Why is it so good?

One question people regularly think of when I tell them that Satan made this world is “why isn’t it worse?”, meaning, why are there good things in it at all then?

I went through that in the last book, but there are some things that may be added.

First, he didn’t actually get what he wanted. He didn’t actually design the world; he made a wish list of parameters he gave to the Jewel, who did all the heavy lifting. Sanat Kumar was like an idiot boss who has a genius employee. He makes his idiotic requests, and the employee figures out how to get the closest to that with what’s actually possible. There were things about the world Satan didn’t like. Like, at all. He tried to change them, but then the world didn’t work. Like, the matter didn’t fuse on nuclear or chemical level. Life didn’t happen, or it remained single-celled forever. Or life happened and was quickly extinguished. Or the species that he wanted got extinct. Or the souls didn’t bind to the bodies. Basically, this is as bad as he could get it before the whole thing became unliveable.

Also, the Gods had a say, as I wrote in the book. They intervened to a point; its very foundations are cracked, allowing transcendence to manifest despite Sanat Kumar’s intent and commands, because the most fundamental layer of everything exists because of God, and the Jewel exists because of God’s plan and intent. This forced Sanat Kumar to just live with some things he absolutely hated, and wouldn’t have allowed them to exist if it were up to him. So, he intervened on the more superficial layer of civilization, when the layer of world architecture couldn’t be pushed beyond a certain point.

The thing is, Satan was never quite happy with what he got, or how it evolved. Some things he hated always seemed to emerge, no matter how hard he tried to suppress them. He would design the system so that oppressing and abusing others was more profitable and effective, and people would still find a way to love someone and care for them, making him irate. The selfish properties he promoted and tried to make more effective ended up creating profound unhappiness despite his propaganda. He designed everything so people would win by playing according to his rules, and most chose “mediocrity” or even “loss”, completely eschewing his rules and the game itself. Almost nobody wanted to win according to his definition of a victory. Instead, they instinctively approximated behaviours they remembered from Heaven, on some layer that wasn’t memory, so he couldn’t completely suppress it. When people embrace his rules and ideals, the entire structure collapses and they notice.

That doesn’t mean that this place is good, and that God is happy with it. Quite the contrary. It’s terrible, but not as terrible as Satan wanted it. He didn’t get his way completely, because his ideas are so fundamentally bad, that reality collapses when they are implemented fully. This leaves a broken compromise with what Satan wanted, and what he could realistically get, softened additionally by the fact that he was allowed to do this in the first place because God had his plans and ideas that had precedence.

So, that’s why beautiful things exist here; that’s why this place is a mixture. That’s why brahman permeates the world the way butter permeates milk. That’s why baby wolves are cute, and societies function when people instinctively emulate aspects of heaven on every level, and they fall apart when Satan gets his way. He designed it, but everything is made upon God, and within God’s mind.

Evil ideology

I understand there’s a problem with communication that I tend to have when I write something.

It’s very concentrated. When I make a statement, I usually invested quite a bit of thought in it. Found out the facts, thought about them a lot, thought what they actually mean, explored the corollaries, mapped out the entire network of ideas around it all, and when I give you the conclusion, it looks like complete nonsense… and then you spend ten years slowly thinking about it, observing how things work, and you eventually get there.

One of those ideas, that I expressed in my latest book, is that the entire system of belief behind the French Revolution and American independence is essentially Satan’s ideology that is being sold to people in order to destroy them. The point of the whole exercise is to sell you ideas that will make you more like Satan, and less like the Gods.

Just listen to the words: independence, liberty, freedom, empowerment, emancipation, rights, democracy. You are conditioned to automatically feel good about them. You automatically assume they are good. And yet, if you take a look at any Satanic church, you will see that they profess the same ideals. They worship the same concepts. They think God is the problem you need to be emancipated from. They think heaven is an oppressive system and Satan is offering freedom. They think service degrades you, that transcendence is an illusion and you are an animal that needs to embrace its animal nature. The difference in belief between modern America and outright Satanism is essentially zero. This is not because Satanism is using American ideals to advertise itself. It’s because America is a Satanist project from its inception.

So, a statement that is so concentrated that it sounds absurd is in fact something that can be easily unpacked and verified. But let’s also dismantle those modernist mantras. Oppression, emancipation, empowerment, rights, democracy and so on.

Democracy is what exactly? Everybody gets a vote? Even Socrates understood how that works and why it’s a terrible idea. If you give everybody a vote, it means you’re empowering demagogues, not the people. Basically, most people are ignorant and disinterested. They don’t know how things actually work or what should be done, and they don’t even care. So, people who are experts in manipulating the masses will sell them propaganda and use them as means of empowering themselves. Since the demagogues are among the worst people in the world, this is whom democracy empowers and this is who actually harvests votes – the propagandists with money and an agenda. This was sold to you as the superior form of government – by the propagandists with an agenda.

