Zionism: The Settler Colonial Ideology That Actually Hurts Jews

One must begin by refusing the usual grunt and eye roll worthy tired blackmail: that any criticism of Israeli Zionism is antisemitic, being a prejudice or hatred toward all Jews. That vulgar conflation is not only so disingenuous, but has done immense intellectual and moral damage.

Zionism, in its political form, is a 19th-century nationalist project, born in the age of ethnic romanticism and imperial cartography. It proposed, quite explicitly, that people of Jewish faith were not merely adherents of a religion or participants in a rich, diasporic civilization, but a singular nation that required territorial consolidation in historic Palestine. That proposition, even before one examines its consequences, is already a narrowing of Jewish identity. It reduces a vast, plural, diasporic tradition into something closer to a flag and a border. Now, how does this harm Jews?

First, it entangles Jewish identity with the actions of a state. When any coprotized government acts unjustly, repressively, violently, or genocidally, as Israel has been doing for decades and continues to do at the time of this recording, it ought to be criticized on its own terms. But when that state insists on presenting itself as the embodiment of a people, it effectively drafts millions of Jews worldwide into a moral conscription they never volunteered for. The result is a grotesque inversion: Jews in Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires are made to answer for policies they neither chose nor control. That is not protection, it is exposure.

Second, it has fueled a catastrophic alliance between Jewish identity and permanent conflict. A settler-colonial framework, where one supremacist population establishes dominance over another which had already been living in the land, does not produce tranquility. It produces resistance, resentment, and cycles of violence. Ask a 5 year old, "do you think it's a good idea as a small country to have all the other countries around you, most of which are larger than you, do things so that they either like you or not like you?" To hitch Jewish safety and flourishing to such a globally disliked project is to guarantee perpetual insecurity, not resolve it. One might say, with some understatement, that building a safe haven in the middle of an ongoing dispossession is rather like constructing a bomb shelter out of matches.

Third, Zionism has often empowered the most illiberal and chauvinistic tendencies within Israeli politics itself - religious fundamentalism, opacity of government, a propagandized population, ethnonational supremacy, and a disdain for universal rights. These are not merely unfortunate side effects, they corrode the very ethical traditions that have historically animated Jewish life. And as a result, you have physically smoking hot Israeli women who have psychotic ugly minds. All this being said, Zionism builds an imperial monotheistic civilization not only known for its spyware but intellectual dissent.

Fourth, and far from least, it has provided a convenient alibi for genuine antisemites. Nothing delights a bigot more than being able to say, “You see? it's the Jews" or "The Jews are the problem,” in a broad sweeping generalization, while pointing to the actions of a state that claims to represent all Jews. This is horeshit just as suicidal fundimentalist radicalizd Muslim morons with ugly ass scruffy beards do not represent all muslims nor Hindu or Christian Nationalists represent all Hindus or Christians. Zionism, in this way, hands ammunition to the very forces it purports to defend against.

None of this is to deny the historical suffering of Jews, or the real and persistent horror of antisemitism that literally mass gassed people or put them in ovens. On the contrary, it is precisely because that history is so grave that one should be wary of political projects that claim to solve it through exclusion, domination, or mythologized entitlement. The absolute tragedy then, is a movement that began as a response to persecution has, in many respects, reproduced the very conditions: fear, isolation, moral compromise, and fascist like fervor that it sought to escape. And in doing so, it has not only genocided Palestinians similarly to how Jews were genocided by Nazi's, but has also, more subtly and insidiously, placed Jews themselves in a position of moral and political jeopardy.

If one actually cares about Jewish safety, dignity, and continuity, one can conclude that tying them to any form of ethnonational supremacy is not merely misguided, but profoundly self defeating.

American Christianity: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Psychotic

Now what we're about to say can be ported into all Abrahamic Religions, but for the sake of this one, we'll use the mental operating system that is American Christianity — A carnival of faith, commerce, redemption, and far too often - lunacy. Like most grand human enterprises, it contains both admirable moral courage and breathtaking hypocrisy. One might say it has produced both saints and salesmen. Let us take the good, the bad, the ugly, and the psychotic in turn.

When you examine it from a kind of anthropological perch, imagine yourself a Martian ethnobotanist hovering above the strip malls and megachurches of the republic, you discover that it is not one thing at all, but a kind of carnival ecosystem of faith or belief. It’s part mystical poetry, part frontier psychology, part television spectacle, and occasionally, how shall we put this delicately, an accelerator for idiocy.

To start with the good - And this is the least imperial. Meaning of Empire. Which is called liberation theology, which means liberation of the oppressed, meaning the poor, which because it's capable of being a powerful engine for social reform, the American Empire has worked really hard to crush it over the decades both domestically and within South America. At its best, this love and light Christianity has helped drive some of the most noble moral campaigns in the nation’s history. Such as the abolitionist movement which was fueled by Christian conviction. Figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe framed slavery as a sin against God and humanity. The civil rights movement leaned heavily on Christian rhetoric and leadership, most famously through Martin Luther King Jr, whose sermons and speeches fused biblical language with democratic ideals. In these moments, Christianity provided a moral vocabulary powerful enough to challenge injustice.

Long before the state grew some hearts and adopted assistance programs, real churches ran community, charity, and social safety nets in the form of hospitals, soup kitchens, disaster relief, and shelters. Organizations like Salvation Army and Catholic Charities USA have delivered extensive aid. Whatever one thinks of the theology, millions of people have been helped by being at times, fed and clothed by these institutions. Amped up during the holidays. This more liberal leaning American Christianity has a tradition of moral language in public life, often supplying the rhetorical grammar of conscience in politics. Even secular Americans recognize phrases like “love thy neighbor” as the idea echoes.

But then we slide into the next phase of the carnival ride when it's bad. Where we move to the less admirable chapters, where spiritual concepts transmute into dogma and morality into moralism.

First, Amplifying Political tribalism - In modern America, Christianity has frequently fused itself with partisan politics, particularly since the rise of the most de-evolved part of America, the Religious Right. This is where things start to get culty, authoritarian, and thus imperial.

Second, selective morality - American Christianity can display an impressive capacity for outrage about some sins and silence about others. Cult members find enormous passion about sexual morality, but often far less about poverty, inequality, and war. It is a curious theology that can detect the sin in a stranger’s bedroom but struggles to notice injustice in public policy.

Third, promotion of off-balance all male dominator patriarchal hierarchy. Which leads to things such as repression of the divine feminine (which being abortion / really anti-choice is all about, it has nothing to do with life) and repression of the natural sexual urge. All of which encouraged toxic masculinity over a natural healthy warrior spirit like the Native Americans had and have. Which is why the religious right is ground zero for institutional scandals and why in Texas dildoes are illegal but high capacity magazines are encouraged. The most disturbing failures have come when religious institutions protected their own reputation over vulnerable people. Especially the denigration of children and women. Nothing corrodes moral authority faster than preaching virtue while hiding scumbaggery and crimes.

Fourth, because modern American culture has a genius for commodifying everything it touches, including the sacred, thus entering religious greed and tax exemptions for not good behavior previously mentioned, but instead for hate and shadow. The spiritual message gets de-spiritualized into a product, and suddenly Jesus has a brand manager. Churches get corporatized and worship bands have lasers and smoke machines. Somewhere between the televangelist grin and the motivational speaking circuit, Christianity Beatitudes in America quietly slip out the back door while prosperity theology sneaks in through the gift shop. This begins moral inversion and eventually bankruptcy because it's backwards. Mega churches then start speaking on behalf of the Epstein class morbidly rich instead of the struggling. Intro the Televangelist grift and the dumbfuckistan of those who eat it up. The United States has produced a peculiar species of conman religious entrepreneur: the prosperity preacher. Figures like Jerry Falwell built cults that treated Christianity less as a spiritual discipline and more as a political identity badge and the result is that faith became a campaign slogan rather than a moral challenge. Televangelists who promise divine wealth in exchange for donations effectively transform God into a celestial investment banker. Examples often cited include figures like Jim Bakker and Kenneth Copeland. Where pastors own private jets while congregants struggle to pay rent, the Sermon on the Mount has been replaced by a quarterly earnings report.

The Ugly - And here we arrive at the darker manifestations, when religion becomes not merely misguided but positively harmful.

First, is its masterful use of Anti-intellectualism. When you hear someone interviewed and they are hand slap to the face dumb, especially in regards to being extremely low information on geo-politics, their dumbness is equal to their heavy religious indoctrination and brainwashing. Taking things spoon fed to them literally instead of allegorically, segments of American Christianity have cultivated suspicion toward science and scholarship. Just like in 1826, 1926, the long-running battles over teaching evolution continue in 2026 about education, biology, the spatial model of the Earth, and climate science. Faith, in these circles, is sometimes defined not by what it affirms but by what it refuses to learn. Hence the society does not move forward, it stays stagnant or even goes backwards. Sound familiar?

