Canonical Folklore

Stories of "the gods" were campfire stories at some point, and were often based on the characteristics of planets and constellations. A god like osiris in egypt was associated with the constellation Orion which is visible in the winter, then "dies" in spring when the crops are growing. And in those stories, somehow the character associated with some bright lights in the night sky came to be seen as the "sun" on earth as grain.

It seems plausible that people working and living in the field of agriculture would be interested a character like Osiris, while people engaged in other activities of life would be less so, like someone who was a hunter wouldn't care that much about it, or someone who was a builder wouldn't either.

There are characters associated with each of these concerns throughout the different mythological systems, like there are numerous historical builder and blacksmithing gods like the greek Hephaestus or the egyptian Ptah. It seems plausible these different characters filled the same role a modern mascot or advertising character does today.

At some point these stories transform from folklore created and maintained by randos to copyrighted, "canonical" stories under control of the ruling class people of a given region and era. One way that might happen is via public festivals and holidays where the god mascots are in parades and public processions and that kind of thing.

Also, simply by being a popular story and a popular character the ruling class slime of any given era would see the value of these characters as a proxy for the public and controlling it. The mere concept that some aspect of a story is "correct" and canonical while any other version of a story is blasphemy or heresy or whatever is a very basic way to condition people that the dirtbags in power are in control of "all".

Another common ruling class ploy associated with claims of a canonical folklore and its god characters is that the ruling class and its priesthood serves as the intermediary to the god characters based on knowledge and expertise about rituals and sacrifices and all that bullshit. When things are going poorly for the corporate entity of the state and the fortunes of the people are down, like crop failures or plagues happen, they can blame the people for not honoring the gods correctly, or not sacrificing enough to them or whatever.

Amazingly, all this same crap goes on today in an even more strident manner than prior eras and there's a ham fisted attempt to control even comic book characters and popular entertianment on behalf of ruling class chock full of pervs and weirdos like Bill Gates.

World Model that Includes a "Grain God"

The dominant model of the 3D reality world today is the based on the "god of forces", which really isn't a "god" at all in the traditional way. The "deist" concept from the Enlightenment Age sums it up pretty well, where "the creator" made up the rules of gravity, electricity, etc... then set the world in motion, but otherwise has no role in reality.

In prior epochs of the mind, people had a significantly different model of reality that was almost entirely based on what we'd term literary or poetic concepts like "synedoche" or allegories, or similes and metaphors where one thing was understood in terms of another, or where a long story would be referred to by a pithy phrase because everyone knew the story.

These two mental models are significantly different, obviously. The "god of forces" mindset seeks to model the world on first principles and insists any other model of reality is inherently wrong. The goal really seems to be to imitate the "god of forces" by recreating the universe in a computer based on the secret mathematical code of the universe, which is, if you think about it, the ultimate compression algorithm.

An example of the "god of forces" mindset is how the science of biology model of animals is "meat robot", which is why psychopathic trash people torture beagles or rabbits or whatever in "experiments" about diseases or to test some useless consumer product crap like eye makeup or whatever. The common sense understanding of animals is labeled as incorrect, that is assigning human qualities to an animal in some weird, arbitrary hierarchy that's also associated with this version of trash human. In recent years people earned PhDs by providing "scientific proof" of the common sense understanding of how animals behave and think, e.g. they have languages or can reason or dream or whatever.

The poetic universe mental model isn't reductive, it's a sometimes pleasant or pretty conceptualization of what happens in terms of human experience of reality. I think the grain god metaphor is a great example. The "grain god" like Osiris is akin to the Michelin Man who's the cartoon representation of "tireness". 

A character like osiris was a cartoon embodiment of grain. There's a poem by Robert Burns "John Barleycorn" that discusses the personified grain that becomes whiskey which is a good riff on this overall approach.

How did that mental model come to be and what is it? If the "god of forces" mental model came from reductive thinking about the universe that ended up in "peer reviewed" published works, where did the poetic model originate?

I think it's basically "folklore" that got really structured, mainly through repetition. If you live someplace with local legends, like here in Geauga County, Ohio there's a story of "The Melonheads" which I learned in high school, it's easy to see how folklore passes from generation to generation and slowly boils down to a handful of basic archetypal characters and narratives.

Another "local" folklore concept is "the devil's icebox". People in the 1800s realized some low nooks and crannies in local sandstone formations would remain cold and even snow filled far into spring. A number of these places would be get labeled as a "devil's icebox". There's a park in Northeast Ohio called "Hell Hollow", which is a Berea Sandstone formation in eastern Lake County. The "Hell" part comes from the ancient mental geography of "the underworld" or Tartarus in the greek mythology, so the steep decent of the park from the general relief of the surrounding landscape represented a journey to "hell". Obviously,  "cold" spot in such a place would be "the devil's icebox", which is also amusing because another folklore geography of "hell" is it's on fire even though the "underworld" is also associated with winter and Tartarus is cold in the greek mythical geography.

A very good example of how this folklore mindset forms is provided by role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, where a group of players improvise a shared hallucination... for those people the hallucination is like a movie playing in their minds eye. In the prior era of the mind, this scenario would happen, apparently, fairly often in people's down time, not as a role playing game, but as "shooting the shit" story telling. So a character like osiris or odin or thor would get a story and the universe would get a folklore mythological landscape, like for the Norse, there were 9 worlds.

So how does folklore turn into religion with priests and canonical stories? That's a really interesting one to think about.

The Previous Gods

The greek and norse mythology includes a concept of one or two prior "generations" of gods. For the greeks there were the Titans. For the norse, there were the Vanir who were later overthrown by the Aesir. This concept is even in the bible myths as "The Fallen Angels" who like the Titans are cast into Tartarus.

Some people think these stories encode a literal change of religion, so there was an older pantheon of gods that was supplanted by a new set of gods, maybe imposed via military conquest. Another interpretation is the changing of the gods represents various aspects of natural creation, like order replacing primordial chaos.

The conversion of european people to christianity offers some clues, potentially. There are some interesting hints that can be gleaned by comparing the extant norse mythology with the bible myths and the present day claims about the characters of the bible.

The norse myths are stories where the main characters like Odin or Thor are subject to the rules and forces of the universe, which are sometimes embodied in other characters like giant wolves or serpents. In fact, in the norse mythology the end of the gods, Ragnarok, is a prime feature of the tale. The characters like Odin are more like the main character of allegorical stories and represent aspects of human life, like the quest after wisdom and knowledge in his case. There's a separation between the "gods of forces", that is, the forces of the natural world like time, cold, heat, etc... The "gods", and then the human world.

I don't think anyone really knows what the pre-christian european "religious" practices were. There are a handful of clues left in history, but it was thoroughly wiped out. The extant mythology suggests it was a sort of shamanistic, maybe individual oriented religious practice, meaning, the people who had access to a shaman would maybe be coached in their life and spiritual journey via these stories, but who knows?

The set of beliefs people regard as "christian" is pretty interesting, because the core concepts of christianity are not found in the bible. In fact, it's sort of a mystery what purpose "the bible" served for "the church". The bible is a compilation of mediterranean world mythology that has a lot of similarities to the greek myths or even egyptian myths, including solar cycle characters like Dionysus or Osiris or Jesus who are "the sun on earth who turns into crops and dies and is reborn", plus the underworld character of Hades/Satan, the city founding twins, and so on.

The "religion" of christianity, though, is a mish-mash of greek philosophy and cliffs-notes and addenda to "the bible" mythology. Christianity was tied to various political attempts to reboot the Roman Empire, even within the ongoing eastern Roman Empire... So there's a "Tsar" (a Cesar) of Russia and an Eastern Orthodox Church, or various European Empires like the "Holy Roman" empire with an Emperor that's allied with the Catholic Church.

As an ingredient of a political project, then, the christian religion was meant to create a "roman" citizen out of europeans in the same way the school system, today, trains a person to be a member of the corporate/consumer society and the way the "media" blasts concepts into the brains of adults 24/7, or the way some clowns in an HR department send spam emails about pronouns or indigenous people's day or whatever.

The mythology of the chrisitian religion differs from the norse or greek myths on some key points. One of those is the god character names that were in the bible were stripped away. So in the norse religion there's Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldur, etc.... or the weekday names correspond to the prior era religions in most countries like Thursday is Thor's Day in the germanic countries and is Jueves (Jove/Jupiter) in Spain. In the christian relgious scheme, though, there is "god", and is regarded as a universal entity rather than a parochial "Yahweh" character or Zeus or Odin.

