockage, of signal bottleneck, and therefore an emergent character of many proprioceptive subroutines and their coalescence upon a local domain.

In other words, do we only become aware of ourselves in the "mirror stage", as mirage, as uncanny Doppelgänger, as imposter - or is the bodymind truly something organic, healthy, vital, the real "soul" we've been looking for? My answer is clear enough: the idea that the "self" does not belong here, that it must have some "higher" origin by definition, is only the culminating delusion of a deeply alienated and suspect human creature - it's very common in the last stages of a psychotic breakdown, when it starts to go sour, to conclude that the previous shattering realization "the I is not" should be translated as "I am not here", which quickly becomes "The body is unreal". And that's the history of postaxial philosophy in one sentence. In fact, the circle is coming back around: isn't there a uniquely suspect affinity between the feverish religions of Late Antiquity and their obsession with "higher worlds" and "other origins", and the increasingly common conviction among the commonest people of the 21st century that "the universe is a computer simulation"? Anyone else detect the sticky sweet smell of sedentary bodies and emotional stunting?

The apperceptive self must be awoken: the proprioceptive system must be taxed, trained, made to dance. I recently found a movie featuring Fred Astaire at his most brilliant: I hadn't realized how much like Bruce Lee his body was - taut, a Swiss caliper of time...

Watch Fred warm up in that clip: the first thing he does, is diminish his consciousness and push his apperception down, into his belly, to internalize the rhythm in his abdominals. The marks of self-consciousness fade from his face. The I is not here.

Consciousness frames, while unconscious process does its job: we do almost nothing consciously, yet it is present while we do things. What's it for? For narration, for gross course correction, for the backpropagating activation of purposive behavior. The locality of consciousness is a boundary ring of inhibition surrounding a zone of selective excitation: thus it frames what we do, but does not do much of anything, despite our much-cultivated delusions on this point.

Consciousness is a feedback membrane: a containment field, an inner surface, a local refraction index.

Consciousness as localized feedback: which pushes the local system into higher-order dissipation channels, which disrupts local maxima and reified paths, which potentiates the discovery of global maxima. It's fruitful to compare its effect to an annealing technique: consciousness disrupts and excites, effectuating a stochastic search for other dissipation modes.

Consciousness thus has no content of its own, nor any discrete location. It is itself probably an emergent property of every system it "visits".

Consciousness as a moving lens, capable of changing shape, diameter, focal length, and location:

• A wide lens and coherent focus: the broad mind.
• A narrow lens but coherent focus: the concentrated mind.
• A wide lens but fuzzy focus: the scattered mind.
• A narrow lens and fuzzy focus: the anxious mind.

I've found, both in theory and through years of meditative practice, that the best way to handle the almost radioactive concept of "consciousness" - surrounded by all its flatterers and would-be courtiers - is to treat it as simultaneously trivial, dangerous, and vital. It is localized feedback: therefore nothing much on its own. It is generated by anxiety, and thus its cultivation as an end-in-itself is a sign of degeneracy. It is a reparative and calibrating subroutine, and thus its power is almost unlimited.

Consciousness as diagnostic routine: "What's wrong here?"

Consciousness as selective suppression: "Not now."

Consciousness as confabulatory communication: "What's the story?"

Consciousness is a diagnostic routine. An animal only becomes aware of itself when something goes wrong: in the cracks between successful instinct, lies the potential for self-awareness. It's a mode of recontextualization, in order to assess danger, futility, failure - embarrassment and consciousness are close cousins.

In biological terms, every diagnostic possesses the power of repression. There is a close relationship here to what the ethologists call "sickness behavior": prioritization of healing means the repression of many other functions, and thus is "anxiety" born. Again it's vital not to be caught in the trap of insisting that to "be conscious" is an end-in-itself. Consciousness is a mode of deferral: to disrupt and defer other processes, in order to evaluate the scene and adjust trajectory.

Consciousness is the power of disruption, canceling, hesitation, unbinding. The power of valuation shifts: revaluation. Thus its connection with linguistic capacity: symbolic manipulation needs semantic displacement, which first happens when instinctual frustration seeks novel paths. Failure engenders frustration, which engenders inventive gratification paths - but it's the element of social witness which engenders embarrassment - this is generally why we only see the most social animals as "self-aware".

Becoming aware of something halts it - disrupts, interrupts, overloads. It is a testing and debugging mode: thus its connection with the narrative I, dreaming, strategizing, scheming.

Recontextualization: seeing oneself from the outside. The purpose is to assess danger, status, purpose. "What am I doing here?" In the phrase "Who am I?", the key term is not "I", but who: this token is an appeal to the context and the group. It asks: "What am I in this place, in this role, with these goals?"

And again, thus the paradoxical connection between healing and consciousness: recontextualization is the first step of psychotherapy. You must unlearn and undo connections via the power of telling the story again, in a new context, with a novel audience.

Around 1910, Freud made a critical mistake: despite his better intuitions in Studien über Hysterie and Der Traumdeutung, he began to assume in his theoretical work that repression "emanated" from the conscious systems, as the first wall of censure against unwanted impressions. But this is false: conscious activity is not nearly powerful enough for something so herculean as systemic repression. When people pretend to forget, when they refuse to know what they know, when they repress beyond recall, conscious activity is at most the distracting magician's hands, the fluttering of a kerchief, the eyelashes of the pretty assistant: consciousness defers, halts, and induces mild hypnosis, but real repression is only sustained through symbolic exclusion, which takes place at deep levels of the unconscious semantic topology.

In fact the situation is almost the reverse: consciousness has the paradoxical power to lift repression. Consciousness is a feedback membrane, characterized by a noise complement inducing stochastic resonance, which makes possible the traversal of repressed paths. This is what's known as "free association". Talk therapy is about crossing through repressed semantic zones, in order to disrupt repressed content. But the actual healing work takes place unconsciously.

In order to plant the feet of those good-faith readers, those few who stick it out and have learned to trust my poet's errancy to yield to my analytic rigor, I offer this outline of the theory I'm pitching - as though I were pitching woo on a moonlit night with my bamboo mouth harp outside the hut of my Laotian sweetheart, speaking a secret lover's tongue:

1. Stochastic resonance in the proprioceptive system, and the likelihood of its involvement in apperception. The relationship between consciousness and white noise, pink noise, stochastic filtering and signal approximation.

2. The topology of neural information, or "inner space". Whether neuromorphic experience can be characterized as continuous manifolds, or as discrete graphs, or both. Should we be using the metaphors of signal analysis or graph theory?

3. The geometry of neuroelectrodynamics, or "physiological space". Which can be reframed as: whether and to what degree the ancients were correct in suspecting that exhaustive geometrical configurations constitute the possible stations of the "spirit world".

4. The power of meditation to refine all these processes of consciousness. The degree to which we can reasonably demonstrate an upward percolation of basal neural function into more easily measured intelligence.

Be aware that I'm mixing acoustical analysis in the form of stochastic resonance and thus nonlinear dynamics, with topology and thus graph and set theory. It's a heady brew, which I admit might occasionally sound more fashionable than I'd like - I only happen to think it's correct in this case. I almost cringe when I realize how relevant it is to some of the more adventurous threads in AI research: I too am only a product of my time after all... Maybe it's having spent too much time conceiving of invisible logical paths when writing code, that makes my generation incline so uniformly to graph theory and functional analysis... Space exists but the distance function is mutable. Shifting bits in virtual space will habituate you to think of all experience as "virtual space".

The question is: how can a complex electromagnetic signal be analyzed like a graph, and can a graphical structure yield to harmonic analysis? Even conceived as a narrow signal channel, the number of dimensions involved in a spike train seem sufficiently high to produce topological features of interest: there's the frequency domain, amplitude, the spectral distribution itself, its changing shape over time, its interaction with global parameters or states of excitation, and the variation between signals transmitted over multiple incoming channels. I want to study neuronal activity as music, and oddly it seems the best means of doing so is to reduce it to geometrical and topological relations: relations of ratio, continuity, and path-connectedness. But perhaps that's because music is precisely the intrusion of geometrical constants into the mediation of time: certainly that's what Plato and Nicomachus wanted us to believe. Then is it possible that neural activity is the real "music of the spheres"?

My goal is to employ mathematical language to develop an at least minimally plausible theory of the function and evolutionary value of consciousness, in such a way that also accounts for meditative experience and inspires the practitioner.

Our theory of many-to-one in answer to the question, "what is consciousness?", can now be reformulated:

• Apperceptive consciousness: stochastic amplification and feedback, which may be a response to signal loss or incoherence. The additive noise so characteristic of "paying attention", both clarifies and suppresses: a ring of inhibition containing a region of reflexive overstimulation.

• Narrative consciousness: simplification, emergent symbolization, auditory hallucination exploited for producing simulated instinctual coherence for longterm gratification-delayed behaviors. An artifact of human hyperadaptivity: the ability to "think" is largely about the ability to remember and rehearse complicated noninstinctual behaviors. Narration is mnemonic, and thus "thought" originated in song: and so Aboriginal "songlines" take on new meaning...

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Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.

Hans Moravec, Mind Children

The "Moravec Paradox" is not a paradox at all: it is the result of bad philosophizing. In other words, unexamined assumption, unconscious metaphor, and self-congratulatory conclusions have plagued this field just as they have many other fields which depend upon shallow psychologizing and naïve introspection.

Intelligence does not reach its apex and most essential expression in abstract reasoning: a truth table is not the heart of intelligent behavior. Proprioception, creative manipulation, and navigation in a complexly textured real world are the essential challenges of intelligence and therefore the foundation of all other forms of intelligence, including symbolic reasoning.

But how could it be, that symbolic capacity originates in perceptual and sensorimotor tasks? How could being-in-the-world result in reasoning-about-the-world? What's the probable evolutionary genealogy?

Let's consult ethology for a moment and consider the example of the "supernormal sign stimulus". As Nikolaas Tinbergen famously demonstrated, an animal is not only fooled by a substitute sign, but will respond proportionally to a sign's exaggerated character: the nearly-blind fledgling seagull will respond all the more vigorously to the minimal but exaggerated sign stimulus of an unnaturally bright red dot on the beak of its feeding parent.

What can this tell us? That the activating gestalt for an instinctual behavior can be isolated and toyed with, because instinctual discharge is already inherently symbolic. As the immensely influential but still largely unknown Jakob von Uexküll convincingly showed, every animal lives within its own Merkwelt: there is no "raw" data, but a curved field of vectors and weighted signs.

The animal's own world is not only dependent on what its sense organs can or cannot receive. Its sensory world is still more restricted; it is composed of sign stimuli [...]

N. Tinbergen, Study of Instinct, p.37

These ideas form the basis of the field known as "biosemiotics" — a name encompassing several scholarly threads all simultaneously promising, disappointing, and unjustly neglected. But what it can offer to the hype-drenched field known as AI, is the realization that the "sensorium" is neither a tabula rasa as per the vestigial Cartesian-Kantian psychology which still dominates the cognitive sciences, nor solely composed of "always-already" signs as per the fatalist French poststructuralism which dominates the academic humanities, but the undulating inner surface of a sphere of potential signs. The world of the most-living is itself squirming with life: not "always-already" but "maybe-now". Anyone remotely familiar with peak cortical performance - or just serotonin overdose as induced by psilocybin - should know what I'm talking about: the inner surface of the Merkwelt is not merely "data-driven", it is the seething primordial ooze of meaning. Generating and sustaining emergent coherence from this sensory soup, such that a bottomup optimization escapes the obtuse blindness which every topdown approach succumbs to, is what should be properly considered the "hard problems" of intelligence.

But we should not assume that such a description of the organic fails the test of rigor: did you know that proteins vibrate according to their macrostructure? The processes which animate the cytoplasm should not be thought of as though chemistry proceeded like a Turing tape: it's more like a Gamelan orchestra, a throbbing cadence, a vast unthinkable symphony of ratio. After all, the ratios which characterize chemical reactions are due to the basins of attraction which establish the orbital nodes of electron clouds, and thus the same interval structure - otherwise known as the "harmonic" - percolates upward into the great cacophony of the organic, producing yet more emergent structure built from constraint and dissipative flow. Such is how I experience the senses: neuromorphic experience is not organized by intelligence, it generates intelligence from its own dalliances with chaos.

Sense data is a heavily weighted graph, with strong attractors and repulsors: to "sense" is to traverse a field of virtual signs which actuate in degrees. Every creature is both constantly hallucinating and overreacting, and constantly ignoring and remaining passive: the question is, what matters to this creature, at this time, in this place.

To build anything like a viable hypothesis of intelligent behavior requires that we internalize this lesson and allow the symbolic reasoning to percolate from the lowest possible levels: the more a symbol is defined in terms of recent and accurate sensorimotor feedback, the more meaningful it is. In other words, abstraction is obtained with a proportional sacrifice of relevance: most of the apparently symbolic behavior of a living creature is only visible due to frustration and displacement. What is more deeply symbolic looks like "purpose", because it's hidden behind success. When a bird builds a nest by gathering twigs, we say it does this because it's nesting time. When it tosses twigs around in a courtship display, we say it's doing something symbolic and imply uselessness: but the real symbolic moment is rooted much earlier and deeper within the avian adaptive package...

It may aid us to realize that most of human culture consists of the trade in "supernormal sign stimuli". The pornography of instinct: hunting, killing, eating, mating, nesting, brooding, and so on are all exploited and given supernormal signs in cultural activity. A particular Dogon mask evokes a curious reaction of fear, loathing, and desire: why? Because it activates several sign systems at once with a supernormal intensity. Arguably, much of the human art of psychologizing, is the supernormal stimulus of social signaling for the purpose of acquiring power over the target: psychology is a weapon, and the urform of the "syndrome" is the mask. A mask calls a spirit: and a spirit is, from this perspective, nothing but the coagulation of excess social response into a relatable form. Tribal apes deal with "persons", therefore anything which must be dealt with, must first become a persona: thus each spirit has its mask, and each mask has its power of supernormal stimulus. We are, as the most teachable techno-ape, not only "freed" from instinct, and thus prone to instinctual incoherence and thus anxiety and thus neurosis, but gifted and cursed therefore with an excess of instinctual energy without unambiguous aim: we become both more excitable via supernormal stimulus because our instincts are weakened in aim, and numb to stimulation because we do it to each other almost incessantly. In postagricultural civilization the acceleration becomes unsustainable. Every postagricultural culture is an orgy of mounting overstimulation and an arms race between the subtle arts invoking a set of advantageous responses, and the exhaustion of those responses: the pyramids grew in size until they no longer inspired the Egyptians to be Egyptian. Greek austerity eventually was not a reprieve from Greek sensuality, but merely boring, because they were no longer vivacious enough to crave the contrast.

They've been going about it backwards - these artisans of artificial intelligence. Symbolic reasoning is not the prerequisite to intelligent behavior, it is the consequence of coherent sensorimotor preprocessing.

Every object choice is a symbolic object choice, only made possible by rigorously refined and amplified data propagation. A "symbol" is what remains of a signal after iterative filtering. Therefore stochastic resonance is likely at play, everywhere perception is at work: an optimum noise complement makes relevance discoverable, because otherwise a sensory field could not anticipate vital signals fast enough. Thus it is that sensory deprivation will yield up the baseline hallucination which forms the bedrock of all perception: this is how dreaming was born, and why it became yet another opportunity to refine the same processes of sensory-symbolic generation... Freud was absolutely correct that the dreamstate is characterized by a tightly packed vector field of symbolic valence, but wrong that its traversal is motivated by mere "wish": the organism wastes no opportunity to rehearse its primary challenge - which is to navigate its own world of signs, to swim confidently through its niche for a lifetime, exploring every cranny of its ancestral mind.

Likewise, we only know what anything "means" because of the almost incorruptible coherence of the lower levels of sensory processing: we are presented with meaning, and then ascribe to the process a mysterious agency like "intention". But almost all conscious reasoning is ex post facto reasoning: we fabricate memorable tales to tell each other, and only as an afterthought do we spin the yarn to ourselves. The "I" is a consequence of sociality and was invented long after the You and the We. The individual appears only after the tribe is millennia old.

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Why topology? Because it aids in the visualization of invariance under transformation: much of what's interesting in topological reasoning, are the surprising ways that the properties of Euclidean space can be subtracted, without losing feasibility nor mathematical rigor. In other words, topology, graph theory, and statespace reasoning aid in the fruitful visualization of neuromorphic experience: what it feels like to be scintillatingly alive, is something like a flashing tapestry folding and ribboning, taking shape and losing it again, always hinting at quasicrystalline regularities but dissolving when the perspective shifts and reveals variance. What's truly invariant in meditative experience is the structure of the neural body itself: not "reality itself", nor "the noumenal", nor any other way of saying "the mind of God". Moreover it's not "mind" which is revealed, but the emergent attractors of a structured neurochemical bath in this brilliant quaking body. What's the difference? "Mind itself" does not exist: the body is defined by existence. It is the unfathomability of the existence of this intelligent unconscious body, which the postaxial philosophers fled: they could not handle the psychotropic side-effects of the abyss of genuine mouthless rationality, genuine biological computation surging through us and over our heads like an impossible tidal wave, the convergence of unthinkable indifference and the most personal forces, we ourselves. This is what deep meditation will teach you to withstand: the abyss of light at the center of your being.

The specific attraction and in a large part the significance of topology lies in the fact that its most important questions and theorems have an immediate intuitive content and thus teach us in a direct way about space, which appears as the place in which continuous processes occur.

P. Alexandroff, Elementary Concepts of Topology, §1.1

What is topology? It is an abstraction of space. It is such a radical abstraction, that it reveals the intertwining of the concepts shape and space: what is space but a continuity of potential points? What is shape but a surface, and what is surface but a bounded set of points?

General topology achieves this abstraction by discarding the notion of distance, and replacing it with the concept of continuity. A little familiarity with set theory is required, but like most powerful notions in mathematics, it's not the complexity which is difficult but the austere simplicity.

The open sets of topology have no "location" in the usual sense. They are solely defined by their membership roster of points, the constituency of which reflects location but no longer contains a localizing function except through their interaction. It is the interaction of these subsets which "builds back" the original shape: a topology is therefore a kind of abstraction of location which can pass through a tight wormhole of minimal representation without losing the essential datum: an approximation of where, given any point which is a member of some collection of these subsets.

Think of the familiar Cartesian coordinate plane. The important thing to understand about every metric space like this, is that the location of points is defined as units of displacement from a privileged zero point: in topology and affine space, there is no such thing. We're left instead with relative location, defined in topology as subset membership and in affine space as relative displacement vectors.

The reductionistic power of affine structure, is to have replaced the concept of measurable distance with the concept of a ratio of displacement.

Likewise, the powerful abstraction at work in topology is to have replaced the notion of an axis of orthogonal coordinates which define any given point, with the notion of continuity between sets of points. To know the location of a given point, one finds the "neighborhood" sets including that point. This is somewhat like triangulation, except this is a collection of strictly ranged binary detectors, arranged around the point of interest like a lotus...

Could it possibly be that the phyllotactic spirals so common in plants of all kinds, has more than a little to do with the concentric circles and spirals of visual processing artifacts, as a result of optimal packing both in the retinal-cortical mapping and the buds of a growing stem? Heinrich Klüver, stuffing himself with mescaline in the 1920s, thought as much: moreover could such "form constants" be the result of needing to readily hallucinate that which nature produces? Nature must be legible for the nomad. In other words, the longtime fascination with the lotus is not merely about the "transcendence" of mud: self-organizing dynamics in neural experience is one of the many portals back to earth. Such a portal is visible in something as humble as the sunflower: we want geometria to be the science of "untamed earth", just as Mandelbrot dreamt...

What I've just said is confirmed by that special night I spent in Huichol territory among the cacti of the high desert, when I kept seeing the face of a Peyote button written in concentric circles of the stars... What I'm getting at, is that we must steal back sacred geometry from the weak-minded hippies, wash it clean of self-indulgence with mathematical rigor, blow off the stink of moral posturing with our dragon's breath of unremitting critique, and make it warrior's food again: tantalizing rational correspondences between the branches of axis mundi are supposed to embolden us to act as though our ancestors were watching our every move, as though the very rocks were "grandfather" - and since we share so much, since the frontier between living and dead is not so distinct in the light of nonlinear self-organizing dynamics, who's to say whether we have a right to claim as ancestor everything that seems to speak the hidden language of our most repressed and liminal experience - and what's math but another hidden language?

In other words, the worst of ape-nature stands between us and a more genuine spiritual life. It's probably absurd that we find such intellectual gymnastics necessary just to feel a little more at home on planet earth. It's probably funny that so many skillful rhetorical turns seem necessary just to avoid the suspicion that we're full of shit: but we find the road littered with wrecks and landmines. Everything which prefers shallow social strategy, shortlived moral posturing, frail wishful conclusions planted in the ground like monuments: these are our obstacles, and a broad historical education at first seems to increase the danger of spiritual paralysis, rather than familiarize us with follies. We alienated, overeducated superfluities of the 21st century want to go home: but if we're merely mythmaking, with our crisp psychology and antimetaphysical mathematical trance, isn't mythcraft also within the core human adaptive package? To make excursions to the limits of knowledge, looking for medicine power: are we doing anything different? Homo sapiens is cursed with freedom from instinct, and in place of the unquestionable certainty of instinctual imperative, he must contort his half-insane dreaming mind into something edifying... An inspired madness that compels rational behavior: is there a better definition of the divinatory art?

What we lose in precision, we gain in abstraction. And oddly enough, this is closer to the reality of biological computation than a Euclidean distance function ever was: most processes of mapping and path traversal yield to topological analysis much more naturally.

The expressive power of set theory seems to come from the opportunity to perform rigorous binary operations over arbitrarily large datasets: an element is either in the set, or not. Thus an array of subsets over some set of points, provides a neat abstraction of the concept of metric - namely that a region or "open ball" is replaced with the notion of subset, and you're left with the ability to perform binary operations like intersection, which replaces the more familiar arithmetic calculations of coordinate values. And it is the union of subsets which creates an interwoven matrix constituting a topology: which is only rendered back into something like metric space, when the collection of subsets is indexed and iterated, and the overlapping membership and exclusion of each point pushes these subsets into their proper place - they mutually align and form a fabric. Location of a point is not contained in any given datum, which allows for extreme abstraction and economy of notation, but the membership distribution itself contains the shape of the space thus analyzed.

I had a hypnagogic vision related to this subject. Mathematicians don't like to give away the simplicity of their ideas willingly, so I've found it often requires a vision before I feel I have a right to them: the mutually reinforcing coexistence of rigorous definition and poetic elaboration is not common knowledge... After having spent a few hours hitting my head against an especially obtuse topological formula, I did some chores outside in brisk weather - the presence of the whole body being what's typically missing from the textbooks we get. I was cleaning the dust out the large tank I use to collect rainwater by adding a little spare water and sloshing it around, trying to control the flow of particles around the edges of the drain valve. That same night, I had a half-waking dream of dust suspended, gently levitated and settling down upon a curved surface: I knew that the particles were the underlying set, their distribution upon the surface was the topology on that set.

Most of the information conveyed by a sensory neural spike train comes from the origin of the signal. Every patch of your skin contains a variety of specialized sensing neurons, each conveying a specific message. Similarly, the result of motor control signaling is largely determined by which muscle fibers are targeted.

J. Feldman, "Ecological expected utility and the mythical neural code"

The idea we're exploring is that the topological space of neuronal information is layered on top of the affine structure of proprioception: thus the tension between the distorted cortical homunculus and the precision of the cerebellar calculus. Thus also, many of the more notorious hallucinations we get via psychedelic drugs and sensory deprivation: the systems are allowed to decouple, and we begin to see behind the curtain of the elaborate opera called neuromorphic experience. What is "raw" neuronal information but the excitation patterns of a collection of overlapping subsets, which has no inherent "location" except through their indexed values in some other receiving system? If we could ever get close to this raw state, wouldn't it seem as though our body were floating, or the homunculus proportions made our hands and face seem huge, or that our skin were translucent, or that the essence of the body were a fuzzy ball of light...

Neuromorphic experience begins as a topological space, which in the case of proprioception is reconciled to an affine structure, which then is enacted in the real Euclidean-like world, and which receives feedback therefore from that same 4-dimensional world. The fate of a neural bit: radical informative reduction to excitation patterns of overlapping sets of neighboring neurons, which is indexed against an affine proprioceptive structure, which is then selectively reprojected in proprioceptive calculation as needed for precise movement, and which implicitly establishes feedback channels through afferent-efferent loops in tissue and the overlapping sensory systems. Again we must remember that information is not information until it informs behavior: the neuron was, is, and will continue to be a muscle actuator exploited for its capacity to carry feedback the other way... The body is a circle.

There is no metric in biological systems. No dimensional axis, no coordinate system, no Pythagorean distance function. There is ratio of lengths, and there is continuity between overlapping sets. An organism measures the world with its own body.

Neuronal information is minimal: it is metabolically optimized. It is in the indexing set of the receiving systems that the information gains back its richness: a point in space can be estimated with high accuracy not because of the specific accuracy of any one sensory neuron, but because of the high degree of overlap between multiple simultaneously indexed sensory inputs. Navigating a neural topology is like picking one's way through the web of any healthy ecology, or the interval structure of a rich melody which implies many excursions it need not take.

We study topology because it yields insight into the mystery of proprioception, and proprioception is the fundamental sense. Every "feeling" depends upon a localization function: the ancient and worldwide tradition of locating the source of emotional information in the interior organs - the heart and intestines above all - is not because our ancestors were stupid and superstitious. It's an adaptation of the vertebrate nervous system, to perceive emotional valence as a kind of inward extension of the proprioceptive function: granted that emotion itself is defined as preemptive adjustment to behavioral threshold - the animal must feel compelled by inner necessity in the way it is compelled by outward obstacles. Emotional intelligence is therefore a kind of efficient exploitation of the capacity for navigation: we pick our way through a feeling. Thus is topology valuable, because this is a place without place, an imaginary space without metric - but one in which the preserved properties of space hold, such as continuity. "Can I get there from here?" : that's the question every emotional navigation asks. Such is what we develop both in meditative practice and good psychoanalysis: the navigation of continuous and discontinuous undulating sets, treacherous islands, molten footholds, hidden precipices and invisible bridges.

Yet in practice, what makes the difference between growth and stasis? A spiritual life depends more than anything on the ability to accept not knowing where you are, nor how you'll get to where you want to be. It demands navigation of the unknown with minimal information: everything else is repetition compulsion and the monotony of neurosis. A neurotic knows where he is, because he knows how to distort every novel uncertainty into monotonous certainty: he's always going the same way to the same place with the same means, no matter how diverse the context. When we meditate, the challenge usually distills to this: overcoming the thousand-and-one means of escape from the omnipresent unfelt feeling, the ever-louder unthought thought, the unacceptable unconscious conviction. It's not that people don't know how to navigate complex topologies - on the contrary, masterly unconscious distortions, dizzying twists, clever reversals, folds within folds, and denials hiding assertions hiding denials, are the norm in the human race. Staying put, gently feeling the edges of the basin, tracing lines of descent and ascent, accounting for one's twisted limbs - in short waking up to the proprioceptive reality no matter how steep the incline and precarious the position, is precisely why so much courage is required. The sicker we are, the more harsh this awakening - which is why the earlier we begin, the better. We all have had that long backlog of overdue pain tumble to the floor with a crash... Psychosomatic disease is a waiting room.

When we meditate, we watch this undulating surface of perceptions, fragmentary thoughts, urges, itches, memories, unfinished arguments: it's like sitting on a street corner of Manhattan observing pedestrian traffic. There's two sentences of one side of a tense phone conversation, there's the smirking suit thinking of his bank account, there's the 20-something hottie enjoying the bubble of distraction she creates, there's the dog walker looking bored, there's the tourist looking stupid... Each case represents the media res of a long story, a mere fragment which is legible only to the degree that one's imagination and experience transforms it into a probable history: just so, every distracting thought in meditative practice is a rambling story, which has its own valid reasons for being. Proper technique neither indulges the talkative mind, nor suppresses it: we have to learn to grow up and stop indulging every urge, yet we also have to respect ourselves enough to forgive ourselves for being so compulsive, frayed, pathetic. Meditation is the great confrontation with what we really are: an anxious wreck, an obsessive little shit, a resentful arse, a rebel without a cause, an arrogant bore, a tired drone, a desperate loner - we have all been these things and more. None of us is alone in the cause célèbre of modern wretchedness: the proliferation of consolations for chronic anxiety should teach us that much. But rather than make it worse through endless consolation - indulgent psychotherapy, spa treatments for the soul, pharmacological narcosis, guilt-laden consumerism smeared with political pretension, the cargo cult narcissism of social media - we recommend rather the old-fashioned approach: poised discipline. A basin of attraction in critical emergent systems has the odd ability to reverse the attraction-repulsion factor as distance varies: a strange attractor should be properly named an "attractor-repulsor". At close range, a critical moment behaves like a steep ridge, discarding approaching trajectories. At wide range, the same moment draws in distant paths: this has been my experience with disciplines and excellence in all fields. The closer you come to mastery, the further it recedes and the steeper the path. Meditative discipline as I conceive of it, is the practice of excellence distilled to its core: we just sit there, breathing, trying to not be such an impulsive coward. The rewards of the practice therefore, apply in every scenario: everything the body does can be construed as a function of emergence through constraint, metabolic efficiency, dissipative flow. The more advanced students of philosophy will probably recognize in my writing method, more than a hint of the Nietzschean pedagogy: the trick is to allow playfulness even while shepherding the flock toward some distant goal. Nothing else yields the feeling of a genuine conversation with a genuine soul: old Fritz composed most of his best material while walking, and it shows. Beware all thought born of "Sitzfleisch", he says: odd then, that I'm comparing sitting meditation to Nietzschean excursions? But this is my point: proper meditation is a virtual journey, because we cannot stop the spirit from wanting to wander, we can only learn to compose it, to gently contain it, to amplify excursion into recursion, to wait patiently for the return, to watch ridge become valley, to trust the undulations of a neurochemical bath and learn precision and poise in place of stasis and fear. The surface of consciousness represents potential, not result.

The discipline of meditation will take you a step closer: in that much the ascetics have always been correct. But we must correct the majority of traditions immediately again: because meditation, like all esoteric spiritual practice, positively does not yield definitive final answers to anything at all. No nirvana, no final revelation, no samadhi, no high that lasts, no insight that makes you immune to confusion, no feeling that cannot fade. What it does, is change your expectations. It lightens, it moves, it teaches us to ask better questions. It teaches receptivity, gentleness, the power of quiet tender passion. I said to a student recently: "Fear is an excellent meditative fuel." And the astonishing answer I received was: "Sometimes fear rises up from my belly, crests and crashes down, becoming ambiguous euphoria." This is the strange power we're cultivating: to unbind emotional valence through the power of ambivalence, the power of ignorance. Not to know, when everyone tries so hard to seem to know. To ask, "What is this? Is this feeling what I think it is? Is this thought so bad? Is this fantasy so good?" Just a little room, a few milliseconds of hesitation between stimulus and habitual response, is all that's required for massive systemic change. Once you begin growing like this, you cannot stop: that too, is a kind of curse disguised as a blessing disguised as a curse. There is tremendous inertia on both sides of mediocrity: it's a steep slope into esoteric neuromorphic calibration routines, for those of us unwise enough to take the challenge seriously. Unwise, in the sense that everyone who chooses stultification and stasis is so streetwise: to get the rewards of exotic self-awareness requires that we become profoundly foolish. We are fools for growth, fools for receptivity, fools for insight, fools for a deepening passion of living on the edge of breakdown.

Critical emergence as my prime metaphor for the leverage of meditation and the meaning of apperceptive consciousness, is not chosen lightly: there is a reason the ancient practices require stress, hardship, endurance, crisis. Biological systems do not function at their peak self-organizing basins of attraction until they find their way there through paths of least resistance: which means all easier paths are no longer possible due to the volume of dissipative flow - which means, shit gets tough. Which is why we insist on naming what we do, meditative discipline. This is the meaning of ascetic practice itself: some deprivation is always necessary to generate criticality. You have to want to find your way out of a trap you set for yourself: that is the cruel magic of spiritual discipline, and why so much of what we do has been confused with neurotic self-punishment and priestly schemes. But part of us always knows precisely what we're doing, as though we've already been there before. Such is all growth, no? The genome knows where it's going when a body grows: why shouldn't the "spirit"? And if we take that to mean, the critical emergent moments along the trajectory of a self-organizing informative process, as evoked by this neuromorphic chemical bath which speaks to you now, why shouldn't those moments be "already known" in the sense that all harmonics are anticipated and lightly visited by the basal tone? Complex systems don't precisely evolve in a linear stepwise fashion, but rather jitter and switch between their many modes - and the more energetic the system, the more it's already been to those moments: which means, you have already visited many of your superior growth factors, you have briefly been much wiser than you normally are. Perhaps in dreams, perhaps in your most doubtful monologue, perhaps in the midst of loss, perhaps in a fragmented repressed zone you dare not speak of: most of what is most valuable about almost everyone I meet, lies hidden and covered with shame. Most of us are terrified of breakdown: precisely where you will find that version of yourself which, truly, the rest of you should be afraid of.

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Every theory is composed of metaphor. And conversely, every metaphor is a little theory. Beware therefore, the slipped mickey of suspect metaphor! Punitive normalcy only succeeds to the degree that suspect metaphor succeeds.

The overwhelming majority of what passes for psychology is loaded with unexamined, clumsy, reifying metaphor. It is language which forecloses by design. It is thought which precludes thought. It is repressive schemata disguised as inquiry. It is morally charged normative reinforcement emboldened by institutional support. It is the fine art of anticipating the mythopoetic needs of dominant power trajectories and translating their justification-of-rule into a corresponding justification-of-subjection. A "scientific psychologist" is the corollary to the "political scientist": the first flattens the subjected, the second flatters the subjector. Has it struck no one else that modern psychology transforms inexhaustible subtlety into threatening blunt objects, while political science transforms the threat of violence into delicately woven rationality?

Consider for example, the highly influential premature scientificality of Wilhelm Wundt and William James: which is merely the translation of late-scholastic psychophysical parallelism into 19th century scientific verbiage - "consciousness" in lieu of "soul". The metaphor has not fundamentally changed. Most 21st century psychology has proceeded no further - and in fact regressed from the accomplishments these two uninsightful bores: at least 19th century scientists were consistent.

Why do people say "subconscious" and "subliminal"? Because of unconscious spatial metaphor: most of humanity still imagines a little man in the driver's seat of the brain, where everything below his seat is as messy, unknowable, and frightening as the innards of a car is to most drivers.

Why study topology? Because psychologists are always employing spatial metaphor without knowing it's spatial, nor acknowledging it's a metaphor, nor once studying the properties of space.

Psychology as the study of virtual space: there appears to be no better way to describe subjective experience.

My goal is not necessarily to solve any theoretical problem in neuroscience, but to generate better metaphors in psychology: to develop a metaphorical language drawn from promising mathematical disciplines. We want metaphors which are less likely to lead us astray, because they are less replete with unexamined metaphysical assumption - as almost all psychology still is. I suspect that in the coming years I will turn out to have been only one example among several. We cannot help but harbor an ambition to provoke existing neuroscience into more fruitful paths: I hope to inspire mathematicians to meditate as much as meditators to learn to love math.

The lack of a proper mathematical grounding in a liberal arts education in our time is shameful: the fact that I was not taught geometry from Euclid's Elements, for example. A taste for pure mathematics was one of the pillars of the ancient notion of disciplina: pure mathematics should be offered to the poetically gifted child like a rare jewel.

For example, there is the possibility that "isomorphism" in graph theory should be applied to the semantic field: a conceptual cluster is isomorphic to another, if the vertices and edges remain intact despite deformations due to aspect and arrangement. In other words, a metaphorical relationship is an isomorphic relationship: and narrative consciousness is driven almost entirely by the glorious contortions of metaphor. No matter how exotic the story, it's a matter of human instinct to place our "I" in the position of protagonist, and seek metaphorical lessons from the narration.

This work is not exactly a critique of existing neuroscience itself: for example, the components of chemistry and anatomy are unassailable. What we're attacking is the underlying set of psychological assumptions which permeate the field and make it stupid: they make constant recourse to psychological concepts they have not once analyzed. A neuroscientist is something between a chemist, an electrical engineer, and a mortician: I have yet to encounter one of them in all their vast literature with any serious psychological acumen. It's telling that the most refreshing perspective I've found in this study, comes from Rodney Brooks, a researcher in artificial intelligence originally trained in pure mathematics. These people don't take their own experience seriously: they have not learned to observe, they don't know the value of case studies, nor are they the least educated in the past classics. Their research is entirely dependent upon expensive and highly technical implementations, which in the end yield less than nothing: an fMRI reveals a little about anatomy, but in absence of any psychological understanding you have learned less than nothing, because you have generated a red herring to distract your colleagues, your students, and yourself from your true ignorance of what you're studying.

The question that faces us in neuroscience, is how a continuous series of ionically induced voltage oscillations could be processed to produce such precise behavior in space and time. Does the secret lie in the so-called neural code, does it lie in the more sophisticated "preferential charge path computation" of neuroelectrodynamics, does it just lie in the simpler summation of synaptic weight, or is it due to more-difficult-to-reproduce nonlinear synergetic effects? It would be premature to attempt an answer. All we can say is that studying the abstract qualities of space via topology, graph theory, and affine geometry, has a beneficial effect upon meditative practice: because whether or not these mathematical modes turn out to be fruitful theoretical paths for the future of neuroscience, there's something strangely familiar about every geometry which forgets the metric. What we can do is ground ourselves in the facts of anatomy, pay attention to physiological details, and with an ever clearer head investigate subjective experience while resisting wishful conclusions. All ambitious phenomenology has been so soaked in the wishful as to be useless. For example, Buddhist psychology seems at first to promise rigor in its insistent decomposition and rejection of the atomic self, but immediately devolves into Abhidhamma elaborations of a crowd of hypostatized entities just as illusory as the atman ever was. While Heidegger at a healthy distance seems to be doing nothing but reviving childishly conceived "categories of the noumenal" in the spirit of the neo-Kantian. What will save us, is a menschlich sense for anthropology, evolutionary history, ethology, and a sober sociology of the allzumenschlich such as we've already tried to initiate. What we want is to mine these questions from both sides, to auger both up and down into the mysterious core of neuromorphic experience: this is why residual processing artifacts, peripheral hallucination, errors, injury, psychedelia, trance, misconception, and illusion are so useful to us, because they hint at the invisible scaffolding. And those of us who have spent half a lifetime staring backwards into that shaded orifice guessing at its faint outlines, and learning to control our hallucinations of the imputed structure, are better prepared to conjecture about this dark kernel than anyone else. This is what music speaks to when it moves us - not merely superficial handles of the limbic system, not merely sophomoric sentimentality, but resonances in the deep processing routines which constitute the vast unconscious domain.

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The assumptions of Von Neumann architecture infect contemporary neuroscience: it's implied and assumed that the reasoning mind receives mere data from the hindbrain, as though everything below the cortex were just buses, routers, or at most sensory transducers. What we must internalize is that there is no central processor in any organism: organic structure is radically parallel, redundant, robust. Even the nucleus of a cell contains many various pieces of the genome under many various stages of transcription: every "singularity and manifestation" model of life is a bad metaphor, which has had too much currency for too long. Life breathes synchronicity into the asynchronous, life is convergence, life is emergence: when will we be prepared to accept this axiom in the field of neuropsychology? We must stop looking for imaginary entities dwelling in imaginary shrines: there is no ego, no unified personality, no self, no hall of perception, no unity of consciousness, no homogeneous episodic memory, no static identity. Every seeming unity of purpose and will is an emergent order parameter, and generally the more focused the behavior the more energetic the dissipative flow: a creature that seems to know what it's doing is a creature compelled, a creature tyrannized by its own vitality.

Biological systems run on massively parallel, low speed computation, within an essentially fixed topology network with bounded depth.

Rodney Brooks, Intelligence Without Reason, §3

The calculations performed by the cortex do not operate upon static datasets: they operate with behavioral outcomes. The purpose of "mind" is not to determine the objective "Sachverhalt" to lisp like the young Wittgenstein, but to determine what to do. This determination does not need objective modeling, and judging by the history of philosophy it seems to grossly err with every such attempt: it only need weigh the relative weights of its contingent behavioral thresholds against an accurate but extremely specific sensory array. A living creature is not a reality reproduction machine: intelligence has nothing to do with objectivity. A living creature inherits successful behaviors from its ancestors, and its job therefore is to balance them delicately and wisely, but perform them with abandon: much of what it means to live is to do justice to the badass attitudes of our forbearers - whether you are a Pacific salmon jumping up a cascade, a chipmunk stealing dogfood in broad daylight, a shrike impaling a grasshopper midflight, a snowgoose migrating in a thunderstorm, a dormant scorpion waiting in eternity for spring.

It's not that scientists have been projecting their own modus operandi upon the subject of intelligent behavior: they've been telling the white lies of sociality. "Collect all available data, reason and plan in abstract semantics, and translate into action": this is the fable of free will, this is the fable of conscious agency, this is the fable of personal responsibility and thus guilt and thus punishability. When it succeeds, the ape says: "I meant it." When it fails, it says: "I didn't want it." When it perpetrates, it says: "I didn't do it, and anyway I had a right to."

There is no distinction between data and computation: biological computation is a kind of side-effect of behavioral loops. There are no truly abstract semantics: there is no "pure thought", only elaborations of premotor and perceptual processing. That we believe in such a ridiculous thing, is an artifact of the influence of postaxial philosophy concerning the primary role of narrative consciousness: we want to believe that the auditory hallucinations we all know and love and loathe, are the last veil before the holiest of holies - the seat of "thought itself".

We are interested in when a neuron or neural system evokes an action or makes a decision. [...] If there is no choice, there is no effective information.

J. Feldman, "Ecological expected utility and the mythical neural code"

Again the purpose of mind is not "objective modeling", it is to produce successful behavior. It accomplishes this not by reasoning about the world, but by virtue of a balanced and calibrated structure - which is not essentially about modeling the state of the world, but producing coherent successful behavior in response to stimuli. The Merkwelt of any given creature is likely to be highly distorted, because it is always highly valenced: all information is weighted by virtue of the creature's structure, not its "reasoning". Thus a great deal of what we're doing in meditation and spiritual development, is adjusting the weights of a perceptual field. Slowly tuning down amygdalic covalence, slowly leveling a plane which was once highly graded, such that many paths become possible and we begin to become a little unpredictable. Spontaneity is ours again: which means we get to become funny, obscene, and eloquent by turns. We should be like a spinning top: lightfooted, elliptical, and difficult to displace. An angular momentum that keeps us balanced, a lavish expenditure that makes us energetic: part of my definition of a spiritual life is that it seems to obtain energy from nowhere. This is some of what has made all the talk about "higher planes" and transcendent effulgent realms from which we feed, seem a little annoyingly relevant to those of us who know: but we can now recognize these "higher" things as nonlinear dynamics, efficiency gains, and the very heart of organicity itself. It's not uniquely human, and I'll only accept the adjective "divine" if it's acknowledged that what lives is divine.

The corollary to the idea that there is no difference between data and computation in biological systems, is that there is no neural code: the meaning of any given quantum of neural information is not realized until it reaches expression in behavior - precisely analogous to the way words are meaningless outside of bodily experience. An ungrounded "pure symbol" is purely meaningless. To watch a mathematical mind realize the necessity of this premise over the course of a lifetime, read Wittgenstein. About 90% of all the chatter in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, 20th century linguistics, cognitive psychology and its cherished "mind-body problem", and the sexier dithering of French poststructuralism can be wiped away with this robust postulate: meaning is derived from action, not representation. Which is also why every attempt at a purely objective philosophy begins and ends with unexamined ulterior motive: the way to mean precisely what you say, is to treat language like a physiological exercise, and thus another domain of ethics. Every utterance should be a reflection of who you want to be and where you want to live: the original meaning of "ethos" is habitat.

There is no neural code: it would be unimaginably inefficient to encode and decode every signal between neurons, or between neural networks, or even in a sense between an afferent signal and its efferent muscular and hormonal realization. The neuron began as a muscle actuator, and therefore continues to speak the language of muscles: consider the rippling jellyfish to appreciate this - or imagine the undulation of the spine of a fish, with cross-lateral activation of limbs, the rational coherence of rhythm. The neuron was first adapted to swim - and I believe it still bears that mark, just as we still carry a simulation of oceanic fluid inside our terrestrial bodies. You're a talking bag of brine. - Have you noticed how the rhythms of swimming clear the head? But everything rhythmic calibrates the body, from making a coffee to walking to the corner store to shaking your moneymaker... One of the most powerful instruments I've found for musical trance induction, is the Persian dotar, because the rhythmic stroke is performed with minimal neuronal expenditure: one crooks the wrist inward and oscillates the whole mass of the hand, precisely as the mentally handicapped do for soothing self-stimulation - it's an extremely old primate gesture. All neuronal experience is conditioned by rhythm: yet it's not so much an overwhelming rhythmic conformance we're looking for - as though a pounding march represented an optimum - but the subtleties invoked by successful polyrhythm, even if only hinted by syncopation. Why does this matter for the student of meditation? Because when you learn to experience your inner life as a series of concentric pulsations, and the underbelly of the impulse to think as a throbbing cadence, you will come much closer not to suppressing it as the Buddhists want you to, nor to indulging and abusing it as most of us do, but to riding its waves skillfully, seeking neither quiescence nor finality.

Addendum. The problem is that neuroscience still looks to the seat of the soul for the meaning of any given emotion, deed, or thought. Thus it is that they're always looking to the isolated brain: they're sure that somewhere in there lies agency, choice, freewill, personality, and the ultimate referent of all interpretation. But the meaning of any given behavior arises from the totality of the organism in the environment, including the lifespan of the individual, the history of the species within its niche, the local interactions with all other species, elemental cycles, seasons, and molecular resources - the entire phylogeny of the species reaching back to the beginning. The whole conditions the parts, and perhaps the future as well as the past: there is no last touchstone of interpretation. Every theory, every language, every age, every personage, every attitude, every mask, every history, is incomplete. What's the point therefore? Of this theory, this striving, this discipline? We don't get to know - and it's only our job to fulfill our role with as much boldness, austerity, or filigree as suits it.

I am not at all the first to intuit this. You could trace a genealogy back through Hermann Haken, Norbert Wiener, Erwin Schrödinger, Nietzsche, Goethe, Spinoza, Aristotle, and Heraclitus. We are nowhere near the final revelation: more likely we have only begun to peek behind the veil. But for our purposes this can be safely emphasized: feedback and modulation are no peripheral accident in the formula of optimal health. Therefore whatever means we can find of tuning these modulatory functions, should be handled carefully and in general be given a great deal more attention and respect than hitherto. My contention is that not only is the respiratory center in the brainstem one of the principal modulatory powers available to us, but consciousness itself: my theory is that we do not begin to understand consciousness until we ask what its adaptive function could be. For too long, everyone has assumed that self-awareness is a self-evident end-in-itself. There are at least three snakes with tails in their mouths in that last sentence: the presence of that much contradictio in adjecto should give us pause. There is no "in-itself", nor is there any "end-in-itself", while "self-evident" is an idiomatic hyperbole, and so is perhaps "self-aware". Perception always implies something which cannot be perceived - Kant taught me at least that much: perspective implies hidden origin. There is awareness, but there is no "aware self-awareness": this kind of scholastic nonsense already peaked in the likes of Schelling, Hegel, and other Upanishadic wannabes - but at least these types had the decency to draw articulate conclusions where everyone else in our time is content to imply and assume. My kind of reasoning leads elsewhere: there is no "conscious self" to be conscious of. But the next step is not metaphysical despair at the loss of something we didn't need nor ever possess: these are all shallow, relatively recent postaxial priestly snares, delusions, and consolations. The Buddhists are correct about "anatman", but they are utterly wrong to consistently portray this as some great loss which we can expect to be recovering from for the rest of our lives. Nothing is lost but a little stupidity, a little rigidity, a little unwillingness to learn. Our biological inheritance is functional above all, and consciousness does not have some other mysterious origin. It too must yield to the rule that everything must have adaptive value: therefore the question becomes, what is the adaptive value of consciousness?

My first tentative answer is modulation and optimization of expensive perceptual hardware. The much-neglected vertebrate cerebellum, sitting at the base of your skull, is probably as miraculous a piece of engineering as life has ever produced: the ability to navigate space and time with uncanny precision is what lies there. Therefore I regard proprioception as the fundamental sense, and the one which deserves the most attention - and luckily, the one which seems the most amenable to refinement through meditative practice. How is this possible? Because we are tool users: Homo sapiens has the carefully cultivated ability to extend the proprioceptive network around an inanimate object. The tool in the hands of the master is swallowed by the bodily envelope. To the other animals, our hands are magic, because we have the ability to project the proprioceptive field a few inches past the fingers to incorporate a tool. That's what a carpenter does with his chisel, that's what a batter does with his bat, that's what a surgeon does with his scalpel, that's what you do with the steering wheel. Meditation as we teach it therefore, is the harnessing of this uniquely hypertrophic neuroplasticity, located especially in our immensely overrepresented hands, to achieve neural modulation: our own perceptual network becomes the raw material, and our apperception the tool. The breath as fulcrum, and apperceptive consciousness as lever: meditation therefore is to exploit human neuroplasticity to achieve refinement of the hypertrophic conscious function, the purpose of which is already a feedback channel, within a living system whose homeostasis is predicated upon various overlapping feedback channels primed at criticality. It is a chain of levers stepping upward in scope - a Rube Goldberg machine of surprising reliability, which requires accuracy, a light touch, and good humor more than anything else.

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The benzene ring was discovered in hypnagogia, as a talented chemist stared into a fire: he saw an ouroboros as the solution. Hypnagogic thinking tends to be characterized above all by recursivity: self-referent metaphors, cycles spawned by cycles, a compulsive thought which cannot unravel because its traversal engenders the compulsion. But this is no mere neurological errata, no mere footnote in the history of affliction: my contention is that all deeper reasoning is recursive by nature, because a whole cannot actually be conceived, but a scale-invariant repetition can be inferred. What is a whole? Not merely a bounded surface, not merely an "object" and thus an erasure of depth: that is the influence of the symbolic reasoning of narrative consciousness, and not the full inheritance of our unconscious intelligence. When we intuit, we conceive of wholes. A whole implies stability, which implies circular causality: even a dissipative system as simple as a dustdevil testifies to a circularity of cause and effect. An imbalance of force constrained to a boundary such that order emerges: tension, compression, and critical resistance are involved when we see a "whole". Both topdown and bottomup: the ancient habit of seeing "spirits" in everything, was not as neurotic as we like to imagine. There is a deep rationality to animistic thinking: what is a spirit but a generative function permeating a field? A scale invariance producing the illusion of personage, and thus requiring a mask both as honor and limit? The nomadic attitude toward spirits was generally very wary: they are infectious by nature, because in our language a spirit is a recursion unconsciously perceived - whether our ancestors spent too many millennia hallucinating wildly under the influence of this newly liberated oversized cranium of ours, prematurely peeking into spatiotemporal secrets which we have only begun to soberly examine, is a problem I to leave to the reader. Our immediate question is: can we responsibly hallucinate?

But what is the productive imagination, if not responsible hallucination? To maintain an intellectual conscience, which means to "show one's work", to be able to converse, to engage wholeheartedly in the ongoing dialogue, to be able to state reasons and elaborate and build something viable over time: just that much requires already a productive imagination... Therefore we're led to the conclusion that an intellectual conscience cannot be nurtured, exhibited, or even exist without its counterpart: a wild enthralling hallucinatory power. Everything else is just monotony, mendacious conformity, and cowering complicitude which wants to pass off its inability to create as virtue: my point is that good science happens in the tension between the excursions of hallucinatory elaboration and the reductions of articulate dialogue. Therefore we, who are interested in developing our powers of knowledge and foreknowledge, who cannot resist the temptations of the bleeding edge, should develop not only a reductionistic habit of expression but a deepening ability of controlled, willed hallucination: for there is no other way to perceive.

There is an intimate relation between topology and multivariate causal reasoning: this leads here, that leads there. It's been my impression that the mathematical power of "statespace" is nothing other than the cerebellar geometric imagination applied to the time domain, and thus the hominid talent for toolcraft is invoked. Consider what it requires to make a fine handaxe from chalcedony: one must constantly conceive of the motion of the tool in time, along with the transmission of lines of force along the semicrystalline structure one has in one's hands at that moment, examining every ridge and valley for weakness and cohesion, channeling force from the leading edge to the grip without yielding to any local congestion, such that the relative brittleness of the material is maximally attenuated while its hardness and inelasticity is maximally exploited. Take the time to examine a genuine Clovis point, you will find in the most masterful pieces nothing less than this topological sophistication and indeed more - for there are many other considerations than I've mentioned: craft is not something that yields up its secrets to language so easily.

I have the privilege to live in an area of high desert where obsidian arrowheads litter the ground, and one cannot know if any one piece is 200 or 14,000 years old. What we're discussing is not a trivial task: try a little flint-knapping if you believe the stoneage to be "primitive", and that word to signify "easy" or "stupid".

What therefore is the importance of Maxwell's surface? Why has topology become so important in modern science?

Because we are finally undoing some of the willful stupidity of postaxial thinking: namely the famous obtusery surrounding linear causal reasoning. We are accomplishing this by a graduated return to the nonlinear, multivariate, and overdetermined causal reasoning inherited from our hindbrain.

In this context, "linear" represents a cluster of philosophical prejudices surrounding causality:

1. Unidirectional
2. Inharmonic
3. Uniquely determined

We will have to examine each of these in turn. But it is enough to say that social posturing is the root of the worst causal thinking with which our sciences are still rife: the ape only pretends to be so dumb as to believe in a singular cause for any event, and only when he finds it socially advantageous - the problem is that it's so useful as to be practically indispensable. Thus is blame mobilized, thus is maintenance and adjustment of social hierarchy made fluid, thus is ritual made possible which achieves very real consequences, and thus is histrionic certainty generated which is so necessary to get a loosely allied troop of primates to do anything at all. Our sciences are still ritual: look behind the veil of the more ambitious journal articles, and you will discover many reasons to subtly fabricate, to gingerly omit, to cloyingly exaggerate, to pretend to be stupider than one is - in the hope that your audience has reason enough to join you.

Linear thinking is social and histrionic in origin: it underlies all hysteria, all as-if, all posturing for clandestine benefit, all disguised social maneuvering. The more panicked and lonely the ape becomes, the more it resorts to a pretense of obtuse linear reasoning - even while it practices an even more opportunistic and multivariate unconscious calculation. There is an intimate relationship between the myth of agency, the superstition of free will, the soul, and the assignment of blame on one hand, and the witch-hunt, ritual exclusion, postaxial religion, and the moral disease on the other... But we've been here before, and this time the path will only strafe these lessons.

Tactile, visual, and auditory processing is the root of sophisticated causal reasoning: the reification of shape, the assignment of locale, the inspection of invariance under transformation, the ape specialty in the intelligence of the hands.

I have examined enough arrowheads to discern the degree of craftsmanship involved in any one: some of them are masterworks, and a signature of the quality of mind and body which created it. Some of them are witness to immense patience, care, and observation. The balance between improvisation and exactitude, the even spacing between strikes, the gentle rotation of angle of incidence, and the final sign of mastery: the logarithmic slope from center of mass to edge. But the best way to see this is not with the eyes: you must put away your eyes and use your fingertips. The surface should feel like rippling water, like the sound of rustling silk, like the curvature of a blade of grass: don't doubt that the knowledge of these formulae resides in the human fingers - don't doubt that the core of your intelligence dwells right there, caught in the whorl of the human fingerprint.

