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When you look at the cultural landscape, what ISN’T alien?
While recent headlines yelled about UFOs, others watched as an industrial disaster in Ohio made the sky look like a storm on Mars.
Meanwhile, Aella—a sexfiend blabbermouth turned influencer—hopped on a podcast with monotone Lex Fridman, evangelizing about her half-baked transhumanist fantasies.
It’s enough to make an even-keeled person want to shut down and become a paranoid android.
Where does this leave humanity? When everything seems permissible, how does that make us want to shoot for the stars? When ChatGPT wants to replace Tolstoy, how do we cultivate a striving spirit that keeps us reaching for the beyond?
Is escapism our only creative outlet these days?
Lately, it seems to be the case. If you aren’t running for the metaverse, you’re trying to recruit members for your utopian homestead off the grid.
Same picture, two different angles.
Meanwhile, I propose a middle path. We DO have tools for redeeming the ugliness in the here and now.
We just have to ask the right questions about what to improve and what to break down.
Most people on Twitter will aim for something esoteric and big.
“We need to improve gender relations therefore we need to break down the mainstream media that gatekeeps all the power symbols and power images. Sign up to become a concubine at my raw milk harem today.”
I believe more than ever we can find a personal revolution through radical simplicity. This entails neither a hyper-digital nor a purely Luddite approach.
We can ask ourselves instead: “What does my food taste like? What does sweat feel like on my skin? How would I describe the smell of late winter air?”
What hides these simple questions from our minds is not some psyop or evil chemical.
We are the ones that hide these simple questions from our minds by insisting that every simple gesture become a grand demonstration of our righteousness.
Our entire society freely stands on the precipice of an open field…
…And yet, hordes of voices shout: “The chains, the walls, the demons—comrade, you must fight them with me, so that we may escape this prison.”
People on social media don’t take walks anymore. They take “Lindy walks.” Even when this is voiced ironically, you can feel how others are detached from the sincere simple sensuality that would lift them out of the swamp.
But no, they want you in that bucket with them, championing the cause for a flashy revolution. Something that will make the normies cry out in shame and confess their sins.
The conceptual web that many of us cling to—or as I call it, the memeplex—is what prevents many of us from crossing over into the wholeness we seek.
So often we pat ourselves on the back for fighting “the Matrix”—only to fall into a more tangled web of symbols. Let’s explore this topic today.
Schisms and Fragments
So far in this series we’ve discussed the ways in which social media contorts the personality, removing it from the soul it’s attached to.
In other words, we’ve been concerned with the manufacturing of People™.
Many times, we willingly engage in this transaction—giving a piece of our soul away in order to participate in the memeplex.
What is the memeplex?
The memeplex is a social ecosystem that we’ve transferred our identities to. More than that, we share this ecosystem with others though I hesitate to use the word “share.”
Why do I hesitate? Because the whole point of everyone engaging in this collective transfer is because they think THEY will be part of the one tribe that will edge out all the others.
This realm’s currency—any meme, which can be an elaborate thought-form or churched up lifestyle—is used to EXCLUDE other people.
So the memeplex may seem to be inclusive on the surface but its primary purpose is to promote winner-take-all tribalism in participants. Kind of like the worst aspects of Reality TV rolled together.
The most common meme among “Right Wing” bodybuilders is “post physique” (really: “poast fizeek”) because they’ve concluded that physique determines the truthfulness of the other speaker in the room.
The most common meme among “Left Wing” libertines is “ok, incel” because they’ve concluded that sex life determines the truthfulness of the other speaker in the room.
What’s ironic is that in the new era all storehouses of value will exist in a perma-fluid state. None of them can permanently weather the storm ahead. Instead of existing within a permanent and immutable hierarchy, they will slip and slide around a horizontal network. One day indeed physicality may be a top concern for humanity…the next day we might need mystical or financial or nutritional or sexual advice to solve the next problem facing our collective condition.
In fact, stitching together a patchwork melange of all sects (ha) really WOULD solve our collective condition.
And that’s what makes the winner-take-all memeplex frustrating. Each of us holds a critical piece of the puzzle to make the collective happy again, but propagandizing for our preferred tribe just holds everything back.
That’s why I think the future lies with individual creativity. Hive minds are hard to calm down. But surely each of us on our own can stitch together a patchwork world of diverse influences. If enough individuals do that, soon the mob mind will take a backseat to a creative ferment sweeping across the land.
