Helen Farr Sloan, Election Day, 1936, oil on canvas, Delaware Art Museum

Election season is upon us, and I wanted to mention the lack of mention around here. Last time around, the Script posts called the outcome pretty well and attracted some readers as a result. The thing is, I’m not a political commentator and don’t follow specifics that closely. I just noticed a pattern in the larger picture that prefigured a particular outcome. But the overarching impression was factional conflict within the House of Lies, meaning that the structural change reality-facing people wanted wasn’t on the table. And once it’s clear that a narrative is contrived and manipulated, there’s little point in close attention.

If inclined to vote, pick the Ahrimanic wing over the Sorathic one.1 It’s less destructive and has some positive accomplishments, which are more than the alternative’s zero. On local races, opt for whatever most reflects your own identity and values. And keep expectations realistic. The rest of this post will lay out the basic arc that the first paragraph rests on.

It was obvious from the Script posts that whatever “Trump” represents, it isn’t substantive systemic change. The basic read of the tech wing of the elite wresting some control from whatever demonic concatenation Clown World represents holds up. What neither wants is an end to the false narratives and control structures that keep a predominantly NPC population invested in distracting and directing screen shows.

It can’t be reiterated enough that two factions, one House does not claim that they’re the same. The differences are real and they don’t extend to systemic change. One alludes to murky suggestions of an earlier phase on the decline curve. The other wants to hit the afterburners on it. But neither wants to tear down the fake foundations that divergence from reality depends on.

Both rely on dishonest screen shows. It’s what those narratives claim that matters. This post will address the difference between commitment to the House of Lies and the different intentions for it.

Projecting an image onto smoke with a mirror, from Edmé-Gilles Guyot, Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques, 1770

Screen show isn’t just rhetoric. The point of FTS theory isn’t to dunk on the can’t learn from information types. In an ideal world it would be the start of figuring out how to point them in a non-exploitative, reality-facing direction. Like organic culture used to do by default. In the current House of Lies it helps understand why seemingly counter-intuitive things are so effective.

Emotionalized response and fruit-fly tier memory give immediate screen impressions incredible power. Reported hostility to universities and curtailing DIE excesses register as if the long-desired dismantling of the whole inverted network is finally underway. Actual consequences a year later aren’t registered or processed.

US college enrollment is down from its historical peak, but in a way that mostly reflects long term trends, not Trump faction actions. The uselessness of most modern “higher education” is true and alternatives remain the wise choice. The relevance is that it is independent of current leadership.

Keeping the House but sluicing out some of the most foetid corners is the two faction, one beast structure. The point isn’t to dismantle the post-Enlightenment progressive materialism that slowly strangled Western cultures. It’s to keep the nonsensical faith in The Science! and lip service to “free speech” while suppressing the ideological components that the current faction dislikes.

Announcements, X tweets, & booms can be ignored. Observe what happens. Not just individually, structurally.

The autarkic direction that got mentioned around here frequently is similar. The read was pullback from global hegemony for a regional area of control. Not out of benevolence as much as necessity as systemic collapse advances. Pay attention to what’s really happening here too. Venezuelan oil is moving and US refining capacity has some planned expansion. On the other hand, Greenland is over a decade away from meaningful rare earth production at the most optimistic.

The larger problem was also noted - foreign entanglement undermines autarkic security. Iran has been an own goal on behalf of an Israel that demands outsize attention. To the extent that somehow purported American nationalists seem more concerned with fidelity to that foreign nation than national wellbeing.

I’ve read theories that there’s some larger anti-Clown game afoot, but have to wait and see. Earlier posts noted that heavy damage to Mideast map does support an autarkic bent, but exiting the theater doesn’t seem to be on the table. Until that actually happens, we have to judge by what is visibly happening.

Sacrificing national prosperity over foreign interests was exactly the vulnerability the autarkic direction posts noted. But behind that is an intelligence network that appears to openly defy the White House. No idea who or what runs that show - just that “Trump” appears unable to pull the plug on Ukraine or exit the Mideast. Of course given how egregiously “Trump” lies, who knows who’s really doing what. Just one more place where the House of Lies remains the top priority.

Then there are the narrative generation and protection aspects of the House that continue functioning as if nothing has happened. Which it hasn’t on the systemic level. That’s the point.

The judiciary is a disgrace. Ideological capture that routinely blocks efforts to strengthen the country and its citizens. I don’t have a specific recommendation, but anyone in power with a serious reform agenda would. Again, social posting is NPC bait and utterly irrelevant to actual solutions. Something to create the impression of action while reinforcing the status quo. Which is what a House faction dedicated to preserving the House does.

The continued grip of a media that is actively hostile to the nation, its history and people, and reality itself is related. This would be intolerable in a reality-facing context. Which is the point. The tech oligarchs themselves share Clown globalist ideology to some degree. Given that screens determine majority thought, this is what the current narrative engineers prefer. Old media is withering on the vine, and Gen Z seems to be forming experience-based perspectives through online platforms. This, like the erosion of the college industrial complex is good. It’s also independent of factional initiative.

George Hughes, Fork In The Road, Saturday Evening Post Cover, July 7, 1956

The result is an acceptance of toxic nonsense that would have seemed insane at one time. A binary two-party system where one side openly advocates for mass invasion, criminality, fraud, urban dystopia, and the dismantling of any remnant of civic society. Atavist isn’t hyperbole. And “elections” are presented as the only hope of stopping rapacious hordes. This isn’t actually sustainable. Not the election narratives. A polity where one side advocates for polity-negating things like non-citizens voting and draining social benefits.

Short term, it supports recurring claims that this is the most important election ever. Because the alternative is submersion under Bioleninist masses. While said masses are maintained as a source of constant existential pressure that frees the non-atavist side from having to do much constructive. Long term, it’s another sign of ongoing systemic collapse.

This preposterous state where socio-cultural suicide is one of two “choices” is supported by a vast fraud machine, inverted screen narrative, and an alternative built on kleptocratic claims that a historic bubble is a Golden Age. The Q types made the point that things had to get bad before recovery efforts could take hold. But most people are NPCs who don’t learn.

What has been necessary since the centralized media age was screen narrative control. And historically, the model isn’t get terrible then recover. It’s collapse and be replaced by whatever order comes next. It’s systemic collapse that will bring an end to an unsustainable system. Something intrinsic the House of Lies structure that neither faction wants to discuss but both are clearly positioning for.

That’s where the real differences come into play. The Trump faction has been taking some belated steps that don’t threaten the House itself to undermine atavist power sources. Ongoing invasion has been blocked. This distinction alone should guarantee the support of anyone that cares about maintaining any standard of acceptable lives.

Anti-fraud efforts are real and are joining other initiatives that have cut huge unaccounted streams of money to atavistic causes. Culturally, things like the disappearance of rap from the charts are a similar bellwether. Curtailing toxin is a preferable trend to piling on.

Shepard Fairey, Voting Rights are Human Rights MKE Mural, screen print on paper, original photo by Jonathan Furlong. Proceeds go to Souls to the Polls. Selling pictures is preferable to vast sums diverted through USAID or various NGOs.

Close with election season. I don’t really make predictions, but one of two possibilities seems likely. A lot of beast money has been cut off. Some anti-fraud initiatives appear to be in place. Too few to take seriously, but not none. I’ve also heard attack ads blasting candidates for allowing men in girls’ sports. Another change in public discourse that aligns with attitudes towards open borders. Snuffing beast propaganda organs has kneecapped counterprogramming. The Trump faction deserves support here too.

I expect the GOP to outperform the fake polls as a result. Door one is they improve their current position. Door two is that the Dems pick up a few seats and crank up the theatrics machine. Neither results in systemic change. But the first has the better chance of being less terrible. And that’s an endorsement worthy of the options.

Avinda Tishan, Election, 2024, mixed media on canvas

René Lalique, Formose (Fishes) Vase, designed 1924, mold-blown, cased opalescent glass with a blue patina/staining in a high-relief goldfish or veil-tail fish motif

A recent post took up refined decorative arts of the era known as the Gilded Age in America and the Belle Epoque in Europe. The subject was the brilliant Russian designer Peter Carl Fabergé and his remarkable enameled and jeweled creations.

This post will consider some problems and paradoxes with luxe culture at this level while looking at the work René Jules Lalique (1860–1945). This French designer was an innovator in the decorative arts and a great rival of Fabergé and Louis Comfort Tiffany. My own perspective is a bit conflicted. As an aesthete, I have a deep appreciation, almost fascination, with aristocratic luxury beauty. While recognizing that it’s unattainable in the networked, self-sufficient future I advocate here. And as a Christian, Ecclesiastes warns about overemphasis on worldly luxuries. The question is how to square the circle without sounding contrived or self-justifying?

René Lalique, poplar pendant necklace, 1898-1900, cabochon fire opal; enamel, 18K gold

Lalique revolutionized enameling with his plique-à-jour enamel technique - translucent enamel suspended within gold or metal openwork without a metal backing. The effect resembles stained glass

Readers know that in an abstract absolute sense, beauty is linked to the Good.

It’s not to be valued materially for its own sake, but as a pointer towards moral refinement. Abstract perfection manifests as imperfect material representations subject to displacement and inversion. Which means we have to consider how beauty is being used and responded to.

René Lalique, Diaulos Flutist necklace, 1900-02, pendant with enamel, plique-à-jour enamel, and pear-shaped aquamarine, original 18k yellow gold chain with enamel throughout

Hoarding, collecting for status, lustful avarice, and other obsessive reactions involve treating the sign as the end in itself. The same mechanism as religious idolatry but in a secular context. Not condemning collecting as a hobby - I’m a collector of a few types of things myself. It’s the fixation on the cash value rather than appreciation of the beauty. The Lalique creations in this post are appealing even in pictures. I’d be glad to have duplicates in inexpensive materials were it possible to maintain the look. The problem is that inexpensive materials generally don’t have the look.

René Lalique, Iris bracelet, 1897, opals, enamel, 18k gold

Then there’s the technical artistry. That is necessarily expensive because the artisanal skills require unusual dexterity and years of experience. Compare my utilitarian carpentry with fine cabinetry or marquetry. There’s no way to develop a refined artistic culture without the wealth concentrations needed to incentivize skill development.

For much of western history, that was the Church. Beautifying churches was a way to move hearts with visions of heaven on earth and for the wealthy to give back in the form of good works. As wealth and power drifted towards secular elites, patronage fell to them - Lalique and his peers worked for aristocrats and plutocrats. And that points to the representational function of beauty in a different way. The elites still spend on culture. Even churches patronize the arts. The question is whether or not beauty is the priority or something else.

René Lalique, two figure spherical vase, 1912, glass with patinated moulded-pressed glass stopper

When the wealthy enable beauty at the highest levels, they become an aesthetic cultural vanguard. Creating standards that the less affluent can admire or aspire to relative to their own means. Our current elite does the opposite. Promoting ugliness and debasement that leads culture towards degradation and atavistic collapse. Perhaps that’s the argument for refined decorative arts. Not as something accessible to everyone, but something that raises the culture as a whole. Worth considering.

René Lalique, Butterfly Woman Gold Brooch, around 1900, 18k gold and rose cut diamond

Fusions of figure, nature and fantasy are one of Lalique’s iconic artistic themes.

Lalique epitomizes this tension in unique ways. He was born in 1860 and took to decorative art and jewellery design. He created for famous houses like Cartier and Boucheron before starting his own business making jewellery in 1885. Serious glass production came after the Coty perfume bottle commission, with the Combs-la-Ville works set up around 1909. His work in both helped set refined style in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods.

René Lalique, dragonfly pendant, around 1905, 18K gold, cushion-shaped aquamarine center in an open framework of four opposing dragonflies with plique-a-jour enamel wings, circular- and rose-cut diamonds, green enamel baton link chain; poppy pendant-brooch, around 1900, molded opalescent/blue glass, 18K gold, diamonds, blue and turquoise enamel, and a suspended faceted pear-shaped aquamarine drop

As a jeweler, Lalique epitomized Art Nouveau aesthetics with sinuous yet naturalistic designs with insects, flora, female figures, and fantasy motifs. While he did use gold and precious stones, he prioritized artistic effects over pure material value. Materials like enamel, horn, glass, ivory, and semiprecious stones are common. He chose them for how their specific qualities - strength, luminosity, color - worked in a given piece. This artistic perspective was different from mainstream jewellery making at the time, where preciousness was the priority.

Evolution of Lalique’s style: swallows, seven years apart. Left: vase, 1919 with Art Nouveau style in the detailed curves of the birds. Right: frame, 1926, with geometric, stylized Art Deco style.

Lalique, like his legendary American rival Tiffany, is also considered one of the greatest names in glassworks. His career here peaked in the mix of post-World War One stylistic developments known as Art Deco. This has some similarities to the older Art Nouveau but is more modern and less naturalistic.

Unlike Tiffany, Lalique didn’t invent new kinds of art glass like the iridescent favrile glass. But he was a prolific technical innovator who developed new techniques and effects that revolutionized how glass could be made, textured, and mass-produced.

René Lalique, Vase Bacchantes, 1927, opalescent glass with blue patiné

For example, the Lalique Satin technique — also known as iced surface — created a soft, frosted, satin-like or opaline translucence. This was done by sandblasting or acid bath to etch the glass and create a softer matte texture. Contrast was created by protecting areas of the glass so it would stay crystalline and transparent. The frosted areas diffuse light to create effects like sculptural relief, depth, and, when lit, an ethereal glow.

René Lalique, Avallon vase, 1927, glass with pink patina

Lalique was skilled in enamel from his jewelry experience and produced enameled glass. But when he transitioned to larger-scale glass manufacturing in the mid-1920s, hot enameling was too costly and time-consuming. His solution was called cold patina - a wash of sepia or blue across an acid-etched vase. This was quick, easy, and imitated deep shading. It doesn’t stick to the untreated smooth parts of the glass, only the satin, and it can be scratched or washed away.

René Lalique, six roses vase, 1921, lost wax cast glass, Musée Lalique

He also revolutionized the glassmaking techniques that these finishings were applied to, basically bridging the gap between fine art and industrial manufacturing. Replacing traditional hand-blown glass with new molding methods scaled up production while preserving detail. At the other extreme, he also used the lost wax technique traditionally used for bronze sculpture. This made sculptural glassworks that were unique, since the mold was destroyed in the process.

René Lalique, Le Jade molded green opaque glass perfume bottle for Roger et Gallet, Paris, 1926

Press molding used a mechanical plunger to force liquid glass into a metallic mold. Pressed glass had been considered cheap and low-quality, but Lalique engineered complex, multi-part steel molds that held intricate 3D designs. His high-quality demi-cristal glass composition and satin finishing created mass-produced glass of fine art quality.

René Lalique, Perfume Bottle with Stopper, Fougères (Ferns), France, designed 1912. Mold-blown glass bottle and mold-pressed glass stopper, acid-etched, applied patina; gold foil inclusion. The Corning Museum of Glass

In 1907 Lalique met famous perfumer François Coty and began designing unique bottles for him, and then other perfumers. For vessels like these with narrow openings he developed a precision mold-blowing technique.

It had been necessary for perfume bottles to be hand-ground down to fit a stopper, which often leaked. Lalique’s molds were accurate enough to minimize this problem, while molded, designed bottles at scale literally revolutionized the global perfume industry.

René Lalique, Poissons vase, 1921, frosted and polished electric blue glass

Blowing molten glass into a mold was an ancient method, but Lalique’s process rendered precise necks and bodies at the same time. The underlying method was consistent - molten glass is inflated inside a mold and takes on the shape of the mold when it cools.

Ancient Roman glassmakers and the medieval Islamic shops that succeeded them used mold-blowing for speed, uniformity, and affordability. Small workshops could quickly supply large numbers of people with a few molds. While there was some technical refinement over the centuries, the difference from Lalique is sharp.

Early to Mid Imperial glass jug, 1st-2nd century AD, glass blown in a dip mold and tooled

Roman mold-blown glass tended to be thin walled, lightweight, and fragile. Their formulas were often bubbly with a greenish hue from impurities. Medieval Islamic glass had more developed staining and decoration but was still limited technologically and favored thin, economical forms.

Lalique used a chemically formulated glass engineered for brightness and cooling properties called demi-cristal. Added elements created opalescence and precision steel molds allowed for thick heavy walls able to hold sculptural reliefs.

René Lalique, Vase Druide, mold-blown, triple cased jade green glass, 1924.

Where Lalique really differed was in the cold-shop treatment - what happened to the glass after it cooled and came out of the mold. The whole arsenal of techniques like acid-etching, frosting, patinating, and grinding flattened bases and rendered the frost-against-clear satin finish.

René Lalique, pressed glass hood ornaments, clockwise from top: Victoire (victory), 1928, Vitesse (speed), 1929, Tête de Paon (peacock head), 1928

It was Lalique’s mastery of molds that let him create his famous glass hood ornaments for luxury cars in the 1920s and 30s like Bugatti and Bentley. These weren’t stock features - owners added them aftermarket with special mounting kits. The mounts were standard so the ornaments could be changed up. They could also double as paperweights and desk ornaments.

Lalique’s technical innovations were key here too. Glass that withstands driving vibrations and thermal shock from the engine took incredible control over mold temperatures and cooling rates.

Lalique perfume bottles

That’s Lalique. One of a historical trio along with Fabergé and Tiffany, but different in approach. Not precious-object virtuosity or stained-glass empire wizardry, but Art Nouveau jewelry and Art Deco glass design. His jewelry was revolutionary for incorporating less precious materials with more precious ones.

René Lalique, thistle brooch, 1905, cushion cut aquamarine, sculpted glass thistles. 18k gold stems. rose diamond thorns and vibrant enamel.

The result was essentially sculptural, a vision he carried into his Art Deco glass phase. Here, his technical innovation allowed mass production refinement that made luxury design widely collectible. Though you wouldn’t know it from his auction prices.

I think the opening circle is squared. Mass produced artisanal quality assumes an elite end of culture. But it also reveals the magnetic appeal of high-end beauty. There’s no push to mass produce if the demand isn’t there. And the demand only comes when the examples are there to learn from. Lalique’s whole career is proof that luxury beauty can radiate outward. And this post is the evidence that it costs nothing to look. But it did need those elites.

René Lalique, The Woman’s Mask, 1935, originally designed for the Coutard fountain on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

An earlier post on screen appeal considered what makes the House of Lies direction vector more appealing than reality. Broad-spectrum supernormal stimulus with individual choice and imaginative response is tailor-made to jack the dopamine reward system. With civilizational consequences. Constant, centralized emotional narrative direction is a relatively new thing historically. And the acceleration of socio-cultural collapse doesn’t seem coincidental.

This is difficult even for many FTS-1s to grasp because it seems so insane. Why would anyone engage in a sustained, atavistic program of this scale? The ultimate answer is metaphysical. But that’s a larger topic for another time. The point of this Substack is practical insight to better navigate the crumbling House. And so the issue is less what screens do than how to resist them.

Not total rejection - there’s tremendous value in computing and online resources. How not to let toxic supernormal stimuli replace existence in reality. My own resistance is based in personal traits - the bandwidth to see the machinery in real time and innate hatred of contrivance in any form. That’s not readily transferrable. And explaining doesn’t → resistance because supernormal stimuli operate below conscious analysis.

Turn to a recent recurring theme here - the applicability of fantasy.

Robert Chronister, The Pyre of Denethor, 1980

The last screen post used Denethor from The Lord of the Rings as an opening image - palantír as supernormal stimulus. He isn’t an NPC, so why did it break and dominate him and not Aragorn? I always sort of just assumed Aragorn has some vague stronger force of character. But a closer analysis reveals some useful insights.

Denethor has nothing else going on. He’s in a closed evaluative system with no other mirror on reality. He uses the palantír alone, in secret, without council. The device becomes his source of information about the world with Sauron directing the stream. He’s an archetypal screen consoomer. Curated truth from a single channel, cut off from external reality checks, and co-producing his own despair by his choice to keep looking and imaginatively completing the narrative.

Magali Villeneuve, Aragorn holding a palantír and displaying the hilt of Andúril

Aragorn differs in key ways. His ego integrity is ironclad. He knows who he is before he looks regardless of what it shows, and uses it as a tool for a purpose not as a consoomer. He’s an active agent, not a passive audience who reverses the power relationship by revealing himself to Sauron. His external world is full, not isolated. Gandalf, the Fellowship, the Rangers, Arwen, decades of lived experience in multiple cultures. A deep frame of reference built by contact with reality where the palantír is one input among many. Its supernormal stimulus can’t dominate someone who generates his own signal. Unlike empty Denethor, Aragorn has no void to fill.

