It’s been seven months since I sent out one of these ‘fragments…’ list posts. I keep bound notebooks, in which I write ideas, quotes, questions, references. This notebook roughly spans my time as an assistant editor at a small prison reform organization. Many of the ideas appear in my essays during the past six months (links to some at the bottom of the page). These thoughts are necessarily fragmentary and speculative but that doesn’t mean they won’t be interesting or useful to others.
“Pretend like you care about some thing, other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.”
“…as a young, 21st-century capitalist myself, the thing I was supposed to do was shut up and play along: wear hipster clothes, lead via practiced vulnerability, applaud diversity and inclusion, and muse on how to make the world a better place at conferences in fancy ski towns. Not a bad gig.”
-Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.
A New Synthesis - society after trans activism…
‘The Noble Savage’ - fallacies of indigenous life
geronticide
infanticide
inter-group conflict
Empire of the Summer Moon
Unwell Healers - why are so many psychologists mentally ill?
Self harm: obesity, anorexia, trans (autogynephilia), BIID…
Soft totalitarianism: judicial and extra-judicial penalties for Jan. 6th
Taking refuge in abstraction - buzzwords, social science assumptions, thought-destroying terminology
The iron law of political self-interest - parties, movements, and politicians always act in their own self-interest, unless it can be proved otherwise. Any appeal to values, ideals, or truth is coincidental or invalid.
The claim of misinformation - the best antidote to misinfo. is thorough and open debate… yet “anti-misinformation” NGO’s and activists uniformly try to shut down debate and discussion and move certain words and ideas out of bounds, prior to examination
‘crybullies’
The Secret Gardens - as society becomes more homogenous and profit-oriented and safetyist and ideologically/normatively rigid and bureaucratized (“globohomo”), the old sources of meaning and value bleed away. Creating new cultural forms is incredibly difficult (it doesn’t seem possible to do it intentionally, at least not without hundreds of thousands of participants). One possible fix is to develop existing corpuses and systems of meaning into new cultural forms. Some of the interesting possibilities in this direction (based on recent conversations) are:
“A hierarchy of initiative” - a kind of dynamic meritocracy is emerging, composed of curious, energetic, responsible, and intelligent people. Privilege and wealth and family origin are meaningful, but not as meaningful as innate capabilities and habits.
As more wealth and opportunities are created the range between the highest (happiest/busiest/most successful) and the lowest increases. The lowest will naturally resent the highest, and seek to use the state as a tool to diminish them, even if this hurts society overall - even if it hurts the lowest.
[Reference: Nietzsche - “The higher you ascend, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. But most of all they hate those who fly.”]
This human tendency (towards malignant envy of success and happiness and dynamism) should be named and shamed. As it stands right now we’ve barely acknowledged it…
Japan has chosen cultural preservation and stability over demographic health and economic growth. This is a trade off which it isn’t even possible to discuss in the West. (Supposed) economic growth and a kind of pathological, faux-empathetic anti-nationalism are simply presumed to be right and correct, and all debate is proscribed.
Banned books (really banned, or at least very much suppressed):
Parable for our times: The Snow Queen (H. C. Anderson) - Demon’s acolytes are cast out of Heaven. Their magic mirror is broken and the shards cause humans to no longer see beauty or feel goodness…
Individual agency = performing actions and making decisions according to one’s own nature. Modernity blunts and erodes this quality in a hundred different ways. That is the bargain we’ve all struck (whether we want it or not): less agency and freedom / more safety and convenience…
On the Marble Cliffs - Ernst Junger
“The word is both king and magician.”
“Thus I… felt the breath of primitive power that surrounded him like a breeze from his forests.”
“Thus in exhausted bodies corruption will set in by way of wounds which a sound man would barely notice.”
“It was a bad sign, too, that the spirit of disorder laid hold upon the last rites of the dead.”
“The best gifts of the gods are unpaid for.”
“In base hearts there lies deep-seated a hatred for beauty.”
“…broken tracery of vaulted cathedrals… in the dusky soil of the vineyard slope…”
“…man-made order is like the universe - from time to time it must plunge into the flames to be born anew.”
“Above all, we continued our study of language, for in the word we recognised the gleaming blade before which tyrants pale. There is a trinity of word, liberty, and spirit.”