Second, cruelty masquerading as faith - At its worst, American Christianity mutates into a kind of civil nationalism, where the cross is wrapped in the flag. The faith of the Nazarene carpenter, who preached humility and mercy—becomes enlisted in culture wars and nationalist rhetoric. One ends up with a Christianity that wants a theocracy and abolishes democratic ideals, which the US is suffering through.

Now, the psychosis - Because there exists, within this tradition, a peculiar spiritual psychological inversion: a subset of believers who are not merely expecting the end of the world—they are rooting for it. Remember, spirituality is the full spectrum of nature, and because they are Russian dolled layer deep in faux dogma, heart removal, and mind control, they not only don't respect or appreciate nature, they actively seek to destroy it because of a skewed ideology of the rapture - an eschatological end-times concept and, just like the Afghani Taliban, are willing to use violence to try and achieve it. This is why far too many Evangelical Christians, the ones who voted for Trumpstein, are really Talibanjelica Hypochristians and why the MAGA cult is best described as the MAGA death cult. Because they anticipate the apocalypse with a kind of glee. The logic goes something like this: the material world must become catastrophically bad so that it can finally become perfectly good. Therefore, disaster is not a tragedy but a scheduling detail. Outside opinions? Climate crisis? Wars? Political collapse? Well, these are just the opening acts before the divine fireworks? This is why all hyper-religious regressives and imperial agents, which is 100% of Republicans and all corporate Democrats, are just political puppets for oligarchy, do little to nothing for We the American People when in office, and solely and exclusively do anything and everything for oligarchy and settler colonist Israel cause they think biblical prophecy about a greater Israel will lead to the return of Jesus when it only leads to genocide.

From a spiritual philosophical perspective, and we speak here as someone who has spent a fair amount of time contemplating the strange architectures of the human mind, the apocalyptic imagination is essentially a mythic narrative trying to break through the crust of modernity. It is the psyche insisting that history has meaning, that we are not merely drifting through a random cosmos or in a soul school but instead just need to destroy so the cosmic story can climax. The trouble, of course, is that when people begin to desire the catastrophe that validates their myth, things get psychologically combustible. It’s like cheering for the theater to burn down while you and your family and other families are sitting in it because you’re certain the final act will be spectacular. The irony, delicious and cosmic, is that if the gentle moral philosophy of the Nazarene were actually practiced widely, the apocalypse enthusiasts might be terribly disappointed. Because a world organized around compassion and humility would be a very inconvenient place for Armageddon to break out. The cultists waiting for the end of the world may unknowingly be following a teacher who spent most of his time explaining how to prevent it.

So note, American Christianity is not a single thing. It is a vast ecosystem of the church basement feeding the hungry, (thumbs up) the preacher marching for justice (thumbs up), the televangelist selling miracles on television (thumbs down), the politician invoking God for votes (thumbs down), and batshit bullshit holy wars for Israel (thumbs down). In other words, it is a mirror of America itself — capable of generosity, hypocrisy, courage, and folly in equal measure. Or, to put it in the sort of blunt phrasing we rather enjoy: Religion in America can inspire people to feed the poor, or convince them that God desperately needs a new private jet. The former is true and the latter is false.

"Steady State Economy" Over "Endless Economic Growth"

Endless economic growth is one of the great pieces of modern mythology. It stands shoulder to shoulder with the divine right of scumbag egomaniacal kings. It is a story we tell ourselves, and like all powerful stories, it shapes the architecture of our civilization.

But let us slow down and look at it carefully. The idea of endless economic growth rests on a very peculiar assumption: that a finite planet can sustain infinite extraction, infinite production, infinite consumption. It is, at its core, a metaphysical claim disguised as an economic one. It says that matter and energy can be reorganized without limit, that the Earth is a kind of bottomless pantry and simultaneously an infinite sewer.

Now, this might have seemed plausible in the 18th or 19th century when the industrial project was young and the planet felt vast and empty. But here we are in the 21st century, with oceans acidifying, species disappearing at a rate comparable to past mass extinctions, and the atmosphere chemically altered by our industriousness. The curve of growth begins to look less like progress and more like pathology.

Growth, in the biological sense, is something organisms do until they reach maturity. A child grows, yes. But if the growth does not stop, if the child continues growing indefinitely, we do not call it success, we call it cancer. This is the uncomfortable metaphor that hangs over the ideology of endless economic expansion. Cancer is growth without limit, growth without integration into the larger system. It consumes the host that makes it possible. Our global economy has begun to resemble such a phenomenon, devouring forests, aquifers, soil fertility, and cultural diversity in the name of quarterly returns - most of which go to Epstien class dark sorcerers so it's long been time to upgrade that operating system.

Now contrast this with the idea of a steady-state economy. A steady-state economy is not a frozen economy, not a stagnant one, but one that understands itself as a subsystem of the biosphere. It acknowledges thermodynamics. It accepts that there are limits to throughput, to the flow of matter and energy through the system, and it aims for dynamic equilibrium rather than endless expansion.

In a steady-state model, the goal is not to increase GDP ad infinitum, but to increase depth - depth of experience, depth of meaning, depth of culture. It asks: what if wealth is not the accumulation of commodities, but the refinement of consciousness? What if progress is not more stuff, but more beauty, more intelligence, more connection?

The tragedy of the growth paradigm is that it reduces the human drama to a kind of accounting problem. It measures success by throughput. It mistakes quantity for quality. It tells us that happiness lies just beyond the next acquisition, the next upgrade, the next spike in the index.

Meditation or the more volume turned up psychedelic experience reveal the opposite. That infinity is accessible inwardly. The boundless is not found in expanding production curves but in expanding awareness. The cosmos blooms inside the mind without extracting a single ton of copper and we have confused the expansion of consciousness with the expansion of consumption.

A steady-state economy would require a profound psychological shift. It would mean relinquishing the adolescent fantasy of perpetual growth and embracing maturity. It would mean recognizing that the Earth is not raw material but a living system, and that we are participants in it, not its managers.

The real question beneath the economic one is existential: What is human life for? If it is for buying and selling, then yes, growth must continue forever. But human beings are not just commercial traders - Our lives are actually for exploring the mystery, cultivating art, deepening love, and participating consciously in the unfolding of evolution, so enough is enough.

Civilization now stands at a bifurcation point. One path is acceleration - more extraction, more speed, more abstraction, until the system destabilizes under its own complexity. The other path is integration, aligning our economic systems with ecological realities and aligning our desires with what is actually nourishing. Endless growth is a hallucination born of industrial triumphalism. A steady-state economy is an act of humility before nature. And humility is the beginning of wisdom.

The Moral Inversion of Fascists Where Every Accusation is a Confession

The 24/7 lies of the MAGA cult are not an American novelty, nor a partisan curiosity. It is a structural feature of any fascist brain drain. Projection is not a bug of the system; it is the system.

If you examine the anatomy of fascism, whether in Benito Mussolini’s Italy or Adolf Hitler’s Germany, you will find the same ritual choreography:

Accuse the enemy of precisely what you intend to do.
Declare yourself the sole guardian of the nation.
Frame any resistance as treason.
Insist that extraordinary powers are required to combat the very threat you have invented.

Projection serves two indispensable purposes. First, it manufactures moral permission. If “they” are already cheating, corrupting, subverting, infiltrating, poisoning the bloodstream of the nation — then any action taken against them is not aggression. It is self-defense. Garbage fascism always casts itself as the last barricade against chaos, even as it dynamites the foundations. Hitler screamed about Marxist subversion while planning the abolition of independent labor. Mussolini railed against parliamentary corruption while extinguishing parliamentary democracy. The accusation is the rehearsal for the crime. Second, projection fuses the leader and the followers into a persecuted tribe. A fascist cult does not merely support a strongman (really weak man) who is too morally frail to man up and admit he lost elections; it identifies with him. If he is accused, they are accused. If he is indicted, they are indicted. Thus, every charge must be flipped, inverted, hurled back with doubled fury. To concede a single point would be to puncture the fiction of collective innocence.

This is why you so often hear the language of victimhood from cults that dominate their political ecosystems. “We are being silenced,” cry those with television networks and godzillionaires at their disposal. “The system is weaponized,” declare those openly promising to weaponize it. The contradiction is not embarrassing; it is essential. It keeps the faithful in a state of siege.

Fascist politics thrives on permanent emergency and emergency requires an enemy monstrous enough to justify anything. If such an enemy does not exist, it must be conjured, or better yet, mirrored. The enemy is said to be corrupt, decadent, treacherous, authoritarian, perverse. Conveniently, those are precisely the traits the cult itself exhibits. The denunciation prepares the audience psychologically for imitation, because they, of course, need to be told what to think. As one must also note the psychological seduction at work. Projection relieves followers of doubt. Any uncomfortable evidence about their own side can be dismissed with a shrug and a “The other side does it worse.” Moral equivalence becomes moral anesthesia. This is why the dynamic feels cultish and why rather than looking at any of their own 100% Nazgûl agents of empire, they immediately go to "the Clintons", or "the Obama's", or "the Biden's" who are half Nazgûl agents of the empire. 

