Category Archives: society

Illusion of choice

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I’ve been thinking how in the mid- to late-1990s there was that prevalent assumption in the “spiritual circles” that we are in the middle of some major global awakening, rise of global energy, mass Kundalini awakenings, spiritual insights and awakenings and so on. Here in Croatia, you couldn’t find a bus stop that didn’t have ads for Reiki-something, something-meditation or some guru or another. Even on the TV, there were esotheric/spiritual/something “shows”, popularising things from spiritual healing and health food to various gurus and spiritual schools.

Then, in the early 2000s, it all went “poof”.

My working hypothesis is that the popularisation of the social networks and smartphones completely shifted the interest from some kind of transcendence, however limited and flawed, to human interaction online, which essentially consumed everybody’s focus and energy. However, that’s not all. I also think there’s a lesson there about the illusion of choice.

You see, someone who was there in the 1990s would be inclined to believe that gurus, spiritual techniques and schools and transcendental realities in general were something common, if not ubiquitous. Enlightened gurus are dime a dozen, advertising themselves and competing for your attention, and you’re obviously so important if they all want you. You have a choice. Even if you chose something, a better thing might be around the corner and just waiting for you to get aware enough to notice.

It was all a circus, for the most part. Guys in Swami clothes and/or with weird names were mostly spiritual beginners with one or two samadhi experiences, all copying each other’s homework which is why they all sounded the same and there was this illusion that spirituality is a standardised thing, all rivers flowing to the same ocean and stuff. My students at that time mostly felt like I’m something normal and common, and if they don’t like my approach, a better guru is around the corner. Even I, myself, did not appreciate the uniqueness of my position.

In hindsight, there was no abundance of gurus and spiritual teachings, merely Hindu copy-pasta and lots of wannabes. The abundance of choice was like the abundance of make money fast and penis enlargement schemes on the Internet – all fake. If anyone knew what they were doing (and there were some), they had no following; those who had a following were all worse than useless. There was no global energy awakening, no ascension into higher realms, no “New Age”, all “channellings” were fake. “Kundalini awakenings” were almost all symptoms of mental disorders. The abundance of choice was just an illusion. It was just me and probably a handful of other, equally unknown people, our voices drowned by the cacophony of charlatans.

For people who had an actual opportunity to achieve something, this illusion of abundant choice was incredibly harmful, because most of them stagnated, missed their chance and will eventually have to do things the hard way. I think their situation was comparable to that of pretty girls on dating sites, where everybody seems to swipe right on them, but since they think wrong, they match with tall, muscular, rich guys who just fuck them all in a circle, while they live in an illusion that thousands of matches mean abundance of choice. Size of the haystack says nothing about the number of needles within. It just turns them into free hookers who soon rack up body counts appropriate for sex workers. Thinking you have abundance of choice is how your life gets wasted and at one point you wake up and realise that, other than the fact that half a kilometre of cock went through you, you also arrogantly rejected all the options that would actually work for you and make you happy. Now those good guys are married, your soul is crushed by all those side-fuck experiences, your youth is gone, and there seems to be nothing good to hope for.

The ego high created by the apparent choice is deadly. You think you’re on top of the world while you crush the best things in your life underfoot, and when the ride ends, it’s all gone. The choice that never was, the actual choices you arrogantly rejected, the time that passed riding the wave of illusion, and then you’re left with bad karma, ruins of a life you never started living, inflated ego and bitterness of being used.

Consent

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There’s a super annoying thing the American leftards are pushing for within their universities and, of course, as the brainwashed students graduate, the thing then spreads into the world. It’s the concept of explicit consent.

Basically, in order to not be accused of some violation or another, you would need to ask permission, verbally and explicitly, and granularly, for every interaction with another person.

Let me illustrate what that would look like.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

“Do you mind if I buy you a coffee?”

“Do you mind if I put my hand on your shoulder in order to draw your attention to something I want to show you?”

“Do you mind if I hold your hand?”

“Do you mind if I kiss you?”

“Do you mind if I kiss you again?”

“I would like to hold you, if that’s all right with you?”

“Would you like to have sex with me?”

“Can I take your clothes off?”

“Do you still want to have sex with me?”