It all starts in your own backyard, in your free time. Simple sensuality. Tasting things. Smelling them. Asking what beautiful sight sits right before your eyes. A post-political wonderland.
Isn’t it interesting how “politics” has been inserted to all the things we mentioned above? “Based” diets, “esoteric” sex, “woke” political schemes. Whatever the case, left or right, somehow our urge to revolt against the modern world turns basic human activities into some total revolutionary act.
That to me seems like a recipe for collective unhappiness. Most of us want to mate, create, eat and be merry.
And yet here we are in the memeplex, propagandizing ourselves as heroes, magnifying every threat into a conspiratorial “psyop.”
Most of us aren’t born to be militant commanders, and I’ve outlined that extensively in my Patchwork Manifesto. I’ll briefly bring you up to speed here with a condensed version of that argument.
Written In Stone, Eroded by Acid Rain
What’s happening in this tribal propaganda is an attempt to re-create the Big Tent society that we lived in pre-2020.
Now, that’s a heady phrase— “Big Tent society.” We’ve got to unpack that.
The Big Tent rose to prominence in the Enlightenment with the philosophy of Modernity. It then essentially took over the world in the 20th century as Modernity transmogrified into globalist Postmodernity. The Big Tent became a coordinated 24/7 government-media matrix. Everything optimizable and utilitarian.
We went from “God is dead, but New is True” (Modernity)…
…To “Truth is dead, there is only the reality you project” (Postmodernity).
I’m looking towards the bright side, to what comes after Postmodernity. I believe we’re entering a multi-truth world, which I call the Patchwork Age.
It’s a post-Big Tent world, baby.
But what came before Modernity and the Big Tent? What was the pre-modern world like?
Well, that’s where the (supposedly) immutable, eternal hierarchies were created.
Just so everyone’s on the same page: the pre-modern classical world was about Truth and Beauty. I’m no apologist for Modernity (or even Postmodernity) but there wasn’t much room for experimentation here. You colored within the lines.
So, taking that, do you know why T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is considered a Modernist marvel?
Think about it: we entered a WASTELAND when we shattered the pre-modern classical world of homage, lineage, hierarchy.
The Enlightenment and its explosion into Modernity with World War One was a tectonic shift in how the world worked. Modernity is perhaps more fearsome than Postmodernity because it represented a Pandora’s Box moment. You just don’t go and tamper with the hierarchies written in stone and not expect it to disrupt everything from gender relations to our relationship with money.
This is why mystic poet William Blake summarizes the horror of industrial enlightenment as child labor.
Children in England were being used for their small size to sweep chimneys (the black smoke he writes of is not too different from the scenes we saw in East Palestine, Ohio).
He writes of an abandoned weeping boy covered in soot. The boy replies that his parents are in church—going through the motions of religion, while ignoring the suffering in their backyard:
A little black thing among the snow, Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe! "Where are thy father and mother? say?" "They are both gone up to the church to pray."
Despite all its technical “progress” and scientific advances, Modernity wrought a kind of hell on earth. Man had attempted to transcend the world by “knowing” it.
We had lost the protective structure of the pre-modern world. Postmodernity just kicked everything into quantum overdrive by saying, “We don’t care about knowing the world, we can just simulate meaning by looking the part.”
Again, like Modernity, despite all the creative potential unlocked, Postmodernity has also brought a lot of disaster. All across social media you can find fatherless and motherless lost boys and lost girls, covered in soot, weeping in the snow. The parental institutions supposed to serve them…are crumbling.
Return to Forever
In the pre-modern world, all of this was much different. Order and hierarchy—what I call meta-codes—emanated from an “council of elders.” Priests, politicians, military generals, what have you. These meta-codes helped model human behavior. Do this when you’re 16, do this when you’re 30, etc. etc.
Like I said, it was NOT up to the individual person to become a militant propagandist and work out this prescriptive model. Their job was simply to be fruitful and multiply.
First principles were GIVEN to a collective rather than having to be PIECED TOGETHER at an individual level.
A macro context—a kind of proto-Big Tent—was in place. That context no longer exists, but more on that in a sec.
This context was hijacked by Modernity, as I’ve just outlined. That’s why I’d be hesitant to say the Big Tent was 100% bad.