“We were living in times during which the author is condemned to solitude.”
“The decline of order brings good fortune to none.”
“In such times the muses are silent, and truth begins to flicker like a torch in a current of foul air.”
“It was his opinion that from the beginning of history there have been two races of men on this Earth - the masters and the slaves - and that in the course of time the breeds had crossed… [He] demanded that they be separated anew.”
“he belonged to the race of men who dream concretely - a very dangerous breed.”
“In such encounters the theorist has always been worsted by the men of action.”
“Then I was certain of something which I had often doubted - there were still noble beings amongst us in whose hearts lived unshakeable knowledge of a lofty, ordered life.”
Analysis, On the Marble Cliffs:
Anarchy and destruction will not triumph. Yet this confidence must not blind one to the spread of evil, the ravages of the Chief Ranger, and the very real violence the narrator witnesses. The threat is objective: “There were at stake life in its highest form, liberty and the dignity of man.” Jünger was unmistakably a critic of the Nazi regime but also, more broadly, a proponent of a complex hybrid, the combination of an emancipatory project of liberty—if you will, a liberal legacy—with the very different claim of dignity, the insistence on the values and qualities that humans deserve. It is this simultaneous pursuit of freedom and values that resonates when the narrator swears that he “would rather fall with the free men than go in triumph among the slaves.”
The oath poses a challenge that resonates beyond the apocalyptic setting of the novel and the specific catastrophe of Nazi Germany. It is a rejection of obligatory mindsets and efforts to extort solidarity, of conformism and public madness, whether in witch trials, lynch mobs, or cancel culture. Ernst Jünger reminds us that, as we face the agents of chaos and destruction, creation retains the upper hand. Logical thinking and clarity of mind are the strongest defenses. Liberty and dignity are the indisputable goals.
“The meddler’s impulse” - the tendency among educated / privileged / underexperienced people to control complex systems in order to ‘improve’ them (re-order them according to their will, therefore augmenting their own importance and status)
Central planning / Command economies
Public housing / Urban planning (response by Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
Educational theory
Psychology / Psychiatry / Therapy
Equity initiatives
Anosognosia & Political Belief - Anosognosia is a psychological symptom which keeps you from recognizing your own impairment and cognitive distortions (dementia, schizophrenia, substance use disorder, etc.). It is systematic and persistent. There seems to be an element of anosognosia in modern political ideology…
“Children of Men” - the cultural implications of falling birthrates
playgrounds
coin fountains at the mall
films and music and restaurant (McDonald’s has gone from a childish burger place to a wannabe-chic coffee shop, all beiges and greys and recessed lighting… )
‘The Chamelon rule” - whenever there is a concerted effort to remake the language around a political or cultural issue, there is dishonesty and manipulation afoot.
One can focus on the self (behavior, motivations, attitudes - the vast subterraneum of the unconscious mind) OR one can focus on the external world.
Every attempt to remake the outside world according to personal convictions or vision is an attempt to run from the self.
JUNG
The map of nameless places…
“…deep below…. nameless things gnaw at the roots of the world.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“There’s only circumambulation of the self.” - Carl Jung
Jung’s house: ‘the Tower’
“I’m in the midst of my true life.” “I’m most deeply myself.” “Here the torment of creation is lessened.” - Jung
“Today I can say I have been true to myself.” - Jung
“I feel quite certain that the process of becoming continues after death.” - Carl Jung
Communal achievement as a rebuke of equity - Americans regard selection or accomplishment as individual endeavors. If you consider achievement a collective endeavor (an entire community and family and value system goes toward making a person successful, or not) you begin to see the profound flaws in the modern idea of ‘equity.’
Example from All the Beauty in the World (and from my own extensive NYC security guard experience): Guards at the Met tend to be Albanian, Guyanese, Russian… rarely black (despite black guards being well-represented in buildings across Manhattan). There are possible explanations for this, but equity wouldn’t address those dynamics whatsoever.