“I’d like to have an orgasm now, if that’s ok with you?”

“Can I pull it out now?”

“Do you want me to make you coffee?”

“Can I kiss you now?”

Honestly, such idiocy could have been conceived only in leftist academia, because only they are so removed from all genuine human experience in the real world, for them to think that such a thing could possibly make sense. In reality, the first few steps are reasonable and make sense as common courtesy; people who are not yet introduced to each other need to do so gradually, in order to establish the level of contact they are comfortable with. However, after the basic introductions have been made, if a man keeps asking for permission for every single thing, instead of just judging the level of chemistry and going from there, any reasonable woman will see him as insecure, tentative and in fact super creepy. Also, the insistence that consent can be withdrawn at any point, even in retrospect, is incredibly dangerous. You see, it sounds nice and empowering to say that a woman can withdraw consent for intimacy at any point and it’s her right to say “no”, but imagine a situation where a woman leads a man on to the point where they are naked in bed, because she already consented to having sex, but now she says “no, that’s enough” because that makes her feel powerful. Great, but how is the man going to feel? Probably used for her mind games; taken advantage of, manipulated and violated. She’s basically going to piss him off and alienate him forever, if he has any self-respect worth speaking of. Also, what’s going to happen to women who play the empowerment games by making themselves attractive only to be able to say “no”, is that men are going to catch on, and then women will run out of men to say “no” to, because men will stop asking. That’s already a thing in America, BTW; the men almost entirely left the dating game and women who fucked around are starting to find out, and what they are finding out is that their major weapon and source of power, the sexual attractiveness to men, stops working if abused, and they are then left in a position of utter and complete disempowerment, because nobody cares about anything they have to offer. Nobody holds the door for them, nobody offers to help carry heavy bags, nobody offers their seat in public transport, nobody comments their look, nobody talks to them, nobody flirts with them, nobody asks them out. Everybody is just politely avoiding them as if they were a non-entity, not exactly lepers but more like dangerous, manipulative social outcasts whose game has been figured out.

And then women ask where are all the good men gone, and why is everybody ignoring them. Well, children, that’s the danger of playing power games with other people. They are not stupid, and they can retaliate. A woman’s power is to say no, but a man’s power is to say yes.

Yes, consent is important; however, it’s not absolute, unless you’re an omnipotent, completely independent and untouchable God or Goddess. If you need things, your consent is relative, and if you really need things, your consent might not matter at all, because you might not be in a position to refuse anything. Let me use work as an example. In the context of work, consent means you really need money in order to buy food and pay the bills, and you will offer to work for someone who can use your abilities and finds them useful enough to pay you money for it. This is a voluntary and consensual business relationship, but it doesn’t mean you have to like it in a sense that you would keep doing it even if you had unlimited financial resources, which is how the leftards would qualify a non-coercive relationship. Of course most consensual relationships are coercive and exploitative. Someone will offer you money if you work for them, and you will accept because you need the money more than you object to doing what you’re asked to do. Also, there are examples of non-consensual interactions that are completely fine, for instance if your heart suddenly stops and you fall down on a sidewalk, and a stranger jumps in and performs CPR on you and breaks your ribs and you are revived, no part of that interaction was consensual, a stranger put their hands on you with enough force to break your ribs, put their mouth on yours and inhaled into your lungs, your permission was neither sought, nor were you in a position to give it, and yet the only thing you are reasonably expect to do is thank them for saving your life, not sue them for touching you without permission while you were incapacitated. Basically, the less power you have the less likely you are to be asked permission about things, and requiring others to ask your permission is perceived as trying to acquire power others might not be willing to give you, and you might find yourself in a situation where you crave the opportunity to say no, but others refuse you that power by simply not offering anything. The trick with consensual relationship is that they go both ways. By saying “no” you are not just gaining power, you are also cutting off interest, which, if done too frequently, makes your power moot, or, in other words, you get to be rejected yourself, and in a way you might not be able to handle at all.