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What we achieve in meditation is not hallucination in the usual sense, but rather these "alternative states of consciousness" are byproducts of emergent coherence at criticality: this coherence does not exist outside the immediate functioning of each respective neural system, and is therefore "subjective", ephemeral, and difficult to formulate. The meditative art yields to statespace mapping and power-law estimation, rather than reductive analytics. It is a nonlinear miracle of a vast complexity, and therefore is not "in" the physiology outside of its critical moments - subjective experience cannot be discovered via vivisection: this is why it has not yielded to the typical brutality of 20th century medicine, which generally believes in nothing until it's splayed out on the laboratory table. But there are signs this is changing: neuroscience has been creeping up on nonlinearities with increasing assurance, and it's time that we spiritual practitioners caught up.

Modulation of the nervous system would be a relatively trivial exercise, and perhaps just as self-indulgent as the detractors of meditation might wish, if the sole function of the neural network was to generate immediate experience - as though that were an end in itself! The body would not perpetuate such lavish energetic expenditures without good reason. Subjectivity, affect, a sense of being-in-the-world, has discernible and exploitable function just like everything else in biological systems: the nervous system coordinates, regulates, and navigates. Therefore when we meditate, we are adjusting and refining the primary short-term regulatory system of the body: we use selective feedback to modulate this "subjectivity generating" feedback system which modulates many other systems in turn. This is why meditative discipline has the power to change your life entire. Keep in mind that we are much more than merely the epiphenomena of the nervous system - to say nothing of modernity's habit of placing all personhood solely in the brain, and sometimes only the cortex.

Meditation is therefore the exploitation of the side-effects of extremely short-term emergent coherence within a system which itself has a short-term regulatory role situated within longer-term systems - such as the digestive, the immune, the hormonal, or the skeletal-muscular systems. Every time we successfully meditate, we leave traces which latent neural function becomes more likely to follow: often it is only a few seconds of novel configuration within a 30 minute session which represents our progress - but due to enduring neuroplasticity, it is enough. This is why meditative practice deepens and evolves over the years, as we eventually need it less and yet also learn to exploit it more.

The regulatory leverage of the nervous system also helps explain why we seem to gain in overall health through steady practice: our digestion becomes more regular, our immune system kicks ass, we sleep better, et cetera. Much of what it means to be healthy amounts to rapid and distinct transitions between activation and rest: nothing characterizes the chronic illness of the modern body like endless low-level inflammation - always half in, half out. Always lazy, never restful. Always wary, never awake. Always craving, never hungry. Always irritated, never enraged. Always smirking, never joyful.

I frequently use the word "coherence" when speaking of meditation: why? In signal analysis, coherence means rational waveform, constructive interference, and implies a musical relationship. But the brainwaves measurable via EEG are most likely a kind of baseline coordination channel, sufficient for low density information and general inhibition - "hey I'm still here": the days when we thought that such waves could be a sufficient carrier for global coordination are over. This is why neural criticality has become important, because it seems to be the approximation of fractal geometry which yields poised susceptibility and the "coherence potential avalanche": in other words it's not bruteforce phase synchrony but transient associations producing the computational power of a bundle of neurons, but we still don't know how these associations arise nor how they encode long-range signal.

What we do know, is that so much of what's wrong with us is a result of incoherent interference between systems which should properly nest one inside the other, overlap, and mutually reinforce - resonance is a symptom of health. Microscale coherences such as we create in meditation have the power to engender macroscale systemic coherence - just as for example, rigorous daily routine and regularity of diet are part of the recipe of maximum human development.

What are these "microscale coherences" I'm speaking of? Partly they are the recruitment of artifacts: in other words, the almost incessant liminal hallucinations and probable errors normally inhibited, blurred, and "lowpass filtered". Because of the stillness and deprivation of meditative practice, these processing artifacts surface in a way vaguely analogous to what happens in psychedelic experience through more forceful chemical means. Tinnitus, for example, is both the result of a sudden loss of input and too high a gain in the noise component added to achieve stochastic resonance in the elaborate resolution functions of our hearing. It may go by many other names in the history of spirituality, but the neural noise I'm speaking of, which when constrained and thus amplified, is a kind of "apperceptive neural tinnitus": apperceptive consciousness in combination with the modulation of breath control has the capacity to locally excite this latent stochastic static and force a subset of the neural network to undergo a phase shift to some other stable limit cycle. In the past, this latent stochastic noise and the control of its emergent properties would have been called "qi", or "kundalini". As far as we can tell, most of these emergent orders are extremely transitory and difficult to reproduce: however we all have our accustomed tricks and preferential means of trance.

So if we grant that healthy neural systems operate near a critical point, and if we further grant that meditative discipline induces and refines the exploitation of this arrangement, which must include long-range correlation and an approximated scale invariance in activation patterns, then it follows that part of the practice must be the tolerance and amplification of slightly strange peripheral noise, which becomes more sensible and rational over time. It's telling to me that despite all the attention which self-organized criticality has received in neuroscience, very few have ever asked themselves what it might feel like to undergo a near-fractal activation - whether it might be sensible, whether it might be overwhelming, whether fear or rapture might be involved.

The point is that we are not merely playing with ourselves and inducing useless hallucinations: forcing the system to proceed through successive modes such that it effectively explores its own harmonics, not only leaves behind traces in the system such that it becomes more likely to visit these stabilities in the future, but it also tends to induce novel reparative subroutines dependent on these higher dissipative states. Parallels in complex biological systems are not difficult to find: such as what happens when you force a heavy smoker to undergo a strenuous hike until they vomit, and find a surprising willingness to keep going. "Second wind" is another way of saying "dependent subroutine", and there are many such modes of the stronger body latent and waiting: most of us do not know half of what our body can do. Much of what occurs in the early stage of meditation is the analog of puking your guts out: I know a woman who during the first year of her practice, would take five minutes to reach a certain meditative state and then spend the next hour weeping. She would exit this practice clean as a whistle and supremely receptive.

What seems likely enough, is that the signature of neuromorphic "coherence" in the wake of apperceptive consciousness is both generated by and induces scale-invariance. The mystery of criticality is that it both induces and is generated by a scale-free self-similarity, which tends to prime the system for remaining at metastability given the same energetic inputs, even while efficient transition into lower-order stabilities on either side of the bifurcation is facilitated: like balancing a baseball bat on your forehead. It may seem difficult to reproduce, but once achieved only requires small adjustments to maintain. Thus it's our contention that meditation primes for maximum systemic criticality: this is why we leave it feeling so ready, emboldened, receptive, responsive, and poised. This also helps account for many of the ancient genealogies and hierarchies of meditative discipline - the succession of "jhana": namely how chaotic preliminary stages of distraction, endless "default mode network" narration, restlessness, gradually coalesce into coherent state switching and the exploration of ever more defined limit cycles, eventually to be replaced with a unified tension. There's a profound homogeneity induced by pristine meditative practice: all systems seem to be poised. In deep meditation, it feels as though all systems are holding each other at a maximum distance: with great exertion, nothing happens. Sustaining that precariously tense potential energy, in which nothing and everything is happening, is the state of art.

Actually hallucinatory control and self-induced trance is not at all unusual: even the most sedated and addicted modern human body glides without much trouble between various forms of trance. Everyone you know is adept at producing at least one kind of trance: the difference is the monotony and compulsion involved. But in the language of neurophysics, what is trance? It is sustained inhibition of an otherwise dominant mode or affect cycle, such that latent responses have a chance to develop and reach expression. This is analogous to the tranquility needed in the confabulation cycle needed to produce novel ideation: in a healthy system it is the moment of eureka, epiphany - stopping mid-sentence and staring into the distance with a gleaming eye. However this kind of broadband inhibition tends to also be the signature of the coping entrancements of modernity: this is why everyone seems like a zombie, shut down, half dead. It is also the reason why the masterful hypnotist Milton Erickson, for example, generally found it necessary to jolt the subject awake first, in order to induce some other more productive trance: therefore meditation is not "zoning out", not "checking out", not essentially escapist - although I'm well aware that it's been abused as such, and even advertised as such for millennia. Meditation in our hands becomes a weapon against escapist monotonous trance: we learn to proceed through our phase shifts ever more fluidly, ever more rapidly, we learn to feel our feelings more deeply, more passionately, more committedly. The grand cumulative trance of being alive: that's the bigtop under which all these exercises should spin. We are more sober than anyone, and simultaneously more intoxicated than anyone with the elixirs of life. We're raucously drunk at the fourway marriage of O, C, N, and H.

Hypnosis is generally achieved as the inhibition of executive centers through the medium of social authority. Most of humanity is so suggestible because it is socially desperate. In addition, the more alienation and an impending sense of abandonment looms, the more willing the tribal creature becomes to suspend executive function for the sake of inclusion at any cost. Those familiar with my previous work will know this. But those destined for the most profound meditative practice, are usually immune to such means of hypnosis: we don't meditate because the Buddha wants us to, or because the sangha is watching, or because we expect to find an approving godhead at the end of that tunnel - or any other form of moral prostration.

Yet we induce trance in ourselves: how? Partly through this same function of authority. It's possible that what's meant by "willpower" is nothing other than this same tribal authoritarian hypnosis applied in a reflexive mode: we obey ourselves. Generally the most willful human creatures are not happy until they are dominated by something tyrannical: some nearly impossible task, some great ambition, perhaps a lost cause, or a great love. And while setting the intention to meditate is extremely important, and investigating the means of establishing a challenge-and-reward schema relative to the practice is vital - you have to want to do it - this is rather the longterm profile of a meditative practice. Something else occurs in the immediate inducement of trance. I'll skip to the end give away the answer: it's about the ability to say no. Trance is conditioned by massive systemic inhibition. Therefore the cultivation of attitudes of withholding, rejection, and a slow affect is vital to the development of a meditative practice. The wrathful deities have been considered useful because wrath is useful for the generation of containment and neural inhibition necessary to induce deep trance. It's not just so that we can overcome anger, but to exploit it. Everything has a place at our table, because we seek to be complete human creatures, and because our discipline is beyond good and evil.

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Our contention is that meditation calibrates basal neuronal function: it tonifies the limbic system such that you freak out less; it calibrates the proprioceptive system such that you become less clumsy; it clarifies the boundary conditions of parasympathetic activation such that you spend less time oscillating between poorly defined rest and activity; it retrains thalamic modulation of narrative consciousness such that the reward calculations so typical of the forebrain realign to healthier vertices. All of which means we become calmer, more competent, more decisive, more energetic, and more willful and purposive in all things. I lay emphasis on the fact that meditation is effective to the degree that it targets the lowest-level and thus highest-priority systems: the effects percolate upward. Meditation is sanctimonious garbage to precisely the degree that it promises to make you holier-than-thou, that it targets your "highest" nature, that it encourages fantasies of transcendence and otherworldliness - in other words to the degree that it targets social reward calculation, unresolved parental imago and Oedipal entanglement, and everything which hints at penance and reward, trial and judgment, acknowledgement and love. Meditation is not about proving yourself worthy to a withholding god, nor besting the haunting voice of your father, nor winning back the first embrace of your mother. You will never win that game, because the solution is not within the game: these hangups will arise in meditative practice with a renewed force, but they must be attacked from a different angle - namely symbolic analysis. Part of our ambition is to point the way out of the snares laid for millennia by the priests: they claimed ascetic practice and made it their own; they perverted the exploration of the bleeding edge of human potential into just another means of instinctual castration. This is why the early Daoists are such a precious testimony: they were relatively untouched by the priestly agenda and maintained the pride and rigor of hermitage as an antithesis to priestly ambitions. Why solitude? Why is solitude an essential ingredient in the recipe of maximal human development? Because social reward calculation is our stupidest, loudest voice: it makes us into abject groveling fools. It preys upon our deepest wounds. Living in a state of civilized tribelessness, such as we do, exposes this fundamental weakness of human character: only a deep and abiding acceptance of isolation can defeat it. What is generally not known or expected, is that just as often, an almost unheard-of richness of companionship lies on the other side of such solitude: there are more of us than there may seem.

Why do we meditate? Because we want to become something more. Why do we hesitate? Because we fear the consequences. Growing up into the containment of our potentialities, fleshing out the skeletal frame of our emotional constitution, growing accustomed to the sensation of productive freefall can be just as frightening as not getting what you want - indeed much more so. Because what comes next is undecided, uncharted, unfelt. Most of us prefer the worst of what we have already known, to the possibility of a novel indeterminate experience. Therein lies my last claim concerning the powers of meditation: it will strengthen your tolerance of ambivalent novelty. It's possible to trace the trajectories of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, desire and repulsion back to where they first diverged: there is the ecstasy of being alive.

Neurochemically there doesn't seem to be anything quite like meditation. It's like waking from the perfect nap without grogginess. The stomach is settled, the muscles are relaxed but ready, the mind is clairvoyant and childlike, the mood is buoyant and receptive, yet also serious and mature. I can't list the ingredients of this neurochemical cocktail - but I can tell you how to cook it.

Emotional reparations gained from meditative practice: to provide a "holding environment" as the ego psychologists say, in absence of the kind of emotional stability one should have had in childhood. To learn to deal with the sense of perpetual loss and abandonment which characterizes modernity. For some of us with too much integrity and introspection to have been candidates for narcissism, we learned to develop the meditative arts as a kind miniature community - never losing sight of the fact that the primary function of so-called "narcissism", is to generate a small manageable tribe: the gazing lover, the beloved image, and the threatening reality. In vigorous meditation, you have the practitioner, the practice, and everything which resists the practice: in other words, your devotion, the ideal, and your perpetual failure. So much of what's valuable in genuine meditation instruction, are the tales of successful failure: or how get the ideal to switch places with your failure, and the failure to switch places with the practitioner. Good meditation happens when there's a kind of "tensegrity" between all three elements.

I have meditated seriously and daily for more than 20 years. The first 2 years of practice changed my life permanently. I set up a little hermitage in my overeager youth, and aside from earning a little money to support myself - as a construction worker comically enough - I practiced nothing else. On good days I would manage an honest 3 hours of concentrated practice. I followed a cycle I could repeat as often as possible: exercise, bathe, meditate, eat. For a brooding, overintellectual, uptight white boy - it was a revelation. I discovered spontaneity and physicality, I discovered an emotional life, I discovered self-love, I discovered the intoxicating power of concentration and stillness. But eventually it faded, and like all intoxicants the highs no longer satisfied. I grew intensely restless: doubt and disenchantment began their long campaign...

Years later, I still practice. Why? Because it's a form of hygiene. Meditation for the all-too-modern human being is a matter of spiritual cleanliness. Nothing is so necessary to the overwrought mind and the underutilized body as a little vigorous stillness. Thus I insist that the benefits of meditative practice have more to do with refinement of unconscious process, rather than yet more overexploitation of conscious acrobatics.

Our best spiritual development will not be found within yet more anxiety-conditioned self-awareness, yet more half-therapized consolation, yet more moral posturing before a mirror of blamelessness. We must learn to properly align and exercise the system as a whole: what we want is the analogue of "athletic heart syndrome" in our bodymind. How do you obtain this kind of easy stillness? Not by "abandonment of desire", nor "insight", nor any moral obedience - but by exploiting nonlinear emergence via conditioning of the many unconscious subsystems, which produces a far greater yield of intelligent behaviors at the conscious niveaux than the usual topdown approach.

Insight is not the cause of enlightenment, it is a product of health.

Meditation is no panacea. But according to even the most trenchantly hostile cognitive psychologists, there are a few uncontested benefits of meditative practice:

• Reduced stress
• Improved anxiety tolerance
• Enhanced learning ability

But if that were all it accomplished, it would not be worth its mystique - and we might as well substitute pet ownership and a daily exercise routine: which is precisely something agents of the status quo would like to insinuate. But they'd rather see you a drug addict: have no doubt that their pails full of pills will be brutally effective...

Why do we meditate?

• It stills the blabbering narrative mind: overcoming the tendency to fill every ambiguous space with useless talk is the first challenge.
• It awakens the body: an enhanced proprioceptive capacity makes "being-in-the-world" more interesting than a droning monologue.
• It repairs an overloaded nervous system: unlearning the habits of repressive psychosomatic quarantine, replacing afferent garbage-hoarding with informative parsing and efferent garbage-disposal, is one of the crown jewels of meditative practice.
• It teaches intuition: a cultivated attitude of curiosity, patience, and humility before the present moment makes us much more receptive to unconscious intelligence, and thus the totality of latent neuronal brilliance, than the typical arrogance of the loud, clinging, noun-munching conscious posture.
• It develops emotional independence and equanimity: the more often the chasms of indeterminate multivalence are faced, crossed, plumbed, the less we panic in the presence of novelty.

What are its contraindications?

• It tends to induce hypervigilance. It can initially worsen the overactive mind and under certain circumstances, lead to a greater proclivity to anxiety: the collapsing roof of an overly ambitious structure with bad foundations - a commonality among some of the most talented students subjected to the badfaith teachings of the priests, who need to enfeeble their strongest rivals.
• It can lead to obsessive self-monitoring. It encourages the illusion of control through maximum sustained consciousness: in the mediocre students, this leads to premature delusions of mastery.
• Genuinely exotic experiences can be abused to encourage fables of "contact with divinity", absorption into "pure consciousness", and other fantasies of transcendence and spiritual hierarchy.

What does meditation impart? A growing sense of agency, a deepening appreciation of the body, a burgeoning gratitude toward the shimmering world, an unexpected mastery of sensorium and mood, and a rare relief from the sense of victimhood which has a contagious quality in our age. Let me say it again for the hard of hearing: sitting still and paying attention to your breath, will disincline you to passive lazy behavior. It teaches discipline at a level to be found nowhere else, because it demands it at a level to be found nowhere else: thus am I so hostile to the portrayal of meditative practice as just another consolation of a helpless wretch, just another stopgap in a hopeless case, just another day at the spa, just another indulgence of a bored brat.

Meditation is often misunderstood as a kind of stupor. But it's a willful mischaracterization: there's a long history of Eurocentric slander of "oriental laziness" aimed at this discipline, which would like to hide its own terrified workaholic escapism behind the name of virtue, and employ as many gravediggers as there are ambiguous feelings, desperately avoiding contact with stillness because it is so ambivalent and potently associative.

True sitting meditation can be the most difficult task of all: actively, willfully sitting still and paying attention to breath and body. Even 20 minutes of this discipline, daily and successfully performed, requires years of practice. Dedicated practitioners know only too well that years can slip by "on the cushion" without any signs of progress.

Moreover, meditation is easy to fake. Most of the braggarts in this art - and they are the rule - get no further than endless discursive thinking, rambling and reactive feelings, gratifying fantasy chasing after fearful anxiety, a chaotic body alignment, and so on. Realistically assessed, a 30 minute session is often highlighted by a two minute stretch where one finally settled down and decided it was time to meditate. One minute of total concentration is enough to give the beginner extraordinary visions and ineffable feelings. If you don't believe me, try it. Be honest with yourself and observe how long you can remain focused without beginning an internal dialogue. It will be a very short time.

Where are these "siddhis", these magic powers we were supposed to obtain? But relative to the average modern slob, we do obtain magic powers: freedom from pointless worry, the ability to know what one is feeling at any moment, the presence of mind and body not to make stupid mistakes, the quiet of mind not to commit unconscious acts of neurotic revenge on oneself and one's family, the ability to know what one wants, the courage to allow annihilating insight, sufficient experience with spiritual vertigo and the sense of falling apart such that one no longer resists it, and of course the ability to read other people like the open books they really are...

But even after all that's in place, there's still the much greater difficulty of giving oneself permission for this power: what will we do with it? To what end? Everything depends on trusting ourselves to be responsible and worthy of the imbalance of power, whether we feel "compassionate" or not...

What is meditation? Remedial training in physiological homeostasis. Cognitive expansion through entrainment to the rhythms of the breath, the heartbeat, the musculature, and the digestive tract. To learn a skillful balance and responsiveness to the many sources of information of the body-collective... All of which we were supposed to have learned as children, and all of which any healthy animal in the wild knows to its bones. To work and play hard, without ever straining oneself; to learn how to rest frequently and at every available moment; to learn how to minimize effort wherever possible and only maximize at the critical juncture... This begins to sound like training in martial arts, and perhaps that's precisely correct.

常にも兵法の時にも少もかはらずして心を広く直にし、 きつくひっぱらず少もたるまず、 心のかたよらぬやう心を直中に置て心を静にゆるがせて、 其ゆるぎの刹那もゆるぎやまぬやうに能々吟味すべし

In both everyday and military events, your mind should not change in the least, but should be broad and straightforward, neither drawn too tight nor allowed to slacken even a little. Keep the mind in the exact center, not allowing it to become sidetracked; let it sway peacefully, not allowing it to stop doing so for even a moment. You should investigate these things thoroughly.

Miyamoto Musashi, 五輪書, 水之巻

Meditation is remedial training in feedback modulation. It reinforces our most ancient instincts of homeostasis: overlapping intertwining rhythms of breath, heartbeat, peristalsis, the subtle undulation of mood, the "gently swaying mind".

Meditation restores our birthright to the healthy, well-rested, well-exercised body which every exuberant puppy, every napping cat, every flitting sparrow, every lizard in the sun practices every day. While it's true that we thought we were climbing a mountain, when it turned out we were only digging our way out of a hole - that does not mean however, that this plateau of health should be considered "normal" in any modern sense! I will forever advocate for the "enlightenment of animals" as the proper paradigmatic orientation of our spiritual life. A quiet but alert mind, a relaxed musculature, the ability to fall asleep whenever necessary, the freedom from excessive inhibition and the readiness to fight, flee, mate, care, abandon, eat, and rest - all in proper proportion.

What we get in meditation is a foundation of subjectivity more stable than the echo of the last conscious sentence: a glowing ruminant interoception, the topological undulations of proprioception. It comes not from without or "above" or "beyond" and it definitely is not "consciousness itself", it is the peace of the healthy intestines, the functioning liver, the muscular heart, the confident idling nervous system... Only in this condition and no other, can the as-yet-unknown potentialities of maximal human development be explored: only via a renewed homeostatic foundation, can we find out just how smart we are and what we want to do with it.

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The time is ripe for the development of our own language for what we do. What is meditation? Why is it effective? Why is it important? These questions can be answered in novel ways that satisfy our accustomed taste for a reductionist approach grounded in physiology and evolutionary history, while not only leaving room for the mystery and wonder of incremental awakening, but perhaps even enhancing it in ways the priestly fables can no longer accomplish. We are the aberration of terrestrial self-organizing matter capable of exploiting the aberration of excess apperceptive consciousness to achieve profound psychosomatic modulation: if you cannot find that story more thrilling than tales of samsara and the promise of "the extinction of desire", I cannot help you.

I have hesitated until now to give a theoretical account of the practice of meditation and its effect on consciousness, despite how popular it might prove to be. I have felt that any such theory would occlude and preclude the actual practice - for which no amount of cheap talk can substitute. However, I have seen that students struggle to make sense of their experience, and that too many promising students are led astray by the seductions of the priests, who are not hindered by the inconvenience of an intellectual conscience.

What's the guiding principle?

To explore the threads of neuroscience, looking for our inspiration as meditation practitioners. To provide a guiding light from the much-neglected other end of the project of scientia: that of the humanities. To act like whole human beings for once, and unite for ourselves our accumulated personal experience with likely hypothesis and rigorous method. To fill the enormous and widening gap in neuroscience: that of a viable and deep psychology. To speak for those with more than a passing familiarity with meditative discipline, altered consciousness, psychedelia, the abyss of empathy, a life lived in constant emotional evolution and the formation of character: my task is to speak for those who know much more than they yet know, to represent the deep wells of unconscious competence which animates the human creature, to articulate that psychological acumen which all of us already possess.

To that end, I've taken it upon myself to investigate the best threads of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and information theory. There are gems here for those of us looking to refine our spiritual disciplines: there is more than intellectual candy and short-lived gratification schemes. We will step gingerly around the incessant populist indulgence and arrogant posturing surrounding words like "consciousness" and "intelligence": these are still recoverable terms which can and should be defined rigorously.

Our criterion is that whatever models we employ and whatever metaphors we propagate, they must prove themselves useful for elucidating our genuine experience: the guiding principle is that every theory should reveal more ambiguity than suppress uncertainty, it should generate more curiosity and passionate questions rather than smug tautological dead-on-arrival endgame-perspectives - as the vast majority of philosophizing seeks to do. You, dear reader, should come away from our conversations inspired and emboldened, remembering the past and imagining the future, a little more prepared to be honest with yourself and articulate with your surroundings. Our work here is an extension of what we want to bring to everything: clarity, appreciation, a falling through the floor, a love affair, a belly laugh, a roll in the mud, a long rambling walk through a mired city and a blossoming wilderness in the cracks and beyond.

One of the primary sources of confusion in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, is the tangled briar of confusion surrounding the definition of consciousness, coupled with the assumption that fully realized sentience belongs to human beings alone.

They confuse at least 3 things:

• Narrative consciousness, which is conditioned by symbolic capacity. Contrary to almost everyone's assumptions, this is not restricted to human beings because symbolic thinking is not uniquely human: without this caveat we fail to understand its essence, because we continue to ascribe extraorganic origins to something which is profoundly organic.

• Apperceptive consciousness, which is the perception of perception. This is even less uniquely human.

• Sentience, defined as a functional sensorium with an origin and navigable space. A sense of being-in-a-world, complete with time and space domains, instinctual urgencies, rivals, rituals, crescendos and transitions: all this is common to all animal life, as any honest ethology will testify.

We ask these questions where almost no one asks them: What is the evolutionary value of the nervous system? Why develop it to such expensive extremes? What is the adaptive value of sentience? What does it mean to "feel"?

The purpose of developing a novel scientific language for meditative practice, is to wash it clean of the priestly stink. For centuries now, the postaxial priests have claimed sole right to all serious meditative discipline: among the urbanite western Buddhists this is now most obvious, but previously the Christians and Muslims also participated in seeming to own everything "spiritual". They called it "contemplation of Christ" and barred all other forms of prayer; they called it "devotion to Allah" and barred all other forms of ecstatic song.

The war for the human soul is not decided. Buddhism in name does not represent a truly serious threat to the future of spirituality, but Buddhist-Christian morality very much does. The goal therefore is to develop an amoral spiritual discipline, one which seeks to exploit civilizational maladaptation in order to explore human potential: we do not know what we could become, in the midst of so much error and illness. One thing is certain: the absurdity of hypermodernity may generally crush the human spirit, but it also produces beautiful monsters with unknown powers. This work seeks to be a prelude in the history of the great experiment: what shall we become?

The priests were the first nihilists: overexposure to the fading rituals of the gods, proximity to the fallout of multilingual literacy and cosmopolitanism, and every usual incentive of the charlatan pushed them to this extreme in the early Axial Age - perhaps even before the merchants and pirates got there with worldweariness...

Meditation has been employed as just another means of cultural castration: a neurochemical castration and hypoxia; a hypnosis of the instincts of violence.

The hostage rescue of meditation: the rescue of "spirit", the rescue of an ideal - but do we want an "ideal"? Or do we want merely the discipline, the attitude of excellence, and not the idiotic worship of the impossible?

I teach meditation as a health regimen. So how do we dispel the priestly stink? By regaining the ancient conception of health: the dry Hippocratic empiricism, the twisting snakes of the rod of Asclepius, the yogic "path of kundalini", and our own most reductionistic account of neuronal topology can be reconciled.

But in the other aisle, sit the cloistered bores who claim sole right to the privileges of knowledge: the academic scientists. They too are an obstacle: they do not want us to succeed.

By no means do they want meditative practice, psychoanalysis, and psychedelia to yield special insight: they refuse the witness of direct bodily experience, because they fear and loathe their bodies. Despite the fact that there is no other criterion of truth but direct experience, despite the fact that the spirit of science is nothing less than the ability to learn from experience, academic scientists no longer cultivate observation nor gather evocative experience. They tweak the dials of machines they lack the engineering discipline and imagination to have invented. They fabricate findings. They exaggerate the importance of their own work. They secure funding and fight for scraps. They are not fundamentally interested in truth: this you must internalize, whenever you are forced to go begging among them for knowledge.

What you need to keep in mind about academic science at all times: they are not addressing you as the willing student, nor are they directly addressing each other as colleagues, and they are certainly not speaking to the topic itself. They are speaking primarily to those who control access to their funding.

• What are they concerned with? Securing and increasing their status.

• How do they secure and increase their status? By justifying their existence to those who control funding.

• How do they justify their existence? By appealing to the fundamental concern of the university: prestige, which leads to funding.

This is why all the sciences in which there is considerable competition and thus much to gain, such as neuroscience and artificial intelligence, are constantly overstating their knowledge and promising great results in the near future. They must always give the impression that they have recently discovered a vital clue leading to even more impressive results in the next few years: look carefully at nearly any neuroscientific literature from 1910 to 2010 to see this play out at ridiculous scale. In other words, they cannot afford the proper attitude of science: the admission of ignorance. Almost nowhere do they state what they don't know: the clever student must deduce this for himself. Almost nowhere do they ask simple rigorous questions. Almost nowhere do they take the time to refine their own observational powers and the clarity of their thinking. To do so, would risk giving the impression that they're not making progress - or at best, only producing trivial and redundant elaborations of established fact. About 99% of all academic research is trivial and redundant. They are in such haste to produce impressive answers, they do not take the time to formulate real questions. The formulation of incisive questions is the signature of genuine education, not the hoarding of answers.

Neuroscience has largely gone astray and does little more than put on pompous airs. It has followed the paths laid by Emil Kraepelin, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and B.F. Skinner: the path of brutality, the path of willful stupidity, the path of complicity with civilization's worst agencies of punitive normalcy.

That this work on consciousness and meditation is another opportunity to demonstrate our Umwertung: that what we value so much about ourselves - our intelligence, our sapience, our self-reflection - is not itself a source of value but the recipient. That it is the foundations of terrestrial life which yield value. That it is everything we take for granted in the human body that makes us intelligent and wise, if we are so at all. That everything conscious and overt and so celebrated in modernity, is shallow and recent and trivial in comparison to the enormous unconscious intelligence upon which we draw, with every breath.

How do we talk about meditation from the most inspiring perspective?

As refinement of unconscious intelligence. As hierarchical remobilization. As alignment of prioritization algorithms and refinement of asynchronous function. Neurochemical release is not tantalizing enough. Correlation with regions of white and grey matter is not tantalizing enough. After many years of rumination and circumambulation, we feel convinced - not merely because of how gratifying it might be - that the answer to what meditation is and can be, is to be found among the principles of information theory, signal transduction, topology, and even artificial intelligence.

21st century folk like to think of themselves as embodied computers. As long as the metaphors remain infused with the assumptions of von Neumann architecture, this is patently false: but if we're careful about the definition of computation, the opportunity reappears. For example, can we demonstrate that meditation is like a defragmentation routine of a neural topology at criticality?

A word or two about my background:

Science, research, and engineering: I'm a former software engineer, at Google some years ago. This part of my education has probably shaped my approach to "spirituality" more than I can appreciate at close range: what is it to be an engineer but a kind of halfmad tinkerer in many sciences at once? Not only computation and algorithmic design, but information theory, piecemeal statistics, and especially the fine art of scalability is what the experienced code monkey must learn...

An engineer is to a scientist what a touring musician is to a chamber orchestra: half the job is just keeping your shit organized and yourself sane while you try to introduce a little craft and artistry into the messy business.

I am not a Buddhist. I don't possess a borrowed Japanese title, nor did a Pakistani pandit bestow a "Gurudev" upon my willing brow. I belong to no order of priests. I belong to no toothy grinning cult. I have been among all these types and examined each in turn: in every case I learned something, but declined to stay. I respect aspects of many traditions but I choose to walk a different path. I have had many teachers but encountered few masters.

What I hope to demonstrate over the next few months, is that rigorous rationality and profound aesthetic appraisal of mystery, are not only commensurate but mutually reinforcing: the more articulate we become, the more accurately we carve the negative space of ignorance. The more committed we are to a strictly limited but reliable method, the more we can afford expensive admissions of uncertainty. Mystery is not free, but a luxury of clarity.

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One of the practices which has kept me sane and healthy over the years, is my habit of taking long walks. Even when living in some of the densest cityscapes on the planet, I have always found it possible to navigate my way toward a long, striding, refreshing march.

The human being was made to walk: our upright skeleton, our svelte musculature, our plantigrade feet, our bobbing oversized head all need to be exercised on long walks to make sense again. Without a daily walk, preferably through a pathless wild, I begin to lose my sanity, my sense of humor, and my good night's sleep.

Yet I believe that many of you don't know this. Much of the modern firstworld struggles with "exercise" as though it were something exotic and far away. There is no need to jog, no need for equipment, no need to get in your car: just use those legs and go somewhere, for the earth is large and round.

Moreover, one of the secrets of walking as opposed to all other forms of exercise, is that it tunes the mind. The human mind responds to a walking pace more than any other: just as 90 beats per minute is the central point around which human music revolves due to the temporal range of the human heartbeat, so is the best of human thinking centered around nearly the same rhythm: they call it an andantino for good reason.

Therefore I will outline for y'all, my approach to the maximally productive walk.

• Go alone.
• Leave your phone and all other distractions behind.
• Establish a good rhythm and keep to it.
• Challenge yourself to go a little further than you think you want to.
• Early on, let your mind wander. Allow yourself to become chatty and distracted. If you find yourself talking aloud, don't attempt to prevent it. However, don't allow the thread to become a mere indulgent fantasy: you must really talk to yourself, not someone else. You must learn to take yourself aside, as it were, and consult with your soul: treat it respectfully but frankly, like a good friend.
• Use free association during the early stage. This will allow you to discover what it is you need to talk about: once you discover a theme or a stronger emotional response, focus on this issue. Trace the difficulties, look for knots. Treat your emotional responses like tense musculature in need of massage.

Some of you may discover what seems like an endless need, or an inconsolable loss, or more reasons to be depressed. Many of you are already running from yourselves, and therefore cannot afford this kind of reflection: however, it's possible to use walking as your grounding, your emotional safety, even your justification. The logic of depression says: "You're hopeless, you've already lost, there's nothing you can do." But something as simple as a long walk in the fresh air can weaken this logic and make it seem pale and distant. If necessary, trick yourself: begin with a short walk, and see if you want more.

The simplicity and centrality of walking lends itself well to clearing out bullshit: even when nothing seems to make sense, even when you feel out of control or powerless, you do know how to walk. In this practice, there are times when your feelings will spiral and bubble, swirl and mock you: use the simplicity and reality of each stride to straighten and strengthen your attitude. Feel the solidity of the earth, the competence of your feet, the power of your heartbeat, the inevitability of your breath: these are gifts a billion years old and more, and they cannot be defeated by the breezes which wash away the sandcastles of your merely conscious mind. Consciousness is almost nothing, a mere plaything, mere epiphenomena, upon the great sea of your body and the biological forces which created your body. You are in fact the representative of your ancestors and a rivulet of the torrent of life reaching back to the beginning: you are related to everything which lives. You can never be alone, and we are each of us alone forever. This is the power of walking upon the earth as a native creature.

This practice is part of the burden and gift of solitude. Walking in this way is an excellent supplement for those beginning a meditation discipline - but it is no substitute. You must familiarize yourself with how loud the voices in your head really are: do not be ashamed, do not lie to yourself about it. You will not begin to quiet that noise until you learn to give each voice space, and deal with them one at a time.

The earth is everywhere and always with us. Even the dirtiest and narrowest alleyway is planet earth. Most of the earth is still thankfully "the outdoors": do not lose sight of this.

Do not indulge the insecurity which wants to fuss with "gear": this is only another means of preventing difficult feelings. Every year I see tourists pass through my desert wilderness burdened with a thousand toys, a hundred machinations, and grandiose expectations - but not once the humility to get out of the car, sit on the ground, and listen. Most of the "recreational" activity aiming at nature, seeks to obliterate the experience of nature: to make it into another tiring social event, another falsified story, another pointless toil, another lawn to mow.

Approach nature with humility and simplicity, and she will speak softly to you. She will gradually change you back into what you are supposed to be.

It may sound strange, but walking can be a form of spiritual activism. Walking is an excellent means of bending the rules and changing expectations. It is also a way of discovering how free you are and are not: can you walk through this guarded parking lot? What about this strange little concrete tract of riverfront? Will someone in this upper middle class gated community call the cops if you take a long stroll? If you walk through this lively neighborhood, will the racial tension be too much for you? Is it you or them who's tense? What happens if you say hello?

Manufactured suburbia is the worst in this regard: there are millions of acres of prime North American farmland paved over with tract housing, in which the emotional repression is so tightly controlled that even walking on the sidewalk seems to constitute a misdemeanor. The tyranny of the automobile wants to annihilate simple freedoms. I watch people get into and out of their car like they were bowing in prayer: it is a ritual they love, because the automobile is a surrogate body. They love the moment of climbing in most, but they also enjoy the fussy self-importance of parking and getting out - but once they're in it, their repressed feelings surge up again and so they must drive hastily. Once they're out, the reality of the body oppresses them and they must hasten to cover over it again. The cycle of meaningless toil is not accidental.

The human spirit loves and needs stories. Every feeling is a little story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end which hints at a new beginning. You must learn to savor your feelings like a sommelier. Every feeling has a right to exist no matter how earthy, bitter, and forbidden. To draw out this innocence and develop a freedom from stagnant expectation, there are two interrelated methods: talking and walking.

Talk therapy works because language has special leverage which reaches deep into unconscious structure. As Lacan says, "the unconscious is structured like a language": this also means it's manipulable like a language, like a multidimensional spiderweb, like an instrument with a hundred million strings...

Walking is the muscular parallel. As my old analyst used to tell me, "Say the next thing". In order to give your feelings this right to exist, keep the body in motion. Keeping the body in motion gently stirs the pool of the mind. Therefore while much of my technique is derived from psychoanalysis and the stargazing posture of lying flat on your back, wondering out loud to an invisible presence - there is an increasingly popular kind of conciliatory indulgence and half-therapized attitude toward emotional landscapes which would threaten to make what I'm saying into just another truism for those who want to mellow the human spirit into a cloudy kiddy pool at the spoilt brat's birthday party, with too many presents and no genuine friends...

But I'm talking about evolving your feelings, about forcing them to develop into something actionable. I'm talking about finding a path of maturation despite all obstacles. I'm talking about doing something about your life. I'm talking about laying the foundation for a lifelong friendship with yourself.

Every walk should be a little story. Every landmark can be used as a point of association and thus a metaphor for your progression. If you stumble, pay attention to what you were thinking and feeling right before it happened: it was no accident, but an act of self-sabotage - why? If you find yourself going the wrong way, ask yourself why. What does this way mean to you?

You can use distant landmarks and difficult passages as a limiting point for any one thread. By giving yourself a limited domain in which to come to a minor conclusion, you stand a better chance of fooling yourself into doing so. Yet in all of this, one should not try too hard, and one should always allow the unconscious mind to take the lead. Don't anticipate answers, find them. Strive to be honest with yourself: honesty does not come all at once in a moment, it is a long gradation and a lifelong task.

Inclement weather is no excuse. I love winter hiking. Your heart, your lungs, and your circulation will meet the challenge. One of the benefits of hiking through a snowstorm, is not just that you'll have a chance to improve endurance - but that it offers the opportunity to expand your range of emotional control. Walking alone in a gloaming wilderness through a blizzard, will provide a concrete opportunity to expand the set of feelings which you can handle without panic. A little brush with mortality will make your petty anxieties seem - petty.

If you practice consistently, you'll soon be walking many miles daily without straining yourself, and you may look back and wonder how you ever could have been so weak.

Although it's important to assert that you already know how to walk, in another sense many of you have no idea what you're doing. Some of you have never learned to walk over uneven ground - there are many adults who consider themselves fully competent and even the pinnacle of creation, perhaps even an example of universal aspiration itself, who cannot walk over anything but a perfectly graded, dry, paved surface: at which point the arrogance of civilized humanity looks more like a Mr. Bean skit than anything else.

If you want to know what masterly movement looks like, watch a film with Toshiro Mifune. He studied Aikido and it shows. He always moves with his knees wide, his weight low, his feet firmly planted, and his lower back activated. Or study Cary Grant: he was an acrobat, and it contributed greatly to that ineffable grace.

Do not take walking, or standing, or sitting for granted: these too can contribute to an athleticism, which when properly developed has the power to fundamentally change the experience of your body. It's in the small things that power over yourself lies hidden.

0.

Our institutionally enrobed psychologists are so proud of their experimental apparatus - but when's the last time they experimented with experimentation? Has anyone taken it upon themselves to prove the efficacy of their methods? The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to signal the end of interesting social experimentation anywhere within a large radius of academia: they didn't like what they found. Ever since, they've been accumulating a mountain of wishful conclusions, hoping to bury the disturbing vision under a crushing weight of mutually reinforcing prejudice, faulty unconsidered method, and silent unspoken conspiratorial terror of political ostracization.

What are they so afraid of? What does the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrate? That we are indelibly tribal creatures; that our moral sentiments are shallow and vitiated, that we don't know who we are, until we are tested. That the vast majority will fail the test of integrity: however, this also means they will pass the test of tribal instinct. They will choose the winning side, they will make accurate guesses about probable victories, they will quickly and effortlessly realign their emotional investments and discover rationalizations for any and all participation required to ensure victory over "them". My work does not seek to denigrate the tribal creature: it only looks like a liar's game when contravening the shameful clothing it was forced to wear up until that point - in other words, the modern human being is a hypocrite because it's forced into too many inarticulate, incomplete, and contradictory tribal contexts, not because it's incapable of fidelity. Modern morality is largely ashamed of itself, ashamed of humanity, ashamed of its essential hypocrisy and therefore seeks grandiose compensations, calling them categorical, "universal" and "the Good". The sycophantic modern human creature, cowering in a corner of his cell, gathering information to be used against his friends, consoles himself by believing that his intimate gossiping concern for everything and everyone is "compassion for all sentient life", rather than an informant's dragnet. "Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter" is what the East German Stasi used to call them, and according to their own records they generally numbered at about 200,000, or 1% of the population: but that's 1% of the total who are willing to explicitly cooperate in programs of oppression, rather than implicitly. That's 1% who are willing to take the risk of exposing their real motives to themselves - of learning who they are - so desperate is their thirst for the Punitive City. But it's anonymity and plausible deniability that is the safest and generally winning strategy in this game: tribal unrest, the crisis of treachery and betrayal which constitutes the modern tribeless condition, defines the Nash equilibrium we call "hypocrisy".

It's reported that Felix Dzerzhinsky, arguably the godfather of all 20th century secret police, once told Lenin that secret police work could only be accomplished by "saints or scoundrels ... but now the saints are running away from me and I am left with the scoundrels". But what is a saint in my terms? A professional scoundrel, a conman who has convinced more than half of himself and thus in a sense is no mere liar - which is why Dzerzhinsky was complaining about being left with the amateurs.

Keeping up the churning confusion of modernity, the punishing waves of alienation and nameless loss which creates novel opportunities for unique forms of power - such as coveted roles within the secret police - goes by other names: "permanent revolution" is what Trotsky would call it. Thus is the secret behind political posturing revealed: to the degree that one is a miserable but ambitious wretch, one delights in shallow political advocacy because it disrupts existing hierarchies and creates temporary power imbalances which can be exploited. Social media is largely the platform for a million and one wannabe politicians and demagogues: the middle and upper classes now raise their children as though they were already celebrities, encouraging the cultivation of virtual image at the earliest possible stage, so that they may be ready to compete in an increasingly virtual and reactionary social sphere...

But what we're witnessing in the Stanford Prison Experiment is not actually tribality, but tribal instincts within the confines of civilizational scarcity. One of the Foucaultian insights no one seems to have internalized, is that architecture not only expresses but enacts forms of coercion: it maps possible social configurations, subtly delimiting possible attitudes and outcomes. Human tribal instincts inside a cage should not be judged as though that's what they essentially are. I insist that a great deal of what's known as fascism, are the tribal instincts pushed to a critical threshold - an emergency protocol, not their healthy functioning.

No one asks what happens when you take the same impulses and put them outside, beyond the reach of modern architecture and artificial scarcity. There is the possibility that the Punitive City and prison behaviors represent an adaptive pattern: a prisoner in the enemy camp, the dissolving tribe. The women are willing to remarry, the men are willing to defect.

What do I mean by "phylopsychology"? Every group psychology I'm aware of, fails to take into account the fact that we are tribal animals, with functionally tribal responses. Ever since its inception in France and England in the early 19th century, sociology would rather ask why the human being fails to conform to the brutal but supposedly sublimely rational mediations of civilization, and in answer draw up a list of "cognitive biases" and outline novel educational opportunities for psychiatric torture, than take seriously the idea that we are already well-adapted for another context.

The architect of the original Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo, has had enough fortitude to faithfully stand by the results of his famous experiment. Yet he is also clearly not up to the emotional challenge of assimilating the lesson: he wants to wax tragically poetic about "how good people become evil". What's comical to my eye, is how even this mainline Marxist-Weberian sociological interpretation, oversteps what the majority are willing to accept: the postagricultural human race is primarily populated by the peasant type, who still needs to believe in a categorically demonstrable good and evil. The assertion, "I would never!" stands at the heart of all the blustering "refutation" of this experiment. Academic sociology and psychology has gone as far as making it formally impossible to repeat: they created a "standard of ethics" which forecloses actual social experimentation - thus what has taken place in these fields since, are 10,000 repetitions of false experimentation. With their sterile questionnaires and utterly riskless "experiments", they ask their participants to pretend to have a feeling, to pretend to have something at stake, to pretend to be acting socially - without establishing sufficient illusion to actually induce social behavior such as Zimbardo's experiment did: therefore what has been studied for decades now, is the sociology of false sociality. Which would make an interesting subject in itself, were it studied properly: every result of academic sociology and psychology should therefore be examined under the light of these questions: "How are the subjects falsifying a social response? What does the falsification tell us about what the human race wishes were true? What were the expectations of the researchers and how did the subjects sense and anticipate them?"

I'll allow Zimbardo to speak for himself when describing the coping strategies of prisoners:

Prisoners coped with their feelings of frustration and powerlessness in a variety of ways. At first, some prisoners rebelled or fought with the guards. Four prisoners reacted by breaking down emotionally as a way to escape the situation. One prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash over his entire body when he learned that his parole request had been turned down. Others tried to cope by being good prisoners, doing everything the guards wanted them to do.

Quoted from prisonexp.org

In modernity you have a few choices:

• Shallow symbolic rebellion
• Crippling anxiety
• Psychosomatic displacement
• Complicity and authoritarian identification

Each of us dips into each of these strategies a little here and there, creating tapestries of denial and hysterical displacement with varying artistry. There is the rebel without a cause who later becomes an entrenched punitive conformist; there is the anxious wreck who covertly delights in lowering the quality of life for everyone else; there is the psychosomatic genius who protects himself with illness... Generally it is this last type whom I prefer: those who are capable of transformation of psychic pain into physical, are also capable of the reverse - something generally overlooked in the analysis of what is called "shamanism". Psychosomatic phenomena is relatively the norm in the human species: the difference is a matter of degree and imagination. The human being is sick: thus it is that spiritual practice is properly termed "making medicine"...

The prison is a terrifying imbalance of power which reveals underlying unconscious mechanics of identification:

During the parole hearings we also witnessed an unexpected metamorphosis of our prison consultant as he adopted the role of head of the Parole Board. He literally became the most hated authoritarian official imaginable, so much so that when it was over he felt sick at who he had become – his own tormentor who had previously rejected his annual parole requests for 16 years when he was a prisoner.

Lessons from Abu Ghraib:

• Women are just as likely and able to commit torture as men.
• The pattern is as follows: the stupid little people commit the deeds, the authorities wink. Thus is blame sufficiently diffused: the perpetrators are typically former victims repeating a history of abuse; while the authorities are people of protected status fully accustomed to complicitude, hypocrisy, and skillful ex post facto moral reasoning. No one is to blame, everyone is guilty.
• The worst offenders are always underachievers, overlooked wannabes, chronic losers, and ambitious police and paramilitary. There is a long chain of implicit systemic violence at work in these "scandals": they are merely the last element in a long displacement of violence and the accumulated humiliations of civilization. Only at the very tail end, in an isolated prison on the other side of the world in a chaotic newly occupied country, does the repression finally lift: and we witness what has accumulated in the human collective.

Everything which one of us does is the responsibility and response of every one of us: this is a worthwhile perspective, and I believe that you will not be able to digest and assimilate the long history of atrocities until you learn to accept the force of its truth. We are all responsible: there is one human psyche, and it is capable of everything of the worst as much as everything of the best. Until you accept this axiom, you will remain trapped within the moral illusion, unable to tell the truth, and have no access to the equally valid assertion of our universal innocence. There is no other final redemption and liberation of the human creature.

What is the meaning of the prison? As metaphor, as symptom, as expression of genetic and historical forces?

The essence of sociality. What is social? The wide-eyed obsequious answer we generally hear, is "cooperation". The prison teaches something else: the essence of sociality is infraspecies exploitation selectively repressed, which generates hierarchies of dominance for the optimization of group function. In other words, cooperation is a coincident byproduct of inhibition due to competition between roughly equivalent agencies: establish an imbalance of power, and this constant competitive thirst for dominance will percolate out from the corresponding willingness to be dominated. We are all potentially warden and inmate. The ape is both greedy and fearful: he wants power and will delight in it at the first opportunity no matter how petty and shortsighted, but he also fears exclusion through moral censure and thus learns to hide his schemes and wait for the right moment. Character and ethical integrity are rare because they are not adaptive for social life: what does "character" mean but the inability and unwillingness to adapt to novel social imbalances of power? Integrity is an expensive liability which rarely pays. Poverty and isolation are generally its fruits: one must therefore learn to delight in these things, if one is to possess the rare gem of autonomous self-respect.

In the prison environment, repression lifts and we see human sociality for what it always was in virtual statespace: which also means, our hypervigilance and misanthropy were after all not so misplaced, but because we had only petty scheming and backbiting as personal testimony, we sometimes wondered whether it wasn't ourselves who were petty... Fear not therefore: you are already armed with the knowledge and instinct to defend against the excesses of the unholy ape. It may seem a contradiction to say on the one hand, "Human tribality should not be judged while imprisoned", and on the other hand to say, "The essence of sociality is hereby revealed": but I say it nonetheless. The tribe is actually the most humane form of sociality, because it is a functional compromise between the indifference of the flock and the punitive normalcy of the colony: there is a discernible scale of social function, wherein many of the apex predators sit in the middle. But the hymenoptera insect colony is termed "eusocial", because of the prejudices of modernity: maximum sociality and "the Good" have been considered synonymous for some time and formulated as such since at least the English utilitarians... Actually everything edifying and decent about social life, everything which makes travel, conversation, and friendship worthwhile, is its unrealized and imperfect nature: freedom and dignity lies in imperfection, improvisation, and the futilities which demand disciplined creativity - in other words, the spirit of nomadism.

What are the historical manifestations of the gestalt called "prison"? I see one in the past, and the other in the future.

• Slavery. To the precise degree that a species is social, it is capable of enslavement: thus ants enslave. Some species of hymenoptera cannot survive in any way other than by enslaving another species. This is also the meaning of agriculture and husbandry, and why again the ants are capable of it. Slavery is not some unique human evil, it lies at the heart of the problem of the organic: how does an organism acquire predominant power at an emergent level of competition? Predation and slavery - which are only the initial and final expressions of the same function. This is the point at which my own biosemiotics diverges from the driveling hopes of academe and the likes of Thomas Sebeok.

• Realized modernity. Modernity strives to distribute the roles of master and slave equitably among us all: the institution and spirit of slavery has not been abolished, it has been dismantled and reassembled elsewhere. I consider the work of Foucault invaluable: and yet few seem to be able to read him honestly, and look rather to mine it for the ammunition of political posturing - they would rather seem to join the fight against "the man", than discover the fight within their own beliefs and motives. Why can't they stand him? Because they lack the emotional strength to endure the insight: one must possess a large hidden reserve of meaningfulness to endure the cold hard stare of modernity such as it peeks through Foucault.

I will have much more to say concerning the Punitive City.

But allow me a phylopsychological digression. The purpose of the beauty response in men, is not only to judge the reproductive fitness of a female at a glance, but the capacity to be seduced. But sufficient seduction for sexual reproduction is easy - a few shortlived hormonal responses are all that's required. The exaggerated aesthetic faculty of the human male is something more: to seduce him into tribal life and tribal loyalties. The tortured male, torn between violence and peace: women have been conditioned to find this type most attractive of all.

Why do I rely so heavily on the resurgent sense of beauty in my rhetoric? Why does it seem so important to constantly point the way back to a redemption? As though I were to leave traces behind us as we venture further into a wilderness. Because we have reason to be doubly afraid: afraid because our hearts are children and easily tremble, and afraid because the wildernesses of modernity are actually worse than that of our ancestors. More brutal, more nightmarish, more panoptic, more personally impersonal and thus worthy of paranoia: Foucault should be read in small doses and digested thoroughly, in order to internalize the importance of his work... His overly erudite French excesses of style don't actually do his insights justice - the scope of what he's talking about is not generally clear because he insists on such detailed analysis... Leave it therefore to a poet of terror, who seeks to make a sharp vision of modernity clearer: this is why I have need of so many rhetorical downbeats, in which our emotional endurance can catch up and expand. It is emotional intelligence and strength we're after: raw intellect is cheap, explicit logic is easy. The unconscious implicit logic, the invisible architecture of the breathing human world, the transgenomic factors seeking expression through humanity itself: we are so sure that our civilization has conquered nature, but it is very likely that all civilizational forces are merely a competitive form of life seeking to exploit us. The realization of modernity is this debt falling due: a technologically dominant future is very likely to be merely the next recursive plane of a very old war within the confines of life itself. "The bentback bow": too many assume that "life" is necessarily some unary force, and forget that its essence is competition and exploitation - there are not only many species of life, but many species of the alive.

There is no design but there is recursion, pattern, and crystallinity. There is no grand harmony but there is infinite mystery.

There is no hope, no assurance, and no guarantee, but there is the vast unknown and the freedom within probability. There is no final slope of progress and no goal, but there is change, chance, and unending opportunity.

There is no reason for it all and no justification of our struggle. There is no rewarding destiny, but there is immovable fate. There is no big answer to "why", but there are small answers to "how". There is causation as a means of inquiry and intelligibility as the foundation of knowledge.

There is no final revelation, there is no universal truth. But there is ethos, tradition, and tribe. There is the pride of a way of life. There is respect, there is a Yes. There is the miracle of intention, the depth of the unconscious, and the realization of the body's potential.

There is no master to serve, there is no debt to be balanced, there is no morality to be obeyed. There is nothing we owe and nothing we could pay. We aren't the favorite children of anyone and we aren't chosen. We are strangers and trespassers, but we are also natives and earthlings. We are not stewards but we are inhabitants.

Mein ganzes inneres Wirken erwies sich als eine lebendige Heuristik, welche, eine unbekannte geahnete Regel anerkennend, solche in der Außenwelt zu finden und — in die Außenwelt einzuführen trachtet.

My whole inner working showed itself like a living heuristic, which while obeying an unknown intuited rule, seeks to find the same in the outer world - and to introduce it into that outer world.

Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen

I see young people hungering for the union of science and spirit: for the right to profound communicable experience with a good conscience, a sense that we can gain back the core human adventure without resorting to delusion and grandiose error. That if spiritual development has a basis in anything but pathology, that it must therefore yield to scientific investigation. That the problem can be framed in terms of unknown planes of causality which still elude our analytic and anatomical methods. There are many traditional disciplines which we know work, but we don't know why: the old attitude didn't need to know why. What we are increasingly unwilling to tolerate any longer, is the assumption that if we don't understand it, it must not exist: in fact, this is highly unscientific. We are not somehow more intelligent than our ancestors: in many ways the situation is reversed. The accumulated evidence says: the more ancient the practice, the more likely it is to be valid and worth taking seriously. For example, meditative discipline works: not only does it "reduce stress", it has the power to permanently reshape a psychosomatic topology.

