culture war dynamics

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.

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

New worldviews are bubbling away in little cauldrons all the time, but they only flow into the mainstream (eg become part of corporate trainings, official gov't policy, school curricula) when they are structurally of service to preserve the power status quo.

man's capacity for good makes markets possible; man's propensity for evil makes markets necessary.

Donald Trump is an uncannily accommodating vessel for projection, good and ill. It occurs as something of a cosmic joke that his last name is “Trump,” which is the Joker in a deck of cards, a wild card, the card that can be any card. So it is that Donald Trump can be any character, whatever people hold him to be. This serves both to elevate him and... See more

The only way to help people rise above undignified behavior is to teach them that they are dignified. You cannot fight shame with shame.

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

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