An Immolationist in Chapel Perilous
Please don't burn yourself alive
As this is written, a few hours ago a man stood outside the Manhattan courthouse where Trump’s trial is proceeding, threw an armful of pamphlets in the air, and set himself on fire.
Everyone’s first thought, of course, was to wonder why he did it, what it means, who takes the blame, how does this affect my affinity group. Was this a leftist, furious that Trump had not yet been locked up for colluding with Russia to destroy Our Democracy and usher in a dark new era of theocratic Christian fascism? Was this a MAGA-hat wearing QAnon lunatic, enraged at the political prosecution of his tribal chieftain by the illegitimate crypto-communists who stole the election on behalf of their paymasters in the Chinese Communist Party?
The immolationist was soon identified as Maxwell Azzarello, a Florida native who’d travelled to NYC a week before, without telling his family. If you follow the link below, you can see Azzarello singing a song, to the tune of Glory, Glory: “Time to start a revolution/you’ve got nothing to lose.”
Pay attention to those eyes. They are the eyes of a man who has decided. A man who is utterly confident that he knows the score. A man who has nothing left to lose, and will not be dissuaded from throwing that nothing away.
Here’s the pamphlet Azzarello was distributing:
Its cover reads:
The True History of the World (Haunted Carnival Edition)
“We’ll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes in false” – CIA Director Bill Casey, 1981
An OCCUPY RETURNS booklet
Our only goal: Abolish our criminal government and replace it with one that serves all
Based on the song and the pamphlet, it’s impossible to resolve that burning question everyone wanted an answer to: is Azzarello a leftist, or a rightist? QAnon, or BlueAnon? The rhetoric, the preoccupations, these are all just ambiguous enough that one can see whatever one wants.
Soon his manifesto turned up, right here on Substack. The title is not particularly subtle. It is getting a lot of attention, as you might expect, and as was certainly Azzarello’s intent.
The manifesto is clarifying as to Azzarello’s alignment: he is neither right, nor left.
He is a schizo.
I don’t say that to be dismissive or cruel. It’s simply my diagnosis.
Azzarello’s thesis begins by talking about cryptocurrency, which he characterizes as an intricate ponzi scheme enacted by billionaires to take over and then crash the global economy, with the goal of trapping humanity in a planetary technocratic prison state. Everyone is in on it: the Clintons, the Bushes, Epstein, Musk, Thiel, and of course Trump (although the Giant Orange Ego is mentioned less than others). As part of his crusade against the crypto ponzi apocalypse, Azzarello launched a quixotic lawsuit against the Clintons and most crypto companies.
He then connects all of this to Harvard, and via Harvard to The Simpsons (this being, he says, where the show’s writers primarily come from). The Simpsons’ role was to brainwash us, via a sort of revelation of the method, into accepting what was coming, what indeed has been planned since the 1980s if not earlier, when global elites realized that financialized industrial capitalism was unsustainable due to resource limitations and climate change. In order to keep us distracted and off balance while they plunder us, they divide us against ourselves along identitarian lines, and then cultivate continual hysteria about climate change, AI, vaccines, COVID, and so forth, keeping the populace in a state of agitation and discord.
The most disquieting thing about Azzarello’s worldview is not that it is crazy, but that it is not so very thematically different from the way that I, and many others, see the world. A chill went up my spine when I saw the Bill Casey quote: I brought it up in conversation with some friends just a day or two ago. Leave the specific details about cryptocurrencies and The Simpsons and so forth aside, and consider simply the broad outlines of the picture he paints: a parasitic globalist class, manoeuvring the species into perpetual financial servitude; the media as a mind control system; rancorous societal factionalism as a classic divide et impera strategy. You will own nothing, etc. The broad outlines of Azzarello’s manifesto are all terrifyingly familiar to anyone operating inside dissident spaces.
