We’re All “With Stupid” Today – (And So Is The Guy Next To Us)

In order to realize useful change, we’re going to need a culture in contact with reality (oh dear!)

Hey folks – no links at all today. I’m still monitoring all of the information channels I suggested last time (and they have been “batting a thousand” for any who are interested in hardcore reality), but my heart is just too heavy to do my usual extra-deep reading, as we all descend yet another level into unhinged madness.

As if this whole crazy lying mass-murdering and sanctimonious century, wasn’t already bad enough!

HOWEVER – I began this (Large Ess Small Press) years ago, because I really wanted to talk more about positive things. Specifically, I wrote a whole series of books about kindness, gratitude, working through difficult things with your friends and even finding the odd bit of transcendence, here and there.

The reason I write about politics, even though many others have more direct immediate knowledge, is because my strange experience of group madness (from my commune childhood) and the insight it gave me into the way collected aspiration can be perverted into the worst kinds of evil, is as relevant as can be to our modern politics. That gives me a line of hardcore fairness to complement my history keener mindset, and that’s a combination I do not often see, anywhere else. (I’m trying to add only signal, because we already have more than enough noise drowning out the best of culture, as it is).

I write about friendship love and gratitude, and try to work those crucial “Why we even bother” themes, into my scary pieces also, not to sugar a bitter pill, but rather to remind my friends, readers (and myself as well) that we always have to be checking and re-checking with our heart.

Yes, I know that sounds sappy – don’t care – it is as important as can be. Let me see if I can explain my reasoning on this, in a way that sounds useful even to my friends of faith, who already have a well established source of wisdom in their religion, and also to those of deep, all-direction skepticism.

I’m going to start with a few basic principles – working axioms for today’s purposes. If I had to stop to adversarially convince you that any of these is valid, I’d never make anything interesting out of them.

Love is a real thing. It isn’t a social construct, it isn’t about property relations or winning advantage.

One of the ways that love is similar to a religious faith, is that it does not work when we borrow and poach from it selectively, seeking only to take, and not ever give anything back to the greater source.

Real love is love that you recognize on a very deep level is bigger than just you, and surrender-to fully – go all-in – because that is when you two together, can make something that becomes truly magic.

By magic I don’t mean fancy, or special-er than others – it isn’t competitive at all. I just mean that two people together who are each feeling continuously grateful and beloved, can activate a whole bunch of things which are dormant potentials inside all of us, emotionally, mentally and even physically.

In a way, this fits with a strange theme I’ve been thinking about for years. How our heads are all full of levers that we often can’t throw ourselves, even though others (like say, a boss) can work them with ease!

I must also stop to note that a true and great friendship is love also. We don’t have to be sleeping with someone, for us to help each other throw our interior “Beloved” switches to “On” – but we absolutely do have to really love each other, though!

The thing about surrendering to a thing bigger than just you, is that it does not constrain, but rather expands your mind heart and soul, instantly (and keeps pushing all to grow stronger and more vital).

Now – before someone thinks I’m overlooking the (phone-book sized) compendium of bitchy disdain, that narcissistic consumerist materialists (who often self-describe as atheists) have attached to every sort of faith, loyalty and dedication to anything beyond the psychotic and selfish (many, in a nod to the actual paranoid schizophrenics who invented modern game theory, even outright insisting that all other attitudes to life are mere pretense, hiding the exact same selfish madness they prize most) no, I’m not.

I grew up on the left, and I could do the standard (very poorly considered) sneering emotionalist rant about the evils of religion and the foolishness of believing in greater powers and causes – for literally hours (and I’d certainly make way more money, if I sold-out my soul that way and just pandered).

But stick with me a moment here, please. Understanding that I am familiar-with and have fully digested every part of that argument, how about we flip it on its head for a moment, try looking at it that way?

What exactly is a self these days, anyhow? More precisely (and I can’t help but paraphrase the bard here) “what benefit does any individual gain if they win even the treasures of the entire world – but in the process, they also lose their own soul?”

Of course we must note the vast majority of people, even the still unusually wealthy “Golden Billion” citizens of the hyper-violent war-crazed western powers, have been feeling the squeeze increasingly, for several generations in a row. The market makes gains, but workers in every sector have been backsliding hard, in dignity, rights and sheer thriving. This has turned hope into fear and bitterness.

