My Initial Response To Jamie Wheals Recent News Letter (Warning, Dark)
This is my initial response to Jamie Wheal’s recent newsletter. And, understand one thing, I have a huge crush on Jamie Wheal, I think he’s a good man.
Find our way back to what, Jamie, “It’s the economy, stupid” or dropping acid in Golden Gate Park? Were the good old days, the caveman days, or those frolicking moments when we ran wooly mammoths off of cliffs? Put like this, Jamie... Go back to 1968 or 1958 or 1929 or... This cheap energy, modern industrial system was morally bankrupt and broken before it was born. The Internet and viral memes have stuck our ugliness in our faces and made us confront our madness or embrace our madness, and because NOW is now, we think this broken, violent, dishonest crap is something new and exclusive to wee little "us." Greed and violence, you little Peaky Blinder, Boardwalk Empire, Tony Soprano, God Father, Vietnam War, 1929 Crash, Great Depression, WWI, WWII, Napoleon in Russia, Kill All The Brutes, Empire Baby, Roman Empire, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Poll Pot, Mongol Hoards, Jack The Ripper, Greed Is Good, Wolf of Wall Street, Debt and Circuses, WikiLeaks, Who Killed Kenedy, Irish Potato Famine, no germ theory, age of reason, US Civil War, Jim Crow, Leopold II, Scythian raiders, Samurai, Rape of Nanking, Serial Killer psychopath and on and on and on and on, little, I noticed moral high ground fella. WTF do we have to call it, Human Nature? And yet, we are sublime and beautiful all the same. Homo Sapiens had a good run and never really wised up. The Stoic Sage, Taoist Monk, Budding Buddha, Celtic Hermit, Kung Fu, Beatitudes Jesus, Joseph Campbell, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Bhagavad Gita, Book of Five Rings, Be Like Water, Socrates, Pericles, Marcus Aurelius, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Qin Shi Huang, Man's Search for Meaning, Cosmos, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Conquest of Happiness, This is Water, Meditations, Letters from a Stoic, Oh, The Places You Go!, An Intimate History of Humanity, The Road Less Traveled, thing never really caught on.
[Read Jamies Wheal’s book— “Recapture The Rapture.” Do it now.]
Wisdom, it seems was never valued enough to supplant our murderous tendencies. Although, “Wisdom” can be a nice business model for a very special niche market. So now we run our omnicidal killing machine, AKA modern civilization with post, post-modern tendencies, right over the cliff. Splat, the coyote, doesn't walk away from reality after all. “Boil, boil, toil, and trouble.” The devil may care and we were created in God’s image. Now that’s entertainment.
Jamie’s recent newsletter:
You may well have missed this last week, but a relatively unknown podcaster posted a string of tweets outlining the alt-right/Capitol Riot justification for how they see things, and why revolt appears reasonable these days. Tucker Carlson devoted over 7 minutes to it on his show, and then DT retweeted it too. After that, all hell broke loose in the chattering classes.
Our buddy Tristan Harris (Social Dilemma, Center for Humane Tech) sent it to a small group of us, asking for thoughts on the breakdown in shared reality.
I'd been conceiving of writing something like this reply for ages but resisting almightily because I can't stand the political, reactive, culture war washing machine––but it was a good group to woodshed the ideas with, and now that it's written, figured I'd pass along. (and if any of these conclusions don't jive with your own particulars, just play through, it's the larger point and pattern, not the pissing match we're trying to illuminate here)
So, if you've kinda wondered why/how we've all got festering splinters in our minds these days––here's my sense of a bit of what's been happening...
My sense is "Russia gate" is only one of several epistemic schisms we've had in the past five years, and each one has prompted a specific maladaptive response in the collective psyche.
Few examples (would be curious if you guys are tracking others):
1) Access Hollywood Tape Never has any national candidate survived a comparable smoking gun scandal. Without it, #Metoo would likely have never happened with the same virulence.
2) Trump/Putin 🤝 Bizarre repeat coziness, never before seen between US and its arch rival. Combined with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and shock election, it prompted all sorts of WTF scrambling for meaning as the Poles shifted––suddenly Republicans were defending a special relationship with a KGB mastermind and Dems were looking to the FBI/CIA/NSA, who had been the villains of Civil Rights and social justice as their potential saviors.
3) Mueller 🤠 Fit everyone's idea of a beyond reproach Cary Grant/John Wayne traditional father figure/G-Man, and after two years of hyping and hoping that Daddy would sort it all out and put us back on the tracks of Platonic Truth...nothing. He just sort of faded to black while Barr crowed from the rooftops "nothing to see here!" and bizarrely, everyone sort of went along with it, despite pages and pages of damning findings.
