Fragments & Miscellanea, Vol. 4
An Autumn Leafpile of Ideas
I have too many ideas to develop fully. From time to time I like to list some of the granular notions from my notebooks, and send the list to my subscribers.
Business Idea:
Substack-like platform:
Users buy in with dollars… and it costs $.01-$.50 to access an article. There could be extra functionality for posting on Twitter or Substack or downloading audio versions or contacting the author. If a writer gets 200 views on his essay, he makes $8… instantly.
Thoughts?
Anthropological Inquiry - similarities between older sacrificial/retainer civilizations, demon possession, cannibalism, consumption of enemies…
Aztecs, PNG natives, Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam (DB), Egyptian burial sacrifices
“People are made of stories.” - Ted Chiang
If consciousness is the fundamental property of much of existence and the reality we inhabit (as Donald Hoffman maintains) then perhaps consciousness follows a pan-psychist scheme. Perhaps the vast clouds of hydrogen gas and the nebulae of scattered dust and the rogue planets on their lonely and interminable transits through the great void and the galaxies themselves are conscious. How better to understand the polytheistic impulse of our ancestors? A vast pantheon of angels and demons, lesser and greater spirits, all part of the greater whole. Our existence as organisms on a small rocky planet would therefore be a condition of dependency and vassalage on/of a greater intelligence (our solar system or the Milky Way, or something greater) which would be governed by the great intelligence behind this structure. This would not be God, but a kind of lesser deity, whose existence wouldn’t necessarily contradict monotheism.
In The Silmarillion all creation is the a fruit of the imagination of Eru Illuvator (The One, Father of All) but is created more directly by the works of the Ainur lesser gods and demigods and divine spirits (the Valar, a pantheon of Hellenic-style nature and thematic gods, and the Maiar, lesser spirits who follow and serve the Valar, including the wizards and the balrogs and Sauron himself). The actions of these spirits all follow the great and inscrutable will of Eru and interact with the forces of nature and the decisions of the children of Eru to bring into being the story (song) of reality.
"Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: 'Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'
Then the Ainur were afraid, and they did not yet comprehend the words that were said to them; and Melkor was filled with shame, of which came secret anger. But Ilúvatar arose in splendour, and he went forth from the fair regions that he had made for the Ainur; and the Ainur followed him."
Donald Hoffman - The Case Against Reality
Holographic Principle
→ Chris Fuchs Experiment
Quantum mechanics > local realism
Schizophrenia and the investigation of ‘edge cases’ of consciousness (psychosis, coma state, delusion, dream) as tools to uncover reality
People using certain psychedelics often report a transcendent sense of oneness with the cosmos… and a sense of perception of and communion with greater, invisible intelligences
Short Story: Corsairs
In a future of moon exploration and interplanetary resource exploitation there are now dozens of moon colonies and a thriving mining industry.
The Asian hegemony dominates Luna, and African and American regional governments fund corsairs to disrupt the trade and mining and building.
They live in cramped diggers and bungalows, always on the verge of disaster, and venture out to launch missions and organize ambushes to disrupt the oxygen and iron and titanium mining operations (~35% of the lunar regolith is composed of oxygen, with a great deal of silicate and a significant quantity of iron. Setting up lunar steel smelting would require a huge input of carbon to the world, of which there’s almost none).
$8 million is bas pay, enough to buy a smallish apartment in the Texas conurbation (for example)…
The Social Contract
There’s an implicit social contract between the workers and the managers, as there is with so many social relationships.
RULERS = present well, be articulate, seem decisive and collected, and manage affairs fairly well (address crime, employment, housing, immigration, etc.). If you do these things you can have primary input into decisions which affect millions of people. It’s not your network or your credentials which ultimately give you authority in the eyes of the governed. It’s not your self-assurance or your class prerogatives and pretension. It’s the results of your decisions.
ACADEMICS = produce papers and operate according to scientific ethics and research standards and avoid craziness or delusion. Do this and you will receive easy and fairly lucrative professional positions and tenure. If working in a lab seems difficult or stressful, try working in a warehouse or joining the Ranger Battalion. It’s not your credentials or your conferences which bolster your class-it’s the value of your research!
These stipulations are not being honored…
Enclaves of the Weird - Kowloon Walled City
Cooperation and healing requires some measure of TRUST and FORGIVENESS, a decision to forget the violence of the past and to move forward according to a new understanding.
THAT is the ingredient missing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinians (often) do not want peace-they want victory. Their attempts at peace are often fake vulnerability and bids of tactical ceasefires, in order to rebuild their strength.