Fascism is not simply a set of policies; it is a moral inversion machine. It tells adherents that loyalty is virtue, that cruelty is strength, that criticism is conspiracy. And it trains them, relentlessly, to see their own reflection only in the distorted caricature of the enemy. The phrase “every accusation is a confession” captures this inversion neatly. In fascist cults, accusations are not arguments. They are previews. And previews, as history rather bloodily demonstrates, should be taken seriously. So fight the empire by sharing or promoting real journalistic pro democracy bottom up media, donating to pro-democratic candidates - especially ones who don't take blood soaked AIPAC money, doing whatever slacktivism you can online, and way better, getting out there through real activism in the real world. 

Arc Raiders and Human Cooperation

Gaming can of course be an addiction. Like all things in life, balance is important and we ourselves are not above playing the occasional computer game as we all need a little escape here and there. In spirts and not letting it take over our life of course. 

Amongst other more creative things, one of our rituals we do for fun with our daughter is watch anime or game together. And recently we did an extremely rare acquisition and bought a new but used off Craigslist graphics card. By the way, we highly recommend the book "Chip War" on the subject of microchips and the massive importance of two companies on the planet, one of which is called ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials) which does extreme ultraviolet photolithography, creating the world's only machines that are required to manufacture the most advanced microchips, and the other is called TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and is the company that manufactures the majority of the world's microchips using ASML hardware in Taiwan and is why that is such a crucial small country in the Earth realm currently. Right around the time of this new GPU acquisition a new game had recently been released which caught our eye and was an excuse to try out the new hardware. 

Arc Raiders is a multiplayer extraction shooter set in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has been driven underground by colossal mechanized entities known as ARC. These are not zombies, not rival factions, not cartoon villains—they are autonomous war machines of various sizes, from tiny little spiders which will jump on you alien face hugger style, or massive multi legged robots which are the size of a warehouse, and all sizes in between that are relics of some prior technological miscalculation. The surface world is hostile, metallic, impersonal. The sky itself is dangerous. Players emerge from subterranean refugees to raid or scavenge resources, complete objectives, and survive encounters with these roaming mechanical intelligences. 

There is a crisis in gaming currently with what are called AAA games. Meaning games made by large companies, usually by teams of thousands of people, and end up being flat, bloated, repetitive, shallow POS's that are expensive to buy, with the current release price for them being about $70, and then overly excessive with in-game purchases. They're just like superhero popcorn fluff movies. Arc Raiders was actually made by a rather small game company - Embark Studios in Stockholm Sweden. The development team was supposedly under 100 people which came out of one such company that was making the Battlefield franchise, which, like most supposedly creative companies, didn't use their employees' creativity. So they we're like... "F you, we're out, we're starting our own company" and have now more creatively created a phenomenal game that is selling well, retaining players well, and has become a somewhat phenomenon putting AAA game companies to shame. 

We've been impressed by it for numerous reasons. The graphics are amazing, the sound design is incredible, the guns and shooting gameplay are phenomenal, but it also has done numerous things we, and likely many other gamers, have thought about but wondered why more games haven't done until recently. 

The first is called proximity chat, where players can talk to one another over their real voice, through microphones, but unlike military comms, and past games, where you could just speak to team members wherever they were inside the map of the whole game world, it's based more on how close one player is to the other. IE, within proximity of your voice sounds like it's in that environment. So if you're in a medical lab it sounds like its in a sterile environment, or a factory setting it echos off the machinery, etc... One can imagine how much fun this adds to gameplay when you can hear other voices, friend or faux, and people use their personalities. To talk trash, be an asshole, or be funny or nice.

The next is that the game is an extraction shooter, meaning you load into a map, collect things, engage with things, and have to leave alive in order to be successful and keep your raided loot. So if you die, you lose almost everything. Which can include stuff you've spent a great deal of time working toward. A custom gun build you've put together, equipment, etc... So this creates a game dynamic with scarcity in the game, and that your life in the game has more value. And thus people are more careful around each corner. Like one would really be if they were in a real shootout. For decades, most games, especially ones with death, had a fast pace where if you die in the game, you just respawn. Meaning your character just pops back to life, usually at some other location, basically instantly. This just means you kill or be killed and are quickly back in the fight and it's got the sophistication of a shallow arcade game reloading over and over again and are very repetitive and end up being boring. 

The third is the general sophistication of the ARC's. Just like the Terminator franchise, which, like most sci-fi, gives grave warning about the potential malevolence of artificial intelligence in the form of what was called Skynet, the game has humans, which are again, all real people playing the game, most of which because were post-apocalyptic look like homeless Chicagoans, who are fighting Artificial intelligence machines that are powered by real AI and machine learning. So you, as a human playing the game, load into a world in which that dystopian sci-fi prediction has become reality, and are playing against AI machines that want to kill you that have machine guns, lasers, flamethrowers, rockets, bombs, etc... in their arsenals, and somewhat think and learn and outsmart you.

In gaming there are these terms PvP or PvE which stand for player versus player, meaning real humans play against other real humans online or player versus environment, meaning a real human plays against the games players, zombies, robots, etc... The structure of Arc Raiders is PvPvE—meaning players can fight each other—but the real, ever-present pressure comes from the environment and the ARC machines themselves. 

And this is where it becomes fascinating.

What’s special about the game is not simply its mechanics or its aesthetic, though both are compelling. It’s special because it frames the central drama not as tribe versus tribe, but humanity versus system. The enemy is not another human face; it is an autonomous technological ecology gone rogue. The machines are vast, indifferent, procedural. They don’t hate you. They don’t negotiate. They simply execute. In that framing, something subtle shifts in the player psyche.

In many competitive online games, the default emotional posture is paranoia. Everyone is a potential threat. Trust is rare because betrayal is rewarded. But in Arc Raiders, survival often requires coordination—watching each other’s backs, reviving downed teammates, pooling resources. The environment can be so overwhelming that cooperation becomes rational. The fourth aspect of what is fascinating is how players have leaned into this. Even in spaces where PvP betrayal is technically possible by what gamers call rats, players who kill other players, many choose alliance. So the most special aspect about the game is it has aggression based matchmaking. Meaning if you kill other people in the game, PvP style, you sink down into game servers where you're on maps with other psychos who all want to murder each other. But if you don't kill other people, perhaps short of occasional self defense fending off rats, you are continually matched on more and more friendly lobbies. And these spaces are amazing and keep friendly players coming back to the game over and over again because of potential fun and non-violent human interactions with real life other people. We run by people and instead of murdering them say "hey pal", or people strike up friendly chats or socialize. If you get downed, sometimes someone is there to help revive you and get you back on your feet. Funny things can happen, the game includes musical instruments, so after a raid and cooperative killing of a giant arc enemy, players will be standing around in a circle playing instruments together and dancing, but what's almost most of all amazing is there's much less scarcity. You can be a rat asshole and shoot someone in the back and steal their shit, but within a short period of time, you'll be having the same done to you. If you're nice, other players are nice to you. And even end up giving you stuff. Including some of the most valuable finds in the game. So helpfulness and kindness leads to more and more abundance. Who would have thought? In Arc Raiders, players cooperate because it works. It increases survival probability. It creates emergent trust. Trust then becomes contagious. And in our opinion, it is way less stressful and just more fun to play.

What makes the game deeper, then, is not simply that it is cooperative, but that it reveals something about us. The system is dangerous enough that the old primate "band together when the leopard appears" circuitry do activate. But... strip away artificial scarcity and ego-driven ranking systems, and when confronted with an impersonal existential threat, humans spontaneously rediscover mutual aid.

The dynamics of what’s happening in Arc Raiders is not merely a quirk of game mechanics—it’s a revelation. A tiny, shimmering aperture through which we glimpse the future of human social organization. The expectation—particularly in a contemporary multiplayer environment—is predation. Suspicion. Opportunism. The Hobbesian reflex: other players are threats. We assume competition because modernity has trained us to assume scarcity and betrayal. That’s the mythology of our economic system bleeding into our digital playgrounds.

And yet, what has this game revealed? That when players are placed in a predominantly PvE environment—where the true antagonist is the system itself, the environment or otherwise the mechanical “other”, they begin spontaneously cooperating. Not because they are forced to. Not because there is a morality meter. But because cooperation is the most intelligent adaptation to shared existential pressure.

This has even surprised the European developers because they, like many of us, have likely internalized the Darwinian caricature—the idea that evolution is fundamentally about tooth and claw. But evolution is equally about symbiosis. The forest is not a battlefield. It is a negotiation.

When the perceived enemy is not each other but a larger system—alien machines, environmental threat, impersonal adversity—human beings tend to organize toward mutual aid. This is very important. It suggests that much of our conflict in the “real world” is a misperception of who the enemy is. If the enemy is your neighbor, you compete. If the enemy is entropy, extinction, ecological collapse—then suddenly cooperation becomes not virtuous, but much more necessary. Because in a PvE structure, the game reframes the narrative. The problem is not “Who can I dominate?” but “How do we survive this together?” And survival in that context becomes a social art form.

