What is a Kakistocracy?

A kakistocracy is when any organization (be that it small company, mega soulless corp, or at largest scale, a form of government) in which the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous individuals are in power. The term comes from the Greek words kakistos, meaning "worst," and kratos, meaning "rule" or "power."

Essentially, a kakistocracy is "rule by the worst." And remember, those who thirst the most for power, and often throughout all of history, because of their iron will to gain it, sadly too often do attain it, and because they are the least honorable, are the opposite of those who should actually have it. They fail upwards. Kak upward failures completely disregard principles of honesty, fairness, public service, and accountability to govern effectively and instead prioritize plutocratic gain, kleptocratic gain, and / or personal gain and nepotism over the well being of the public. Kakistocracy is often used as a pejorative term to criticize a corporation or government or corporatized government perceived as corrupt, self-serving, or ineffective for the people, and it's signature call sign characteristics are corruption + incompetence + low ethical standards by those within the formal halls of power. Who only admit those into their power cult because of little to nothing to do with their qualifications and nearly everything to do with blind loyalty. Which inevitably leads to crap decision-making and ineffective policies for the working class at best or highly damaging ones for the working class at worst.

Alchemy teaches that in binary reality, meaning the material world, meaning the Earth realm, meaning your personal life when your meat suit is breathing oxygen, and when doing so go out there and have a career in the professional world, there will always be some level of dysfunction, thus there will always be some level of corruption. Any place you've worked likely demonstrates this. We worked and lived in New Zealand for the better part of a year in our late 20's, and the New Zealand government is often listed as one of the least corrupt, most well functioning governments in the world. Be that in a small, somewhat homogeneous country. It even has a healthy amount of Māori (meaning the indigenous people of New Zealand) representation of MP's in their parliament. Some of which on occasion perform Haka's, their traditional ceremonial dance which is designed to intimidate opponents, not just on the-All Blacks rugby field but also on their parliament floor to protest hot garbage imperial bills that reduce working class, poor, or indigenous liberty. So even though New Zealand is quite good, of course it's never 100% non corrupt and outside of nature, anything created by man, never will be.

In our country, the US of A , up until 2024, there was corruption, but systems were generally working as intended because those in power actually tried to represent the people. But when you hate people that have to work for a living, now at the time of this writing in early 2025, those "we hate people because their born into sin and not in our cult" folks are back in power and like never before have cranked up the redlining levels of their corrupt criminals running the justice department, oil barons running the Environmental Protection Agency, demonstrably underqualified military personnel running the Department of Defence (which is really the Department of Offence) and a convicted felon and wanna be dictator in the office of the Commander and Chief. We can have a separate conversation about how much these agencies really do what they claim to do, but when they're also literally installing someone from the World Wrestling Federation to head the Department of Education, that's Mountain Dew instead of natural spring water. We have a similar level of respect for WWF that we do for Insane Clown Posse and the Kek clown show would also appoint the Grinch in charge of the Department of Christmas if they weren't already so mind controlled by the Christianization of the winter solstice.

Now why is this? A reminder that George Carlin said it well:

“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system far too often produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public.

And why do large swaths of the American public suck? IE, those who vote less democratic and more authoritarian. Because of three simple things - Heavy indoctrination into religion that sucks, with little education or no education that sucks, stacked with consistent long term exposure to a mountain of media that sucks. All by design which we'll continue to discuss.

Standard of Living Compared To Quality of Life

In the previous insight we concluded by mentioning there is a difference of "standard of living" compared to "quality of life". Both are measures used supposedly to assess how society is doin', but one has significantly more depth than the other and the actual difference between the two is everything. 

"Standard of Living" refers primarily to economic factors and thus the machine levers of commerce and man made material conditions and can be defined as "the amount of goods and services people can buy with the money they have". This is relatively objective and within shallow and not very good economic speak, only include superficial things such as employment opportunities, assets & liabilities, and thus, level of wealth, and accumulation of material goods and services. With corpo robots claiming that the main metric to measure how to tell if a civilization is doing well is its Gross Domestic Product. Yet, one can not buy happiness.

The wife and I once visited some friends on the East Coast who are both ER docs who are both partners within their hospital system. They work all the time, probably make a combined $900,000+ per year and they have one of those Virginia McMansion 5000 square foot houses with complex roof angles and by previously said economic measurements are doing top notch. They buy their kids nearly anything they want and as a result their house is full to the brim with toys such as literal arcade games including one of those arcade basketball throwing things. Both the giant basement and 3 car garage which they can't park their cars in are so full of stuff they're heading to hoarder territory and a general underlying anxiety is heavy when visiting their personal spaces. They obviously have over-spending problems, making them and their kids lite slaves to marketing and commercialism, and are a prime example that above a certain point, one does not need more stuff cause access and availability of goods also quickly means "stuff that fills up storage lockers" and maintaining that type of standard of living is a time drain. 

"Quality of life" is a broader concept that includes not only and exclusively made by man material things, which do have some importance, but also goes deeper to include non made by man but more individual or better said subjective general well-being and personal fulfillment beyond just economic metrics. Basically, how are you really doing not just physically, mentally, but also spiritually. In your safety and security, work-life balance, satisfaction, pursuing passions, access to cultural, social, and recreational opportunities, freedom, liberty, human rights, leisure time, the pursuit of happiness, and we would say most importantly, ability to work on one's personal development and balance within a natural environment. These are all things that the empire hates and works to slow or stop in the individual. 

A country might have a high standard of living - high relative incomes, modern infrastructure, and social services such as health care (which when overly privatized becomes sick don't care) that are available to a population. Which are certainly not un-important, but at the same time those with access to such things can have a lower quality of life if there is over materialism, rat race time sucking, widespread disinformation, oppression, sub-par environmental conditions, and still massive mis-distribution of wealth. Conversely, a simpler lifestyle in a country with a lower standard of living may result in a higher quality of life due to community ties, cultural richness, or environmental sustainability or resilience. Thus, quality of life is in no way directly correlated to standard of living. As it's really up to the community's mindsets outside of economic factors. So both concepts are useful for understanding societal development but serve different analytical purposes. With "standard of living" capturing only material conditions, while "quality of life" diving into the broader experience of human existence. 

And regardless of how much money you have, all of it in the world or none of it at all, it's really all about the physical, mental, and thus spiritual health of your community. So you could be a rich kid of Instagram D-bag whose materially rich as shit but actually has a not very good quality of life cause your hollow dad is away 95% and loves is work way more than his family, your plastic mother whose had half a dozen augmentations on her face and tits is a drunk, and everyone else in your life is ultra selfish, superficial, and shallow like the real housewives of Orange County and you have little to no real friends cause all you want to do is upload escape into mass multiplayer video games to get away from it all. On this same note, see the documentary "The Queen of Versailles" for a worse case scenario of this. Or you could live in a favela in Mexico or Costa Rica and while technically being considered economically poor, reside in a cinder block hut with dirt floors and chickens free ranging through your living room, but still have a very loving family and quite good community, thus have a higher quality of life. 

Finally, if you're playing Niles' bingo, the word balance will absolutely be on there, and since Standard of Living & Quality of Life are closely correlated but also somewhat inversely correlated, a center balance of this spectrum is where most of us want to land. Without sharing living spaces with livestock or living in a Queen of Versailles 1800,000 square foot house, but instead realistically somewhere way more toward the former or middle. 

The Outdated Use of the Term First World

The terms "first world", "second world", "third world", and later "fourth world" originated as a Cold War geopolitical framework that divided the Earth realm into distinct categories based on nations' levels of development.

The "first world" was classified as Western nations like those in Western Europe and North America that at the time became further allies with The United States. The term "Second World" described more Eastern countries aligned with the Soviet Union and its allies. Such as the communist bloc nations that had been absorbed under the USSR including some countries in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia such as China and North Korea. The term "third world" likely was coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, drawing an analogy to the "Third Estate" in pre-revolutionary France, which represented lower class poverty. Which in cold war era rhetoric, described countries that were non-aligned with either the Western bloc or the Eastern bloc. Which encompassed many nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, often characterized by developing economies. The term "fourth world" was later popularized in 1974 by Shuswap Chief George Manuel in his book "The Fourth World: An Indian Reality" to categorize regions that did not fit into the existing political or economic categorizations at all, meaning those who don’t use money, such as indigenous peoples and other stateless and often marginalized and oppressed groups who are not fully integrated into the nation-states where they reside.

The concept of the Second World largely disappeared after the end of the Cold War in the early 90's and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which then resulted in many former then called "Second World" nations transitioning to market-based economies and more democratic leaning governance, arguably then becoming part of "the First World". But, unfortunately, the terms "third world" compared to "first world" are outdated language which one can still hear today and we are even conscious of being guilty to have done so in our rhetoric and are always trying to move away from such.

Although the "First World" did deserve a pat on the back for half the time leading the way for other nations to become more democratic, while the other half of the time fueling anti-democratic coups in South America, the term "First World" is increasingly seen as problematic for several reasons, as it reflects outdated, inaccurate hierarchical, and oversimplified ways of categorizing entire countries. The label "First World" at the time was very much a Western framing on behalf of the West. With self-arrogance implying first in line superiority over "Second World" and "Third World" countries, let alone the "Fourth World" which was and still is often considered irrelevant. Creating inaccuracy that suggests the entire population of certain entire nations were inherently "better" or more advanced than the entire population of certain entire other nations, not to mention also marginalizing alternative systems of governance, economic structures, and alternative cultural approaches to societal well-being. Because the "Third World" became synonymous with poverty, underdevelopment, and instability, which stigmatized many non- "First world" categorized countries. Basically implying that the "first world" was synonymous with suburban 1950's era infrastructure with concrete roads and multiple room houses with central heat and air conditioning, while third world meant dirt roads with thatch or cinder block huts with chickens wandering around on their dirt floors. Yet numbered binary framing totally ignored nuances and perpetuated a false narrative based only on linear economic progress and is rooted in geopolitical divisions that no longer exist. Reinforcing the mindset of a privileged, superior group of nations while oversimplifying the challenges faced by others.