It is, of course, the specific details of his manifesto that render it schizo. Cryptocurrencies are a pimple on the left butt-cheek of the Leviathan that is the global derivatives bubble. The Simpsons had a good run, and was massively influential, but hasn’t been culturally relevant for decades. While it is technically possible that the opposition of Trump, Musk, and Thiel on the one hand, against the Bushes, Clintons, and Epstein on the other, is all kayfabe (as Azzarello characterizes it), rolling together every single elite into one vast cabal strikes me, at least, as being insufficiently granular.
And yet even those individual details, when you hold them at a distance and squint at their general thrust, don’t seem that crazy. There’s no question that the ruling class colludes, cooperating across political, institutional, and international boundaries to guide events in the direction it wants. Both news and entertainment media are quite obviously tools of social engineering. While cryptocurrency seems unlikely as an avenue for consolidating control of the global financial market, the financial analyst David Rogers Webb has made the case in The Great Taking that regulatory changes that have been quietly implemented over the last two decades will be triggered when the derivatives bubble pops, leading to the globalist elites acquiring ownership over every financialized asset on the planet, including your bank account.
It seems to me that Azzarello’s intuition was telling him something real about the state of the world – something urgent and dangerous: that we are at a historical inflection point, on the verge of something potentially very bad. In an attempt to make sense of this broader gestalt, his rational mind then attempted to assemble the puzzle pieces he found lying around on the Internet into something that more or less fit.
You see this all the time these days. Take the Q-boomer convinced that the COVID vaccines were vectors for graphene oxide nanochips that would turn everyone into zombies controlled by 5G antennae. This is probably nonsense, but it’s also the case that the vaxx was bad mojo. Their intuition was telling them to avoid the jab, their rational mind tried to explain why and came to some loopy conclusions in the process, but if in the end they avoided the jab, that’s all that really matters. If you hear a branch snap in a dark forest and your mind throws up an image of a manticore when it’s really just a bog-standard bear, the important thing is that you run fast enough that you don’t get eaten.
Sometimes the schizo is simply crazy. Deep furrows have been run into their minds by some psychotic idée fixe – talk to them for even a short time, and you find them repeating the same nonsensical babble, circling around some obsessive concept, drawing them ever deeper into madness like a sailor caught in a whirlpool. But sometimes, the schizo operates in a sort of shamanic mode, their right-brained intuition picking up gestalt understandings of reality that their left brains are helpless to interpret. The result is a different kind of babble: one in which the individual pieces make no sense at all, and are often flatly wrong, but which nevertheless have been arranged into a semi-coherent picture that is not so far off from the truth, and may even provide deep insight into it, may even be more true than how most people see the world.
We’re going to see more of this, I’m afraid. Not just self-immolations, although this is our second one this year, but more emotional breakdowns, more psychotic breaks into madness, more erratic and dangerous behaviour. Sometimes it will manifest as mass shootings, sometimes as assassinations, sometimes as public suicides. Sometimes simply incoherent screaming. Sometimes it will just be weird.
There are many reasons for this.
Social stress is at the breaking point. There’s war and rumours of war: regional, global, and civil. The economy is falling apart: high interest rates, high inflation, low wages, low employment, a housing bubble that’s rendered housing unaffordable. The Gini coefficient is off the charts. Decades of unprecedented levels of internal migration and international immigration have shattered communities. Relations between the sexes have never been worse. Confidence in institutions is universally abysmal. People are atomized, alone and lonely, unable to trust and therefore disconnected from those around them, while simultaneously frightened and anxious.
At the same time there’s the evolutionary hypernovelty of our environment. Genetically modified phood fertilized, raised, and manufactured from industrial biochemicals we’ve never eaten before. Psychoactive drugs, recreational and prescribed, affecting peoples’ minds. Synthetic hormones affecting our behaviour. Microplastics in our cells, affecting who knows what. Drones in the skies. Robots in the factories. Cars that drive themselves. Social media algorithms eating our attention and digesting our sanity. Artificial intelligence eating the Internet.
