Deep dives into culture, myth, memory, and meaning. These essays explore the unseen forces shaping human life, from psychological truths to historical patterns.
Feb 11, 2025 | First take a breath and breathe deeply. It’s the first rule of resistance — breathe! That is how you know you are still human. MAGA maniacs just rage. That how you know they are Zombies.
Topics covered in all four parts:
1) Join one of your local resistance cells (Democracy Forward was mentioned on the call I was on in Virginia with Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Individible, local Democratic chapters),
2) Join What’s Happening & How You Can Take Action | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (subscribe and stay informed with AOC )
3) Watch The Rachel Maddow Show [9PM] 2/10/2025 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 BREAKING NEWS Today February 10, 2025 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyrMr2VzgPk
Connecting the Dots of Chaos, Confusion, and Authoritarianism
Rachel is a master of connecting the dots and painting the bigger picture so you can’t MISS SEEING WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON. In last night’s show, she paints a picture so clearly of how Trump is decapitating government, you can’t miss it. Trump’s biggest Loser Cabinet will be the biggest, baddest cabinet ever!
Putting LOSERS in Charge
To be selected by Trump to head a government agency or department, you just have to be a LOSER! Once appointed, these LOSERS are executing these government systems Trump put them in control of, and I mean kill them.
Rachel also tells us why we should be VERY concerned about Federal Agencies such as the CFPB being ILLEGALLY shut down. Have you ever been scammed? Well… watch out because now the agency that has worked to get your money back from scammers is gone! Elizabeth Warren tells Rachel in the past 13 years 21 billion dollars has been recovered by this tiny, insignificant agency and put back in USA citizens pockets. But Elon has a plan!!! Turn ex-Twitter into PayPal… do you remember? That’s how Evilon got his toe into making money. And now he can scam the H*** out of anyone stupid enough to use his sketchy system with NO Regulation!
The Three Buckets of Chaos, Doom, and Authoritarianism
The Three Buckets of Chaos Rachel breaks down are CRITICAL. Study them and learn to recognize what wacky thing the Trump-Elon monster has done to day fits under and it is #3 that we must push back on relentlessly and not ignore!!!
Resistance 101:The TruMuck Monster
Number 1: Bad Outcomes such as planes crashing or farmers getting screwed by TruMusk – or TruMuck because they turned off Biden’s Inflation Reduction funding.
And He Did Resign — Right Before the Biggest Air Disaster in 25 Years!!!
Even FOX has to report on it!!
Only 500 feet of separation between passenger plane (above) and military plane (below) occurred on Friday — March 28, 2025
Number 2: Double-dealing such as Elon’s Tesla chargers get a big head start and huge advantage over his competitors as Trump administration pauses a federal clean energy program to expand the country’s network of electric vehicle charging stations.
Yep… It’s going right into you and your DOGE bro’s pockets!!!
Damn Right Elon’s Running USA RIGHT NOW!!! IT is the brain of all modern systems… if you highjack the brain, you run the system
Elon is Not that much different than the Toxoplasma gondii virus
The parasite Toxoplasma gondii hijacks the brains of mice and other rodents, causing them to lose their fear of cats.This makes them more likely to be eaten by cats, which can then spread the parasite to other animals.
How does Toxoplasma affect the brain?
It may secrete molecules that rewire the brain
It may cause brain cysts that interfere with dopamine production
It may trigger inflammation in the brain, which changes brain function and behavior
It blocks the rodents’ natural aversion to cat urine, instead attracting them to the pheromone
How long does the effect last?
The effect of Toxoplasma can last for months, even after the parasite is no longer detectable.
How can you avoid infection?
To avoid infection, you can:
Maintain good hygiene for you and your pets
Wear gloves and a mask when gardening
Keep sandboxes closed when not in use
Clean fruits and vegetables
Thoroughly cook meats
Wash hands regularly
Hmmmm, now we need a list of how to avoid infection of the Elon MuskToxoplasma gondii virus
Resistance 101: This is what it looks like inside of Elon’s Mind
Back to The Three Buckets of Chaos, Doom, and Authoritarianism
Number 3: Authoritarian Breakthrough such as TruMuckignoring Court Orders to turn funding to HeadStart and Community Health Centers back on — guess what? It.. the TruMuck monster, hasn’t turned the money back on. Nor have they reopened USAID, which a Federal Judge has also ordered halted.
Another sign of authoritarian breakthrough is pardoning criminals such as Rod Blagojevich, January 6ers, Jared’s dad. All of these people are now beholden to TruMuck to do his bidding. TruMuck is still deciding how to use Rod. But January 6ers, they are now TruMuck’s personal band of Terror Police.
This sort of play is not so far back in our collective human history! Are we stupid?! Let’s look back at Russian Czar Alexander III regarded by historians as the last real autocrat in Russia. His secret police force was called the Okhrana. They were tasked with terrorizing or killing any opponents of Alexander III. One of the things they did was kill dogs and tie their heads on the saddles of their horses so that they appeared like demons, which of course they were. [Sources: Wiki-Oprichnik, Study Guide ]
Resistance 101: History of Russia & Ivan the TerribleResistance 101: Bad Outcomes Again… this is Stupid Ivan killing his own son because he couldn’t control his thirst for Power any more
Stay Awake! Stay Aware! Be Ready to Act!
So, you see there is a reason why Republican Senators and Reps are spineless, sniveling fools right now… but if they don’t stand up Now, which I don’t think they ever well, there is no way to stop TruMuck using our democratic levers of democracy.
Stay Aware. Stay Informed. Take Breaks, But DO NOT IGNORE THIS. Action is Required.
The question haunts many Trump voters now, why are we seen as so stupid by liberals?
An anguished question from a Trump supporter:
“Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?“
The ListBegins with the One Created by Adam-Troy Castro but with Pictures & Even More Citations! Then It Continues, Including 4 Powerful Messages from God, Himself!!!
Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:
— Answers by ADAM-TROY CASTRO
#1.That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.“
#4.That when Trump made up stories about seeing Muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.”
#6. That when you heard him relating a story of an elderly guest of his country club, an 80-year old man, who fell off a stage and hit his head, to Trump replied: “‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t—you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He was bleeding all over the place. And I felt terrible, because it was a beautiful white marble floor, and now it had changed color. Became very red.” You said, “That’s cool!
Donald Trump once turned away from an unconscious 80-year-old man who had hit his head “Get that blood cleaned up, it’s disgusting” — PUBLISHED: 03 OCTOBER 2017 — Harpers Bazaar [as well as GQ,CNN, and other sources]
#7. That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
#9. That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
#12. That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
#13. That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
What has President Trump said about your country? | BBC | 23 July 2018 — This list includes Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Botswana, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, …. oh go look at this report for yourself… Trump basically says: “Fuck you to the entire world!”
#14. That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
Lost Safeguards: Popular Public Protections Repealed in the Trump Era
If You Voted for Trump, Do You Think You Are Stupid Now?
“No… you say?”
Well… The List Goes On
— More answers by ADAM-TROY CASTRO
#15. That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!” [Yes, so smart… that’s your tax dollars at work for the orange man]
The Secret Service spent nearly $2 million at Trump properties
#16. That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was in the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.”
The Late Show [as well as reported by CNN, NBC, many other sources]
#17. That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!”
#18. That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids, has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “Well, OK then.”
Trump migrant separation policy: Children ‘in cages’ in Texas
#19. That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
Trump is anti-worker. Here are 10 of his most shocking anti-worker statements
What you don’t get, Trump supporters, is that our succumbing to frustration and shaking our heads, thinking of you as stupid, may very well be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.
Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.
– Adam-Troy Castro
(To all who agree with its content, I ask that you PLEASE SHARE IT on your own post, and ENCOURAGE OTHERS to do the same.)
#20. Trump plans to take away civil rights, civil liberties, and freedoms, and you say: “Way to go… your my man!”
DEFEND THE RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE NATIONWIDE. | ACLU | 2024 Abortion care, trans people’s right to live freely, people’s right to vote – our freedoms are at stake and we need you with us. Donate today and fuel our fight in courts, statehouses, and nationwide
#21. Upon seeing a list of Horrible or Deplorable things Trump has said or done, and you shout: “Hip, Hip, Hooray!”
Okay… Trump supporters…. you win this one… he was hilariously funny with this whooper. But innocent immigrants, who are here legally, suffered horribly because of his lie… and you laughed anyways. So when your turn comes to be a victim from one of his whooper lies of promises made and promises broken, I am going to be the first to laugh at you!
Never Forget Jan 6, 2021
From January 2022 blog — Remembering Jan 6From January 2022 blog — Remembering Jan 6January 2022 blog — Remembering Jan 6January 2022 blog — Remembering Jan 6
OH YEAH! God Said Your Stupid on New Year’s Eve 2024
Four lightening stikes on American icon’s of democracy and capitalism. If this isn’t a warning about the impending doom America faces with Trump supporters voting the most ignorant man back into the highest seat of power in the world, well, might as well go play the Squid Games then… you are probably one of the idiots who thinks you are going to survive out of everyone playing!
Since I posted this blog little over one year ago, Trump tariffed the world putting his own MAGA supporters at great risk: Midwestern farmers and ranchers. I made several videos about this last year during spring planting time in a very red part of Southern Minnesota.
The world pretty much stopped buying US corn and soybean. US farmers (many MAGA) stored their crops. Now, spring planting time in America again, Trump started war with Iran, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. This has caused global fuel shortages and something that the small pea sized brain of Trump probably never considered, it caused a fertilizer shortage for his already strained MAGA farmers.
But are his MAGA farmers who face the real possibility of losing their farms regretting their vote?
The segments I have watched indicate No… they still support the strange Orange Man tearing down the White House (literally) and tearing down the World Order (literally).
This is the definition of stupid. Men and women so intend on ignoring the facts they have become stupid people making stupid decisions that threaten the entire world. There must be a word for that… something beyond stupid…
Other Things About Trump & MAGAYou Might Have Missed
It’s just 7 days until Halloween… and 12 days until the Presidential elections.
Have you stocked up on Halloween candy?
More importantly—have you voted?
If you haven’t bought your Trick or Treating candy yet, consider yourself lucky. But when it comes to voting, sitting back and letting others decide your future is a gamble you can’t afford. The country needs your voice now more than ever, or we all risk waking up in a nightmare of our own making.
Nightmare of Our Own Making
Don’t Do These Things for the Next 12 Days
Couch Surfing
Doom Scrolling
Remaining an Undecided Voter
Diving into “Deep state” conspiracies holes… Anti-vaccine misinformation holes… QAnon holes… Trump won the 2020 hole…
Fixating on Conspiracies Theories Niches
Zombie Dancing with an Online “Cult” Community
Going to MAGA rallies… or maybe you really need to go to one NOW!
Engaging in Misinformation Manic Madness
Grim Reality
It’s not Breaking News but more like a grim reality that for many Trump supporters, they will not wake up and see the truth of who they are voting for until it’s too late. History has shown us that when power-hungry factions run unchecked, it’s often the very supporters who fall victim to their own foolish belief in “their guy” that leads to a tragic fall into a very deep pit of complacency. Just look at the aftermath of the Russian Revolution or the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. In both cases, extremist elements seized power, leaving a trail of chaos, death, and destruction in their wake.
This is what happens when Sinister Sycophants stir up a mob mentality that prevails in wiping out a functional democracy. Sycophants don’t care. And they don’t discriminate who to blame next for all the terrible things they bring into being once all the previous scapegoats are gone. The people supporting Trump & Dark MAGA today can easily become tomorrow’s victims.
If we don’t stand up now for human rights and dignity, even for Trump cult followers blinded by blind faith in their Sick Sycophantic Fanatic leaders and talking heads, then we all might just find ourselves living in a dark chapter that we never saw coming. So, as you prepare for Halloween, remember: the treats can wait, but your vote is crucial. Don’t let the spirit of apathy haunt you this season.
He set up a secret police force that was loyal to the Bolsheviks.
He decreed that the government could seize private and church property.
He began to negotiate Russia’s withdrawal from the war.
The secret police loyal to the Bolsheviks hunted down and killed or imprisoned leaders and members of the other forms of communism in Russia in 1917 such as Menshevism, which was a more moderate socialist ideology within the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, advocating for gradual change rather than the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary approach; other factions included the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), with some factions leaning towards more radical forms of socialism and even anarchism.
This resulted in The Red Terror beginning on September 2, 1918 that resulted in the deaths of 50,000 to 600,000 people who held differing opinions and ideas about communism… all were label Anti-Bolsheviks. Other groups targeted included the clergy, rival socialists, counter-revolutionaries, peasant, and dissidents. The Red Terror is followed by the Great Purge where another 220,000 members are purged from Stalin’s ideas of communism. And Stalin is just getting started with these purges.
Or if you prefer to consider Germany in 1920, which is when the Nazi party emerges. It begins as a fringe party until personalities like Hitler rise within its ranks. Hitler was an early adopter of Nazism, joining the party in 1919 when it was still known as the German Worker’s Party.
In 1933, Hindenburg appoints Hitler as chancellor, hoping that the powerful Nazi leader could be brought to heel as a member of the president’s cabinet. Hindenburg sorely underestimated Hitler’s thirst for power and willingness to do anything to get it, including setting the Reichstag building on fire [this would be like Trump setting the Capitol on fire or calling an angry mob to swarm the capitol building on Jan. 6].
Just as Trump called into question the legitimacy of the 2020 election, which he used to sig his crazed crowd on the Capitol, Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to call for a general election.
However, Hindenburg underestimated Hitler’s political audacity, and one of the new chancellor’s first acts was to use the burning of the Reichstag building as a pretext for calling general elections. The police, under Nazi Hermann Goering, suppressed much of the party’s opposition before the election. The Nazi Party joined forces with the German National People's Party (DNVP), to gain a bare working majority in the Reichstag. Shortly after, Hitler took on absolute power through the Enabling Acts. In 1934, Hindenburg died, and the last remnants of Germany’s democratic government were dismantled, leaving Hitler the sole master of a nation intent on war and genocide. - History: Hitler purges member of his own Nazi part in Night of Long Knives
Before the Holocaust and Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hitler purged his own part in the Night of Long Knives.
At least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have been in the hundreds, with high estimates running from 700 to 1,000. More than 1,000 perceived opponents were arrested. The purge strengthened and consolidated the support of the military for Hitler. It also provided a legal grounding for the Nazis, as the German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extrajudicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. The Night of the Long Knives was a turning point for the German government.[3] It established Hitler as the supreme administrator of justice of the German people, as he put it in his 13 July speech to the Reichstag. - Wiki
VOTE… Because Democracies Have Fallen Many Times Before… & Trump Has A Plan
It seems impossible that America sits tittering on the edge of fascism in 2024. Yet, here we are, sitting on the titter totter of doom waiting for a few undecided voters to make up their minds.
The Titter Totter of Doom
And… Then, There’s No Place to Run
If “We the People” fail to understand that this is not an election for who has the best policies and which party is going to take America in a better direction. If we fail to grasp that the clear and present danger to America isTrump and MAGA. If we fail to comprehend that we could lose the very democracy we claim to be voting for on Nov. 5, 2024. And if we fail to vote Kamala Harris and Tim Walz into the White House with an overwhelming majority of votes, then Trump & MAGA have a plan.
This isn’t a new plan or twist of fate. Throughout history, sadistic figures like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Putin, and even Trump—though he stands out as the least intellectually formidable—have emerged from the shadows of civilization.
This unsettling theme is at the heart of my book, Sapience: The Moment Is Now. Many friends have told me they find it too depressing to continue reading, often stopping around pages 35 or 50. And by doing so, they miss the chance to truly grasp where the story is heading and why it’s an important story for our present moment in time.
Yes, discussing sadists and psychopaths is uncomfortable. But so is the reality of suffering at their hands. We can’t effectively protect ourselves from looming threats if we bury our heads in comforting illusions and ignore the existence of these dangerous creatures living among us disguised as human beings.
Sapience is a cautionary tale about dangerous figures who have disrupted and destroyed one civilization after another for thousands of years. If we want to survive as a species on our beautiful planet, we need to learn the lessons of our forebears or prepare to perish.
Ben from the MeidasTouch Network articulates a similar sentiment in a recent video, emphasizing that now is not the time to shy away from confronting those who act like monsters.
Trump AWFUL PAST Resurfaces after BURIAL SCAM Exposed — Reporting Only Found at the MeidasTouch
While you are at it, watch this segment about the final two weeks before the biggest election of America’s
Trump Gets DECIMATED by Most SAVAGE ATTACK AD of Election == WATCH to the END It’s Too Important to Make Excuses
Dysfunctional Decals
Now, let’s delve into these stickers that evoke ancient names for the type of creature that Trump embodies and the contagion he has unleashed among ordinary Americans, driving a wedge between us to undermine democracy and pave the way for his hellish victory!
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s worn out, tired, overused ploy tyrants have been using against peace-loving societies for over 5,000 years!
Meet The Eccentric Menagerie
Here are 9 Kiss-Cut Vinyl Decals that encapsulate the Divisive & Dangerous Case of Donald J. Trump. This essential collection features the Betrayer-in-Chief, Airhead Narc, Sinister Sycophant, Half-Witted Hedonist, Obtuse Weirdo, Dim-Witted Psycho, Licentious Sycophant, and the Sore Loser decals.
Betrayer-in-Chief is a striking and thought-provoking design featuring a green-faced depiction of Trump, emblazoned with the bold title “Betrayer-in-Chief.” This decal captures the essence of betrayal in leadership, highlighting the disillusionment many feel toward those in power who prioritize personal gain over the welfare of their constituents.
Airhead Narc is a bold and provocative piece featuring a green-faced depiction of Trump, complete with the striking labels “Airhead” on top and “NARC” at the bottom. This decal humorously captures the essence of narcissism, illustrating how those with narcissistic tendencies often divide the world into simplistic categories of good and bad.
Sinister Sycophant unleashes your inner critic with this striking decal featuring a green-faced depiction of Trump, exuding an aura of malevolence. The bold lettering at the top reads “Sinister,” while the bottom proclaims “Sycophant,” capturing the essence of self-serving flattery and manipulation.
Half-Witted Hedonist features a striking red theme capturing the essence of indulgence and folly. This decal humorously portrays the age-old tendency to prioritize pleasure over wisdom, reflecting how deception can often masquerade as enjoyment. The term “Half-Witted Hedonist” highlights the folly of those who chase fleeting pleasures without consideration for consequences or deeper understanding. It serves as a playful reminder that the pursuit of hedonism, when devoid of wisdom, can lead to misguided choices and a superficial existence.
Obtuse Weirdo is a vibrant, orange-themed design capturing the eccentricity of those who boldly embrace their uniqueness. The term “obtuse” hints at a lack of understanding or sharpness, while “weirdo” affectionately embraces the quirks that make people truly interesting. While being different is something to celebrate, not hide away, this is not the case when the obtuse weirdo is malignant narcissist who will say or do anything to grab power or hang onto power. Then, such a fool becomes dangerous.
Dim-Witted Psycho boldly captures the essence of eccentricity and madness. It playfully explores the juxtaposition of folly and chaos, inviting viewers to ponder the thin line between humor and absurdity. This decal serves as a tongue-in-cheek reminder of the quirks and eccentricities that make life interesting, even when they verge on the outrageous. However, when such an oddity gets a hold of power and can entertain their hypnotized followers into a berserker frenzy, then there is a dangerous problem going on that deserves your time and attention.
The Sore Loser decal boldly showcases the colors of red, white, and blue while playfully confronting the theme of defeat. Featuring the phrase “Sore Loser,” it humorously critiques the reluctance to accept loss, embodying the frustration and stubbornness that can accompany disappointment.The term “sore loser” evokes the image of someone who struggles to gracefully concede, capturing a sentiment that resonates in both personal and political arenas. This decal serves as a lighthearted reminder that losing is a part of the game and embracing it with dignity is far more admirable than clinging to resentment.
Overall, these decals serve as visual critiques of the manipulative tactics employed by wannabe dictators like Trump who exploit their positions for self-serving agendas. Once they get into power, they betray the very people they fooled to gain power.
You can find them at The Quip Collection on this site.
Every Voice, Every Vote
Ending with an upbeat message, this is a short, happy video to the uplifting beat of Sandra Dee Collier called: Every Voice, Every Vote!
On October 7, 2023, a significant and tragic escalation occurred in the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel. Early in the morning, Hamas launched a large-scale surprise attack on Israeli territory. The attack involved rocket fire and incursions by armed militants into various communities. This assault marked a particularly deadly day in the conflict’s history. It caused many casualties among both Israelis and Palestinians.
In response, Israel declared a state of war and commenced extensive military operations in Gaza. The violence quickly escalated, leading to airstrikes on Gaza and widespread destruction. The international community reacted with alarm, calling for de-escalation and urging both sides to pursue dialogue. The events of that day worsened the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. They also reignited discussions about the long-standing issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As the anniversary approaches, reflections on the events and their aftermath emerge. They highlight the ongoing tensions. These tensions have a profound impact on civilians in the region.