However – we still remain above all – the people of illusion and indulgence – the cult of the pacifying falsehood. This is at once what used to make our culture look appealing to others (mostly with flattering lies, told by commercially-amplified culture), and also our most universal weakness, as a lapsed-democratic people (that is, on a level one step above individual subcultures).

We, the world’s greatest ever consumerists, have created vast industries out of flattering illusions – and then forgotten how to escape illusions, and return to responsible consensus reality again. We’d rather live inside fantasy, full-time!

I have written at length about the weirdness of television and consumerism, as a deliberate strategy of social pacification in the post-WWII period. (Dreamed-up by grand strategists who both wanted the steady profits such a system would certainly generate, and seriously feared their own people could rise spontaneously, in ways they would not be able to control, were they not both adequately bribed and stupefied). That is – our whole modern way of thinking and living is based upon preventing genuine democracy from ever breaking out, and challenging the rule of our modern investor-class aristocrats. That’s what we’re used to. Normalcy.

It may be that I should have stressed this more, when talking about the boomers. They had a far more nourishing and substantial education than anyone here has got in a half a century – but they also had their own version of mind-warping and all encompassing “cellphone-like” mass culture to deal with – and crude as it was – Television (like radio before it) was also incredibly seductive, right from the start.

The sad fact is that though TV has lied boomers into war and profound complicity in outright evil, for their entire lives, they still believe TV lies so very much, they think people who don’t, are DANGEROUS – and huge majorities of them support laws to throw such free-thinkers in jail. (Which finally, for once and for all proves they were never progressives, but always closet fascists – as befits nearly perfected narcissists).

Makes me think – maybe it isn’t so much about the specific mental hazards of a given technology – but rather the novelty of the undermining threat and use, and the way our brains always seem to take too long to see the hazard, in a diet of pure candy. (Only once the injury is deeply dealt).

Old TV looks dumb to us now, seems almost silly to think of it as a mind-control system – but that’s mostly because those mentally damaging programs have already done their work, and we’ve moved on to being seduced (and destroyed) by new ones. Foolishly certain (every damn time) that we’ve learned lessons, while proving with our thoughts, actions and insane recklessness, that we absolutely have not.

I mentioned in a recent piece (above) that when I first started playing computer games, I had to step-enter the program by hand, every single time I wanted to play. Taught myself basic programming, just so I could goof-off awhile, after earning it.

A couple of years later, there was a whole range of commercial software (and a whole ton of piracy) and even some early “builder environments” so you could make your own graphic-driven game. To this day, I still regularly find myself laughing out loud at how many different ways modern games find, to solve the narrative and technical problems I once worked on myself, in super-crude (but also easy all-access) form.

But what hit me the other day, is that even in those earliest days of lousy graphics on a green phosphor screen, what really counted was how much we lent our imagination to the thing. My friend and I could happily spend hours “sailing” between ports and trading or pirate-raiding – even when our “ship” looked like poorly designed corporate logo, and the ‘sailing’ consisted of two lines of very sparse text.

Every year since (certainly, by an order of magnitude per decade) the user has been less of a mechanic and author of the digital process (with at least a clue of the backstage), and more of a passive consumer.

This makes our latest beguilements harder to resist – even for the naturally smart and skeptical, who often did see-through and resist earlier generations of corporate/state mind control technology. But the key factor that makes the very latest cellular pocket-computer head-scams work, is the still same basic thing that once made howdy doody utterly fascinating, even though, to kids of today, he and his whole production looks clunky and stupid beyond belief!

We invest our own imaginations in participating in the illusion. We voluntarily surrender-to, and then let it carry us away – with almost all of the same risks of any other surrender we can name (or critique) and very few of the potential benefits.

Which forces an uncomfortable question – have we displaced love and faith with ego and advertising?

I recently caught someone snarkily writing (probably in the grotesque sellout empire-promoting Guardian, just from the tone) about how the whole idea of podcasts was essentially anti-social, because you’re supposed to have friends to talk to, who can stimulate your thinking, and challenge it, also.

But of course, sneering tribalist gossip columnists posing as reporters are fake friends that displace real nutritious contact also. In fact, they are often far more destructive – because bullshit posing as news (invoking the authority of news-institutions), displaces the genuine democratically crucial real thing, every damn time – and real news is way more important than any light gossip or debate among friends.

It is SO HARD TO RESIST fake authority, even when we know it’s fake (and I mean, for everyone).