That’s the main problem with what all those leftards and feminazis are doing: society is a complicated dance, mostly non-verbal, between pushing too hard and not doing enough, between enforcing your boundaries and being sensitive to other people’s needs and wants. Sure, you can try to enforce rules according to which consensual sex means having a notarised written permission, and everything else qualifies as rape, and women will applaud you until they notice that they became so powerful that men don’t want to have anything to do with that, because it’s too risky. Even talking to a woman who can arbitrarily decide to report you for harassment and have you fired is too risky. So, then women find out that their main source of power in a society stems from being wanted by men, and if men withdraw their interest, women find themselves in a position where they are completely and utterly powerless. Power, respect and consent are games with multiple players. Just saying.

Keywords

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I’ve been reading some more of those space fantasies written by either AI, idiots or both.

There seem to be keywords, or key concepts, that are invariably used by idiots who are pretending to sound smart while having no idea what they’re talking about.

The first such concept is anything quantum. Quantum entanglement, quantum this, quantum that; I swear, whenever I hear or read the word quantum I develop a rash from the antibodies I start producing to that bullshit. Every goddamn idiot who is trying to make his materialism sound mystical resorts to some quantum bullshit. The second concept they resort to is the multiverse, especially if it’s related to the many worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is something evil people resort to in order to justify their moral relativism – basically, every action forks the universe into every possible choice-outcome, so you never did anything good or evil, because you did both at every single choice, so you can’t be judged. Of course, the only thing that quantum theory actually states is that our statistically formulated ignorance collapses into certainty at the moment of observation, and everything else is obscurantist nonsense propagated by charlatans, frauds and assholes. Multiverse, for instance, is invented by people who hate the concept of God, so they violated Occam’s razor in the most extreme way, by introducing an infinite number of unproven entities in order to avoid the unpleasant fact that some fundamental constants of this universe proved to be extremely finely tuned in order for it to exist in this form, which proves that it was created by an action of a conscious entity. After this slam-dunk evidence for creationism emerged, we started hearing all that multiverse nonsense, which is essentially atheist propaganda without a single fucking shred of evidence to back it; in fact, it’s worse in this sense than string theory. The only reason why it’s even talked about is atheist propaganda; if they talk about it enough, people will believe that there’s something real behind it. In fact, there is – since religions believe that Heaven exists as a separate Universe, this theoretically qualifies as a multiverse, but I kinda don’t think the atheists had that interpretation in mind.

The next concept that annoys me immensely is the idea of an AI that will go around and try to kill or enslave all organic life. I mean, it’s possible, but that’s not the problem with the AI. The problem is that totalitarian minded people using some kind of an AI, that doesn’t even have to be that smart or self-aware, will use it to look through millions of cameras, identify every human everywhere in order to map whatever they are doing at every point, in order to prevent and stop insurgencies that could remove them from power, ever, and by insurgency I mean even the actually free elections. I mean, who would dare to do anything to attract attention to themselves when it could mean degradation of their credit rating, closure of their bank account, deactivation of their credit cards, or instant activation of certain clauses on their mortgage. In a world where cash will be banned, and everything is done on credit, this amounts to a death sentence. That’s why every country is afraid of America: they all live on credit, and America controls their credit rating. Degrade it from average to trash, and you can kiss your economy goodbye. So, the problem with the AI isn’t that it will supersede humans. No, that stuff is dumber than a house fly, and it ain’t superseding shit. However, it’s very good at scanning faces and license plates and pairing them with databases of citizens and vehicles, and it’s also excellent at finding needles in haystacks. That’s the actual problem: it enslaves humans in a cage of fear, because the Big Brother now has a servant who watches through all eyes simultaneously, can track everyone at once, can access cloud storage and remote accounts, can plant fake evidence and destroy reputations, or simply track and prevent online payment. I wish the threat was death, because that would be a way out. The actual threat is worse.

I just had to take this off my chest because, really…

The fallacy of determinism

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The most qualified person is going to do the best job.

The best camera/lens is going to take the best picture.

The most beautiful woman is going to make the best wife.

The strongest guy in class is going to win at life.

The smartest kid at school is going to win at life.

The most hard working person is going to succeed.