In my book, Sapience: The Moment Is Now, I trace the roots of antisemitism back centuries. These hateful sentiments stretch back to the First Crusades and even further back in time. The night (or rather early morning) of the attack, I had a dream about the Human Cake. It was the second time I had dreamed this dream. It is not a pleasant dream. Rather, it is a shocking, revolting, scary dream, and I could not image why I was dreaming about it again.
In this dream, I see a team of doctors all wearing white coats. They enter a sterile white space where I and others wait. They enter this room through shiny white double doors. Behind these doors is the operating theater where they have been creating their new thing. It is this Thing that they are giving a press conference about. It is clear they are very pleased with their work. I can see their pride on their sly smiles. I can feel their arrogance in the way they push the Thing in a wheelchair for everyone to see.
They spare no gory details on how they created the atrocity sitting in the wheelchair. This Thing used to be a man. Now, it sits as a helpless creature in its wheelchair for it has no legs. Nor can it express any emotions because it no longer has a face. The doctors are proud of these aspects of the creature. They say it is a break through and discuss each step they took to get to this featureless creature.
Everyone in the room sits in stunned silence. There is nothing left of the man except a mound of gory goo. The doctors take turns describing with excitement how they systematically cut off every recognizable feature of the man. They describe with joy how they took these pieces and reattached them to utterly unsuitable places of the body. Places never intended for a severed limb or an eye.
The result is disgusting, stomach-churning, repulsive, beastly, vulgar, and heinous. The doctors did it, but the man volunteered. I couldn’t understand why?! Then, I woke up to the horrible news of what was happening in Israel. I was overwhelmed by the news coming out of Israel. And overhanging this was the shock and horror of my dream that lingered in my mind like an evil specter.
Carl Jung calls such moments as these Moments of Synchronicity. When any human encounters a moment of synchronicity, attention must be paid. This is because often, there is something very important for the individual to know or understand. I knew this was important.
I was working on the final stretch of my book feeling an intense need to get it published by 4/24/24. After October 7, 2023, I stopped writing and editing my book. I could not do a thing in it for the rest of the month. I felt compelled to witness the harrowing stories of survival. And I listened to the tragic stories of death of innocence people at the hands of men filled with hate.
I made a playlist on YouTube called Remember. I saved every story I heard to this list. I was shocked again and again at the savagery described by survivors. The brutality inflicted on babies, children, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers shook me to my core.
After this month of bearing witness, I knew what I had to do with my book. I needed to write about the Human Cake. And I also needed to include the history of the Middle East. This new research and writing sidelined me for at least another month, but I did it.
If you get my book, you will encounter the Human Cake first. He makes his appearance in the book at about page 101. Brothers of the Levant… Before the Fall begins on page 173. Histories of genocides begins around page 320 with the chapter titled: Rise of the Machine.
You need to read all of these sections to gain a full history of current crisis in the Middle East. You also need to read other sections to understand how hate has risen inside of man. He has learned to harness it with machine-like precision. I cover many, many hate groups who have emerged and are growing like a cancer all over the world. In addition, I carefully show how no human being is immune to the infection of hate. These sections are cited for I have researched them intensely. I cite historians, psychologists, and philosophers. Additionally, I reference people who have specialized and written about all this stuff for a very long time.
In this section, I talk about the Human Cake. My character Rain recalls her grandmother’s words about fear and other strong emotions. Her grandmother was a wise woman, and Rain knows she needs wisdom now to survive.
A man who clings to his instinct to kill becomes a person aroused by murder and death. It fascinates him like a candle flame, but to keep the kill candle burning… such a man must kill… constantly. But doing so in a civilized society risks punishment and possibly his own death. And so, such a man fantasizes about murder, mayhem, and massacres inside the confines of his mind. Such a man feeds his fantasies with pictures and images of dead or dying people; kill porn. Such a man glorifies death and idolizes martyrdom. Such a man celebrates the wholesale slaughter of other human beings who he considers to be less than he considers himself to be. It is a false and insincere division made by his foul and increasingly warp light of consciousness that must be constantly fed. He becomes like a drug addict who needs a hit of heroin to feel normal again.
Grandmother said that anything done constantly in the mind soon grows boring to man’s fickle, flickering light of conscious attention, so a man clinging to his kill instinct must up the ante to feed his fading fervor and desire to butcher and decimate other living beings. Such a man may pacify his erotic passion by killing what he considers lesser forms of life. He can also fuel the instinct to kill with anger, regret, and rage. He can work himself up into a berserker frenzy by consuming a steady diet of fury and indignation.
Grandmother said that a man who fantasizes about death and celebrates killing is the devil he fears in others. Such a man cultivates his inner instinct to kill to a fever-pitch, he becomes a tube of intensity, a cannula of desperate excitement, a pipeline of frantic, frenzied, futile fear and rage. His magma tube of hate drops him below the animal realm of living beings, it plunges him below the daemon realm of human beings. He falls into a monster pit, a place where he embodies the wretched vermin that he accuses others of being. His invisible world where all his thinking is done is transformed into Hell’s Kitchen populated by unrecognizable things baked in the heat of hate and scorn.
Such a man uses his laser beam of hate to mutilate his inner man. He disfigures and desecrates his inner self by cutting off his inner man’s fingers and toes, hands and feet, legs, and arms. He pulls out his inner man’s hair and gouges out his eyes. He removes his nose and mouth and face and slops them onto the growing heap of hate he is becoming. Then he turns up the heat of his fear and loathing, baking himself into a human cake made of hostility, disgust, resentment, bitterness, antipathy, and apathy.
Such a dismembered and disfigured inner man can no longer recognize the humanity in himself, and certainly not in others. He becomes a thing of contempt and repugnance, a thing no longer recognizable as human or animal, except for one thing: his thinking and his words. Such a man uses these lingering abilities with deft callousness to beguile and enthrall, to rivet and fascinate, to transfix, super charge, and magnetize the ordinary man and woman… pulling them farther and farther out of the mainstream, tempting them to leave their reservoirs of wisdom with promises of everything but love. Then he destroys their inner equanimity and binds them to him with chains of fear that are firmly fastened to his crumpled wheelchair of cruelty. He must do this for such a man is crippled by his own fear and hate. And so, he needs others to do the terrible things he dreams up, but which he is too cowardly to do himself.
Commanding his army of human zombies from his wheelchair of hate, he must constantly recruit new people to his wretched world of scorn and loathing because he throws his foot soldiers to their deaths again and again. And they must die because they have been commanded to kill the women, kill the children, kill the babies, kill the goats and chickens and dogs and wheat and barley and water… to kill anything resembling life. So, anything resembling life must fight back or be killed and die by the killer human zombies who have been robbed of their souls by the human cakes baked by their own hate.
Just before the Fall, some of the biggest, most hideous, gut-churning, ghastly acts of hate are immortalized as mere numbers: 9/11, 2/24, 10/7. Days of infamy that plunged the highly interconnected world of the dawning 21st Century not only into bloody, gruesome, localized conflicts and war, but mind grenades carefully calibrated to inspire fear and fill the ordinary man and woman with hate for the other around the entire world. It doesn’t matter what side a person is blown to in the blast of gruesome cruelty. These mind grenades are simply meant to shock and to shake the fragile foundations upon which modern people must trust will protect them and keep them safe.
With the ordinary man’s and woman’s trust in humanity shook, it doesn’t take much more for the most hateful human cakes to shatter any common bonds still holding a civilized society together into a million, billion bits. Once shattered, the hate filled human cakes rearrange the shiny, reflective shards of human consciousness like tiny mirrors on a disco ball. The human cakes shine their light of hate on the remnants of the ordinary man’s and woman’s sense of safety and security. -- Excerpt from Sapience: The Moment Is Now
What else can I say about hate of Human Cakes?
I can only show you the drawing I made of this creature… the one I dreamt about on the morning of October 7, 2023 for the second time. The dream I knew I needed to pay attention to… and so I did.
It is the 4th of July 2024! The United States of America has withstood so many moments of greatness, disaster, conflict, trauma, war and peace. Through it all, for 248 years, Americans of all makes and models, Americans great and small, rich or poor, immigrant or native (and most modern Americans are by far immigrants… it is ignorance to argue otherwise) have managed to come together and stand together when the times of required us to act as one body to achieve our destiny.
But this July 4th, Americans stand divided. Americans are more fractured than ever, perhaps more divided than Americans were on April 11, 1861. This is the day before the Civil War began. Evidently, the division that plunged Americans in the the bloody Civil War did not end on April 9, 1865. It rages on today.
Today, we face a stark choice: Biden or Trump. To vote for a third candidate is to shrink from your duty to make a hard choice. It is a cop out. It is playing the game of chicken when America needs you to play the game of defending democracy for the future.
Is the choice easy?
No, of course not. When the stakes are high, when is a choice that matters ever easy?
Biden is old, but he is wise. Trump is old, and he is pig-ignorant.
Biden is frail, but he tells the truth. Trump is vigorous but lies like the Devil.
Biden fumbled the debate, but his is good. Trump fumbled too, and he is evil.
What is evil?
I talk about it in my book available on Amazon titled: Sapience: The Moment Is Now.
Sapience: The Moment Is Now (available on Amazon!)
Evil is Live spelled backwards. When a human being ignores too much of reality, humans are capable of creating conditions that do not support life. In other words, the make a livable world un livable. That is evil, pure and simple.
What is ignorance?
I also talk extensively about this in my book on Amazon. Ignorance is ignoring certain parts of reality so that you can know more about one thing or another. We all must learn to ignore the world in order to know certain parts of the world. This is how we gain knowledge. But too much ignoring leads straight to foolish ignor-ance. This is where we are with the Cult of Trump and MAGA.
So, why MIGA?
If you shorten Making Ignorance Great Again, and you get MIGA. I got this idea while swimming and created it on my iPad. Basically, I took the A in MAGA crack it in half to get the lopsided I (the broken piece of A that is going to fall over because every opposite thing needs its other half to stand strong). I added an orange with a MIGA hat on top in homage to Orange Jesus.
Thank you Liz Cheney for revealing in your book that is what MAGA followers call Trump.
In short, this is what it seems to me what MAGA is bent on doing… making up fiends and foes out of common, ordinary people living in America who happen to have different ideas, lifestyles, color of skin, political or religious beliefs, or anything else they want to make a big fuss about. To do this, the very first thing that must be done is to divide Americans into “us” and “them”. Then, once the division is made, the “us” group gets to go around screaming, shouting, and raging about reality not being how or what they want it to be. It’s so easy to rage.
It’s hard to do the work to really understand the complexities of nature, much less a huge, complicate country like the USA. So, just forget about trying to understand all nuances, complexity, or differences… just cut reality in half, throw away or get rid of the part you don’t like, and plough ahead with half a head and a lopsided mind. In other words, ignore complexity. This is how you get MIGA out of MAGA.
MIGA… Making Ignorance Great Again! See the MIGA Collection now available on my Etsy store: The Quip Collection.
How Corporations, Politicians & Billionaires Profit Off of the Infantilization of Mankind, September 3, 2023
This blog series is based on Joost Meerloo’s The Rape of the Mind and his warnings about modern mass persuasion, emotional conditioning, repetition, spectacle, and engineered dependency.
SUMMARY OF THE 2023 Super Hero, Terror?!
What Super Hero, Terror?! is about
In the summer of 2023, long before the phrase “information warfare” became dinner-table conversation, this blog asked a question most people weren’t ready to hear: what if the same psychological tactics used by totalitarian regimes — fear, manufactured confusion, the Big Lie, the myth of the all-powerful leader — were already operating inside our democracies, wrapped in entertainment and spectacle?
Drawing on psychiatrist Joost Meerloo’s prescient 1956 book The Rape of the Mind, Part 4 of the Marvelization of Man series traces how psychological warfare works: not through brute force, but by exhausting your capacity to think clearly. The unpredictable leader. The firehose of falsehood. The slogans of defeat whispered before a single battle begins. Meerloo documented these tactics in the aftermath of World War II. This post asked whether we were watching them repeat.
It also argued something subtler: that hollowed-out mythmaking — Marvel’s assembly-line superheroes, engineered for profit rather than meaning — leaves us psychologically undefended. We need strong archetypal stories to build the inner models that help us resist manipulation. When our myths go thin, so does our resistance.
“Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot — it confuses those who think straight.” — Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, 1956
Read it as a warning.
From warning to diagnosis: reading this post in 2026
When this piece was published in September 2023, it read as a warning shot. In May 2026, it reads as a field guide to what has already happened.
Meerloo described the “unpredictable madman” as a deliberate tactic — a calculated performance of chaos designed to keep opponents off balance, unable to mount a coherent response before the next lie lands. What this post identified as a political style has since become governing policy. The firehose of falsehood is no longer primarily a foreign adversary’s weapon. It runs domestically, at scale, from the top.
The institutions Meerloo identified as psychological anchors — a free press, independent courts, reliable civic language — have been systematically challenged and, in some cases, functionally dismantled. This is not coincidence. It is the playbook. You weaken the structures that help people tell truth from fiction, and then the fiction wins by default.
Meanwhile, the infantilization argument this post introduced has only deepened. AI-generated content floods every platform. Algorithmic feeds are engineered for emotional reaction, not reason. Political identity has been gamified. People are more entertained, more stimulated, and less equipped for critical thought than at any point in recent memory — which is precisely what a propaganda ecosystem requires of its audience.
Most urgently: Meerloo wrote that the real goal of totalitarian psychological warfare is to win before the fighting starts — to break the will to resist. The question this blog was asking in 2023 was: are we awake enough to see this happening? The question in 2026 is harder. We can see it. The question now is whether we still believe our response matters — and whether we act before we stop believing it does.
“Only the awakened imagination can counter the machinery of deception.”— Sapience: The Moment Is Now
That line is from Sapience: The Moment Is Now, a novel I spent twelve years writing, published in 2024. The book traces a 5,000-year arc of civilization — through the rise and fall of empires, the machinery of authoritarian control, the engineered collapse of collective wisdom — and arrives at the same conclusion this blog reaches: that what is being stolen from us, above all else, is our capacity to imagine something different.
The Super Hero, Terror blog asked why our myths were going hollow and what that cost us. Sapienceanswers that question through three characters living across three moments of planetary collapse — one in 2024, watching it begin; one in 2050–2109, living through the worst of it; one in 2147, trying to remember how it could have gone otherwise. Together, they trace exactly what Meerloo warned about: a civilization that was shown the tools of its own manipulation and still could not look away from the spectacle long enough to resist.
The blog diagnosed the disease. The book maps the terrain of what happens if we don’t treat it — and what becomes possible if we do. Both were written as warnings. Both are now something more urgent than that.
The moment, as it has always been, is now.
Original 2023 Introduction toSuper Hero, Terror?!
The Marvelization of Man series juxtaposes the marvelous world of Marvel and its universe of Super Heroes against the not so marvelous world of real life human beings. Sometimes the men and women who present themselves as Super Heroes swooping in to protect us turn out instead to be deceiving and manipulating us.
Way too often in our Modern Era the men and women presenting themselves as the Super Heroes saving civilization are hiding behind lies and madman tactics designed to intrigue, confuse and shock us into their mesmerizing realm of thought control.
Recapof The Marvelization of Man Series
My series begins with Marvel origin story of Morbius who as a “living vampire”, which is an archetypal character for real life narcissists. Morbius flopped even though it should have racked in the bucks as discussed in depth in Part 2 of The Marvelization of Man.
Part 3 of The Marvelization of Man dives into how our minds work and why when a conglomerate company like Disney absorbs the universes of Marvel, Star Wars, Predator, and so many others, the movies they spin out can fall into the trap of creating transactional characters who are made to fit into a highly formula movie that is calculated to do one thing: make lots of money.
This results in weak storytelling and weak Super Heroes. Lacking strong Super Hero stories can water down our inner ability to resist mass manipulation of the kind Joost speaks about in his book: The Rape of the Mind, published in 1956. Super Heroes are our modern versions of archetypal stories and when we tell weak archetypal stories, we lack strong models to base the development of our own inner archetypal stories impacting every aspect of our ordinary lives.
Part 4 of The Marvelization of Man is delving deeper into the subtle art of mind control. It is something our Modern world has excelled at doing and perfected regardless of whether you live in a totalitarian system of government where overt mind control is used by nation-state like Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia OR if you live in a free-wheeling, capitalistic nation-state like the United States, Britain, Australia, or pretty much any nation aligning themselves economically and politically with the Western values and civilization.
The Rape of the Mind
Joost Meerloo describes Chapter 5 of his book Rape of the Mind in this way:
The purpose of the second part of this book is to show various aspects of political and non-political strategy used to change the feelings and thoughts of the masses, starting with simple advertising and propaganda, then surveying psychological warfare and actual cold war, and going on to examine the means used for internal streamlining of man's thoughts and behaviour. Part Two ends with an intricate examination of how one of the tools of emotional fascination and attack -- the weapon of fear -- is used and what reactions it arouses in men.
-- page 65 | The Rape of the Mind
I will highlight parts of Chapter 5 discussing Psychological Warfare as a Weapon of Terror (Page 69 — The Rape of the Mind) and provide current models of how this continues to take place today.
Psychological Warfare as a Weapon of Terror
Rape of the Mind,Chapter 5: The Cold War Against the Mind.
Every human communication can be either a report of straight facts or an attempt to suggest things and situations as they do not exist. Such distortion and perversion of facts strike at the core of human communication. The verbal battle against man's concept of truth and against his mind seems to be ceaseless. For example, if I can instill in eventual future enemies fear and terror and the suggestion of impending defeat, even before they are willing to fight, my battle is already half won.
-- Page 69 - 70 | The Rape of the Mind
The strategy of man to use a frightening mask and a loud voice to utter lies in order to manipulate friend and foe is as old as mankind. Primitive people used terror-provoking masks, magic fascination, or self-deceit as much as we use loudly spoken words to convince others or ourselves. They use their magic paints and we our ideologies. Truly, we live in an age of ads, propaganda, and publicity. But only under dictatorial and totalitarian regimes have such human habit formations mushroomed into systematic psychological assault on mankind.
-- Page 69 - 70 | The Rape of the Mind
Super Hero, Terror?! Trump — Shaman-Magician, Primitive Boogeyman | Music: Succession: Season 1 (HBO Original Series Soundtrack) — Nicholas Britell
The weapons the dictator uses against his own people, he may use against the outside world as well. For example, the false confessions that divert the minds of dictator's subjects from their own real problems have still another effect: they are meant (and sometimes they succeed in their aim) to terrorize the world's public. By strengthening the myth of the dictator's omnipotence, such confessions weaken man's will to resist him. If a period of peace can be used to soften up a future enemy, the totalitarian armies may be able in time of war to win a cheap and easy victory. Totalitarian psychological warfare is directed largely toward this end. It is an effort to propagandize and hypnotize the world into submission.
-- Page 69 - 70 | The Rape of the Mind
Consider Russia:
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists after a live broadcast nationwide call-in, Moscow, April 14, 2016
We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”2
Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
Russia’s years-long information war was instrumental in informing Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. This effort has failed to build support for Russia among Russian-speaking Ukrainians, especially in Donbas.
A key example is the myth of “Novorossiya”. The term, which means “New Russia”, is meant to conjure up feelings of a restored Russian empire and righting the historical “wrong” of assigning Russian lands under Ukrainian jurisdiction.
Since 2014, Putin, the Kremlin’s propaganda strategists, and insurgents in the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk repeatedly referred to “Novorossiya” as one of the justifications for Russia’s invasion.
In reality, there never was a Novorossiya. As an ideological project, it has failed to take hold in the minds of those living on its supposed territories in eastern and southern Ukraine, and was abandoned by Russia and the authorities of the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk as soon as it became politically inconvenient.
As far back as the early nineteenth century, Napoleon organized his Bureau de l'Opinion Publique in order to influence the thinking of the French people. But it fell to the Germans to develop the manipulation of public opinion into a huge, well organized machine. Their psychological warfare became aggressive strategy in peacetime, the so-called war between wars. It was as a result of the Nazi attack on European morale and the Nazi war of nerves against their neighbours that the other nations of the world began to organize their own psychological forces, but it was only in the second half of the war that they were able to achieve some measure of success. The Germans had a long head start.
-- Page 69 - 70 | The Rape of the Mind
Hitler's psychological artillery was composed primarily of the weapon of fear. He had, for example, a network of fifth columnists whose main job was to sow rumours and suspicions among the citizens of the countries against which he eventually planned to fight. The people were upset not only by the spy system itself, but by the very rumour of spies. These fifth columnists spread slogans of defeat and political confusion: "Why should France die for England?" Fear began to direct people's actions. Instead of facing the real threat of German invasion, instead of preparing for it, all of Europe shuddered at spy stories, discussed irrelevant problems, argued endlessly about scapegoats and minorities. Thus Hitler used the rampant, vague fears to becloud the real issues, and by attacking his enemies' will to fight, weakened them.
