— jdemeta

 When I was a young lad I used to visit my Great Uncle a lot, and anyone who’s been following my work for a while knows that he is my greatest inspiration. I think this is in part because he had a direct connection to seemingly ‘distant’ history and often used to tell stories of the city of Norwich being on fire during WW2, and other memories relating to pulling dead pilots out of trees near his home. I’m sure these early encounters with both the brutality and nonchalance of history have influenced my writing, in fact, I’m certain of it. Anyway, one of my most vivid memories is – lucky for me – the moment I learnt one of the most important lessons I’ll ever learn.

Me and my Great Uncle were driving down some rural country lanes to a small pigeon shooting spot he liked to check when he was bored and the weather was nice. The day was bright, quintessentially English, I believe it was spring time and early in the morning. We got to a junction and were about to turn right, but before we did, we had to wait for someone walking their dog. Now, what are often common sights can become lifetime lessons when seen through the eyes of someone wise, this is largely what Michel Serres’ work is.

The woman who was walking her dog wasn’t exactly walking her dog, as much as she was being dragged by it. When one thinks of people who are walking their pets this is actually an extremely common sight. The dog on its leash/lead being ‘walked’ by its owner, but when one looks closer, the leash is so tense that the owner is actually being pulled by the dog, the leash is only there to give the illusion of control. My Uncle, probably spotting a great moment to teach a moral lesson, held on the brakes before taking the turn. Watching as the woman was dragged at an uncomfortable pace by her dog past the front of the car, my Uncle turned to me and said ‘My boy, who’s walking who?’

Little did I know this would be the greatest lesson in power I would ever learn. In an instant my Uncle had taught me everything about power they don’t want you to know, that is, power is exactly where you can sense it, whether or not various institutions, structures or systems say otherwise. The great illusion here is that just because the dog was kept on a leash and the owner had ahold of the leash that the dog was under control, except, this isn’t true at all. But in reality, due to the creation of a structure of power which is entwined with various social entities it seems both easy and difficult to see exactly where the power lies.

The large majority of people would of course say that the owner (or person holding the leash) is the person who holds the power, for the mere fact that they hold the leash. In much the same manner, many would say it is the government which holds the power because they hold the societal leash via taxes etc. Some would say it was the leash itself which holds power, the structure which allows power to operate is power itself, the normalcy of the leash is power. A rare few would notice that the dog actually holds a fair bit of power because he is able to pull the leash and thus the owner via the strength of his will, however, dogs of a certain age rarely learn that if they keep pulling the leash that they will end up with either a shorter leash or simply be banned from going on walks altogether.

So there’s quite a few little oddities of information held in this one example. Firstly, the dog does in fact hold the power. He is able to control both the leash and thus the owner via exertion of his will, but he doesn’t think of the consequences with respect to what the owner might do due to such frustrations, he only thinks of the immediate goals he’d like to attain. In much the same way, one can currently say that within our contemporary form of pseudo-democratic government the people hold a certain amount of power, but it is constrained by the leash, there is a limit to their power and the owner is always in control of this limit. Shifts of the democratic herd towards X, Y or Z seem – from their perspective – to have accomplished something, but they never contemplate whether or not they’re still on the leash altogether, which of course they are. It’s the illusion of freedom within the same constraints. When we see people who exert their will over the government and cause it to bend or (in-part) break, it should be clear that it is they who – momentarily – hold the actual power, but they have changed nothing, and are simply exhausting themselves by pushing against the leash.

I think if any of my essays ever get misconstrued as defeatist, this will definitely be the one, but I’m hoping I can argue my corner. What happens to those faithful mutts who understand the system? Who understand that haphazardly putting their energies solely in direction of their own will only causes greater harm in the long-run? Dare I say, what happens to those loyal mutts who inherently understand limitation, etiquette and order? They get let off the leash, they get trusted. Am I saying sit back, do nothing and don’t exert your opinion? Absolutely not. Am I saying that more often than not multiple forms of energy exertion are performed within a closed loop which has illusory ends? Yes.

It sucks, you’re in a system which you’re not keen on. That no one is keen on, at least in its current form. So, what are your options? Tug on the leash and exhaust all your energy within the confines of disobedience, a place where one is always watched and suppressed…this sounds utterly useless. Or, accept certain limitations of life, accept the cyclicity of history and try to remove yourself from it. Practice understanding the grey-ness of history and truth, head towards a clarity of thought which is not tainted by various shades of blue and red. If you begin from a position of personal sovereignty which is created with an understanding of immediate governmental limitation, then your direction can only be one of personal self-improvement. From this position one can – internally – be let off the leash and head towards a position of sincerity and discipline. An understanding that you are your own person, and that your energies will not be targeted at deconstruction or demolition, not for lack of vitality, but for lack of care regarding that system, it is what it is, but it doesn’t have to infect you. And so you become the mutt without the leash, trusted to wander here and there, exploring and relaxing, being intrigued by what fascinates you and unconcerned with what doesn’t.