So it's key to note that the use of "Third World" can be seen as an old and outdated mental operating system which is and always was a pejorative, and more modern and precise terminology is superior in contemporary discourse. Because the term "First World" being used today very much fails to account for the complexity of global development. For example, many so-called "First World" nations very much still struggle with issues like poverty, inequality, and infrastructure gaps while some "developing" or "Third World" nations have areas of rapid growth and innovation. Today, terms like "Emerging Economies", or "Developing Countries", "Low to Middle Income Countries", and "Global South" are more commonly used now to describe former "third world" classified countries and economic statuses. With "Global North", "High-Income Countries", "Developed Countries", or "Industrialized Nations" being better terms for what used to be called the "First World". With developing countries being not the best cause the so called "developed countries" of the North still having plenty of developing to do and "industrialized" nations also not being so great cause today they still have plenty of failing infrastructure. And we'll keep this totally on brand by saying, due to our life transformative experiences with shamanism, what used to be considered "fourth world" and is now better classified simply as "indigenous peoples" have some of the most superior spirituality and the least empire of any of the other classifications.

What this ultimately comes down to is the difference in "standard of living" compared to "quality of life". And we'll get into that, in the next insight.

Truths on Repeat

We've long realized, at least for the last 10+ years, that many things we've come to know, far too many other people don't know, and sadly many don't care to know. But if you're one of frankly not that many folks, formally educated or not, who listen to our material, give yourself a pat on the back and consider yourself a more sophisticated individual. As you care to learn from us as much as we acknowledge we can also potentially learn from you.

It's called either having eyes to see or having ears to hear. Which like the film Inception, has multiple nested layers to it in terms of truths one is willing to want to accept and then act upon.

And one of our shortcomings is always assuming those who freshly stumble across our material, being previously unfamiliar with it, have a basic grasp of some of the moderate material, let alone deeper material, when in reality, they don't even have a basic grasp on basic entry level foundational truths. Not just related to their own personal individual development but societal development collectively. This has forced our work to extend into the political. As evident in the way the median voter can be swayed primarily because they've grown up with low quality religion, low quality education, and low quality news media.

So as we freely divvy out continuing insights, which will never be "news" but instead more hopefully timeless micro short lectures that if they were found 50 years from now would still be fresh, valid, and actionable, we have come to realize, just as a propagandist will keep lying over and over and over again, saying essentially "believe us, not your lying eyes" to vast swaths of the world's populace, we need to just keep repeating truths over and over and over again.

Because the media throughout much of the world has gone to absolute poo. So get used to us recurrently saying "we've said it before and we'll say it again and we're going to keep refining it and saying it" as we are going to continue to try and be one individual, amongst a growing network of other media makers, who provide mental vegetables to push back on the media mental junk food landscape which is making far too many de-evolve when they should instead be evolving.

Claiming "Head of Household"

In large sections of the Middle East, which are controlled by MINO's meaning "Muslims in Name Only", in 2024, not 1824 or 1624, women still need their husband's approval to do most things outside of the home such as acquiring a driver's license. 

Also believe it or not, in 2024, not 1824 or 1624, in a Tweet, (which are now called excretions after a former illegal immigrant now turned edgelord and eugenicist took over Twitter), a certain mentally unwell CHINO, meaning "Christian in Name Only" excreted this vulgar statement:

"In a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband's direction. He is the head and they are one. Unity extends to politics. This is not controversial."

"Now why did the CHINO say such a controversial and fallacious thing, do you ask? Well... because he suffers from the same mass mental confusion as the MINO and because there has been a campaign going on to remind the feminine that within the freedom of liberal democracy when in the ballot box, that is a private space, and a woman has the power to vote however she choses without her homo-vulgaris husband knowing. 

On a deeper level, real spirituality, which is about the powerful esoteric (inner) journey of each soul in the “soul school” that is Earth, which is intimately tied to nature and the cosmos and will inevitably lead the evolving soul to the realization that the feminine and the masculine have equal value in perfect balance. As more evident in esoteric nature based practices such as the 10% esoteric aspect of Islam that is Sufism or 10% esoteric aspect of Christianity that is Gnosticism in which individuals can have direct experiences for their own self-development and evolution of consciousness.

Modern Abrahamic religion throughout the world however, 90% of which is of Empire, has co-opted and watered down esoteric practices and mirrored them back to front to remove any of the esoteric and make them only exoteric (outer) replacing those natural evolutionary internal processes with a hierarchy of male figures to be subservient to. God / Allah / Buddah (claimed to be male), Jesus (claimed to be male), Satan (claimed to be male) and then a priest class (in which no women are of course allowed) and the more ones been indoctrinated into such fallacies from their youth the more that’s taken literally and historically the more one becomes an ultra conservative and thus ultra regressive, mouth foaming reactionary who has complete blind allegiance to male authority and promotes male patriarchal theocracy which falsely claims the masculine is superior to the feminine resulting in them forming dark imperial political blocks which not only want to destroy spiritual nature but also reduce women’s rights throughout the world. 

And in closing, any real man who's been successfully married for many years comes to also eventually know that the woman has the final say at least 50% of the time. 

The Anti-Choice LIe

This primarily goes out to our podcast, which is 50/50 women and men, but the video version primarily goes out to our obscure YouTube channel, which the analytics says is like 90% men. So we're primarily talking to the masculine here on the video side. And a warning, surrounded by police car revolving lights, fellas, if you hate truth, and freedom, and freedom of speech, turn this off now and do not watch or listen. 

So we've said it before and we'll say it again and we're going to keep saying it and we're going to keep refining it. This shouldn't be a divisive polarizing issue but instead a universally agreed upon issue. It's also an issue which puts a magnifying glass on a storefront marketing pitch vs a real underlying reason. And from most conversations on the subject, especially in oligarchic owned corporate media, they intentionally give a "both sides" between truth and lies at least point of view, or a pure lie at worst point of view, when what should happen in free and open society is only giving pure truth. This is why our work has significantly more depth because we seek underlying truth instead of storefront shallow wish wash. Although the main paramount important thing in one's self development is pursuing truth, anytime you have a conversation with someone who is against abortion, 100% of the time, they will say or mention the word "life". However, the whole framing of abortion using the word "life" is a lie. It is false. The truth about what this whole issue is really all about is control over women. 

So in regards to the control aspect, just as not all gay men have a lisp in their voice, feminizing it on the outside, only gay men have a lisp in their voice, not all religious people are against abortion and even birth control, but only religious people are against abortion and even birth control. Specifically the type of extreme religious person who also just happens to be in an end times death cult. Now our usual disclaimer of balance, no member of the exoteric outer religions, Christianity, Judisim, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Pastafarianism, etc... should feel discriminated against or persecuted for their faith as long as they keep it personal and hopefully lite. Anyone can personally study and worship whatever flying spaghetti monster they choose. But the more heavy and literal historical one takes these rather new man made systems, the more they are based in male hierarchical domination. With, as previously discussed, deities and Gods said to be males who are implied to be hierarchically above the female. And then the more they will push that onto others. This is what imperial missionaries have been about. Where in their more extreme radicalization, it becomes "convert heathens to the faith". Rather than the attitude of let the faith stand on its own, or let those who are spiritually developed enough find it on their own.

Imagine a group of controlling matriarchal women trying to pass laws saying men had to be castrated, so they were not allowed to have any sex drive, get boners, and produce or expel semen. So that would be lunatic women trying to control men and we would fight them to our last breath. But when this basically goes the other way, being lunatic extremely religious men trying to control women sexual organs, those who think they are superior to women, even brainwashed women themselves, think that is remotely acceptable, cause they believe their own death cult lies about life and being pro-life when in reality they are just pro control the feminine and pro anti-choice. Being anti-choice or anti-abortion or even anti-birth control has fuck all nothing to do with life. 

If they were really pro-life, they would care about the loss of species biodiversity globally or clearcutting of the biome in the Amazon basin, which they do not. If they were really pro-life, they would care about the lives of migrant refugee children dying in the Darién Gap from Colombia to Panama or Mexican desert on their way into Texas and Arizona, or drowning in the Mediterranean, which they do not. If they were really pro-life, they would care about horrendous living conditions of farm animals in American factory farms, or horrendous working conditions of women slaving in sweatshops in Bangladesh, which they do not. If they were really pro-life, they would care about the Maternal Health Crisis of African American women due to structural and systemic racism at the core of the American healthcare system, which they do not. If they were really pro-life, they would care more about the lives of second graders more than the second amendment, which they do not. If they were really pro-life, they would care about femicide of indigenous women, which they do not. And the real tell is if they were really pro-life, they would care about the lives of children living below the poverty line who are born into households where they are not wanted and unloved, which they do not as well as acknowledging that in countries where abortion is not legal, it still happens just as often, but instead becomes more back alley and dangerous, leading to more female mortalities. What they really are is forced birth don’t care about life because that removes the final decision from the woman, and turns her back into a mandatory baby factory. Limiting women's access to abortion and contraception is about power and control. Specifically theocratic patriarchal control over the divine feminine. FULL STOP. 

Just like owning a gun empowers the individual, both birth control and abortion are tools which empower the feminine. The storefront marketing campaign against abortion, radiating out with marching orders from batshit crazy televangelist preachers, is the claim to be advocates for the unborn, which allows for a faux quasi highest morality stance while then hiding their actual not giving a shit about the acorns which they claim are oak trees after they are born. The limiting of a choice to disempower the host, in their minds superseeds claims of caring about the life of the seed. As evident by the fact that Christians in Name Only, with all their big corporate tax exempt money, are not funding adoption agencies. Also evident that fash theo nightmare Dante's inferno Project 20205 advocated in 2024 for slashing regulations of baby formula as well as exploiting child labor by allowing minors to work in dangerous conditions with fewer protections. 

Doing some research of what life was like for women prior to the advent of birth control, which is a preventative, and abortion, which is a much more difficult decision but an available option of choice, and one would find it was staggeringly more difficult and disempowering for them. Women were basically considered second class, completely subservient to males, and sperm dumpster repositories who were only valued for their bodies and the ability to continue the population instead of for their infinite other possibilities. Men are horn balls and always want sex. Women don't. So strong women in democratic society control sexual access. In more authoritarian past cultures like fascist Italy, women were pushed to have as many children as possible, by force. In more authoritarian cultures of today, such as under the Afgani Taliban in Afganistan, or even within the Christian Wrong American style Taliban such as the New Apostolic Reformation, male to female rape within marriage is still covertly sanctioned within the cult. This is because all young women within said cults can then do is stay at home and raise children, even from a very young, under adult, age. And the very people who lie that they're "pro life" are actually pro child marrage, which the vast majority of the time is being teenage (or even pre teen) girls and adult men that also happen to embrace loop holes in statutory rape exceptions. So that young girls in said cult, or other religious cults such as within the heavily religious orthodox jewish community, then have little to no say in their own plans for education, independence, travel, career, political activity, and say outside of the household. This is why we are amazed why any woman is not lightly but instead heavily religious. And why any woman votes for authoritarianism is a contrary position, and can only occur because of an indoctrination into an off-balance system of patriarchy. For the religions of the empire have always dis-empowered the feminine. So women who are crusaders against their very own right to choose have been mind controlled to be not only self-hating but also self-disempowering.

