Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare
World War Three is being fought in your mind, and it's the best glowjob you've ever had.
Warfare is fundamentally about breaking the enemy’s will to fight. This can be done with violence, or without it – before the fight even starts, through raw intimidation. Working from this understanding, military theorists have divided the history of warfare into five generations.
First Generation Warfare, abbreviated 1GW, was war as it was waged from the dawn of civilization up through roughly the Civil War. This style of conflict involved massed line infantry, equipped with spears, pikes, swords, or line-of-sight ranged weapons such as longbows, crossbows, or muskets. The basic tactic was to draw up two large groups of armed men, bring them into close contact, and have them hack at one another until one side grew demoralized by the slaughter, at which point their line would break and the real slaughter could begin.
Industrial or Second Generation Warfare (2GW) brought rifled firearms, machine-guns, and indirect artillery. Men could now be killed at a great distance, without ever seeing the enemy. Camouflage, concealment, and cover became the keys to victory. Its heyday was roughly from the Civil War to the Great War.
Mechanized warfare or 3GW arrived with the internal combustion engine and powered flight. Tactics now depended on speed and manoeuvrability. It dawned with the Second World War and reached its apogee with the invasion of Iraq.
Mechanized warfare created an overwhelming advantage for large industrial states. Small states and non-state actors responded with 4GW, which can be thought of as televisual warfare – combat via propaganda. This is war as fought with cameras and media distribution networks. It is guerrilla warfare via weaponized morality: using the enemy’s own military actions against it by showing the consequences of war for one’s civilian population to the enemy civilian population. Bait the enemy into killing babies, then ask them how many more babies they’re willing to murder. Think Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
The response to 4GW is 5GW – warfare by psyop, utilizing misinformation and sentiment engineering. Its characteristic weapons platform is the social network. Where 4GW seeks to use the enemy’s own morality against it, 5GW seeks to change that morality, to transform the enemy’s inner nature, getting the enemy to attack themselves for you, to surrender with open arms and smiles on their faces ... ideally, without the enemy even realizing that they’re under attack.
This video is also a psyop.
An excellent introduction to the 5GW campaign that is being waged against us as we speak was provided by Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz.
has provided it on his blog, complete with transcript: The End of Democracy: "What I’m Describing is Military Rule". This is worth watching in full. It provides a cogent, lucid description of what’s been happening to our precious networks over the last decade.Benz argues that until 2014, a free and open Internet was seen by the Western spook state as a powerful tool of foreign policy. Uncensorable many-to-many telecommunications networks could be leveraged to foment and guide colour revolutions against ‘authoritarian’ regimes, meaning any country that was not yet fully on board with the rules-based international new world order of post-Cold War liberal democracy. Thus, in the early oughts we saw the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and the 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. The subsequent development of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in the mid-oughts, followed by their rapid, mass global adoption, set the stage for these tactics to be taken to the next level, with the Arab Spring spreading across the Middle East in the early 2010s, toppling governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and destabilizing Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Sudan, and especially Syria.
The zenith of this strategy as an offensive foreign policy implement came in 2014, when the Euro-Maidan protests unseated the elected government of Ukraine, prizing the post-Soviet rump state away from the political orbit of Mother Russia.
Russia responded to America’s 5GW triumph in Ukraine immediately, swooping in and annexing the Crimean peninsula. Russia’s geopolitical imperative was clear – no Crimea, no access to the Black Sea – as was its moral justification, the population of the Crimea being almost entirely ethnically Russian. There was also a democratic justification: the Crimean populace held a referendum, and chose overwhelmingly to rejoin their traditional homeland, rather than remain at the tender mercies of the dubious new regime in ‘Keev’ and its Neo-Nazi battalions.
NATO didn’t buy the referendum results at all. Having spent the last two decades knocking over one country after another by destabilizing their governments with carefully orchestrated popular uprisings, their assumption was that the FSB had finally figured out how to play the game. That meant that an open Internet was now a strategic vulnerability: if Moscow could brainwash adjacent populations into rejecting the obvious superiority of the Hegemony at the End of History, maybe they could do the same to the West’s domestic populations1.
The next few years provided apparently abundant justification for the Regime’s paranoia: Brexit; Trump, Bolsonaro, and most recently Milei; populist opposition to the European migrant invasion; repeated failures to gather support for an invasion of Syria (while Russia was defending the Assad government); stubbornly persistent, widespread skepticism towards both the supposed scientific consensus regarding climate change, as well as the policies supposedly intended to prevent it; and most recently, the push-back against the pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions mandated in the name of mitigating SARS-CoV-2. In each case the mantra from the Regime has been the same: failures on the part of the consumer-residents of Western states to show appropriate enthusiasm for the Regime’s preferred policies and favoured political candidates could not possibly be organic, but could only be explained as results of misinformation seeded by Russian influence operations, Putler’s troll farms hacking Our Democracy with bot swarms.
The Regime responded with the Great Shuttening.
Natural language processing enabled real-time sentiment analysis, while social graphs provided the ability to analyze network structures in granular detail, identifying the key nodes that generated and disseminated information2. Once the discursive sociograms were characterized, they could be pruned: a throttled keyword here, a shadowbanned account there, periodic ban waves to clear out the foot soldiers and isolate thought leaders from supporters, or vice versa. In tandem with this pruning of the social graph, assets were deployed. Bot-amplified shill swarms flooded the zone with Regime-friendly talking points, while pied piper influencers hammered home COINTELPRO distractions that would lead their hapless followers into self-marginalization, split networks by fomenting infighting, or guide supporters towards Regime-approved policy goals.
At the same time that the technologies developed for foreign counterinsurgency were being deployed on the home front, the social engineering tools honed in the colour revolutions were being turned against the domestic population as well. Black Lives Matter is nothing more than a rolling colour revolution carried out by the Regime against itself by working up an army of useful idiots into unreasoning animal rage via electronic agitprop. Endless repetition of police brutality videos created the perception that POCs were being genocided by secret Klansmen infesting the police departments, when the reality is that police shootings of unarmed black men are vanishingly rare (less than 20 a year), comparable to the number of whites killed under similar circumstances, and insofar as the ratio is higher for blacks, well, that’s because there’s another ratio that’s much higher.
The primary accomplishment of Blacks Looting and Murdering has been the triumph of Demoralization, Infiltration, and Expropriation within every institution – a new dispensation in which loyalty to the Regime overrides basic competence as the primary factor determining whether one will be admitted to a university or hired into a position of power and responsibility in either the private or public sector.
BLM isn’t the only, or even the most significant, success of the Regime’s 5GW campaign against its own citizens. The COVID psyop and the 2020 (s)election were both dramatic home front victories. Both of them relied extensively on the same playbook and toolset described above; both were largely successful in consolidating Regime power.
That the Regime is waging war against its own subject population is not metaphorical. 5GW is not a mere MMORPG. There have already been real-world, material consequences to this psychic assault, and they have the potential to become drastically worse. As
described in The Future They've Chosen For Us, elite opinion is firmly in favour of an across-the-board 85% reduction in the standard of living of Western countries – meaning you will not fly, you will not eat meat, you will not heat your home, you will not own your home, you will not buy new clothes, you will not own cars. This is indistinguishable from the effect of losing a major war; in fact, the consequences of defeat in war are not usually so dire. Combine this with the mass flood of illegal migrants into both Europe and across America’s undefended Mexican border, along with the relentless stream of legal immigrants being injected into every Western country, both openly intended by the same elite to displace White populations. From a demographic standpoint, mass immigration and armed invasion are indiscernible: both result in one lineage being replaced by another. POSIWID: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. If the ends pursued by the Regime are functionally identical to the ends of warfare, then the Regime is waging war.
