This is probably the best essay I've read on this topic (and believe me, I've read a few - this topic has been central to my thinking since 2016). I believe that tribalism, and its accompanying dehumanization of friends, neighbors, and family members, poses one of the few truly existential threats to our society.
I have watched so many people I know and love fall into this trap, and feel so terribly removed from them because I can't have dispassionate, intellectual conversations with them without triggering immense anger if I challenge any of their hobby horses.
There is nothing wrong with tribalism. We humans evolved within tribes. They are our ancient home. The wrong part is an epistemic disease where a person beomes imprisoned within "One truth, one way, mine."
Tribalism is how we evolved and became homo sapiens. Is that a horrible outcome? (At least you could acknowledge that there are various meanings to the word.)
I don't think we really disagree. But what may have been fantastic for a tribe of glorified chimps hunting and gathering its way across the Serengeti maybe ain't so great for a tribe of glorified chimps armed with automatic weapons and ICBMs.
Put another way, you have to work really hard to unwire millions of years of evolutionary programming, and most people aren't even aware that they have been programmed. Maybe this isn't so bad if I like the Dodgers and you like the Giants, so long as I am not the recipient of the parking lot TBI. But when it comes to hating thy neighbor, I'm a hard pass.
Tribalism is not about hating thy neighbor. It's about focusing on your own tribe, and taking care of and being loyal to your own first of all. Jews, for example, are tribal. They are loyal to other Jews. Does that mean they hate the goyim?
The whole "unwiring millions of years of evolution" seems to me a utopian project doomed to fail. Better to work with what we have, I figure.
Important distinction: there's a difference between community bonds (which provide meaning and connection) and the manufactured binaries I critique.
What makes modern tribalism toxic isn't group identity itself, but how it's weaponized to create artificial divisions and prevent pattern recognition across tribal lines. Healthy communities have permeable boundaries and acknowledge complexity; the Tavistock engineered tribalism I'm focused on demands rigid categorization and simplistic thinking. The former strengthens our humanity; the latter reduces it to caricature.
This is the exact perspective in Dr. Iain McGillchrist's work. Left hemisphere dominance actually causes the individual to focus so much on the details, that the big picture is completely lost. Wow, that's pretty amazing that someone spelled it out so clearly as to that particular operating system.
Brilliant! That reminds me of the lecture Bill Gates was giving to the CIA on creating vaccines that would affect frontal lobe areas of the brain that signal belief in a higher power. He called it religious extremism. Which is very much a left brain black white point of view, it seems. The state and it's controllers really have become left brained, and so have many of us. I don't know about the vaccine correlation to what's happening. But it's interesting that it was focused on that essential point of meaning that normal human beings require in life.
@Exposing Smokescreens, several people in the past few weeks, including a few in this comment section, have recommended McGilchrist's framework - I haven't read him yet, but when this many pattern-recognizers point to the same source, that's the universe sending a message. I'll check him out.
@Andrew N, thanks for sharing this piece on fear. Reading it made me think about the progression from War on Drugs → War on Terror → War on Covid → War on Climate. Each represents an invisible, amorphous threat requiring perpetual emergency powers with no clear endpoint. All are designed to create hysteria and chip away at our civil liberties while keeping us in a state of fear that prevents clear pattern recognition.
If you're not familiar, I recommend you check out the late great Bill Hicks on the choice of fear vs love:
Great news, your work is phenomenal. I look forward to reading more as you dive into his research. Thanks for all you do, truly. I yearn for nonpartisan input. Bless you.
Too late, I just signed up for the democratic party this morning. 😂
For real, thanks for the vote of confidence. I've been stewing on most of these concepts for the last few years and just getting them off my chest. After sending lots of long emails, a writer friend suggested I expand on these themes here. We'll see how long it lasts.
😅 oh my. My housemate is a Democrat, and that's no joke. Yeesh! Makes me remember why I quit believing in politics. You indeed have my vote of confidence, I'm so happy to find your work. Have a wonderful day Josh 🌻
You co-opted my thesis with your last sentence: "What if the real victory isn’t proving who’s right, but rediscovering how to think together?"
I've noted over the years that the educational system has produced "highly educated" people, that is, people conversant in facts, but sadly failed in producing people with an ability to understand and think about those "facts."
When I was in college in the late 60s-early 70s, the initiative was to teach the student how to think clearly and deliver a logical argument as well as express themselves concisely in writing, again, thereby establishing their reasoning and logic.
I note that many, many people have degrees listed after their names in society today..even HR directors...but few understand how to think. They become dictatorial and authoritarian exactly because they can't use the many "facts" given to them. Their facts are their liturgy. Their facts prove their religiosity.
What happens when you have so many disparate facts contesting each other? Supposedly the "truth" lies in the facts, but it doesn't. The underlying presumptions and proclivities of the person with those facts develops their "standard of truth."
I have no particular political sway anymore except skepticism. My latest paradigm switch allows me to see everything as theater and orchestration...not from an intellectual plane but from a deep intuition. "Spot the false anomaly in the picture." "What doesn't belong?"
The critic you describe has had his "thinking" sanctioned for far too long. Hence, the hysteria breaking forth like fires everywhere today. Indeed, Trump's first term was simply a huge overshadowing by Obama's people and policies...so maybe the Liberal Mindset has been in play since 2008. George W. Bush wasn't terribly conservative either. A long time. 17 or 25 years. They've never encountered "opposing" thoughts...not truly opposing thoughts.
The Beatles had a song about this problem.
You say "Yes", I say "No".
You say "Stop" and I say "Go, go, go".
Oh no.
You say "Goodbye" and I say "Hello, hello, hello".
I don't know why you say "Goodbye", I say "Hello, hello, hello".
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello.
I say "High", you say "Low".
You say "Why?" And I say "I don't know".
Oh no.
You say "Goodbye" and I say "Hello, hello, hello".
I don't know why you say "Goodbye", I say "Hello, hello, hello".
Etc.
I doubt, however, anyone will "come together" in a kumbaya moment. I see more of what we see today. People will continue jousting with their particular facts as "THE" standard of truth, but I certainly wish luck to those who hope for better.
Facts are liturgy when thinking becomes a lost art.
Funny you mention The Beatles. They were a huge part of my on-ramp to many of these ideas... until a few years ago, I had no clue they were integral pillar in this decades old psyop.