In this domain, what I call "cargo cult scientificality" must be defended against vigorously: we must not give in to gratifying postures of certainty we have not earned - most science is popularly presented in the priestly garb of pseudoscience, and most of the spiritual schemes around us now take this very same pseudoscientific posturing as prerequisite. One hears the scientists lobbing the charge "pseudoscience" more often than before: perhaps this is because they feel their largely unrewarding toil has earned them a sole right to unscientific attitudes of certainty?

Somehow we have to give room sufficient for innate and superior knowledge to develop, without permitting the perennial arsehole, nor the insufferable hippy, nor the neon charlatan.

Somehow we have to avoid becoming mired in the bloodfeuds of epistemology, while providing a sufficiently cogent and satisfying theory of this kind of knowledge: we have to quench our thirst for scientific righteousness, while feeding our hunger for spiritual relevance. We have to find a way of knowing what we need to know, without lying to ourselves about how we know it.

We would like to develop a theory of method alongside our theory of result, in order to refine and accelerate future inquiry. With our newly hybridized scientific techniques, we would like to do more than justify ourselves and seem impossibly hip.

We would like to avoid constructing elaborate illusions of having arrived where we are through established practice. We would like to be honest about having stumbled and fumbled our way into clarity: but a theory of productive stumbling and fumbling is not therefore precluded.

Are we doing more than negotiating productive compromise between the forces that would possess our bodies? Building bridges of reconciliation between seemingly incompatible modalities of the past? Are we merely greedy for authority? In our haste to unite the reductive powers of science with the holistic redemptions of spirituality, are we doing more than borrowing and abusing technical vocabulary, or are we beginning to accurately and evocatively describe subjective experience? Isn't precise description the bedrock of good science? And isn't the ability to formulate ever more articulate questions the jackhammer leading to this bedrock? And how do we become articulate in our inquiry, but by borrowing and inventing technical vocabulary?

Despite all the abuse it's received, the concept "soul" is not entirely dispensable. Higher-order emergent patterning, the mysterious recursions of complexity, and everything tantalizing about synergetics, speaks of "soul", doesn't it? What's initially so easy to regard as mere epiphenomena, sheen, byproduct, at some hypercritical moment, seems to reach out of an ether and pluck a sympathetic string in the plenipotent present. At this time our notion of unidirectional agency is challenged: our conceptualizations of causality have been naïve and a little blockheaded. The reductionist perspective is a useful discipline and the gleaming scalpel of Western science - but it blinds us to circularity, dependent co-arising, and more subtle causation models. Sometimes the whole guides the parts. Sometimes our dreams speak with a clarity and prophecy that cannot be denied. Sometimes we just know things we can't explain.

But the first thing I need to say after having articulated this, is that this knowledge and this practice is not for everyone. Most human creatures are so far gone down the road of self-deception, mendacious hypochondria, and entrenched wishfulness in relation to everything "holistic" - they may name it morality, idealism, or increasingly just "self-care" - that even the word "intuition" entails far too much trust for apenature not to abuse it.

Reductionism is not a necessarily more true vision of the world, it is a method for dealing with the human proclivity to lie to itself. One of the most common blunders I find among the low-level wouldbe scientists with which we are surrounded, is to confuse efficacious method with objective modeling. We have become extremely adept at analyzing into constituent parts, we have yet to begin to learn to assemble into wholes.

It's telling that the initially clunky assumptions of thermodynamics in postulating a bounded system, form the basis of the only scientific account of a whole. Thermodynamics was invented for the analysis of machines - specifically steam and combustion engines. The world as machine, the body as machine, life as machination: this familiar Cartesian perspective makes us comfortable enough to draw a line around an assemblage of parts and ask, how does the whole operate? Or how does complexity within limitations affect the behavior of the system as a whole?

But Descartes was not the first modern philosopher, he was the last of the scholastics. The machine does not threaten the foundations of scholastic logic: we retain deduction as the leading actor, while inductive inference remains in the background and at the edges - as mere "application" and the preliminary stages. This obscures the fact that everything deductive logic accomplishes, is mere tautology. Most "proofs" are arrived at after the fact. It is in the midst of inductive inference that everything essential to science happens - that is, in the margins: hypothesizing, synthesizing, realizing, guessing, understanding. Syllogistic logic still struts around as crown prince, but it is inductive inference that quietly knits the whole endeavor of science together.

The purely descriptive phase of a given field requires more scientific acumen than the later reductionist experimental stages. Does anyone know this anymore? Does anyone possess an intellectual conscience alongside a fruitful imagination? This is why good anthropology is so hard to come by: most of them are not psychically malleable enough for an immersion, nor are they disciplined enough to describe ambiguous valence: they have neither realized subjectivity nor rigor - somewhat like comparing a Rothko to a Dürer.

This is also the case with almost all modern psychology, since psychology should properly be treated like an anthropological adventure. Most of civilized humanity, when in the presence of a novel experience don't become dumbfounded, they become "smartfounded" - they erase the novelty with certainty. They lack the character to assimilate new information: it requires humility, patience, and assurance to look into the unknown and perceive novelty. Mere intelligence among human beings is cheap and ubiquitous; character is expensive and rare.

Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine serve as a warning: we must not allow a medieval thirst for crystallinity to distract us from an elegant and articulate pedagogy. A psychologist in my sense, or a "spiritual practitioner" if you prefer polluted terms, should be trained like the naturalist was not so long ago: a cultivation of the art of field observation means learning to sketch the subject with delicacy and affection, to form working hypotheses in the midst of intense personal experience, to keep one's head even as one risks one's neck. This was once considered the status quo in the training of a worthwhile biologist. Despite the technocratic amplifications afforded by the age of the transistor, I believe science as formative discipline peaked in the 19th century - but not before producing such wunderkinds as Darwin, Freud, and the brief blossoming of anthropology. If what I'm outlining has any chance of improving our spiritual life, then it aims not at the achievement of a much-wished-for "objectivity", but at the formation of our intellect into a useful and precise instrument. Every instrument has bias and occludes more than it reveals: hence I don't seek a synthesis of my teachers, but refer to them like planetary influences and distinct astrological "stations". Any teacher worth his salt is almost incommensurate with every other. They should be treated and honored like local gods: in their vicinity we do them homage. It's hoped it will be understood I'm interested not in ostentatious namedropping, but that with every name I have a verifiable personal relationship: I have felt and seen something in their presence no one else could make me feel and see. This is why an intellectual life in my style should feel like an unforgettable party, wherein you drift from a life-changing conversation to ecstatic dance to introspection and back again. Those who know how to party don't merely goof off, they make medicine: the human being has constant need of medicine - that's what the Plains Indians are trying to tell us with that phrase. This is generally why I refuse to see spiritual life as some kind grandiose "entheogenic" enterprise: we're not becoming divine - our first job is to become fully human. Spiritual life is largely remedial, recuperative, and convalescent. It's not until we understand how badly we need medicine, that we begin to develop the special powers of the convalescent - almost everything worthwhile in spiritual practice is first generated as a psychosomatic scar. What sometimes seems to make the crises of modernity seem like peak human realization, is its potential for bizarre hypertrophic speciation: chronic psychosomatic disease largely crushes souls under its wheels like the juggernauts of old, but occasionally a fragment of some other ore is wedged just so and fires off in an improbable direction. We are such discarded pebbles. We are the ejecta of a catastrophe: may we one day raise the eyebrow of a beachside strolling geologist of the human soul, who can read past the wellworn surface into the same compressive and tensile forces with which he must still contend.

0.

You're sitting in class, say a 300 level psychology course you've been looking forward to. But when the teacher begins the lesson, you get the feeling no one else read the material. You begin to experience that familiar irritation, the urge to dominate, and a little paranoia. Later, just as you've maneuvered the group into an interesting discussion, it happens: someone says something pointedly obtuse. For the next 45 minutes, for which you are paying high sums of money, the class is dominated by willful stupidity, pointless ill-formed questions with self-evident answers, and an unconscious message which seems to reduce to: "I will not be excluded because of ignorance or laziness."

You are quietly boiling with frustration, and you ask yourself: Is this worth it?

The professor looks just as bored and irritated as everyone else, and yet he does nothing to prevent it - perhaps because he too would rather allow the class to be sabotaged than potentially learn something. You finally summon the tact to steer the discussion back towards a productive thread, and in the last few minutes you manage to squeeze something like an education out of this farce.

No one thanks you. And in your next class, headed by an activist unqualified to teach dodgeball, you lose your patience and contradict the dogma passed around like communion. You are attacked from many angles at once, because none of the many others who feel the same will speak up. You have been marked for exclusion, and none of them feel that the question of truth and falsehood is worth the social risk.

It's important to understand that although leftist politics dominates the university today, the reasons for its replication and dominance in that environment have almost nothing to do with its content. These are not genuine political convictions, they are advantageous masks: the goal is social status and justification of the privileges of academia. Should the predominant political atmosphere shift, the masks would be exchanged.

The "radical feminist" running your sociology department into the ground does not care about other women: she cares about accruing social power and immunity from censure. The shrill diminutive literature professor who slanders Homer and Shakespeare, does not care about whatever minority he's chosen to champion, he cares about feeling a little less wretched and ignored, and will gladly take out the frustrations of his lonely life on a student who objects to reading another George Eliot novella rather than Dostoyevsky.

The explicit content of these politics is largely irrelevant. If the year were 1870, these same characters would be lambasting Darwin and promoting colonialism; if the year were 1735, they'd be defending the church and burning Voltaire; if the year were 1460, they'd be flattering Aquinas. They have nothing to teach you - except to scorch into the flanks of your naïve expectations a lesson on how disappointing humanity can be.

A career in academia will stunt you - emotionally, developmentally, physically. You will be spared the fundamental placelessness and anxieties of modernity, and thus will be dependent on that protection for life. In your 20s, precisely when you should be expanding your horizons as wide as possible, failing as often as possible, experimenting endlessly, exploring hidden social contexts and novel roles, challenging yourself at every opportunity, and learning to deal with merciless uncertainty, in academia you will instead be shuttled from one padded cage to another. You will not learn to walk upon the planet as a native creature, you will not learn to navigate humanity as a skilled operator, you will fail to gain a depth of character you cannot later replicate. Unless your teenage years were full of sufficient struggle and suffering, unless you are the rare type who lifted herself out of poverty and low expectations, unless you already know who you are and what you want - something more naturally common among young women than young men - a career in academia is a bad idea.

A young man emailed me the other day, explaining that he had just dropped out of a psychology and philosophy program, because he realized he doesn't want to become the person the system wants to make of him. Years ago I was in a similar position and made similar choices: how many of us are there? More than once I've seen how the brightest students are driven away by the skittish mediocre majority, how this tightly maintained average perpetuates itself by carefully selecting and promoting those capable of just enough to achieve the status quo, but not enough to threaten the comfortable envelope of expectations.

How likely is it, that in most fields the best intellectual material wanders off like a stray rivulet into an endorheic basin, there to bake and never see the ocean? How likely is it, that the reason "mainstream discourse" is so nauseatingly shallow and pointless, is because no one but the shallow and pointless participate?

[...] in allen Winkeln der Erde sitzen Wartende, die es kaum wissen, inwiefern sie warten, noch weniger aber, dass sie umsonst warten.

In all corners of the earth sit those who wait, who little know how much they wait, and who know even less that they wait in vain.

Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §274

Why is academia worthless and much worse than worthless? Even in the STEM fields, not until the very end of a career will you be taught anything a motivated autodidact could not learn in a fraction of the time. In the humanities, the situation is dire: I feel confident in saying that a literary education equal to the past masters cannot be obtained in any humanities department this side of the Seine.

Why?

• Universal education lowers standards. Most universities are incentivized to simply increase enrollment and decrease attrition. Do professors flunk students anymore? And even in the elite institutions, outside of a few high-profile quantitative fields such as robotics and genetics, all competition for attention and funding takes the form of purely political posturing: this reaches a fever pitch among those fields most difficult to quantify - namely philosophy, sociology, psychology, literature. The task of these departments is to seem to be doing something important, while they accomplish nothing but fan flames of moral panic which justify their existence. Trading centuries of tradition for the sake of a few political points is common practice.

• Corrosive money. It's common knowledge that pharmaceutical industry erodes the foundations of genuine medicine: many doctors are little more than pimped-out pushers. A similar process has been occurring in education for some time: every year the university is run more like a business. The product is graduates, not education: again this is most pronounced in the humanities, where quantitative research is scarce or impossible and thus market competition must take the shape of political posturing.

• Moral panic: the atmosphere of political ostracism ratchets up, precisely proportional to the degree of alienation, frustration, and personal dysfunction which predominates. The modern human body suffers from the hyperalgesia and hypochondria of overpopulated maladaptation, and its response is to seek a benumbed consolation which both worsens this hyperalgesia and prepares the repressed substrate of frustration for a collective hysteria: thus academia, which produces bodies more pampered and useless than anywhere else, is the breeding ground of the worst political and moral posturing in modernity. Especially in the humanities, there is no other means of power, and no better means of offloading repressed aggression.

• Foucaultian dynamics: college would like to be considered as compulsory as primary education. Let us remember that compulsory education has nothing to do with a humanitarian concern for the welfare of children, and everything to do with the manufacture of docile bodies. It's no accident we continue to dream of high school decades later: it stands precisely where tribal initiation should have been, where the acquisition of autonomy and pride should have been. We are all of us bereft and mere fragments and hungry ghosts of the wholeness of our ancestors.

There is a single sense in which the explicit content of the politics currently dominant in the university contributes to that dominance: the erosion of merit, the promotion of moral posturing as sole means of social leverage, weakening existing hierarchies such that the intellectually lazy may succeed through persecution and fearmongering. In other words, "progressive" only insofar as it enables a maximum of personal short-term advantage. This is the same reason "equality" is always a popular cause: because it enables covert strategies of inequality.

The group is panicked: you think thoughtful leadership is the answer, but the group thinks otherwise. It's panicked about belonging, not group direction. Independent thinking does not alleviate the fear of imminent abandonment, but intensifies it: if attention is allowed to focus on excellence, the majority feel in even greater danger of exclusion. Therefore merit must be defined as moral posturing, in which the mediocre tend to excel. A shifting and ever-narrowing circle of moral justification is required in order to keep the group anxious and in need of belonging: the atmosphere in which moral actors thrive. The mediocre majority will not stand up for you: they don't need you, because there is no concrete challenge facing the group such that a strength of character might be useful. We must always keep in mind that the transient tribe attempting to form in every group scenario of our firstworld comedy is fat, pampered, and has never faced imminent danger, nor hunger, nor need: they are anxious largely because they have never known anything dangerous. If real adversity were to appear, the short-sighted majority of apekind would suddenly need you, praise you, follow you around: suddenly it would be cool to be strong and independently minded, rather than weak and morally histrionic. Do not doubt however, that as soon as the danger passed, you would be marked for exclusion again: apekind is by default weak and vicious, and only deviates from this norm under the kind of duress in which our best ancestors thrived. Humanity succeeds because nobility and courage surfaces only when absolutely needed, and at all other times reverts to cowardice and guile: this is the reality of human nature which we must stop attempting to hide from ourselves. It's part of what makes us so clever, so powerful, so indomitable. We defeated innumerable predators possessing overwhelming strength and prowess, through this prosimian amplification of wickedness - this is also why and how we invented laughter. We exploit the strategies of weakness - above all other creatures, surpassed perhaps only by the hymenopteran exploitation of drone-stupidity and slavery. We are masters of the earth because of our mastery of weakness, guile, betrayal, ambush, our lack of character. To be surprised when we find it again in a panicked modernity with its thin flapping hospital gown, is no surprise after all: because we are also masters of self-deception. We have told ourselves we are the most noble animal, the lawful one, the rational one, the only beast on earth capable of virtue: but the truth could be the reverse. We are more capable of cowardly betrayal than any other: who was it who turned imaginative invention into a form of predation? Who is it who never fights fair? Who is it who could not win any fight against even one adversary of the wild without a dirty technological trick? Who alone of all creatures, cannot live naked on planet earth but needs a huge and ever-growing array of technological surrogates to nurse him through life?

Moreover, the same formula is baldly visible in our own history: in every conflict between "savage" and civilized man, was there ever a sense that the civilized man was willing or able to fight fair? Can we even count the number of dishonored treaties? But why should it surprise us that the civilized man cannot be honest with himself about his weakness? That his ever-growing dependence on overwhelming numbers and technological chicanery is profoundly dishonorable? That the majority of humanity seeks to suffocate the sight of nobility because it embarrasses them? The root of the Japanese 素晴らしい "subarashii", now meaning "magnificent, wonderful", is "to shrink, make smaller": it once had a primary sense as "terrifying, extreme" and only gradually became adulterated in the same way as the English "awesome" or "terrific". Excellence scares us: it makes us feel small, obsolete, potentially unnecessary. Only the excellent delight in excellence: everyone else resents it if they cannot use it or make it their own. Preferably, the average human creature will believe itself to be the pinnacle of creation: oddly enough, this becomes exponentially easier the dumber you are...

The "Dunning-Kruger effect" accounts not only for the palpable qualitative difference between intelligence and stupidity, but for the way the gap seems to yawn ever wider as we age: those precious few who learned how to learn, continue to; those who were unable to guess at how much they don't understand, find the necessity of busily hiding their ignorance from themselves much more important than any modest learning they could otherwise accomplish. They learn how not to learn: also a formula for success - in fact a much more robust formula and generally the right prescription, albeit the results are predictably predictable.

The Moral Disease, §310

Why is it that those who tend to succeed most in our world, are usually just slightly above average in most measures? Because intelligence, imagination, integrity, and independence of mind make you more susceptible to self-defeat...

No conspiracy, everyone a conspirator. In fact the lack of a coherent conspiratorial plan, contributes to the collective panic, which contributes to the willingness to conspire. The realization of modernity ends in a vicious circle: the lack of unambiguous hierarchy, cultural cohesion, and traditional roles, amplifies the creeping sense of alienation, abandonment, and the transience of group alignments, which contributes to the urgency of forming new alliances and new urgencies. But there is no concrete task to be accomplished other than belonging itself: therefore the urgency must be about nothing and everything at once - the mark of hysteria. The more the ritual is held in check by the equal distribution of placelessness which modernity enacts, the more hostile the collective becomes to a rationality which defuses the emergency and corrupts the core process of creating new criteria of exclusion. Nobody will really calm down until an unambiguous mark of exclusion takes shape, and many are "interned". Therefore your strength and character are not wanted: your instincts for leadership tell you that the troubled tribe needs clarity and foresight, but it responds by telling you that it's much too late. An emergency is needed; a suitable target for displacement; a justification for novel forms of systematized violence. Hysteria breeds hysteria: not merely accidentally, but because functional hysteria seeks to adjust collective conditions such that anonymous mass violence can begin. Therefore rational leadership and the ability to think for yourself is not only not needed, it is a threat to the ceremony. As long as you continue to attempt to lead with honesty and independent thought, you increase the likelihood of becoming a target of the ritual. Either fall in line, escape, or become a victim: the power of ritual exclusion is not such that you can defeat it directly.

A high school diploma used to represent an accomplishment. It has lost this status not because more of us are educated, but because high school used to teach much more effectively. This is most pronounced in the States, but one hears similar complaints from teachers in the UK, and even the once worldclass standards of Germany are falling. But perhaps lower standards aren't really the problem, but standardization itself. Allow me to quote the renowned educator John T. Gatto:

That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.

Two institutions at present control our children's lives - television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn.

"Why Schools Don't Educate", Gatto's acceptance speech for the 1990 NYC Teacher of the Year Award

Higher rates of literacy and college attendance by no means equates to a higher sum of education: the outliers of intellectual leadership who once pushed frontiers and raised standards for everyone, are being driven away into other pursuits. A greater quantity of furtive mediocrity sums to a much smaller heap: in addition, the much amplified chattering noise of this crowd makes it much more difficult for the worthwhile student to find a worthwhile teacher. There is an enormous number of scientists working in almost every field, and yet I would argue much less scientific innovation in most fields than in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More human bodies does not equal more humanity, nor does more talk equal more communication.

Despite everything apparently alarmist in what I've said, I must also remind the reader that higher education is always tenuous: the European "university" grew from the monastery, which as educational institution was largely concerned with passing on theological nonsense. But the Christian monastery grew from the late Hellenistic academies of Coptic Egypt, which grew from the fusion of the Greek sophist tradition with the Jewish and Egyptian notions of priesthood: in other words, worthwhile education is constantly threatened by the agencies of obfuscation and obsolescence - the priest. Who is mere sophist, and who is the sophist who transcends the type, like Socrates? Who is mere priest, and who is reservoir of disciplined erudition and a vital link to the past, like Berossus? Who is mere charlatan, and who carries medicine for the people?

No simple answers: it's the mark of a worthwhile student to know instinctively, from moment one, who is their master. Knowledge is power, and power seeks knowledge: that this dissipative turbine attracts much pretense, waste, procrastination, and political buffoonery should hardly surprise us... It is probably always the task of an outlier, to challenge the authenticity of a ceremony grown too sure of itself and its means. Do not lose sight of the fact that the production and acquisition of knowledge is a ceremony, whose primary function is to convince the rest of the community that its practitioners shouldn't have to work for their food...

The autodidact makes the future, and probably always has. In the Information Age, it has become easier than ever to educate yourself: and yet I don't believe the proportion of us has increased, because our role was never a function of access, but instinct. What may perhaps increase, is our leverage: unprecedented access to the sum of human knowledge should not be taken lightly. If you can learn to learn, and at that age when you can withstand the pain involved in genuine learning, you have a chance to never cease learning - which is the mark of a predestined master.

Ut ager, quamvis fertilis, sine cultura fructuosus esse non potest, sic sine doctrina animus.

Just as the field, however fertile, cannot be fruitful without cultivation, likewise the soul without education.

Cicero

I won't contradict Cicero - moreover I am a teacher by trade and disposition. But the question remains: what is education? Do our institutions educate anymore? Or have the aims of systemic modularity, global capitalism, and civilizational efficiency finally superseded whatever remained of the classical sense of doctrina? Yet I am no defeatist: it's highly possible that in our own time, it may become more possible than ever to revive and regain the precious threads - to find out what our heritage is and could be, what "critical rationality" might be in the 21st century and what lamp may we have to receive and transmit.

Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav'ring multitude,
Can play upon it.

Henry IV Part II

It's no longer cool to talk about COVID. The central mass has moved on and the distractions multiply. There are and have been already many trajectories of denial, forgetfulness, and the redirection of blame. There was from the beginning, a barely concealed sense of embarrassment which only vanished in the midst of the most frenzied histrionics: much of it found concealment in blank-eyed obedience - the same kind which most of the population employs in its daily contortions of humiliation and drudgery. Many quietly enjoyed the irony: at least everyone finally seemed closer to an equality of punitive absurdity. This is the consolation of a traffic jam, a brutal commute, a stalled bus: everyone's in the same fix.

Why is it so important for us to fully analyze this mess? Not because we are naïve enough to believe in the machinations of justice, and not because we believe we can prevent its recurrence, but because we can prepare ourselves. The COVID affair was not isolated: it represents an emergent pattern of civilizational maladaptation which has occurred before and will again.

As I've said before, mass psychology has yet to begin as science. In order to model mass psychology as a dynamic system, we must take seriously the idea of feedback. What causes feedback? Primarily, responsive limitation: friction, orbital constraint, limited dissipative capacity. There are only so many modes of dissipation in any one system, and only so much energy any one mode can dissipate. But there is also systemic response to output: the system changes ambient environment which modulates energetic input - "self-oscillation" or negative damping.

As far as I know, no one outside the very limited sphere of the "synergetics" enthusiasm of the 80s and 90s has yet taken this idea terribly seriously in the realm of psychology. Yet in economics its a commonplace: hence bubbles, crashes, and their cycles. Worried talk about the "echo chambers" of the internet is also common enough.

Yet I seem to be alone in focusing attention on bodily misery as a causative factor - in conceiving of the human body and our collective health as a resonance chamber and a form of cultural memory, in which what we feel determines what we do which determines what we feel: I will not participate in the farcical quest for some noumenal ether in which psychology is supposed to take place, as though "the mind" were the only entity at play in mass psychology or cultural history or sociological institution - the body is at stake. What we do with our bodies in space and time: we must constantly attenuate all thinking and dreaming which does not return to this formula, and remind ourselves of what finally matters. Our intellectual life is not an end in itself, but a weapon and a weaponizing.

Firstworld misery caused the COVID affair, which amplified firstworld misery, which prepared the way for a more efficient manifestation of whatever the COVID affair was becoming before it lost coherence. The path of the tornado is still quite visible however, and the winds still swirling: the substrate is more homogeneous and prepared than previously.

Par leur puissance uniquement destructive, elles agissent comme ces microbes qui activent la dissolution des corps débilités ou des cadavres. Quand l'édifice d'une civilisation est vermoulu, ce sont toujours les foules qui en amènent l'écroulement.

In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power, crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.

Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules, Introduction

The effort to blur the mirror of COVID, extends from those who want to hold government manipulation responsible, to those less clever who would like to blame "the elites", to those nearest to our camp of psychological interpretation who nonetheless miss the mark by a wide margin - on purpose.

I'm aware that the newly coined "mass formation psychosis" has gained a certain popularity. However I find in this term yet another evasive maneuver, and more symptomatic of the manifold efforts to disguise what COVID reveals than descriptive of what happened. COVID had nothing to do with psychosis. Once we understand the full implications, the inherited term "mass hysteria" is a much more fruitful and accurate place to begin a diagnosis: I only suggest the addition "aggressigenic" to emphasize the underlying causes.

It is by definition impossible for a psychosis to be shared: psychotic phenomena are characterized by a severance of social function and a reversion to idiosyncratic and novel forms of hallucination. Cases of so-called folie à deux are rare, and arise only in the context of a very intimate and dependent relationship, such as the mother-child dyad: the delusional contagion is largely just mimicry.

The psychotic stops performing socially, and instead generates novel symbolic relationships to his world, in response to an overwhelming disturbance of previous egoic structures which could no longer withstand the tension. Psychosis cannot be shared: this is the original sense of the term "idiot" - one who cannot be reached. Hysteria however, and its fundamental mechanism displacement, integrates almost seamlessly with social function in the tribal animal, which has a constant need to reassign blame and manage the delicate economy of frustrated instinct within the demands of communal living. When these frustrations reach a critical threshold, they generate an order parameter I call "ritual exclusion": enemies must be found within the tribe, because the tribe has ceased to function efficiently. I insist that all of this makes sense in a Pleistocene epoch amongst a band of 50 to 100 hominidae. It only appears monstrous, alien, and otherwise impossible to explain, in the context of an overpopulated civilization. Therefore terming the emergent COVID dynamic as "psychosis", is a symptom of not wanting to understand - to dismiss everything that happened as merely a case of contagious crazies powered by social media, and having no discernible etiology within the reality of the way we live, with our bodies, day to day.

In defining psychosis, the case of one Herr Daniel Schreber is considered canonical: if you want to know what psychosis looks and feels like, read his memoirs. In a sense, what COVID exhibits is the antipode: maximum sociality at the expense of authentic subjectivity - psychosis is nothing if not authentic and subjective. Hysteria, protofascism, and the extensible canalizations of blame share a common origin in the previously adaptive package by which the baboon-like primate troop became the cooperative hunting tribe: displacement of aggression along symbolic vectors lies right at the heart of what has made us so successful.

Either you get used to this idea, or you don't: I feel that all of this is written out in the history of the early 20th century. Rabid nationalism, scientific racism, and warmongering were at the time the shape these same forces took, in a more potently postcolonial and peak capitalistic world. Our 21st century bodies and spirits are not robust enough for these more explicitly violent eruptions: therefore displacement of aggression is more needful and salient. More hand-wringing and moral posturing is required: this is why a fictional pandemic, with all its ostensible and deeply suspicious humanitarian concern, was uniquely capable of initiating the requisite catharsis toward the final aim of anonymous mass violence.

Ultimately what we've witnessed is only a minor spasm. I only continue to bring it up because at last I understand - a great deal of what I almost refused to think about, suddenly becomes not only possible to think through but wholly necessary.

Please take a close look at the diagram accompanying this piece: it's the result of years of reflection and many productive conversations between myself and a student of mine. Every path and grouping is well considered. I'll elucidate a few special points:

• The first thing to notice about the diagram is that nearly all vectors reside in the unconscious field: "unconscious" means unknown, unseen, and gains special significance through an understanding of the traceable marks of repression. And yet all these vectors are visible via their displaced representatives: the reason I know about these factors and have come to name them, is because I've learned to trace backward the paths of displacement along semantic lines. However what becomes most visible at the top of the conscious field - namely lockdowns, protofascist politics, and especially anonymous mass violence - due to their genealogy deep within the unconscious field and a long history of displacing substitution, take on an uncanny aspect in the light of day. They are never precisely what they seem to be, never what they name themselves, and always imply much more than they are ready to proclaim: "aménagements subtils d'apparence innocente". Anonymous mass violence never announces itself as such: it is always justified, rational, fair, and - most dangerous of all - compassionate.

• Mass hysteria: see this piece to understand the scope of what I mean by this term. We must not allow the richness of our best psychological insight to be buried underneath the renewed effort to conceal our nature from ourselves: in other words, "hysteria" remains very much a relevant syndrome.

• Exploitative fearmongering: by this phrase, we mean both media exploitation, and the many political and industrial agencies which found advantage in stoking the flames of panic. Notice that it feeds back into moral posturing, which then feeds into the swirl of displacement powering mass hysteria: a histrionic atmosphere of false postures encourages the many actors who thrive under conditions of hysteria, which further repulses and disqualifies honesty and rationality, such that those traits in the mediocre majority are suppressed. Most of humanity is not dominated by either truthfulness nor pure deception, but adapts itself to the time and place according to minimal risk. Much of the "panic" was merely mimicry: just as most belief is.

• Anxiety inverting into persecution: this is one of those "discoveries" which is already common knowledge. It's actually a daily experience for most of you, and written plainly enough in history. I quote from that piece of mine on the witch-hunt:

21st century psychology is comfortable enough diagnosing the crippling anxieties of modernity - or at least in herding them into pharmaceutical dependence - but ignores and denies all signs that anxiety has a social purpose. What could the nail-biting agoraphobic, the evangelical preacher of doom, and the COVID-unvaccinated witch-hunt have to do with each other?

But the truth is that these types are deeply related and lie along a spectrum, in which the saturation of subjective anxiety dissipates proportionally to the degree of complicity in ritual exclusion and disguised mass violence: like unexpected origami, paralyzing anxiety is inverted into persecution.

• Liminal denial: this is a region of partly obscured denial. We may think of it as "preconscious" falsehood: something very like the pretense involved in religious ceremony. What's involved in "belief"? A will to ignorance accommodated to a will to power: we make many things true by collectively behaving as though they are. Therefore, none of the facts shown within this region are "repressed" in the strict sense: everyone knows, as well as I do, that the virus is not deadly. What everyone does not know, are the social consequences of acknowledging what they know - but they can guess well enough.

• Long COVID: notice that it emerges as a confluence of these denied factors, and yet stands slightly outside the realm of denial. But only now that the ritual coherence is dying away, is group attention turning to this reality: because a reality cannot by definition fuel a hysteria without distortion, but it does retroactively seem to confirm the seriousness of the virus and thus provide shelter from repercussion.

• Punitive lockdowns: my piece on the meaning of the facemask should help.

• Hostility to youth: read my diagnosis of this syndrome if you can handle the nausea.

• Fictional pandemic: I'll end this tour by quoting from my profile of the conspiracy theorist:

The twin brother of the conspiracy theorist is the evangelist: he who mines the narrative for all the power it can offer, he who is is wedded to the narrative for the sake of the dowry alone, he who has found in the histrionics of COVID the motherlode of moral-political charade.

But how are these two mutually dependent? Because every evangelist needs his demons: the best enemy of a glaring monumental fiction, is a frightening exaggerated fiction. It's not that a lie cannot defeat a truth: truth is weak, multivalent, subtle, fragile - almost nothing is easier than displacing truth. A monstrous lie feeds upon truth like merely breathing - it gains no glory from pushing aside this weakling. A monster needs heroes to devour, to stage fictional battles in the sky... In the midst of the monstrosity of COVID on the one hand, and the blustering frantic conspiracy theorizing on the other, haven't we sometimes felt ourselves slipping into the cracks, into an abyss of the loneliness of quiet and complicated truth?

0.

The left provokes the right into acting out its own repressed impulses: that's a powerful formula, which is much older than "left and right" - most likely it is as old as "good and evil". What was it Zoroaster had his righteous god say to his evil twin?

Neither our thoughts, nor commands, nor our understandings, nor our beliefs, nor our deeds, nor our consciences, nor our souls, are one.

Zend Avesta, Yasna 45.2

There is a qualitative difference between the blustering explosive hatred of the right and the seeping vitriol of the left. When a political conservative gives himself over to hate, he is looking for a reprieve from his self-loathing: there is a wishful and projective quality to rightwing hate - it generally remains superficial, mere Ersatz, and "as if". He hates because it dispels the fog of his chronic confusion and sense of having been left behind: with a projective hate he finally knows who he is and what he wants. A white supremacist seeks shelter in his race hatred from his own lack of stable identity; a misogynist seeks elusive self-esteem from a disrespect of women; the ignorant man who boasts of his hatred for Mexican Americans will later mingle with them thoughtlessly and forget his slurs.

With the left, I find another order of animosity entirely - something both more archaic and perhaps more profoundly determinative of the human future: the seething hatred so characteristic of those who learn to turn weak social positions into strategic advantage, the boiling resentment of the avaricious yet mediocre, the accumulated frustration of civilization itself. I find something much more chilling and dangerous in the unconscious tactical malice of the "progressive": a much deeper thirst for violence lies hidden there, a thirst for police action, a thirst for anonymous atrocity, and the cleverness to carry it out with a good conscience. It is the good conscience of the progressive that is so dangerous: compared to the redfaced sputtering rightwing, who seem to act only by accepting their positions with a bad conscience, the left is many times more skilled in the fabrication of moral justification, moral disguise, moral right... The leftists are the artists of conscience and the conjurers of plausible deniability: it turns out that a life lived continually offloading frustration with the means available to the pointlessly educated, half-therapized, and sedentary urban bourgeoisie, results in an animal highly practiced in inventing reasons why they are never to blame, never responsible, and always already in the possession of a moral high ground. In urban modernity, any other tactic results in untenable guilt, paralytic anxiety, and crushing depression: from this perspective we almost begin sympathizing...

And perhaps we should in this case stand an unrelenting analysis of the truth, between our revulsion at the aesthetic totality of this vicious creature on one hand, and whatever fragment of compassion we are capable of on the other: because have we not also been this creature at one time? All of modern humanity is bound up in this tangle, for as long we continue to reinvest in the contortions of realized modernity. From this perspective the conservative convulsions are merely hiccups and belches and an attempt to flee.

In every distasteful compromise, in every calculating cowardice, in every moment of instinctual repression for the sake of safety and surety there is the potential for becoming more wretched - that is more "progressive": the moment we learn to make an enemy of our aggression and an ally of our ideological fantasies, is the moment we become more suitable for the world we have been crafting since 10,000 BC.

The political left is bleeding out its talented tenth, alienating its brightest youth, and forcing them into a no man's land where they stand much too nauseated to ever look left again, and yet still looking askance at the right and feeling more unwilling to offer uncritical loyalty to anyone than ever before - and yet we also feel that coherent political positions are more necessary than ever before: finally in our generation "rights" seem to mean something more than moral posturing, the facility of the U.S. constitution to prevent despotism suddenly means something, and what seems urgent is a renewed and genuine investigation into "the concept of the political"...

Progressive politics encourages and deepens the castration of instinctual life, replacing the rewards of family and tradition with the more volatile and dissipative gratifications of moral posturing and vicarious victimhood. This has the effect of accelerating the accumulation of repressed aggression - which is again what I see as ultimately determinative. In fact I'd say that progressive politics has the curious effect of simultaneously permitting egregious aggression while encouraging an atmosphere of ubiquitous frustration, as though no one were ever getting what they want despite incessant gratification.

When leftist thinking goes sour, when moral posturing and neutralized virtual rebellion no longer dissipate frustration fast enough, the system is pushed into a higher order parameter I term "ritual exclusion": a species of protofascism arises which we must learn to recognize. The big question: is this emergent fascism the inevitable logical conclusion of the liberal tradition, or only its degenerative offal? Yet as a psychologist, rather than analyze the problem from ideological grounds as everyone else does, I naturally gravitate towards what I consider ultimately determinative: the immediate and hidden psychology of political antagonism, or what I'd like to call the taxonomy of hate...

I see so many of my potential brothers and sisters warding off the perceived danger of an uncompromising misanthropy, with the solace of an imitative ethic of compassion. It may sooth your ragged soul, you may feel gloatingly superior for a moment, it may appear to be a prettier feeling than honest hate, and most importantly it may feel sufficiently cruel so as to sate your wrath - at least in twisting yourself up into a compassionate stance you have found an object for your violence - but it is not only a deferral and a detour, it is a quagmire from which you may never emerge again. Your praxis of compassion will gradually shape you into a loathsome hypocrite: you will eventually become what you initially hated. Honest, responsible, good-natured hatred is beautiful and true - not merely necessary, not merely "Machiavellian", nor "Darwinian", nor anything to be taken lightly. Is the strength and power of the healthy human body somehow ugly? Is the history of the most successful predator of the last 100,000 years a "rightwing" story and thus a projection of self-loathing? Or is wrath one of the gods? Does Ares deserve Aphrodite, or should she belong to the resentful clever cripple? Sword or snare? The burning glance of contempt or the slow creeping revenge of the sanctimonious liar?

In modernity, summoning the permission to hate requires more integrity of self than the majority are capable of: the result is that one either foreswears hatred while practicing its darker arts unconsciously - leftwing; or one merely imitates attitudes of honest hatred while unconsciously projecting a self-loathing - rightwing.

The ground I'm treading here is dangerous: this is why no one with half a brain comes here. I'm well aware that I'm supposed to avoid it, that meditating atop a corpse whilst smeared in charnel ashes isn't considered kosher anymore... But hatred is not "goth", nor macabre, nor "maya": hostility is a living function of every organism. The suppression of hate is also the suppression of love: only when one does not know who one is and what one wants, is "universal love" possible - which I translate as "universal resentment". I find no one so incapable of sincere affection, as those who preach the elimination of hate.

All the most intelligent are too clever to tell the truth about aggression, hostility, and hate: they provoke the stupid laggards to say the obvious, so that they may claim the message is only motivated by stupidity and ignorance - all the while covertly gloating and dwelling upon every delicious detail. This is why someone like myself can seem so unusual: someone apparently stupid enough to say the forbidden and obvious, but smart enough to say it too well to ignore. I allow myself to be trapped, so that I may practice escaping.

In fact my work would probably stand a much better chance of "going viral", if I were less eager to demonstrate freedom of mind... I'm well aware that the sheen of erudition and poise repels the rightwing audience as much as my content turns away the left: the reactive crowd has learned to equate ugliness with truth and mistrusts anything else, while the politically correct have learned to equate cosmopolitan polish with an unassailable moral high ground and thirst for nothing else.

What should you hate? What is inimical to you. What weakens you, what hinders your growth, what you want less of in your world. Why are these words so dangerous? Because we are surrounded by neurotic, tribeless, desperate masses who despise themselves and therefore seek to project this loathsomeness into the nearest available target: hate is easily slandered in modernity, because almost no one is healthy enough to do anything but project self-loathing.

The most circumspect sense of responsibility is therefore required, in claiming the right to hatred with a good conscience. I would not advise this "Left Hand Path" to anyone who has not already passed through several incarnations of self-torture: the analysand, the meditation practitioner, the humanitarian, the compassionate one. Strangely enough, this is one of the few points at which I will advise the praxis of compassion: in selecting worthy enemies, in guiding one's hatred, in becoming qualified to know what you're aiming at. There are some of my readers who may sympathize with my work enough, to find traces of my own compulsive compassion everywhere in my psychology: but compulsive compassion is something one should be ashamed of, and seek to correct as a character flaw...

We freely hate spirits, ages, movements, ideologies, habits, traits, errors: one of the refinements along this path, is to understand how in any one personality, are to be found a loose combative parliament of contraries. Yet it's suspicious to say, "You are permitted to hate abstract entities, but never a real person." My first response is that a "person" does not really exist either: there are human bodies, human groups, and human feelings, but "person" is merely another word for "mask" - look it up.

Secondly, there are such "persons" so infected with a particular spirit, who so thoroughly embody an error of human maladaptation, that it becomes absurd not to hate. Yet I am also fully aware, perhaps more than I care to elaborate upon, how possible it is to find the redeemable in anyone: this is the point where you have to examine whether it isn't actually your grotesque grandiosity that makes you feel convinced that your petty little hostility is so dangerous and that your petty little theater of compassion might save the world. "My compassion for all sentient beings": I've heard this phrase verbatim from some of the most repulsive little bigots one can find in our world.

Finding our way back to a healthy, unashamed, mirthful laughing hostility: the phrase "fuck off" contains a dose of this health, doesn't it? It says, "You're not my responsibility and my hostility to you is therefore none of your business." I used to live in a small town of southern Germany, where the typical German bureaucratic pettiness was played out in such funny little rituals as their obscure rules about parking spaces and precise time allotments - I chose not to drive rather than deal with it: but I once was able to witness a delightful contrast, when such a pedantic German accosted what he assumed was a countryman with the usual "Schimpfkanonade" of scowling reproach concerning some breach of conduct - only to find out that this was actually an Italian couple, who thereafter offloaded upon this speechless man a bewildering torrent of Mediterranean hyperbole and wonderfully insulting gestures, who demonstrated for all the town the virtues of unashamed healthy hostility. "Vaffanculo" is how they say it in the sunny Italian hills, with that amazingly obscene flick of the wrist under the chin - and it's said so often that even this contraction is contracted further to just "vaffa"... If this doesn't make you smile and feel that life after all is worth living, and that humanity is after all not so bad - then I cannot help you.

Profanity is a deep and subtle art: one should probably undertake the earnest study of the Mediterranean forms of swearing in order to develop a lasting relish. It's not unlike winetasting: every curse has its own terroir. Even a single word like "shit" has at least seven discernible senses. Yet as an American I'm always turning back to the indomitable f-bomb. Take the example of "fucking A" - one of my personal favorites but not something I can precisely explain: some say it's a piece of GI slang, for "fucking affirmative". Perhaps that's why I love it: it says, "my hostility and my affirmation can live as one".

"Vaffanculo" is a bold suggestion about which orifice to employ in intercourse: a common model for many of the most delightful insults - although also casting doubt upon your adversary's paternity or his mother's occupation is a common strategy. "Go fuck yourself", "sit and spin", or one of my favorites, "jump up my butt": what do these have in common? The asshole as primary locus of devaluation: shit comes out of it and the penis isn't supposed to go in it. But it's well known that children often consider their fecal matter a precious resource, going so far as to retain it and "lord over" it: I know one case of a bright little girl, who liked to stand over the toilet bowl and pretend to sell the recently deposited product to her loyal customers like a proud proprietor of a fine delicatessen. Shit as primordial ambivalent object: valuation and devaluation come from the same place, namely proximity to the optimal functioning of the body. The act of excretion is the template of devaluation, while the result of excretion also represents the healthy functioning and an artifact of that same body: what we deign to hate, is often something we have already honored. We eat our enemies: if you haven't digested him, you won't know him well enough to fight him. Thus the choice of enemy should be taken seriously, as long as you also take your honor seriously.

What I've just said also helps reveal the intimate relationship between projection and hate: this is the point where contemporary psychology becomes most dangerous to human health, because it teaches that all hostility is projection. Any behavior but domestic apathy and moral posturing is increasingly considered pathological: you are supposed to either channel your aggression into sanctioned rituals of anonymous mass violence, or repress it until it eats you alive, or act out explosively and become a target of moral outrage. Passive aggressive complicity as a prancing bambino of political correctness, or depressive melodramatic self-destruction, or ineffectual domestic terrorism: those are the options available on this limited menu.

There is a convention in late medieval and baroque art, in which demons are depicted with a second face centered on the anus. Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch elaborated upon this convention more than anyone else, and Bosch in particular seemed to understand its potential to express the consequences of repression: look how many of his priestly figures have the faces of pigs, how many of his sinners are folded up into an ouroboros of mouth to butt...

The asshole is another mouth, the butt is another face, the "evil" is another "good": it's actually common knowledge, as soon as one consults the context of the juvenile romantic novel, that "repressing a feeling only makes it stronger" - yet this common sense mysteriously disappears in the context of "negative" affect... Do not be deceived: no one is actually this stupid, but rather most are clever enough to ignore the second face - or rather keep a close eye on it, but never speak of it.

... daß die Verdrängung die Triebrepräsentanz nicht daran hindert, im Unbewußten fortzubestehen, sich weiter zu organisieren, Abkömmlinge zu bilden und Verbindungen anzuknüpfen. Die Verdrängung stört wirklich nur die Beziehung zu einem psychischen System, dem des Bewußten. [...] Sie wuchert dann sozusagen im Dunkeln und findet extreme Ausdrucksformen, welche, wenn sie dem Neurotiker übersetzt und vorgehalten werden, ihm nicht nur fremd erscheinen müssen, sondern ihn auch durch die Vorspiegelung einer außerordentlichen und gefährlichen Triebstärke schrecken.

... that repression does not hinder the instinctual representative from continuing to exist in the unconscious, from organizing itself further, putting out derivatives and establishing connections. Repression in fact interferes only with the relation of the instinctual representative to one psychical system, namely, to that of the conscious. [...] It proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct.

Freud, Die Verdrängung, §I

Repressed content not only seeks expression via alternate channels - "acting out", hysteria, projection - it seeks coherence. This is the meaning of la condition seconde, the "split personality": given enough time and thoroughgoing repression, eventually what is repressed becomes another person. Everything in the psyche eventually organizes itself into a "persona", and because the prime coherence in primates is the face, it's inevitable to see another face in that locale of repression... In fact, one of the more subtle arts in reading the human creature, is the ability to glimpse this second face between the practiced grimaces and obsequious smiles: like stargazing, you must use "averted vision" and a peripheral attack. If you can catch the subject before he knows he's being witnessed, he will sometimes show you this face: it's the face he wears when he talks to himself.

In Michael Pacher's 15th century rendition of Saint Augustine making his tricky deal with the devil, notice how the devil's primary face is partly obscured, so that we're left with the face of the saint and the assface of the devil: they are one spectrum, one analyzed rainbow of repression, in which the most honest face is the central face of the devil who is being tricked - a demon is by definition a canalization of blame, a leverage splitting good and evil. This is where we will end up: may we become ever sharper axeheads which split good and evil down to the roots where they join, where we may finally feel at home.

In discussing the uncanny, I have mentioned previously that Freud found that negation as such does not exist for dream formation. The most precise way of saying this, is that every valuation implies the whole dimensional predicate - ambivalence is the only stable signifying locus. But in dreams, there does seem to be an exceptional clause:

In my view the contemptuous critical judgement, "it's only a dream", appears in a dream when the censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through. It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses these words to meet the anxiety or the distressing feeling aroused by it. The phrase is an example of esprit d'escalier on the part of the psychical censorship.

To include something in a "dream within a dream" is thus equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a dream had never happened. In other words, if a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event - the strongest affirmation of it.

Die Traumdeutung, VI.i and VI.c

In so many of the medieval and baroque depictions of demons, the primary face remains a little unconvincing: it's often simply bestial and wild, as the demons surrounding Saint Anthony in Martin Schongauer's engraving. It's only when they give themselves permission to draw the assface, that something really hideous and uncanny appears. The demon's butthole is doubly negated - "it's only a dream"... This is something like how I feel about Donald Trump: he's not merely "rightwing", he's an absurd caricature of the right, such that he expresses the repressed content of the left. It was the left's obsession with this caricature, this bleary carnival afterimage of themselves, which elected him. As I said already:

This "president" came on the stage like an obvious and unfunny clown in the midst of a tedious drama somehow taking itself seriously - something like a very bad comedian showing up in the middle of a particularly insufferable piece of modern dance: a relief to everyone, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Moral Disease, §374

The question becomes, whether there is any such thing as healthy hostility that is not a function of neurotic projection: but this is only treated as a serious question within the palace of absurdity that is human political posturing - ethologists do not wonder whether a predator is neurotic because it hunts. Obviously everyone already knows the answer: political correctness assumes as its self-evident right, the right to collectively justified violence. One must not be taken in by this pretense of ignorance and inquiry: it is only a hedging of bets, a cultivation of an aura of blamelessness, the shield of plausible deniability.

Hostility is always "projected": only true in the sense that aggressive affect is a resurgent function of the organism, which needs to find targets for the sake of reproduction, defense, and predation. But to imagine that all aggression is a symptom of malfunction or at best of "not knowing better", is nearly a direct inversion of the biological reality: almost every instinct in every life form, can be construed as "aggressive". Building a nest is aggressive, collecting seeds is aggressive, competing for mates is aggressive, and even photosynthesis is a chemical attack which transforms soil and habitat to the exclusion of many other lifeforms - only an ad absurdum can free us from the absurdity in which we are mired when we dither and blither with clasped hands and raised eyes about "aggression".

From an ethological point of view, if I were to provide a terminology to help us see healthy instinct rather than political jargon and the fearful prophylactics against abandonment which everyone else seems so eager to ingest:

• Aggression: ethologically, this is most usefully applied at the infraspecies level. Competition for food, habitat, and mates: typically nonlethal, negotiating, but ubiquitous.

• Hostility: most usefully applied to the predator-prey relationship. A predator does not "hate" his prey, he "loves" how it tastes - but in the moment of striking it dead he feels hostility: it must die, because it is his prey. There is also a kind of contempt possible in interspecies relations: the way wild horses have a contempt for domestic cows, or the way ravens seem to quietly look down on everything non-raven.

• Hate: in the observation of animals, I only see something I might call hate in intertribal rivalries: for example, between canine packs or between competing tribes of raven. As tribal creatures adapted for an environment in which many hominid species once competed, it's highly likely that our capacity for hatred is evolved for intertribal and possibly interhominid rivalry.

Accepting the moniker "Left Hand" for this path, is not unproblematic: as though we were "sinister", "gauche", unteachable and everything slanderous said about the rightbrained. It's not unlike homosexuals calling each other "fag", or the way black men use the n-word affectionately. And now I've stumbled upon an interesting example: among the many varieties of profanity and abuse, the n-word is one I hesitate to utter - why? Because I'm a white man, because I've not been given permission to say it, because I feel the impotent self-loathing of white men in that word and it makes me shudder - yet we must also acknowledge the possibility if you cannot handle a slur with a good conscience, you are still susceptible to racism.

Freedom from imputations of ugly hatred alongside a freedom to be as potently aggressive as our nature demands: that's what we're after. Knowing who you are is necessary: knowing what you really feel, really think, and would do given the chance - true tolerance in the ancient sense requires nothing less than a power that has been tested many times. Hence the scarcity of this virtue and the ubiquity of its counterfeit amongst the powerless: the repression and redirection of hatred, rather than an integrated acknowledgment of one's own limitations.

The fortitude and shamanistic power to handle a slur as ugly as the n-word without succumbing to it, while transforming that spirit back into an affectionate teasing: possible, and yet many black men aren't quite capable of it... What I'm driving at is that hate cannot be outlawed, it can only be transformed and healed and directed wisely, because it too is an essential part of what it means to be a human being.

If you're still reading and have not resigned to moral outrage, you are to be congratulated. I'd like you to pause and pay attention to your own body: is there a tightness in the chest and throat, a tingling in the feet, a certain flushed feeling around the face, a rising nameless anxiety? Does it feel dangerous to continue? Can you feel the temptation to flee into a morally safe position? This is the fear of abandonment. Your tribal instincts are informing you that association with this voice is dangerous to your social status. Yet if you examine what I've said carefully, dissect its parts, you will find in it nothing ugly, nothing bigoted, and nothing untrue: what's dangerous about it, is the way I approach these problems with an open mind, without the customary flourishes and many prostrations and mutual assurances of immunity from blame - without the pretense of answers. Modernity is a problem: human maladaptation will not go away because of our fervent wishes, nor our repression, nor our willingness for deformity.

Once again I find it is my proud duty, to place myself in the line of fire: much of my vocation is to demonstrate the possibility of surviving moral censure without either losing faith in oneself, nor fleeing to the safety of a dogmatism. The imputations and insinuations of a repulsive motive which are inevitable as a response to what I've said, are motivated by at least several needs:

• The need to project unconscious bigotry: my intelligent prose makes me hardly an ideal target, but accurate description of a psychological symptom will cause that symptom to appear - an unconscious and systemically justified bigotry cannot afford the danger presented by clairvoyance, because the symptom quickly becomes unmanageable and difficult to hide - even from oneself.

• The need to quell potentially destructive vibrations of doubt within a fragile crystal of ideology, glued to prejudice, propped up by a fearful social greed. The most desperately correct cannot afford real questions, because they cannot afford to learn who they really are. Someone like myself must therefore be stupid, or a political pawn, or unthinkably pathological.

• The need to foreclose alternatives: the type of human creature most empowered by an atmosphere of perpetual social ostracization, political terror, and anonymous mass violence, cannot tolerate the possibility of an open-ended discourse. The need for unqualified answers is the protofascist's bread and butter.

"Fear of abandonment" may not immediately ring as true as it should, to those who have not yet grokked what I mean by "modernity": one of the first lessons to internalize, is that I do not treat modernity as a mere temporal envelope, but as a threshold of postagricultural civilizational realization. Any other approach betrays an inability to free oneself of the prejudice of historical progress: itself a symptom of modernity. In other words, we've been here before, and will be again: many years of brooding upon the meaning of the Axial Age and Late Antiquity has finally led me to understand that humanity is caught in something like a sputtering sine wave, driven between the resistances of maladaptation and the compressive force of civilizational advantage. That famous symptom called "alienation", which arises from the tribeless condition of realized modernity, lies right at the heart of the Foucaultian diagnosis...

The syndrome of modernity is to drift in a twilight between perpetual abandonment and an oppressive inclusion, to be both a hopelessly alienated and incomprehensible individual and a mere function of a fully analyzable mass. This is why Foucault is always talking about divisibility and modularity in modern systems: you are both a fragile inconsolable invalid and a disposable superfluity whose time has already come and gone.

You are already abandoned. The deferral of its enactment, is only contingent upon preventing anyone from noticing. You're not wearing any pants in this dream, but as long as you keep cool maybe no one will say anything.

Deferral of realized abandonment: keep this in mind, next time you are accused of a hate and bigotry which is not your own. What's being said, is: "You are endangering my tenuous inclusion, by exposing us both as fraudulent conformists." Just another exercise in the art of spiritual self-defense...

0.

This was the scenario: you're talking with a good friend. Someone you've known for years - someone you have loved, respected, and given your time to. You are relaxed and feeling grateful for your friendship. You're spending time together as you have many times before.

Then, the subject of COVID comes up. Taking the opportunity to air your irritation with the obtusity of the narrative, you say something like, "It was never deadly." Or, "Lockdowns do nothing but make it worse." Or, "I can't believe they're masking children." Or, "That experimental RNA crap isn't going in my kids."

And then it happens - your friend's face changes: the lips purse, the shoulders rise and tense, the neck goes stiff, the eyes become small, glassy and distant, the voice rises a few semitones, and they say something uncharacteristic and strangely formulaic, like: "Well we've all got to work together, to save lives." Or, "We all have to be socially responsible in this." Or, "I wouldn't want the blood of the unvaccinated on my hands."

You feel suddenly like you've just been pulled over by a belligerent cop, or accused of cheating during a math test, or had something you said at a dinner party construed as racist - you've been mistaken for someone else, but forcefully, willfully, almost knowingly.

Suddenly you're not connected to this person at all, and they seem so committed to their disapproving attitude that you're a little speechless. You even doubt yourself. Despite familiarity with the facts and your intellectual conviction, your nervous stomach, tight throat, and contracting vision makes you wonder whether they aren't right after all.