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In 2004 a book called The Secret was published, written by new age spiritualist Rhonda Byrne. The book is one in a long line of New Age spiritual self-help books, this book however – like many others – makes one critical error. Instead of abiding by the generally accepted principle ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ (Gandhi) – which has been the basis of various spiritual traditions for millennia – The Secret alters this phrase into ‘You change the world’. New Age spirituality ignorantly takes critique to a whole other level, in that one believes they are quite literally changing the world to their own vision of it. Now, the former quote from Gandhi is actually related to such change, but it’s doing so from an understanding between the real and the ideal. What Byrne’s book does is make the user believe they can actually immanentize their subjective ideal into reality itself, what the tried-and-tested ‘Be the change’ formula does is work with the real.

What reactionary thought does – as clearly outlined in James Burnham’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom – is address the real. Using known, tried and tested systems, structures and traditions to make a judgment regarding what we should do. Am I saying steadfast traditionalist reactionaries can learn something from New Age spirituality, why yes, I am. What reactionaries are reacting against is the ideal, and what they’re trying to work with – as I’ve stated – is the real. Progressive political systems are inherently ideal, in that they can never arrive in their definitive form, and do so with some manner of mutation, or with some form of parasitic infection. The political ideal can never become because it’s tied to a disordered and chaotic subjective consciousness, whereas the real of reactionary thought is tethered to hell-baked truths of existence.

Many of you will have listened to my recent interview with Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), and if you haven’t, get on it. Yarvin’s overarching point with regard to those who are sick and tired of the current regime is this: Any reaction that plays by the rules of the current regime bolsters the current regime. Reaction has become zero-sum, all energy and spirit targeted at progressivism is subsumed into progressivism. Progress is the great vampire, one which can alter any objections into its own lifeforce. So what does Yarvin state we should do? We should ‘detach’:

“Engagement is any voluntary relationship with power—to assist or resist power, whether in action or just desire. If you are trying to change the world—even if you just want to change it—maybe even if you just want it to change—you are engaged.

The opposite of engagement is detachment. To be detached is to be consciously irrelevant—to inhabit the world as it is, to know that it is likely to continue on its current path, and to separate yourself from any action or desire to change it. No one can achieve perfect detachment—which is the point of trying.

Engagement is not compliance. Compliance is involuntary action. Engagement is voluntary action or desire for action. Compliance is paying your taxes. Engagement is putting a sign on your lawn. Detachment is weird; anything weird in your lifestyle will commend your attorneys to the most meticulous possible compliance.

Detachment is not dissidence. Detachment never resists. It does nothing against any person or institution, legal or illegal, violent or nonviolent. It does not even try to influence public policy or public opinion. It is never angry; it never cares; and it always obeys—both the formal laws, and the informal rules.

Detachment is a hard spiritual task in which no one can succeed perfectly. It is not a fact or even an idea. Detachment, like Zen, is a practice. And while serious Zen practice involves hours of painful sitting that can cause hemorrhoids and even nerve damage, how hard can it be to practice not giving a shit?” – Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince

Now, this theory of detachment is something I have been writing about years. Most notably here, here and here, but the underlying idea is within all my work. Sure, Yarvin is writing about detachment from quite a specific angle, but I’ve always been a critic of progressivism, and if modernity is anything, it’s a blood relative of progressivism.

So, what can us curmudgeons learn from the New Age movement? Well firstly we need to learn – as Burnham and Yarvin point out – to deal specifically with the real. Now, for those of you that are practicing some form of religion or magic, this doesn’t mean some sudden reversion to new atheism or materialism, because here’s the thing, the ‘real’ can be defined as that which works and that which enacts the intended effect on one’s consciousness, culture or state. Dion Fortune defines magic as “the art of causing changes to take place in consciousness in accordance with will.” – Any changes that are caused must be noted, cross-references and understood, anything else is empty ignorant wishes. But hey, there’s a lot of people whose heads are buried in the sand with regards to what is actually happening.