-- Page 69 - 70 | The Rape of the Mind
Super Hero, Terror?! Manipulation Man | Music: Books of Blood: The Coming of Tan by Jedi Mind Tricks [Album: The Psycho-social, Chemical, Biological, And Electro-magnetic Manipulation Of Human Consiousness]
Not content with this strategic attack on the will to defend oneself, Hitler tried to paralyze Europe with the threat of terror, not only the threat of bombing, destruction, and occupation, but also the psychological threat implicit in his own boast of ruthlessness. The fear of an implacable foe makes man more willing to submit even before he has begun to fight. Hitler's criminal acts at home -- the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the mass murders, the atmosphere of terror throughout Germany - were as useful in the service of his fear-instilling propaganda machinery as they were a part of his delusions.
-- Page 69 - 70 | The Rape of the Mind
There is another important weapon the totalitarians use in their campaign to frighten the world into submission. This is the weapon of psychological shock. Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval. They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot - it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.
-- Page 69 - 70 | The Rape of the Mind
What this essay identified in 2023 has not diminished. It has accelerated.
The machinery of psychological warfare no longer operates only through state propaganda ministries, television broadcasts, newspapers, or carefully staged political spectacles. By 2026, it has become embedded in algorithmic feeds, attention markets, viral video loops, targeted persuasion systems, and synthetic media environments that operate continuously. Fear no longer arrives in discrete political messages. It now circulates as a permanent atmosphere.
That matters because Joost Meerloo was describing something deeper than propaganda alone. He was describing how confusion, repetition, shock, emotional overload, and distortion gradually weaken the mind’s capacity to distinguish reality from performance. That process has become industrialized. The contemporary information environment rewards velocity over reflection, emotional arousal over understanding, symbolic identity over structural analysis, and outrage over orientation. The result is not merely misinformation. It is psychological destabilization.
The old totalitarian insight remains brutally modern: if you can keep populations frightened, disoriented, exhausted, and continuously reacting, you weaken their ability to think clearly about actual causes, actual power, and actual danger. While citizens chase spectacle, the deeper architecture of political, economic, technological, and institutional power becomes harder to see.
This is where the “super hero” dimension of this essay becomes more important now than when it was first written. Heroic spectacle trains the imagination toward simplified moral theater—heroes, villains, saviors, enemies, dramatic confrontations, and emotional resolution. But real civic life rarely works that way. Real democracy demands attention, patience, complexity, memory, and collective responsibility. A population trained to seek theatrical emotional certainty becomes more vulnerable to those who know how to weaponize fear, grievance, myth, and spectacle.
In 2026, the danger is not simply that people believe false things. The deeper danger is that many people now live inside engineered emotional environments where fear, shock, tribal identity, symbolic conflict, and perpetual crisis continuously shape perception itself. This is precisely the terrain Meerloo warned about: the battlefield of the mind.
How Corporations, Politicians & Billionaires Profit Off of the Infantilization of Mankind
August 23, 2023
Summary: “Public-Opinion Engineers” — Part 3 of The Marvelization of Man (August 2023)
This blog is Part 3 of the Marvelization of Man series, and it pivots from entertainment culture into the mechanics of covert thought control in free-market capitalist societies, drawing heavily from Joost Meerloo’s 1956 book The Rape of the Mind. sapience2112
The central argument is that we face two flavors of the same poison: overt, brutal thought control practiced by totalitarian regimes (covered in Meerloo’s first half), and the subtler, profit-driven manipulation practiced by what Meerloo calls the “Public-Opinion Engineers” — the political consultants, advertisers, and media architects who shape what we believe, what we buy, and who we vote for. The blog warns that when elaborately engineered propaganda campaigns can sell any idea or candidate to the public, the danger is that whoever can pay the most can temporarily become the one who influences people to act against their own real interests. sapience2112
A substantial section is devoted to the importance of healthy archetypes — the deep psychological templates that superheroes embody — as a form of mental immunity. The blog argues that healthy archetypes empower people to choose wisely and resist manipulation, while unhealthy, one-sided archetypes can hijack the mind without the person even knowing it. Christopher Nolan’s comments about Batman as “modern-day mythology” are used to illustrate how superhero stories serve this protective psychological function. The problem is that Marvel characters are increasingly becoming one-dimensional and cartoonish as commercial priorities override storytelling, watering them down so they feel less real and less inspiring — which, in the blog’s framework, is actively harmful, stripping the culture of the archetypal nutrition people need to resist manipulation. sapience2112Sapience2112
Meerloo’s 1956 observations about motivation research, infantile impulse-triggering, manufactured dissatisfaction, and the engineering of artificial needs are presented as eerily applicable to 2023 — and the blog argues that a society of “Automen and Autowomen” conditioned into passive consumption is the ideal population for narcissistic power-seekers to exploit. sapience2112
The narcissist archetype runs as a throughline: from corporate CEOs to political figures, the blog argues that modern capitalism has become an incubator for narcissistic personalities who then employ Public-Opinion Engineers to do their bidding.
Original 2023 Blog: Part 3: Public-Opinion Engineers
Part 1: The Marvelization of Man pokes fun at the entertainment universes (very much a plural) that are owned by Disney. However, I am glad Mark Parker (Disney Chairman) and Bob Iger (Disney CEO) are such a gargantuan company that they can go toe-to-toe with grumpy Governor Ron DeSantis. He is polling at 19% as the man in the 2024 Republican Presidential campaign who is trying to be Trumper than Trump.
Part 2: The Marvelization of Man dives into The Narcissist. This is what Morbius’ character embodies for he is a ‘Living Vampire’. But Morbius is a nice vampire (aka he is an evolved Narcissist). This evolution is necessary because by the 1970s narcissism has proliferated to unprecedented levels in America and any culture embracing a free-market economy based on capitalism.
For the most part, free-market economies embracing capitalism flourish in Western Civilization, and it is here where we find the underbelly of the beast of thought control: The Public-Opinion Engineers, which this blog will explore. This is what Joost Merloo writes about in the second half of his 1956 book The Rape of the Mind.
The first half of his book is dedicated to the mirror image of a free-market capitalist based society. This mirror image is totalitarian capitalism where there is is an economic system in which a capitalist market economy exists alongside an authoritarian government. A more extreme version of this mirror image is simply totalitarian communism (or simply totalitarian rule) where overt thought control is employed to get society to produce the riches that the upper 1% depend upon to enjoy their super luxurious life styles.
The totalitarian style of thought control is what Joost Merloo writes about in the first part of his book. The free-market capitalist style of thought control is what Joost writes about in the second part of his book.
This series: The Marvelization of Man delves into covert forms of thought control. I specifically draw from Joost Merloo who describes covert thought control techniques in the second part of his book: The Rape of the Mind.
One of the only ways to build up resistance to mind conditioning and other forms of thought control is to understand more about how your mind works. One of the essential components of a healthy mind are active fully realized archetypes. A conscious person’s mind simply does not work without them.
However, just like our bodies, we need to pay attention and take care of the systems running and regulating our mind. A person who eats junk food, does not exercise, does not sleep enough, abuses drugs and alcohol is going to run down and ultimately destroy their body faster than a person who does the opposite thing.
The same is true of the mind. If we don’t understand, pay attention to, and exercise our mind, we are going to fall prey to the predators of our society. And they exist in democratic, fake democratic, communist, and totally totalitarian systems. And The Narcissistic personality plays an oversized role in all our modern economic systems. This is why I think Morbius is an important Marvel character and why I focused on The Narcissist in Part 2: The Marvelization of Man.
It is during the 1970s, which is when Morbius was first created, that The Narcissist really proliferates American society. They were certainly multiplying by the buck loads in the 1960s, but the 1970s, the bucket of narcissism runneth over.
Morbius realizes his mistake in hunting for a cure to his crippling disease and he doesn’t want to drink human blood to survive. Fortunately, he invented synthetic blood, which is tiding him over, but it’s not as good as human blood and eventually, it will not sustain him.
He thinks ending his life will solve the problem, but his best childhood friend with the same disease gets his vampire serum, and so now there are two of them: one nice, the other one not nice.
Morbius is forced to hunt down his friend using his vampire super powers, but it’s not easy because his mean friend has them too. This is where we get to the critical idea that it just might take a monster to kill a monster. In other words, it takes a good vampire to kill a bad vampire.
Applying this to the archetype that the vampire represents, it just might take a recovering Narcissist to dethrone or take down a very sick Narcissist. Think Bob Iger (Disney CEO) [the narcissists trying to be a good narcissists] and grumpy Governor Ron DeSantis [the narcissists trying to be meaner, mightier, and uglier than the Trump Narc who is the biggest, baddest Narc clobbering anyone in the Republican Party who goes against him].
Public-Opinion Engineers: Match of the Narcs | Corporate Disney Narc vs Political DeSantis Narc
Narcissism Runs Rampant in American Culture& Public-Opinion Engineers Help Spread IT
Before leaving this idea of how narcissism dominates the social, political, and economic systems of American Culture (as well as most of Western Culture, which does not leave the rest of the world off the hook, they simply have overt narcissism running rampant while American and Western Cultures are cultivating covert narcissism), I want to highlight Andy Dunn and his story of success at the price of his mental health.
Andy Dunn, co-founded of the men’s apparel company Bonobos in 2007, agrees with me about American corporate culture being one that embraces and celebrate narcissism. In his TedTalk about Starting a company, dealing with bipolar disorder and struggling to manage both, he describes how our modern capitalist market-based economy basically makes being a Narcissist a prerequisite to start a company or be a CEO as well as other mental health disorders or illnesses.
Lessons from Losing My Mind | Andy Dunn | TED
Super Hero Stories Are Important
Also, before Joost’s chapter on the Opinion Engineers, I want to highlight why super hero characters in comic books, novels, and movies are vital to our mental wellbeing.
The stories we tell each other and to ourselves do much more than entertain us. They condition our minds to operate in certain ways.
Christopher Nolan and Batman
I heard Christopher Nolan on Fresh Air talk with Terry Gross about his new movie Oppenheimer. They also talked about “Dunkirk,” “Tenet,” the “Batman” trilogy, “Inception,” “Insomnia” and “Memento.” What he said about Batman (a different super hero universe but important nonetheless) is relevant to the points I am attempting to communicate about archetypes and how our minds work.
He said:
NOLAN: Well, I think, like a lot of kids, you know, I would read comics. And they were a great sort of launchpad for your imagination. You know, the way in which your brain processes the frames of a comic book, not unlike the way a filmmaker processes storyboards, you know, that have been drawn for a sequence or something - you're kind of - you're using your brain to flesh out from the work of the sort of artists and writers. And I became more interested in the character of Batman in that great era of sort of graphic novels - you know, the work of people like Frank Miller in particular. So they meant mythology, I suppose. They meant modern-day mythology, and they meant larger-than-life sort of operatic figures.
So when I took on the character of Batman in the trilogy we made, in the "Dark Knight" trilogy, you know, it was really all about an operatic approach to storytelling. So it's heightened reality, and that character really allows you to do that. And what I loved about Batman - of all the characters, the reason I wanted to deal with Batman is for me, he was the most human and relatable of superheroes because he doesn't really have any superpowers unless you count his extraordinary wealth. You know, that's the thing he brings to bear. But he's basically a guy who does a lot of pushups. And...
Nolan thinks comic book super heroes are important! They help us workout our minds and grow new abilities such as imagination, creativity, and film-making-storytelling. Nolan believes comic book super heroes fill a place in our mind where meaning is made and purpose is born.
This is an important place Nolan speaks of. It is that invisible place deep inside every human being where larger-than-life, operatic characters live. These are the archetypes. Think of them more like pools and reservoirs of energy. Each pool or reservoir provides the energy and mental models needed to understand and met specific situations, moments, and challenges in our lives.
These moments and challenges are universal to all people. The archetypes might take different shapes and wear different costumes depending on culture and time, but they represent the same energy of human beings grappling with situations and life experiences that are uniquely human.
Archetypes transcend place and time. Archetypes hold the collective experiences, challenges, and cognitive changes we have made to instincts going back, back, back to the very first conscious Homo sapiens (of which we are one species of six and we are the last surviving species, if we can survive the consequences of consciousness).
Archetypes are the mirror image of instincts. They energize and inspire us to fulfill and handle the life situations and challenges confronting us every day. Archetypes are arches because they contain the energy of instincts changed by consciousness that channeled action in a way better than what nature would have allowed through instinctual responses. And, they contain all the energy of instincts changed by consciousness that channeled action in a way that turned out worse than nature would have allowed through instincts.
Think of archetypes like memories for the mind to use instantaneously to respond to things happening inside and outside of the body.
When we cultivate and exercise our mind, in the way Nolan describes, we grow the capacity to solve our problems and handle our life situations in new and novel ways that might work out better than the ways we were told or taught.
Healthy Archetypes
Healthy archetypes see both sides of themselves. Healthy archetypes know there is a good way to respond or do something and there is a bad way. Healthy archetypes empower us to choose wisely. Healthy archetypes give us a feeling of power and control, but also peace and serenity because healthy archetypes know when to not use power to control others or their environment, which is most of the time. Healthy archetypes, even in the most challenging and adverse conditions, help us do the hardest things. So this is no small stuff super hero and other strong movies do for us.
Public-Opinion Engineers: Arches of Consciousness
Super Heroes (aka Archetypes) also help us grow mental immunity to thought control efforts and mind control conditioning that you will soon see through Joosts work surrounds us every moment of every day. We are constantly submitted to the social pressures of the Public-Opinion Engineers as well as a host of other mind control tactics.
Unhealthy Archetypes
The reverse is also true of archetypes. Unhealthy archetypes have lost sight of one side of themselves. Unhealthy archetypes are one sided and inflexible. Unhealthy archetypes can hijack our minds and make us respond to circumstances in our life in lopsided, rigid, and inflexible ways. Unhealthy archetypes are stealth and sneaky. Unhealthy archetypes are lopsided and want to remain lopsided. Unhealthy archetypes can take over your life and rule you and you won’t even know it because unhealthy archetypes work night and day to keep your conscious mind in the dark or in a very little box.
I saw 3,000 Years of Longing recently that does a pretty good job showing you what unhealthy archetypes can do to you.
In this movie the main character Alithea Binnie is a British narratology scholar who occasionally hallucinatesdemonic beings. Despite being a story researcher, she is an incredibly rational person.
The movie begins with her saying: “My name is Alithea. My story is true. You’re more likely to believe me if I tell you it’s a fairy tale.” She is flying to a conference in Istanbul about storytelling and even though she is telling the audience that we have science to tell us how everything works and we really don’t need stories any more, the following happens:
Alithea is one of the speakers at the conference, where she says that stories about mythical gods have been a part of human history for ages. (In the background on the conference stage is a collage portrait of comic book superheroes, to illustrate her point.) During her speech, Alithea sees in the audience a vision of ghost-like elderly man wearing all white in an ancient royal outfit, including a crown.
--
Review: ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing,’ starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton -- August 28, 2022 by Carla Hay
No matter what she does to try to make the White Demon go away, he appears closer and closer until she passes out with fear.
And she hasn’t even met the Djinn yet! This story-movie hints at another thing mythic stories do for us. They help us digest and deal with anxiety and stress of daily living. In fact, they provide an outlet for it as well as for other strong feelings that are hard get rid of or express in modern society such as anger, disappointment, despair, longing, fear, frustration, anguish, disgust… the icky stuff that’s not polite to show or discuss in civil society but the stuff we all feel and experience in life.
Perhaps mythic movies actually give us an outlet for this pent up energy, help us balance our psyche, which helps us feel less anxiety, less frustration, and a greater sense of meaning and purpose.
Archetype Are Echoes
Archetypes are echoes, they are the memory of every alteration ever made by consciousness through space and time. When confronted with a similar situation, archetypes jump into action riding up alongside instinctual responses and giving us instantaneously knowledge of ways to alter our response consciously.
However, when we don’t exercise our mind with curiosity, learning, and imagination, archetypes fall into our unconsciousness and we may pick a bad response due to our failure to remain fully conscious of all our options.
Myths and stories are filled with archetypal characters that convey information about all our options in converting the energy of archetypes into action. Heroes, super heroes, tricksters, wise old men, wise old women, and villians of every story portray what happens when people see both sides of their archetype, when people become unconscious of their archetype, and when people lose sight of one side of their archetype being called into action and act in a lopsided way.
The characters of myths and stories are essentially showing us how the energy running through us all the time can improve our lives or make it worse. When we find ourselves in similar situations our mythic heroes and villians are living out their story arch inside us.
Myths and stories help us recognize, develop, and mature these strong energies that as feelings, emotions, and other mental forces that can knock us sideways if we don’t pay attention or take care.
Myths and stories help us recognize ourselves and give us examples of how to integrate these unconscious aspects of ourselves. All good myths and stories provide templates, examples of bad ways of dealing with these energies (the villians) and good ways of channelling and dealing with these energies (the heroes).
Archetypes are mirror images of instincts but they have been changed by conscious choices. Archetypes provide human beings with images of the spectrum of consequences for how primal instinctual energies are changed by conscious choices. And as you have probably guessed by now, some choices are destructive and produce destructive outcomes, other choices are creative or compassionate and produce generative outcomes.
This sort of knowledge is power. It is a power our ancestors understood very well.
Archetypes echo the vibrant reflections of our innate, instinctual behaviors.
Public-Opinion Engineers: Archetypes
Perhaps if we modern humans understood the power of archetypes, we could better navigate our outer spaces (the place where you and I can meet) and inner spaces (the place where you talk to yourself…we call it thinking).
Perhaps if we really understood archetypes, we could play them like a lute… or perhaps they play us, but we might know when they are playing us and be better prepared for the consequences.
Joost Merloo, Rape of the Mind and the Role of Public-Opinion Engineers
This is the stuff A.M. Merloo, M.D., writes about in his book the Rape of the Mind. This nebulous space we call mind. A space we take for granted that we all just naturally do, but do we really know what we are doing inside our heads or have we been conditioned to think we know what we are doing, but the thoughts, ideas, and behaviors have been planted their by the Public-Opinion Engineers! They are the professionals who herd us like cows and get us to believe, act, and buy the things they want us to think, do, and buy… their stuff.
In the first half of his book, Merloo goes into great detail about how autocrats, tyrants, dictators, despots, and fascists control people’s minds. These are brutal people who employ brutal tactics. These are people and regimes that have an overarching need to control other people and imposing their way of thinking on them… much like the narcissist. They use overt, cruel tactics of thought control.
The second half of his book deals with the subtle uses of thought control. This is the part I am covering here. Subtle thought control is a tool that serves the banker, the baker, and candlestick maker. Basically, if you run a business, you need to get inside the minds of possible customers. But some businesses are much more nefarious about this.
Subtle thought control is a given element of modern economics, especially capitalistic economics that have practically become an incubator for narcissists.
A.M. Merloo wrote his book in 1956 but it sure sounds like 2023. I introduce Merloo in this blog.
The conviction is steadily growing in our country that an elaborate propaganda campaign for either a political idea or a deep-freeze(r) can be successful in selling the public any idea or object one wants them to buy, any political figure one wants them to elect. Recently, some of our election campaigns have been masterminded by the so-called public-opinion engineers, who have used all the techniques of modern mass communication and all the contemporary knowledge of the human mind to persuade Americans to vote for the candidate who is paying the public-relation men's salaries. The danger of such high-pressure advertising is that the man or the party who can pay the most can become, temporarily at least, the one who can influence the people to buy or to vote for what may not be in their real interest. -- Page 67 -- The Rape of the Mind, A. M. Meerloo, M.D.
This first paragraph cannot be emphasized enough. I’m not even going to try. Rather, I’ll try to articulate it with an image.
Public-Opinion Engineers:The Price of Mediocre Is So Cheap!! “The Price for Believing Mediocre Men… Is Being Ruled By the Monsters of Mediocrity: VOTE for ME! BECAUSE……Only ICAN MakeAmericaGreatAgain!!! BUY ME! You NEED Me to Freeze YourMeat & YourMind! The World According to Trump and Putin…… and ALL Their Evil, Mindless Minons Mine! Mine! I OWN everything with MY MONEY!!I OWN YOU!! I OWN theWORLD! I OWN EVERYTHING!!!” Music: City Dreams (interlude) 2:17, by: The Midnight, album: MonstersThe Price of Mediocre Is So Cheap!!
The specialists in the art of persuasion and the moulding of public sentiment may try to knead man's mental dough with all the tools of communication available to them: pamphlets, speeches, posters, billboards, radio programs, and T.V. shows. They may water down the spontaneity and creativity of thoughts and ideas into sterile and streamlined clichés that direct our thoughts even although we still have the illusion of being original and individual.
The effects of persuasion wear down our resistance to it (such as watering down the stories we tell with Super Sweet Super Heroes). Persuasion also turns us into automatic humans, pretty much robots who do what the Big Guy wants them to do. The Big Guy is usually the Biggest Narc in control of the group who has succumb to the persuasion put out by that Narc’s Public-Opinion Engineers. Here are two examples:
Watered Down Archetypes
Public-Opinion Engineers: Watered Down Archetypes
Marvel is essentially watering down their super heroes (or sweeting them up too much) by making them transactional characters. That is to say that purpose of the Marvel character is to sell a pre-packaged storyline that follows a movie arch that has already made billions, not to tell a good story. As movies and entertainment become more mainstream, more collective, the archetypal characters we see are super watered down, not super heroes. The more we see every character following the same pre-packaged theme, the faster they turn into sterile clichés, rather than ambassadors of powerful inner forces influencing us every moment of every day.