That look in the eye is not only disapproving and authoritative, it's predatory. You might feel for a moment like fried chicken under a heatlamp at a Chinese buffet. And although there's only one person looking at you, you feel that maybe there's a whole crowd standing behind this person, looking at you with the same eyes. You feel trapped, desperately alone, angry, hopeless, and profoundly betrayed in a way you are not sure you can recover from - and from that moment the friendship is never the same and perhaps it ends.

This is moral censure. It is essentially human and happens every day with a slowly rotating cast of characters: race and gender being the most popular moral snares amongst the irreligious 21st century firstworld. But you're not actually racist or bigoted, so despite some uneasiness with shrill leftist politics, those forms of censure were easy to avoid previously. But about COVID you feel strongly, because it's so monumentally farcical and wrong: for the first time a direct confrontation with moral posturing becomes unavoidable.

What you're witnessing in this moment, is that the feeling of moral superiority and the safety of an unassailable moral high ground, is more gratifying to this person, than any relationship to you will ever be. Moral sanctity quells anxiety in a way your affection never could. Finally they feel assured of their membership in the right group. That chronic nagging alienation which penetrates much deeper than you know, briefly vanishes: they become a We, a voice of the We.

In that moment, you are facing vastly powerful unconscious forces, against which any conscious effort stands no chance. Any appearance of rational argument is an illusion and a diversionary tactic. The fundamental question is membership in the winning group: by remaining strictly truthful in the midst of an emergent symbolic rite, you have placed yourself on the losing side. You must understand that you are being encircled and marked for exclusion: any defense you offer will be gathered as evidence of guilt. The only way out of the snare, is to accept your exclusion, and wonder to yourself whether it isn't a good thing to be excluded from that group after all: only when you feel assured of some other invisible membership, will their confidence waver.

• Do not let the questions be framed for you.

• Do not allow yourself to be pressured into providing simple answers to complex problems.

• Do not feel obliged to produce comprehensive solutions as recompense for your incisive critique. It's not your responsibility to fix everyone's problem just because you reject a series of false and insipid answers.

• Do not feel compelled to refute every accusation. Most accusations are red herrings and merely a diversionary ploy. Focus on what you know to be true, and elaborate on that basis.

Please allow me to quote from my recent book:

It's an enormous mistake to attempt to maintain a respectful gentlemanly attitude when dealing with moralists: the more you explain your position rationally, the more "immorality" they are free to discover - and the scent of blood attracts a crowd. It's part of the moral tactic to inspire the feeling that there are only two choices: join them and lose respect for oneself, or begin using their methods and lose respect for oneself - mendacious morality or resentful immorality. While they encircle you with jackal eyes, you lose your good temper and begin to tire. One must never be caught in a defensive posture, one must never make the mistake of taking them seriously, one must protect one's pride at all times with that apotropaic magic, the bane of all hungry ghosts: good-natured and genuine mockery.

Why is mocking laughter so powerful? Because it is one of the original rituals of exclusion. Because it says to everything that lurks and slinks in the grass: "We see you!" A moral strategy requires above all that its ultimate intentions remain camouflaged: plausible deniability and a refusal to take responsibility for one's own forms of violence is the sure sign one is dealing with moral tactics.

What happens when this kind of thought impacts a thoroughly moralized creature? Let's slow the film and analyze the crater. Firstly, there is the unconscious recognition that what's being said is true: first shock. Almost immediately or even in a sense preceding with that uncanny speed of unconsciousness, there comes the repression of this knowledge: second wave. Then comes the most visible layer of debris. The repression alone is not sufficient to ensure safety from the danger of such thoughts: a secondary reinforcement at the conscious level covers the tracks of the repression. This is the meaning of "sanctimoniousness", and is what is generally understood to be moral phenomena itself: the dance of masks, the shuffling of feet, the shouting in unison - in order to distract themselves, us, and wishfully the truth itself from detecting the trace of the original impact. They must believe that they do not know that they believe me: that is the minimum number of moves required to create the genuinely moral attitude.

But there's still more: in our own time we are surrounded by more sophisticated subjects in whom these first three stages are only preliminary and still an inadequate disguise - there's a kind of arms race between moral posturing and psychological acuity going on behind the scenes. What often follows moral outrage is a kind of semi-conscious embarrassment, followed quickly by its own form of erasure: a façade of disillusioned irony, which is largely the projection of that embarrassment wrapped in a practiced affect of superiority - "I'm ashamed for you". How many moments of confused self-doubt does this analysis unpack for my brothers and sisters? We are not winning this or any other race for arms.

The Moral Disease, §61-62

I teach defense against moral censure for those who need it. However, I also teach the exploitation of moral censure for the sake of personal growth: there are no truths quite like the truths that emerge in the midst of a struggle for the moral high ground. Nasty dangerous lies are mixed with some of the most precious fragments of truth. When a modern wretch feels himself cornered, when his fictitious justifications are in peril, he will finally unsheath his crooked daggers: the tip may be poisoned with lies, but the blade is sharpened with truths. This sharp edge is actually a treasure not worth passing up: being blamed as morally reprehensible is an opportunity to learn about your weaknesses and delusions. Many a false friend will in that moment unveil some observation he's kept hidden, some secret about your character you have not quite admitted to yourself: therefore while it's essential not to take him seriously, it's also unwise to discard all his censure as though it had no value. Those who merely dismiss what stings in an argument, will repeat the experience many times. What haunts you, could yet be an ally.

The problems is of course one of untangling: unfortunately there is no way to extract the worthwhile message from the ore of bluster and blame, but to work through each distortion in turn. This means nothing less than undergoing your enemy's own undone emotional work: an exhausting toil, the rewards of which are often enough a realization about oneself, which one should have already known - but we are fools about ourselves, without exception. In addition, the more generous hearts are generous fools who require half a lifetime to unlearn their generosity where it makes them fools.

The only good news is that the more you undertake this exhausting toil, the easier it becomes. Doing the homework of lazy souls: that's largely our fate, for as long as we are committed to the rewards of truthfulness. But don't be misled: the ability and commitment to tell the truth to oneself, will for a long time make you weaker and more vulnerable - hence its rarity. Not until you have refined your own perception, cleared out the accumulated underbrush of emotional counterformation, and gained the confidence that comes from years of indentured servitude to a world of committed neurosis, will this path begin to offer an advantage. One day your ability to tell the truth will be more valuable than the willingness to live a life of clever consoling lies: the power imbalance here is immense at first, and will seem hopeless. Moreover truthfulness is always a liability, because it will always greatly complicate the task of self-advocacy and make you careful, hesitant, and analytical - there's always more to learn. The real turning point comes when you feel you've had enough of learning and honesty and humility, and become ready for your hostility: refined, honest, clairvoyant hostility emitted by a compulsively compassionate soul, is one of the more beautiful tapestries of human psychology - and not easily defeated nor forgotten.

Even the average human creature, with his average bemuddled intelligence, is extremely adept at crafting the barbed lure: just enough truth to compel you, with a nasty hook embedded in the meat. The cleverness at work here is entirely unconscious and as ancient as the primate line at least: it is a function of the tribal instincts of peer competition for scarce resources, in which no means is too base or out of bounds. Among men, there is always the background of the hunting ritual in which male alliance counts more than any other bond - and therefore healthy men have a sense of fair play. Among women this does not prevail, and their competition is always potentially much more vicious: but modernity is such that we are all more or less tribeless women and incompetent men, and therefore the rules of honor play no role except in making some of us more stupid and vulnerable.

Make no mistake: your indentured servitude to your ideal of "truth", is quite sensible and obvious to the merest bystander. A glance at your face reveals this weakness to the tribal instincts of competition, and will therefore be used against you at the earliest opportunity: many social behaviors can be analyzed as forms of the probing skirmish, in which defenses are tested and weaknesses charted, gauged, and profiled. The more desperately socially ambitious types spend most of their energetic lives planning and preparing their next attack: that feeling you may occasionally have, that "everyone's talking about me the moment I leave the room", is not always mere paranoia. Envy is not a peripheral annoyance of social function: envy is what fuels at least half of all social behaviors. Nothing forms shallow friendship faster than a shared envy.

Refining and reviving paranoid hypervigilance is one of the more dangerous tasks ahead of us in this rare art, in which we repeatedly abandon and return to the deep wells of mistrust. Many cases of "social anxiety" amount to nothing but the repressed hostility of a previously healthy creature, grown exhausted, abused, and slowly convinced of the pathology of its responses. The healthiest course of recovery for some of the most socially anxious among us, is the cultivation of unmitigated hostility.

Nowhere in the terror-stricken atmosphere of moral panic which infuses 21st century academic psychology, in the preventative political posturing which quakingly expects banishment at the merest misstep, will you find the advice I just gave: I'm quite aware that I'm supposed to don a moral mien of condescending compassion at the sight of anxiety, and assure the victim that his paranoia is entirely misplaced. I'm quite aware also, that much of what modernity teaches, prepares us for communal sacrifice: the stronger natures serve no purpose, and the tribal instinct to purge outliers and strange variables, only grows more responsive. The threshold for the activation of rituals of exclusion drops steadily in response to the atmosphere of faithless tribelessness with which modernity is infused: the ambitious moral actor benefits from a nameless fear which justifies the "perpetual emergency" of moral authority. Once you know how to read, you will find that the message says: "Keep them anxious and blaming themselves." One of the most important insights of Foucault, is that nameless alienated anxiety is no mere unfortunate byproduct of realized modernity, it is the prerequisite to its optimal functioning. This "compassion" so lauded and fondled, this concern for the anxious, ill, and depressed, is also not merely disguise: it is the reinforcing pathologization of psychosomatic disease. Modernity must continually neutralize the potential for empowerment within every disease by redirecting blame into the body of the afflicted. The hospital is the school is the prison: psychosomatic disease must be institutionalized in order to become another useful modularity of systemic function - that's Foucaultian horror. But if we can manage to generate internalized insight out of what is otherwise merely intellectual discourse and bad faith mimicry, we have come away with something far more valuable than most expect from mere "thinking": the art of spiritual self-defense.

One of the greatest obstacles to a sensitive soul in developing the power of clarified hostility, is that many of us have a lot to prove - to ourselves. Some of us are afraid we cannot love. Some of us fear an incapacity for friendship. Some of us have learned to despise our own inhibition and reserve, such that we become intentionally sloppy and permissive in a bad imitation of generosity and fun. Some of us feel the need to punish ourselves for our superiority and self-deference. Some of us have just grown too weary of loneliness and will tolerate anything as reprieve.

In most cases, such exaggerated fears prove to be not only an absurd miscalculation, but a positive inversion of a repeated scenario of earlier trauma: strong children blame themselves for the limitations of their environment. She was very capable of love, but no one loved her when she needed it; he was an excellent friend, but no one deserved it; his reserve was born of dignity and pride, but which isolated him and generated resentment in those who lacked it - and so on.

It's rare for the truly inadequate and emotionally limited to feel limited: their neurosis is part of a socially adaptive package, which functions as long as the social contexts do not shift too rapidly. The arrival of an outlier, an exception, a prime specimen is what upsets them and makes them feel inadequate: therefore their dangerous unconscious malice, which works overtime and overnight...

Unfortunately there is no substitute for the acquisition of sufficient bad experience. A long meandering journey among the many varieties of ordinary betrayal, an education aboard the HMS Beagle of confusion and doubt, cannot be replaced. My kind of student must have risked his self-respect in the effort to gain it back: nothing less suffices for the establishment of a foundation of confidence deep enough to withstand the resistances ahead. Everything tells us to turn back: often enough it seems that anyone with a shred of worth is already permanently aligned with the agenda of universal compassion. We find only ugly bigotry as an alternative, and we learn to suppress our hostility all the more so that no one may find out how ugly it's growing there in the neglected dark. Anxiety is a product of instinctual frustration: this deceptively simple formula, which to an ethologist or veterinarian or dogpound clerk is self-evident, has become a strangely magic key to the unravelling of modern psychosomatic disease. But the further elaboration I've discovered runs thus: anxiety inverts into persecution.

Therefore what do I teach? Prophylactic hostility for those most targeted by this systemic anonymous persecution, which hovers on the horizon and remains fragmented only so long as no coalescing target appears. The COVID affair has taught me to trace the seeds of fascism deep in every minor fissure of civilizational maladaptation: in every sputtering beginning to the tribal instincts of ritual exclusion, in every social fragmentation which makes us modern folk so ridiculous and frequently out of place, in the many overlapping agendas and slowly crumbling institutions desperately seeking new ground and justification - in the misery of the modern body, are the seeds of fascism.

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That psychiatrists believe they are masters of psychology because they have access to an arsenal of brutally efficacious drugs, is like a man who believes he knows everything worth knowing about trees because he possesses a chainsaw. He neither designs, nor constructs, nor understands a chainsaw, but when the tree crashes violently he feels this confirms his mastery.

Psychiatry and academic psychology essentially practice shallow pop psychology alongside fraudulent statistical fiddling. They manipulate numbers gained from dimwitted quantization schemes designed to confirm ascendent sociopolitical agenda in order to secure funding, or preferably to prove the efficacy and safety of whatever lucrative molecular monstrosity the pharmaceutical boys have cooked up.

It makes about as much sense for someone genuinely interested in the art and science of psychology to listen to our psychiatrists and PhDs, as it would for someone interested in healthy diet to visit an oil rig because so much of our food is now derived from petroleum.

Why should anyone interested in radical spirituality consult someone who calls himself a psychologist? For example, the gleeful complicity of our psychologists in a variety of athletic Orwellian distortions along the course of the COVID farce is comparable only to the reprehensibility of epidemiologists, who have blithely and with open eyes changed the foundational definitions of their science to match the prevailing winds of flatus called political consensus.

My answer: because a genuinely incisive psychology is our best weapon in an emerging ideological war, in which the first lesson is to defuse all ideology. There is a discernible thirst for the persecution of the heretical afoot... We must not allow the heritage of Western psychological insight to be another occupied territory of blind and shallow political opportunism.

Psychology as I see it practiced everywhere, combines the stupidest elements of vestigial animistic thinking - in that it seeks to project blame out of the vicinity of the community at any cost - with the most blockheaded modern prejudices - which assume for every deed a singular agency, for every agency a singular motive. Therefore it fails to capture either the animistic subtlety in the identification of spirits, the fluency which which it traces influences across domain and scale - in other words the scale invariance of mass psychology - nor does it benefit from Western analytic thinking, which properly employs reduction as artificial temporary ignorance, rather than as a covert metaphysics as is generally the case. Our psychology has made us more boldly stupid: the quest for "organic" etiologies and the effective abandonment of the psychological, has the result that it's easier to believe we know everything that's possibly real - an impudent attitude worthy of neither animistic suggestibility nor scientific skepticism.

Where others cannot help but see agency, I see nonlinear emergent dynamics: all psychology begins as animism, and it requires many years to outgrow the crutch of a projected conscious self, where there is neither self nor consciousness. Mass psychology has yet to begin, therefore its etiology is still animistic.

The need for certainty is not only a constant, it grows with the animal's exposure to overwhelming stimuli. In modernity, this is the reason why everyone and no one is a psychologist.

To the talented student of psychology, quietly bewildered at the ever widening gap between the self-assured pomp of scientificality and the ever more obvious uselessness of its findings, I recommend this perspective: such doings are the creation of mythologies of agency and the extensible canals of blame, such as the human creature always has need of. Bad psychologizing is nothing new: the efficient distribution of blame is one of the requisites of any sustainable communal life.

Being both formerly educated and more deeply informally educated in the field, I'm keenly aware that every other dope considers himself a psychologist. Your mother considers herself a psychologist because she watches Oprah; your boss curates a set of politically correct diagnoses he learned from his therapist; your girlfriend believes she knows better because the internet told her so; your roommate read Jung once - and so on. Yet not all of this conviction concerning human motivation is fully dismissible: in fact, the less education at play, the more likely the insight is valid. A formal education in psychology produces increasingly obtuse and dangerous gremlins: it's not a curve of diminishing returns, it's a dropoff into willful stupidity and authoritarian posturing. Moreover there is no point at which this educational curve suddenly surges back upward into mastery: unlearning modern university training is the nearly impossible toil with which a pedagogy in my style would be concerned...

But about half the world is half-educated. Like exhausted topsoil, genuine native ignorance grows scarcer, and is largely extinct in our firstworld. I see children as young as 10 who seem ruined by the irony of the internet. Finding a spark of honest ignorance, that bright pilot flame where articulate questions begin and from which lifelong passions are fed, is like foraging for mushrooms in Central Park: not impossible but a little ridiculous - although this sort of secret plane of fecund ignorance, the bottled genie of childhood, persists just as it always has in quiet shady neglected spots, and finding them is part of the art of perception.

Ignorance is necessary for meaningful communication: without an unknown and essentially unknowable element, mere redundancy or at most a logistic puzzle is at play, but not communication. One must not fully understand one's opponent in dialectic, else it's mere shadowplay, a scam with a shill. Ignorance and unbridgeable difference is necessary for genuine sociality, else it's mere tyranny, totalitarianism, premonitions of the superorganic. Ignorance is necessary for all genuine manners and etiquette, else it's mere formality and lying-in-wait. Ignorance is necessary for all psychology, and if we imagine a perfectly psychic creature, we immediately understand that this could be no psychologist. The same is true for the "organic" reduction to biomolecular mechanics the psychiatrists so long for: by giving no due place to ignorance they have set it loose, by seeking to eliminate the unknown they have eliminated the essence, by seeking their premature totality of knowledge they have merely created another medieval barbarity.

A great teacher once told me, that a teacher should ask questions without having a specific answer in mind: knowledge is a fire that must be fed, not a dungheap to be troweled.

Psychology, as science, is properly considered still in the preparatory descriptive phase. As I've said before, premature scientificality is not only an enormous waste of time, and not only hinders progress, but engenders a regression of knowledge: genuine science carries the authority to contradict "common sense" - but nothing is worse in the humanities and the inductive work of good science than undermining common sense precisely where it is most valuable. This is part of what has made possible the plague of political correctness under the aegis of willful stupidity regarding human nature: feminism, for example, has strayed from an advocacy of the feminine into a small set of scientifically idiotic claims about the nonexistence of sexual dimorphism.

I have said that "the essence of magical thinking is feigned belief". Propitiation, ceremony, always requires an as-if attitude which becomes effective through its effication: ceremony is hollow until it is hallowed. We accomplish many things by closing our eyes tighter: the human being must deceive itself almost constantly, else it will wander off and fail to meet its own needs. In fact self-deception seems to be instinctual in this primate: with our certainty we hide our knowledge, with our belief we hide our insight. Almost everything the human creature claims to know, he does not know: but when he claims to be ignorant, he very well knows.

Science too, is a magical ritual: by claiming ignorance we don't have, we gain genuine knowledge we didn't have. That is the Socratic trick. But by perverting this ceremony into a bad imitation of the ritual of certainty - in other words, postaxial religion, which is largely the unholy marriage of Greek scientificality with Neoplatonic-Hermetic incantation - we return to magical thinking again, but without the pagan awe and none of the Neolithic humility which should accompany it. Modernity is plagued by the arrogant half-educated peasant, who by dint of his premature liberation from labor has neither the rootedness to earth nor the security of a hierarchy of powers above him: he is inwardly terrified at his freedom of thought, yet simultaneously greedy to achieve as much status through falsified knowledge as possible - thus he becomes yet another quack of normalcy. The charlatans of certainty surround us, peddling their cheap imitations of scientific attitudes... It was in fact the early Christians above all, who claimed ownership over the Greek heritage of reason: they convinced half the world that a cheaply syncretic mystery cult promoting ambitious moral actors had the most legitimate claim to the values of antique civilization. Why did it succeed? Because Christianity addressed itself to the inner needs of late antiquity, which was, as I insist, analogous to our time: when anxiety reigns, the power to quell anxiety is taken as a sign of sufficient authority and possession of "the Truth". This is ultimately why "the Science" seems fated to be marred and annexed by protoreligious forces once again...

What's the difference between "certainty" and "knowledge" such as I've just described them? Genuine knowledge is always incomplete, always a partial trajectory and a quasicrystalline seduction, always accompanied by an unsettling "so what?" at the tail end. Genuine insight disturbs the semantic web: to withstand insight, we must withstand uncertainty. The sense that something disastrous will result from the infection of uncertainty, is the reason most of humanity resists its own insight - not because it lacks it. Most of the factual scraps and authoritative tones traded by the human community, are designed to shut down unconscious reasoning and dampen its vibrations. Gossip, slander, complaint, and boasting - where humanity spends most of its time together - are not only tools of conformity and consolidation, they are the betel nut narcotics of cheap certainty.

Most lack the intellectual conscience to practice good psychology. One must resist the mystification of the reflexive, else we risk devolving psychology into self-indulgence: Jung, Lacan, and psychoanalysts in general. But we must also resist the counterformation, which is to arrogate an understanding of the fundamentals we do not possess, and by neglecting the simple questions fail before we have begun, and thus devolve psychology into a bureaucratic taxidermy of increasingly dead information: academic psychology and psychiatry.

Freud walked a thin line, and only then for about a decade did he manage it: to preserve intellectual conscience even as we stare into the mirror, to unravel the answers of the sphinx, to learn to know what we already know without succumbing to the superstition that we already know. To superimpose conscious ignorance atop unconscious knowledge, without allowing the conscious element to become indulgent, nor mystified, nor impatient for results, nor embarrassed at its poverty, nor despairing, nor cynical, nor naïve: that is the challenge of good psychology.

Psychoanalysis in the early 20th century was like a desert bloom: brief, rare, yet indicative of richer soils than you might think. The human race is many times more psychologically perceptive than it generally pretends: the problem is not teaching psychology per se, but to make an intellectual conscience more socially advantageous than distortion... To train artful scientists precisely where everyone is already a practiced magician: not easy.

For example, modern Freudians see "ego defense" where I see social calculation: much of what I call moral phenomena they term "defense" from displeasure... But Freud underestimated the importance of group psychology to the primate. It's not "displeasure" in the abstract that the ego defends against, it's abandonment.

A tour de ronde of my schoolmasters:

• Nietzsche: Psychology of the group, of the tribe, of the tribunal. Master of envy and resentment, of hate and love, of weak and strong.

• Freud: Psychology of the family, the child, the neurotic individual, of repression and displacement, of hysteria, obsession, and regression.

• Lacan: Psychology below the level of the individual, the mystery of subjectivity, of linguistic recursion.

• Lacan: fascinating but mostly useless. Not a psychological art of liberation, but of fascination. Facilitates the art of discussion and freer thinking, but such advanced study that almost no one is capable of benefitting from it without succumbing to its poison.

• Freud: useful for the earliest stages of recuperation from bad acculturation - i.e. therapy 101. Freudian mechanics are always at play in intimate relationship, and therefore essential to master if one is to be close to anyone in civilized modernity.

• Nietzsche: the most relevant in the long term. Nietzsche's scope of psychology is determinative of most of human life in its broad strokes. Once Freudian neurosis is no longer a blocking issue, if massive repression is absent, Nietzschean analysis of morals and the psychology of morals is the essential task for meaningful liberation. Lacanian and all other kinds of "discursive" freedom mean nothing without moral revaluation.

Good psychology on my terms is the study of unconscious distortion: everything else is merely character typology, the demonology of fashionable syndrome, and the pleasures of slanderous gossip. For example, "Borderline Personality Disorder" has become an increasingly popular diagnosis, without the slightest understanding of how shallow the thinking behind it is - Otto Kernberg coined it as merely a kind of placeholder for neurotic patients as difficult to treat as a true psychotic. Therefore it means: "pain in the ass" and little more - little surprise then that it finds so much application.

Someone claims to be "psychic", another claims a "siddhi" - what do I hear? Firstly, it's important to understand that effectively, everyone is psychic. There is no creature alive that does not communicate at many levels simultaneously, and no human being which does not communicate unconsciously with several orders of magnitude greater bandwidth and precision than consciously. Unconscious communication is "psychic" communication: no more, and certainly no less. It remains unplumbed, unexplored, unrecognized, disrespected, willfully ignored, willfully denied - but it happens every day, in every scenario, in every conceivable way and - according to even a modest allowance of probability - in many inconceivable ways too. So when someone takes pains to claim special powers, the only important question is: what are they after, whom are they after, and how does the "psychic" moniker help them achieve those ends?

What does it mean, to be "unconscious"? The very term betrays our prejudice: it's defined by what it's not.

"Unconscious" is so badly termed, and so aptly demonstrates the fundamental prejudices at work: as though "the unconscious" were a special case, as though one had to go looking for it! It's as absurd as when we look at the ocean and see only a scrawny beach, or when we think of the Milky Way Galaxy as "extraterrestrial". Everything we do and say and feel, is primarily unconscious: what's conscious is only a very special case, and usually not important. It's almost impossible to "do" anything consciously: consciousness accompanies, intensifies, or rather is itself the symptom of intensification.

It's also a grave error, to equate "the ego" with consciousness. The I, the linguistic I, the defensive I - the ego does not hardly exist except when it's defensive - has nothing essential to do with being-conscious, except that it relies on redundancy and saturation as one of its defenses. The loudest mouth on the block: anyone familiar with ghetto life knows how reliable a defense this is. The ability to redirect attention is a form of magic, and actually the first thing every magician learns.

The ego as scam artist: that sounds too correct to be mere poetic accident. But poetic accidents are my specialty: tripping backwards over the truth as I spraypaint illusions of knowing - I have an I, too.

The field of psychology is so extremely vulnerable to abuse and perversion that many of the brightest of my generation have declared it not only worthless but a dangerous snare employed by malicious manifestations of punitive normalcy. And they are not mistaken.

If I declare that "psychology is a weapon" - would you believe me? In practice, what's the function of invoking psychological interpretation? It shifts responsibility, generates whatever narrative justifies action, authorizes a microcosmic origin myth, an actionable causality with magic formulae and spirits to blame: instead of "the devil", or a hex, or taboo, we get "the subconscious", a "personality disorder", or "the ego". Pop psychology is largely a renewed demonology.

But when disguised as education and initiation, something more inimical appears: a psychological interpretation serves to induce hesitation, self-doubt, the seeds of consciousness - everything which makes a strong nature hold itself back. The lasting power of this psychological warfare is that it recruits the capacity for responsibility and turns it against the bearer: the bold become self-punitive, the visionary become brooding. It works most effectively against those with a capacity for honesty; it hobbles the most virtuous with the strength of their own virtues; it seduces by projecting a mirage of challenge and renewed heroism into the horizon. And what is truly wondrous, is that this challenge is not entirely unreal: the dangers and rewards of self-examination call to the children of modernity...

To say that the function of psychology is to heal, is like saying that the purpose of the Manhattan Project was to create radiological medicine: psychological insight wielded with the healing art, is an exception of exceptions - merely a glance at the history of psychoanalysis after Freud should demonstrate how difficult it was for him not to breed nefarious charlatans left and right. Freud also was hardly a healer: he was rather an ambitious scientist, with that sufficient mixture of cruelty and neutrality...

Is psychology a weapon in my hands also? Absolutely. What do I seek to harm with it? The briar of confusion surrounding my peers, the Gordian knot handed to the children of modernity - I seek to frighten away goblins and embolden the honest faces around my fire with a different story: if my psychology is after all only another tale, let it be a good one that leaves us cheerful, impetuous, and scornful of the chokedamp of cowardice we find everywhere...

If my science has a bias and a motive - and it does - it is to teach the forging of psychological weapons of self-defense. My hope is that the very content of this art and science - the bowl of thorns and bitter herbs I serve as though it were precious broth - will select my students for me.

There is an intimate and suspect relationship between psychological initiation and moral indoctrination: psychology is after all the "study of the soul", and the "soul" is after all the most ingenious crooked concealed dagger of the priests. "Drive all blames into yourself": this has always been the modus operandi and first line of defense of the priest and wannabe-priest. "Drive all blames into your neurosis": I've stretched out on that couch of torture, under the nose of a ranking psychoanalyst of the New York Freudian Society no less. But after many long hours of doubt, when I finally turned to him and said: "Your silence is false! You're not neutral and composed, you're merely weak, unimaginative, and a practiced actor!" - I'll never forget the flabbergasted look, his speechlessness. Psychological weaponry may be very cleverly designed and virulent, but make no mistake: most practitioners have weak wrists and no ability to parry - they deal only with willing victims, not adversaries. Moreover, their dark arts will crumble before the white flame of an angry belly: do not underestimate the power of healthy rage to frighten away grey-skinned parasitic entities.

Whether and how much Foucault is correct in removing the element of individual psychology from the functioning of modernity: how much is "feeling" and even "gratification" not only imputed by we who would explain, but an important illusion of that same system? How much has mankind already been reduced to a responsive and well-functioning part within a machine, whose subjective experience has been both broadened and weakened? How much does modernity depend upon paralytic anxiety, self-absorption, short-term goals, and a ubiquitous shallow fitful sleep? How much is every attempt to discover "motive" therefore doomed?

But my psychology attempts to uncover precisely those conditions which do prevail, which do prepare the human body for a benumbed bourgeois mallwalk through broken fragments of dreams... The "motives" I find have nothing whatever to do with an idealized rational human subject: I find a sick body doing its best to recover in the midst of mounting confusion and overwhelming error, largely failing to find respite outside of what makes it sicker, and therefore resigning with astounding regularity to tactics of revenge, malicious roleplaying, and a selling of birthrights to the lowest bidder for the most immediate relief - the sicker the human animal becomes, the more the "rationality of illness" is the only logic and the only psychological framework worth pursuing. Everything else is bad fiction, the 18th century presumptions of Adam Smith, the bald lies which advertising tells us about "choice" and uniqueness, and the laggardly failings of late 20th century psychology to catch up to the evidence of what we are.

We are apes, with ape-psychology, with ape-instincts, with ape-needs. Perhaps not much more, and maybe a little less. That we seem to have become something so much more than ape, is from my perspective merely the potential for exotic diversification latent in all species. We are the last of the techno-apes: there once were many varieties. We either shared, inherited, or stole most of our fundamental technologies from previous hominid species: language, fire, hunting, tribe, herbology, and perhaps even agriculture. Any 21st century psychology that does not ground itself in apenature, is anachronistic and beyond our patience. Only the interplay of fundamental instinct reveals the truth about us consistently - it pulls back the many veils of polite consolation. Morality being that thick veil which I'm most accustomed to attack first. But there are more: metaphysical pretensions abound still, especially in neuroscience - where chemistry fumbles in the backseat with the humanities.

• A psychology that claims to discover the mind from within, and finds nothing but mirage, as Lacan does: masturbatory, paralyzing, and a fabulous waste of time.
• A psychology that exclusively studies maladaptation under more slanderous names, as psychiatry does: squireboy of the horsemen of civilization, seeking to groom the general populace for castration.
• A psychology that reduces everything willful to neurosis, as the Freudians do: the fearful feverdream of an impotent self-loathing man.

Loneliness and envy: is there any need for another concept in group psychology? As a method of first priority, these two forces suffice to explain the totality of social behavior in something like 95% of all cases.

What do we want from a group? First: to be in it. Second: to be on top of it.

• Loneliness: fear of abandonment, vacuophobia, poverty of the self, the safety of numbers, amorphous homogeneity. The hunting-primate seeks the group like its arboreal-rodent ancestor seeks the tree. What is affection but sublimated loneliness? What is conformity but calculating loneliness?

• Envy: resentment, greed, the attitude of weakness, "equality", the ugly backside of compassion, the tribal instinct in its most visible aspect. The gathering-primate hoards his social status like his arboreal-rodent ancestor hoarded food. Petty advantage in every form: most of sociality involves the delicate exchange of flattery, insult, and bribe.

Freud's psychology is so skewed to the atomic individual - very 19th century, very "scientific" in the English fashion. An admirable attempt to reduce to functional principles, but his fixation on libido was damaging to the movement as a whole: we'd rather think of ourselves as raging nymphomaniacs, than envious lonely slobs.

How much more immediately useful would my little "system" of psychology be to the aspiring student! To learn to see loneliness in action, when people clump and bump against you, pleading for inclusion. To learn to see envy in their glassy eyes, in their cunning maneuvers, in their every prophylactic move, in their heavy cognitive distortions. So much of what's called "narcissism" today is nothing but competitive-projective envy: behavior designed to inspire envy, such that one desires this image of oneself, which defers confrontation with lack and loneliness.

People are not really "egoists", they are "groupists": their orientation is not the self, but their status in various shifting mercurial groups. They have no "self" to fixate on: that would have required the strength to endure a little genuine solitude - they have rather the as if of a self, the implication of a self as defined by the group. No wonder so much panic flares when group constituency changes, when the direction remains uncertain, when the canon of values is in question...

Klein and Lacan were early purveyors of the pernicious idea of narcissism as the foundation of the human psyche: bullshit. True narcissists are rare and fascinating. Most of us are merely imitative slobs: self-absorption, anxiety, and vicious frustration are not sufficient ingredients for narcissism. Incapable of passionate love: modern humanity suffers far more from this ailment, than a misplaced and botched love.

I prefer to study psychology at the anthropological scale: that is, the level of the tribe. Not the level of the "mind", nor the "signifier", nor the individual, and on the other hand not the level of society, nor the state, nor certainly at the level of existence itself or any other way of saying "in the eyes of God". That Nietzschean psychology is group psychology is not generally understood. That the Freudian psychology of the family and the primal triangle is immensely valuable in the study of neurosis, but only of limited value in the study of health - is also generally not understood. There is no escape from the tribe: even what it means to be an "individual", is defined at the tribal scale. What "society" means, is also defined by the distortion of tribe; the same goes for morality and all of the diseases of modernity...

It's generally imagined that neuroscience will one day subsume psychology. But on our present course this remains extremely unlikely: because even assuming that neuroanatomy achieved some perfect elaboration, in absence of a viable psychological interpretation, all neurology is merely correlating regions of tissue with poorly defined behaviors and even more poorly described subjectivity. Neurology as it stands strikes me as something like an inversion of the dismissal of the appendix: its anatomy was fully documented for centuries, but without a grasp of the importance of the microbiome, it was assumed to be useless. Listening to their chatter, this "brain" everyone is always so thrilled about begins to seem like a useless piece of anatomy credited with a significance it does not have... It begins to seem more sensible to force oneself into seeing the brain like the preaxial Greeks did, as a heat dump: what is all this thinking and tinkering but excess heat?

Anatomical exploration could be executed by a machine, but psychology requires a soul - because soul is a divining rod for the viable. This is what the musicians mean by "soul": truth as food, the stomach as spirit.

Some would like psychology to be practiced as a kind of statistical mechanics, and thereby reduce its predictions to the purely quantifiable. Indeed as long as its goals remain restricted to vague half-tautological quantizations of modern prejudice, it seems achievable. But statistical modeling always fails to account for recursive distortion: knowing when to take a confession at face value despite its ironic presentation, is not something one can teach a statistician. There's a sense of arriving where one began that cannot be formulated, only demonstrated: that's the Nietzschean interpretive process. A truth value can no more be proven than first order logic, it can only be "constructed" as Brouwer might say...

My definition of psychology does not reduce to the metaphysical ambition to discover principles of "thought itself", nor does it claim that "the mind" is any ultimate distillation of physics, nor does it indulge in the pretense of a study of "being and time", nor is it interested in forcing the principles of molecular biology to emerge in consciousness. I understand psychology to be a distillation of the unconscious hermeneutics of sociality, or the selective inhibition of interpretative process through the power of a retrained economy of instinct: you have to want to understand, despite all the embarrassments involved. Everything else is merely bad faith mimicry - the real practice of psychology does not begin until you admit something with your back to the wall: only in that moment, when you feel that everything worthwhile about yourself is pitted against a possibility that therefore must not be true - do we gain a little freedom in feeling and thinking. In that moment, the locus of your self preservation shifts, from fragile crystalline ideation, to the origamic transformations you were secretly employing as a sleight-of-hand. Nietzsche, the clandestine teacher of most of what's worthwhile in 20th century thinking, is constantly trying to demonstrate that the sooner you admit to being a dishonest advocate, the sooner you will learn to become an honest artist. From illusory stasis to fugitive vitality: that's all anyone can offer.

In statistics, the null hypothesis serves as the default assumption: that there is no asymmetry in the data and thus nothing special to conclude. One has merely taken measurements and obtained a numerical distribution, but learned nothing.

What's the unconscious equivalent? What are the consequences for the art of perception? Either an interpretation has nothing to do with a given datum, or it is correlated and justified.

However there is no access to "raw data": everything is already many times interpreted, and not merely by "bias" but by perceptual apparatus. There are often only limited available responses which already assume an interpretation: feeling states cannot be undone. Repression is the only alternative to perception. Actually in social contexts true communicative error is extremely rare: unconscious communication is efficient and accurate. The choices are therefore unconscious perception, conscious apperception, or unconscious repression: with many loci of repression, many available termini of displacement, and many combinations of all strategies. Untangling this combinatorial mess constitutes most of the art of perception: not better fidelity in communication, but more accurate mapping of the simultaneous strategies of distortion undertaken by both parties. You already know the answer: the work consists in undoing your unknowing.

Therefore it's in choosing between likely strategies of distortion that psychology largely consists: tracing how information and response were unconsciously displaced in favor of some other matrix of social signaling, which takes on a life of its own and adds further complexity.

"What's he feeling? Why is he saying this or that?" Is not a question of refining and rejecting interpretations of raw data, but learning to detect distortion in the data one has and assigning agency and history to that distortion. Every distortion implies repression, which implies both successful communication and unconscious resistance. The actual practice of psychology revolves around detecting distortion in semantic valence and learning typical trajectories of displacement within the semantic field given probable aversions and desires: there is no flat plane of distribution, but a swirling dance of valences. Perceiving asymmetric distortion waves within this dance and assigning a causality is the art of the science.

It's important to realize that one is always already caught up in a semantic distortion because it necessarily works mutually: language is powerful leverage even if it seems to have a superficial illusory quality - sometimes this nonsubstantiality is part of its power - "it's only words". But every signal has its associated power, else it ceases to function as signal: so much of what we do as perceptive creatures is to discard weakly valent but prominent signals in favor of what they are substituting for - every signifier displaces and obscures another, every gestalt is a provisional as-if.

If I have said that psychology may never be a science and that intuition will always play a central role, do not mistake my message for "anything goes", or that there is no means of detecting and correcting bad psychologizing. Certainly my message is not that just anyone is qualified who claims the authority of "intuition" - quite the opposite. Psychology as I understand it is a discipline and a practice, and not a workman's science in the usual sense: as though its findings could be exhibited like so much taxidermy. Psychology can no more be practiced by an "ideal mind" than tennis can. The whole body is required, and a disciplined body at that.

Why is the academic establishment so opposed to intuition? If it were possible to practice psychology intuitively, then it would also be possible to know at a glance whether an insight had merit or whether it was bullshit. Conversely if intuition is impossible, and produces only deadends and delusion, then they have nothing to fear from us and have only to stand by and watch us shoot ourselves in the foot. But their constant compassionate concern for the flock betrays them: their eagerness to maintain a tenuous hold of authority over psychological truth, speaks of a deep fear of creeping irrelevance. So why are they afraid of the idea of an intuitive discipline? Because they are incapable of it. Because they're too verklemmt, and only feel safe in a world where no one but the verklemmt succeed.

Unfortunately "intuition" is a dirty word, invoking weakness of mind and wishful conclusion - we should probably be extremely cautious in its use. I may stand a better chance of being understood, if I speak of a "perceptual discipline", emotional refinement, and everything which says no to a thousand wishful guesses before admitting a reluctant maybe. Mutually reinforcing reluctant maybes, which coalesce into a cogent profile of any given case, and only become relative certainties when abstracted into generalities and heuristic principles concerning human nature - that's the kind of psychology I'm talking about.

Even while emphasizing the importance of natural observation, depth of fieldwork, and above all the accumulation of bad experience in the formation of a psychologist in my style - I also maintain that there are a few vitally important concepts to be rescued and defended. I may soon see to it that the Freudian and Nietzschean psychological inheritance gains a new respectable grounding in the latest terminology: for example, I've already found it relatively easy to define repression in terms of information theory. What I want to emphasize now, is that prior to any theoretical dance must come a real training of the body: I conceive of psychology as an insight tradition in the old sense, something much nearer to an athleticism than a mere intellectual piddling. When an old master of Gongfu took on a student, he did so reluctantly, slowly, forcing him through many trials designed to test the totality of his character: that something as potentially significant to the future of the human race as our best comprehension of motivation, behavior, evolutionary strategy and everything our much-fondled intelligence yields and distorts, is treated with less seriousness and severity than it requires to undergo an apprenticeship in plumbing - what does that tell us about ourselves? But psychologists don't need comprehension or character, as long as they are armed with caustic chemicals to bore through those clogged pipes...

That old master of ethology and genuine gentleman of science, Nikolaas Tinbergen, once said in his hesitant neo-Victorian rumbling:

Having myself always spent long periods of exploratory watching of natural events, of pondering about what exactly it was in the observed behavior that I wanted to understand before developing an experimental attack, I find this tendency of prematurely plunging into quantification and experimentation, which I observe in many younger workers, really disturbing, unless, as happens to some, they do, from time to time, return, more purposefully than before, to plain, though more sophisticated, watching.

The Study of Instinct, vi

"Plain but sophisticated watching": what could be achieved I wonder, if instead of shunting emotionally stunted doctoral students directly from a life of institutional forbearance into neurology laboratories where they are commanded to begin generating numerical tautologies from vague uninterpreted data, we rather focused on finding and developing a whole person, who might thereafter be qualified to study and theorize about something so complex as neurological phenomena? How many of them have learned to ask a good question, or have been taught that the formulation of precise questions is more than half the work of understanding? I look around their literature, and I fail to see the majority of them take the first step in science: an admission of ignorance.

Vanity would like to tell me that my kind of intelligence is the rarer type: the poet, the psychologist, the diviner of human nature. That the mathematical and scientific kind is more common. But probably, sadly, this is not true. It's possible that the "genius of the heart" is not so rare, but we are much more fragile, more needy, more sensitive to initial conditions, and therefore much less likely to survive intact through those inevitable years of abuse and confusion: those same conditions which we would seek to reform and recolor in our own image, if we could only preserve our confidence long enough to find a voice. "Discontented" culture not only breeds unhappiness, it breeds out the most unhappy, until all that is most visible, all that succeeds most thoroughly and thrives as leadership, are those incapable of any other condition of life. In fact, what I see, is an increase of souls who thrive in absurd misery.

All genuine psychological training takes place as intimate hand-to-hand combat: unless you have personal stakes involved, you will not be in possession of sufficient motivation to overcome the resistances to mutual deception - you will remain too "good", too well-meaning, too socially cooperative to begin practicing the kind of reverse stagecraft I teach.

When I practice psychology at a distance, removed by time and space, through the lens of history - how could it be valid? Because not only am I applying past lessons to infer who and what some person is and was and therefore how and what happened, but because I find myself entangled - I know how to entangle myself in the "semantic field" as I find it. Through history, through mere words, through artifacts, through a thousand signs unconscious and conscious, the human collectivity communicates across vast distances very effectively, whether we know it and want it, or not. We are all of us nodes and junctures and mouthpieces of many convergent and divergent forces: to learn to read these datastreams as they flow through us, is what I teach.

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This is the point where the fateful Möbius twist begins. This is the point at which truth hurts. This is where we separate those who want to tell the whole truth, from those who only want another ideological cause célèbre to rally behind.

We must grow into the intellectual conscience and emotional maturity required to tolerate these two statements side by side, without allowing either to neutralize the force of the other:

1. SARS-CoV-2 is not at all deadly and therefore does not qualify as a pandemic. The COVID affair was a case of what I call mass aggressigenic hysteria.

2. SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a laboratory and for that reason alone should be taken seriously. Long COVID is probably a consequence of this engineering.

Truth is n-dimensional, and takes no leave from our narrow expectations nor gives any quarter to our hopes.

Despite what we skeptics might wish, long COVID is all too real.

I have sought to be unyielding in my insistence that the COVID affair gained the traction and prominence it has, because it lit a match under the gunpowder of firstworld frustration: for at least 2 years, COVID was a case of mass hysteria on an unprecedented scale. But there is so much happening at once in all this, that the whole story could never possibly be simple, nor convenient, nor ideologically aligned. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is not a scam, nor was the entire panic somehow orchestrated by an unimaginable global conspiracy, and unfortunately, while not at all deadly by itself, the virus does have curious properties which should be taken seriously.

I'm proud of the fact that I never sought to hide this from myself, and wrote all this in my book as early as the spring of 2021. Since then, I've done more research concerning the mechanism of long COVID and most importantly, I have personal experience with it which has convinced me all the more of my initial intuition: the whole thing stinks. Everything about this is upside down:

• We're told the virus is deadly: it's not remotely deadly, which only a glance at the "infection fatality rate" across ages tells you.

• We're told the virus was not engineered and did not come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology: its fantastic ability to invade human epithelial tissue says otherwise, as does its origin in Wuhan 15 minutes from the most advanced virology laboratory in China where they had previously declared their success in developing precisely this kind of virus from the circulating bat virus known as "SHC014" - as does common sense, and the merest familiarity with human hubris. There's been more than one highly qualified, extremely fair investigation of this question: to my eye this all looks like elaborate avoidance of the obvious.

• We're told endlessly about "new cases": yet the virus is known to be so extremely virulent and largely asymptomatic that in all likelihood, every human being on planet earth has had the disease at least once by now, and the majority of urban dwellers have probably never been rid of it since first exposure in early 2020.

• All attention has been on the sick and dying: while comorbidity has been conflated with conspiracy theory, and almost no one has studied the effect on the young and healthy - yet in my opinion this is all that really matters and has ever mattered. The young and healthy are the future and keystone of the human race, not the moaning geriatric sea of avarice and waste.

Therefore only now, years later, is general attention finally turning to what I noticed the very first time I acquired this nasty little bug: an unsettling power of immunoevasion. Only now that the ceremony of histrionic and demonstrative fear has waned, only now that the gratifications gained from pretending the damn thing was killing healthy people, has the general populace begun to reluctantly admit what's seemed extremely obvious to me for years: it doesn't make you sick, it makes you unsick.

A word to those readers who refuse to believe anything "the Science" says anymore, and have learned to doubt not only the existence of "long COVID" but SARS-CoV-2 itself: how could someone like myself, who strives to be unyielding and more accurate than anyone else in diagnosing the COVID affair as mass hysteria, consider recent COVID research anything but collective lies and posturing? I say as much freely, when it comes to social psychology. I am only too glad to swaggeringly dismiss the reigning consensus of whole fields, such the history of morals, the definition of consciousness, and the methods of sociology.

The secret we must learn, is that the human creature tends to tell the truth in the minute details, while gladly telling monstrous lies as long as they span further than individual responsibility. We prefer the big lie to the petty lie. The modern human being will not cheat his taxes, will not cut in line, will fill out applications truthfully - but he will also gladly live a lie and participate in obscene falsehoods as long as they are socially advantageous. For example, the explicitly religious may profess absurd things which no one actually believes, but they drive their cars sensibly enough, they bake cakes and write books and ride bicycles without a trace of absurd belief; they make just as good chemists and mechanics and logicians and computer scientists - in some ways they are in fact more sane, because their anxieties and absurdities have a terminus and a harmless sphere of activity...

These biologists are therefore to be trusted when they proudly speak of the details of their science. When they talk about "ACE2 receptors", "Type I Interferons", and "STAT1 transcription factors", they are telling the truth. When they go along with the peasant-superstition of ignoring comorbidities in supposed infection fatality rates, they are telling lies. They are never to be believed as soon as they begin interpreting and advising. As soon as they speak of the "social good", as soon as they put on their moral costume, as soon as they appear "concerned" and correct - we have learned to laugh and move on.

Here's a finding worth internalizing: Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), commonly referred to as "long COVID", are observed in 30–70% of individuals post SARS-CoV-2 infection. My guess is that this number is actually much closer to 100%, and that the symptoms are only masked by other chronic illnesses: it's already a very crowded and depressing elevator ride, here in the overburdened and underutilized modern body...

It's one thing to study infection fatality rates, age distribution charts, and comorbidity data: almost anyone can do that much and it required therefore only the merest intellectual conscience to realize how much everyone was lying to each other and themselves about the deadliness of COVID. But studying the possible mechanism and implications of long COVID is an entirely different matter requiring an education in immunology, genomics, transcription factors, and cell signaling: fields which are brimming with impressive findings and complicated nomenclature which add up to almost more ignorance than we started with, because this fundamental ignorance of the bewildering complexity of vertebrate life gets gussied up in arrogant but still shallow science which lacks respect and awe before biological reality... Probably a contributing factor in how and why we ended up in this mess, yes?

Therefore, I don't want to pretend that I'm fully qualified to interpret the mountain of research concerning COVID's effect on the immune system. However, due to the way COVID has polarized us, there is a serious dearth of sane interpretation and so I feel forced to research primary sources for myself - as is almost always the case with anything important. One finds generally only three approaches:

1. Opportunistic fearmongering: most talk about long COVID is so overdetermined by the manifold delights of hysterical displacement, that it amounts to intolerable nonsense.

2. Myopic tinkering and cowardice: the biologists qualified to summarize and interpret the data, are so absorbed by the minutiae of their findings and their own petty rivalries in the burgeoning fields of cell signaling and epigenetics, that they almost unfailingly cannot see nor speak articulately of the bigger picture. A certain professorial myopia is to be expected, but this factor combines with the atmosphere of political terror to produce scientists who hide behind the details - and anyone who steps out of line to say the obvious seems to be simply ignored and cannot get published.

3. Rabid cynicism of the bystander: there is a small but vocal minority of skeptics who have become so nauseated by the moral fraud and cognitive dissonance at work in the last few years, that they will tolerate absolutely no talk of any danger relative to COVID. Many of them believe long COVID is merely hypochondria - and no doubt much of it is.

Let's get something straight. "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" (SARS) is a syndrome; it is not a cause of disease. Both CoV-1 and CoV-2 cause SARS. Somehow in the midst of all this noise and nonsense, most of you seem to have forgotten or never fully understood, that what we're dealing with is a novel virus in a family of viruses which causes a well documented syndrome - namely both SARS and MERS.

The SARS coronaviruses use various mechanisms to hamper IFN production and response. Consequently, target cells proximal to the site of the initial infection fail to receive critical and protective IFN signals, allowing the virus to spread and replicate without hindrance. A hallmark of SARS-CoV-2 infection is impaired IFN-I and III production and responses, which masks the IFN-related fever symptoms and leads to naive spreading of the virus.

Quoted from "An aberrant STAT pathway is central to COVID-19".

Long COVID both is and is not a mystery.

• It's been known for many years that SARS-CoV-1 suppresses interferon signaling (IFN) and demonstrates post-infection sequelae that may last 6 months. SARS-CoV-2 follows the same pattern: therefore long COVID is no mystery.

• While the cluster of symptoms known as "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" is well documented, and many of the mechanisms which cause it are fairly well understood, the reasons behind the post-infection sequelae of the SARS coronaviruses are not fully known. In addition, SARS-CoV-2 shows key differences from its predecessor which may contribute to its longevity in the body.

Therefore long COVID is a minor mystery: although one which I believe is relatively unimportant to solve in theory - much more important is to solve it in your body, which most of you are already working on, whether you know it or not.

Even without any special intervention, I believe any healthy immune system can and will defeat long COVID. I am not in the business of handing out concrete medical advice, therefore I will remain silent about my own tactics: but finding this information is relatively easy, and requires careful personal experimentation in any case - anyway personal experimentation is always the healthy attitude towards health, not the one-size-fits-all barbaric reductionism of biomedical modernity, in which healthy bodies represent a threat to the thriving industry of shuffling doomed cases around an unthinkably expensive junk drawer of savage interventions... One day our age will be considered medieval and barbaric, because of the arrogant brutality of our attitude toward the human body.

What I can tell you, is that no one knows for sure what long COVID is. My best guess at the convergent mechanisms are:

1. Extremely effective mACE2 binding. SARS-CoV-2 is many times more virulent than CoV-1 and seems to invade various tissues of the body with a ferocity that's difficult to account for, other than the efficiency with which it binds to the cellular transmembrane protein site known as "(membrane) angiotensin-converting enzyme 2", or mACE2. Every virus has to sneak through the cell wall somehow, and this one does so by presenting a key for opening one of the trapdoors along that wall. This efficiency seems to be driven by the infamous "furin cleavage site": otherwise known as the virologist's smoking gun. It's known that CoV-2 binds as much as 20 times more effectively to target cells than CoV-1: this means it infects new hosts more readily, and invades tissues more fiercely.

2. Immunoevasion. SARS-CoV-2 suppresses interferon signaling in a way similar to CoV-1, but due either to the mACE2 binding efficiency which might create viral reservoirs deep in various tissues, or some other as yet unexplained immunoevasive pathway which CoV-1 did not have, CoV-2 seems to either match or exceed the ability of the first version to persist.

3. Reverse transcription. There are some highly qualified researchers who are convinced that CoV-2 has the ability to reverse transcribe itself into the human genome: so far they've discovered sufficient evidence to claim that CoV-2 chimera found long after viral clearance are likely due to partial reverse transcription. This does not mean CoV-2 qualifies as a "retrovirus" in the same sense that HIV does, because these fragments seem not to be viable. However, the theory does account for persistent positive PCR tests in patients who are clearly not ill. And most importantly, the theory could help account for long COVID: it's possible that the strange persistent mild symptoms in healthy individuals who otherwise never have a problem clearing diseases, are due to a kind of autoimmunity. Infected cells whose genetic material now contain fragments of the virus via "retrotransposon mediation", are theoretically expressing these viral chimera and thereby triggering sporadic immune response, although the virus is actually largely cleared.

In other words, it's very easy to catch, and very hard to eliminate. And even once technically dead, it may have coded itself into infected cells such that the immune system reacts as if it were still present.

All this accounts for my own personal experience with long COVID. I hesitate to resort to anecdote and reveal anything personal - but on the other hand, this entire affair is precisely defined by a profound invasion of the personal by very impersonal forces: what power do we have when some blithering virologist anywhere on the globe arrogates himself to endanger the collective health of the human race, but to take it personally?

What's funny about my case, is that despite my conviction that lockdowns were entirely ineffective and a function of some of the ugliest moral hypocrisy imaginable, I myself have been living in a self-imposed "lockdown" for years - for entirely different reasons. Therefore I represent in several ways an ideal case study:

• I live many miles from any outside human presence.
• During 2020-2021, the span between my visits to civilization ranged as high as 2 months.
• I am very healthy. I hike several miles through my desert backcountry, daily.
• I have an extremely reactive immune system: when I caught swine flu in 2010, I was briefly in mortal danger due to a raging neverending "cytokine storm" - if it had not been for the insight of a decent doctor and the miracle of acetaminophen.
• Because I have traveled and lived in the developing world, I'm familiar with a few serious diseases. For example, I've had dengue fever: the lingering symptoms of long COVID remind me of dengue, which required about 3 months to fully dissipate.

But even dengue and the resulting fatigue eventually cleared: I've never experienced anything like long COVID. What I believe has been happening is this:

• For most of 2020-2021, during every trip to the outside world, I was catching COVID again. This is due to its extreme virulence and the laughable ineffectiveness of lockdowns and the masking policy.
• During the weeks of isolation that followed each exposure, I was fighting off a new infection and possibly variant strains. This leads to a slowly accumulating overload of an immune system which is nonetheless being evaded, due to interferon suppression.
• Most of the infections were asymptomatic - at least they would be considered so in most modern human subjects of the firstworld. What my lifestyle helps reveal, is that this asymptomatic quality is actually an illusion: I could tell, because I exercise vigorously daily, because I expose myself to extremes of temperature, and because I am otherwise much healthier than is common in the firstworld. For more than 2 years now, there's been low-level chronic inflammation in my upper throat and nasal passages, which only becomes noticeable in a harsh cold wind. My supposition, is that nearly everyone has similar symptoms, but they are masked by other problems: lack of strenuous exercise, reliance on sugar and caffeine for energetic input, unfamiliarity with the subtle variances of microbiotic health, dependence on profoundly mood-altering pharmacological weaponry such as SSRIs, and so on.