What I like about Yarvin’s piece is that he makes it clear that: “Detachment, like Zen, is a practice. And while serious Zen practice involves hours of painful sitting that can cause hemorrhoids and even nerve damage, how hard can it be to practice not giving a shit?” When we think back to that original quote by Gandhi ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’ we can begin to realise, when juxtaposed with the Yarvin quote, that it adheres to a semantic bias. The entire idea of ‘change’ has succumbed to the vampirism of progressivism, and has been made synonymous with progress itself. When we hear someone is out there changing the world, we instantly think of someone going to Africa to build wells, or helping out at a soup kitchen. Of course, these aren’t bad things to do if you’re so inclined, however, the hegemonic usage of the word ‘change’ disallows other forms of change to ever become.

“How hard can it be to practice not giving a shit?” well Curtis, as you’ve probably found out, unless you define how people are perpetually, unconsciously giving a shit, not giving a shit is basically impossible. Once again, if you don’t even know you’re in a cage, why would you ever try to escape? By now I hope most of you know that you’re at least stuck within something, even if you’re having a hard time defining what exactly that ‘thing’ is. Anyway, back to detachment and how to practice it. I don’t want to distinctly follow on from Yarvin here, so I will just state, this is my own theorization of ‘detachment’.

What I read and understand detachment to be is something which is not active, but it’s also not apathetic, and it’s most definitely not neutral. But that isn’t to say it has to be overtly extrovert, activist or active in any way. So, what the hell is it then? It’s acceptance. When someone truly doesn’t give a shit, when someone’s frame hits its absolute peak, what have they actually done? They have accepted their opinions as their own, accepted the culture they find themselves within and primarily have accepted the real. What does this look like in practice? Well it looks like what it’s always looked like, not bowing to popularity, not acting out of desire for status, acting on principle, being honourable and not bending to the whim of various social, cultural and progressive parasites.

Here’s how it looks in real life:

“Hey man, you excited for that [popular] film everyone is on about?”

“Not really.”

“So, are you red or blue?”

“Neither, I believe democracy is an inherently stupid idea.”

“How about those protests, hey?”

“I wasn’t really paying attention; I have a family to look after and things to build and create. I think most people involving themselves in such things are simply bored and are looking for something to do, they don’t actually believe in whatever it is they’re supporting that week.”

Note, in these 3 examples the reply shouldn’t be said in any overt reactionary manner, as if you’re making some sort of ‘statement’ or outlining some dumb manifesto, one’s reactions and replies should be both honest and sincere. Nothing more is needed. When others realise, they are allowed to disagree, they will begin to understand that there is a system which is controlling them and is covertly creating psychological restraints which unconsciously disallow certain opinions.

Detachment and ‘not giving a shit’ aren’t about checking out altogether. It’s detaching oneself from that which one has been covertly programmed to become attached to (the idea of progress) and likewise, to not give a shit about that which one has been programmed to give a shit about (popular media, activist movements, red vs blue politics, political status games etc.) When I state that one should ‘Become the Reaction You Want to See in the World’ I am not stating that people should do anything, because doing something simply acts as fuel for the fire of progress.

Progress’ modus operandi is defining its process as the universal good and by proxy defining all which disagree with it as bad. By appealing to man’s inherently virtuous nature as someone or some people who wish to appear good as to receive status and popularity, progress gains its support by appeals to vanity and narcissism. So, what one should do, is not do anything which progress can use, simply adhere to strict personal principles and disciplines, and state with conviction, honesty and sincerity that which they truly believe and that which they truly disagree with. You are allowed to disagree with entire systems.

Sit back and become the reaction you want to see in the world. Everyone is getting so caught up in the myth of progress that it’s made them believe they have to react to it in some form, that any disagreement with its method of operation is some grand act in itself, it isn’t. My friend, you are allowed to disagree with anything and everything, and you should. Accept your own opinions, and do not let the parasites of false virtue invade your mind.

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Is this you:

You feel like you have a 2” thick shell of gunk surrounding your entire body which inhibits your ability to truly contact reality?

You’ve had a light-brain-fog for basically as long as you can remember?

You find it difficult to remember what you had for lunch yesterday, let alone a week ago?

You increasingly can’t keep up with what’s going on and everything is moving in an abstract blur?

Your concentration levels have dropped to the standard of a child and you flip between activities, books, tabs, games and songs for no discernible reason?

You desire various items, objects, visuals and stimuli but have no reasoning or history for said desire?

Your emotions and feelings are becoming increasingly dampened, you wonder if you’re a sociopath or narcissist?

Are you ‘mentally’ tired but can find no reason as to why?

Don’t worry, you’re not going mad, but I do have some bad news for you, you might have been lobotomized. Not literally of course, but abstractly. But then, in practice, what’s the difference? Before I begin, I’d like to state that I don’t mean to use the term ‘lobotomy’ in any irrational or flippant way, it was a horrid procedure, and its after effects were both drastic and sad. (See: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). But if we take a look at the history of the lobotomy, what it does and what the intended outcome of it was, we might just find that lobotomization has been deterritorialized into an institutionally controlled abstraction.