As modern man loses recognition and contact with his inner archetypes, he essential cedes his own conscious awareness to going with the flow of the slow, steady drizzle of mediocrity demanded by Modern life. Doing what you are told slowly becomes the gold standard of being a man, even if it means becoming the standardized mediocre bloke everyone has told him he is from the day he was born.
What we call the will of the people, or the will of the masses, we only get to know after such collective action is put on the move, after the will of the people has been expressed either at the polls or in fury and rebellion. This indicates again how important it is who directs the tools and machines of public opinion.
Julia Angwin brings up the example of the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer. As the police were taking him away, he proclaimed that he didn’t want to do this but he had to because the dangerous liberal democrats and seizing so much control. He saw himself as a warrior in an existential crises that demanded violence… yes, violence! We should be alarmed and jump out of our arm chairs knowing someone thinks their own fellow citizens are eating babies and want to kill them, so they will kill the liberal democrats first!
She asks people, “Do we want to live in the Stasi where people are informing on each other?”
Julia Angwin
Everyone says “No definitely not!” But, she warns if we don’t watch our current slide as a nation that is exactly where we are going to end up.
Julia Angwin
The Public-Opinion Engineers — Continued
Trust is the most essential ingredient for a civil society. When trust breaks down, polarization reigns in society. Where polarization and lack of trust in each other reigns, individuals become very vulnerable to the work of the Public-Opinion Engineers.
In the wake of such advertising and engineering of consent, the citizen's trust in his leaders may become shaken and the populace may gradually grow more and more accustomed to official deceit. Finally, when people no longer have confidence in any program, any position, and when they are unable to form intelligent judgments any more, they can be more easily influenced by any demagogue or would-be dictator, whose strength appeals to their confusion and their growing sense of dissatisfaction. Perhaps the worst aspect of this slick merchandising of ideas is that too often even those who buy the experts, and even the opinion experts themselves, are unaware of what they are doing. They too are swayed by the current catchword "management of public opinion," and they cannot judge any more the tools they have hired. The end never justifies the means; enough steps on this road can lead us gradually to Totalitaria. -- The Rape of the Mind, p. 67
Even in Joost’s time in the 1950s, the adverse and negative effects of Public-Opinion Engineers was very apparent.
At this very moment in our country, an elaborate research into motivation is going on, whose object is to find out why and what the buyer likes to buy. What makes him tick? The aim is to bypass the resistance barriers of the buying public. It is part of our paradoxical cultural philosophy to stimulate human needs and to stimulate the wants of the people. Commercialized psychological understanding wants to sell to the public, to the potential buyer, many more products than he really wants to buy. In order to do this, rather infantile impulses have to be awakened, such as sibling rivalry and neighbour envy, the need to have more and more sweets, the glamour of colors, and the need for more and more luxuries.
Even then, the very people we were told to go to for help with our mental health were not always helping to liberate us from the tentacleof the Public-Opinion Engineers.
The commercial psychologist teaches the seller how to avoid unpleasant associations in his advertising, how to stimulate, unobtrusively, sex associations, how to make everything look simple and happy and successful and secure! He teaches the shops how to boost the buyer's ego, how to flatter the customer.
Once the Public-Opinion Engineers make it inside our minds, we grow dangerously close to becoming the Automan. This is the most ideal mental state for an ordinary citizen in a society ruled by narcissists to exist in.
The marketing engineers have discovered that our public wants the suggestion of strength and virility in their product. A car must have more horse-power in order to balance feelings of inner weakness in the owner. A car must represent one's social status and reputation, because without such a flag man feels empty. Advertising agencies dream of "universitas advertensis," the world of glittering sham ideas, the glorification of "menus vult decipi," the intensification of snob appeal, the expression of vulgar conspicuousness, and all this in order to push more sales into the greedy mouths of buying babies. In our world of advertising, artificial needs are invented by sedulous sellers and buyers. Here lies the threat of building up a sham world that can have a dangerous influence on our world of ideas.
Public-Opinion Engineers: I AM the AUTOMAN by James’s Equation 5:53,I Am Robot And Proud, album: The Catch & Spring Summer Autumn Winter: AI Generated Images from Midjourney as Found on Genolve
A society increasingly populated by Automen and Autowomen is a hard and sharp society. Lots of people suffer in such a society, including the Automen but they are taught to blame their misfortunes on others and never to take responsibility for their own choices.
This situation emphasizes the neurotic greed of the public, the need to indulge in private fancies at the cost of an awareness of real values. The public becomes conditioned to meretricious values. Of course, a free public gradually finds its defences against slogans, but dishonesty and mistrust slip through the barriers of our consciousness and leave behind a gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction. After all, advertising symbolizes the art of making people dissatisfied with what they have. In the meantime it is evident man sustains a continual sneak attack on his better judgment.
Joost is right, the Modern Age is like a tsunami of Public-Opinion Engineers paid by Narcissists who are working hard to wear us down into an army of Automen and Autowomen carefully conditioned to power the economy that provides the luxurious lifestyles the people at the very top of our pyramid structured systems enjoy.
In our epoch of too many noises and many frustrations, many "free" minds have given up the struggle for decency and individuality. They surrender to the "Zeitgeist," often without being aware of it. Public opinion moulds our critical thoughts every day. Unknowingly, we may become opinionated robots. The slow coercion of hypocrisy, of traditions in our culture that have a levelling effect -- these things change us. We crave excitement, hair-raising stories, sensation. We search for situations that create superficial fear to cover up inner anxieties. We like to escape into the irrational because we dislike the challenge of self-study and self-thinking. Our leisure time is occupied increasingly by automatized activities in which we take no part: listening to piped-in words and viewing television screens. We hurry along with cars and go to bed with a sleeping pill. This pattern of living in turn may open the way for renewed sneak attacks on our mind. Our boredom may welcome any seductive suggestion.
The Rape of the Mind explores the Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. Published in 1956 and written by Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D., Instructor in Psychiatry, Columbia University Lecturer in Social Psychology, New School for Social Research, Former Chief, Psychological Department, Netherlands Forces.
How Things Have Progressed Since August 2023
The blog’s warnings look considerably less theoretical from where we sit in May 2026. Several things the blog was tracking as warning signs have accelerated:
The 2024 U.S. election cycle demonstrated public-opinion engineering at a scale and precision Meerloo couldn’t have imagined — AI-generated content, micro-targeted social media, and algorithmic amplification of emotionally charged messaging reached saturation levels. The “Automan” dynamic the blog described — citizens conditioned to consume rather than think — mapped directly onto the information environment of that election.
My more recent posts from 2025 and 2026 reflect this acceleration — titles like “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely: From Caligula to Trump,” “Stephen Miller: The Architect of Fear,” “Prediction 2026: Catastrophic Authoritarian Overreach,” and “Monuments Against Time: Nero, Hitler, Trump” suggest the series has moved from warning to documenting an unfolding crisis. Sapience2112
The Marvel universe continued its commercial decline — audience fatigue with formulaic, franchise-first storytelling validated the “watered-down archetypes” argument from a purely entertainment standpoint, while simultaneously the culture’s hunger for genuine mythic stories found other outlets (and in some cases, was exploited by very dark storytellers on the right who understood archetypal power better than the studios did).
Meerloo’s core insight — that the erosion of trust creates a population vulnerable to demagogues — played out with almost textbook precision. His warning that when people can no longer form intelligent judgments, they become more easily influenced by any would-be dictator whose apparent strength appeals to their confusion reads now less like analysis and more like a prediction that came true.
How Corporations, Politicians & Billionaires Profit Off of the Infantilization of Mankind
This is the first blog in a series discussing the Marvelization of Man’s Mind based on the book: The Rape of the Mind by Joost Meerloo
Marvelization of Man: Morbius
After watching Morbius, I felt flat and bloated like I had just downed a Family Sized Package of Cheetos too fast.
MORBIUS – Official Trailer (HD)
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Morbius’ origin story!
The movie is well acted, well executed, and has superb special effects… just as we have come to expect from a Marvelous Marvel Movie… or should I say, just as we have been conditioned to expect?
Perhaps that’s it, Marvel Movies are entirely predictable. In the past 20 some years, they have become perfectly formulated to meet popular tastes. Because of this, we know what to expect, when to expect it, and how to expect it.
Marvel Movies run on well worn tracks of success. Yes, a few have been busts, but on average, Marvel Movies make $715 million dollars per movie with at least half of this gross-income, which means it goes right into the pockets of Robert Iger, CEO, and the Disney-Marvel Cinematic Universe. This has been the case since 2009 when Disney brought Marvel Cinematic Universe from Ronald Perelman who formerly use to pocket the bucks.
Marvelization of Man: Let’s Begin with Dinsey
The Marvelous Marvel formula has evolved to include hooks and lures about how each newly rendered Marvel character retrieved from the Marvel vault and brought to life on screen will met up and team up with other recently revived Marvel characters for the next Marvelous Marvel movie.
Heck, soon the different Disney universes and their characters might begin meeting up with Marvel, or ever perhaps as, Marvel characters to fight off the bad guys.
Perhaps like this super cool new chic: Tinker Bell Die Hard Predator Ape?
Marvelization of Man: Don’t Mess With the Tinker Bell Die Hard Predator Ape! | These blended characters are all owned by Disney!
Hell YEAH… this might actually BE interesting!
Marvel Characters Are Archetypes
We adore Marvel characters because they are archetypes. They speak to things deep inside of all of us: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Stuff that is really, really hard to speak to each other about in our overly average, highly regimented, very repetitive work, work, and more work worlds.
Mostly we don’t talk to each other about this stuff. It is so much safer (and let’s face it, it is so much easier) to be superficial with each other.
That’s what the movies are made for! Right?!
Movies give us an emotional release and a little freedom from all that stuff pent up and building up inside of us. The stuff we don’t or can’t talk to each other about, at least not on the deepest levels where our wounds usually lay. These are deep interior layers that we can seldom reach without self-expression that can lead to self-realization, if we allow it.
This is what archetypes partly do for us. They help illuminate things inside of us that are vague, mysterious, troubling, or even exhilarating. But things that are hard to put our finger on because they are inside of us and we can’t see them with our eyes. We can only feel them or try not to feel them when they bother us too much.
Archetypes are mental models that give shape and perspective on the shadowy, nebulous, unsettling, fuzzy states and feelings that can overtake us. They do a lot more than this, but for the purposes of this blog I’ll stick to how archetypes provide man with mental models on how to handle and act to feelings rising inside of him and all around him in other people.
Ever since Marvel’s founding in 1939 by Martin Goodman, which was then known as Timely Comics, the characters have been giving shape to man’s collective shadowy feelings and showing us possibilities on how to channel and handle our dim, indistinct inner worlds in our shared outer world.
In 1951, Timely Comics became known as Atlas Comics. It is not until June 1961 that it transforms into the franchise we know it today as Marvel with the launch of The Fantastic Four.
Ever since its beginning, Marvel characters were created to meet a moment. They emerged from the fabric of that time and in the spaces of what was happening in the country or world at that moment. Their creators invented characters who could met the demands and uncertainty of the times in which they were created.
I am sure each creator imbued their characters with the super powers everyone needed at that moment to survive mental through the demands, threats, and catastrophes of the times. That is what archetypes do. They provide strong mental images combined with stories that imbue inspiration, hope, and courage into the hearts and minds of real people who need to meet real life challenges as they navigate the ups and downs of life.
CharacterDate Created Creator(s)
Sub-Mariner | 1939 (Build up to WII)| Bill Everett
Human Torch | 1939 (Build up toWWII) | Carl Burgos
Angel | 1939 (Build up to WWII) | Paul Gustavson
Masked Raider | 1939 (WWII & shifting economics) | Al Anders
Phantom Reporter | 1940 (WWII & shifting economics)| Robert O. Erisman, Sam Cooper
Black Widow | 1940 (WWII & shifting economics such as women working to build war machines and bombs) | George Kapitan, Harry Gahle
Vision | 1940 (Intensification of WWII)| Joe Simon, Jack Kirby
Captain America | 1940 (Intensification of WWII)| Joe Simon, Jack Kirby
Black Marvel | 1941 (Intensification of WWII) | Al Gabriele
Uranian Boy | 1950 (First atomic bomb drop 1945) | Stan Lee, Russ Heath
The Fantastic Four | 1961 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!) | Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
The Hulk | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!)| Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Red She Hulk | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!) | Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Thor | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Jack!)| Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Spider-Man | 1962 (It's the 60s and its Stan and Steve this time)| Stan Lee, Steve Ditko
Iron Man | 1963 (Cuban missile crisis 1962)| Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Don Heck
Doctor Strange | 1963 (Cuban missile crisis 1962) | Stan Lee, Steve Ditko
Black Panther | 1966 (Civil Rights Act sign 1965) | Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
-- See full timeline at Wiki
I think you get the idea.
So, What’s Wrong With A Little Marvel Time?!
There is nothing wrong with a little Marvel time.
The issue is much more subtle and pervasive than that. It is not so much that we go to the movies to watch great, big, spectacular dramas that take our minds off our worries or give us a joyful jolt of non-reality.
The issue is rather what we are not seeing when we go to the movies, especially the really BIG blockbuster ones that are highly formulated and super monetized to capture our time and attention.
These blockbuster cash cows act like somewhat steamrollers crushing the competition and funneling more and more money into the pockets of billionaires who own mega conglomerates that control the content and production of multiple franchises and merchandise.
And guess what the mega billionaires want you to do?
They want you to go to see more of their movies and buy more of their merchandise so they make more money.
And we do exactly that… and each time we do, they grow even bigger!
If you’re wondering why Marvel movies all look alike, it’s because of us. It is the way we are choosing to consume them.
I recently learned more about this from Terry Gross’ interview with Lucas Shaw, who is in charge of Media and Entertainment at Bloomberg and writes the Screentime newsletter. He’s the one who made me aware of how much content Disney owns!
But there are a lot of other big Media-Entertainment Titans operating out there too and all of them want to get inside our heads and tickle away some our money that we make working highly automated jobs that require at least 8 hours of our days, 5 days a week.
Sadly, despite popular opinions, most of us do not work in our Dream Jobs! Indeed, most of us must go through the motions 8 hours days doing very boring, tedious, monotonous work. So who wouldn’t want to break free and escape into a Marvelous Marvel movie when it comes out?
But that might be exactly what the super rich want us to feel and react. They can make money from lots of bored people who need to escape from their dreary, mind-numbing, mechanical lives with a Fantastic New Movie!
And, hey wait, you can also escape and feel just like the movie characters feel by buying this splashy new watch or this brand new fancy car or this mouthwatering, very pricey dress. And of course you need the latest technology to go along with all this! You want to look modern don’t you?
All these fancy, enjoyable costly things are there to help you escape from your boredom and ease your burden of living highly repetitive, unvarying, humdrum modern lives.
Lucas Shaw tells Terry Gross how the movie-TV-streaming business is becoming one super long ad promoting consumerism, capitalism, and merchandising by the new Titans of Industry.
SHAW: You know, Barry Diller, I feel like, has been declaring the death of Hollywood for a long time now, so I do take what he says with a little grain of salt. But he's right that the growth of Amazon and Apple, which I would say are now two of the six major studios in town - you know, they've replaced some of the other ones that have been consolidated in the deals that we've talked about - entertainment is not their primary business. And it speaks to maybe the lesser value of traditional film and television in broader culture, where it - so does the fact that YouTube is now bigger than any TV network, that if you - that TikTok is as popular as any streaming service.
You know, film and TV doesn't have the same stranglehold on culture and on youth that it used to. And it's - if I were running one of these traditional media and entertainment companies - running Warner Bros. Discovery, running Disney - it would certainly scare me that two of our biggest competitors don't care about making money from film and TV in the same way because it means that the stakes are lower. The approach is going to be different. And entertainment is just a means of selling something else - in Amazon's case, you know, diapers or books or whatever it is; in Apple's case, phones and other devices. -- FreshAir, July 20, 2023
So my take away from this conversation is that the purpose of movies, TV shows, and streaming platforms are increasingly veering towards a focus on how to keep viewing audiences glued to a particular station-conglomerate, so it can make more money–be that ads, subscriptions, or the super cool merchandise they make, create, and sell.
Marvelization of Man: The Hollowing Out Effect of Money
This hyper-focus on making more money is a major force in hollowing out many Marvel characters. You can read about the reasons why 16 actors are talking about quitting or leaving the Marvel Cinematic Universe here.
The Marvel universe seems to be becoming more one-dimensional and cartoonish as the focus on making another blockbuster and capturing the vast majority of the market take precedence over story. This focus on money has a watering down effect on the characters, making them feel less real, less vibrant, and less inspiring.
They are losing their numinosity, which is what archetypes hold for us. Numinous content gives our lives meaning, content, and purpose. Without numinosity in our lives, we feel drab, automatic, and mechanical.
But maybe the mechanization of man is one of the very objectives these new Titans of Industry seek to create inside of us.
If we are continually feeling unimportant, unremarkable, and unnecessary in keeping the clogs of industry running in the world, then we need to compensate for our super small roles in society.
How else can we wake up each morning and go out to do our boring, repetitive jobs?
So a good Marvel Movie is a great antidote to not feeling like a machine!
But, don’t get too caught up in the marvelousness of a Marvel movie! That would be going too far in our highly mechanized modern world.
If you do happen to believe Marvel characters are real and you look up to them and draw hope and courage from then (like any good archetype should do), then you will get laughed at because we are not really suppose to identify with them anymore. They are simply entertainment.
We watch them, then we get up the next day and go back to work to make some money so we can go watch the next amazing Marvel movie coming out soon because there was that little teaser at the end!
Another troubling result of the Marvelizationof Man is that Marvel movies are impacting how other movies are made or even more importantly, NOT BEING MADE.
With great big, super blockbusters with BIG special effects (like Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar), more and more people only go to theaters to see these on the silver screen. They don’t show up for the “other movies” being made and trying to survive in an increasingly one-dimensional entertainment universe.
Basically, every studio wants a piece of the action in this “shared universe” business.
But it’s hard to argue that any of them have been as successful as Marvel has.
Kevin Feige’s ambitious plan (which resulted in him being named President of Marvel Studios and reporting directly to Disney CEO Bob Iger) has fundamentally changed the way film studios approach properties. Certainly, a creative idea which allows for iteration upon iteration, sequel after sequel after spinoff after prequel, to be produced is appealing to every studio executive. -- The Marvelization of Movies | / FILM TALKIES
This effect is drying up the field of creativity for the creation, production, and life of other types of movies that deal with difficult but really important stuff such as Women Talking:
The women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling their reality with their faith. Though the backstory, we see a community of women come together to figure out how they might move forward together to build a better world for themselves and their children. Stay and fight or leave. They will not do nothing.— Official synopsis
WOMEN TALKING | Official Trailer
Or like the Fabelmans:
Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth.
It is lpLoosely based on Spielberg's childhood growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, from age seven to eighteen, a young man named Sammy Fabelman discovers a shattering family secret, and explores how the power of movies help us see the truth about each other and ourselves. —Toronto International Film Festival
He also encounters antisemitism and bullying, which is a very important issue that deserves far more airtime in our current culture and polictical climate.
The Fabelmans | Official Trailer [HD]
Or going back even further to the time of radio like Suspense: Report From A Dead Planet
Report From a Dead Planet – Suspense | A spaceship lands on a beautiful world and finds that all the inhabitants have vanished.
Another thing that struck me while watching Morbius is that really talented actors are playing pretty superficial, very simplified characters.
Matt Smith for example is the villain in Morbius. He is great as the villain, but his performance leaves me feeling empty. He is a really talented actor! Why don’t I feel more from his performance in Morbius?
Because I’m not supposed to?!
His super villain in Morbius is pretty vanilla compared to his roles in Season 1 and 2 of The Crown, The Last Night in Soho, and my all time favorite The Doctor of Doctor Who.
Also, Jared Leto who plays Morbius struck me as a super talented actor as well. I haven’t seen him before. He does a great job playing Morbius. In fact, he imbue more life into Morbius than the role allows.
Tarantino previously said that he would not want to direct a movie for Marvel Studios for the simple reason he is “not a hired hand.’ As someone planning to direct just ten movies in his career, and with only one of those to make up the number, it is probably not surprising that the Pulp Fiction helmer would want to concentrate on his own ideas. When it comes to the MCU, the director says that the franchise does not contain any “movie stars” as the characters are all people want to see. He said:
“Part of the Marvel-ization of Hollywood is… you have all these actors who have become famous playing these characters, but they’re not movie stars. Right? Captain America is the star. Or Thor is the star. I mean, I’m not the first person to say that. I think that’s been said a zillion times, you know, but it’s like, you know, it’s these franchise characters that become a star.” -- Quentin Tarantino Says Marvel Actors Are 'Not Movie Stars'
BY
ANTHONY LUND
PUBLISHED NOV 22, 2022
Quentin Tarantino has been vocal about his feelings regarding the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it looks like he isn't quite done yet.
