What if all conventional advice is bad advice?
We don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world. Yet we have enjoyed this 40-year bull market in bonds, populations raging up to 8 billions, a permanent plateau of American Order ambrosia. And so we thought everyone was the same, that all peoples follow some rational expectations theorem. That the parochial universalism of the American heartland was the final human eschaton.
But this monistic worldview does not answer the question of what one ought to do. Our prosperity concealed our “oughts” from view. Timeless and eternal “truths“ do not help humanity create, nor then pay its enormous debts. Only the one-time, historically unique insights and productive endeavors do. What makes sense for us to do right here right now in 2023? Conventional bromides are never targeted for this. The things that matter are the things that are divergent and original, not the things that are mainstream deconstructions of the monistic.
What matters for our time? What matters for this current state of technology? What matters for the current state of the prevailing worldview?
The conceit of all conceits is that deferring to the crowd and creating dependency on the crowd’s interests can itself elevate the dynamic nature of the crowd, not further stultify and calcify it. This hubristic conceit is embodied in the permanence and persistence of the Epimethean personality and behavior is a characteristic of Zeus’ hold on the cosmos. The conceit is that inertia and gravity are the only cosmic forces when in fact, they plainly are not.
For the paradox of the crowd is that this hubris is both bizarre, but by definition, also common and normal. The conceit morphs into an ideology built around bundling more and more individuals into the crowded theater, all of whom more and more dependent on the success of those calcified interests, and the ideology becomes cartelized. The ideology becomes the conspiracy.
The ideology acts as a cover or a front for a racket for a cartel. It’s nothing more than a bundle of conventional bromides packaged to stand up plausible deniability around one’s membership in the cartel.
Cartels work best when the economic good that is being cartelized has an inelastic demand, such that withholding supply generates rising prices proportionally more than the decrease in quantity sold, and thus higher profitability nonetheless. Cartels can only be organized if a good is necessary. Oil is an example. In the case of our world today, though, this economic good is instead the essential aspect of the human enterprise: forethought. Forethought is the essential ingredient in profit. Forethought has been cartelized. Supplies of forethought are purposefully constrained by an ever-densifying nexus of socialist statism and traditionalism – all the -isms which feed on bromide.
Alas, “people aren’t built for infantile satiation. They are built for truthful adventure.”
-Peterson.
The global bond collapse is a slow-motion car crash. Most are still in shock or still numb from the hangover of the 40-year uninterrupted bull market. Consumerism, debt-fueled strategies, and government budgets are all evaporating.
The American generation of 1950 to 2030 lashed their economic lives to the liquidation of the capital value of Western civilization. Mortgaging capital surpluses, financial and cultural, that they inherited, caused the collapse of creativity and curiosity and a collapse of independent agency, and drastically constrained the supply of forethought. They lived and breathed the unconsidered assumption of the permanent stability in the status quo, calcified by fields of ambrosia. Addiction to bromides and reliance on official reports for “the truth” is collapsing as well. A population pathologically geared to suppressed interest rates cannot comprehend or translate monism into other populations which they have forced to take the other side of the trade. Especially because these other populations are by default geared for high interest rates and even higher discount rates.
Polarity is inverting from “all-is-one“ monism. Hard cash, raw equity, unmortgaged collateral rule the New Age. But vastly more powerful than the collateral itself are agile attitudes, creative, independent agency, heterodox confidence, and muscular pioneering psychology. This psychology, worldview, and poetic-archetypal thinking about nature of technology, finance, and cultural union is emerging as the single most valuable good. Its power is in its unconventional “ought”, its requirement of us to develop and adhere to an individuated ethos. And it cannot be cartelized.
The 10 Commandments
As far as conventional advice is concerned, take the 10 Commandments. Are they moral because they are commandments? Or are they moral because they are moral? And is the commander one who latches on to what is already moral, but claims those things are moral instead because he says so? Is this an exercise in self-aggrandizement hitching onto the gravitas of something that is already true? Is this a prototypical version of the way which bolsheviks constantly work to change the meanings of words in order to co-opt the gravitas of the previous meaning into the new contrived and phony meaning? In 3,000 years don’t we ask why something moral would require commands?