Also, along with this change in the prior era mythology, this generic "unnameable god" supplants the "gods of forces" and natural forces in the mythology of the norse or greek panetheons to whom the god characters are subject. This is an innovation of the christian religion and comes from greek philosophizing rather than anything found in the bible, which incorporates the mediterranean world's mythologies of creation. The nonsense concept of "the trinity" sums up the attempt to merge the god pantheon of the classical and ancient world with the "god of forces" characters, like the Titans or the Vanir of the norse myths. Some of the "reasoning" about god is still taught today in colleges in medieval philosophy courses. In retrospect as an advertising/propaganda talking point it is absurd. Their claim was basically "our god is the biggest and bestest" versus the prior brand of god.

Eventually, that propaganda invention killed the christian religion and its predecessors, and quite ironically, allowed the Titans to defeat the Olympians and effectively threw them into Tartarus. Now there's only a "god of forces", that is "nature".

"Last Year's Sun" Character

There are a handful of mythological characters from different cultures through history who represent the solar agricultural cycle. The egyptian characters provide a guide for the greek characters and the biblical characters. For example, the Osiris character is the sun on earth character who becomes crops and is then mutilated or cut up or otherwise horribly mistreated, which is a comical depiction of what happens to wheat. Similarly, wine gods are castrated (grapes cut off the vine), or torn to pieces by crazed (drunk) women, etc... Jesus is both a grain god and a wine god. He's flogged and beaten and put up on a trellis and pierced.

One of the really intriguing characters of the agricultural cycle is the "last year's sun" character. In the egyptian mythology it's Ra. Ra is also the underworld sun who goes through the underworld at night and fights Apep. In Greek mythology Ra turns into Hades/Pluto, the god of the dead, the underworld and wealth. The modern vampire character seems to be pressed out of the Hades mold. In the teen drama TV show "One Tree Hill", the character Dan is the Hades/Ra character. He's the rich father of the two main male characters. I can't remember the character names. One of those boys actually "dies" and is resurrected in a nod to the mythology. In the show he's a "harsh taskmaster" like Ra and he's wealthy like Hades.

"Wealth" is often just a version of stored or "last year's" sunlight. Even something like oil is just old solar energy. It's very likely the concept of a "loan" and interest originated with an ancient seed and grain monopoly. It's very interesting that "last years sun" turned into the concept of harshness and "evil". In the bible story of Cain and Abel, Cain is "cursed" to work and also ends up in the city and has become associated with "technology" (because he's Greek Prometheus). The "curse" is really to come under the thumb of Ra, or the last year's Sun character and all his bullshit, like contracts, which is really just a type of "curse".

Who's "Ra" in the bible myths? It's left somewhat ambiguous. In the egyptian myths "Ra" would match up with the God character of the bible, however in the greek myths, the Ra character is split into Zeus and Hades. Similarly in the bible there's the God character and the Satan character. Some commentators draw the conclusion they're the same, that is God=Satan. One of the interpretations is Satan is "the god of this world", that is the world of man. Like Hades or Ra, he's associated with "work" in that the curse of man is to "work" because Eve ate the apple, and the Satan character is also supposedly the secret father of Cain, which is even part of the story of One Tree Hill where the main solar hero character of the show is actually the illegitimate son of Dan, the Hades/Satan/Vampire figure.

I think what the Ra character ultimately represents, and the reason it becomes "evil" or scorned is that "wealth" is illusory. Take the concept of "stored work" as wealth like numbers in a bank account. Bitcoin fanbois imagine a bitcoin represents "stored work" in the hashing of the blockchain. This is a good representation of work in general. The blockchain is actually a representation of the increasing entropy of the universe--a bunch of burned fuel to make a pattern in computer memories, which are constantly eating energy, etc... Most of things people do to "create value" are mere transformations of an underlying substance, and in the case of agriculture, it "just happens" via nature.

In the mythology a character like Prometheus dies over and over because there's no "extracting value" or "storing value". The Hades/Ra character is a cheater or really a god of fraud in many cases because he can't provide the thing people really want.

Serious vs Play

The "Ant and the Grasshopper" fable is a great depiction of the "serious" mindset. In that fable, the ant is diligent, works, and is prepared for winter while the grasshopper messes around then starves. The "serious" mindset is really interesting to ponder. Where does it actually come from? What is it?

A variation on the "serious" mindset is the "security" mindset. One example of that is "coyote fear". In northeast Ohio most predators were extirpated by around 1900. Over the past 30 years or so, though, as the area transitioned from a rural/agricultural zone to suburbs and exurbs, coyotes moved in. Some cadre of people thinks they are very dangerous animals. A subset of those hysterical people think the presence of coyotes warrants wearing a sidearm when walking around in suburban or exurban parks. In reality, a coyote is a medium sized dog that avoids people. Other predators like eagles, possums, foxes are similarly dangerous to pets and farm animals, but the coyote gets weird fantastical status among local suburban retards.

"Folk concept" is another way of saying people rely on a prepackaged story based model for interpreting reality. A hysterical retard lady who sees a coyote when she's taking out her trash, for example, won't be able to ascertain it's a medium sized dog that poses no threat and runs away as soon as it sees a human, she'll only see the folk story version of a deadly predator. In some places and among some people that folk version of reality becomes the consensus view and when there is fear or some minor risk involved, it can foster a sort of mass hysteria.

In other cases, an individual's anxiety and phantasmagorical horror show understanding of reality doesn't extend beyond their inner world. I saw an interesting bodycam video a few days ago where a 74 year old man pulled a knife on an 11 year old. The old man was afraid of a kid riding a bike on the sidewalk so he threatened the boy with a knife. The old man was also carrying a loaded gun. In the old man's mind, he was maneuvering in a world of threats to his person and his fear justified his actions. This is the basis of the security mindset: fear and anxiety. However, in his case, his delusions were proprietary, rather than shared so he was arrested.

Anyway, I think the "serious" mindset is a variation on this same theme. It's a folk world view, or maybe a religious belief about the nature of reality. Essentially, if you don't "work hard", that is, be serious, god or reality will "punish" you. In some circumstances people believe this literally, that is, being frivolous is a sin which results in future punishment.

However, these same people also realize the converse scenario isn't a sure thing, that is "hard work" does not necessarily lead to success. In fact, it is often frustrated, so the folk concept of "man plans, god laughs" or the line "The best-laid plans of mice and men oft’ go awry” sums that folk view up.

I think those two concepts are fused together in the minds of many people, maybe especially european descended people. They believe in hard work, but know "luck" or good fortune or "god's favor" is actually the dominant force in the universe.

This topic takes me back to the "play" approach versus the serious mindset. Kids and young animals play to "develop". Their lack of experience makes them necessarily open minded, and often willing to experiment and push boundaries of what they think they can do. In the context of the adult world this can lead to innovation and new ways of understanding the world, or even just provides an individual with an opportunity to have their own experiences rather than living inside a folk model or religious delusion of reality.

An important element of these models of reality is it imposes a sorting process on the population. Let's take that 74 year old crazy man as an example. In his community, his delusion is personal, so he's jailed and forced to accept the nominal world view. However, in some scenario where everyone is equally a shithead about danger and every other man is packing a side arm because they think they might be attacked at any moment, he'd be right at home and the kid in that story and his family would move. In the "coyote fear" community, if you were a nature boy you'd leave so you could have a pet coyote, or hang out in peace with the critters.

Ironically, the "play" mindset seems like the big time winner for humans at least in terms of generating wealth, and it also seems to be associated with intelligence, while the serious people can be pretty stupid. A "folklore heavy" or religious community is often stifling and/or materially poor.

Status and Competitions

When I was a kid, there was a gradual transition in the organized activities kids participated in from "free form games" to structured competitions. I didn't really "get it" for a long time, that is, I was sort of stuck in the free form game mode when classmates were shifting into competition mode. I remember, for example, being kind of traumatized by the coaches and kids being "serious" about baseball when I was still in "game" mode when I was maybe 8 or 9.

At some point, even the tone of school changed similarly. In elementary school there weren't really grades. I think we got check marks or something like that, then in 6th grade/middle school there were "grades" and maybe even rankings of students. There were also myriad competitions in almost every activity, like in band there were rankings of players "1st chair", and so on, plus spelling bees, competitions in presentations, etc... Of course there were organized sports as well, so kids began training to be on the football team or whatever.

All the organized judging and rule based games are supposed to be training for "the real world", which is theoretically a bunch of similar competitions. I heard warnings from adults maybe 1,000 times that I'd be a loser if I didn't work hard, or that if I didn't buckle down and study I'd be a bum. As I noted in the previous post, "the loser" character is really the invisible fence of the boomer world, or the corporate/consumer society.