What we call the dark psychological caduceus, which is the mix of fascism and theocracy, which we pledge to you to never stop denigrating on because it's the core of modern day Empire, so you're welcome, comprises faux christian sects that are into false christian things like dominionism and have degraded the "conservative" majority of the Supreme Court, and they care only for power, over anything else. This is evident by the fact that when they attain power, they reduce feminine rights instead of expanding feminine rights. They are regressive and contractive and not progressive and expansive. If they were really for progress and expanding rights they would care about real freedom for the people. But since they only want regress and to contract rights of the people, what they mean by freedom is the freedom to tell the people, and especially the feminine half of the people, what to do. So the more a political party will lie about being pro freedom and “pro-life” is because they recognize it can be used to tell women what to do. This is why when you use that same appeal “pro-life”—when you ask authoritarian regressives, who care only for power, to do something about gun violence killing our young children in schools, it doesn’t work. Because they don't really care about life and don't want anyone telling them what to do. 

We've spoken before about women and men having complete equal value. So fellas, we're assuming those of you who still watch or listen to us are not women hating incel losers who find a home in the shadows of fascism. But even if you had a rough relationship with your own mother, still respect women and many of us have daughters. We happen to have had a good relationship with our mother and have always had very positive relationships with women and they very much like us back. So even if we didn't have a young daughter who we treasure and even if we only had a son, we would still be writing this. We also have a specific dog in this fight because our wife is an Ob-Gyn and 1% of the time, she has a young, dumb female patient who over uses abortions as a form of birth control only because they've stupidly not used birth control. But 99% of the time, on the rare and unfortunate time she has to perform an abortion, such as for an ectopic pregnancy, neither of us have ever once done anything except known she's doing anything other than helping women with their own health care decisions. 

Written Insight: Manly P. Hall's Definition of Personal Growth

We highly recommend listening to the lectures of Manly P. Hall. While a criticism of Hall's work from more academic, material science based intellectuals, and we remember Sam Harris specifically say this, is that Hall's work is "a waste of time", especially his seminal book, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which he wrote very bizarrely young, ... we have to say we disagree with that criticism. We would say people who say that don't understand the majority of what he's talking about because they have not grown into his work yet. And as a result, think his content is gobbledygook. After Hall wrote his most known book, he dedicated the majority of his later life from writing more books to instead doing recorded lectures on a regular basis, often without notes, for sometimes multiple hours, from his home base of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. Like Alan Watts or Terence McKenna's lectures, we often think of them as being a hundred if not multiple hundreds of years ahead of their time. 

So Hall would give these incredibly advanced lectures, and just like our YouTube channel, it would be to like 8 people on a Tuesday evening. And yes, they are not easy to listen to. Doing so is work. Because they are dense and heading towards highest common denominator spirituality because the more you know the less people you can talk to. Contrast that with the less you know spiritually, the more people you can talk to. This is why junk food, pop culture, and by popular culture that includes ultra shallow urine filled baby pool mega church sermons, are intentionally made to be heading towards the lowest common denominator, because then they appeal to the most spiritually undeveloped people who just say things like "birth control is a sin." So while Hall was talking to tiny rooms that megachurch is stadium packed. And in this specific instance of his lecture titled "How Hermeticism Influenced Gnosticism And Neoplatonism", very standard Tuesday night stuff, of which, and on a planet of 7 billion some people, he was probably 1 of a dozen people in the world who could eloquently discuss said topic for over an hour, he dropped the single best definition of personal growth we have ever heard. 

First he said, "Through the course of growth everything that is concealed, must be revealed" and then the actual definition he gave was "growth is the unfolding into the obvious of things previously not obvious" which not only speaks heavily of things that are more advanced self development processes, some of which we can't even talk about cause they're such real life Jedi stuff and thus so secretive, but underscores that unless one is always willing to explore new information that challenges underlying dogmas, which includes getting out of their comfort zone, they're not evolving.

Having gnosis that growth is an inner journey of expanding consciousness, understanding, and wisdom, Hall saw personal and spiritual growth as intertwined, where individuals must strive to transcend their lower, material desires and cultivate higher virtues like compassion and wisdom. Revolving around the development of the inner self through self-awareness and self-discipline. Hall has also influenced our own work with the shared commonality that true personal growth comes from an individual’s spiritual journey and dedication to moral and philosophical enlightenment. He often emphasized that growth involves continuous learning, particularly through philosophy and esoteric traditions. He regarded this process as a path toward becoming more attuned to the universal laws and truths that govern real life. Emphasizing the importance of understanding universal truths, cultivating virtues, and aligning oneself with higher principles. Knowing that personal growth is a lifelong, or which you could even say as a multiple life long, process of becoming more attuned to the spiritual forces that shape human existence, transcending materialism and superficial concerns. Because all that you can take with you when you wrap it up is what you've learned. 

Written Insight: The Dark Psychological Caduceus

The caduceus is a staff with two snakes wrapped around it heading upward, and is an esoteric symbol with multiple levels of meaning which we could talk about for hours, specifically related to its significance in Hermeticism and our interest in the human mind. But in the West, its most common modern more popularly known association is that of being the crest or logo of public health services often seen in hospitals. Long story short, it's essentially a benevolent symbol that we personally associate with physical and mental health. But let us propose an idea for an inverted version which is monovalent. A Dark Psychological Caduceus if you will.

Picture the two snakes headed downward of this upside down caduceus as representing theocracy and fascism. The modern day DNA of the Empire that almost always intertwined through the combination of authoritarian control and religious ideology and always wants to send societies downward, not upward. In both systems, absolute authority is concentrated, often under a single leader or ruling group. Theocratic fascism uses religious justification for the state's authoritarian rule, portraying leaders as divinely chosen or guided.

We bring these two words up in our work not as much from a political standpoint but from a psychological one. Theocracy is psychological because it relies heavily on belief systems and moral authority to exert control over a population. In a theocracy, rulers derive their power from religious doctrines, which influence people's thoughts, behaviors, and worldviews. The psychological aspect is profound, as citizens are often conditioned to see the government’s authority as divine or sacred, making dissent less likely. In contrast to purely political systems, theocratic control mixes deeply with skewed versions of personal faith (which is far too often just indoctrination), shaping uneditable, un-refinable, mostly hard locked regressive political beliefs through some sort of divine retribution. Fascism is psychological because it seeks to control not only actions but the mindset of individuals. Relying on mass manipulation through propaganda, fostering a collective identity rooted in nationalism, and obedience. By appealing to deep emotional drives like fear of "the other", a sense of superiority, and aiming to create an environment where questioning authority feels dangerous or immoral. Fascism wanting to do so through manipulating perceptions and unwavering devotion to a supposedly powerful leader, and theocracy wanting to do so through religious devotion and moral duty, creating a system where dissent is seen as both political treason and religious heresy.

So they very much operate together and their intertwining has been seen in freedom-hating regimes where religious and fascist elements aim to control both the state and the mindset of the people. But in our country, we are approaching an inflection point, in an upcoming election, and frankly, all future elections, where we either keep working toward liberal democracy, which has yet to be achieved, continuing to head upward toward the land of milk and honey, or head downward into the hellfires of Project 2025 fascist theocracy and our Opus Dei influenced Supreme Court which is currently comprised of majority theo idealogues.

Because the feminine has also had some of their rights taken away by said court, and is thus more likely to want to head upward, let's also do the same fellas.

Written Insight: The Problem with the Media #10 - Dissemination of Propaganda

Russia has a very long and complex history. But at the time of this writing, its modern iteration is that of an oligarchic petro state. Meaning it makes the vast majority of its money from oil, minerals, coal, and mainly gas. After the fall of the USSR, it transitioned into a totalitarian dictatorship with a comprehensive cult of personality around the Kremlin. Becoming a state being run by around 100 extremely rich individuals, being the imperial oligarchs ruling it. Who got that morbidly wealthy via extracting the blood of the Earth so they could set fire to the biome for profit, and consolidated around one centralized "dictatorial" authority. With most to all of the president in name only (who's really a dictator) members of their cabinet composed of those oligarchs. Much of Russia is vast un-used tundra or barren land, with the vast majority of its populace being low income. Peasants if you will, with a weak middle class. But, like with all of the most corrupt countries, the majority of the Russian people don't want or comply with their country's way of doing things. Because there is a massive disconnect between what the people want, and what the oligarchic dark sorcerer wants, so the Kremlin still has to pretend it operates democratically. This is where propaganda comes in. To sway the hearts and minds of the people away from their own middle class interests, of government working primarily for them, into it working only for the interests of the morbidly rich. So everything there in modernity is still top down just as it was in the dark ages of queens and kings. Where back in the day if they didn't like you it was overtly off with your head in the town square and now if they don't like you it's having you disappear overtly. So what is the media like in Russia? Short of what is underground, all public Russian media is state sanctioned by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs, and only to benefit the oligarchs. So as a result, it's a 24/7 lie machine and is near complete 100% state sanctioned Kremlin propaganda. With zero journalistic oath, nearly complete lies and mind control from the top of the hierarchy down to seek lies and spread them, maximize harm, act on behalf of power structures to prevent their accountability, and are opaque in doing so. Making those who hate liberal democracy proud.

The problem with oligarchy is that it only represents less than .01% of the population. There by 99.9+% is not represented. And in the United States, because of 40+ years of Reganomic trickle down golden shower austerity measures doing their part to try and destroy the middle class, and thus democracy, we are left with the most massive lopsided distribution of wealth since the robber baron era and see the website www.lcurve.org ont ehr subject. So we're certainly better than Russia but have been heading towards its model. As a result, Russia has become a global leading edge hub of far right political and media influence throughout the world because the right wing's main role, throughout the world, is to protect extreme corrupt wealth hierarchy and is why we shit on it 85% of the time over the left so you're welcome. Every regressive - liar, extractor, and authoritarian, modern iterations of which are ultranationalists, white supremists, neo-natzis, regressive reactionaries,

propagandists, grifters, etc... end up adopting a very pro Russian style language, and Putin literally said that they are all welcome to immigrate to Russia as a haven from western liberality, progressivism, and freedom. Russian oligarchs have spent undaunting amounts of money, not on helping their own people, cause they don't care about their own people, let alone other countries' people, let alone indigenous people, but instead into intelligence work manipulating the global narrative. This goes for all authoritarian petro states - Saudi Arabia is basically no different. Which is reason 64,321 why we need to transition away from all fossil fuels because they have been the finance machines for dictatorships throughout the world.

