culture war dynamics

The most radical thing you can do today is not be an asshole.

It would sure make things easy if this election were a simple contest of good versus evil. But this is the way of thinking that is tearing the world apart. Those who think that way always consider themselves to be members of Team Good, of course. If your opponent is evil incarnate, then any means to stop him are justified.

I won’t play the game of denouncing or endorsing. The psycho-social patterning of “which side are you on” springs from one of the chief narratives of the mythology of Separation. It understands the world by simplifying it into a drama of good versus evil, and also simplifies the human beings who play roles in that drama into subhuman or superhuman ... See more

I first wrote about Breach in 2020, and again in my book. It’s the idea that the internet has become our externalised collective unconscious, capturing and then amplifying a swirling ocean of our projections, hopes, fantasies, and violent urges. Some of these become archetypal, turning into myths and memes that evolve to take on a life of their own... See more

The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage

a successful malignant ideology will promise to make your life better while actually sabotaging it and making it worse in ways that seem to prove the ideology correct. the more you follow it, the worse everything gets, while you become more and more devoted to it. demonic even.