Ideological unity is broken. The ruling class’ efforts at achieving epistemic security by making war on mis-, dis-, and mal-information1 only serve to engender deeper paranoia amongst a mistrustful populace that has learned to assume that the truth is most likely the opposite of whatever the authorities have said. It does not help that we really have been lied to, systematically, about almost everything, from history to science, from anthropology to nutrition. The authoritative sources we’ve relied on to parse truth for us have been revealed, one by one and then, during COVID, suddenly all at once, to be deeply, dangerously, and malignantly unreliable. You are without a trace of irony better off getting information from your mutuals than you are from legacy media.
The inevitable result is that we have become ontologically fractured. Our collective picture of reality is a shattered mirror, a million different fragments in which we can’t even agree on basic facts. All of us are left trying to assemble something coherent out of this mess, and frequently cutting our fingers on the shards as we pick them up and try to fit them together. Now that generative AI deepfakes are in the picture, it only gets worse: every digital image or video you see could be a fake. The only way to know something happened is to see it with your own eyes; everything else reverts to hearsay and rumour, as it has been for most of our species’ history.
We’re living in what Robert Anton Wilson called Chapel Perilous – a liminal conceptual twilight in which we can never be quite certain whether what we see is natural, supernatural, or a product of our own fevered imaginations.
We’re on edge, unsure what to believe, and unsure what’s coming next.
We’ve done the species-level equivalent of eating a fistful of peyote caps before going skydiving over a warzone in a country we’ve never even heard of.
Of course we’re going crazy. Who wouldn’t?
Some of us will go too crazy, and they will do crazy stuff, becoming a danger to themselves, to others, or to both. Maybe to you, maybe to those you love. Maybe the ones who go crazy will be the ones you love. Maybe it will be you.
Maybe it will be me.
Maybe it already is.
It’s good to ask yourself that, sometimes.
Maintaining some approximation of psychological stability in the coming years is going to be a challenge. There are, I think, certain principles that can be applied. Keeping yourself grounded, touching grass as it were. Staying connected to the actual human beings around you, not only online, but talking to the people physically there with you. Focusing on what and who you can see and touch, directly. Basic stuff.
Stay in touch with your intuition. Trust it. In a rapidly changing world filled with unreliable information, your rational faculties will struggle to keep up. Understanding will frequently be elusive. Gut feelings, however, are instantaneous, and more often correct than not.
The most important thing, I think, is epistemic. Don’t get too wrapped up in any one narrative. Don’t become too emotionally invested in any one, specific thing as The Truth. Emphasize the question over the answer, adopting the zetetic stance in which ontological ambiguity is not the problem, but the point. Maintaining an emotional distance from any given narrative or truth-claim that comes your way, treating it like a radioactive spent fuel rod, holding it at arm’s length, behind lead shielding – this, I think, can go a long way to keep from getting sickened by meme poisoning.
In a hypernovel environment, you need to maintain a flexible mind, because things will change very quickly, and you will understand very little of what you see. Remind yourself that very little of what you come across is likely to be completely accurate, that even your high-level picture of reality may be mistaken ... and that the same is true of everyone else. In most cases there are multiple possible interpretations to any given fact, event, or phenomenon – don’t choose between models too hastily. Be willing to play with ideas, but not to become their playthings. The point is not to take things too seriously, to always maintain a sense of humour regarding your own, probably inevitable, paranoia.
Reports are that Azzarello survived, but is in critical condition. I’m not sure whether to hope for his recovery or not; if he lives, his injuries will be severe, and he’ll be severely disfigured for life. Either way this is going to be incredibly difficult for his family. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers ... and if your chain of reasoning is leading you to the conclusion of ‘and therefore, public suicide’, spare a thought for how this will affect the ones you love, and don’t do it.