I prefer to define actual facts as being tidbits of Reality. Bullshit is not fact, it is usually opinion or outright lies masquerading as fact. We are trying to sift out the few tidbits of Reality from oceans of largely manufactured bullshit. Some of that bullshit has been propagated and refined over millennia, and widely passes for fact. Beliefs are not facts, no matter how hard the Oligarch-backed Religion Business tries to claim otherwise.
Compared to industry-manufactured 'phenomena' like Brittney Spears, Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift, the 1960's musical British Invasion was amateur hour. As Paul Simon sang, "every generation throws a hero up the pop-charts". That "invasion" provided the popular foundation for helping force the US gov't to abandon the Vietnam Debacle (another war inherited from European Colonialism). Doesn't seem to fit the claim it was all a clever tactic by the warmonger City of London and MI6/CIA to subvert wholesome US culture. The US gov't reaction to the aftermath of the Invasion via idiocy like the War On Drugs did more to damage the US psycho-socially than a bunch of mop-top Brits singing about relationships and peace, while increasingly dabbling in non-Western ideologies and perspective-altering substances. And before anyone goes there, Addiction has always been with humanity, despite the sanctimonious tongue-clucking of the teetotallers and prohibitionists.
We can certainly disagree on this. I wrote 10k words making my case (the link I shared was part 2 of a 3-part series) that barely scratches the surface. The social engineering is undeniable in my view - especially in retrospect.
Of course, I do agree with you about the War on Drugs doing tremendous damage - it's one of those manufactured crises I mentioned elsewhere that was designed to create hysteria and chip away at civil liberties. In fact, I mentioned it here just this morning.
Today's versions are cartoon updates of that era, perhaps because it's more explicit or maybe because we're more aware. Regardless, I'm not suggesting the artists are all bad - or necessarily even aware of what they may be participating in (though I'm certain *some* are).
My belief is there are guardrails on society steering us to the next era - as the elites from 100 years ago called it, the Age of Aquarius, or as Crowley put it, the Aeon of Horus. These broader patterns connect directly to my broader thesis about manufactured binaries - the "teams" we're encouraged to join are carefully defined and limited, creating the illusion of choice while maintaining the underlying power structures.
FWIW, this was the team I chose - the counterculture/rock n'roll Tavistock flavor. At this stage, I can decouple my love of the art from my understanding that there was some other impetus for it that I wasn't aware of when it was initially embedded into my consciousness.
I agree, Josh. I, too, am very aware of what you wrote connecting deliberate orchestration of movements and psyops to entrain a larger cultural mindset.
I still like and listen to the music of my era. Some less; some more. I fell into exploring the roots of the British Invasion which were American R&R (Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Del Shannon, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, etc.) and blues (Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Robert Johnson, etc.). Exploring these genres may have connected me to other streams of consciousness.
The one distinction I would make--and I can do so only because I lived through the subsequent eras--is that most of the people dropped the "counterculture" they so fervently embraced in college and returned to the values shared with their parents as jobs and babies were acquired. Whereas the music continued in a kick-ass fashion, they no longer shared the values or goals of "counter" anything. The music had to fit into their lives while they got their kids ready for school and very likely mom worked outside the home.
I think, too, the control was not so onerous. I began as a flaming feminist in the 1960s only to disavow the movement's ideology in the 80s as I thought deriding/punishing men didn't liberate women in any fashion.
I think far more insidious than the overt manipulations of cultures and minds in the latter part of the 20th century has been the ubiquitous adoption of the smart/cell phone in the early 21st which has, in my estimation, dramatically entrained and altered neural pathways. The act of looking whenever the instrument pings; the radically altered training of attention span to 20 sec. or 1 min. (and thereby capacity to think); narrowing social contact into one conduit (leaving people far more lonely, in my estimation, than previously); etc.
Couple with this entrainment the overt surveillance and harvesting of data revealed by people like Shoshanna Zuboff and we have an era in which control fails heavily upon a population. The data harvesting is used, I could almost guarantee, to predict and steer actions and opinions of people in a far more nefarious fashion than promoting drugs in the 60s and to train AI. Consider, too, more discourse was open in the 60s. I remember the underground newspapers which we eagerly read on campus. Pronouncements were coming from the Haight where young "counter" doctors were warning people away from speed and heroin.
Yep. We're fundamentally lacking in-person connection - a trend accelerated by COVID, which basically threw gasoline on an already smoldering digital isolation. Human connection is real vibrational energy; digital spaces can complement (in fact, we're doing it now!) but never replace that embodied experience.
As a GenX observer, I've always been fascinated by how the hippies of the 60s became the yuppies of the 80s. The more I've learned about Tavistock, the more I'm convinced that these branded decades are part of the show - carefully manufactured cultural narratives designed to give us the illusion of change while maintaining underlying power structures and evolving a long planned agenda.
What fascinates me most about that era is how it represented an on-ramp to gradual, insidious change. The Beatles weren't just a band - they were a vector for systemic transformation, introducing ideas and cultural shifts so subtly that by the time people realized what was happening, the landscape had already fundamentally shifted.
Think about the leap from Meet the Beatles to Sgt Pepper. Then, followed by the slow change over the next 55 years bringing us to present with stuff like the satanic Grammy awards - where pop culture seems less about music and more about performing bizarre ritualistic spectacles that feel engineered to desensitize us to increasingly dark symbolic imagery. What do I know, I'm just a conspiracy theorist. 🤷
Oh, Josh!! What an excellent response!! You are, I think, absolutely correct! "... carefully manufactured cultural narratives designed to give us the illusion of change while maintaining underlying power structures and evolving a long planned agenda."
I'm so glad that I encountered your Substack. Old age apparently involves, among many various events and considerations, a review of our past. I find myself thinking of events, happenings, and people from long ago from no apparent trigger. Your quite accurate overview gives me an added dimension to understanding.
I know immediately and intuitively when my paradigm shifts. When I know at that depth, I'm absolutely certain that I'm experiencing truth. The paradigm shifts from intellectualism to an operating system (if that makes sense).
Hold on to your hat, Josh. This will be wild.