Rights also sound good – I have rights, you can’t fuck with me. Until you understand that the people giving you your supposed rights are the ones most likely to fuck with you. In America, police will treat you like a slave; they will command you to lie on the floor like a slave and put you in chains, they will steal any cash you happen to have with some false excuse, they will pepper spray you or taser you if you show any reaction other than absolute submission to their authority, and they will read you your “rights” that essentially say that you are a slave and they are so hostile to you that whatever you do will be used as evidence against you, and your only recourse is an attorney who will represent you in a court system that’s basically been put there by the same system that put the police there to keep you enslaved and submissive. I explained the concept of rights to my son by saying that those are basically things invented by the state in order to sell you the idea that they are the ones you depend on in order to have them. Since they invented the concept of rights, they can also revoke it or modify it by making it into a mockery, for instance giving obvious enemies of everything good more rights and protections than they give normal people. They can also import hostile foreigners and pretend those are some victim category that requires special protections. There’s no end to the abuse of the concept, since it was originally designed with malicious intent in mind. I also told him that this concept was invented because they wanted to remove religion from legislature, because the concept of law was originally seen as provided by God, and implemented by the state. God said “don’t kill”, and the state then made it into laws against murder, with the entire infrastructure that enforces it. God said “don’t steal” and the state translated it into laws that protect property. God said “do not covet” and the state translated it into laws that define and protect the public morale and decency. Essentially, the state used to be an extension of religion, and certain Satanist groups hated that and invented an alternative legal system, based not on obedience to God and on the concept of duties, but on inverted assumptions; essentially, that killing you or stealing from you is bad not because God forbade it, but because you have inherent rights to life and property. Everybody has been brainwashed to no end into accepting this idiotic concept, and now you can’t even question it without zombies looking at you as if you questioned the existence of gravity. However, how is a right to life even a thing? Life by default ends in death. Not even life itself believes in the right to life. The state that claims to protect your rights will be the first to get you killed if it needs soldiers to defend it. The terrible slaughterhouses of first and second world war were a great example – oh, we’re secular states that believe in rights, so we’ll forcefully or deceptively recruit you to die for some foolish reason we made up. We’ll also kill people who disobey our authority. But yeah, we’re guaranteeing your rights.

I told my son that the worst thing that can happen to him is to be reduced to a situation where the state gives him what they think he has a right to. Basically, you’re doing fine not because you have rights, but because I have duties. It has absolutely nothing to do with the state, and everything to do with my relationship with God. Without God, you would have hell, of the kind my parents created for me, or the kind the state creates for people who are reduced to asking for social care. God is not some heavenly tyrant you need emancipation from. God is the silent source of good things that have happened to you. God is the reason why good people are good, and absence of God is why evil people are evil. God is the light and love behind duty, and absence of that light is why Satan invented the concept of rights and had his servants promote it. You don’t need rights when you’re surrounded by people who love you, as God commanded. You think you need rights to protect you from the godless people who want to hurt you and take advantage of you, and when you are in danger of them you get to understand that those exact ones invented the concept of rights so that they could cut you away from God’s love.

Satan used to spread propaganda about how he left heaven because he didn’t want to obey God, didn’t want to serve, didn’t want to live in tyranny. Sure. In fact, he couldn’t bear people being happy, free and loving each other. He wanted them to cry in oppression so that he could feel powerful, because when he saw powerful, free people in heaven, he felt hatred, and some kind of a miserable combination of envy, fear and deprivation that weak, depraved beings feel when they see strong, fulfilled ones. That’s how all his propaganda always worked – re-package depravity as emancipation. Re-package being small, hateful, envious and evil and hating the people whose magnificent, fulfilled and radiant state made him feel the full impact of his depraved nature by providing a point of reference, into being oppressed by them and unwilling to take it any more. It’s what you get in every single instance when you scratch the surface of all those modernist people supposedly fighting for emancipation, progress and liberation. You get a depraved Lesbian hating the fact that all normal women want to get married and have families, so she invents feminism – trying to convince them that they are oppressed and in need of emancipation, and finds support in rich people who want women as cheap workforce, and the state that wants women paying taxes. You think that’s exaggerated caricature? It’s the actual history of feminism. Look it up. All the women who came up with feminism in the first place were the rock bottom of the pool of human depravity. You would be hard pressed to find worse people anywhere. All their intentions were selfish and evil. Feminism exists because Satan hated women, and hated men and women being happy together even more, so he invented a “cure” for that. He thought if everybody was miserable, he’ll at least feel some malicious glee that is the equivalent of happiness in his depraved existence, as if that would help him.

Yes, that’s the root cause behind all those “mantras” – democracy, emancipation, freedom, rights. Hatred of God, pain of seeing fulfilled and happy people just hanging out, loving each other, respecting each other and praising God’s light. That’s what you’ve been sold, and why.

Improving

I think I’m developing a new aspect of my photographic style.

It’s not “everything sharp”. It’s not a close-up detail with blurred background either.

Motive sharp, everything else gone

Everything sharp

Those two used to be my mainstays; now, I’m doing something that’s a detail of the wider scene, sometimes sharp, and sometimes with the planes separated by depth of field or geometry.