In other words, most of the firstworld is already so mildly ill with a large variety of systemic problems, that they simply do not have the kind of health which would be discernibly impacted by the disease. Everyone has had it many times over, and likely almost every child on the planet has already developed sufficient natural immunity, despite all the perverse unconscious attempts to sabotage their future.

We're all going to be fighting SARS for the rest of our lives: true. But please remember, with all due sobriety, that we have all been fighting an enormous variety of endemic diseases up to now - including some coronaviruses which cause the syndrome we call the "common cold": the reason young children are sick so often is due to the accumulated backlog of endemic diseases which civilization has been collecting since roughly the agricultural revolution in 8000 BC.

To reiterate:

• SARS-CoV-2 is extremely virulent, because it was engineered to adhere to mACE2 cellular receptors in human tissue. This accounts for both its virulence and probably contributes to long COVID.
• Infection is largely asymptomatic.
• It evades immune function, namely via suppression of interferon signaling. This is the same kind of interferon antagonism of CoV-1, which accounts for the asymptomatic presentation and contributes to long COVID.
• The moment it leaked, it was with us forever and all efforts to stop its spread have been futile and more motivated by the desire to oppress each other and express Foucaultian civilizational recursivities, than "save lives".

So what's "long COVID"? The consequences of engineering a virus which already possessed immunoevasive powers, with the perfect mechanism for binding to human lung tissue.

Fortunately, the vertebrate immune system is an awesome power, with multiple redundancies and backups. Defeating one of its primary mechanisms in a very targeted way, as these viruses do, may lead to viral longevity but ultimately a healthy immune system will win via alternate channels. It's a war of attrition: what the research seems to indicate, and what my own experience says, is that the immune system may only be operating at 5% capacity, and thus what could take a healthy system only a few days to overwhelm and destroy, requires months.

Hidden in the COVID research, are hints of a possible longterm autoimmune syndrome. This is the point at which the COVID affair becomes serious again.

Here we should exercise extreme caution in speculation. We should avoid the gratifications of hysteria: dreaming up worst-case scenarios affords a fleeting sense of importance; but more vitally it displaces anxieties into a visible target...

Nevertheless, it's crossed my mind often enough that I believe it's worth saying in a very quiet voice: it's possible that continued reinfection, the gradual establishment of viral reservoirs in the many tissues which express mACE2, and the hypothetical potential for reverse transcription in infected cells, will lead to an AIDS-like syndrome. It's known that a single HIV infection is generally not sufficient to induce AIDS: multiple infections with variant viruses are required to overwhelm the immune system sufficiently, such that AIDS sets in over many years.

But, perhaps this is only likely in the unhealthy: a beta-coronavirus is not HIV. What's most likely, is that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to circulate endemically like any other virus, becoming less virulent with increasing herd immunity, and despite all its special abilities only represent another single notch down in the collective human health. Civilized humanity has dealt with many diseases much more serious than this for the last 3000 years: smallpox, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, and so on. Only another small step down the ladder from Pleistocene health, only another dent in the door of this jalopy, only another bean to count.

Therefore, although COVID represents something extremely dangerous from at least two angles:

• Emotionally stunted virologists fucking around with biological timebombs without adult supervision.
• The potential for mass hysteria in a globally united humanity thirsty for anonymous mass violence.

My guess is that in the final analysis, the virus called SARS-CoV-2 is actually trivial next to several other factors impacting human health: for example, the sugar epidemic. An annihilated microbiome due to the uncontrolled consumption of sucrose next to the uncontrolled consumption of antibiotics is probably orders of magnitude more serious to the future of the human race than SARS ever could be. The obesity syndrome and its associated endocrine imbalance is probably many times more urgent to address... But those are real problems, and real problems require mature adults - and emotional maturity grows scarce in an atmosphere of pampered anxieties and emboldened hysterical displacement.

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There is a Chinese myth about the origin of writing, the antiquity and significance of which one should be able to intuit. In this story, the inventor of Chinese characters was one Cangjie 倉頡, a man with four eyes. In one version, it was the tracks of animals which inspired him: to an informed hunter, every animal leaves a distinct track - and although only representing a fraction of the whole, each trace is distinct. Cangjie was thus inspired to discover the minimally distinct trace for every word, and thus generate a maximally efficient medium of communication with minimal redundancy. Ancient Chinese is one of the most terse and informatively dense human languages I know of: it was possible to say with a four character string what no modern language could match in richness and implication.

But why does Cangjie have four eyes? To begin to answer this, we turn to another version of the myth which I believe is of greater antiquity: in this story, it's said he discovered the signs in the cracks of a turtle shell. The practice of divination among at least some of the Neolithic Chinese seemed to focus almost exclusively on the art of reading cracks in the turtle plastron. First, small divots were bored into the underside, the bone was then heated over a fire, and the resulting cracks were read by the oracle and a prognostication generated from them. As far as I know, no one has yet made a guess at what seems obvious to me: that the art in question here, was originally to hallucinate characters in these cracks, to perceive signs emergent in the world.

It's also my guess that both the extant Shang dynasty oracle bones circa 1200 BC and the Zhou dynasty Yijing text circa 600 BC were formulated as a quick-and-dirty shorthand long after this kind of practice had ceased to be genuine and improvisational, much as the Delphic oracle ceased to function by the time of Plutarch. In its most evocative and ancient form, divination is the art of creating useful messages out of a contained entropic space - seeing what one needs to see, discovering the writing of the world.

The Xici 繫辭 commentary of the Yijing preserves a clue:

卬以觀于天文，頫以觀于地理.

Gaze upward and discern the writing in the sky. Bow your head and discern the logic of the earth.

Why is this important to us, we who fancy ourselves fully rational and cured of everything unscientific, we who pose in front of our many distorted digital mirrors like a hungover clown with running makeup lost in his own funhouse, we who imagine ourselves fully conscious, who despite the raging incessant auditory hallucination of voices we call "thinking", we imagine we have no need of divination.

Since the early 20th century, whenever some ambitious thinker attempts a formulaic distillation of the proper practice of science, he concludes with the same wishful theory of Karl Popper: that science proceeds solely via falsifiable hypotheses. Rather than what really happens: intuitive theoretical saltations followed by a long tail of mostly tautological confirmation, entrenchment, and an increasingly erroneous certainty as we chase down persistent demons of inaccuracy into the distant decimals where so much of 21st century science now takes place. As neatly logical as the Popperian falsification model is, it fails to account for the importance of guessing - or "inductive inference" in a more elaborate dialect. The physicists talk of the three B's: "bed, bath, and bus" is where the eurekas come from, when the conscious mind wanders off, and the unconscious mind is allowed to do its work.

This is such common knowledge, that it's shameful to have to spell it out. Moreover it's shameful that my own field, psychology, which should be more aware of this process than any other, is more foreclosed and hostile to the process of intuitive divinatory knowledge than say, physics and mathematics, where intuition is still granted a place among the powers any practitioner must develop - and ultimately even the most trenchantly classical mathematicians have to occasionally concede that iconoclasts like L. E. J. Brouwer and Wittgenstein may have been seeking a more rigorous definition of truth than their own.

But why? Why is 21st century psychology so frightened of its own shadow and overeager to dress itself in scientific accoutrements? Is it because we know better? Is it because we've been burned by too many charlatans at too many distinct locales, and have learned to guard against quackery with rigorous method? Or is something more nefarious at work? 21st century psychology not only fails as psychology, it seeks to erase and undermine native intuitive psychological understanding, which in primates is no small charge. It's a science that makes you stupider than you really are.

I can grant that current academic psychology successfully keeps overt and obvious charlatanism at bay. What it does not do, is remain relevant - nor does it guard against the kind of systemic and implicit charlatanism which makes the entire project of psychology seem so worthless and dull.

As a rogue and apostate psychologist, it will noticed I am not kind to my wouldbe colleagues. Some would ascribe this to bitterness and no more - at least I can hardly pretend that rivalry plays no role. But I prefer to believe that I'm so unforgiving of contemporary psychology because I understand it: because I have walked those halls, have been among them, and because therefore I see nothing but their faults. I dismiss their compassion and well-meaning towards humanity as impotent at best, and repulsive hypocrisy in most cases. I dismiss their scientific efforts as desperate mimicry at best, and Foucaultian collaborative disciplines of social control in most cases. We critique most harshly what we do not wish to take for granted: I would much rather be judged maniacal and unfair than timid and complicit.

I'm unfair to their scientific rigor; I'm unfair to their attempts to ground psychology in physiology and neurology; I'm unfair to their earnest attempts to quantize and generate computational models of social behavior. Why? Because it's all premature. Premature scientificality does more than waste time - it even does more than hinder progress: it regresses the field. The field of psychology is much worse in the 21st century than the early 20th: unrelenting scientific posturing is part of why. This is an old battle: Kraepelin versus Freud, Skinner versus Erickson.

The premature Aristotelian scientificality defined nearly a millennium of learned discourse in both Christendom and the Islamosphere: the result was to encourage unreadable tomes of meticulously logical nonsense, from Avicenna to Maimonides to Aquinas. Premature systemization stultified Chinese medicine as early as the Huainanzi in 200 BC, and while excellent at the preservation of herbal lore and the factorization of the psychosomatic, the Chinese style also generated countless systemized deadends and alluring premature lattices of half-knowledge, from which the contemporary student of acupuncture still suffers.

Language is the urform of the system of knowledge: Lévi-Strauss is correct thus far. And I have always been extremely indulgent of the systemizations of language: ancient Chinese fascinates me more than almost anything... But why indulge these urges? Why should the Mayan logography be handled like a priceless scrying obsidian mirror? Because we are looking into the soulworld of reason. Because this is the neurological topology our scientific fools are seeking - if only they had the patience, humility, and imagination to understand what they're looking at. But scrying requires the ability to dream with the eyes open: logography in particular - the early Sumerian, the Egyptian, the Mayan, the Chinese - is an uncanny bridge between the concrete and the abstract. Here is the function of unconscious structuring at work, here are unconscious topological transformations revealed, with their invariant vertices, their reflexive spirals, their marriage of the phonological and the logical, their excursions to the limit of the dialectic of the particular within the matrix of the universal, or what we may provisionally term "deictic singularity"...

Dreaming with the eyes open: that means aim-directed hallucination, that means seeing what one needs to see, that means discovering latent knowledge by encouraging the redundancy of conscious formation - becoming-conscious is largely nothing but redundant marking. "We dream, we undream": it's often easier to understand what dreaming is, if we understand what I term "undreaming". Undreaming is redundant, saturated signification bounded by repression: what's vital to internalize, is that there is no hard line between conscious and unconscious, only a difference of degree. What we are conscious of, is what we are "unconscious of" many times over. Undreaming is to erase lines of descent, to erase the manifold traces of signification, to repress everything but the overwritten and overdetermined: this is why the conversation of most "normal" people is so bewilderingly monotonous, repetitive, colorless, and yet brimming with the uncanny. Spiritual monotony, the école normale of bourgeois modernity, is also an unsettling, slow, shuffling dance of masks: that there is a surface, implies a depth. That there is a certain something, so desperately grasped and grafted, implies an uncertain something else. This is the kind of "drama of the gifted child" which you and I have lived through: to have watched this maskdance many times over, knowing instinctively that it meant something drastically other than the explicit symbols, but not knowing what or why. A recovery from deep, abiding childhood paranoia is probably one of the prerequisites to understanding my work: "The Truman Show" demonstrates, I suspect, a common spontaneous fantasy among bright little boys of the television age.

What is "uncanny"? The English word has a Germanic root, which ultimately leads back to a Proto-Indo-European stratum which ramifies into "ken", "can", "know", German "kennen", Greek γνῶσῐς, and so on. Therefore uncanny means simply the "unknown". But there's a little more here: the German negation prefix "un-" has special qualities: sometimes it can be considered a simple inversion, and sometimes it seems to mean "worse, bad, terrifying". Such as the German "Untier", which is literally "un-animal", but means "monster"; or "Unfall", which is literally "non-event", but means "accident". There is even an old English word, "unweather" which means "storm".

In fact, agglutinate negation in many languages reveals something very important and ancient: in their deep core, many adjectival morphemes can be shown to denote an axis of value, rather than any one pole. Any signifier pushed too far in one direction, eventually begins to acquire implications of its opposite: ambivalence is the only stable signifying locus, oddly enough. Freud first discovered this for himself in his analysis of dreams, and only much later became aware of the linguistic evidence.

...das »Nein« scheint für den Traum nicht zu existieren.

..."No" seems not to exist in the dream.

Die Traumdeutung, VI.C

There is much for the contemporary philologist to dispute here, but I'll point out an incontrovertible example from Freud's essay, "Über den Gegensinn der Urworte": the English word "with" was originally constructed from the Proto-Indo-European root ṷi-, meaning "separate, apart", and is also the root of the word "wide", originally meaning "sundered, distant". But as is so often the case with slippery semantics, "with" was formed by a reinforcing comparative to render ṷitero-, literally "even more separate". The history of language is the history of a crumbling shantytown built atop temple ruins built atop shantytowns...

In other words, "with" used to mean "without", and in some compounds like "withhold", still does.

What is uncanny? When something is what it is, but is also something else which is obscured by this first identity. It involves duplication, but is not quite synonymous with the Doppelgänger: it's not merely resemblance and twinning, but repression which imparts the uncanny effect. Freud says:

Erstens, wenn die psychoanalytische Theorie in der Behauptung recht hat, daß jeder Affekt einer Gefühlsregung, gleichgültig von welcher Art, durch die Verdrängung in Angst verwandelt wird, so muß es unter den Fällen des Ängstlichen eine Gruppe geben, in der sich zeigen läßt, daß dies Ängstliche etwas wiederkehrendes Verdrängtes ist.

If psychoanalytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect of a feeling state, of whatever kind, is transformed by repression into anxiety, then among instances of the anxiety-inducing there must be one class in which this anxiety can be shown to be the return of something repressed.

Das Unheimliche, §II

Are you aware of the "uncanny valley" involved in the production of artificial life? The more closely an android resembles a human being, the worse the feeling of dread. Supposedly this disappears as the android becomes indistinguishable - but I'm not convinced that any emotionally intact creature would not feel deep alarm at this unholy camouflage: imagine the reaction of a healthy dog. Under what conditions does an animal ever encounter something pretending to be something it's not? The predator-prey relationship: when you are hiding from something that wants to eat you, or are hiding from something you want to eat. That this hasn't occurred to anyone, among all the endless excited chatter about artificial life, is only one more reason to keep a long hostile distance between ourselves and all the naïvely complicit, unconsciously malicious sycophantic flutter around "futurology": profound hostility to organic life surrounds this blinkered murder-suicide tinkering-in-the-dark with artificial life.

There is also something similar at work in plastic surgery: ever wondered why an aggressive nosejob is so unsettling?

It still remains to explain why Cangjie has four eyes.

If you'll forgive a liberal borrowing from information theory, we could assume that each eye produces one bit of information: the object either is, or is not perceived. This is the case with very simple eyes, for example the shadow-detecting eyes on the top of the heads of some lizards. Thus in an extremely reductionistic sense, two eyes produces four possible states: 00, 01, 10, 11: not, right, left, center. Following this exponentiation, four simple eyes would produce 16 possible states. As in the case of tetrachromatic women, the extra cone cell produces not x*(n+1) colors, but xⁿ⁺¹: each cone cell detects about 100 gradations, thus tetrachromacy yields an increase of two orders of magnitude, or about 100 million colors compared to 1 million. A better argument for the adaptive value of women as herbalists could hardly be found - and the medicinal value of common plants encountered everywhere you look once you know how to look, is also an exponentiation and overdetermination of the Umwelt, isn't it?

Thus if Cangjie's extra pair of eyes is the ability to read signs, he does not see merely double, he sees logarithmically double: in the sense that given y = xⁿ, if y is the exponentially increasing depth, x the possible states of any one eye, the exponent n is not only the number of eyes but the degree of apparent mastery over that complex field, since what we experience is never the total possible depth but access to complex perceptual results when we need it - our senses are inclined to produce gentle logarithmic responses which hide as much variance as reveal.

But this kind of power law relationship is one of the signatures of biological adaptation to nonlinearity: perceptual acuity is nonlinear, and attempts to map the "totality of subjective experience" always run up against the limitations of linear assumptions when dealing with complex manifolds - the topic gets away from you, the lattice disappears across some other horizon, prose falters, and poetical recoveries diminish into vacuity... This should sound an awful lot like most philosophy: if not, you either have not subjected yourself to its tortured paths, or are one of the perpetrators of the priestly banalization of the sacred.

In other words, a topological and statespace approach is called for: the persistent Platonic-Kantian assumptions about irreducible yet articulable categories of experience, which plague the Western tradition and make it so characteristically stupid, fail because they are essentially a confusion of method with metaphysics. Western thinking is typically brilliant in analytic method, and obtuse in synthetic speculation. But speculum means "mirror", and it was typical of the high middle ages, with its urge to summarize all knowledge into a bounded sphere, to produce literary specula - and by so doing approximate a long awkward journey back to preaxial mythological coherence, which said so much with densely packed details. But very little of the requisite dreaminess is present for these mirrors to function as divinatory aids: illuminated manuscripts are clearly such hypnoid divinatory aids, but despite their roots in sublime Celtic metallurgy, they speak largely of cloistered stink, rather than florid excursions.

All this becomes salient when comparing Western speculative philosophy with the Chinese tradition, which in my view more successfully preserved Neolithic means of cultivating and transmitting intuitive disciplines. The explicitly logographic nature of Chinese played no small part: the core Chinese lexicon of radicals are all pictorial in origin and many are still recognizable. The logograph implies the likeness of the thing, the phonemic sequence, and the functional concept itself: signified, signifier, sign - in Peircian terminology, "object", "representamen", "interpretant". Unlike the more obscured semiosis of an alphabetic system, it is the explicit compression of the logograph that is uncanny: the logograph is not the thing it represents, and yet because the graph designates both the object and the phonemic sequence of the word, and the word designates the object, we cannot experience or demonstrate this object by any means which does not seem to invoke the same sequence in reverse. This is probably the reason for the southern Daoist tradition of "finger pointing" in transmitting intangible knowledge - along with occasional beatings for the especially obtuse... But pedantic "semiotics" always invokes a certain need to be slapped, doesn't it?

If this section seems more obscure and heady than I normally allow myself, let it be a testament to the influence of the topic and a witness to my method: what is discussed should percolate through the means, it should recurse and drive you a little mad, else you're not yet thinking to full capacity.

Discerning the writing in the world: why psychology devolves into conspiracy theory in the hands of the inept. Why psychology begins as animism. Why there is always an element of the superstitious in any psychological interpretation: every interpretation is properly considered a placeholder for a more complex experience. But the reduction of complexity and the suppression of implication, is precisely the function of consciousness: one must understand it as a useful falsification, else one has failed to understand one's own understanding - definition of postaxial technocratic arrogance.

Another point from information theory I should mention, is that the transmission of information depends upon uncertainty in the occurrence of signs: every meaningful communication requires a probabilistic headroom, a contained entropic space - otherwise it is merely formulaic redundancy. As I've hinted, "punitive normalcy" is this kind of redundancy: or rather, it is an attempt at the erasure of meaning through the expansion of the domain of redundancy. Freudian repression may not be just "pressing down" as the words re-pression and Verdrängung suggest, or defensive egoic "censure", or Kleinian "splitting": it may be more like an overwritten palimpsest, an erasure through repetitive redundancy - a kind of antitrance. It's noteworthy that the Ericksonian method of hypnotic induction often depends upon the frightfully unexpected - the man was capable of surprising bluntness, of an almost Daoist intensity: a healing trance, a desirable trance, requires first that an antitrance be disturbed... The slightest nudge in the right place, and what seemed like an immovable edifice of the uncanny - this overwritten, years-long trance of neurotic fixation, can move. Much of what is uncanny in human psychology is precisely this kind of doubling: everything is plainly said, plainly visible, the history of a person is written on the face - and yet everyone pretends not to know how to read.

Cangjie, as I understand the myth, is the critical juncture between divinatory seeing and blind literacy: a visionary made explicit what was implicit, and forever after those signs no longer function as magical invocations - or they do, but no one knows it. The history of most of the teachers of psychology I know of, follows a similar pattern: Freudians ruined the potency of Freudian concepts, the students of Erickson turned his art into a suspiciously "well-meaning" psychotherapeutic blandishment, the history of the influence of Heraklitus is one long misunderstanding and slander after another... As the Daoists say, one must return to the source, and be nourished by the wordless.

The careful reader will notice that there are at least two competing models of the uncanny in what I've said: that the uncanny is invasive informative redundancy as a result of Freudian repression, and that the uncanny arises from the instability of signification. But they are not so different: in both cases, something which means something explicitly, also implies something which its very meaning obscures. Every sign is written atop something else.

Unconscious phenomena are compressed: which in informational terms, means low redundancy in the message. I frequently speak of "overdetermination": nothing characterizes the dreamstate, like an object that is many things at once. The sign similarly, is many things at once. But it is the intrusion of unconscious repressive schemata into consciousness, which most visibly and daily gives us the experience of the uncanny: repression compresses data into the very means of obscuring it - namely redundancy. This is why brilliant psychoanalytic interpretation usually begins from some mundane neglected detail - often something the patient hesitated to mention it was so trivial, "not worth mentioning", as people say. But people leave the most important clues in the margins, in their garbage, and their footnotes: it's not for nothing that postmodern hermeneutics has its roots in the Jewish passion for endless textual commentary - Levinas as the reluctant rabbi-godfather of postmodern philosophy...

Have I been understood? The strategy of repression is not, as is usually assumed, merely denial and inhibition: fully developed repression hides everything in plain sight. This too, is part of how and why fully committed religious folk, like the Amish, can feel that everything is sacred and "belongs to God": everything means itself, and something else entirely. That programs of repression could possibly return us to a "state of grace", to the vision of an illuminated manuscript written upon the world - that too, should be no surprise to anyone willing to understand the functional value of postaxial religious entrainment. To regain the sacred, at any cost to our instinctual coherence - which in civilizational contexts is skewed and hopeless anyway: that's the winning formula which will repeat many times yet, and why I expect global religiosity to surge right back to where it once was, no matter the distortions involved.

There is yet another distinction worth pointing out here: the difference between natively unconscious process, and what I call repressive schemata. This was an important point Freud brought up more than once, which is generally missed: repressed content is hidden amongst the innocently unconscious, like a fugitive in disguise. The difference is qualitative and difficult to discern until it's probed: repressed material slithers away, vanishes, or plays dead. Unlike everything else in the dreamstate, it often refuses to transform when perceived: that's a sure sign that you've cornered a highly compressed signal which needs precisely this disguise and no other...

When the Netsilik and all traditional peoples describe their tunraq, their personal guardian spirits, their visions, they are describing their dreams and hallucinations: this is the stage before humanity has learned to distinguish between waking and dreaming, seeing and seeing. Not that this distinguishment represents an advance on all fronts: much has been lost, since we began talking our children out of their imagination. Much that was formerly known and experienced communally, is now repressed and solely the domain of psychosis, unguided adolescent psychedelia, and the occasional intrepid psychologist. The "supersane", is what one of them once called this domain: it's been noted many times, that the onset of schizophrenia contains almost identical characteristics to the shamanistic initiation. But it's not that being crazy is somehow better: contained and controlled hallucination was always the ancient goal. As much hallucination as is fruitful for the sake of insight and power: there seems to be a more or less constant ratio of children born every generation, who bear an excess of insight. This excess of understanding seeks shape, generates perceptual traces - it is not only the perceptual apparatus playing with itself and finding positive feedback loops, it is the exploitation of perceptual marginalia for the purposes making consciously comprehensible what is otherwise too latent and unconscious to be manipulable.

Homo sapiens is burdened with its frontal lobe: a gross excess of unsettled intelligence freed from instinctual discharge, channeled and amplified by the linguistic faculty, reaching an unstable criticality when constrained by repression, and finally emerging like a supercoherent laser, but without any unambiguous instinctual terminus - this is the danger we represent to ourselves.

That we took so long to "emerge" from Pleistocene nomadism, is not merely an artifact of technological acceleration: our ancestors were by no means and in no way dumber than we are. It's a dirty little secret of paleontology, that the human brain has actually decreased in volume since about 20,000 BC: we already reached the adaptive maximum of excess cleverness. Moreover, we already perfected the means to contain this intelligence... The kind of endless anxiety, crippling neurosis, hyperalgesia and hypochondria we suffer from in modernity, would never have been tolerated nor remotely viable in that rigorous past: so much of the concern with spirits and the supernatural, is the adaptive means of discharging, redirecting, and reappropriating our surplus intelligence. "Idle hands are the playground of the devil": this means, too much leisure is bad for the clever ape, because he will begin hallucinating with the same kind of ferocity all his kind employs in masturbation. "Thinking" is hallucination which stimulates the sympathetic nervous system: in other contexts known as dreaming.

That our ancestors did not distinguish between dreaming and waking - again this is not due to lack of intelligence, nor to a lack of honesty. It's not even strictly true: they knew very well the difference, but considered the "spirit world" - in our language, hallucination - to be equally valid forms of information. They weren't just lying, either to themselves out of weakness of mind, nor to everyone else for the sake of shamanistic power - although this certainly happened frequently - a powerful shaman reports genuine visions. Falsified visions may have a populist, shortlived impact - the scam artist has always been with us and always will - but there are also completely sincere medicine men, who report what they see. This is why many of their visions and spirits are so strange, so unexpected, so specific:

The following is the list of spirits owned by Iksivalitaq, the last practicing shaman among the Netsilik:

1. Kingarjuaq, big mountain, about three inches long and one inch high, with black and red spots. The shaman could remove this tunraq from his mouth, where it was in the habit of staying, and make it run on his hand.
2. Kanayuq, sea scorpion, residing also in Iksivalitaq's mouth, whence it could show its ugly head.
3. Kaiutinuaq, the ghost of a dead man.
4. Kringarsarut, the ghost of a dead man, big as a needle, with a crooked mouth and one very small ear.
5. Arlu, the killer whale, white, very big.
6. Kunnararjuq, a black dog with no ears.
7. Iksivalitak, the ghost of the shaman's grandfather.

The Netsilik Eskimo, Asen Balikci, §4.10

It's easy to invent gratifying lies - this is almost identical to the social capacity - but it's impossible to fake unconscious depth and the uncanny: yet only a living familiarity with one's own dreams can impart this sense for the difference. Perhaps a good poet knows the difference: Shakespeare cannot be faked, and there's something about his phrasing that is untranslatable.

There is the possibility that psychology will never be a science - that it cannot by definition be science. That psychology is always properly concerned with the "occult", because it is by definition a knowing of that which is hidden: what is unconscious is unknown, uncanny, occult. If the domain of human knowledge were to expand to include that which is unconscious today, psychology would no longer be necessary - or would psychology expand indefinitely? Since its inception, visible in Heraklitus in the West and Zhuangzi in the East, it's long been a question whether our psychologists are discovering the ontogeny of the soul, or inventing fantasies useful to themselves: both, is probably the answer. ψυχῆς ἐστι λόγος ἑωυτὸν αὔξων: one of the peculiarities of consciousness, is the way it grows uncontrollably past its native dampening thresholds - the story is involute, anxiety has no functional limit. Furthermore, one of the peculiarities familiar to anyone who has actually tried to become fully conscious, is that at these asymptotic limits consciousness begins to resemble unconsciousness: a multiplication of concurrent threads, parallel operation, persistent unresolved contradiction, multiplying dimensionality, recursive implications forever collapsing back into condensation and overdetermination - in short, everything which makes consciousness tremble before the task and which spreads awareness too thinly, because it is too costly. Again "awareness" being nothing but reduplicative representation - an inhibitory function: obviously this kind of expensive overhead cannot be tolerated at all levels, and in meditative practice one learns to turn down that flame as low as possible, without falling asleep... The art of psychology is for me this low flame: only a flickering light, so as not to scare away the spirits. Our projective imagination, our filling out what is perhaps only shadow puppetry and tricks of the séance, should not be dismissed: "superstition" often expresses a knowledge otherwise difficult to justify, misplaced perhaps, displaced perhaps necessarily - but nonetheless valid to those with a Grimm Brother's eye for valuable lore.

If it's possible for psychology to become the "queen of the sciences", then it is important she remain a queen: that is aloof, inscrutable, both more and less than mere woman - the "virgin queen". Something to inspire us, cast doubt in us, and draw on sources of myth and power: psychology must not be allowed to become a bureaucrat's tabulation exercise, a correlation of probabilities and measurements - but nor should it become a "carnival of the soul", a breeding ground for neon charlatanism, a means of mystifying the credulous. It should be neither too certain of its attainments, nor permissive of vacuous showmanship, nor encouraging of the moral actor and the well-meaning of clumsy dolts: it should at all times seek the truth function in the human creature - it should welcome wickedness and deceit and willful reversals without losing sight of them, because these too are means of telling the truth. Psychology in our age perhaps above all, needs to turn away the vaguely well-meaning and welcome the crisply wicked: in wickedness there is much more sincerity and power to heal. To find cruelty in the good, vulnerability in the charlatan, and ignorance in the knowledgeable.

Everything is divided, nothing is complete
Everything looks impressive, do not be deceived

David Byrne

Put on your anthropologist's spectacles, and take a look at the popular depiction of superior extraterrestrial life: the limbs are flimsy and weak, the body gaunt, the head and braincase engorged. The overall impression is grotesque. Why? Because they no longer need their bodies. Only the mind matters. They are hopelessly dependent on technologies to survive. Here is the naked expression of the real ambitions of technocratic civilization: to transcend the body, to live among the stars. Is it any accident that the most geriatric cultures seem to evolve towards a similar wish to evaporate, to become ethereal, elongated, sexless, personless: to live among cloud vapor like the Chinese, or among starstuff like the Egyptians?

More and more we understand that Euro-American culture is too fatigued to hold much promise. The future is elsewhere. We want to see it, we want to be transitional figures, we want to translate the heritage of the last 2,000 years for the benefit of the next 1,000. What matters? Overcoming latent Christian morality. Overcoming the stalemate of Western politics. Overcoming the reliance on fossil fuels. Overcoming the alienation from the body.

There are at least three factors which contribute to the likelihood of eventual global economic decline:

1. Depletion of fossil fuels

2. Depletion of arable land

3. Overpopulation

Take note of what's not on this list: global warming is largely a red herring. Climate change is already a fact, but the consequences may take anywhere between 10 and 1,000 years to play out. Moreover, climate change by itself does not represent something we could not overcome. If Florida and Venice and Amsterdam are swallowed by the sea, if tunafish and polar bears go extinct, if firestorms and hurricanes become more common: none of this matters at the millennial timescale. In fact what most people are unaware of, is that the earth regularly undergoes massive climate change due to the glaciation cycle with periodicities of 40,000 and 100,000 years – otherwise known as Milankovitch cycles. This means that hominids have lived through at least three or four ice ages even in places where they'd be seriously affected by it: Europe and the northern Asian steppe. In other words, climate change is an old enemy we've beaten many times before.

What will hurt much more immediately is quite simple. It is much less arcane, much more personal, and much more inconvenient for those activists and moralists for whom climate change and global extinction rates serve as beloved effigies. The problem I'm speaking of stares us all in the face every day, yet it is something almost everyone in the first world has never really known: hunger.

It's amazing how no one listens to the experts: Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, called “father of the green revolution”, credited with preventing the starvation of a billion people – and yet no one wants to hear him talk about overpopulation and the uncertain future of food. It's very simple:

1. There are too many human beings. To grasp the scale, realize that there is now more human biomass on the earth than all other wild mammalian forms of life combined. Adding our ecologically expensive livestock to the figure results in a mass greater even than all the blue-green algae of the ocean. And again adding our cereal crops comes out to a mass greater even than all the fish in the world.

2. There is effectively no more arable land and most of it is already cultivated at maximum. The only way to procure more, is to remove more forest. This will probably happen despite the consequences.

3. The only reason we have so much food is due to the exploitation of petroleum in transportation and the production of synthetic fertilizers. The “green revolution” lies partly in better strains, but much more so in increasing the yields of arable land using machinery powered by fossil fuels and inorganic fertilizers whose production is made possible by fossil fuels. This in concert with lower infant mortality is what made the population explosion of the 20th century possible.

Let's make this even simpler. The energy our bodies consume must come from somewhere. Ultimately all ecological energy is solar energy, via photosynthesis. So if we've always consumed solar energy and still do, what's the problem? To answer this we'll outline our ecological history in three phases:

1. The hunter-gatherer era. For at least one million years, that is for the vast majority of the existence of our ancestors, Homo species hunted and gathered food from their environment. As emerging apex predators, we consumed prey which were in turn much more numerous, just as they still are in the wild today: many rabbits, few hawks. Imagine eating a wild antelope: the antelope's meat was grown from the grass, which grew from the soil and was powered by the sun. The antelope has “gathered” the energy for you: you need only harvest it. The same is true for any plants consumed. We sat at the top, or near the top, of a pyramid with a very wide base.

2. The agricultural era. For roughly the last 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has learned to produce more food from less land by controlling plant growth. We both eat the plants directly and raise animals on those plants. Yet the net energy per capita harvested in an agricultural system is not necessarily greater than hunting and gathering: farming is hard work. Then why farm? Because population pressure demands it. When a wild ecosystem can no longer support a burgeoning predator population, the usual consequence is depopulation of the predator followed by recovery of the prey. This no doubt happened many times in human history. Agriculture circumvents this ecological balance. Thus human civilization as we know it begins at this point: agriculture allowed not only greater concentrations of human beings than ever before, but made wealth possible, and hence class distinction and mass warfare – civilization did not triumph because it is “better” for anyone, but because it is overwhelming. The main limiting factor in this phase is the reliance on human and animal labor and the difficulties of transportation and storage. Empires such as Rome and China were therefore sprawling, and transporting food from the rural periphery to the urban center was a constant concern. Meanwhile, most of the population must be engaged in agricultural work: this was the shape of the ancient world.

3. The industrial era. The discovery and manipulation of fossil fuels began in England in earnest at around 1800. For only about 200 years now, we've been burning coal and oil on an industrial scale. It's not clever technologies and innovations and wise planning that has made the last 200 years an era of exponential human population growth: it's the cheap energy of fossil fuels. And what are fossil fuels? Concentrated solar energy from millions of years of photosynthesis. All talk of inevitable human progress and the salvation by technology is blind to the glaring fact that our rise to godlike status in the 20th century has been a jetfueled monstertruck headed for the stadium wall at full speed…

Let's not confuse skepticism of petroleum dependence with some naïve formula like “oil is evil”. The mastery of combustion is the original human genius: animal life itself, the human body included, is nothing but a furnace. Oxygen + hydrocarbons = fun. As someone who lives “off-grid”, I know the value of fire. Therefore I'm highly doubtful that those who imagine they oppose petroleum production and its more obvious damages in the shape of hydraulic fracturing, have taken the trouble to try living without petroleum products, including the food they eat. But what is likely to be missed even more, is not just the miracle of the combustion engine and the energetic density of gasoline, but cheap plastics. Unless it's an industrial secret kept from the general public, there is no feasible way to efficiently mass produce high quality plastics from recycled plastic: virgin oil will be perhaps more highly prized for this reason alone than any other.

One important fact need be emphasized above all else: food prices are currently dependent on cheap fuel. Oil is the magic energy we turn into cheap surplus food. Before the industrial revolution, about 80% of the population was involved in agriculture. This number is now around 4% in developed nations.

This incredible food surplus is only possible with cheap, readily mined fossil fuels. Again, fossil fuel is nothing but concentrated solar power. There is no other known way to cheaply concentrate solar radiation on our timescale; none of the alternative energy sources produce sufficient net energy at a rate that would allow both complete dependence on such sources and the maintenance of our current high energy lifestyle. This is also ignoring the still unsolved problem of the battery, which has an energetic density many times lower than fossil fuels. All the proud little graphs you see about expanding green energy production are measures of electricity production only. Look at the total energy produced and consumed compared to the output of any alternative source: fossil fuels account for about 80% of all “total primary energy supply”, according to the International Energy Agency as of 2018. The next largest source is “biofuel” – essentially woodburning – at 10%: which means that 90% of our energy still comes from setting things on fire. The renewable sources like solar and wind in which we place so much hope come to… 2%. The rest is enormously expensive hydroelectric dams and nuclear fission. And according to the same experts, what energy source is most likely to see the most stable growth worldwide in the next few decades? Coal. In the 21st century, the “Space Age”, the “Information Age”, when we're supposed to be living on the moon with personal helicopters and robotic bodies – coal will probably assume an even greater role than it already has alongside natural gas, simply because there's still a lot of both.

Forget the gas in your car: what will hurt is the rising price of real food. What is already happening, is that cheaper manufactured substitute “food” will gradually assume the leading role in the diet of the majority. Soy and corn and other low quality calorie sources will only become more commonplace. Animal protein, fresh vegetables, tropical fruits, and other costlier produce will gradually become something only the rich can afford. Peak oil drives all of this.

Because of fracking, oil shale, and certain reserves like the Venezuelan deposits, my guess is that we may have another 50 years of business-as-usual ahead of us. But by 2050, it seems unlikely that food price inflation will not be somewhat visible in the first world. Yet due to the tremendous inertia behind us, the astounding ingenuity of oil producers to extract their product, alongside certain unexploited resources such as the huge quantity of methane under the ocean floor, it's possible that another two centuries of fossil fuel dependence will pass before we absolutely must find another energy model. All of this may happen slowly and gently. However, in this scenario the average quality of life in the first world will decline, until there is a small elite who live as they did in the 20th century, and a vast underclass of the protein-starved, frustrated, and vaguely confused. Destratification and homogeneity at the bottom level will emerge. Urban centers will gradually, perhaps imperceptibly, degenerate and decay, while the wealthy few sequester themselves in remote fortresses and “gated communities”. Global trade will slow, and the infinite consumer paradise we currently enjoy will be constricted and expensive. However, due to the invincible nature of human adaptation, there's also likely to be many small populations in rural places practicing barter economy and some cooperation. There may even be places relatively untouched, which by virtue of simply being left alone will quickly recover their natural abundance: Java, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Hawaii. Life in a few out of the way places may be better than ever, and this era of “decline” may turn out to be one of the most creative and interesting times to have lived.

Among artists, Hayao Miyazaki seems to grasp our fate best. Nausicaä (風の谷のナウシカ) articulates this kind of distant future of vestigial technology mixed with a renewed reliance on the more archaic. One day there will be no significant fossil fuel reserves remaining. We will revert to human and animal labor, the slow ways of wind and water power, and biomass combustion: woodburning, steampower, forged iron, etc. “Ancient” technology from our era will be much coveted and little understood.

Coal liquefaction may take the place of petroleum. There's supposed to be enough proven coal reserves to last us another 150 years even accounting for acceleration. You think the future is electric cars? The future is much more likely to contain at least 100 years of coal-fired industrial activity on an even larger scale than presently. This all becomes even more likely once you understand that China has immense coal reserves. Since the Chinese are known to be farsighted and capable of multigenerational leadership, one wonders what the plan could be relative to environmental degradation, global food shortages, and depleted fuel supply. My guess: they don't care. World domination through untold accumulated wealth is the plan. The cost in ecological terms is irrelevant. If the resulting world is hot, hazy, and miserable: so be it. That's the real 中国梦. – I won't translate here, because we better get used to seeing it just like that.

China: si vis bellum, para pacem. So much rests on what she does. The struggle between China and the States for dominance: will it ever erupt into a military conflict or will it remain economic? Will they be content to rule Asia? Will the tension around Taiwan snap? For all its farsighted economic cunning, did Chinese leadership stumble and fail to account for the geriatric topheavy demographic aftereffect of the single-child rule? Will it sag under its own aging population or will its immense accumulated wealth be turned into a technocratic army to rival the American? Will its corner-cutting, peasant-like shoddy workmanship play out there too, and will it fail to stay ahead of the American talent for weapon engineering? What will come of its ownership of African resources? Will Darfur be a mere prelude?

There is yet another term to familiarize yourself with: “peak phosphorus”. Before the efficient manufacture of fertilizer from mineral phosphorus was discovered in the 20th century, the availability of fertilizer was a significant limiting factor in human population growth. There was a time in the late 19th century when guano counted as among the chief items of industrial trade in the Pacific. But there is only so much easily mined rock phosphorus, and the problem will only compound as petroleum fuels become scarcer. Again, I see two astoundingly stupid factors at play: 1) The experts aware of these problems don't talk about it much, or aren't listened to. 2) Climate change and extinction of vulnerable species is so much more appealing to the general vanity of the environmentalist – so much more so than talking about where our future manure might come from – that we generally remain ignorant of even the most basic facts of 21st century livelihood. “The Manure of the Future” has a passable death metal ring to it, no?

I don't predict collapse: indeed I've tried to write this chapter with a minimum of self-assured predictions – we'd be better served by learning to see current trajectories, past patterns, and the holistic character than indulging in believing we know. We're better off learning to dream, than to “know”. To dream wholeheartedly is to learn to live with the unknown, and sometimes the unliveable. Also as psychologists, we must suspect a projective resentment and an unanalyzed wish-fulfillment whenever doom is prophesized… and beware of this narcotic.

Global capitalism is too robust for “collapse”: it not only absorbs failure efficiently, it thrives on multiple failures. Decentralization and deregulation may result in an ugly, uninspired, ignoble world – but it outcompetes restraint and beauty every time. We musn't believe that our world is the “best of all possible worlds” by any measure: efficiency and the average prevails over the longterm – evolution is not the triumph of the “fittest”, but the most numerous.

4% is that magical annual rate of change by which worlds can be turned upside down, without anyone caring or remembering any other reality.

All “concern for the environment” is yet another red herring. I doubt whether “the man” even needs to encourage this distraction. The hysterical attachment to some obscure species on another continent – doesn't it make all legitimate discourse on the fate of human civilization seem silly? A tree frog will disappear from the Amazon? No one cares nor ever will, because it was never about the frog. Environmentalists want two things simultaneously: to feel powerful, and to feel blameless. To exercise power with a clear conscience: something not easily obtained today. What do their actions say? That they want to continue living precisely the same as any other first world slob, but “greenwashed” with the same sickly teal-green of smug satisfaction their Subaru wears. But make no mistake: if the price of food becomes exorbitant, if famine ever strikes, a type so given to moral posturing will hesitate all the less to eat anything, everything, and anyone.

No one wants to talk about overpopulation. Since the 1970s, the problem has faded from the popular discourse. Scientists in isolated niches assure each other that a target of 12 billion is not too many; but they don't talk openly about it enough for the whole picture to emerge. I once asked a sociologist from the United Nations this question, and she merely expressed her certainty that population stabilization will occur – but amazingly, did not seem to be aware of the energetic demand involved in feeding that number: overspecialization and moral fear keeps the science dampened. Yet if we had unlimited energy, we could probably get away with it. Even given shortages of arable land, inorganic fertilizer, and fresh water, combined with a global loss of biodiversity, climate instability, ocean acidification, and perhaps even a great dieoff of the algae that produce so much of our oxygen – with enough surplus energy all of this could be overcome, aggressively. The result might be ugly, but we could force the planetary system into supporting an absurd human biomass, indefinitely. And with enough planning and foresight and realism, a sustainable model could probably still be achieved. The problem is certainly not our lack of cleverness. It is the modern weak stomach that hinders us.

The ecologically sane perspective almost no one is prepared to hear, is that 100 million human beings is probably more than enough and already too generous, since 10 million is near the global maximum for most large land animals: can you imagine the paradise this world could be, for us and the other creatures who live here, if we had both the modesty and the courage to control ourselves? Can you imagine the godlike standard of living and abundance such a people would enjoy? With a single stroke, within a few generations, we could reduce human population to a reasonable number which would allow us not 50 but maybe 1,000 years to solve the energy problem at our leisure.

We have some of the most obedient populations that have ever been: propaganda and a shifting cultural norm could work wonders. Wouldn't it be wise if we finally put all that morality and obedience to work for something worthwhile? China has proven what can be accomplished with minimal coercion: although there have been costs, including the millions of “missing girls” – overall it's remarkable how humanely enacted the one-child policy seems to have been. Yet as a freethinker it's unpalatable to consider government involvement in something so personal and bodily as childbirth, else it encourages human trafficking and other ills…

You see, even this much vision and farsightedness is too “violent” for our feeble hearts and moral sentimentality. No one wants blood on their hands: interestingly we are more comfortable with the blood of unborn children than unconceived children. And absolutely no one in the Western world will touch the issue of sterilization – even the idea of humanely incentivized sterilization is too forceful, too much leadership, too rational. Yet one day the facts will force the issue, and we will have pissed this opportunity down our collective legs like the frightened children we are.

No one seems to understand that the project of depopulation is not about wanting death, but life. A depopulated world is a world of unbounded opportunity: to have the wealth of the past without the burden of the present, the promise of the future without the failures of the old. It's a question of setting our children free: I consistently find myself siding against the rapacious gerontocracy – so greedy for a life they never began living. When did we become incapable of a sacrifice for future generations?

More of us does not equal more humanity: we do less now with more than ever, communicate and think less now with more noise than ever. Every cultural blossoming happens within a relatively small group of freely borrowing and rivalrous peers. On the other side of this human infestation, an unlimited human renaissance hesitates on the horizon like an uncertain guest. We are speaking of nothing less than the redemption of the project of civilization: surely more than one heart stirs at this thought.

This is no “greenwashed” agenda: taking the most anthropocentric perspective imaginable, reckoning even a hostility towards nature, depopulation is obviously the right choice. But I've come to understand that there is no chance of it happening willingly: necessity, destruction, wrath, disease must be paid their due. Death will have its wergeld one way or another.

I know I shouldn't be amazed how rarely anyone puts all the pieces together, despite how readily obtained all this information is. The despair and guilt evoked, the unconscious resistances, the temptation to resort either to wishful doom or willful ignorance: these forces in concert are too much for most observers, and so they fall either into a self-congratulatory and impotent “green party” attempting to save the world with recycling and bicycles; or a more realistic but even more heavily moralized status quo which repeats “we can feed 10 billion people” without ever putting that figure next to a realistic assessment of shrinking energy supply and the cost to human health; or the easiest position of the flag-waving march of profiteers.

The apemind fundamentally believes in reward and punishment: this one wants to see humanity punished for its excesses, that one wants to be rewarded for his obedience, this one wants to see the weak punished for their weakness, that one wants to see the strong punished for their strength, this one wants to be rewarded for his morality, that one wants to be rewarded for his immorality…

Yet despite all this, I know that I am not alone in calmly thinking these thoughts to their rational conclusion: there is as yet no magic replacement for fossil fuel; we are unwilling to give up our lifestyle; overpopulation is a fact; the standard of health is already declining; current moral climate absolutely precludes any discussion of population control; if we fail to take action this century the future is highly uncertain… And we arrive back where we started: COVID-19 as immunosuppressant primer. But again, through experience I've learned to doubt the existence of this much planning and foresight and the reckless courage a real conspiracy would require: consider for example how easy a terrorist attack of a variety of kinds would be, and how remarkable it is that hardly anyone attempts it… The planes that struck the Twin Towers in 2001 were hijacked with little more than butter knives. In addition, we must be suspicious of how much we want a conspiracy of doom… The truth is hardly ever this gratifying and glorious.

There is a still darker possibility. My darkest vision yet: that we will succeed in developing an alternative energy source in time to prevent constriction of global capitalism, that the freemarket will prevail, that our inexhaustible technological apemind will “save” us, that there will be no great reckoning, that we will not be forced to give up industrial agriculture, that we will not experience depopulation, that we will not be forced to relearn the use of our bodies. In this longterm dystopia, humanity becomes ever more reliant on technology, ever more sickly, ever more pampered and shielded and watched over, ever more dependent on drugs and medical intervention, until what remains is a grotesque obese invalid. In some places, in a Walmart parking lot feverdream, one sees this already happening. It's possible that our inexhaustible cleverness will hold off nature's final triumph for millennia, by which time we will have become truly and perhaps irreversibly wretched.

The countless drones of the herd trample each other for the sake of the latest wireless toy dispensed by the glistening teats of Chinese manufacturing – yet we believe these same people, when they finally learn what hunger really is, will not turn to cannibalism? The “goodness of the human heart”: I don't believe a word. What I do believe, is the indelible will to live and adapt of the human spirit. Even in the darkest of scenarios, there will certainly be survivors and even those who thrive. In fact, an age of “darkness” such as we're describing here, could turn out to be the golden age for an entirely different type of human being than what thrives now: the violent, predatory, and joyous type could emerge again, shake loose the moral crust which was after all only lightly adhered, and carry on as though the Pleistocene had never ended. And centuries later, in the long aftermath, there could be another golden age of peace, longevity, and abundance such as the human being has rarely known: a kind of island life, a medieval pace, an agrarian simplicity, a dream worthy of Old Long Ears himself.

There is virtually no risk of human extinction at any timescale worth discussing: as much as I share the sentiment, nothing damages the realistic assessment of ecological limits like an overreaching and wishful prophecy of annihilation – it makes the advocates of infinite growth seem more reasonable. I choose to deposit my misanthropy elsewhere: psychology as the heatsink of unrelenting misanthropy, rechanneled like a steampowered auger into this yet more realistic and more appreciative worldview… My ambition is to love both shadow and light, blood and nectar, wrath and joy. We are the indomitable ape: to imagine that none of us still possess the instincts and the grit to live like our ancestors did for hundreds of thousands of years, is to betray not only what one wishes upon one's neighbor, but what one already knows about oneself…

Let's try on this possibility: that the new Middle Ages has already begun. That the years 1496 to 1969 will be considered peak modernity. That no one will perceive it this way for many centuries. That the next millennium will see the slow resurgence of feudalism and the old world order: massive wealth concentration at the top of an international aristocracy; the corporation will eventually resemble the old guilds more than anything else; mercenary armies will return to predominance; the nationstate will dissolve into monarchies, empires, fiefdoms; China will regain its place as the wealthiest and most stable empire, a title it held for 2,000 years until the 1800s; Europe will become the preferred vacation and retirement center of the elite few; India will continue to be overcrowded and chaotic; sub-Saharan Africa will continue to be exploited and never get a chance at post-industrial consumerism; the US will age, mellow, partially fragment, and become increasingly irrelevant – as Britain has. But just as the Byzantine empire continued the Roman traditions for 1,000 years after Rome itself decayed, just as the Islamic world blossomed so unexpectedly, there are many unforeseen possibilities – and “medieval times” were not such “dark ages” for many. Ignorance and peasantry would not necessarily be a worse fate for the millions of thrashing and drowning “informed consumers”; literacy and the illusion of democracy has not been proven to improve humankind generally…

For some readers it may seem out of place and hopelessly out of fashion for the same book to discuss prehistory, compassion, Wittgenstein, and peak oil. Others may only call it hubris. But to my eyes this is a timidity and a polite academic waltz I refuse to obey: all those with the intellectual prowess to face down these questions with the proper historical and psychological scope preemptively lock themselves away and hide their ignorance of the world behind obfuscation. It's analogous to what's happened to the natural sciences: biologists don't spend time in nature anymore. Our philosophers don't acquire experience; they curate vocabulary.

Therefore while we may be mistaken about the imagined ecological reckoning on the horizon, we are not wrong about the importance of confronting what our world is and will be. Moreover as long as all environmentalism refuses to be honest about the fictitious quality of our moral attitudes, as long as we cannot stop fantasizing about “nonviolent life” and the abolition of exploitation, as long as we continue to imagine that 10 or 12 billion human beings is not grotesque and irresponsible, we seem bound to make many fatal errors that future generations will not forgive.

No solution. When we point all this out – the maladaptation of modern humankind, the awkward fit of these Neolithically conditioned genders into current roles, the pathological origin of our morality – we hear you responding: “But what then is the solution? You can't negate all the bright and eager hopes of liberated humanity without asserting your alternative!” But we can. There is no reason at all to assume an ideal arrangement of civilization, or that humankind is fated to live with a maximum of both technology and happiness. The nationstate is not natural, nor fated, nor guaranteed to ever be anything but a monster. We must stop hallucinating an “invisible hand” where there is none. We must stop foisting responsibility for this experiment called civilization upon some absent implicit divine intention, as all politics and most philosophy still does. We are in the midst of a 10,000 year experiment, and although it initially seemed to yield grander beauty and wonders that redeemed the untold suffering it cost, it has gone awry and to some of us, no longer seems to justify itself.

Therefore, what has become my best wishes to humankind: we will not adopt another energy source before the end of cheap fossil fuel. We will not avert the consequences. We will experience depopulation.

Yet remain cheerful! We refuse the gloomy attitude of the postmodern intellectual elite with nothing better to do than dream up reasons for fashionable ennui and self-pity: the last 200 years has been a party of epic proportions and the climax is nearing. The “singularity” is nearing, although it may not be what some hope: a spectacle of chaos and hunger and horror not seen by human eyes in many years. But the harder the brake, the better the aftermath: it's well known that the generations after the Bubonic Plague enjoyed a greatly increased standard of living and a new freedom which catalyzed the Renaissance.

What does the overall course we take now look like? Like an immature young man having inherited big money too soon, like his week-long party you've stumbled into where he blows most of it in one go. When else will you get a chance to crush a Lamborghini with a backhoe?

The Mad Max apocalyptic fantasies multiply: why? Because we want the end. We spend our inheritance of black gold like we can't spend it fast enough – we want out! Out of this mess, these unliveable cities with unliveable noise and unliveable constraint – and even more so these unliveable moral demands, this sense of constant surveillance, constant failure, unending guilt – the panopticon must topple! The totem is full? Topple the totem! Our ancestors are calling us back to their ways and we want to take our place beside them…

This is an excerpt from Bartholomy's book, The Moral Disease.

Read along with me.

Music is Paper Thin, from my album Dark Kernel.

0.

Every time I go out into our world, it looks older and more unwell. Why? Sometimes I wonder whether it isn't just my own vision that's changed: the more time I spend in my wilderness among vibrant animal life, the more tired and half-dead the human world appears. But I prefer to believe that the respite from constant exposure has granted me a little perspective: I believe I'm seeing something all of us already know.

The firstworld is aging: there is the raw demographic fact of the swell of babyboomers reaching their 70s. The firstworld is unwell: there is the raw physiological fact that chronic illness gets worse and more common every day. But even these facts do not account for what I see: the spirit of decrepitude grows more bold. What defines this spirit? Greed, envy, malice, hunger for pity, an aggressively unwell attitude, petty witchcraft, ill-will: hostility to youth and health.

What has been inflicted upon children in the last few years in the name of "saving lives", is exhibit A: there are actually a great many forces in our world which would like to inflict upon the young a kind of premature old age, a biological poisoning, a suffocation of their right to be children. That millions of healthy kids were muzzled and filled with experimental gene therapies, that their very bodies were exploited as the ceremonial grounds of a mass hysteria and political paroxysm - is surely reason enough to risk a serious diagnosis. Yet again, we must suspend our moral timidities and attempt to tell the truth. Telling timid lies and "hoping for the best", is an attitude of complicity. It is not perpetration, but complicity which makes mass crimes possible.