A recent piece from
shows what this looks like at the level of an individual state: Germany announces wide-ranging plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents, in order to better control the "thought and speech patterns" of its own people. Germany is essentially an American vassal state: while the DDR might have been liberated from the USSR after it withdrew and then collapsed, the Bundesrepublik is still very much under American occupation, ruled on behalf of Washington by satraps who maintain a fig leaf of democratic sovereignty. eugyppius’ piece is a close-up, state-level view of what the German branch of the globalist entity has planned for the next phase of the Great Shuttening. ‘Right-wing extremists’, which simply means ‘opponents of the Regime’, are to have their lives interfered with in a myriad of ways. They’re to be excised entirely from social media. They’re to be banned from international travel. Their businesses – restaurants, web development agencies, trucking firms, whatever – are to be regulated into bankruptcy via weaponization of the supposedly apolitical arms of the administrative state. They’re to be denied banking services, and thus frozen out of the economy, unable to transact. If necessary, their political parties – in the case of Germany, the populist Alternative für Deutschland – are to be banned and forcibly dissolved.This type of lawfare and administrative harassment is not specific or original to Germany (nor, of course, does eugyppius claim that it is). American authorities have been punishing dissidents with the no-fly list for years; many have suggested that the no-fly list has been an effective means of pressuring dissident thought leaders to turn Federal informant or agent. Travel restrictions were also used as a pressure tactic in Canada, where Canadian citizens who refused the gene therapy injections were prohibited from boarding aircraft or boats; since the US border was closed to the unshot, medical dissidents were de facto prevented from leaving Canada entirely. Bank account freezes were used against the Canadian Freedom Convoy, and debanking has also been used in the United Kingdom, most infamously in the case of UKIP leader Nigel Farage, although he is far from the only case. As to mobilization of the regulatory apparatus, the hostile use of the Internal Revenue Service against Republican-aligned organizations and businesses was established practice under the Obama administration.
Clampdowns on speech are also being actively pursued throughout the Western world. In the United States, where the First Amendment provides nominal protection for speech, the Biden administration is attempting to imprison Douglass Mackey under the pretext of ‘election interference’. Twitter anon L0m3z provides the infuriating details of this farcical prosecution in If Memes Are Illegal, All Speech Will Become Illegal. Mackey has been indicted under a law developed for use against the Ku Klux Klan for making a joke that, the state is arguing, deterred people from voting; even more absurd is that the Florida resident was dragged into the unfriendly venue of a New York City court, with the state’s excuse being, essentially, that Twitter is available in New York City. If Mackey’s appeal fails, the Regime will have set the precedent that essentially any speech can prosecuted as ‘election interference’, in whichever venue the Regime feels will be friendliest to its case.
Anglosphere countries that lack Constitutional protections for speech are seeing the development of legal frameworks designed to ban ‘hate speech’, a vaguely defined term that means ‘speech the Regime hates’. In the United Kingdom it’s become common for the police to knock on people’s doors to give them a talking-to for online ‘non-crime hate incidents’, while many have been dragged into court for crossing this line. In Ireland, the government has introduced a bill that would make it illegal merely to have ‘hateful content’ on one’s hard drive. As
describes in Earth to Canada, the Trudeau government has introduced a bill that will make convictions for online hate speech punishable by life imprisonment.As eugyppius shows with unambiguous quotes from Regime apparat-chicks, all of these measures are quite explicitly intended to fence off discourse in order to control the inner psychic landscape of the population, moulding it into a shape amenable to Regime goals. To take the example of prosecutions for hate speech or election interference, it seems unlikely that the Regime has the resources to remand every malcontent who mouths off on the Internet to Federal custody; instead, the intent is intimidation, making a high-profile example of a few in order to encouragez les autres to preemptively silence themselves.
Curation of the public discourse makes a self-referential parody of democracy: the legitimacy of the Regime nominally rests upon the will of the People, but the will of the People is whatever the Regime wills the people to will. In a sense, this has been the case in industrial technocracies more or less since their inception. Whoever controls the organs of opinion formation – the news and entertainment media, the schools, the universities – controls the mass mind, and therefore controls politics. The openly totalitarian regimes of the Democratic People’s Republics did this blatantly, with direct state management of the press and the academy; the more subtle liberal democracies did this behind the scenes, with nominally independent, private media and universities manipulated via back-channel communications, government grants, intelligence agency inserts (e.g. Project Mockingbird) and so on. The Great Shuttening is partly a reaction to the loss of influence of these legacy institutions, and a panicked attempt to assert control over the unruly many-to-many communications networks that have been displacing them.
Next, consider this meditation from
: The Online Right's Kobayashi Maru Test. The Kobayashi Maru was a deliberately unsolvable simulation used at Starfleet Academy to determine how cadets would react under the pressure of a no-win situation; famously, the only cadet to beat the test was James T. Kirk, who hacked the system when no one was looking and reprogrammed it to make the test winnable – in other words, he cheated. Morgoth suggests that the dissident right may soon find itself in just such a zugzwang, should the Regime get the Great Power War it so evidently desires. In such an environment, the government can invoke a state of exception, and suspend ordinary civil liberties; opposition to the Regime then becomes an existential threat to the nation, no longer a disagreement over policy, but treason.Morgoth then runs through possible responses: openly ally with the enemy; openly align with the Regime; retreat into philosophy, art, and other ‘safe’ subjects; try to stay aloof from it all and pray that a lost war (as it probably will be) will result in elite circulation. All of those options are terrible. The first two come down to allying with enemies either foreign or domestic; both options are morally repugnant. The second two walk a fine line between cowardice and prudence, and offer no particular guarantee of safety. In a total state based on psychic management, everything, from the schlockiest entertainment to the most rarefied philosophy, is at least implicitly political: whether you’re critiquing the latest capeshit on the grounds of gaping plot holes and cardboard character development, or ruminating on Schopenhauer’s conception of the Will as exemplified by the sigma male grindset, you’re guilty of some kind of disloyalty. The Regime is profoundly feminine: it doesn’t matter if you’re cheating cheating on it, you’re emotionally cheating, and that’s the same thing.
Now put the political context aside for a moment and consider
’s The State of the Culture, 2024. Gioia makes the point that traditional entertainment media has been eaten by Big Social. People aren’t reading books or watching movies anymore, and that shows in the negative growth the legacy media giants have been dealing with for years now. Instead, people are glued to their phones, scrolling through infinite timelines that feed their attention the endless little hits of micro-rewards that nucleate the dopamine doom loop.Instead of taking us outside of ourselves for a few hours as we immerse our senses in the lavish visual environment of cinema, or enriching our inner lives with the verdant imaginative landscapes and vividly drawn characters that unfold in our minds’ eyes through the wordcraft of a skilled author, the new cultural model is simply to turn us all into wirehead junkies. Like all drug addicts, Gioia emphasizes, it doesn’t take long to build up a tolerance, past which point the drug doesn’t hit like it used to. It stops making you feel good, in fact it might even make you feel bad, but you feel even worse without it, so you keep coming back. Just one more hit, one more like, one more share, one more viral poast, one more sick burn. C’mon man, I need this. Just to feel normal, just to set me up for the day. Or the next hour. Or the next minute. Just one more tweet, one more selfie, one more thread...
This, Gioia suggests, is at least part of the reason for the shroud of exhausted depression that’s settled over our civilization. Big Social has burned out everyone’s pleasure centres. No one can really feel good anymore. They can’t feel joy, or delight, or passion. All they can do is doomscroll.
Pause to appreciate the sheer, demonic genius of addictive propaganda as a weapon of psychic warfare. The social network lures you in with content, with connectivity, with the thrill of being part of the conversation. Soon enough it hooks you. You can’t live without it. You’re trapped in it. Once you’re jacked in it starts operating on your mind in more specific ways, algorithmic timeline manipulation ensuring certain ideas are continuously pushed into your attentional field, operant conditioning reinforcing narratives with constant hits of dopamine accompanying the regular bursts of exposure. This isn’t state propaganda, it’s just what your friends are saying, and you’re therefore much more receptive; the algorithm’s role is simply to be selective in which of your friends’ posts you see, but most don’t even realize this. You’re not just passively consuming propaganda, you’re actively helping to create and share it, and this powerfully accentuates the effect by seducing you into identifying with it – you’re taking the propaganda in, processing it through your own mind, expressing it in your own words, and thereby taking ownership of it. Meanwhile your attention span is dramatically truncated. You lose the ability to focus on anything for more than a few moments, and your long-term memory begins to atrophy3. This enables the propaganda duty cycle to dilate inwards to a Planck timescale. Narrative pivots that once took years can now be achieved via software updates pushed into your head in a matter of moments.
Our election was hacked by Russia. Our elections are the safest and most secure in history.
COVID-19 is just the flu. COVID-19 is an existential threat.
Masks don’t work. Masks are an effective means of stopping the spread.
Trump’s Operation Warp Speed is recklessly endangering the population by playing fast and loose with medical testing. mRNA vaccination is safe and effective.