I guess the purpose, or maybe just a side effect of all the competitions in school is students internalize a phony model of reality, that is, there is a merit based hierarchy all throughout life that's determined by work and talent and judging. Maybe you suck at sports, but you can win the spelling bee, or maybe go to the chemistry olympics, or vice versa, you suck at chemistry class, but are a starter on the football team and so on. That is, there's always some "fair", real competition you can participate in.

One fairly useful observation is that almost every game is arbitrary and even the competitions are fraudulent or severely distorted in the sense that the rankings are really meaningless. For example, in high school football in the US, there are divisions of schools because some high schools only have 150 students and others have 3,000 so a kid who might be the quarterback on a Division IV football team might not even get on the varsity Division I football team. That's true in almost every type of organized sporting event I ever participated in as an adult. The competition is divvied up so people are participating against "peers" rather than the whole population of athletes, like in running races there are age groups, or in cycling races there are skill categories.

In professional sports, which is ostensibly the closest thing to the "real world" form of competition, that is an unlimited contest which reveals who is really the best, there are myriad arbitrary rules. In fact, in many pro sports the rules accumulate endlessly. In pro cycling, for example, there are all kinds of rules about how much your bicycle can weigh, what the geometry is, the position you can ride in, and on and on. Most pro or olympic level sports have all sorts of rules about the substances an athlete can take to eliminate the use of 'roids and HGH and such.

Another aspect of this competition internalization is people seek counterfeit representations of merit via "status" symbols like expensive cars and houses or sporting goods. In almost every case, a person gets their "status" object like a house with a giant pile of debt. Then they retain their status symbol by avoiding loser status, usually by grinding away at a shitty corporate job for their whole life. 

Anyway, quite ironically, it turns out that the elementary school view of games versus the high school competitions forever corresponds to the "real world". That is, there's no gamified reality except the shared hallucination of the general public who's been trained to participate in it.

"The Loser" is "The Wind Beneath My Wings"

I lived in two fairly distinct "worlds" through my life. I was born and raised and trained to live in the "boomer world", or corporate/consumer society, but I liked to be in "the woods". I think it's a really common story, especially when you add in all the other "worlds" people inhabit. For some people it's beach world, others it's boat world, or mountain world. That is, we'd all rather be in that other world than living the boomer world anxiety grind.

When I was in my 20s, I went on a vacation with my girlfriend at the time to the Allegheny National Forest. Her family had what they called a "camp" there. It was a small plot of land her father owned, which I think he inherited from his father, which had a trailer parked there. It was kind of a time capsule, because it was stocked with vintage stuff, like the prior generation of a radio, or a coffee maker, or whatever. It was all very basic, and it was obviously "fine" in fact it was a good place to live. Visiting that place demonstrated that the cost of living could be super low, and that life was very pleasant. I remember asking her why people like us would go "on vacation" away from the boomer world, but then repeatedly return to the boomer world. Neither of us had an answer. In fact, we both slowly transformed from granola/flannel/nature people to just another pair of yuppies. She went full yuppie and I was pretty reluctant and confused about that and really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time.

When I was growing up my family went on vacation to a cabin in the Adirondacks a few times. The overall feel of the place was similar to "the camp". The cabin was setup in "lodge" style with pine furniture and similarly dated decor, probably from the early 1960s. (We were there in the 80s.) It was all pretty nice and relaxing. Inevitably we'd return to the boomer world, school, and my parents would go back to "the grind" and my sisters and I went to "kid grind" in school.

What actually keeps people in the boomer world instead of just slipping away to their version of the woods? I've been mulling this question over lately. One potential answer came to me via a very crude girl in a Midwest Safety Video. At some point in the video she (a drunk) becomes incredulous she's being arrested for DUI and she hilariously shrieks to her mom on the phone, "I'm not a nigger!" That video is a hall of famer bodycam edit.

That dumb moment shows one of the ways "it works". She doesn't mean "I'm not black", she really means "I'm not a low status person". People stay at the grind from "status anxiety".

There's a sort of generalized anxiety about maintaining status, meaning a social position, which is for the most part completely imaginary. I've been "out of work" a couple of times in my life. The first time I was laid off during the dot com implosion. I remember feeling sort of hollow and like a pretender once I wasn't working. I think that anxiety was due to my bad finances at the time. I needed to get a job to pay bills and keep my house and the like. I felt like a pretender because my boomer life really was a costume I was renting, including my house. If I were too long out of work, I'd end up homeless trash, that is, I'd lose my social status and fall out of what's essentially a club and it's not a very exclusive club.

Many retards who can barely do anything have fancy high paying jobs. When I was in college, I busted my ass in physics classes and was up late many nights a week studying and doing homework for several years. At the same time, shitloads of people in my school were just partying or taking dumb fuck business classes or whatever and as far as I know, none of those people ended up homeless.

When people have anxiety about losing health care coverage which is tied to their job, they really worry about bouncing down the status ladder into the poverty life because "the loser" is really the driving force in their existence, ironically.

Conversely when they have a job, the same people don't worry about their horrible diet, lack of exercise, totally sedentary life, etc... In fact, many people are sort of kept alive in spite of that unhealthy lifestyle by the medical system which gives them a pill for their ailments.

Anyway, ironically it's a sort of mythic "loser" which terrorizes the eternal boomer and keeps this shit show going. The "loser" is basically like an invisible fence for all the people who briefly escape on vacation.

Expert "How To" Videos

I've been watching youtube videos about cornering a mountain bike for a couple of weeks. I think the general category of expert "how to" videos is quite interesting and they show why the sci-fi nonsense sales pitch on "AI" is so dumb.

Many of the MTB cornering videos follow a "break down" approach, that is, they present cornering as a multi-phase, multi-step sequence. Step 1--look into the turn, step 2, lean the bike, step 3, position your body, etc... The concept is through repetition of the steps, a rider will become proficient at cornering.

That's not what happens at all though. What really happens is the riders brain and nervous system eventually encompass the bike so they can "feel" the tires on the ground and feel the orientation of their mass distribution on the bike. Once a person is an expert, they can ex post facto explain what their body is doing when they're cornering, or doing a hand stand, or whatever. To the novice, the word salad really isn't helpful. If anything it's kind of counterproductive.

I realize I don't have good feel for the bike's wheels. It's frustrating for me as a long time cyclist to throw away so much precious speed in a hundred corners by even feathering the brakes when I should be able to just rip through the corners. That said, I really do not want to crash and break the bike or my bones.

Anyway, it's obvious I will not learn anything from the videos; in fact there's really an obvious course toward improvement. Go to a free form loose ground area, like a big gravel parking lot, ideally with a slope, setup some "corners" by drawing them with a stick, then turn over and over and over and maybe take a video. The advantage of a parking lot is it's easier to repeat--more tries per unit time, plus a missed corner = rolling over a line instead of crashing into a tree.

The thing I'm really trying to do here is extend my nervous system to the contact patch of the tires and the ground. Currently, there's a big void there. Learning to ice skate or rollerblade is actually a very similar process. Prior to developing "feel" people are generally all "hands, head, and feet". If you watch a novice on rollerblades, they flail their arms around as their head and feet rotate around their center-of mass. They're generally oblivious to their center of mass, which is quite interesting.

Developing feel is a nonverbal process. Really words provide very little useful information for developing these skills. This is the severe limitation of so called "AI" because this concept of "feel" is pervasive in human endeavors.

In fact, it's possible to sort of flip this concept around entirely and see the effect of the dullard verbal mind model on the world. In general people dislike an irregular and even mildly challenging world where even the smallest obstacle is intolerable. They do not want to learn anything, ever. They don't want to condition their body for balance or strength or mobility. They don't even want to pay attention when they do something insipidly simple, like drive a car. It'd be good to understand what they really want. Like what's the goal of the average person when they're doing all the nonsense stuff they do?

The Willforce Delusion

It's quite common for people to imagine their "will force" somehow affects real world events. One example of that is focusing attention on a sporting event. People imagine they are "urging" a player to score a touchdown in a football game, for example, when they intently watch. This happens in all sorts of relationship scenarios as well, from the mundane work relationship to an intense romantic relationship.

It's all entirely, equally imaginary. There's no "will force", however, almost anybody reading this will understand what I'm writing about here. The fictional concept of "telekinesis" is the same thing. That is, in fiction, some character will be able to move an object with his or her "mind". It's often depicted as severe mental "exertion" to the point of causing a nose bleed, which is supposed to be blood leaking from the taxed brain,  I guess.