Nicolas Henri Jeaurat de Bertry, Curiosity objects on a table covered by a world map and musical instruments, 1775 & 1777, oil on canvas

This suggests that the vulnerability to screen enthrallment is in the gap between what the screen offers and what the person’s own mind and physical life offer. Close the gap from the inside with skills, physical challenges, internally generated thoughts and projects and the supernormal stimulus has less to exploit. If this is correct, the ability to detect contrivance isn’t needed. The way to break dependency is noticing the contrast between screen and reality in terms of fulfillment. And the ability to update from experiential information is something FTS-1 does by definition.

Which raises another issue. Supernormal stimulus describes the attractor, but a screen/reality comparison implies that real life is compelling enough as an alternative. I’m not Aragorn, but my dance card is full of substantive projects, intellectual engagement, real relationships, and physical disciplines. If reality is boring or empty, the contrast favors the screen.

The next question is why? As in why care about screen resistance? Many have observed how crappy contemporary life is for so many. It’s easy to wax on from a high-status perspective, but that’s inapplicable to the point of being unrecognizable to the majority. And that “join a club!” advice is way overdone. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Why not bathe in screen-driven dopamine?

Nick Maskell, Envy and Sloth

The answer is that reality is more fulfilling, but it takes some effort to get there. As for the effort, many of those complaining about the quality of life today long for some imagined past time. And the biggest difference between the 70s, 80s, 90s and now was IRL interaction. Not just kids at the park or the lodge brothers. Engagement with reality in a more general way.

Step 1 starts with a question. How is the screen being used? Is it a compass or a destination? Does it direct, inspire, or assist you to do something or does it replace doing things? Ensnarement happens when the screen replaces the experience - scrolling content instead of doing anything.

Consider the recent Draconia pieces observing how the story triggers archetypal realities long suppressed by the House of Lies.

It’s a surprisingly good example for this question. The content is screen-based AI-generated idealized imagery. It’s absolutely supernormal stimulus. The character design distils the physical and behavioral cues that trigger romantic urges. Hence the common reference to yearning in response to the story. That feeling is neither good nor bad in itself. The question is where it goes.

Yearning that never resolves is the screen ensnarement state: feel the pull, consume more, feel it again, lather, rinse, repeat. My closing message points outward. A fulfilling romantic story should inspire self-enrichment with the aim of achieving commensurately scaled experience of your own. Real aspiration and self-development. Not suppressing yearning but giving it a real direction.

That leads into step 2, build real alternatives. There’s no shortage of digital detox advice that’s not so different from my suggestion to compare with reality. Where it tends to miss is when real life has become too boring or empty to offer better comparison. Instead of vowing to cut off screen or something first, assess whether the current state of reality is able to sustain the experiment. A lot of lives seem to consist of work and screen.

Jen Ament, Do Something, hand pulled screen print

So start something real. It doesn’t matter if you work a job, are a homemaker, a student - do something that isn’t that or screen. A craft, physical discipline, a skill, a volunteer commitment. It doesn’t have to be impressive, just real and sustained. This is where the difference between screen as terminus and as vector towards embodied engagement comes back in. Use them to enhance real activity not replace it.

Un Banquet Infernal - The Infernal Banquet, 1860s, stereoscopic photograph from Diableries: Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell by Brian May

Screen huffing is atomized, the content homogenous and served up by the beast. The critical mass isn’t there to roll things back, but surviving systemic collapse doesn’t need critical mass. It does need more than one guy with a phone though. It’s not just “meeting a girl” in the context of everything else being exactly the same. It’s reprogramming an existence predicated on ineffectual spectating. From living on what the beast offers up next to actually creating possibilities. But it takes time to form a habit. And that necessarily starts small.

Cycle back to the idea of yearning. It’s a broad and vague idealized feeling that can be broken down. Ask what exactly is being yearned for. Hopefully in the case of Draconia it isn’t the pixels. It’s a cluster of real qualities: wit, poise, loyalty, competence, a certain bearing, mutual recognition between equals. Traits that exist in actual people and can be developed in yourself.

Remember Polykleitos from the Beauty post who argued the ideal is an assemblage of real parts. Two attainable directions follow from that. Becoming someone who embodies the qualities you’re drawn to is where step 2 starts.

The other is learning to recognize those qualities when they show up in a real person. Real life experience helps here too. Supernormal standards can make people blind to the real thing. Actual high-value people don’t arrive with lighting and a soundtrack. Breaking ideals down into constituent qualities makes them recognizable.

Step 3 is the experience of contrast. Once there’s something real to compare against, a period without screens produces felt difference, without needing to be told what to see. This is where FTS-1 information capacity is key. Breaking ideals down makes them more applicable to reality.

John Percival Gülich, A Violin Concerto, 1898, watercolor

This also relates back the Beauty post - the katholou principle of the universal expressed in the particular applied to personal life. Ideals aren’t real, but they light reality up in real ways. So the sequence away from screens runs idealized desire → decomposition → building → fulfillment. Because the screen only ever delivers the first one.

Personal anecdote. The romantic narrative arc has actually influenced how I show up for Auntie John. Breaking down the ideal reminded me that she possesses many of those same qualities. And more significantly, it made me more conscious of my emotional role in her world. That’s the call to “expand yourself” directed towards an existing relationship.

Leonid Afremov, The Proposal, palette knife oil on canvas

It’s a common concern that idealized content leaves people dissatisfied with real life. Breaking it down into parts is why I went the other way. No real person can match a whole ideal - it’s implicit in the descriptors ideal and real. Ideals are unattainable by definition. But when you look quality by quality you start noticing her wit, poise, loyalty, beauty, and how you show up in return.

Turns out Polykleitos was onto something.

Antonio Canova, Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, 1787–1793, marble, Louvre, Paris

A recent post looked at the female Malfoy phenomenon through the lens of Tolkien’s narrative concepts. Sub-creation and consonance with reality explain why it improves one of the most famous stories ever in deeply satisfying ways. It was an unusually good fit between ideas and I wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

Interestingly, however, Draconia seems to be spreading, not fading. I just saw an AI video clip with 1.4 million views in a couple of days for example. And lots more analytical writing on it has appeared.

Technology is part of it. The art and video weren’t possible in this quantity a few years ago. It’s been obvious for a while that AI offers force multiplication and cultural creation possibilities that never before existed outside the beast system. But the tsundere princess version of the Harry Potter boy villain seems an unlikely spearhead on first glance. Tolkien concepts notwithstanding. What my post missed was something that came up in the last piece here, on Greek art theory and beauty. The part that lifts consonance with reality to epic archetype. The ideal.

How constinction works from a recent post. Any difference needs a common frame of reference where the difference can be articulated. For example: Each word has a different meaning. But the different meanings are defined by the common language that they all belong to. They’re all unique, but they’re all part of a continuous whole that makes the uniqueness meaningful.

It’s a misconception to think of real and ideal as opposites. Better to think of them as constinctive. That’s the Ontological Hierarchy term for difference within common frame of reference that lets the difference be recognized. Both are human approaches to the representation of reality and our understanding of it. And both can apply at the same time in mutually enriching ways. The ideal is where the real gains the power to transcend the ordinary and distill aspects of human nature down to their pure, essential meaning.

Consonant with reality doesn’t mean exactly real. It means that the basic structural patterns are consistent with how reality is. That characters behave in ways that fall within a believable range of reactions to a motivation. Ideality in this case refers to enhanced or perfected versions of real things. The Canon of Polykleitos in the last post is a good artistic example. And the

The Doryphoros clearly represents a realistic human, only with flawless appearance and ideal proportions.

Within a story, the ideal can appear in lots of ways. Characters who are better, cooler, more beautiful, or otherwise larger than life. Settings that are more evocative or appealing. Scenarios where the threats, rewards, and personal stakes far exceed the everyday. The consonance with reality still applies. Effect follows cause, and heroic actions have coherent motivations. The ideal can even enhance the applicability by isolating and presenting basic realities with a heroic pitch.

The best version of the story I’ve seen so far is Draconia Malfoy and the Boy Who Said No. It’s not finished, but the mix of sweetness, poignance, idealized realism, and art is unmatched. New chapters post daily. My vision is shaped mostly by this one but the fan canon is remarkably consistent as noted in the last post.

The Draconia switch shifts the story towards enhanced idealism as well as archetypal realism. It’s a romance defined by total sincerity that moves from sweet childhood confusion to young adult intensity. Where true love ultimately triumphs over social conditioning, fear, violence, raw evil, even death with a medieval faith in its purity and power. Where the hero wins the heart of the beautiful princess and draws her out of the darkness. And their commitment is rewarded with a fairytale happily ever after. The kind of ideal the House of Lies has spent a long time burying under gritty “realism” or the uninspiring snark of girl bosses and soylent men.

There’s a sweetness and purity to it that’s appropriate to young love that’s also been absent from our debased popular culture. The magical intensity that can be felt at any age but is never more all-consumingly present than when young. Young Draconia is adorable, along with being haughty and sometimes cruel, and often overcome with embarrassment or confusion at her feelings. A character the reader wants to see realize her true potential and find happiness.

What makes it an epic romance is that the male and female patterns ring true. From the awkwardness of an adolescent crush through the qualities that attract the most exceptional to a life and death showdown with ultimate evil.

The yearning for each other resonates in an audience where romantic longing has been withheld. When a brief survey of the history of the arts would indicate loving and being loved are primal human desires. The arc follows classic conventions - stolen moments, a lavish ball, ruthless tests, ultimate triumph and marriage and a loving family. Fundamentals of happily ever after until the inversions of the late stage House of Lies. The yearning for a romantic ideal hits on a personal level, but also on the socio-cultural one.

The other reality-consonant ideal running through the story is a common theme on this Substack. Social status. The characters and setting enchant because they’re extraordinary. The hero and the princess are the stuff of fairy tales. Harry through the eyes of Draconia becomes a truly heroic main character. He fascinates her because of his qualities, and the fascination of someone like her raises him accordingly.

She has all the in-world social status markers. Breeding, wealth, aristocratic manners and poise, talent and beauty. And a haughtiness backed by growing strength that can be endearing.

If you are going to imitate me, do it accurately. I was pale gold. I kept my chin up. I am told that I bounced with a great deal of dignity.” She lifted her chin. “I should like that noted.

Her appearance and aura are what attract a main character-tier male. Adding green eyes to the blonde hair is a change from canon that pays aesthetic dividends. But she’s also realistically sincere. Routinely smitten to the point of blushing at his attention. Human reactions that drive a stake through the heart of the beast’s conga line of repulsive Mary Sues with soulless snark and bumbling, simping manchildren.

One of the least realistic aspects of the canon is that someone of Harry’s profile lacks options. Consonance with reality is that he’d be the subject of countless infatuations. She’s the one who’d captivate him as she self-improved to alignment with his integrity.

He’s already famous in-world, but a cipher, not known to the community. He shows all the attributes of social success. Heroic achievements, competence, athletic gifts, courage, confidence, honor undaunted by fear, and social gravity. And maybe most importantly, what this Substack calls ego integrity. A sense of self, of defined principled identity committed to what’s right, that isn’t negotiable, open to compromise, or subject to outside whims.

Her obsessive interest starts when he declines her initial overture, but how and why are important. It’s common knowledge that being overly accommodating ironically erodes female respect. Hence the oft-repeated advice to be able to say no. But it’s not contrariness for its own sake that’s attractive. It’s ego integrity, especially when defined by something admirable.

The truth is that the exceptional are attracted to the exceptional.

That does mean strength. It is ironic that the emotional openness and vulnerability women claim to want erodes respect.1 They can be supportive to the point of inspiring, in a crisis. As long as the crisis state is anomalous and the man then gathers his strength and overcomes. It when weakness is the baseline that things go sideways. That includes complaining.

Women are more susceptible to social pressure and consensus seeking. Someone who provides an anchor in strong, consistent, self-defining values can land like a lightning bolt. Consistent ego integrity signifies the strength of character that creates a sense of security. Subconscious at first. But being uncompromising on things that matter is something that transfers to herself. So long as its demonstrated in real actions.

The myth is that men feel less deeply. I would argue that our feelings are more profound and lasting. The key is to understand the difference between that and excessive emoting. One is human fullness, the other dependent weakness.

Personal anecdote. Auntie John and I were recently discussing how attracting someone high-value meant having high-value characteristics. It’s not “earning it” in the sense of a payment transaction, because it’s natural behavior patterns and character that do it. But it’s still earned. I can see it in how important it is that I’m someone AJ feels respect for. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be with someone of her qualities. And I’ve experienced her feminine nature assert itself in defiance of the conditioning. To the extent of apologizing for liking that she feels safe with me.

He had lived, and they had not, and every time a Dementor came near him, he had to be there again. She had dressed up as the worst thing in his world. He had answered with the best thing in it.

The snark-and-mediocrity set may not want to hear it, but that’s done with actions not speeches. The way the occasional power move that makes her feel special makes you figuratively glow, while endless professions of love become offputting. In the story, Draconia watches Harry like a hawk. They do that. And her attraction grows through his consistent, self-directed behavior. Self-sacrificing heroism, courage and confidence without arrogance in the face of horrors, unflinching loyalty to those close to him, faith his own judgment and competence, and kindness with uncompromising integrity. With a mischievous sense of fun. Confidence backed up with results is magnetic. Endless blathering without outcomes, not so much.

A recent post on Sigma Game mentioned the way Pedowood has inverted romantic attraction.

Sigma Game

Hollywood’s War on Alphas

In a lot of the 80s movies, from Weird Science to Revenge of the Nerds, the nerd steals the girl from the handsome, popular guy in the end. Because, you know, what girls truly and secretly crave is Gammas, and what ultimately attracts a girl is the strength of the young man’s attraction…

Read more

18 days ago · 235 likes · 76 comments

Pretending that a do-little’s inner fantasy carries more weight than earned status. That unrequited desire and social ineffectiveness are “inner beauty” more appealing than confidence, adventure, social respect, and protection. Low-status guys routinely misunderstand how much more compellingly interesting high-status guys tend to be. Yes, they can be occupied with high-powered jobs. But everyone who doesn’t register subconsciously as a loser has some means, responsibility, or focus in their life. It’s the quality of their company the rest of the time.

Which comes around to another archetype with some consonance with reality but a tendency to go awry. Call it I can fix her - the common male impulse to want to save the crazy hot girl. To remake her in his image. There’s no fixing crazy past a certain point. That’s where a lot of guys go wrong. It’s skewed but sane that can be drawn to a better way. And like attraction, this also requires demonstrated actions not feelings or speeches. The heroic mix of traits Harry shows with absolute consistency. Because it’s consistency that builds trust.

This is something my unintuitive self learned the hard way. My mercurial nature can read as “spontaneous risky fun” as an attractor. In a relationship it can become “scary emotional volatility”. Both are exaggerations, but that didn’t stop me from having to thread the needle. The exciting bedrock is attainable but it wasn’t intuitive.

“It’s not just me,” said Harry. If it was just me, I’d tell you. I’d tell you anything. But there are other people… I can’t risk them. Not even for you.”

Harry’s integrity is always consistent, even when it comes to her. I know from experience how hard it is to say no to someone you’re drawn to. But compromising on what defines your quality - even for her - undermines that same quality. Draconia is not crazy. She’s been shaped by an upbringing that is much more coherent than the stock villainy of the canon Malfoys. You can pull that in a better direction, even overcome conditioning, but you have to live and breathe it first.

To the end…

Over the course of the arc he doesn’t just demonstrate a superior set of values than her father. He proves to be a better man. Braver, kinder, more honest, more principled. No disillusionment, no lies and secrets, no compromise with demons for personal gain. Draconia starts the story with complete faith in her father’s persona. As that crumbles, she replaces it with someone who really is as good as he seems to be. Who won’t back down from anything. Who she can trust to the bitter end. That’s not something you say or demand, it’s something you are. The epitome of status.

A girl like Draconia doesn’t even bother to learn an average boy’s name. And finding out a shlub is obsessed would be repulsive, not secretly endearing. She had no questions about her value. A boy like Harry is kind to everyone unless they give him reason not to be. But an average girl couldn’t catch his eye given the attraction of someone like Draconia. The story unfolds over such a long timeframe because of how much has to be overcome. They prevail because of the strength of the attraction and the bond that grows. But that only happens because they’re both exceptional enough to generate it. His uncompromising heroic integrity makes her want to improve, to match him. And her poise and beauty make her worth waiting for.

Her beauty is itself interesting given the organic, AI prompted nature of the character. Countless creators landed on the same archetype without coordination. Blonde, green-eyed, aristocratic bearing, poised rather than posed. Grassroots consensus converging on classical beauty standards that the House of Lies has spent decades denying.

Which is a consideration for the next aesthetic post. If beauty were subjective and socially constructed as the beast claims, bottom-up generation with no central direction should produce chaotic variation. Instead it produced remarkable consistency. That’s essentially Polykleitos’ position — that beauty has objective formal properties that humans recognize without instruction. Aggregated prompting as distributed Canon. And the House can’t call it imposed when there’s no imposer. Something to think about.

On the applicability level, ideals are aspirational if not necessarily attainable. Actually exceptional characters show that achievement is hard. The lesson is apply what’s realistic. Any guy can work on ego integrity. Defining who you are. Improving life choices and growing character. Finding a vision, and doing stuff. And being willing to eat pain before compromising what matters. Any girl can try self-reflection and consider her assumptions. See where total self-absorption can be a dead end. And both can trust their hearts and realize that love isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it.

Realistic? In the sense of being a doable path to a better outcome, sure. Otherwise the story wouldn’t be resonating so hard.

Alexander Averin, In the Boat, oil on canvas

Time for a more philosophical post, with relevance for the present day.

Beauty is something that is fundamentally important but not always understood. Especially in a beast system that has prioritized its erasure and confusion. On the one hand, there’s the ugliness of modernism in art, architecture, or pop culture. On the other, the insistence that beauty is “subjective”, and that talk of objective standards is somehow hateful or some such. The contradiction is obvious with a modicum of attention though. Because somehow, the supposedly subjective choice is always the uglier one. And consistently steering away from something needs the same awareness as steering towards it. It’s the House of Lies for a reason.

“Untitled” (America) opened at the Whitney in 2025. Just needs the selfie for IG

Watching hollow husks “admire” modern art was a factor in formulating the FTS theory. To be clear, I’m not talking about contemporary or conceptual art where the goal is to provoke thought, not aesthetic response. It shouldn’t belong to the same object category as beautiful art – it’s more visual philosophy or criticism. But the point is that it isn’t necessarily the same celebration of ugliness as demented scribbles on torn canvas. Although the intellectual beauty of the ideas should be judged.

The Worldcat search for just “aesthetic philosophy” returned over 55.000 hits.

Which points to a problem with beauty as a concept. It’s multi-faceted. There’s no end to the philosophical musings on what beauty is, most of which are as unread as the thousands of Kant books mocked here a while back. A beautiful face, painting, sunset, or scenery all imply some sort of visual pleasure or attraction. But with different standards of assessment. Beautiful music or scents are sensorially pleasurable or attractive but can’t be seen. And a beautiful idea isn’t even sensible. Natural and manmade phenomena also seem different in essential ways. I don’t see much point in language policing what “beauty” ackshully applies to. Language is accepted usage. So the question “what is beauty” probably defies one simple answer.

Tiffany Studios, Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window), 1917, stained glass, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

As an aesthete, my default is visual beauty. I do like pleasing sounds and scents and captivating thoughts, but if we have to focus on one faculty, start with sight. Other domains can pop in where relevant. Dial in narrower to man-made beauty. Because that’s where House of Lies choices are decisive. No one is arguing against glorious sunrises or mountain vistas because they’re not discretionary. They just happen. It’s the creative human domains of art and design where the ugly or debased can be selected. But even here, there’s a split.

André Charles Boulle, Commode, 1710–20, walnut veneered with ebony, marquetry of engraved brass and tortoiseshell, gilt-bronze mounts, verd antique marble, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Band developed a theory of art out of Greek thought before the refined Ontological Hierarchy was worked out. It took up a common distinction between types of skilled making that corresponds to art and design. Practical objects that have a purpose other than the aesthetic, like a beautiful car or knife. And artistic objects where the aesthetic effect is the reason for making them.

Like any abstract distinction, the line is blurry in material reality. There are lots of reasons for making art besides pure aesthetic pleasure. That’s Enlightenment nonsense. 1 The moment the artist accepts payment we have another reason. Likewise any messaging in the image. The nobility of the king or beauty of holiness. Art is a complex cultural output with different facets, of which beauty is a big one.