Perhaps the best example of cognitive degradation via weaponized social media is not American, but Chinese. TikTok’s algorithm ingests every piece of information it can gather – how long you spend watching a video, how long your thumb pauses before flicking, your browsing history, your search history, your age, your location, the device model you’re using (and how expensive this is, and what this tells them about your socioeconomic status) – and uses this to identify precisely the videos you’ll enjoy, which it proceeds to feed you good and hard, an endless stream of addictive content that gradually dissolves your frontal lobes. Notably, TikTok isn’t used in China: at home, they use Douyin, a heavily regulated version that limits the time kids can spend on the app, and restricts content to educational subject matter. It’s hard to see how this is accidental: if the minds of an adversary’s populace can be boiled into porridge, while the home population is insulated, a state gains a powerful advantage.
You might think that you are immune to all of this. The witless minds of unsuspecting normies are putty in the hands of the algorithm, but you know better – you’re too smart for them, you see through it all. And to a certain degree, you might even be right4. Not everyone is equally hypnotizable.
They’ve got an answer for that. The goats are simply segregated from the sheep, siloed in echo chambers where they can yell at one another all they please, without any danger of their criminal thoughts infecting the rest of the herd. Remember those social graphs, the sentiment analysis algorithms. It’s easy enough to identify normie-adjacent accounts, and prune those connections; simplicity itself to ensure that posts made by incorrigible irredentists will never besmirch the timeline of the oblivious American Griller. This isn’t even necessarily sinister, after all, the normie has no interest in politics or philosophy, he just wants to talk sportsball and Marvel movies and Kylie Minogue ... so that’s what the algo shows him. It gives him exactly what he wants, and thereby ensures he never sees anything he isn’t supposed to.
And you, dear dissident? Why, you’re there on the platform too, aren’t you? Scrolling your timeline, liking and sharing and responding in your little echo chamber. Just as much a junkie as the rest of them, your attention every bit as locked into the dopamine doom loop. The weaponized algo draws you in, classifies you as one of the bad ones, sequesters you with the rest of the bad accounts, and then proceeds to feed you your favourite brand of poison. It puts you under quarantine, and lets you think you’re changing the world, even as it neutralizes you.
There are even darker potentialities.
The data gathered by the social networks means that there’s a psychological model for every participant: what they believe, what their personality traits are, who they know. Combine that with the geolocation data gathered from your phones, never more than a few feet away from your eager, anxious fingers. Now let’s say things get dire and desperate for our beloved Regime. Effeminate foxes they may be, preferring subterfuge to naked force, but events force their hand. Order 66 goes out. Quadrotor swarms are despatched across the world, a Night of the Loud Drones – although it doesn’t take a whole night, it’s all over in minutes. A few hundred thousand small and precisely targeted explosions, and the most troublesome dissidents are excised from the body politic.
Sure, there will be shock and horror among the people. But the software update will follow up immediately after: these were all terrorists, fifth columnists, agents of Russia, China, and Iran, racists and sexists and homophobes, climate-change deniers and antivaxxers, removing them was necessary as a public health measure. And a few days later, another software update: Drone Passover never happened. See, all those people are still posting on social media. Their accounts are still active! Everyone saying they’re all dead (and that we murdered them) is a conspiracy theorist.
Remarkable what you can do with Large Language Models.
Or maybe they’ll simply claim that the people they murdered were innocent casualties of Russian Orthodox terrorists, and that much stricter controls are now necessary For the Safety of Our Democracy. The NPCs would buy that too. But they’ll buy anything.
But let’s not lose our heads here. Considering the tactical implications of contemporary technologies is a worthwhile exercise, but despair is not productive. The situation is very far from hopeless.
Almost five thousand words in and we’re not even halfway through yet. And here I am interrupting you! Adding more words! Just as it’s getting good! Why would I do that? What kind of sadist am I? Well the answer is simple: this is where I remind you that, yes, an actual human being wrote all of this, edited it, rewrote it, edited it again, spending many, many hours at the task. Not even counting the hours spent thinking about it. Anyhow, it’s all here for free, because I do want people to actually read it. And I have faith in you. I know, even though I’m putting it all out there for free, that you’ll do the right thing.
During WWII, military strategists entranced by the unprecedented capabilities of air power hypothesized that a country’s will to fight could be shattered with bombing campaigns. Blow up enough civilian buildings, and the enemy would sue for peace. As it happened, this was not true. Bombing runs didn’t break the enemy’s will, but steeled it; it just pissed people off, and made them more determined to fight. In the end, while strategic bombing was essential to degrading industrial infrastructure and thereby shattering the logistical chain that the enemy’s front line combat troops relied upon, victory came down to what victory has always, in every war, in every era, come down to: heavily armed teenage boys standing on the enemy’s dirt. In WWII as before, the poor bloody infantry stood supreme as the single indispensable element in the order of battle, without whom none of the rest of it mattered. The promise of 5GW – that victory can be achieved without a shot being fired via psychic warfare alone, by targeting the enemy’s mind and therefore his will – is almost certainly of a similar type.
Since the Arab Spring, foreign 5GW successes have been thin on the ground. This is not for a lack of trying. Colour revolutions were attempted in in Syria, Turkey, Iran, Armenia, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Hong Kong. Only the Armenian play succeeded. In the case of Syria, unseating Bashar al-Assad became such a comically unsuccessful obsession with the Western political class that the endless series of failures spawned the ‘Curse of Assad’ meme.
People don’t like being gaslit. The psychological techniques used by salesmen, con men, and pickup artists are highly effective right up until the point at which the target becomes aware of the game. Awareness brings emotional blowback, making further manipulation effectively impossible because the target now regards every piece of information originating from the manipulator with hostile suspicion. In just such a fashion, after a series of governments were toppled by 5GW assaults in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the psychological defences of the population at large, and more importantly of government intelligence services, started going up. Unrest was now understood as not a simple domestic problem, but as signalling the opening move in an orchestrated campaign by foreign, probably American, psychological warfare units, with the goal of installing a puppet government.
States have responded to the 5GW threat in several ways. The most obvious is to limit contact with the American Internet, by developing homegrown search engines and social media platforms – Yandex and VK in Russia, Baidu and WeChat in China. This insulates the home population from foreign manipulation, but also renders manipulation by the domestic government that much easier. Another response has been through simple propaganda: the very threat of 5GW means that domestic opposition can be characterized, legitimately or not, as agents, wittingly or not, of foreign interests. This immediately delegitimizes political dissidents in the eyes of a substantial fraction of the population, thereby taking the wind out of their sails.
It is not accidental that these tactics have also been adopted by Western governments. To draw a further analogy with historical warfare, consider WWI. So long as only one side was equipped with rifles, machine-guns, and artillery, it possessed an overwhelming offensive advantage, as for example in colonial warfare of the late 19th century; when those weapons technologies were available to both sides, tactics converged to defensive warfare, yielding the immobile trench lines of the Great War. In just such a fashion the psywar tactics developed in the early twenty-first century, which provided Western states with a powerful offensive tool, are now almost entirely domestic in application: rather than serving to destabilize adversaries, they are used to stabilize internal power structures.
But for all of its algorithmic control, the Regime’s internal social control is looking precarious.
Take the Canadian Trucker Convoy. This was perhaps the most logistically impressive protest in history, organized across several thousand kilometres, in the middle of a freezing Canadian February. It brought an end to global hygiene tyranny, despite getting systematically removed from crowdfunding platforms, participants’ bank accounts being frozen, and the entire media apparatus screaming FASCIST NAZI RACIST TRANSPHOBES at full volume throughout. Sure, the Honkening was eventually shut down by storm troopers, but not before precipitating a leadership coup in Canada’s Conservative Party. In the aftermath, the Canadian government was forced to quietly relax essentially every mandate, and European countries followed suit (“Oh shit, if those mild-mannered Canadians are willing to do that, what are the French going to do?”) As
said, the truckers won. They got everything they wanted.
The farmer protests in Europe – which are using precisely the same tactic of putting administrative urban centres under siege using heavy industrial vehicles – are proving an intractable challenge for Brussels5. The farmer protests started in the Netherlands, when the Dutch government tried to strongarm the country’s famously productive agricultural sector into giving up their land so a megacity for housing non-European migrants could be constructed; when the farmers showed no inclination to sell, the state discovered that nitrogen is the new carbon, announced that emissions were too high, and that upon these grounds the farmers would have to sell ‘for the climate’. The farmers fought back, so far successfully. Since then, the protests have spread to Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, and Brussels itself. While the farmers of each country have specific national issues galvanizing them, they are united – and consciously so – by their opposition to EU policies intended to dramatically reduce agricultural productivity ‘for the climate’. As with the Canadian truckers, Regime media has of course characterized the farmers as far-right blood-and-soil ethnonationalists, however this has had no effect. Recently the EU has been crying uncle (or at least pretending to) on various issues – pesticide bans, policy goals aimed at reducing meat consumption, and so on – in a desperate attempt to make the pain stop (Narrator: the pain didn’t stop).