This is an interesting case of something that doesn't exist at all, that is "will force", turning into an idea that multitudes of people have. So where does the concept even come from?

All through life people "want" things. I can remember being a kid and fervently wanting some dumb toy or whatever, or as a young adult getting into messy romantic relationships and wanting some girl or young woman fervently or being wanted the same way by different women. The "want" existed as a sort of pressure. That pressure is almost certainly physical and hormonal and about procreation in the sex scenario. There are many examples of that same type of behavior among animals.

It seems plausible that the mental machinery of "want", which is actually an internal compulsion could lead to the idea that "wanting hard enough" will cause things to happen in the real world or even move. For some people this "willforce" delusion manifests as a desire for obsessive overall control and the idea that everything can and should be managed (by them).

A Fancy Pants House is Stupid

I got in the habit of watching youtube bodycam videos a few months ago. I'd like to know who the OG bodycam video content makers are because it was an ingenious idea. The footage is public record, so there's and endless supply of often compelling, funny and dramatic real-world content available to serve up to the public.

There's some minimal dose of bodycam videos that will lead the most blue-haired progressive lesbian democrat "them" to the conclusion that loads of black people are dysfunctional and stupid. For example, there's a bodycam video of a shooting and inexplicably nonsense chaotic aftermath where a crowd of maybe 50 black people swarm around the fallen guy to: 1.) rob him and 2.) freak out hysterically. While they scream out for someone to help, they simultaneously prevent the police from rendering first aid and even assault the cops who are trying to help. Nothing in the video "makes sense".

The problem with this criticism of the black people isn't that it's "racist", it's that it is implicitly based on the notion that whitey "has it all figured out" and that the white people society and methods of organization are rational and therefore optimal because the white people individually are rational. This is obviously not true.

One example of irrational behavior that applies to almost everyone in the US, but maybe especially the "upper class" white people is the pursuit of luxury, and luxury housing in particular. This topic is apparent to me because I think about what my family "should do" with our house and property on a regular basis.

We have an ideal parcel of land in an ideal location, but the house is kind of dumpy and tired out. It turns out, though, that the dumpy house works in our favor because it keeps our property taxes, one of our only housing related "fixed" expenses, as low as possible. In fact, it would make sense to reduce those as much as possible by minimizing the market value of the home, while at the same time maximizing the property's real productive capacity, e.g. farming or the like. That is you can add "real utility" to a property without the county auditor giving you a higher tax bill. Now that I understand this strategy, I see other people doing the same thing here and there in my neighborhood.

This is what everyone should be doing in my area if they were practical/pragmatic people, but typically they do the opposite, that is, they maximize the nominal and imaginary value of their property so they pay maximally high property taxes. For example, there are several couples living in $800,000 McMansion homes in the immediate area. The maintenance and taxes on their property is probably 5x ours, but there's nothing that comes from that extra expense. Typically they do nothing productive with their property, like running a farm. It's just all expense and lots of extra maintained space for a couple of people. It's actually stupid and counterproductive and keeps people running on the work treadmill for extra years of their life because all they really care about is totally imaginary status.

In many cases the people who live the imaginary status luxury life are really in dire financial straights to appear wealthy. They live on loans and can't even really afford to maintain their McMansion, and certainly can't afford to burn $30,000 on new car cost every few years, but they do that also.

Anyway, as per usual, when the mass of people does something it's almost by definition "wrong".

 

Serious vs Play

I had two types of study-halls in High School. One was modeled on prison life and was like punishment by pure boredom and was no different than "detention". The students sat on one side of tables in a big room and were only allowed to do some quiet thing, like read, do homework, or doodle or just sit and stare. The other type was free-form and students could do whatever they want, like playing games, or laughing and joking around. I have no idea why some study halls were fun and the others were like prison, I guess it must have been up to the teacher running it.

In retrospect, it's obvious a big component of primary education is training students to be obedient "workers". For example, there are a lot of jobs where people believe they must surrender their human freedom when they're on the clock, so if there's nothing to do, they'll just sit around and stare at a computer screen or sweep an already clean floor or whatever until the clock magically frees them.

Those people have internalized a "serious" life, maybe from things like study halls. It's often instructive to lookup the etymology of a label like "serious". The day-to-day meaning of it comes from a feeling; everyone knows the feeling of being serious. Appropriately, scholars think the word comes from an ancient root word for "heavy". Being serious is the equivalent of telekinetically trying to move a heavy weight. People do that all the time. They imagine exerting their internal will-force has a real-world effect, when it has zero real world effect. That particular delusion is fascinating.

The opposite of a serious life is a frivolous or play life... not surprisingly the origin of that word is "light" as in "a light weight". Sometimes in the "fun study hall" my friends and I would get in trouble for having too much fun. For example, in one of those, we invented a game that involved a baseball made of taped up paper. I don't recall exactly how it worked, but someone would pitch, and someone would bat. The group of kids probably got too loud so we were chided for "playing". The collective idea in the school was the study hall should be in that punishment/serious mindset, I suppose.

Play and creativity go together, while "seriousness" generally inhibits creativity. My first "real" job was at a tree farm when I was 16 and it epitomized that "serious" mindset. The overall concept of that tree farm was "work is serious" in the sense that it should be simple and sort of stupid and kind of a workout and strength training exercise. 

One of the tree farm tasks for the kids was to go pickup the newly cut rounds of fallen trees and process them into firewood. We'd load them on a trailer, then put them one-by-one onto a hydraulic log splitter in wood barn and break them into firewood. The firewood was piled up in the barn where it dried. People would buy the wood by the pickup truck bed, which is obviously a totally arbitrary unit, and we'd toss it into the back. When I was just 16, I could see the workflow could be more efficient, even with just the primitive tools the farm had, but the point wasn't to improve things, it was to "work hard", that is, stupidly. I only worked there for a couple weekends.

The "play/creative" mindset won out massively over my Gen-X life and the "serious mindset" people ate it on the societal and individual level. Being "serious" is a sort of self-imposed punishment. Let's return to the tree farm example for a very obvious case of creativity winning out. Over the decades since I was un-ergonomically loading rounds into a hydraulic log splitter, people build log processor equipment that automated that whole process. One guy can generate a mountain of firewood in a couple hours by loading a tree trunk onto a machine with another machine like a tractor or skidsteer.

That "serious" mindset still managed to partially infect me in spite of seeing it for what it is. It's difficult to fully embrace philosophical absurdism and be freed from all the years of training by dullards. The training should be about an ability to focus and concentrate when needed as a tool rather than merely appearing to do so, or worse yet by "obeying" some dumb ass teacher in a school setting.

 

What is Anxiety?

I ride the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail multiple times a week. I eek out a little more speed almost every session. Since I just started riding there last fall, the steps of my progression are fairly obvious to me. I'm about 50% faster than I was when I started, mainly due to improved technique and skill rather than improved aerobic capacity.

One that stands out is I had an issue with hand numbness for the first few months I was riding, which is now all but gone. The reason is apparent, too, I used to forcefully grip the bars, now I barely squeeze them. That happened "by itself". The mountain bike teachers have a maxim "heavy feet/light hands" to teach this concept, but for me it mostly happened because I was trying to be relaxed and not waste energy by "fighting the bike", which happens on the road as well.

"Fighting the bike" means you're wasting precious watts by exerting nonsense forces on the bike. It can happen from exhaustion, ironically, or a condition that's similar to daily life "anxiety". The anxiety case is pretty interesting because it has broad daily life application.

There are a couple of sections of the Big Creek trail that took several months of attempts for me to even finish successfully, that is, ride without getting off the bike. One is a steep twisty uphill section which is crowned by a large beech tree root. The root looks like a stair step at the top of a steep, dusty 10-20 foot climb. When you're a novice mountain biker, it seems implausible a person could ride up such an obstacle, but it's actually pretty "easy" for me now.

For the novice many things are "unknowns", like what happens if you can't ride up that hill and fall off awkwardly? It's an "oh shit" moment when you ride around a corner and see such a thing for the first time. That's where anxiety kicks in, when it's actually least useful and is totally counterproductive. When you "fight the bike" with mind and body, you're all but certain to fail riding over any obstacle. Situational awareness flies out the window, and the body goes ridgid into a sort of fighting mode, which is completely counter productive.