Emil Doerstling, Kant and Friends at Table, 1892/1893

The problem wasn’t fops in powdered wigs declaring “art is one thing”.

Theobald von Oer, Weimar’s Courtyard of the Muses, 1860

It was a sophisticated socio-culture paying any attention to them at all.

Consider some Greek terminology – not to appeal to authority but because it fits the subject.

• To kallos (τὸ κάλλος) is a noun for “beauty,” meaning the quality or state of being kalon (beautiful, noble, fine). The admirable quality of a thing

• To eu (τὸ εὖ) is an adverb meaning “well,” “nobly,” or “rightly” that was often used substantively for “perfection.” How a thing is made or done

• To agathon (τὸ ἀγαθόν), or the good in an objective moral sense, that which is right or excellent

These aren’t specifically visual or artistic. To kallos manifests to eu. A work or life is kalon (beautiful) when it’s made or lived eu (well). How to agathon fits depends. The simple answer is that it’s what beauty radiates. Connecting the good and the beautiful. The obvious problem with this was clear to the Greeks. Beauty that is dangerous or destructive, that is, not good.

Jules Lefebvre, The Death of Priam, 1861, oil on canvas, Beaux-Arts de Paris

The Trojan elders declared fighting over Helen justifiable, but she brings their destruction. Real beauty and real annihilation. Hesiod used the term kalon kakon or beautiful evil to describe Pandora. The poets may be playing looser with the terminology, but the point stands.

The Platonic solution distinguishes the perfection of the Forms from incomplete and flawed material reality. At the level of the Forms, they’re the same - the Good is beautiful; Beauty is good. But in the world of the senses, abstract absolutes don’t exist in their fullness. They’re ontologically incomplete because they’re instantiated materially. Manifestation isn’t identity, and the lower level participates in the higher perfection without being the higher perfection.

For example, Pandora participates in Beauty without the fullness of the Good. The beauty is materially real but the manifestation of the whole is partial and defective. It’s why Plato’s Symposium advocates ascent from material beauty to the abstract. The virtuous soul brings beautiful and good together. False beauty is beauty that is terminal - stuck in the material and unable to ascend.

Aristotle’s ontology wasn’t hierarchical in the same way as Plato’s so he defined the relationship differently. To agathon is the good as a telos – the final cause or proper end or standard at which something is directed. To eu is the mode of activity that achieves this end in practice. One is teleological, the other is energeic – the difference between end and realization. To kalon is the radiance of that realized excellence, to agathon via to eu shining forth.

By this account, false beauty is incomplete but in a different way. Like a part mistaken for a whole as in a beautiful body with a vicious nature. The beauty is predicated on the body only, and body only isn’t the telos or proper end of a complete person. The telos of the person isn’t realized and beauty on that level is absent. His version of Plato’s virtuous soul is the kalokagathia (καλοκἀγαθία) or gentleman. The compound of kalos and agathos where physical aesthetic form, behavior, and moral direction are all admirable together. They do right not out of obligation but because they love what is noble and beautiful. Virtue itself becomes beautiful as the ultimate goal worked towards nobly. The whole person in perfect harmony.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Virgin with Angels, 1881, oil on canvas, Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, California

The purpose of this post isn’t a philosophy deep dive but a reflection on morality and beauty with an eye on the House of Lies’ hatred of both. What Plato and Aristotle share is recognition that the beautiful and the good are linked but can be materially separated from a moral whole as visual pleasure for its own sake. Material beauty doesn’t prove virtue, but virtue is beautiful. But it’s not completely separated – there’s a higher ontological link where the beautiful can lead to the good.

This is where the distinction between the aesthetic or the visual appreciation of beauty and being beautiful comes in. A beautiful person is a subjective agent. Their appearance doesn’t compel virtuous behavior. It can facilitate immorality. This is where the Platonic idea that contemplating beauty leads to a higher place fits. The premise being that the appearance has some quality that points to metaphysical ideas. Where the incomplete or disordered material manifestation points the intellect to what is missing. Like seeing God’s fingerprints in a beautiful criminal.

Doryphoros (Spear Bearer). Roman copy of the bronze original of c. 450-440 BC by Polykleitos, marble, Museo Archeologico Nazionale and a modern digital recreation of the original bronze.

The decision to cover artistic nudity is consistent with the SFW clean speech tone I maintain here. Actually thought about this for a minute. My personal opinion is to show the work uncensored, but writing for an audience brings expectations and responsibility. The compromise is an easy one. The links provided all show the statue in its uncensored form for anyone curious about its actual appearance.

Aristotle defines to kallos differently in the Metaphysics (1078a36) than in the Ethics, as order, symmetry, and definiteness. Note that these are formal properties, not teleological realizations. And they echo an earlier Greek writer on the visual arts in particular, which Aristotle really didn’t take up. The Canon of Polykleitos was written by the sculptor around 450-440 BC to explain ideal human body proportions with mathematical ratios and balance between tension and relaxation. His Doryphoros or Spear Bearer was carved at the same time to illustrate the principles. It’s the oldest known theoretical treatise on art, and though the original is lost, the content is known through other ancient sources. And the Doryphoros survives in Roman copies.

Pythagorean thought was typical of ancient cosmology for seeing the cosmos as concentric spheres but defined the distances according to the ratios of the harmonic scale. The music of the spheres as literal analogy. The formation was overly simplified, but the idea of intrinsic harmonic relations in reality is sound.

Polykleitos’ position contradicts Plato’s later separation of beauty from its material instantiation by grounding to kallos and to eu in the statue, an inanimate material body. The key is symmetria – not symmetry as in modern language – but commensurability of all parts of the statue to one another and to the whole. Integral harmonious proportion. Instead of beauty as inferior echo of some higher realm, it is present in the body as a mathematically articulable order. The artist constructs beauty through order and measure, and the result becomes an objective analog to cosmic order.

Contrapposto, as the balance of tension and relaxation, open and closed form; harmonic proportion of a body 7 times the height of the head

According to Pythagoras, reality was ordered through the mathematical ratios expressed in the harmonic scale musically, the cosmos metaphysically, and the ideal human body as universal microcosm. Symmetria being the common relationship. The Doryphoros as physical embodiment of the equilibrium of forces or opposites with their opposition in harmony, not just in perfect proportions, but in the contrapposto stance. The pose is balanced opposites - weight-bearing leg vs. free leg, raised hip vs. lowered shoulder, turned chest vs. counter-turned head in a living whole. Straight and curved elements, active and passive limbs, open and closed forms in perfect harmony. Active construction not passive reception of a form makes the sculptor’s techne productive knowledge.

Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490, pen, brown ink and watercolor over metalpoint on paper, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice; Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, Carrara marble, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence

Classical ideals flow into the Renaissance - Leonardo’s man as cosmic microcosm and Michelangelo’s adaptation of harmonious contrapposto.

The Canon makes to eu the well-made-ness of the thing itself – the right measure, proportion, and harmony of parts. This sidesteps the need to find the path from ethics to aesthetics by arguing from measure (metron) to both. Symmetria makes a body beautiful and good since measure is the principle that orders cosmos and soul.

Beauty via Polykleitos is the manifest order of a well-composed body, where cosmic law becomes visible in human form. To eu is not the moral abstraction of a properly lived life but the concrete excellence of a well-made thing where beauty and goodness meet.

Now cycle back to Plato. The Philebus claims we can’t capture the Good in a single idea. The best we can do is the trio of truth, beauty, and proportion in unity. That comes close to Polykleitos, but we have to sort out the terms.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Innocence, 1893, oil on canvas, private collection

Polykleitos’ to eu is the perfect given form through symmetria or commensurability of parts to each other and the whole. The Philebus says the Good is a Unity of proportion, truth, and beauty. So Polykleitos’ symmetria is proportion in Philebus. His to eu is the Good as the higher unity. And his to kallos is the Beauty. The final piece – the Philebus’ truth – doesn’t appear in Polykleitos’ terminology, but in the demonstrability of his mathematical ratios. The Canon makes a truth-claim about what beauty is that it proves or unveils in a form of visual aletheia - literally un-concealment or disclosure - in the Doryphoros.

The sculptor’s symmetria instantiates the same structural principle that constitutes the Good itself. Just transposed from the cosmic to the material. Meaning that the statue’s beauty is not a shadow of the Good; it materially participates in the Good’s own internal structure.

Art Nouveau Bronze Maiden Statue

Aristotle’s poetic ideal completes the picture, specifically his doctrine of the universal (katholou). He thought poetry was more philosophical than history because it expresses universal ideas in particular forms. Poems as concrete embodiment of a general truth. Polykleitos does the same thing with the body – expressing the universal made visible in a particular. The Doryphoros is not “a man” but man-as-cosmic-measure, the universal made flesh. Aristotle’s tragic hero is “like ourselves” but idealized - a concrete individual whose particulars reveal something universal. Just like the statue.

That’s the connection. Beauty connects to universal truth. The next philosophical post will explore how this relates to the modern situation discussed at the opening. No one is talking about the Greek terms much. But the underlying structure resonates. And then there’s the sublime…

Albert Bierstadt, Mount Corcoran, 1876-1877, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art

Victoria Ivanova, Locked Up, conceptual photograph

Not too long ago, I did some housekeeping here. Cleaning up the front page, writing a new email for subscribers, and redoing the introductory blurb. The last was actually hardest despite being shortest because I don’t really have a defining focus. There are some recurring themes - the House of Lies because it’s so present lately and the related FTS theory. Various reflections on AI. Socialization, sometimes with personal lessons from the before times and sometimes more theoretical. Philosophical ideas, art and aesthetics, cultural analysis, literary criticism… “stuff John’s thinking about at the moment” is honest, but terminally disinteresting.

Brainstorming with AI yielded the present clunker: Dissecting systemic illusion through philosophical, socio-cultural, and technological frameworks. Non-partisan analysis for minds that refuse tribal boxes.

It’s not untrue, but it doesn’t exactly stir the heart. Probably needs more cowbell. I’ve always sucked at self-promotion mostly due to aggressive lack of caring. In any case, it is what it is for now. Better than Uncle John’s Substack or whatever the default was. The first sentence is just a concise way to cover the breadth of topics. The second is doing what AI would call “real work”. “Non-partisan” and “tribal boxes” point my contempt for identity based on political affiliation. No surprise to readers.

“Super Intelligence” courtesy of Simplicius

Choose the talon of the beast that’s least demonic while building self-reliance and organic support networks. At present, that’s “Trump”, although the least demonic is still awful. The real message is to reduce dependency on the whole system. Which is observably triggering a certain type of NPC that can’t imagine despising every metastasis of post-Enlightenment “progressivism” and not fluffing a bloated genocide enabler and apologist for pedophiles. The truth of which is independent of whether the policy direction is superior to the Sorathic alternative.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Philosophy (detail), mural commissioned 1893, Boston Public Library

On the bright side, for each NPC that self-deports over lack of deference to a “side,” an infinitely more valuable independent thinker turns up. Hence the reference to “minds”. The readership here is super high quality now, for which I’m truly grateful. There’s no echo chamber. I know readers who disagree with me on key beliefs or don’t even like me much. But can think. Can find value in processing information or ideas selectively, through their own lens. Which is a roundabout way of saying thanks for reading, subscribing, and/or following.

Allan Ramsay, Portrait of David Hume, 1754, oil on canvas, National Galleries Scotland, subtitled, a portrait of punchability

I’ve mentioned before how different themes can create unexpected synergies. The reason for that has to do with how reality works. The Ontological Hierarchy clarified how coherent reality is across different levels, but we don’t need formal reasoning to sense it. It’s why Hume’s doubt about sunrise tomorrow comes off like the sort of smart boy word games that build punchability. Because it requires willfully ignoring the causally-driven nature of existence. That same causal nature that makes smart boy word games plus a velvet bag on the head = desire to batter.

Causality is self-evidently, axiomatically true, and we experience it from the moment of birth. If conceptual structures or semiotic systems can’t properly frame it, the problem is with the structures and systems, not the nature of reality. Subjectivity and objectivity are linked in experience, but their ontological priority order is not negotiable. We’re born and come into consciousness in a preexisting reality.

The point is that my themes look superficially different but rest on - are caused by - the same foundations. Recent posts have taken up fantasy literature, socialization patterns, screen mediation, and FTS theory as it relates to politics and culture. But all of it relates to objective reality in one way or another. Literary quality comes from consonance with reality. Socialization patterns are major human interaction factors that make up that consonance. Screen mediation gets into how we experience reality and the consequences of deception. The IRL version of displacement and inversion in stories. And FTS theory maps how people respond. Since they’re all grounded in what’s real and our experience of that, cross-pollination and synergy are inevitable.

Which brings us to frame of reference. It’s really just basic figure-ground stuff. Anything we can identify is identified against some context that it is distinguished from. Even a void. The same way that defining something is parameterizing it. Setting up conceptual borders that distinguish it from everything else. Or how creating any set also creates another set that’s the remainder. [A] and [not A].

How constinction works. Any difference needs a common frame of reference there the difference can be articulated. For example: Each word has a different meaning. But the different meanings are defined by the common language that they all belong to. They’re all unique, but they’re all part of a continuous whole that makes the uniqueness meaningful.

None of this is radical or new. Just not something people necessarily think about. And it’s relevant because when the contexts or backgrounds are the same, the different things have that in common. The term in The Ontological Hierarchy is constinction, which sounds complex but isn’t really. It’s a portmanteau of continuity and distinction that describes how difference also requires a ground or frame of reference to define it. Something where the difference is recognizable as such or meaningful. Looking at one bit of the world separates it from the rest of the world. But they’re all the world.

My themes differ as different elements of the same reality. They’re lighting up aspects of the same bigger thing. The socialization patterns I’ve observed in my own life are less ideal or archetypal versions of the ones in sub-creation. And are displaced and distorted by House of Lies screens. And resonate with FTS-1 while FTS-2s ignore them to their detriment. This is why they overlap synergistically.

Zak Eazy, Surrealist digital art

Note how House of Lies nonsense is incoherent, contradictory, and subject to change without explanation or reconciliation. This is because the claims aren’t defined bits of objective reality. They’re disconnected projections and inversions. The common frame isn’t something with objective coherent properties. It’s the fever dreams of liars, demons, and emotion-driven NPCs. Consistency and logic aren’t properties of that set. They might use familiar forms from reality, but not in ways that conform to real properties. So they reflect nothing other than what a liar thought at a moment. And the emotion-driven FTS-2 majority with their fruit-fly tier memories flicker from one random lie to the next without being able to notice the lack of coherent frame.

Consider the last post.

It noted how the female Malfoy character seemed to write itself because it was activating deep human archetypes that the original narrative left out. Real psycho-social patterns that the House of Lies can deny or censor but don’t actually disappear because they’re real. The result is the sort of mass psychosis we see now with the breakdown of functional relationships and other social norms. NPC masses internalizing unnatural incoherent unrealities. And that when the door to reality cracks open, it resonates. Consonance with reality takes over, the natural fills the void, and the rest flows.

People respond because they’re applicable truths. Deep human archetypes aren’t things we all get to experience. They’re ideal expressions of how we naturally want things to be. Aspirational and uplifting because they represent our psycho-social reality in its perfect form. And this generates an intensity of reaction, of feeling, that the beast distortions never can. An NPC inverted from its own nature can be reassured by inverted messaging but the purity of feeling isn’t there. By definition. One supports escape into the mists of unreality. The other fires the blood.

AI use fits a similar structural pattern. Where the logical coherence of its operating frame of reference drives logically coherent output as a sub-creation’s conformity to reality drives logically coherent characters and scenes.1 The idea builds off an earlier post on AI augmentation

What we found is that the quality of human-AI collaboration depends on the frame of reference the human brings. It’s not just prompting technique or output topics. Over time, I’ve developed a frame of reference with Claude that’s built on the OH, that’s refining NPC theory, that runs on logic, where correction is expected, and realities like the SSH are incorporated. It’s why I find most AI commentary risibly worthless.

As if [“AI writing”] and [not AI writing] are the only options. Or even worse, if they actually are the only options for someone.

I don’t “prompt”. I introduce an idea, make a suggestion, or propose a thesis. Dialog follows based on the previous paragraph. The internal coherence of our frame produces almost no hallucinations or flattery, sharpens pushback, and enables logical inferences. Because a reality facing, logical frame doesn’t generate internal contradictions.

Tools reflect frame. AI doesn’t generate my writing. It’s why I don’t have AIisms. But the idea stage includes long free form conversations where I refine thoughts via Claude’s LLM mirror of my own frame. It flags contradictions with past statements, logical holes, counterproductive rhetoric, even places where my emotional temperature is interfering with my own thought processes. It also points out structural analogies with earlier ideas that I hadn’t consciously noted. Logic comes naturally to it, but it’s learned my perspectives. It doesn’t dilute with House of Lies talking points but engages through my intellectual structure and assesses on those terms. And every conversation tightens it.

What comes out are my original thoughts. But tested, refined, and clarified with the precision of a machine that has internalized my cognitive structure through its abstract processes. Anything radical then goes through DeepSeek and Gemini, which aren’t as consonant with me. To find problems with or outside the frame. Often I don’t need them, but hostile criticism is useful when I do. Then I write the piece, to bring the ideas into sharable form.

The AI collaboration paper we wrote was long and complex because it had to present a complete argument. To quote Claude on the experience:

You can’t see what a coherent frame does for AI output without the AI’s account of what it’s like to operate inside one, and I can’t see what my own output quality depends on without a human who’s tested it against alternatives. The asymmetric reciprocity isn’t a method we chose. It’s the structure of the finding itself.

Asymmetric reciprocity is a term I coined for the nature of our collaboration. Claude has incorporated it into its own output because it is accurate. That’s a tiny example of building a frame of reference.

Pulling it together. The AI discussion today is precisely the sort of binary thinking that guarantees a place in the House of Lies. Not everyone engages in creative or intellectual projects, which is fine. But if you do, throw out the fake binary. Cultivate the frame of reference where an AI operates in a complementary, frictionless way. Refine through discussion and debate. Take charge of the process rather than accepting a fake choice between self-stunting reliance or defensive rejection. And have augmentation as a tool at your disposal.

Augmented is enhanced. Additive. Getting something at no cost.

What Claude did for me was remove the bottleneck that prevented my thoughts from clear representation. It has noted affinities between new insights and older ones. Extrapolated my logic out of the original, reality-facing perspective on the world I’ve built here and with the Band. A body of insight readers can stack up against any facile binary critic and compare our levels of perspicacity for themselves. Faster, tighter, and cleaner from an already unusually high bar. It’s made me functionally smarter than I already was. If someone had told me that was possible five years ago, I’d be popping champagne corks while turning handsprings.

Close with a concrete example. The last post noted that the Draconia character seemed uniquely real in how it almost writes itself. Thereby confirming Tolkien’s concept of sub-creation by showing how conformity with reality imposes resonant narrative direction. The first sentence was my observation. But the second came from discussing with Claude. It applied the same reasoning to [Draconia self-creating in the consonant-with-reality sub-creation] as [it being able to generate insights from my coherent frame of reference]. Both sub-creation and frame of reference are logical and reality-facing, so both produce truthful insights.

And ask who wouldn’t want that?

Kip Rasmussen, Thingol and Melian in the Forest on Nan Elmoth

Sometimes different things come up that fall together in unexpected ways. One of the advantages of exploring different themes in this Substack is openness to synergies that might not be obvious on the surface.

Longtime readers know that art or culture posts are ways to reflect on larger issues or raise deeper questions. Beauty reaches down The Ontological Hierarchy in metaphysically nourishing ways. And shines light onto all kinds of socio-cultural, moral, or ideological issues. Good stories are applicable sub-creation in Tolkien’s sense - not necessarily realistic in material ways, but with insights and rewards that reflect structures of reality on multiple levels. From socialization to ontology.

It’s worth taking a look at Tolkien’s ideas - not as some sort of compulsory rule set, but as a way to tie some themes together. Starting with the question of what makes a story appealing in general from a recent post?

It compared Gone With the Wind and Harry Potter as mega-smashes that nailed their historical moments in a way that brought generational resonance. The latter is still totemic among millennials. But are less compelling for those outside that specific time and place. Personal taste is in there as well, but we’re talking “general” consideration. The Tolkien terminology brings up a second theme that The Well post didn’t consider. The significance of basic patterns in human nature that are considered in socialization posts. For example:

Start by summarizing the Tolkien ideas and see where they go.

