(or, How To Utilize Incorrect Predictions to Influence the Present)
4619 words.
“I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity.”
– GK CHESTERTON
Our quest to pull the veil back to reveal the mathematics of existence is for a single purpose: to achieve control of our experience by mastering the unknown. It is the belief that behind the façade of the unknown there lies a system that can be understood – and, by implication, manipulated – by a human mind, explicitly for the benefit of human existence.
There is a theoretical flashpoint within the modern reality of Total Politics, where the topics of the day extend beyond public policy and bureaucratic governance, touching upon the identities and spirituality of every citizen. This is not the only battle, but the subject of the present inquiry. In this realm of Total Politics, at various levels and with varying terminology, we see a battle between Dialectical Materialism and Ontological Truth, with nothing less than the true nature of existence on the line.
Do you believe that there an eternal metaphysics behind subjective human comprehension, or is everything contained within the immediate human experience? Do you believe in ideology, or materialistic power politics? Do you believe in the soul, or an amalgamation of mental processes? One side believes that while absolute truth is unattainable – it is our quest for truth that defines reality – so we will always lack the complete and total understanding of the mechanisms of the universe. Prediction is therefore impossible, because our search for truth always kicks it further down the road.
Still, every single day, everyone from anarchists to monarchists attempt to claim that special insight that allows them to predict the future. If we are playing a game, does each player utilizing game theory change the game itself? Does prediction even matter, or is it just data-crunching to create narratives masquerading as prediction that actually guide the future?
Predicting the Forces Conducting People
We live in a curious world, one that boasts unrestricted access to historical records and analytics of macro trends, detailed catalogues of the tectonic shifts in how societies engage with the world, yet secretly we believe that change is rare. This is no more evident than in the world of stock trading, where the public routinely hears that the experts have developed advanced models that consign the boom/bust cycle to the dustbin of history. They will claim that employing new predictive models coupled with improved legislation, and seemingly every decade we hear how the chaos of the marketplace is a thing of the past1.
We believe stories only happen in the past, while stasis thrives in the future.
“The great stock market bull seeks to condense the future into a few days, to discount the long march of history, and capture the present value of all the future.”
– JAMES BUCHAN
Furthermore, the more comprehensive our understanding of the past, the more we assume we control the future, so it’s not a problem of historical literacy or research. The more intelligent we are, the more we eagerly devour these fictions. It would seem that the richer our cynicism towards the capabilities of human animal, the stronger our idealism concerning how to stand outside of, and correct, them.
While our knowledge of natural system and insight into human behavior at various scales has granted us much power, the true ability to accurately predict outcomes eludes us. This is partly due to the nature of scientific inquiry itself; we frequently begin with a hypothesis conjured in the human mind, then seek to either prove or disprove it. Contrary to pop-mythology, there is no wandering around the dark with a torch in search of elusive truths, rather it is us beginning with conclusions and stress testing them. The problem is how seductive those conclusions can be from the outset.
Predicting the unpredictable is where this crosses over into the political. There is a visceral interest in forecasting catastrophes, financial crashes, or even climate change. Nassim Taleb, in his investigations into prediction, calls these unpredictable events Black Swans, which are unprecedented events or innovations that retroactively make us reconsider our preconceived notions 2. They are truly unpredictable paradigm shifts, evidenced by how few people benefit from them, sometimes actively predicting their impossibility. Taleb claims there are two types of Black Swans: those with narrative power and those without. This means that as we attempt to uncover or prepare for Black Swan events, we have a tendency to get hung up on the story more than the likelihood. There are some unpredictable events that we attempt to predict because they sound like a story we want to avoid, a popular one being a zombie apocalypse, or some other lurid collapse scenario where everyone is leveled. This is largely why climate activism has proven to be so effective while having perhaps the worst track record of predictions ever documented.
Trying to predict these Black Swans don’t increase their likelihood, but we don’t know how to predict anything else. Why is it we favor these narrative-driven Black Swan events?
