Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

A good discussion about anarchism. Watch the whole thing before you read my acerbic commentary.

Watch before reading.

The problem isn't that anarchism is an ideology but that it's a fantasy. A leftist rationalist academic fantasy. No anarchism will exist in a thousand years, and the fact that leftists take it seriously as a form of governance demonstrates how completely ungrounded their conception of politics and society is. Only someone who has never done actual politics thinks that this could work. Human beings are corrupt mindless apes who need government to force them to act semi-correctly. These leftists talk about the province of God, but they don't even understand that God is real, and they try to ascribe these qualities to average mouth-breathing humans. For anarchism to have a chance to work, everyone would need to be as developed as The Buddha, and even then it would still struggle to fly. Completely unserious. No understanding of human development levels.

Leftists who think anarchism could work have no clue how civilization is organized and why. This is precisely what Michael Oakeshott spoke against. You cannot invent a better form of government by theorizing in your office. All of that will fail because it is not intelligent enough. Anarchism is childish next to the intelligence of civilization. Academic types don't fathom this. This is how academia makes you stupid. The real social world operates in a totally different way than your academic, moralistic ideals. You want anarchism? Go live alone in the forest with your friends, because you are not talking about civilization. Civilization requires strong hierarchy. That's the cost. Intelligence is understanding the true cost of things.

The point of government is that it needs to handle the behaviors of hundreds of millions of people with the development level of children, and worse, bloodthirsty delusional psychopaths.

Anarchism is a childish ideology born from a profound inexperience with governance.

My God, it's so irresponsible and unrealistic. Michael Oakeshott was so right. Leftists have no idea how civilization works. It's such profound group-think that they aren't even ashamed of themselves. Wow.

This is a fascinating example. Vlad reacts to Hunter Biden's description of God. Watch, and then read my commentary below:

Commentary:

• Hunter Biden says, "We are all literally connected." Not only is that true, that's more true than Vlad or even Hunter can fathom. Not only are we all connected, we are identical.
• Overall, Hunter Biden's description of God is very good. Of course it's still rather shallow, but for him it's good enough.
• Hunter Biden says, "I know that there is not a sentient being that is not literally me." Correct! Everyone is the same being. Everyone is God under the sock-puppet.
• Vlad responds by saying that he's open to Christian and Islamic mystical experiences, but not the New Age. Quoting Vlad: "It's very difficult to give an account of that which is not a kind of fantasy wish fulfillment."  This is backwards. Hunter's description is more accurate than most Christian and Islamic ones. So Vlad is mistaken here. It is popular to poo-poo the New Age, but the New Age is often more right than anything else, so be careful. You will get a better understanding of God via the New Age than Christianity or Islam, because the New Age is less dogmatic. Dogma cripples the mind's ability to comprehend God.
• Vlad dismisses Hunter's description as stemming from Hunter's emotional weakness as a drug addict. This is wrong. Hunter's description comes from direct experience from all the drugs he's done. Which shows you that a drug addict will have a deeper understanding of God than a trained philosopher. This is a great lesson. Drugs beat academia every time :)
• Vlad says he has meditated twice a day since 2004. Then he says that he understands the experience of the dissolution of the self and that there is a certain sense of "everything being connected", "but that's not the same as sitting at the dinner table and claiming that metaphysically everything is connected." Wrong. That's exactly what it means!
• Vlad says, "It does not follow that you can say, without sentimentality and kitch, that everything is everything." Of course Everything is Everything! Lol. That's exactly what God is! That is the highest truth.
• Vlad says there's no such thing as meditating well. This sounds true but is false. There are definitely right and wrong ways to meditate. In fact, most of the stuff people call meditation is not meditation at all, it is daydreaming. Good meditation requires extreme rigor and focus, which is why its so hard and rare. Which is why Vlad has not realized God after 20 years of it.
• Overall, this example beautifully reveals how easy it is to mislead yourself with meditation and academic philosophy. Vlad has studied so much academic philosophy that it has made him metaphysically and spiritually dense. And his 20+ years of daily meditation have not brought him any closer to realizing God. This is why I am critical of meditation and insist on psychedelics. With the right psychedelic, Vlad could realize God in 10 minutes.
• The reason I endorse psychedelics is precisely to avoid Vlad's situation. Without psychedelics, most spiritual people and meditators will end up like Vlad, which is heartbreaking. 20+ years and still no Awakening. Actualized.org is designed to preempt that trap.

Note: I enjoy and respect Vlad's work. Lots of love to him. He is just speaking about a topic outside his wheelhouse (which is another lesson in self-deception). The point of this post is not to criticize Vlad but to teach you a lesson.

A very subtle self-deception of capitalists is that most of them are workaholics, which makes them feel like they earned their excessive wealth through hard work — since they do in fact work long hours. For example, Elon Musk works long hours, works hard. Wall Street investment bankers work crazy long hours. However, that’s still a self-deception because the wealth they get for their work is entirely disproportional to their labor. Yes, Elon Musk works long and hard, but he does not work 1000x longer and harder than one of his engineers. Yet he is paid 1000x more. Just because you work hard does not mean you earned or deserve your wealth. But the capitalist conveniently makes that conflation. Many capitalists work very hard and long hours to screw over their employees.

The core self-deception of capitalism is that anything you can get away with through financial manipulation, you deserve. Hollywood celebrities work long hours on films, but they do not deserve nor truly earn a $20,000,000 paycheck. What these deluded capitalists overlook is that the lady cleaning toilets all day long at their hotel also works hard. The construction worker building their luxury mansion also works hard. The school teacher also works hard. But none of them get compensated fairly for their hard work. This is the problem with capitalism: Just because a few jobs pay insanely well does not mean most jobs do. But society requires those non-well-paying jobs.