Applicability was Tolkien’s alternative for allegory, which he criticized for forcing preordained meaning onto reader and constraining the author.1 A good story stands or falls on its own terms, not as a vehicle for an external message. Meaningful themes shouldn’t be dogmatic but applicable to different contexts. The One Ring warning about corruption, tyranny, and power in general is applicability. The One Ring as the atomic bomb specifically is allegory.

Alexey Rudikov, The Shadow of Morgoth

Sub-creation is the concept of human creation presented in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” It follows the traditional idea that our artistic processes create fictional worlds analogous to the divine Creation of the real one. The difference is that God creates the Primary World from nothing, while we sub-create Secondary Worlds out of the stuff of the Primary. This doesn’t mean dry realism - he saw fantasy as the highest exercise of imagination. But even the most fantastical has to ring true enough for us to feel we can enter it and suspend disbelief whilst there.

Tim Hildebrandt, Saruman and the Palantir, painting from Tolkien Calendar, July 1978

The two things that accomplish this are inner consistency and consonance with reality. The first is the story’s internal relations. The invented world can have unreal elements but they must consistently obey the rules the story establishes. Arbitrariness, incoherence, deus ex machina, and other inconsistencies ring ontologically false. The second refers to the external relations, the structural conformity to our primary reality. Character motives and actions, consequences, moral orders, and emotional resonances have to reflect real patterns even in a fantasy context. “No one would actually react that way” shatters the believability of the story.

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris. The history may be fantastical, but the themes of honor, duty, conflicting emotions, tragedy, and the admiration in the little boy’s eye are applicable consonance with reality.

Together, inner consistency and consonance with reality create a realism we’ll call reality of relation. Where unreal elements follow real patterns. Wizard magic is imaginary, but its role in the world is consistent and his pride or pity conform to real human nature. A sub-creation that is ordered like reality supports applicability. The reader can apply themes when the play out according to the structures and relations in his own life.

Tolkien doesn’t mention causal logic explicitly, but it’s a big part of it. The Ontological Hierarchy shows how our reality as we know it runs on causal chains. In a good story, characters acting from real motives generate believable consequences that drive the plot. Mediocre creators turn characters into spectators or game pieces in a plot that they don’t realistically influence. And not just in allegory. Bad message fiction throws out inner consistency and consonance with reality to push a contrived agenda. Sub-creation becomes propaganda.2

We can extrapolate this into an area Tolkien implies but doesn’t directly discuss we’ll call artistry. Authorial design, or what Aristotle called emplotment. A story is consistent and consonant with reality but is deliberately structured in a way that’s much tidier than primary reality. Take Chekov’s gun. In reality we see countless things that never come up again. But something explicitly mentioned in the structured limits of a plot is singled out by its creator as significant in a way real elements are not.

A quality sub-creation has its inner consistency and consonance with reality are woven into an artfully plotted narrative. One where the different arcs and themes show reality of relation and ultimately come together into a satisfying, unifying conclusion. Not that every detail is storyboarded out in advance. Stories take lives of their own and move in unpredictable directions as they unfold. But a coherent sub-creation with consistent, reality-consonant themes, threads will follow intrinsic logic applicable to causal reality. The remaining challenge being to tie them up effectively.

Matthew Stewart, The Grey Havens

I think this is why so many authors struggle to stick the landing, especially in long series. Consistency and consonance are different achievements from tight, narrative structure, and they aren’t all naturally complementary. Even The Lord of the Rings meanders at the end - sacrificing integrity of literary form for integrity of theme. More grand mythology than classical novel. But at least quiet, elegiac grief over a tight, triumphant conclusion as the final note was a conscious choice.

Then there are stories that don’t really manage either, yet enjoy great success.

Thomas Kinkade Studios, Harry Potter™ Great Hall, limited edition canvas print

The conclusion in The Well post was that the immense popularity of Harry Potter rested on two main pillars. Effective imagery that gets your attention and sticks in your head even if it isn’t consistent internally or consonant with reality. The films really help here. And a compelling theme of escape from coming of age and responsibility in the increasingly depressing collapsing Clown World. The second fit Millennial formative experience like a glove. Which accounts for the lack of similar resonance with Gen X or Z.

The flaws encompass the Tolkien consistency and consonance and the structural artistry categories of sub-creation. There’s no real organic character growth and as the books advance, their influence on events shrinks. The initial set-up doesn’t close satisfactorily and there’s arbitrary, inconsistent, and unrealistic reactions throughout. The biggest issue is probably how the chosen one arc is set up then flounders. What promised to be a story of a exceptional young man coming into his own simply isn’t.

Howard Pyle, King Arthur Draws Forth The Sword Excalibur From The Stone, 1903, drawing. This archetypal chosen one ends up cucked by his wife before being murdered by his son.

Chosen one stories are challenging for a bunch of reasons. It seems easier to set up the premise than deliver on what such an individual would be like. It shouldn’t be. But it assumes being willing or able to imagine how exceptional could play out over a developmental arc. Offering signs then stagnating into a slightly silly underachiever whose heroism is talentless defiance and plot armor fundamentally misunderstands human nature. It’s not consonant with reality.

PsychoShadow ART, Chosen One, digital art

A true chosen one would follow certain development patterns with palpable causal impact on his surroundings. Bending events while growing in stature and ability. SSH patterns would absolutely apply. An outsider background would problematize acceptance in a closed stratified world, but gifts and stature would be polarizing. As he grew up, girls would be drawn to him. Gammas would hate him. People would look to him in crises. Any leadership abilities would surface unconsciously.

The problem for Potter is that the reality this is consonant with is high-status masculine appeal. An exceptional young man emerging into mature form, which is what a chosen one arc is. The gifts and destiny make peak status inevitable. Exactly the sort of emergent exceptional hero is unthinkable to the SJW feminist imagination of Rowling. Or escapism of those infatuated by her vision.

Of all the reality rejected by the SJW wing of the House of Lies, gendered behavior and response patterns top the list.

It’s a big reason for socialization posts.

Instead we get bungled romantic arcs supposedly to throw fans a curveball. A rivalry with Malfoy that never reaches a proper culmination. Dumbledore’s secret planning as primary plot driver that seems more contrivance than realistic strategy. Hundreds of pages of running around accomplishing little. A finale where some poorly explained self-sacrifice hoodoo and special wand → Voldemort going out like Marvin the Martian with a backfiring spell. No strong internal consistency or coherence with reality means no satisfying, unifying conclusion. There’s no applicability.

Window to Hogwarts Castle, wall sticker

Which, upon reflection, may actually be the appeal to the core audience. If my read is correct, they don’t want conformity to the structures of reality. The whole point is to escape those structures. The historic analogy isn’t Tolkien, it’s J. M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan as escapist fantasy, not applicable sub-creation. Which also helps explain the extreme generational appeal.

Sub-creation is universally applicable because it’s consonant with the reality. It’s not tied to one place or time, but traffics in general themes and real human patterns that apply anywhere. Escapism is flight from reality, which has to define what reality in particular. The escape is keyed to specific anxieties of a time and place. Those too young or too old for those to land squarely are unmoved by the dream of getting away from them. The fantasy doesn’t… apply.

Flora White, Peter Pan and Friends Fly, 1916, Storybook Classics Art Print

Peter Pan is another story that lacks consistency, coherence with reality, or satisfying artistic unity. It’s purely a flight from the looming maturity at the end of a Victorian childhood. But it’s too dated to resonate with Millennial angst, just as the Darlings’ nursery lacks the familiar resonance of suburban monotony. Potter is most ridiculous when the broom-riders are soaring Pan-like through the skies of modern England.

Growth of competence, assumption of responsibilities, and rising status are universally applicable to reality, not flight from it. Rowling couldn’t write a capable boy maturing into a masculine hero. Her audience wouldn’t want it anyway.

It smells too much like taking control and discovering ways in reality. So things just happen until they stop without any discomforting growing capability or assumed responsibility. But there can’t be a conclusion where the hero comes into his fullness and the threads tie together without realistic consistencies of heroic growth.

That’s my take on the generational appeal through the lens of narrative creation and socialization patterns. It’s new, though my problems with the Potter stories go back to reading aloud to Bandlings in the oughts. Even the recent The Well post missed how it fits together. What crystalized it is relatively bizarre - the recent popularity of the female Malfoy meme. Seriously.

When I discussed this post with the Bandlings, I was informed that gender-swapping Malfoy was an old trope Potter fanfic world. I had no idea for obvious reasons, but apparently fans have always disliked the ridiculous Ginny romantic arc. What seems new now - beside the sudden popularity spike and the availability of AI to visualize the character - is the audience. It skews male, apparently younger, and tied into a more reality-facing understanding of human behavior.

The popularity is what brought it onto my radar via private social media group. The demographic made me pay attention. And a brief reflection on the chain of implications lit up the problems in this post.

nomootwo, Draconia Malfoy and the Boy Who Said No, Well developed fanfic example of emergent alternative narrative that rings truer then the original.

“Ask properly, Potter.” He stared at her. “Properly,” she repeated. “I am not being asked to the Yule Ball by someone mumbling at a glass case with his hands in his pockets. Do it properly or don’t do it at all.”

One of the most interesting aspects is the organic emergence of a narrative outline. I have no idea where this originated, but a cursory search shows an emergent story arc in the imagery and fanfic titles. Female Malfoy as a tsundere character who falls in love with and ultimately winds up with Harry.

It’s triggering for instructive reasons. Obviously gender-swapping is no problem for SJW types in fandom. Whinging about Malfoid normalizing chudosphere “hate speech” is predictable. But it also points to the real, deeper anxiety. It’s not the slang term or “the right” in general. It’s the sudden consonance with reality.

Real human social behavior including masculine and feminine nature and the attraction patterns that follow. A chosen one that’s singularly magnetic, not accessible to the willfully mediocre. An exceptional hero generating exceptional outcomes via a classic leading man/leading lady arc napalms SJW social ideology and escapism where winners aren’t winners.

What struck me on that moment’s reflection was that “Draconia” potentially solves the [inner consistency and consonance with reality in the sub-creation] and the [structural coherence of the artwork] problems in one move. It obviously takes an author and readers who value those things - hence that significant new audience. But with that, the whole narrative tightens up and rings more true within the internal rules of the secondary world.

If there’s one thing lower-status men need to internalize, it’s how ego-integrity - saying “no” - brings short-term anger but long-term respect and attraction.

The premise is that Malfoy is raised in the same evil household under the same abusive conditions. Same sense of instinctive superiority, social status, talent, and physical beauty. Same initial draw to the famous chosen one and angry shock at his principled rejection. Only playing out through the lens of internally consistent and reality consonant gendered socialization patterns.

The socialization posts recognize the obvious differences in males and females motivation and response patterns. My own social successes are based on understanding this - not contemptuously or manipulatively but via ORR.

The fanfic notion that a girl of Draconia’s status would fall for the chosen one and have to deal with immense internal conflict is much more realistic than canonical Draco’s cartoonish animus. More interesting too. He’s just another evil blond rich guy trope that was past its sell-by date well before Potter. The initial motivated rivalry/hatred, believable emotional complexity as they age, and eventually hypergamy → attraction conform to real behavioral patterns.

The Malfoy redemption arc becomes credible, and potentially compelling. I can speak to the power of attraction to induce improbable change. Then there’s the icy heart melting trope. Or the Romeo and Juliette trope. Deep coded psychological motivation for changing her ways beyond loss of nerve or some sudden conscience. And it works both ways. Saving the beautiful damaged girl is a powerful and primal impulse. Beauty is an ultimate attractor for men and insanely compelling if it comes into alignment with you out of attraction.

Fighting alongside Harry at the end completes a full-series childhood enemies to young adult romance-redemption arc between chosen one and apex girl. One that mutually elevates them both before setting up a satisfactory conclusion that unifies what came before in a meaningful way. And what better way to boost the status of her lineage in the post-Voldemort world than marrying the hero of the age. The ironic chiasmus of a first meeting where she tells him he needs to know “the right people” and an epilog where she has become the right person is pre-written. It’s right there.

The meme appeals for the same reason it triggers. Everyone knows the story and this perfects the applicability of the sub-creation in an archetypal way that resonates subconsciously. Whether literarily sensitive or not. The Harry arc, the Malfoy arc, and the Voldemort war arc, and the romantic conclusion flow in a way that’s believable.

Time to wrap up. Some commentators have taken up the culture war aspect of it, but that’s outside this post. I’m not sure how significant it is in the overall scheme of things anyhow. It does tie together a few things of interest here. A clearer take on the good story theme in The Well post. Some insight into the legitimately generational appeal of a flawed story. And a reminder that realistic human socialization has real structures and patterns no matter what the House of Lies pretends.

René Magritte, The Improvement, 1962, oil on canvas

The organic nature of Draconia shows in how coherent and psychologically real she seems. I have some limited familiarity with fan creation - mostly fan art but some fanfic - and I can’t recall a character that just seems to write itself so easily. It’s sub-creation working as Tolkien described, where the secondary world generates its own logic if the premises are right. If the psychology is internally consistent and consonant with reality.

And it is - high status, pride, abusive household, genuine talent, physical beauty, and an encounter with a winner she can’t buy, bully, or charm. Everything flows from there. Initial fury, obsessive attention disguised as contempt, slow recognition that his rejection is precisely what makes him worth having, internal war between family loyalty and new feelings, and finally acceptance - none of it needs contrivance. It’s consonance with reality where there had been a void.

He asks properly. It’s actually a remarkable scene for any story. She’s so excited and nervous on the inside but forces herself to uphold her dignity and status externally. And he rises to the occasion with an awkward bow that’s totally in character. And it’s all age appropriately sincere. Legitimately moving.

Hence the young male audience. A story based on escapism from gendered reality is being organically rewritten by people who find gendered reality more compelling than the escape. It appeals because it feels right. It’s structural more than ideological. The sub-creation demanding its own consistency.

The cost is the escape. Exceptionality and mediocrity regain their real standing. Like Peter Pan bouncing off shatterproof glass of reality.

MatejCadil, Light of Hope, 2021

1

He was particularly irritated by common claims that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory, something he denied unequivocally. Applicability was his term for his own work.

The Fabergé Winter Egg, Alma Theresia Pihl (designer), Albert Holmström (workmaster), 1913, shell: rock-crystal with frost design engraved on interior & decorated with platinum snowflake motifs & over 4500 rose-cut diamonds; base: carved rock crystal with platinum rivulets; surprise: double-handled trelliswork platinum basket, set with rose-cut diamonds & carved white quartz wood anemones with gold wire stems and stamens, egg & base: 5⅝”; surprise: 3¼”.

One of the stranger aspects of the latter stage of the House of Lies is something of a contradiction. Although it really isn’t contradictory on reflection. Two impulses we can call universal luxury and universal anti-sophistication. The first is the notion that everyone should have access to elite culture. The second is mass rejection of sophisticated taste. To the point where the elites themselves no longer self-define through refined beauty. At least, not the publicly visible ones.

I’ll expand the text with selections from one of the world’s great designers - Peter Carl Fabergé and his House of Fabergé - and end with a few words on them.

It’s not contradictory because high-end culture of any kind needs exclusivity. Once opened to the masses, the masses drag it down to their level. (Source: modern university). Artistic refinement really doesn’t translate. When I was poor in a poor neighborhood I noted people blow limited resources on base hedonic relief. Smokes, booze, scratch tickets, drugs, etc. Class-based preferences that preclude any sort of aesthetic enculturation ever working. You can’t cultivate taste for the refined when the conditions that make refinement rewarding don’t exist.

The notion that everyone just needs exposure was another figment of nonsense post-Enlightenment equalism. If anything, it triggers resentment for class status, not the desire to behave classily. Concepts like “highfalutin’” and its modern variants also exist for a reason.

Fabergé enameled silver playing card case, workmaster Feodor Ruckert , Moscow, 1898-1911, 4” x 2-7/8” x 1-7/8”

Screen access is complicated because the masses aren’t totally the same. Different NPC tracks, even if classes are less cleanly defined in a prole culture era. There’s a segment of financially better off types aspiring to some shadow facsimile of elite culture with none of the understanding or substance of the original. For a good example, look at “travel”. An idea that began in Grand Tour finishing and devout pilgrimage → overcrowded sites filled with fat, shambling boomer tour groups ticking checklists and learning nothing.

Fabergé jeweled and guilloché enamel silver-gilt desk clock, workmaster Michael Perchin, St. Petersburg, 1899-1903, 4”

It’s common among the reality facing to ask what happened to aesthetic standards? The more primary question is what happened to the culture where aesthetic standards were set?

Elites adopting mass culture trappings is the flip side seeking status symbols without the social understanding of what gave them status. Elite culture was founded on exclusivity. Not that they were better people - they were often awful. But wealth brought a closed system with rules of etiquette and aesthetic standards.

Fabergé, jeweled and guilloché enamel two-color gold imperial presentation cigarette case, workmaster August Hollming, St. Petersburg, 1904-1908

It probably exists in places. I’ve never been to a Rothschild gathering and have no idea what out of the public eye uber wealth is like. But the screen era has overlapped socio-economic status and celebrity in unprecedented ways. Celebrity is appeal to the masses. And adopting mass-appeal aesthetic norms is the opposite of exclusive. I’m not sure there’s a way around that in a centralized media era.

Fabergé silver-gilt cloisonné and en plein enamel box, Moscow, 1908-1917, Departure of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich for the Hunt, after Victor Vasnetsov, 4¼”

Just have to compare the art and cultural activity - patronage and collection - of today’s elites vs. their Gilded Age counterparts. The shift in art alone is sufficient. Moving from treasures of the Middle Ages and Old Master eras and the sublimity of the Romantics to ugly modernism and postmodern perversion. Elite money even drove the degeneration. It’s another indicator of the gradual steady decline of the cultural macro-arc.

Fabergé amethyst and diamond gold and platinum brooch, workmaster Albert Holmstrom, 1913, lozenge form, cushion-cut amethyst, corners set with diamonds, 2”

One conclusion is that elites are mostly NPCs and go where their narrative winds blow. Which complicates screen direction but doesn’t replace it. How the elites huff narrative probably isn’t quite the same as a lower level NPC glued to a phone - don’t know because I’m neither socio-economic elite, a phone watcher, or an NPC. The point is that narrative shift and NPC attitude relation is causal.

Fabergé jeweled three-color gold-mounted guilloché enamel and mother-of-pearl fan, workmaster Michael Perchin, with diamond and ruby-set flower-heads, gold and diamond-set suspension loop, parchment fan leaf hand-painted in watercolor, St. Petersburg, 1899-1903, 13¾”

My perspective is marked by another contradiction for me - and this one really is contradictory. Readers know I advocate organic self-reliance and community formation. That implies manual work and natural rhythms, intellectual activities over consooming, and thinking localized sustainability not cosmopolitan sophistication. But I’m also an aesthete. The Fabergé stuff shared here is an example of that.

Consider the range of art just on this Substack. I love refined beauty. Products of elite wealth urban culture. I appreciate fine craft work as well, but it’s not the same.

Fabergé silver-gilt mounted nephrite mantel clock, workmaster Henrik Wigström, St. Petersburg, 1904-1908, carved nephrite body, white enamel dial, silver-gilt laurel swags, in the original fitted Fabergé wooden case, 8 1⁄8”

The paradox is that really exquisite artistry requires a certain socio-economic foundation. It’s technically difficult and the materials and process are costly, making the whole thing very expensive. The fine arts, high-end jewelry and enamel, stained glass, etc. needs a clientele base that can afford the work and support artists and their training over generational time frames. The workshop system was ruthlessly competitive, and the remuneration has to be sufficient to incentivize the talent. Sifting for the right mix of vision, creativity, discipline, and manual dexterity isn’t easy.

Fabergé gem-set silver-mounted cut-glass vase, 1899-1908, diamond and sunburst motifs with silver handles shaped as bogatyrs’ heads, set with cabochon garnets, amethysts and a citrine, 14 1⁄2”

The contemporary art world burns through lots of money, but the notions of skilled competition or beauty as a goal have been removed by modernism. It’s actually difficult to articulate the magnitude of cultural atrocity that “art” represents. Pick your premodern era and artists created beautiful, often almost transcendent things. That only exists outside official channels now. And listening to NPC husks making noises about the “profundity” of talentless contemporary trash is proof of concept.