“We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random the information is, the more dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think the world is less random than it actually is. And the black swan is what we leave out of simplification”
– NASSIM TALEB, THE BLACK SWAN
We prefer narrative-driven predictions not only because we are driven to identify patterns, but also because stories are easy to archive in the brain whereas unprocessed information is hard to not only retrieve but store. We hate abstracts and prioritize any overarching reason, like drawing constellations in the night sky. We know that one hemisphere of the brain is more literal while the other side is the domain of interpretation and theories, thereby narrowing our vision and leaving us vulnerable to unpredictability. In many social circles on the Right, this takes the form of collapse scenarios. Individuals will become ideologically possessed by their particular narrative of how society, or perhaps the entire planet, will be washed away, leaving a blank canvas for a new order. This informs their everyday lives, and the more they prepare for one specific event, the more they lose sight of other possibilities that may pose more real danger.
To summarize: the quest to profit from predicting the future is in human DNA and drives everything we do, and it is not the purview of a single sector. The profit of financial markets is one example, the profit of human survival against nature is another, the entirety of the business is another. But what’s more fascinating is the persistence of these predictive models, absent the data and research. As addressed earlier, much of climate science has been proven inaccurate by time, and we can all think of similar examples of incorrect forecasting that nonetheless impacted public policy or our lived reality in some other way. In fact, the accuracy of future predictions no longer seems to matter at all, and we can simply state our misunderstanding was optimism. A common response to doomsday predictions not coming to pass is “it must be way worse than we thought,” thereby offloading the responsibility onto the rest of humankind. If it turns out that every single aspect of climate science has been incorrect on purpose, one might respond with “well is it so bad, preventing pollution?” Throw in children’s lives, and the conversation is over. There is no condemnation for the idealist.
It seems that predicting the future can impact the present, which changes that very future. As the Dialectical Materialists would say, the quest for truth changes both the quest and truth. Rather than controlling the future by leveraging knowledge of the present, it appears the world turners leverage knowledge of the future to control the present. The players attain control of the present while pushing control of the future ever further away, but this is because it was never within their grasp to begin with. If It Bleeds It Leads, but for the Think Tank Race.
Predicting the People Conducting Forces
There exist many systems that endeavor to describe how human beings operate when thrust into high-stakes situations, one of which being Game Theory. There are some who believe this is a distilled example of how different ethnic or religious mindsets approach a problem, while others believe that it cuts away all ideology and reveals the true human: a rational individual driven by self-interest.
Game theory gets a bad reputation for being only applicable to a world of 1:1 transactions populated by coldly rational actors. Game theory – which grafts easily onto Wittgenstein’s theory of communication being word games – states that when individuals come together with their own self-interests, they engage in a strategic dance where they attempt to fulfill their own desires 3. Rather than being a Machiavellian powerplay, game theory contains a concept called the Nash Equilibrium which states within each game there is an optimal balance where each side gets the maximum benefit. However, the problem – as outlined in the prisoner’s dilemma – is that when we assume each side will slit the throat of each other to win, we are thrust into a paranoid reality where we assume the worst of each party. If both sides go into it with the cold cynicism of game theorists, the ideal outcome will probably elude them.
The prisoner’s dilemma presents a situation where two parties, separated and unable to communicate, must each choose between cooperating with the other or not. The highest reward for each party occurs when both parties choose to co-operate. The classic prisoner’s dilemma goes like this: Two bank robbers, Elizabeth and Henry, have been arrested and are being interrogated in separate rooms.
– KEN BINMORE, GAME THEORY
The authorities have no other witnesses, and can only prove the case against them if they can convince at least one of the robbers to betray their accomplice and testify to the crime. Each bank robber is faced with the choice to cooperate with their accomplice and remain silent or to defect from the gang and testify for the prosecution.
If they both co-operate and remain silent, then the authorities will only be able to convict them on a lesser charge resulting in one year in jail for each (1 year for Elizabeth + 1 year for Henry = 2 years total jail time).
If one testifies and the other does not, then the one who testifies will go free and the other will get five years (0 years for the one who defects + 5 for the one convicted = 5 years total).
However, if both testify against the other, each will get three years in jail for being partly responsible for the robbery (3 years for Elizabeth + 3 years for Henry = 6 years total jail time).
A proper analysis of game theory and its implications does not, contrary to popular belief, propose a dog-eat-dog world where the sole lesson is to assume everyone is selfish and treacherous.
