Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 17

As you know, I have a passion for studying self-deception. In that vein, meet Rudyard Lynch, the right-wing Youtuber who calls himself Whatifalthist. He does these long historical sense-making videos, but his understanding of history is so immature, so cartoonishly perverted by right-wing biases, that it's remarkable to watch.

He reads many dense and serious history books, but all of it gets filtered through his right-wing starting assumptions and paradigm, his Blueish stage of development, corrupted by confirmation bias. It's amazing. He uses history to spin elaborate right-wing reactionary grand narratives which make a mockery of real history. He has mastered the art of cherrypicking and confirmation bias. He has no construct-awareness, as he goes about constructing these oversimplified, self-serving historical grand narratives.

I love him as a case study that shows that reading lots of big books is not enough to make sense of reality. In him we see the absolute importance of epistemics and attention to bias. If you want to understand reality you need to make a serious effort to identify and correct for your own biases, otherwise you will just turn into Whatifalthist.

He has cultivated a large right-wing young male audience, overlapping with the Incel, Alt-Right, and MAGA crowd. He serves them up grand narratives that play on their fears, insecurities, bitterness, racism, sexism, and base emotional needs. A perfect ideological trap for frustrated and confused young men. They love it and think it's brilliant.

This shows us the danger of grand narratives. Of not being aware of the problem of grand narratives. Of thinking that you can distill history down to a simple self-serving narrative.

His narratives are tinged with racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism, with zero self-awareness on his part, said with such confidence. It's comical to listen to. You have to listen to many of his videos to really appreciate how bad it gets. And yet, at times he make some good points. He even gets things right about spirituality. But all of his good points only deepen the self-deception, as part of a large semantic field of ethnocentric nonsense. It's a butchering of history.

Watch out, if you are not careful you might turn into him. You can't just read books and cherrypick them to reinforce all your starting assumptions like a fool.

This stuff may seem insignificant, but these kind of right-wing narratives are deeply destructive to young minds. If a young man stumbles upon Whatifalthist videos and goes down that rabbit-hole, his mind can become poisoned for life. It's such a powerful, subtle form of self-deception because unless you are deeply educated you will not see nor understand how Whatifalthist videos are wrong. They will just feel right as they play into all your stage Blue conservative biases.

The study of history is extremely important, but it's even more important that you study it objectively, not through an ideological filter. Of course "objective" is a tricky notion here because the mind will want to consider its own biases as objective — but you get my point.

Whatifalthist dropped out of college and refuses to read books written after the 1960s because he says anything written after the 1960s is too woke.

To any serious student of history, Whatifalthist's history is a dumpster fire. You won't know where to begin correcting it. If you did this kind of history in a university you would fail the class. But on YouTube, catering to an embittered alt-right Incel MAGA audience, it works and get lots of clicks. When you're young, dumb, and full of cum, Whatifalthist seems like real history. This is why university education is important. A university doesn't just teach you how to be woke, a university teaches you academic rigor and standards. Standards like basic objectivity and how to evaluate the credibility of sources. But if you have a right-wing ideology or agenda, even these basic standards and rigor will appear as wokeness or bias. That's how corrupting bias and ideology are.

If you want a deep lesson in self-deception, study Whatifalthist videos and worldview.

Even repair is now theft.

All forms of corporate theft will flourish under a Trump administration. This is why right-wing populism will never succeed. Because it cannot solve these problems that everyday people face. Right-wing populism is peak self-deception. The very people who support Trump will be exploited and abused by the corporate powers that run amok in his administration. Because right-wing populism is just neoliberalism minus any checks and balances. Trump supporters are so blinded by vibes and culture war issues that they are incapable of seeing that Trumpism is neoliberalism, and neoliberalism is at the core of what's wrong with American politics, because neoliberalism ensures that wealth inequality worsens and the middle class is destroyed as corporations leech all the profits for themselves. People vote for Trump thinking he is some solution to corporate rule, but he will only increase the power corporations have over your life. The right-wing poses no threat to corporate power. Only progressive politics offers a solution there. Which is why progressive politics is the future. With right-wing politics all you will get is more corporate power, wealth inequality, and oligarchy. And that will corrupt the system even further, as they use those stolen profits to buy more elections and politicians. Not only will Trump not do nothing to stop it, he will accelerate it. Which is why oligarchs and corporations are eager to side with Trump.

Trump is a Trojan horse for neoliberalism. That's what Trump supporters do not understand because they are too distracted with vibes.