Bipartisan corruption in Washington DC is nothing new. But no one does corruption like the Grand Old Party. They are the leading edge of it. When Richard Nixon's administration was in scandal and shambles leading to his resignation in the late 60's at the time the fairness doctrine was still in place, before the Republicans at the FCC killed it, thus he was forced out because the fourth estate did its job as a check on corrupt power. But in the 1970's, propagandist, sexual assaulter, and Jabba the Hutt style slug human Roger Ailes wrote a memo which was later to be rediscovered in Nixon's Presidential Library, which proposed how to circumvent the “prejudices of network news” and deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers. In this case, prejudices means "truth" and pro administration means "lies". So that in the future, after the fairness doctrine had been abolished under the osposis of "free speech"... sound familiar?, a future corrupt Nixon-esq president would not have a fourth estate doing its job against their corruption but instead be the opposite, a media ecosystem ecco chamber to constantly back up corruption and amplify their lies. Injecting a far-right slant to “gradually, subtly, slowly” inject “their philosophy in the news.” The network was, in the words of a news director who quit in protest, a “propaganda machine.”

Today, watching more than 15 minutes of Fox News will turn your brain to goo. If you're well loved, well traveled, and formally well educated or even a well educated autodidact it's extremely unlikely you'd have the great misfortune of doing that in the first place. But to the un-loved, untraveled, and uneducated and most of all weak willed and gullible it's hate fuel. As Rolling Stone says - "To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party - Roger Ailes. As a political consultant, which is really just a marketer, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. But an examination of his career reveals that Ailes used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enabled the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, became a soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of

a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism. The result became one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that has played a leading role in defining regressive talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right." As for actual journalists? “Fuck ’em,” Ailes said. “It’s not a press conference – it’s a television show. Our television show. And the press has no business on the set.”

This is also the precise reason why we need middle class media over fascist oligarchic owned media which is fascistic propaganda heavy or American corporate media which is both sidesing and normalizing authoritarianism and is thus propaganda lite. In the United States, and this also applies to Oligarchic Murdoch owned media in parts of Europe and Australia, networks such as Sky, Fox, Brieghbart, Washington Times and although Andrew Breitbart was actually somewhat of a real journalist uncovering scandalous things about the Clintons and John Podesta for example, the more right wing, the more untruthful lying with every breath modern propaganda networks they have become with no journalistic integrity. And newer OAN, Newsmax, and "Truth" Social (really Lies Social) are even worse. Put them on the same level as Russia state media with nearly 100% lies and only some occasional micro cracks of truth. While The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, CNN, ABC, etc are better but are still very corporatist both sides between truth and lies Republican lite because they are also owned by slightly nicer members of the bourgeoisie, and even MSNBC which is the only legacy network that leans forward thinking which could be called MSDNC which is the most pro-middle class and thus pro-democracy, still is very 50/50 truth at best pro-corporate news which is not going to tell the full truth on things such as Isreal's genocide.

We know someone in New York who worked at Fox News doing graphics for the News Network and he said most employees there, while sometimes being treated well, while also for many of the “fasch plast” platinum blondes who had to deal with a toxic misogynist work environment, the majority of the employees knew the whole thing was not much different than the Onion. Which is a satirical comedic newspaper. Where, most of them, meaning those who literally work there, while appreciative of their job security, viewed it like a big joke machine selling only hate and fear, and did not think well of their audience. Who are primarily crusty old regressive people whose grown children want nothing to do with them cause they are so hard locked in their ways of sexism, racism, and xenophobia. With the on screen talking heads at Fox having zero journalistic integrity, not fighting the man, but instead working for the man. Knowing their lying for the money. The owners of the network also all know their business model is constant lies. As evidenced by Fox so called News paying out a $787.5 million dollar lawsuit to Dominion voting systems in 2023 for spreading lies, which they knew were lies cause fear gets ratings, about outcome determinative fraud in the 2020 election and not in a million years putting the Murdocs on the stand.

So the American right wing has spent nearly half a century putting forth little to no policies that do anything for the middle class, let alone the poor, but instead giving the already morbidly wealthy tax cuts at the expense of the

American people while building a right wing lie machine media empire to non stop lie to those same people. And today, some 70 million some red Americans are blanketed from morning, noon, and night with non-stop fascist propaganda that was constructed by the bourgeoisie godzillionars to distract them from the fact that they are getting robbed blind by those same bourgeoisie. Talk radio, TV news, Russian bot farms, Telegram, 1000 video channel and podcast new media grifters, and now Twitter with the stupid new name, are all there solely and exclusively to stack lies on top of lies. Where if you've not mainline the propaganda, you hear the dumbest obviously blatant things, such as “giga chad MS13 mexican rapists are coming for your trad wives” or “every shooter is not a fear based gun nut but are instead purple or blue hair transexuals”, or “kids are using litter boxes in school and haitian voodoo is eating our pets”, and can't believe you live in a country where your fellow countrymen can even remotely begin to think any of it is real.

So why is America so polarized today? Simple explanation. Because of the results of Roger Ailes style propagandistic media business model. Bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Written Insight: Reading Through Your Ears Via Text To Speech

In the previous insight we spoke on the importance of reading through our ears if we can't seem to find the time to read in the traditional way. And for that we highlighted the wonder of audiobooks. However audiobooks require time, money, and production value to create. As someone who has spent years recording our voice for narrating documentaries, podcast interviews, and other long-form audio outputs, we can tell you it takes talent to read out a book well. Requiring professional speaking skills if not even acting skills, not to mention a soundproof space to do it in, not too different than a recording studio.

Because audiobooks are a significant amount of work to make, they typically are only made for more modern, mainstream, commercially successful texts. So what about older books? Many old texts that are packed with excellence have not been transcribed to an audiobook. The modern version of books on tape is the spoken word version of the text on the page. Either read by a human or translated digitally into an audio file, just like a book on tape. This is a technique called text to speech which is a secret weapon of outstandingness. While more texts are continually having audio analogues of themselves recorded, the only way you're going to get any ebook that has yet to have an audiobook version of itself made, is via text to speech. A technology which has changed our lives for the better and can do the same for you, if it hasn't already.

There are pieces of software which allow you to copy text and have it spoken out to you, which for the first decade or two of the tech resulted in a very robotic Stephen Hawking-like voice doing so, but now the artificial voices and even artificial intelligence voices based off real voices have gotten very good. The day we discovered that you can highlight text and copy it into a reader and push play was truly life-transformative as it allowed for our world to open up to new areas and heights which we always struggled to achieve in the past. So much so that we know our grade point average in school would have been better if the technology was around in our high school and university years. So if you're going through formal schooling now and can circumvent the big heavy analogue school textbook greed monopoly and get ebook versions of texts it’s a beautiful time to educate yourself through reading with greater ease due to the ability to have this technology at your fingertips.

Older versions of the Amazon Kindle allowed most if not all books you purchased on Kindle to also be transcribed as an audiobook. An outstanding feature they very sneakily and quietly removed in later versions because of conflicts with publishing companies over copyright of audio books vs traditional books. Even though they are a giant centralized behemoth worth a trillion dollars and continuously lower the payout percentage their app store developers receive because they apparently still aren't happy with their profit margins, we will believe it or not give credit to the richest company on spaceship Earth, Apple, and mention that more recent versions of the Mac OS operating system have an incredible feature where you can simply highlight any text, be it the full pros on an entire novel or a single article, then right click on the highlighted text and say "Read highlighted text as spoken track". BOOM! You've got an audio file that's essentially an audiobook. Either save to your machine as an audio file or created quickly from ANY text you can copy from. And we've programmed that keyboard command into an efficiency control box on our desktop, names of which go by things such as Streamdeck or Loupedeck, and our pushing that button dozens of times a day when working from home. Allowing us to read potentially doesnt of articles a day.

Written Insight: Read Through Your Ears Via Audiobooks

Wisdom and knowledge come from life experience while information gathering comes from multiple other sources, but the best version is reading. Actual full books. People who are "well read" are more interesting to talk to and have a much broader range of depth than those who never read anything. There has been a loss of reading skills in recent decades and a decline in the creation of classical literature.

Many people in modernity won't even read this insight in written form off them members section of our website, or a magazine article, or a fluffy fun book, or a book of fiction, or a book of nonfiction, let alone a more knowledgeable dense book such as an older text or even modern philosophical leaning text. Which is part of numerous reasons why the comedy Idiocracy has become a documentary because we're so often programmed to move a mile a minute over being grounded and centered and still. Reading takes time and requires one to slow down. Ask most people off the street how many books they read in a year and you'd be lucky to find any that say, if not zero, more than a low single digit number. Not only is traditional reading a time investment, involving your full attention, it's also hard on the eyes. Listening is not necessarily the same. When listening, you can also do something else visual.

While cold hardware technologies absolutely have their downsides, and smartphones have had so much damage through their attention sucking, time wasting, and anxiety producing feeds, at the same time they have put multiple wonderful tools in most of our pockets. Such as digital maps and another being their audio listening capabilities. Audiobooks offer a unique combination of convenience, accessibility, and immersive storytelling. Whether for relaxation, learning, or entertainment, audiobooks are an excellent alternative or complement to traditional reading. You may feel the same, but either at home or on the move, if we're alone and don’t have headphones in our ear holes, it feels as though something is missing. Leaving the house without the trifecta of the wallet, keys, and phone with earbuds causes sensations of being partially nude.

Time is valuable and life is short. Our time to ourselves is best spent taking in healthy and good tasting information via audiobook or yummy educational podcast, while perhaps also getting some other tasks done at the same time. You can always have earbuds in your ears listening whenever you're by yourself in your spare time. And if you choose to make those audiobooks over other mediums you can read a

book or two a month. Reading through your ears while out and about, commuting, operating some sort of motor vehicle, getting chores done, exercising, working in the yard, doing various hobbies, not to mention their amazing benefits for helping to improve listening skills, enhance vocabulary, reducing reading anxiety, and make literature accessible to other language learners, of those with visual or learning challenges.

