Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 47

The mainstream self-help industry is so disgustingly corrupt. The more mainstream it is, the more popular it is, the more corrupt it is. And the most disgusting thing about it is, not only are all the most successful self-help gurus massively corrupt grifters, their grit is to teach their students and followers how to become grifters just like them. It's grifters teaching grifters how to be more effective grifters while providing a set of rationalizations for why grifting is good for the customer. The self-help industry sells courses in corruption which are bought by all the major podcasters, influencers, and Youtubers to optimize their marketing funnels. It's such a pernicious form of corruption masquerading as goodness and self-improvement. Naive folk enter self-help without any idea that they are being inducted into a corruption funnel.

This fucking guy takes narcissism and corruption to cartoonish levels.

There's no clearer example of how power and money corrupts than Elon Musk. There is nobody in Musk's life who can tell him No. It's like being a private dictator. You can see how badly this kind of dynamic corrupts the mind.

I fucking hate nightclubs. There's no stupider place to be on the planet. But I've been to and paid for so many nightclubs and experienced how they work from the inside.

This is a great video explaining the secretive business and manipulations of nightclubs:

Nightclubs are hives of corruption. Is it a coincidence that corruption, alcohol, stupidity, and sex go hand in hand?

But if nightclubs suck so much, why go there?

To learn to socialize. The more it sucks, the more you grow. Once you've trained in hell, normalize socialization is a walk in the park.

This is a peak behind the curtain of how conservative media companies operate behind the scenes, underneath all the fake conservative posturing about God and morality.

Watch timestamp: 42:27-43:50

(You can watch the full video if you want to see the degeneracy that is the Daily Wire propaganda machine.)

"The only God here is power and money."

This is the company Jordan Peterson works for. The man of God and morality.

Grasp this: Religious conservatives are incapable of being good people. Why? Because they never cared about truth. They never did truth-seeking. They never did philosophical questioning, they never did consciousness work, they never solved the problems of self-deception, ego, illusion, epistemology. Their entire lives are devoted to defending human bullshit, so of course they cannot be good people. The louder they speak about morality, the more corrupt they are behind the scenes. This is religious conservative virtue-signaling. To actually be a good person requires understanding reality as deeply as I discuss through Actualized.org. There is no other way to be good. Good requires truth. Good requires profound understanding of self-deception, epistemology, and ego-psychology.

I am not claiming to be good. But I am claiming to understand the prerequisites for being good — which is more than what any right-winger understands.

All conservative religion is epistemic ignorance and corruption, so it can never be good. Ignorant people are incapable of being good no matter how hard they try. Because goodness requires consciousness, not belief, not ideology, not group-think. It is metaphysically impossible to be a good person by following the ideas of someone like a Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson, or Denis Prager. Because they are not teaching consciousness. They have no idea what consciousness is or how it works. They have no understanding of what reality is.

This issue is not specific to Daily Wire or its hosts. This is true across the board for all conservative religious hosts, pundits, preachers, influencers, media outlets. Everyone at Fox News, all the right-wing YTubers and podcasters, talk radio. All of this is epistemic and moral corruption masquerading as genuine morality and spirituality. All of this conservative stuff is just unconscious survival: it's about money, power, fame, status, sex, reproduction, friends, tribe, and cope and rationalization of all the above at the expense of truth and justice.

This is good stuff:

One correction I want to make about what she said above is that it is certainly not the case that everyone has equal access to God or Truth. Most people have very low connection to God and Truth, simply because they are not conscious, do not have good genetics, and never cared about truth their whole lives. So a genuine spiritual teacher has way more access to God and Truth their students. However, no one has a monopoly on God or Truth. Everyone is God/Truth. But that does not mean everyone has the same ability to access it. For example, I genuinely understand God/Truth much deeper than most human beings. If this wasn't the case there would be no point in listening to me. But that doesn't mean you can't reach my level of understanding. You can. But it will take lots of work which most people will never do. So in this sense I am objectively valuable to you. That's just how all teaching works. A genuine teacher knows more than his students — at least at this moment in time. This is proper. But because this is true, a good teacher has an enormous responsibility not to exploit or mislead his students — which is where cult leaders fail hugely by putting their survival agenda above truth.