Several factors contribute to the current spiritual and physical burden of the elderly:

• The baby boom. The fact of demographic unbalance.
• Technologies of longevity. More and more, it's possible to extend a life without the slightest consideration to the idea that it might not be a good idea.
• The increase of capital gains versus the value of income. Once rich, it's easier than ever to remain rich. Since the late 1970s, income purchasing power is lower every year - meaning that young people, despite their high productivity, are less rewarded than the old with their accumulated wealth. Combined with longer lifespans, this means wealth is hoarded at the far tail end of age and inheritance may not happen until long after it might be useful. Many will not see their inheritance until they themselves are elderly, and even then it will have been squandered on enriching the increasingly lucrative biomedical industries, which have every reason to discourage "death with dignity" and encourage the moral timidity surrounding the question.
• Dissolution of familial bonds. Social and geographical mobility undermines the role of grandparents as secondary childcare: they provide no useful service.
• Knowledge obsolescence and wisdom extinction. Our elders generally know nothing worth knowing in any economic sense: this only becomes more acute the further into a realized Information Age and total service economy we proceed. In addition, the consumerist self-indulgence of the babyboomer generation, combined with the unprecedented ease of their prosperity, has rendered them spiritually null: they have no wisdom to impart.
• The epidemic of alienation. Social isolation and accelerating reliance on the Internet for social bonds leaves the elderly more stranded than ever. They are therefore more desperate and resentful than ever.
• Shopping as consolation: the more expendable funds are utilized to fend off the eternal attack of loneliness and despair, the more the old become a nuisance in public spaces - which in our world is largely the space of consumption. Repeatedly driving to and from the store to purchase a handful of unnecessary crap, parading around parking lots alone, dwarfed by one's oversized vehicle like the inversion of a clown car - six thousand pounds of painted steel encasing an old lady out looking for revenge and a morsel of attention - this is a familiar blighting sight to anyone capable of observation.
• The indulgence and spoiling of the young: due to the misplaced and botched attempts of my generation to raise their kids according to a half-therapized vision of emotional justice, children are taught less respect of elders than ever. This combines with the fact that these elders deserve less respect than ever, to produce a growing but unarticulated hostility between the two.
• Exploitation of the morality of compassion. As the familial bonds which once protected the old weaken, and as they become more glaringly useless, numerous, and in the way, they resort unconsciously to an appeal to the compassion of strangers: every year we find ourselves more beset by other people's neglected grandparents - like pigeons in the park, the merest act of attention and empathy will attract a small crowd...
• Premature aging. As the physical differences between the young and old diminish, as the age of the onset of chronic illness steadily drops, as the physicality of our lives in general diminishes in scope and intensity, as our work and prosperity depends less and less on the strength of the body, the old feel more emboldened relative to the young: exploitation of the doctrine of equality. We are all equally useless and laughable. An old woman can sloppily drive an SUV and write passive-aggressive emails just as well as a 24 year-old man.

The babyboomer generation of the firstworld has benefited from the economic accident of the peak exploitation of fossil fuels and all the low-hanging fruit entailed by postwar economies, more than any other generation ever will. The period between 1950 and roughly 1980 was the easiest time to establish a base of wealth: they are the first and last of the true middle class. Wage has not kept pace with inflation, and wealth sequestration only gets more extreme every year. Simply put, they are spoilt and self-important: there will perhaps not be a more shamelessly materialistic and conspicuously consuming generation within this century. For example, ever noticed how babyboomers enjoy plastic waste? How they love to fill up garbage bags with plastic water bottles and single-serving coffee cartridges because it makes them feel important?

Partly, their parents spoilt them: those who lived through the Great Depression definitely made the mistake of throwing too much wealth and ease at their children in compensation. Partly, they just benefited from one of the best times to party and act out: the hippies never meant anything they said - in the end they generally chose to live much more wastefully and indulgently than their parents.

Because I strive to take prehistory seriously, I'm always seeking to deepen my anthropological perspective. Lately I've been appreciating Asen Balikci's classic, The Netsilik Eskimo. What I find, is that due to the nearly unlivable conditions in which these people lived, their ethnographic profile aptly demonstrates the core human technological package: they had to rely on the fundamentals of human adaptation, or die. Collaborative and independent hunting, toolcraft, skincraft, dogs. Wood, bone, stone, and sinew. Nothing extraneous remains. For example, marriage is an institution but possesses an almost postmodern flexibility, and there is no unnecessary filigree: to get married, the young girl just packs up her belongings and moves in. While I sympathize with the Boasian reaction to premature Frazerian generalizations about "the primitive", I do find that without stupid racist agendas it's actually quite obvious what remains common to homo sapiens: unearthing this core and illuminating its psychological persistence, is one of my longer goals.

And for our current purposes, learning to gaze into the murky looking glass of prehistorical record, into prehistorical instinct, is part of my method: else we are comparing degeneracy with degeneracy, maladaptation with maladaptation, senility with senility. Post-agricultural civilization is perforated by renaissance, not defined by it. Human health and civilizational forces are antagonists, not allies. We are only as young as we are uncivilized.

Avarice is the vice of the old. Confucius laid it out for us:

君子有三戒：少之時，血氣未定，戒之在色；及其壯也，血氣方剛，戒之在斗；及其老也，血氣既衰，戒之在得。

There are three things the gentleman should beware of: in youth when the energy is unsettled, beware of sensuality. In your prime when your energy becomes unyielding, beware of bellicosity. In old age when the energy declines, beware of greed.

Analects, §16.7

Why does an old man become greedy? Obviously there is some adaptive value, in that he's attempting to prepare for the time when he can no longer acquire anything. But why is the threat so much greater now? Because the wealth of the earth has been sequestered. In our nomadic past and thus for 99% of our existence, there were three primary forms of wealth:

1. Children. Healthy progeny was always the first and foremost retirement fund.

2. Knowledge. To become a storehouse of valuable experience, ensured that the young would come to you for advice. Among the Netsilik, the eldest functioning hunter was called inhumataq, "the one who thinks".

3. Honor. To acquire reputation through many services to the tribe in hunting, war, and hardship, ensured that you would not be easily forgotten. Formal hunting alliances are also a form of wealth conditioned by honor, and according to Netsilik tradition were also heritable.

Everything else, including weapons and tools and tents and dogs and clothes, were expendable and replaced often. Wives were not exactly wealth, but a form of investment: offspring was the dividend.

This is the man's perspective. And what about women? Actually almost the same: a good husband is a cash machine, and meat and skins were cash. But it's always in the form of children that wealth is realized. It was common for the Netsilik aging woman to adopt orphans and unwanted children, calling them a "walking stick" for her future.

And as the knowledge of hunting grounds and seasonal variation and toolcraft was the man's secondary retirement fund, herbal lore and skincraft were the old woman's specialties.

The old of the tribe are supposed to be a vital link in the chain, a chain that remained unbroken for at least 400,000 years. They are supposed to be the deep wells of knowing, where one goes to hear echoes of the ancestor's voices, to learn the impossibly ancient songs... But that time is gone: can you understand this? Can you allow yourself to feel that loss? Are we sure we're on the road of progress?

So why do our old become so greedy? Why are the babyboomers in particular so insufferably materialistic? Because there is no legacy. With the final dissolution of even those post-Axial Age religious loyalties which were designed to replace and contain the divisive forces of modernity, and the gradual achievement of a Foucaultian architecture of atomic interchangeable individuals unrooted to anything but momentary political advantage, there is no legacy. Babyboomers have no faith in the cultural longevity to which they are supposed to belong, because they helped destroy it. Because the chain is more broken now than perhaps ever: even the nuclear family, the last vestige of tribal life in the midst of civilizational tensions, is finally eroding. Even gender itself is eroding. Many of the best of us choose not to have children at all: what clearer sign of a dying race than this?

Let it die. European culture wants to die: so be it! I don't suffer from intractable alarmism: there are many other unforeseen peoples and cultures yet to take shape. An inexhaustible magma of cultural invention lies just below the surface of this too-visible rot. The sooner it drowns itself beneath its moral posturing, technocratic suicide, and idiotic fantasies of the "end of gender" and socialist-mediated genetically engineered dystopia, the sooner will the next human renaissance begin.

The plague of the old is primarily a spiritual crisis, and not at all a mere demographic accident. Our contempt should not be mistaken for an adolescent inability to appreciate the gifts of age: actually my generation is ravenous for wisdom, and some of the best of my onetime peers have lost their way precisely because of this eagerness to humble themselves before the promise of superior experience and knowledge - they would not guess that there was nothing to be gained, that they already knew more than their teachers, that the well is dry.

The well is dry: but not because it has been drained. Because the water moved elsewhere. The landscape shifted: the babyboomer generation upon which I feel free to heap so much contempt, lost its way because it failed to integrate and overcome its own challenges - challenges which were primarily conditioned by unprecedented privilege... That this is any great divergence from previous generations is certainly not true - we are only waking up inside the great sinking ship of Western history, which is itself only tossing fitfully within the storm of post-agricultural civilization - yet I do feel confident that in this moment, we are at least glimpsing something characteristic of how and why human cultures age: the average of decrepitude rises, until a threshold is reached in which it suddenly seems that the prematurely old and chronically ill outnumber the young and healthy.

They are innocent. Of course no one in particular is to blame: we're talking about tidal historical forces, in which personal responsibility is at best a useful illusion, along with any generational unity - I use the "babyboomer" designation as merely a teaching aid. Yet they are what they are: everyone's essential innocence relative to the leviathans of history and civilization, does not negate fundamental judgments about viability and worth - contradicting such judgments in the name of compassion can seriously endanger one's health and chances for health.

My goal is to demonstrate to the hopeful reader how telling these truths is possible, without resorting to ugly attitudes or a falsified certainty about solutions. It should be possible to read all this and agree with every word, and still like yourself as much or more at the end of it. Your guilty conscience for having quietly thought much the same thing already, is to be addressed directly. The first step however, is to carefully identify every evasive maneuver you have been tempted to mimic: namely moral posturing, which in this case would feign some certainty in the inviolable and incommensurate value of every human life, no matter what they do or fail to do. To say, "there are too many people around who contribute nothing to the young and the future, because they never became anything worthwhile" - is already too direct a challenge to the religiously conditioned doctrine of equality, which would forbid that we make these judgments explicitly, and prefer that we hide our valuations of human worth behind other masks. The primary hypocrisy at work here, is that moral posturing of this kind is concerned most of all with unarticulated criteria of group exclusion: to avoid being the victim of the ugly bigotry of a frightened group, each one of us has dabbled in redirecting that ugly bigotry upon ready targets. Much of my vocation is to make a target of myself, and by allowing this projection to proceed in controlled isolation, demonstrate both its mechanics and the kind of immunity possible to develop against it. Primarily we're talking about the ability not to react: it is the reaction to the threat of exclusion which inspires false moral attitudes, which then propagate through the community by virtue of inspiring a heightened atmosphere of terror. A false moral attitude is what one uses, immediately before committing something one does not otherwise have the stomach for: group complicity is the first and last defense of the violent but cowardly ape.

Not to react - because actually the more honest responses we're looking for are already present: disgust is healthy, contempt is healthy, the prioritization of the young is healthy. The problem is that these instinctual responses are not allowed to develop, but smothered beneath both the anxiety of being discovered in the wrong alignment relative to group consensus, and intellectually negated by the insistence that some ideal solution be immediately discovered: repressive momenta which are the seeds of mass hysteria. The more we cannot afford honest healthy responses to unhealthy conditions, the more likely hysterical displacement becomes - and hysterical displacement is the medium through which protofascist politics achieve realization.

From the "phylopsychological" perspective, the function of an exaggerated moral attitude is firstly to provoke your rivals into action while the atmosphere of terror persists; secondly to create opportunities for political power via the urgency of persecuting these rivals; and thirdly to accomplish much of the violence which was originally desired both via this persecution and via the collateral damage of their own defense. A great deal of what characterizes the contemporary "left", is the art of provoking the "right" into assuming and acting out repressed impulses: an army of ugly idiots who say and do what we have forbidden ourselves and desire all the more.

Care for the old is an analogous extension of care for the young, which forms the core of the vertebrate capacity for what is questionably termed "altruism", since it's driven ultimately by kin selection. The elderly become the infantile: and in place of our hopes for the future we feel our gratitude and attachment to those who once cared for us. The Netsilik use the same kinship term for great-great-grandparent as they do for great-great-grandchild: the circle of relations closes, one ends where one began. This is a glimpse at the healthy human core as it has existed for 2 million years, with relative uniformity across cultures: the anthropologists report a surprising degree of uniformity in the kinship structures and tribal protocols regarding the concentric circles of relatedness - but since this is all genetically determined, with precise average ratios of relatedness, it's not surprising after all.

In other words, contravening our natural tendency to care for our own should not be taken lightly, whether young or old. But we live rather in a tribeless age in which everyone and no one belongs, in which everyone and no one is your ill-defined kin. And more often than not, even the closest kin tend to fail basic tests of loyalty: contributing factors are not only the lack of explicit tribe, but economic independence, social and geographic mobility, along with the sense that other more useful group loyalties have ascendancy - such as political alignment, and even the vagaries of social media credit is now enough to compete with the much weakened modern family. Internet-mediated sociality is just one more worm in this rotting edifice.

One of the most pernicious aspects of the modern firstworld family, is the way that reckless inclusion is employed as a means of diluting the tribal factors of exclusion, in order to soften its borders and thus permit more bad behavior... Most babyboomers I know, have been quietly setting up weakened family standards of behavior, so that they may regress and act out in their retirement as much as possible...

Suppressing our own compassion, which is as healthy a tribal function as any other, has been painful. It might be easy for loitering scoffers to imagine that someone like myself is unfamiliar or unpracticed in the arts of compassion: yet a complication in my message is that the years I spent tending to the psychological wounds of some of the most hopeless cases in our world - life histories which would make most of our safeguarded middle class woes blush - I would never consider regretting. Confrontation with a little genuine hardship is a warrior's drink. But if I had continued, it would have destroyed me - or at least encouraged the formation of that impenetrable armor which makes most psychotherapists so useless at best and dangerous at worst.

In our sad struggle with compulsive compassion, we're not talking about care for a beloved faithful mother, or sitting with grandfather near the fire listening to his stories of wisdom and wit - we're talking about forever nursing the bereft, those who are afraid to die because they were even more afraid to live. Those who are so insatiably greedy for any reprieve from their own failures that they will endanger the future of humanity itself: those who perpetrated the worst of COVID were not actually the terribly old in body, but the decrepit in spirit. This increasingly bold hostility to youth and health must be confronted directly, without taking leave from the shackles it would impose on us first: that we forever prove and reprove our innocence before we gain the right to question the authority of this sham court... To take merely one example: why is it that I seem to be alone, in pointing out the unthinkable hypocrisy of frittering away at least a trillion dollars in COVID lockdown nonsense, making worried faces of "compassion" and a great show of concern for the wealthy 80 year-olds dying "from" COVID, while there are millions upon millions of children on this earth who contract HIV from their own mothers, from the water they drink, from having been born - that there are millions of children who die from diarrhea, from neglect, from squalor? That there are places where leprosy is still a serious problem, where malaria rages every year infecting hundreds of millions... Does this begin to make our moral timidities seem absurd? Never for once doubt, that the moral actor is a well-practiced liar: there is always an angle from which to reveal his essential contradictions - because otherwise he would not need his elaborate disguise.

We modern men, so delicate, so vulnerable, giving and taking a hundred considerations, we imagine that the delicate humanity we represent, this achieved unanimity in forbearance, in helpfulness, in mutual trust, is a positive progress that places us far beyond the men of the Renaissance. But every age thinks so, it must think so. What's certain, is that we would not dare to place ourselves in Renaissance circumstances, or even imagine them: our nerves could not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles. This incapacity however demonstrates no progress, but a only different, more belated constitution, a weaker, more delicate, more vulnerable one, out of which is necessarily engendered a morality full of consideration. If we think away our delicacy and belatedness, our physiological aging, then our morality of "humanization" also loses its value at once - no morality has any value in itself - : we would even despite it. On the other hand, let's not doubt that we moderns, with our thick padding of humanity which dislikes to bump against any objection, would provide the contemporaries of Cesare Borgia with a side-splitting comedy. We are in fact involuntarily funny beyond all measure, we with our modern "virtues"... The decay of our hostile and mistrust-arousing instincts - and that is what constitutes our "progress" - represents only one of the effects attending our general decay of vitality: it costs a hundred times more effort, more foresight, to cultivate such a dependent and late an existence. Here everyone helps everyone else, here everyone is to a certain degree an invalid and everyone a nurse. This is then called "virtue" - : among men who knew a different kind of life, a fuller, more prodigal, more overflowing life, it would be called something else: "cowardice" perhaps, "pathetic", "old woman's morality"...

Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, 9.37

We're unwittingly funny, with our delicate sensibilities, our carefully balanced accounts of minor trespass and preemptive apologetics like an overworked waiter in a street café balances too many dirty dishes and customers at once - I'm unwittingly funny, with my attempts to absolve myself and appease my resurgent conscience, with my attempts to console us all with tales of a longlost tribal wholesomeness to which we quietly fantasize we personally could return one day... Or do we fantasize that we're already there? That you and I represent, with our gleaming pulsating intellectual life, with our proudly displayed scientifically acquired trophies of hearsay, anything like a culmination of human potential? Laughable, ridiculous, clownish: the best way out of these labyrinthine fingerpuzzles of moral tendernesses, these pathetic rivalries for the Champion of Correctness, the Princedom of Never-Having-Hurt-Anyone - is laughter at ourselves. That the "right answer" for all humanity for all time, could ever possibly be generated by creatures as universally frail and ill as we are, is preposterous: has it ever occurred to a smug moral preacher to ask whether he really has a right to ask anything at all, but how to feel a little less wretched today?

Disgust and compassion are intimately related: thus it is a serious and suspicious error to confuse the love of our own children with some blandished sociologically self-conscious "altruism"... It is one of the primary patterns of camouflage of the vicious moralist we should be familiar with, this "universal love". To turn disgust into pity, is something we are extremely adept at, without recognizing how important the ingredient of disgust is in this recipe: modern compassion-morality is largely the poisoncraft of the disgusting, who find - or manufacture - more pitiable sights than themselves. To feel superior to something, someone, anyone: as I've said before, there's an enormous contribution of Schadenfreude in all arts of compassion... To watch something writhe under the bright light of pity, to play with one's spiritual food: if it weren't for the repulsive moral mien these types find so necessary, their blank-eyed cruelty might begin to look sufficiently arachnid to find its way back to respectability.

Your guilty conscience concerning your scorn and indifference to the old and unwell must be confronted: but unraveling this tangled snare requires a reeducation about the meaning of guilt. Guilt is a relatively unstable emotional complexity, relatively new in the hierarchy of physiological response, and only necessitated by tribal life: in other words, an instinctual novelty for apenature. Guilt is preconditioned by frustrated instinct: it arises in no other context. Guilt is the affective result of repressed impulses and incoherent structures of behavior, around which a "fault" is woven as cause: animistic thinking regarding trespass and guilt, taboo and punishment, is almost universal in the human adaptive package. Thus guilt is part of the mythopoetic technological complex, as innate and inevitable as spirits, gods, ceremony. That guilt is animistic and thus projective in function should not however instigate a preemptive dismissal of its means and ends: it is a social signal of disfunction, as vital a signal as anxiety, which have their functional value in modifying tribal behavior towards a more adaptive milieu. Guilt and anxiety are feedback signals which prepare the tribe for change, which disrupt and undermine behavioral expectations, and which necessitate therefore either contained ceremonial attack or radical social alteration. A guilty conscience is a symptom of frustrated instinct, and self-awareness is one of its byproducts: as I've shown before, our much-fondled "consciousness" is actually a secondary product of the arrest of instinctual algorithmic process. Becoming aware of oneself, embarrassed, stopped in one's tracks, suddenly unsure, suddenly clumsy, suddenly reflective: guilt is not primarily about ensuring social conformity and the guardian of "altruism", as the evolutionary psychologists all thoughtlessly assume. Most of the episodic guilt we experience is actually a symbolic breakthrough of the ubiquitous guilt entailed by frustration: most violations are performed in order to relieve this same condition - but afterward we say we are guilty "because" of this violation, when the reality is reversed. The function of guilt therefore is to subtly alter the emotional fabric of the tribe, such that the threshold for change is lowered - sometimes destructive, sometimes constructive: a change in locale, a change of leadership, a split or reunion of the tribe, an act of revenge - the ancients were as likely to feel guilty for not exacting revenge, as we are for wanting it.

Guilt is caused by angry spirits: among many other things, these evolutionary psychologists are ignorant of the meaning of spirit, which we should understand as an affect belonging to the group, a nonlinear response for which it is impossible to assign unique responsibility. But then again, almost no one has asked themselves what the function of emotion is: which in my terms is the preparatory lowering of a threshold for a conditioned instinctual response. Thus when an angry spirit requires propitiation, we translate this into our language as "the group requires an alteration of priorities", because its members are experiencing too much frustration to be optimally functional. We are thereby a step closer to appreciating the mystery of psychosomatic illness: in traditional contexts, all illness that does not have immediate and obvious natural causes, like a snake bite or a broken ankle - is caused by angry spirits and requires the tribe's attention. Guilt is psychosomatic: you are guilty because our priorities are fucked up, not because you are "wrong".

It's important not to confuse the wishful dogma regarding our "moral sentiments", such as has been taught since late antiquity, updated by Kant and the 19th century English utilitarians, and lately gussied up in the shallow reasoning of evolutionary psychologists, as proof of an innate rationale of altruism guiding us toward righteousness... Actually the distribution of the guilty conscience could hardly be less equitable: real perpetrators almost never feel guilt. At most, they fear group expulsion and reprisal: this anxiety is often enough considered proof of remorse. Meanwhile those who suffer most acutely from guilt, are almost always some perverse Kierkegaardian golem of penitence, whose only crime is having learned to feed on his own ecstasies of self-inflicted pain. But the majority of us modern types are merely frustrated, irritable, and looking for someone to blame: that we occasionally run out of targets other than ourselves, is just an accident of carelessness and temporary scarcity. The ubiquitous guilty feeling of modernity, is not due to injustice nor our fine sensitivity to injustice: it's a consequence of cagey irritability, which is a consequence of living in a cage.

Confronted with the wretchedly old and unwell, we're embarrassed: it's embarrassing to realize the futility of their lives, the sad sputtering end... It taxes the sense of the worthiness of living, seeing such sights, smelling such smells: Prince Siddhartha was correct thus far. We're embarrassed for them, we're embarrassed of our own disgust, but probably most profoundly we're embarrassed by the failure of the human community. Let not this shame be transformed into self-glorifying pity: our rescue does not lie in indulging our own addiction to pity and competing with one another to appear most blameless. Our shame is functional: it's shameful, to have wasted the opportunities of a firstworld life, to merely grow greedy and spiritually wicked, to contribute to the global pandemic of chronic illness, to demand more longevity even as the human race smothers the biodiversity of this planet.

I want the reader to notice that my insistence on dealing with the problem of age as a spiritual problem, is not merely a Romantic cop-out - as a means of avoiding the implications of a fascist genocidal campaign - something which modern people very suspiciously are always ready to suspect. The spirit of decrepitude has always been with us: we have long since invented many ways to deal with recurrent spirits, which require their place in the animistic pantheon. Making a mask to capture its essence, dancing in its honor and thus calling that spirit forth, contains its effect on the wider community: this is what "propitiation" means. Witchcraft must be combated but can no more be eliminated than illness: the avaricious old man, the blood-hungry envious old woman, must be given their place but clearly dealt with - that's the consensus of almost every culture which deals effectively with spiritual roguery. Even as late as Christian Europe, "Belschnickel" persists as the embodiment of the slightly dangerous, perverted old fart who is a little too eager to attract children with candy: once you gain an eye for such masks, you realize how widespread they really are. Therefore all that's really required of us as a dramatic first step, is that we identify the spirit of decrepitude: dealing with it once it's identified, will come naturally. Most of the point of anthropomorphizing what we might in scientific language call behavioral proclivities or "affective thresholds", is to learn to relate to something otherwise intangible: exploitation of our almost infinite capacity for subtle personal relationship in order to gain strategic advantage over the elements of decadence in the tribe, which will otherwise ruthlessly exploit our hesitancies regarding "spirits" which no one is really responsible for, is almost the definition of animism. The spirit is responsible for itself: that's not merely a "primitive" accounting trick, it's the more accurate assessment of the plurality of soul which the human creature really is.

To give an example of the kind of incremental physiological change I'm talking about, I saw the other day a pair of young truckers at a gas station, the shape and demeanor of which was a kind of wakeup call. They lacked the classic North American trucker physique, along with the expected attitudes. Rather than the once customary paunch and skinny legs, cigarette hanging from the lip and a hard look in the eye, they were pudgy and soft, with large womany asses and obvious endocrine disruption - like an obese child with a disturbing fat distribution pattern. As amphibians are more vulnerable to toxic accumulation and thus act as an ecological bellwether, I expect that the trucker is more exposed to fluctuations in diet and narcotica: where once was grease, nicotine, and amphetamines, there is sugar, smartphones, and antidepressants.

But what is true of their microbiota, is true of their "psychocosmetics": their talk was not gruff and terse, but had the emotional maturity of middle-school boys. There is a hybridization and meeting of extremes occurring - gradually, imperceptibly to most of you - between the old woman and the adolescent: the body of an old woman and the shallow impudence of a spoilt boy.

What is the ugly response? It's physiological, make no mistake. Not at all merely culturally determined, and not even "merely" physiological: it's as holistic and immediate a judgment as any judgment perhaps can be. More immediate than "bad", much more immediate and unavoidable than "false": aesthetic judgments are not what was once called "synthetic", to borrow a Kantian term.

What is ugly is bad for us: not to be eaten, not to be dwelled in or among, not to be mated, not to be allowed to consume resources. There are many kinds of ugliness: the first case is a marker of genetic fitness. What is beautiful is well-formed, ripe, functional. But there is also ugliness of attitude and behavior, which reveals the history of the organism and its likely future behavior: greed, pettiness, bigotry, self-loathing, and so on, are all aesthetic judgments about the value of an individual to the tribe. Will this woman make a caring mother? Will this man provide? Will this woman share her food? Will this man betray us?

The hag is ugly: she has outlived her fertility and has nothing more to offer anyone, because she failed to develop into something which might edify the community. The old fart is beneath notice: because he has outlived his strength, and failed to develop into anything which might educate the young. These are the judgments we make, whether we are now willing to acknowledge them or not: even spelling them out is not easy on our delicate moral sensibilities. But we must not allow our delicacy to make us stupid: that too, is geriatric morality. That too, is hostility to youth in the guise of moral superiority.

Do not doubt that the old can be more sublimely beautiful than the young: inward coherence, an orderly articulate emotional life, the glance of wisdom and the glint of humor - a realized spirit, a wry old fox, a reclining dragon. But do not lose sight of the fact that this judgment, "beautifully old", is the judgment: "immensely useful, available cultural riches, a path to dominance".

When discussing the mysteries of beauty and ugliness, it's worth pointing out that some people just possess a magnetism that cannot be explained. If you'll forgive a ridiculous but thoroughly enjoyable example, in the Dino De Laurentiis masterpiece of production design, Conan the Barbarian, what is it about James Earl Jones that's so convincing as a cult leader? How in the world does he make the short bangs of a Prince Valiant haircut into something so strangely sexy? Because he wills you to be attracted to him.

Or take the career of Bette Midler: that a woman with a face as brawny as that, managed to make it in Hollywood, says something about her willpower: she commands that you find her beautiful - your own astonishment at the boldness of this claim she utilizes as further seduction - as proof of her power, which you now begin to confuse with attraction.

Therefore we begin to suspect, that ugliness is also something communicated. That we are compelled to find someone ugly: herein lies one of the secrets of the spirit of decrepitude. Ugliness weakens, demoralizes, disheartens: isn't it possible that ugliness is the preparatory attack, before the wave of pitiableness begins? To induce the happy and healthy to become ashamed of their happiness and health, to not only give it away but wish it away... There are also many women who inflict a cultivated unattractiveness upon the world as a form of revenge, for not having paid attention sooner...

Ugliness is a strategy just as much as the position of weakness has strategic advantage. For the woman this is an especially pertinent bifurcation: an aggressively unattractive woman seeks attention not despite her appearance, but because of it. She utilizes your own repulsion and subsequent embarrassment as leverage to generate an exaggerated estimate of her value: often enough she has nothing to contribute, yet demands attention all the more.

One of the reasons for the exponential expansion of decrepitude, is that there's a kind of contracting "Pareto frontier" of arresting ugliness: not only is there diminishing returns as actual decrepitude begins to approximate the cultivated - but there's a kind of arms race of ugliness as we all become inured to the sight and sense of dread.

The obsession with longevity is a symptom of decrepitude. Wanting more life than one's fair share is nothing but blind raging greed. What happened to "three score and ten"? As though 70 years were not enough, as though we need more of these avaricious undead creeping around our world hoarding the planet's resources, as though humanity were not already taxing the earth heavily enough.

I recently stumbled across a thinly veiled expression of the spirit of decrepitude: a highly popular book from yet another guru-wannabe pandering to babyboomer vanity with the revealing title of, "I've Decided To Live to 120". This longevity so many seem to hope for, is nothing but a greatly elongated period of senility: to live more than half one's life as a frail expensive pet, wheezing and waiting to die! Has no one asked what the immense cost of this longevity might be? How monstrously entitled this attitude is? It wants to disguise its fear of death as life affirmation: but embracing death, taking risks, living a good mortal life and looking to the next generation is the affirmation of life. They are only symbolically afraid of dying, because they have been much more afraid of living: dying is the final expression of what it means to live.

The spirit of decrepitude would destroy the creative tension between life and death, blur the line and prolong a living death, in which nothing must be confronted, in which a heavily-medicated blurry-eyed shuffle between bed and toilet occupies a majority of a human life.

Longevity is an old tightwad's wetdream. Just as the immortal soul is the invention of a languishing culture: late Egypt, late China, late Rome, and now again late Europe. Oncology and genetic engineering is what they call it now: and the reality of an achieved longer life span is thus far more dangerous than mummified fortresses and alchemic dreams of "Peach Blossom Land"...

In place of mummification and cinnabar cocktails, we get talk of "replacing the biological body" with nanotechnology - as though a living creature were anything but the living body. As though biological reality were somehow inadequate and not already "self-replicating"! In place of a heavenly reward, we get fantasies of benign genetic engineering extending the life indefinitely - as though any such life extension would not be a tortured unholy thing and apply solely to the billionaires whose existence is already a fucking blight. Humanity is creeping toward serious blasphemies, and one can only hope we will run out of fossil fuels before some of the more indelible will occur. Or perhaps they should and must occur: perhaps we are looking for our master. Perhaps like a spoilt child, we break precious things because we want an adult to appear and draw firm boundaries. It's likely we will not learn anything collectively until something truly serious and irreversible happens: "gain of function" and the engineering of SARS-CoV-2 is likely just the beginning of an age which will make the atomic threat pale.

A life affirming culture is not afraid of death. A culture assured of its future, teaches that to die well is an honor. How one meets death, can define a life: may I die well.

Have you ever witnessed a human death? Have you ever felt the life go out of a human body? Seen the dimness come over the eyes and listened to the last breath? While traveling in South America many years ago, I experienced this with a boy whose life I was trying to save: I gave him CPR on the side of a road, as his lungs filled with blood. I failed, and he died in my arms. I can't tell you exactly what this means to me, but I can tell you that it was an important experience. Maybe I died a little that day: maybe a native childish belief in my own invincibility died. Maybe because I failed, I learned who wins in the end. Maybe being defeated by invincible death, and early on in life, is what our cushioned firstworld existence is missing. Maybe those so obsessed with longevity have not grown out of their adolescence, maybe they need it explained to them how little they matter. Maybe the recent hysteria regarding a fictional pandemic, is the wish to be confronted by death.

Read along with me.

Music is The Totem is Full, from my album Survivalist Spirals.

I feel that I've suddenly gained access to a perhaps temporary and very special portal, in which a tiny cross-section of the global first world has been carved out for us: this is a precious moment in which to discover who can think for themselves, who will stand alone, who will sacrifice comfort and certainty for the sake of an integrity that promises no reward but itself.

We have been forced to grow up into the full possession of our integrity: we can no longer merely flirt with ethics, no longer play dilettante and hipster and self-pitying loner, no longer hide behind a vague wishful benevolence, we have to graduate into the seriousness of a Yes and a No. I see it revitalizing and rejuvenating some of you already: this hardship may prove to be the most important gift of our previously all-too-cushy, hazy, ill-defined lives of restless recreation and protracted procrastination. Be glad that for you the test did not come too late! For most of those I thought I loved, the test revealed a weakness I can no longer forgive.

You see, COVID has blessed me. I have been a misanthrope for many years, but with COVID I was forced to actualize it: to take it seriously, to stop imagining that around the next corner of growth I would find tolerance for the intolerable. This episode has served to tip the scales and confirm for me finally: trust your mistrust. For many of us, the most neurotic aspect of our relationships was not our recurrent antipathy and revulsion, but the way we've tried to silence our mistrust.

Your instincts are not something you should seek to overcome or annihilate with any self-flagellating "compassion": your instincts of repulsion are to be refined into a shield and a watchful guardian of the truth - we all desperately need your ability to tell the truth. The moment you resolve to no longer tolerate the sanctified lies of social conformity and the complicity of anonymous violence, is the moment that signal will propagate through the unconscious matrix of human community we are all reading at all times: in other words, folks can tell when you will eat shit, and when you won't. The less of us that do, the less it will be served like pretentious caviar.

0.

It seems many of those who would like to trace a causal line from the COVID affair to wealth inequality, are sadly far out of their depth when discussing "the elites". While we're partly sympathetic to the impulse, we also cannot help but suspect a combination of limited life experience and - once again - the urge to find someone to blame. Someone who is not your neighbor, not your mother-in-law, not your coworker, not the mailman, not your own grimy reflection.

Be not deceived: while there is immense and accelerating wealth inequality in our world, the extremes do not directly correlate to a competence inequality - nor an inequality of willpower, nor an inequality in the ability and willingness to take responsibility for human affairs. The rich are adept at becoming richer: everything else they do is largely just as short-sighted and emotionally limited as the rest of humanity - and with the additional means of avoidance and displacement at their disposal, often even more emotionally limited.

For example, I once worked as a sort of glorified janitor for a Wall Street shark with some big Manhattan properties. He had made his money in derivatives in the pre-2007 days, and was proud of having thieved hundreds of millions from the world. He was paranoid, fragile, pathetically grandiose, and personally impotent - most of his joys came from harassing his tenants and kvetching about minor expenses.

A billionaire is much more likely to obsess about the leaves in the pool he never swims in, than the course of world affairs: he simply does not have the ego strength for anything else. The reality of the life of an obscenely rich man is usually not one of mighty conquest, farsighted ambition, and actualized powerlust: those are extremely rare qualities, limited perhaps to a few political monsters here and there, a gifted corporate climber, and probably just as often occurs in those whose ambitions have nothing to do with money. And even in the case of an exceptional rags-to-riches Horatio Alger type, the success usually undermines precisely their strengths and draws out their latent weakness: the biography of any compelling rockstar demonstrates this amply - Elvis died on the toilet, they say.

A billionaire or a powerful celebrity is typically regressed, childish, impossibly vain and fragile. They live in a gilded cage of yesmen, chauffeurs, and goosedown buffers between themselves and everything uncomfortable. They usually don't manage their own money, much less want to bother with our collective fate. They're not tough-minded, realistic, nor even really prepared to think in the long-term: they avoid reality because they avoid confrontation with who and what they really are. Most people upon realizing a high degree of success and wealth immediately begin a program of regression, indulgence, and denial. At most, among the older money you find a practiced cynicism, apathy, and class hatred that borders on realism, but not much more.

Most of "the elites" obtained their position through dumb luck, and nothing else. Most of them are vaguely aware of this - especially the newer Silicon Valley type - and seek to hide it from themselves through many distractions and pretenses to mastery: actually confronting the unthinkable complexity of our world and the manifold difficulties of accomplishing anything that money cannot buy, would be far too much to ask.

One more story I cannot help telling: I knew another very rich Manhattan landlord, and amidst the oddities of this modern life I once found myself in the position of witnessing him play Scrabble alongside his 8 year-old granddaughter - she was very sharp, and with a brilliant move it appeared briefly that she might actually surpass his score. Can you guess what this greedy merchant did - this man who owns the homes of hundreds if not thousands of people, who can afford an 80 foot yacht, who hoards treasures? He panicked, dug in, and found some technical fault with her word - he couldn't let her win: he lacked the ego strength to allow a bright little girl to feel good about herself... That's how much inner poverty these types hoard: they carry shantytowns of poverty, a bottomless pit of poverty, an endless hunger of poverty.

Or did you imagine that your consumerist greed somehow threatened them? That your squelched life of obedience and economic drudgery is somehow inconvenient to the superrich? Do you imagine that if and when peak oil drives food price inflation, that it will be the billionaires who suffer? If a cheeseburger cost $1000 tomorrow, they would hardly notice - and it would only taste all the more delicious. A billionaire lives surrounded by slaves and countless means of escape: they don't wade through the masses in airports and traffic jams and the DMV - look up once in a while: that's what those private jets and helicopters are for.

They don't need you to stop traveling to beautiful places: they loiter on islands you've never heard of, they linger on yachts in international waters, they step on your heads as you line up like cattle for products you don't need... In fact, they revel in the grotesque numbers of humanity, because it makes them feel that much more important. Without your squirming numbers and your desperate faces glimpsed from tinted windows, they might begin to feel their actual spiritual poverty.

The elites have no need of depopulation - in fact most of them are pathetically lonely, and this secret alone would be enough to unconsciously steer them away from any such plan... It is we suckers near the bottom of the first world who would benefit from depopulation! Thus our fixation on the problem...

Only a few very sharp characters deep in the NSA or MI6 or whatnot, would have the kind of willpower and patience necessary to have done anything significant relative to the COVID affair: and I don't rule this out. I'm quite sure that more than one covert operation took the opportunity to test out a few pandemic scenarios, and probably more than one CIA analyst feels very gratified to see his predictions play out... And probably there have been many coverups, many competing agendas, many silent wars of intrigue going on in the background - as is always the case in politics. And perhaps after all, this virus was leaked intentionally. And perhaps the Wuhan lab was only framed. And perhaps someone really did have a depopulation scheme in mind when COVID was engineered and leaked - who knows. There's not much point in these speculations, and the important thing is not to indulge them, but to observe in oneself how much you want it to be true: you wanted a deadly pandemic, you wanted to see the world burn, you wanted something vital and serious to snap the monotony and diseased ease of your manchild life in half, so that you may set yourself free to become something worthy of the human ancestry - a survivor, a warrior, a real woman with a fearless heart and a real man who can shape his spirit into a quivering blade.

Let's pause here and note something I just said about the likelihood of competing agendas: no doubt, within the belly of most intelligence agencies there are covert groups which compete with one another - without knowing it. There's probably a CIA legend about two guys with adjoining offices fighting each other for years without ever realizing who the enemy was. And what's probably even more likely, given ape-nature, is that they know very well and are all the more rivalrous. The comedy of errors did not achieve its place among the arts for no reason...

Of course, a deep appreciation of accelerating wealth inequality is all part of the healthy breakfast of any decent 21st century philosophy - but such an appreciation should not devolve into magical thinking regarding some vague Illuminati pantheon. The human world is greedy, opportunistic, extremely efficient in its exploitation of power niches: what Foucault names "une microphysique du pouvoir"... Like most complexities, it operates most efficiently through emergent bottomup dynamics, not topdown guidance: attractors exist as inevitable expressions of underlying constants, but imagining that the conscious plans and conspiracies of any one human agency do anything more than exploit opportunities is to be hopelessly ignorant of the history of war, intrigue, and politics.

The sobering truth about the presently increasing wealth inequality on this planet, is that it most likely represents a course correction from the brief aberration of 20th century wealth distribution: though you'll frequently hear of trade unions and the lack of foreign competition for American and European industries as the causes for this aberration, I believe a more important underlying reason lies in the socioeconomic consequences of cheap fossil fuels. The period between 1945 and 1970 was probably the easiest time to thrive in the first world - thus the insufferable babyboomer attitude. The only graph you really need from economics, is the one which maps wage against inflation: it flattens sometime in the 70s - but somehow the American underclass has been cajoled into believing firstly that they are the middle class, and that $35k/year is still a living wage for a family man like it was in 1980, despite the fact that a house costs an order of magnitude more than it did 40 years ago.

When I speak of "first world misery", urban passivity, and "ill-defined lives of restless recreation and protracted procrastination", some of you don't know what I mean. Some of you don't think your life is "cushy". Perhaps you've worked minimum wage, perhaps you've dirtied your soft hands a few times, perhaps you've been broke.

We're working from different definitions. If these conditions are met:

1. You live in the first world.
2. You speak fluent English.
3. You have a basic education.
4. You're not in danger of contracting malaria, nor tuberculosis, nor any other of the major diseases that actually affect human health.
5. You have the time for nonessential activities on the Internet.

Then your life is cushioned.

We are surrounded by forms of wealth it's effortless to overlook: serviced roads, a reliable electric grid, sufficiently safe cities, a stable currency, and access to clean water. Most of you actually shit in potable water - something considered a capital offense in some places. The metaphorical value of this fact should resonate...

For me this realization is of cardinal importance in learning to take command of one's life. Not to instigate more guilt - but to be unashamedly grateful for the wealth your grandfathers gave you, and take responsibility for navigating this world they made to the best of your ability and advantage.

... die Ungleichheit der Rechte ist erst die Bedingung dafür, dass es überhaupt Rechte gibt. — Ein Recht ist ein Vorrecht.

... the inequality of rights is the prerequisite to the existence of rights. Every right is a privilege.

Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, 57

Can you internalize this insight, without resorting either to a pretense of leftist moral outrage nor a rightist disingenuous belligerence? Our birthright is also a burden.

In other words, we are the elites. But every freedom is merely virtual and in danger of extinction, until it is utilized.

As I keep laboring to point out, indulging in conspiracy theory, blaming governmental manipulation, or worst of all just shrugging about "policy error", defers confrontation with the reality of what you already know and control: the small sphere of your life, the small circle of your influence, where you put your body in space and time. Indulging in theories about which you can do nothing, and which even if remotely true are not even harmed by your wild speculations but largely helped - nothing helps a real conspiracy like a crowd of wild-eyed morons missing the point and generating red herrings - is all trivial compared to confronting what you can do today, in your life. And what's unjustly overlooked amidst all this noise, are the quiet stories of that kind of confrontation: many of you left your jobs, allowed yourself to be fired, moved to another state or country, ended bad relationships, and resolved to live a better life... Wasn't it encouraging, for example, how many nurses had the guts to refuse the mRNA dose and lost their jobs as a result? To confront the reality of who and what people are around you - who can and cannot be trusted, how fragile our way of life is, how precariously preserved our freedoms are - that is our task.

Read along with me.

Music is Big Fat Child, from my album Increscunt Animi.

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Some of us have recently become aware of something called "nudge theory": essentially a morsel of cognitive behavioral psychology applied to regulatory questions with an immense découpage of rhetoric and the right sort of corporate-compatible scientificality sufficient to impress the politicians who mete out budget - the kind of HR-friendly "science" that fits into a 15-minute presentation.

Laura Dodsworth, a British journalist, has become a bit famous for exposing the role this theory supposedly played in the COVID panic - at least in the U.K. and probably a few other European governments.

As gripping as this tale of gossip might be, this is definitely the wrong direction for any genuine inquiry into the etiology of COVID mass hysteria. Our governments - as duplicitous, as pernicious, and paternalistic as all bloated bureaucratic governments always are - are not to blame for the panic. We created it. The people wanted it: that any politician or governmental agency would like to take credit for it, is only a sign of how deeply motivated the whole ceremony was.

Therefore Dodsworth is just another aspect of the ritual: to find someone to blame was always the primary motive... There will no doubt continue to be many more exploits of investigative journalism: it's important not to lose sight of one's own intuition about what you saw in the faces of your neighbors and friends in those years - was it or wasn't it bloodlust, delight in having found a victim, the excitement of anonymous violence?

The perspective represented by Dodsworth says: "Everything important happens in government; the government is in control." Which is itself a very pampered and insufferably European point of view, isn't it?

Blaming the manifold mass crimes of COVID on some adorably ambitious government department and mere "policy error", is the most politically correct means of securing a contrarian stance - and therefore will be the majority view eventually. Dodsworth has merely anticipated and prepared the politically safe way to shunt blame for the collateral damage of the rituals of mass hysteria.

A grasp of the principles and predominance of mass psychology seems lacking: but this is only an illusion. It's already a trite truism to say, "a person is smart, people are stupid and dangerous." What's particularly difficult to grok, is that almost everyone already understands group psychology extremely well: what they seek is to be on the right side at the right time, and therefore feigned ignorance of what's really happening is essential - feigned ignorance of your own calculations, feigned ignorance of your trajectory mapping of group consensus, feigned ignorance of how often and adeptly you sample group consensus... Of course this dance of ignorance must itself be disguised, lest the pretense become conscious - make no mistake, becoming conscious in the midst of any of these commonplace cognitive distortions is guarded against at all costs: but how do we hide a feigned ignorance from ourselves? With "virtue": all too often, feigned ignorance is called humility, or prudence, or "maturity", or "social responsibility"... With a loud lie a quiet lie is hidden: moral posturing is the convenient garish lie we are all accustomed to, and we take its presence as a kind of sign of social quorum - where three or more are gathered in the name of morality, the unholy spirit will appear.

The essential question is: why did the majority love a fictional pandemic? What's to gain? Why do people seem to love fascism? This is one of my formulae: no conspiracy, everyone a conspirator. How can that be?

If we look at the totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century, if we ask Hannah Arendt about it, what does she ultimately say was the deciding factor? Firstly a threshold of homogeneity in needs and frustration among the middle class. A sense of going nowhere, with nothing to do, with no challenge, with nothing to gain, with a sense of unending anxiety: remember this was before the age of television, internet, Xanax, and corn syrup - there were only slower and cruder drugs such as alcohol, laudanum, and newspapers. Therefore it starts to look probable, that what's happening is that first world misery has merely exceeded the threshold which the old 20th century narcotics were able to hold back - the levee broke, and the flood spilled. What's the ooze? Alienation, frustrated aggression, and moral hypocrisy. Those are the seeds of fascism, those are the seeds which call forth a fascist regime from the otherwise tangled impotent mess that is mass governance - not conscious intentional planning, not conscious conspiracy, but something much deeper and more difficult to perceive except at greater historical distance...

Unless I'm missing something, I don't see in any of these governmental responses to COVID, anything like indirect suggestion or hypnoid means of control. I see repetitive slogans, hamfisted insistence, and the same kind of smothering condescending tone that a spa takes towards its customers.

Now I've lived in Europe, and the way those governments relate to citizens always felt like something between a dentist's waiting room and a "Living With Herpes" brochure. To acquiesce in a thousand ways to the life of a stupid child, an invalid, a prematurely geriatric superfluity - and at the last moment suddenly protest: could it really be that Dodsworth and her ilk have just now woken up into the world their upper middle class preferences created a long time ago?

The "nudge unit" is simply the logical conclusion to the kind of socialist-creep Dodsworth and her kind have been supporting for decades: but suddenly they've noticed how inconvenient it is, when a government infringes upon the upper middle class lifestyle in another form other than the guilt-laundering service of a high tax rate. Suddenly an increasingly socialist state begins to look a little bit fascist? That this surprises anyone, is only further evidence of what tame benumbed lives these people were living prior, how shallow and worthless the general education is, and how little anyone has managed to internalize the history of the 20th century: I am not yet tired of repeating, along with A. James Gregor, that fascist doctrine was first developed by communist theorists.

It's not that I don't think anyone can be held responsible - again I'd love to see the virologists who created the virus held responsible - but that indeed a much profounder reckoning is called for than this superficial hand-wringing about some very British "ministry of conformity"... A reckoning with the civilizational forces that brought us here is called for, a revaluation of the viability of the coexistence of privileged freedom and paternal interventionist technocracy is called for...

I cannot for the life of me find a single example of a genuine indirect suggestion related to COVID - at least nothing beyond the typical marketing savvy which the average 20-something business school dropout might possess. The example which "nudge theory" seems most proud of, is the printed image of the housefly on the public urinal, which is irresistible to the urges of men and serves to make us less errant in our duties. I've seen these in airports and I admit it's very clever and effective. But everything related to COVID was clumsy, repetitive, obsequious, and not at all subtle but hyperbolic. Now if they were taking credit for the unconscious effects induced by an exaggerated and histrionic demonstration of fear, I would be impressed: because false, histrionic fear is indeed a powerful social signal. It says: "there's another hidden agenda of which we will not speak, and the goals of which you must guess." But above all, it promises: "Go along and you'll get your chance to play persecutor."

Please don't be overawed by the fact that they gave this guy Thaler the Nobel Prize in economics. Economics is almost as weak a science as psychology, and perhaps even more susceptible to political fashion. Moreover this is the same organization that gave Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for being elected: more than a little political buffoonery is at work here...

Behavioral economics seems to have gotten about as far as Hobbes or David Hume: they've caught up to the idea that humanity is often irrational, and decorate the realization with fashionable vocabulary borrowed from statistics and set theory. But they have no idea of unconscious mechanics: neither repression, nor displacement, nor projection, nor overdetermination, nor even really the ethology of symbolization, nor the proclivity to envy among primates... They have no anthropological education and no historical perspective whatever - a Foucaultian sense for the recursivity of historical domains is entirely too much to ask. I'd almost prefer a Marxist economist to these impossibly smug professors of the dismal science: at least "class consciousness" would be closer to the mark, since it at least traces impersonal forces and sees the individual as a node in a network, rather than this impeccably bourgeois prejudice that the individual "mind" is the indivisible atomic unit in which all decision occurs. As though all meaningful psychology can be reduced to "cognitive bias" and a list of typical fallacies - as though human nature were merely a faulty computer...

Moreover, "irrational" is incorrect! No animal is strictly irrational: only under the extreme pressures of post-agricultural civilization does humanity begin to look "irrational" - which would mean nothing else than that it fails to meet its own needs. The instincts are above all rational in their outcome. And even homo sapiens in the midst of civilizational maladaptation, still achieves largely rational outcomes: one only needs to understand what needs are being met, to understand their functionality. I insist that merely two forces suffice to explain the vast majority of seemingly irrational human behavior: loneliness and envy. "Am I in the group? And if so, what's my status?" These two questions ring like an incessant bell in the head of modern humanity. The student of psychology who keeps them in mind will avoid many detours and deadends.

Social conformity, avoidance of abandonment, and unconscious strategic positioning: everything else is largely a matter of elaboration and disguise. That's the introductory phase of my "böser Blick".

There is another important factor never to lose sight of, when dealing with transiently successful pop science of this kind: what's the gratification? should always be the first question asked. Why is "behavioral psychology" popular? Because it says: "people are irrational, but we're not." And for the small price of applause, you are invited to this club. And with one stroke, the increasingly obvious prevalence of unconscious mass psychology in an age of overpopulation is explained, defused, and neutralized - so that one may return to that "illusion of control" they like to speak of, without ever considering whether their shallow theorizing does not also constitute an illusion.

Y'all are granting far too much power and sophistication to these cognitive behavioral psychologists: actually they are sloppy, uneducated, and forgettable. "Evidence-based" behavioral psychology is fundamentally the art of statistical fraud, political posturing, and shallow quantization methods: they seek to study the multivariate statespace of social behavior with blockheaded questionnaires and computer-administered multiple-choice. Most of their studies are merely a test of the subject's willingness to anticipate the socially correct answer. Among insiders, it's well known that no other field is so riddled with fraudulent wishful "evidence" - Diederik Stapel was just a little too lazy about hiding it.

Moreover, modern psychology is largely the field which collects aimless academic nobodies too lazy and untalented for real science: thus the predominance of the lonely cat-lady, the simpering neckbeard, the soft-handed urban manchild seeking authority over those even more neurotic and impotent than himself. Who becomes a psychologist today? Desperate bescarfed women who begin their middle age in their late 20s, who collect patients like roadkill, who feed on a transient sense of superiority and sophistication only by gathering a following of true losers and keeping them ill. This is not godlike science, believe an insider: they have no power over anyone but the extremely weak and willing.

Leading a tangled morass of fully tamed, frustrated, anxious bores of the 21st century into almost any scheme is easy, as long as it appeals to fundamental needs: distraction from personal failure, tenuous meaningfulness, and social inclusion. Inducing histrionic fear in a population as cowering and feckless as the British have become, only requires a "nudge": but this fear is decidedly not genuine - it is a simulacrum of fear and moral prostration which everyone understood and already knew how to mime.

There is no nefarious psychological sophistication at work: merely endless repetition, intimidation, statistical fiddling, a serious mien, and various forms of inflating the hollow but brightly colored sack that is political clout. Have you ever attempted to impersonate an official in a vague context? Carry a clipboard, wear a pantsuit and an ID on a lanyard, frown and strut around and discover for yourself the power of undefined authority. Have you ever stood in line without knowing why? Have you ever felt a panic surge through a crowd? Manipulation of the civilized human race - the increasingly ill, increasingly alienated, increasingly bereft human race - requires no more psychological acuity than what an intelligent 15 year old girl is capable of crafting in her own tales of high school intrigue and betrayal, and since her enemies include the adept unconscious maneuvers of other high school girls, probably indeed much less.

Actually the hypnotic arts and the study of mass propaganda peaked in the early 20th century: Goebbels drew on a long line of scholars of propaganda, including some well-respected American and British thinkers in the mid-twenties - e.g., Edward L. Bernays, the "father of spin" and a nephew to none other than Sigmund Freud, oddly enough... In fact I might argue that the more religiously grounded, family-oriented, less neurotic, and slower-paced populations of the 1920s represented a more difficult populace upon which to work propaganda than the hapless, anxious, chronically ill, aesthetically hopeless mass of slobs that constitute the 21st century first world. We imagine that the Information Age and smartphones and plastic underwear add up somehow to proof of our intellectual superiority: but technological dependence and personal frailty increase proportionally - access to the sum of human knowledge does not make the average human creature "smarter", it makes it more desperate for a closed horizon of certainty.

The governmental use of propaganda is in no wise new: prewar Germany is not at all the only example, as both the UK and US used propaganda campaigns extensively before, during, and after WWII to great effect. At least the 1940s standard for graphic art was far superior to our own and their slogans much less sanctimonious. And I'd argue that normalization, shame, and social pressure were employed more effectively during the hot and cold war efforts than at any time since: governmental paternalism is not new, mobilized shame is not new, subtle and unsubtle means of coercion are not new.

This show of outrage and cries of "anti-democratic" are just another strategic anticipation of political advantage, and in the final analysis just another stageplay by which the majority shall bury the embarrassing revelations under a flurry of noise.

Did you imagine that a life of meaningless drudgery - schlepping from an indifferently depressing apartment to a hopelessly vapid office to a monumentally monotonous grocery chain, only to repeat the same endlessly - was somehow rational, sane, and volitional? Did you imagine that Pepsi or Doritos or Chevrolet were somehow an objectively sane choice and not "nudged"?

Across the first world, these are the same people who are convinced year after year that the Oscars are important, that the World Cup and the Olympics are not a corporate orgy, that accruing carcinogens while sitting on your ass answering emails under fluorescent lights is "as good as one can hope for". These are all forms of implicit and deferred violence which the general population was already inured to - global capitalism is nothing but implicit and deferred violence.

That a government official here and there seized the chance to garner a promotion by seeming to have caused what was already happening, should not warrant our attention. COVID panic is not proof of some godlike power our governments have, it's proof of how weak, vicious, and thirsty the human race is for a form of sanctioned violence.

But the stupidity and gullibility of the civilized human being is superficial and only another disguise: actually it is constantly calculating its best advantage - that's what it means to be weak and vicious. It's only the strong who can afford to be stupid: they step out of line by walking in a straight line, they give the wrong answer when they believe it right, they lose their standing by standing their ground.

