--- In my life, there’s a couple very important lessons I’ve learned, many of which seemed incredibly counter intuitive. One of the ones I grapple with most often is; > It is ugly to hold onto things. Another form of this, often echoed in biblical proverbs; > You lose what you desire most **Matthew 16:25 (NIV):** "For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." Here ugly refers to both others perception, but also a physical trait. It’s one you’ll notice in every villain ever depicted. They hold onto something so dearly, it corrupts their character, and physically makes the appear ugly to our perception. Often, the best villains are those who otherwise are no different from the protagonist, apart from this desire to hold onto something. The most common illustrative occurrence of this is what we all have a finite amount of, time. Those at the end of their time, so desperate to live, are thousand fold uglier than those who’ve accepted their time. It’s counter intuitive as the principle applies subtly to nearly everything, from the material to immaterial such as memories, friends, power, abilities / traits etc. It’s a rule which comes into play for that which we cherish most. It’s a manifestation of desire, a love born only from the known, and thus incomplete. I would go so far as to say a characters depth is defined not by what they can gain, but by what they’re willing to lose. In the most impactful cases, this answer is everything. It’s this rule which I believe is most important in relationships. --- > In a world where safety is implicit in the social contract, where simulations dominate our desires, we must ask what can change in the paradigm, for a decision to become life or death. --- Motifs of Snowy Northern fortresses show up in the most iconic of fantasies from medieval Western tales to Korean webnovels, Chinese xianxia, and Russian folklore. The harsh landscape, the unknown, the adventure, and within it a symbol of endurance. Cold stone walls, a bastion from liminality. Fires and halls ward off freezing wilds, community is thus strengthened through hardship. These are spaces of reinvention, redefinition, both for its loyal constituents, and its own remoteness, which mediates danger, paradoxically becoming more intimate than a bustling city. In our modernity, we've lost the need for intimate cooperation due to our own abundance. We no longer fear the night, our city lights blanket the skies and hide the stars. > *In chasing a sea of gold we lost the crystal sky of stars.* I pose the question, what does it look like in our changing paradigms, in our future, to bring that fear back? We lost the mystique of nation boundaries, roads and cars turned our cultures into amalgamations of each other. No longer was the Opera believable, so we turned to space to represent the same gaps of time. We literally created space operas. Now, I thoroughly believe that for the foreseeable future, the next 1000+ years, that turning to the stars is escapism. Manufacturing sure, but these environments are not livable for humans, even the accelerationists know this. Thus to create this gap which allows for culture to form, you need a degree of artificially induced danger and barriers. Perhaps as resources and the means of production become more advanced, this creates a desperation due to elitism in education and the capital to leverage technology, creating a brutal competition of danger between the lower classes. Perhaps AI robots are unleashed into the wild to induce this danger, and once again we retreat to our walled cities. Don't fall into a mouse utopia, post modernist hedonism dictates that suffering is bad, yet this is an assumption which when tested (2008-2050) yielded more pain and dissonance than near any other time in history. Perspective can not be gained in a single dimension, all of our most impactful art comes from a human place, one which taps into the shared narrative. If suffering were truly bad, than why do we value our history? The stories of our forefathers? The glory of humanity is in our overcoming of the unknown. This is why the narrative of fascism and neo-liberalism is so powerful, in positing that your identity is the state itself, you abdicate responsibility of any personal failure. Any moral failing, any reality too harsh and unpredictable to understand, becomes a subject to expand the states authority and thus your own aggrandizement. The fear of letting down the clan doesn't work if you have personal abundance. However, wealth is comprised of many things. In a world of nihilistic suppression, propagandized information, mimetic tides, wealth becomes knowledge of what is true, the same knowledge which exposes the chaos of madness of the ontological wilderness. This is why religion and cults are so seductive. The Jewish victim identity coupled with explanatory power of the unknown, the claim of "god's chosen people", creates a fundamental gap in reason, a perspective which cannot be bridged by an out group. The most interesting though experiment is if you took a child today, and raised them in 200BCE Rome, or a modern recreation of it. Would that child have any perspective outside of what it experiences? Is there a fundamental difference between a child, a reality now, vs a reality of past? I think the most clear answer, outside an evolving zeitgeist, is no. Thus we see the elitist appeal of defending a controlled of ontological reality. - **Control the Language:** Define terms like "hate speech," "misinformation," and "equity" to frame the entire moral landscape. - **Control the History:** Shape the educational curriculum to present a narrative where your power is the inevitable and righteous culmination of history. - **Control the Culture:** Ensure that film, music, and media celebrate the values that support your system and pathologize those that threaten it. - **Control the Economy:** Create systems of debt and dependence (student loans, mortgages, digital currencies) that bind individuals to the system, making rebellion