There’s also the element of subsidies: while the UNRWA and UN agencies under the UNCT in the oPt remain (as long as conflict persists) billions of dollars are thrown into the area and tens of thousands of Palestinians receive grants and stable employment. It’s an (indirect) subsidy of resistance and intractability and I believe it has an effect on the conflict.
‘Short Cuts’
The effect on psychology and identity of disordered and indulgent lifestyles
Lost and uncertain and immature ‘adults’
Chronically online people, clinging to social justice ideology as a salve and a reason to live
PREDICTION - YouTube
YouTube will begin to shift in viewers and revenue toward commentary channels. One variable will be perceived authenticity/honesty (and, of course, incisive observations) but another major factor will be a cultivation of an intimate and familiar style, with quirky characteristics.
The era of the polished and formatted media production is coming to an end. The medium has changed and the style and personalities will change with it
Requiem for American Childhood
(
, , ‘free range parenting’, etc.)Sometimes changes are bigger than economic shifts or legislation or technological advance. Sometimes they encompass and effect all of these and simultaneously move the entire culture… and after the shift we barely remember how things were before.
This kind of change seems to have shifted the subjective experience of American childhood. When I was young we lived in government (army) housing and spent every day playing in the woods and competing in sports and wandering for miles
Neighborhoods these days are often bereft of children. Even when they are present, they are ghostly additions, seen briefly several times per day as they run from minivan to front door… whereupon they vanish into airconditioned living rooms and bedrooms outfitted with screens…
Safety culture
Smart phones
mental health symptoms (anxiety, initiative, resilience)
physical health
subjective experience
A persistent anti-racist inconsistency: _______________ disparity doesn’t exist or is poorly measured or exaggerated… (and, when shown it does exist or is a legitimate problem), _________________ is a product of racism.
I thought you said it didn’t exist? You’ve gone from claiming the disparity isn’t real to professing certainty about its causes.
The Best Minds - Jonathan Rosen
“Every nuclear family is nuclear in its own way”
The ‘worried well’ (mentally standard individuals, especially rich and especially female, who are dogged by persistent mood disorders or anxiety, etc.)
Pathological naivete - the professionals and academics and activists who behave as if their conception of the world is accurate, and refuse to account for inconsistencies or conflicts (for example: a schizophrenic who’s been praised by the NY Times, whose friends and patrons will not commit him because they consider this unjust… who then goes on to murder his fiancée)
Intellectual approach to reality - progressivism, post-modernism, structuralism
“the word ‘discourse’ somehow made technical things sounds sexy as much as ‘intercourse’ made sexy things sound technical”
Harold Bloom, whose sick child and realistic approach to illness and disability made him a target of radicals and folks who couldn’t accept that difficulty and trade-offs and coercion were sometimes necessary in life
“art can’t be the lie that tells the truth in a world that cannot recognize lies”
The Fatal Funnel… and those who think they know
There are professionals who deal with evil and danger… and then there are people who think they know what those things are, who think their preconceptions and their ideals should guide those (police, soldiers, prison guards) who must regularly use and threaten force in their job
The Best Minds, p. 498 - police fight Michael Laudor
Police-involved shootings
The conduct of war, ROE’s
To Punish and Protect: Against a System - Jeanine Pirro
The Benefits of Empire - Why Pax Americana is a Blessing for the World (and the United States!)
Peace, International cooperation
Maritime trade, international supply lines
(U.S.) ‘exorbitant privilege’ - dollar as global currency and massive benefits for our federal budget and dollar value
Cosmological Speculations:
Terraforming Venus (sulfur, heat, CO2, no water)
Terraforming mars - nanoreflectors
Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles
Their method proposes tiny conductive nano-antennas, each roughly 9 microns long and no wider than 150 nanometers. This structure, which is tuned for the wavelengths corresponding to thermal emission, forms a greenhouse effect >5000 times stronger than the strongest greenhouse gasses known to science, the perfluorocarbons. They also don’t require the construction of enormous automated fluorite mines on Mars, a planet that has no known fluorite deposits, though they probably exist somewhere!
Moon engineering
Exoplanet seeding - sending hardy bacteria to other worlds to stimulate the spread of life!!!
Titan - methane liquid cycle, thick atmosphere
Europe - ice shell moon, with 3x the salty water of earth (potentially), kept liquid by radioactive mineral decay and tidal flexing
Pluto - ice volcanoes
‘Folly - a century of progressive blunders’
Eugenics; slum clearance; the war on poverty (Great Society); climate activism; anti-racism and “criminal justice reform”
Swaying the doubters: you must be grounded in reality in order to be convincing.