Thank you for reading my scattered thoughts on this weird and tragic episode. If you found value here, please
for all the good it will do, given the platform wars. Much more importantly, you should
to make sure you don’t miss the next Postcard From Barsoom, which I hope will be on a more evergreen, and less fraught subject. I was supposed to be finishing an entirely different essay TWICE this week, before getting distracted with current events. I’ve collected some of my best work in the below post, organized thematically to help you find the writing you’ll be most interested by.
Of Science and Shitposting
When I started writing Postcards From Barsoom two years ago, I was in a pretty different place in my life. At the time I was still thoroughly immersed in my career as an academic scientist, something I’d devoted over a decade of my life to at that point. There was a lot to enjoy about that vocation.
Those being, respectively: untrue things that are inconvenient for the ruling class which have been spread accidentally; untrue things that are inconvenient for the ruling class which have been spread deliberately; true things that are inconvenient for the ruling class which have been spread for any reason.
Nietzche had the profound realization that you touched upon - that the foundations of logic are ultimately based upon error. It is our instincts, not the truth, that cause us to judge the sound in the bush to be a scary predator. Those who wanted to deny their instincts to learn the truth about the cause of the sound did not survive to pass on their genes. All of us alive today have inherited a fundamentally flawed logic. Our challenge then is to learn to hold sensory input in a superposition, so to speak, for as long as possible to allow all the wavefunctions to interfere constructively and destructively leaving only the truth as the final observable. This is quite difficult for a lone individual to do, as it requires one to deny their instincts and potentially be devoured by the monster in the bush. However, if we stick together and attempt to let the information flow through us without passing judgement, then even if there is a monster in the bush, it cannot devour us all, and by revealing itself to many we gain even more invaluable information. The key, I think, is to let the information flow and let nature work its magic.
Very nice post, John, and you hit on many good points about this incident. Here are some additional thoughts I had about it:
- The guy was like 4'5" tall, ouch: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1781410697882034438
- Owen Benjamin today on his podcast correctly claimed that anything other than scorn and mockery for such acts fuels future copycats, much like school shooters copied Columbine because of the media attention. Committing violence to try to promote a message — including against oneself — is the mark of an omega tier, low IQ idiot. It’s like a child crying out for attention because they lack the basic skills necessary to communicate or persuade others, as Curtis Yarvin has correctly pointed out in the past. Same thing goes for Aaron Bushnell. Such scorn and mockery is necessary to lower the chances of copycats.
- The choice of self-immolation is a strange one. It's incredibly painful and there's a chance they might survive and then live in Hell thereafter. Contrast this with the suicide of Mitchell Hiesman, who killed himself to draw attention to his 1,000 page Suicide Note (but at least he did it in a painless way; still retarded).
- A cognitive infiltration strategy was articulated by Cass Sunstein in 2008 in an article titled “Conspiracy Theories” for the Journal of Political Philosophy, where he made a radical proposal: “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.”…they defined “cognitive infiltration” as a program “whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.” Cognitive infiltration on social media is heavily boosted via bots who push arguments about, for example, the glass dome and the firmament (flat earth arguments) to distract people and lead them into harmless political dead ends.
- Note that Klaus Schwab warned his co-elites: “Be prepared for an angrier world” (as a result of the 2030 agenda): youtube.com/watch?v=LJTnkzl3K64
- Westerners are *really* not prepared for harder times given how steeped they are in wealth, complacency, and nihilism. This isn't new either: in The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn wrote that basically no one killed themselves in the gulag *except* for westerners, who simply mentally couldn't handle the total lack of materialism. Westerners are going to be in for a *much* harder road ahead -- it's going to get much worse and one can expect a lot more mental illness triggered events to occur (many of them egged on by the globohomo security elite, of course).
- This brings to mind Anders Breivik quoting heavily from European blogger Fjordman in his manifesto (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjordman ); Fjordman's blogging hobby was basically ruined as a result. It's important to be consciously aware and to police one's readers if they seem "off" or "crazy". There is always a concern that a future nutjob might be used as an excuse by globohomo to clamp down on free speech on Substack otherwise.