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How Does It Feel being Shot In The Head?

3,974 words.

Not long ago, Donald Trump experienced the second assassination attempt in the runup to the presidential election. I have been told there have been at least three, but it is the first where it could have been the slow-motion end of the film. Regardless of how you feel about Trump or what sort of high velocity object truly impacted his ear during the most infamous attempt, it is inarguable that there have been multiple serious attempts on his life.

These attempts have been astonishingly memory-holed in the current election cycle, and even his most adamant supporters won’t harness the indignation triggered by these catastrophes of competence.

The particulars concerning the political alignment of the perpetrators seem irrelevant as so many of us can immediately storyboard their vendettas, and correctly predict their hypothetical manifestos as confused at best. It matters not that Trump doesn’t pose direct threat to the status quo, and there is no argument to be made – as his Republican base defensively blusters – that Trump is in fact not a racist, a sexist, or a fascist. His enemies don’t seem to care about how much he embraces Israel during their proclamations that he is Hitler II. If he gave one billion dollars to every Black woman in America, the same narrative would reflexively increase in volume.  Donald J. Trump and his supporters have no say in the emergent political construct that is known as Trump: the archetype of White Supremacy and Male Hegemony. Trump is White Southern Christian history manifest, regardless of his upbringing as a Rich Agnostic Urban Democrat.

American Republicans have been slamming their head against this brick wall for years, hollering that he is the most gay-and-immigrant-friendly president in history. They are correct, and it doesn’t matter.

Trump was not attacked: you were attacked. Your identity was attacked, an identity that you do not control as much as you probably thought. The idea of you – your tulpa – experienced an assassination attempt, and you must realize you are in play. You, Christian Man, White Man, Traditionalist Man, Heterosexual Man, or any cocktail thereof; you are the system – the essence – they are rebelling against, and that essence can be given form and sacrificed.

Readers may behold this and proclaim that this is all theatre; voting does not matter, and the forces that control society are sequestered far from our input. These people are fundamentally correct, but they are so correct that that the looming truth is ignored: everything is theatre, which makes the theatre real, and whether you like it or not your life is on the line as a result of this smoke and mirrors mapping itself back onto reality.

The one thing everyone implicitly understands is that democracy isn’t real, only the chaos in its orbit like cosmic wreckage dancing around a black hole. This was proven by the work in post-war media manipulation pioneered by Edward Bernays, who took everything he learned in wartime propaganda and rebranded it as Public Relations. It was here that he learned that social issues could be puppeted by utilizing the emerging power marketing, data, and media dissemination.

“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints.” – Edward Bernays, Propaganda

The baseline theory was that the average person was not, as the Liberal Democratic project assumed, rational and materially self-interested individuals, but rather guided by an unseen ocean of subliminal desires, unconscious beliefs, and inadmissible agendas.

By scientifically analyzing how each individual was not a Measurable Unit of Freedom, Walter Lipmann even lamented that the democratic project was impossible.

“We lie, as Emerson, said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.” – Walter Lippmann

Democracy becomes a different type of commodity to be endorsed and fought for, to attack or control people with, a metric that is tracked and analyzed but not the primary mechanism to decide who possesses the power to shape events. Voting can be understood as a thermometer with which to take take the temperature of the subject as social pathogens are introduced, with the the real struggle for dominance taking place in the Managerial Elite, the Military Industrial Complex, Technocrat Boardrooms, Dark Money Vacation Spots, and whatever complex exchanges of blackmail constitute the ligaments of the whole decrepit machine. It is less about leaders promising change to a homogenous populace and more artificial intelligence constructs parsing through advertisements garroting each other and how that can draw a crooked line to real world violence on a micro or macro scale.

It is a war between hyperreal fandom phenomenologies of such complexity that they become true organisms. And yours was shot at.

The age of psychiatry was the death of the Mass Man, leading to its fracturing into runaway self-consciousness and the tribalism of identity/fandom sectors. It was through the work of Freud, Bernays, Bion, and a rogues gallery of radical scientists that our conceptualization of ourselves began a skyrocketing of mutations. Whether or not you believe the role of trauma is instructive of behavior or how sexuality undergirds every decision, we all live within a psychiatric context, constantly psychoanalyzing each other in everything from feuds to romance to politics. Jacques Ellul, in his own celebrated work investigating the role of propaganda upon society, took a divergent path.

Where Bernays saw people as fundamentally irrational and impossible to guide to their own self-interest without coercion, Ellul saw them as rational but subjected to modern pressures. He saw that effective propaganda speaks to both the individual and the masses simultaneously as, contrary to the Liberal Democratic outlook, each individual sees themselves in the context of a group identity.