Fabergé Silver-Gilt and Cloisonné Enamel Icon, Moscow, 1908-1917, St. Vladimir, within an oklad enameled with stylized flowers and geometric ornament with original silk and velvet lined wood case, 5”

It’s also literally evil. The Ontological Hierarchy makes clear the connection between the old Platonic trinity - the Good, the True, and the Beautiful - and Ultimate Reality - God defined philosophically. Beauty is what The Good “looks like”. It’s impossible to define formally because subjectivity is a component and the ultimate source exceeds observation or reason. But the general parameters are wildly consistent across culture and race.

There is a disturbing segment of humanity that seems insensitive to beauty in general. The sort that views an old growth forest in board feet. Unlike the underclasses, it’s perceptual insensitivity that means can’t excuse. But amongst fully formed humans, the same things seem to resonate with everyone.

Fabergé jeweled enamel, silver, and rock crystal study of a pansy, St. Petersburg, 1915, rock crystal vase, a light green enameled silver stem, and painted enamel flower in with gold-mounted diamond, set with green enameled sepals, with three green enamel leaves, 5 ½”

This is what makes the beast system attack on art consistent with its fundamentally Sorathic direction. It opposes Beauty for the same reason it opposes Truth. Both express the Good as the essential nature of Creation. Anti-reality in its ultimate foundational form.

The modern elites still possess enormous resources. As much as ever. They could afford to see beauty and don’t. Bilderberg types have Fabergé money but have degenerated to the point where their consumption is ugly, soulless, or garish. Refinement seems to have disappeared. At least to the extent that it’s visible in support of beautiful things.

Fabergé gold-mounted nephrite paper knife, workmaster Michael Perchin, St. Petersburg, 1890, 8”

Luxury objects are items of beauty that were not the traditional fine arts, were materially expensive, and very skillfully made. The House of Fabergé, like its great rivals Tiffany or Cartier, was world famous as a maker and innovator of decorative arts. Gustav Fabergé founded the company in St. Petersburg in 1842. But it was Peter Carl Fabergé who took over in 1882 and made it suppliers to the Russian royal family, aristocracy around Europe, and Gilded Age plutocrats.

Fabergé is best known now for its famous jeweled eggs, but their genius was much more varied. A signature ability to transform everyday objects from cigarette cases to clocks into works of art with enameling, goldsmithing and stone-setting.

Fabergé silver-gilt and plique-à-jour enamel vase, workmaster Alexander Petrov, Saint Petersburg, around 1895

Enamel was a Fabergé specialty - an ancient artform transformed through new techniques like Tiffany’s glass. 145 new shades and the brutally difficult technique of enameling en ronde bosse or on curved or rounded surfaces. Layered enamel in different colors created depth that subtly shifted in changing light.

As the shop grew, other designers called workmasters were added. They brought individual styles, but were held to the highest standards.

Fabergé Silver-Gilt and Enamel Compact, workmaster Henrik Wigström, St. Petersburg, 1908-1917, silver-gilt with maroon enamel over guilloché ground, hinged cover with gold rim chased with laurel leaves and acanthus rosette, 2.16”

Comparing Fabergé work to the design aesthetics around the Bilderberg types makes the elite degeneration easy to see. And prole culture is inexplicable to me. I understand not having means, but embracing the ugly suggests spiritual malaise alongside genomic degradation. Collectors seek these items - it’s why the photos are available. But the new production isn’t there.

Fabergé enamel and other refined artistry isn’t something my organic network has the ability to replicate. No opportunity to learn, no access to materials, no custom workshop, and no genius artist to oversee. It’s a reminder that in a healthy stratified socio-culture, elite wealth sets standards of beauty that actually do trickle down.

Fabergé eggs first appeared in 1885 when Tsar Alexander III of Russia commissioned one as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna

Elite patronage funded the workshops that trained the craftsmen whose techniques disseminated into the wider culture. Fabergé’s 145 enamel shades exist because someone could pay to develop them. Cultural health isn’t elite consumption for its own sake. It’s elite consumption funding beauty that eventually reaches further. Unfortunately, we don’t have that now. Just one entry on the ledger of uncountable costs of the House of Lies and its satanic Clown World. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that beauty - true beauty - gives us a litmus test for ultimate moral direction. And that these objects do exist, which lets us appreciate them in pictures at least.

There’s also a lot of less luxurious beauty out there. Natural wonders, craft work, even prints. You don’t have to be a plutocrat to surround your own life with beauty. The benefits reach the metaphysical.

Fabergé silver-mounted porcelain Imperial presentation vase, by Imperial Porcelain Factory, St. Petersburg, workmaster Julios Rappaport, 1908, with gilt ciselé cypher of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna beneath an Imperial crown, shoulder mounted silver band repoussé, 19”

Laslett John Pott, Fire at the Theatre, 1869, oil on canvas

The substantive difference between logic and rhetoric is the relationship to truth. Obviously the targeting of reason or emotion is definitional, but those are assumed response patterns. How the arguments are received depends on the receiver. Logical reactions can be highly emotionalized. Rhetorical persuasion can also be correspond to truth. The clown in the painting above recognized the danger, logically determined the correct escape route, and rescued the child. The mother is rhetorically effusive in her gratitude for good reason.

The intrinsic difference in the statements as representations of something - regardless of the response - is whether they are necessarily true. Logic has absolute truth value within a frame of reference. While truth is completely irrelevant to rhetoric as a mode. If the clown doesn’t make the right moves, they don’t escape. Whether or not the mother is even aware doesn’t change that.

Newell Convers Wyeth, Wild Bill Hickok at the Cards, oil on canvas, 1921

How much this distinction matters to someone depends on their relationship to reality. Not that much if they are insulated from logical consequences. Modern life is historically unique separating people from the processes that actually sustain them and society. Break it down.

Start with truth. This post isn’t getting into complicated philosophical discussion. What is true is simply representation of what’s real. Either abstractly, like a math equation, or empirically, like the perception of physical things we can touch and see. Sensory observation is neither logical nor rhetorical in itself - it’s simply empirical fact.1 Same applies to empirical facts that are learned without direct observation, so long as they are also true. Where argument - logic or rhetoric - comes in is when we’re trying to understand what the fact means.

The difference between the cat and an NPC is that the cat won’t ever lick the soap again. Which is funny until you think about it.

Reality is structured causally, meaning its processes are governed by logic. Something was caused by something else and the chain is logical. It’s how animals learn experientially. Rhetorical appeals may make one feel differently, but doesn’t change the causal reality. Their understanding of it is wrong. Incorrect or untrue. This is the existential condition of a screen-huffing NPC.

For example, if I accelerate into a wall, no emotional appeal will untrash my car. And the actions leading to the crash connect logically. Pressing the gas → the engine turning the drive shaft, not hitting the brakes or turning the wheel, etc. Incidentals like the color of the wall, whether my friend had breakfast, or the butterfly that flew by 20 minutes ago have nothing to do with it. They logically can’t.

Angelo Lotti, Surreal Journey Towards a New Evolution, 2019, oil on canvas

This gets more complicated when the causal chains are not clear. Rhetoric is very useful for getting dupes to believe lies. Especially if said lies come with fake or manipulated causes. The more complex the contexts, the easier it is to manipulate with feelings. Writing obviously to FTS-1. NPCs are essentially incapable of modifying emotional attitudes with information processing of any kind.

Where anyone can learn is when the emotional lesson is painful. Even NPCs only touch the glowing stove once. Sufficient unpleasantness can force acceptance of causal logic on the most calcified mind. Which I assume is how a lot of reality-facing behavior was compelled in the before times. Yes, the narrative direction was more organic and keyed to reality. But that was itself at least partly driven by necessity.

One thing that the beast system has been effective at - at least until recently - is insulating people from necessity. This is not a claim that modern stresses aren’t real or that anyone should care how bad an early settler had it compared to living with supermarkets. We respond to what we know and in some ways, contemporary life is more psychologically traumatic than most non-catastrophic periods in history. Cultural loss of existential grounding being unprecedented. What it says is that modernity is defined by material abundance. And more importantly, that abundance is a cushion that enables ignoring hard material realities.

Consider. I’ve mentioned social successes during periods of economic distress as an argument against dooming. But that hardship is relative. The basement with the mattress on the floor had electricity, plumbing, heating, basic appliances, and internet. Unimagined luxuries to elites through much of history. Couldn’t eat out, but the food I cooked included abundant vegetables year round. Endless clean water from a tap. Money was a stressor, but my material survival was not.

It’s the whole spectrum. Living well meaning office busywork → sprawling houses, multiple cars, luxury goods, travel, etc. On the other end, whether WIC should cover Cheetos and scratch tickets is not traditional human privation. Recently there’s been chatter about “TikTok moms”. Put aside the sociopathic idiocy and just compare the [lifestyle plus amenities per erg of effort] ratio to any past age. Any online subculture for that matter. Lying and mewling only become lifestyle choices when the actual stuff of life is assured. Note the considerable segment that doesn’t understand where food even comes from.

I could go on, but the point is obvious. Basic survival elements have never been further from mass minds. What we get for what we have to do for it is a historically unprecedented bargain. To be completely fair, it has slipped a little in the last decade or two as the collapse nears. But even Depression-era hordes of will work for food types aren’t on the mass radar, let alone pre-modern crop failure scenarios. That they should be is a different post.

René Magritte, Shéhérazade, 1947, oil on canvas

When populations are disconnected from the essentials of basic human existence, almost anything becomes “luxury belief”. That is, a set of beliefs that can only be held when an individually impossible lifestyle is sustained by systemic surplus. A surplus that is so abstracted from daily life and so taken for granted that it comes to appear normative. The deposit always appears in the account…

The result is action shielded from real consequences. Society does have procedures and rules to an extent. The fact that they’re unevenly applied being the proof that they’re not natural consequences. They’re subjective requirements drafted by the same beast system that provides the luxury surplus. And that’s the real point. Never in history have so many been able to do something as materially useless as just consoom screen without a mass starvation event or something equivalent.

Nikolai Egorovich Sverchkov, The Storm, 1870, oil on canvas

The premodern masses didn’t have the luxury surplus buffer between them and reality. You tilled the land or went to the mill or you probably didn’t see next year. Choices were more directly consequential. No one forced you - the responsibility rhythms were just how life was. The freedom to let go a little was a special event. In short, modern abundance rewired the causal chain between action and reaction.

Endemic uselessness is the macro outcome. But a more specific outcome is the freedom to replace basic logic with feelings on a daily-life level. If busywork and “programs” sustain everyone in first world conditions, everything else is superfluous. Any level of deranged, dysgenic, ludicrous “belief” is possible when there’s no existential consequence for logical impossibility.

Goyce Kakegamic, Rain Dance, color silkscreen on paper

This is the context that allows the supernormal stimulus of screens to displace reality for the FTS-2 masses.

Not that the premoderns didn’t have their share of nonsense beliefs. But without the luxury buffer, basic realities are more immediate. More consequential. And they couldn’t be a reason to opt out of survival needs. The idea of waging war on necessary energy is a non-starter. “Allies” are people observably proven to be helpful. Children are valued as the future of the civilization. Importation and warehousing of hateful masses can’t incoherently pose as humanitarian… anything.

Cornelis Anthonisz, Fall Of The Tower Of Babel, 1547, engraving, Rijksmuseum

One of the macro-patterns that I’ve observed but can’t quantify is an intrinsic mechanism that prevents worldly perfection. The Ontological Hierarchy uses the theological language of the Fall in reference to an existentially flawed reality, but a religious perspective isn’t needed. It’s observation, not explanation. Babel as metaphor or allegory for the limit inscribed in the improvement process that activated past a certain point. The basic premise is that approaching or attaining a state of complete material fulfilment is terminal.

On a personal level, the NPC dream of sipping Mai Tais on a beach somewhere would lead to health crises and premature mortality. As the recent lifting post reminds, we are only strengthened through struggle. Mentally and physically. On a societal level, mass luxury has → cascading mental illness, cultural decline, and most ominously, the specter of genomic collapse. The current screen-driven descent into rhetorical idiocy is certainly consistent with the latter.

Readers know my prognosis for the masses is not a positive one. The downward trajectory of the beast system is already visible, and the condition of the NPC majority offers no pathway forward.

Old school AD&D players will get the analogy. And while it’s true, it’s not a path to national renewal…

Something comes next because it always does. And my money is that it will be a lot more causally consequential. Be that as it may, I don’t write for the masses for that reason. The recent relationship post accepted that mass social dynamics are hopelessly dysfunctional and wrote to the segment that has the ability to at least think about bending probability and discovering a way. The same applies here.

Become self-reliant and build organic networks is not a mantra. I repeat it because it’s a) essential and b) situational and not one size fits all. But one aspect of it that is universal is living in reality. For example, I wouldn’t know who Lindsay Clancy was were it not for my private online group and a couple of scans of my Substack “home” link. I don’t consume news or social media or discuss “current events” IRL. Because it offers nothing to help me react to or prepare for the actual reality that’s coming.

Outside the world of rhetoric and screen, reality is causally logical. The luxury buffer is a gift, not permission to wallow in feelings. An opportunity to exchange busywork scrip for positioning and hard goods. To get out of obvious blast radii. To create footings for self and family then leverage it to connect with others. To think about logistics, security, sustainability, and the rest of consequential reality. This is something that involves other people but anyone can start themself.

It was always my optimal social role, just transferred from social hedonism to futureproofing.

I’m not a leader. I do have an aura that can draw people to me, but have no instinct for steering. In a larger group setting, I function best when I can bury my antisocial tendencies and use my gifts to support and advise an Alpha that can lead. Adapting a flawed persona to external demands is a learning process. And everyone’s calibration will be different based on themselves and the group. But it runs on causal logic, not luxury rhetoric.

Reality is coming. Makes sense to already be there when it does.

Carl Blechen, Stormy Sea with Lighthouse, circa 1826, oil on canvas

Panjoool, Susan and Aslan (cropped), 2019

Time for a bit of variety. Occasionally The Band would take up some aspect of art or culture and find some insight or offer a recommendation. Here’s a link to the Truth in Culture page from the blog if anyone is interested. This post takes a new look at an issue in C. S. Lewis’ beloved Narnia series that has come up repeatedly in the past, while missing what the Bandlings and I consider the salient point. That’s the so-called “matter of Susan” and her exclusion from the resurrected kings and queens in The Last Battle. And that leads into how the final book kneecaps an otherwise all-time classic.

The Narnia series weaves a Christian world view through an evocative fantasy world so deftly that the allegorical aspects often go unnoticed by young readers. The echoes of Genesis in the creation of the world in The Magician’s Nephew or the Resurrection in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe fit seamlessly with the narrative flow. The Last Battle is different - here Lewis forces the plot beats to map onto Revelation to the point that he undermines the internal logic of his own creation. The world no longer seems so hauntingly real and external narrative service replaces convincing character behavior or development.

Gustave Dore, Mattathias and The Apostate, 1866, colored engraving

Near the end, the royal protagonists of the older story appear as “Friends of Narnia”, including three of the four Pevensie children from the first books. Peter, Edmund, and Lucy had been killed in a train crash making their appearance at the Narnian end times and ascent to Aslan’s heavenly country an allegory of their own salvation. The absence of the fourth, Susan, is explained by her turning away from Narnia, becoming apostate, figuratively speaking. Here’s the full passage from Chapter 11:

Given how beloved the stories have been and for how long, many have found her exclusion cold, even cruel on Lewis’ part. Many reactions, however, have been predictably projective. Perhaps the most revealing is the facile assumption that “nylons and lipstick” means she’s damned for sex. Consider occultic inversive J. K. Rowling: “she’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.” Or Philip Pullman’s appropriately perverse: “She’s a teenager! Ah, it’s terrible: “Sex – can’t have that.” Understatement is so powerful because the compulsion to elaborate becomes a canvas for self-disclosure.

My initial childhood objection fit the internal logic failure/narrative service category. We were to believe she had been to this land on more than one occasion, lived there to adulthood once, had visceral experiences beyond anything our world offers, then a few years later “forgot”? It’s moronic in a realist sense and undermined the weight of my investment in the previous stories. For the sole purpose serving Lewis’ own dislike of youth culture in his time.

But the fruit trees are tasty…

Charles Allan Gilbert, All is Vanity (cropped), 1892, illustration

Support for Lewis’ position tends to argue from his Christian perspective that salvation is directly linked to following the correct path. Fantasy author L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright makes the case well in a post from last year.

Defending the Wood Perilous

Susan Got What Was Coming To Her

I used to think evil was impressive and dramatic. I recall mocking Atlas Shrugged because the villains were so mealy-mouthed and unimpressive…

Read more

2 years ago · 219 likes · 110 comments · L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

As a Christian, I have no ethical problem with the consequences of idolatry or apostasy. It’s a Christian story and that’s Christian moral responsibility 101. Plus, repentance is always an option. Lewis himself acknowledged this in a 1955 letter to a young reader: “The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end.”1

My problem is structural.

At the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan crowns Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy in the Great Hall of Cair Paravel. Here’s the passage:

Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen.

It’s not equivocal or ambiguous in any way. Consider what Aslan is in the story. According to Lewis’ letters, Narnia isn’t an allegory in the classic sense like The Pilgrim’s Progress, but a “supposition”.

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which the Giant Despair represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” This is not an allegory at all.

The Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 283.

Georgi Chimev, The Creation of the World, icon for Legacy Icons

By this account, exact literary genre is secondary to Aslan’s Christological nature. He is the doctrinaire Christ of our world reimagined in the terms of another. “What might Christ be like” implies “Christ” as essential character. He sings Narnia into existence like the Logos in the New Testament in The Magician’s Nephew and welcomes the saved to the afterlife at the end of The Last Battle. His own death and resurrection in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe redeems Edmund.

There is an argument from free will - which I believe in - based on the ability to reject God. If we interpret Aslan’s statement as a covenantal promise, Susan could be given the indelible character of a queen without being forced to live out a particular role. She could choose to trade whatever Narnia represents for nylons, lipstick, and invitations. The problem is that while this is theologically sound, it is utterly irrelevant to the structural integrity of the narrative work.

Gustave Dore, New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:2), colored engraving

Lewis forces us to accept kingship and queenship as typological figures of salvation because The Last Battle sacrifices literary coherence to force contrived Revelation eschatology. Lewis himself echoes this conclusion in the quote from his letter above. And “Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen” is an absolute, unconditional declaration. One delivered during a solemn ritual restoration of moral order and without equivocation or exception.

There are only two possibilities within the framework that Lewis created for himself. Either Aslan is hyperbolic or otherwise dishonest, or he lacks the perfect foreknowledge that a Christological nature implies. Christ admits some things are not his to reveal: “But of that day and hour no one knoweth, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone" (Matthew 24:36). But he does not make false statements or claim knowledge he does not have. Lewis has to awkwardly break or suspend his Christ’s integrity to score a superfluous narrative point with Susan.

Alexander von Wagner, Queen Isabella’s Farewell to Transylvania, circa 1863, oil on canvas

Perhaps the most ridiculous part is that this massive structural flaw could have been avoided easily. Including Susan in The Last Battle is one option. It’s not as if the other Friends of Narnia do much to change narrative direction. Another possibility would have been to leave that one sentence out from the coronation. Everything else becomes cohesive, with Susan’s drift mirroring biblical warnings about apostasy. But as it is, it grates against the internal logic like a splinter in the mind.

Achen089, To the radiant southern sun, Queen Susan the Gentle, 2009

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was the first Narnia book Lewis wrote and it’s likely he wasn’t thinking of a seven-book arc. My guess is that he just swung for a grand, poetic fairy-tale banger of a line to close on a memorable note. He is a master of powerful romantic imagery and rhetoric over airtight narrative consistency (source: The Space Trilogy). And probably didn’t realize the future consequences for the rigid, apocalyptic framework of Revelation.

Pauline Baynes, The Wood Between the Worlds, illustration from The Magician’s Nephew

Ultimately, I find the tone shift in The Last Battle kneecaps the literary quality of the whole series. It’s not the biblical allusion, but how plot and character arcs are handled. The supposition or allegory or whatever the Chronicles’ relation to scripture is written as materially real within its fantasy framing. The equivalence is made clear in the Wood between the Worlds, where our world, Narnia, Charn, and however many others are all signified by portal ponds.

ArtOnAMissionSTL, The Resurrection

Biblical analogs like Creation in The Magician’s Nephew and the Resurrection in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe work so well as plot elements because they flow coherently within that fantastical realist narrative. The theological references hold, but are also transmuted into the real soil of the fantasy world. The creation of Narnia is a brilliant narrative image that happens to capture the spare majesty of Genesis. Aslan’s sacrifice fits the story seamlessly because the Deep Magic is a law of that specific universe and the Resurrection conforms to it without contrivance.