Protect us from retroviruses? RV’s seem to have given us synciotyotrophoblast. The protein responsible for giving us this structure (syncitein) seems to have come from an ancient retrovirus.
estimate: 8-10% of human DNA is viral in origin…
2020 paper, by Franco Vazza & Alberto Filetti: the structure of the brain is analogous to the structure of the universe
Przybyski’s Star - “one of the most chemically peculiar…,” shows a mysterious amount of unusually heavy elements. No one is sure how this is possible.
LUCA (‘last universal common ancestor,’ or earliest organism to which all life on earth is genetically related) - University of Bristol Study
4.3 billion years ago (much earlier than originally imagined)
Early prokaryote
Lived in a world with viruses, (RNA?), other life…
IDEAS:
‘No phone’ singles bar
Mutual aid societies
Dating app master registry
New romantic norms (to reflect our cultural and economic changes)
Ideologies are always incomplete and misleading. They flatten and rewrite reality.
Every total worldview must account for:
Mysterious universe
History
The biological reality of human nature
The unconscious mind
Ideologies pretend to account for all realities and they pretend to seek to explain, but they’re tools for gaining power.
The American Dream
“…a little house, up-country somewhere…” - The Lighthouse (film)
Independence, ‘untroddenness’
Opportunity
you can go anywhere and do anything you’re inclined and able to do
the lie of ‘equity’ is that it claims to expand this range (not for everybody, but for certain groups). However, it only creates feelings of resentment, and erects a middle class of managers and busybodies to opportion opportunity (and status and wealth, etc.). It doesn’t actually expand opportunity. It distorts and diminishes it, and weakens the realtionship between talent/effort and achievement.
Linda Sun - aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul, Chinese spy
It’s extraordinarily difficult to find recent (since 2020) statistics, about economic indicators, academic performance, government debt, crime, etc.
It’s fairly difficult to find the works of critical theorists online. Adam Smith, Marl Marx, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau - all have not only primary texts by quotes and memes galore. The critical theorists are hardly less influential (these days), yet their ideas seem to have been smuggled in, largely unattributed.
Herbert Marcuse, Gayle Rubin, Angela Davis, etc. are still unknown. Is this recency? Does it reflect the fact that their writing is clumsy and dense? Do activists and their controllers want to avoid making the primary texts available, for criticism and analysis?
Publishing Led Astray - why is progressive ideology (and ideology in general) so toxic for writing / fiction / screenwriting / storytelling?
How far can it go? - When does ‘woke’ re-adjust’?
‘Vicious Children’ - if culture sets parameters and guides ambitions, a flawed culture will result in great masses of members languishing or failing or falling into wastage. There is evil in the world, and it can be created and spread through cruelty and negligence and extreme selfishness.
‘Marshmallow experiment’
‘Adaptability - prison
‘Puer Aeternas’
The Women
The Children
The Cycles continues
Any culture-wide pathology that persists for more than 1-2 generations requires some kind of buy-in, especially among young women…
“The artist as an unafraid person.” - Patrick Bringley
“I’m lost because I’m free.” - Franz Kafka
W. H. Auden: “The Old Masters [of painting]: …about suffering they were never wrong.”
REAL victims tend to minimize their suffering (to preserve their dignity, and to move forward) and focus on their agency.
MODERN victims discount their agency altogether, and maximize their reported suffering, even if this entails lying or exaggerating.
Propaganda - it could be the case that the indoctrination of students is less harmful due to the particular values and ideas taught, and more harmful for the inculcation of the sense that reality and society are shallow and morally simple.
The inculcation of tendencies to long for status and to seek the approval of peers and authorities is an entirely different issue, and this may be yet still greater. This shapes peoples’ natures in a very real way, often for life.
The ‘Ferguson Effect’:
Dante’s threefold nature of sin:
ignorance
impotence
hatred
Fractal mapping - NGO’s (whose activities have become much more contentious in the wake of the trimming of USAID programs)
I’ve built a powerful tool to help you track nonprofit leadership and follow USAID grant flows with ease.
Here’s what you can do:
✅ Search by Principal Officer – Find nonprofits connected to a specific name.
✅ EIN & Nonprofit Name Lookup – Quickly locate organizations by tax ID or name.
✅ Expand Your View – See all principal officers linked to an EIN in one place.