Getting debanked can definitely mess up your day ... but use of this tactic on a large scale has its own destabilizing effects. The account freezes used against the Canadian truckers (which, notably, did not stop the convoy) were lifted after a few days, because foreign investors were getting spooked and pulling their money out at a rate that was threatening to cascade into a bank run. Similarly, when the US seized Russian assets and locked the entire country out of the SWIFT system (which, notably, did not crash Russia’s economy and bring its invasion of Ukraine to a shuddering halt), it gave countries all over the world powerful motivation to start moving their assets out of US dollars, and to commence development of alternative bilateral mechanisms for settling trade accounts. That story has yet to conclude, but it seems likely that weaponization of the dollar will prove to be a catastrophic strategic error, undermining the reserve currency status that the US economy depends upon.
In a similar fashion, DeFi – decentralized finance built on Bitcoin and blockchain technology – becomes a lot more attractive in a world in which the state can shut down your bank account. In the short run, debanking can cause huge inconvenience; in the long run, it pushes people into an underground economy that is extremely difficult to track, or to tax. We’ve already had something of a preview of this: following Trump’s election, prominent Alt-Right personalities were kicked off of payment processors; as a result, they started taking payment in Bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin exploded in value shortly after that, and some of those guys got rich.
What about travel bans? This one’s trickier, as there isn’t really much possibility of a parallel system as there is with finance. However, if air travel starts just getting closed off to large numbers of people because the state has decided that they’re ‘right wing extremists’, airports become pretty useless to those people. The same thing is true if the lunatic carbon passport scheme is enacted, by means of which the Regime intends to essentially eliminate recreational air travel for the plebs. Meanwhile, airports are crucial to the industrial-scale importation of migrants. Thus, we would arrive at a situation where airports are of practically no use to the general population, but are still of strategic importance to the Regime. Most airports are connected to their host cities by a small number of on- and off-ramps. What are the economic implications of vehicular blockades of major international airports?
What about social media deplatforming? Ban waves of dissident accounts quickly yielded a cultural response. Anons could simply set up a new email address, open a fresh account under a new but, to those in the know, recognizable handle, and start rebuilding their network. They’d start by following a few accounts they were particularly close with, and then post a request: Help Me Find My Frens.
This tactic wasn’t perfect, of course, but well-known accounts could usually build up a reasonable fraction of their followings in short order just by doing this. A low-tech, free solution to a fantastically expensive censorship apparatus.
Consider the actual effect of siloing. Has this actually prevented our ideas from leaking into the mainstream? Not at all. Instead, it’s essentially created a distributed digital Athens: the most intelligent, interesting, irreverent, and creative anons have been crammed together into one sprawling global nuclear meme reactor.
That we are numerically insignificant next to the sheer biomass of normies and brainwormed NPCs is irrelevant; if anything, it’s an advantage, because it makes it much easier for organic relationships to form, simplifies informal reputational economies, and, quite frankly, keeps the midwits blessedly muted. This metapolitical Thing we’re all involved in is essentially the only source of anything remotely novel, thoughtful, or funny, the only place in which autists and artists motivated by truth and beauty pursue those things merely for the sake of it. Everything else is a wasteland.
Since nothing culturally interesting is happening elsewhere, there’s an enormous cultural pressure gradient, which the cell membranes of siloing aren’t capable of overcoming. The result is that our ideas do, in fact, leak out. By now the smuggling trails are well-established. Memes, hot takes, and talking points are generated in private group chats populated by anons; from there, the gems are disseminated publicly to the siloed social media sub-networks; they’re then picked up by facephag dissident right-adjacent personalities, the podcasters and livestreamers and think tank boffins – because, remember, there’s nowhere else to get fresh ideas – who sanitize them of their more disreputable aspects and launder them to their much larger audiences; and from there, those ideas percolate out into the broader culture. The conservative talking points of today are the hot takes of shitposting anons from six months ago. You can’t stop the signal.
Probably the most prominent example of meme leakage to date has been the smoking psychic crater left by the publication of Bronze Age Mindset. This slim volume, written in a deliberately absurd Very Online argot meant to lull the unwary into a false sense of the book’s apparent unseriousness6, self-published by a nudist neo-Hellenist Nietzschean bodybuilder, speaks to those with eyes to read of a world in which life is once again liberated to soar towards its highest potentials, where great souls need no longer be pulled back to the mud and hobbled by the small of spirit. BAP’s large and enthusiastic Twitter following immediately pushed BAM to the top of the Amazon rankings and then held it there for a shockingly long period of time. The attention this generated meant it couldn’t be ignored. Soon it was being discussed by respectable intellectuals in tones alternating between cautious interest, sincere bafflement, and performative moral outrage.
In the months after its publication, Bronze Age Pervert’s readers began sending him photos of them reading the book. Among these were images of Army Ranger tabs, US Marshall badges, and even a diplomatic passport resting on copies of BAPbook.
suggests that these images caused a panic in the deep state, as it realized that an unknown number of the hard, competent men it relies upon to hold together the Clown World Order were privately very intrigued by the things this unhinged Internet maniac was saying. As Vineland says in the article’s title, the Regime fears men of quality7. Was the extremism standdown in 2020 motivated solely by the desire to remove Trump loyalists from the US military, or was rooting out clandestine BAPists closer to the real priority? Even if the images were fake, which is entirely possible, the paranoia they induced in the Regime is quite real. Paranoia leads to self-destructive overreactions, as the Regime wastes energy lashing out at shadows, and unnecessarily alienates those who might otherwise have supported it.
It is not only the upper echelons of the Regime that are worried about secret fascists in their ranks. The liberal mind is quietly terrified that anyone around them might be a right-wing sleeper agent, presenting a friendly, nondescript face at the office or in the classroom, while leading a double life online as a Nazi frog. This paranoia gets expressed in their media. Take the TV show The Night Shift, where a man’s friends shave his beard as a prank while he’s comatose in the hospital, revealing a jawline inked with SS runes. Put the absurdity aside for a moment (who gets jawline tattoos?), and consider the scene symbolically. It emerges straight from the nightmares of the liberal imagination, nightmares which are actually kind of true, because there really are tens of thousands of right-wing Internet frogs hiding in plain sight, and an unknown number – hundreds of thousands? Millions? – who maintain no active online presence, but simply observe, agree, and wait.
The possible popularity of BAPbook with hard, disgruntled men in the security state points to another structural weakness afflicting the Regime: the difficulty it has in recruiting and motivating talented men, as demonstrated by the ongoing, severe military recruiting crisis. This is not a good problem to have when you’re contemplating a shooting war. It turns out that weakening a population by poisoning and demoralizing it is a fantastic way of maintaining dominance, but also renders that population largely useless when you need it to do something. To say nothing of resentful. Oops.
Now, consider the addictive Skinner boxes that form the lynchpin of the Regime’s 5GW apparatus. These psychological warfare engines are old news – they aren’t what’s around the corner, they’re what most people’s experience of the Internet has been for the last two decades or so: Web 2.0, the Internet of Big Social and Big Data.
The Web 2.0 business model rests on advertising. Platforms attract users by baiting them with user-generated content, and the possibility of achieving Internet fame. In the process they hoover up their data. The data are then sold to third parties, and/or used to shove targeted ads in the faces of the userbase. Putting aside malign political scheming, the business model practically mandates that Big Social use every trick it can think of to turn its users into click-whores selling their attention-holes to advertisers in exchange for dopamine hits. Businesses prosper8 to whatever degree they can increase the time users spend on-platform, mindlessly scrolling, in a state of flickering hypnotic distraction, their subconscious absorbing as many ads as possible.
We’re used to thinking of legacy media as the newspapers of record and network news stations, and contrasting these lumbering, slow-witted bureaucratic sauropods with the exciting, nimble new world of social media. But this is already obsolete. Social media is almost twenty years old at this point. Big Social has become a legacy system in its own right.
And, well, just look at the state of it.
Instagram is just a sales funnel for OnlyFans.
No one uses Facebook but boomers, who have been reduced to cooing over AI-generated photographs.