The last time this happened to me I was watching Gigi Young, a mystic-psychic, being interviewed. She asked, as if plain for everyone to see, why would aliens travel hyper-dimensionally or thousands of light years away to get our DNA? Her theory was that a devolved human species (who, I guess, just might direct those fully formed but much lower caste humans who go by the initials WEF) is harvesting and investigating current human DNA (referencing the many instances of people who have experienced abductions and extraction of their bodily fluids by beings normally called the Greys--the Roswell ETB) to regenerate their devolved physicality. (Yes, I realize, too, that some people think the memories are implanted.)
Given that Antartica is so heavily guarded and off limits with Operation Highjump completely censored and Byrd sequestered and gagged immediately upon returning to the U.S., we may have such areas where a devolved species can live. Perhaps they're remnants of an older civilization with some super-sophisticated technology remaining in their possession. The Russian military's assessment is one of the few honest ones available. Flying "saucer-like" aircraft decimated Byrd's military armada and abrogated the operation. (Never did find those Nazis...did they?)
Of course, the normal argument is that these "alien" species "seeded" their DNA in us and now, because of some catastrophe within their star system, need to "replenish" their DNA. She couples her observation with the corollary that the human form (body) is a divine vehicle in perfect unison with the planet (Earth) to allow humans to evolve (spiritually, physically, mentally)--a precept of Steiner's anthroposophy...who, to me, outlines an excellent overall interpretation how our Orwellian age fits into the various ages and epochs for soul development progression.
1953-vintage mid-boomer here, so saw the British Invasion first-hand. Woodstock Generation, "how the f*** do you think you're ever gonna stop the war if you can't sing any louder than that...". My music catalogue includes samples of most everything except rap and opera. Gypsy jazz to Marilyn Manson to Hendrix, Bach, Chad Mitchell Trio, John Prine, Arkells. But I digress.
'Never let an opportunity to influence, or a crisis, go to waste, whether you created it or not' The Oligarch's Creed
Catch-as-catch-can opportunism and cash-grabbing is as strong a factor as any in progressing towards the ultimate goal of the 'full spectrum' assault which the Rothschilds/WEF curiously admitted to... "You will own nothing, rent everything and be happy". They just left out the "or else" which we are seeing now... or else they'll crash the entire global economy and start WW3.
Culturally, if it wasn't for the Beatles, some other appropriated inheritor of the 'coat' and 'crown' metaphorically passed from Holly and James Dean to Elvis et.al. would have sufficed. The Beatles/British Invasion definitely disrupted the US rock/pop music culture scene, but was quickly brought 'in house'... making a quick buck while manipulating the masses is Oligarchic SOP.
No surprise rebellious 'street music' like Psychedelia, Punk, then Rap, were also largely assimilated into mainstream music industry catalogues. Country music has changed from a rural patriotic cultural bastion to just another sub-genre of Pop/Rock... if you play a modern 'country' song backwards, you still won't get back your girlfriend, pickup truck or dog.
The trend to the current 'performance art' displayed at the Grammys and Olympics started with Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, Bowie (Ziggy Stardust) and Jethro Tull (Aqualung). These were hard acts to follow in the 'shock rock' category, but nothing exceeds like excess.
In short, love the music, hate the Oligarchic/corporate machine that curates and manipulates the soundtrack of our lives.
Nothing exemplifies this as well as the current federal election in Canada where the single issue of "Trump" has completely reshuffled what was a focus on Gov policy decisions into an exercise in division over who likes a foreign leader less.
If they can fake the moon landing and if they can convince people there is an invisible man who lives in the sky that loves them, then they can convince people that viruses exist. Who is going to go out and buy a scanning electron microscope to prove them wrong? Remember, we still don't have an en vivo isolation of a SARS-CoV-2 virus. Oh yeah, mutations and what not.
The lies probably go way deeper than we can ever imagine. They have rewired our brains to accept mostly lies and deny truths. Convince yourself we never went to the moon and the dominoes begin to fall.
How you managed to get the "God Question" right and everything else wrong is an interesting case study in 'beliefs'. Just because a lot of people 'believe' something doesn't make it so. That said, at some point, to make sense of the Bigger Questions, humans have to 'believe' in things beyond our personal ability to verify, yet are well supported by the current state of knowledge and technology.
By simple observation only, without any 'technology' or mathematics to augment our senses, it is impossible to personally observe whether the Earth or Sun is the centre of the solar system/universe. Any proof of a heliocentric system requires a LOT of data gathering and application of what eventually became Newtonian Laws of Motion to convincingly make the case. The entire flat-earth con depends on stupid humans ignoring all the real information presented to them since Ancient Greeks figured out the basics.
There are likely many aspects of the moon landing information-stream which were (ahem) 'enhanced' to make the US taxpayer feel they got 'value' for their contributions and emotional support their 'Exceptionalist' view of the USA! USA! USA! But did humans actually make it to the Moon and back? Probably. But you and I will likely never be able to 'prove' it either way without relying on sources we can't personally, 100% verify.
Besides, whether humans made it to the Moon is not the 'gov't lies' litmus test I would rely on. There are so many, many, more obvious lies which have had far greater negative impact on the course of civilizations than that.
Took me all of 5 seconds to search "covid virus electron microscope" to find it. But ya, 'there's no proof'. A Scanning Tunnelling Microscope can show 0.1 nanometer features with 0.01 nm depth resolution. I'm guessing that is more than adequate to 'see' a virus structure.
Did nearly all the gov'ts of the world and Big Pharma/Medicine baldfaced lie to us about what Covid and the Jabs really were? That the lockdowns, masks and quarantines were rolled out to see if such a massive fear-based power-grab could be implemented? ABSOLUTELY... but that doesn't mean the viruses don't exist, let alone it was not deliberately concocted in a lab and intentionally released. 'Plandemic' is the term you're looking for.
So we arrive at the age old question, what exactly would it take for you to believe in a particular thing, event or idea which you can't personally 100% verify. Add in AI and Deep Fakes, and nearly everything on the internet is subject to conjecture.
Let's look at Gravity, something few sane people deny exists. Drop a 20 pound rock on your toe and you will immediately surmise there is some phenomena causing the movement of said rock from your hands to your toe. But how can that be, there is no tangible mechanism in evidence, other than the intellectual circularity of the fact the rock ALWAYS drops, even if you throw it upwards first.
The rub is the HOW... what mechanism? The truth is NO HUMAN knows what makes Gravity work, beyond how Mass is fundamentally involved. So is Gravity 'real' if we puny humans can't figure out HOW it works? You've ruled out God, so what next?
