Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

This is good philosophy. Some good insights here.

This is a lecture series on Marxism, the professor is a Marxist, but I'm not sharing it with you to make you a Marxist. Even if you will never be a Marxist, it's important that you study and understand the Marxist position without strawmanning it. There are many important ideas in Marxism, even if it's totally impractical. You don't need to be a socialist to benefit from hearing these ideas. Capitalists need to understand this stuff.

This professor is really good. I recommend watching most of this 29-part series. There's a lot of great insight there about Marxism, human development. economics, history, and more. The series starts slow. The heavy Marxist stuff comes in the second half of the series. It starts with general philosophy and history. This is like a full college course on Marxist theory. Good stuff!

Marxism Lecture Series Playlist - 29 episodes

In particular, Lecture 14 & Lecture 15 are outstanding. You can start there if you want to jump into the deep Marxism. Don't be afraid to watch stuff like this out of order. You can always go backwards. In fact, watching stuff like this out of order is better than watching it in order. Skip right to the stuff that's valuable. Don't waste your time going through formalities.

All explanation is circular. It’s just a question of, How long is the circle? Why? Because Reality is a Unity, so you can never appeal to anything outside of it to explain it. All explanation is ultimately solipsistic because Mind is solipsistic, and Reality is Mind. You can't reach outside of Reality to explain Reality. You are always explaining Reality in terms of Reality. Reality is like one continuous sheet of fabric and every explanation is the fabric folding in on itself. But the fabric can never penetrate itself.

However, there’s an interesting psychological trick being played. If you make the explanation long enough and complex enough, the finite mind will become so overwhelmed and exhausted that it will stop asking questions and never recognize the circularity. All of science is just one endlessly long circularity which ultimately explains nothing, but since the circle is so long, no scientist sees it. Science is a dog chasing its own tail, never to catch it. God is when the dog catches its tail. Science is a mind-game that scientists don’t even know they are playing. The game of science is to keep elongating the circle, but this makes them rats running faster in a wheel, getting nowhere. It's the perfect distraction, an endless distraction. The fraud of science is the sense that it explains anything at all. Every scientist is slowly bamboozled into this fraud from childhood, like a frog boiled alive in water. Science is the illusion that one day, if you just do enough hard science, everything will be explained. But the truth is, nothing will be explained.

When the snake is long enough, no segment of it sees that it's a circle. That's the genius of Maya, that's the devilry of it.

The circularity of something like Christianity is so obvious a child can see it. But the circularity of science is much more devious. Science is a tar pit that traps even the wiliest, swiftest, and strongest creatures. Religion is a trap for fools, science is a trap for intellectuals. The intellectual ends up ensnared by his own intellect, which is a kind of poetic justice for his arrogance.

The reason that I do philosophy is to have insights like this. To me, this insight is more beautiful than owning a private jet. It took me something like 20 years of intellectual work to be able to articulate it so clearly, so it is more meaningful to me than a private jet.

This is one of my fave documentaries. Ahead of its time.

Any philosopher driven by politics will be a corrupt and deluded philosopher. Why? Because politics is survival, philosophy is the search for truth, and survival poisons the search for truth. When you enter philosophy with any political agenda you’ve already committed an epistemic error because you do not know whether your political agenda is true or not. To know that, you’d first need to master philosophy, but you’ve just started philosophy. You’ve already been blinded by survival. You’ve already put the cart before the horse. You’ve already assumed you know when you don’t. You cannot know your political agenda is not self-deception until you’ve solved philosophy first. Philosophy is much more fundamental than politics or survival. Philosophers who place politics first are bad philosophers. It cannot be otherwise. After all, politics is the dirtiest things human do. How dare you bring that filth into truth-seeking? Truth-seeking requires no agenda other than knowing what’s true. Your Marxism, your libertarianism, your conservatism, your religion, your ideology, your agenda, your survival — is poisoning your philosophy.