This is a metaphor for humanity standing at the edge of the 21st century abyss where we are entering an evolutionary bottleneck. Climate destabilization, AI acceleration, biosphere degradation—these are our Arc Raiders. These are the machines descending from the sky. And what is fascinating is that in moments of genuine shared crisis - such as natural disasters or global emergencies - sure there are occasional psycho rats, but people overwhelmingly help one another. The tribal lines dissolve under pressure from something larger. The future of humanity may depend on whether we can perceive the true scale of the “PvE” scenario we are in.  The game allows us to simulate what it feels like to live in the shadow of systems larger than ourselves and to discover that the winning strategy is not ruthless individualism but networked cooperation.

Historical empire, modern empire, and modern geopolitics is structured like PvP. Nation against nation. Ideology against ideology. Corporation against corporation. But the biosphere does not care about these abstractions. The carbon molecule is indifferent to any flag. If humanity can continue to collectively recognize that we are in a cooperative survival game against systemic collapse, then the spontaneous kindness seen in Arc Raiders becomes not an anomaly but a prototype. Of course your digital life is not your real life. But digital environments function as a kind of rehearsal space for evolutionary possibilities. Multiplayer games are mythic training grounds. They reveal latent tendencies. They expose default settings in the psyche. When you give people the option to betray or to bond, and the structure rewards bonding, something ancient awakens: the campfire instinct. That’s why it stands out. Not because it reinvents the shooter genre, but because it accidentally exposes a deeper truth: when the sky fills with machines, the tribe reforms around the campfire. And we have always been and will always be a social primate whose greatest weapon is coordination.

The game has been chatted about as a massive social experiment. Patrick Söderlund, CEO of Embark Studios, revealed that a distinguished neurology professor actually approached him about Arc Raiders and why it should be used in a psychological testing. He claims: "I actually had a conversation at dinner three days ago with a very prominent professor in neurology that had gotten to know about the game, and said, 'Listen, you have no idea what you've built. Forget about the game itself.' From just the whole idea of psychological and social experimentation, and what this game can be. She, a good friend of mine, basically said, 'You should go and do a collaboration or work with people from the medical field to study what behaviors are triggered in Arc Raiders."

In the West we have been so conditioned, especially in America, to expect selfishness that altruism feels like a glitch in the code. But it is not a glitch. It is the deeper program. Competition is context-dependent; cooperation is structural to our survival. The question is not whether humanity is capable of cooperation. Clearly, we are, and it's our default state. The question is whether we can design our “game mechanics” — our economic systems, our political frameworks, our technological incentives — to reward cooperation rather than extraction.

Imagine a planetary civilization where ecological restoration, renewable infrastructure, and collective intelligence are the “PvE objectives.” Suddenly the smartest strategy is alliance. 

So the game is a parable. When the threat is impersonal and immense, the illusion of separateness weakens. And when separateness weakens, a new form of intelligence emerges—not individual brilliance, but distributed cognition. It's the good aspect of a hive mind, not in the being susceptible to propaganda sense, or the dystopian sense, but in the mycelial sense. Information flowing through a network of sovereign nodes.

Arc Raiders reveals that beneath our cynical cultural narrative lies an untapped cooperative reflex. And that reflex may be the hinge on which the future turns. The real question is: can we learn from our simulations before reality forces the lesson upon us? Because reality, like the game, does not offer respawns.

Be Kind To People but Ruthless to Systems

“Be kind to people, but ruthless to systems” is one of those deceptively gentle aphorisms that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a hand grenade wrapped in a thank-you note.

What it insists upon, quite rightly, is a moral distinction that our age finds unbearably difficult to maintain. People are fallible, frightened, often doing the best they can with the intellectual furniture available to them. Systems, by contrast, are not frightened, not confused, and not deserving of sympathy. Systems are designed. They embody incentives, hierarchies, exclusions, and often cruelties, all carefully engineered and then defended with a priesthood of jargon.

To be kind to people is to recognize that most human beings are, in a sense, hostages: born into economic arrangements they didn’t design, bureaucracies they cannot meaningfully challenge, traditions they are punished for questioning. It is both vulgar and lazy to mistake the victim for the author of the crime.

But to be ruthless to systems - ah, there is the rub. That requires intellectual courage. It means refusing to sentimentalize institutions simply because they are old, powerful, or cloaked in moral language. It means interrogating isms like horrendous fascism, or better but still potnteitally authoritarian communism, or rape the Earth for profit Capitalism, or not so good and quite good versions of socialism without worshipping them, or scrutinizing both wonderful and horrible religion without indulging it, or deconstructing and examining the state without blindly saluting it. Ruthlessness here does not mean cruelty; it means clarity. It means following an argument to its end, even when that end threatens someone’s livelihood, prestige, or cherished illusion.

The quote is also a rebuke to two common forms of cowardice. The first is the conservative bully who attacks individuals because it’s easier than dismantling the machinery that produced the injustice - lord knowns we get plenty of those in our comments. The second is the liberal hand-wringer who preaches kindness so fervently that it becomes an alibi for never confronting power at all. Kindness without ruthlessness is merely politeness in the face of oppression.

In short, this maxim is an instruction manual for moral adulthood. Love people enough to understand their predicament. Hate bad systems enough to want them dismantled. And never, ever confuse being “nice” with being just.

The Epstein Files Tell Us That Obscene Wealth Rots The Soul

The Epstein files tell us, if one has the stomach to read them and the spine to accept their implications, that the ultra-rich inhabit not merely a different tax bracket, which consists of paying little to no taxes when they are the only ones who should pay most to all the taxes, but a different moral jurisdiction.

Jeffrey Epstein was not powerful because he was mysterious; he was mysterious because he was protected. The so-called “files”  consisting of emails, images, video, flight logs, depositions, settlement records, and sealed testimonies pried open only after years of legal trench warfare - reveal a pattern that is by now impossible to deny: wealth, when concentrated to obscene levels, functions as a solvent. It dissolves law, accountability, and shame.

First, they expose how money purchases proximity to power. Epstein was not an outcast skulking on the fringes of high society; he was welcomed into it. He socialized with financiers, politicians, royalty, and self-styled “philanthropists” who publicly sermonized about virtue while privately enjoying the perks of impunity. The corruption here is not merely sexual but institutional. Prosecutors hesitated. Police were leaned on. Plea deals were engineered so lenient they might as well have been engraved invitations to reoffend.

Second, the files demonstrate how the ultra-rich outsource risk. Epstein’s victims bore all of it -legal, psychological, social - while he bore none. When caught, the machinery of privilege whirred into action: elite lawyers, compliant judges, sealed records, and a corporatized media culture oddly deferential to “important men.” This is not conspiracy theory; it is class analysis with footnotes.

Third, they reveal the fiction at the heart of plutocratic mythology: that extreme wealth is a proxy for intelligence, responsibility, or moral seriousness. Epstein’s fortune did not make him enlightened; it made him insulated. It allowed him to construct a private universe in which young women were commodities and consequences were optional. That universe did not collapse until public outrage overwhelmed the defenses money had built.

Fourthly, they show us that the ultra rich are 9 times out of 10 ultra liars.

And finally, most damningly, the files show how accountability, when it comes at all, comes too late and too partially. Epstein was suicided conveniently beyond cross-examination, and the system that enabled him remains largely intact. Many who benefited from his protection have never been meaningfully questioned, let alone charged. The lesson absorbed by the scumbag powerful is not “don’t do this,” but “be more careful.”

So what do the Epstein files tell us about the corruption of the ultra-rich? They tell us that extreme morbid wealth rots the soul. Because when wealth becomes unanswerable, it becomes obviously predatory. That secrecy is not an accident but a business model. And that a society which allows money to trump justice should not be surprised when monsters flourish in first class while their victims are told to sit quietly in the back, if they are acknowledged at all.

This is not a scandal. It is a symptom. And is screaming that power should be answerable to law rather than the other way around.

American Empire on Overload

Cultures do not collapse because they are evil they collapse because they are exhausted by their own metaphors. And the de-evolving radically regressive wanna be-fascism mixed with idiocracy American hating Trump regime - whether one speaks of the leader whose been a lifelong criminal, the cult, or the psychic weather that produced it, is best understood as the right-wing American Empire in a state of neurological overload.

Empire is a kind of hallucination. It’s a story a society tells itself about permanence, inevitability, and divine exemption from the laws of nature and real history. America’s story of building an empire through slaughtering indigenous people's, has in many ways since been expanded in many bad ways without limit. Novelty channeled into material accumulation. But real novelty belongs to mind and meaning, not to strip malls and derivatives.

Oligarchic criminals are not the cause. They are the symptom. They are what happens when the operating system of an empire caters only to the top of the socio economic hierarchy. 

What we are witnessing is cultural feedback failure. The corpotized institutions no longer metabolize reality. Light spirituality, higher thoughts, the arts, the sciences are all ignored and or degraded, myth replaces reason, and power becomes performative - pure spectacle. This is classic late-empire behavior. Rome did it. Spain did it. Britain did it. They all mistook domination for destiny.