Have a GPS unit (phone, car, etc.)? ... Gee, the GPS satellites have to employ Relativity calculations to synchronize clocks to compensate for the differences in speeds between the earth's surface and the satellites. So the 'Theory' of Relativity is no longer pure theory, it is used in day-to-day practice as well.
Science may not explain 'everything' (yet, if ever), but is does a much better job than any religion or other metaphysical framework humans have been convinced by their leaders to accept as foundational ideologies.
The Theory of Atoms incrementally developed from the Ancient Greek concept (~5 centuries BCE) to the current format, which shows how humans gnaw away at a 'theory' until the errors are expunged. What will humans know 2,500 years from now which 100% contradicts what we 'believe' today?
So ya, our personal path to rational beliefs begins with critical inspection of our 'world' and equally critical introspection to comprehend from where our 'beliefs' spring.
"The moment we label someone based on a single opinion, we stop seeing them as complex individuals with nuances, contradictions, and rich inner lives."
This is a key insight. When we attach whichever dehumanizing label we decide fits best, we've transformed a potentially thoughtful discussion into an emotional catfight. The irony, in my mind, is that when we do so, it's most harmful to our own thinking.
Well done Mr Stylman. Very well put down. "They have our number" is my way of concisely phrasing this for some years now, but what you've done here is terrific in laying down the details.
Time is the ingredient to avoid getting sucked into the too-often misleading slick pre-packaged narrative. For example, it took two years before the "Kuwaiti babies thrown from incubators" lie used to help justify the US invasion of Iraq was revealed to be a total PR stunt. Never happened, the distraught girl who claimed to have witnessed it was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and wasn't ever anywhere near the site of the supposed event, let alone in Kuwait at the time.
About the Covid virus "lab leak" narrative: The complete facts on this still remain to be confirmed, but researchers early on in the "P(L)andemic" found additions at cleavage sites that ONLY could have been done in a lab. So the bat/pangolin/wet-market theory is disproved. But that still leaves the question of which lab was it "leaked" from? Given the ceaseless US/NATO push to 'blame China', it is no stretch that the US gov't funding (via serial liar Fauci et.al.) of the Wuhan lab was a deliberate set-up, to be used to provide plausible deniability and divert attention from other international US-controlled illegal bio-weapon labs. One thread to pull is the CIA-run bio-weapon labs seized by Russia in the 'failed' operation towards Kiev. which revealed all manner of 'research' targeting Russia, but also on ... you guessed it, mRNA and Covid. And somewhat circumstantially, there were military athletic games occurring in Wuhan the week of the "outbreak", with US and Canadian military personnel attending. The US came 35th in those games, so not the US's best and brightest were sent to compete... another 'mission' than track and field? Add in that the head of the Wuhan Institute immediately checked the DNA signature of the 'original' Covid strain and found it didn't match any Covid-type sample in prior possession of the Institute. Millions dead and injured, both by the virus and the "vaccines". Don't forget the attacks on PROVEN safe and effective Ivermectin, which could have saved the entire world from Covid suffering, without the Jabs and their residual harms. (no Big Pharma profits from that tho') Note the WHO and the FDA had to change the definition of "vaccine" to qualify it for all the 'emergency' measures and funding thereof.
And now we have Trumpty Dumbdy thrashing about with his Tariff-palooza, claiming the entire world has been "ripping off" the US for decades. Even slapping countries which the US DOESN'T have a trade deficit with. To the point that S Korea, Japan and China have negotiated a side deal regarding semiconductors and more. Hell may actually be freezing over, Russia allied with China, Iran cooperating with Saudi Arabia.
In short, the US/NATO has been openly declared "agreement incapable", a polite way of saying they lie and cheat. Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director clearly stated "we lied, we cheated, we stole".
Thank you, but I am indeed 'that' Any Person, no special access to the corridors of power or otherwise connected to the 'information industry'. The point of my moniker is that by observing a wide range of openly available sources for coherent information over a time-frame longer than the MSM click-and-forget cycle, any critical-thinking person can see what I see and should speak and write about. Of course wading through British Hansard for references definitively connecting the Rothschilds to arms-length fomenting violent Zionism isn't everyone's cuppa. Or better yet, searching Wikileaks for emails between best buddies Hillary Clinton and Lynn de Rothschild is also illuminating.
And still there can be surprises, like Putin and Peskov et.al. pragmatically saying they don't expect the US/EU/NATO to lift sanctions any time soon, and "Putin's Brain" (LOL) Dugin actually stating (Trump's) "Tariff plan is ethically marvellous and morally exceptional."
It may be that the Russians are applying a bit of Sun Tzu, not interrupting an opponent while they are making mistakes. Almost cheerleading the other side, while said opponent runs headlong into a brick wall which the opponent freely constructed. Like Trump railing against the USMCA "Free" Trade Agreement which Trump signed in his first term. With Trump's 'people', the Western garden-variety local-capitalists cheering the impending Crash as merely another opportunity to 'buy the dip'. Actually heard that exact sentiment from an asset manager we are thinking of hiring yesterday. Yup, crashing the Wall and Main Street economy is a good thing, as long as the Rothschild Class Oligarchs behind the curtain control the 'money supply' (aka $36Trillion in debt).
Rest assured, as your 'reach' expands, the trolls and coordinated Nudge Operatives WILL appear. The long-term efficacy of various moderator strategies to deal with such (or not) can be seen at blogs like Moon of Alabama, SONAR21 and Unz Review.
Haha, reach isn't the goal at all. Many of these ideas have been percolating for the last few years - I was doing short-form quips on Twitter and Instagram, but those platforms are too constrained to let these ideas breathe. Writing here is pure catharsis. The community forming around these conversations is a surprising bonus. I actually didn't even allow comments initially, but @Dr. K convinced me - and I'm glad he did. It's helped me learn so much. If reach grows, I'll cross that bridge when I get there. As for those sites, I'm aware of Unz but will check out the others - another chance to maximize serendipity through genuine conversation.
Excellent reflection on the probably engineered breakdown of critical thinking and the schism that has been born out of this breakdown. I would add only this: polarization, confirmation bias, and inflexibility are probably more than cognitive styles that are shaped by misinformation: they are the product I believe of what Mattias Desmet has talked about in The Psychology of Totalitarianism: an emotional and spiritual state of anomie, where there is anxiety, interpersonal disconnection, and lack of meaning in people's lives. This is the emotional and spiritual matrix in which cognitive rigidity and poor perspective taking thrives.
