The Peasant and the Slopulist Darketer

or, Does Hypernormalization Create Squatter Egregores?

(2,753 words.)

I recently had a lively discussion with the reading group I steal all my favorite books from while telling everyone they “came across my desk.” The discussion was concerning the term “peasant thinking,” referring to a way of understanding the world that harkens back to a narrower and far more provincial state of mind. To my mind it smuggled in a class critique, but I was assured it had less to do with the economic status of the individual and more their inability to think abstractly or correctly integrate new information.

This is a meditation on the demands placed upon us to internalize never-ending information hazards as we navigate this hostile society. This is about how our attempts to make sense of the world sap our strength of will directed towards it.

My cherished opponents clarified that it would be truer to refer to “peasant thinking” as “magical thinking.” Of course, only peasants would seriously believe in something like magic, because they’re poor and don’t know how to read. Such is the implication.

You have probably encountered people or groups that fit this description, one that springs to mind is when people blame the Antichrist for the strife of political particulars. It could be Satan himself, or ill-defined elites which could be Luciferian Baby-Eating Sociopaths or Luciferian Baby-Eating Extraterrestrials, as espoused by David Icke.

In short, you take a very complex situation and find the lowest-resolution explanation for why it is, typically taking the form of demons or some other superstition. To them, an explanation becomes a talisman: a mystically possessed object one can wave at a problem to affect change. The talisman perpetually places the problem in question beyond one’s grasp; a paranormal barrier has been erected to repel the problem rather than dissect it in a rational mindscape.

To be clear: these people do exist. By which I mean, of course, the modern peasant mind as well as the aliens eating the babies.

I objected to the characterization of this social phenomenon being something expressed by the lower strata of society. To begin, my view is that magic is not a simple solution to a complex problem; rather, it is a complex solution to a simple problem. How we see it employed is not as a blunt dismissal of impending tribulation, but a process of layering esoteric rationalisms over a single event in an attempt to explain and thereby control it. You do not even need to believe in magic to understand that every instance you can conjure is a complicated ritual backed by a bewildering belief system actioned by an agent that is laser-focused on making their ex-spouse sad or coaxing a demon out of the darkness to make the most asinine request imaginable.

This is pretty much what Wicca is, by the way. It’s 10,000 fat hags spending hours making drawings of chicken’s blood and flower petals in their room, concentrating their vaginal energies to sway the election for Hillary Clinton. When it doesn’t work they say something about how they “felt that there was… another…” then continue on gracelessly living.

This more accurately describes what I believe we are seeing: massively complex concepts developed to explain specific, often materialistic, events in the domains of politics and culture. While it is obviously true that uneducated minds may cling to faith when confronted by something they cannot understand, this is far more utilitarian than devising an ideological superstructure that is similarly called upon for quick reference.

It’s not the uneducated people who employ the latter; it’s the overeducated. It is the information-poisoned, the intensely-researched, it’s the most literate of us that grope for the same intellectual coping mechanism. These were the types who seem to have historically been drawn to magic, alchemy, and esoterica. Most superstition has been and remains an attempt to avoid the supernatural, whereas what we are discussing is people moving towards it in an attempt to understand and control it.

To their credit my colleagues identified themselves as peasants, as did I. The people in our circles are all guilty of this, but if that’s the case what do we call those who don’t behave this way? Would anyone that does not engage in these sorts of intense inquiries be the aristocrats- the monarchy – which could include both the super-wealthy and the impoverished uneducated?

A babushka waving a handful of smoldering thyme gathered into the shape of a man to ward off spirits is more defensible than believing oil is an interdimensional manifestation of evil given form through capitalism. Such are the sins that flow freely in our online realms of discourse. One of these approaches is for people who want to tell the devil to fuck off, and one of these is for people who want to invite the devil in. 

The gravitational pull of intoxicating theory has great minds losing themselves in the pursuit of alchemy and metaphysics alike. In my experience this is also how most Leftist theory operates, specifically how Marxist ideology has developed throughout the 20^th century. The premises are always reputable; often their starting points are ignored by the Right, like Foucault investigating the history of incarceration or even Bataille analyzing the concept of surplus in the pre-capitalist world as a justification for human sacrifice. While such geneses are pulled from our lived reality, the solutions are always exceptionally simple, while the glut of the middle is where all the baffling theory resides. Herein lies the jungle of ideology.