To be clear, I am not seeking to make people feel ashamed of their error, or even angry about missed opportunities to do better and grow as a human – I just want you to be better at understanding more people who I know are your natural allies – even if you’ve spent years now, thinking you hate them!

(Who was the feisty poet who so sympathetically said “If it ain’t impossible, I’m not interested!”) ;o)

Now let me skip back to the angry side of things for a moment – this is certainly a moment with plenty of cause for both shared frustration and very serious and reasonable fear, on many different levels (nuclear war is bad, m’kay? – can we please agree to take that, as another axiom for today? Even if our own governments no longer know it).

I was an angry teenage leftist back in the early eighties when Reagan was setting fire to the economy (plenty of heat, but the firewood was all precious load-bearing members) and the left was years into retreat.

Still – even in the age of “Greed is good” and increasing poverty and desperation, side by side with increasing ostentatious wealth (very thirties) I was sincerely convinced that the situation was dire, the problems were fairly simple and obvious, and if only I and others all around the world could help to “Get The Word Out” then everyone else would see this obvious manifest truth also, and suddenly a surpassing shared awareness would dawn, which would make great things possible, at long last.

The funny (and I mean actually hilarious) thing about being an old man, is that I still study in all of the same areas I was studying then – history, economics, societal cycles and revolutions (cultural and otherwise), and of course the rise and fall of entire civilizations. But I do not come to the same conclusions I once did, and I certainly do not think the problems or solutions are nearly as simple, or self-evident.

But I am still convinced that human beings can organize in ways that make us all far more successful (by which I mean both happier as people and also more useful to others) than any organizing principles we’ve favoured here in at least a half a century – and the more we can negotiate our competing claims and our disagreements based on principle, the more room we will have in our lives (and hearts) for the love and friendship which alone makes all the rest (struggles and joys both) truly worth it.

Again, yes I know that sounds pollyanna – still don’t care. If I used a technical or mechanical analogy, I’d just frustrate a different bunch of my readers. What I’m after here is the function – forget the illustration.

On the other hand – looking back at my foolish young self, I can also see an attitude and righteous arrogance which is functionally identical to the exact parts of religion which atheists most often caricaturize and disparage.

So now, rather than letting it get bogged down in any specific dogma, let me be clear by being specifically general. This applies to our ideas about race, about economics, sex, status and institutions, civil law, the environment – you name it.

As soon as we are convinced we have the one and only true immaculate answer, to which all others should also show reverence, we have crossed a line from rational advocate, to unhinged fanatic – and in crossing that line (which to us, often just feels like an increase in our sincerity and energy for the ‘cause’) we utterly destroy our ability to persuade more reasonable and well-balanced people.

The funny thing is – we are often so very sure we’re right (and so blind to our obnoxious certainty) that we become convinced that others who hear us, but still stubbornly refuse to accept “the message” (fill in the sacred pseudo-science, polisci-fi or faith blank) must therefore be a wilful opponent not of our lousy pitch (and often dumb and contradictory ideas) but of the sacred truth itself – and what could make a foe more perfectly identifiable as evil, than their refusal to accept sacred truth?

We use derisive labels like: deniers, skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and misinformation peddlers – but what we mean on an emotional level is SMITE THE BLASPHEMERS! (Burn the witch!)

Seriously folks – just try and make a distinction of logical type with a crazed fundamentalist fanatic.

You can’t – because there isn’t any. (“it ain’t what you do...” rears it’s ugly but useful head, yet again).

I have three more ideas which have been bouncing around my head since the last century and bear on all of this, which I should here add to the recipe (don’t cook-down all the spice from the start, add some of it late, so it still bites).

One of the strangest things about the “School” which was set up by the demented (and yet immaculate) son of the even more demented (and yet even more immaculate) matriarch of our strange commune, was that he sold it, and even taught us students to sell it to others, using genuinely fine educational theory.

I actually really enjoyed the whole thing about actively studying education, even as you were educating yourself (we each designed our own curriculum). Every kid should read thinkers like Piaget and Montessori – to add a layer of conscious awareness to their own process of constructing their conscious awareness!

But the thinker he most often referenced was AS Neil, who created the famous Summerhill free school in England. I liked Neil’s books and reading about his school. But even as a twelve year old it was hilariously evident that everything that was wrong with our school, was better thought-out in his (just as my old man eye sees that our ‘strengths’ – at a completely unreasonable psychological cost, I should make clear – were in just as strong a contrast with his own school’s infamous weaknesses).