Hi Josh. First time poster. Your writing is brilliant. You MUST read and listen to Dr Iain McGilchrist's work on the divided brain. He has come to the same conclusion as you and argues that the reason we (animals) have two cerebral hemispheres is that each hemisphere sees the world in a different way. According to McGilchrist, the left and right hemispheres "pay attention" to the world in different ways.
The left brain is about narrow focused attention on the tree, the target, the goal, the object, the tool, the data, reason, logic, power, control.
The right hemisphere maintains broad attention and sees the forest, the context, the pattern, the relationships, the nuance, the complexity, the uncertainty, empathy, humility.
The left hemisphere is clever but hubristic; the right hemisphere is wise.
The left brain APprehends (grabs); the right brain COMprehends (understands).
McGilcrist argues that since the renaissance, humanity has been shifting towards a left brain dominant culture, slowly at first, and now quickly.
I understand your skepticism towards promoted ideas. I think much of the hype is due to his prescience. His first book. “The Master and His Emissary” was published 2009. Also the explanatory power of his observation is profound.
He is legit according to my reality testing and pattern recognition. 😉
Great essay, thank you. I've been exploring self-awareness of this phenomenon by having people reflect on where they get attached, and what that feels like. If a person gets triggered, defensive, starts attacking, overly consuming a narrative, etc, that's a sign for them to look inward. Is the info hooking into their head center - their need or insistence on being right, a particular piece of info being right, unable to tolerate the very uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance (considering an opinion/perspective different from one's own), etc? Is it hooking into their emotional center, their care or anger about certain people getting hurt, people suffering? Is it getting hooked into their instinctual center, activating their survival or social instincts, that their survival is in danger, their community is in danger, fear, tribalism?
Brilliant observation. The centers of attachment reveal more about our inner landscape than the content itself. I suspect the awareness of where we're being 'hooked' may be the first step to liberation from manufactured narratives.
This relates to the psychological mechanism I explored in this piece...
Yes! People think they are objectively consuming media narratives that are outside of themselves. They think there's a separation between themselves and the narrative. But that's not true, that's not what's happening. People have "relationships" with / people are relating with - these narratives based on their previous life experiences, biases, attachments, etc. (just like other relationships with people are conditioned by their past experiences). Getting people to recognize the relationship they are having with media narratives (I've chosen attachments and self-awareness of the direct experience of cognitive dissonance, and you're great writing is another way) I think is the beginning steps to loosening the power of media narratives over people and people's perception of what they take to be reality (or various realities based on the narratives).
Kirsten, I appreciate your perspective on this and share similar thoughts about how people get hooked. I would add that spiritual bypass and intellectual bypass (impulsively going up into our heads) can also be about survival as we retreat into what feels comfortable, familiar or structuralizing (meaning formative to our identity) when we are faced with experiences that are overwhelmingly complex and uncertain. It can be very disorienting when beliefs integral to our identity are challenged. I think it's a capacity we can build through self-refection that is sorely lacking these days. I appreciate Joshua's essays because they help me reflect on my inner state when I fall into those polarity patterns with people in my life.
I think you're exactly right. There are some deeper survival issues underneath. The way I see it/feel it is it challenges our actual sense of self. Our sense of self is a fundamental organizing principle of our own consciousness, and is also fundamentally connected to how we see the world. So our sense of self can be challenged either directly through inner work, or by deeply looking at how we see the world. For anyone who has faced their sense of self dissolving tvia inner unfolding knows how challenging it is. It is quite scary sometimes fragmenting, feels like you're losing not only yourself but everything you're associated with, etc. This is the depth of the challenge, no small thing really, and some preparatory work is needed. The way I've approached the preparatory work is by having people turn inward and look at their attachments - head, heart and belly.
Yes, I resonate strongly with what you are saying here. The fragmentation certainly can feel scary. The other side of the journey is a much more solid foundation where we can look at the bigger picture with more inner resilience and solidity. It also can cultivate what one of my mentors calls embodied cognition - the capacity to be connected to the direct experience of our thinking rather than thinking being a strategy of disconnection.
This is probably the best essay I've read on this topic (and believe me, I've read a few - this topic has been central to my thinking since 2016). I believe that tribalism, and its accompanying dehumanization of friends, neighbors, and family members, poses one of the few truly existential threats to our society.
I have watched so many people I know and love fall into this trap, and feel so terribly removed from them because I can't have dispassionate, intellectual conversations with them without triggering immense anger if I challenge any of their hobby horses.
Please keep writing.
There is nothing wrong with tribalism. We humans evolved within tribes. They are our ancient home. The wrong part is an epistemic disease where a person beomes imprisoned within "One truth, one way, mine."
Agreed. If you ignore all of the examples where tribalism has led to horrible outcomes, tribalism is great!
Tribalism is how we evolved and became homo sapiens. Is that a horrible outcome? (At least you could acknowledge that there are various meanings to the word.)
I don't think we really disagree. But what may have been fantastic for a tribe of glorified chimps hunting and gathering its way across the Serengeti maybe ain't so great for a tribe of glorified chimps armed with automatic weapons and ICBMs.
Put another way, you have to work really hard to unwire millions of years of evolutionary programming, and most people aren't even aware that they have been programmed. Maybe this isn't so bad if I like the Dodgers and you like the Giants, so long as I am not the recipient of the parking lot TBI. But when it comes to hating thy neighbor, I'm a hard pass.
Tribalism is not about hating thy neighbor. It's about focusing on your own tribe, and taking care of and being loyal to your own first of all. Jews, for example, are tribal. They are loyal to other Jews. Does that mean they hate the goyim?
The whole "unwiring millions of years of evolution" seems to me a utopian project doomed to fail. Better to work with what we have, I figure.
Important distinction: there's a difference between community bonds (which provide meaning and connection) and the manufactured binaries I critique.
What makes modern tribalism toxic isn't group identity itself, but how it's weaponized to create artificial divisions and prevent pattern recognition across tribal lines. Healthy communities have permeable boundaries and acknowledge complexity; the Tavistock engineered tribalism I'm focused on demands rigid categorization and simplistic thinking. The former strengthens our humanity; the latter reduces it to caricature.
