Notes From the Underground

Some thoughts you may like or that may ignite a little bomb inside of you.

“I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”―George Orwell,1984

For the record, I am for mental sovereignty and I don’t give two hoots about the reds or the blues. Fundamentally, I’m noticing more and more how little room there is for debate, discussion, dialectic (Hegelian not Marxist), disagreement… dare I say free flowing creative thought and free will. The emotional charges within many of us get discharged at the slightest provocation. Ideology rules the day based on repeated algorithmic rhetoric from precisely how we set it up on our devices. On some level I agree with the documentarian Adam Curtis, I don’t think there are any dark forces at play, the darkness is seeping up from inside, triggered by our own lizard brains and directly related to no longer lingering dormant remnants of schoolyard adolescent bullying. Some of us are the perpetrators, some of us, the victims. These two roles are largely unacknowledged on the conscious realm but the third point of the triangle of dependency is… we love to play the part of the savior.

Yes, we are the righteous ones! And, based on our vast support system embedded within the algorithm we’ve set up for ourselves on our applications, we have endless sources to prove our points to the “others”. However, we are largely preaching to the choir because we are also oddly motivated to surround ourselves with a group of humans who flourish within our algorithmic subset. This is a great manipulation and is doing none of us any service. So when we meet in the “real world”, we tend to leave our opinions behind lest we find ourselves in a mortal ideological battle of righteousness, dystopian and authoritarian to the core. When I take a risk and engage with others with what now feels like an anachronistic approach, utilizing critical thinking and the lost art of listening, there are times when I’m reminded where we’ve arrived. Watching the defensiveness emerge, sometimes the utter rage, often devolving to labeling, name-calling, and occasionally, as we’ve seen in some recent footage, literally holding hands over ears or walking away.

I began to notice this when I dared to question vaccine mandates and Covid policies in March of 2021. It became even more clear when I decided not to get vaccinated. But it was going on well before that during the lead up to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. I was still on the blue team then. I began to shift my view of things when I was labeled a murderer by those who were unwilling to accept my decision to remain unvaccinated. I began to see how the very same people in my algorithm were unable to consider that there was something strange afoot in our political and societal landscape. For me that brief liminal era allowed a not so subtle (to me anyway) graduation from the idea of “freedom to”, based in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, to “freedom from” based on concepts of misinformation, disinformation, censorship and the dangerous knife’s edge we’re walking in relation to how we are slaves to the myopic tunnel vision type information we’re receiving through our self-designed algorithms. A reminder, data harvesting and consumer surveillance is one of the largest industries so the corporate behemoth is tickled by our non-resistance to falling into The Matrix! Where’s Edward Snowden now? Oh right, exiled right along with a now eerily silenced Julian Assange. But I digress.

I’m going to attempt an experiment now. The following are notes from my Substack feed as well as a few images that will either delight you or send you into spasms of defensive rage. Feel free to comment. I promise you this, I will refrain from launching into any kind of counter defense. I will not judge you no matter how much you might attempt to destroy my character with labels, name-calling or preconceived notions about who I am. Perhaps I will only hear crickets as you move your hands towards your ears. So be it. The question you can ask yourselves, is it okay to speak out? As we move into the fall semester where throngs of students will be raising their voices in protest on college campuses, it’s important to consider that the incredibly juvenile labels cast with great abandon such as - “anti-semite!”, “communist!”, “fascist!”, along with the sophomoric reactions like - “a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for the Ayatollah!” may be useful for you to defend your position with conviction.

I’ll start my experiment with this:

~Everyone just calm down! It’s all gonna be okay! Just don’t get so worked up! Once we get back to normal with Harris/Walz all will be well again. You gotta just be positive and things will fall back into place! Don’t move too far to the left or too far to the right, stay right on the center line and try not to be too critical. Trust me. Prediction - this will be the next wave of bullshit. Critical thinking and mental sovereignty will be swept away by empty platitudes.