4) Epstein TWO US PRESIDENTS AND THE ROYAL FAMILY directly and repeatedly implicated in a massive super shady something or other and then the motherfucker up and dies in prison with no video tape! Were it not for Epstein, we likely would never have had pastel QAnon and #savethechildren. His spooky island temple and little black book gave proof to the PizzaGate fever dream.
5) Global/National/Partisan Response to Virus 🦠 The crisis playbook for the past fifty odd years has been transnational in flavor, with orgs like the WHO and CDC leading the way, and all G6-8 Nations' leaders falling in line, generally sharing resources and data and emphasizing coordinated response to global events. (see 9/11 initial response, etc.). None of it was perfect, but that was at least the dominant coordinating narrative. FFW to 2020 and we have US Gov't casting aspersions at those efforts, suppressing testing, slandering public health experts, refusing to mobilize a national emergency power to coordinate supplies (even within and for US citizens), explicitly suppressing aid to some states due to the political affiliation of their governors or voting persuasion of their citizens, and, perhaps for the first time ever, making bog-standard basic protocols like mask usage, a signifier of tribal identity. A complete and utter abdication of national unity and global responsibility.
5) George Floyd His words "I can't breathe" ricocheted around the world, and became the rallying cry in Paris, London, et al. The notion of "to serve and protect" being overridden by a seemingly murderous cop and then militarized police response to peaceful protests (Never mind the parsing of the event, actual stats on black on blue violence etc etc––just talking about the psychic shockwaves of the flashpoint itself). Without this and "good people on both sides of Charlottesville" we would not have #defundthepolice, Antifa or CRT/Anti-racism in quite the same way.
6) Wuhan Lab/NIH/Fauci It's a bit like post-mortems showing that Bush sr. admin helped Bin Laden family members exit the US post 9/11. All a bit too cozy, too much overlap to be pure coincidence, wheels within wheels, conspiracy fodder. And the fact that mainstream press and even peer reviewed journals like the Lancet all fell in line, despite no compelling epidemiological "smoking gun" to confirm natural origin, fully undermined their later backtracking. (to say nothing of all the inept and shifting guidance from masks to distancing to vaxes, boosters, openings)
7) Capitol Riot The party of law and order fomenting and even glorifying lawlessness (doesn't matter how justified or not you think it was, it's a HUGE flip for conservatives to be in that role and not the radical left)––with half the right claiming victory and the other half claiming false flag op, is evidence of the epistemic confusion.
There's tons of others, at least half of which sprang from Trump's admin––from villainizing the "rain, snow, dark of night" Post Office as partisan stooges, to upending Tea Party deficit vigilance and breaking budgets, to voter suppression in a "free democracy" suddenly being talked about out loud, to RINO now meaning (an actual conservative who refused to bend the knee to Trumpism vs. the other way round) to "fake news" becoming the rallying cry of a president who produced more documented lies than any figure in history––it's all become classic schizophrenic double bind territory––the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance is to go crazy, or to subscribe to a grand narrative that can explain it all.
My sense is that partisans on both sides have been putting thumbs on the scales of their propaganda engines for a while, but if you had to call it, I'd make the case that the Blue Church well and truly lost its mind during the Trump admin due to many of the schisms mapped above (amplified by a totally captured right wing news media), and upon realizing that the old rules of fair play and debate had been thoroughly shredded and they were getting their asses kicked, abandoned their own standards of due process, fact-checking, right of reply, etc with a vengeance. To the point where "liberals" are openly advocating some the most illiberal policies in the public sphere, in the name of leveling injustice.
#yesallmen #whitefragility etc. could not exist as the "guilty until proven innocent" stand that they are, without the trampling of good faith civil discourse.
Unfortunately, the Blue Church/Mainstream media has been serving up a hat trick of own goals, so they've lost huge chunks of whatever reasoned credibility they might have once held––the meritocrats and technocrats that held claim to running media, government, academic and NGOs since Bretton Woods, have all effectively shat the bed, and we're now looking at Turchin's thesis of overproduction of elites coming home.
See recent Atlantic article: The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) JD Vance (Yale Law) Bannon (HBS/Goldman) Hawley (Stanford/Rhodes), Cruz (Princeton), and lots of others are exploiting the populist turn and there's nothing strong enough at the center of the old consensus to hold them back.
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Hope that helps map the wonky-ass terrain we've been traversing and maybe even sheds some light on "splinters in your own mind"––little nagging wounds that have festered under the skin.
It’s not always super fun to have to go back through a litany like that––in many cases we’d all prefer to forget what we’ve just been through––but in order to find our way back to common ground, it’s important to note all of the things that knocked us off track.
We haven’t gone crazy, the world has. And if we’re going to find our way back to mutuality, respect and shared commitments to Life, Liberty and that ever-elusive Pursuit of Happiness, it’s important to reclaim our cognitive liberty. No one should ever be renting space in our heads, without our consent.]
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.