The radically shitty rightward attempted takeover is the empire’s reptile brain trying to seize control. Fear of demographic change. Fear of ecological reckoning. Fear of lost mythic centrality. When an empire is taken over by regressives trying to pull its people into a past that never existed, it retreats into a fantasy - flags, walls, strongmen who are weak men, purity narratives, and ICE goon squads. This is not strength. It's pathetic weakness and panic ritualized as politics.

Wet diaper Trumpism is cargo-cult authority: loud, simplified, emotionally charged, hostile to nuance. It bubbled to the surface because the culture has been flattened by suboptimal media saturation, which are owned by previously said oligarchic criminals, where attention is the only remaining currency. The empire is trying to expand outward; with eye roll worthy dumb AF talk of Canada and Greenland, while in actuality it is imploding inward, cannibalizing its own symbols.

“American Empire on Overload,” is: Too much inaccurate information. Too little real wisdom. Too much abused power. Too little actual humility.

The system has exceeded its own mythological bandwidth and evolution doesn’t ask permission. What comes next is not decided by elections alone and rural folks not voting against themselves, but by whether consciousness itself can re-ground. Whether people continue to rediscover community, ecological sanity, and a relationship to the living planet rather than to abstractions of dominance.

When an empire overloads, the question is not how to fix the machine, but how to outgrow it. Empires cannot be saved, but people can be redirected. The radically shitty right thrives on attention. Rage is its sacrament. The first solution is refusal. Not apathy - selective disengagement. Don't feed the cultural machine your fear, outrage, and nervous system.

Re-localize Meaning. Empire is abstraction. Numbers, flags, markets, identities without faces. Decentralize Power Through Networked Intelligence - The empire overloads because it is top-heavy with criminal assholes running it. The future is decentralized networks over dominator hierarchy pyramids. Sourced locally. Food grown nearby, people known by name, and shared nature based rituals, are all skills that actually work. When meaning returns to the village, authoritarian mythology collapses. The strongman really weakman has nothing to say to a community that already knows how to live.

Re-mythologize the future and not the past - Trumpism is also necromancy. It raises the dead myths of hierarchy, conquest, and masculine certainty. We need to continue better systems such as those inspired by the good aspects of hardware and software technologies combined with the natural technologies indigenous peoples have known: which are humans as caretakers, not rulers. Intelligence being ecological and not extractive. And technology as a partner with biology, not its replacement.

Restore the Sacred Through Direct Experience. Authoritarianism flourishes in populations such as Supremacist Zionism, the Christian Right, or fundamentalist Islam because they actually spiritually starved. People who have touched the mystery and continue to work on their development in their day to day lives, and we just had an ayahuasca experience ourselves, do not need supremacist religions or their weasley tyrants. Direct experience, whether through deep meditation, ritual, time in wilderness, or yes, responsible entheogenic exploration, reintroduces humility. It dissolves the cartoon ego that fascism depends on. A person who has experienced ego-death cannot be easily recruited into a cult of dominance.

Teach Media Literacy as Survival Skill. The ultra-right is a memetic infection. Images, slogans, emotional hooks bypass reason and lodge directly in the limbic system. Teaching people how the media manipulates attention is not optional anymore - it’s as essential as clean water.

Re-ally with the Planet This is the deepest solution. The American Empire is collapsing because it declared war on Gaia. Climate chaos is not a side issue - it is the central intelligence pushing back. Any politics that denies ecological reality will inevitably become authoritarian, because it must suppress truth to survive. A culture aligned with Earth does not need enemies. It has higher responsibilities.

Casting Spells over Thoughts and Prayers

The fabulous comedian David Cross, whose comedy decades ago first raised our eyebrow to lowest common denominator political American stupidity, has a great bit where he says “I would like to officially change and substitute 'casting spells and chanting' in place of 'thoughts and prayers'. Hilarious and even more American!

This is not only wonderful and delightful because it draws attention to the fact that language itself is micro magic. When a likely fake Christian politician stands at a podium after a 2nd Amendment related tragedy and utters that eye roll worthy, tired, and empty phrase, “thoughts and prayers,” instead of passing very popular common sense policies to help reduce gun violence, what they are actually doing is a kind of spiritual bypassing substituted for spell-casting, though a spell so worn down, so emptied of intention, that it has become little more than background noise. The words drift out, ritualistically, to soothe and placate, but not to transform a culture into something better.

Imagine if instead of that hollow incantation, they were to admit what it actually is: “We are casting spells and chanting" or "engaging in magical ritual and doing incantations”. Because that is precisely what speech is. Every utterance is an attempt to shape reality through vibration and symbol. To speak is to weave the air with intention. The tragedy of “thoughts and prayers” is not that it is mystical, but that it is virtue signaling stripped of potency, a ritual gone unconscious. The vast majority of stuff in Abrahamic faiths, which at their most water down easily consumable and thus least spiritual, are exoteric, meaning outer, are borrowed and co-opeded, if not outright stolen from older, esoteric, pegan, dreidic, indigenous, deeper esoteric practices.

So to say “casting spells and doing incantations” would be not only to ground it more in nature, and thus real spirituality, but to bring the hidden truth back to the surface: that language has power, and that power can be wielded authentically or cynically. The shamans of old did not speak words lightly; they knew that syllables could open doorways in the mind, that the right phrase in the right moment could heal or destroy. In our society, we have forgotten this, but are surely starting to realize it now due to the increase of harsh rhetoric, even though clichés are still babbled as though they were somehow sufficient.

What would it mean if public officials more deeply understood their words as spells? It would mean that every promise and proclamation would have to be crafted with the care of a magician drawing symbols. It would mean responsibility for the energetic resonance of speech. And perhaps it would mean fewer empty rituals and more beneficial actions that actually change the fabric of the collective psyche for the better. To evolve it instead of devole it.

Doomy Titles Are Miscalculations Of Destiny

Doomy titles, those grim little prophecies scattered across the scrollable wasteland of social media such as “It’s over” “The end is near” “We’re cooked” "This country is done".

These are not messages; they are emotional tripwires, engineered in the same factories of attention where clickbait is synthesized like a psychic plastic.

The culture has learned something very old and very potent: fear is the most efficient solvent of attention. Long before corporate news and controlled algorithms, sub-optimal priests and kings understood that if they can convince people the sky is falling, they can rearrange the ground beneath their feet.

So these titles of DOOM are not simply expressions of anxiety; they are performances of apocalypse, stitched together by the technosphere to keep the mind oscillating between dread and distraction. They turn the vast, living complexity of the human predicament into bumper-sticker eschatology.

And here’s the irony: in darker times, hue-woman-anity has always believed it was standing on the brink. Every generation, from the ancient Maya to the medieval mystics to the wanna be cyberpunks of Silicon Valley, has cried out, “We’re cooked!” It’s not only a way of trying to deal with death, which is not an end, but also a reflection of the shallow canyons of the co-opted and narrow mind.

The real danger is not that we’re cooked, but that we begin to internalize these slogans as cosmological truths. If one repeats doom enough times, the psyche begins to treat it as destiny — and that is a profound miscalculation of the creative, adaptive, myth-making power of the human mind.

When you encounter these bleak proclamations, treat them as signals, yes, but not as verdicts. Listen, but do not bow. Ask yourself: Is this a genuine insight, or merely the cultural machine playing its favorite chord — the minor key of panic?

Because the future is not a fixed script delivered in a headline. It is a garden, and gardeners know the seasons and natural cycles: experimenting, cultivating, and imagining the next blooming.

Why Those in Theocratic Cults All Parrot the Same Things

One of the many great things about "No Kings" is the variety of messaging we saw. Which means a variety of thoughts. For the progress side of America this is both good and bad because messaging can be scattered. As historically, there will always be the "free Tibet" Berkeley hippies there with those fighting for civil rights, affordable healthcare, and upholding the constitution. For the regress side of America, they're messaging is often more homogenized because there is less variety of thought. This unfortunately means its messaging can be parroted and echoed quicker. 

When we look at the phenomenon of theocratic fascist cults, whether they arise in the deserts of the ancient world or the digital jungles of the modern mind—we are observing the triumph of ideology over experience. These people, who we've said it before and we'll never stop saying it, in their latest incarnation, are in a fascist MAGA cult, nested in a regressive red cult, nested in a faux Abrahamic supremacist religious cult. So these thrice cult fervent disciples speak in unison because the narrow structure they inhabit demands it. Language, that great frontier of the individual spirit, within these tight canyons is commandeered, reduced, and weaponized into a tool of control. The spontaneous bloom of personal insight is replaced by the same dozen tired selfish asshole tropes, "You Marxist", "You Communist", "We're a Republic, not a democracy", "You wanna raise my taxes", etc... SNORE!!!