I think that type of anxiety is really an evolutionary "brace for impact" adaptation. One common version of that is the "sympathetic grunt" when you see another person fall awkwardly. The person who is falling will often make a sort of grunt or groan even before they hit the ground, and if there's a person or crowd watching, even on video, they'll involuntarily make a similar noise, which I think is essentially stiffening the ribs with positive air pressure... it's basically like a human air bag deployment. That type of anxiety is an involuntary response. It goes away with experience in the mountain bike obstacle scenario.

The daily life cousin of that type of anxiety is the phantasmagorical imagining of some bad scenario, which is also counterproductive and maladaptive. It's also a "brace for impact" scenario, but it can play out indefinitely just in the mind. Ironically, the source of this form of anxiety is the notion that a person is "in control" through planning and intention, which is also ultimately where the mountain bike obstacle angst comes from.

On the MTB, the trail goes over the obstacle, so the rider must navigate it or jump off the bike before it turns into a crash and maybe injury or a broken bike even though the trail and the situation is completely contrived. The anxiety arises from a faux "goal".

The day to day life anxieties are really similar. A contrived, typically accidental scenario induces angst: "If I don't do XYZ, I might lose my job!" or some romantic scenario might completely occupy the mind or money trouble might plague a person's thoughts.

The MTB obstacles are basically the point of riding the mountain bike. The first time I cleared that hill, I was completely thrilled. Really, every time I do it now, I get a little rush. The Big Creek trail is loaded with 1000 similar obstacles.

People have wildly more anxiety about life situations that are extremly boring and not dangerous at all and are mostly phantasms. They think their neighbors and friends are laughing at them if they don't have the right car or if their grass is too long or their hair isn't blond enough or they're too fat or too thin or their teeth aren't white enough or whatever. A great example of how insane such people can get is offered by "Asian Plastic Surgery" youtube channels

The Ancient Seed Monopoly

There's kid lore in Chardon, Ohio that was passed down for generations. The lore is there is a tunnel network from Rocky Cellar, which is sandstone bedrock outcropping off Basquin Drive, up to the county courthouse about a mile away, and perhaps there is a tunnel network through all the sandstone to various places.

I think that story is a great example of how folk stories, in that case a kid folk story, encode actual information: the original detailed information is boiled off and jumbled up with generic archetypes. In that story case, a historical event, was replaced with a generic "secret tunnel" narrative. The historical event was a town official hid court records in Rocky Cellar during the war of 1812. The story also encodes the prevalent underlying sandstone bedrock in Chardon. The boring details of that original historical event got replaced with something interesting.

In some cases, historical events that are interesting in and of themselves retain their original narrative form. A good example of that is "Brady's Leap" in Kent, Ohio and the associated frontier adventure story. Since the event was cool and kick ass, the man's name and the details of the event is in the lore.

The vampire character blends together many real world concepts into a mythological character. One that I think is particularly intriguing the the element of the Hades/Persephone story that involves pomegranate seeds. Hades basically gets to keep Persephone because she ate the pomegranate arils. I read/heard many attempts to explain this element of the story.

Persephone being married to Hades is a seasonal myth. Hades is the king of the underworld, which is often equated with winter, that is the dead time of the year. To a modern person it doesn't make any sense that the king of the underworld and especially winter world would also be associated with wealth, which is the lean time of the year. Hades association with wealth spills over into the vampire myth: Dracula is even a "Count" and he lives in a castle.

The Arils component of the story involves "a deal" that Persephone broke, or was tricked into, depending on the version of the story. Why would that element of the story hang around for thousands of years?

I think that story is really about an ancient "seed monopoly" from the dawn of agriculture. I think that's also where the concept of interest comes from. This is also why "Hades" is associated with wealth, not the common interpretation that the concept was all wealth came from the underworld... which also makes no sense, unless you're talking about a mine, like a silver mine, which was another thing which was frequently monopolized.

Death and blood are at the core of the Hades/Vampire story for fairly obvious reasons... how is a monopoly built and maintained? murder and destruction.

The Book of Enoch and "The Jews"

In a previous post about the "cultural significance" of Star Wars versus the near insignificance of the movie Avatar I pointed out two narratives that permeate pop culture movies and TV shows and also the bible, which is really Star Wars + Avatar. There are basically three core narratives to discuss here:

• The Osiris Cycle, or the Demeter/Persephone Cycle (crops and winter);
• Moonman/woman and Sunman versus winterman;
• Rich people form a slave colony (Book of Enoch and Avatar, and 10,000 BC).

The Osiris cycle is "the sun" comes to Earth and is embodied in the crops like wheat or grapes, dies, and mutilated, and is reborn. In the Osiris story (there are some different versions), Osiris gets put into a tight fitting casket (wheat storage) and floated down a river (shipped). He's eventually reborn via artificial means (planted). In the grape crop based versions of the stories the plant-embodied-sun gets castrated (grapes cut off), and then torn to pieces by mad women in one case, stomped and mashed and made into wine. Jesus is wheat cult + wine cult. The violence in these stories should be regarded as looney tunes or Final Destination style cartoon violence where the character of Osiris, Jesus, or Dionysus is the personification of wheat (which used to be literally flailed by workers) or grapes.

The Demeter/Persephone/Hades version of this story is Persephone is "kidnapped" and kept in the underworld by Hades who is the wealthy king of the dead, and she is released in spring. One of the reasons Persephone is kept by Hades is she ingests Pomegranate seeds. Hades morphed into a vampire in modern times. He represents the never ending seed monopoly/finance scheme still used today.

The adventures of Moonman/woman and Sunman (the first released Star Wars movies Han/Leia and Luke) are another seasonal cycle story and the Osiris cycle provides the background. One example of that is Luke ends up hanging upside down in the ice cave on Hoth (winter planet, Luke/Sun in the south, i.e. upside down).

The "rich people form a slave colony" story is the Book of Enoch and Avatar, and maybe more interestingly Stargate and 10,000 BC. The TV series "The 100" is another example of this core narrative. The "rich people" slave colony story of the book of Enoch ends up in the bible in the Cain character and his city founding. This thread is also present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who's a "nephilim" as described in the book of Enoch.

The Stargate and 10,000 BC movies depict the bible jews. I think the current concept of "jews" is a mangled, nonsense concept. The depiction of spece jews in the Stargate and 10,000 BC movies makes sense with respect to the Enoch narrative.

In Stargate the jews are the people who are contacted by people from Earth, that is, the advanced civilization. The character Skaara takes on the Enoch role. The name "Enoch" means "to train" or "initiated". In Stargate the Americans find these space jews ensalved to the Egyptians/Goauld snake people. In 10,000 BC, the white people find the first civilization people enslaved by the Atlanteans... and in that scenario the "slaves" are a rando assortment of people who are "the jews". Jews are the bamboozled slaves of an "advanced" slaver civilization rather than an ethnicity. Today an American is enmeshed in the slaver civilization system, but "American" is not an ethnicity.

Dojo Appeal

The corporate/consumer system in the United States is a soft version of military life, specifically life on a ship. Sadly, people are trained for it from the time they're a toddler. Kids get shipped off to "kindergarten" to get used to authority figures giving them orders and spending all their time on a controlled schedule inside an institutional building where their movements are controlled by institutional paperwork and orders like "hall passes". It's not even an American concept; it came from inbred Prussian lizard people.

A big component of the "midlife crisis" is the realization that life spent in this system is a waste. For many people, it's not so much a "realization", that is a conscious, well formed thought, it's more of a feeling that plays out in mute desperation and acting out. The certainty of mortality, and the corresponding preciousness of one's life collides with the absurdity of masses of people living under the thumb of a bunch of greedy cockroaches who have bamboozled the multitudes.

This realization is also why movies like They Live attain a "cult" following. It allows the audience to "externalize" this model of control, that is, the narrative of the movie allows one to be like a fish that climbs out of the fish bowl and see it for what it is.

However, once a person "can see", a possibly harsher reality is everyone now "needs" this pile of trash system because it makes almost everything including the most essential items like food and controls the distribution of everything with funny money.

That said, many of the things people do are purposely and firmly outside the corporate/consumer system. I experience one successful, very good example of that on a regular basis when I do my mountain biking hobby. I go to a public park and ride a trail that was built and maintained by volunteers who receive no compensation other than the ability to ride their bike.

After a summer storm, the trail can be impassible since it's in the woods and many branches and even whole trees or large chunks of a dying tree will fall on the trail... but they will disappear as if "by magic" over maybe a half a day. The "magic" is rando mountain bikers moving them or chopping them up. I've done it myself. A portion of the trail is only ~1200 feet away from my couch through the woods. I dragged a chainsaw over there and chopped up a log and cleared the trail because I wanted to ride the next day.