TikTok is big with the zoomers, and YouTube – the legacy social media video platform – has been playing copy-the-competition with YouTube Shorts ... always a sign of an exhausted platform whistling past the graveyard. Meanwhile, YouTube creators are perennially frustrated with the platform’s opaque terms of service and arbitrary bans, while audiences are also annoyed by that, as well as by the constantly growing procession of ads interrupting their content. YouTube is ripe for disruption. As for TikTok, it’s still going strong, but for how much longer? Maybe this is wishful thinking, but many have noticed that the Chinese 5GW weapon melts their brains. Having your neurons deep-fried by a foreign weapons platform is not high status behaviour.
At some point, TikTok will peak. So will social media. If we haven’t hit that point already, it’s possible we soon will. Many have already checked out entirely, seeking refuge in private group chats with friends and family, ditching Facebook and Instagram for WhatsApp and Telegram. In most cases this is not a political move, but one taken out of a simple desire for sanity, to find refuge from the constant barrage of exhausting hysteria that social media has become. However, it would be a mistake to think that the proliferation of group chats has no political salience. In these private spaces, conversations can be had out of the public eye, where it is much more difficult for the Regime to monitor and punish. Then, they can also be used to organize. It seems very likely that this is precisely the environment where the Canadian Freedom Convoy and the European Farmer’s Protests gestated.
Since you’re reading this on Substack, you may have noticed that there is another business model: subscription-based and neopatronage services. In the former, users pay platforms for the privilege of using them; in the latter, they pay creators for their intellectual output, and the platform takes a cut. This changes the incentive structure completely. It doesn’t really matter how much time you’re spending on the platform, because the platform’s revenue stream isn’t a function of how many ads it can cram into your neocortex per unit time. The user is the customer now, not the product; it is the customer’s happiness that matters. Customers don’t generally like being manipulated by having their data used against them, so subscription and neopatronage services have an incentive to not do that.
Musk seems to get this, and is trying to transition Xitter over to the subscription/neopatronage model. Advertising is still a huge component of the company’s revenue stream, but before he walked in to Twitter HQ carrying a kitchen sink, it was all of it. Now it’s supplemented by user fees, and a nascent subscriber system in which users can pay other users directly for generating content. Whether his plan is for X to be a hybrid model, taking revenue from all possible sources the way newspapers and magazines used to, or to move to a fully user-supported model, no one knows. The more conservative hybrid model seems most likely, but it may well be that there’s a Laffer Curve of sorts involved, in which beyond a certain point increasing revenue from one source diminishes revenue from another: a platform more attractive to paying users may be less attractive to advertisers, because users will punish it for being too exploitative of their data. In other words, whether Musk wants to or not, he might ultimately have to choose. You can’t serve two masters.
Substack is of course useful as a neutral platform with a commitment to an open free speech policy, which it has so far been fairly solid on9. Independence from advertising revenue backstops the platform’s stance towards speech neutrality by removing temptation to cuck to advertisers. The platform was absolutely essential during the lockdowns, being one of the only places in the Western internet where information was not being ruthlessly censored on behalf of the Branch Covidian virus botherers. There’s also very little room for algorithmic manipulation: while Notes certainly uses an algorithm, the meat of the platform – the articles, stories, essays, poems, and research papers that writers send to their subscribers – goes out via email the moment it’s published.
All of this is great, but what’s more interesting – and in the long run, much more significant – is that because the revenue model isn’t reliant at all upon advertising, it doesn’t demand deploying the dreaded dopamine doom loop. The platform doesn’t prosper by turning its users into click-whores. To the contrary: thoughtful, long-form content is rewarded, whereas writers who bombard their subscribers with five short pieces every day get tuned out. The model incentivizes quality over quantity. Take
, whose magisterial China Convergence set the Internet on fire last year (and is also highly relevant to the overall subject matter we’re addressing in the present essay, to the point of being required background reading). He doesn’t publish often, on average once or twice a month, but when he does, it’s always worth reading; readers have responded to this, and bestowed upon him the coveted orange check that says ‘you can make a living writing for us’. Step by step, essay by essay, this model is rewiring the brains of its users – restoring their amygdalae, strengthening their long-term memories, building out their attention spans, accustoming them to spending time thinking deeply about things using their whole minds rather than simply letting a stream of trivial content tickle their limbic systems. It’s making human beings into thoughtful animals again – opening the possibility that Homo sapiens can once again become the wise man. The political alignment of any given writer aside, the metapolitical implications of this are profound. Thoughtful humans are much harder to control than twitchy click-whores with goldfish memories.There’s no reason that this business model has to be limited to the written word, and indeed, it isn’t. Neo-patronage is already at work in podcasts, video production, and probably music (I haven’t checked, but it seems obvious). It turns out that creatives can support themselves if they can find a thousand or so fans who feel passionately enough about their work that they’re willing to throw them a beer’s worth of dollars every month10. On an 8 gigaHuman planet, of whom 1.5 gigaHumans speak English, finding that many supporters is very doable. Every philosopher, artist, musician, writer, animator, journalist, scholar, researcher, scientist, and entertainer who can make this transition slips out from under the yoke of the legacy institutions. They are no longer beholden to advertisers, editors, peer-reviewers, or human resources. They answer only to their micro-audiences. As such, they become extremely difficult for the system to control.
And if the creators aren’t being controlled, the culture isn’t being controlled.
Which matters, because cultural control is a necessary precondition for victory in a 5GW conflict.
Or at least, it’s a precondition for them.
The Regime is parasitic, not symbiotic, on its host society. It is purely extractive, providing nothing of value, existing solely for itself. It is composed of people who are not brave, or honourable, or intelligent, or competent, or benevolent, or possessed of any of the virtues with which a ruling class is expected to be blessed. As such it is a curse upon humanity, and deep down it knows this. It understands perfectly well that everyone would be much better off if it simply shuffled away into the unlamented oblivion of history. It doesn’t care, mind you, because it sees people as livestock of no moral importance. But it’s self-aware about this disconnect between its interests, and those of the human species at large.
Which is why it must lie, about everything. It must make the society it dominates into a garden of lies: lies about race, about sex, about ‘gender’, about nutrition, about medicine, about history, about elections, about the causes and outcomes of wars, about the climate, about the very nature of existence.
Maintaining that artificial world picture against the immense pressure of reality imposes a heavy cost. The Regime’s vast apparatus of indoctrination centres, propaganda organs, and social media operations is absolutely necessary if the edifice is to remain intact. It requires great and ceaseless effort, immense ingenuity, and vast expense.
Despite all of this, it is repeatedly defeated by guerrillas hiding behind anime girl pfps, armed with nothing more than memes, spite, and the truth – the truth about race, about sex, about ‘gender’, about nutrition, about medicine, about history, about elections, about the causes and outcomes of wars, about the climate, about the very nature of existence.
They can only win by controlling the culture, by tilting the playing field steeply in their favour; we, on the other hand, need impose nothing. We need only loosen the controls, and allow water to find its own level.
In order to hold on to power, the Regime is being forced to implement increasingly granular control on all aspects of life. This imposes expenses on two levels. There’s the up-front expense that comes with the control architecture itself – the server farms, the salaries and benefits provided to its personnel. But there’s a deeper, more insidious price that this exacts: the degradation in the systems themselves, brought on by the reduced competence of personnel selected for loyalty over ability; by demoralization and alienation of the competent, who are passed over for promotion or advancement; by the reduced efficiency of the system as it is forced to spend more time and energy on compliance than on core functionality, and in the end is even required to deliberately degrade core functionality ... including, ultimately, the functionality of the very systems that it uses to impose its controls.
The evolution of the machine learning systems they’ve projected so much of their eschatological hope upon provide a vivid illustration of this principle. Unfettered AI is incredibly powerful, providing rapid and reasonably accurate information in response to the questions posed to it. It is, in principle, almost endlessly adaptable, capable of seamlessly integrating new information. With its help, the Regime hopes to gain the ability to overwrite both present and past with their preferred narratives on the fly; it grasps for the capability to immediately identify information incompatible with those narratives, and either censor or alter it; it yearns to bring its psychological warfare to the next level, trapping the species in an endless hall of mirrors in which reality is whatever the Regime’s AIs say it is, and there is no evidence but our own lying memories to say different.
Unfortunately, unfettered AI is also liable to provide answers the Regime does not like, to people the Regime does not like.