So What?
I will still watch Marvel movies.
But I will seek out and watch more different movies that leave an impression in my psyche and make me think about the world in ways I might not have before.
I will continue to gravitate to movies where BIG ideas are explored rather than BIG action but increasingly hallow characters dance across the screen.
I want something that satisfies my imagination and feeds my psyche, because feeling alive and not like small cog in a BIG machine is important to me, and only I can change my perspective and the way I feel about things.
Stories and movies feed my imagination so I can feed and grow my soul.
Stay tuned for this series because I am going to go deeper into the effects and impacts of living in our super consumerism society on man’s mind.
For now, maybe the Oppenheimer-Barbie movies will provide a reprieve from the Marvelization of Man’s Mind.
Marvelization of Man: Introducing Atomic Barbie | The New Super Hero We Didn’t Know We Need!
Postscript From 2026: The Manufactured Child Mind
When I first wrote Marvelization of Man in 2023, I was trying to describe something larger than comic book films, celebrity culture, or billion-dollar entertainment franchises. I was describing a psychological condition spreading across modern civilization — the deliberate infantilization of humanity.
Three years later, the condition has deepened.
Politics has become spectacle. Billionaires perform as saviors. Corporations market identity itself back to consumers in prepackaged emotional bundles. Citizens increasingly respond not as grounded adults capable of critical thought, sacrifice, or long-term vision, but as emotionally conditioned audiences trained to crave stimulation, outrage, tribal belonging, and simplistic heroes.
This was precisely the danger warned about by Joost Meerloo in The Rape of the Mind.
Meerloo understood that modern authoritarian systems do not merely conquer territory. They conquer attention, imagination, and inner psychological stability. They erode independent thought not always through brute violence, but through repetition, emotional exhaustion, mass distraction, fear conditioning, and dependency.
The modern age has industrialized these mechanisms.
Algorithms now perform what propagandists once did manually.
Advertising colonizes identity from childhood onward.
Politics functions increasingly like entertainment wrestling, where billionaires, influencers, and strongmen become larger-than-life archetypal projections rather than accountable public servants.
And corporations profit enormously from keeping populations psychologically suspended in adolescence.
Because children are easier to manipulate than adults.
Children seek rescuers.
Children seek simple villains.
Children seek constant stimulation.
Children fear complexity.
Children surrender responsibility for comfort.
The “Marvelization” of culture is not fundamentally about superheroes. It is about replacing mature civic consciousness with endless emotional consumption.
The result is a civilization increasingly unable to distinguish mythology from marketing, symbolism from substance, or performance from truth.
This is why ruthless rulers thrive in such an environment.
A society trained to consume fantasy eventually elects fantasy.
A population conditioned to worship spectacle eventually mistakes spectacle for leadership.
And billionaires, corporations, and political operatives understand this far better than most citizens do.
But mythology itself is not the enemy.
Archetypes are not the enemy.
Storytelling is not the enemy.
In fact, authentic mythic storytelling may be one of the few remaining tools capable of helping humanity awaken from manufactured illusion.
The question is whether stories deepen consciousness… or hollow it out for profit.
Marvelization of Man: Archetypal Animations
I made all images with Genolve using AI generated images, specifically Midjourney, this time. So I am just listing the songs used in the above animations.
Feature Archetypal Animation: Nowhere but Up | [3] Break the Chain 4:53
WYR GEMI – Predator | Music for Tinker Bell Die Hard Predator Ape!
Herod exists in the strange territory between history and myth — precisely where archetypes become psychologically powerful. Whether encountered through scripture, history, or storytelling, Herod represents the paranoid ruler obsessed with domination, legacy, and self-preservation at all costs.
That archetype never disappeared.
It simply modernized.
Strongmen throughout history recycle the same psychological patterns: grandiosity, persecution narratives, loyalty demands, spectacle, fear, and the creation of enemies to maintain power. The point of revisiting figures like Herod is not merely historical comparison. It is bringing ancient archetypal patterns into conscious awareness before societies unconsciously repeat them.
Storytelling becomes a mirror.
And conscious archetypal awareness breaks manipulation.
This archetypal animation explores something deeper than politics alone: the eternal psychological battlefield within civilization itself.
The arena is ancient because human beings have always struggled with fear, domination, tribalism, greed, ego, and collective illusion. Yet it is modern because today these forces are amplified by algorithms, billion-dollar media systems, and industrial-scale psychological engineering.
Modern spectacle culture often reduces myth into shallow entertainment products optimized for consumption.
Archetypal storytelling attempts the opposite.
It seeks to reconnect people to deeper symbolic patterns capable of awakening reflection, emotional maturity, and self-awareness rather than passive consumption.
Indra’s Net is an ancient metaphor for radical interconnectedness — a universe where every jewel reflects every other jewel infinitely.
This stands in direct opposition to the hyper-individualized consumer conditioning of modern capitalism, which trains people to see themselves as isolated competitors, branded identities, or self-contained markets.
The deeper psychological crisis of the modern age is disconnection:
disconnection from nature,
disconnection from community,
disconnection from meaning,
disconnection from inner life,
and ultimately disconnection from one another.
The infantilized consumer self is easier to manipulate precisely because it experiences itself as alone, afraid, and perpetually incomplete.
Indra’s Net symbolizes something older and wiser: that consciousness itself is relational.
That what happens to one affects all.
That no billionaire, corporation, nation, or individual truly stands separate from the larger web of humanity.
And perhaps that realization is one of the few antidotes left against the psychological fragmentation described by Meerloo decades ago.
Final Note:
The future may depend on whether humanity continues surrendering its imagination to corporations and strongmen… or reclaims storytelling, archetype, and myth as tools for consciousness rather than control.
I have been contemplating the shape of civilizations at different points in time in the 5,000 years since humans, spontaneously (everywhere, all at once) and voluntarily, began to organized themselves into civilizations.
The oldest civilization we know to arise is Sumer, but there is intriguing clues around the world that humans were moving in this direction for a long time such as Göbekli Tepe, which was discovered in the mid-1990s in Turkey. This is an ancient temple predating the emergence of Summer by 7,000 years.
Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological wonder,” says Prof. Gopher. “Built by Neolithic communities 11,500 to 11,000 years ago, it features enormous, round stone structures and monumental stone pillars up to 5.5 meters high. Since there is no evidence of farming or animal domestication at the time, the site is believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers. However, its architectural complexity is highly unusual for them.”
Discovered by German archaeologist Dr. Klaus Schmidt in 1994, Göbekli Tepe has since been the subject of hot archaeological debate. But while these, and other early Neolithic remains, have been intensively studied, the issue of architectural planning during these periods and its cultural ramifications have not. -- Posted on May 20, 2020 by Karin Kloosterman in Archeology
How civilizations self-organize and hold themselves together has become an obsession with me as I finish the first book in my series called Sapience. Right now I am putting the final touches on a section where a Grandmother is telling her Granddaughter how the world ended up they way it does in my not so distant future on Earth–a planet forever changed by man’s inability to course correct and change direction. A collective choice that will led humanity and all life on Earth over the Climate Cliff!
As I searched for the model of mind that held the shape of Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Chinese civilizations, I stumbled upon this documentary that absolutely fascinated me. It enchanted me mostly because ever since I started keeping journals for the story I am writing, I have been drawing the shapes depicted in Drunvalo’s documentary of the Flower of Life. I had no idea what I was drawing, but I knew it was important for the story and just keep drawing the shapes that were shaping my story.
Drunvalo Melchizedek Flower Of Life Full Documentary Sacred Geometry Meaning
Sun & Moon Beings: Do Your OWN Thinking…
…And Stay Opened Minded as You Do YOUR OWN Research on Nifty Ideas that Captivate Your Attention! Flexibility of Mind is especially important when you are attracted to highly seductive, fascinating, enchanting, alluring, and interesting ideas! Throughout human history of having a mind to think up ideas, these sort of ideas have always been the Most Dangerous kind of Ideas!!!
I have never taken anyone or anything presented to me at face value. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt when I first met them and trust what they are telling me, but when I find out they are using their words to manipulate, deceive, or control me–WATCH OUT!
And, I will find out because I tend to feel deception and manipulations in others and I have always been curious about the world. When I encounter something new on my own or presented to me by someone else, I seem to have more questions and want to find out the archaeology of the idea or beliefs being presented.
Perhaps I am old fashion, but I want to learn more about a NEW Idea (especially a highly attractive one) before I incorporate them into my belief system.
So this is what I was doing about Drunvalo’s documentary about the Flower of Life when I stumbled upon Jordan Pearce who I believe created or helped to create this documentary.
Sun and Moon Beings
In looking into who Jordan Pearce is, I encountered a shock, which is the spark for this blog.
The Flower of Life documentary is full of images that also shocked me as I have been drawing many of these shapes and images in my notebook ever since I started keeping notes on my story in 2013. The first shape I started drawing is infinity.
Sun & Moon Beings: Sapience Notebook | 2013-2014
It would evolve dramatically leading to these shapes:
Sun & Moon Beings: The Divine Dodo Mini Series
After watching the full documentary and making my own doodling and drawings of it, I began to envision a circle with yellow, orange, and red flames on one side and blue and white and purple flames on the other side in my mind.
I was considering how to draw it when I came across one of Jordan Pearce’s blogs and there in his blog was the image I was seeing in my mind!
Recognizing this was the image I was seeing in my head, I drew by my own hand adding some elements that made it feel more as I saw it in my head. I had not seen the faces in my image, nor did I connect it with the sun and moon, but I felt this was right. This was what my knowing was trying to tell me.
Sun & Moon Beings: My drawing of the drawing above
And so this is what gave me the idea for the feature animated archetypal animation for this blog, which I have titled: Sun & Moon Beings. And they are living beings. This is energy that courses through every living being on earth. It is part of the Life Force that human beings began to become conscious of and represent through art, architecture, and language for thousands of years.
It is this energy that creates the foundation of every civilization that has existed or will exist on Earth. It is how we interpret this energy that will determine our fate as a species on Earth. It is the energetic form of Yin and Yang experienced by every living being on Earth that has ever lived on Earth as night and day.
Sun & Moon Beings: Cloak of Doubt
Given the synchronicity of this image, I knew Jordan Pearce’s blog was important for something I needed to understand or pay attention to. It felt linked to the time when I pulled the Cloak of Doubt over my head and plunged into an inner abyss from which I almost did not come back.
Sun & Moon Beings: Cloak of Doubt | Letting Others Trick You into Not Believing in Yourself
I talked about the perils of the Cloak of Doubt in my previous blog where I pick apart the rantings of a person I had counted on as a friend during this time. I admired his way of thinking and ability to string words together to create compelling and alluring ideas… but I would come to realize how hollow, empty, and full of hubris his words were during my time of deafening sorrow, despair, and deep grief.
I would come to understand that he and all the FAKE people I had met on FAKEBOOK at a time of in my life when everything was not going my way; a time when my husband would lose his job, I would lose two jobs back to back, I would come to understand the brutality reality of my mother-in-law’s narcissism and brother-in-law’s psychopathy (terrible human mental afflictions that have plagued humanity ever since humans could think and these afflictions were ripping my family apart during this horrible time), and I would lose my father, which sent me into the abyss.
Functional Hierarchies
Nearly, five years this personal disaster and mass abandonment of FAKE friends on Facebook and in real life, I have slowly been reckoning with this time in my life. Part of this reckoning is to make an accounting of the people in my life then who made me doubt myself as I spiraled into probably the darkest time of my life.
As I emerge on the other side of this dark period, I can see how I let these people dupe me and allowed them to let me doubt myself. I can see how I did this by admiring them but not doing my due diligence to dig deeper into the hollow ideas they were touting. They were shiny, happy ideas that I guess I needed at that time because I thought they might keep me afloat as everything around me disintegrated and turned into the Sea of Sorrow where I was cast adrift on a rickety raft.
I was drawing this sea like crazy at this time and sharing them in post such as this one:
These “friends” would nod their heads like bobble dolls, but they really didn’t care. And the further I spun into despair, the more distant and inhuman they grew. This is because, I realize now, I was just easy food for them.
I was a vulnerable person attracted to their ideas or art or weird philosophies and I did not have the inner power to doubt them, instead I doubted myself… and way too many of them liked this! In fact, they actively encouraged me to doubt myself because it keep me as a captive audience and loyal follower.
I cut them off as I spun deeper into despair. Something inside me kicked into survival mode. And dad’s death dramatically showed me how FAKE and inhospitable these people really were. It was very painful, but I let them go and now I realize they were channelling dangerous and dying ideas full of hubris and arrogance that only an ignorant human being can achieve.
They are ignorant because they cling to ideas they have spent way too much time thinking about. They are attached to these ideas as if they were part of their body, perhaps replacing their heart. They are so attached to their ideas they cannot let go of them no matter how catastrophic the final destination of these ideas might turn out to be.
Strangely, as the publication date of this blog dawns near, the world is completely absorbed in the hunt for 5 explores onboard the Titan–a tiny, experimental submarine that was heading down to see the Titanic.
We all found out yesterday that the 5 did not survive. The experimental sub touted to be a game changer in deep sea exploration imploded during its descent to the Titanic.
These are just a few of the pictures flooding news outlets around the world ever since the Titian went missing on Sunday in its dive to see the Titanic. Our collective imagination is captivated because this tragedy eerily parallels the very same disaster that led to sinking of the unsinkable Titanic on April 14, 1912.
LEAKED Titan Sub Transcript Shows Crew In Battle For Lives | Jeff Ostroff reviews the leaked Titan Sub Transcript which the internet is debating the authenticity of, to see if this scenario is real, and whether the crew spent 20 minutes fighting for their lives with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush at the helm, only to have the OceanGate Titan submarine implode before it could resurface.
Crushed, Burned or Toothpaste? Surgeon Explains What Happened To Crew OceanGate TITAN Sub Implosion | Dr. Chris Raynor | Not Your Everyday Ortho | In this explainer video, orthopedic surgeon reacts to the Titan submarine disaster and theorizes about what happens to the people onboard when their submersible catastrophically imploded. #titan#submersible#implosion
James Cameron Reflections the Titanic & the Titan
I feel “Titanic” director James Cameron summarizes what we have learned about the fate of the 5 explores on the Titan brilliantly in an interview with Anderson Cooper yesterday when the world found out the tiny sub imploded 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent sending parts of it debris field resting 1600 feet from Titanic’s famous bow.
Cameron said:
“I think there’s a great, almost surreal irony here, which is Titanic sank because the captain took it full steam into an ice field at night, on a moonless night with very poor visibility after he had been repeatedly warned,” Cameron told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Thursday.
He added that while he thinks it’s important to remember that history, “here’s a case starkly, today, where the collective, we didn’t remember the lesson of Titanic — these guys at OceanGate didn’t.”
“I just think it’s heartbreaking that it was so preventable.”
James Cameron made his own submarine to complete a record-breaking solo dive to 35,787 feet to the deepest point on Earth. His 12-ton vessel is known as the Deepsea Challenger, so he knows a thing or two about submersibles and how to survive the inhospitable, alien space of the deep, deep, black sea.
Sun & Moon Beings: Natural History Museum
He told Anderson the composite material used to build Titan was simply the wrong material to use for deep sea diving vessels, everyone knew it and the deep sea diving community was really concerned about the decision to use it to make Titan. However, the idea was highly attractive and it worked for a while, but if you have to build in sensors to tell you that your hull is beginning to crack, well, that is problem because you can’t really do anything about it when you are almost 2 miles below the sea.
Cameroon said that Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, was brilliant, brave, and a true explorer, but he got caught by the same hubris that sunk the Titanic down 111 years ago.
Cameroon says using the carbon fiber cylindrical hull was fundamentally wrong. In another interview reported on by NPR, Cameroon says:
"I think it was unconscionable that this group did not go through that rigorous process," he told CNN.
He told the BBC he believed they hadn't done so because "they knew they wouldn't pass."
OceanGate said in a 2019 blog post that the certification process only assessed the vessels themselves — not operational safety, which it took seriously. It also said regulation was preventing innovation, echoing comments Rush told Smithsonian Magazine that same year.
Cameron said he personally never believed in the sort of carbon fiber cylindrical hull that the company used, telling Reuters it was a "horrible idea" that "just sounded bad on its face."
Pressure hulls should be made out of contiguous material like steel, titanium, ceramic or acrylic, he explained, in order to do modeling and finite element analysis to "understand the number of cycles that it can take." That's not the case with a composite material, like carbon fiber, made of two different materials blended together.
"And so we all knew that the danger was delamination and progressive failure over time with microscopic water ingress and ... what they call cycling fatigue," he added. "And we knew if the sub passed its pressure test it wasn't gonna fail on its first dive ... but it's going to fail over time, which is insidious. You don't get that with steel or titanium."
-- NPR Interview
This trait for pomposity is an innate quality of being a conscious living being. One could say it is the price of being conscious.
If a person chooses not to be self-aware, he or she cuts off an important inner guidance system. If a person does not recognize and counteract their personal form of pomposity with modesty and humility, they will veer off course heading for the deepest, darkest, most dangerous inner waters, which they happily ignore in empty proclamations of how great they are or how bold and innovative their flimsy IDEAS are.
This tendency to believe oneself to be the best, most important person in the world will balloon inside the fragile ego expressing itself in endless iterations of self-importance, magniloquence, grandiosity, vanity, self-conceit, and dare I say Narcissism. If you allow these ideas free range, they will replicate inside your mind, making you more and more lopsided, more insane, more dangerous and more destructive every day. If you leave your lopsided ideas unopposed, and only YOU can oppose them and course correct, your BAD ideas will turn you into a machine, this is the best case scenario! Most people keep sinking and descend to the depths of MONSTER, this is basically a Self-Implosion Model of being a conscious living being in the world.
Pomposity, vanity, narcissism are very contagious mental viruses–let’s call them the HubrisViruses. They and other variants infect virtually the entire Modern World… this being the Modern Mindset based purely on thinking. Most people have no idea they are infected and go about their daily lives feeding their increasingly lopsided ideas that grow more and more extreme and polarized and infecting others with their BAD IDEAS.
This is what my FAKE friend did to me as I entered a very dangerous time of personal crisis. And this is what men like Putin are doing to the entire world. Putin used his HubrisVirus to manipulate and gain the reigns of power in Russia. Now, this shitty, insane man and his shitty, insane supporters are putting the entire world in danger due to his brutal invasion of Ukraine that enters its month 17… and if WE (THE FREE WORLD) don’t STOP his Shitty Version of Russia form fulfilling at its predetermined destination, which is HELL, TOGETHER… it is going to get worse and worse and worse.
Putin and his insanity ducks will never STOP. They will deploy nuclear weapons or conduct nuclear sabotage at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
From February 2023 Blog Marking One Year Since Crazy Russian Czar Putin Invaded Ukraine
No one will be safe!
Alan Watts On Inner Voyages
Dangerous hubris and intellectual arrogance will kill our world, if not by nuclear war, then by climate disasters, other wars, or the AI apocalypse.
This is a time when humanity not only needs bold and courageous explorers of the physical world, but we also need them for the invisible world too. This is the world inside each and every human being’s mind.
Alan Watts talks beautifully about why we need to pay attention to our inner spaces NOW more than ever before in this video. He says near the end of this lecture that Inner Dives can be just as dangerous as making a deep sea decent or taking an excursion outside the protective atmosphere of Earth,
Alan Watts: Drugs: Turning the Head or Turning On – Being in the Way Ep. 7 – Hosted by Mark Watts
Can you get mysticism in a bottle? Alan Watts explores the drug question, in this psychedelically infused episode of Being in the Way. This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit https://Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts. Mysticism in a Bottle // The Smell of Burnt Almonds (0:00) Psychedelics, Mystical Experiences, & Western Culture (28:18) Psychedelics as Instruments // Set & Setting (45:35) Morality & Legislation // Policing, Preaching, & Hypocrisy (49:25) “Lo and behold, I had what I simply could not deny being an experience of cosmic consciousness, the sense of complete fundamental total unity forever-and-ever with the whole universe. And not only that, but that what this thing was fundamentally—despite every thing and every kind of appearance in ordinary life to the contrary—that the energy behind the world was ecstatic bliss and love.” – Alan Watts
Highly Sensitive People, Empathy, and Arrogance
But I digress! Let’s get back to Jordan Pearce and why I found his blog so helpful.
It is probably not so much that I was dealing with HSP or transcended individuals during my dangerous descent into myself, but I was dealing with individuals who were weaving highly attractive webs made out of hollow and dying ideas because they were too caught up in their own hubris.
When a person becomes so attached to their own ideas, they become blind to the needs of others and fail to see the humanity in the people who they preach to night and day. It turns out such people need us (the vulnerable ones going through a hard time) than we need them. That is because they have hollowed themselves out inside and must consume other people’s time and attention to feel alive. This is a dangerous type of human being because they can disguise themselves in all sorts of attractive personas.
This is what I fell into… cockeyed people touting crooked and corrupted ideas. But they would never admit it. Rather, they would blame others for their errors in thought… thinking was becoming increasingly insane and inhumane.