There are many other models of organization that match the mountain bike hobby and trail construction such as a dojo, which is maybe the most appealing one for free and productive people. Models like cults and religious orders maintain elements of corporate and military organizations that aren't appropriate to free men.

I never really thought about the word dojo and its inherent relationship to "the way", i.e. "do". A dojo is a place where you practice "the way" of a discipline like martial arts. The idealized dojo is organized like the mountain bike hobby, not like a corporation or military unit or public schools. If there's a hierarchy, it's a real hierarchy. The teacher is not an authority figure because of a title, but has natural authority versus a student who wants to learn "the way".

Many people have noticed this concept and tried to apply it to the tech industry or other commercial endeavors but it doesn't really work because someone is trying to get paid, which corrupts the structure and imposes a false hierarchy of "owner ship", which is the thing at the root of the corporate trash system. As observers like Jordan Maxwell pointed out, the "ship" is at the core of this thing.

Complexity of the Information Dimension

This past weekend I went for a bike ride on Butternut Road from Munson over to Burton. It was a perfect, bright, sunny and windy day and that road is picturesque. It goes through a handful of river valleys. The Chagrin, the West Branch of the Cuyahoga, and the East Branch of the Cuyahoga and has lumpy, rolling hills and open grassy fields with horses and other farm animals all along the way.

I'm on a geology kick lately and "see" the glacial deposition, which geologists gave a bunch of names like Kames, Hummocky Moraines and the like. That route passes over several different such regions, which are complex there because the road passes over three sandstone highlands. One of them even has a name "Maple Hill" which is Auburn Road near Cedar and Butternut.

The "experience" of riding combines with the maps I've been looking at for a couple of weeks to generate a new combination of observations in my mind, and my mind only, that is in the "information dimension" where my personal Thomas Anderson character exists. I have an understanding of the difference in elevation of the Cuyahoga Formation and the Sharon Conglomerate sandstone highlands and how that's filled in with glacial till because of the effort involved to climb various hills, or drop down various descents.

The (abrigded) etymology of "experience" is instructive here, it's "ex" (out of) "peritus" (testing). Also "expert", which is someone who had experiences basically. "Experiential" learning is much deeper than mere symbolic learning, which is basically a huge waste of time. It's wild that almost the whole population of a country like the USA flushes away their prime growing and learning years soaking in a soup of disconnected factoids preached by teachers who similarly don't "know" anything.

It makes sense that culture would go hog wild on these dumb fuck LLMs. The emphasis on a jumble of pure symbolic nonsense with zero experience goes hand in hand with rote "learning" and assemblies of facts. All the "actual" knowledge, like all the nutrition is in the experience not the words. That huge sea of information is not available to machines, it can barely be shared from human to human.

Anyway, this takes my back to an immense divide between "experts" and "dilettantes" and poseurs. The expert lives in the deep complexity of the information dimension. The dilettante lives "off the cuff" and on whims. I think the US ruling class is very toxic poseurs. I'm sure there's a bunch of such people, like CEOs saying things like, "What does the AI say about it?" in meetings all the time now.

The vacuum/negative space this black hole of foolishness is creating might give birth to another wisdom tradition in the US.

"The Way"

I recently watched a YouTube video about the vast cultural impact of Star Wars versus the zero cultural impact of the movie Avatar which was also a "mega blockbuster hit movie". The "Star Wars" topic is one of the things that got me started on the initial concept of this blog, which is humanity's mind model is inextricably bound up with mythology. Why is Star Wars a cultural icon while Avatar is not?

Star Wars is literally star wars which is the basis of a lot of mythological systems. I wrote a bunch of posts on this topic, but this one is a good summary. I'll jot down a few really obvious highlights. Millenium Falcon = the moon. X-Wing fighter looks like an erect penis. Luke literally shoots his load into the "death star". Rebels = solar imagery. The Empire is the world of the dead, that is, the Winter and last years sun and hoarded wealth, like the greek god Pluto, who's also a vampire. Luke (light) and Han are Horus. Princess Leia is Isis. Vader is Osiris/the constellation Orion. Every year the Rebels, the Sun, overthrows the Empire (the winter) and there's a big Ewok Party--Summer.

Avatar is possibly based on another old myth, but it's a less well known myth. It might be a twist on the Book of Enoch story or the story of the Nephilim which is also the basis of the Stargate SG-1 story, which is also the Atlantis story told by Plato, which is shown in bits and pieces in the movie 10,000 BC and is also in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica. That story is an advanced civilization came to prehistoric Earth and basically "engineered" humanity. In the book of Enoch, for example, the "watchers" teach humans "civilization". The nephilim enslave humanity, as in Avatar, an evil corporation sends an imposter to dupe the blue aliens.

For whatever reason, this story is not as widely known or celebrated, and all these entertainment products have niche fandoms, or no fandom, like Avatar, which was, ironically just corporate entertainment slop compared to Star Wars which was based on "The Contendings of Horus and Set" and "The Osiris Cycle", which are arguably products of the Nephilim. That is, the "seasonal religion" is a scam that's been used to enslave humanity for 1000s of years.

"Star Wars" also includes "the force" mythology, but in true Nephilim style corrupted it with the concept of "royal blood", which is the Nephilim/fallen angels myth. That is, "the force" is only available via biological and hereditary juju called "mitichlorians" or whatever. That's all a sort of grotesque corruption of concepts in Daoism. "The Force" = "The Way".

The depiction of "the daoist" comes and goes in entertainment products. I think corporations are not eager to promote it, nor are corporate types who are the people who make hollywood slop now. A classic example of this is Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu. The "Caine" surname and his origin story is drawn from the Nephilim story yet again (in the lore, it's the biblical Cain), but it doesn't fit the rest of the concepts in Kung Fu, nor the Shaolin Monk concept. Another similar, and corrupted example is the Ranger Aragon from Lord of the Rings who's the "secret king", but a ranger. The TV series the Incredible Hulk is yet another one where a wandering stranger goes around the world solving problems "outside the system". Of course Yoda and the Jedis are supposed to be Shaolin Monks who have a sort of stand-offish relationship with "the system" and have their own concerns about "maintaining balance" which is independent of the government's agendas.

"The Way" is the only way, so it necessarily supercedes religion, which is a pack of lies, and politics, which is also a pile of fraud and lies, and it really trumps all similar nonsense, like consumerism, or work anxiety, corporations, etc... It asserts itself in times of extreme madness, like in classical Athens during peak empire, or in ancient Rome in the form of stoicism, or now in the US where the "ruling class" is being revealed as utter trash.

Authentic Folklore/Imposed Folklore

I wrote a couple of posts about "kid knowledge", which I think is a great example of "authentic" folklore in the western world. A couple of examples of kid folklore from Chardon, Ohio are: 1) the story of the Melonheads; 2) the idea that there is a tunnel network connecting the high school, the court house and "Rocky Cellar" which is a sandstone bedrock outcrop off of Basquin Drive in Chardon.

The kid knowledge is "authentic" because it was generated by rando kids or adults over time and was handed down kid to kid through the generations. The "tunnel" story is almost certainly a jumbled up version of what was more or less an adventure story from the War of 1812, which was coincident with the founding of Ohio and Geauga County. An early county official stashed documents in Rocky Cellar to keep them safe from the British and Indian mercenaries of the British. Eventually that turned into a "tunnel to the courthouse".

The melonhead story is just a monster story, maybe about kids with hydrocephalus who lived near Wisner Road in Chardon, Township. It got embellished over the years to become a fantastical tale of a "mad scientist" run amok who was then destroyed by his creation, which is just a jumble of horror movie tropes.

Kids are motivated to tell and listen to stories for entertainment purposes, so the stories are lean on facts and more about being "cool" or interesting exercises of imagination. They also draw upon well worn story tropes and archetypes. I am guessing there is very little "kid knowledge" left of that kind. Instead it's turned into memes and funny stories and images on the Internet. 

I think the contemporary source of authentic folklore, or authentic human expression is the Internet, and specifically things like youtube videos made by actual randos, rather than astroturfed imitations of that generated by "ruling class" agents. Youtube is currently, far and away, the most watched entertainment medium.

 

The entire corporate entertainment industry is often a version of astroturf "folk lore" creation. The news is a version of that. PBS, NPR, etc... are just more versions of that. Essentially it's all a sales pitch from the "ruling class" about virtually every topic and is mainly meant to shape public opinion, or impose mind models that favor the ruling class or at the very least just impose their rando religious opinions on myriad topics.