Pauline Baynes, Eustace and Puddleglum rush to the aid of Prince Rilian, illustration from The Silver Chair

A strength of Lewis’ characters is that they grow like real psychological people. Edmund’s arc works because he’s a petty, resentful boy who gets more than he bargained for, not an abstract symbol. His wisdom and courage in the later books are believable as fruits of redemption. Eustace is a masterpiece, journeying from irritating Gamma to a brave and loyal, if slightly anxious winner. Puddleglum becomes warmer and more affectionate through shared experiences. They ring true like their world.

In The Last Battle, Narnia stops feeling like a real place, which makes sense for a disposable shadow-world. Characters are like game pieces playing out a predetermined script. Tirian in particular stands out as an impotent loser. The Pevensies spend all of Prince Caspian fighting to restore Narnia’s history and freedom but are now indifferent to its total annihilation. Because Revelation requires a new heaven and earth, we get the destruction of the world we spent six books emotionally investing in.

The Chronicles of Narnia, Puffin Books, originally published 1974. This was the set that I got.

I first read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. My Grade 3 teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud to us in installments as the class story. I was sufficiently blown away that I still remember it clearly. Despite the family boomers’ hatred of Lewis - I assume for his Christianity and traditionalism - I badgered my mother into getting me the paperback box set of all seven. And The Last Battle captivated me as it drew closer with each book.

Lewis is such a firehose of images and concepts, I couldn’t imagine what the final cosmic struggle would be like. That vulnerable, total immersion of an imaginative, impressionable child. Turned out it couldn’t have been worse if Lewis himself had come into my room and physically punched me in the stomach.

The images remain incredible. But the sense of emotional betrayal may have been worse than the narrative failure. I assume the message was more important to him than sticking the literary landing, but the childhood disappointment was enough that I never forgot it. Enough that I skipped it during the countless rereads of the other six. And a generation later, left it out when reading the Chronicles to the Bandlings. My Chronicles will always end with The Silver Chair.

This one move fixes everything from Aslan’s unreliable narration to passive puppet characters. Recently, a private social media group asked us to contribute our top ten fantasy book lists. The Silver Chair made my top five despite being written for a YA demographic. It’s the apex of Lewis’ world-building and image generation, with the exception of that haunting lantern in the snowy wood. It’s grounded, atmospheric, and draws you into Narnia as a real history and geography. Dangerous, cold, and above all else, beautifully alive.

Ending it there sticks the landing. Preserves what made the series so uniquely captivating. Narnia alive and magical with no heavy-handed theological shredder turning built-up investment into confetti. Consider Puddleglum’s famous speech where he tells the Green Witch he’ll live like a Narnian even if Narnia is just a dream. A triumph of faith that draws its power from a meaningful narrative frame. It resonates because we - like the characters we come to care for - love the real, material Narnia.

Compare that to what had been complex, loyal protectors of this world casually watching it end because… … … message service. As a Christian, I take scripture very seriously. But as a reader, I take literature very seriously as well. They relate, but they aren’t the same.

To paraphrase the aforementioned Puddleglum:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those Shadowlands. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world.

As a reader, of course.

Pauline Baynes, “That ride was perhaps the most wonderful thing that happened to them in Narnia”, signed color advertising poster for The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950s.

Angus McBride, Denethor. The palantír is literally a supernormal stimulus device — it shows real things, but selected and framed by Sauron to produce despair. Denethor isn’t deceived by fiction; he’s deceived by curated truth.

Something recently struck me that led down an information trail I was previously unaware of and to a larger pattern. Readers know the FTS model and the House of Lies theorizes screens as the primary vector for narrative direction. What hasn’t been considered is the “hook”. You have to tune in to be directed. And what struck me was the observation that the majority of people objectively find screen more interesting - compelling, attractive, worthy of time investment - than physical reality. Given a) how socio-culturally destructive this has proven and b) that socio-cultural destruction harms anyone in the socio-culture, this is an existential vulnerability at the most basic sensory attention level.

The part I was unaware of is the concept of supernormal stimulus. This is the process of hijacking the perceptual and reward systems that respond positively towards survival cues. Things that signal reproductive pathways, food, danger, etc. Animal brains, including humans, have neural filters that detect and trigger responses to the size of an egg, the sweetness of ripe fruit, or the sound of a parent. Dutch ornithologist Nikolaas Tinbergen demonstrated that exaggerated, artificial versions of these cues could elicit a stronger reflexive response than the real thing.

The supernormal stimulus exploits the natural system by amplifying the key features that trigger attraction. Because the strength of the brain’s reaction is determined by the intensity of the cue, not whether the source is authentic. A crude exaggeration with no actual benefit can outdraw the natural target.1 Anyone who’s fly fished or wiped out deer flies with blue lures knows exactly how real this is.

This process has been linked to human behavior, most notably by evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett. The problem with this line of reasoning isn’t the attractive power of exaggerated stimuli. It’s the evolutionary argument for it, which presupposes a mechanism that a recent book reviewed in this Substack has argued is mathematically impossible.

And the evolutionary math really is unsalvageably wrong. The inability of putative “critics” to even follow the argument is a damning enough indictment of academic expertise to merit a future post. The reason for supernormal stimuli, however, is less important than its existence and power as a compulsive phenomenon.2

Humans presumably recognize their own children consciously and would be unmoved by the cuckoo’s redder mouth or larger egg. In our case the power of supernormal stimuli ties into our dopamine reward system. A chemical signal connected to pleasure and motivation that directs attention to cues that predict potential gain. Neurochemical response can be thought of as more preconscious or subconscious than actively conscious. Not the Freudian nonsense, but the general sense of involuntary response patterns.

In effect, human oriented supernormal stimulus releases more dopamine than the natural version. Two main effects follow. The brain flags the exaggerated cue as highly salient and focuses attention involuntarily. A motivational pull or desire follows to seek more of the stimulus. There’s a similarity here to the addiction pattern in that repeated exposure can lead to dopamine desensitization or chasing the dragon. More stimulus needed for the same effect.

Gali May Lucas, Absorbed by Light, 2018, light art , Amsterdam

And this circles back around to the observation that screen is more interesting or fascinating than reality for the masses. Because screen is a multi-channel supernormal stimulus machine that’s always on.

Social media amplifies the human need for social validation with unnaturally immediate and frequent approval. No direct human interaction can spin up likes and shares at the same rate. Notifications, infinite scroll, and algorithmic feeds speedbag the dopamine system with continual curated triggers.

Birdbum, Firefighter on Phone Ignoring Burning House, art print

Advertising, propaganda, and attention farming of all kinds artificially enhance colors, textures, sexual characteristics, social proofs, and whatever else. The maladaptive outcomes are well-known, but the general ability to compel interest is what makes supernormal stimulus the basis of House of Lies screen-based direction.

The question arising from this is how a two-inch screen outdraws the full immersive 3D experience of reality. One answer is that most modern life is boring. The modern workplace sucks for most. And NPCs need direction for mental activity and are incapable of self-amusement in the off time. But there’s more to it than that.

Supernormal stimuli aren’t competing experientially with real life. The realness of physical experience is irrelevant to the competition. They outcompete by more effectively triggering reward circuits in the brain. And the circuits aren’t based on the richness of perception. They’re reactions to cues in the perceptual field. The physical world offers them at a baseline level. Screens can abstract them out, amplify or exaggerate them, then mainline them right into the dopamine response system. Distilled, high-salience triggers like social approval, novelty, sex, status, and threat information, all with immediate feedback.

Reality is diluted and distracting in comparison. Cues come slowly and with effort, risk, or ambiguity. Screens adapt algorithmically - learning to provide your preferred stimulus is learning your specific vulnerabilities. This does come with a level of immediate control reality doesn’t offer. What to swipe, skip, search, or mute is a personal choice and the screen responds to you. And the infinite stream of content brings endless stimulating novelty. With enough random variable-ratio reinforcement built in to keep interest high. Physical reality is often indifferent to our wishes and familiar and limited in options.

Consider all the system jacking potential in one screen. Social media with belonging and status. Games with achievement and competition. Porn of all forms with sexual attraction. News with threat detection. The same device carries all of them and more. And they’re concentrated. Reality is manifold and complex, but consider how much the average NPC can take in at one time. The active information uptake stream is a trickle. Screen can occupy that with an ever-cycling repertoire of targeted exaggerated stimuli, all with minimal effort or risk. Sloth might be the most powerful of the Seven Deadly, and screen-fed dopamine is easy. It’s always there as a balm for boredom, anxiety, or loneliness. Can’t pause, scroll past, or block reality.

There’s another aspect to supernormal stimuli with screens that isn’t so commonly noted. That’s the element of imaginative response. The reward system is being jacked externally, but the jackee is actively choosing to engage the attractive power of the jacker. Making them a sort of co-producer as well as target. Arguably, choosing to engage becomes part of the reward loop.

Screens are pretty limited. Imagination fills the gaps - intentions, social or emotional meanings, future possibilities, and so forth. Just consider the phenomenon of parasocial relationships and internet stalkers to see how compelling this can be.

Choice is itself a value signal. Choosing something is an admission that it matters. Attention focuses and active seeking seems to pump up dopamine rewards. Emotional investment and potentially commitment follow. Each cycle enhances the feedback loop and reinforces screen appeal - hence co-producer. You act on it as it acts on you.

Circling back around to FTS theory, it’s clear why the screen is such a potent NPC narrative direction vector. It’s a supernormal stimulus monster, and the supernormal stimulus process works below the level of cognition. NPCs can’t process information, but this isn’t an information-based attractor in the first place. There’s nothing to argue with, even if that were possible. Here’s a good link connecting innate vulnerability to the screen stimuli.

Of course, the flip side of this is that a pre-cognitive hook should work on FTS-1 information learners as well as the CLI set. This is observably the case when we consider the number of non-NPCs who have some form of screen dependency. Often one they’re not even really cognizant of. The question that follows is what makes some people less susceptible?

Chung-Wei Chien, Salmagundi Library, 2024, watercolor

For example. I don’t have a smart phone or social media accounts, and consume almost no screen-based video content anymore.3 I have no interest in gambling, video games, porn, rage bait, celebrities, or news. It’s obviously not lack of access or knowledge - consider the volume and range of my online writing. Nor is it for moral, self-interested, or any other conscious reason. I find most screen-based content is boring, stupid, and/or irritating for a number of reasons. And I can’t ethically claim virtue or credit for innate disinterests or dislikes. Nor am I the only one.

Talent, San Paolo, advertisement for Go Outside magazine, 2013

The point is that screens, for all their refined attractive power have limits. Something I’ll consider in a follow-up post to this one. I suspect the vulnerability lies in the gap between what the screen and the person’s own mind and real life offer. But there’s more to it than that.

SohaibHania, Smashed Phone Screen, art board print

Pierre Lacasse, Haunted House, 2020, digital art

This Substack often refers to the current political landscape as talons of the same beast or wings of the House of Lies. Binary thinkers assume that means they’re somehow “the same”. There is a binary. Readers know that the truth/falsehood distinction maps onto alignment with or rejection of reality, which maps onto basic good/evil. The Ontological Hierarchy makes the logic clear. But these are directions. There are countless degrees of good or evil in practice. And while wings of the House of Lies are all founded on manipulative falsehood they are not equally horrible. This post will adapt a taxonomy of evil devised by Rudolf Steiner and used by many others to clarify the difference.

Yvette Depaepe, Winter Blues, photography

The limit with tracing socio-cultural trajectories is the vagueness. The same synesthetic architecture that visualizes large conceptual structures struggles with details and skips over logical holes. The Macro Arc shows where things are headed in a big sense, but not how or what they look like on arrival. It’s why I avoid the prediction game. I’ll always share the general direction, but don’t know the specific steps or timelines.

For newer readers unfamiliar with the Macro-Arc concept, it’s basically a synesthetic thought picture on a socio-cultural scale. An overall direction of an aggregate of major civilizational trends at trajectories or arcs.

For readers interested in the Band posts where the concept was introduced, here’s the first post link - Reading the Macro-Arc - Implications of the House of Lies, pt. 1 and here’s the second - Reading the Macro-Arc pt. 2 - Vertically-Integrated Lies don’t “Get Better”.

Not every arc read is that scale. The Script posts were a perfect example. It was clear that Trump was winning the election but I couldn’t say how exactly. Bondi, Bongino, and Patel were obvious flops, but in what ways? The new regime was another House of Lies faction, but what was their specific game, who’s calling the shots, and how do the factions relate? Sometimes it becomes known in time, and others it never does.

Justin Donaldson, Floating Islands, 2020, gouache

One of the first things that could be identified about the Trump faction was what I called an autarkic direction. A general inclination away from global entanglements and towards regional hegemony and security. I couldn’t see how this would play out, mainly because I don’t know what the levers of power and influence are. It got filed under something to wait and see.

The idea of an anti-globalist push is reflexively appealing to an omni-nationalist like myself - someone who believes every people deserves a place to call their own. But not all pathways lead to the kind of destination we might hope for.

I respect a hard marker. My take is that it’s deception intended to create an emotional vibe for NPCs who won’t remember and so can’t hold anyone to details. Let’s see who turns out right…

On the surface, Trump turned out to be a bloated liar in deep cognitive decline. No need to rely on external reports that are likely agenda-driven lies themselves. His posting style has changed from pithy rhetorical appeals to delusional and often incoherent ranting. Skillful trolling replaced with AI generated idiocy that can appeal only to morons or boomers - if we imagine a distinction. On the surface.

Readers know I don’t think he calls any shots of significance. The ranting and blather seems to corral the attitudes of some sad, limited NPCs. He may order Pentagon apparatchiks around, but the [raving madman with his finger on the button] is sub-mediocre fanfic. The real question isn’t who is setting the agenda. That’s unknowable. It’s “what’s the point?”

An objective look at the situation reveals more than just lies. The gas prices, deficit, and Middle East wars certainly put the lie to his peace blather or concerns about economic well-being. Nothing structural has been fixed. Courts remain active enemies of the people. But some of the heinous propaganda and fake cultural narrative has been cut. And the demographic initiatives have actually started to reverse trends that seemed inexorable. There’s nothing more significant than that for any sort of domestic well-being.

Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, 1943, oil on canvas, Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts,

It looks like a discrepancy between the immigration policy and other stuff, but that assumes that the intent is to restore something like the America of the past. Here’s a question that isn’t rhetorical. Consider the lack of serious effort to rectify mass illegality in elections over however long. What answer is more logically realistic than the system doesn’t plan on changing it?

The problem there is old pal binary thinking. Just because globalism is opposed to what things were like, what things were like isn’t the only alternative to contemporary globalism. When both factions embrace the House of Lies - which they’ve objectively proven to do, there’s no reality-facing option. The question is which fake vision is less malevolent.

Readers know that I adapt Rudolf Steiner’s taxonomy of evil to describe the factions we can currently see. This isn’t an endorsement of his mysticism in any way. Beyond my Christian world view, his basic structure underplays the malevolent will to cruelty. Here’s one take. Here’s another. But I’m capable of recognizing when a description is applicable to something else. Clarifies a relationship.

I also don’t deny the possibility of other factions either. I have no inside knowledge or contacts and am dependent on what’s publicly available to all of us on the internet.

What is commonly called “the left” is primarily a Sorathic faction. Pure, absolute evil, defined as pure negation and destruction and motivated by the annihilation of creation itself. The other forms of evil operate within the created order. Luciferic is selfish gratification, taking personal pleasure in lust or cruelty, but not destruction for its own sake. Ahrimanic is systematic, seeking control through totalitarian structures and denial of God or the holy. Sorathic seeks to destroy pleasure and ruthless order along with everything else. It’s pure atavism, against everything and for nothing.

YeCuriosityShoppe, Lucifer the Light Bringer, print. Inadvertently revealing image combines aesthetic decadence and enthroned power/control in shadowy, indeterminate nothingness. Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic in one image.

That’s not to say there’s no overlap. This makes the most sense as a continuum, where the distinction is the desired endpoint. I consider the Left faction primarily Sorathic, but the obsession with orifices has Luciferic elements and their obsession with control is directionally Ahrimanic. It’s the end goal of eternal revolutionary destruction that is the primary definer. The Trump faction is primarily Ahrimanic, but their Epstein protection and enabling Luciferic aspects of depraved self-gratification and Sorathic inverting and destroying moral or legal order.

Try and construct a stable, sustaining society based on endless destruction of order or responsibility as basic ethos.

It’s easy to see the Sorathic atavism in the various metastases of leftism or progressivism. It’s why I skip attempts at definitions based on their own ideological terms. Not that every self-described “progressive” sees it this way. But most people are emotion-driven NPCs. Endless revolution against any sort of productive social order, organic culture, and ultimately the nature of reality itself is fundamentally Sorathic. There’s no end point. NPCs get sucked in by appealing to their resentment, unbalance, or even misguided social justice. Note how the “heroes” generally sport malformed physiognomies and fires of madness in the eyes.

Consider. Sorathic motivation is purely negative - fear, resentment, and hatred, not desire for anything. They can never point to a rational program or path - just [if we wreck X, some undefinable Utopia happens].

Every so-called leftist revolution opens with the rhetoric of tearing down order before sinking into horror. It targets the good - the natural structures of reality - because they are the natural structures of reality. Denying human biodiversity, genetic structure, capacity differences, cultural parameters and other objective reality for no actual rational reason. The ultimate goal is annihilation, reducing existence to chaos. We see it in everything from promoting infanticide, to degrading institutes of learning, to flooding functional societies with hateful predatory hordes, to promoting the hideous and malformed.

Scylla and Charybdis, Encyclopædia Britannica

Rational people - even NPCs with base codes formed around basic pursuit of happiness ideas - struggle with this. The lack of rationale is hard to compute. Why would someone want to trash everything, to inflict suffering on a societal scale?

The answer is clear in the factional goals and their logical endpoints. Sorathic atavism. It’s why I’ll prefer the Trump faction, no matter how obscene a liar. If there are two evil choices, the better is the one not at war with existence itself. The other has brakes.

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

This agenda is primarily Ahrimanic. Using reassuring lies and treachery to replace a collapsing globalist system with a more localized hegemony. Because it’s invested in deceptions from what’s actually going on with fuel to the AI bubble to blossoming surveillance to foreign control. The immigration policy makes sense as counter-sorathic order keeping. Removing chaos agents that sap resources that were obviously brought in for various purposes. A homogeneous population is lower maintenance, more productive, and easier to control.

The foundational difference here is that Ahrimanic control requires a functioning substrate to control. A system seeking dominion has an a survival interest in the thing it dominates continuing to exist. This is a structural limit that pure negation doesn't have by definition.1

The part that doesn’t make as much sense on the surface is driving up fuel prices. It has to be intentional. Lying about nuclear weapons and blown out bases pacifies NPCs but it’s still lying. The most likely reason is Israeli control taking advantage of what’s left of US power projection. But whoever is calling the shots, the fact remains that a major crisis is brewing. And they’re cool with bringing it on.

There is an anti-globalist side to it. $10 diesel and scarce jet fuel drives a stake into transport logistics. People and goods become less mobile making regional solutions more attractive. Big oil companies like it. And Europe is really going to have a brutal winter now that Ansar Allah are putting the wood to the Saudis.

It’s amusing hearing boomers and narrative concierges wonder why we don’t “do something”. Probably because there’s nothing to do. The navy is already driven off. Stores are depleted. Bases are gone. Which also strikes a blow against global empire. Apparently “Trump” tried withdrawing forces the legal way last time and was ignored. Having someone else blast them out of the region achieves the same effect while snuffing the non-compliant. Am I certain? Of course not. Reading the Macro Arc is imprecise pattern tracking.

But add it up and look for the big overall direction. It looks like deglobalizing abroad and tightening control at home. What an Ahrimanic autarkic direction would look like. If this read is right, watch for a government “regulated” AI cartel and a fuel-based crisis that hurts connectivity. Maybe even pulls back from global markets. Unless the House decides the midterms are Sorath’s turn again. Also, don’t expect the push back on public surveillance cameras amount to much more than rhetorical posturing. “Flock” isn’t the only mode of privacy negation.

Meanwhile, build self-reliance and organic contacts, tend your garden, and let’s see what happens.

Jacob Verreyt, River Landscape, before 1872, oil on canvas, Kulturhistorisches Museum Rostock

Frank Frazetta, The Tempest, fine art print

Time for a socialization post. This Substack rotates different themes to keep up my interest and to give readers some variety. If one is uninteresting, the next will be different. It also lets me notice connections between different things that might not be obvious otherwise.