Fundamentally, cults happen because people confuse and blend social survival with spirituality. This is a huge mistake. Such people never cared about truth for its own sake, they are not doing truth-seeking, they are using spiritual performance and vibes to satisfy basic human social needs like a sense of community, love, belonging, purpose, friendship, sex, shelter, power, approval, and feeling special. None of this has anything to do with truth-seeking. Truth-seeking is about understanding the nature of reality, mind, and self. Truth-seeking has nothing to do with sex, community, friendship, rituals, power, or feeling special. Truth-seeking is not about feeling loved. Truth-seeking is not about being happy or feeling good or helping save the world.

Do not join social groups or communities to do spirituality. All that socializing is just a noisy distraction. Stop trying to combine the satisfying of your social survival needs with truth-seeking or God. Stop trying to combine your sex with spirituality. Real spirituality is not about community, relationship, friendship, or sex. It is about pure truth-seeking. Stop being fooled and seduced by the allure of human connection. I am not telling you to be a recluse. Have whatever relationships you want, have sex, be social — but do not mix it with truth-seeking or Awakening. Don't fornicate in the temple. If you do spirituality as a communal activity you will end up adopting all their group-think and 90% of your time will be wasted dealing with human noise and drama. Community is the distraction. The whole point of spirituality is to disconnect yourself from human community, which is society at large. Human society as a whole is a large cult that distracts you from truth-seeking. Joining a micro-cult within the macro-cult is just doubling-down on your problem. Your goal with spirituality is to transcend all the human social nonsense, not to create more of it. You are not going to do serious truth-seeking in a New Age spiritual community. New Age spiritual communities prioritize human survival, positive feelings, fantasy over truth-seeking.

Notice this: there's nothing particularly special about cults. Cults are barely more toxic than society as a whole, when fully seen — it's just that you never see the toxic underbelly of society as a whole. You don't see the torture, rape, murder, war, genocide, assassination, cheating, lies, abuse, wage slavery, corporate fuckery, political corruption, etc. A cult is just a proto-society. All societies are built on survival, hierarchy, and power. Cults suffer from the same fundamental problems that all human social organization suffers from: dishonesty, hypocrisy, ego, corruption, sociopathy, narcissism, mental illness, childhood trauma, greed, lust, bullshit, self-deception, politics, power games, human drama, ideology, group-think, exploitation, abuse, grifting. Any time you assemble a large group of selfish, unconscious, ignorant, corrupt, conformist minds — this must be the result. It does not matter what the content of the group is. It could be scientific, orthodox religious, Christian, New Age, occult, left wing, right wing — the content does not matter because the underlying social survival mechanics are all the same. Size also doesn't matter so much. The one thing all these social groups have in common is that none of them genuinely care about truth-seeking. They always prioritize survival first — which is the #1 thing that keeps you from realizing God.

The emotionally difficult thing is to just do pure truth-seeking on your own. The emotionally easy thing is to skip that in favor of using a spiritual community to help your survival and make you feel good. So just do the difficult thing, since that's obviously what leads to Truth, not the easy social thing. Social activity does not lead to Truth, it leads to distraction, self-deception, and corruption.

A cult is just a mechanism for low-level survival. Cults are nothing more than corruption. And all of society is corrupt. So of course cults are corrupt. People who warn of cults have no idea how corrupt society as a whole is. All social groups are corrupt because nobody has access to Truth, because they never even cared.

If you want to have sex, make friends, and be social — no problem. Do your truth-seeking alone at home locked in your closet in the dark. Commune with God. Then go out and socialize. Stop bringing God into your human monkey games. Do not make God a tool in your survival. Do not invoke the name of God or Truth to anoint your selfish monkey-stuff. And nothing is more monkey-stuff than socializing. The problem isn't socializing, the problem is when you fool yourself that your socializing is truthful or spiritual. It's not. It's just survival with an icing of spiritual fantasy.

Communal spirituality an S-tier self-deception mechanism. You could write a whole encyclopedia about it.

The corruption and irresponsibility across social media influencers is out of control.

When conservatives lament the moral decay of civilization — they are correct, but they misapply it to protect their pet ideological attachments. Moral decay is a real thing. And this is it.

Today's conservatives are not truly conservative, they are moral degenerates masquerading as conservatives. A true conservative would not do any of this crypto shit. Crypto nicely reveals how the master is not ideology or philosophy, the master is always survival. Today's conservatives have no integrity. They will do anything to get money, fame, and power — even if it is liberal. Crypto is a liberal phenomenon, and it shows the dangers and stupidity of liberalness. A true conservative would understand that allowing people to print their own money is a bad idea that ends in disaster — and would refuse to partake in such moral degeneracy.