Over where I’m standing, it’s the inverse. In my experience it is only what can be broadly identified as The Right that proposes detailed solutions and where most of us spend our time hashing out the details, even if such solutions are offensively radical.

An illustrative example is crime, where most Leftists will cite volumes of theory that lead to one conclusion: abolish crime. On our side of things, we believe that all crime is different and should be weighted as such. Certain crimes carry malevolence in their intent rather than misdemeanors of opportunity, and while we may agree with certain elements of the Leftist interrogation, we widely believe far more people should be in prisons and then those prisons hurled – indeed, chucked – right into the ocean. There is one group that is constantly attempting to legalize crime and enact social policies that excuse all behaviors except for wealth accumulation.

Leftist philosophers and their adherents adore vast labyrinths of theory. Like modern American conspiracy theories, the journey is more attractive than the destination. People love to get lost in these multitudinous conceptual frameworks, and the longer they persist the more real they appear. Furthermore, the more real they become, anchored as they are by real agents in the real world who commit real actions in their name.

It all sounds very magical, doesn’t it? Similar to how revolutions never end and the scars even vanquished movements leave define civilizations indefinitely, so too do these ideoplexes guide our destinies the longer they remain in the public consciousness long after their magnificent impacts.

The collective focus of individuals can have a profound effect on the real world. Hypernormalization is a term coined in the Soviet Union to explain how citizens near the collapse of the Communist system were aware that the system was failing but could not envision a viable alternative to replace it. This mode of social zombification generated the delusion of stability through inevitability, which was later appropriated by popular Leftist philosopher Mark Fisher to explain the persistence of capitalism. You believe the system you inhabit is the only possible system, which drives you to passively defend it out of fear that the alternative is total darkness. Apathy is adorned with vestiges of certainty which thereby perpetuates the system.

It’s a nice sounding theory to explain why everything seems fake and everyone is sad and everything seems to be getting worse. It sounds nice until you realize the primary competitor to capitalism enjoyed comparatively faker, sadder, and worse parallels of everything from art to architecture. If you hate Capitalist High Modernism, you should try Communist Brutalism. From where Fisher was writing in the 2010s it might have also seemed obvious that the dominant economic system was a frustrating fusion of capitalism and socialism, with China, Russia, and America embracing varying shades of this hybrid model. It leads to puzzling discoveries like how America, as a percentage of GDP, spends more money on social services than China. It’s all Neoliberalism across the board, so apparently hypernormalization is a feature of both thriving and failing systems.

Someone of my persuasion would point to the characteristics of the civilizations themselves and their human capital to explain many of the differences, but that is not on the table for these intellectuals. They are traipsing through that bloated tract of theory, seeking justification to the point they begin embracing obtuse metaphysics writing itself into existence.

You can build entrancing cathedrals of inquiry that justify their existence by the sheer scale alone.

“Yes, it’s good in practice. But, is it good in theory?” – Some Asshole

Generations after the Communist revolution we see Marxist/Leftist critique wandering far from economic concerns and into the fog of spiritual, sexual, and neurochemical capitalism. Now we’re talking about how symbolic castration gives birth to existential lack which spawns desiring-machines: the irreducible psychological mechanisms which make capitalism inevitable. Now we’re talking about the solar anus.

The longer these critiques are maintained by subsequent generations, and the longer they are kept alive through the blood transfusions of synthesis, the more influential they become. The bigger they are, the more gravity they exert, and the more matter they are able to draw towards them. And the more baffling they stand in their wild complexity, so increases their stimulation for minds wandering aimless.

Focused human intent maintains these constructs like a tulpa, and tulpas can wield sledgehammers in your neighborhood. There are no qualitative filters to wither these lifeforms. They become hypernormalized over time and eventually you can’t imagine a world without them.

Consider how much Marxist critique has been sewn into the tapestry of the American Capitalist Empire: it integrated class consciousness, it encourages collective revolt, it condemns the exploitation of labour, and it has been disproportionately redistributing wealth for over half a century. China and America have arrived at the same destination through opposing directions. The average person is so exhausted by this discourse they more or less accept it now.

It’s akin to UFO disclosure: we have been inundated with conflicting evidence, bewildering theories, and recently outright confirmation through official disclosure to the point if extraterrestrials landed on the Earth’s surface tomorrow most people would not be expectedly disabled by such a revelation.

There was a time when the majority would deny aliens existed, whereas recent studies show over two thirds of Americans believe in intelligent life beyond Earth and over half say UFOs reported by the military are evidence they are present on Earth. There have been no public demonstrations or seemingly any increase in social discord.  People have been primed for acceptance through exposure, and exhaustion.