The core incoherence of capitalists is that they expect to be paid insanely well for their hard work, but they expect everyone else to be paid shit for their hard work. Insane compensation for me but not for thee.

The only reason capitalists are so rich is because they rig insanely disproportionate compensation for themselves at everyone else's expense. Why is Elon Musk so rich? Because he left Paypal with a $100M check. Did Musk do $100M worth of labor at Paypal? Fuck no. That idea is laughable. The most important secret skill of capitalists is engineering crazy compensation packages for themselves in secret. Very few professions allow you to do that, which is why its unfair.

We could easily pass a law that says that you cannot get paid more than 100x your average employee. But see, the capitalist class will cry that this is unfair. Is it unfair? What's the truth?

Humans are so puzzled: if God exists and God is Good, why does God allow all this evil stuff to happen?

It’s simple: Because when God is unconscious, God behaves like a monster. All the evil stuff that happens is when God is less than 100% conscious. Evil stuff is the logical necessity of less than 100% Consciousness, precisely because Good is 100% Consciousness. When we say God is Good, that means God at 100% Consciousness. But even the best humans are only 1% conscious, so evil is rampant. Ontologically, evil IS low Consciousness. God cannot prevent low Consciousness from producing evil. God can only strive to be more conscious. People of low Consciousness cannot magically be Good by God waving his wand. God can’t change its own ontology, God cannot change what it is or how Consciousness works. Skeptics love to turn this into a contradiction against Omnipotence. No! It’s not a contradiction. Truth/Being/Consciousness has a definite nature, an absolute nature. The nature of Truth/Being/Consciousness cannot be changed, not even by God, and this does not contradict Omnipotence. The nature of Infinite Consciousness is that it has to be able to imagine lower forms of itself, which is where evil, so-to-speak, comes from. For God to eliminate evil, it would have to eliminate every form of Consciousness lower than 100%, which means no finite beings like humans could exist. Do you want that? No. You call that death. That would not be Good. It is better that humans are allowed to be evil. So here we are. Life is a sojourn through lower Consciousness, which involves experiencing evil.

Now, some smart-ass will say, "But isn't it evil to subject humans to evil?" To which the answer is: Not if God is the one who is subjecting itself to evil out of curiosity and boredom. Is it evil to bite your own tail if you are bored? Not if you're doing it for the experience. Is it evil to stick your own hand in the fire? Not if you're curious what fire feels like. God's game would be evil if God was doing it to someone other than itself. But there is no one other than itself. What an elegant solution!

No one is evil by choice. Evil is simply a function of low Consciousness. Evil doesn’t know any better. No one chose low Consciousness, they just found themselves in it. The finite is a logically necessary part of the Infinite, because finite and Infinite are One. Life is an experiment in low Consciousness, like God handicapping himself for fun.

See? There you go! A 2000 year old philosophical puzzle solved in a few paragraphs. True philosophy is not about endlessly debating questions, it's about answering them once and for all, so you never have to think about them again. You answer the question and then you have PEACE. The point is to be at peace because you understand.

Think of it this way: Evil occurs when God gets drunk. Drunk on its own hallucination. How can you expect a drunk person to be Good? That's impossible. Only a fully sober mind can be Good. You might wonder, "Well, why then doesn't God just ban drinking?" Because if God banned drinking, your life would end.

Science wants to have it both ways. On the one hand science wants to claim that science, strictly-speaking, never proves anything. However, this is BS because every scientist treats scientific truths as proven and absolute. When debating the shape of the Earth, no scientist will accept the argument that the Earth might be flat because science never proves anything. In practice everyone treats scientific truths as proven, regardless of the technicalities of what proof is or isn’t. See, you can’t survive on the strict idealized scientific notion of proof, because in practice nothing of importance ever clears that bar. Have you logically proven that your spouse cheated on you? No. But you will react emotionally nonetheless. So there exists this profound disconnect in science between proof and sense-making. If you as a scientist want to take the position that science never proves anything, then why do you believe science so strongly? Notice that in practice you treat science as if it proves things. You treat science as having proven that the Earth is round. But that’s an interesting epistemic question, Has science proven that the Earth is round? What does it take to prove that the Earth is round? This is much more tricky than scientists want to admit. Scientists do not want a relativistic notion of proof because they want science to be objective, but proof is relativistic. No two people will agree on what counts a proof, which is why Flat Earthers exist.

The reason I say all this is because when arguing with a serious scientist, eventually they will pull this cheap trick on you: "But science doesn't really prove anything." That's what they love to say when you back them into a corner. But if science doesn't prove anything, then nothing in science is truly known. But the scientist cannot admit that. The scientist needs to have it both ways: the scientist wants science to be the highest source of sense-making, but also must technically deny that science really knows anything for sure. This is the chicanery of science.

"But Leo! Nothing can be known for sure!"

You don't know that.

See, if science doesn't prove anything, then science has not proven that science is true. Yet every scientist holds science as true. If science doesn't prove anything, then everyone is placing way too much authority in science. That is indeed the case, but scientists are in denial about it because they don't want to relinquish that authority.

What is the truth? The truth is that science is much more shaky than scientists like to admit to themselves. Science is a bunch of ideas held together with duct tape and bubblegum. But scientists do not portray it that way because that looks too embarrassing and invites doubt. But that doubt is not a bug, it's a feature. You should doubt science because it was never proven to be true. But here's the kicker: the reason it was never proven to be true is because it isn't.