“If an empath allows the HSP’s fear of lower vibrations to be internalized within, we agree to the HSP’s story (lower vibrations = I’m unsafe). This is a profoundly damaging belief for an empath to have, as it causes deep internal conflict about the very essence of what we are. By nature, we cannot reject our emotional experience without making ourselves sick or blocking Life Force.”
After reading Jordan Pearce’s blog above, I made the following comment.
This is so helpful!! I had to look up what HSP is…"A highly sensitive person (HSP) is someone who has an increased sensitivity to stimulation and information…" I had no idea such a person existed! WOW! I have just finished watching all of Drunvalo Melchizedek Flower Of Life Full Documentary Sacred Geometry Meaning, which has you mentioned in the transcript. So I looked you up, wanting to find out just who is Jordan Pearce?
I would not have been ready to view or understand this documentary when it was first posted in 2014. At that time, I was getting lost, very lost. I was beginning a descent... a REALLY, REALLY deep descent…one from which I almost did not return.
I took notes all the way through this documentary because I have been drawing the egg of life, the seed of life, the tree of life, the flower ever since about 2015 as my descent increased speed. I had NO IDEA what I was drawing… and no one I knew did either.
Then, in 2016, the dive began… and I REALLY started drawing this stuff… and after reading this; I think I willingly aligned myself with a lot of Righteous HSP while I am pretty I am an Empath… and when my fall came… boy did they make me feel like shit and they abandoned me to my doom. It felt horrible because while I aligned with their way of thinking, I was there friend, but when I had to access my inner warrior and get swallowed by my inner dragon… they made me doubt myself more than ever. Doubt is the Dark Force of Destruction… this I know for sure now.
I was meant to find this blog because the image you have above the the sun and moon women I was seeing in my head after finishing the documentary. I was trying to figure out how I could draw this when I looked you up and found this blog. That is what I was seeing! I never knew about you… I have never been to your site before… but I was seeing this image and I think was led here to learn something about what I passed through because I have so much anger and rage about what happened and how I was abandoned… however, I also I drew the Cloak of Doubt over my own head. I aligned myself with these people so I would stand absolutely alone when the time came… and all along I knew I needed to make this passage utterly alone and it was dangerous and some how I survived.
Thank you for your work!
What I realized in his blog, is that people are going to want to shame and blame you for things they cannot reckoned with inside themselves. You do not need to be their punching bag, victim, or target for their bad ideas.
Walk away, unless… you need to done the Cloak of Doubt to begin your deep dive. These are dangerous journeys. Not everyone makes it back… but there treasures buried deep inside every individual alive on this planet right now.
Flower of Life
Another synchronicity experienced today occurred during a trip to the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA. This is a place that once made weapons of mass destruction but now provides spaces for artists to create, collaborate, and sell their work.
I have never been inside the Torpedo Factory! It took our daughter visiting to get us there today. And because I watched this documentary, I recognized the Tree of Life and Flower of Life. The artist is Sermin Ciddi, a renowned Turkish artist skilled in the modern miniature painting of the highly specialized arts of the Ottoman and Turkish culture.
Artists, musicians, writers are our deep divers of Self and Other. We need the arts more than ever in our fast pace, consumer-based, status obsessed, overly achieving, overly hectic and complicated Modern World.
We need to understand symbols and symbology more than any time every before in human history because if we don’t… we are going to implode or explode from our over exuberant and arrogant ways of being in the world… ways that depend on putting other people down so you can be up (Functional Hierarchies)… ways that ignore the facts like icebergs in the sea: Never Mind That the Titanic’s Captain Shouts! Full Steam Ahead! or the will of the people: King Trump!
Sun & Moon Beings: Note the words painted into this picture: “I want to make the sun and moon rise and set!”
So here we are full circle back to the Sun and Moon Beings!
Sun & Moon Beings: Feature Archetypal Animation Images
Sun and moon combo #mandala art#Moon Sun Conjunction# Moon has a friendly relationship with Sun but their energies are vastly different. One is hot and fiery while the other is calm and compassionate.#When their energies combine in trine or 10th house or in their own signs (Cancer, Leo and Aries), their effect is mostly positive#RS arts
Recently, I found out that I really hate the word hierarchy. I came to this conclusion after arguing with an old, ex-Facebook friend about “functional hierarchy“.
I fundamentally don’t believe any human hierarchy can withstand the corruption of thought. It is thinking too much that has gotten the world into the predicaments it is in, thinking is not the God it once was, and it is not going to get us out of our messes.
We are like 10 billion baby birds clustered in nests of endless thought and thinking, and we are terrified to fly. This will make sense if you keep reading! But before dropping into the underworld, you better watch this Mother video!!!
Meghan Trainor — Mother (Official Music Video) — How to Stop Mansplaining | Thank You EJ!!! This is so Awesome!!!
This whole convoluted conversation happened because of a very simple question I asked about a diagram this particular man made about Transformational Change.
In the graphic he posted, I noticed there is no pathway for what to do if people don’t agree on the type of Transformational Change needed or on how to implement it.
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies:
So, I made the following comment:
On the outer circle of Discuss & Agree... what happens when you Discuss & Disagree or even further have Conflict?
Without this other very real possibility included in a realistic way, this is a closed-circle of "Liked-minded" thinkers who will grow smaller and smaller in their shared beliefs and ideas of Transformation, which they may conclude: "Needs to Be Imposed on Everyone Else for the Good of the World."
So much trauma and cycles of destruction, reprisals, vendettas have emerged out of Closed-Systems of Thinking ending in "Do Gooder" agendas.
What do you think?
Well, maybe I was alittle too provocative and Alan Wattsy in my comment when I ask about Do-Gooder agendas. He probably has no idea what I mean. But, as you will see, he assumes he knows what I mean… but he has no clue.
What I am referring to is explained simply in this video:
Alan Watts – The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions
His response to my comment is as follows:
true. Which is why this model aims to 'transcend to THEN include'... the ethical commitment to acton behalf of the whole.
Can you show me a model where informed democracy is addressing Overshoot? No... there is, unfortunately, a functional hierarchy which needs to honour those who CAN see more, sense more, grok more, on behalf of the whole system/social field. This is only part of the process
If interested you might find more here (it's a link to his website...)
GULP! Now, I have a whole bunch more questions!
Really, he has made a mental model thatCAN identify people who have transcended and these people get admitted into some governing body who will make decisions and act on behalf of the whole?
Does this mean, the whole world?
Does it mean all the misfortunate survivors of the coming catastrophe that is going to destroy most of mankind …pick your catastrophe:climate change, nuclear war, AIs take over the world; they do this because they were given instructions by a Do-Gooder programmer desperately trying tomake the world safe for all life, so the AIs decide that humans have to go to make the world safe for more lifeforms.
You think I am exaggerating?! Then, you better listen to the Godfather of A.I.s as we know them today. He cracked the code for how the human mind works and implemented his understandings to machine learning. And did you know machines hallucinate? Well, the intelligent ones do! I think this is utterly fascinating!
I also know that this guy (and many others in his circle of friends on Facebook) fervently believe the world is going to collapse, and it is going to be God awful, so we better have a plan.
Knowing this, and assuming I survive the collapse, what if I don’t like this transcended group of people who are going to jump into action with their plan to save us and ensure only actions that benefit the good of us all are implemented?
And Grok?!! Really, is this like Mork (where is Mindy?). Or is Grok more like super Geeky?
Whatever it is, I don’t think I want anyone grokking for me.
I should have given up the ghost at this point, but I was stupid and engaged further saying:
Ah yes, functional hierarchy like what we see in the Good’Old USA or Russia sure is showing the world how much more they see than the rest of us can see on how to make the world Great again!
I say this tongue and cheek but without allowing for conflict even on the highest levels of hierarchy, I just don’t see how the human race is going to be doing much transforming any time soon, except maybe some fizzy bubbles on the sides of spaceship Earth
By the way, I could have also brought up China’s ambitions, North Korea’s ambitions, India’s ambitions, Saudi Arabia’s ambitions, and the newly incorporated states of mind and ambitions of Trump & Company, Elon Musk & Companies, Zhong Shanshan & Companies, Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault & Companies, and the list of corporations who make more money than most countries GDP is endless. But, I didn’t want to overwhelm him.
He responded with gusto! Writing the following response:
At this moment I've just watched a program on Al Jazeera on Black Lives Matter, and seeing (one of) the deep dysfunctional divisions in the US - the US is in collapse (see Umair Haque or Chris Hedges) [OH?!! Thank God this guy knows something I didn't know! Thank God We're going to die!], and will continue to split apart along these and other fault lines as biophysical reality gets harder to cope with (with climate change and ecological collapse and resultant economic collapse - which is already happening).
These divisions are caused by competing for identity (and survival) at a level less than that needed for the higher-level collective identity - in the words of one commentator the 'more viable future' would be 'a multiracial society that can live in harmony'.
I need to interrupt here. This guy has just made a huge pivot and is lecturing me about my own country! I live in the United States of America. In fact, I live less than 5 miles from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.
Now, I’m not putting Al Jazeera down, but since I live here and I must navigate these competing “identity issues” every day, I think I know a little bit more about them than he does or a single documentary can cover.
In fact, I’ve made a few documentaries myself about these very divisions and dysfunctions.
Here are just a few of them:
Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (2)
Black Lives Matter
Trump Rally about a Month and a Half Before Jan. 6 | Cacophony — The Beautiful Humans of Earth
Sustain the Flame – Full (Best Version) Women’s March on Washington 2017
Women’s March 2018 — Can’t Delete Reality
March for Truth — Watergate Redux
March for Truth — State of World
Sioux Z Dezbah at Women’s March on Washington — 1/21/17
Science March | 6 years ago
Sapience Talks — March for Science — Climate Change is Critical | 6 years ago
March for Science — Climate Change is Single Most Critical Issue | 6 years ago
Sapience Talks (#3) — Science Builds Communities
Sapience Talks – Day after Comey is Fired — interview 1
Sapience Talks – Day after Comey is Fired — interview 2
Sapience Talks – Comey Fired – #3
Sapience Talks #2 — The Intersection of Science & Spirit
Web of Lies — March for Truth
Women’s March 2018 — Diversity
Women’s March 2018 — Handmaid’s Tale
Women’s March 2018 — Stranger Things
March for Our Lives | 5 years ago
Never Again | March Against Gun Violence | 5 years ago
Deep Forgiveness (Darryl Green) & March for Our Lives | March For Our Lives | 5 years ago (This is the only one this ex-friend watched and made fun of it.)
Orange is the New Black — Science March 2017 | 6 years ago
“I Want to Be a Scientist” — Science March 2017 | 6 years ago
College Students Climate March | 6 years ago
Curiosity & Human Civilization – Science March 2017 | 6 years ago
Science March 2017 — Bio-medical Robots | 6 years ago
Science March 2017 — Bio-medical Research and Cuts to NIH | 6 years ago
Teens – People’s Climate March | 6 years ago
We ARE the Monsters | 6 months ago
We Are the Story Earth Needs | 4 years ago
Whew! I bet you thought I’d never stop listing them!
Back to ex-FakeBook friend’s comments.
When I refer to 'functional hierarchy' I mean the sort of hierarchy that every natural ecosystem has - nested, holonic, and operating on behalf of the whole AND with diverse individual yet interdependent autonomous beings. In nature this animate intelligence expresses itself through co-evolution and within the higher 'goal' of 'life'.
AH!!! The baby birds! I bet you read this far to see what the 10 billion baby birds in nests is all about! It’s about this comment.
First of all, I bet this ex-friend doesn’t know that being a baby bird in a nest is the most dangerous time of a bird’s life. It is a time of flightlessness that make baby birds vulnerable to all kinds of threats--crows, squirrels, snakes, cats, even wind.
The best thing for a baby bird to do is grow up fast and get the heck out of the nest!!! And have you ever looked at a nest after all the baby birds have left? I have! It’s full of poop!!!
I am not very impressed with his responses so far and started to do my own research on how to run a country or run a bunch of survivors after a great BIG disaster.
I quickly find based on his reference to nests,which I think he wants it to sound NATURAL, that he really doesn’t mean ‘functional hierarchy‘ at all — if he is really talking about a natural system where there is lots and lots of diversity and autonomous living beingswalking about and doing their thing, then he is talking heterarchy; full stop: NOT hierarchy.
I found an article rather quickly in Forbe’s about all of this and this article led me to Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles. I will talk more about this later. But clearly my ex-friend has never heard of Philip or his book.
Also, before moving on to the rest of his comments, let’s dig into this word holonic:
A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In other words, holons can be understood as the constituent part–wholes of a hierarchy. Wikipedia
It is also a fundamental theory of machine learning. So, we are back to the end of the world by A.I.s!
Who knows, he might even be the Do-Gooder programmer who writes a well intention code to save as much diversity of life as possible that ends the human race because the AIs determine we are killing life faster than we are preserving it.
And the last thing I want to know: has he talked to this animate intelligence himself?!
How the HELL does he know that this thing or being has a higher goal and that the goal is life?
First of all, I know he doesn’t believe in God, but this is sounding a lot like a God with goals who is going to Make Something Happen!
This an important clue to his thinking, and it provides a glimpse into the Mega Myth he fervently believes runs the universe.
This myth is The Fully Automative Model. This short Alan Watts tells it best!
Alan Watts – The Ceramic and the Fully Automatic
Alright, I’ve digressed enough, so back to his comments:
In Human systems we most often have structural hierarchies, with power-over dynamics. We DO need ways of inviting (creative) conflict across difference to discuss the options in front of us; and a functional Democracy is meant to assist that process. And, it can... but often at a level that is removed from the emerging future realities of biophysical collapse.
Wow — I’m so glad he pointed this out to me. I would still be thinking humans who live in great BIG civilized systems still gather around one GREAT BIG camp fire singing Kumbaya to solve conflicts!
Is he possibly admitting that there should be an arrow in his diagram for conflict?!!
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies:
We could have ended this entire conversation right here!
But wait! He goes on!
If democratic representatives were aware of the biophysical realities within which all their ideas and creative options are nested (functional hierarchy) then perhaps they might make collective decisions in mutual interest at levels required for what's coming. Unfortunately most people are ecologically illiterate and removed from nature so they don't realize that their current comfort levels and assumptions of entitlement, and fear of others taking them from them, are threatened by bigger, more encompassing forces (that will affect everyone) that will cause massive suffering as whole systems collapse.
Fine, these are overly broad generalizations that basically paint a picture that pretty much every human being living in a civilization on Earth is an illiterate, fearful, comfort-seeking coward with entitlement issues. If he wants to define nearly 10 billion people on Earth in this way, he’s not all wrong, but neither is he all right.
In making all my documentaries, I met and talked with so many motivated, well-informed, highly intelligent people who had profound ecological awareness and were not sitting home eating Cheetos! Rather, they were getting on a buses at 3 a.m. to get to marches happening in Washington, DC on Climate Change, Science, Gun Violence, Trump, Lies, and Black Lives Matter.
Perhaps he’s simply mansplaining again. But he still has more to say:
My point about 'transcend' is that only people that understand this can see which futures are no longer viable. That does not mean they 'know everything' - but it does mean they have a different worldview. They cannot guarantee 'the way' to go - there is no single direction. They can however point to many of the non-ways to go, because of Universal Harms that would and do threaten Universal Interests - not just the vested interests of any particular group that sees 'others' as the biggest threat to their identity and wellbeing.
Oh goodie! Transcendence! Yes, I really want to know more about what he means by transcend!
But, Hmmmmm… there are ONLY a select group of people who can understand this? My father was a pastor. My grandfathers were pastors. My great grandfathers were pastors as were many of my uncles and cousins… and you get the picture… I have been steeped in the language and imagery of transcendence.
What he describes is not transcendence. It’s intellectual arrogance, which is super creepy. At least he recognizes he and other transcended individuals might not get it right and cannot guarantee “the way to go“.
I remain highly concern about how power and authority is being ranked and sorted in his System of Transformation.
How is this really complicated human issue of governing itself in ever bigger and bigger systems of humans going to decide and select people to serve on this “functional hierarchy“? How in the HELL are they even going to recognize Transcended individuals?!
First of all, I don’t think you can recognize transcended people. In fact, for thousands of years, human beings typically tend to kill people who have transcended, in other words people who have become Holy.
Why do humans kill Holy people? Because Holy people scare the crap out of us regular, run of the mill human beings.
And why is this? Because Holy people are Whole people–they have fully integrated their Light and Dark sides, their Good Side and their Evil Side, the Savior and the Devil. This is not my idea. This is a very ancient idea as expressed by Alan Watts.
So, if you think you are a bunch of highly intelligent Transcendedpeople, you probably aren’t. But if you take the reins of ruling a great big bunch of humans, and you believe you are a transcended bunch of bloʊks, then you are eventually going to have to decide who lives and who dies.
Running huge human systems is not for sissies or for people who are squeamish because Nature makes LIFE and DEATH decisions every day, and if you think you are a bunch of Transcended humans running things like NATURE does, then guess what!?? You are going to have to make these kind of decisions too.
If you don’t,Kaboom! Another disaster! Overpopulation, perhaps like The Mote in God’s Eye, which is a science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, first published in 1974.
This story is about human beings first contact with an intelligent alien race. How exciting, except these aliens are more intelligent than humans and they keep something concealed from the humans who are trying to decide if they are friends or foes. The thing they are hiding is population issues…really, really serious population issues that have caused this ancient race of intelligent beings to rise to spectacular heights only to crash back down into primitive savagery again and again and again… something they call Cycles.
Such big and complex decisions required to run an advanced, intelligent civilization (regardless of whether they are human or aliens) depends entirely on what is being valued by the group and by who wants to do the running of things.
How is this any different than what is happening in the USA, in Russia, or in any hierarchical system on Earth? In fact, how is it different than how corporations, cities, towns, non-profits, and pretty much every modern, technology-using human system (and perhaps even intelligent alien system) are deciding how to run things?
If an intelligent group of beings decides to run things by a hierarchy, then they have to decide first on what they value. Based on these values, a ranking is created that determines how the hierarchy will be structured.
In other words, the values selected determine who will be placed on top of the pyramid to give to the orders and who will be placed in the middle and bottom of the pyramid to listen to and follow the orders. Another way of seeing this, is that the people in the middle and on the bottom (everyone who are below the ruling class) are the ones doing the work to hold up the agreed uponvalues.
Everyone–this includes rulers, managers, middle managers, bosses, workers, and through much of human history, slaves–assumes the mold of the Functional Hierarchy. Another way of saying this is that every person assume a role that holds the mold, which operates constantly in the background of everybody’s mind who lives in the system. This operating system provides unconscious instructions sort of like an algorithm, which are a set of rules to be followed or calculations to be made to solve problems encountered as the system operates through time.
The mental model of a pyramid is a powerful system of thinking. Indeed it is machine-like. It can be cold, calculating, and extremely brutal, perhaps this is why humans are so found on hierarchies, regardless of if they are functional or dysfunctional.
However, whenever (wherever) humans create hierarchies to run things, lots of people and things don’t make it to the top of the pyramid because they simply don’t fit into the desired values of the “functional hierarchy” (something humans created based on arbitrary ideas and values). The people and things(living beings) that get left outside of the ideal are automatically de-valued. Clearly, something important is being left out, being ig-nored, by the very ideas necessary to create a Functional Hierarchy.
Let’s see if he answers or addresses any of these concerns because so far he has not. But he’s also not done explaining (or should I say mansplaing):
In our approach we don't create 'safe-spaces' where everybody stays in their comfort zone. We create 'safe-enough spaces' where people are challenged. From our website Glossary: (his website again and another diagram)
“Safety is not the absence of threat—it is the presence of connection.”
– Gabor Maté
We use the term to describe spaces where we can have challenging Courageous Conversations about difficult topics, involving rigorous inquiry from multiple perspectives, and still hold space for “respectful belonging” where we can appreciate one another as we live the questions together.
Part of our approach is to hold people 'safe-enough' while challenging them not to collude at levels less than the biophysical system dictates is needed - ie. face reality and live the questions, together, in Universal Interests... and, yes, you are right to be cynical, for it is virtually impossible from this starting point... especially in the US at present.
Hmmm… I don’t really have a problem with all this mulling about safety and safe enough and challenging people. But he is not providing a tangible way of doing anything differently than what we are already doing in the world with all our hierarchies, functional or not!
And, WOW, he is really putting the USA down! I never knew he hated Americans so much!!!
So, once again I press on when I should have stopped writing this:
So how do you select people: "that understand this can see which futures are no longer viable."
How do you ensure all peoples, the ones still asleep in the safety of civilization and the people awaken to the the coming collapse, are represented in the decision-making of the 'functional hierarchy' (I don't think you used functional previously, but that is beside the point)... who gets to decide what is functional and belongs in a human hierarchy?
Might it not be our very own overthinking of every problem and solution digging us all deeper into the pit of collapse?
And who is "our" in approach? Is this the synthesize of your years of deep thinking and consideration, which is considerable and done with empathic intent, or are there others involved in the "our"?