What's a clear example of this? Aleksandr Dugin. But there are many others, many Marxists and post-modernists on the left. Leftists do shitty philosophy. Conservatives do even shittier philosophy.

To think well about politics you first need to master thinking well in general, which requires a mastery of epistemology. If you skip this step, you will fall into common kinds of self-deception, which all these political philosophers do. Jumping into political philosophy is amateur-hour. Jumping into political philosophy is like walking into a clean house from the rain without taking off your muddy shoes.

Why do so many people have such poor politics? Because they never cared about understanding self-deception. If you do not care about self-deception, I promise you will end up self-deceived. There's no other way it could be. You are not going to get lucky and magically stumble into truth.

It's not complicated: Do not politicize philosophy. Do not weaponize philosophy against your enemies, because the notion that you even have enemies is a delusion which you should use philosophy to cure yourself of. How do you know that your enemy is truly an enemy? You don't know that. If you think you do, that's because you haven't done enough philosophy.

I am in the middle of reading a book called By Way Of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky. He is a former Mossad officer who writes of Mossad's inner workings and corruption. It's a great book, but unfortunately it's old and out of print, so it's expensive unless you buy a digital copy.

Here's an old interview with him:

(Start at time-stamp 11:50)

Mossad's official motto is amazing: "By way of deception, thou shalt do war."

Intel agencies are a prime example of how corruption spreads like a cancer due to lack of transparency. Of course intel agencies are corrupt, how could they not be when there's no transparency? Making intel agencies more transparent, by law, is a sorely needed reform that no one is even talking about. These agencies have written themselves a blank check to be devils.

Note: I have many other great books about politics and intelligence agencies on my book list. And I will be adding even more in the future. I read a lot about politics. That's because politics cannot be understood through direct experience. Spirituality does not require reading but politics does. I read so much interesting political history.

Consider how hard it is to create a society. You need to gather a bunch of strangers and get them to all agree on following your arbitrary rules. Can you see that this is almost impossible? Why should anyone care about following your rules when they could kill you and rape your family instead for fun?

So, because of this, society and culture must resort to a lot of manipulation, construction, and fakery. Without fakery, society would fall apart. Society is an inherently fake project from day one. But we’re 2000 years into it, so we can’t just stop or we would all die. Do you understand that the very precondition of your existence, of your human life, is fakery? Unless all your ancestors were full of shit, you could not be alive today. You are the child of bullshitters, liars, con-artists, fakes, and criminals. Your existential life project is to somehow rise up from 2000 years of fakery and make yourself True.

Now you understand why its so hard. You are not standing on the shoulders of truth-tellers, you are standing on the shoulders of liars. Lying is baked into your DNA. You are a liar not just by culture, but by DNA! You have the DNA of a devil, and our work is to somehow transcend that. The Devil has woven himself into your genes! Quite the challenge. To become spiritual you are literally fighting your own biology, your own psychology, your own culture, your own species. To be loyal to God, you must be disloyal to all of that.

Genuine spirituality is you pulling yourself up out of human devilry by your bootstraps. Not easy, but rewarding.

It is so telling that conservatives belittle and even demonize empathy. That's the biggest red flag ever. If someone says they don't value empathy, run! If someone tries to logically explain why empathy is weak, run! That's pure delusion.

Empathy has existential, metaphysical importance. You cannot understand God, Reality, Self, or other without profound empathy. It is impossible to be a Good person without profound empathy. That's why everyone who demonizes empathy is so bad and stupid. Only stupidity belittles empathy. You cannot coherently marginalize empathy because some day you will suffer bad enough that you will want empathy for yourself. But if you want it, everyone wants it. If you deserve it, everyone deserves it. And if you don't deserve it then you don't love yourself, and you cannot know God, because God is Love.

It is ridiculous that right-wing Christians demonize empathy and simultaneously believe that God is Love. How do you think you're going to understand Love without empathy? How are you going to understand fellow man without empathy? What Jesus taught cannot be realized or embodied without crazy levels of empathy that would terrify a right-wing Christian. Imagine having so much empathy that you have empathy for the worst criminals. Imagine having so much empathy for criminals that normal people call you evil and want to kill you. That's real spirituality.