✅ Follow the USAID Money Trail – Instantly trace how USAID grant dollars flow from the following NGOs:
🔹 National Endowment for Democracy
🔹 Freedom House
🔹 Global Communities
🔹 Internews Network
🔹 Consortium for Elections
🔹 PACT Inc
🔹 Institute of International Education
🔹 East-West Management Institute
🔹 Church World Service Inc.
I’ve always felt more comfortable in the hood than in swanky neighborhoods. There’s something about the artifice of relative social privilege that makes me a little uneasy.
My theory (still a work in progress) is: the truly wealthy (those with tens of millions of dollars) are secure upon the apex; they have no need to pretend they are anything but insanely privileged. They only perform for one other, and they’re a relatively small group.
(Unrelated) I suspect that many of the people in this group act and think as if their wealth is principally due to their own talent and efforts (this seems to be human nature). Instead, their resources are due to a combination of good decisions, access to a network of privilege, luck, and inherited blessings.
American Capitalism is curious in terms of how it shapes the self-identities of the participants:
Very poor → see themselves as poor (don’t care about status, want more money)
Poor → see themselves as middle class (many poor people consider themselves middle class, and cling to their difficult jobs and responsible financial behaviors as evidence for this possibility. They only want enough status to be considered middle class and beyond that status-seeking would seem fake and unseemly).
Middle class → see themselves as middle class
Upper middle class → see themselves as middle class (UMC members and even rich people usually also see themselves as middle class. They remember their younger years, when they worked hard for less money, or they unconsciously discount their financial achievement. These people are often very concerned with getting and keeping status, especially from other UMC/rich individuals).
The bureaucratic super-organism can largely be seen as an effort to impose order (through theory, rules, and process) on complex systems - human psychology, society, urban planning, markets, etc. This efforts are always flawed (often massively) but these flaws are invisible to the creature. Any effort to appreciate or evaluate its own shortcomings would risk its health and existence, and so the emphasis is on hiding failures, meeting arbitrary metrics, and slowly redefining problems such that they become the kinds of problems that the bureaucracy likes to solve, rather than the most important problems which exist.
From Purity (Jonathan Franzen) -
“…only the weak and feeble, the illegitimate, had to brag.”
“At home, he cleansed his hard drive of downloaded obscenity. His new sense of purpose and sobriety felt well worth the compulsive binge it had cost him to attain it.”
A modest proposal: salient, long-form debates upon contested issues
People who complain about misinformation rarely seem inclined to discuss or debate their claims. Rather, they hide behind credentials, institutions, and a kind of moral presumption (and class arrogance) to shame and silence those who disagree with them. Someone should tell them that these strategies are no longer effective, and that they’re becoming absurd. The credentials mean less, the institutions are discredited, and the moral high ground has been ceded so decisively that it’s now occupied, in many cases, by their opponents - people who have risked their reputations and careers to tell the truth. There’s an the obvious difference between brave people and cowards.
Eventually we may need some kind of Truth & Reconciliation commission to systematically unearth and illuminate the failures and unethical practices of institutions
“Any concern with truth must begin with intellectual humility…. and self-scrutiny.” Avoiding any acknowledgement of one’s own mistakes guarantees error and dishonesty.
“The politics of shame” has worked well for social justice ideology. To stop and reverse the institutional drift toward Critical Theory, it should be deployed against SJI believers, many of whom combine a kind of utopian smugness with an almost total lack of real-world experience.
Examples:
Shame from the working class directed at the rich, the idle, the overeducated, the residents insulated from crime and social discord
Shame from society (the young & productive parts) against the prosperous old and against nonprofits and other government clients and dependents
Hierophany (n.) -
A hierophany is a manifestation of the sacred or divine, where something ordinary becomes a conduit for the transcendent. It's a broader term than theophany, which specifically refers to the appearance of a god. Hierophanies can be found in various forms, including sacred spaces, objects, or even natural phenomena.
The tragedy of public housing - rent control, tragedy of the commons, selection mechanisms which concentrate and empower antisocial and toxic cultural elements.
Examples:
Pruitt Igoe
Chicago’s Southside
NYCHA'
Scandinavia’s rental market collapses
etc. (?)