Every idea you discuss is granted power. You have more responsibility than you think by entertaining any of this.

Marxism and Aliens have been implanted in the Western psyche through media rape. It is an essential function of the Western mind to think, while being brutally raped, “let’s figure this out.”

Unless the Great Awakening – the “redpilling” – is paired with measurable action then the populace eventually becomes exhausted with the discourse and it is absorbed into the status quo. Taken further, it is the social integration of even insane, maladaptive ideas. Upon taking root, they mutate and become impossible to remove, subjects of meta-analysis, of cultural enshrinement.

Nobody wants to waste their time arguing against class resentment or alien spacecraft. Thus is becomes part of your cultural code.

We spatialize time but we also create living egregores of ideas we find compelling, becoming their servants in the interest of actualizing them on Earth. The reactive inquiries that would limit their growth gradually expend our vigor and we are left with bemused acceptance. We believe that, contrary to the peasant mind, simple situations require complex analysis and therefore the most complex strategy – regardless of how preposterous it might sound – must be the most accurate.

This is why I rejected the word “peasant.” If we gather what we have learned the more apt identification is “wizard.” And that is, of course, disgusting.

I prefer a word already in rotation which boasts exceptional explanatory power: “theorycel.” A reconfiguring of “incel,” or involuntary celibate, identifying the same manner of critique at work. There is no direct relation to sexuality here, but a parallel drawn to how incels experience paralysis though analysis of the inexorable tension between the genders and over-intellectualize courtship dynamics thereby making them ever more distant from their aims. Over time the -cels lose sight of why they are even pursuing these intense inquiries.

The theorycel is far more susceptible to bewitchment through shiny glittering objects than the ignorant peasant. To restate the obvious: that would describe me. That would also describe you, the doomed reader of this.

Putting magic spells and solar anuses to the side, what do we think is really going on here? If you recall what a K-Line (Knowledge Line) is, it’s a neurobiological model that explains how a human mind constructs itself through experience and problem solving. You can see it at work if you observe children growing up. Put simply, you grind to learn rudimentary skills and then you tie those skills together into a psychological shortcut both for quick recall but also to combine simple processes into actions of higher complexity. For instance, as a child you must first learn to grasp an object, which takes a significant amount of effort. Separately you must master walking, and then you must master throwing in a straight line, and then a dozen more distinct skills before you can ultimately pass a ball during a game. Once you connect them and relegate them to your subconscious, you can eventually graduate into operating an industrial lathe.

Your mind is k-lines hooked into adjacent k-lines, triggering one another like magisterial music, granting you the power of muscle memory to create tapestries of highly complex tasks like constructing an engine with discretely functioning components.

I believe our modern malaise is at least partially explained by how we have continued developing k-lines, but they have come to encompass higher-order ideological constructs. The essential pattern identification remains the same, but it now assumes the responsibility of perceiving overlaps between mind-bending concepts. Baffling words triggering connections to divergent ideas, their connections forged through acute contemplation. We are cramming esoteric theories into k-lines, then weaving those together to form even greater structures that trigger each other like a matrix of landmines.

Theorycels are especially prone to entombing themselves in these matrices, but I submit that everyone is susceptible to this to one degree or another. The age of information places incredible demands upon the average mind, and they are encouraged to craft explanations for the psychological operations – private, public, and social – they are subjected to daily. The risk we run is that everything we seriously consider leaves a stain upon our mind, just as everything that is actioned leaves some sort of wound on our world.

There is a theory that technological development is seeded from future or possibly interdimensional intelligences, but flights of fancy such as these sound like the reeking hippie cousin of determinism. I don’t believe it to be as simple as disjointed linearities painted with sci-fi graffiti. The egregores we conjure to implant into our world are drawn from a far darker and more treacherous aether. It’s pulled through us from timeless intersections woven through our DNA, not sent from the future by an evil robot. Grasping a talisman to keep it at bay would be far more dignified, but we are doomed. We are doomed to find these things interesting, to birth new ontologies matching every new trauma, and to detect astounding overlaps between the cognitohazards we must construct just to survive.

What we need are new talismans to smash the walls of theory and use their jagged shards to construct the tools for dark solutions. Such things we will do with these savage devices will prove to be far more illuminating, far more intellectually stimulating. The hour is late, and you can just do (insane) things.