"Does that mean they hate the goyim?"
If you read the Torah and Talmud, that's exactly what they are told to do. Non-Jews are non-human, just ask Nutty-yahoo.
But of course all us non-Jews simply don't 'understand' how to correctly interpret what is written in plain language in the Abrahamic Texts.
This is the exact perspective in Dr. Iain McGillchrist's work. Left hemisphere dominance actually causes the individual to focus so much on the details, that the big picture is completely lost. Wow, that's pretty amazing that someone spelled it out so clearly as to that particular operating system.
I was going to point out the same comparison to McGilchrist's work, similar themes from a different angle.
Just found this article, The State has become so left brained.
https://bdbinc.substack.com/p/fear-is-the-hook
Brilliant! That reminds me of the lecture Bill Gates was giving to the CIA on creating vaccines that would affect frontal lobe areas of the brain that signal belief in a higher power. He called it religious extremism. Which is very much a left brain black white point of view, it seems. The state and it's controllers really have become left brained, and so have many of us. I don't know about the vaccine correlation to what's happening. But it's interesting that it was focused on that essential point of meaning that normal human beings require in life.
@Exposing Smokescreens, several people in the past few weeks, including a few in this comment section, have recommended McGilchrist's framework - I haven't read him yet, but when this many pattern-recognizers point to the same source, that's the universe sending a message. I'll check him out.
@Andrew N, thanks for sharing this piece on fear. Reading it made me think about the progression from War on Drugs → War on Terror → War on Covid → War on Climate. Each represents an invisible, amorphous threat requiring perpetual emergency powers with no clear endpoint. All are designed to create hysteria and chip away at our civil liberties while keeping us in a state of fear that prevents clear pattern recognition.
If you're not familiar, I recommend you check out the late great Bill Hicks on the choice of fear vs love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzQuE1pR1w
Oh also, he is now on substack. Yay!
Great news, your work is phenomenal. I look forward to reading more as you dive into his research. Thanks for all you do, truly. I yearn for nonpartisan input. Bless you.
Too late, I just signed up for the democratic party this morning. 😂
For real, thanks for the vote of confidence. I've been stewing on most of these concepts for the last few years and just getting them off my chest. After sending lots of long emails, a writer friend suggested I expand on these themes here. We'll see how long it lasts.
😅 oh my. My housemate is a Democrat, and that's no joke. Yeesh! Makes me remember why I quit believing in politics. You indeed have my vote of confidence, I'm so happy to find your work. Have a wonderful day Josh 🌻
You co-opted my thesis with your last sentence: "What if the real victory isn’t proving who’s right, but rediscovering how to think together?"
I've noted over the years that the educational system has produced "highly educated" people, that is, people conversant in facts, but sadly failed in producing people with an ability to understand and think about those "facts."
When I was in college in the late 60s-early 70s, the initiative was to teach the student how to think clearly and deliver a logical argument as well as express themselves concisely in writing, again, thereby establishing their reasoning and logic.
I note that many, many people have degrees listed after their names in society today..even HR directors...but few understand how to think. They become dictatorial and authoritarian exactly because they can't use the many "facts" given to them. Their facts are their liturgy. Their facts prove their religiosity.
What happens when you have so many disparate facts contesting each other? Supposedly the "truth" lies in the facts, but it doesn't. The underlying presumptions and proclivities of the person with those facts develops their "standard of truth."
I have no particular political sway anymore except skepticism. My latest paradigm switch allows me to see everything as theater and orchestration...not from an intellectual plane but from a deep intuition. "Spot the false anomaly in the picture." "What doesn't belong?"
The critic you describe has had his "thinking" sanctioned for far too long. Hence, the hysteria breaking forth like fires everywhere today. Indeed, Trump's first term was simply a huge overshadowing by Obama's people and policies...so maybe the Liberal Mindset has been in play since 2008. George W. Bush wasn't terribly conservative either. A long time. 17 or 25 years. They've never encountered "opposing" thoughts...not truly opposing thoughts.
The Beatles had a song about this problem.
You say "Yes", I say "No".
You say "Stop" and I say "Go, go, go".
Oh no.
You say "Goodbye" and I say "Hello, hello, hello".
I don't know why you say "Goodbye", I say "Hello, hello, hello".
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello.
I say "High", you say "Low".
You say "Why?" And I say "I don't know".
Oh no.
You say "Goodbye" and I say "Hello, hello, hello".
I don't know why you say "Goodbye", I say "Hello, hello, hello".
Etc.
I doubt, however, anyone will "come together" in a kumbaya moment. I see more of what we see today. People will continue jousting with their particular facts as "THE" standard of truth, but I certainly wish luck to those who hope for better.
Facts are liturgy when thinking becomes a lost art.
Funny you mention The Beatles. They were a huge part of my on-ramp to many of these ideas... until a few years ago, I had no clue they were integral pillar in this decades old psyop.
https://stylman.substack.com/p/engineering-reality-part-ii
I prefer to define actual facts as being tidbits of Reality. Bullshit is not fact, it is usually opinion or outright lies masquerading as fact. We are trying to sift out the few tidbits of Reality from oceans of largely manufactured bullshit. Some of that bullshit has been propagated and refined over millennia, and widely passes for fact. Beliefs are not facts, no matter how hard the Oligarch-backed Religion Business tries to claim otherwise.
Compared to industry-manufactured 'phenomena' like Brittney Spears, Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift, the 1960's musical British Invasion was amateur hour. As Paul Simon sang, "every generation throws a hero up the pop-charts". That "invasion" provided the popular foundation for helping force the US gov't to abandon the Vietnam Debacle (another war inherited from European Colonialism). Doesn't seem to fit the claim it was all a clever tactic by the warmonger City of London and MI6/CIA to subvert wholesome US culture. The US gov't reaction to the aftermath of the Invasion via idiocy like the War On Drugs did more to damage the US psycho-socially than a bunch of mop-top Brits singing about relationships and peace, while increasingly dabbling in non-Western ideologies and perspective-altering substances. And before anyone goes there, Addiction has always been with humanity, despite the sanctimonious tongue-clucking of the teetotallers and prohibitionists.
We can certainly disagree on this. I wrote 10k words making my case (the link I shared was part 2 of a 3-part series) that barely scratches the surface. The social engineering is undeniable in my view - especially in retrospect.