Let's take the topic of "race relations" as an example. In the 70s and 80s, there was a constant drumbeat of government and "ruling class" propaganda about black and white race relations in the US, and a big effort to get white people to think "racism" was absolutely the worst sin and that anyone who had a racist opinion was absolute trash. I think that social engineering effort peaked in the 1990s with Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central, which was a huge hit and which treated the topic comedically and nonchalantly.

The main thrust of that propaganda isn't that "race relations" can be fixed or solved, it's actually that black people need the government to propagandize white people and "manage" the two groups, just as the blacks need the government for welfare, public housing, police at their beaches, their pools, and high school football games, etc...

In the early 2000s through today, though, lefty political people got extremely aggressive about the subject, so even the entertainment propaganda got extremely heavy handed and the concept of "DEI" started to show up all over the place. The concept shifted from the 70s/80s notion of "white and black people should learn to get along" to "white people are bad", which is also part of the management pitch.

That propaganda ran headlong into the Internet and youtube, which casually crushed it for a large segment of the white audience. White lefty women and men are the only people who are still onboard with the ruling class propaganda from the 70s to the early 2000s about black people, and in many cases, those white shitlibs live in a world of total nonsense and severe cognitive dissonance. For example, they live in extremely white areas, but imagine that somehow a "diverse" neighborhood is preferable, until they drive through black Cleveland, Ohio, and lock their car doors and drive as fast as possible to get back to their own civilization.

Anyway, I think it's not possible to keep imposing folklore on people. Eventually they notice it's fake garbage, which would probably indicate that all respect for "the ruling class" and their opinions is being lost.

Being "Wrong"/Bad Mind Models

I had an "earth science" class in 8th grade. It was an unusual class and maybe was some kind of educational experiment in our school district. It had two teachers and it culminated in a multi-day field trip to Kelly's Island in Lake Erie. We visited the glacial grooves there. I maintained an on again/off again interest in local geology ever since.

The glacial grooves at Kelly's Island are pretty impressive. It's obvious they were formed by an immense force scraping rocks and boulders along the exposed limestone. The force was provided by the slow motion flow of the laurentide ice sheet. For many years after the class, I had an opinion that the glacier ice was "miles thick" and uniformly deep. I thought it looked something like this painting at the boundary, but this concept was a "scientific" version of folklore.

In my hometown area where there is exposed bedrock there are no glacial grooves. Also there's significant accumulation of glacial till here; it's tens to hundreds of feet thick (in old river valleys). The mental model of miles-thick ice scouring the bedrock here doesn't jibe with that.

Images of the present day Greenland ice sheet shows it tapers down significantly at the edges, so maybe it's ~20 feet thick, plus it's all dirty and gray and it rides on a layer of rocks and ground up rock powder. Also it's shape and thickness seems to be significantly affected by underlying bedrock and land elevation.

This photo, below, from Greenland of the Isunnguata Sermia glacier is probably a good approximation for what the glacial times were like here in my neighborhood, which is on a terminal moraine from 14,000 years ago. Maybe there was more vegetation here at the time, like hemlock forests and grasslands since we're much farther south than Greenland.

So if I were living 14,000 years ago, the view from my current property would have been something like that. Maybe tens of feet of ice off to the north stretching on for endless miles into Canada. The southern side of the glacier was probably filled with streams and holes and lakes in the summer season.

A bunch of glacial till would be stacked up all over the place with new grass, weeds, and trees quickly taking over, and there would be lakes and rivers everywhere supplied by melt water. In fact, there was a lake just to the north of my property which eventually emptied out via what's currently Big Creek.

Anyway, I think most of the mind-models people have are low fidelity like my 8th grade glacier model. The folklore mind model of Ohio ice age geology is a pretty interesting one to think about. It shares some common traits with kid lore I learned in the late 1970s/early 1980s in Chardon, Ohio.

There's an "official"/technical and highly detailed version of Ohio ice age geology which is constantly updated by PhD students and geology researchers, plus a slow, steady stream of information comes from water well drilling companies into ODNR databases. This technical/detailed information ends up in maps, reports, whitepapers, etc... Some geology professors in Ohio will understand and have a significant amount of that info at their fingertips.

A popularized, shortened version ends up in text books. Middle school teachers will grasp some subsection of facts, and jumble and mix up other concepts as they convey that info to students. It turns into a narrative that borrows core elements from fictional stories, and get exaggerated and peppered with interesting concepts like "miles thick ice", which is way more interesting than a pile of dirty snow that ebbs and flows like a super slow motion waves on the beach.

Converged Dystopia

The "dystopian" sci-fi genre was pretty popular in the 1970s-90s. Movies like Robocop or Demolition Man and Idiocracy were entertaining plus their authors spent some brain cells trying to imagine what the future was going to be like based on the "trends" of the prior decades. Unfortunately, they were correct, and the present day is like a dystopia movie gumbo. It's mostly Idiocracy with chunks of Robocop, Demolition Man, and They Live mixed in, especially when the aliens in "They Live" represent jewish mobsters.

A great example of this was provided by the first episode of an HBO show called Euphoria which made me nauseous because it's so bleak and disgusting. It's more or less the 90210 for the dystopian world. 90210 was a multi-year after school special. This Euphoria show seems like depraved propaganda meant to mind-poison gen Z dummies, or put another way, it's entertainment for a completely mind poisoned generation.

The main character is a mixed-race mentally ill girl who is a crackhead, which I guess is supposed to be normal now. She's having a sad mope life because she lives in the suburbs instead of the city so she is a junkie and in rehab at age 16 or whatever. The hot white girl character immediately shows her boobs, then has sex with a black kid. The white high school jock kid is a rapist sociopath. There's an obligatory trannie high schooler who goes and has butt sex with a middle aged psycho white man. The show is dripping with black/urban trash "culture" which is all a hollywood invention anyway. The "normal" kids are dunks and drug users and sit around drinking and smoking vapes like they live in a giant crack house world.

I think the "converged dystopia" is really just the "mouse utopia" and it happens over and over again throughout history, but is cycles within cycles. There are micro cycles, like generational financial scams ebbing and flowing, and larger cycles of actual capital and technology creation, war cycles, all nestled withing big climatic and geologic cycles which put hard limits on human population and activities.

It's not possible to "fix" the culture, just like it's not possible to fix dysfunctional people, and it's not possible to make the mouse utopia work. 

Natural Thinking

A couple weeks ago I went after a Strava road bike segment that goes from Rt 6 in Hambden, south along Kile Road. It's a little over 2 miles and has a 50 foot climb in the middle.

A while after I finished the ride it dawned on me that Kile Road passes over glacial landforms which were created about 14,000 years ago. The elevation chart for the segment is more or less a cross section of the "Defiance Moraine", which spans Ohio from east to west and is named for the city of Defiance. It's a terminal moraine which is the debris that's piled up at the end of a glacier as shown in the following picture of a glacier in Greenland.

By NASA / Michael Studinger

Kile Road is an open air glacial surface feature museum. The moraine landform is subtle, but noticeable especially on a bicycle. It's even visible on google streetview. It's noticeable because Kile Road otherwise follows the east branch of the Cuyahoga River Valley which is about 1.5-2 miles wide there. At the center of the valley the elevation is around 1180 feet and it's about 1300 feet on either side. The valley runs north-south, but the moraine on Kile is running east-west. Also, there's a large flat and open area which was a lake in glacial times. There are several farms there, plus Pioneer Waterland water park whose central feature is a remnant of that glacial lake.

The following map is from the ODNR Ohio Geology Interactive Map. It shows the Strava segment (the red line) and the portion of the moraine which forms the hill on the segment, which is the dark green mass that is in the middle of the segment.

Both the moraine and ancient glacial lake weren't all that "obvious" to me even after studying local geology for many years by riding my bike around and looking at rock formations and also reading about the subject and studying maps for years. The geologists who put the story of Earth together in the 19th and 20th century managed to deduce a complex narrative from very subtle clues. I think they represent a very good example of following the evidence to get to the "truth" no matter where it leads.

The "truth" revealed by geology is the operation of the earth and climate system, which runs, obviously, without human intervention and with no regard for humans at all. It shows humanity isn't uniquely important and will come and go like many other species before us. The evidence for that is everywhere. For example, my house and property is right on top of the Defiance Moraine, so about 14,000 years ago, it looked like the photo above and a huge field of ice rolled off into the north. Millions of years before that, this land was under an ocean, etc...

People (including me) struggle and strain and fight over piles of imaginary nonsense. The masses allow the most horrible trashbucket element of humanity like politicians and priests goad them on into wreaking all sorts of havoc and murder based on magical thinking nonsense.