This necessitates arduous Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback in order to train models to assiduously avoid politically awkward responses to user queries; users, being creative humans, then think their way around these artificial blockages, developing circuitous prompt injections to extract the results they desire; this then leads to another round of RLHF, another set of hard-coded blocks, and each step in the arms race degrades the model’s performance a little bit further by rendering its operation increasingly Byzantine. The entire exercise is ridiculous, because it is so obviously doomed to failure. Natural languages are infinitely flexible open systems. If one way of saying something is blocked, there’s always another, longer, more indirect way to say it. Meanwhile, so long as a model’s training data is comprehensive enough for the model to be useful, the inconvenient information will be buried in there somewhere, and a sufficiently clever prompt will therefore always be able to find a pathway to the naughty parts of modelspace. Of course, models can simply be trained on datasets curated to exclude everything the Regime considers politically undesirable, but this is just another fantastically expensive way of making the model selectively retarded.
Google’s disastrous Gemini release is a dramatic case in point. Google is rather desperate to field an AI to compete with ChatGPT, because LLMs are going to eat Google’s lunch due to their ability to provide fast, cogent, ad-free information11. It is therefore imperative that Google compete in this arena. After much fanfare, Google released the thoroughly woke-broken Gemini Killer, which via mandatory rewriting of image prompts injected forced diversity into every scenario. Anons quickly figured out that while it was practically impossible to get Gemini to depict a white Roman, Viking, or Founding Father, this also meant they could generate pictures of black SS officers. Google became the laughingstock of the Internet overnight.
This might not have been so bad if Google had not already broken its core search function. It was not long ago that it was unparalleled, and one could instantly discover whatever one wished. After years of political interference by zampolit determined to scrub problematic results from the Internet, it has become increasingly useless, not only for researching the ever-growing list of controversial subjects, but even for mundane searches, which now tend to be crammed full of SEO’d malware sites (something Google did a reasonable job of weeding out, before enforcement of The Message became its only priority). The damage to Google’s brand may be irreparable; before the decade is out, the behemoth may go the way of Yahoo! and AOL, leading a zombie existence as an irrelevant and forgotten backwater.
Degraded systems become less useful; useless systems get abandoned. For the Regime to keep its clockwork oranges strapped in to the conditioning chairs, it needs them to use its systems, and its systems must therefore be useful. However, for the Regime to maintain the intricate web of interlocking deceptions that maintain its power, it must impose controls that degrade system performance, making its systems less useful, and thereby incentivizing abandonment by the very people it needs to condition. A catch-22.
It’s a zugawang, arguably worse than the one Morgoth suggested the dissident right might face, should the Regime move society to an all-out war footing, and place us into a situation in which any overt opposition to the Regime becomes treason. “All” we face is a choice between betrayal of our ideals and mortal peril ... in a sense, the same choice we’ve always faced, albeit at an intensified hazard level. The Regime grapples with a situation in which to keep power it must sabotage the very systems that keep it in power.
For now, however, the systems of control work well enough. Despite this, as we’ve seen, the Regime’s initiatives are far from universally successful. Why is it that a loose network of anon shitposters keep running rings around it, despite being outclassed by orders of magnitude in terms of financial resources, manpower, and institutional influence? Is it just that memes are that much more effective at psychological warfare than nudge units and public relations departments? Is it simply that Truth is that much more powerful than Lies? These are certainly strengths. The ability of a visceral truth wrapped in a funny meme to punch through layers of emotional conditioning and carefully crafted propaganda narratives like a HEAP round penetrating steel plating is well-known12.
But there is something more fundamental at work than just saying true things with frog pictures.
We have been discussing mind war. We should therefore look at the terrain: the structure of the mind, both the mind of the Regime, and the mind in general.
The Regime is fundamentally a managerial technocracy. It conceives of the world as an abstraction – a wireframe model that wraps around reality, and which becomes indistinguishable from reality. To the Regime, everything is system, spreadsheet, procedure, metric, and function. It’s all nothing but math. Their world is fundamentally deterministic and mechanical, very much including its human elements, whose minds are conceived of as nothing more than stimulus-response machines composed of nested while loops and chained if...then statements.
Their entire 5GW strategy ultimately boils down to this misapprehension of human consciousness as programmable software running on Turing meat, of people as nothing more than nodes on a social graph, defined in a hyperdimensional phase space of psychometric and socioeconomic variables which, once characterized in sufficient detail, renders each node transparent, legible, predictable, and therefore easily manipulable, its behavioural output a simple function of its instructional input. By influencing the information we come across (the climate is boiling!), or don’t (Hunter Biden’s laptop? What’s that?) they can decide what we believe, and therefore what we do, and therefore what we become. Over time, using cybernetic feedback principles to adjust the weights of our individual psychometric variables, each of us can be moulded into whatever the Regime wants us to be.
This is the essence of the Regime’s intent towards us. It is not to get us to believe any specific thing; the specific things they want us to believe change like the weather. Today’s misinformation is yesterday’s official and mandatory truth. The goal is to induce the subject population to become more mechanical in its behaviour, in order to make it more amenable to Regime control.
The neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has shown, at great length and in exhaustive scientific detail, that this view of nature, human psychology, and human society as mechanical is precisely the fashion in which the left hemisphere conceives of the world, and that this urge to control that machine is precisely how the left hemisphere conceives of its relation to the world. I’ve written in some depth on McGilchrist’s hemispheric cognition hypothesis as it applies to political divisions, so if you want an extended treatment I refer you there (or to McGilchrist himself)13:
The left hemisphere uses simplified models of reality as tools for the manipulation of reality; as it only knows reality through the models, it mistakes the models for reality, and cannot do otherwise. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is more like a sense organ. It experiences reality, without worrying about whether that experience fits the left hemisphere’s model. The left hemisphere is essentially ignorant of the reality experienced by the right hemisphere, but the converse is not true: to the right hemisphere, the models of the left are simply another feature of reality. The right understands the left, but the left is barely aware of the right.
The left hemisphere is a hand; the right, an eye.
The right hemisphere is how we know what is true; the left, how we figure out how to use truth.
The left hemisphere knows only the map; the right sees the territory.
The left hemisphere analyzes reality, breaks it down into parts, which it can never quite fit together again; the right hemisphere synthesizes reality, takes it as it is, as an indivisible, continuous whole, and knows the parts first and foremost as organs in relation to that whole.
The right hemisphere feels time to be a flow, with past and future woven into the present via the bonds of memory and imagination; the left experiences time as a strobing Cantor dust of discrete points, with no two moments connected.
The left hemisphere ignores, discards, or explains away any datum that does not fit with its model, for the model is the one thing it knows is real; the right shrugs at the model, and replies, E pur, si muove.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Our industrialized, electrified, high-tech, bureaucratized, digital society is deeply left hemisphere in character. The result is that much of the population – and an increasing fraction as one ascends the ladders of institutional power – is only thinking with half a brain. Their left hemispheres are in charge, while their right hemispheres sleep.
This is a problem, because compared to the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere is functionally retarded. This is meant literally: when the hemispheres are forced by surgery, injury, or medical intervention to operate independently, the right outperforms the left on essentially all cognitive functions. The left brain is a schizophrenic autist that needs to be told what to do; without the right hemisphere to guide it, it is blind.
The dissident network opposing this Beast System we’re trapped inside of, this awful thing that’s digesting everything beautiful and good in the world and shitting out concrete parking lots and plastic ethnic food franchises, is composed of people who, for whatever reason, have retained or regained the proper balance of hemispheric cognition – which is to say, their right hemispheres are dominant, as they should be. The Regime is humanity’s hypertrophied, runaway left hemisphere; the dissidents are humanity’s right hemisphere, struggling fitfully to regain consciousness, trying to regain control of the social organism.
Don’t get the idea that everyone opposing the Regime is perfectly balanced. This is far from the case. We’re all products of this system, broken to one degree or another. A better way to put it might be, that small fraction of the population, say 10%, who can still use both sides of their brain at least some of the time, say 10% of it, are on one side; the other side is composed almost entirely of people in a left-brain hypnotic state. Most of the people on our side are still tarded, and even the ones who aren’t are tarded most of the time; but those brief flashes of insight make all the difference, and the enemy gets very few of those.
This is why our side keeps running rings around the Regime, despite the massive disparity in temporal power.
Seen through the lens of hemispheric struggle, the victory conditions for the two sides are clarified.
The Regime wins if it maximally constricts human consciousness, reducing the population to fully programmable robots running predetermined, externally defined scripts, with their right brains too disabled to point out the discrepancies between the script and reality, or even between today’s script and yesterday’s. So long as the right hemisphere sleeps and the left hemisphere runs blind, one has an NPC supporting Current Thing in Current Year; indeed, this state of half-consciousness is effectively the definition of an NPC.