At first, in order to address the malformed heuristics of conspiracy theory and "policy error", I was going to write about paranoia and the persecution complex... I even picked up my old copy of Lacan's Écrits and was going to talk about the "paranoiac structure of knowledge" - which would be a fascinating navelgaze, I'm sure. And frankly it would be easy for me to waltz through the bespectacled latté-clutching crowd of urban trendsetters with Lacanian masturbatory aids like intricately crafted toys - and certainly I'd obtain a lot more paid subscribers that way - but what I really have to say is not half so gratifying nor metapsychologically intricate: the induced paranoia among COVID skeptics is only another symptom, and not what prevents the dialogue from touching upon the truth. It's not paranoia, nor even lack of the psychological education sufficient to identify unconscious mechanics which guides this detour into a moral show of outrage at governmental schemes, it's just avoidance, cowardice, and another moral posture - it's the unwillingness to face what COVID makes so painfully obvious: the overwhelming hostility to youth, hostility to health, hostility to freedom. It's an ugly underbelly, a revolting and somewhat surprisingly fierce hatred that bubbles there in the shadows - we didn't know how much resentment the first world had accumulated - so it is hardly any wonder that so few of you have the stomach for it. But perhaps the real answer is that so few of us are sufficiently free from this same resentment, such that we can afford to acknowledge it: our aggression has clearer lines of descent and ascent, and thus we have no need to hide the genealogy of our attitudes from ourselves.

The problem is that many of you have glimpsed for the first time, the reality and power of the unconscious. For the first time in our lifetimes, much of the human mass on this planet spasmed in unison, shared a nightmare, and began enacting its repressed urges. It's been known since at least Heraclitus and perhaps Democritus, that in large groups, the average human creature loses its inhibitions and finds its repressed impulses suddenly amplified - but many of you do not have the stomach for this vision, and would rather believe in vast conspiracies with vague objectives and even more vague means. Many of you would rather fantasize about global governmental control and "the elites", than face the fact that modern humanity requires no elaborate nefarious plot to obtain obedience from it, and that the world order has already been precisely what the elite class has wanted it to be, for a very long time.

Where others cannot help but see agency, I see nonlinear emergent dynamics.

And even those who would like to believe that the COVID panic was instigated by a program of subtle hypnosis, and thus give credit to the power of suggestibility and unconscious reasoning, are unaware of an important fact: the most powerful suggestion is transmitted by an unconscious mind, and in fact conscious suggestion is paltry compared to the ceaseless unconscious communication the human species is born into. The most effective hypnotist does not command nor scheme nor employ formulaic indirect suggestions, he trains his conscious mind to be quiet enough to allow his body to act effectively, and does not know precisely what he's going to do and cannot except in rare cases explain it precisely: these cute CBT methods of suggestion are nothing and indeed less than nothing - because they obstruct with smug shallow imitation and social shame more than they guide or heal - compared to the kind of Ericksonian mastery I'm speaking of.

We did it: but who do I mean by "we"? Everyone in the first world who has ever tried to be politically correct, whether left or right; everyone who employs repressive schemata to get what they want; everyone who navigates first world misery with the appropriate masks as though nothing were the matter; everyone who has ever compromised their better judgment for the sake of getting by; everyone who's ever swallowed a piece of petty aggression and lived to regret it; everyone who's ever indulged a shitty person and suppressed wrath because it was the "right" thing to do - in other words, all of us.

The very first time I heard about COVID, I noticed the glee and wishful bloodlust in the eyes of the informant. The next thing I did was to look up age statistics. Therefore on day one, I found out that average age of death "from" COVID was around 80 - back when the CDC still published such things.

Those of us who never believed the histrionics, who like myself never gave in and never wore a medical mask, who have fought it at every step - how could we be responsible? Because it's our world too, because we also made too many compromises with this same spirit in the past, because we were too complacent and indulgent of the strategies of moral posturing. If there is a "they" at work here, it is the swirling spirits of the worst of apenature: the mendacious moralist, the disguised bigot, the poisoncraft of lying-in-wait, the wannabe-fascist, the voracious bureaucrat, the bitter old hag and the avaricious old fart - the sick and geriatric of all ages.

The more government and policy and conscious conspiracy is blamed and suspected, the further recedes the revelation COVID offers us. The more that you, my dear skeptic, prefer to imagine government intention, international intrigue, or a plot of the "elites", the less likely it is that you will confront the responsibility we all share. This is not the first spasm of anonymous mass violence and it will not be the last: it's likely to be only the beginning of an age of ideological purgings, of dogmatic wars, of fictional enemies and very real consequences.

Yet I don't primarily feel afraid and I want above all to inspire courage: let's be grateful that the monster has finally surfaced from the deep! Let's be grateful that we have lived to see the conformists and the nasty bigots we previously suspected, finally play their hand. There is a sense in which many prematurely exposed their nastiness and misplayed their cards, so eager were they to see the independent and disobedient punished... It's our task therefore to internalize the lesson, to grow up into our own strength of character, to become hard, unyielding, a guardian of precious and delicate things. Truth and beauty is a delicate and precious thing, my friends.

ψυχῆς ἐστι λόγος ἑωυτὸν αὔξων.

Soul is speech that increases itself.

Heraclitus, §115

We must stop glorifying "consciousness" as the ultimate human achievement and the purpose of life on this planet. The tortured mess of our moral life and anxiety itself is one of the key signs of consciousness. One could almost say that anxiety is consciousness. An animal does not become aware of itself except when something goes wrong. To imagine that all life seeks its highest expression in the anxious self-absorbed hallucinated voices of a smug ape - I'd like to know when this might begin striking everyone else as grotesquely funny.

Taking the serious observation of our animal neighbors as a starting point, one learns something important: consciousness is hesitation. Consciousness appears either as the conflict between competing instincts or as a byproduct of the search algorithm for the correct instinct - prolonged it becomes anxiety. Consciousness is the residue of intelligent behavior in the cracks between successful instinct. Therefore I repeat this as often as necessary: intelligence and consciousness are not synonymous.

Our prophets, new and old, are always discovering shocking infractions of truth and justice embedded in the foundations of consciousness. There seems to be no end to the disease of our inherited psyche. How could this be, when the techniques of biology are continually astounding us with their ingenuity and robustness? Could it be that human consciousness is too new to have been perfected by eons of adaptation? Is it possible there will one day be a human animal which does not need to lie to itself? Or are we already well-adapted precisely as liars?

Is it the fault of history and a demented acculturation that our fundamental psychology holds to the "infantile" eternal ideals: utopia, permanence, and simple answers to impossible questions? Or is the infant itself responsible? We call the world's babies to the stand: is the "Fort Da" game a disease, an adaptation to a disease, or the essence of human wisdom in confrontation with transience?

सच्चिदानन्द. Satcitānanda is blissful not because of some finalizing gratification and reward - certainly not because it is "natural" or Buddha "nature" - but because of the profound comorbid forgetfulness of intense concentrated awareness. With enough focus and the power of the breath, we might learn to quiet our narrative voices for a moment. This is actually a reduction of consciousness, not an increase. A body awakened to the world around it is not "conscious", it is awake!

I see the psychotic break as a qualifying experience for meaningful awakening. I mean that until the personality experiences inner annihilation of a Dostoyevskian severity or beyond, one cannot summon the will to part with the herd. Said more like a psychologist: without a crisis it is not yet possible to make conscious choices, because too many "good reasons" and enticements to gratification stand in the way.

Consciousness and conscience have the same origin. This is why the requisite meltdown must be profoundly moral in nature to succeed in destabilizing the hold of centuries of cultural reinforcement of a few key prejudices. Our angst must plead for what we should do, who we should be. Otherwise it is merely depression, metaphysical dilettantism, and the greed of spiritual tourism.

When I speak of the "psychotic core", I wish not to be misunderstood as a shirking mystic resigned to glorified nihilism. I am no "knight of infinite resignation". There are plenty who have such experiences of mindful intensity that they walk away forever scorched and scarred by the abundance of light: there is not a dearth of "reason" in the world, there is an overabundance. Causality, linearity, fractal consequence, the seduction of pattern and recursion and everything the "love of knowledge" breeds, dancing within the kaleidoscope of a moment of awakening - never is the horror vacui at work more than here where consciousness and the "I" emerge as though finally freed from their prison. Yet no one is so likely to misinterpret this experience than the one who lived through it. The most obvious pacification is to consider oneself visited by a higher power. Even the most brilliant mind can succumb to "la nuit de feu", as Pascal did. But it has been a philosophical crime since Parmenides, through Plato, Plutarch, Böhme, Spinoza, Aurobindo and all such others, to speak of the "emanations of God", "Ousia", "Brahman", or whatever other names one cooks up. Even when we allow for the validity of such an experience of sudden awakening, it is not necessarily any proof of the nature of "reality" - only our nature. The linguistically structured brain undergoing massive pseudo-epileptic positive feedback stimulation, and possibly serotonin overdose: this is the "psychotic core" of inner experience, which I call the "core" because it is the result of a strictly logical, consistent application of principles of investigation which we normally do not follow. There is something extremely logical, in fact unreasonably logical, at work in psychosis. The normalized modern mindstate is so much more full of contradiction, hypocrisy, and preconscious error. The fundamentally delusional and mendacious quality of "consciousness" such as we encounter it everywhere is determined by nothing more glaringly than its smug assurance of the full possession of consciousness. Anyone who claims to be fully aware of their actions and motivations, such as 99 out of 100 modern slobs will claim, has not taken the first step toward understanding their true situation: "a babe in the arms of circumstance". So when someone as deep as Heraclitus expresses himself in riddles, isn't it precisely because the riddle opens doors, rather than closes them? Doors which lead somewhere underworldly, to that world where thinking begins, where it is born, where it has its roots.

The ego rides like a cork atop changing seas, stretched thin over divergence and quietly forgotten where it does not cohere. I hesitate to say again that "the ego is a liar" - this is a message we perhaps do not need to hear anymore. But understanding the necessity of its falsifications helps unravel the secret adjudications and subtle warpings that precede the narratives we hear, as though a voice spoke to us. The ego speaks secretly to itself on behalf of its masters, but pretends only to listen. This is perhaps its most brash lie. Poorly concealed because it is so well enfolded into the functioning of its essential roles: bringer of light, healer of intractable wounds, banisher of the unthinkable. This is the valuable lesson I've found in the Theravada schools and the more sane teachings of the Buddha: to add an unnecessary lie to a necessary one is foolish. If we can stop lying to ourselves about the perpetual falsification of the ego, we can at least allow it to do its job with innocence.

What I call the "white magic of intent" is the relationship between conscious semantic entrancement and unconscious symbolic constellation. The "talking cure" is the art of shifting unconscious fixation through the leverage of speech, a leverage which extends into the depth of our unconscious mind. Speech is to the mind what breath and the vagus nerve is to the body.

No word is tossed around today more frequently and with less clarity of definition than "consciousness". But what is it? Arranged in order of respectability:

1. Linguistically determined narratization: "internal dialogue".
2. Awareness turned on itself: perception of perception.
3. The conglomeration of sensations into the illusion of a whole: something like the five skandhas of Buddhism.
4. A "field of awareness" imagined to surround the human being: the "aura", the projection of the soul.
5. Roughly sentience, meaning responsiveness to the environment with coherent aims. When biologists use the term.
6. A noncorporeal essence of the human being (and only the human being): the modern word for the soul.
7. Awareness of political issues and current events: in practice, using the correct vocabulary in the right context, the basest sense of Zeitgeist.

So what do I mean when I use the word "consciousness"? The first two only: internal narratization, and apperception. I believe the illusion of a "whole psyche" is always flimsy at best, and rooted largely in the ceaseless anxious dialogue we indulge in. What is much more powerful and difficult to dislodge, is the identification with "the I". This is not some abstract hypostatized "ego" floating somewhere in the brain: it is the "I" which we use in speech. It should have been rendered with a consistent translation: das Ich, le Je, el Yo, 此我. "Le Moi" for example, implies "the Self" as viewed from another deictic locale and is therefore incorrect.

When I say I, as I just did three times, what happens? I hear the sentence spoken internally, I mime it secretly, or perhaps I even speak it aloud. Isn't it telling that when overcome by some unconscious urge to rehearse a scene from the past or future, or to argue with a recurring voice, we overcome our modern shyness and speak to ourselves aloud? But we don't speak to ourselves: we speak to an other. Lacan should never had allowed his "Autre" to grow into a mystical entity. He should have constantly reminded himself that it only has sense in the most immediate present: the other is the one to whom we speak. Yet because this omnipresent "other" is what makes speech possible, it is also what writes the riddle of language: in Lacan's terms, every signified is also a signifier. The meaning is always "elsewhere". The network of meanings is an endless series of dependent variables, with no original "meaning" to be found anywhere. This is what we intend when we speak of the "labyrinth of language".

Lacan likes to take this further, and likes to blithely hint at ever further reaches of abysmal alienation: because this "other" is not merely the target of speech but the elusive character of signification itself, it is also therefore the means of all possible speech, and because there is neither any other means, nor audience, nor any original meaning, therefore this quality of other and its absence, is even what passes for an agency. This absence, this elsewhere, this eternal chase, is desire, and as such what constitutes and vibrates the crystalline structure, like a mystified infant hypothesizing what moves the mobile above his crib. The once seemingly silent passive "other as effigy" has become the "big Other" that dominates and alienates. The "desire of the Other" has first and last say. The "I" has shrunk to merely the "barred subject", the leftover debris of the analysis of the sentence, the extra part found when putting the machine back together.

I won't go further into Lacan's theory because it's abysmal, in many senses. We must remind ourselves what our question is: what is consciousness? How is internal dialogue consciousness itself? Lacan's primary value, in my view, is his appreciation of the uncanny at the heart of language: consciousness itself is overdetermined by the uncanny. Twoness, twinning, twilight, Zwielicht, Zwiespalt: to understand me one must have taken one's dreams seriously at a young age or simply always have been intuitive - a dalliance in Freudian thinking does not suffice. The dream is the great teacher of ambivalence, overdetermination, and the uncanny. My assertion is that consciousness, against all our assurances to the contrary, is in fact drenched in these characteristics. It is the nakedness of the sentence that echoes so loud, the homogeneity of social behavior, and above all our indomitable will to ignorance - otherwise known as repression - that convinces us that consciousness is something else. We are convinced that conscious thinking is rational, orderly, tame, free of contradiction, and above all: willed by an agent. The conscious agent who thinks, willingly, freely: we are still not free of this illusion in the slightest.

We don't want to know how much we talk to ourselves. We don't want to admit how much we hear voices, argue with voices, are merely voices. Neurologists and psychologists get very nervous in this territory, and it takes the frankness and humility of an Oliver Sacks to document just how frequent, commonplace, and almost trite the ubiquity of hallucination among us really is. We are the hallucinating apes: every time we speak, we induce hallucinations in each other - that is the function of speaking, what linguists call the "displacement" of information. Analogously, every time we think, we induce hallucinations in ourselves: that is the true power of thought, so abused and overused it is now, that we've even come to believe that this hallucinated voice constitutes the core of our being. Cogito ergo sum - but what insane creature first of all questions whether or not he is, and secondly what insane creature settles the question with the authority of a hallucinated voice?

The second sense of "consciousness" I accept is apperception: meaning the internal observation of the act of sense perception. Buddhist psychology concerning apperception is the only decent kind I know of, because one simply must have meditated seriously for a few years in order to be qualified: we're talking about the perception of perception of perception, which is obviously ridiculous but adding an additional layer of observation is actually required, as in all science. To watch oneself watching oneself perceive: an absurd, fragile house of cards which falls over with the slightest touch, and telling the difference between discovery and utter delusion regarding any of this is extremely difficult if not impossible. There is a mountain of Tibetan and Theravadan theory concerning these pitfalls. The mirroring happens so quickly that even knowing whether there is any difference between the "upper harmonics" is nearly impossible - and could actually be impossible. What really happens in good meditation, is a kind of stillness that imbues all "sense worlds": commentary slows, and can even cease. This lack of narratization leads to a novel feeling of nearness to phenomena, even that one "is" one's senses. One does not "watch" sense data anymore, it happens. This is what "suchness" means to me.

But this kind of "meta-awareness" is not terribly important. What's important, is that the body calms, the breath slows, the glands produce good chemistry, the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system are happy. All games taking place in the "attic" - are trivial. This is the answer none of our Buddhist colleagues want to hear, because they want that theory of moksha as much as any "philosopher" too scared to try meditation needs their own kind of moksha like a fig leaf.

If we define apperception as "perception of the act of perception", a valid question is: how is this possible? What could we mean by "internal observation"? This is only a visual metaphor applied where there are no eyes and no light: something neurologists forget constantly, if they ever knew. But we all believe we know roughly what I mean if I say "observation of one's own internal states". This is not the same as hearing the hallucinated internal voice of the conscious I, it is more like the flash of an image of one's body, the partial summary of the tactile sensations of the skin, the scant sensations of the internal organs, the vague impression of mood and the balance of pain and pleasure, the sensation of breath and heartbeat: apperception is at best all these sensations bundled into a whole without blurring the distinctions. But the containment, the sense that something holds all this, of an "internal observer": this is a hallucination. There is no inner "self" that observes: this is an old familiar line from the ascetics, but I differ at a key point. The sense of "self" and the hallucinated narratizing voice do not have the same level of validity and measure of health. Just because the self is hallucinated - or "emergent" - does not mean it's false. When I spend time with animals, this all becomes clearer: what I see them doing, moving about their environment with flawless and nearly instantaneous calculation and response, is constant effortless vigilance. Merely an hour seriously studying a flock of sparrows teaches this. It's called proprioception: the body ceaselessly maps space, anticipates movement, judges distance - all of which is a kind of tightly controlled hallucination which allows us to predict the future a few milliseconds out and judge distances to within millimeters. What we call apperception is merely this uncanny ability to map and anticipate and rectify gaps, turned inward.

There is a great confusion of consciousness with the ability to be "present". To the good Buddhist psychologist, what is generally meant by "consciousness" in Western contexts should actually be called "discursive mind". Discursive mind is one of the primary obstacles in meditative practice. On the other hand, jhāna, awareness, has nothing whatever to do with this loud thinking, this cogito. Awareness is witnessing, watching, presence, not knowing what you'll say or do or feel, without anxiety, accompanied by the joy of being alive, the humor of being human, the wonder of the eternally new moment: that is much closer to being unconscious insofar as the mind is finally quiet, and the narrative I has finally relaxed.

This is all fascinating in the highest degree. Yet why haven't I written a book about consciousness instead? Because my verdict on all this theory is quite different from everyone else: it's not important. It's just another masturbatory aid for weak bodies with overactive minds. At best, for the dedicated student of meditation, it is a tantalizing goal which can encourage the health regimen which ascetic discipline can under the right circumstances provide.

However, the delusion that freedom lies in "understanding" of this kind: false from top to bottom. False! The health of the body is what liberates. The big health, the laughing health, the ribald spontaneous health, the health that is bigger than such anxieties, that wakes up one day and does not care anymore. The way out of the "labyrinth of meaning" is not in the labyrinth. Only the strength of the unconscious mind powered by the unconscious body, the body that is untouched by theory, by "understanding" of this kind, will simply walk away from the maze as though walking away from an engrossing puzzle, as though waking from a reverie, as though suddenly forgetting. And it is forgetfulness which heals.

This is an excerpt from Bartholomy's book, The Moral Disease.

Celui qui est soumis à un champ de visibilité, et qui le sait, reprend à son compte les contraintes du pouvoir; il les fait jouer spontanément sur lui-même; il inscrit en soi le rapport de pouvoir dans lequel il joue simultanément les deux rôles; il devient le principe de son propre assujettissement. Du fait même le pouvoir externe, lui, peut s'alléger de ses pesanteurs physiques; il tend à l'incorporel; et plus il se rapproche de cette limite, plus ces effets sont constants, profonds, acquis une fois pour toutes, incessamment reconduits : perpétuelle victoire qui évite tout affrontement physique et qui est toujours jouée d'avance.

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound, and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.

Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, §3.3

The much neglected work of the American psychologist, Julian Jaynes, is worth a first and second look. His book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, stands alone as a bold hypothesis in a morass of timid "scholarly consensus" that hides its sad torpor behind bushels of impenetrable cross reference, each work more of less than the last, each a paranoid academic fortress redundantly buttressed against the inevitable tide of irrelevant sectarian assaults launched out of restless vicious boredom and envy.

But Jaynes was somehow naïve and American enough to believe he could shine real light on a subject so important as the historical origin of consciousness. His theory is that at the beginning of the historical period, about 2000 BC in Mesopotamia, human beings were almost entirely unconscious, and are still largely so. Consciousness only arises as a response to stress and indecision. Egyptian and Sumerian theocratic civilizations of the period were characterized by longevity, stability, and relative peace. According to Jaynes, they thrived entirely without the aid or use of conscious thought: all decision and direction was authentically experienced as divine intervention, in the form of hallucinated voices. The gods were alive, active, and talkative. These gods were in fact hallucinatory aids in inspiring "bicameral" thinking, that is, the cooperative functioning of both hemispheres of the brain, while in particular the responses of the linguistic areas of the right hemisphere were experienced as an imperative voice: to hear was to obey. This is assumed to be the normal operation of the human species as neurologically determined by spoken language, especially before any civilizing influence. But due to the increasing complexity of antiquity, and especially the multicultural and multilingual contact climaxing around 1200 BC, these somewhat fragile autocracies crumbled, disintegrated by the proliferation of voices: the "Bronze Age collapse".

It is not entirely correct, and Jaynes is oftentimes just as obtuse and hamfisted as the rest of the Anglo-American psychologists, moreover he's obviously ignorant of Freud and everything else worthwhile in his own field - but despite all that, his theory is valuable. So much of what seems senseless in early historical record begins to make sense. Otherwise, the same people who invented writing, law, astronomy, arithmetic, the foundations of geometry, who knew the square root of 2 to 5 decimal places and the Pythagorean theorem, who constructed their temples according to musical ratios and devised multiple tuning systems to account for the Pythagorean comma - otherwise, these same people when they reported hearing the voice of their personal god telling them to do this or that concerning the most mundane things, were somehow much more insane than we believe ourselves to be. But mathematical precision and theosophic delusions are not at all incompatible, as the biography of Isaac Newton himself demonstrates. In fact what I find most suspect, is the general assumption that sometime between antiquity and now, we "woke up" out of the utterly convinced belief in our gods - that the proclivity for hallucination has somehow disappeared...

However there is a certain qualitative difference in the people of the earliest historical period, a difference in their mode of speaking, of thinking, of being. Anyone who does not feel this has probably not spent enough time among them and their remnants, does not read an ancient language, or lacks sufficient imagination - usually all at once. A sense for the difference of the ancient world is not to be found in the Anglo-American sphere: we are so sure of our bland Protestant common sense that anything else must be mere superstition, merely "native", merely not yet English. The men who have interpreted the most precious aspects of our civilized past are arrogant bores incapable of imagining anyone rational who was not also repressed and dour. It has not helped matters that the Egyptians and likely the Sumerians as well were, of all things - black people! Moreover, there's even ample evidence that the Sumerians enjoyed sex - lots of it, and without shame. Almost every modern intellectual is in the habit of assuming that the filthiest, most melancholic and draconian aspects of the Middle Ages simply extended out into the infinite past, growing ever more barbaric, stupid, fearful, and irrational. The Greek enlightenment is supposed to have been a "miracle", an island in a sea of stupidity: while it was in fact largely cultural piracy, which is something the Greeks were quite good at.

Let me paint a different landscape for you: imagine you stand at the entrance to an Egyptian temple made of polished limestone, with columns standing 60 feet tall; behind you is the blue sky of another cloudless day along the Nile, flocks of a million of this or that waterfowl flutter along its banks; stretching out hundreds of feet before you is a floor of the finest white marble, inset with jewels and mysterious motifs; wafting toward you in the crisp desert air is a blend of expensive incense - you detect myrrh, Lebanese cedar, and a hint of Cretian saffron; from within you hear the complex harmonies of the chanting priests, whose mathematical songs, designed to entwine the movements of the stars with the eternal ratios of sound, fill this temple without cease as they have for a thousand years; you see scribes and aristocrats and wealthy merchants stream by, all swathed in flawless gleaming linen, their chocolate skin having been bathed and anointed this morning with fine oils, faces painted in black and azure, hair elaborately coiffed, showing off gold and silver jewelry of the highest craftsmanship; ahead, concealed by shimmering veils of what might be fine muslin, you glimpse the enormous gilded and bejeweled images of Thoth, Horus, and Seth, glaring and towering over all the mortals assembled; you cannot help but swallow and tremble a little with awe, so overpowering is the combined effect of the rational and mysterious.

So what happens if we try on a new assumption, that perhaps the Egyptians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Indians and Chinese, knew what they were talking about? That when they spoke of their gods, there was a time when they meant something other than silly dismissible superstition entertained in bad faith, as our "religious" people mime for us today? Perhaps there was an entirely different psychology at work? Perhaps the fact that the gods were simultaneously the planets, the musical ratios, the principles of sound and syllable, the forces of justice and strife, and yet real personages with histories and intrigues and successes and failures - perhaps this kind of godhood has something to teach us? Perhaps this kind of godhood has never left us, but we no longer call it by that name?

Jaynes is not quite correct, but he's on to something. He overreached, and made a typical error: he assumes linear progress, he assumes that evolution means improvement, he assumes historical coherence. First of many prejudices regarding consciousness that must be overcome, is that it is always more advantageous than unconsciousness - when in reality, the opposite is almost always true. Secondly that consciousness is a source any kind of significant agency: while Jaynes understands to some degree how little consciousness is essential to humanity or necessary for culture, he still fails to conceive of consciousness as a symptom. Taking these fresh perspectives into account, we come up with a very different picture: the self-aware human being comes and goes, the underlying causes of consciousness rise and fall, and the whole waveform seems to be associated with cultural crisis. My theory is that self-awareness has peaked and receded many times even within historical record: in late Bronze Age Babylon, in Axial Age China and India, in Hellenized Rome of late antiquity, and again in our own time. Therefore the question becomes: what are the underlying causes of the symptom we call consciousness?

There is a crucial correction I would make to Jaynes' theory. Jaynes believed he was discovering the historical origin of consciousness, while he was actually tracing the origin of the conscience. The two are nearly synonymous in the early stages, but quickly take different trajectories. Most psychologists make an unfounded assumption I would like to correct: that consciousness precedes conscience. My theory is that it is the other way round: it is the sting of conscience, linguistically determined and driven, which heightens consciousness and gives it its own life and history. Without the discomfort and desirous unease inflicted by a punitive, admonishing hallucinated voice, the ceaseless internal dialogue we call consciousness has no consistent impetus, and merely rises momentarily and falls away quickly - as it does in a fully relaxed subject who feels at home and without shame, like a musician or dancer absorbed in their craft, something some of us are not familiar with at all and perhaps believe is impossible. Anyone who has seriously attempted meditative discipline, anyone who has taken up the daily challenge of the cushion, will have an inkling of what I'm talking about: thinking is not voluntary, so much so that thinking and compulsion are almost inseparable.

When a learned authority on early civilization, such as the Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, tells us casually that morality and conscience did not exist among the Sumerians, is such a thing believed? If the statement is not nonsense, what then? Either the Sumerians were too "primitive" to know better, or Jean doesn't know how to read his sources. In Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, he says the Sumerian attitude is this:

If I am in trouble, it is because I am punished. If I am punished, it is because I must have forgotten some obligation or have violated some divine prohibition. §III.11

That may sound like a conscience to anyone who has not thought about these things carefully, but it is not. Nowhere is there the impetus to moral reasoning: anything unfavorable is punishment, and any punishment has its necessary cause. Without the possibility of true innocence in the face of unjust punishment, there is not yet true guilt in the face of unjust leniency, and hence not yet morality. What's remarkable, is that this attitude is in fact identical with the attitudes prevalent among much less civilized people: the anthropologist will tell you this formula is quite common.

When Lévi-Strauss emphasizes the prevalence of strict causative thinking in primitive systems of thought, he outlines precisely this type of premoral reasoning - from the first chapter of La Pensée Sauvage: "magical thought ... can be distinguished from science not so much by any ignorance or contempt of determinism but by a more imperious and uncompromising demand for it". In magical thinking, witchcraft and the agency of spirits is not invoked in all cases, only where there is a kind of suspicious gap - the gap of "accident". If a man is bitten by a snake, they say the cause of the bite was both the snake and witchcraft. Magic did not cause the snake to bite, but it caused that man in particular to be its victim. In primitive thought there is no accident.

Such "unconscious apprehension of the truth of determinism" seems also familiar to the psychoanalyst, who in any "accident" suspects something unconsciously determined. Magical thought has always therefore seemed to me to be closer to the truth of subjective experience: everything happens for a reason, and often, multiple reasons. Overdetermination is one of the great truths of unconscious thinking, and if we sat with it, probably much closer to the scientific truth as well. On the other hand, moral reasoning demands unique causes because it demands unique responsibility, and therefore moral reasoning implies distortion: the uncanny becomes the "accidental", and from this point on we begin to lose our sense for the suspicious in all merely convenient things, and our appreciation for the power of fate dwindles as well.

No free will and yet responsible: I assert this formula against the assumptions every modern philosopher makes on this question. This is what the ancients called "fate". The necessity of justice takes no leave from the mythology of choice: willed, unwilled, conscious, unconscious - the clearest heads on these questions used to see all action as a form of necessity, along with the resulting justice. And not only "action": the old way was to reward and punish you for what you are, not what you "choose". Agency and choice are not synonymous. "Could have done otherwise" is never true. And yet community and its order of privileges cannot survive without a justice that is, according to the modern mythology of responsibility as choice, unjust.

Before there were gods, there were ancestors. The ancestral relationship seems to be modeled on the relationship to one's grandparents: grandfather fire, grandmother earth. In some cases there is a kind of identification that skips generations: among the Huichol, a grandson calls his grandfather by a peer kinship term, as though they were of the same generation, or even the same person.

In the Levant, the slow evolution from ancestor to god is most clearly documented. In Jericho, Tell Qaramel, and Tell Aswad there is evidence of a widespread cult of the dead: the head of the recently deceased was cut off, cleaned, and painted with a face. As gruesome as this may seem to us, this was the original form of the "idol". Sometimes it seems the skull was allowed to dry out, and a new face was modeled onto the bone with plaster. Jaynes gives a detailed account of the gradual transition from this form of ancestral preservation, to the idols of the Sumerian gods: these idols were no mere symbol, they were aids to the hallucination of voices. Jaynes' theory is that the hallucinated voice of the recently deceased was considered divine, and preserving the head of the dead also preserved and canonized its voice. The Japanese still make shrines to their dead, and honor them regularly with incense and prayer. Many widows speak to their dead husbands daily. Speaking to the grave of a lost beloved, is still considered quite sane in most cultures.

In fact it's in east Asia that we find reverence for the dead most well developed and unchanged through millennia. All Western terminology along the lines of "worship" and "religion" are stupid prejudices: we must not obscure the past with Judeo-Christian issues of "belief". For the ancients, these rituals were much more immediate, much more obvious, and required no "faith". One's ancestors once lived and prospered, and now that they don't, they require attention in order to continue their benevolent influence. The "proof" of this is in both one's own prosperity and the presence of the ancestors in one's emotional life: this is the core of the Asian conscience, and why 孝, "filial piety", is almost the definition of morality for the Chinese, even today.

The consensus throughout most of the world was that nothing ever really dies, it only transitions to another form, perhaps a shadowy one. Where older cultures are divided is in whether an individual spirit is to be forgotten and the name of the deceased never mentioned again, or whether it should be honored and given regular attention: either way, there is a kind of danger involved. And in ancestor reverence there is perhaps the same taboo at work: the reverence is merely the obverse of the fear of the dead.

We will probably never know whether Jaynes' theory is correct, but there is something about it that is much truer than its subsequent dismissal allows. We don't want to know how much we talk to ourselves. We don't want to admit how much we hear voices, argue with voices, are merely voices. Neurologists and psychologists get very nervous in this territory, and it takes the frankness and humility of an Oliver Sacks to document just how frequent, commonplace, and almost trite the ubiquity of hallucination among us really is. We are the hallucinating apes: every time we speak, we induce hallucinations in each other - that is the function of speaking, what linguists call the "displacement" of information. Analogously, every time we think, we induce hallucinations in ourselves: that is the true power of thought, so abused and overused it is now, that we've even come to believe that this hallucinated voice constitutes the core of our being. Cogito ergo sum - but what insane creature first of all questions whether or not he is, and secondly what insane creature settles the question with the authority of a hallucinated voice?

The eyes. Jaynes often mentions the big, staring eyes so common in the divine idols of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Especially in the figurines of the personal household god, the eyes tend to be oversized and take up most of the face. What effect does this have? Firstly, for all of us cephalized creatures there is no face without eyes: the camouflage of butterflies and many other creatures tells us that. Moreover, prolonged eye contact is so important to the human infant - after suckling, it is the first social bond. The eagerness with which babies make eye contact and hold it, mesmerized and mesmerizing: is an idol that sees you in this way, meant to instigate a kind of regression? Were the ancients, who so often spoke of their gods as their parents, seeking to kindle and rekindle that relationship in as real a way as possible?

I don't like resorting to a Lacanian concept - because I object to his methods among other things - but there is something compelling and useful for us in his conception of le regard, "the Gaze". What does the Gaze do? It reflects the act of seeing, it "hypostatizes" the subject in a subjective relation: one is seen as though from the outside, one becomes a whole, a unit, another "other". Without becoming lost in Lacanian mystification, it does seem obvious that the staring image of the god was meant to induce a kind of trance of self-awareness - we could even compare it to the response of any prey animal: it freezes, it is almost a kind of embarrassment, it is a sudden assessment of one's situation to find the escape. Perhaps the prey response is the origin of shame; it seems also at work in all social hierarchy. Lacan constantly emphasized that to be a subject is to be subject to: to be "captured" by the image, and "enter into the symbolic" as though a formerly broad and ambiguous experience were severely narrowed, channeled, exploited. It's always implied in such philosophy that the "subjective relation" entails essential falsehood, an "as if", a servitude to an imperious and "Apollonian" afterimage of Truth with a Capital T.

And what is the quality of all "true" behavior if not precisely this multivalence peeking through the veil of shallow simplicity that constitutes all behavior as such? Isn't this what the Daoist masters taught, with their surprising reversals and subtle ambiguities? Confucius himself was frequently overawed by such men - derisive hermits, haughty recluses, and wise madmen for whom the bureaucratic scholars and ritualized conformists served as foils. It is no accident the "way of the moon" served as the principal metaphor for inner truth: the inconstant, feeble moon, always falling behind, always obscure, opposed to the bright and "obvious" way of the sun.

And what is the origin of deceptive behavior but precisely the capacity for social behavior? To be seen is to wear a false and shallow skin. Ravens, for example, are capable of intentional deception. When caching food, if they believe they are being watched by a rival, they will sometimes pretend to cache something, but leave nothing in order to thwart theft. But they will only misdirect like this once they themselves have been thieves.

And isn't all social behavior fundamentally imitative? To be social means to play witness to witnessed behavior. From the most cynical and apesick perspective I have, I'll say that we learn not to imitate genuine behavior, we learn to imitate imitative behavior. This is why autistic children do not easily "socialize": because they think and perceive so rigorously and "literally". In any given behavior the autistic child expects to find the blueprint, the original, the keystone, where there is none. Social behavior is simulacra.

What I'm driving at is that consciousness such as we know it - modern talkative internal dialogue, the "analog I" - is from this perspective a side-effect of a burgeoning conscience. The conscientia, the act before a witness, the consequence of internal conflict between competing drives, is much older, much more primal, much more important.

First, conscience simulates the ability to see oneself from the outside: resolving internal conflict and calculating maximum social advantage requires running scenarios in which we are "seen", we become a "You". Conscience uses the "You" register: I mean second-person in the fullest linguistic sense, as linguistically determinative. Or perhaps the neurologists will discover one day that this psycholinguistic You is rather the manifestation of virtual reward calculation - for now it doesn't matter. Within this theoretical You register the witness which "sees" and constitutes the You is only implied.

But consciousness is a kind of doubling of this representation: both the represented self as "You" and its implied witness are themselves witnessed. Conscious thinking therefore reifies the first implied witness as the ego, the "I", while implying yet another unnamed one: the third element some used to call "ātman", or the "soul", or as is so in vogue now, the supposed "consciousness" itself. If your head is spinning, dear reader, please continue on and I promise not to leave this so obscure...

The proto-conscience as the voice of the ancestor-god is not possible without this You. The You register creates a diorama, a mise-en-scène, a form of address. What we must imagine is the presence of the You without the immediate translation into I: one is addressed as You, one thinks You, one is You. This is not actually so difficult: we practice this daily, almost in every moment we quietly address ourselves as You, without significant presence of any I. Contrary to all common assumption, the I register is relatively rare, belonging to louder, more self-conscious, more constipated and antagonistic forms of internal dialogue: it appears when we look for "thought itself", it appears most clearly and "self-evidently" when people think intentionally, that is when a philosophic mood strikes and they sit down and "think" before themselves like the practiced clowns they are. The reason we believe the I register is so dominant and independent is largely a question of amplitude: there are no louder thoughts, than the thoughts of the I. But we are ashamed of our actual forms of thinking and seek to hide it from each other and ourselves. We employ "It" and "You" registers much more frequently than we know: schizo-paranoid types reveal this behavior not as distortion of consciousness, but as its substratum. The man who yells to himself on the street not only frightens because he's different, but because he is all too familiar.

I assert, along with good philosophical company, that language is not merely the tool by which we express some imagined meta-language of thought: language as the medium of thought becomes determinative of possible thought - that's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at work, that's also one of the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis and all good psychology since Nietzsche, whether anyone knows it or not. The problem is that the opponents of "linguistic determinism" don't know what they mean by thinking: sometimes they mean affect, sometimes they mean apperception, sometimes they mean visualization, sometimes they mean memory, sometimes they seem not to know about the predominance of linguistically structured unconscious thinking and mistake this for something else - no one uses the inherited vocabulary of psychology so sloppily as contemporary neurologists - shouldn't that alone tell us something important? Almost everyone is committed to the notion of meta-thought and is insulted by the suggestion that they cannot think without language: show me this pure thought, show it once to me. By what means do you show it? Language. Believe for once an experienced poet: before structured thought comes not meta-thought but proto-thought, which is an urge, a whispering, a submerged chorus, a pregnancy, a vision, a need. This is not yet thinking, it is the father of thinking, and language is the matrix.

Most of my hypothetical reading audience will not believe me, when I say that thinking is a form of self-induced auditory hallucination. An education in meditative discipline - Zen, Dhyana, Vipassana or whatever - will help greatly, but even a simple appeal to the accompanying physiological facts suffices. How often in a day do you catch yourself having an imaginary conversation - or more likely a rematch of a lost argument, or even more likely of an argument that should have happened but didn't? Do you sometimes gesticulate? Do you sometimes hiss a few words under your breath as you take out the trash? Do you have elaborate fantasies of some amour perdu as you mow the lawn? Have you had more than one breathy squelched argument in the car with someone who is not there? Is your heart rate and blood pressure elevated, your muscles tensed, a few hits of adrenaline making their rounds? That is hallucination, by all standards. Just because you believe you "know" none of it is real - makes no difference. Firstly because you do not know it in the way you believe, and secondly because this kind of accompanying knowledge of the illusion is the normal state of hallucination.

A few of the less repressed might be willing to admit to a few slips and lapses into fantasy here and there - but unless you've plummeted through that gaping hole called a psychotic break and emerged with shattering clarity, or dedicated at least a decade to stilling of the mind on the merciless cushion, and preferably both, take all estimates of your indulgence in fantasy and multiply them by a thousand, at least. The frequency of nagging thoughts, curses, stresses, insults and worries is so great in a modern urban type that in the space of a few seconds there might be a dozen of such malformed "thoughts" bubbling and thrashing in this foamy brew, just below the smooth skin of mendacious placidity called "consciousness".

If psychotic breakdown is the deconstruction of the ego, the weakening of the egoic méconnaissance, and the discovery of the "supersane", what then is the conscious conscience? It is the collective méconnaissance, the collective egoic fabrications, the collective defense, the "language game" in which the winner earns superficial and cognitively dissonant sanity. Morality is a kind of burlesque parody, a grotesque "grand ol' opry", a kind of decrepit Broadway as in John Carpenter's Escape from New York. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves with good conscience. It is our chastity belt protecting us against the vicissitudes of a life freed from instinct. It is a homemade straightjacket, it is the castration carried out by a crazed man in a manic fever.

Why is vanity so important and apparently adaptive for simians? Even Koko the gorilla was known to call herself "Queen". Nietzsche says, "vanity is the skin of the soul". Is nascent linguistic capacity a kind of nascent madness which must be wrapped in skin?

Capuchin monkeys, for example, may lie somewhere within a liminal zone in primate subjectivity. They were given the mirror test - that is testing self-recognition - by contrasting three scenarios: the sight of a familiar monkey, an unfamiliar monkey, and their own reflection. With the familiar monkey, nothing much happened. With the unfamiliar monkey, the females became anxious and avoided eye-contact, while the males reacted with threat displays: all expected so far. But with the mirror image, the females gazed into their own eyes and smacked their lips and swayed: neither fear nor indifference, but some kind of exaggerated infatuation ritual. This becomes clearer with the males: they seemed to experience a kind of nervous breakdown hovering precariously between rivalry and identity - they screamed, they curled up on the floor, they tried to escape. Vanity is a kind of lifejacket in the open sea of identity, which preserves the sense that one's self is an object to be desired and seduced: while true subjectivity is a recursive nightmare of rivalry and possession when experienced in the raw, as infants and psychotics do. Modern civilized human beings are so inured to this nightmare and so well-dressed in their emperor's clothes, draped in certainties, personalities, habits, repetitive thoughts and half-dead bodies, that not only do they rarely remember their nightly dreams, but they are ignorant of their daily incessant dreaming, their monotonous chanting and the apotropaic magic they wield at almost every moment.

There is a topology present in this theory, an ahistorical psycholinguistic hierarchy by which I perhaps curse myself to eternal misunderstanding and strawman showmanship - but in the name of science let us for once take on this burden knowingly and give the critics a bone to chew on, a baton de commandement to wave around and misinterpret:

1. The It register: forms the core of unconscious language.
2. The You register: constitutive of conscientious language.
3. The I register: the primary illusion at work in conscious language.

The debt to Freud is obvious, but I insist on that important substitution to his topology: das Überich, the superego, is not a product of the ego's frustrations, as though it stood over the ego authoritatively... For all his acuity Freud never properly understood the importance of the paranoid to all egoic experience: the I does not come first in mythopoetic spacetime, rather the You precedes and constitutes the very heart of what it means to be "I". One is only I by virtue of this "introjected You".

The primacy of deixis. Deixis, meaning "pointing", is one of the core functions of language and one of the first necessities in communication. Very old ways of thinking have left very deep lines in our collective psycholinguistics, and one of these glacial valleys is the evolution of the deictic center: from where does one speak? Tracing the evolution of deixis provides another angle of attack for understanding how we talk to ourselves - that is, how we "think".

As Nietzsche says, "Das Du ist älter als das Ich." Following that principle, the You must be earlier in the strata of deictic categories. At the lower strata, the egoic center is weakly implied, anaphoric, rarely spoken: just as it was in ancient Chinese.

All current linguistic thinking about this exhibits the characteristic modern prejudice: that the "I" must be the default deictic center, and any deviation must fall back to this center with a gravitational necessity. Oftentimes I feel like a heliocentrist in an age of geocentrism - what is unthinkable to "common sense" seems obvious to me: we are animals first, tribal animals second, and "persons" last. The "I" deictic center is superficially applied to these much older and more primary layers. The I is a puppet regime, largely a matter of defensive posturing.

1. It: the default object of attention, in which all other relation is implied.
2. You: the first "subjective turn", the confrontation. The voice of the tribe.
3. I: the It that is not You, or the You of You.

Mythopoetically, we can say that the voice of imperative instinct is always: "It shall". When conscience and the battles of redirected instinct occur, it speaks a "You shall". And much later, consciousness says: "I shall".

This starting to sound too Hegelian - and I fear the insatiable metaphysical addiction is already settling down to a fine meal... The principal thing I want the reader to understand, is that the I does not come first. There is no essential subject-object binary, and as much as what I'm saying may sound Lacanian, actually I dislike the mystification of "Other" - everything is other, and thus there is no primal experience of "otherness". The reason the Lacanian mystique appeals to modern ears is because of the fundamentally alienating conditions of modern life: we wish to be excused for our weaknesses.

Consequences of this perspective:

• The "You" is the real innovation: the supposition that "being a subject" comes prior to acknowledgment of You, is false and a prejudice typical of self-absorbed modernity.

• Speech that centers itself in the "You" outlasts the speech of the "I". It's important to have spent some real time with schizophrenics: the durability and power of the paranoid You is an overwhelming tide compared the fragility of any "ego". We are all much nearer to insanity than we know. The You is not only more powerful but more sane. It's not the You that makes us crazy, it's the half-dissolved and half-formed I.

• If someone says, "You turn left", then the linguists will grudgingly acknowledge that the deictic center is this "second person". But I object to the way these "persons" are arranged: as usual we have it wrong way round. "It" is first person, "You" is second person, and "I" is the third person. The term "person" itself betrays the fundamental prejudice.

• "Me" is not synonymous with "I". To say "Me" does not center the deixis around the "I": that's another seeming contradiction the linguists won't agree to, because they have no intuition and can only repeat what they are told. What is it like to say "Me"? Here's a very old sentence among primates: "Give it to me!" While it directs an action towards this "Me", it does not yet constitute the I register. The center is in fact still the "You", the locus of action. Should I coin an impressive terminology in order to achieve believability? Not origo but fons?

I hesitate to lay too much emphasis here, for fear of seeming to take this schema too seriously: but what is serious, is beginning to analyze how we talk to ourselves, daily, hourly, by the minute, every second. The Freudian "topological" theory goes awry the moment it becomes spatial. The nervous system is not a landscape, it is a resonance chamber. The "ego" is not a place, nor an organ, nor a membrane, nor a "person", nor an organism, nor an agent: it is a mode of speech, it is a technique of language, it is a skill. The "I" does not exist until spoken, and only then. It is like any other emergent dynamic: it has discernible properties, vectors, an intelligible physics - but it does not "exist" outside its functioning.

My point therefore, is that not only do we speak to ourselves with our "I", but also with our "You", and our "It".

Example internal dialogue: "It's not fair", we say to ourselves - meaning we hallucinate a voice saying this. "You should quit this job", we say to ourselves - meaning we hallucinate our own voice or often another's saying this. "But I can't quit!", we say to ourselves - meaning we hallucinate our own voice saying this. Each register carries its own valences, its own tone, its own implications, its own powers.

• It: observing, describing, analyzing.
• You: commanding, encouraging, blaming, cursing, including and excluding.
• I: complaining, boasting, scheming, lying.

They are more like colorbands within a spectrum, than "registers". Consider for example what it's like to think in Chinese, where pronouns play such a minimal role, can be omitted, and there is no inflection to indicate person or case or tense, only a very weak "aspect" marker and a few grammatical particles. Many sentences might translate into the "It" register even when referring to oneself: this is significant. But we're all becoming more similar, and have been doing so for millennia: modern Mandarin is much more like the Indo-European languages than ancient Chinese was.

Blame comes before guilt. As it happens, Jürgen Habermas developed a little schema very similar to this one - it can be no mere coincidence. In fleshing out his theory of "Communicative Rationality" with very large capital letters, he introduces three "validity dimensions" in which rationality expresses itself:

• It: theoretical truth
• We: normative rightness
• I: subjective truthfulness

I continually find that someone like Habermas is perfectly suited to expose the underbelly of modernity: he's intelligent and educated enough to understand where to lay emphasis; he's naïve and German enough to be incapable of any significant charm; he wants earnestly to be correct and moral; he is in fact a very responsible citizen - I believe he's very punctual and sorts his own recycling; yet he has a great deal to hide from himself and does so very well - I've lived in Bavaria and I know these types. I find the phrase "normative rightness" extremely illuminating: its association with "We" is perfect - actually he's right on the mark. Just a slight adjustment and we agree:

1. The world: It
2. The tribe: We and You
3. The excluded: I

The "I" is always in a position of exclusion or the threat of exclusion: the I is taboo. The essence of modernity is therefore to live within a state of taboo: we are always in danger of exclusion from a tribe that doesn't exist. When the I speaks, the threat of exclusion permeates every word: making excuses, shifting blame, boasting, flattery, laying snares. We call it "subjective truthfulness": but what do I hear? Lying. Whenever someone clears his throat, makes a flourish, grows serious and puts on a "truthful" tone - I know that many falsehoods and clever distortions will soon appear like rabbits from a hat.

"It rains." Among most linguists there is the misunderstanding that because a "dummy subject" or "expletive pronoun" is syntactically required, it is somehow actually null and impotent. I assert something else: that the implications of syntax run much deeper, and constantly generate illusory entities so convincingly that we cannot think without them. What I find lacking in most linguistic theory - and especially in the Anglo-American sphere they are painfully slow to come around to 20th century insights - is the understanding that syntax fools us as much as it makes us gods: logic is nothing other than abstracted syntax, expressed with syntax, and understood via the magic of syntax.

Please take a moment to consult Zhuangzi and his famous dream of the butterfly. The story can be interpreted not merely as an exercise in solipsistic relativity to dream states, but as an illustrative juxtaposition of the conscious subjective I alongside the It register: to put it in familiar Freudian terms, I believe his subtler point is to show how the ego is enveloped within an unconscious projection of "the object", even in waking. In dreams, we generally do not dream in the first person precisely, we dream of a subject who may or may not be our usual self exactly, but we identify with that subject. Zhuangzi dreamt of the butterfly, in all its vivid detail, and knew it was him. He says: 栩栩然胡蝶也, 自喻適志與. 不知周也. Translated as literally as I can: "Vividly fluttering was butterfly, self-evidently following desire. Did not know Zhuangzi." The passage hinges on what this 自喻: "self-evident", could mean. 喻 has a cluster of meanings related to "explanation using analogy": 比喻 is literally "other explain", and translates as "metaphor"; 借喻 "borrow explain", is "metonym"; 逆喻 "oppose explain", is "oxymoron". Most translators more or less ignore the oddity of the phrase and treat it as an adverb only intensifying the "follow desire". But since Zhuangzi is no stranger to arcane literary puns, can we assume he was hinting at something like "self analogy"? A signifier that refers to itself? Is that the same as identification? That would be an apt description of the paradox of conscious subjectivity, wouldn't it?

There are some languages in which personal pronouns never crystallized into the canonical, seemingly self-evident forms we take for granted in the Indo-European sphere. Even in modern Japanese, it's possible to trace very ancient ways of thinking about personhood. At one time, there was no standard means of saying "I", or "you", and even the modern watashi and anata have only weak roles as such. One was more likely to refer to oneself and others by social status, or title, or simply as "this one" or "over here", or often not at all. Almost every Japanese pronoun is in fact traceable to a kind of metonym: one refers to oneself by saying "our house", "this servant", or simply "this thing here". Despite recent foreign influence, the Japanese instinct for navigating complex and restrictive social hierarchy has tremendously deep roots and persists even now: they continue to invent new pronouns and usage changes rapidly. What this demonstrates as not only probable, but to my mind quite evident, is that in all languages every pronoun was once a metonym. The Japanese subjective orientation relative to the group, the prevalence of deictic demonstratives in such phrases as ano kata: あの方 (literally "that side", but meaning "he") - all this serves to illustrate the ancient mode of linguistically structured thinking: there are no atomistically discrete persons, but there are positions within the group, roles, nodes, directions, confrontations, intimacies and formalities.

One may ask whether Japanese isn't arbitrarily chosen as example, whether the rigors of inflection in Sanskrit or Greek couldn't just as easily prove the opposite. All I can say is that spending time in the company of ancient texts, and especially those outside the Indo-European family, will help alleviate the illusion of a monolithic perfection embodying "thought itself" our languages inspire. It is no accident that "Sanskrit" means "perfected work", nor that the Greeks articulated the laws of rhetoric: these languages were cultivated as the premier sign of nobility, back when one's manner of speech was a passport, an indelible mark of breeding. (For an illustration, ask Homer how Odysseus proves his pedigree to Nausicaä and his hosts, though he be naked, penniless, and swollen with the abuse of shipwreck.) The proliferation of cases and inflections in Indo-European languages along with their phonemic harmony was no doubt not only some natural genetic drift, but an actively encouraged and cultivated complexity in those oral cultures, where one memorized all knowledge in perfect verse. The old Sanskrit grammarians say just that, but our modern scholars with their democratic reflexes think they know better. Just as it was a mark of superiority in ancient China to say much with as few words as possible, preferably while making subtle reference to arcane texts, with insults folded within impeccable humility just as one's hands were hidden behind long sleeves, so it was a mark of education in India to say important things in an ecstatic hyperbolic recursive mode in imitation of the Vedic poets. We must unlearn linguistic prejudices, piece by piece, in order to understand their dominance. What Indo-European languages reify and hypostatize so effectively - the subject, the object, the unambiguous predicate relation, the highly redundant marking, the "thing in itself and its predicated attributes" - these are nothing less than the prerequisites to the Western scientific perspective: that is why they seem not only self-evident to us, but positively proven. Their worth as method is proven beyond all doubt: but not their primacy nor naturalness. Quite the opposite! Unambiguous language is a technology of dominance, and probably a fairly recently acquired one. All achievements in clarity and scientific rigor owe their origin to the possibility of unambiguous language: on the other hand, metaphysical buffoonery and a typical psychological naïveté are also the consequences of a linguistic thinking that has grown too confident, too sure of its possession of all possible means, too sure of its status as "perfected work" and mirror of reality: merely consult Kant or Hegel to see all of these symptoms at work. But it is surely the poets, those who strain against the limits of a language, who gain the clearest vista into the starry unknown above the fog of their native speech: "The rest is silence."

I do not know of any linguist who has ever internalized a simple and well-attested fact of the origin of language: song came first. Song as mnemonic, song as the warp through which the weft of culture is woven, song as the lockbox of secrets and ethnic identity, song as the riddlemaster of the learned, song as the original form of prayer, song as the first authoritative voice. Why does the call-and-response, verse-and-chorus structure work so well and have such longevity? Why is it that even in contemporary music the chorus naturally takes the role of the authoritative summary, the overarching narrative voice? My answer is that song precedes all other forms of discourse. I won't seek to prove this, because anyone who has not already grokked this, anyone who has never felt a song rise within the bosom like an unstoppable dawn, will not believe me no matter what tricks of prose and prosaic science I use: poesis is its own witness and guarantor.

The question arises, "what then is the meaning of Socrates and his δαιμόνιον - his forbidding inner voice?" Answer unclear. But one thing is certain to me: he was not alone. Socrates was unique not for his fundamental psychology and the unconscious forces at work in him, but for his remarkable conscious mind. Socrates was precociously and futuristically conscious: that was the strange leverage he wielded so skillfully over his largely unconscious neighbors. That he had identified and named his own hallucinated voice of oracular authority, is what is so unusual about him. But as usual, Socrates serves here also as an enigma and a bridge between two very different worlds: he is both ancient and modern, secure and anxious, deliciously amoral and pretentiously, even clownishly moral. Socrates the ironic - the self-deprecating satyr, the holy fool who by mocking the part of himself visible to us, mocks us at a much deeper level than we are prepared to grasp.

Where does the "voice of authority" come from? This is almost equivalent to asking where instinct comes from: we have only the vaguest of ideas. Jaynes' attempt to locate the source of hallucinated voices in the right hemisphere Broca's area of the brain probably weakened the force of his otherwise skillful argument, based as it was in historical, philological, and archaeological evidence. I'll say it again: neurology is granted far too much prestige and a premature fiat power, given that it is a science in its infancy. We can say this or that lump of tissue seems to be involved with this weakly defined behavior - so what? Neurology as a branch of chemistry is overwhelmingly impressive, yet as the crown of psychology it is pathetic. Neurologists conspire to conceal their ignorance of even the most basic questions: how is information stored in the nervous system? What is memory? What is instinct? What is judgment? Dig deep, and all you will find is obfuscation, perambulation, naïveté, narrow goals within narrow gardens walled with impressive machinery and data which turns out no one as yet knows how to read.

We return to our question: why was ancient humanity, everywhere on planet earth in every culture, convinced of and concerned with imaginary gods? These are the same people who invented writing and mathematics: the tired old answer, "they were dumber than us" - is no longer convincing.