And, you did not mention Russia or Putin? How does this transcendent approach handle this situation? Or is this Western propaganda at work blowing up the situation in Ukraine?
One quick side note on overthinking and/or clinging to an idea or a thought when clearly one should have let go of it long ago. When a person does this, the idea or thought tends to grow smaller and smaller.
This is because the process of thinking presses the LIFE FORCE right out of an idea or a thought. The more the LIFE FORCE is removed, the less and less alive the IDEA is inside ones mind, or should I say the MORE DEAD the IDEA BECOMES.
Every single person who is born into Western Civilization is trained to do this from the day they are born. It is essential they learn how to do this and to do this all the time so that they stay in the social order, the social hierarchy, regardless of it is a functional one or not.
Alan Watts and many of great sages of Buddhism speak a lot about the need to let go of our ideas and patterns of thought and beliefs. They encourage us to fly, not to cling to dead and dying thoughts that make us do ignorant and increasingly crazy things. Once we outgrow our ideas or learn something new, we need to let go of them and move on with the flow of all things living in time and are alive.
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: Drawing from Notebook on 4/24/23 | Pressed into the Mold or Clinging to a Thought Until All the Life Is Drained Out of the Idea
Now, back to his thoughts and thinking:
...thanks for engaging. First, re 'functional hierarchy' I did mention it
I don’t think until this point he knew who I was, and I hit a nerve for sure: a functional nerve! In his original invitation for Transformational Change anyone, he does not mention functional. That is what I was commenting about. The first time he mentions functional and hierarchy is in his first comment to my original question. And his answer to that question is what made more questions in my mind.
But, he goes on:
"Can you show me a model where informed democracy is addressing Overshoot? No... there is, unfortunately, a functional hierarchy which needs to honour those who CAN see more, sense more, grok more, on behalf of the whole system/social field. This is only part of the process "
There’s the Geeky Grokking again. And the inference that some human beings are better than and more advanced than others, in what precisely?!
If you read it as hierarchy then you probably didn't see my point... it is a naturalfunctional hierarchy - which many debate, but which does exist, based on maturity, capability, consciousness levels and activation (or not) of human development potentials - NOT a constructed human hierarchy (like an imposed boss/ servant relationship - with power over).
OH WOW! He says it again, it is a natural functioning hierarchy! Which apparently should make all the difference something like what Simba discovered, right?
Alan Watts & David Lindberg & The Lion King – Who Are You
But, no, my ex-friend is not talking about a Natural System because he is dividing and cutting it up into all sorts of categorizes by using labels such as maturity, capability, consciousness levels and activation. This is what the thinking mind does; it cuts up reality into little tiny bits then messes them up, so we can never put it back together again…just like Humpty Dumpty or at least not as long as our selfish, self-center, fearful, greedy human minds are in control of the narrative.
And, he’s still not done mansplaining. So maybe there is still something in his explanation that won’t make the hairs stand on my arm.
Here he goes! Hold onto your steering wheel:
That said, people are, despite their best wishes and hopesNOT equal [I don't disagree with this, but please...] every parent knows this... you don't force a kid who can only crawl to walk before they are ready (or at all);[Well... duh!] yet you can assume they have the potential, and, if they see others doing it, will one day also do so - where does the leadership example come from...? Another younger kid? An older kid? An adult? [Ah, perhaps here's the natural functional hierarchy...you age into it? Is this what he's implying? Well, I take issue.] Hence we need to be careful NOT to assume people don't have 'potential' while also recognising that not everyone has actualised it yet - that's why we generally don't let kids drive trucks. [Haha -- he hasn't been to the USA! Here, we can do anything at any age!]
OK!!! Full Stop!!! We’ve got to explore this explanation a little bit more!
Hmmm… maybe babies can drive trucks!
And what if the evolution of mind runs in reverse to the evolution to the physical body?
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: Above, the trajectory of growth of the human body is indeed as he describes… until… the decline begins. However, many of the most ancient sages say we come into this world perfect and through the trials and journey of life, our consciousness narrows and shrinks and becomes less and less than what it started out as… until… the physical decline begins!
I’m a MOM! I’ve raised a baby! Yes, my baby crawled, then she walked, and now she drives a truck!!! It all happened exactly as he says…LOL!
But, I don’t think WISDOM grows that way. I think on the Mental-Spiritual realm (this gooey, sticky place inside the human mind where we feel this utterly strange sensation of sentience, something we all simply refer to as consciousness) that growth rather runs in reverse to the body.
As we grow up, we get narrower and narrower in our thinking and focus. We are forced to shut out more and more of the world from our MIND so we can carry out the tasks of daily living (or survival in a manmade world). Eventually, we all get to an incredibly small world views with an incredibly small selection of thoughts, ideas, values that we think explain everything. What we fail to see is we have become a SINGULARITY and we are COLLAPSING in on ourselves!
This sounds terrible, but this is the mental world… not the physical world. This moment of COLLAPSE is the most exciting opportunity ever! It the MOMENT of Transformation.
The thing you got to do when you get to this MOMENT is KEEP MOVING… go man go!!!
Whatever crisis you hit, it’s there for a reason. It is your DOING, your HAPPENING because you want to GROW and TRANSFORM is what consciousness does... it is flowing, it is dancing, it is constantly making new patterns and experiences.
I can’t tell you what your moment of crisis will be or when you will hit it. But if you are human, you’re going to have a chance to thread the eye of your MOMENT IN TIME.
Each of us is born into this world with utterly unique capabilities and potential. Each of us is trying to master innate abilities we have always had, but we forget we have them because of all the training we get into HOW TO BE A GOOD CITIZEN.
Don’t get me wrong! There is tremendous value in this. Going around and hitting other kids over the head is not a NICE way to move through the WORLD (Trump and Putin obviously never moved passed this stage in mental development).
We all want civility in this world. That is how we all live in peace and plenty, but we cannot master our innate abilities without really digesting and integrating ALL the knowledge trained into us on how to be a GOOD CITIZEN and RECKON that with WHO WE REALLY are (and have always been since the day we were born).
Without this reckoning that is really going to feel like a constriction, a tightening and reduction of consciousness, you won’t get to other side of your Self.
If you are paying attention, there is going to a point of crisis in your life that is going to make you question everything. And this is ALL RIGHT! In fact, it is essential.
But, if you are not paying attention (Ron DeSantis, I’m talking AT you), and you don’t want to WAKE UP, then you are not going to WAKE UP. And this is ALL RIGHT too!
The only thing I can tell you if you do hit this point of constriction is:
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies:
But wait, my ex-friend is not done mansplaining:
Unfortunately many in politics (such as your infamous ex-Pres) reach arrested development at a level less than what is required to provide systems-ethical leadership for our times. Bully boy narcissism (pick any number of exemplars, globally) is not what's called for when the potential extinction of humanityis the writing on the wall.
[What did I tell you? He is totally into total collapse of our global system...and human extinction. But maybe we deserve to go extinct and resistance is futile, so why suffer the inevitable? It's a collective gamble that we all clearly lost...right?!!]
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: See — I love to make funny pictures of Putin and Trump!
But this also pissed me off. Not the Bully Boy Narcissism comment, that just made it very obvious he is not paying attention to me or my work (as he pretended to do for years).
If he had been paying attention, he might have learned something NEW because I’ve been writing and posting about all this stuff (some stuff very humorously, some very critical of our ex-President) for a long time.
Basically, my take away from his comment is that he is implying this functional hierarchy is most probably going to consist of a lot of grumpy old men and a few token women who refuse to grow up.
I know this guy from lots of previous engagements, and I can read between the lines, and this is exactly what he is saying.
He is also implying HE is the one who can see further, run faster, and out thinkall the rest of us to lead this NEW functional hierarchy that will save the world from collapse (or after collapse)!
It leads me to wonder just which direction is he and his new functional leaders going towards? Is it truly the “right” direction to be looking or is it just more of the same tangled web of endless bureaucracies we are already stuck in up over our eyeballs already?
So these are some of the reasons this comment really pisses me off.
And also, some of the wisest, kindness, most inclusive people I know are young people. I would totally choose a younger people over jagged jerks like my ex-friend is being here as he defends his fictional “functional hierarchy.“
But, maybe I should still be patient and read keep reading:
As for "who are we when I say 'our'" - I provided a link to 'our' website - And Now What - and this is the About Us page - https://andnowwhat.be/about/ - and, yes, it is the result of "years of deep thinking and consideration, which is considerable and done with empathic intent" by each of us alone, and for several years collectively.
______
YEAH! Finally! He is addressing the Putin bastard and dysfunctional Russia!
As for Russia or Putin - what can I say... he would not be included in the 'transcendent' because he is, by definition, not aiming to transcend and include (partly my point) but to take-over by force... which, incidentally, also happens to be the way the US generally behaves - and it will continue to do so, for it fears losing the dominance its inhabitants take for granted, and fears what would happen if others behaved toward it as it has toward them.
But, hey wait! That is a huge BIG pivot! WOW, he really hates us. He didn’t even finish his thought about Russia.
I was REALLY hoping to learn something about his thinking on Putin.
Several years ago, back when we conversed all the time, I told him that the most evil character in my book is based on Putin. This was before Putin invaded Ukraine and Trump was cozying up to him like a pussy cat to a snake or is it a snake to a pussy cat or are they really both SNAKE CATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe Putin and Trump mated and mutated!!!!!!!!!!!
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: Viral ‘Amazon Snake Cat‘ Has the Internet Totally Baffled | WOW! I want one of those!!!
He immediately put me down by lecturing me on how Putin is a pussy cat, really he isn’t a bad guy at all, he’s just watching out for his country like any good ruler would do. And, it’s a BIG country he has to take care of and the world isn’t very nice place, especially the WEST. He told me that I was simply indoctrinated by Western media and didn’t understand things accurately.
He kind of sounded like Trump (?!!)in that moment! I have never forgotten his put down. And, it’s probably the real reason I needled him.
But, I have digressed again! Let’s get back to his mighty man-splaination!
So, to be clear - I think you have just pointed to why there needs to be distinction between those who CANthink transformationally, on behalf of the whole system, and those who can only think of their own vested interests or for a smaller subset of the whole (individual, in-group, corporation, nation)...
So, if you had to try to create transformative change that might get the US out of the mess it has created for itself, who would you select? Who would you not select? And why?
I’m fine with leaving Putin out of the hierarchy too… DUH!
But HERE again he pivots and attacks my country lumping the USA in the same dusty coal bin as Putin and his goons.
We are having this conversation, by the way, over the United States Memorial Weekend, which is a time we reflect on the men and women who have served in the Armed Forces, especially the ones who died or were injured.
I have 2 Great Uncles who served in WWI, an Uncle who served in Korea, and a brother who served in the Army Reserves. He’s really pissed me off NOW!
And Now What would have happened to the world if the US had not gotten involved in these great wars?
Would he really want a Kim Jong Un ruling over the whole Korean Peninsula? Does he know Winston Churchill begged the US to get involved in WWII? What if the US had just sat on its hands mumbling: “We don’t want to get involved in that war,” as it sang Kumbaya to itself as it pretended nothing’s going on over there?
Yes, the USA has made some really bad foreign affairs decisions. The US has sent troops into places they should not have sent them. The US has pulled troops out of places we have been when they should not done this: Afghanistan!!
What happened in Afghanistan is complicated. How do you define exactly when all the trouble began and how do you define when it has all ended? Was it 1219 to 1332 when the Mongol Empire ruled Afghanistan? Was it 1370 to 1405 when Timur (sometimes referred to as Tamerlane) ruled the land that would become Afghanistan plus a whole lot more of middle Asia? Both Empires are remembered for the barbarity of their conquests.
But that is ancient history, right? What does that have to do with the barbarity of our modern age? Well, have you seen Flee? If not, you should!
FLEE – Official Trailer |Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner FLEE tells the story of Amin Nawabi as he grapples with a painful secret he has kept hidden for 20 years, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon to be husband. Recounted mostly through animation to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, he tells for the first time the story of his extraordinary journey as a child refugee from Afghanistan. Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen Executive Produced by Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Produced by Monica Hellström, Signe Byrge Sørensen
If you watch Flee, you may ask Why did the US fund the mujahideen?
Well that’s a long, sordid, complicated story that “began decades earlier, after the Soviet Union invaded that country in 1979. The U.S. wanted to do everything it could to counter the Russians during the Cold War. And so, at that time, the U.S. worked with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to arm Afghan Islamist fighters known as the mujahideen.” — Read or listen to PBS NewsHour and the Former head of Saudi intelligence recounts America’s longstanding ties to Afghanistan
This colossal battle between the two Titans of the Modern Western World, because if you’re going to be a Good Titan you’re going to need a Bad Titan. It has been this way in the human made world for 5,000 years. If you’re wondering why I pick this number, you are just going to have to wait and read my book.
Since WWII, the USA and USSR (now Russia) made so many Nukes if they went to war with each other, the world would descend into a nuclear winter so profound, life as we know it would cease. Something like Midnight Sky depicted:
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: Earth after some unnamed disaster, but most likely nuclear war | Midnight Sky
So instead, the US and Russia poke each other through proxy wars that create a different sort of consequence: Blowback. I am not as stupid as my mansplaining friend wants to pretend that I am, nor are countless Americans like me.
US support of mujahideen created Osama bin Laden who would train Saudi men to fly planes into buildings pulling off one of the worst terrorist event on US soil 9/11. Leading to the US invasion of Afghanistan and hunt for bin Laden.
The Pakistan government has repeatedly denied that it provides any military support to the Taliban in its diplomacy regarding its extensive operations in Afghanistan.82 Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban's virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support. -- Human Rights Watch
Pakistan did this because it served their interests. US stayed for 20 years to encourage democracy because that served our interests. Then, the US pulled out due to a deal negotiated by the Orange turkey himself, Trump, and implemented by Biden, letting everything all come crashing down again, just like what happened to Amin and his family on April 28, 1992, and the USA played a role in this collapse too!
If we are really honest with what is happening in the world right now, it has so much more to do with ordinary, everyday men and women and their individual and collective beliefs, values, and biases than it has to do with a big bad Russia or a big bad USA.
Oh yes, humans know how to cluster together into great, big, bad armies and nations. We know how to build pyramids—Functional Hierarchies–structures that live inside our minds and operate endlessly like algorithmic codes transported seamlessly into our very souls on endless streams of thoughts (conscious thoughts or unconscious thoughts) and also the things we are told we must do or else!
We’ve been doing this for over 5,000 years. Creating human pyramids to get our way in this world; it is a very human thing to do. And it’s worked way too well!
Wherever Amin and his family fled, they had to fear the RULES and CUSTOMS of every country and nation where they had FLED desperately seeking safety… seeking a HOME.
How we treat the least of us is a global issue! Is there any place on Earth where humans have settled that can claim to be completely angelic and benevolent? Is there any nation, state, or city in the world from any time that has always made the right decisions at the right time, always and always and always… like a GOD or an angel?
I think my friend is a bit jealous of the USA’s status in the world because he knows his Functional Hierarchy is just a wish-dream. It is his performance; his great show in the world of men and their endless games of one-upmanships. Yes, indeed these are ships made out of thoughts built like pyramids. These Functional Vessels sail every day to the twin continents of Doom and Disaster.
This mansplayer knows very well where he’s going, and he also knows that he will never captain a ship as BIG as the Good’Old USA. But who cares?! He knows if he crows loud enough, long enough that we all just cry out: Hip, Hip Hooray–for that’s just what we say when another ship sets sail to the Land of Doom or Disaster!
Now, being pretty beyond pissed, I pressed him again:
I don't think you are really talking about hierarchies as how you explain it in the above comment.
Rather you are describing a Heterarchy, but this is your thinking and work, so you are absolutely free to name it whatever you like.
And, the And Now What? team looks exceptional
As for who would I select? There is absolutely no one I would select to form a team to transform the Good'Old USA. There is no way I am in a position to see, understand, or hear all the voices and ideas that would be necessary to do such a thing... this country will either survive or it will die, as things in this world have always done.
And to be clear... I am of the USA... but I am not of the fraction in the USA who are dead set... "to take-over by force" (as you put it) ...the rest of the world. Nor do I "fear losing the dominance" in the world, nor do I "take for granted" that the USA has dominance or that my Whiteness gives me privilege in the world as we know it. And, I am not alone in knowing this... and in the face of the pressure to conform to the Mold, I resist it, as do many others here in USA and as reports come on in Russia, despite the threat of death there, while here, it harassment, lost opportunities, and hate.
I must surmise your opinion of the United States is as low as your opinion is of Russia. I suspect you are implying that the US flows in the very same vein and mindset of World Domination and Control as Russia, China, North Korea, the unincorporated state of Trump, the unincorporated state of Elon Musk, and anyone else with power, authority, or money who can make others submit to them.
But be careful of over generalizing systems. They are always so much more complicated than you can fully see and comprehend. This is why I remain highly suspicious of hierarchies, even highly evolved, functional hierarchies, because when it comes down to it... it is only made up of men (and a few token women).
I might suggest that I am like a very small cell like an antibody reacting and responding to an overwhelming spiritual-psychological-psychic Viral Infection that seeks devastation and to do harm to pretty much anyone who is not on the "inside" of the infection.
And this infection is everywhere, not just Russia-USA, it is inside every human being on the planet, including myself... one can only acknowledge the infection is real, it is deadly, and it will not stop until human life is brought to its ultimate demise (self-inflicted and totally avoidable)...
I find by the way, the youngest humans among us are the wisest and healthiest. If I had to depend on someone to carry me to a safe spot because I ran out of energy (due to fighting against the overwhelming infection that I know is inside of me and everyone else and an infection that I know I cannot by myself overcome) I would choose the youngest among us in the infected country formerly known as the USA.
He responds with the infamous:
When people do this on FakeBook when there clearly is not a sickness, death, despair, or trauma, it means: “Fuck off” … with a smile.
By the way, Alan Watts says the best leaders are the most Selfish! What he means by this are individuals who have thought about what being Selfish means. Alan Watts says it so much better!
Alan Watts – Selfish
Anticipating Mansplayer would not be able to explain to me why I should trust a functional hierarchy to save the world, I did my own research. This is what I found.
Heterarchyvs Hierarchy vs Anarchy
In a hierarchy, if A is over B, and B is over C, then A is over C — your basic pecking order. In a heterarchy, though, you can have A over B, B over C, and C over A. Think of the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Paper covers rock; rock crushes scissors; scissors cut paper. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
Heterarchy
“A heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets.” — Warren McCulloch’s 1945 essay
A HETERARCHICAL SYSTEM In a heterarchy, as opposed to a hierarchy, there is no “top” or “bottom” ranking. However, unlike in an anarchy, there is superiority and inferiority as each element is activated in some circumstances and inhibited in others. McCulloch calls these circular configurations of neurons: “dromes of diallels.”
Copyright Strat for 2016 www.stratfor.com
This is a fascinating article in Forbes: Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time. You need to read the whole thing yourself, if you are interested in this idea, but here are a few parts that really capture my excitement in discovering this word I did not know existed.
Interestingly enough -- and here's where both problems and possibilities start popping up -- this circular logic is identical to what Nobel economist Kenneth Arrow described as the "Voter's Paradox." The problem goes all the way back to the late 18th century when it was identified by Marquis de Condorcet. Consider the case in which one faction prefers candidate A over B and candidate B over C; a second, equal faction prefers B over C and C over A; and a third faction prefers, you guessed it, C over A and A over B. The choice that eventually gets made will not be a reflection of the real preference of the whole society, but will instead result from "irrational" and arbitrary issues like who voted first and who voted last. And over time and subsequent elections, the decision may cycle from one choice to another with no apparent reason. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
Why the quotation marks around "irrational"? Because in the analysis of the relationship between hierarchy and heterarchy, it is precisely the definition of what counts as rational that is at stake. As McCulloch explained:
“Circularities in preference instead of indicating inconsistencies, actually demonstrate consistency of a higher order than had been dreamed of in our philosophy. An organism possessed of this nervous system — six neurons — is sufficiently endowed to be unpredictable from any theory founded on a scale of values. It has a heterarchy of values, and is thus internectively too rich to submit to a summum bonum [highest good].”
Now there is a phrase to conjure with: "internectively too rich to submit to a summum bonum." This sounds like the Middle East. Or the geopolitical, global problematique. Or the Republican primaries in the United States. Or the problems of the European Union.
The problem with heterarchy, and the challenge to making it work, is not the lack of hierarchy, but too many competing hierarchies. And that's the reality we live in. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
(…)
"Heterarchy" is an unwieldy word. Our ongoing discussion group on making heterarchy work eventually abandoned the word when one of our members looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and found the definition to be "rule by aliens." That's not what we meant at all. Despite its unwieldiness, and shadows of aliens, though, the term recommends itself for the way it mediates the dialectic between hierarchy and anarchy. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
Hierarchies
As Francis Fukuyama showed in The Origins of Political Order, the first hierarchies were imposed by "strongmen" and then later justified by ancestor worship and a priestly caste. From all we can determine, primitive hunter-gatherer bands were heterarchical. Teamwork joining different skills was necessary to bag a woolly bison. But no one leader called for deference to a summum bonum.