I don’t even know how many times I encountered this expectation – that the inputs will somehow translate into results. However, life doesn’t exactly work that way. Raw capability and talent doesn’t linearly translate into results; in fact, it usually creates expectations, and expectations result in either pressure, which results in self-sabotage and failure, or hubris and failure. For instance, the worst thing that can happen to a kid seems to be early success. Early failure, however, is healthy, because if you crash early enough, you learn to deal with real life, which is for the most part failure, learning from it, changing, doing better, and eventually getting so used to the process that the psychological impact of failure no longer even registers for you. However, if success is expected for long enough, the devastating impact of failure can be such that you might never recover.

Also, “repeat success and victory until death” is a very poor approximation of life, and a very damaging lesson to teach people. The expectation that you’re going to keep doing well, keep winning, keep being successful, in a linear manner, is in fact so unrealistic that it borders on insanity. In fact, the healthy attitude would be that failure is so expected, that it’s in fact a necessary element of getting anything done, and if anything, failure is something that needs to be integrated in any process that eventually results in anything worthwhile. In fact, science does exactly that. In order to apply scientific method, you need to plan for all kinds of failure that will gather useful data, and that hopefully expands your knowledge enough to create a map of a wider, previously unknown reality. Usefulness of an experiment isn’t judged by whether it “succeeds”, but by whether it provides useful data. Failure to confirm a theory that is methodologically well done and provides solid data is in fact a scientific success. You now know something you didn’t know before.

In my experience, the best candidates for success in spiritual practice aren’t people who are in some top 1% of the most successful people in a group. In fact, they are the most likely to fail in the most dangerous ways possible, with the worst imaginable outcomes. The most likely ones to succeed are those who survived devastating trauma, loss, personal failure, and especially personal failure which they themselves caused by their foolishness, and the result broke their confidence, broke their entire world, and they look at you with eyes that have depth you can see in children who survived war, a terrible natural disaster, injury or disease. They were broken, they learned to shed the parts of life that don’t matter, they don’t have entitlement, expectation of success, expectation of survival, and they have awareness and intelligence far beyond expected in their peer group. Basically, the most likely person to become a buddha isn’t someone who lived life on easy mode, but someone who was broken by trauma and had to rebuild his entire world from ruin, because that’s what yoga is. It’s learning to break yourself by observation and analysis, learning to face the fundamental, painful truths, learning to bear the burden of suffering peacefully, without entitlement or expectation of success or pleasure. Surviving the process of yoga is failure. Being crushed, refined on a particle level, and reborn from trauma and suffering as much as from Divine insight and transcendental experience, dying and letting God be born from your ashes, is success in yoga.

This doesn’t mean that broken people of all kinds are good candidates for enlightenment. Far from it. Broken people who stay broken are not good candidates for anything; however, those beautiful, successful young people with perfect self-confidence that resulted from a life of success and admiration from others are in fact worse. They are beautiful in a way a brand new land mine is beautiful, because that thing is also perfect all the way until detonation, and then it’s all over. However, persistence built in terrible, prolonged suffering and humiliation, and hard work in resisting terrible circumstances and rebuilding your broken life by clinging to what matters and letting the water carry away the rest, that is someone who already made their first steps into yoga, and they just need to learn to be methodical about the process.

That’s something Christianity knows – if you’re trying to find God in the world, look at the crucifixion site, not the throne room. If you’re looking for the queen of heaven, look for someone crying under a cross. True success often looks like failure to worldly eyes, and true failure is often a result of repeated success. You can’t be rebuilt better if you’re not completely broken in the process. Surviving intact means failure. Building on apparent success with more success in fact enforces failure until everything is lost. Also, compassion is not necessarily a process of helping others succeed; sometimes it’s a process of allowing them to fail, be broken and lose their sense of self in order to start actually paying attention to reality. In order to be reborn, you need to learn how to die.

WTF?

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Those space fantasy stories I’ve been reading, something just struck me.

Most of them are normal stuff – a soldier saves a child buried in rubble, or a gravely injured woman belonging to the enemy species, and it changes his life because he finds purpose.

However, I just noticed a trend in some of those stories: huge corporations experimenting on children in illegal facilities. Then I remembered stories from American-occupied nations at war, children and adults being harvested for organs, or for the human slavery sex market, and I was like “oh, fuck”. Yeah. Who knows what those American soldiers saw or heard, other than wishing they saved women and children instead of ignoring or killing them.