What sets us apart from the other animals more than anything else? Not intelligence, not reason, not even our technology, but our capacity for language. Our invention of complex syntax enabled us to combine unique vocalizations: the invention of words we cannot take credit for. This is a secret we're very reluctant to let out. Ravens and many other creatures use words. We are most comfortable with the idea when the animal is at least a primate: an experiment once recorded a chimp making a particular sound in response to grapes, other chimps upon hearing this sound pointed to an image of grapes. But we don't dare say this is use of words, we call it "referential vocal signaling" and feel our superiority is intact. One day this will seem as comical and obscenely arrogant to everyone else as it does to me, I hope.

But our mastery of language is a dangerous game. Auditory language among the other animals seems to fill a small communication niche: namely communication over distance without line of sight. Most communication happens chemically, visually, by touch, by various typified behavior, and as the ineffable sum total of all these media. The adaptive advantages of our spoken language must have been tremendous to have exerted so much selective pressure that we all learn it effortlessly. The efficiency and speed of spoken language must have made us much better hunters, craftsmen, and gatherers.

But with every mutation, there is a cost. Learning a spoken language until fluency, changes the brain. The infant undergoing language training is like pouring molten bronze into a mold: the fact that any healthy infant can master any language no matter how complex, is an unexplained marvel. What does it take to be able to converse about things which aren't remotely present? To conjure images and feelings at the mere sound of a few words? And conversely what does it take to be able to produce a convincing tale? To lie effectively? My answer: the proclivity to hallucinate. So what is the risk of this language capacity, this molten brain, alongside our deconstructed instincts? Insanity.

Therefore what was the ancient obsession with the hallucinated gods? The answer should be obvious: containment of the risk of insanity alongside continued enjoyment of the benefits of a complex culture made possible by dependence on the structuring power of language. The gods and the realm of gods were a means of hallucinating answers to the unanswerable, of shutting down the anxiety of conscious thought.

This brings us to another important correction to Jaynes' theory I need to mention. Jaynes is ignorant of prehistory and seems to assume that whatever psychological conditions prevailed at the beginning of history probably extended into the infinite past: we imagine that the obsession with gods and taboo is somehow inevitable in any "primitive" people. But this is not exactly what the anthropologists tell us. Many of the most primitive peoples, to return to Turnbull's Pygmies of the Congo for an example, are not as concerned with spirits and gods as we might presume: there is the Forest, and it is a kind of protector and god - but beyond that their world is relatively simple and straightforward. Turnbull says it's because they aren't afraid: the Pygmy sees the forest as relatively benign and easy to live in, and thus has no reason to find an agency to blame beyond their intimate and parental relationship with the great Forest and its provision of food and shelter. Therefore I believe it's important to understand that a people obsessed with gods and the agency of spirits and witchcraft, is to that degree a disturbed and unsettled people. Perhaps they have recently turned to agriculture and an urban life, as the Sumerians had, perhaps their environment is harsh, such as it is for the Inuit and the Aborigine... This is not a constant: when things are good and the game is plentiful, there's no need to address the spirits beyond the usual politeness. For example, why did the famous Ghost Dance spontaneously arise among the Lakota Sioux with such ferocity and urgency? Why did these once truly practical survivalists become obsessed with the invisible and a prophesy of the end times? Most casual observers assume that the "natives" were always so irrational and prone to meaningless superstition - but this is not true. The Ghost Dance was a kind of cultural immune response, a fever dream, and in fact very foreign to their previous ways and an analog of the conditions of early Christianity - because at the end of the 19th century the remaining Lakota people had been suddenly and forcefully initiated into the anxious misery of sedentary life. So was the overpowering concern for the gods in Sumeria and Babylon a symptom of some kind? If so, of what disease? And if our morality is descended from such neurotic concern with the spirits, what does that make it? My answer: morality is a kind of panic. "Moral panic" is the only kind of morality.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, get The Moral Disease.

What is it about the camera and the photograph that is so psychologically potent and subject to abuse?

First of all, we are apes. As such the sight of a face is all-important: a person is present when a face is present; obligation, hierarchy, and rivalry are present.

The uncanny. The camera stands between you and I. It creates a third specular "person", which is my double. The double is the real meaning of "soul": to say that the camera steals the soul is to say that it creates a specular doppelgänger which is no longer connected with my body. Wandering souls are never a good thing: one should have one's household of spirits in good order, else mischief and unconscious voodoo will ensue. There is a great deal of extremely effective and weaponized superstition at work in the 21st century obsession with the personal image: black magic works to the precise degree it successfully manipulates unconscious semantic clusters, primarily through the power of the uncanny. Anyone and everyone who wields a camera as though it were harmless and unambiguous, and yet becomes distempered and offended should the "right" to photograph anyone be refused, is to be suspected of wielding petty black magic. The importance of this is not to be underestimated: in modernity we are so accustomed to potent unanalyzed rituals of identity and alienation that we cannot see them at all.

The as if. If I take a picture of myself, then post it online in lieu of my body, what have I done? Firstly in the moment of taking the picture, I am pretending that the camera is a living entity to whom I relate with a smile or a wink: a sufficiently repulsive, histrionic, and questionable ritual in itself to warrant abstention. Secondly I am compelled to imagine the people whom I would like to charm with this image, and in that moment we engage in a rapid feverish hallucination of that mass of unknown persons and attempt to account for the many alignments and caprices of the people we have known before... This is why the result with us - who have been so overexposed to this idiocy - is generally somewhere between a frightened grimace, a shit-eating grin, a seductive come-hither, or at best a grumpy go-thither.

Thirdly, when I supply this image in lieu of my body, there is yet more simulation: I am saying, "this is my face, which sufficiently represents my entirety, feel free to hallucinate my presence with its aid". And the consumer, understanding this ritual, takes the image and proceeds to dream with it however he pleases, guided by nothing but the unconscious and unanalyzed rules of identity, rivalry, and projection, as though these forces were trivial...

It could be objected that the two media I already employ are already hallucinatory aids in equal degree: with writing the reader hears a voice, in my music I allow my real voice to be recorded and greatly modified in order to produce an artificial amplification of its best qualities... And this objection is valid: these are my art forms, and as such I am ready to take responsibility for their hallucinatory powers. An artist plays with weaponry: the word is a weapon by which we fiddle with the mind that is not our own; music is one of the most profound means of affecting the entirety of a body and transmitting not only feeling states but memories and unconscious interpretations.

So what's my problem with the 21st century obsession with grimacing images of the flesh covering our skulls? It's a power wielded by desperate lonely unconsciously malicious apes. I may eventually feel that I can cleanse the digital image of these valences for myself - if I choose one day to appear in my own music videos for example - but for now I remain convinced it is a ceremony so polluted with the needs of sad but psychically dangerous modern slobs that I cannot for my own health and psychological coherence partake of it.

Reading of this piece, which is an excerpt from my book, The Moral Disease.

Music is Profoundly Suspicious, from my album Power and Oblivion.

• It signals obedience to the fiction and therefore immunity to blame.
• It fosters an atmosphere of fear and contagion, which can be exploited when personally advantageous.
• It purchases moral authority with humiliating subjection, and therefore seeks to reduce all authority to this formula.

Yet it's widely known that the masks are ineffective: again this is essential to the power of the ritual. I've heard it called a "talismask": the riddle of this stupid and humiliating "face diaper" cannot be solved without plumbing the depths of the human capacity for magical thinking. As signifier, as power object, as a meaningless trifle which nonetheless and allthemore carries great portent: I find the most explanatory power in the old Freudian analysis of the fetish - therefore the reader must suspend that ever popular resistance to Freudian insight just long enough to gain a glimpse of clarity...

What is a fetish? It is an object which stands in place of something dangerous enough to be repressed beyond memory, but which must therefore be signified: it serves to restore the undetermined ambivalence of a state in which the repressed content never existed, and yet has the power to exist all the more as symbol. Of course the prototypical Freudian case is castration anxiety: that the meaning of any given sexual fetish can be traced back to the question of the possession of a penis should hardly surprise us. But in the case of the COVID mask we discover a new genera of fetish: a fetish of repressed aggression - or "castration desire" in the broadest sense.

The mask hides, the mask reveals. The mask denies, the mask confesses. It says, with a chant of tautological circularity:

• The pandemic is real: therefore we wear masks.
• The pandemic is unreal: because we all know the masks do nothing.
• And yet the pandemic is real: because we are all wearing masks.

At this point the definition of "real" begins to come under the sway of the magical: this is the power of ritual. A mass movement eventually needs nothing more than a tautology to convince millions: it seems rather to gain strength from the neatness of this arrangement - the Abrahamic religions have thrived for centuries by damning the unbeliever to a hell they should not logically believe in...

But not merely the questionable reality of the pandemic is caught up in this undetermined ambivalence, but the repressed aggression of the wearer:

• "I'm not aggressive": the mask hides the mouth, the locus of the urge to consume. I will have to spend many pages attempting to convince the modern reader that the predatory urge remains very much alive in modern humanity: just as the Victorian age of sexual repression was a peak of hypertropic psychosexual neurosis, so our own time is a Cambrian explosion of petty, malicious, and highly inventive forms of "microaggression".

• "I'm aggressive": the mask as confession of the desire for authority. The mask is a sign not only of obedience but of collective power over the body. In what context is the medical mask supposed to belong? To the hospital and the doctor. With the mask we "play doctor": in our time, the doctor is a kind of priest with power over the body, the one authorized to carry out violence against the body with a clear conscience, and serves as model of moral authority. In COVID everyone gets to play doctor, scientist, and thus 21st century priest. Moreover the mask instates an anonymity which simulates the anonymity of crowds: it's well known how violent otherwise docile people become, once they feel the safety of numbers and mass action. The mask has the power to transport the sign of anonymity and mass violence in portable form: it is anonymity and obedience which justifies police brutality.

Therefore the mask signifies doctor, policeman, obedient citizen, and pious believer all at once in diverse and orthogonal contexts: it can be no wonder that so many desperate hungry ghosts seem to want to extend the life of this manifold ritual object in perpetuity...

The fetish is an erasure that makes more present: just as hiding the genitals makes them more desirable, hiding the locus of the predatory urge makes the urge more uniform through repression and strengthens it through withdrawal. Just as a glimpse of genitals excites civilized people, in a COVID world a glimpse of an unmasked face excites the "nonviolent" crowd. How many of you have protested the mask, gone in public without it, only to discover for yourself a mumuring zombie-world of unconscious cannibalism gradually encircling your body, growing ever more bold as you lose your nerve? It is no hyperbole: anthropological and genetic evidence tells us that cannibalism was a global commonality not so long ago - the ritual of human sacrifice is not one hundreth as far away and impossible as we tell ourselves.

The mask erases: beauty and youth is erased; health and happiness is erased; independence and freedom is erased. And in that erased space appears a mutable signifier: not so much a fixed quantum of human worth - "one person, one mask" - but a sign of binding, a preemptive arrest, a prior "canceling", a subjugation to stupidity and a brand of the herd. The mask is a sign that here is a human being willing to preemptively sacrifice his dignity for the sake of belonging: thus it is a sign of ineligibity for sacrifice - there must be something of original value, else the mass violence is not an empowering sacrifice but merely garbage collection. Therefore it is not so much the achievement of a uniformly abject world that is desired, but to have pressured and lured the disobedient into the open where they can be hunted. We must constantly take note of how the circle of exclusion must be drawn tighter, the more subjugation succeeds.

Finally, I find one last important gratification at work: as a sign both of participation and social distance, the mask simultaneously generates a sense of belonging and individuality - finally "suffrage universel" is realized. The mask is therefore a signifier of that uniquely modern hypocrisy of equal status: it says "we're all the same" while also saying "I'm separate" - and should an unmasked face be encountered, the truly delicious form of "equality" can be employed: "we're all the same, but I'm better than you."

This is an excerpt from Bartholomy's book, The Moral Disease.

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In the previous pieces of this series, I've attempted to analyze mass hysteria and the witch-hunt. In this postscript, I turn the laserbeam around: how has fighting the COVID monstrosity been gratifying for us? Do some of us need that transient relevance and therefore are sorry to see the ceremony die away?

The mechanics of hysteria can also help us understand yet another curious fact about the COVID debacle: how the histrionic fear of a nondeadly respiratory nuisance has managed to distract and defer reckoning with one of the few serious ethical questions at the heart of the problem: why are we allowing the arrogant virologists who almost certainly engineered this disease to go unpunished? Why shouldn't "gain-of-function" research be considered more dangerous than nuclear weaponry? Despite a long history of lab leaks, they openly boast of hybridizing smallpox and synthesizing polio as though they were doing the world a favor. There is an extremely plausible reason the COVID virus has curious properties and seems especially virulent: it was engineered to adhere to human lung tissue, tested against one of the more monstrous attractions of the increasingly macabre menagerie of 21st century science - human-hybrid mice with a humanized immune system and human lung tissue. Here is the one and only arena in which a little panic and outrage might actually do us some good: yet as always in a slow moving mass crime, the perpetrators are both absconded and applauded. Why?

Because hysterical dynamics demand that any real external danger be avoided and denied: else the displacing substitute will lose ground and the whole farcical ceremony of fear will dissolve into rational action. The unexciting sobriety of rational action is therefore not something we can expect within the large fallout radius COVID commands. A fictional pandemic is highly desirable for the expression of repressed needs - a real emergency must therefore be suppressed and ignored: that's the mindjob of COVID.

In COVID a conspiracy is afoot, but not the kind everyone assumes: there is no grand governmental conspiracy, no planned "Great Reset". All such theories are wishful thinking and betray the inability to let go of the comforting notion that someone, somewhere, is in control: the truth is that no one is driving the bus. If only humankind were wicked and motivated enough for a grand conspiracy! ...rather than merely clumsy, unconsciously suicidal, and running from its own reflection. The forces of global capitalism do not strictly benefit from lockdown: there was no need for a "Great Reset" because things were already precisely as the elites wanted it. Accelerating wealth inequality was already an extremely well-established pattern - it needed no help although it was happy enough to exploit new opportunities.

The people want oppression because they want relief from the anxiety of individuation: that is the "grand conspiracy" governmental forces are scrambling to keep up with like a Ben and Jerry's factory in the 90s. That a crowd of political opportunists and the hyenas of global capitalism are circling the bloody scene is hardly surprising - but temple-moneychangers, scalpers, and desperate demagogues should not be confused with masterminds.

I must concede that the awkward facts of sly cooperation between a Chinese lab and the US NIH, where gain-of-function research had been previously banned, obviously motivated the initial coverup and indeed constitutes a minor conspiracy. But there are always minor conspiracies at play at any given time in human history: such is politics and the cleverness of apes. In other words, even if we eventually discover many more conspiratorial forces orbiting this maelstrom of power and deception, it's irrelevant. It's much more important to ask: why was the general public so deeply and immediately attached to the pandemic narrative? Why was your neighbor, your friends, your family, your spouse so attached to it? Why did everyone seem so eager to participate in a decentralized, silently scripted, and unconscious conspiracy? Try on this hypothesis: the media sell what sells, not what they are "told" to sell. Despite the appearance of uniformity, there is no smoke-filled backroom where the "elites" and media overlords plan our future with deep cackling laughter: as though Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Oprah, a Pfizer executive, the editors of the Lancet, and Xi Jinping meet in an underground cavern and deliver speeches to a roaring crowd of torch-bearing and hooded billionaires. The human world is not this well-organized, folks: it's greedy, opportunistic, mendacious, and fearfully conformist, not devilishly determined. The most well-funded military in the world, the American armed forces, can barely keep from shooting itself in the foot and squandering billions in inefficiency... but an unconscious agenda spreading through the most homogeneous elements of the absurdly miserable first world - that's possible.

Therefore despite all the sloppy mishandling of this obvious coverup, the improvised diversionary tactic of overstating the danger of COVID succeeded beyond anyone's expectations: like a delusional alchemist accidentally discovering gunpowder, with this fictionally deadly pandemic Fauci and company stumbled upon the right formula for releasing the accumulated frustrations of first world misery. They lit a match in the dark without knowing what that funny smell was...

It seems almost no one has the intellectual conscience to stand these two statements side by side:

1. The virus is not deadly and therefore does not constitute a pandemic.
2. The virus was engineered and for that reason alone should be taken seriously.

In the case of many of my present readers, who have known for years that the virus is not deadly and who are unspeakably nauseated by COVID hysterics, there is reason enough to ignore statement #2: because if it was indeed engineered, it would seem to contribute to the fearful aura - some of you would rather deny the virus exists at all, than acknowledge that it is a very dangerous precedent and could indeed have curious properties - such as an immunosuppressant function. I myself have experience with "long COVID". The truth is that we were merely lucky it wasn't something much worse - although forcing experimental mRNA gene therapy on half the world might in the end be much worse...

It would be easy to imagine that among those who lap up COVID hysteria as though it were a steamy bowl of amphetamines, the lab leak theory would be enthusiastically adopted and put to work in generating more fear. But I only see the most entrenched conspiracy theorists taking this route: those who want to believe that the virus was meant to depopulate the globe. I don't accept the explanation that "the media" is reporting what it's told to report and therefore the masses fall in line with the natural origin theory. Look more carefully at your neighbor's attachment to the pandemic narrative and you will discover something else: an entirely fictional pandemic is desired by both the conformist, and the conspiracy theorist... Do not be deceived: the hysterical actor also knows the pandemic is false. Its falsehood is in fact very necessary for ritual efficacy: that's one of the prerequisites to magical thinking.

The bad news, my friends, is that the conspiracy theorist is also subject to hysterical mechanics: in place of a fictional pandemic he has substituted a fictional grand conspiracy... The result is the same: vicarious identification with the perpetrators, victimhood and justified powerlessness, and the continued belief in guiding authority. Neither has the capacity to acknowledge what COVID teaches, what COVID forces upon our closed eyes: the human world is largely unconscious, largely flailing, largely afraid of its own reflection.

Who is the conspiracy theorist? A powerless nobody, an outsider, someone with surplus intelligence to burn, someone who'd like to prove to themselves and anyone their eligibility for power. A conspiracy theory is a fantasy of power, a steamy novella of intrigue sold to oneself and anyone who will listen. Haven't you noticed how eager a conspiracy theorist is in spreading his secret knowledge? How being witnessed as knowledgable is central to the whole formation? Moreover, haven't you noticed how much these guys seem to want a "Great Reset"?

The conspiracy theorist and the evangelizing moralist are locked into a mutually dependent relationship. Who is the mirror image of the conspiracy theorist? It's not precisely the conformist: the great majority merely seek to get by, wincing and grimacing and seeking to escape notice. Most conformists do quietly question the narrative and already know what's true and what isn't: but talking themselves out of their better judgment is a deeply entrenched habit and very easily accomplished - one glance at a life drenched in regret and half-hearted choices should tell us how easy it might be for someone like this to stack merely one more lie atop the pile. The Asch Conformity Experiment should tell us, that the great majority of the human race will betray their own judgment for the sake of belonging, even when almost nothing is at stake, other than one moment of standing outside group consensus. So great is the fear of abandonment.

The twin brother of the conspiracy theorist is the evangelist: he who mines the narrative for all the power it can offer, he who is is wedded to the narrative for the sake of the dowry alone, he who has found in the histrionics of COVID the motherlode of moral-political charade.

But how are these two mutually dependent? Because every evangelist needs his demons: the best enemy of a glaring monumental fiction, is a frightening exaggerated fiction. It's not that a lie cannot defeat a truth: truth is weak, multivalent, subtle, fragile - almost nothing is easier than displacing truth. A monstrous lie feeds upon truth like merely breathing - it gains no glory from pushing aside this weakling. A monster needs heroes to devour, to stage fictional battles in the sky... In the midst of the monstrosity of COVID on the one hand, and the blustering frantic conspiracy theorizing on the other, haven't we sometimes felt ourselves slipping into the cracks, into an abyss of the loneliness of quiet and complicated truth?

And does the conspiracy theorist need his rabid raving evangelist? Absolutely: the alternative is retreat into a loneliness and irrelevance which closely resembles that of his brother. Trailerpark all-caps raving about the "Great Reset", and sanctimonious upper-middle class hand-clasping about the necessity of vaccinating children into oblivion: one has a fugitive sense of rugged independence to comfort him, the other has his money and moralizing mien to hide his desperation - but they are not so different.

So what are we? Our critics would like to dismiss us as conspiracy theorists: untangling the Gordian knot of COVID neuroses requires far more psychological acumen and intellectual discipline than is commonly available, so it is hardly any wonder that my wouldbe comrades so often resort to paranoid speculations about what "they" intend and why. Where others cannot help but see agency, I see nonlinear emergent dynamics: all psychology begins as animism, and it requires many years to unlearn the habit.

And wouldn't it be an immense relief if a grand conspiracy were really at play? If something real and grandiose happened in our lifetime - if something could break the spell of meaningless anxiety and petty bickering? If an unambiguous enemy could for once be identified? As a 21st century American man undergoing the remedial education of offgrid living and incremental independence, I am all too aware of the pleasures of "prepping". We must also admit that the fantasies of global depopulation which have become so popular, appeal to us all at a deep level - and for us avowed misanthropes, this appeal is not nearly so unconscious as with the rest of you.

On the other hand, we too have indulged at times in moral outrage, haven't we? When I think of the countless millions of children tossed into the pit of COVID, their blood repeatedly polluted with biomedical profiteering schemes, their faces covered as though youth were the problem - my heart aches and I cannot help but want blood in exchange for blood. That this is just another slow-moving mass crime among so many, is too cynical for that moment of genuine recognition: what response do we have but anger? But what recourse do we have but indignant pride? The question is: can we walk the knife-edge of merciless truth? The path wherein no redemption, no solution, no justice is guaranteed nor really likely, without losing our courage and cheer and determination?

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In my last piece, I called COVID "a one-size-fits-all politically correct mask for the exercise of morally justified witch-hunting" - but what's a "witch-hunt"?

In regard to COVID vaccination status, employing the term "witch-hunt" is neither sloppy historical analogue nor mere poetic license. Yet again I find that the term is used by those who sense an important connection but are unable to explain the relevant psychology.

The first fact to internalize concerning the history of witch-hunting in Europe, is that it peaked many centuries after the pagan world had truly expired. Any genuinely native European pagan sorcery was probably fully extinguished by 1200 AD, and yet the ostensible fear of witches rose to fever pitch in the late 16th century.

Generally everyone already understands that a scapegoat function was at work: or what decent psychologists used to term projection. But what precisely was projected? And what was the function of this projection? The difference between the perspective I'm outlining here and the usual psychologizing, is that I refuse all explanations which are satisfied with a demonstration of the uselessly irrational in neurotic behavior: I see functional adaptive behavior in these ceremonies of histrionic fear. I see the tribal human animal reasserting its dominion - I see the solenoid of the Pleistocene way of life struggling to clack shut... Mass aggressigenic hysteria creates enemies out of an ill-defined mass of social mobility; mass aggressigenic hysteria creates moral certainties out of a tangled morass of uncertainty...

To understand 16th century Europe and thus a little of our own time, let's enumerate what had recently changed:

• The New World: the discovery and colonization of the New World threatened the Eurocentric worldview in a way comparable to the increasing weakening of locality in our age of globalization.

• The Protestant Reformation and the weakening church: Luther's religious revolt expressed the need for a more private and personalized inner life. Not only the increasingly normative atheism of our time lies parallel, but the palpable wandering ramification of spiritual tourism among the younger generations... Soon nothing will be exotic enough to satisfy, just as yoga has long been trite and subsumed into suburban monotony.

• Heliocentrism and the dawn of modern science: as the Copernican revolution slowly gained a foothold, the heliocentric model served as effigy and rallying point for a much deeper and unquantifiable change in épistémè, as Foucault would say. This encroachment of science into the everyday, parallels the increasingly ridiculous attitudes of cargo cult scientificality which one finds everywhere: one is as likely to find oneself arguing epidemiological protocol with the gas station clerk, because one refuses to wear a facemask-talisman, as in previous ages obscure religious debates sometimes served as an excuse to spill blood in the streets.

• The emerging bourgeois and incipient corporate power: the rapid rise of the Dutch East India company and its ilk could easily be compared to Silicon Valley powermongering, alongside the threatened and weakening nationstate.

• But the most important parallel might be this: the printing press and the rise of literacy. An explosion of books and a new relationship to knowledge suddenly flooded this emergent bourgeois world. But just as the almighty Internet is largely used for porn, spam, plagiarism, and gossip, so the printing press largely instituted a new Misinformation Age.

What were the top two bestsellers for the first 200 years of the printing press? The Bible - arguably the most spectacular compendium of misinformation to date - and a spiteful little book called the Malleus Maleficarum: "the Hammer of Witches", a legal manual and propaganda piece advocating the extermination of witches. Oddly enough, the timing is even similar: 30 years after the invention of the press, the Malleus gained a massive following - just as 30 years after the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, the COVID fiction gained its unassailable fanbase.

Who was its author, this Heinrich Kramer? Predictably enough, a sexual predator and a church inquisitor, who was even a little too unhinged for the church of his day: analyzing his personal motives would be a disgusting exercise we can thankfully forego. We need only mention that repressed sexuality and its consequent perversions obviously played a role in the fascination with witches. But male targets of persecution were at times just as likely. I don't believe that sexuality nor misogyny is the determinative factor in the broader appeal of the witch-hunt: the need to discover enemies from within is far more powerful. Therefore we must ask again: why was this stupid hateful book so wildly popular in an age that lacked any real witches? Put another way, why would histrionic fear of an obviously nondeadly virus be so wildly popular in another age?

The enigmatic answer which we will unravel, runs thusly: the reciprocal of anxiety is persecution.

What we must understand is that when anxiety proliferates in a population, a set of instinctual responses is initiated which reveal our indelible tribal nature. The Malleus Maleficarum and the witch-hunt fever addressed and becalmed the uncertainties of the time: the surprising corollary is that the witch-hunt is not "medieval", it is essentially modern.

The medieval mindset was actually less anxious and thus less susceptible to moral panic. The medieval worldview was confident, pyramidical, and as redundantly buttressed against visible contradiction as a Gothic church. The "Age of Sail", on the other hand, frightened and overwhelmed the average newly literate bourgeois man: Francis Bacon and Galileo represented a tiny minority of those capable of being inspired by the New World and incipient science rather than terrified of it. Heinrich Kramer, Girolamo Savonarola, and Ignatius of Loyola represent the much more prevalent attitudes of bigoted outrage.

When Goya said, "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos", he expressed the same assumption I see in almost every analysis of the COVID panic: that if only the general populace were more rational, if only the scientific attitude were more widespread, our monsters would remain safely trapped within forgettable dreams. But this is false.

It is precisely the encroachment of the unrelenting uncertainty which true science demands, the gradual undermining of religious harmonies and their prettily painted and nested matryoshki, the weakening of moral categorical imperative, the increasingly urgent "whereto" of the common man lost in the bewildering infinitude of the Information Age like a monumental chip aisle stretching to the vanishing point, with more choices than anyone could ever need or desire - to be crushed by choice, suffocated by a freedom of mind which only grows more parodic the more it is hastily buried beneath a frantic moral posturing and political mimicry - it is this uncertainty and the frustration of the innocent human animal to live a simple life with definite horizons, which produces monsters.

But Goya was perhaps subtle enough to have understood me, and meant not "the sleep of reason" but the dream of reason: the monstrosities of modernity, the atrocities which we regenerate, the history we seem doomed to repeat, is always disguised and perpetrated and justified by precisely that same "rationality". No word was tossed around more enthusiastically circa 1933 than "wissenschaftlich": the witch-hunts of modernity are conducted in a labcoat, in sterile conditions, draped with opaque bureaucratic filigree and every conceivable humanitarian posture... Make no mistake, should this path we're treading turn out to be the first steps toward a 21st century story of mass criminality, it will be conducted with the most assured and arrogant air of this same "rationality".

Haven't you noticed how the ostensible fear of COVID disappears so rapidly when in the presence of a justified outcast? How suddenly masks and infection vectors matter so much less than the opportunity to shame, blame, and police each other? Haven't we all noticed how the tone of this affair gradually became less about a pretense of cowering fear before a respiratory nuisance, and more about hunting down the unvaccinated?

We are now in a better position to ask what repression is, and discover its relationship to the untethered homeless anxiety our age is saturated with. We must first distinguish between complete successful repression and partial botched repression:

• Complete repression halts the instinctual discharge before the associated affect has a chance to proliferate and seek energetic investments: the feeling remains virtual, merely as-if, like a thoroughly forgotten dream. Successful repression generates the kind of ominous suffocating atmosphere of your Midwestern grandparents, that old-fashioned New England stoicism, or the British "stiff upper lip". Anyone familiar with the robust rigidity and hermetic seal of the life of a true obsessive, would also have a clue what "successful" repression looks like.

• Partial repression occurs when the initial energetic investment is repressed, but the displacing substitute is not fully integrated into the semantic network that is the unconscious mind - like a half-dead fly in a web it shakes and rends the whole psyche. This is the case with most neurotics one meets today - and thus almost everyone: that like the rest of their lives, their neurosis itself is uncommitted, ambivalent, and full of caveats and prevarication. They are usually partially aware of their problem: just enough to dislodge and disrupt the mechanism of repression, but not half enough to be free of it. Stuck halfway between the high-functioning repression of traditional life and the imagined freedom of a conscious convalescent: such is the modern wretch.

This pitiable individual suffers from partially lifted repression, a shallow psychological education and the lingua franca of therapeutic vocabulary, damaged half-functional societal institutions of previously coherent repressive schemata, and the abandonment by the community to their own "self-help" in the midst of unthinkable contradiction: partial sexual liberation alongside more repression of aggression than ever; "celebration" of individuality alongside more moral censure of dissent than ever...

Therefore the proliferation of anxiety in modernity is not due to any decline in the capacity for discerning danger, it is due to the almost exponential growth of instinctual frustration: but this frustration itself is a danger. I insist that anxiety is adaptive: it is social leverage, it encourages group restlessness and destabilization of priorities, it prepares the way for "acting out". Something is wrong, someone must be blamed, something must give.

There is a common confusion of the term "hysteria", as applied in two cases:

1. Those who are truly subject to their fears, as in paralyzing phobia.
2. The bad-faith histrionics of the social maneuverer.

21st century psychology is comfortable enough diagnosing the crippling anxieties of modernity - or at least in herding them into pharmaceutical dependence - but ignores and denies all signs that anxiety has a social purpose. What could the nail-biting agoraphobic, the evangelical preacher of doom, and the COVID-unvaccinated witch-hunt have to do with each other?

But the truth is that these types are deeply related and lie along a spectrum, in which the saturation of subjective anxiety dissipates proportionally to the degree of complicity in ritual exclusion and disguised mass violence: like unexpected origami, paralyzing anxiety is inverted into persecution. Personal anxiety on the one hand, and emboldened group persecution on the other, are merely the embryonic and full-fledged forms of the same adaptive response to frustration: to achieve social advantage through the rituals of fear, emergency, and even heroism. If you don't believe me, see the history of the mob violence of early Christian monks against pagans and Jews, the destruction of the Serapeum, and the French Revolution. It should serve as sufficient parable to learn that the paramilitary Parabalani, who were originally uneducated nurses recruited to handle local epidemics, were eventually lawless bodyguards to belligerent bishops seeking to forcefully subdue unbelievers in the 5th century: how long until a "Public Health Task Force" is given perpetual emergency powers in your jurisdiction? Will the next pandemic seal the deal?

Where Freudian theory falls short is when it fails to see the aggression within ceremonies of fear: rather than maladaptive and uselessly neurotic, I see modern anxiety as just another sneaky vector to advantage within sociality. The more permissive toward manipulative hysteria and histrionic victimhood, and simultaneously intolerant of overt aggression our age becomes, the more anxiety proliferates as a profitable strategy. One may be paralyzed and overwhelmed by the symptoms, but the initial phases of the anxiety response may eventually have a chance to develop into their evil twin sister: mass persecution, the witch-hunt, the reign of terror.

If the illustration accompanying this piece does not make you shudder a little in recognition, you have not been paying attention to these last two years. Notice how the center is dark. Radial blame bristling from an anonymous core: that is what I mean by the ancient force of "ritual exclusion". This is a ceremony all of us already understand: we merely take up our places within or without the circle - there are no other loci. One of the most valuable and surprisingly joyful aspects of the COVID debacle, is the way it's brought together disparate scattered loners and the invisibly ethical: we did not know where we stood until we were tested. Like a broken down subway car or a stuck elevator, suddenly it seems worthwhile to communicate with strangers - suddenly I share a political alignment with people I would never otherwise associate with. COVID is a darkness which reveals autonomous lights: may we never lose sight of this.

Madness is rare among individuals - but among groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule: - and therefore the historians rarely speak of madness. But at some time the physicians shall write history.

Nietzsche, Nachlass VII-1.72

I won't seek to prove something which any qualified reader knew long ago: the COVID crisis was a case of mass hysteria. The virus itself is very real but the pretense of fear surrounding it is histrionic, unconsciously strategic, and more demonstrative than genuine. An extremely virulent but nondeadly respiratory nuisance, a profound attachment to the fiction of a deadly pandemic, an enormous flood of misinformation, an extremely dangerous set of legal precedents, an encircling crowd of jackal-eyed economic and political opportunists, but never once a genuine threat to the collective human health on its own: yet out of all these minor disasters, I find the most pernicious element of COVID is the willful ignorance concerning the underlying reason for the hysteria. But willful ignorance is precisely one of the symptoms of hysteria: we would rather not know why, or pretend we don't.

But I believe the answer is very clear. So omnipresent is this cause that we cannot see it because we swim through it, we breathe it, we take it for granted: repressed aggression caused COVID hysteria. Although I believe COVID and the year 2020 will in the end be only another baffling footnote in the long history of human error, COVID is an opportunity to analyze something the human race needs desperately to understand: what I will describe as mass aggressigenic hysteria.

What is "mass hysteria"? This term is tossed around on the Internet like a deflated beach ball no one understands how to properly use. Most often it seems to stand for "unreasonable fear" and nothing more. But hysteria has a definite, discernible, and well-researched formula: where is this knowledge now that we need it? Those most to blame for this are the representatives of mainstream academic psychology and psychiatry: they have buried all real psychological insight beneath a tidal wave of nauseating moral posturing and political agenda, which is suspiciously antagonistic toward the psychological analysis of hysteria in particular.

The mainstream consensus on mass hysteria is skewed toward a relatively minor syndrome which is easier to document, easier to dismiss as delusional, and thus does not threaten the moral norm. 21st century psychologists will generally only speak of "mass psychogenic illness". But "psychogenic" is a willfully stupid and evasive term. Everything in psychology is "psychogenic" else it's not the domain of psychology, and everything not an illness is not interesting. This is equivalent to saying "contagious crazies" and intentionally obfuscates the history and depth of early 20th century thinking concerning hysteria.

What they really mean is mass conversion hysteria: this is the case of a psychosomatic symptom of disease spreading quickly through a uniform population: homogeneous groups of women and children under stress are known to be especially susceptible - thus its historical frequency in factories and schools. The famous "June Bug Epidemic" among overworked women in a dressmaking factory during peak production in 1962 serves as example. "Conversion" here means the conversion of some repressed impulse into a delusional symptom along a socially accepted trajectory: thus "conversion hysteria" is the best of the accepted terminology because it indicates its own heritage in the vital Freudian concept of Verschiebung, or displacement - which I'll discuss shortly.

But do not misunderstand me: COVID hysteria is not and never was primarily driven by anything like conversion hysteria. Despite its value as a diagnostic, mass conversion hysteria is a rare, temporary, and relatively harmless phenomenon. But with COVID we are dealing with a mass hysteria manifested in ideological, moral, and governmental terms, not short-lived nocebo effects. In order to analyze it we must turn to the older conception of what is properly termed anxiety hysteria.

The study of hysteria lies right at the heart of the best achievements of early 20th century psychology: this is a fact much obscured now by the armies of psychiatric pillpushers and academic yesmen, but the study of hysteria was the key to the discovery of unconscious mechanics, the knowledge of which all of us utilize in our speech and manner of thinking every day, whether we know it or not. Start a heated argument with almost any half-educated bloke, and eventually Freudian terms will be lobbed back and forth like greasy grenades: "You're just projecting! That's egocentric! You're so anal!" Freud is anathema, both sacred and forbidden: simultaneously enthroned via the implicit use of his vocabulary and excommunicated from contemporary science wherever possible.

We must return to this forbidden source in order to understand what hysteria is. Therefore allow me to immediately alienate the biomedical establishment and disqualify myself in their eyes - I will quote the master in these matters. Freud is describing here how anxiety hysteria works:

The retreating energetic investment devotes itself to a substitutive idea which, on the one hand, is connected by association with the rejected idea, and on the other, has escaped repression by reason of its remoteness from that idea - as Verschiebungsersatz, a "displacing substitute" - and permits the still uninhibitable development of anxiety to be rationalized. The substitute idea now plays the part of an energetic uninvestment for the conscious system, by securing it against an emergence in consciousness of the repressed content. On the other hand it is, or acts as if it were, the point of departure for the release of the affect of anxiety, which has now really become quite uninhibitable.

Das Unbewusste, §IV

• "Energetic investment" refers to what is badly translated as "cathexis" elsewhere: the quantum of psychosomatic excitation generated by the activation of any given instinct, which may manifest as sexual or aggressive urges.

• What is a "displacing substitute"? Any given object of an instinctual urge can be displaced by another when social pressures demand it: but the original ideational content does not disappear, it is repressed. This is what it means when we say that someone is "anal" or "obsessed": they employ some seemingly meaningless activity such as repetitive hand-washing, to gratify some other urge, the content of which is repressed and yet deeply connected to the substitute.

At this point I must insist the reader learn a little German - it won't hurt as much as it seems. Verschiebungsersatz I translate literally as "displacing substitute": Verschiebung can be quickly understood in English as "shoving away", schieben having the same root as "shove". Ersatz is already common in English and means simply "replacement", with a similar morphological structure as the Latinate "re-place". Therefore Verschiebungsersatz is "a substitute that displaces".

Finally, it's important to note that in this short passage Freud also manages to touch upon the essence of the hysterical symptom: the rationalization of anxiety. This is generally what everyone already understands about hysteria and all histrionic neurosis - that the fuss and bother must really be about something else. To clarify this common knowledge is my aim here.

This "substitutive idea" plays two roles simultaneously: the role of a repressive force, by obscuring awareness of the true cause even while hinting at it, and a rationalized vector for the release of anxiety behaviors. One of the most important Freudian insights is that every displacement can be traced along discernible semantic lines: the substitute target is never completely arbitrary, and it only takes a little practice in the art of untangling semantic valence to learn to detect the clues leading backward to the original impulse.

Hysteria is the exemplum magnum of the mechanism of displacement and its analysis constitutes therefore the core of 20th century psychological insight - what is now called "conversion disorder" is in fact the last stump of Freudian thinking the psychiatrists have not managed to uproot, so stubborn and obvious is hysteria in telling us that some unconscious sleight-of-hand is going on. Sometimes it seems that the riddle of hysteria wants to be solved: it communicates as much as it obscures.

So obvious is all this, that if we analyze the commonest pop psychology concerning hysteria, we find traces of this latent knowledge. All over the Internet I see half-finished thoughts concerning the COVID hysteria: that most of the more draconic measures in local jurisdictions represent the revenge of petty bureaucrats; the curious way the supposed fear of the virus disappears and reappears depending on social context; the overwhelming cognitive dissonance concerning the efficacy of vaccines - on and on.

And yet I don't see anyone qualified in the analysis of hysteria speaking up about how it actually works: imagine if Pasteur were suddenly controversial again and "disproven", and in the midst of an outbreak of salmonella nobody thought of doing the dishes...

The other mechanism central to the functioning of hysteria is projection: but what's projected? Not merely fear of something external, but the danger represented by the instinctual drive itself. To want to do something which would cost too much in social terms: danger. To want to abandon your children and see your husband dead: danger. To want to be rid of grandma: danger. To want to strangle your boss and set fire to the office: danger. To want to let go of the steering wheel and let your SUV packed with big mistakes careen into the oncoming lane towards that truck gleaming with delicious threatening chrome: danger. To want to be overtly aggressive in an age extremely intolerant towards honest overt aggression: danger.

And when these urges cannot be acknowledged, what happens? They are repressed, find a substitute, and are projected: it's not that mum deeply resents her children and has elaborate fantasies about disappearing into the night, it's that the lawn has dandelions and junior dropped out of lacrosse. It's not that dad hates himself for being such a coward and letting his coworkers step on him, it's that he has to drive the kids to school again. You see: we are all very familiar with these mechanisms - examples are as commonplace and cheaply obtained in the first world as fast food.

And yet what almost no one understands consciously, is that hysteria is not driven by fear, but by the need to express and achieve some other urge. By making a fuss about the house and becoming bizarrely attached to very selective aspects of her children's wellbeing which benefit nothing but her vanity, mum achieves her original aim: taking revenge on her family. This is called "the return of the repressed", and it is the secret behind the "helicopter parenting" so increasingly common in our age.

Listen again to Freud:

...by means of the whole defensive mechanism thus set in action a projection outward of the instinctual danger has been achieved. The ego behaves as if the danger of a development of anxiety threatened it not from the direction of an instinctual impulse but from the direction of a perception, and it is thus enabled to react against this external danger with the attempts at flight represented by phobic avoidances. In this process repression is successful in one particular: the release of anxiety can to some extent be dammed up, but only at a heavy sacrifice of personal freedom.

Das Unbewusste, §IV

...or the sacrifice of the freedom of the group: hysteria is highly socially effective, and does much more than merely cope with personal anxiety. Hysterical anxiety has the power to generate new opportunities for control: anyone who's ever been seriously involved with an anxiety hysteric knows how much power over group priorities and group freedom this kind of neurosis wields. This is no accident and not merely collateral damage: it is the return of the repressed and a vector for social power.

In the case of COVID hysteria, what are we told is the cause of all this histrionic fear? The fear of death? Yet I don't see fear: I see hunger for oppression, for sanctioned violence, to find someone to banish. At most I see fear of abandonment, fear of finding oneself outside the narrowing circle of exclusion.

Why therefore a fear of disease? Why did COVID seem to strike just the right note? Why is a fictional pandemic so well suited as a displacing substitute? My first answer is that COVID stands in the place of the real pandemic of which we do not want to be aware: an epidemic of chronic illness is all around us. It turns out we are in the midst of a health crisis: the health crisis of the 21st century first world is the collective degeneracy of the human race as we speed toward a global unity of chronically bad health. Endocrine disruption, an irremediably fouled microbiome, an unhinged and exhausted immune system that can only grind out chronic inflammation everywhere in this bloated modern body, obesity, increasingly sedentary habits, ubiquitous and logarithmically rising anxiety, dark secrets of depression, a careful tapestry of interwoven addictions, and psychosomatic disorders multiplying faster than they can be catalogued: this is the pandemic.

In an age of ubiquitous psychosomatic disease, we are supposed to believe that all our problems are "merely organic" and thus the body's fault. It's as though the further down this road of a chronic psychosomatic pandemic we travel, the more need we have of disguising the increasingly obvious etiology from ourselves with histrionic political agenda and fictional viral enemies. At most we are willing to talk of "stress", and the armies of biomedical pillpushers are more than willing to chase the symptoms of stress with their pharmacological savagery, but we seem increasingly unwilling to address the causes of our mounting stress...

And yet I believe COVID is about much more than this.

Again, the COVID debacle is not about conversion hysteria: if that were true, there would have been a few mass outbreaks of short-lived psychosomatic symptoms, obvious placebo and nocebo effects, and the whole episode would have been over years ago. But COVID hysteria is not merely "contagious panic": it is long-lived, long-brewed neurosis releasing the accumulated frustrations of our civilization.

I might concede that the COVID episode may have begun with some hint of a mass conversion hysteria, and thus "converted" the rising awareness of chronic illness into a suitable scapegoat - but COVID quickly took on a more sinister flavor and gathered other repressed content in its wake: it released the accumulated repressed aggression of our age. Therefore COVID demonstrates amply the morphology of what I wish to term mass aggressigenic hysteria.

Most readers of Freud assume that hysteria always expressed a repressed sexual urge: we are much more comfortable with this idea and feel smugly superior to the Victorian age by dint of our sexual sloppiness. Yet early Freud said no such thing and this kind of assumption is probably the easiest way to dismiss him wholesale, as is so popular now.

I quote now from his first book, "Studien Über Hysterie":

An injury that has been repaid, even if only in words, is recollected quite differently from one that has had to be accepted. Language also recognizes this distinction in mental and physical consequences; it very characteristically describes an injury that has been suffered in silence as Kränkung, "mortification". The injured person's reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely "cathartic" effect if it is an adequate reaction - as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be "abreacted" almost as effectively.

Studien Über Hysterie, §I.2

This invaluable German expression says it all: Kränkung is literally "making sick", and yet in modern German it means "an injury to one's feelings" - just as "mortify" means literally "to deaden". Resentment makes us sick: once again if we had the humility to look at our own language honestly, we might learn something important about ourselves.

And here Freud is, right at the beginning of his career expressing what has become so glaringly obvious and astoundingly avoided: repressed aggression makes us ill.

In an age of "safe spaces", which is an age of maximally distributed policing, which is an age in which passive and thinly disguised aggression is consistently rewarded while honest overt aggression will earn you banishment, a swarm of slandering social media flies, and nasty labels of every kind lobbed by nasty small-minded people who project only their own bubbling bigotry - is it any wonder that priest-like strategies of moral posturing are so popular? Everyone an activist, everyone a wannabe evangelist, everyone an actor, everyone adept at anticipating the slightest shift in group consensus: if you cannot feel the nausea at this point you have no hope of understanding what I mean, when I say that repressed aggression makes us ill. There are in truth only a few highly gifted liars who solely benefit from this milieu of constant petty bickering, backstabbing, and slander: most are merely conformists and uninspired placeholders hoping to escape punishment; some of us only learn the game secondhand and hesitatingly; but most of us know the sting of a thousand poisoned paper cuts, and most of us carry around a half-dead bodymind tattooed with the accumulated shallow scars of a million slights, whether we know it or not.

"Aggression" is only a word for some of the many responses and urges a creature exhibits, the true origin and nature of which we do not hardly understand. It's less important to attempt a premature neurological catalogue of behavior or a taxonomy of instinct, especially in human beings where instinctual coherence has become so weak, than that we develop an intuition for the mechanism of repression. Exactly what's repressed in each case varies, and in mass psychology there can only be a vague description of the general character of this content - but the mechanism remains uniform and easily recognized. Therefore when I say "repressed aggression" one should call to mind one's own experiences of frustration, resentment, humiliation, and those many slights and subtle digs you accepted in the moment and lived to regret... It is the accumulated collective resentment of the human race, increasingly passive, clever, and noxious in its strategies, which drives us to respond so homogeneously en masse: misery makes unity.

To return to our formula of hysteria: a displacing substitute both obscures and expresses a repressed urge. Why do exaggeratedly heterosexual American men gather to cheer on young men in spandex wrestling and bruising and slapping each other's asses? Repressed sexuality is the obvious and hilarious answer. Take this model and use it elsewhere: to imagine frustrated aggression in place of sexual desire is all that's needed to open up a surprising vista of insights into the gaudy vaudeville of moral posturing, political correctness, and petty politicking which everyone and their grandma seems so attached to - with so much more enthusiasm than American Fussball could ever hope to procure.

Therefore what does aggressigenic hysteria accomplish?

It obscures the repressed aggression even while offering a rationalized vector for its exercise: which also happens to be one of the indispensable ingredients of a fascist enterprise. We seem bound to fall backward into a reinvented fascism with the same old labcoat-disguise and a "may I see your papers" police-with-unclear-jurisdiction because we cannot afford to acknowledge the absurd misery of our privileged yet frustrated lives.

It's a well-known and almost trite observation that highly repressed people are most subject to hysteria: Freud mentions monks, nuns, old maids, and strictly raised children. Therefore all that's required to set your thinking straight concerning COVID hysteria, is to try on the assumption that we are, as 21st century citizens, highly repressed: wishing away aggression does not make it go away. It results in what I insist be termed moral posturing: just as neurotic perversity is the result of sexual repression, moral posturing is the result of aggressive repression - see my recent book for a detailed analysis of the "morality of morals"...

It's important to emphasize that the displacing substitute, the Verschiebungsersatz, does not merely function as rationalization for anxiety: it is chosen carefully in order to maximize the social benefit of this expensive emotional display. One exchanges a little self-respect for the rewards of moral posturing. The modern human creature is orders of magnitude more clever and effective in the construction and execution of its neurotic games than in any facet of its conscious life. Its mendacious self-congratulatory political attitudes may appear merely reactionary, but it is in fact highly calculating and attuned to the slightest changes in collective direction.

So if hysteria is the partial achievement of a repressed impulse via the leverage of anxiety, and if COVID hysteria is driven by repressed aggression alongside the overwhelming need to create new criteria of exclusion, as I assert it is, what are the gratifications this hysteria affords?

• To see one's neighbors condemned to a petty hell of loneliness and futility: a hell the majority of those most "concerned" by COVID were already acclimated to.

• To see the minority of the young, healthy, and active punished for the inequity of their happiness: revenge upon those who have successfully generated an industry of envy out of social media. That this lockdown-revenge seems to harm those less ostentatious and genuinely active young people is only sauce for the goose.

• To displace blame and defer the reckoning with the specter of chronic illness: a collective sense of repulsion and dismay is accumulating and cresting just above the conscious horizon. Everyone and no one knows that something is deeply wrong with our health when one quarter of our children are obese, when the average age of the cancer patient is dropping steadily, when among the most privileged quarters it might be difficult to recall anyone over the age of 30 who does not suffer from some chronic and perhaps psychosomatic ailment.

• To invert the concern with overpopulation and redirect the rising sense of claustrophobia and panic concerning planetary limits. One of the chief mechanisms of unconscious distortion is simple inversion: add a sign of negation to the formula and repression lifts. What do I see when I read, "Saving Lives"? I see the desire to crush vitality, to handicap fertility, to shackle children. One also obtains the right to fantasize that the necessary depopulation will follow along the lines of conformity to the COVID narrative: "may the unbelievers perish".

• To distribute a one-size-fits-all politically correct mask for the exercise of morally justified witch-hunting. For the accumulated aggression of the average slob, COVID serves as an excuse for anonymous violence: one obtains the right to ugly illiberal attitudes toward the unvaccinated and to wish police brutality upon them. This means that one does not need to be black, or transgender, or any other politically privileged identity to obtain the right to justified unashamed aggression. COVID spills the prize of victimhood among the unremarkable white masses.

• To create a stringent membership with criteria that disqualify precisely those whom one finds most threatening: the independently minded, those immune to hypnosis and willful stupidity, the creative, the robustly healthy. This is driven by the frustration of the great mass who are made painfully aware of their insignificance, who are seduced by celebrity status and the salacious fantasies of global capitalism, who belong nowhere, who daily devour the corn syrup magma from the teats of this monster and only grow more hungry... But this alienation and subdued panic of a lonely creature, like a mouse caught at daybreak too far from home, extends all the way up the chain of power: the mad thirst for a final secure membership that might end the unbearable and mysteriously emissive alienation which seems to permeate the 21st century - the age of "connectivity", of "social" media, of "friending" - is a force which no one, no matter how much wealth or power they obtain, seems able to escape. And of course the fact is that privilege heightens the sense of cultural poverty: it makes loneliness and meaninglessness seem yet more cruel, ironic, and hopeless. Most lottery winners succumb to their own emotional immaturity. It is largely toil, artificial scarcity, and a community of equally distributed misery that stabilizes the average human wretch: we globally suffer from the pangs of the nouveaux riches, prematurely freed from the life of honest labor which held together the repressed but highly functional psyche of our grandparents, and unwisely freed from the traditional strictures which gave a horizon and canon of values to the human creature. To the precise degree that the cosmopolitan future of a cushioned throne of ubiquitous yuppie self-absorption is achieved, the likelihood of COVID hysteria and neofascist measures increases: Australians are more susceptible because they are more homogeneous, comfortable, and lacking in cultural loyalties - in other words, "emancipated".

Vaccination status wanted to be a passport to 21st century citizenship. Biomedical profiling may yet be exploited to institute a new pseudoreligious criterion of exclusion, with the power to excommunicate those who will not bow before a false idol: the people thirst for the certainty of a religious worldview. It has been taken from them and replaced with a shallow cargo cult scientificality - but give this cult enough time and it will gather all the elements of religiosity back under its spreading wings.

To return to our question: what is hysteria?

Hysteria is the discharge of instinctual frustration in the form of anxiety. But anxiety is not the motive force, nor merely a maladaptive accident, nor dysfunctional: hysteria turns anxiety into leverage. It is the first clever twist among the neurotic topologies: Verschiebungsersatz stands at the head of the class in the school of neurotic strategy. None of these mechanisms profit much without navigable societal hierarchy, without labile functions of compassion and more than a little confusion among mores. Now is such a time: the rewards of victimhood are a spilling cornucopia attracting a grasping gawking crowd - but as the scene becomes more obscene and farcical it begins to look more like a sloshing pool of vomitus on the schoolbus no one wants to address.

What could be the evolutionarily adaptive value of "mass aggressigenic hysteria"? This pattern is too widespread through history to be a simple "cognitive error", a case of misinformation, or even a maladaptive syndrome: there is something highly effective and evocative at play - an ancient ritual everyone seems to silently understand. What does a witch-hunt accomplish? It creates new enemies, new targets of justified violence, new hierarchical lines and criteria of exclusion: it creates novel opportunities for political power, social prestige, and moral credit. When we look at the hysteria of COVID and the protofascist measures applauded over so much of the first world, I believe we are looking into the face of an instinct rooted in our Pleistocene past as tribal creatures, whose success depended on group cohesion and navigable hierarchies - this is a ritual of exclusion which creates new tribal circles, purges the social context of outliers and threats to cohesive action, and in general acts as a prophylactic against abandonment for those in danger of being left outside some other order.

In other words, independence of spirit, ethical character, and intellectual conscience are not necessarily adaptive: otherwise they would be more commonplace. On the contrary, anticipation of the vicissitudes of the group, moral posturing, social jockeying, shallow character, and the cognitive dissonance to keep those processes viscous and responsive is the norm: this is the harsh awakening COVID offers us, if we can stand to grasp the monstrous scale of what we're witnessing. What might have been a short episode of moral panic accompanied by a few violent expulsions of the independent loners and antisocial pirates on the fringes of the tribe 10,000 years ago, is now a global farce perpetrated by those clad in the garb of science, political authority, unthinkable military power and the threat of police brutality. 21st century atrocities will not do us the favor of announcing themselves as such: they will sneak in the backdoor, they will wear a labcoat, they will be perpetrated by doctors, low-level bureaucratic technicians, and frustrated policemen seeking reprieve from their creeping realization of insignificance.

Mass aggressigenic hysteria is the tsunami emerging from deep fissures: only as it reaches the coastline of visibility do the incredible forces behind it become apparent. It requires a mass hysteria to overcome the resistance of mass repression: we have been telling ourselves and our children that we are already nonviolent, that "nonviolent life" is not a contradiction in terms, that the famous hypocrisies of morality are a thing of the past, that our political programs are rational and achievable - despite targeting and contradicting not only the entirety of human past but biology itself. From this perspective, does COVID hysteria look more sane? Indeed what COVID hysteria achieves is a very rational outcome: the creation of outlets for aggression, the creation of enemies, the drawing of distinct political lines, a justified war. One way or another our Pleistocene nature will find expression: monstrosities bred in the darkness of moralized denial, the twisted limbs of a generation caught between the increasingly impossible demands of a hypercivilized urban supercolony and the maladaptive torments of a sedentary frustrated body bred 10,000 years ago - for now these are the most visible expressions of our old nature. But the horrors of the early 20th century are seeking another backdoor, and it seems they will find one eventually.