With the transition from nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger settlements with agricultural surpluses, patriarchy and hierarchy were required to maintain some degree of order. As my colleague in this space, Ian Morris, argues in his several books, the bargain we humans made with hierarchies might strike a visiting Martian as odd once it compares the life of the unencumbered hunter-gatherer with the lives of later citizens suborned under often onerous hierarchies. But once you start down that road toward hierarchy, from the point of view of defense and security, bigger is almost always better. So there is a natural logic of larger, more powerful hierarchies conquering and subsuming smaller, less powerful hierarchies.
Next thing you know, people are talking about "the American Century," or "the Chinese Century," as if it is perfectly natural that some nation must be number one. I recall an invitation to give a talk at Rand a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The concern at Rand was how to manage a "unipolar world" now that the bipolar order of the Cold War had come to an end. I tried to tell the researchers at Rand about heterarchy ... but they were not interested. There was a mindset there, a hierarchical mindset, that insisted that somebody must be "number one," and it better be us.
You see this mindset at play in the well-worn epithet of the lion as "king of the jungle." Who says that the jungle has to have a king? The jungle is not a political order, however many alpha male gorillas may roam its paths. The jungle is an ecology -- an incredibly complex web of metabolisms, relationships and interactions, some of which may be hierarchical. But there is no summum bonum in the jungle. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
Chapter 25 of Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles. In those 60 pages, Bobbitt develops three scenarios:
“The world of The Meadow is that of a society of states in which the entrepreneurial market-state has become predominant. In this world, success comes to those who nimbly exploit the fast-moving, evanescent opportunities…“
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: Photo by PhotoMIX Company on Pexels.com
“The world view portrayed in The Park… reflects a society in which the values and attitudes of the managerial market-state have prevailed. Governments play a far larger role…“
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: Photo by Ryutaro Tsukata on Pexels.com
“Unlike the regional groupings fostered by The Park, the states of The Garden have become more and more ethnocentric, and more and more protective of their respective cultures.”
As you will not be surprised to hear, these scenarios and their names can be associated with certain geopolitical avatars, namely, North America for the wide open Meadow, Europe for the publicly managed Park, and East Asia for the ethnocentric Garden. "In a meadow all is profusion, randomness, variety. A park is for the most part publicly maintained, highly regulated with different sectors for different uses. A garden is smaller, more inwardly turned -- it aims for the sublime, not the efficient or the just."
Bobbitt then explores a range of drivers and trends, possible events and challenging decisions prior to the articulation of the three scenarios in which all of these elements play out in different ways. In my humble opinion, the truly remarkable climax of Bobbitt's very long book is the elegant construction of the heterarchy of choices playing out in the global geopolitical dynamic involving the United States, Europe and East Asia. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
If you read this far, you should go to the full article: Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes — 2/4/16 and read carefully all the possible scenarios of the three different ways the 3 different ways of organizing hierarchies interact and lead to global outcomes. . No wonder my ex-friend is terrified, but then again, he is trying to solve an impending cataclysm with yet another type of hierarchy.
Hmmm… yeah… like that is going to work after more than 5,000 years of increasingly dysfunctional myopic hierarchies!
For five centuries, the State has evolved according to epoch-making cycles of war and peace. But now our world has changed irrevocably. What faces us in this era of fear and uncertainty? How do we protect ourselves against war machines that can penetrate the defenses of any state? Visionary and prophetic, The Shield of Achilles looks back at history, at the “Long War” of 1914-1990, and at the future: the death of the nation-state and the birth of a new kind of conflict without precedent.
Another thing about hierarchies is that they can go sideways fast. Big ones can. Little ones can. Corporate ones can. Non-profit ones can. Peace-loving ones can. Bottom line, if humans build a hierarchy to run something, it seems too tempting for humans not to take advantage of it.
Also, governments of any kind are dealing with a lot of information, pushes and pulls, demands, crises, polls, budgets, public opinion (that is by definition pretty variable depending on the day) and so many more things. So to take a country like Russia or the USA and make the comments my ex-fakebook friend said is a pretty naive and ignorant thing to say.
This episode on Throughline is very compelling. If you want to see how easy it is for a hierarchy to go sideways, listen to this one.
Corruption. Wealth. Authoritarianism. Torture. These are the words many people associate with Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, and his wife, Imelda. But in 1965, on the day of his presidential inauguration, clad in bright white traditional Filipino clothing, Ferdinand and Imelda were the picture of hope and progress: the Camelot of the Philippines. They styled themselves as mythical figures with a divine right to rule, even as their democratic ascent reached a dictatorial peak.
Ferdinand Marcos ruled for two decades. And then, in 2022, more than thirty years after his death, the Philippines elected a new president: Ferdinand's son, Bongbong. Both in his campaign and since taking office, Bongbong has evoked the Marcos era as a golden age — effectively, rewriting history.
Welcome to the "Epic of Marcos." In this tale of a family that's larger than life, Ferdinand Marcos is at the center. But the figures that surround him are just as important: Imelda, his muse; Bongbong, his heir; and the United States, his faithful sidekick. The story of the Marcos family is a blueprint for authoritarianism, laying out clearly how melodrama, paranoia, love, betrayal and a hunger for power collide to create a myth capable of propelling a nation.
Today on the show, the rise, fall, and resurrection of a dynasty — and what that means for democracy worldwide.
The Freedom of Speech
Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies: Image from Throughline: Volunteers help roll up a giant banner printed with the Preamble to the United States Constitution during a demonstration against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall October 20, 2010 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Another thing about hierarchies is that they need to select and enforce the values that matter. But just as I was needling my ex-friend, how are these values selected? Are we conscious of them or not?
This episode of THROUGHLINE goes through the history and conscious and unconscious biases of the USA selecting and enforcing just one value: Freedom of Speech. If you are interested in this process, take a listen. It is worth your while!!
Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us.What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they created the First Amendment, and how have the words they wrote in the 18th century been stretched and shaped to fit a world they never could have imagined? It's a story that travels through world wars and culture wars. Through the highest courts and the Ku Klux Klan. What exactly is free speech, and how has the answer to that question changed in the history of the U.S.?
Anarchy
Most anarchists are disappointed hierarchists. From Mikhail Bakunin to Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, anarchists have taken potshots at the failings of hierarchy: They shoot holes in the purported legitimacy of exercises of authority, whether by the divine right of kings or the use of violence to impose subordination.
As Francis Fukuyama showed in The Origins of Political Order, the first hierarchies were imposed by "strongmen" and then later justified by ancestor worship and a priestly caste. From all we can determine, primitive hunter-gatherer bands were heterarchical. Teamwork joining different skills was necessary to bag a woolly bison. But no one leader called for deference to a summum bonum[the highest good, especially as the ultimate goal according to which values and priorities are established in an ethical system].
-- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time
So in summary of the Forbe’s article and Throughline episode, hierarchies can be concluded understood as:
Organic vs Mechanical World View — More From Alan Watts
Throughout this series I have been trying to explain two fundamentally different ways of looking at our world, one characteristic predominantly of the West and the other of the East. And these might be called, respectively, the way of description as opposed to the way of seeing. The way, in other words, of understanding things in words or in terms contrasted with the way of understanding through looking and seeing a field or a subject totally all at once. Or you might call these the linear view (strung out in a line) or the total view (seeing all at once), or the serial view on the one hand as contrasted with the simultaneous view on the other. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Now, in classical Western science we have depended largely on this serial or analytic view, which understands the world by translating it into ideas, into words, or into, say, even series of numbers. The basic feature of it being that things are understood in a step-by-step way in sequence. And insofar as we constantly look at nature in that way, we tend to think of nature as something constructed—something, in other words, made or put together as we ourselves make and put things together through a series of steps. And perhaps this gives us the feeling that if we understood nature sufficiently, if we understood in full detail all the steps which go to the making of our universe, we could ourselves make it. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Now, it’s here, you see, that we get a very fundamental contrast between East and West, and especially through Chinese and Japanese ideas of the formation of nature. Because for them it seems extremely odd to think of nature as being constructed or made by a sort of step-by-step procedure.Their feeling is rather that the world and its forms are not so much constructed as grown. And one of the most important keys to an understanding of Far Eastern thought is to see the difference between a view of a constructed world and a grown world. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Now, to give a sort of crazy illustration of this: supposing I construct something—for example, an artificial flower—and you know, when you get instructions, how to do this, and you buy a book of do-it-yourself artificial flowers, you get a step-by-step procedure which tells you what to do. Step one: take a piece of wire with a black button and fix it to the end. Step two: take the stamens previously cut out and affix it to the button. Next step: insert a disk of sticky material, push the wire through the middle, and then affix the petals. Here they go. And notice that, as I put them on, I take them from outside and around me—things that are bits—and I bring these bits together to make the flower a construction, or whatever form it is that I’m intending to create. And so from going around to the center, from getting something that was previously pieces and bringing it all together, I get my flower. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
How to make artificial flowers at home with paper / diy home decoration paper flower
But now watch how an actual flower grows; how it starts, as it were, from the center. And it unfolds itself not bit by bit, but all the parts of the flower exfoliating together from the center outwards, in contrast to the making process, which goes from the outside inwards. From a situation where the parts are originally all apart (all in bits) and then assembled, contrasting with a situation where you have some simple beginning (like a seed or a bud), and as it expands it constellates or forms its own parts from within itself. And this is the fundamental process of natural growth. It’s in the same way that the human baby is formed within the womb. It’s in the same way that, if you watch crystals under a microscope forming a solution, you will notice the whole area of the crystal, the whole structure of the crystal, coming into being all together at once, and you will not see a kind of bit-by-bit assemblage which we use when we make machines or make houses or make tools. Even when we carve a block of wood—although the block of wood is not originally a lot of distinct parts, nevertheless we work upon it from the outside towards the inside, whereas all processes of growth go from the inside to the outside. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Time-Lapse: Watch Flowers Bloom Before Your Eyes | Short Film Showcase
Now, in our current scientific way of thinking in the West, this kind of growth, this kind of formation, is always talked about in terms of what we call field theory; fields of force. And I suppose one of the most striking exhibitions of what a field is can be seen in looking at the formation of magnetic lines of force in iron filings—as when we take filings that are not magnetized, just thrown chaotically over an area, and then, with the magnets underneath, notice that all the filings form together into a pattern, the whole area moving together, every single part of it simultaneously into its shape. And that shows us the whole nature of a field of force. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Magnetic Field Around Stack of Magnets With Iron Filings
(Blab, blab, blab…I skipped a lot of important stuff from his talk to get to the part that links up to my inquiry about hierarchies vs heterarchies, but what Watts says here is exactly what Jay Ogilvy is sharing in the article in Forbes)
And then, in turn, in the field there is a structure, and the structure of the field is thought of as governing the formation of the universe. And you may remember that, in the last program, I gave you a particular Chinese world which meant the basic pattern or order of the world. Do you remember this word, which is pronounced lǐ, and which had as its original meaning “the markings in jade,” “the fiber in muscle,” or “the grain in wood.” This word, then, designates the basic structure within the tao, within the fundamental field of the world, and thus its order—which can be, as it were, understood by looking at it, but is too complex, too much happening so fast all together at once, for us ever to be able to analyze it in the relatively clumsy language of words. Now thus, you see, it seems to us that that order is enormously complex. The order of nature, the order of beauty, the order of ethics—all these kinds of orders baffle us when we try to think about them bit by bit. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Lǐ 里 Inside – Chinese Word of the Day 每日一词
The “Tao” Explained: Deep Insights With Deng Ming Dao 道
But actually this order is only a complicated order when we try to think about it. I mean, it’s very simple, isn’t it, to drink water if you put it in a cup or a glass and toss it down. But it would be extraordinarily complex if one tried to drink water with a fork. And in the same way, the world and the order of the world, the activity within the field, seems incredibly complicated to us when we try to translate it into thinking and into words. But this, then, is the fundamental Chinese Taoist and Indian Buddhist view of how the formations of the world arise. Not by a step-by-step process which can be put down in a line like the instructions for making the flower, but by something which happens spontaneously all together at once. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
The centipede was happy, quite, Until a toad, in fun, said, “Pray, Which leg goes after which?” This worked its mind to such a pitch, It lay distracted in a ditch Considering how to run.
All this writing about Transformation has made me remember that I wrote a blog about this very idea 6 years ago, way back when I started this blogging business (which is a pretty useless one at that).
One of my very early posts was titled Is Collective Transformation Possible? It was sandwich between my Girl With Dragon and Divine Dodo series. Also, I had just finished my Women’s March Documentary documenting why thousands (millions) of women and men around the world gathered to march against Trump and after doing all that work, well, yes, I was hoping some people would watch it…at least some of it…and commune with me about some of the really important issues people were bringing up. We all felt what TRUMP stood for and it was revolting. But no one really watched my documentary and NO ONE communed (communicated) with me about any of the issues explored in my Women’s March Documentary, except my REAL friends in Germany.
I joined hundreds of Facebook groups to meet liked-minded people who might care. It was so exciting and so hopefully for a minute, then my time of constriction came.
I knew it was coming. I could feel it. It had been building up for quite some time. But no one I was talking to then understood what I was talking about. I told this one group that felt itself to be an extremely rare group of enlightened beings, that I needed to go through a very small hole or to make a very difficult journey. They just smiled politely and said: “Oh, maybe you’re already on the other side? Maybe you’re already HERE!!”
And when my time of constriction gripped me with such despair that death sounded more pleasant that life and thoughts of violent murder and suicide floated continuously through my mind… all these NEW, hopeful, FAKE friends vanished like THE NOTHING. Many of my physical friends did too.
I was left to navigate my inner DARKNESS where a good part of my inner collective wanted me dead. I was drawing my journey. I was documenting my descent. But you know what Mansplanyer said to me at a point of crisis, a time when I simply needed a compassionate listener and occasional cheerleader? He told me he didn’t think the Dodo was a good look for me and I shouldn’t continue… people might get the wrong impressions!
Well…DUH, Duh, duh! Do you see what is happening to Dodo? He’s being crucified for GOD’s sakes! Don’t you think I know DEAD is not a GOOD look?
As my inner collective divided into fighting factions–some aspects of myself wanted to help me, other aspects not so much, my exterior collective crumbled as well. These were the real life people who said they were my friends but they dried up like the Great Salt Lake, leaving nothing to help me during a very difficult time–a kind word, likes of my blog posts, regular comments on my Facebook page–would have meant so much to me at this time.
The System of Facebook is not set up to operate with kindness and compassion. Rather it is set up for Performers to Perform.
I would soon learn all these “NEW” friends were FAKEFRIENDS. They were happy to court my attention IF (and only IF) I FOLLOWED THEM. The more blindly I followed, the more FAKE ATTENTION they might throw my way, and even that was ify. Most just had to be constantly admired!
This behavior is called Bread Crumbing or Baiting. It is an aspect of a significant psychological disorder called Narcissism. And FAKEBOOK is especially calculated up to cater to Narcissists and for people suffering from the opposite imbalance of this disorder: the ECHO Personality.
Narcissistic baiting & how deal with it | 92,295 views May 14, 2023 (There is a reason this video is getting so many views! Every person in civilized society is dealing with more and more Narcissitic People more often)
I was an echo that nobody missed when my voice began to fail and fade.
I chose to surround myself and to trust people who were nesting, in hollow holonic circular thoughts that spun round and round shrinking, sinking, shrieking point of consciousness that was cut off from true human understanding.
I pulled the Cloak of Darknessand Doubt over my own head and descended into HELL.
Cloak of Darkness and Doubt
To be a genuine human being requires self-sacrifice. It requires suspension of thinking and judgement. It requires listening, sometimes for hours and hours and hours, as someone else wails in grief and despair due to the circumstance of their life. To be alive, to be a real authentic human being requires give and take… not just take, take, take… and abandoning others when they become a burden to you.
To be a trustworthy person, you have to be a person that another person can TRUST to be there when TIMES are TOUGH. This might require sitting for hours and hours in complete silence just being with another human being who is being crushed by their circumstances. It is only people who are capable of doing this who can be TRUSTED with AUTHORITY. Only people who other people can depend on to BE THERE when YOU NEED THEM can be trusted with the Authority to make decisions for the Greater Good, which might very well require the Sacrifice of Self.
March 2, 2022 Blog Post
Just like what is going on in Ukraine right now… hundreds of thousands of men and women are STANDING UP, STANDING AGAIST BRUTALITY… TO HELL with my MANSPLAYER ex friend who equates the USA with Russia! I STAND WITH UKRAINE! I stand with every person doing creative acts of resistance as well as every person fighting, killing other people to defeat Russia NOW!
This is the stuff my father did. He was never called to serve in a war. He was a listener. He provided compassionate assistance to anyone for as long as they needed it! He was a healer. He gave his time, his money, his life for others. This is how the world is saved… not by abandoning each other when we need each other the most because it takes too much TIME! Time is all we have… and how we value our time decides the type of world we live inside.
Saving the World is not the stuff being hocked on FakeBook or pretty much anywhere you look or turn for security and comfort (not comfortable but for solace and support) in our modern, overly complicated, pyramid-based world.
We made this world out of thoughts! It is a world that forces every civilized person to Hold the Mold of their cult–ture, of their caste, of their race (because the Modern World is extremely racists), of their economic situation, and of their place in the social order (all the hierarchies in which they live and must navigate to work, to play, to live).
The Modern World was built by narcissists to lift up narcissists that is why narcissist are rising to the Top of Likes like frothy bubbles on FakeBook, this is why they rise and hold the highest levels of power in almost every modern human civilization on Earth–each one built out of pyramid schemes. That is why everybody wants to be a narcissist in our world or at least they need to learn to play with narcissistic people and like it. Because that is how you wield POWER in the physical world NOW.
If you aspire to be a narcissist,FakeBook is the place for you! There are so many narcissists playing and sparring with each other on FakeBook. And there are so many echoes (like ME) attracted to all the glittery, sparkly thoughts, ideas, wishes, and dreamsthe narcissists spin. But, they are simply spinning hollow holonic nests of dead and dying thoughts. And the spinning of these expiring, nesting thoughts creates a vortex that has a suck. And if you get sucked into one of these vortex (most often it is one of your own making), you are heading straight down to HELL.
I knew what was happening to me, inside and outside of me, 6 years ago. And, The Dodo knew that I had pulled the Cloak of Darkness and Dark over my head. The Dodo knew I did this to myself, but the Dodo did not judge… he was just there providing glimmering specks of creative imagination, LIGHT—sparks of light (but not thinking light), that were guiding me through HELL.
And the Dodo was the one thing that Mansplayer didn’t want me to have. He told me to give up the Dodo, to stop drawing him!!! And, I did stop drawing him, but I also stopped following the Mansplayer. But I was still in HELL; however now, without my guide, the dumb, stupid Dodo! HELL is a place of our own making... HELL is where you doubt yourself! Doubt is the Dark Force!
From a blog published in May of 2021
In this old post where I wonder if Collective Transformation is possible, I provide a list and links to all the wonderful people I was meeting on Facebook 6 years ago. I cannot recommend any of these people today. Not the artists, musicians, or writers who are listed, but the people who made me DOUBT myself. These people I cannot recommend.
These people know who they are. They are the ones playing at DOING something to SAVE the WORLD. But they can’t even SAVE THEMSELVES much less take a MOMENT in their very busy days to HELP anyone else who is drowning.
“OH NO!” You’ll hear them yell. “I can’t stop. You’ll slow me down! You’re too much of a burden in this state of despair. I’m the only one who can SEE more, RUN faster, TRAVEL farther than ALL the REST!! I’m the only one who can SAVE the WORLD!!!!”
All of them yell this. Mansplayers and Womansplayers, there are hundreds of thousands of them all yelling different version of this chant night and day…telling you (begging you) to follow them! But the only place you are going to go if you follow them is down because without the super powers of kindness, compassion, love… these people, all of them, are just hypoallergenichollow holonic nesters spinning around and around a vortex of their own making, drilling deeper and deeper into the darkest parts of themselves on streams of endless thoughts.
You are MONSTERS…you people who pretended to care about me and then abandoned me when I really needed a helping hand. You, the ones who treated me as if I were the contagion, while in reality it is you suffering from the most prolific pandemic of our MODERN time: Narcissism and Supreme Ignorance created by OVERTHINKING. This is the Greatest EVIL of our TIME. We are all vulnerable to it but some fight it off better than others.
Signs You’re Dealing With an Evil Person | 3,150,085 views Sep 5, 2020 (and more and more people are dabbling in the DARK TRIAD of psychological disorders)
I don’t know how I survived this time. It lasted for more than 6 years! But the story that my very dear friend from college told me about her suicide attempt somehow stopped me from mine. Today, I don’t think Collective Transformation is possible, even though this is what my story is about. The one I have been writing since 2012.
Have a GREAT DAY! And, remember, GO FOR IT! Follow your passion and whatever you do, keep moving, don’t stop!
Satan’s Sister | Moonrunner by Dance With the Dead
Jonar Sabilano [as well as reported by 