Of course, I do agree with you about the War on Drugs doing tremendous damage - it's one of those manufactured crises I mentioned elsewhere that was designed to create hysteria and chip away at civil liberties. In fact, I mentioned it here just this morning.
https://stylman.substack.com/p/patterns-of-paradox/comment/106207050
Today's versions are cartoon updates of that era, perhaps because it's more explicit or maybe because we're more aware. Regardless, I'm not suggesting the artists are all bad - or necessarily even aware of what they may be participating in (though I'm certain *some* are).
My belief is there are guardrails on society steering us to the next era - as the elites from 100 years ago called it, the Age of Aquarius, or as Crowley put it, the Aeon of Horus. These broader patterns connect directly to my broader thesis about manufactured binaries - the "teams" we're encouraged to join are carefully defined and limited, creating the illusion of choice while maintaining the underlying power structures.
FWIW, this was the team I chose - the counterculture/rock n'roll Tavistock flavor. At this stage, I can decouple my love of the art from my understanding that there was some other impetus for it that I wasn't aware of when it was initially embedded into my consciousness.
I agree, Josh. I, too, am very aware of what you wrote connecting deliberate orchestration of movements and psyops to entrain a larger cultural mindset.
I still like and listen to the music of my era. Some less; some more. I fell into exploring the roots of the British Invasion which were American R&R (Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Del Shannon, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, etc.) and blues (Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Robert Johnson, etc.). Exploring these genres may have connected me to other streams of consciousness.
The one distinction I would make--and I can do so only because I lived through the subsequent eras--is that most of the people dropped the "counterculture" they so fervently embraced in college and returned to the values shared with their parents as jobs and babies were acquired. Whereas the music continued in a kick-ass fashion, they no longer shared the values or goals of "counter" anything. The music had to fit into their lives while they got their kids ready for school and very likely mom worked outside the home.
I think, too, the control was not so onerous. I began as a flaming feminist in the 1960s only to disavow the movement's ideology in the 80s as I thought deriding/punishing men didn't liberate women in any fashion.
I think far more insidious than the overt manipulations of cultures and minds in the latter part of the 20th century has been the ubiquitous adoption of the smart/cell phone in the early 21st which has, in my estimation, dramatically entrained and altered neural pathways. The act of looking whenever the instrument pings; the radically altered training of attention span to 20 sec. or 1 min. (and thereby capacity to think); narrowing social contact into one conduit (leaving people far more lonely, in my estimation, than previously); etc.
Couple with this entrainment the overt surveillance and harvesting of data revealed by people like Shoshanna Zuboff and we have an era in which control fails heavily upon a population. The data harvesting is used, I could almost guarantee, to predict and steer actions and opinions of people in a far more nefarious fashion than promoting drugs in the 60s and to train AI. Consider, too, more discourse was open in the 60s. I remember the underground newspapers which we eagerly read on campus. Pronouncements were coming from the Haight where young "counter" doctors were warning people away from speed and heroin.
Yep. We're fundamentally lacking in-person connection - a trend accelerated by COVID, which basically threw gasoline on an already smoldering digital isolation. Human connection is real vibrational energy; digital spaces can complement (in fact, we're doing it now!) but never replace that embodied experience.
As a GenX observer, I've always been fascinated by how the hippies of the 60s became the yuppies of the 80s. The more I've learned about Tavistock, the more I'm convinced that these branded decades are part of the show - carefully manufactured cultural narratives designed to give us the illusion of change while maintaining underlying power structures and evolving a long planned agenda.
What fascinates me most about that era is how it represented an on-ramp to gradual, insidious change. The Beatles weren't just a band - they were a vector for systemic transformation, introducing ideas and cultural shifts so subtly that by the time people realized what was happening, the landscape had already fundamentally shifted.
Think about the leap from Meet the Beatles to Sgt Pepper. Then, followed by the slow change over the next 55 years bringing us to present with stuff like the satanic Grammy awards - where pop culture seems less about music and more about performing bizarre ritualistic spectacles that feel engineered to desensitize us to increasingly dark symbolic imagery. What do I know, I'm just a conspiracy theorist. 🤷
Oh, Josh!! What an excellent response!! You are, I think, absolutely correct! "... carefully manufactured cultural narratives designed to give us the illusion of change while maintaining underlying power structures and evolving a long planned agenda."
I'm so glad that I encountered your Substack. Old age apparently involves, among many various events and considerations, a review of our past. I find myself thinking of events, happenings, and people from long ago from no apparent trigger. Your quite accurate overview gives me an added dimension to understanding.
I know immediately and intuitively when my paradigm shifts. When I know at that depth, I'm absolutely certain that I'm experiencing truth. The paradigm shifts from intellectualism to an operating system (if that makes sense).
Hold on to your hat, Josh. This will be wild.
The last time this happened to me I was watching Gigi Young, a mystic-psychic, being interviewed. She asked, as if plain for everyone to see, why would aliens travel hyper-dimensionally or thousands of light years away to get our DNA? Her theory was that a devolved human species (who, I guess, just might direct those fully formed but much lower caste humans who go by the initials WEF) is harvesting and investigating current human DNA (referencing the many instances of people who have experienced abductions and extraction of their bodily fluids by beings normally called the Greys--the Roswell ETB) to regenerate their devolved physicality. (Yes, I realize, too, that some people think the memories are implanted.)
Given that Antartica is so heavily guarded and off limits with Operation Highjump completely censored and Byrd sequestered and gagged immediately upon returning to the U.S., we may have such areas where a devolved species can live. Perhaps they're remnants of an older civilization with some super-sophisticated technology remaining in their possession. The Russian military's assessment is one of the few honest ones available. Flying "saucer-like" aircraft decimated Byrd's military armada and abrogated the operation. (Never did find those Nazis...did they?)
Of course, the normal argument is that these "alien" species "seeded" their DNA in us and now, because of some catastrophe within their star system, need to "replenish" their DNA. She couples her observation with the corollary that the human form (body) is a divine vehicle in perfect unison with the planet (Earth) to allow humans to evolve (spiritually, physically, mentally)--a precept of Steiner's anthroposophy...who, to me, outlines an excellent overall interpretation how our Orwellian age fits into the various ages and epochs for soul development progression.