Propaganda isn’t defined as brainwashing or even convincing an individual of an idea; it requires physical action or a change in behavior as opposed to beliefs or ideas. Furthermore, effective propaganda can have people behaving counter to their beliefs, triggering reflexive responses that exist outside of their ideology, faith, or rationality. By establishing social norms, it is more likely to make someone police their own attitudes, and punish those who surround them if they fall out of line.

“The propagandist tries to create myths by which man will live, which respond to his sense of the sacred. By “myth” we mean an all-encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it. Such an image pushes man to action precisely because it includes all that he feels is good, just, and true.”  – Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

The enemy of propaganda is not the mass or the individual, but a small group that can reason through manipulation and create their own internal filters for information. It is here we see the formation of group identity and its dynamic feedback loop with the individual members.

You are in the Myndwar, where you can seek neither refuge in rational individualism nor in the romantic power of a mass movement. You are dealing with people who want your dispossession and have no problem crafting an identity on your behalf, and then assaulting it from a political dimension you have no access to. While group dynamics offer new pathways to conflict and pathological subservience, it is the only way to escape the 20th Century prisonstyles as endlessly-interrogated-individual and common-denominator-cog.

I recently read an article written by a formerly-rural progressive – otherwise known as a Hicklib – about how all mass shooters in America are White Ruralites, who are trained to murder as many innocents as possible because, while they are members of the Patriarchy, they are allegedly attempting to appeal to the Patriarchy by killing each other and themselves. Utterly incoherent and more an example of sociopolitical self-flaggelation, this is a narrative that can be taken up by the mainstream progressive establishment as a reason this group deserves to be dispossessed.

Leftists are correct when they identify the existence of Stochastic Terrorism, and they should know because they are the primary ones that leverage it. Stochastic terrorism is not mothers complaining that a man in a dress followed their daughter into a public washroom; it is a class of aging twink wonks saying that the greatest threat to freedom is White men who just so happen to be flirting with suicide (“And That’s A Good Thing.”)

We live in an era of the Meta-Man wielding Hyperstition in an attempt to inflict violence upon their opponents. Hyperstition, you may recall, is when you craft a fiction that by both interior and exterior wills becomes real. It is fear so powerful it manifests itself as an entity. It’s the phenomenology of categories existing to such a degree they become Platonic forms. In this sense, Meta-Politics functions like occult magic. Intellectual constructs projected by way of powerful group dynamics at the intersection of neurotechnology, artificial intelligence, and a rapidly accelerating noosphere means everything becomes valid.

You are a Meta-Man engaged in a Myndwar that you need to begin taking seriously and the autoimmune response of irony will prevent you from pursuing this duty.

“Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations.” – Delphi Carstens

The digital space becoming real has never been successfully achieved through VR, but it is real in the sense that we extend ourselves into this space and it has a profound impact on our relationships, our ambitions, our understanding of the world, and ourselves. We can apprehend ideas such as hyperstition because we have a subconscious sense that the digital world is where real things happen, events divorced from our everyday lives that otherwise map themselves with visceral urgency onto our experiences. It is a space where our individual behavior can be tracked as part of an affinity group – either self-selected or bucketed algorithmically – and that group can be aggregated into large trends that manifest as visual organisms over time.

Andrey Mir explores these ideas in the form of “The Viral Editor” and more recently “The Viral Inquisitor,” most critically how humans have as media in the context of that which lives in this new digital ecosystem. With enough data we can fully understand how we collectivize and imprint into the digital space before it remaps itself back onto us. This will sound elementary to those who work in data modelling, but they are likely not used to looking upon this as a wizard might.

“The Viral Editor is a distributed being of the Internet, a sort of Artificial Intelligence whose ‘processing chips’ are the people – users. The user’s main goal is to elicit a response. This personal yearning for a response is the motivation behind the entire system. While weak on the individual, ‘atomic’ level, for large arrays of users this motivation creates strong forces that nourish the Viral Editor’s work. The Viral Editor enables not only the transmission, but also the crystallisation of meaning, which is more important for the infected population, as well as the selection of the very best wording.” – Andrey Mir, Humans as Media

Many people have either consciously or unconsciously apprehended this fact, and as was discussed in the article on the Sensitive Young Man phenomenon, it is easy (and free!) to lose  oneself in the fractal jungles of theory with no real connection to real world consequences. The most obvious dangers at present are how we can become lost in the weeds of theory that appear naturally attuned to a world of hostile complexity. With this in mind it’s important to identify what makes these investigations so intriguing, or even necessary. It is not obvious that these seductive rabbitholes are a pathway to the dooming shade of inwardness, and there are examples we can contrast to understand this emergent phenomenon.