If that were the case it would not describe reality where altruism exists, and mutually beneficial negotiations can occur. The primary conceit in game theory is that each side will act rationally. It does not mean, as some claim, that human beings must be expected to behave as secular humanist machines seeking optimal resources. Rather, it assumes people will not behave randomly, which is usually only something someone well versed on game theory would do in an attempt to outsmart someone else who may know game theory. You spend more time attempting to outthink the person trying to outthink you trying to outthink them, and you can place yourself far away from achieving what you actually want.
For example, if you were in a game of brinksmanship as a Western Christian up against a Saudi Muslim, you would not expect that you are dealing with someone who puts their adherence to Islam aside when negotiating with someone on equal footing. You will be aware of the distinct values, prejudices, and goals that trend across not just the Muslim world, but their Muslim region. What you expect them to do is reason as a Muslim would, and this would include presuppositions about how they treat materialism, personal honor, their feelings towards no-Muslims and their assumed loyalties, etc. You can even weight them with some iteration of a Payoff Matrix, with numerical values based on how important each value is to them; if honor is important attach a higher number, if you believe honor is less important when transacting with someone not in their tribe, you weight it lower in that instance. To be rational simply means to be internally consistent, and it is only truly difficult if you are dealing with a lunatic.
“Even when people haven’t thought everything out in advance, it doesn’t follow that they are necessarily behaving irrationally. Game theory has had some notable successes in explaining the behavior of spiders and fish, neither of which can be said to think at all. Such mindless animals end up behaving as though they were rational, because rivals whose genes programmed them to behave irrationally are now extinct.”
– KEN BINMORE, GAME THEORY
This is simply to say that in a rational accounting of forces and decisions, we can create frameworks that account for cultural differences and incorporate that into the decision matrix we form to chart a pathway forward. What’s crucial, however, is we tailor these on a case-by-case basis. We can have a universal strategic system, but unless we can plug in a variety of exigent factors it has no predictive ability.
This is similar to how sports and athletics work in the real world, especially when viewed on a global scale. When geopolitical opponents – each possessing different values, genetics, even political systems – meet during the Olympics, the rules of each game that bind their actions do not negate the social or civilizational spirit of the players. In fact, quite the opposite: the entire reason we do this, even though it is rarely discussed anymore, is to treat these athletes as indicative of the higher-order superstructures they represent. I’m not sure how a secular humanist would view these games, other than a People Casino.
The validity of game theory runs parallel to the study of Neorealism, sometimes known as Offensive Realism. One of its pioneers is John Mearsheimer, who uses it to analyze geopolitical conflicts to great effect. In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, the thesis is outlined in detail: once a nation gets large enough to become relevant on the global stage, they enter into a geopolitical powerplay whether they like it or not.
If a nation wishes to successfully centralize its power in the form of the state and achieve regional authority thereby reaching sovereignty, they are not afforded the luxury of ignoring what America, India, the Soviet Union, or the European Union think of them. You become their competitors, and you will inevitably pop up on their radar 4. The dark side of achieving significance is that every entity with power will immediately weight the personal benefits of living in a world with you, and without you. Neorealism suggests that you should plan for the best but prepare for the worst. Your job becomes to outmaneuver the worst-case scenarios, and the victors tend to be the ones with the most strategies.
“One might surmise that international anarchy is the key structural factor that causes states to fight wars. After all, the best way for states to survive in an anarchic system in which other states have some offensive capability and intentions that might be hostile is to have more rather than less power. This logic […] drives states to strive to maximize their share of world power, which sometimes means going up against a rival state.”
– JOHN MEARSHEIMER, The TRAGEDY OF GREAT POWER POLITICS
Now let us add one extra dimension that makes it more relevant: when the individual represents the power of a nation. Here we find the elites, the dynasties, the shadowy power brokers. These can be leaders of nations who have total existential command of the body politic, or a billionaire who has amalgamated enough resources to rival the majority of other nations. It is within these great individuals that we find the soul of a civilization; he who pilots a civilizational organism the way a brain pilots a body. Specifically, how the brain does not, in fact, pilot the body or exist as a separate control organism; it is one with the body and consciousness requires the totality of the form. Those brains that seek to separate from the nervous system succeed in killing the organism. The leader of an civilizational organism is never separate from the nervous system of his agenda, no matter how much we like to imagine a higher apolitical strata controlling everything.