~In Kamala’s speech at the DNC, she proudly claimed she’s committed to building the most lethal military on the planet. Huge applause! This is proof that she and her followers are just as insane as Trump and his followers. WW3 seems more imminent than ever. “We begin bombing in five minutes”, jested Ronald Reagan back in the 1980’s.

~US exceptionalism is complete bullshit. I can’t believe how people still cheer for it. It’s designed for bullying narcissists. Pax Americana and the Marshall Plan is about power fundamentally. These god bless America speeches from the red and blue teams are embodiments of idiocracy.

~When Kamala was on the debate stage in 2020 with Bernie and the others I wrote a cheeky brief description of all the candidates. Hers was “chief prosecutor for the whole world”. I caught a bit of her speech last night and felt the same. Her campaign should be subtitled “The People Vs. Donald Trump”.

~I don’t want to be an ordinary citizen. I want all the fringe, free thinking weirdos to be embraced for their freethinking weirdness.

~One bizarre thing about modern US presidential races is watching politicians in one of the most dystopian civilizations ever to exist warning people that the other candidate wants to lead them into a dark dystopia, which depending on the party they label "communism" or "fascism".

~The message is so simple and clear. STOP ARMING ISRAEL. The resistance to the message lies in the hearts of every citizen who cannot accept that the US is complicit in the murder of innocent humans.

~Powerful speech at Riverside Church. Please watch and spread around. I just sent to a family member and got the reductionist question, “do you support Hamas”? Sad. I support Palestinian liberation!

~The suffering and murder and dismembered babies… “Pax Americana”? “Pax Romanus”! Tonight the blue cultists converge to do battle with the red cultists. I hope the protesters break in to the convention and disrupt the Joy-mala.

~This is pathological.

~I’m learning that the most intelligent among us are falling for the algorithms. It’s Edward Bernays on crack. Scary Terry Gilliam Brazil type shit. It’s not going to stop until… (fill in the blank). Here’s photo I took on my morning dog walk.

~There’s a campaign slogan I just noticed, “Joymala”, which is a perfect reminder that what so many yearn for is joy and comfort, or comfort and joy as the Christmas song goes. This yearning is tragic in the face of so many suffering at the hands of a powerful nation that supplies weapons to the state of Israel in order to kill Palestinians, considered less than human. The tyranny, the horror, the absolute non-humanity of this situation is unreal.

The Helplessness and Pain

FYI - These two babies were blown to bits.

The Windigo is always hungry — its curse is that the more it consumes, the more it wants. It is so hungry that it will eat its own kind. It’s a cannibal; that’s what makes it monstrous. To have an insatiable appetite that ends up destroying everything you love is the hallmark of a monster. Windigos were once humans who became sick with this terrible hunger. The message is that we humans possess the potential for consuming too much at the expense of life, and we need to find ways to rein it in. The story of the Windigo is a cautionary tale about greed. It establishes a taboo: the community needs to survive, and if one individual takes too much, then the community is endangered. All flourishing is mutual. I’ve been told that one of the meanings of the name Windigo has to do with thinking only of oneself. I see parallels between this monster and the kind of economies we have created, which are never satisfied and will destroy us all in order to have more, more, more. I see extreme methods of resource extraction — fracking, offshore drilling, various types of mining — as Windigo footprints. We don’t need to do these things. They are the antithesis of taking only what is given. The Windigo comes with blood on its mouth, always looking for more.

—Robin Wall Kimmerer

~Are you supporting monsters? Are you the monster?

~I’m speaking so shut the fuck up. This is a democracy! Everyone has a voice but if you want Trump let ME speak! I am talking about justice and freedom for ALL SO SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ... So I ask, in my writing, what is real?" – Philip K. Dick

I don’t think too many people take this quote and other quotes regarding manufacturing of consent seriously enough. Comfort, sedation, avoidance and denial are the ways we resist the systematic numbing of our minds. Critical thinking and mental sovereignty are quickly becoming lost arts. You can see it everywhere including in the stories being told. Those who still look deeply are pigeonholed in obvious ways through carefully manufactured labels and perceptions.

Don’t believe everything you think.