Of course, basing a whole school on “freedom” (which we said we also did, but absolutely DID NOT, when the intense and therapeutically invasive psychological pressures are factored in) forced Neil to have a huge number of arguments and debates with skeptics around him, and even with his staff.

Just how the hell do you define a word as tricky as freedom, anyhow? How to describe it in such a way that you maximize the good, and minimize the very seductive and dangerous potentials, also implicit?

He came up with a beauty. He said “Freedom not license.” (and holy crap do I ever wish our demented headmaster had taken the last words to heart).

And sure enough, if you consider it for awhile, you quickly see this is a super-useful way to think about principled relations, rather than those based on emotion ego and consumerist tantrums – which are both fatally alienating and ultimately corporate-profitable, in equal measure, especially when tribal (left or right).

Your free range of motion starts to be a consideration and a negotiation, whenever it bumps into the freedoms of others. This doesn’t mean it stops – just that fairness demands more thought and reason, past that threshold.

The thing is – many of us now exist only inside ourselves – and have a digital echo chamber to tell us we’re correct already, and don’t really need to learn more and still more consideration for others (as absolutely ALL of us always do – lifelong – or else we are OBJECTIVELY ‘the assholes’ – simple as).

This has lead us to adopt an almost universal way of expressing our own needs and views, as if they should be recognized as great universal truths – regardless of how irrational or self-serving they are. (What I was saying a few pieces ago about so many fake-atheists, who really think they are god).

Once again – we represent even true and valid causes like a bunch of unprincipled fanatics, rather than considerate reasonable people who have respect for others, and their ideas and views also.

But how do we react to those WE see as fanatics? We panic – freak out – THEY MUST BE STOPPED! (Which means we become willing to authorize dangerous power grabs, from always-waiting grand schemers).

And of course, as long as we express ourselves as fanatics (again, this applies to left and right both) we end-up scaring a whole bunch of perfectly normal and decent people, instead of helping anyone at all – let far alone convincing them to share our perceptions and ‘sacred truths’.

Worse, we’re all so convinced of the outstandingly self-evident and all suffusing perfection of our (whatever the hell it is today) TRUTH, that we invariably interpret objections to our fanaticism, as if they are objections to the principles that we do not even know how to effectively articulate, anymore.

THEY must be doing what they are doing, for the worst reason we can imagine – WE aren’t like that.

The other thing that sitting inside our heads (and online) and not spending enough time with other human beings doing real things in the real world and just having an actual chaotic unpredictable and interesting life does to us, is make us place WAY too much emphasis on text, and not nearly enough on the reality behind it.

I know I hit this point practically every time – but I can’t help myself – we need to learn this one! The map is not the territory. Logical operations on symbols are not revelations of underlying realities. MODELS ARE NOT TRUTHS – sacred or otherwise (please read William Briggs on this – hard-reason GENIUS)

Love, friendship and all kinds of fine relationships (mentorship, caregiving) are more real than all of these theories we so treasure, in the same way that a forest is better for your soul than an office.

You could, sitting in an office, make all kinds of arguments about why that wasn’t so. But sitting in a forest clearing and watching the birds and insects do their thing among the flowers, you would never even want to try to make that argument in favour of the office. The whole idea would be ridiculous.

Far better still, you wouldn’t bother constructing a logical argument about how much nicer it was to be sitting in nature, because the friend who was there with you would get it themselves, instantly, anyhow, and who the hell wants to waste a great day like this with dumb arguments about nonsense?

One reason that keeping our toxic text-and-online imbalance in mind (and also going out of our way to redress it, with our real world friends and time in nature) is so important, is the whole question of conditionality.

Some ideas must rest on a foundation of another idea. Some ideas are small nice things, based on much bigger and stronger things which must first be established, before the niceties are even considered.

Maslow did a useful (and yet also hilarious) job of describing this “Hierarchy of needs”. Reminding us decadent westerners that the reason we struggle so hard with things like “Self-actualization” is because we (for awhile there) overcame basic survival fears, for the vast majority of the population.

People who are still struggling for basic subsistence – simply don’t have time for our neurotic obsessions!

The strange thing is – the west has been moving millions here in the direction of fundamental survival insecurity for decades now – and yet millions more still live in cultural bubbles where they think “First-world-problems” are the only (or at least, the most important) problems there are!