We find utility in these theories because we find ourselves in an epoch where religion, ideology, and history are all in flux; untethered from any form of stability, we are nonetheless possessed by the certainty that responsibility falls to us to chart a course towards the future despite the dissipation of our belief in utopia.

In a low-trust society, we probe the shadows in search of new mechanisms where our previous tools have proven helpful, but insufficient. We still rely on these concepts as a builder requires a schematic, but the more experienced one is in their trade the less they need to adhere to instructions and can rely on the memory of mind, body, and even blood.

The most common avenue to arrive at these inquiries is through the Left, specifically through Marxist theory which must conceive of increasingly complex justifications for the failures of their political projects and the deep-seated antagonism they feel towards every system in existence.  One such example is Spinal Catastrophism, a prefect encapsulation of the nihilism that results in wandering into the labyrinth of theory. While it comes across as irrational, what makes it attractive is how it conjures a vibe from some place deeper than rationality.

According to Moynihan, organic development is just the future arriving early, organic ‘structure’ is just the retention of the past as an embodiment of trauma inflicted by a hostile universe, and our experience of time is nothing but movement within this immersive morpho-space. In this framework, everything is grounded in the trauma of pain and destruction. The human body, guided by the upward rebellion of the spine, is a machine for predicting and thereby avoiding trauma while being a living record of it. The verticality of the spine, compared to the horizontality of other mammals, raised in opposition to the planet has one goal: to vengefully catapult back upon it with planet-cracking technical force.

Just as the plant coheres with the sun through its blossom, the brain of the human animal coheres with the sun in its invention of the fission bomb, and the procession towards advanced warfare is the destiny of our bones.

“Within Reichian ‘orgone-therapeutics’, traumatisms inscribe themselves via the ‘biopathy’ of ‘characterological armouring’: a deposition of somatic ‘immobility and rigidity’ symptomatized through ‘muscular hypertonia’, identifiable as postural aberration. Spinal Catastrophism’s conception of time is one essential to modernity itself. The lock-in of systems that cause their own furtherance and exaggeration (i.e. the globalized economic system unmasked by both Ferenczi and Bataille as an excrementitious end-unto-itself) creates a sense in which the future drags us towards it. The future is not passive, it actively creates its own emergence via such circular causality (when something causes itself to cause itself, time seems to flow backward).” – Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism

In this model of the universe, human intelligence only emerges as a result of the upright posture of the spine and head, which is a vein of truth that ought to be respected. Self-awareness can therefore be seen as an evolution in escaping trauma, and everything we do is to either predict or escape a hostile universe. This aligns with Information Theory which posits the human body is just the most recent iteration of an evolving defensive ship created by our DNA to withstand entropic forces. The purpose of intelligence is ultimately to dominate the source of our fears and not only annihilate the universe, but create a feedback loop of eternal hellfire that prevents a bounce-back of rebirth, an ouroboros of antilife.

Here we behold the nucleus of this wretched framework is total nihilism: we only exist as the pathetic inevitability of a universe that wants to destroy us. Our entire being is trauma manifest, and our destiny is to commit the most total suicide imaginable because nothing else matters.

This isn’t to say that all new theories of experience are destined to be self-destructive. It would be too simple to say that modernity can only produce cursed ideas and the only salvation can be found in tradition, especially when those traditions spend most of the time gasping for air, grasping for salvation as we look down and demand their secret to ascention. To contrast, there is an emergent theory of existence forwarded by two authors who could best be described as the political inverse of the Post-Left, Space Age Maximalist and StormyWaters.

It begins with Paul A. LaViolette’s Subquantum Kinetics, specifically how to solve cosmic creation without a miraculous Big Bang. The substance known as aether is what ties it all together, fully and completely. Simultaneously source, medium, and container of our reality, it proposes a more encompassing physics that accommodates the esoteric. Some call it Zero-Point Energy, the Quantum Vacuum, the implicate order, or Chi, Prana, or Vril.