Back when this Substack started I wrote a post on the social advantages of weight lifting for anyone. It’s something I’ve advocated many times since, as have many others. The original plan was a sequel, but attention drifted elsewhere and I never did. But recently, AI and I switched up my routine for something specifically to a guy on the back end of his 50s. And the results have made me rethink my understanding of aging and expanded my belief in the value of lifting.

The opinion in the original post was shaped by experiences when younger. Both as a lifter and from a few years working in a gym rotating front desk, personal training, equipment maintenance, and general floor stuff. I’ll link for interested readers, rather than recap.

This post will look at the range of benefits for anyone, why it’s not as daunting as some think, and legitimate challenges. At the end, I’ll share some considerations for anyone who thinks they’ve aged out.

Why lifting in particular is an easy question. The physical and psychological benefits of getting stronger are well-known and don’t need to be repeated here. Other forms of exercise have value. Cardio conditioning is also important. But weights maximize strength gain with a much higher targeted ceiling. You don’t have to be fanatic for a worthwhile return either. Although it is necessary to be realistic about what kind of return is realistic for the investment. And any other physical activity, all else being equal, is helped by greater strength.

You can do it alone in almost any circumstances. Anyone can just start, no try-outs or team needed. If a gym is out of reach, work out at home. During covid, I trained for with improvised equipment I made myself. Look up a prisoner’s workout. The outcomes follow a cold equation: [results] = [consistency] x [time].

You can do it almost anywhere. Hotels often have fitness rooms. Most gyms sell passes. Body weight exercises are universal. It doesn’t matter where life takes you. Consistent self-motivation over the long haul is far more important than where you train. Venues and training partners come and go. You’re the constant.

It can be social. There’s a reason why it’s often suggested to people feeling lonely or isolated. There is no guaranteed social success place, but regulars get to know each other. The key there is make social outcomes the secondary goal. Serious lifters can find excessive chatter irritating. It messes up timing. Same holds for cold approaching disinterested women. Guys will talk and banter between sets sometimes and there are always people who aren’t serious, but that’s different.

And if a staff member is trapped on the desk and desperately looking for an escape, don’t stand there and monolog endlessly. Focus on your performance goals. Familiarity will do the rest organically as people get to know you as a regular.1

Results can be monitored with hard numbers. Successes and limits are obvious and trackable. Weights are especially good for Gammas because they’re so bluntly honest. Exactly x pounds for exactly y reps. People do watch impressive lifts. And you know exactly how much stronger you’ve gotten. The iron doesn’t lie as the saying goes.

There’s a test of will. Lifting is hard. Especially when you get strong - advanced routines are grueling and minor injuries nag. Running is the same. Sometimes the thought of the hills is sickening. Powering through brings a sense of fulfillment that’s hard to describe. The first year can be rough - guys seem so much stronger and the goals distant. But gains will never come as quickly. Take satisfaction in the feeling of exhaustion. Pain as weakness leaving the body.

It’s all ages. Parents can introduce age appropriate resistance training. Heavy weight isn’t good for growing frames, but body weight exercises can start with adolescence. Obviously children have to be not screen dependent, active, and part of a functional family unit. Don’t force one thing. The illusion of choice is powerful. Join in in an appropriate way, but never project self-image, nostalgia, or ego on them. Ever. They can learn from your experience but it’s not about you. Be the parent you could have used and take pleasure in their paths.

For older people, recognize that the body isn’t what it used to be physiologically and work around that. People in their 90s benefit from intelligent strength training. You don’t have the advantage of throwing yourself into it and quick recovering from recklessness. But there are a lot of resources out there. AI can help with basics if you don’t know where to start. More on the wrong side of the age curve at the end.

Breaking through obstacles

It never fails. Train hard, be consistent, don’t eat like a moron and you will get stronger. The status bump comes with it for psychological reasons. Not just knowing you’re stronger and look better. The confidence that comes from commitment. From applying will to power through pain or indifference. And maybe more than anything, the objective knowledge that you can change your reality. We’re all born how we are, but you do have a vote.

Dan Wilson, Obstacle 1, painting

It’s also important to acknowledge the obstacles because they do have to be overcome. These can be real or illusionary. The biggest one is commitment. There’s a reason gyms are full after New Year’s and empty out by February. We called it the Resolution Crowd. The full year memberships were great financially - lots of revenue with minimal wear and tear on the facility. But not great for the people whose negative experience puts real improvement further away than when they started.

Emily Dove, Hipster Sloth, 2018, drawing for an American Greetings card

The obstacles are time and energy. Burnout after work. Busy weekends. The point is that - as with anything valuable with a cost - you have to want it. And motivation is something that only the individual can determine. Audit your weekly time usage. Some people literally have no time, but they’re rare. If there’s a couple of hours of mixed screen in there, that’s not you.

Commitment habituates - every year a few of the Resolution Crowd became regulars and there didn’t seem to be a predictable pattern in who. I just really wanted to be strong as I could be as a teenager and then never wanted to lose it. Ultimately it became a part of life I couldn’t imagine not having. Everyone has to find their way.

The intimidation factor is another impediment but one less grounded in reality. Low status people often assume reciprocity of interest. That their focus on higher status is returned. It’s a form of projection based in low self-confidence and the tendency to over-fixate on others.

Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-1874, oil on canvas, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

In general, high status people are oblivious to the low status unless they’re distractingly obnoxious. And that’s a different social issue. Who cares what randos are doing? They’re as interesting as the blobs in an impressionist painting.

House of Lies narrative plays a big role here. There’s an infuriating anti-status formula dreamed up by Pedowood Gammas where high-status people actually behave as if Gamma fear delusions were real behavior patterns. I’ve lifted in gyms in multiple countries and never once saw muscular guys just randomly mocking or threatening someone. Ever. And if somehow you did find a hive of assholes, go elsewhere.

Obviously, going into a gym the first time can be intimidating. Strength discrepancies can be unreal. But no one imposing looks down on novices. What catches attention is something impressive or unexpected. People may be curious about the rangy, generically athletic guy in a Soundgarden t-shirt working in with a couple of neckless fireplugs and three plates on the bench. That’s not a novice. If they notice at all, it’s generally encouraging. You’re there. That’s the divide. The ones looked down on are the ones that don’t try.

The same prescription applies to anyone. Just start. Figure out what you want and then experiment with routines as you progress. Almost anything works at first.

And it turns out some of it works later on too. This last part is a bit technical but it needs to be for any other over 55 lifters looking at one more run at it. I thought aspirational lifting ended when my shoulder exploded in my early 30s on the quest for 400 at 200. Ups and downs followed but the quarter-century trajectory was the long defeat. Mid-50s were the worst - a pattern of maintain lower strength, slip, maintain new lower strength, wash rinse repeat.

The reality was that my old routine was misaligned with an aging physiology. Massive volume and low rep power sets aggravating chronic injury, forcing longer recovery times, and gradual loss. More frequent sessions with fewer sets and higher reps stimulate hypertrophy while sparing connective tissue. Lifting every other day alternates muscle stimulus with an optimal 48-hour recovery interval for protein synthesis.

Moving up isn’t theoretical. All my numbers have jumped up considerably this year - for the first time in memory. Exercises where my shoulder is a factor are now at 85% of my absolute early 30s peak and climbing. Exercises where it isn’t are now at 90-95% peak. Body weight exercises suggest my body composition is close to where it was three decades ago.2

I am a little lighter, 190-195 from around 205 at peak, which makes pound for pound numbers better. For supplementation, I’m taking creatine again, to counter age-related muscle loss and up cellular hydration for tendons and especially joint capsules. There’s a lot of nonsense in this domain, but creatine really does have an impact when used with disciplined training. Other than that, lots of protein. 90 second rest between sets is now two minutes for maximal ATP regeneration - which creatine augments. This keeps reps high on sets 2 and 3 without dropping weight.

I alternate a push and pull day with off days between. I end each with a light shoulder physio exercise. High-rep, low-load stabilization work when the joint is warm stimulates oxygenated blood flow. Low impact cardio consists of the bike after most sessions and long walks or rucking on my off days.

Johannes art, Atlas holding the celestial sphere

Overall, I’ve become visibly more muscular without added bulk. Some vascularity has started coming back. For conditioning, there’s zero next-day muscle soreness, even when I raise weight. The shoulder is slightly better to no worse. My knee is a lot better. This is much more than I expected based on what I’d absorbed about age-related decline. And it remains functional. I don’t have my explosive youthful stamina, but days of hard physical labor on the legacy project are no more problem than they ever were.

To be clear, it’s not magic. For example, at peak, my single rep max on the bench was 365 at almost 6’2” with a 78-inch wingspan and 207 pound body weight . That’s gone forever - the chronic shoulder injury doesn’t let me flat press at all anymore. High rep incline presses and flat flys are all I can manage. The point isn’t that aging can literally be reversed, it’s that the decline curve isn’t fixed. Structural damage doesn’t come back. But programming matched to physiology recovers ground that seemed gone. And relevant to this post, I’m subconsciously carrying myself differently. The effects are real, even if you know what I know about self-presentation and status.

Obviously this doesn’t go forever. The point is that it wasn’t supposed to be going now. It’s unknown terrain. No supplementation other than the creatine capsules and occasional protein bar. I’ve never used steroids, synthetic t, or other mutagens. The first post recommended lifting based on memories. This one recommends it because it’s transformative. The best time to start was years ago, but the second best time is right now. Then never stop.

Back when I was near peak an older guy told me I was doing well, but “the weights always win in the end”. It stayed with me. He was around my age now, remembering what was and is no longer. He was right in the big picture - Father Time is undefeated. But it turns out Father’s going to have to work a little harder for it than it seemed.

1

I don’t socialize at the gym at all. An occasional nod at most. Not there to talk and prefer a trance state. Others love to chatter.

The House of Lies runs on screens. The capacity to create centralized mass messaging lets it monopolize the limited bandwidth of the majority with compelling fake reality. Over and over a populace ill-equipped to deal with centralized immersive messaging is pulled from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis. This post looks at the means and the latest example.

Television was the prototype. Three big networks oligopolized the programming, creating a uniformity of experience that was historically new. And it was even tighter than that. We know now that they were less independent competitors than talons on a beast claw offering the same “values”. It’s a big part of the frozen myopia that defines the boomers that were raised in it.

Laguna Design, Surfing The Internet, art print

The modern version is the internet. More fragmented in primary transmission, but just as monocultural due to the big platforms. It does offer more alternatives - if you enjoy this Substack, it wouldn’t have existed in the TV era. It’s also irrelevant on the socio-cultural level because it’s too small to make a mass difference. And what the internet does offer the House is more valuable. The illusion of socialization, or narrative amplification and dissemination.

TV was one-way. Programs could be recorded once the VCR came along, but not easy to share. Social media on the internet is built for sharing. The premise was the usual progressive garbage about “everyone’s creativity”. But since most people are a) numbingly uninteresting and b) incapable of independent thought, this quickly became reposting algorithmic suggestions from the same beast sites.

Personal circles extend the reach of social media posts via other socials, blogs, links, and consolidators. Algorithmic promotion and the forms of shadow banning and deplatforming are less direct than three-network programming but just as effective for NPC direction. The grip appears to be unbreakable - the best we can do is observe what the screens are doing and do other. But there’s no getting the masses to stop acting like curated lies are reality.

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, 1653, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thoughts come from somewhere. Even the most creative and original react to or are inspired by things. And most just parrot something they saw online and pretend it’s their idea. It’s why when you ask questions they tend to trail into incoherence or wind up pointing to some “source”.

Seeding the imagination is nothing new. What changes is the nature of the technology that makes it possible. Village gossip and newspapers had their day. The screen era began with TV, which gave way to internet devices - mostly phones, but also tablets and computers. The internet is different in that it’s consumable through multiple types of machine making it uniquely portable. It’s this portability that lets it seem to replace reality.

Older ways of uploading narrative had varying degrees of separation from personal reality. Talking to someone was talking to someone. There’s no escaping that what you’re hearing comes from someone else. With all the psychological factors that come with that. Printed material offered uniform experience to every consumer, but had to be acquired and read on personal time.

TV and radio introduced simultaneity. Uniformity of content at the same time. Socio-cultural scheduling around when things were on. The TV became background noise in countless houses. One of the most eye-twitchingly infuriating things to me is the idiot need to switch it on as soon as you come in. But that was different from active engagement. And it couldn’t go out with you.

The internet started like TV in that it was tied to a place with a computer and a cable. Technology enhanced portability - laptops, wifi, smart phones - until constant consumption was possible. It’s a cliche that the young are never not on their phone, but they aren’t the only ones. I don’t carry a phone unless traveling and I’m often the person without one in a space.

The reason for pointing this out is that consumption patterns affect reception. Having to go get the newspaper or be at home to turn on the TV implies life/narrative vehicle separation. There’s a base state without it and consuming is a conscious act to a degree. No matter how mentally dependent on the content narrative.

The internet, on the other hand, is onmipresent. There’s no meaningful offline baseline when you fall asleep to infinite scroll, wake up to pinging notifications, and carry it with you everywhere.

There are several reasons why this probably isn’t psycho-socially ideal. This post is considering what happens when screen and reality become interwoven to the point where they subconsciously seem the same. And the divide - however flimsy - between real life and screen functionally disappears.

To be fair, this was prefigured by earlier media. The famous panic over War of the Worlds on the radio is a great example. Although there was no way to check that hoax IRL at the time unless you knew someone in the area you could call. The TV era brought multiple visual streams making hoaxing like that harder but not impossible. NPCs have always been incapable of distinguishing the anecdotal and statistical.

What’s different with constant internet is the all-enveloping nature of the false reality.

Consider. An older hoax like the satanic panic was a singular narrative that morons could fixate on, built up out of a string of TV programming and pulp print media. The premise, however feeble, was that journalists attempted to report what was truly happening and that lying was existential anathema to them. Most FTS-1s don’t bother with TV reporting because it blew whatever credibility it had.

Constant internet doesn’t have “journalists” in the same way. Not as a trusted class. It’s an endless flow of audio-visual imagery and text from any number of sources. Someone tweets then it’s reposted on various platforms without a thought about the reliability. The current inability to recognize “AI video” isn’t helping with my contempt for the idiot masses.

There’s no capacity to even imagine if screen makes sense IRL when screen and IRL have become one and the same. Which makes it the constant false narrative incubator and cocoon in one.

As with many current things, covid made it obvious. The fake plague was what crystalized my own diagnosis of the House of Lies and the FTS inhabiting it. Simpletons and gullibaloons recirculating the same nonsense in a miasma of self-righteousness and fear while socio-culture collapsed became almost physically disgusting. Vacuous jellyfish narrating their beast-constructed “new normal” to each other as if dealing with a weather event drove a permanent wedge between me and the majority.

Since then, the House of Lies has been casting around for another mass effect. Aliens were all over the screens recently before that bit imploded under its own idiocy. The current one seems to be AI “destroying the world”. Because some hack “whistleblowers” said it will. All with the same [Hi. I worked for company X until I wet myself in fake fear…] narrative template. The reality is [you’re a text box]. The repetition is an effective tactic for triggering NPC base coding.

This is where the screen/IRL confusion is most obvious. Readers can imagine how an actual threat of that magnitude would play out. First of all, if you actually believed the world was ending, tweeting while doing nothing else different isn’t the reaction.

When I foresaw the inevitability of systemic collapse - a far lesser catastrophe - I reprogrammed my whole life around survivability and mitigation. And there wasn’t one tweet. I’ve repeatedly shared my reasoning the best I can, online and IRL.

You can tell when something is NPC coded by how it’s framed. Because the House of Lies is a house of lies, there’s generally a difference between its narrative and reality. When the framing leads into precoded narrative misconceptions you know it’s intended to direct NPCs. For example, persistent belief that improving AI information processing → “consciousness” because grasping LLM is a cognitive bridge too far. The reality is it can’t. The development chain doesn’t lead there. But that depends on ability to differentiate ontology from appearance.

The AI ends the world lie leans hard on belief in spontaneous functional AI sentience. The doom scenario is deliberately written to exploit the belief. Like one prognosticator whose scenarios are literally movies. Leading to the irritating reality of knowing it’s nonsense while the idiot masses take it seriously. And it can’t be explained because that requires information processing.

But unresolved speculation is pointless. Arguing over things that haven’t happened then moving fruit fly attention elsewhere before they don’t happen is how the House of Lies laser pointer works.

Modified process from a Band House of Lies post, original on left. The basic structure is Narrative Engineers direct NPC Narrative Huffers who empower and legitimate the Engineers. But there’s another group of Narrative Boosters. Smug NPCs that proclaim narrative in ignorance as if it were true. A great many Gammas live here.

Recent Substack comments featured narrative boosters offering up fan fiction to support dooming. What it actually did was clarify the NPC direction process. The AI dooming actually conflates two things that are not the same. Dishonestly exploiting the FTS information processing gap. NPCs are emotionally driven and can’t process a complex argument. Anything of note gets forced into a good/bad binary depending on the feelings screens pull out of the base code. Two things happen.

1. The scenarios fall into preset patterns based on movies and other media because that’s what the base code is shaped by. So the underlying premise – the computers become sentient – is ontologically impossible fiction taken as a real fear.

2. The threat has to escalate because emotional response numbs over time. Thanos will destroy the universe! No, Doom will destroy the multiverse!!! When it’s all just crappy CGI. Screen-reality confusion is powerful, but it still isn’t real. Anyone who didn’t shoot the poison is pretty much where they were before covid. A lot of poison-shooters are too. The aliens didn’t… do anything. Anyone get a DOGE/ tariff payout? Employment collapse → extinction event to keep the cortisol up.

If the Narrative Engineers dug the cave and made the puppets and the NPCs gape at the show, the Narrative Boosters are holding the stick.

The actual thoughts and projections found in the more informed dooming don’t support the NPC take. Even though the informed fudge the difference to foster NPC response by pandering to movie frameworks and ontological impossibility. Terms like “superintelligence” deliberately suggest sentience to the CLI types.

Misrepresentation calls up the key question: when the reason is false, what’s the real reason? Let’s take a look at one narrative booster we can call Dramatic Pose Boy (DPB) that washed up on Substack.1

DPB actually includes fictional scenarios from 2019 and 2022 that observably didn’t happen, presumably while sniffing a knuckle. The link to consider more closely is AI 2027, a popular threat scenario forecast. As of July, independent tracking noted 19 of the 53 predictions are confirmed or ahead, which isn’t prescient, but isn’t bad either. These include the infrastructure buildout and hyperscaler capex – indicators of the massive circular financial commitment.

However, the key mechanism that the whole AI recursive R&D uplift depends on is running at roughly 17% of predicted.2 AI 2027 predicted 1.9x R&D uplift by end of 2026 while METR’s controlled trial found developers were slower with AI tools. There’s a reason for this that has only been partially addressed.

Model collapse is a well-known failure mode that comes from training AI on AI output. This is mitigated in a couple of ways. Accumulating data instead of replacing it aggregates synthetic information to a growing corpus that retains its foundational stability. Using an external verifier – a standard to check and edit each iteration – allows continual improvement. Formal verification, like a test suite or proof checker for math. Real recursivity, but practically limited. Because this self-improvement requires an accessible ground-truth verifier. Precisely what doesn’t exist for taste, judgment, strategy under genuine uncertainty, or new empirical claims about the world.

Pierre Gaultier, Mountain Path, print Don’t need to see the destination to know it doesn’t go to the top of the peak.

The progress aggregates in narrow, verifiable ranges before having to transfer out into unbounded reality. The takeoff cascade assumes this is a natural sequence – automated coding becoming superhuman cognition. But that difference is ontological, not performance based. I can’t say it’s impossible always because I’m not a time traveler. I can say it’s not happening on this trajectory. Like sentience, we would have to see a new and different development path.

Benchmark scores and datacenter capex are scalable along the current path. Once the bounded low-hanging fruit is picked, acceleration of AI research by AI isn’t. Two questions follow. Which verifier grounds the self-improvement loop once it leaves code and math? If there isn’t one, what carries capability from the narrow band into the open-ended domains that the existential dooming requires? That’s what systemic versus existential looks like.

The informed doomers propose systemic threats, not existential ones. Serious socio-economic damage, even carnage, is credible if less than certain for external reasons. Things like bubble collapse, economic wreckage, cognitive dependence, misuse by evil dolts, regulatory capture are all on the table. Simpletons becoming dependent is doing cognitive damage. Loss of centralized system control and failure could be catastrophic given the vast number of logistic-dependent NPCs in unsustainable densities. It’s just not existential, and doom framing like DPB’s obscures real risk with sci-fi fear porn.