Try to imagine, just for a moment (use another country, if it helps) how you’d feel if you saw a bunch of rich people complaining they were sad or unfulfilled, while their own reckless consumerism was causing literal death and catastrophe for increasingly impoverished hard-struggling people around you.

The fact that the tribalists most obsessed with first world problems now call themselves the left, and the tribe which wants an end to war and a return to worker’s prosperity is TV labelled “far-right” is just one more sign that the world is in flux – the labels have come off EVERYTHING. Don’t believe them!

(Only a taste will tell – and yes it might be ambrosia or poison – that’s why we need smart and caring friends, more than ever – to help us sort with soul-grounding, instead of foul and inevitably corporate-skewed echo chambers).

A writer I admire greatly once said that the mistake many make about enlightenment is that the goal isn’t to stop there and just radiate, (wallow) but rather to be able to be more useful to the community around you. The point was not GLORY but SERVICE.

As an old leftist, I of course did the grand tour of eastern religions (and encountered some wonderful and some rather baffling texts, along the way), but I noticed a very long time ago that there are far more fakes than serious students, and still far more serious students, than actual believing exemplars.

I don’t mean this personally about Buddhists in particular (works all over the place) but if a western white person tells me they are a Buddhist, my first instinct is to laugh. I mean, it is cute, that they assume they even have the right basic mindset to approach the subject, but it is also extremely unlikely to be so.

I don’t mean to say I consider Buddhism “Too exalted” for whiteness to enter. Buddhism is what it is, and has value to those who give to it, what is required to activate that particular quality. All I’m saying is that as a group, we’re a bunch of self-indulgent children who have no basic discipline, and no respect for anything.

And that is NOT a good emotional basis from which to approach eastern religion (or philosophy, even). Kids using sacredness as a toy. Like a five year old who gets into mom’s makeup. Clown-face pretty!

At the same time as that message began to register on me from multiple impacts (the late eighties “New Age” craze was very instructively demented, in this way), I also began to think about Christianity differently. More precisely, I noticed that despite all of the things leftists are supposed to believe (and repeat, uncritically) about Christianity – absolutely none of the Christians I know (and I know a lot, from many different denominations) are like that. I mean literally zero.

Of course you can say I sort for kindness and love people naturally (and I sure hope I do, I try, anyhow) so my personal witness sample may be skewed away from the very worst. But how else could we hope to understand ANYTHING complex, but by showing some respect for the aspirational motivations?

I mean seriously, if I wanted to do a lecture about the hazards of and stupidities on the left, I could do that a thousand times more compellingly than any take-down of Religion. Not only because I’m way better informed (and I’ve been watching the mass foolishness discrediting my team, a very long while), but also because it wouldn’t be rote recitation – a stale sneering secular catechism – boilerplate disdain.

It would be thought and witness and caring and ‘how do we fix this and do better?’ Concerned/respectful.

Now one final spice in the stew – anyone – I mean any politician, any ‘reporter’ (BigWar salesman) any ‘expert’ or ‘academic’ who tells you, in video or written form “WE CANNOT AFFORD PUBLIC SKEPTICISM IN THIS MOMENT OF EMERGENCY” is EVIL – and they want you to agree to be more evil too.

I know that sounds at once too general, and yet also uncomfortably close to a whole lot of recent messaging, from which some are still having a hard time escaping. Once again – don’t care – this is much too important to skip, just because it makes some people feel awkward.

So let me take it from the other direction entirely. Why do we study history? Why especially, do weirdos like me bother trying to figure out the historical moment in which we are living? The problem is insanely difficult, the odds against recognizing the ideal perspective, even if we found it, are astronomical, and the deluge of lies are much harder to distinguish, in the anxious moment itself.

The reason we study history, is so we can be less disastrously stupid – right here and now this very moment.

Sorry, I know that sounds so simple as to be dumb, but we’ve all managed to forget it, somehow. More precisely, we are trained to let the nice people on TV (or web) “Tell us” what the context and previous applicable history is – without having any memory or framework ourselves, to judge the quality and suss-out the implicit corruptions built into the framing and hidden assumptions of their story.

When we let others act as our memory, we surrender our powers of judgment to whoever can pay the most money to corrupt (and/or train, or HR-filter) the people we have lazily decided to use from now on, instead of using our own brains and judgement.