How deliciously ironic that conservatives — the party that whines the loudest about moral decay — would support and re-elect as their fuhrer the posterboy of moral degeneracy. This shows just how little self-awareness and self-honesty conservatives have. Today's conservatives are more corrupt than Satan, and they don't even notice.

Scientific method is insufficient to answer questions which are meta-methological. For any formal epistemic method there must always exist a set of meta-methodological questions which adjudicate between methods. How do you know whether method #1 is superior to method #2? Obviously this matter cannot be resolved by employing either method #1 or method #2, as that would be question-begging and self-biased. Get this: the question of whether science is superior to witchcraft cannot be resolved using science! It must be resolved using something higher. This point is not understood by almost anyone! But it gets worse. By extension, there also cannot be a single meta-methodological method because there will be questions about which meta-criteria to use. So, there will be meta-method #1 and meta-method #2 and you cannot use either to adjudicate which one is best, as there will always be meta-meta questions.

This demonstrates why epistemology cannot be reduced to scientific method, rationality, nor any kind of method. Epistemology is necessarily prior to and more fundamental than any articulable method. Epistemology is the field of all possible methods, true and false. Epistemology is not just more science. Epistemology transcends science. There are truths within epistemology which science cannot fathom, access, nor prove. Science is necessarily subordinate to epistemology. Epistemology must always remain an open-ended, unbounded field. This is the case because fundamentally we do not know which method is best. Whatever ideas you have about which method will reflect reality best — is just a guess. Scientific method has always been nothing more than a guess. The question of knowing which method reflects reality best is a harder class of question than any question of observable empirical fact. It is easier to know if atoms exist than it is to know whether scientific method is true.

Consider: How would you know, how would you demonstrate, that scientific method is true and best? Do you see that this is a harder problem than building an advanced atomic microscope? Humans can build atomic microscopes, humans cannot prove scientific method. This demonstrates why science cannot exist without epistemology, philosophy, and ultimately metaphysics. The issue of metaphysics goes even deeper and I’m not even addressing here. It is impossible to reduce away meta-scientific issues in the naïve way that most defenders of science wish to do. There are always meaningful questions which science cannot answer but upon which science’s entire existence and validity hinges. Acknowledging this fact drives scientists and rationalists nuts because it reveals an unfixable chink in their entire worldview. In their mind this opens a Pandora's Box of "woo". But this isn't a bug, this is a feature. The core problem is that scientific method is too closed to account for all truths about reality. Complaining about woo is not a solution, it is a childish deflection of the serious philosophy at play here. It is a fact that science does not have and cannot ever have a solid foundation. But, no serious scientist is allowed to admit this, which is the secret reason why serious scientists and rationalists do not do deep philosophy — because if they did, they would realize that science has no basis. What is the actual basis of science? Guesswork.

This is not a theoretical or academic matter. Science has no ground and it could not be otherwise. But this is not commonly understood, as the vast majority of mankind just believes that science is reality. No. This has never been true and cannot ever be true for deep metaphysical reasons — reasons of infinity that are beyond the scope of this post. My claim is, if you question science deeply enough, the entire system will fall apart. Therefore, it is fundamental to science’s existence never to question its own foundations to rock-bottom. If science seriously questioned its own foundations it would destroy itself. Which is why scientism is a stubborn old mule. You're not arguing with facts, you're arguing with group-think and unquestioned paradigmatic assumptions.

But how is it possible that science is foundationally groundless yet science still produces results and technology? Well, that’s a serious trick, indeed, which I don’t have time or space to explain here.

It follows from all of the above that no honest scientist is ever allowed to say, “The world is scientific.” No. You do not know that. You never knew that. You never proved that. That’s just a guess, nothing more. And it is a false guess. The world is not scientific. The world is meta-scientific. But scientists have sworn a figurative oath of loyalty to science, not truth, so their mind is incapable of understanding what I said here. And so they will forever remain wrong about the nature of reality. That is the price you pay for not taking philosophy seriously. Your paradigm tells you that philosophy doesn’t matter to science. Of course you never knew that, you never proved that — it was just a guess. Well, have fun living and dying in that paradigm, while those of us who know better soar above you like eagles.

Out beyond science and rationality there is a field. I'll meet you there.