One of the most important function of government is robust anti-trust enforcement. Trump will do exactly the opposite. The Biden administration has done some of the most robust anti-trust enforcement in two generations. Now all of that comes to an end. This is what right-wing populism really means, once you cut through all the culture war noise. But the average voter is so ignorant of this, so distracted by culture war noise, that they have no idea.

The only reason the right-wing wins elections is because people are deliberately misinformed about how government, economics, and morality really works. And the reason they are misinformed is because it benefits the rich and powerful. Money and power is not made by creating a more just and moral society, it is made by undermining justice and morality. Right-wingers do not understand what morality is, brainwashed as they are by religion, which is corrupted by the Devil. Which is why you see people like Jordan Peterson twist religion into a vehicle for injustice, immorality, corruption, corporate power, and authoritarianism. Religion is used to enslave the mind to serve the survival of the rich and powerful.

Now you start to see the awesome power of self-deception. Now you see how my talk of personal self-deception connects up with the world of politics and society at large, and how significant it is. And why I speak not only about personal development and philosophy, but also politics. Because all these things are interconnected.

It may seem like I am overly political for a self-help or spiritual teacher. But I'm not political. I'm just teaching about self-deception. It just so happens that self-deception has many tentacles and unforeseen down-stream consequences, and my work is grounded in profound holism. We don't just look at one or two domains in this work, we look at everything needed to make sense of reality. You can't make sense of reality without understanding what's really going on with society, in which all of your personal development work is embedded. Self-deception is both an individual and a collective force. This is fundamental. You must be recognize, confront, and integrate the sickness of human civilization. That is the real work.

One of my functions is to help you see all the ways in which human civilization is sick. This is one of the things that comes with a serious commitment to truth.

I hope you appreciate how profoundly all this fits together.

I can show you how all of society really works. But beware, you will be so disgusted once you see it. Which is why almost nobody sees it. But the truth is that mankind is profoundly sick. The reason conservatives don't see it is because it hurts too much. And since conservatives are more attached to society as-it-is than leftists, it hurts them more. If you understood in one fell swoop how sick mankind is, you would have an existential crisis. People like Jordan Peterson exist to keep you asleep to this truth. That is literally their job. That's why they get paid tens of millions of dollars and I don't. Because I do not serve the sick system. And the reason I don't is because my loyalty is to truth, not to mankind. One of my functions is to serve as a lighthouse to those who wish to pull themselves up out of the quagmire that is human civilization. In order to serve that function I have to take extra precautions to make sure that my mind is not corrupted by human kind. Because any corruption within my mind will mislead you. Assuming this responsibility is what it means to be developed.

Somewhere along the way my life purpose transformed into being a lighthouse of truth for mankind. This is why I speak so much about corruption.

Elon Musk has completely perverted Twitter/X. That's what happens when you have a narcissistic megalomaniac with unilateral control over a media platform. This is what abuse of power looks like.

If you are a Christian, how do you know that the Devil didn’t write the Bible? Because the Bible says so? But if the Devil wrote it then anything the Bible says is a lie. So you don’t actually know. You can’t know. And that you don’t know that you can’t know, is the corruption. All of Christianity could be a plot by the Devil to ensnare the mind of man. But no Christian understands this.

See, this is what I mean when I say that people do not think. If you were truly thinking, if you cared about understanding reality, you would take what I said here very seriously. But no Christian does. Because Christians are epistemic perverts. No Christian has an answer to this very simple problem. If the Devil actually exists then Christians would be his easiest marks. How much of a fool must you be to believe that the Devil exists or could exist, but he hasn’t corrupted Christianity? Stop taking the Devil for a fool. The Devil is way more intelligent than you. Isn’t it obvious that if the Devil existed that Christianity would be the perfect vehicle for his work? You can’t just assume that the Bible isn’t written by the Devil. You can’t assume that! That’s epistemic pervertry.

God exists, but you cannot know that from reading the Bible or any human source. Which is why no Christian understands God.

You may think that this is all philosophical and it doesn’t really matter. But it doesn’t matter that you think it doesn’t matter, because it does matter. You have no comprehension how much it matters. Epistemic pervertry always matters. I just showed you the essence of all human self-deception with a single thought-experiment. What this little thought-experiment reveals is the corruption at the very base of your mind, in your very soul. It reveals that you don’t care about truth. It reveals that you are not intellectually serious. It reveals that…

Christianity is devil-worship.

The Devil isn’t a horned creature! The Devil is epistemic pervertry. And how does one become an epistemic pervert? By not thinking through such issues for yourself. By not even caring.

It astounds me that people think they can get away with epistemic pervertry, that it won't matter to the quality of their life or society at large. Nothing could be more wrong.