In such systems, the logos—the living, breathing word—is no longer the voice of mystery but the echo of dogma. The cult member is taught to fear ambiguity, to distrust nuance. Their inner world is colonized by slogans masquerading as truths. Of course historically given to them by hate radio and now more manosphere casts. Theocracy in its fascist form functions as a linguistic parasite: it replicates by infecting minds with prefabricated phrases that suppress doubt and exalt obedience. This is why, when you listen to them speak, you hear not individuals but a kind of psychic hive narrating other lies they heard echoed within their chambers.

And yet, beneath that monotone, there remains a faint pulse of something human. People are indoctrinated into these cults not out of evil but from hunger—for meaning, for belonging, for the comfort of certainty in a world where everything seems in flux. The problem is that when the search for meaning is outsourced to a garbage authority, it ceases to be a quest and becomes a prison.

So the sameness of their speech is not just mimicry; it’s the linguistic manifestation of fear. Fear of the abyss, fear of freedom, fear of the self unmoored from the collective trance. The vast majority are permanently lost to never return, but because it's finally now affecting them personally, some are now going through the de-conditioning process, beginning to have courage to listen ever so slightly to their own higher selves which they have been previously closed off too. Plato's Cave style.

American Reactionaries Want to De-Evolve Instead of Evolve (Exclusive for Members)

The other day, on some of our content, we had a troll attempt to sling mud. They abided by the same exact pattern we see with every troll, who were triggered because what we were saying threatened one of their underlying fictional operating systems. Not to mention one of their multiple nested cults which they are in. We encourage you to listen to our previous insight titled "Regressive Reactionaries" because that is the pattern. Which is that we have never seen an American imperial advocate, meaning regressive, otherwise called a heavy "right winger" leave a proactive, or insightful, or considerate comment. Instead, the comments are always, always, always reactionary. 

The term reactionary is very precise, and when applied to those who claim to call themselves conservatives helps us overstand what is really happening beneath their false slogans and their terrible policy which hurts the average person, including themselves. A reactionary is not simply someone who holds traditional values. A reactionary is someone who defines themselves by opposition to change, someone whose entire political energy comes from the desire to reverse history, to roll back the clock, to resist the forward momentum of culture.

In America, conservatism has always been a peculiar hybrid. Before we were born 45 years ago, at its noblest, it was about conserving the liberties enshrined in the Constitution, conserving a suspicion of centralized authority. But in its current darker manifestation, it is reactionary: clinging to a mythical past — whether it be the 1950s suburban idyll, or the frontier individualism of the 19th century and seeks to impose that simulacrum of stability upon the present.

The problem is that time does not flow backwards. Novelty is the very nature of existence. Change is not a choice, it is the ground state of reality. To be reactionary, then, is to place oneself in a posture of perpetual resistance to the inevitable, like a person who insists on rowing upstream while the river of history flows toward the ocean. The more fiercely they row, the more exhausted and embittered they become, and the more they lash out at those who ride the current with ease. And the more the current regime gets more wanna be authoritarian against the American people.

This is why American reactionaries so often become entangled with said wanna be authoritarianism. To hold back the tide of novelty, they turn to rigid hierarchies, to strongmen who are really pathetic, weak men, and to myths of purity. They convince themselves that if they can only freeze the cultural flux, then meaning will return. But meaning never comes from freezing the dance of history (HIS story) let alone the mystery (MY story). Meaning comes from participating in it.

So from a self-development standpoint, the American conservative, insofar as they become reactionary, is tragically engaged in a losing battle against the very fabric of time. Their fear of change, and make no mistake, they are fear based, blinds them to the possibility that change is not annihilation, but transformation. And this is why we would argue that the true radicalism today is not the reactionary fantasy of going back, but the courage to go forward.

Regressive Reactionaries (Exclusive for Members)

These insights, and our essays, and our documentaries are not for the faint of heart. They are not shallow fluff but hopefully hard hitting, paradigm crushing, and dogma challenging. They are our attempts at having a memorable body of work to help the development of you dear watchers, readers, and/or listeners but are also obscure and relatively unknown. So we very sporadically get feedback but it's few and far between. When we do get rare feedback, 2/3 of the time it's impressive, thoughtful, insightful, even educational, but most of all proactive. But the other 1/3 of the time the comments are so staggeringly poor they are laughable. We've noticed a consistent pattern in each and every one of these really atrocious comments - They are regressive and they are reactionary. Not to mention always coming from someone who is anonymous - A troll.

We have, at times, put the following text in the info of our video channels - "Due to the nature of our work often challenging people's dogmas (and catmas), reactionary comments are not worth the time but proactive comments are encouraged!" There's a hilarious old website called dontevenreply.com which is subtitled "E-mails From An Asshole." It's since concluded but was posts from a guy who messed with people on various internet classified ad sites. He'd pick the most goofy requests posts that were just asking for it and just continually mess with them, in a proactive way, with an ultimate goal of trying to string them along for as long as possible so it was good content for the site. We took it as a lesson in not even engaging with anonymous internet reactionaries in the first place, as the troll's goals are to get you to engage. We've also further remembered this wisdom after hearing Robert Anton Wilson, the wonderful author and sit down comedian say this in regards to debate - "Don't teach a pig to sing, it will only upset you and annoy the pig". Which is a hysterical R.A.W. way of saying don't even try to debate. Debate and respectful discourse is important in healthy democracy though, so we would say you should absolutely debate if you are moderate and they are moderate and both want to find common ground in good faith and this "don't teach a pig" quote only applies if the opposition is not extreme and in good faith - as then you won’t even agree on definitions of terms. So because of these two bits of comedy wisdom from the past, we basically do a quick glance at the reactionary comments, roll our eyes and or chuckle, delete them, and try to at least respond proactively back with the proactive comments, only giving those our time. See our piece "Proactive vs Reactive" on the massively important quality of being proactive in one's personal and professional life.

We know the left vs right binary political framing to be a binary trap. It's never our intention to turn our personal outputs, this podcast, our future creations, into just a left to lib vs con to right polarized battle and saying things within this framing certainly can trigger tribal trolls. Our podcast, which these insights go out to as audio only, mixed with our longer narrated essays, always has a foundational component which is balance, and liberal democracy, with a healthy mix off public social and private capital is a true center point and the farthest thing away from both left extreme communism which has the gulags and right extreme fascism that has the camps, both of which become authoritarian starvation nightmares but one of which our country is far away from while the other is trying to be implemented as we speak so being an "enlightened centrist" doesn't work half way between democracy and authoritarianism.

Although we are an independent who cares deeply about progress and society evolving, we could have a very left-wing communist come at us and say the government should be making our shoes and television sets and we would vehemently disagree that should be left up to corporations. We could also have some crazy extreme ideological person come at us that says there are more than two sexes and men can get pregnant and we would also vehemently disagree. But to date, neither has happened. What has actually happened, is that anytime these very unimpressive regressive reactive comments have come at us to date, we can tell they have been coming from an extreme right wing point of view and have been triggered with a “how dare you challenge our underlying dark hate based imperial religion” attitude. If they were intelligent and proactive they'd punch through a maybe influence a bit, but because the more heavy the conservatism the more it protects hierarchy, (and is usually built on a foundation in religious patriarchal hierarchy), the more the underlying ideologies are pro-morbid rich, pro-oligarch, and thus pro-authoritarian. They don't propose anything to help the working middle class, those words don't even exist on heavy right wing regressive media, but instead have been spending years getting working class people to fight each other over those culture wars.

Asking the ghost in the machine what "Reactionary politics" is and it says: it refers to a political ideology or movement that seeks to return to a previous social or political order. Characterized by a desire to reverse or counteract social, political, or economic changes that have occurred in society. Unlike conservative politics, which may seek to preserve certain aspects of the status quo, reactionary politics aim to roll back progress and return to what they perceive as a better or more traditional way of life. This can include the re-establishment of heavier hierarchies, the reversal of progressive reforms, or even advocating for the restoration of monarchies, which is certainly firing on all cylinders in the US of A by dark agents. Reactionary politics often arise in response to perceived threats to traditional values, institutions, or ways of life and advocate for authoritarian measures to turn back the clock on social progress and return to a perceived period when things "used to be great" but in no way had liberty and justice for all.

Now, as an example, if you’re a regressive reactionary, no need to listen to this final 2 minutes of the light of truth, as it will trigger your dark shadow dogma of lies.

We’ve said the following before, we’ll say it again now, and we’re going to keep saying it. Women control access to sexual intercourse. Birth control and abortion empower women and give them more options and freedom. And the regressive, Christian Right are not real Christians but Talibangelical Hypochristians whose crusade against abortion is not about life. It's about dark imperial hyper-patriarchal love lacking sexually repressed religions that want to suppress the empowerment of the feminine and make them inferior to men by telling them what to do and limiting their rights and freedom. This devolution, retrograde, regression is owned in the United States by right wing "conservatives" most of whom now seem perfectly fine with fascism mixed with idiocracy. As the majority regressive right wing Federal Supreme court rolled back a nearly 50 year right given to women in Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision and the right wing Arizona supreme court rolled back women’s rights in Arizona to 1864. The most regressive legal move in our country in our lifetime and even our parents' lifetimes and women who support this, are self hating. They hate their backwards selves.

