Snake Oil for the Soul
The Info Economy & Why Political "Solutions" Never Address Spiritual Dilemmas
Art by Michelle Horsley
(Audio version at the end of the piece)
“If you go back to Charles Galton Darwin’s book, The Next Million Years, he is speaking on behalf of the elite. He said we will alter the rest of humanity, the lesser peoples. But he says we, the elite, will not alter ourselves. They must keep their survival capabilities intact. But we [the people], won’t need them, because the state will be controlling our lives for us. And he called it The Next Million Years. This is quite the boast.” —researcher Alan Watt
Chinese farmer gets a horse. The horse runs away. A neighbor says, “What a shame!”
The farmer replies, “Who knows?”
The horse comes back and brings another horse with him. His neighbor says, “Wow, great news!”
“Who knows?” says the farmer, with a shrug. He gives the second horse to his son who is thrown and breaks his leg.
“So sorry to hear the news,” says the neighbor, when he hears.
“Good news, bad news, who knows?” says the farmer.
The following week, the emperor’s men come to the village and take every able-bodied young man to fight in the war. Because his leg is broken, the farmer’s son is left behind.
“What a stroke of luck!” say all the friends and neighbors.
The farmer shrugs. “Good luck, bad luck, who knows?”
Dog Shit vs Cat Shit
I heard somewhere recently that Tolstoy said the difference between violence wielded by the state and violence of a revolution is the difference between dog shit and cat shit (I haven’t found the quote, if it even exists).
How clever is Tolstoy being here? As everybody who has cats knows, there’s all the difference in the world between dog shit and cat shit, because cats bury their shit, which means you don’t have to deal with cat shit the way you have to deal with dog shit.
I assume Tolstoy knew this and that he was being clever, because Tolstoy was quite clever. This would suggest he was advocating revolution by saying that they bury their own shit, rather than spread it all around for us to walk in.
I am not sure if that is true, however (read Tolstoy’s contemporary and countryman, Dostoyevsky, specifically The Devils, for a taste of how shitty revolutionaries can be). Most of the time, revolutionary violence causes just as many problems as the other kind, though it does depend on the spirit of the revolution, since not every revolution is a created equal (color revolutions that are astroturfed are obviously quite different from ones that arise more organically out of local disgruntlement).
There’s a popular idea currently about a revolution going on in the US that’s being led by the President.
Pause for laughter.
Yes, this guy:
Since some people who believe this also read my substack, I’ve spent quite a bit of time dismantling this delusion, beginning with the alleged assassination attempt (now further evidenced as fake, at least insofar as it was not intended to succeed), with this piece:
The piece included these lines (quoting Rene Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 48):
The rules of what we call “royal enthronement” are those of the sacrifice; they attempt to make the king a victim capable of channeling mimetic antagonism. One indication of this is that in many societies the inauguration of a king is accompanied by collective threats against him, and these are required by ritual just as are the expression of submission and adoration that follow them. The two attitudes correspond to the transference of crisis and of reconciliation that constitute the sacred. The king is at first nothing more than a victim with a sort of suspended sentence. . .
The Trump psyop is gaining a lot of traction with people who should know better. They have got caught up in the heat of the moment, been parasocially (and superculturally) possessed, and lack the simple wisdom of the Chinese farmer in the folk tale. This is because there are apparent gains.
DJT has been in office a little over a month and stuff is happening. USAID and the JFK files and Greenland and cutbacks that are being touted as a “deep state dismantling” when they are just more power-grabbing, balance-adjusting, controlled destabilization, and skinsuit-switching, as the hidden controllers who Trump made his deal with clear out more and more human elements, so AI can come on in through the Stargate.
Big Evil, Little Good
Let’s take a broader view of things, even if it risks 2nd Matrix simplification, to avoid getting drawn into the immediate frisson of this global theater. Alan Watt:
We are fascinated, mystified, when we see a plan that’s even 50 years in the making. That fascinates us. However, it’s almost unthinkable for us with our short lifespans to imagine people who can set up a future 500 years or a thousand years ahead. It’s intergenerational, they plan for hundreds of years ahead. That’s not unusual if you realize that the ancient pharaohs were taught the techniques of government from a very early age and told that their descendants would be running the world thousands of years from then. . . . There might be the case that they actually are reincarnated back into the same family bloodlines. That’s what Plato talked about. That was part of the aristocracy of ancient Rome. That’s what they believed, that the knowledge would come into the same family lineages because of reincarnation of the same spirits. Whether it was true doesn’t matter; if they thought it was true, it would certainly help them plan their own future.1
Of course, some people are also saying Trump is the Antichrist. E.g.:
But this is also part of the theater. This is the video DJT posted at his official site on Truth Social, which Donnie Discerned is talking about:
This is DJT trolling but it may also be quite real (Trump may actually erect a golden statue of himself on the Gaza strip—who knows?—since that would also be a form of trolling). This is King Kek, after all, spewed out of 4chan and the collective id to wreak havoc with the woke superego.
Which is good cop/bad cop on a global scale—making us the mark.
First off, DJT is too old to be the Antichrist (Musk is a better candidate); second off, it is giving him way too much credit, importance, and attention (energy). The Antichrist, as I wrote thirty years ago, when I first composed what became The Lucid View—though it may manifest in a single human being—is “the spirit of the mob.”
And the mob loves nothing so much as to see itself up there on the world stage.
All of this is good spectacle, I’m not going to argue with that. It is good entertainment. When was the last time a presidential election led to interesting stuff going on at a superficial sociopolitical level, and even a slightly deeper sociopolitical level? It’s good succession drama and I can allow the theater production is getting better and better. I acknowledge that because it’s undeniable.
But it’s the same principles—and the same principals—at play as it has always been.
Walt Whitman wrote this (after reading Hegel): “Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.”
So where are you going to put your attention?2
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