As someone who is mildly dyslexic, reading has been a lifelong struggle for this writer. The McDonalds for the mind B+ level accurate Wikipedia definition of dyslexia is "difficulty in learning to read or interpret words". Which sure as shit was true here in this brain’s real estate. When going through our 12 years of the mind control conform boot camp of public school, even though we were appreciative to go to good public schools, (balance of capital and social) we would have so much problem not remembering what we had just gone over a few paragraph's before. This mainly popped up when reading fiction whereas we would often be lost in place and time within the story, making it difficult to always know when and where we were in the narrative. However, it wasn't so much the information in the text itself but more the process of extracting the details of that info off the page and into memory. It felt analogous to gears turning over slow in the mental cogs. However, being read that very same text out loud was a different story. And because of the lack of audiobooks available in our high school years in the 1990's, we eventually came to discover another audio reading technology, which has not only made us a better reader, but also a better writer, which is a secret weapon which we'll get into in the next one.

Written Insight: The Problem with the Media #9 - Propaganda and Agitprop

Propaganda refers to information, ideas, or messages deliberately spread to influence public opinion or behavior in favor of a particular cause, ideology, or agenda. It entails misleading content and is typically used by corporations (which just rebrand it as marketing), as well as governments, organizations, or movements to shape perceptions, manipulate emotions, or promote specific political, social, or cultural objectives. Key characteristics of propaganda are that it's biased - often presenting information in a one-sided or distorted way to persuade audiences, slants or alters history - giving half truths about past occurrences at best if not full on rewrites at worst, has emotional appeal - frequently enacting pathos emotions like fear, patriotism, or hatred to elicit a desired response, has ideological goals - usually aimed at advancing a political cause, government agenda, or belief system, often has mass dissemination - typically spread through media channels such as newspapers, radio, television, and anti-social media to reach a wide audience, and finally and almost most of all entails manipulation - with the goal being to adjust, change, and degrade how people think, feel, or act, often by tricks such as simplifying complex issues or promoting stereotypes.

Agitprop is a blend of the words "agitation" and "propaganda", and it refers to propaganda, especially that used in literature, theater, music, and other forms of more artistic mass communication, with the goal of promoting specific agendas. Propaganda and agitprop are related concepts, but they differ in scope, methods, and emphasis. Propaganda is a broad term for persuasive messaging used to negatively influence opinions on a wide range of topics, while agitprop is a specific form of propaganda that combines agitation and propaganda, aiming to incite political activism, often through the arts. The term originated in Soviet Russia during the early 20th century. Agitprop is primarily aimed at spreading political ideas, often promoting revolutionary, more extreme socialist, or even communist ideologies. For example the Department for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) was part of the Communist Party's strategy to educate the masses in bad news Marxist-Leninist ideology of that time. 

While extreme right leaning elements typically favor voice and text propaganda because they are more cutthroat in business, extreme left leaning elements typically favor agitprop because it's more artistic or visual and liberals dominate the arts. So for example, aspects of AM radio, specifically hate radio, which many truckers across the United States mainline all day, would be an example of right-wing propaganda while some aspects of Hollywood could be an example of mind control through the arts and left-wing propaganda. While one could argue that just like the word "conspiracy" could be thought of as not always negative, but more neutral, we would argue propaganda is always malevolent because it seeks to hide truth. While agitprop can be full spectrum - Either monovalent anti truth, neutral, and sometimes almost even openly truthful anti-propaganda. Examples of which would be the art of Shepard Ferry or Banksy which seek to engage emotions, have cultural influence, give historical context, and mobilize people into political action while at the same time overtly stylizing themselves in traditional agitprop aesthetics. Thus art can degrade or art can lift and transcend. So in more modern usage today, the term can be used more broadly to describe any overtly political art or communication that pushes a particular ideology. We would say it only carries a negative and propagandistic connotation if it's degrading or lying. That's the key. But if art is lifting up, while being truthful, while also engaging emotions, having cultural influence, and mobilizing people into political action then that's more benevolent. Meaning a good thing and very much what we try to do through all our work.

What is true is that the more free the country, the less propaganda is spread or even allowed. In the modern world today, through speakers and billboards and worst of all screens, legacy media and even various forms of new media, are absolutely awash in it. And as we continue to talk about the problems with the media, we're not going to sugar coat this issue, or symmetrically both sides this issue, but highlight where the vast asymmetrical majority of the propaganda comes from throught our county and other parts of the world. 

Written Insight: Insight - The Balance Between Capital & Social

Let's chat about the balance between capital and social. How exciting! In economics, capital means private while social means sharing. Are you a 5-year old who doesn't want to share or are you an adult who sees the benefit of sharing? While at the same time, of course having some things private. Which would be a balanced approach with the most co-benefit happening with a mix of both private capital and public social. Now, if we add an "ism" to these two things, for far too many, one of them stays great but the other becomes a boogeyman. And when we hear someone blanketly denigrate socialism can tell that not only are they self hating if they're middle class, but that they've been mind controlled by oligarchic media when that happens because the con of the oligarchy for hundreds of years has been to privatize gains and socialize losses, essentially keeping the best aspects of private and public for themselves, instead of for the people. A prime example being taxpayers bailing out banking crooks on Wall Street in the 2008 mortgage crisis. So what type of socialism, or capitalism for that matter, is one referring to? Because these things, on both ends, exist in a spectrum.

As for the accumulation of capital, we have:

Laissez-Faire Capitalism, State Capitalism, Corporate Capitalism, Crony Capitalism, Welfare Capitalism, Democratic Capitalism, People's Capitalism, Natural Capitalism, Financial Capitalism, Green Capitalism, Creative Capitalism, and Inclusive Capitalism

And for the sharing of resources we have:

Democratic Socialism, Social Democracy, Utopian Socialism, Marxist Socialism, Libertarian Socialism, Revolutionary Socialism, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Eco-Socialism, Market Socialism, Guild Socialism, Fabian Socialism, and Syndicalism

So, even though we would much rather be talking about meditation, or Jungian Psychology, or our psychedelic experiences, or alchemical symbolism in engravings, or other esoteric things instead of anything orbiting the political, as we've said before, and we'll say again, because it can't be said enough, and also because one of the main pillars of our work is about balance, and we got a comment the other day blanketly denigrating the social aspect which led to our mouth sighing and then our eyes rolling because this is like high school level stuff that a lot of Americans don't get so we have to keep sinking down into lower consciousness insights to do our part to help democracy... in what configuration are you mixing these in order to have the most balance between the two, and thus the most liberty and freedom? Because 100% Capitalism without any public social, becomes Fascism, and 100% socialism, without any private capital, becomes Communism. Both of which are authoritarian and aweful. Psycho North Korea being an example of a communist nightmare. Which is a single-party system, that has a nearly 100% state (meaning totalitarian government) control of all significant economic activities, complete centralized planning and distribution, including the media and the means of production where there is little to no private enterprise - IE the government makes the food, shoes, and TV sets, and all that is tightly controlled by a ruling authority cult under a Marxisst-Leninist economic style ideology with complete lack of political and economic freedoms. At the complete opposite end of that polar spectrum, you have psycho Natzi Germany, which was Fascist, yet cleverly marketed itself during its formation as being "National Socialists" to win over the minds of German's at the time cause socialism was very popular in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's but the SS were actually just ultranationalists who immediately privatized all industry also under a single party totalitarian cult that also rejects liberal democratic principles such as a strong middle class, individual rights, pluralism, and multiparty democracy.

What does have the most liberty and justice for all is a balance between capitalism and socialism where corporations operate within a set of rules in which the government acts like a referee on behalf of the middle class - this is referred to as a social market economy or social democracy. An approach which combines the benefits of a market-based economy with robust social policies and government regulation to ensure economic stability, reduce inequality, and provide a basic safety net for all citizens.

A Social Market Economy or Social Democracy is the most populous system in the freest parts of the world because of its key characteristics that entail:

Having a mixed Economy: Allowing for private ownership of businesses and capital, fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. At the same time, it maintains a significant role in regulating the market to prevent monopolies, ensure fair competition, and protect workers.

Having a strong social safety net: Social democracies typically have comprehensive social programs, including universal healthcare, free or subsidized education, unemployment benefits, pensions, and social housing. Reducing poverty, supporting the vulnerable, and ensuring that basic needs are met for all citizens.

Having Progressive Taxation: Which ensures that the wealthier individuals and corporations pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. Preventing morbid wealth, reducing income inequality, and fund social services and public goods.

Having Labor Rights and Protections: Including minimum wage laws, collective bargaining rights, and safe working conditions, empowering workers and ensuring fair wages. Helping to build a robust middle class by promoting job security and fair compensation.

Having Regulated Markets: While markets are largely free and competitive, the government plays a role in regulating them to prevent abuses, protect the environment, and ensure public well being. This regulation helps to stabilize the economy and prevent crises that could disproportionately affect the middle class.

Having Public Investment in Infrastructure and Services: Creating jobs across the economic spectrum, improving the quality of life across the economic spectrum, and providing equal opportunities for economic advancement.

And having Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises: Through grants, loans, and favorable regulations which foster a diverse economy and reduce dependence on large soulless mega corpses.

A strong middle class is often associated with political stability because middle-class citizens tend to favor policies that promote public services and democratic governance, reducing the risk of political extremism and polarization. Contributing to economic resilience by providing a stable consumer base, fostering creative entrepreneurship, and promoting economic growth. Middle-class citizens tend to have more disposable income, which supports domestic consumption and demand. Reducing economic inequality and promoting a strong middle class can enhance social cohesion and reduce social tensions. When citizens feel that they have a fair opportunity to succeed, it fosters a sense of shared purpose and solidarity. This engagement is crucial for maintaining a healthy democracy, as it promotes accountability, transparency, and public participation in the political process. And most of all, and empire very much knows this, a prosperous middle class is more likely to be politically active, engaged in civic life, and then free to be focused on their self-development. Which is terrifying to the empire because it gives the most freedom to the people to control their own destinies.

Written Insight: The Problem With The Media #8 - Hate Broadcasts

There's a great quote by a hilarious comedian which says... “Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared they're supposed to be.”

As mentioned in the last insight of this series, there are really two base emotions on the extremes - Love or Hate. And the numerous underlying element to hate is just fear. And no one spreads fear like corporate or fascistic media. Especially what calls itself conservative media when we would say it's just trying to conserve robber baron criminality at best or imperial royal hierarchies at worst. It's regressive and most of all reactionary media, because it focuses on the negative, fears anything novel or new, and because its long sold out to the robber baron Godzillionaire criminal class (Ie, wall street, big commercial banks, big pharma, big war profiteers, etc...) it has to program it's viewers or listeners with a stronger physiological response to threats because that not only increases engagement, mistrust, and polarization, but most of all it has to misdirect them away from those previously mentioned who are actually causing their problems and instead misdirect their hate onto their fellow middle class or poor within their country and from other countries. Such as those without their same skin color, sexual orientations,or those who are more open minded than they are. ONe of the main ways this game is played is through border fear and hate. Because imperial agents know that austerity measures either lead to progressive revolution or fascism.