The thing is that Man knows instinctively that orthodoxy causes collapse. The supine among us are willing to play along wagering that the status quo ambrosia field will last long enough for us to reach retirement. But we overgraze the commons, selectively ignoring that that orthodoxy is required for our colonization. The human instinct understands that orthodoxy serves to drive populations, which distribute in a standard distribution around an economic interest, into an ideology which instead compels them to distribute into a Cauchy distribution. The more peeked, the more cartelized.
Many more times the number huddle around the mean as would otherwise, and the left and right tail are evacuated of both creative agency and of the town criers. Then maliciously, the cartelized bromide-eaters scapegoat the creators and town criers for refusing the colonization.
Distributed Cognition, Distributed Beauty
Mankind is built for distributed thinking, and distributed agency. Mankind is built for negotiating the many polar, indestructible forces in the nature of the cosmos. Monists, like flat earthers, contrive that all the world is merely gravity and inertia. That because the plain “many-ness” of things is not understandable by any one person, it must mean that some singular entity with the power of “otherness” yet does command the “many-ness.” A heuristic is constructed to make the multitudes into a single palatable thing: The One.
The One is a shorthand for commonalities among the many. But the meta-meaning and even power of The One is nonetheless derived from the prior “many-ness” it serves to represent/replace.
Colonization
And where does the monist get his ambrosia?
By ritualistically murdering the scapegoat after he has been colonized by the projection of the perpetrator’s wrongdoing, and has also succumbed to internalizing the projection as introjection as an inductee into the cartel, the blood sacrifice of the scapegoat can restore the perpetrator’s humanity, personhood and wholeness to himself. These mechanics are exactly the same, whether in interpersonal abuse, Marxist statism, or in the ordeal of Job.
This means of extracting this bizarre type of complicity is a source of supply for the sacrifice. It not only manufactures the temporary experience of the sacrificer regaining a sense of wholeness, but also ushers in a kind of ritualistic rebirth. The same is true for bolshevik purges and perpetual revolution, the murderous cycle of abuse and discard. A town crier or a creator, reminding us of the “many-ness” of things, is to endure a blood sacrifice for the reconstitution of the bromide-eating monistic commune.
Monism, just like the bromides of the bond market, is collapsing before our eyes. Government CBDCs, in league with traditionalist ideologies, are the ritual knives.
The West
The West is in a Do-or-Die moment. A new philosophy, a new aesthetic and poetic vision of the world, of right tail heterodoxy, is the liberator. It is like the Egyptian archetypal tale of Osiris. Osiris, the God of inertia, the hierarchy, and the aegis of the skies, Osiris crumbled when his brother, The Adversary, poisoned his ear. From Osiris’ fragmented pieces, Isis, his wife birthed Horace, the hawk, the spirit of disembodied vision.
Horace could not only see over the horizon, beyond all the world visible to us, but could also peer right down into the granular, distributed nature of things. His lesson demonstrates that all the things of the known world, of the local pasture, primarily serve to occlude the nature of reality, not illuminate it. For Horace can not only look over the horizon past the multitude of things, but also into deep time. He is the spirit of disembodied forethought. And also, critically, the spirit extremely low time preference. He is also disembodied precision and acute measurement. And in his disembodied nature, he is also egoless. He descends into Hades to resurrect Osiris and build the new kingdom.
The Adversary has whispered into the ear of the West. Monistic bolsheviks and traditionalists seek ritual blood sacrifices to preserve their bromide eating and rent seeking. But the pyramid is crumbling nonetheless. The West is called to a supernova of confidence, to truthful adventure, where strength is no longer found in commonly held suppositions, but instead in individuated heterodox capacity and unapologetic expansiveness.
This is the ideology of the Free World.
-RC