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.
What keeps a family together?
People. The relationships between them and the stories they share.
But what happens when pressures on the family become great?
We struggle, looking for ways to trace scraps of our shattered reality back to the source. We believe we can “return” to the basis of our family and thus re-establish continuity.
But as we falter in this quixotically impossible quest, we fix our gaze harder on the external world of tribal symbols.
The Big Tent has been torn apart after 2020. It was a 24/7 media matrix that replaced councils of elders that infused communities with tradition. The Big Tent was the matrix telling all of us to talk about the same movie at the office water cooler, at 9am sharp, on Monday.
Some of the Big Tent was good. A lot of it was very deceptive. We could be in Ohio and have our conservative Midwestern interpretation of the latest Batman movie, while not being completely alienated from the coastal liberals in New York with their own take on the film. Ironically, each camp felt that its ascendancy was only a matter of time. Each camp patiently awaiting the next election. Voting would vindicate the holy. The pendulum would swing back.
But now with the Big Tent gone we see this was all an illusion. None of us ever had superiority. It was all a manufactured game. And instead of accepting this, many want to magnify their scrap of meaning that’s dancing in the wind and wrap a Big Tent over the world once again—this time for keeps.
“Our tribe will be proved right! The rest of the world will come around, you’ll see! The others will have to admit they were wrong! We will ensure that every other word out of our mouths is about seed oils or raw milk or sunning our balls! This is the key to bringing a shattered reality back together! Stay vigilant, comrades. Read every ingredient. And don’t wear pants with a tight crotch. Onward. Everyone will live under the shadow of our Big Tent. It’s only a matter of time.”
It would be more beneficial to remain open minded, cross-pollinate with those who have dissenting opinions, now that we realize our antagonism was harvested for a pyramidal elite.
We could stitch together a patchwork world with new supply chains of meaning.
But instead many insist that everything must be militarized, where gatekeepers all march in lockstep. You’d think 2020 would’ve purged the collective of this urge. But no.
Instead of openly sharing our experiences and creating a human vision with one another, we are…engineering the Ubermensch.
You see, under stress, we don’t like to admit that propaganda is bad and that deception is unethical. We tell ourselves that, if WE and OUR TRIBE were at the helm, we would produce helpful and good propaganda. “Program or be programmed” as gurus on Twitter like to say.
Instead of thinking of more creative solutions, we demand control of the old corrupt tools.
“If someone is going to brainwash humanity…well, it might as well be me and my group. After all, WE know the truth behind reality.”
Rather than admit the old reality is broken—which would cause us to reorient our thinking completely—we decide that WE will salvage it, restore it to former glory, but under OUR name now.
And so we fashion ourselves in superhuman form and encourage family members to do so in kind. We turn to digital spaces to do this. We pretend to be animals wearing bowties, or some other Frankenstein amalgamation—never once guessing that what we’re doing is tampering with the firmware of our soul.
We decide that we will be…People™.
Finding the Others
There is always a “we” at play. Because the thing with championing People™ is that no individual person exists. One is merely a node in a network, awaiting signal.
“All for one and one for all.”
The individual person is a problem. He or she might point to new ways of thinking, so that a new reality can be co-created rather than and old one reinstated. That person is a threat to the shared illusion/delusion. They are a heretic. They are to be exiled, excommunicated.
But sometimes, through this painful journey, brave individuals find the others, the people who can truly build something together, in a sphere where risk exists.
They live at the fringes. They may show up as outcasts and rebels. They are saints as well as sinners. Pious priests and holy nuns, lone wolfs howling in monasteries of the mind. Scholars, seekers, caretakers, servicemen. Theorists and musicians, collectors and chasers of curiosities. They are pure, but they are marked as being too dangerous to live with People™.
Already, very quickly, we’re getting a sense of how People™ will appear to us. The first intimations were in the mid-2010s, as figures like Bronze Age Pervert promised a Never-Neverland for Lost Boys.
To be fair, the project may have been viable for a time. Collectively, few of us could really tell that this was the last big hurrah for the Big Tent circus. But post-2020, it’s obvious that such “movements” are only loosely tethered to the side of reality you can co-create with.
These movements remain on the other side of reality, in the exclusively imaginary realm, where risk cannot exist. In the imaginary realm, mindset rules the day. “I think I am a king therefore I am.” Clean and pristine as an iPhone store. No outside voice can enter this temple of perverse solipsism. Winning can’t be in jeopardy. It must be secured against all dissenting voices.