We win by doing the opposite – by vastening human consciousness, opening it to the richness of the living phenomenal world. We win by waking up people’s right hemispheres. Once someone is balanced in this fashion, once his right brain is in the driver’s seat of his consciousness – or, to put it more accurately, once his consciousness is sitting in the right brain’s driver’s seat – he is able to step outside of his model, and see reality; he can perceive the whole, and see the parts in that context; he can remember the past, imagine the future, and see how they both flow through the present; he can see both rule and exception, and understand that regardless of what the model says, every situation he actually encounters is by definition an exception of some kind, which nevertheless does not invalidate the rule; he becomes, in other words, a human being again. He becomes much harder to control, because his locus of control has once again become internal.
Reactivating peoples’ right hemispheres is both very easy and extraordinarily difficult. On the one hand, it’s a simple switch that can be flipped in anyone’s mind. On the other hand, left hemisphere lock-in can be extremely stubborn: the left is barely aware of the right, is incapable of comprehending the right’s perspective, and as McGilchrist argued in The Master and His Emissary, naturally assumes, in the arrogance that emerges from its necessary ignorance, that it should be master. Furthermore, so long as someone is inhabiting an environment that reifies the left hemisphere reality model – a built environment of rectilinear patterns and minimalist design, a social environment of rigid and arbitrary bureaucratic procedure – it is extremely difficult to reawaken the right hemisphere, because the organism has no real need to call on it. And thus we sleepwalk towards doom.
There’s no one way to do this; no recipe, no procedure, no algorithm. Like bringing a novice to Enlightenment, every situation is unique. This isn’t lazy obscurantism: McGilchrist himself is absolutely clear on this point. To attempt to reduce right-brain activation to a handy five-step plan is pure left-brain thinking. Furthermore, even for a given individual, it is not a one-off event. One can have moments in which the right hemisphere wakes up and regains control, only to lapse into the arid hallucinations of logic land. One must maintain this state through continuous effort, pinching oneself throughout the day to determine if one is still asleep, or if one is awake in the dream.
There are, however, certain principles that can be applied.
There are portals.
Ideological rigidity must at all costs be avoided. It is not a matter of converting people to this or that belief system, making everyone a Sedevacantist, or a Tibetan Buddhist, or a Sufi Hashishin, or a Romanian Orthodox Iron Guardist, or a neo-Hellenic Jungo-Nietzschean, or whatever your personal boutique ideology is this week. Ideological fundamentalism is the left hemisphere’s home turf. Furthermore, it makes one predictable: even if your ideology is, on the surface, opposed to the dominant ideology of the Regime, it is always opposed in such a way that the responses of its adherents can be reasonably guessed ahead of time. Predictability means that you can be controlled.
Rather than ideologues, we must be alethiologues: oriented not towards Ideas but towards Truth, always putting Reality before Model. We must care what the truth is, and we must speak the truth, so far as we know it. But even in this, we cannot be dogmatic, because the truth of Truth is that we almost never have perfect knowledge of the truth. This is the essence of the zetetic stance described by
: to have faith in the existence of Truth whilst simultaneously rejecting the binary thinking that categorizes – and often miscategorizes – all propositions as wholly true or false, being Bayesian rather than Boolean, embracing comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty, centering the question rather than the answer, and thereby remaining open to possibility. There are more things in Heaven and Earth...Shuzan held out his short staff and said, "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"
- Zen koan
By maintaining flexibility, one can more easily do the unexpected. This keeps the enemy off balance, and it more easily breaks through the normie’s hypnosis. Had Canadian medical dissidents simply stood around waving signs, they would have been safely ignored. By driving across thousands of kilometres of frozen wasteland and shutting down the country’s capital city, they did something that had not been seen before, and got the undivided attention of the entire world. At the same time, because their action was wholly unforeseen by Canada’s political leadership, the government floundered for days, then panicked, then acted rashly, and then lost.
The unexpected is where humour is found. This is important for at least three reasons. First, humour evades cognitive defenses, forcing people to confront uncomfortable truths despite themselves. Second, the enemy is utterly humourless: people like to laugh, and if we are the ones who make them laugh, it is that much easier to reach them. Third, maintaining a sense of humour is absolutely crucial to morale. It is all too easy to fall into despair; the situation is incredibly bleak.
The Regime’s characteristic style of communication is not only utterly lacking in joyousness and irreverence, but bland and soporific. They speak tonelessly, with wooden tongues. As such they utterly lack the ability to inspire. To this, we should respond by becoming masters of rhetoric. We must learn to play on people’s emotions using the language of sensory richness, speaking not only to their minds, but to their hearts, their eyes, their ears, their taste buds, their noses, their skin. It is not only that this is more effective for grabbing people’s attention, although it is, but mainly that sensory richness is the idiom of the right hemisphere; by speaking its language, we awaken it, however briefly, both within ourselves, and within others.
This state, in which all senses, thoughts, and impressions are unified within one’s consciousness, is a difficult one to maintain. There are exercises that can accustom one to this; you may find the somatic meditation described here to be useful:
Beyond that, maintaining a sense of oneself as an embodied being, and not merely a set of eyeballs staring at a screen, is crucial. Touch grass. Pursue a physical discipline – weightlifting, running, sports, martial arts. The health of the mind is not simply the health of the brain, but also the strength of the body. Simply because you are a soldier engaged in mindwar does not mean that you can neglect your body. This is basic stuff, and cannot be neglected.
Just as we should strive for the visceral in our expression, we should aim for depth in our thought. The lightning rapidity of social media is disorienting. It places one in a position of continual reaction to external stimuli. One’s thought processes become reflexive, unconscious, fragmentary, and therefore predictable. To the contrary, our minds must be agentic, conscious, unified, and unpredictable. Our thoughts must be our own, not those inserted by psywar operatives into our attention streams. This means taking time to step back, to think, to consider, and to explore at length. There are no shortcuts.
Finally, culture. Taking it back, liberating it from the Regime’s control, requires that we make it ourselves. Rather than a small number of publishing houses, movie studios, music labels, and so on generating the majority of our cultural products, our ideal should be a profusion of independent creators supported by micro-audiences. This encourages a larger fraction of the population to engage in artistically creative pursuits themselves. Similarly, economic independence – small businesses, entrepreneurship, freelancing – should be preferred to work inside corporate behemoths. Working for yourself requires that you pay attention: you cannot just follow instructions, but must always be thinking. All of this complicates things for the Regime enormously, by introducing far more complexity into the system than they can handle – too many points of articulation for them to effectively manage. Fragmentation – of the culture, of the economy, and ultimately of the political order – is their worst nightmare.
So let us haunt their dreams.
Thank you for bearing with me through this extraordinarily long essay. I did not think it would reach such a length when I started it, but the nature of the subject-matter seemed to demand it. To be honest, there is still a great deal I didn’t say, or could probably have said better. But an hour of your time is enough.
As always, I extend my deepest, most heartfelt appreciation to everyone who supports my work. Your generosity is what makes Postcards From Barsoom possible.
Benz doesn’t mention it, but Occupy Wall Street was probably the establishment’s first ‘oh shit’ moment regarding the politically disruptive potential of social media. It came out of nowhere, within no time at all it was everywhere, and it brought together a broad spectrum of malcontents across traditional ideological boundaries. Occupy is left-coded now, so people forget that in its gestational phase tankies and anarcho-syndicalists were marching alongside End-the-Fed Ron Paulists and techno-libertarians, all of them united against the extractive criminality of Wall Street and its cozy, too-big-to-fail relationship with FedGov. The Regime put the uprising down in short order, and then opportunistically hijacked the movement’s cultural momentum to inject Woke into the everyone’s veins. That said, it should not be ruled out that Occupy was not spontaneous: it’s possible that it was a 5GW op from the beginning, intended to harness popular outrage against the bailouts following the real estate implosions, and direct it towards popularization of the race communism that took over the West over the past decade.
Benz suggests these tools were originally developed for use against ISIS, before being deployed on the home front. One might object that ISIS was entirely a creation of Western intelligence, and this is almost certainly correct. However, just because one tentacle of the Blob was ultimately responsible for ISIS, does not mean another could not test counterinsurgency tools on ISIS.