What’s a lobotomy then:

Lobotomy: a surgical operation involving incision into the prefrontal lobe of the brain, formerly used to treat mental illness.

This isn’t all that helpful, and if there ever was a ‘Foucauldian statement’, this is it. The entire premise of this statement rests on the last past, ‘to treat mental illness’ Those of you who paid attention to my Free Floating Power essay will realise that what this statement allows is for power to fall into the hands of those who define mental illness. Supposedly, the ‘lobotomy has become a disparaged procedure, a byword for medical barbarism and an exemplary instance of the medical trampling of patients’ rights’, except, the procedure still exists, but entirely as a virtual process which – abstractly – slowly ticks away at the very same areas which a lobotomy attacks head-on. A lobotomy, or ‘prefrontal lobotomy’ would traditionally require surgery to the frontal cortex, containing the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for internal, purposeful mental action, commonly called reasoning or prefrontal synthesis.

So, what we have here is a procedure which is used on ‘mentally ill’ people whose psychic life was overly complex, emotional or distraught. In fact, ‘British psychiatrist Maurice Partridge, who conducted a follow-up study of 300 patients, said that the treatment achieved its effects by “reducing the complexity of psychic life”.’ ‘Reducing the complexity of psychic life’, hell, that sounds like modernity to me. Or at least, that sounds like what modernity wants to do you, or even, unconsciously is doing to you whether you know it or not. How is it doing this then? How is this slow-form of abstract lobotomy being performed? Limit-compression, dopamine-reward-systems, Overton-window-compression, time-compression and normalcy compression. Note, I use the word compression because something that’s compressed eventually springs back with serious force. The more you compress something, the harder it will spring back up and the more energy is needed to keep it down. Anyway, let’s look at the ways it’s performing this lobotomy one-by-one:

Dopamine-Reward-Systems – We quite literally get anxiety attacks when we’ve misplaced our phones, thus, we have cultivated a maternal relationship with our smartphones and social media, they are in charge of us. An average of 2600 taps per-day, phantom-vibration syndrome, reduction in sleep quality, worsening eyesight and on and on, all because we’re locked into a dopamine based social reward system. Dopamine is a chemical in our brain which plays the main role in motivating behaviour, it gets released when we eat tasty food, have sex, masturbate, exercise, and most importantly, engage in successful social interactions. Now, defining successful social interactions used to be difficult, but the sphere of social interaction has since been immanentized onto the metric of likes, retweets, hearts etc, wherein a greater number of positive likes equates to a more successful social interaction, and thus, when we get a like we get a little hit of dopamine. Many might say, ‘Well why’s this worse that eating a tasty sandwich, we get dopamine from doing that too?!’ Yes, we do, but we also don’t do that literally thousands of times per day. We begin to feel good from getting all these likes so we keep doing it, we keep posting things to get more likes, eventually, we succumb to the mechanism itself and instead of posting stuff we find interesting, or stuff we genuinely want to post, we post that which we believe will get us a greater quantity of likes. Social media virtue signalling then, is quite literally the same process/function as masturbation, but then again, so is political, philosophical and all forms of mimetic posting.

Overton-window-compression – The Overton window is the range of policies, discussion and thought which is acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time, it’s also known as the ‘window of discourse’. It is the range within which acceptability is given, anything outside the Overton window is generally deemed odd, weird, hateful, spiteful, silly, radical, or, not-normal. Now, as we can see from the previous section on dopamine-reward-systems, what social media and quantifiable discourse is doing is mentally limiting what we can say and do, not by way of oppression, but by way or ostracization, alienation and peer-pressure. If you don’t post X, Y or Z which are deemed the things to be posting right now, due to their greater dopamine feedback response, then what you’re posting must be weird or horrible. The Overton window then begins to be compressed into a tighter and tighter spectrum of acceptability, not due to any lack of original thought, but due to the majority of its actors, agents and big-players adhering to the compression itself, for if they venture outside the Overton window they risk losing it all, fame, status, popularity, wealth, all of these ride on remaining inside the window and therefor contributing to the positive feedback of acceptable-thought compression. What you’re thinking isn’t mad or weird, it just isn’t acceptable within limits which are constantly finding their way into you via malicious pathways.