There are times when “crossover” occurs—a bit of authenticity shines in a post about raw milk or sales or monogamy, while signaling allegiance to one’s chosen tribe. I’ll talk about “crossover” a lot in this series. We’re also going to talk about the cultish idea that beliefs are programmable special effects—and how that disrupts our notion of ethics (see the tweet above for a daily example).
Maybe someone posts a picture of their wife, and we realize she is not an avatar of what the rest of the community esteems as “the Ideal Feminine.” Or maybe someone hits “like” on a tweet that criticizes bodybuilding.
Tribal members in general are becoming less and less tolerant of this crossover. As a result, expression is becoming more sterile, more contrived. Those who play outside the rhythm are noticed immediately.
“Bro, I saw your wife posting a seed oil meal the other day, hope you’ve got a prenuptial because that’s a no-no in Ubermensch Land.”
Individual expression is too risky for the neo-tribes, and the atmosphere of fear and punishment keeps it at bay. An individual may get a taste of true creativity—and there’s no place for that in the exclusively imaginary realm. Things must be kept under lock and key. The illusion must not be disrupted. Monitoring is in place to assess any risk of dissenting thought.
Outcasts find each other in the night. Clandestine crossovers happen in DMs, or in person. But again, sometimes the mask slips online…and it all becomes public.
Picking Up Your Identikit
The headline example ushering us into this major transition is the public unmasking of Carnivore Aurelius (hereafter referred to as “CA”).
CA seemed to say all the right things that could mark one as a man in the 2020s. As an early iteration of People™, though, the identity had some loose threads. There’s a concept called “uncanny valley” where the humanoid or cyborg reveals a slight imperfection, causing a sense of unease in the viewer. “Is it human? Or is it fake?”
One of the giveaways, for instance, was the use of a fluffy alpaca emoji next to CA’s screen name. Not very masculine, eh?
And so, after one intrepid investigator began rooting around, it became known to the public that CA was not an ascended man who was pointing a path into the future, after having restored the roots of Western Civilization.
No, the poster behind the account was, in fact, a bit of what we’d call a “basic bitch.”
This unveiling stirred the collective unconscious on Twitter. Many people had to rationalize their confused emotion as glee. “Seriously, cheers for the excellent grift and hustle,” many responders said.
But deep down, there was unease—a sense that they had modeled some of their beliefs on this hyper-masculine signal, a realization that they had sacrificed part of their creative spark to feel a bit of community.
Less spontaneous but at least accepted as one of the People™.
And as that all came crashing down, you could detect a stir of anxiety.
“The next iteration of People™ must get out quickly, stat! Let’s get down to programming a better and more persuasive form of humanity!”
In the next few weeks you’ll see this frazzled, scatterbrained, glitchy behavior sweep through interactions as people scramble to elevate a concept that can hypnotize the tribe and once again foster a sense of collective utopia.
Identikits will be in high demand—factories will be sloppily cranking them out en masse to banish the feeling that major supply chains of meaning have exploded.
As our digital subcultures rush to reorient themselves, hastiness will be at play. Overt scams, cults and cognitive dissonance will be more openly accepted. This will lead to an unforgiving attitude towards those who point out shoddy foundations.
Surveillance will scan for any utterance that stands in the way of this rush to restore meaning. A distorted golden calf will be placed on the mountaintop, broadcasting a signal to the masses. You will increasingly hear, too, that this calf is a martyr—that anyone who dares accuse it of corruption is a blackhearted rebel.
Already on Twitter I’m noting bitter fights between accounts that previously would’ve been an assumed alliance in the Bronze Age Pervert era. In one case, almost instantaneously, a disagreement over the nutritional profile of fish turned into bitter attacks.
Over fish.
One offended account posted portraits of a dissenter and began berating their physique. Onlookers scrambled to recover a sense of communal belonging in the splintering chaos.
It could have been easily avoided. More could have been made of the situation. A new alliance. Something productive. Patching together a new reality from the disparate scraps of a Big Tent world gone ka-boom.
But instead, we witnessed neo-gatekeeping—the unconscious urge to engineer People™.
I hope to explore a more constructive path with you in this series. Until next time…stay curious.
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.
‘ These movements remain on the other side of reality, in the exclusively imaginary realm, where risk cannot exist. In the imaginary realm, mindset rules the day. “I think I am a king therefore I am.” Clean and pristine as an iPhone store. No outside voice can enter this temple of perverse solipsism. Winning can’t be in jeopardy. It must be secured against all dissenting voices.’
🤌
This one felt like the negative polar of "Clarion Call". 2023 is going deep on contriving.