No Kings and The Pro-Democratic Movement of Joy

The No Kings protests are a marvelous eruption of the human spirit into the political landscape. To see people in the United States of America, a society long habituated to the theater of managed choice and the soft hypnosis of consumerism, awakening and dancing in the streets beneath banners that declare the blatantly obvious “No Kings” — well, that is the body politic rediscovering its pulse and deeper spirit.

Democracy, in its truest sense, is not a system of bureaucratic rituals or a cold architecture of laws. It is an ecstatic phenomenon. The collective imagination made flesh, the many realizing they are, like an ant hive or mycelial network, one organism with countless voices and are the most powerful. More than pedo oligarchs, or a nightmare fuel supreme court, or a deeply mentally ill criminal shitler clown president gone rogue. The No Kings movement, in its humor, in its refusal to genuflect before the false idols of authority, is a reclamation of humor and joy as a political act. And joy, my friend, is one of the most subversive forces in the cosmos. Tyrants and bureaucrats cannot understand it, for it arises from a source beyond fear or control so the MAGA cult of fear is so jealous of their joy because they have no joy and will have no joy until they leave the cult.

What is happening in those gatherings — the laughter, the music, the dancing — is not mere peaceful protest; it is ritual. It is a spontaneous remembering that the divine spark within each evolving person is sovereign, that no flag, no corporation, no wanna be cunty king or technocrat can claim ownership over the ecstatic pulse of life. The No Kings protesters are saying: We are not subjects; we are participants in the cosmic drama of becoming. And that is where the real revolution always begins — not in the corridors of power but in the liberated imagination of those who refuse to bow to dumbfuckery. When joy becomes contagious, the old order trembles. The empire of control will not survive the laughter of awakening souls. So let's keep doing it funny and joyful patriots.

Conservative/Regressive Media is Sycophantic

What we are witnessing in what calls itself conservative but is really just regressive media in the west today is not journalism in the classical sense - it is court ritual, a choreography of flattery and fear. It has become sycophantic because it no longer serves truth but instead power and no longer enlightens but anesthetizes. In periods of higher consciousness, we had counsels of wise elders in democratic organization. In dark age kingdoms, monarchs were almost never the Walt Disney version of a philosopher King or Queen but we're instead more Alice in Wonderland "off with his head" egomaniacal psychopaths. Thus empires had to be built on lies where the person at the top was told they were good when they were instead really bad. Courtiers surrounded them echoing his words, magnifying his myths, and shielding him from the murmurs of the real world. The same drama is now enacted nightly across millions of glowing screens from thousands of different grifting sources.

A sycophantic media ecosystem thrives not on inquiry, but on affirmation. It tells its audience what they already believe, and praises them for believing it. It replaces curiosity with certainty, complexity with outrage, and civic responsibility with tribal belonging. The news anchor becomes a priest of grievance, dispensing indulgences to the faithful and casting heretics into the outer darkness. The result is a kind of psychic feedback loop, where propaganda is mistaken for revelation and emotional arousal for insight.

This sickness—because it is a sickness—emerges when truth itself becomes secondary to allegiance. When the purpose of communication shifts from discovery to domination, from illumination to the maintenance of hierarchy, the collective mind begins to rot. You can hear it in the language: repetition, simplification, scapegoating. The vocabulary of power replacing the language of understanding.

And yet, this sycophancy is not merely a media problem; it is a societal symptom. When people feel unmoored, afraid, and disoriented, they long for voices that promise stability, even if those voices lie. Con man media has learned to exploit that longing, converting insecurity into obedience. It does not speak truth to power; it speaks comfort to power and fear to everyone else.

But the antidote lies, as always, in self-education and awareness. To recognize sycophancy for what it is—a theater of control—is to rob it of its enchantment. Real journalistic media, the kind that nurtures democracy, seeks truth, invites discomfort, encourages doubt, and awakens thought. It treats the citizen not as a customer or a convert, but as a participant in the great conversation of an evolving civilization.

Casting Spells and Chanting over Thoughts and Prayers

The fabulous comedian David Cross, whose comedy decades ago first raised our eyebrow to lowest common denominator political American stupidity, has a great bit where he says “I would like to officially change and substitute 'casting spells and chanting' in place of 'thoughts and prayers'. Hilarious and even more American!

This is not only wonderful and delightful because it draws attention to the fact that language itself is micro magic. When a likely fake Christian politician stands at a podium after a 2nd Amendment related tragedy and utters that eye roll worthy, tired, and empty phrase, “thoughts and prayers,” instead of passing very popular common sense policies to help reduce gun violence, what they are actually doing is a kind of spiritual bypassing substituted for spell-casting, though a spell so worn down, so emptied of intention, that it has become little more than background noise. The words drift out, ritualistically, to soothe and placate, but not to transform a culture into something better.

Imagine if instead of that hollow incantation, they were to admit what it actually is: “We are casting spells and chanting" or "engaging in magical ritual and doing incantations”. Because that is precisely what speech is. Every utterance is an attempt to shape reality through vibration and symbol. To speak is to weave the air with intention. The tragedy of “thoughts and prayers” is not that it is mystical, but that it is virtue signaling stripped of potency, a ritual gone unconscious. The vast majority of stuff in Abrahamic faiths, which at their most water down easily consumable and thus least spiritual, are exoteric, meaning outer, are borrowed and co-opeded, if not outright stolen from older, esoteric, pegan, dreidic, indigenous, deeper esoteric practices.

So to say “casting spells and doing incantations” would be not only to ground it more in nature, and thus real spirituality, but to bring the hidden truth back to the surface: that language has power, and that power can be wielded authentically or cynically. The shamans of old did not speak words lightly; they knew that syllables could open doorways in the mind, that the right phrase in the right moment could heal or destroy. In our society, we have forgotten this, but are surely starting to realize it now due to the increase of harsh rhetoric, even though clichés are still babbled as though they were somehow sufficient.

What would it mean if public officials more deeply understood their words as spells? It would mean that every promise and proclamation would have to be crafted with the care of a magician drawing symbols. It would mean responsibility for the energetic resonance of speech. And perhaps it would mean fewer empty rituals and more beneficial actions that actually change the fabric of the collective psyche for the better. To evolve it instead of devole it.

A Description of the MAGA Cult's Supreme Leader (Exclusive For Members)

Oliver Kornetzke had a great summary of the American president in office in the year of our lord 2025 / otherwise called the imperial roman calendar which was co-opted and stolen from the more sophisticated indigenous to pagan lunisolar calendar. Fake pharisees Christians, which are the ones who are not love and light, loving their neighbors, but instead hate (just because they fear) everyone not like them and think they are supreme, which would be the subprime Christian Nationalists, and thank you non supremacist real love and light Christians who support us in also calling them out, think their fictional male sky daddy version of God works through imperfect people. The current one being someone who has been a lifelong criminal who should have been in jail since the 1970's and the Russian's have had kompromat on since the 1980's thus never should have even been allowed to have any sway in local New York City politics, let alone federal politics, let alone even run for office, let alone get elected to federal office, let along fail upwards as an entry level political position to the highest office in the land while continually committing crimes all the way up.  

Kornetzke, with some of our additions, amply describes him as "a festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge fund ghoul - who wears shoe lifts to falsely claim he's a scooch more tall, spray paints his face orange (from bronzer, the revealing of which on a white KN95 mask was the primary reason he didn't want to wear them) and is paraded like a prize hog at a country fair with fake toupee hair. Not a president. Not even a real man. Just the deceased distillation of everything the United States swears it isn't but has always been - arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel." All with the stinky smell of constantly filling adult diapers from his fecal incontinence. And that doesn't even start to touch on his close buddy relationship with one of the world's formost child moelesters that co-enegaged with him in juvenile human trafficing and we would not be suprized to hear outright teenage rape and perhaps even House of Cards style adolescence muder for adreachrome taking purposes and that's the only reason he's lived as long with such horrible mental and physical health. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when power centers of a nation kneel before money and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul - it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader. 

So as a member of the freedom loving democratic world who cares about freedom of truthful speech, the best thing you can always do on a regular basis, is to mock this clown and his Nazgûl crew which indigenous cultures call a "Heyokas". Who, even though he and his minions have spent way too much time taking a wrecking ball to the rule of law, and the worst thing about them, short of their massive damage to American democracy, is changing America from a somewhat respected country to one which is a joke on the world stage. Most Japanese cities were flattened to rubble after World War II, and within a decade we're roaring back again. So America, let's keep fighting back, stronger and louder than ever, to restore rules of law, democratic government, and the US of A's global reputation. Which will take time. But continuing with humor combined with action is the best counter remedy. Which is effective against his fasch cult who just wants to spread cruelty and own the libs because they refuse to see their gluttonous emperor has no clothes and is in bed with Satan. 