Now, we are not naive. And realize there is a quote which says, "If liberals don't protect borders, fascists will" and realize the single issue in liberal Europe's tendencies to allow extremely regressive wrong wing movements to re-rise, ala their past Italian fascism of Mousolini or German fascism of Hitleter is a single issue issue. Which is black and brown people from Africa or the Middle East coming into predominantly white Europe or brown people from South America coming into majority white but multi ethnic North America. As they're never talking about the white on white Northern borders such as from Scotland to Britain or Canadian to the US and are instead only talking about the southern borders. Those are the only ones that need hating. All though you of course cannot have mass open border illegal immigration, that never works out, look how it worked out for the native Americans for example, the goal is to live in desirable countries which have common since, compassionate pathways for legal immigration - because in the long run, that only helps that country's economy. Instead of a country with a mass exodus, which, in the long run, only hurts those countries' economies. The whole point of border this, border that, fear from the squawk machine is to ignite that pathos, fight or flight, fear hate primarily in Christian's in Name Only, who incorrectly and falsely think their country is a WASP nation. It's one of many poke points they pull at the heartstrings of fear-based lowest common denominator mind killer culture. That along with "There's a run on the banks, they're trying to assassinate you so you gotta stockpile arms and can beans, WW3, civil war, islamic jehad, they're coming for your gas water heaters and stoves, or to make you gay, the stock market is gonna crash, since I've been a corporate criminal my whole life and am now having to actually face accountability for my crimes... if it can happen to me, it can happen to you, there are Nukes in shipping containers. ICBMS can reach us in 33 minutes, bla bla bla."

Psychologists call a “negativity bias” when attention is biased toward the negative, the result is an overly threat-conscious appraisal of one’s surroundings. To many regressives, and within that is a (pho conservatism which has existed in a continuous state of terror and rage for most of its existence), the world may look like a much scarier place. This would explain why so many white haired outdated soon to keel over viewpoints tend to be rooted in fear and thus hate. Resulting in the less traveled incorrectly feel that the areas outside their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe, overestimating their odds of becoming a victim, or believe that crime rates are rising when the opposite is actually occuring, or considering the world to be a dangerous place. Because there's another accurate quote which says "the world's always getting better but far too many people inaccurately think it's always getting worse." We know someone whose elderly conservative parents were going to the city of Chicago and were so sure it was going to be like 1980's war torn Beirut that when it turned out to be the generally nice, clean, lovely, but Antartically cold during the winter city it was, they could hardly believe all the fear based media they had been main lining had been lying to them!

Hate speech is commonly defined as any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristics such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion. The identified common traits refer to: the targeting of a group, or an individual as a member of a group; the presence of a content that expresses hatred, causes a harm, incites bad actions beyond the speech itself, and has no redeeming purpose other than just venting and creating an other to assign blame to for your own personal life problems.

The controllers know they need to hijack minds externally and make them fear and hate based internally. Because not only is fear the mind killer, the more you hate what is out there, the more it really means you hate aspects of yourself. The Hermetic principle of "as within, so without" knows that there is a correspondence between our inner state and our outer experiences. With our inner thoughts and emotions shaping the reality we perceive and experience. Positive inner states tend to manifest positive external circumstances, while negative inner states often result in negative external experiences. When we harbor hate, hating ourselves, we tend to project it outward. This means that the hatred we feel internally can manifest as hostile actions towards others. The principle of "as within, so without" suggests that our external expressions of hate are a direct reflection of our internal emotional state. The principle also implies that like attracts like. By harboring hate, we might attract more hate from others, creating a cycle of negativity that perpetuates the emotion both internally and externally. To break the cycle, it's essential to engage in self-reflection and understand the root causes of this emotion - one of the main ones being dogshit corporate or fascist media - which should be turned off. And moving more inward to identifying and addressing the sources of hate within ourselves to thus help transform our inner state. By fostering positive emotions within such as forgiveness, empathy, and compassion, we change our outer experiences accordingly, especially in regard to those different from us.

Written Insight - Calling Out Empire #1: What is it?

We say this word, "imperial" often. So this leads us into a series of insights on Empire called "Calling Out Empire" which, just as our ongoing slow drip "Pro-Democracy" essay series and our "Problem With the Media" insight series, this series will also be peppered throughout other outputs. But we'll start this off by simply giving a few tiers of ways of looking at what empire is. While we could write a book on this subject, and many have been, to simplify, think of empire as the darkness & shadow of the world. While the light is the opposite.

It's very crucial to not think empires are a thing of the past. The poster for Empire would be the leading edge of a medieval hoard of armored soldiers on the battlefield with a giant cross. But if you dont think modern versions of that are still persisting, think again. In binary reality, Empire is, unfortunately, somewhat timeless. And from a mythological standpoint it exists from fantasy of the long past to science fiction of the far future.

In terms of the first layer to define Empire, we'll go straight to some popular cultural science fiction references which do a good job of providing modern myths in regards to the subject... One being Avatar, with the indigenous and deeply nature connected to Eywa, Na'vi... Who have no concept of private property but instead what the agents of empire within the US would surly label as "hippie" or "socialism" or "sustainability" of sharing everything in a reciprocal cycle of living in balance. Then we have the Sky people, which are our future selves if we keep acting like imperial idiots. Whose goals are to commodify the elements of earth, air, fire, and water being 100% profit based with zero care for nature. Our next reference is Star Wars. Were you have the ragtag rebels, who do use advanced, yet stuck in the design theme of the 1970's technologies, but are fighting for justice and freedom from conquest while also having a lineage of spiritual Jedi on their side, who are the initiates into higher states of consciousness, working on behalf of the light side of the force. That compared to the dark galactic empire of fascistic, hyper hierarchical based, where no one ever smiles inside large scale advanced hard surface cold militaristic technologies, which at the top of their hierarchy are dark sorcerers who are also initiates into higher states of consciousness which either have risen in or unfortunately turned to the dark side of the force and are all about colonizing cause colonialism through wars and violence are Empire's mainstays. As a third analogous example, in the series Dune, there are Harkonnens, which basically are advanced technology yet worst case scenario psychopathic Roman Space Empires, who descend on the harsh desert planet of Arrakis, to mine, at any cost, no matter how many of the local population they kill, a priceless psychotropic substance that imparts heightened vitality and awareness called the "spice" because it's also key to interstellar travel.

The second layer, from a non-fiction geo-political standpoint, is the standard historical one. Being a central state or ruling power with a collection of territories controlled or governed by a central authority. Empires are always characterized by their expansionist ambitions, seeking to acquire and maintain control over territories (and those territories' resources) beyond their original borders. They are formed through conquest and colonization. Examples of well-known empires include from thousands to hundreds of years ago the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, while more recent versions have been the founding of The United States and its treatment to Native Americans and Africans or the Japanese Empire primarily up until WWII. Empires have played a significant role in shaping cultures, economies, and political systems around the world, which outside of infrastructure, which Empires generally do well, pretty much everything else about them is bad news. The United States is a great country. But, if we are to be honest, we must also admit its a militarized empire built on sociopathic settler colonialism and genocide and the backs of slaves and it still has a long way to go for making up for that. Because for example, at the time of this writing, it's still continuing it by funding the lunatics in charge of Israel whose goal is to expel or eradicate all Arabs from Palestine, who were there prior to the Jews. So, just as other Arab regions have been on the perpetrating end of the Empire, regardless of where you live in the world, unless you're an indigenous person, your country has likely been complicit in it. Each region shares the blame. Through the deep time of the precessional cycles of the Earth, in the good time, empires subside, but in times of darkness, they rise.

The third layer is the deeper psychological element to empire, which is the human administration of slowing or stopping and reverting the natural evolutionary process of each individual’s (or what one could call soul’s) spiritual growth or what could be called spiritual self development. Much more to discuss.

Written Insight: God is Non-Binary

So this title is not meant to be click bait, or in any way disrespectful, but we must address a foundational issue which we constantly hear misused and aim to state our case why that is regarding now. So our main ask here is to listen to this with an open mind because this is a very basic spiritual concept and is not hard to understand nor should it in any way be controversial. The only reason it's either of those things is because of thousands of years of patriarchal theocratic marketing that has people deep in Plato’s Cave. The concept is that it is incorrect to refer to God as a "he" or "him" .... yet almost everyone does it. We of course expect its misuse for thousands of years from the dogmatists, but we recently visited a Masonic lodge, which we consider a more sophisticated spiritual group, and even heard it used (or misused) by an individual there.

If you happen to visit a Masonic temple inside a lodge in your life, or even just look at photos of one online, you'll see the floor is usually a black and white checkerboard tile pattern. This is a symbolic representation of the binary material world. With the luminance of black and white tiles representing polar opposites on the floor. Where on Earth we have night and day, moon and sun, female and male, negative and positive electric poles, etc... Think of your soul as a ball of light within each of us piloting our meat suits, meaning our fleshy bodies. While our bodies only exist in the binary material world, and will one day fail and be worm food, an adjacent basic spiritual teaching is that our souls are eternal, and after many lives, will eventually graduate from the binary, into unity. Where those binaries merge into equilibrium and our souls melt back into the divine light - of which each is a branch. Now "binary" means the opposite ends, which are not all or nothing, there is a spectrum in between. Just as the day transitions to the night, and gets gradually darker and gradually brighter, between the symbolic colors of black and white there exists a gradient of all shades of gray.

Now we know this one is going to piss off anyone in a fundamentalist religion such as the extreme Christian Right and as a result we’ll likely turn comments off. Because fundamentalist cults can attract very young, immature, spiritually undeveloped souls which see things only in stark binaries and don’t have an interest in their members' spiritual self development but instead turning their flock only into an extreme polarized political block. Which we can back up by highlighting that it's common to hear from them, and other extreme religious ideologies throughout the world, the phrase, "we're good their evil" when speaking of those they disagree with. While more spiritually advanced and sophisticated souls see things as the shades of gray, and as they continue to advance they move more toward perfect middle gray of equilibrium. This is also one of the reasons why democracy is the human enactment of a spiritual idea, that not only do all souls have value and should have a system which works on behalf of all of them, and that decisions that lead to the most liberty on a societal level happen within a system that seeks a middle ground through compromise. This is also the reason why the Christian Right is the largest threat to democracy in the United States, because they don’t want compromise, they want only their extreme way, which is very far out on the edge of a political binary, to rule and have absolute power.

