Space Lizard

Pointless mental and verbal masturbation, imo.

You're talking about symptoms more than causes. What is causing people to lose faith in democracy? A healthy system doesn't produce this level of discontent. It's better to deal with the underlying disease than just treat the symptoms. The "far right" has little power; all major American institutions are controlled by moderates and liberals. If there is a systemic failure, we have to look first at the people running the show, not the guys on the margins.

Why only two? There's a famous book called The Nine Nations of North America that describes how North America naturally divides into nine economic and cultural regions. That would make more sense than a Red/Blue divide, which looks totally unworkable.

If you want to stop identifying with the body, this universe and incarnated life are probably not for you. Maybe the Metaverse will live up to its promise and become the Matrix, where you can live full-time in a simulated world of pure mind. Good luck.

The map is not the territory. The Ten Thousand Things are not the Tao. Tonal is not nagual. Yeah this is old news.

Is the right wing responsible for the decay and crime we're seeing in American cities that have been run by liberals for decades? Is the right wing driving people out of liberal regions to more conservative locales like Florida, Arizona or Idaho? Blaming everything on the right wing seems to be a favorite tactic of people who don't want to take any responsibility for their own failures.

Here's a guy who can't wait to get fully plugged into the Matrix and leave the problematic place called "reality" behind. Good luck with that dude.

Or maybe the shit you're full of is the same as God. How would you tell the difference? And what does any of this mean, as a practical matter and not just some vague thoughts in your head and words on a screen? A traditional Zen teacher would have a field day here beating people with sticks for talking all this nonsense.

It looks totally dystopian to me. But I'm fascinated by this drive so many people have to replace reality by simulations and counterfeits, and to live in fantasy worlds. Why are Disneyland, Las Vegas, movies, video games and social media so popular? One explanation is that artificial realities can be controlled, programmed and made to conform to an ideology far easier than reality, which is messy and uncontrollable. Another is that reality is flawed, difficult, limited, unsatisfying, and virtual worlds are an escape. Put these two tendencies together, and you get potential VR tyrants like Zuckerberg, lording over a dystopian world of reality-hating zombies, and eventually the Matrix. It’s terrifying. Fortunately I don’t see how it can succeed; we can’t escape reality, no matter how much we may want to, and how alluring illusionists like Zuckerberg make it.

It seems like a place where people want to talk about powerful states of consciousness that words can’t convey, but keep trying anyway. So we get a lot of very abstract statements like “God is love” that don’t seem to have any practical meaning. But I’m not going to be too critical; at least people are trying to talk about something more interesting than the latest political scandal or sporting event. My only real complaint is the association of leftist political ideals with mysticism, which doesn’t agree with my own perceptions or biases.

First I would ask: what is so terrible about Poland or Hungary that you are presenting it as this specter that we should be worried about? Have you been to either place? But more to the point, the time-tested way of solving irreconcilable political differences is divorce. Declare your independence, secede, separate; break the USA into more coherent political entities. There’s no reason under the sun why people who have such fundamental differences of values should share a government. The USA was formed by people who thought this way, who didn’t want to live under tyranny, so it would be the American thing to do, right?

What is the upshot of this belief? It sounds like a meaningless abstraction, or maybe a statement of nihilism. What are the consequences of this belief in your life?

Yes, to me this fear and polarization is the really dangerous pandemic. It has infected a lot of people's minds to the point where their thinking has become totally binary, their language weaponized and their behavior robotic. It's like they have a transistor in their brains that flips either "good tribe" or "bad tribe" on any issue. Their main concern isn't studying the evidence with an independent mind, but looking at the tribal markers of people involved and immediately labelling anyone of the bad tribe with demeaning language ("anti-vaxxer", "climate denier", etc.). And once a decision has been reached by the tribe's authorities, the matter is settled, debate is closed, and they go into thought police mode. It's classic totalitarian behavior. I really don't understand this mentality, by people who otherwise often seem thoughtful and intelligent. Is it the fatal flaw of rationalism, the idea that there is only one permissible answer to any question? Or is more of a manifestation of religious puritanism or a memetic infection? Does anyone have any insight?

That's an interesting question. For me, too much internet use is not healthy. I don't feel stronger after I've spent all day surfing the internet, do you? It's more of an unhealthy addiction, like smoking. Reality is still out there in the physical world; we can't survive and thrive in these artificial environments. I see people who spend most of their lives online and they tend to look sickly, flabby, neurotic, detached from reality--the opposite of strong. But that's just, like, my opinion.