A large portion of the Left has lost the ability to speak to virtually any person with different values and viewpoints…
The Paradox of Progressivism (Part 2) - the critics of hierarchy and merit and tradition are strangely sanguine about their power structures. Tradition is rubbish… unless it’s a tradition of individualist activism. Merit is an illusion… unless it’s the merit reflected by their credentials and rank. ‘Other ways of knowing’ are equally valid… unless they conflict with any of their expertise. Power structures are oppressive… unless this ideology gains control of them and can use them for its ends.
‘Money over status’ - status within the elite is totally hierarchical and organizational. There’s no status to be gained (in their world) outside of rising within and achieving validation from large organizations. No profit or initiative or independence is rewarded.
This enforces a system of cowardice and conformity, of competition (while pretending there’s none) within certain institutional strictures. Sometimes identity or victim status are leveraged, more often it’s simply a matter of giving the organization the results and conclusions it wants.
It’s a vast structure of herdlike movement, where priorities and values must be reflected back at the hierarchy precisely as they’re transmitted. Bravery, initiative, independence, are all penalized. It’s little wonder we see these qualities in short supply in the ‘symbolic capitalist’ (
) class‘Neurotic Nation’ - the state of our mental health
[mental health survey]
Why? There’s an answer the global consensus doesn’t want us to grapple with.
This is a problem which they prefer be ignored or ‘treated’ using expensive and ineffectual therapeutic and pharmaceutical interventions…
The Fake Sanctimony of Foreign Policy Discourse
Norms, priorities, human rights, victims, POWER
Marshall MacLuhan - “the medium is the message”
Entertained to Death
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
ASSORTED QUOTES:
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
Affluence creates poverty.
Freudian psychology / Marxism / Post-modernism & Critical Theory as psychopathologies of the modern world
The other side of the coin - fascism and its constituent values (patriotism, natalism, belligerency, racism, nationalism, traditionalism, etc.) are often highly stigmatized by the Left. What about Utopianism? Radical opposition to nation and family and tradition have proven to be just as alluring and as destructive for humanity…
Crafting a liberatory Slavic worldview - can Russia be ‘liberalized’ in its own way? Can the spectre of paranoiac nationalism be exorcised and a new, future-oriented and optimistic Russian philosophy rise out of the suffering and struggle of the past? (Aleksandr Dugin)
The Reagan Revolution - the last great anti-elite political shift in the United States
Eric Weinstein’s Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)
Jeffrey Epstein
The Finders came to wider public attention when two members of the movement were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida in 1987 and charged with misdemeanor child abuse of the six children accompanying them, the two men having remained silent when, in a public park, the police inquired as to their identity and relationship to the children.[2] The men were Douglas Ammerman and James Michael Holwell, both described as "well-dressed men in suits." They used a van to transport "six scruffy, hungry children" of varying ages between 2 and 11.[3]
The two oldest children, referred to as "Mary" and "Max", were interviewed by law enforcement, as the others were too young to properly communicate. It was noted that medical examinations of the children showed signs of sexual abuse and malnutrition, as well as bite marks potentially belonging to an adult human. During the interview as well as eyewitness testimony from neighbors, it was discovered that the children were raised on a farm belonging to Pettie with little adult supervision, with there being twenty adults and one other child present. The younger children were observed to display behavior indicating they were not used to being in a house or using indoor plumbing, requesting to go outside to use the bathroom, or urinating in their pants (noted to lack underwear). "Max" had a poor concept of time. They explained that they were being “weaned” from their mothers and were rarely allowed inside the house, even sleeping outside. Neighbors observed that the children apparently lived in the farm’s watermelon field. Mary described Ammerman and Holwell as their "teachers", teaching them to read and "play games". One game involved disrobing a man, wearing his clothes, and going through his pockets for money (she later revised her statement and asserted that only jackets were involved). The two reported seeing female members of the cult naked and believed this to be another game as well. When questioned about "bad touches" Mary denied sexual abuse but "became very fidgety and wanted to end the interview." At another Finders farm in Virginia, agents recorded cages on the premises, with witnesses asserting they were used to keep children. As of 2022, the full medical and psychological reports are not available for public viewing.[4]
According to U.S. District Court records in Washington, a confidential police source had previously told authorities that the Finders were "a cult" that conducted "brainwashing" techniques at a warehouse and a Glover Park duplex raided by law enforcement. This source told of being recruited by the Finders with promises of "financial reward and sexual gratification" and of being invited by one member to "explore" satanism with them, according to the documents. Police sources said some of the items seized showed pictures of children engaged in what appeared to be "cult rituals." Officials of the U.S. Customs Service said that the material seized included photos showing children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of animals and one photograph of a child in chains.[5] It was noted by a detective during the investigation that documents were discovered with detailed instructions about methods to obtain children for unspecified purposes (including the impregnation of female members of the community, purchasing, trading, and kidnapping), but neither the documents nor anyone else with knowledge of them could later be found.[4]
Robert Gardner Terrell, who owned one of the raided properties, claimed ″We are rational people ... not devil worshipers or child molesters″ and ″anything we’ve done is based on the desire for the children to have the richest life they could have.″ According to Terrell, the recovered photos of naked children were of Holwell’s own children, and the dead goats shown in the photos mentioned by the Customs Service were already butchered with the children being taught how to prepare them.[6] The men were released six weeks later, with the state of Florida dropping all charges against them.