A part of me wants to describe this as incredibly sad – and it is – because I can tell you that despite shifting indoctrination mediums and economic models, this basic mental self-possession dignity has steadily decreased with every generation, for many decades now. That’s not a value of people thing – it is instead about capabilities and happiness. I’m not saying they are lazy, I’m saying they were robbed of some of the very best in life.

But let’s be real here – the robbers aren’t ever going to be the ones to make them thriving vital and happy again, are they? They make all their money from our decay!

So now what if you do study history, and you find these weird coincidences, which happen every time a society does something especially ruinous, horrifying or self-destructive (of material or spiritual value).

What if you realize the Spanish American War (which first turned America from a Republic into an Empire – despite the protestations of Twain and many others) was sold by newspapers screaming “Remember the Maine!” A warship which blew up in Havana harbour – almost certainly because of a shitty boiler design (that is, accident and screw-up) but was described by “Experts” to the American people as DASTARDLY SABOTAGE BY DASTARDLY FOREIGNERS (did we say dastardly?)

And then you consider “REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA” torpedoed by German Uboats, but also definitely carrying munitions – as strictly forbidden by international treaties of the time, for passenger liners.

Helped get America into WWI (a disaster I’ve written about extensively), and also helped America pass one of the worst, most anti-freedom and constitution laws which remain on the books – you know the one – The Alien Enemies and Sedition Act which Obama used repeatedly to prosecute ACTUAL journalists as traitors (to warn the rest of the crowd to get in-line and sell BigWar, like BigMedia is supposed to).

And Pearl Harbour, and the Gulf of Tonkin, and “Nerve Gas precursors” (to justify Clinton’s missile strike, which utterly destroyed the largest and most modern generic drug factory in Sudan) and of course the recent top-forty (NYT, BBC and CNN) hit “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Back in town for another run on Broadway, after all these years – hoping (pathetically) that they’ll still draw those big big crowds.

Say you see all of that stuff, and the way mass murder and national horror followed, every single excited and non-rational moment which was twisted and amplified this way, by the delegated brains of our mass media. And say you also notice that every other time people raised their voices and said “This is a terrible mistake we’ve made before – the stated goal is unsound and illusory, and the costs will be incalculable” they got nothing but shit for it. When the mob is moved to charge, the calm get trampled!

Are you supposed to just shut up and smile and nod and conform, like a good little consumoron?

Are you supposed to say – go ahead and direct my nation and those of our so-called allies, to a project of endless imperial bloodshed, all for the sake of the very same tiny class of super-investors who have conspired to make the lives and communities which used to thrive, all across the western world, into hollow and pathetic doped-out and suicidal shells of their once vital and future-facing selves?

Are you supposed to say – you go ahead and do lifelong damage to all children and poor people right across our entire society for years on end – and then never even mention it, let far alone apologize for it, ever again. Pretend it never happened. Make them feel even more unheard, unvalued, unneeded. Silence the weakest – hurt them.

No, that isn’t what you are supposed to say. (and no I wouldn’t say it, even it if was).

Because if you’re doing it right (as in “ain’t what you do”) – going all-in – you don’t study anything deeply, and give to it what it needs, for ego or personal glory – but only for SERVICE. (In fact not infrequently, we learn service BY giving what is needed).

Anyhow, a “Cassandra” always struck me as a perfectly respectable kind of doomed, to be (if doomed we must all continue to actively decide to be). I saw it even as a kid – she isn’t screaming like that because she’s a crazy bitch – it’s ‘cause she loves you, your ship and quest – but sees the freakin’ rocks, you big dummy!

DISSENT IN THE MOMENT IS THE ONLY DISSENT THERE IS.

Stand with it – stand up for it – do not insult it by making it look like shit, to normal decent people, do not back any state abridgment of ANY rights. No tribalism applies.

And do not ever assume that your idea of “perfect immaculate truth” is all-suffusing and universal.

That is not enlightenment - it just feels like it in the moment. That is actually called being a dumb arrogant kid. Channel that drive into more study, skill and people!

By the time you can derive your own cause, entirely from first principles, instead of recitation, group mind and mob excitement, you’ll be savvy enough to judge your fights, smart enough to know who to fight, and sincere enough to land a proper blow, when you do. Inspirational, instead of just infuriating! Function (service) not ego (lies).

And don’t forget – check with your heart, every damn time.

Only way we can stay worthy of finding other true hearts alongside us, as we work on understanding and building the good.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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