The internet was developed in the 1960s, by guys like this (born 1926) and this (born 1924), when the boomers were kids.

Yes, well Hegel was a strange one. His idea that human history is progressing toward some final goal, according to a "dialectic", is a bizarre religious story that I see no reason to believe. But he does seem to be the biggest influence on leftist and progressive thinking. His "religion of progress" is just another myth, and nonsense, to me. I am amazed how many people believe it who are otherwise skeptical of religion.

Let's look at recent America history. The parents of baby-boomers lived through hard times of depressions and world wars, became strong men and created the good times that the boomers were born into. Boomers had it very easy, became a generation of over-indulged weak men, by and large, and brought harder times upon us. So these are possible data points for Rogan's model. That picture looks like its from the "good times" of the 1950s-60s, when boomers were still little kids and hadn't grown up to become "sissies" and create harder times. So it all makes sense, if you look at it from this perspective.

Still not sure why this idea of a cycle is so triggering to people. I imagine the average non internet forum dweller would consider it common sense. If your life gets too easy and you over-indulge yourself, you are going to have problems eventually. If you face adversity with strength, your life is likely to improve. I'm sure most of you have experienced something like that in your lives. Now extrapolate to a whole society. Or research the outcome of the "mouse utopia" experiments, where mice that could indulge themselves at will developed all kinds of pathologies. Equating strength to fascism is just silly. These are just facts about nature, and human beings have not and cannot transcend nature, no matter how many psychedelics they take.

I just want to comment in a friendly way that I find this forum pretty amusing. I feel like I've wandered into a cult that I'm not part of. I see a lot of statements like: Do statements this abstract have any meaning? If I said "Spaghetti is love. All is spaghetti", would this be any less meaningful? It seems like the kind stuff you say when you're very high and think you're being profound, but really aren't saying anything. Not trying to be rude or a troll, just challenging.

"Reactionary" and "nobody" are just an ad hominems, not substantive criticisms. As I posted earlier, it sounds similar to Ibn Khaldun's cyclical theory of history, which he based on observations of actual events. I'm not sure about the Kali Yuga connection, but Rogan is probably connecting the four Yugas to the four phases of the chart, and saying that the "weak men creating hard times" is what happens in the Kali Yuga . What fascinates me is the reaction to Rogan's post; the way people have an almost religious commitment to Progress, and treat people who don't think history is an upward curve from a barbaric and ignorant past to a glorious utopian future like they're heretics. And they accuse Rogan of being infected by ideology when they are so obviously in the grip of an ideology themselves (the Religion of Progress).

What is the actual criticism of Rogan's chart? So far I've heard declarations of faith in progress, that history is inevitably marching toward world unity and a progressive utopia, name-calling and calls to stop him. Whose minds are infected by ideology here, Rogan, or the people making ideological claims and calling him names for not buying their ideology?

How about the inverted pentagram, symbol of Satanism, ego-worship, I-theism, spirit trapped in matter, etc.

You reach this incredible level of consciousness on DMT, and what is the upshot? Have you escaped your mortal physical incarnation? No. Has anything fundamentally changed about reality? No. Are you in a state of intense delusion? Apparently. So who cares about it?

Keep in mind that the Western media is intensely Russophobic, and they can make anyone look bad with the right editing and without providing context. For example, the NGOs he is attacking are a well known vector of Western imperialism. When the West wants to meddle in a country, leading possibly to a coup like in the Ukraine or the attempted revolution in Hong Kong, they like to use NGOs. It's a way for them to subvert other societies indirectly without being too obvious about it. That's not to say that Lukashenko doesn't have tyrannical tendencies, just that you have to put things in context. When a country is always being harassed by a meddlesome superpower, its leaders tend to react badly. But the media never gives you any context, so you just think they're nasty tyrants. Imagine if they interviewed an angry homeowner who was shouting and threatening people, but they didn't tell you that he had been getting harassed by the same gang of thieves for a year; you would probably think the guy was bad news. That's the kind of thing the media does all the time with people it doesn't like. It's called propaganda.

@Joel3102 It probably comes from the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who had a similar theory. He observed that cohesive barbarian tribes would conquer decadent dynasties, then the barbarians would become civilized, get soft and lose their cohesion, and some new barbarian tribe would conquer them, and the cycle repeats.