So with this very basic concept of lower less advanced polarity to higher more advanced unity being stated, how can a supreme being, which one could call source, or the divine, or God, which is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, that exists in unity have only one half of the sexual binary? It would not. Instead it is an equal combination of both. With its female aspect having no less importance than its male aspect, and vice versa. It has perfect equilibrium between the two and has graduated beyond the binary. This is a teaching to show us that women and men have complete equal value, with neither having greater or less value and the name of the game of thousands of years of Empire, has been to claim the male aspect is superior while the female is inferior. Which is incorrect and why fictional corporeal white caucasian God got a fictional celestial penis. A divine creator, does not have a corporeal body and can instead be more accurately described as non-binary multidimensional energy. So if we ever sell T-shirts in the store at our website, the first one would say "God is Non-Binary" which is accurate.

Now as an epilogue to this... Speaking of genitalia... at the time of this writing, the term "non-binary" is catnip for regressive reactionary hate. So to be fair, this natural law also applies to human meat suits in binary reality. While our personalities can have a gradient mix of masculine and feminine gender aspects, as those very much do a fluidity, with the exception of one in a million babies that are born with hermaphroditic like genitalia, our sexual genitalia can really be only female or male. So if someone is homosexual and transgender, and their meat suit was born as a male and wants to transition into a female or was born a female and wants to transition into a male, it is also incorrect for them to claim that they are "non-binary". Which is not possible in the binary material. Sexual reassignment can be a multi-year long process, not to mention an expensive one which many cannot afford to complete. Which initially begins in youth with thoughts and feelings, then adjustments to fashion, then hormone treatments, then sexual reassignment surgery if completed. And one may look very hybridized between the two sexes for years, but our meat suit sexual organs are only going to be one or the other - male or female. So a more accurate way to say it, and a way not to be untruthful on legal documents is to simply say one is a female transitioning to male or a male transitioning to female. No big deal.

Written Essay: Two Problematic Patterns Within Conspiracy

Essay - Negative Conspiracy Patterns

By Niles Heckman

We've had a background creating personal work in primarily the area of self-development which is really spiritual self-development because we are absolutely spiritual beings having a human experience. That's the trunk that leads up the tree of the branches of the health of the natural world (environmental health), as well as mental and physical health on both an individual and then global societal level. Which we desperately need to improve because it's "evolve or perish", "grow up or die" time for humanity. This has led us into interests and experience with entheogens (especially their usage within indigenous traditions), as well as areas such as esotericism which means the little known inside. Searching into some of these alternate areas inevitably touches on other areas that could be related to "conspiracy" or what's sometimes called "conspirituality" which is sometimes a catch-all term for people who are in alternative medicine communities. Becoming more open to conspiracy is an early stage in spiritual growth. Which is essentially due to a distrust in cultural institutions and realization that they have not been fully or sometimes even partially honest with the public. Spending over a decade in this and its adjacent orbiting material, and in the early days of it thinking most conspiracies had validity, we matured into realizing certain things were very wrong with it. Primarily because of many folks within this areas support for the election of a deplorable excuse for a human being to the United States Presidency in 2016 and then how it dealt with the global Covid-19 situation, mainly having a strong one sided anti-vax / anti-science thread, we came to notice two patterns running in many "alternate media'' circles, especially those related to conspiracy and sometimes even conspirituality which has caused us to be much less supportive of said subjects. The philosopher Terrence McKenna who had mushroom gnosis would sometimes say, I'm not very supportive of conspiracy theory, and we've now come to see more and more why, because at the time of this recording, we're now 50/50 at best regarding it. Some conspiracies are valid, while others breed irrational or baseless thinking. So it's crucial to recognize that this term can be politically charged and might be used to dismiss legitimate concerns by painting them as mere conspiracies. As with any conspiracy theory, the validity of the claims associated with it should be evaluated based on evidence and critical analysis.

The first negative pattern we started to notice within conspiracy circles is the accurate identification of problems but then proposing batshit crazy solutions. Specifically related to what is public and what is private and a heavy asymmetry towards giving the private a pass. Being very 50/50 on the subject, the other main pattern is we've honestly come to think that 50% + of conspiracy or conspirituality, the half we don't buy, is really just extremist right wing politics in disguise. Nothing more. Since everything is all about the money, in the United States, liberal leaning politics is typically associated with progressivism, social equality of opportunity, and government uses in the economy to achieve social goals on behalf of the middle class - which is generally more compassionate. Modern heavy handed conservatism wants you to think it's somehow for individual freedoms and gives false binaries such as freedom or government control when a more accurate juxtaposition would be public democratic governance over private corporate greed. Conservative politics in the US, while claiming and historically many decades ago having some semblance of being for individual liberty, free market principles, and limited government intervention in economic and personal matters, doesn't actually do those things now and has basically been replaced with this neo-fascism which protects the wealth and power of godzillionares and mega corpses. Which hurts the individual, rigs the market to be corporate crony markets, uses government to only give tax cuts to the top 1%, privatizes everything for corporate profit, amplifies corporate greed through deregulation, gets in quagmire holy wars in the middle East for Israel, and then because those shit policies have been screwing over the middle class and the poor for nearly half a century, because it’s compassionless, tells people immigrants are to blame for their middle class ills - is a form of neo-fascism.

Most conspiracy accurately identifies that the way the world really works is that a small number of extremely wealthy people, probably a few thousand, on a planet (or as the flat Earthers would say, on a plane, lose the T) of 7 some billion people, have a massively disproportionate influence on governments throughout the world. Controlling industry and public policy. Authoritarian governments are awful. Democratic governments, while messy, are the most representative of all people and have the most freedom. A lot of folks in conspiracy, not even when speaking of authoritarianism but instead within democracies tend to say phrases like "governments lie" or "all politics is corrupt" or "it doesn't matter who you vote for" or "both parties one puppet string puller"... the problem with all of that is first off is not what they're saying, it's what their not saying. Which is that corporations lie even more and the reason governments lie is because they're corporatized - meaning they're captured only by private corporate interests. This is evident by the fact that newspapers 50 years ago had both a labor section (meaning speaking for the majority of working people) and a business section (meaning speaking for a small number of private business owners), and now usually only have a business section. 

The next problem with the "all governments lie and are totally corrupt" mindset, is that it throws all governments into the trashcan for working class people. Which is a very right wing misdirection trick. We were listening to the podcast of someone who we are generally fond of, who we've had as a past guest on earlier iterations of our own podcast, and now hosts their own podcast. Everyones got a podcast, Yeah... They had a guest on who was doing a really amazing deconstructing and analyzing of the problems with various cultural institutions such as corporatized universities and the corporate media. It was one of those things where the first hour was free to listen to and the second hour was for members only, with the first hour being tracking the problems with the second hour being some solutions proposed, and since we're not yet members of their podcast we honestly couldn't tell from the first half of the conversation if it was doing what we've seen far too many related discussions doing, such as many conversations on The Higherside Chats podcast, which is one of the world's foremost conspiracy podcasts, that we have been a past guest on, and now were 50/50 on, because like it and this other podcast, it seems many conspiracy guests are just sending people down into something more conservative and regressive politically by giving a complete pass to private corporate corruption and oligarchic corruption and only talking about public university corruption and government corruption which have only happened because they’ve become so for profit privatized by corporate interests.

Another problem with the “governments lie" oversimplified talking point is that the problems between left and right are not symmetrical within US politics. While both parties in the US absolutely have problems, mainly that they are both heavily captured by the conservative leaning Israel lobby, and we are going to do an upcoming series of insights on the problems of the extremes of the left, the difference between issues stemming from left wing policies are 15% of the problem and issues stemming from right wing policies are 85% of the problem. So why not work to continually be involved in fixing the better and more truthful of two dysfunctional options? So throwing one side, which has some corruption - meaning it mainly works on behalf of the middle class but sometimes only helps the morbidly rich, into the same pot as the side that does nothing for the middle class and exclusively and only helps the morbid rich in their policies, means "conservative conspiracy" solutions are an oxymoron. If anything, we'd buy a conspiracy if it leads to having more liberal ideals so that the government more works on behalf of the wide range of people instead of the micro narrow spectrum of special corporate oligarchic interests. In terms of accurately identifying problems and then proposing bat shit crazy solutions, the extremist right wing Q-Anon cult’s pitch is "Hey, there's a global network of sex traffickers and sex abusers, many of which hurt children, so let's try and put one in the white house while we give the others tax breaks''. While in the US what is considered more left-leaning conspiracy, sometimes labeled "Blue Anon", alleges that various right-wing groups are systematically engaging in widespread voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, particularly minority groups. Which is much more factually accurate.

We used to keep an eye on the work of an individual who dove heavily into the conspiratorial as one of their main pillars. Even though they claimed they’re work had little to do with politics, every time they touched on the political, everything they were saying became the same things the dark imperial agents of the Christian Right (really Christian Wrong) were saying, who want to turn liberal democracy into a fascist nightmare with the incredibly unpopular anti-American Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposed theocratic hellscape. This individual even started getting into the world of Natzi esotericist Julius Evola and alternate WWII history which basically = Natzi's were really good guys. Which is not only batshit but is an all good green lite for heading towards fascism, fuck that and "no way Jose". So after the realization of "oh my gosh, their work is just about politics, nothing more" light bulb moment going off... After deciphering the pattern that they were just leading people towards fascism, but doing it in overt ways, we figured we might as well include forward thinking, more balanced politics into our work in order to counter that awfulness. This is why we've gotten more political with what we call "pro-democratic political philosophy" mixed into our work over the last few years". And why much of it has been so up front and center in our material, because democracy is hanging by a thread in the US and it's us that need to keep fighting to save it for future generations.

Extremely rich captains of industry, via their tentacles such as their political organizations, lobbyists, etc... are very interested and involved in politics and want to turn democracies throughout the world into authoritarianism which is an ongoing fight cause it helps them and not you. Representative liberal democracy, while sloppy and slow, and direct democracy would be better, and the seven liberal arts, all have the ability to help you over helping them, but it also requires an educated and informed voting electorate to be the arbiters of who gets into the halls of power and who can sift through the massive signal to noise of corporate media propaganda. Which is not easy and requires knowledge of the logical fallacies to see through all the lies.