The Finders leader Robert Terrell publicly gathered with members at the Vietnam Memorial Park in Tallahassee to speak with members of the press and give the public an opportunity to meet the group personally in order 'to dispel the bad image bestowed on the group by law enforcement and the media'.[4]
Federal authorities concluded that there was no evidence of criminal activity, with it being noted that, although more could have been done for the children, it was difficult to compile accurate information with what knowledge they did have of their lifestyle only being able to be judged subjectively.[4] The authorities contacted the mothers of the children, who came to Tallahassee and retrieved them.[3]
CoIntel Pro, MK Ultra
Modern Analogues - DEI, ESG, academic/political funding by Qatar & China
An alternative vision of romance: love in the modern era
Finding a connection in a chaotic and confusing society
Fictional depictions: Punch Drunk Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, Garden State
Embrace weirdness and spontaneity
Policy failures (instances of utopianism failing to pay off): electric vehicles, educational equity, rent controls, bail reform
The Schism Hypothesis - every unitary human group/society/organization above a certain size needs competition, or it will develop infighting and split.
That could account for the rise of Critical Theory after the West defeated the Soviet Union. A nation without credible adversaries will tend to become consumed with endogenous class and cultural struggles…
‘DEI as corporate status signal’, like nap rooms or yoga; expensive accoutrements which make the company more attractive to rich young kids (women especially) and thereby indirectly drive the collective profile and recruiting.
As an expensive and superfluous addition it tends to be cut during lean times though. It’s not about mission of even improvement. It’s about fashion and status.
Colonialism - the collusion problem
Native groups enthusiastically embraced and colluded with colonial masters. the idea of oppressed and oppressive breaks down very quickly upon investigation
“We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thoughts are technologically mediated.” -Ted Chiang
A note concerning mistakes: if you’ve never been completely wrong about huge political issues and value judgements… then you HAVE been wrong (we all have) and you just don’t realize it. Few people in this condition ever admit it, to themselves or to others.
‘Find your tribe’
‘Find a reason to live’
The immaturity and smothering comfort of urban life (‘island dwarfism’ shrinks animals in constricted ecologies… perhaps modern urban life shrinks the spirit of they city’s inhabitants in a similar way)
(personal account)
can money buy you anything?
everything in such a place is organized to reinforce status, and preclude discomfort (for those with money!)
A vision for the future (?)
Freddie DeBoer has a novel on the way!
My first novel, titled The Mind Reels, is nearing the production phase, meaning that all of the pre-production editing work is done, with only the page-proof edits to come. We’re still working on the cover. I expect that galleys will be produced in a few months and the book will start to get into the hands of influential literary world types soon. Publication date is October of 2025. I’m very excited and pretty nervous, given that fiction is not my usual jam. I am in the principle composition phase of my (currently untitled) third trade nonfiction book, for Simon & Schuster, which is also about mental illness. (There was no plan to have both a fiction and a nonfiction book on that topic at the same time; that was just how things broke in the complicated game of getting books sold.) That book is gonna be a long big-think omnibus book about insanity, psychiatric medicine, and mental health culture in the 21st century, which pulls together all of my many thoughts and complaints about how mental illness is treated, conceptualized, and discussed in modern society. I’d like to think of it as in the spirit of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s books, if I can pull that off, something that builds a world around the reader. That’s coming sometime in 2026. Finally, Harvard University Press has in hand the manuscript of my book titled Writing Itself, which is an academic book about the teaching of college writing and how the field most associated with it went so wrong.
UPCOMING PROJECTS:
Train Up A Child
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the culture of indulgence and self-absorption
-Paolo Freire - children as agents of social change
To Uplift the Marginalized - the spirit of liberalism
-John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
-Individualism v. communalism/communitarianism
A Republic, Not an Empire
-Toward a non-interventionist and nationalist foreign policy
Information & Misinformation
-resetting society’s epistemological mechanisms