We can look to the great esotericists, like Julius Evola, who have attempted to chart the maturation and decline of civilizations as if they were organisms. Not content to view human collectives as random configurations of individuals, they see these nations and empires as operating like organic entities and are thus discussed as having a spiritual dimension 5. These experts seek to analyze the soul of civilizations and large tectonic shifts in great peoples, similar to how we craft a new spirituality for the individual through psychoanalysis.
“In all the ancient testimonies of traditional humanity it is possible to find, in various forms, the idea of a regression or a fall: from originally higher states beings have stooped to states conditioned by human, moral, and contingent elements. This involutive process allegedly began in a very distant past; the term that best characterizes it is the Eddic term ragna-rokkr, the ‘twilight of the gods.’ […] According to tradition, the actual sense of history and genesis of what I have labeled, generally speaking, as the ‘modern world,’ results from a process of gradual decadence through four cycles or ‘generations.’”
– JULIUS EVOLA, REVOLT AGAINST THE MODERN WORLD.
We need to recognize that on a broad scale there exist colossal epoch-defining movements, like the Chinese and Egyptians. Whether you want to believe in it or not, the “Western” civilization is looked at collectively by the entire world, and that story is being recorded in their diverse narratives. That Western civilization, despite being reducible to micro-power-plays, is broadly a concert that can stand apart. The game is played between individuals as micro representations of the organism of the group, the organism of the group engages in a different game on a larger scale which requires the participation of those same individuals. That organism has a self-awareness and an awareness of the fall of great civilizations and may be playing a game against its own people for its own interests. While it is obvious that self-serving tyrants and chaotic despots exist, it is more common that the leader at the table is more a manifestation of this civilizational organism than a jobber at a control panel.
This is all to say, it appears the most rational way to predict even short-term events is to calculate a multiplicity of conflicting rationalities, meaning the system itself is just a case-by-case basis. Our determination to find universal patterns that fit all levels of resolution and conflict actually limit us from perceiving lived reality accurately. Furthermore, we are not allowed to tell stories of vast civilizations as if they are complex organisms, only psychoanalytic stories of individual self-interests that meet in a massive web of coincidence.
This is why when people predict the outcomes of global conflict, nobody puts money on it. It seems obvious that the only ones who benefit are the ones who engineer the outcomes, typically with purposefully incorrect predictions.
You cannot call the game, you can only play the game.
The Antichrist Model of Anecdotes
Like any sensible centrist in this Political Ontology Asylum, I like bringing up the Antichrist. Many of the most vocal on this topic would not even count themselves as nominally Christian; it seems to occur more as an echo of a deeper integration of Christianity into the broader Western spirit, but I am not going to unravel the history of this meme. While you will find a variety of summaries about how the Antichrist will behave during the End Times, the through-line to all of them is a seemingly miraculous figure that appears as a wicked doppelganger of the real messiah, offering boons and granting wishes in the interest of creating a single world religion. The Antichrist makes no demands of you, he says that you are perfect just the way you are and that you have already reached ascension, and lastly all your materialist desires can be achieved in the proposed Heaven on Earth. Ironically, I think this is a view of the Antichrist that can appeal to EveryoneTM.
Those who are on high alert for the Antichrist have a common refrain: enlightenment delivered with ease ought to be treated with suspicion. For popular writers such as Fr. Seraphim Rose, he saw the popularity of Eastern Spiritualism and New Age Spirituality as mechanisms of the Antichrist, and their current status within the American mind has polluted Christianity itself6 .
“The ‘charismatic revival’, the product of a world without sacraments, without grace, a world thirsting for spiritual ‘signs’ without being able to discern the spirits that give the signs, is itself a ’sign’ of these apostate times. The ecumenical movement itself remains always a movement of ‘good intentions,’ and feeble humanitarian ‘good deeds’; but when it is joined by a movement with ‘power,’ indeed with all power and signs and lying wonders (II Thess. 2:9), then who will be able to stop it? […] that is only the first step to a larger goal which lies entirely outside of Christianity; the establishment of the ‘spiritual unity’ of all religions, of all mankind.”