Say Nothing (Patrick Radden Keefe)
“An awful lot of people come onto Earth, eat, work, and die and never contribute anything to the world. If they die, at least they will have done something.” - Albert Price [speaking about his daughter’s terrorist activities]
‘The United States of Agencies’
Are intelligence agencies the true masters of American government? They tend to concentrate great power in few hands, and they operate in total secrecy. It is possible that this combination has slowly shifted de facto power to them, and made other appendages of government mere puppets, at least in important matters.
Intellectual insecurity
Conservative, libertarian, federalist, anti-globalist spaces tend to be freewheeling, vibrant, heterodox.
I think that many leftists are beginning to understand that they are memetically frozen (although many do not understand this). They can’t see a way out though. They want to preserve their values and their cherished… but those are the problem. Any idea system which precludes criticism and debate must rely on coercion, or deception. It certainly will not be able to compete in the marketplace of ideas indefinitely.
The conservative heterodox ecosystem is a place that leftists pretend simply doesn’t exist.
Why don’t social justice ideologues change? Why are they proving to be so intransigent, even as narratives begin to crumble fully?
information flow / myopia / media bias
class bias and prejudice
lack of interclass communication and open debate
they cannot admit even the possibility that they are “the bad guys”
Story idea: ‘Feverland’
A mysterious pathogen (other factor?) makes people in a rural area suddenly descend into delusion and florid psychosis…
(Don’t) Trust the Experts
Absurdities (biological sex is a spectrum; it’s uncertain whether men have mean athletic advantages; etc.)
Bad science (statistics, models, reasoning, assumptions…
Arrogance/unwillingness to acknowledge limitations to knowledge (psychology, policymaking, ECE)
Unwillingness to admit mistakes
Lacklustre selection, promotion, and award candidates (DEI, conformity, bureaucratic criteria)
Book awards (~80% female), racial criteria for air traffic controllers and Cornell faculty, etc.
Lack of institutional and individual accountability
Why not reform? Because it’s difficult and because it threatens people’s jobs…
Why does it seem that conservatives (or at least ideological outsiders) are the only ones digging into and trying to improve these organizations? It’s because these organizations are not trying to produce innovation and social value - not really. They’re trying to appear to do these things, while protecting their financial resources and status and power.
An expert class that’s ideological and silly and unreliable isn’t an expert class at all.
The lulling routines of rules, credentials, schedules, meetings, metrics, etc.: the hard borders to almost any role or specialty these days. It’s possible that the rules and standards have, in many cases, become pathological and smothering - unproductive and limiting enough that they are dissuading talented and energetic candidates from pursuing careers in many fields.
Some Notes on Political Symbolism
Every political movement adopts and exploits symbols.
The fact that modern progressivism minimizes old symbols (national flag, cross, Constitution, etc.) doesn’t mean that they are more inclusive. Instead, they’ve adopted different symbols, which have different meanings. These symbols, and the ideas they reflect, are sources of insight into the modern left.
[1] Inevitable sorting and development of hierarchies within the GULAG system:
Because the ripped clothes seemed designed to rob them of dignity, many prisoners would later go to great lengths to improve them… In general, women who were able to sew or to quilt were able to earn extra bread rations, so coveted were even the slightest improvements to the standard uniform: the ability to distinguish oneself, to look slightly better than the others, would become… associated with higher rank, better health, greater privilege.
The inevitable, organic development of privilege and status in the most brutalized and communist social setting of the 20th century…
[2] Intricate, ‘scientific’, completely imaginary rules and regulations for GULAG life:
…the distribution of food to prisoners in camps grew into quite an elaborate science.
Camp commanders were instructed to lower the bread ration of those prisoners meeting only 75 percent of the norm by 50 grams, and for those meeting only 50 percent by 100 grams. Those overfulfilling the plan, on the other hand, received an extra 50 grams of buckwheat, 25 grams of meat, and 25 grams of fish, among other things.
[3] The importance of competence (in the context of sex roles):
In the women-only sewing buildings:
Machinery also broke down constantly, a factor not necessarily taken into account when norms were calculated. In the same textile factory, “mechanics were constantly being summoned. These were mostly female convicts. The repairs went on for hours, for the women were not skilled. It became impossible to do the compulsory amount of work, and consequently we received no bread.”