The Big Tent society could not ever be 100% bad because its source code came from a largely benevolent origin. The origin was a pre-modern template for organizing a just society. This template also coordinated cooperation for (relative) peace and trade between other groups (clans, nations, empires, etc. which had their own roundtable councils).
In the pre-modern world, the collective was seen as a community of dependents rather than slaves. The council thus served a protective structural role. When that was hijacked, we opened the door for a world dominated by slave morality, as highlighted in the William Blake poem.
Institutions replaced the actual human fathers and mothers that organized society.
Humanity gets stretched thin the further out on this timeline you go, until it kicks into the kind of transhumanist paradigm we have now—which I call People™.
What we have now is people begging for the Big Tent—which was never that benevolent to them in the first place—and worse thinking they can piece it back together after 2020.
When people talk about Trad or Lindy as a total lifestyle you can just put on like a suit, they aren’t really talking about the pre-modern world. They’re talking about the Modern or even Postmodern Big Tent where you individual collect symbols to say, “Hey, look, I’m trad!”
This is why, instead of coming off as a kind of benevolent royal pre-modern tour de force, most Trad and Lindy people are annoying Karens.
They are Postmodern Posers telling everybody what to do with their penis, what food to put in their mouth and where to work. They’ve automagically promoted themselves as gatekeepers, not realizing that gatekeeping is what got us into this modern mess.
“You too can RETVRN to paradise…if you follow my 12-step Lindy program.”
It’s not supposed to make logical sense. It’s all about utopian fantasy. This is where we get the meme “This Is My Politics.”
Someone posts a picture of an espresso cup next to a book of Baroque Art, while overlooking the riviera on holiday.
We think “Oooh, this person’s got it figured out, they’ve got a life, there’s a signifier of meaning, and another one, and another…let me crawl under that Big Tent with them and be safe.”
And they push and push this angle, hoping by brute force that we’ll all wake up and like one big happy family start pursuing these rituals in lockstep.
Well, except for the ones who won’t—the memeplex is designed to highlight the unwashed sinners, who will not be allowed to chill by the riviera with the messiahs!
The Other Side
We know the endgame of the Big Tent: lockdown.
Everybody locked under the shadow of that big cloth that divides us into two camps: saints versus sinners.
We should be glad it is in tatters now. I’ll admit, it is scary.
But returning to that lockdown mentality is going to be very tempting, as we grapple with the loss and grief and ghosts of What Once Was.
As comforting as the Big Tent was, it also was ultimately very oppressive to us all. Now we are confused about its loss. We decide to launch our own form of lockdowns. We've need to risk new forms of interacting with each another but we’ve deeply identified with our former kidnappers.
Heading into March, we will struggle greatly with “Free Range Thought.”
Just as we enter a window of opportunity to head in a direction of freedom, you can see the collective mind go: "Mmm, I think I will continue with this prison theme." That's the perverse "safety" people have known.
While the Patchwork Age allows us to shift between tribes externally—and even internally as we stitch and unstitch our value sets—you will see people act in punitive ways this year.
“No, you shall not be allowed to think outside the box! It’s either Us or Them!”
We must find the courage for freedom—to crossover.
Even our conception of this major shift from Old World to New World must be given some leeway.
Are we looking for a hard definitive neon sign dropped from the sky: “Welcome to the New World”?
Or are we surfing the sinuous waves back and forth, touching the Old…then swishing into the New for a taste of that fresh salty air?
Go a bit easy on yourself as we make this transition. Surf through it. Don’t demand that it take shape immediately, like some immaculate gigantic fully formed Big Tent.
Individually, we can stitch the tatters of this Tent to redeem it, through new combinations. If we are stuck in the age of experimentation, let’s make experimentation a positive rather than destructive force. We can honor the past instead of fighting over it.
We can also lean on our partners during this time, sharing our memories and bonding over What Once Was—cheering each other to get out there and continue making new memories.
Close relations now can remind us not to exaggerate our respective patches of perspective and to see how we each hold a key to our shared problems.
So, go on. Pick up a patch of meaning and start building out the vision of your dreams. What you make will play a crucial part in lifting everyone else up—and they’ll feed you in return.
Things are coming full circle. Break on through the whiplash. No more bouncing from one extreme to the other. Left to Right. Right to Left.
You can cross over into a realm of pure creativity.
IMMERSED in your craft.
I am currently quite full with reading requests right now, but if you have an authenticated birth time and wish to be waitlisted, contact me HERE.