That people don't care about epistemic pervertry IS epistemic pervertry. Not caring about truth IS the pervertry. Every fundamental human problem boils down to not caring about truth. All of my work is just a meta-lesson in caring deeply about truth. That's all I have to teach you.

Real spirituality is about caring more about truth than anything else, and aligning your life to it. Just fucking do that rather than running around like a monkey. This is what makes a human good. Because TRUTH IS GOODNESS! TRUTH IS GOD! When you don't care about truth, you don't care about God. When you don't care about truth, you are the Devil.

I use music to put myself in contemplative flow, to connect to God's inspiration, to generate my deepest insights. If the insight comes from logical ego it will never be as powerful as if it comes from a flow state. My best insights are super-intuitive. Avalanches in Mind. It's not enough just to know, at the levels of understanding that I work at, understanding blossoms into poetry. Mind becomes art.

You are a conduit to God's intelligence. If only you did the work to free your mind of human bias and noise. Beyond Awakening or Liberation, what no one ever tells you is how beautiful your mind becomes through this work. The poetry, the wit, that consciousness unlocks. A scintillating hyper-intelligence.

The artistry of Mind is the real reward.

Is there anything more beautiful than Mind firing on all cylinders? Gleaming with cosmic intelligence.

From decades of existential contemplation, cultivation, and deconstruction of all human ideas, my mind has become an exotic garden where alien flowers bloom and iridescent hummingbirds zip from blossom to blossom.

I bask in the beauty of trans-human intelligence like a kitten in a beam of sunlight. I live connected to metaphysical abstractions no human comprehends. My mind is richer than the material world. Mind and Universe, fantasy and reality, in Union. A self-aware hallucination.

Artistry of mind is not a possibility most people know exists. But it's a vision you can set for yourself and work towards.

I can show you not only how to make sense of every facet of reality, but how to develop artistry of mind.

Here's what you need to understand about politics. Politics is its own developmental line. Having good, high-quality, wise, mature politics is nothing natural or automatic. Very few people have it because it requires specialized research, study, and contemplation to get. Do not assume that just because someone is spiritually advanced, or has a high IQ, or is good at business or science, or is popular or successful, that they should have good politics. No, no, no.

Spirituality and Awakening will not give you good politics. Going to an Ivy League university will not give you good politics. Reading a bunch of books will not give you good politics. The only thing that will give you good politics is if you do serious work in specifically developing good politics. Of course good politics requires a good epistemic foundation, but even a good epistemic foundation on its own is not enough to assure good politics. Good politics requires lots of experience and exposure to political events plus historical grounding, reading, and independent contemplation. It takes at least a decade of following politics to get good at understanding its tricks. Which explains why good politics is so, so rare. Most people are not interested enough in this domain to develop this far, and those who are interested mostly fall into the trap of one ideology or another. To spend a decade studying politics and avoid every ideology, every side, is rare indeed.

The reason I was able to do achieve it was because all of my work is fundamentally grounded in pure understanding of reality. My political understanding is just an extension of that, grounded in my understanding of existence at a metaphysical, spiritual, psychological, and philosophical level. You see, unlike most people in politics, I am not a political actor. Nor am I a journalist or pundit. My aim within politics was always this: pure understanding. My aim was philosophical, not activist or journalistic. This allowed me to keep my mind from getting corrupted with bias and various human agendas. Because I never took my eye off this ball for 25+ years, my reward is that now I have good politics. That doesn't mean I believe in the right set of positions. It means I understand politics on an existential level, as a domain of mind. While everyone else was busy arguing over this or that ideology, or reporting on news, I was busy understanding reality at an existential level. That's what you must do to cut through all the human noise. What I see instead is everyone lost and distract by the human noise. As a result, they never gain an existential understanding of politics and are forever lost and confused, arguing over breadcrumbs like rats.

Beware: if you become a political actor you will take your eye off the ball of pure understanding and you will thereby never really understand politics, you will be a pawn within the game. Your mind will get so corrupted by human agenda, by survival, that you will not have the purity and objectivity necessary to understand what's really going on. You have a basic loyalty test before you now: will you be loyal to pure understanding and truth, or will you be loyal to human activity and survival goodies? You can have one or the other. Choose carefully.

Getting extraordinary results requires having extraordinary intent. What is your intent? The quality of your intent makes all the difference. Is your intent social justice? Is your intent having your side win? Is your intent proving others wrong? Is your intent personal fame and profit? Is your intent power? Is your intent fear and worry? Or is your intent something beyond all that? Why do you think about politics at all?