But being practical about sharing public resources, communal respectability, and the lower and middle classes and thus democracy shouldn't even be a partisan issue. The whole con is to get the middle class and poor people fighting against one another which only helps morbid wealth. The oligarch controllers want people to be more conservative (meaning more protective of private wealth hierarchy) and they certainly want you to be less liberal (meaning openness and freedom of heart) and less social (being more publicly communal minded). We are fiercely independent but we also personally recognize shared public communal resources are crucial for any healthy community. Liberal democracy requires a strong, activist, public minded, progressive (meaning wanting to evolve) middle class and fascists have been trying to destroy that our whole life. If anything, being more progressive, meaning wanting to help the middle class and electing those who enact policies which do so, in your politics should be like step 3 of 10 in your spiritual development. And since “conservative” policies protect wealth hierarchy while extreme right wing fascist policies that claim their “conservative” protect extreme wealth hierarchy while also empowering power hungry villains like Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it boggles our mind that so many conspiracy folks then end up falling down right wing rabbit holes. If anything they should end up moving less conservative and more progressive in their politics to more support the middle class. Instead of being down for intolerant extreme ideologies that breed wanna be fascist dictators. 

So our confession on this one is that all of our spiritual self-development themed work is not only intended to help you in your personal development, but the road to that is paved in helping make you into a more compassionate and open hearted and open minded person. More compassion for the environment, more compassion for the lives of all people, regardless of their economic class, more compassion for all animal life, more liberal (in the classical sense of the word) and especially more compassionate to the plight of the indigenous people - such as femicide of indigenous women. But you must go more outside of the empire to do that. That majority of our readers or listeners will read this or hear this and be like “OMG! right on! so true! thumbs up!” But those who have stopped reading or listening to these essays because they think what we’re saying is  “bleeding heart lib woke”, are not only more compassionless, but deeper in the empire.

Written Insight: What is Patternicity?

"Patternicity" is a term often credited to author Michael Shermer, to describe the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in random data or meaningless data.

Shermer writes "We are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth... "He continued "Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. It's not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong." So he uses it almost exclusively as a pejorative (meaning in the negative) in terms of encapsulating why people have been said to see faces in clouds, hear hidden messages in music played backward, or be overly sympathetic to supernatural phenomena. We however, would say it should also apply to meaningful data because the concept can also be supportive in terms of the human brain's evolved ability to recognize valid patterns, a skill crucial for survival. Identifying patterns allowed early humans to predict weather changes, recognize dangerous animals, and find food. 

For example, our ancient ancestors, which have been both more primitive and more advanced than us in our current state, in their earlier more primitive evolutionary development, realized that when they saw high grass moving in a non-natural way, as would happen from the breeze or wind, it would mean a certain percentage of the time that a predator, which they could not directly see or even hear, could be lurking in that area, some of the time, but not all of the time. Most of the time it was an animal, but not one that would attempt to eat them or their children. But either way that pattern of behavior in the grass was worth paying attention to. Fast forward to today that the pattern-recognition ability can also lead to correct future outcomes or also to false positives, such as seeing patterns that aren't there because it’s usually better to be safe and err on the side of caution than it is to be sorry and miss a real threat. 

Patternicity is related to other cognitive phenomena such as apophenia, which is "the tendency to perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things" and pareidolia, which is "a specific type of apophenia where people see faces or other significant images in random stimuli". And with three definitions in this one already being given, we'll give one more adjacent definition... The word consciousness is a 64,000 hour conversation, and there are multiple good definitions of the word that each have overlap. But one definition of the word that we like is "your ability to recognize patterns and meaning both externally out in the world, and internally within your own psychology." Because there are absolutely repeating actions being played out in society that both benefit the average individual and the average people (which we also highlight as the balanced middle class), and also other repeating actions that do not benefit them.

So being conscious of patterns (both false and true) can help explain a wide range of human behaviors both within the world out there and within ourselves and in the next one we are going to share two specific patterns we've recognized, which we of course feel to be true, that have caused a dramatic shift on our personal outputs.

Written Insight: Respect for (Wise) Elders

In general, it is a good practice to respect our elders. Those who have been alive longer than we have. Yet there is an exception, which is if the elder is unwise, meaning not ebodying wizdom, they deserve lesser respect on an individual case-by-case basis.

As we age, the body, and thus the physical mind and physical heart, and other organs and muscular systems will all start to go. It's said we have maximum energy at age 10, then it's all physically and even mentally downhill from there. As an example, the United States just had a cringy presidential debate between the two oldest potential candidates in the country's history, one is an 81 year old elder statesman, and the other is only three years younger at 78. The 81 year old elder, has had bad doll hair plugs which have been upgraded with newer hair growing technology, has had a face lift, has a natural stutter and that combined with a bad cold resulted in him coughing often and speaking more quietly, thus appearing more frail, and when not speaking lingered with a strange cold stare. While the 78 year old elder is overweight with a gut, has a flappy neck vagina, bad toupee to cover up his bald clown head, wears bronzer and secret lift shoes to make himself appear an inch or two taller, and has severe fecal incontinence which essentially requires him to wear adult diapers and results in him being smelly. And probobally both have to pee three times during the night due to prostate issues. But none of those physical traits should be made fun directly at, cause fellas, all of us are inevitably also headed towards some of those things. What is of concern with both of them are their mental and moral capacities to be responsible for such a high stress, high tension, high stakes job, with the 81 year old elder having trouble efficiently and forcefully finishing sentences while having a superior heart and moral compass and the 78 year old elder also occasionally slurring a word, yet while serial lying and having zero moral compass. So in that case, we would say one is wiser than the other, and thus deserves more respect.

Historically, since about the beginning of the Reformation in the early 16th century, Western cultures have placed greater value on younger adults not because of physical youthfulness and not having any of the previously stated traits, but primarily because of immature and off-balanced Protestant values that tie a person's worth almost exclusively to their ability to "work". Eastern cultures tend to value age and the wisdom and experience elders can share more than Western ones. With multi-generational households being more common there than they are in the West.

In modernity, wise elders can offer into their retirement years, via past experience - guidance, perspective, support, contributions, legacy, and hopefully wisdom. All of which have huge value to enrich those younger than themselves, fostering a culture where experience and knowledge are cherished and passed on. Yet some elders are just not very wise. They are young or immature souls. Resulting in physically older bitter grumpy curmudgeons stuck in bad routines and outdated mindsets that add to ageism. While elder neglect, or abuse is unacceptable, and self respect should not decline on the curve of life, respect is a two way street so the caregiver, guardian, role model, parent, grandparent, and great grandparent also need to earn that on a flowering young mind. Via first practicing respect for themselves and others. Thomas Paine once said: “Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself”. This goes beyond respect into dignity and legacy.

In indigenous traditions around the world, respect for elders held and still holds a profound significance rooted in cultural values, spiritual practices, and community harmony for providing leadership, healing, guidance, sacrifices, passing down tradition, and most of all... as wisdom keepers. Typically being led for eons by councils of wise elders with learned experience within nature.

Even though their meat suits are failing and internal operating systems are slowing, respecting wise elders should be a timeless virtue that spans cultures and generations. When those elders embody some level of wisdom.

Written Insight: Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR)

For this one we're going to be talking about two primary words. One is spirituality and the other is religion. In previous insights or essays which you can find in our back catalog we gave, at different times, what we feel are the two best simple definitions of each. And those are that "spirituality" is "full spectrum nature" while "religion" is "any system of faith, worship, or practice".

So a lot of heavily religious people think that their system or menu they subscribe to, and only eat food off that one menu, receive their spirituality only through that menu because religion = spirituality. While a lot of secular folks (meaning those that have no religious affiliation) are turned off by the word 'spiritual' because they think it's owned by religion and you must be religious to be spiritual because they've also been tricked into thinking spirituality=religion. Well... neither are correct. And we would say each way of thinking is a product of imperial (meaning of the empire's) mind control programming because the goal of empire is to slow, stop, or full-on contract the spiritual growth of each individual.

The United States has historically been founded with an enlightenment view. Although its founding was far from enlightened due to its psychotic imperial settler colonialism against Native Americans, to allow for all religions, through the first amendment of the constitution's "Free Exercise Clause" that guarantees individuals the right to freely exercise their religion while also simultaneously having the "Establishment Clause" that ensures that the government cannot favor one religion over another and protects individuals' rights to practice any faith without interference from the state. So you're free to not have a religion, or have one, with no specific one being superior. This is why Christian Nationalism, which is really just Christian Supremacy, is fundamentally of empire, not to mention anti-American being more analogous to the Taliban's ideology, and those trying to put the 10 Commandments in schools are dark imperial agents.

Although the US is still a quite heavily religious country, church attendance has been steadily declining for the last half century while during this time, interest in spirituality has been steadily increasing. This is a very good trend because we are absolutely spiritual beings having a human experience, and are all on what we call "the spiritual path" but not religious beings" on a religious path because any formal system of faith, worship, or practice is not needed for that. They're are thousands of religions, and any of them can be used or accessed, but none of them are required. It's like saying, I want to go exercise, but I don't need formal team sports to do that. I can do it myself. You can access a more full spectrum of nature (or could also be said as "multidimensional" nature) on your own, by meditating, going in a flotation tank, taking an entheogen, going on a hike in nature, getting a good therapist, being a more loving and compassionate person, any combination of those things, and much more... The main way that the individual accesses spirituality is through an internal individual process. And getting out into nature only amplifies accessing more full spectrum nature. Indigenous people have known this for millions of years. And it shows because they live, unless co-opted by the empire, in harmony and balance with nature.

Now we are not hostile to religion if it has a personal esoteric path, we're hostile to big corporate imperial religion which promotes a theocracy that tries to push its view on others and then actually becomes hostile to nature with a dogshit prosperity gospel that says God put the oil in the ground for us to extract drill baby drill Dumbfuckistan yee ha and is generally hostile to the natural world, evolution, and the material sciences. This is the problem with missionaries who were absolutely of the empire, whose goals have been to assimilate other cultures, especially indigenous ones like the Borg collective. Because what are many of the world's big religions doing? They are taking the natural systems and hierarchies of nature, such as the elements of nature earth, air, fire, water, their associated spirits, the moon, the sun, the cosmos, the divine, and natural alchemical evolutionary processes which are both exoteric (out there) and esoteric (in here) and replacing them with only an external hierarchy of men. God or Allah (male), Jesus (male), Satan (male) and then a priest class (which also happens to be, shocker, primarily male) that they say you need to be subservient to or go through in order to supposedly access the divine.

The problem here is that for the most part, big religion is not interested in the spiritual self development of the individual, the internal individual's difficult path, but more interested in spoon feeding large swaths of people dogma through doctrine and far too often correlating that with regressive politics because it's very hierarchical. Because signing up to someone else's menu wholesale means you can outsource the work which is easy and why many people do it. But less people are wanting to do it, which is an evolutionary process.