“The main model for the aether is that of a chemical reaction-diffusion system, not unlike a Brusselator, in which different chemical reagents can spontaneously exit equilibrium and spawn emergent patterns of order in time and space. The Michelson-Morley experiment, conducted in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, was a groundbreaking study designed to detect the existence of a luminiferous aether, a hypothetical medium thought to permeate space and carry light waves.” – Space Age Maximalist

In this model, matter and energy are stable concentration patterns of aetheric particles called “etherons” and can appear and be destroyed under the right conditions – much like waves on the surface of the ocean. This means mass and energy are not conserved at our level of existence, and matter begets more matter. This contains echoes of Spinal Catastrophism and the broader corpus of the CCRU which posit that the universe, rather than being mostly dead and inert, is teeming with conscious life down to the microscopic level and all throughout deep space.

Here, life is prime mover rather than matter dictating the aggressive boundaries of life, the inverse of spinal catastrophism and other similar frameworks. The universe is therefore conscious and can be otherwise understood as is God learning and experiencing Himself, constituting the geometry in which we live. A manifestation of life rather than a hostile tomb where life struggles for a short and painful existence. Our ongoing experiments in the quantum realm open the doors to the harnessing of this mysterious landscape, and this directs us not towards the cosmos but rather inward, towards our own genetic material.

“So right now, Righetti computing is capable of over 200 qubits. And unlike everybody else doing quantum computing or they really just say that they’re doing it, but they’re not really. So, in 2025, a computer that has 415 quantum bits is going to go live and that’s it. When that day happens, it’s over with. That’s quantum supremacy. What would take the total computing power of the entire Earth 1 billion years to do, that is quantum supremacy.  That means computers, the way we know computers are dead.” – StormyWaters

All of the base pairs in one strand of DNA work like computers when you pass electromagnetic frequency through them. In certain parts of this DNA strand are objects analogous to antennas.  We don’t know how precisely these antennae function because they are more like quantum antennas, with part existing outside of our dimensional space, located in some unidentified dimension. This means that there are components of our very genetic code that are intertwined with some paranormal zone we can barely begin to understand. If modern science is coming to the same conclusions as ancient mysticism, there are more connections between these systems than inherent oppositional natures.

This primordial force – this aether – that’s constantly moving through all of us, everywhere in the universe, we simply can’t detect it in our everyday lives. When we conceptualize antennas with DNA, when life passes through you in the form of aether, how does it take in all that information? Can we download as well as upload, or even manipulate the flow? Can we passively feed information into the flow of aether to influence others without them even knowing?

It is consciousness that organizes the material – similar to how Spinal Catastrophism and its broader avenue of thinking posits that the Central Nervous System generates the universe – and it can collectivize and move like tracking data trends in the noosphere. As opposed to the Secular Humanist outlook, which would see the entirety of humanity as having a shared consciousness, it is likely highly localized within groups and at best coalescing at the regional level. This group can be traumatized by shared experience or possessed by the same mind viruses that direct their consciousness to shared desires taking form all throughout the aether.

This concentrated psychic pressure eventually becomes a singular consciousness, a discrete entity which can cross over to where we live. That egregore needs to find a home, a person, a singular individual to reside in, so our newly relevant mythologies would remind us.

An egregore is a distinct and discreet consciousness. So that possessed person will bring about the world that that egregore desires, which is the psychic organism representing the shared desire sometimes triggered by trauma, but more often a clot of thought. This is similar to when DeMaistre speaks of the ontological necessity of sovereignty not as a status one achieves but rather a space that demands occupation by a single individual summoned forth by particularities of circumstance. This is the reversal of an individual seeing himself as merely a cog composed of punishment operating within a sick game designed by malevolent entities with the only endpoint the blissful release of annihilation.

The individual is the key, but the hand which turns it and the lock it opens are both beyond his experience. Both Spinal Catastrophism and this hybrid of Subquantum Kinetics and Ancient Mysticism are approaching the same conclusions, and both afford special power to the human consciousness. One redeems ancient wisdom through cutting-edge science, while the other is a total rejection of all human endeavors outside of war, which can be interpreted as the motivation behind all out collective works. We are drawn into these Houses of Leaves not because they present immediate solutions, but because we sense a incandescent vibe somewhere deep within them, something we can still use to chart a course where all our traditions and institutions have proven ill equipped to lead us. There are new, weak embers burning dimly in the fringes of this unprecedented civilization, and they can be nurtured into 21st century torches.

The awareness of these models is essential because they thrive in the stratosphere of power where Stochastic Realism inspires righteous violence in plebeians and elites alike.

This is all to say: Tim Walz guzzling an unhuman volume of animal semen does not need to be an event that occurred to be true. Buried deep within the American psyche is the desire for someone famous to have ingested a near-fatal amount of animal semen, and that man is Tim Walz, and that is something that occurred in a place more real than reality.