– FR. SERAPHIM ROSE, ORTHODOXY AND THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE
The reason this is a component of the conceptual machinery described in this article is because we should all be suspicious of anyone that offers easy answers. As a highly advanced society, we still fall prey to someone who shows up with the secret sauce that can reduce a complicated world down to a single equation, which can then be applied to all circumstances. Liberalism tells us that everything is the result of individual mental illness, and that if we can solve for that – usually in the form of surgery, pills, or lifelong interrogation – then we can collapse blindingly complicated realities down to a pocket-size point.
The Antichrist Organism wields the anecdote as the delivery system for the poison that blinds us to other trends.
Studies have shown that adding a reason or story to the likelihood of an event causes subjects to increase the likelihood of it happening. One such study was asking if people thought it likely a flood in America would kill 1000 people, to which the majority rated as unlikely. Other subjects were asked if they thought it likely that 1000 people would die in a flood caused by an earthquake in California, and there was a marked increase in people thinking it would occur. Even if the details added are completely superfluous, our minds seek it out and incorporate it into our mental models. Now all you have to ask yourself is: what if the details are concocted by manipulative sources? How easy is it to hijack our drive to action by peppering in random reason rather than truth?
One way to look at this would be to admit that the truth is never easy to attain, and you should treat with caution any reason that purports to cut through the details. This is what the mainstream media typically does with claims of mental illness, which is treated like an ill-defined catchall matrix with which to embed any event too atypical to understand. They are deemed glitches in a perfect system. The simpler the reasons given to us by the mainstream, the more perilous our future is.
We don’t really need reasons, we need truths that are nearly impossible to attain, and we need to understand the prime souls that govern society. A re-visitation of the Great Man theory of history, but recast with decentralized Doomed Souls.
Hijacking Civilization with the Gun of Reason
We understand that there is no universal equation that can divine the future, and any such solution that is offered is only to control the present.
Predicting immediate events is not only impossible, but it is polluted by wicked fictions. You can control them with stories just like your opponents do – don’t even concern yourself whether or not they’re lies, simply use your narrative power to fight on that field while reinforcing the future vision on a grand scale, which is where the real truth lies.
Our opponents refuse to even admit that civilizations matter, which means we are the only ones who can operate on a civilizational level with full awareness to how they relate to its component parts, and the life cycles they are subject to.
I am reminded of Dilbert’s Scott Adams, who in 2022 released a surprisingly dark video expressing his desire to end his life in one year if his state of living did not improve. This seemed like a terminus to his multi-year campaign against those who resisted the Covid-19 vaccine, as he finally stated, “those who were against the vaccine, you were not right, but I won’t say you were wrong.”
This was the culmination of a saga of prediction, which he had built his online brand upon. Scott was a proud data analyst, not necessarily a man who trusts mainstream pundits or narratives, but believed that with enough information given to the right analytical mind, there was nothing that could be accomplished with the un-analytical mind. This was reminiscent of Vox Day, who occupies a very different part of the political landscape and invested the same sort of faith and analytical toolkit to go all-in with the Qanon movement. Up until end-of-day on January 6, he was certain that his Cold Sigma Mind paired with the inarguable data predicted that Trump would sweep into the White House, and presumably arrest every member of Congress.
In both of these cases, I have yet to see a mea culpa that indicates that they must rethink their predictive acumen. I have witnessed similar thought-leaders in the dissident sphere make incredibly inaccurate predictions on Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, and every single election in my lifetime. I do not believe I have ever seen anyone correctly predict anything, and those who claim to have succeeded in this endeavor have given the most flaccid and vague predictions. We have no shortage of NEETstrodamuses.
You don’t need to be an elite to change the world, you just need to understand the complex influence afforded decentralized doomed souls, and learn from the Antichrist’s relationship with the world. Truth is to be found in large trends and it is the only thing the vanguardism-minded individual should be trying to understand, but it requires pivoting away from predicting the future and only predicting it in spirit as a way to guide the present. In this sense you employ dark magick propaganda, just like media outlets, governments, scientists, and those who shape history.
- 1.Chancellor E. Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. Plume; 2000.
- 2.Taleb N. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. 2nd ed. : Random House Trade Paperbacks; 2010.
- 3.Binmore K. Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press; 2007.
- 4.Mearsheimer JJ. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. WW Norton; 2014.
- 5.Evola J. Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. Inner Traditions; 1995.
- 6.Rose S. Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. 5th ed. St. Herman Press; 1997.