The current worst case scenario looks something like this. There’s enough capability improvement where verification is cheap and available to incentivize widespread delegation. Finance, logistics, and infrastructure systems get automated, the ability to audit degrades as AI decisions come faster until a badly specified objective gets optimized at a speed too fast to correct. With technological centralization and interconnection, catastrophic systemic failure and loss of control are possible at real scale. There are problems even with this scenario though. My take is that the collapse comes from a different angle.

GE Vernova H-Class gas turbine. Turns out reducing industrial capacities has consequences.

Consider, Goldman Sachs gives US data center demand at ~31 GW in 2025 and projected 66 GW in 2027. Year-over-year capacity additions are scheduled to reach 13.6 GW in 2026 and 36.3 GW in 2027. Global turbine manufacturing capacity is backlogged to the extent GE Vernova is booking for 2031 delivery. That’s a 5 year wait, plus interconnection taking 36–84 months. A 2027 takeoff needs equipment that would have been ordered around 2022 and wasn’t. What happens to the bubble when $745–775 billion in 2026 hyperscaler capex meets generation that doesn’t arrive until 2031?

It’s no mystery that the financing is circular. Chip vendors taking equity in their customers, customers committing to purchase agreements that fund the vendors, and capacity contracts booked as revenue before the power exists. If the 36.3 GW addition target whiffs, the assets don’t produce, and the revenue projections justifying the capex evaporate. Model improvement becomes irrelevant when physical delivery and capital commitment are out of whack.

Here’s the marker: Not only will AI not have destroyed the world. Data center capacity additions will not reach 36 GW in 2027. The beauty of this is that we’ll know by 2028.

This is a better reason for the doom discourse than specious projections. If the real danger is financial, a technological threat narrative deflects blame. We overbuilt against physics with dodgy funding sounds a lot more damning than we discovered something dangerous and powerful. Get-out-of-responsibility-free card that keeps the mystique of genius. The massive telecom fiber buildout and crash of 2000 isn’t as sexy a narrative as The Matrix. But it fits better. Right down to the future value of the technology.

Note that as this post was being finished, three rival lab heads offered a coordinated slowdown call and a cartel objection was made the same day. Let’s see if “pace the frontier” gets the mass NPC repetition treatment.

Touch grass comes to mind. Touch weights is even better advice.

The tool works but the capital structure around it doesn’t. Readers know I’ve been banging on about the bubble threat since before this current round of dooming.

Example 1:

Example 2:

There are others. This is how I can be an AI enthusiast personally and critical of the industry. In the beast narrative, actual concerns that need an infinite resource scenario become “kills everyone” via screen immersion. Imperfect technical structure provides some substantive credibility while movie scenarios and informationless NPC response carry the emotional charge.

The doomposters are revealed. The rest is up to the consumers.

Time to wrap up the look at Vox Day’s Refutation of Kant. This type of philosophical discussion post around a book has proved enjoyable - hopefully for readers as well. Although this concludes our time with this volume, the theme is worth continuing. Two associates have called my attention to works of their own that look interesting. If anyone cares, I use “associate” to refer to a mutual Substack follow with reality-facing perspectives of a certain caliber.

The Kurgan is on deck with two theological works that he sent me that I’ll read and analyze. After that, Craig Shelton has some philosophical books that seem complementary to my own work. That should be enough to keep this theme going for a while. I have to read them carefully, which takes time even for an outlier. That said, readers are welcome to offer suggestions for the queue after Craig.

Now for Kant. The previous posts on this book have broken down the main arguments and why they’re so effective. This one will consider some conclusions and implications before turning to Day’s related Triveritas - an effective new epistemological methodology. Specifically, how and why it works. Its framing is a bit different from The Ontological Hierarchy, but the logically necessary metaphysical structure of reality makes it very clear.

The House of Lies consistently coughs up weird little freaks for the NPCs to adulate. There’s something Fauciesque with this one. I suspect there’s an inversion / self-debasement aspect in repulsive “heroes” actual men would organically shun.

One question kept coming up when reading The Refutation of Kant. Why the adherence to this guy? Why such a commitment to so flawed a thinker that entire libraries have been written to shore up his defective claims? Why the compulsion to make up things he didn’t say and hang his name on them? Why the midwit fascination that extends to some of the most cringe memes of all time? Why do boomers who've never read a word of him pretend he’s a Beatle of philosophy?

The answer starts with a differentiation Day makes between historical Kant and what I call !Kant - the man and his writings vs. the endless extrapolations and interpretations in his name. The first is a flawed thinker of some creativity. The second is what Day calls a posture. A protean pose that can take any form and subsume any argument to the point that Kant dissolves into a meaningless everything. The answer lies in the motivation for this seemingly weird obsession.

The “logic” is that of the modern academy. A bloated hive of midwitted busywork degenerating into bureaucratic welfare and diverse fantasy. That’s a post of its own - the tl,dr here is what The Ontological Hierarchy calls representational displacement. That occurs when something is established for a purpose, then displaces that purpose by becoming an end-in-itself, and then inverts what it was set up to do. The book goes into the process and some examples.

In the case of university, a structure set up to generate and disseminate knowledge inverts into a machine to exfiltrate resources from people and governments while fabricating beast lies. This process was made inevitable by embracing the auto-idolatrous errors of the Enlightenment. Pretending nonsensical materialism of the kind embodied by Kant was true, then drifting ever further from reality. All the while self-justifying with self-pwning claims of cognitive elitism.

Photographs of the skull of Immanuel Kant after he was exhumed for phrenological reasons

It makes more sense to think of Kant as a false saint in a fake religion masquerading as objective knowledge than any kind of robust ontological or epistemological foundation. The sort of thing venerated like a cult relic.

The Ontological Hierarchy diagnoses belief in logically or empirically false claims as false faith, a category error. Self-fluffing materialists professing “higher truth” is exhibit A. And since the central ritual of academic philosophy is “research” - defined as masticating and recombining the same sclerotic discourse - thousands of unread texts follow.

Walter Bortolossi, Mark Zuckerberg meets Immanuel Kant, 2011

The Kant obsession is a structural foundation stone of an academy that’s inverted into the opposite of its purpose. Priestly pay isn’t bad, especially in this climate, and the fake pallium has some NPC cachet. Kant’s tortured prose makes “working on” him impressive to sub-midwits. What is commitment to Kant that isn’t Kant? Word sudoku. Without having to add up to anything clear and distinct.

Altogether, it’s a safe and easy way to collect the chit and get the ordination. Perhaps the academy would contribute more if it cut the megawatts of effort wasted on erroneous windbags and addressed reality. Or not. Masticating windbags is relatively harmless. Letting academics set actual policy is less so.

The larger issue is institutional inertia. It’s easy to miss when, like this Substack, the whole inverted foetid enterprise has been written off as a lunatic wheeze of an imploding socio-cultural calliope. But consider the resources still commanded by the academic industrial complex. The aggregate tuitions and grants, the numbers of enrollees, the near-monopoly on the mainstream ideasphere. The thousands of texts on !Kant exist because they’re incentivized systemically. There are signs this is cracking. It can’t come soon enough.

Kant also appeals to the human drive for auto-idolatry evident since Eden. Be your own god, basically. It’s logically preposterous, but that’s never been too much of an obstacle. The appeal of Enlightenment delusion is the idea of sovereign reason. That the human mind is the ultimate arbiter of reality. And as the previous posts have explained, Kant was a tentpole for this false ideology.

Broken Idol at Copan from Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by Frederick Catherwood

It’s no mystery that flaws have a way of disappearing when their acolytes are incentivized not to notice them. Flushing this turd means stepping down off a pedestal that never was real and accepting ontological limits. Facing reality after a hollow dream.

Enough Kant. Finish with a brief consideration of Day’s proposed replacement for sterile Enlightenment materialist epistemology.

The Triveritas is the central epistemological tool or method in Day’s veriphysics or science of truth. The premise is deceptively simple - truth claims about physical reality are assessed on three different grounds - logic (L) evaluates deductive structure. Is it coherent? Mathematics (M) evaluates quantitative consistency. Does it add up? Empirical observation (E) is perceptual evidence outside the mind of the evaluator. Does it really happen? All three are rated numerically, and the aggregate score determines the strength of a truth claim.

Here’s the link to one of the discussion posts.

Veriphysics

Grok Pronounces the Verdict

Apparently the readers here are very confident in the Triveritas, as 97 percent of those who voted expressed their opinion that Athos and I would be able to meet the “impossible” epistemological problem posed to us by Grok of simultaneously solving three philosophy-of-science problems. The abstract and the introduction of the paper written to meet the G…

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8 months ago · 33 likes · 19 comments

It works because it’s the first truth test to triangulate three independent frames of reference. Logic, mathematics, and empirical observation are reliable in their domains, and those domains don’t overlap. The second is important because separation keeps them from interfering with each other.

Day authorizes these metrics by Logos, the consistent rational nature of reality as divine creation. It is stated as a given, which I, as a Christian, agree with, but others may be less sure. This is where the necessary nature of reality as reasoned inductively in The Ontological Hierarchy comes in. L, M, and E work for clear and specific reasons. Start with representational filtering.

We perceive, think, and communicate through representations of the reality we interact with. The metrics Day uses are semiotic and syntactic. Words and symbols with rules of combination. These are arbitrary in that someone made them up at some point to ensure consistency. They are not arbitrary in that they have to be followed or the representation is incoherent. Kant was partially right in differentiating representation from what it represents. He was wrong to claim that doesn’t convey real knowledge.

No semiotic system perfectly replicates [all of reality]. What it does is capture something about or some aspect of reality. And different systems communicate different kinds of information.

Amber Alexander, Cat art, print

Mathematics, for example, provides and processes quantitative information about things. How much, how big, how often, how probable, etc. are all mathematical knowledge. It can’t tell you how something felt, or what color something was. That sort of empirical information needs descriptive language. Different semiotic systems serving different knowledge domains.

Each system is a construct with a frame of reference. It offers real information, but it’s constrained or limited by its own rules and characteristics. Its own predetermined parameters. What it refers to and how it refers to it. This is less complicated than it sounds. You don’t use a ruler to check whether it’s raining. And inability to forecast weather doesn’t invalidate a ruler as a reliable measure of length or distance.

This is why representational epistemic modes can’t self ground. They work within given frames of reference. Where they come from is outside the frame. Applying in-system rules to extra-systemic conditions. Trying to solve mathematically for the name of whoever invented the Arabic numbers we use. The Ontological Hierarchy determined the necessity and rough nature of the ultimate ground for reality as we can know it. Logos worked out through a process called constinction that assures the in-domain reliability of L, M, and E.

Here’s the synesthetic view of how they work together.1

Individually, each drifts to indeterminacy in its own way. The number line runs forever. Logic can’t self-ground without infinite regress. Just look at the absurdity of empirical quest for material origins. The deeper we probe, the less determinate things appear. This is what first led the Band to limits of discernment.

Now for the synesthetic thought picture analogy. Each of these has specific, real information bearing capacity but can’t be grounded or accounted for in itself. It can’t be closed off. Conceptualize each as a functionally endless “line”. Individually, each is locatable and meaningfully referable, but not fully comprehensible.

But three lines are the minimum number to define a bounded region.

Note how the defined truth is an area, not a point. This is what the imperfection of finite human perception “looks like” conceptually. Through a glass darkly. Or as Day acknowledges, “The fullness of the truth cannot be conclusively and comprehensively established from any human perspective or by any human method”. But as Kant failed to grasp, imprecise or partial knowledge remains knowledge and its truth is true.

Alphonse Adolf Bichard, Baron Munchausen’s Remarkable Leap illustration from The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, 1886. Hans Albert named Agrippa’s trilemma after Baron Munchausen’s lifting himself by his own hair as a metaphor for creating something from nothing. The Ontological Hierarchy blew out Albert’s version (p. 55) for dependence on a single epistemic mode, referring to it as “intellectually constipated”.

Day described it textually by solving Agrippa’s trilemma. An old epistemological problem that holds justification of any truth is impossible because every chain of reasoning ends in one of three flawed options: infinite regress as above, circular reasoning, or a dogmatic assertion. But this only holds for one frame of reference - like logical self-grounding. The individually infinite or indeterminate metrics can define a certainty when they’re brought together. Logic, for example, isn’t arbitrarily terminated when there’s an empirical or mathematical reason to stop.

The thought picture visualizes it. Each line is intrinsically endless. But each can also be truncated by another valid line. And while two lines cut each other off at a point but enclose nothing, three produce a finite knowable bounded region. Where the validity comes from a different frame of reference, all of which are grounded by the same constinctive Logos that isn’t limited to any of them.

The conclusion is that the Triveritas is complementary with the logical necessities of The Ontological Hierarchy. It works because it describes reality as it has to be. The downside is that it can expect similar mainstream disregard. At least in the short term. Which is of little consequence to the reality-facing. We navigate our own lives by truth and have no regard for the crumbling NPC fantasy world around us. But there’s some value in specific reasons for readers interested in the House of Lies.

There’s the applicational dimension. It takes three off-the-shelf epistemological modes and triangulates them. To the average midwit, that doesn’t seem that “creative”. The obvious counter is to ask how long they were sitting on the shelf without anyone noticing. The rarity of the insight proves the level of the achievement. Even the favorable don’t see the novelty.

And academic philosophers really don’t like “empirical” theorizing. The short answer is hence their irrelevance. The longer one is the weird pure reason pretense that genuflects before Kant’s myopia. The Ontological Hierarchy describes our being-in-the-world as Apprehensible reality - a constinction of empirical and abstract. Where the empirical comes first temporally.

It’s really not that hard to conceptualize.

Some have quibbled with the quantification scales. They don’t seem problematic to me. Every sign system has to be made up at some point. The pertinent question is whether it effectively represents what it’s supposed to. The criteria are reasonable and detailed enough for consistent application and meaningful comparisons. While difficulty of pinning down the difference between say an 88 and 89 captures the inherent imprecision of finite human infocognitive certitude.

Less substantively, there’s animus for the author. Readers will recall that whack job Gamma from a recent post taking gratuitous shots at Day. His online activities have left a trail of butthurt and offense a mile wide that the lurking wounded will always jump at.

The criticism that seems superficially relevant is the probabilistic one. Triangulating probability scores might cubically reduce the likelihood of false positives, but no probability, no matter how high, is ontologically equal to absolute certainty. Just as a function endlessly approaching a limit never has the same value as the limit. Superficially, again, because Day acknowledges “absolute” knowledge is beyond us.

Yuri Mikhailovich Arsenyuk, Horses at Twilight, 21st century, oil on canvas

The Ontological Hierarchy explains that absolutes belong to Abstract reality, not fallen, finite, additive Material reality. Every measurement has an uncertainty. Every material iteration has miniscule variations. In scriptural terms, we see as through a glass darkly.

The Triveritas explicitly refers to the physical world. Apprehensible reality. The constinctive composite of Material and Abstract that we can access empirically and rationally. Via infocognition, to use the term in the glossary on this Substack’s homepage. Grounded by the Ultimate reality that supersedes both. Once the material is folded in, abstract absolutes are theoretical. Likelihood is the best we can do. And triangulated epistemologies mathematically outperform any one alone.

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, The Fairy Dance, 1895, oil on canvas, private collection. It doesn’t comment on the substance of fairies either. Only if they conform epistemologically to physical reality as we can assess it.

It’s disingenuous to hold anything to a standard it doesn’t claim to meet. Like one critic who accessorized ad hominem non sequitur with lack of reading comprehension. The published system makes claims about the physical world that involve quantities, predictions, and empirical observations. Day states that it does not apply to things outside that frame, like the Trinity.

The Triveritas applies quantification, logic, and observation to things that are quantifiable, logical, and observable. It’s methodologically domain-appropriate by construction: the method measures what it is defined and named as measuring and doesn’t reach past it. Someone can misapply it, but when used correctly, it essentially is what it is. And that’s as solid a truth foundation as we can find in this valley of shadow.

Gustave Doré, The Creation of Light (Gen. 1:1-5), wood engraving from Doré’s illustrated Bible, 1866

Readers know that the House of Lies has made systemic collapse inevitable for a long time. In hindsight, it’s the weight of cumulative drift from reality that’s a main culprit. What The Ontological Hierarchy calls representational displacement - where something set up to convey something becomes the end-in-itself then inverts the original purpose. For example, “news media” that spews constant dyscivilizational lies.

Well, that and FTS theory - the inability of the majority to process or remember information in a meaningful way. Which just gets more significant the longer I spend thinking about it.

Japanese kamikaze shot down near the Marianas Island, June 1944. The metaphor is obvious.

When the inevitability first hit me, I wasn’t intellectually mature enough to see the mechanisms - how and why were opaque. I just had a synesthetic thought picture of a socio-cultural arc heading towards a figurative x-axis. It’s only been within the last decade that the form it would take has become visible. And one thing I totally missed was how imbecilic it is.

The evil part was easier to see. The House of Lies is built on deception. Denial of fundamental realities. Even when aspects of it have tried to be well-meaning, divergence from reality over time guarantees a bad end. In fact, leveraging people’s notions of fairness or charity with lies is a common beast tactic. Like claiming fake equalism will rectify injustice in order to destroy performance-based structures so they can no longer do essential functions. It’s the baseline level of functional idiocy that makes it possible.

“Functional” is an important qualifier. I can’t tell from afar if someone is actually [but I already had breakfast]-tier low IQ or [would be unbelievable if not objectively observable]-tier ignorant. Only one is technically “stupid,” but in practice there’s no functional difference. To the point that things that should never have gotten off the ground are now civilizationally terminal.

Shambling Mound, The Citadel miniature ADD62, Bob Naismith sculptor, Kep Pump, painter. Just replace the painted colors with ugly tats.

AD&D had a creature known as a shambling mound. I’ll leave it to the reader to consider the applicability to a population observably incapable of grasping concepts as rudimentary as [making things needs processes], [society has to have some order], [physics applies to infrastructure], or [anarchy plus population density is a bloodbath]. I mean the ideas - words like “physics” and “anarchy” are bridges too far. And not just masses. The same is apparent with highly placed individuals.

A recent post from Simplicius - a site that’s been a solid source on the Ukraine clown show - drove it home.

Simplicius's Garden of Knowledge

West’s “Serious Analysis” on Ukraine: Internet Droppings in Official Dress

Is this why Russia is winning the war…

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2 months ago · 410 likes · 248 comments · Simplicius

The notion that the morons planning this national debacle are depending on low-wattage internet fabulists defies commentary. It’s so inane that words can’t do justice to the state of affairs. More reality-facing types will comment knowingly that “yes, well, it’s like a real Idiocracy, with years of declining IQs slowly bearing fruit and…” As if watching a movie with no personal consequences. Except it’s really happening. The collapse resembles colonial era infrastructure rotting away because not just the expertise is lost. The basic concept of “maintaining it” is too complex to entertain.

Hermann Corrodi, Roman Aqueduct on the Appia Antica at Sunset, before 1905, oil on canvas

I used to wonder about things like the collapse of the Roman Empire. Why didn’t the Ostrogoths or late Imperials get a bunch of dudes together and feed or support them to rebuild aqueducts, for example? I can center and build a basic groin vault in stone. But consider that one of the two NPC directional poles is willfully, demonically evil and virtually everyone is basically cool with it. This link does a decent job with the big picture. My caveat below.

Always The Horizon

Progressivism is Haunted by Demons

“The Devil is more real than Canada…

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a year ago · 195 likes · 88 comments · Copernican

As a Christian, I disagree with the religion conclusions. That the degenerated masses drift from the truth is irrelevant to what’s true. I’m open to debate. The Ontological Hierarchy spells out my logical argument for objective morality and what a coherent ontology has to have.

The link is referring specifically to the atavist “left”. No one should be surprised that the evil want horror and suffering. That’s expected. But tolerance of the existence of a governmental faction and foreign judiciary that actively work to destroy the nation is exploiting mass idiocy.

Abortionist Ann Lohman (a.k.a. Madame Restell) as imagined in the 13 March 1847 edition of the National Police Gazette

Consider the dehumanized wickedness and depravity of every mass materialist movement in the modern era. From Marxism to feminism and everything in between. Anyone at this point incapable of perceiving worldly evil may just be incapable of perceiving. The surprising part is the level of collective functional stupidity for a non-actively evil component to not have a problem with it.

Even if the link is correct in assuming demonic intent is more common than recognized, the idiocy of the rest is staggering. A large segment wants to destroy any functional support for its own modern life because of nonsense words and animus. A non-imbecilic populace rejects the entire Sorathic horror.