economically suicidal. When that becomes the "outside" and knowledge of it the "inside" what then happens to the individual? These are the modern fortresses of today; - Elite school teach narratives of cultural, productive and financial capital flows - Universities teach narratives of socialist communists critiques and tabula rasa equality or a controlled opposition of neo-conservatism, media literacy and rhetoric. - Lower income urban schools teach rote memorization and cultural consumerism These become unbridgeable realities, this is why the modern temple, a place of learning, is the individuals act of resistance against the unknown. The moment that act becomes ritualized in shared necessity, is the moment you bring the modern fortress back. --- I truly believe that the next ~10 years, from 2025-2035 will be the precipice of hubris, a biblical level of folly comparable to sodom or babel. It seems to me there is either one of the following; - An organized plot by the billionaire ruling class, technocratic elite, and zionist CIA / Mossad on an anti-christ messianic mission. - A semi-organized childish yet geriatric governing class, formed into oligarchical and corporatist sects of a perveted libertarian globalism, drunk on luxury neoliberalist virtue signalling, blinding light with greed. - Or a Satan worshiping zeitgeist of modernity, coupled with the worst parts of radical Christian empathy, bent on anti-natalism and their own self destruction due to shame and a desire for sacrifice. > Worse yet, it seems to be all the above. I am not a conspiracy theorist, just someone who understands the history of the internet, whose seen it from the beginning. From the beginning it's purpose stemmed from the American Imperialist aspirations of ARPA-NET. The news of Palantir is not unexpected, and not a single person should be illusioned into believing it is anything but the actualization of a surveillance state, a CIA offshoot, like all of the big tech companies, privatized to avoid government oversight, funded and partnered with the Israelis. Keep in mind, I have no horse in this race. I don't believe in good or evil, in empathy, in morality, beyond the corruption of character laid out in the bible. The knowledge of the bible itself has been bastardized in translations and bad faith actors. However, tangent aside, I see what has come unto the world, the fear, the loss, the robbery of spirit and I can only acknowledge how much worse it will become. I don't really care, about the justness of what I believe is going on. As I believe technology expands the agency of possibilities, and once the constraints of a complex system are expanded you cannot prevent the emergent outcome. > The fear of god is the beginning of wisdom > > — Proverbs 9:10 God in these sense, the word, the logos, is the underlying order of the complex system we find ourselves in, that of the laws of (material) reality (The Father), zeitgeist (The Holy Spirit manifests though), and my human consciousness (The Son). And so I know the rules are changing around me. However, nothing has really changed, nor will it ever. --- > Be proud, hold your head high. We must remember though, that what has come unto the world isn't the result of a grand plot, isn't the result of devil esque subversion. These are post-facto rationalizations, the narrativization of inevitability, the connection of dots looking backwards, a fantasy, the very simulation of reality in which we aim to escape. Everything you see today is a result of our, the collective consciousnesses, own inaction. Perhaps not all at once, but over time. If you only ever take action, when it is called upon you, when left with no choice, then you are a mere pawn in someone else's game. This mindset, taking what you have for granted, being unable to articulate and defend what you hold dear, what you believe in, is the sin of sloth. It will always be the case that the spiral of time and technology will enable new becomings, periods of great change, uncertainty and opportunity. There will always be those positioned to adapt, and those who are not. The only thing which ever matters, throughout all of time, through out all the repeated archetypes, is agency over the world. You cannot allow yourself to become victim to a system, to the opinions of others, to the compromise of stagnant mediocrity in which your very character, your soul, becomes placated. Embrace the unknown, know your values, ask yourself who you really are. > “I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.” > > —  Rumi --- Again, we live in a tumultuous time, however the miraculous thing about our universe is that in a system of sufficient complexity, we find emergence, based on the communication (word) of the individual components, order from chaos, rules from the unknown. When all we presumed to know begins to crumble around us, the dissonance will shatter, people will be in shock, reeling from uncertainty in their own world views. > "There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish… People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming onto the world…" > > — Luke 21:25-26 This is why truth, history, is so important. What we must remember is that relative times of peace are rare, it is not the natural order. The last 100 years have been an anomaly. A house of cards made possible by lies and technology, built so tall, housing language, belief, algorithms so diverse, we've polarized to the point where many of us only exist within online spheres of curated reality. There are no commons of communication, from the death of god rose mankind, only with a tower of babel. When our tower falls, when we are unable to communicate with our neighbours, when we look out into our nations and see only strangers, only then will we realize the war which has taken place. The cultural genocide, the subversion, shame, and idolatry. > No prayer is substitute for action. > > [— James 2:14-26](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%202%3A14-26&version=NKJV)