Normalcy-compression – This largely thought and mental-based compression of the Overton window begins to infect corporal and material reality by way of self-panopticonic policing, that is, people begin to constantly check both themselves and others for any traits of weirdness or non-normality. They don’t do this consciously, because most people are largely unconscious, if not – for all practical purposes – asleep. What Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the little fascist in all of us’ begins to police and cross-reference everyone’s behaviours with the compressed mode of normalcy given in a single present. Thus, normalcy, normality and what is considered to be normal is a perpetual process of tightening wherein the end-game is roughly 3 or 4 seemingly different thought loops which lead back to precisely the same reality, one wherein you are born, you go to work, you consume, you produce and you die, and you do not question whether or not you want to do this, whether you like to do this, or whether you even thought about any of this in the first place.

Limit-compression – Limit-compression then is relatively simple, from all these forms and modes of compression combined and built up, we end up in a reality where everything is continually compressed for the sake of adhering to an increasingly tightening mode of normality.  The project of atomization is the great illusory emancipatory freedom layered over an ever-constraining normality, atomization allows only for greater normality to be imposed on an individual level, away from families, groups and communes which will potentially have a sturdy and stable enough leader to disrupt the process of modernity.

Time-compression – The final bastion of modernity, the one it really doesn’t want you to break. Time-compression is all the previous modes of compression combined into an absolute chimaera of control. Control via time-compression. Time becomes constrained to the point where one is not ‘living in the present’ in a Buddhist or Taoist sense, but merely existing at the whim of the latest dopamine feedback response, whatever spontaneous social-media based or dopamine-inducing masturbation session the user succumbs to that day is their nano-present; we are at the whims of a cybernetic master whose taken control of our most basic brain functions and is slowly performing a lobotomy by inducing various degrees of compression, limitation and constraint, degrees which we accept, agree with and eventually, promote.

Do you remember Greta Thunberg?

Do you remember Brexit?

Do you remember Jordan Peterson?

Do you remember the Las Vegas Shootings?

Do you remember James Mason?

Do you remember Climate Panic?

Do you remember the Coronavirus?

Do you remember Emma Gonzalez?

Do you remember Jacob Rees Mogg?

Do you remember Theresa May?

Do you remember the 5G debacle?

If you’ve forgotten most of these, then the latest media event is another entry into a long line of various other media events which arise in spontaneity and disintegrate as quickly as they arose, awaiting the next morsel of spectacle to come along and possess your pathetic attention span. This will seem undoubtedly harsh to some, but in much the same manner that saying the very same thing within various other media events would have also seemed harsh and cynical, it’s not. It’s not for the very fact that this entire ‘timeline’ of spectacle events are simply empty happenings which momentarily infect your thought leaving you no time to analyse your being until the next comes in and slams your mentality to the floor.

When I state that we are being globally lobotomized I quite literally mean it, if a successful lobotomy is to induce a ‘decreased complexity of psychic life’ then this is more than a success, this is a triumph! There’s nothing complex about meandering to a single news event whilst waiting for the next one to come along and fill your head. Complexity is found within deep-time, within analysis of the past, within variation, correlation, correspondence, fragmentation and most of all, process. There is no complexity to be found in a watertight present.

So, how can you avoid all this? Well, it’s quite simply and it’s most likely the same advice which is promoted anywhere this sort of this is written about, but I’ll throw in a few actions you can take to get your brain out of this sordid gutter.

Begin to use your phone as little as possible, and most especially don’t use your phone at meal times.

Begin going on walks (preferably in the countryside) without your phone, it will force you to revert to another way of being.

Continually check your thoughts, actions, purchases and posts. Do I actually like this? Do I actually believe this? What do I actually think? Basically, start to fucking think.

If you keep up a routine, start your day with a short meditation or contemplation on a question or idea that is bothering you. I prefer discursive meditation as outlined by John Michael Greer here.

Read old books, preferably books published before the 1900s, it really alters your psyche to realise how different things were just 100 or so years ago.

Read a book on a failed revolution or religion or a dead civilization, understand that things die and decay, and that things are reborn again.

Read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr for a deeper understanding of the way in which internet addiction is effecting you.

Go outside, seriously go outside. Look around, it’s great out there.

Limit screen usage where possible, or, if you have to live with a screen in your life keep a smaller reminder of nature nearby – I have a peace lily on my desk.

Take some time out everyday to think through your thoughts, think about what’s yours and what isn’t, level/stabilize yourself and realise you are still you and what’s going on is outside of you, even though it tries extremely hard to prove otherwise.

You’re not going mad, you’re just holding onto the last remnants of individuality you have within the belly of a malicious machine, plant them in the right places and you might wake up entirely.

Translations:

Russian: https://howtorecover.me/kak-izbezhat-globalnoy-lobotomii

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