Basically, instead of a berry or an insect or a bird isolated by the depth of field, I separate a piece of the scenery. You’d expect me to do it with a longer focal length, but I sometimes do it with an ultrawide, too.

I started doing it more than a year ago, and I’m noticing it just now; I went through my recent photos and they didn’t look like my typical stuff, and I asked myself why.

They still have the same atmosphere like my other stuff, though. It’s just that the technical and compositional aspect seems to have evolved.

I think I developed this technique because I stopped giving a shit about what anyone online would think. You see, it’s actually hard to learn new things if you maintain an online presence, because people like seeing the stuff you’re doing well, and they don’t like seeing the transitional stuff that’s not necessarily good – or, more accurately, it’s bad by necessity, because you’re learning, and when you’re learning you’re not getting everything right. So, you kind of tend to produce more of the stuff you’re good at, in order to avoid criticism, and by doing so you don’t improve. You learn how to insulate yourself against criticism online very quickly; basically, you check your work for things someone might object to, and you post the most polished versions of the stuff that got you the most praise. There were a few years when I tended to do that. It actually improved my technique; I learned how to get perfect sharpness when things needed to be perfectly sharp, and how to get perfect blur when they needed to be blurred out. However, it had a drawback – I stopped taking pictures I felt were good, when I knew people wouldn’t get the point quickly enough. I stopped taking specific atmospheric shots that were not compositionally obvious enough for the online audience. However, at some point, I stopped giving a shit to the point where I am now revisiting those things, the aspects of photography where I never practiced enough to get really good at them because I knew other stuff would be better received.

I also shoot more black&white now, and I tend to include humans and their artefacts in the pictures more, instead of trying to create an impression of untouched nature. It’s not that I never did that before, but I usually avoided it. I now treat humans like bugs or squirrels – they just happen to be there, as parts of the scenery.

It’s not that I abandoned my old forms – I still do “everything sharp, no human presence, pure nature, wide scenery” pictures, as well as my standard closeup portraits of tiny things. It’s just that I also do the things in between.

Late evening

I took the FE 135mm f/1.8 and A7RV for a walk tonight. I thought, it there’s going to be any motives, they are going to require a long lens, and I was right. I didn’t want to take the 100-400mm, because it’s slow and I would have ran out of light much sooner.

The results were much better than I expected, because I didn’t really expect anything; the sun sets earlier now, and it was cloudy all day so I expected a grey mess, and instead I got very nice colours.

Peripheral

I was just thinking about something that changed in the way I take pictures.

At some point, I used to try to take pictures that would show the equipment in the most advantageous light. Partially it was because I was writing equipment reviews for a photography e-zine, but also because I subconsciously tried to avoid criticism of not being a good enough photographer to get the best out of the gear. I tried to make the pictures look as spectacular as possible, regardless of what I actually liked.

At some point, I stopped caring about that, because it made me feel stupid. Did I buy the camera to do the stuff I want to do, or did the camera buy me in order to show off its capabilities? Sure, I like making spectacular images occasionally. However, something I like making completely unspectacular images of nothing in particular because it reflects my mood, or captures some idea. However, I initially took pictures without any regard for the audience, then started taking pictures in order to prove something and impress the audience, and now I’m back at doing it for myself and not giving much thought to what anyone would say.

For instance, here are two versions of the same place, from different parts of the summer. The first is when the lavender was blooming and I was taking pictures of butterflies there with an ultra-wide lens, which is a weird thing to do, but I felt like doing it because I got bored of doing it the “right way”, with a telephoto.

The second picture is at the end of the summer. The lavender is gone, the butterflies are gone, and even the sun is gone at the end of the day, and there’s nothing there but stone walls, fence, dry grass, and emptiness. This emptiness is the subject matter of the picture – everything that was worth looking at is gone, and what remains is what caught my attention, and I photographed it in very dark black&white tonality to showcase the total, utter absence of anything meaningful.

How am I supposed to do that? By using all the colour the camera is capable of capturing? Despite the fact that there’s nothing of colour there? Am I to try to capture it in a dynamic way, making a composition that tries to engage the audience? Why? There’s nothing dynamic there. It’s exactly the static, empty remainder of a once colourful scenery that caught my eye. Photographing it in the most static way possible, that accentuates the stillness that remains when everything meaningful is gone, is the exact point of that picture. It’s not supposed to evoke colourful and dynamic sentiment, it’s supposed to evoke the emptiness one feels playing Witcher 3, visiting Kaer Mohren after the main mission is complete, and everything is as you left it, only without anything that used to give it meaning. The people are gone, the meaning is gone, but for some reason the lights are still on. You don’t photograph this with Velvia or EBX; you photograph it with the most depressing kind of Ilford B&W. It’s not supposed to showcase the gear. The gear is merely a shovel that moves the manure. It’s not the subject matter of the picture. In some pictures, the gear is the obvious part of the composition; the first thing people will ask is what gear that was taken with, because it looks spectacular. In some cases, however, the picture could be taken with anything, and the gear is supposed to be the last thing on your mind when you look at it.