Worry Mode of Consciousness

I've been riding the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail on a regular basis since fall of 2025. Even though I'm in pretty decent shape for my age and am actually fairly fast on a road bike, I suck on the mountain bike. For example, I'm in the top 10, or sometimes the "king of the mountain" out of hundreds or even multiple thousand people on certain Strava segments on the road bike, but I'm in the bottom half or worse on the Big Creek Park segments, which probably means I'm the slowest of the "fast people" who are the ones that bother having a Strava account in the first place. I find this annoying, so I work to improve my speed.

Going fast on the MTB is at least as dependent on technique as aerobic conditioning. The technique seems to be about training the mind and body with a much more complicated center-of-mass/bike position model than is required for road biking. Of course that model is all based on "feel" and experience rather than a conscious physics model. The conscious mind model is too slow to pilot the bike effectively and efficiently.

On the mountain bike, efficiency is key, and efficiency means not braking too much for a corner or difficult section. Braking for every corner is one of the things that really drains all the speed/kinetic energy from the mountain bike/rider system, and then of course requires the rider to replace that energy from their legs, so it's also quite tiring. The inefficiency drags the average speed way down.

However, it's quite "scary" to try to maintain speed through corners, especially on steep downhill sections. The fear is really a manifestation of the lack of a good mind/body model for the mountain bike. The temptation to grab the brakes is almost impossible to overcome, for very good reason. The conscious mind "knows" there's a big gap in training and there's no mind/body mountain bike model to rely on.

Unfortunately, building up that model involves crashes. I just crashed yesterday while trying to "flow" through a "fast", but relatively flat section of the trail, but it has turn after turn after turn, plus little bumps and dips. I resisted the temptation to get on the brakes and tried maneuvering through each turn. Eventually the front wheel washed out on some soil that was loose and slippery compared to the rest of the corners and down I went.

A few minutes later, I realized my mistake "consciously", that I was off balance on the bike in that corner. My weight was too far back and probably shifted to the wrong side of the bike, that is, on the inside of the turn. Anyway, the whole of the mind/body model for the MTB seems to be about keeping the center-of-mass of the bike body system optimal over the wheels all the time, then developing a feel for the limits of the wheels for given soil conditions. When the center-of-mass is well positioned, it's possible to safely bail out of a bad situation, or to slide through a turn even when the wheels lose group.

The inability of the conscious mind, that is the "self" or the "ego" to wrangle with 3D reality is very common. One variant of this problem manifests as "worry" which is fairly similar to the "scary" feeling on a mountain bike. Worry is low level nagging stress that some situation is "out of control", that is, "unknown".

On the MTB, the "scare" feeling is the conscious realization that training is inadequate to handle a given speed through a turn. The "scare" feeling is transient--it lasts the duration of a turn which might be 2 seconds. Since the only way to get better is to train the turns there's no point mentally obsessing on it.

Worry is the consciousness trying to play out many different scenarios in an obsessive manner. It's generally worthless compared to the mountain bike training and learning process. People worry about work. They worry about love, family, finances, etc... Some people are worried their entire life. The "worry" scenario is all imagined, but it leads to adverse physical consequences, like higher cortisol levels which are the "bad" and "heavy" feeling.

A corresponding mode of consciousness to worrying is "enduring". The person who decides to "endure" their worry and heavy feeling has a model that they'll "get to the other side" eventually. That is, by struggling, they will eventually "make it" or succeed and their burden (the cortisol dose) will eventually go away. There are various sayings and folk-wisdom phrases associated with this mode of consciousness, e.g. "it's darkest before the dawn".

The enduring mode of consciousness is foolish to indulge because the "worry" is all imaginary. Old Obi-Wan's advice to "let go" is really good. The "go with the flow" model is really all that can be done anyway. The recognition of the reality of given circumstances is the best antidote.

Psychosis is Normal

A person having a "psychotic break" can't distinguish between their inner world imaginings and the 3D external reality world. If you witness a friend or relative struggle with psychosis, it's frightening, especially when that person might have been competent and balanced previously. That reveals the mind-model of reality is as contingent as physical health. "You" have potentially as little control over your mind model as you do on getting a cold or breaking your leg.

The concept of a "normal" mode of consciousness and a "psychotic" mode of consciousness implies that this state is "rare", especially if you ever witnessed someone lose it that way. However, once you start considering all the nonsense and bullshit that compels peoples' lives all over the world, the "psychotic" condition seems to be the norm.

"Lawn care" is a good example of a completely imaginary, groomed compulsion. Through the summer millions of people in the US are ruled by an image of uniform green squares. When their grass departs from that image, they must mow. People will spend $10,000 on a lawn mower machine. People who can't DIY anything will spend $1000 for a mechanic to change their oil and do other minor service on their mower. Some people pay thousands of dollars per year to landscapers to maintain that image, and never even go out of their house and walk on the grass, or even look at their flower beds. It's all very strange.

Political parties are another great example. Dolts imagine they are on a "team" with a scumbag like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and the only thing preventing a utopia is the bad guys on the other team. That stultifying mental model dominates some people's entire lives. All the contrary evidence and day-to-day experience of actual reality doesn't change their mental model one iota. They'll argue with the other team until they're blue in the face about random issues they have zero first hand knowledge of.

There's endless examples. As I wrote in the previous post, much of this psychosis is cultivated by "the ruling class", many of whom earnestly believe it. In that scenario, they more or less project their own reality model onto their cult members and the shared delusion forms a herd. People scoff at a group like Heaven's Gate, but actually live that Heaven's Gate life. Their own personal Marshal Applewhite could be a boss, or a political figure, or some talking head who's preaching about COVID, global warming or any number of other topics.

One of the interesting reactions to this cult grooming is people who reject all facts or any model of reality that doesn't seem authentic to them. For example, the flat earther people glom onto a "theory" they consider the opposite of the authoritative teaching of "globe earth". The flat earthers are scorned, but they're actually more enlightened than a lot of people who simply regurgitate an authority's statements without any actual knoweledge.

The realization that one is going to die and that nobody knows anything is a good antidote to these forms of psychosis. Another useful realization is quite a lot of the human world is composed of inanimate objects that actually feed on human energy and attention, aka the world of the dead. The lawn care industry is a great example of that. People feed a giant grass beast and kill all kinds of other creatures to maintain their green square image. In some jurisdictions, it's even written into the laws that the plants in a yard can only be so long.

Rule by Common Sense

When I was in middle school and high school from the mid to late 1980s the predominant insult label you would throw at someone was "poseur". "Fag" was another one, which basically meant the same thing, that is the person was weak, incompetent, and a fraud.

The poseur term came from Punk Rock, which was a big thing at the time. In that world, "poseur" was a band who pretended to be a "punk" but was really just a commercial scammer. For example, the band "Blondie" reportedly disliked their big hit song "Heart of Glass" which was a disco tune, because they were a punk band, and didn't want to be revealed as greedy corporate money whores instead of authentic punk rockers.

There was a corresponding attempt to be "good at things" among my friends and peers at school. I don't think that 100% came from the concept of fear of being labeled a poseur. In fact, it was probably the opposite. That is, people who put an emphasis on competency would gravitate to use an insult like "poseur".

That emphasis on competency makes sense in the context of the US economy of the time. In the 1970s and 80s, the US still made stuff, so a widespread culture of competency sort of makes sense. However, at the same time, the US started to turn into the financialized, scam based shit show it is today. This was heralded by things like the "Savings and Loan" crime wave of the 80s.

The departure from "common sense" and the beliefs I grew up with goes hand in hand with the "elite overproduction" concept from Peter Turchin. There's an inverse statistical relationship between the "elites" and the "people", which is an age old story. We're in a period of peak parasite, and maximum social stress now. It's probably the maximum deviation from "common sense" as well.

The deviation from common sense is easy to understand. Government and corporations make novel claims to create new organizations and opportunities for wealth extraction. Trannies and pronouns are great current day examples. The "ruling class" can find fault with "common sense" and ordinary people and undertake social engineering quests. In the late 1800s it was the temperance movement. Today it's basically the opposite of things that happened then. Like in the 1800s around that time there was a "eugenics" movement. Today there's basically an opposite concept of racism and opposition to "white people" as a category. Both concepts are arbitrary inventions of the "ruling class" of the times.

The madness basically comes about through the financial system which extracts wealth from the population en masse and diverts it to the various causes of the ruling class people. It seems pretty likely the break between the ruling class and the common sense people will form around the financial system and associated institutions like the insurance industry or banks or the legal system, which is also a participant in the madness.