Hope is Catalytic (Exclusive For Members)

Hopium. That curious neologism of our digital moment, a word forged in the meme-forge of the internet to describe hope as if it were a narcotic, a delusory vapor inhaled by the naïve to dull the sting of reality. The cynic wields the word as a weapon, sneering: “You’re just smoking hopium,” meaning your optimism is not courage but a chemical fantasy, a way of refusing to face the brutal truth.

And yet, let us examine this more carefully. Is hope always a drug, an intoxicant that blinds? Or is it sometimes a medicine, a plant ally that expands the horizon of the possible? The line between anesthesia and initiation is thin. Yes, hopium can be a form of anesthesia—think of the endless promises that “change is around the corner,” while the machinery of exploitation grinds on. In this sense, hope becomes not an act of courage but a sedative, keeping populations passive, docile, always waiting for tomorrow’s miracle rather than demanding transformation today.

But dismissing all hope as “hopium” is itself another kind of intoxication—the intoxication of despair. For despair, too, is a drug, a narcotic of certainty: “Nothing will change, nothing can change.” The problem is not hope itself, but the quality of the hope. False hope—hope that demands no action, that requires no imagination—is indeed hopium. But fierce hope, hope that burns, hope that drives people into mass organizing and uprising, into art, into experiment—that is not narcotic, that is catalytic.

So when someone accuses you of inhaling hopium, you might ask them: “What is the alternative you are offering? The opiate of despair?” Better, perhaps, to risk the hallucination of hope, for at least hallucinations have a way of becoming reality if believed in strongly enough. All great changes, all revolutions, began as “hopium”—dreams derided as naïve until they crystallized into the world we now inhabit.

The real question, then, is not whether hope is a drug, but whether it is the drug that numbs or the drug that awakens. Psychedelics themselves are often dismissed as delusion, but we know they can open the psyche to realities more real than the so-called real. So too with hope. It can sedate, or it can illuminate. The work is to learn the difference.

The Asymmetry of American Violent Rhetoric (Exclusive for Members)

Our work of sharing self-development is to help make sure you continue to move toward love and less toward fear and hate. Or to say that more philosophically, less a part of the Empire - which is a movement of assimilation or slavery or death. And we're very transparent in saying that in the United States the lion’s share of its Empire comes from the rightward side of the house, the old confederacy, who with all their disparaging of the government working for working people, turns their version of "gov mint" over to American robber baron criminal oligarchs - who, along with Israeli and Russian Oligarchs that co-fund it, want the working people in-fighting, which is called divide and conquer. As that's the whole point of conservative media.

The contemporary vector of that oligarchic grift money fueled media is regressivism - as everything is about going backward. To channel the spirit of the Wild West founding when violence was sanctioned and sanctified in the birth story of the Republic. So to the backwards mind, to speak violently is to speak authentically. Now, in 2025 we had a key propagandist co-member of such media and co-member of their end times death cult die, and before even knowing who did the killing, the cult was calling for more death. And since it thrives on outrage the fear based gun culture rhetorical lie machine ecco chamber results in cultists all trying to out hypocrasize themselves via an atmosphere of embattlement. Presenting the world as a zero-sum struggle, a war of “real Americans” against shadowy others - immigrants, intellectuals, bureaucrats, globalists, thinkers, non-oligarchic ball garglers, multiculturalists, religions actually coexisting in harmony, etc... That multiethnic, multicultural, multi-religious community, which they call "The left", for all its challenges, problems, struggles, and rhetoric of revolution for the people, tends toward protest action and its disruptions can be irritating but rarely lethal and within said groups, violence is overwhelmingly denounced. But for however many progressives in that camp that slip through and celebrate a killing, you'll find 1000x more regressives doing so because for them violence supposedly becomes not only permissible but virtuous, and is viewed as a defense of civilization against decay. And since their cult is based on projection, inversion, and confession the opposite is true - as they are the primary group in a devolutionary decay.

For example, around 80%+ of shooters all fit the same profile - internet radicalized slep fascistic white males that have spent way too much time in the darker corners of the internet, who are in some variation of theocratic end times cults such as Mormonism which thrive on guilt and shame, not to mention sexual repression - as one of the incubating factors to fascism is based on sexual insecurity, they nurture a fetish for weaponry cause they are their dark falices. But beneath their BBK's they wish they had is a deeper psychological crisis. The right-wing fascination with violence is a symptom of their unprocessed grief. The world they thought they owned—the stable hierarchies of race, gender, religion—is dissolving before their eyes. Instead of mourning that passing and seeking renewal, they mythologize it as a battle to the death. The violent word becomes a spell against the chaos of change, a way of insisting that the old cowboy order is still alive.

The real antidote lies not in counter violence, which only fuels the paranoia, but in each of us in the pro-democratic majority continuing to become active - speaking out, acting and participating locally, engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, which is as American as apple pie, and the general sharing of better ideas to continue the construction of a richer cultural story. One where strength is measured in resilience. The right-wing obsession with violent speech is a symptom of it's spiritual impoverishment because virtually all of them are in these not only sexually repressed but also spiritually bereft perverted supremacist cults which are just factories of hate. And until they address that poverty, until they are offered alternative visions of belonging and purpose that are more compelling than their fantasies of civil war, the war will continue to be in their own minds.

Never Be Scared By (Wanna Be) Fascists

Fascists, when you strip away the theatrical suits and the jargon, are not only professional liars but terror engineers. Their business is not merely trying to win arguments with rapid fire lies; it is manufacturing a climate in which people feel so besieged, so atomized and frightened, that they will surrender their freedoms for the promise of safety. They want your imagination hostage. Fear is the lever they try and pull to make moral and political reasoning inert; fear makes weak and spiritually undeveloped people, the bottom floor of which would be the lemmings in de-spiritualized supremacist religious cults, clutch whatever talisman is offered—whether it be a uniform, a charismatic demagogue, or a fantasy of ethnic or cultural purity. Once fear is doing the thinking, consent is engineered rather than earned.

After they cultivate that fear in their core cult they aim to spread it to the larger population, such as members of non supremacist religions, or secular folks, in highly specific ways. They invent enemies and inflate small problems into apocalyptic narratives; sound familiar? They turn complexity into a simple story with villains and a promised clean solution. They stage spectacles like unwatchable cringe worthy rallies, paramilitary displays, dramatic denunciations - that function like ritual to normalize aggression. They flood the information space with lies, half-truths, and conspiracy so that trust in institutions and in one another corrodes. They weaponize humiliation and shame, making people afraid to speak, to question, or to reach across divides. And crucially, they cultivate the false fantasy that violence or authoritarian rule is a noble instrument of regeneration—this is how they sacralize intimidation.

But here is the crucial, empowering truth: they are trying to scare you because your fear is useful to them. Fear is fuel. Whatever terrifies you, they will try and amplify; whatever solidarity you allow yourself, they will try to fracture. So the answer is not bravado and not denial; it is clear-sightedness. When you study their techniques - endless gaslighting, name-calling, scapegoating, backwards conspiracy, lack of empathy, internal weakness - you demystify them. Once a trick is recognized as a trick, its power evaporates. The magician loses the audience when the audience finally looks behind the curtain and gains gnosis that the false emperor has no clothes.

Now when a specific pathetic excuse for a human being says "he hates the left" what he is really saying is he fears the left. Because hate is just fear. So never be scared, or defeatist because fear narrows the mind and shrinks the possible. Courage, in the political sense, is not the absence of fear but the refusal to let fear define the terms of your life. Continue to build your life in ways that are robust to intimidation: continue making durable ties of friendship and community across cultures, faiths, and belief systems, continue cultivating institutions of mutual aid, start your own pro-democracy media, support non corporatized independent real journalistic media, support real education, and practice humility and curiosity. These are the real bulwarks against authoritarian temptation. Fascism does not succeed where people have thick, overlapping networks of trust and a lively culture that can absorb and transform shocks.

Humor, irony, ridicule—these are not frivolities; they are social immunities. Satire punctures the grandiosity of demagogues; art expands the field of possible futures; philosophy teaches us how to tolerate ambiguity. When we refuse to reduce ourselves to the binary frames offered by fearmongers, we reclaim the narrative. We say: the world contains more than your enemy, your scapegoat, your emergency. We insist on complexity, on moral imagination.

History is not a single arrow marching inevitably toward darkness. There have been countless victories over tyranny and they're will be many more: labor movements won protections for workers; civil rights campaigns unraveled legalized bigotry; subterranean networks have protected the persecuted in dark times. Those victories were not the product of some grand, heroic violence but of persistent, creative, and often humble forms of resistance: decentralized media creation, strikes, legal fights, boycotts, culture-making, sanctuary networks, mutual aid. That is the ongoing template for answerability. So do not meet their spectacle on their terms. Do not let your life be rearranged into eternal vigilance against invented monsters. Learn their methods, deflate their myths, and invest your energy in the fabrics of ordinary human life that they seek to degrade. When the politics of fear encounters a culture dense with empathy, wit, and durable relationships, it loses its purchase because fear shrivels in the presence of a sustained, creative community.