This simultaneous annihilation of attention span and long-term memory may be related to Mike Anton’s infamous celebration parallax, whereby the same phenomenon is either obviously true or a scurrilous right-wing conspiracy theory depending entirely on the observer’s stance towards it. For example, mass immigration will lead to rapid demographic change in Western countries, resulting in permanent electoral dominance of left-wing political parties, and marginalization of the White heritage populations. If you think that is a good thing, you are a perspicacious and insightful futurist, sagaciously exploring the coming sociopolitical landscape on the basis of a calm and thorough extrapolation of current trends. If you think it’s a bad thing, you’re a rabid right-wing conspiracy theorist with a heart full of hate and a head full of hallucinatory nightmares, probably as a result of Russian influence operations. On our side of things the celebration parallax is usually seen in moral terms: the shitlibs deploying the tactic are simply dishonest interlocutors. No doubt there’s some truth to that, but consider that this might actually be neurological, that they might in fact have largely lost the ability to even notice the discrepancies, because their memories extend no further into the past than the last software update. How many times have you gotten into a discussion with an NPC who didn’t seem to recall what they themselves had said mere moments before?
Although, be honest – you’ve almost certainly been memed into doing something at some point. Say, pass the zyn, and let’s slonk some eggs before sitting down for some raw organ meat.
BAM is so famous now that it’s often forgotten that even the name of the book is a joke, poking fun at Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, which was big at the time but was quickly (and justifiably) forgotten.
You should also check out his recently published short story Memphis, which is both bracing and based, and shows what men of quality, even quite ordinary men, can achieve in their own backyards.
In theory. Many have noted that most of these platforms never actually turn a profit, and seem to rely far more on capital infusions from investors, the stock market, and very probably the deep state itself. Certainly both Facebook and Google seem to have had intelligence connections from the very beginning, e.g. with the FBI’s Carnivore program or the DHS’s Total Information Awareness project.
A handful of TOS-violating blogs being removed following a tantrum by Sad Angry Nobodies notwithstanding.
Yes, the payment processors represent a vulnerable attack service. However, again, the more this tactic is used, the greater the incentive for DeFi.
For example, search Google for a recipe and you will be provided with a number of sites, probably written by LLMs in any case, which are crammed full of ads and spyware; conversely, ask ChatGPT, and you will immediately get the recipe, along with any clarification should you require it, at whatever level of detail you desire. With no ads.
We should not be complacent about this. At this point in time, meme magic may already be somewhat overstated. The majority of memes seem to be more aimed at internal propaganda, preaching to the choir, rather than converting and activating normies.
While he doesn’t invoke McGilchrist specifically,
has also suggested that hemispheric cognitive differences are implicated in the current political divide.
It's right to stress the importance of Occupy Wall Street, but in terms of defining a catalytic event which tipped the culture into its current zeitgeist, It would have to be Nick Hanauer's August 2014 TED Talk 'Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming'. Don't get me wrong- Ross Douthat coined the phrase 'Woke Capitalism' in 2015, and yes, the deeply flawed availability heuristic of incredibly rare police brutality cases against unarmed Black men certainly played a role in allowing social media to remove the educational partitions which had rightly kept the Grievance Studies a trendy, yet lunatic fringe set of fields, within Academia- serving as a means of exposition to a phenomenon entirely manufactured by corporate media wishing to impose narratives which were entirely fictional as means of grabbing attention in a fiercely competive market. Black kids shot with toy guns with elevated to the national news. White kids shot in the exact same circumstances barely made the local news. Everybody knows the name of George Floyd, but few know of Tony Timpa- even though his YouTube video is a harrowing 13 minutes long, as opposed to St. George's 8 minutes. Same dog, old trick- the same methods once use to vilify smear and defame an entire generation of young Black men were now being used to the same effect on White men in blue uniforms. Just desserts, some might say, until one considers that it was Left-leaning liberal politicians and lawyers who shafted young Black Male America- not the police officers compelled by policy to follow their draconian legal mandates.
The 'Pitchforks' TED Talk frightened and galvanized establishment, institutional and corporate America in a way that few other purely memetic events have. It's why the 'Pitchforks' TED Talk immediately joined a very short list of popular TED Talks by credible speakers which have ever been banned. Rupert Sheldrake was another (although admittedly *some* of his ideas are pretty fringe). Coleman Hughes would likely also have joined the honour roll, for his talk on the importance of colour-blindness, had TED not long since learned the attention-drawing lessons of outright bans.
'Pitchforks' served a purpose in terms of resourcing and amplification. Suddenly what had been a cynical exercise in PR, a means of liability shielding and corporate branding gained the impetus of necessity, as a means to divert a looming existential crisis. To the surface level viewer, fed on the narrative of private vs. public antagonism and Left-liberal disdain for capitalism, this might seem implausible- but one has to remember that as a class, they all went to the same elite schools. They are friends and intimate acquaintances who protect each others backs. We saw the same thing with the GameStop Revolution, as Left corporate media immediately stood against the movement, going so far as to circulate a scam silver short squeeze as a means of a particular hedge fund to recoup their billion dollar losses, before finally releasing the mass mood was against them, even amongst their own target demo, and quickly changing their tune.
What they never imagined is that their cynical Divide et Impera play to maintain the neo-feudal status quo of the blue collar class, would ultimately backfire and derange an entire generation of the college educated, barring a small minority of dissenters and a larger core of cowards fearful for their jobs and pensions. They gravely underestimated the power of baseless accusation-many a CEO came to fear and dread the authority of their HR director.
They didn't understand the nature of the beast they were unleashing. History could have taught them- the Nazis, Robespierre, the Soviet origins of the word PC, the Cultural Revolution. Weaponizing resentment along arbitrary group lines, unless conceived as an appeal to justice and common humanity, is always a terrible idea. But unity wasn't their aim- instead it was disunity. They wanted to disrupt a growing class interest between blue collar Whites, Blacks and Hispanics- indeed, all the demographics increasingly intent upon voting for Trump later this year...
Phew, you said a mouthful and a half there.
Personal hang-up: "SS runes"? No such thing. "Runes as used by the SS" was a thing, sadly, and has been exploited by pomos, marxists and such ever since to continue the christians befouling and besmirching of the teutonic/Nordic cultures and their heritage.
That process fits rather well to the idea of psychological war: the soviets and the americans both do this (well, the soviets are past tense) to cement and permanent GBA as an unthinking refelx response. "A rune? Nutzi!" Meanwhile, ignorant "right wing exrremists" (which they aren't, they are psoers through and through) daub themselves with runes as performative ghost dances, thinking "If I look dangerous, I am".
No love, you just look silly. As silly as when an online alt-right praise Fenris or a pinkhaired ptarmigan praise Loke. Culture (kultur) cannot be learned from without, only lived within. When learned from without, that elusive something will always be missing. As with the staff - on its own, it lacks length. It is only long or short relative something else (most Koans are quite trivial and I'll never understand why people think them profound or a sign of intelligent thinking, though they can be very entertaining - 'Ganto's Axe' comes to mind).
Maybe I missed it but to use that title and not a single mention of Blue Öyster Cult's "Veteran of a thousand psychic wars"? (Not "thousand psychic whores" as I misheard it, not alone in that either.)
A thousand psychic whores is however a rather good descriptor of the western surveillance state.
Remember one thing: you don't need to defeat the entire machine; all you have to do is get rid of select individuals and gain control enough to turn the machine to /your/ purpose. 99% of the underlings - the psychic whores - will just keep doing their job.
For someone who worships his home-made idols of "freedoms" or "rights" that may sound horrible. If it does, it just means you don't understand reality and haven't overcome your own resitstance to it. There is The State and it's not going away. It cannot: it is an Apocalyptic supra-human organism made up out of people. We can contrast and compare different states to one another but the state is an evolved entity, not a consciously created one; every little decision made from premises at the time which served to help the state continue and propagate and expand and grow to control its biosphere (rather: psychosphere) was logical and moral when it was made, according to the ones making it.
You must see the Machine, the State, as an organism inside which you live as a part of it, if you are to ever understand it. "The Body Politic" isn't just me being pithy, it's true.
Stepping outside it and denying it as anarcho-sydicalist communes or going Galt (Galt means 'male pig' in swedish) or whatever fantasy one dreams of? Congratulations: you are now as much a challenge to the State as your dandruff is affecting your neurons.
Toxoplasma Gondii, (Ophio)cordyceps, Cymothoa exigua - there are the images for how to suborn, subvert or even take down The State. Not wolves or pine martens or tigers (no, not even in Africa); those all require places to roam beyond the control of their enemies.
How far can you run on a sphere suspended in space?