It's hard to think of what could grow your spirituality faster than proactive empathy.

The Manosphere idea that empathy is for gays and pussies could not be more wrong. Empathy is required to see other perspectives, and God is Infinite Perspective. Without empathy you cannot see anything but your own perspective, which makes you blind and stupid. Making yourself blind and stupid cannot be masculine. Masculinity requires Truth, but Truth requires seeing from infinite points of view, which is empathy. Any man telling you that empathy is feminine, is stupid and blind. Empathy forces you to develop real emotional, spiritual strength and maturity. Real strength is not bench-pressing 300 pounds or doing Jiu Jitsu or smoking a cigar, real strength is being able to empathize with a poor Mexican woman who spends 12 hours a day picking strawberries. But see, that does not sell to men the way Manosphere does. Real empathy is hard to do because it is emotionally disturbing. Once you empathize with that Mexican woman, you can never unsee that.

Without empathy you cannot understand others, you cannot understand society, you cannot understand women, you cannot understand justice, you cannot understand your own children, you cannot understand Reality, you cannot understand God, you cannot understand Yourself, and you cannot understand Love. And a man who does not understand Love is just a horny child.

By demonizing empathy you've shot yourself in the foot. What kind of man proudly shoots himself in the foot?

This channel has great survival videos. Watching survival videos is a hobby of mine.

If you take a microscope and you zoom into Spirit, you will see molecules and atoms. If you take Spirit and put it into a particle collider, you will see quarks and electrons. If you measure Spirit with a ruler, you will discover it obeys mathematical equations. If you take Spirit and you split some of its atoms, Spirit will erupt in a nuclear explosion that kills you. Spirit behaves in all the ways science has measured, and much more which science does not know how to measure.

Just think of it like this: If Spirit existed, you could do science on it, because Spirit has logical structure and is rational up to a point. That’s why science works at all. Science does not contradict Spirit, science is done by Spirit on Spirit. Science is one way in which Spirit understands itself, but it is far from the only or the best way. Spirit can also understand itself directly, without the use of science. Limited aspects of Spirit can be understood with science, but not All of Spirit because science is too partial to grasp All of it at once. But Spirit can grasp All of itself at once, that’s called Awakening.

Science is a limited aspect of Spirit. That's why it works. But science is not self-aware enough to recognize itself as Spirit. So today's science denies Spirit, but future science will recognize Spirit and regard today's science as blind. Spirit is trying to understand itself, through science, but also through any other means. If Spirit convinces itself that it can only be known through science, then Spirit has foolishly cut itself off from the highest dimensions of itself, which cannot be reached through science because the holism of science is too low. If the holism of science increases enough, it stops looking like science and starts to look like mysticism. So today's science defines itself by its lack of holism, in opposition to mysticism, out of bigotry.

Consider this seriously:

If you told a white slavemaster 200 years ago, "You are no different from black people", the response would be, "No way! That's fucking crazy! How dare you! You are a traitor to the white race!"

If you tell a scientist today, "Science is no different than mysticism", the response will be, "No way! You're fucking crazy! How dare you! You are a traitor to science!"

A bigoted Spirit denies its Unity with all the things it has demonized. An open Spirit sees that it is One with all things. The bigotry of science is just a recycling of the bigotry of religion, tribalism, and racism, but at a more subtle level. That bigotry never disappeared, it just evolved into science. Did you really think that bigotry would disappear after you realized religion is stupid? Of course not. Bigotry is a much deeper problem than religion. Of course scientific bigotry exists.

This reminds me of today's conservatives who think that racism has disappeared. Of course something as deep as racism has not disappeared in 60 years. Something as toxic as racism doesn't just disappear overnight, it evolves into more subtle and sneaky forms. Notice the parallels.