1953-vintage mid-boomer here, so saw the British Invasion first-hand. Woodstock Generation, "how the f*** do you think you're ever gonna stop the war if you can't sing any louder than that...". My music catalogue includes samples of most everything except rap and opera. Gypsy jazz to Marilyn Manson to Hendrix, Bach, Chad Mitchell Trio, John Prine, Arkells. But I digress.
'Never let an opportunity to influence, or a crisis, go to waste, whether you created it or not' The Oligarch's Creed
Catch-as-catch-can opportunism and cash-grabbing is as strong a factor as any in progressing towards the ultimate goal of the 'full spectrum' assault which the Rothschilds/WEF curiously admitted to... "You will own nothing, rent everything and be happy". They just left out the "or else" which we are seeing now... or else they'll crash the entire global economy and start WW3.
Culturally, if it wasn't for the Beatles, some other appropriated inheritor of the 'coat' and 'crown' metaphorically passed from Holly and James Dean to Elvis et.al. would have sufficed. The Beatles/British Invasion definitely disrupted the US rock/pop music culture scene, but was quickly brought 'in house'... making a quick buck while manipulating the masses is Oligarchic SOP.
No surprise rebellious 'street music' like Psychedelia, Punk, then Rap, were also largely assimilated into mainstream music industry catalogues. Country music has changed from a rural patriotic cultural bastion to just another sub-genre of Pop/Rock... if you play a modern 'country' song backwards, you still won't get back your girlfriend, pickup truck or dog.
The trend to the current 'performance art' displayed at the Grammys and Olympics started with Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, Bowie (Ziggy Stardust) and Jethro Tull (Aqualung). These were hard acts to follow in the 'shock rock' category, but nothing exceeds like excess.
In short, love the music, hate the Oligarchic/corporate machine that curates and manipulates the soundtrack of our lives.
Lab leak is BS too. So are pandemics.
It's a false dichotomy.
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/how-to-fake-pandemics-the-maestro
Well spotted. The dichotomy itself is the sleight of hand.
The current favorite in my friend group is round vs flat earth. Make what that as you will :-)
Nothing exemplifies this as well as the current federal election in Canada where the single issue of "Trump" has completely reshuffled what was a focus on Gov policy decisions into an exercise in division over who likes a foreign leader less.
If they can fake the moon landing and if they can convince people there is an invisible man who lives in the sky that loves them, then they can convince people that viruses exist. Who is going to go out and buy a scanning electron microscope to prove them wrong? Remember, we still don't have an en vivo isolation of a SARS-CoV-2 virus. Oh yeah, mutations and what not.
The lies probably go way deeper than we can ever imagine. They have rewired our brains to accept mostly lies and deny truths. Convince yourself we never went to the moon and the dominoes begin to fall.
How you managed to get the "God Question" right and everything else wrong is an interesting case study in 'beliefs'. Just because a lot of people 'believe' something doesn't make it so. That said, at some point, to make sense of the Bigger Questions, humans have to 'believe' in things beyond our personal ability to verify, yet are well supported by the current state of knowledge and technology.
By simple observation only, without any 'technology' or mathematics to augment our senses, it is impossible to personally observe whether the Earth or Sun is the centre of the solar system/universe. Any proof of a heliocentric system requires a LOT of data gathering and application of what eventually became Newtonian Laws of Motion to convincingly make the case. The entire flat-earth con depends on stupid humans ignoring all the real information presented to them since Ancient Greeks figured out the basics.
There are likely many aspects of the moon landing information-stream which were (ahem) 'enhanced' to make the US taxpayer feel they got 'value' for their contributions and emotional support their 'Exceptionalist' view of the USA! USA! USA! But did humans actually make it to the Moon and back? Probably. But you and I will likely never be able to 'prove' it either way without relying on sources we can't personally, 100% verify.
Besides, whether humans made it to the Moon is not the 'gov't lies' litmus test I would rely on. There are so many, many, more obvious lies which have had far greater negative impact on the course of civilizations than that.
Covid? There's inconvenient stuff like:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73162-5
Took me all of 5 seconds to search "covid virus electron microscope" to find it. But ya, 'there's no proof'. A Scanning Tunnelling Microscope can show 0.1 nanometer features with 0.01 nm depth resolution. I'm guessing that is more than adequate to 'see' a virus structure.
Did nearly all the gov'ts of the world and Big Pharma/Medicine baldfaced lie to us about what Covid and the Jabs really were? That the lockdowns, masks and quarantines were rolled out to see if such a massive fear-based power-grab could be implemented? ABSOLUTELY... but that doesn't mean the viruses don't exist, let alone it was not deliberately concocted in a lab and intentionally released. 'Plandemic' is the term you're looking for.
So we arrive at the age old question, what exactly would it take for you to believe in a particular thing, event or idea which you can't personally 100% verify. Add in AI and Deep Fakes, and nearly everything on the internet is subject to conjecture.
Let's look at Gravity, something few sane people deny exists. Drop a 20 pound rock on your toe and you will immediately surmise there is some phenomena causing the movement of said rock from your hands to your toe. But how can that be, there is no tangible mechanism in evidence, other than the intellectual circularity of the fact the rock ALWAYS drops, even if you throw it upwards first.
The rub is the HOW... what mechanism? The truth is NO HUMAN knows what makes Gravity work, beyond how Mass is fundamentally involved. So is Gravity 'real' if we puny humans can't figure out HOW it works? You've ruled out God, so what next?
Have a GPS unit (phone, car, etc.)? ... Gee, the GPS satellites have to employ Relativity calculations to synchronize clocks to compensate for the differences in speeds between the earth's surface and the satellites. So the 'Theory' of Relativity is no longer pure theory, it is used in day-to-day practice as well.
Science may not explain 'everything' (yet, if ever), but is does a much better job than any religion or other metaphysical framework humans have been convinced by their leaders to accept as foundational ideologies.
The Theory of Atoms incrementally developed from the Ancient Greek concept (~5 centuries BCE) to the current format, which shows how humans gnaw away at a 'theory' until the errors are expunged. What will humans know 2,500 years from now which 100% contradicts what we 'believe' today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_atomic_theory
So ya, our personal path to rational beliefs begins with critical inspection of our 'world' and equally critical introspection to comprehend from where our 'beliefs' spring.
"The moment we label someone based on a single opinion, we stop seeing them as complex individuals with nuances, contradictions, and rich inner lives."
This is a key insight. When we attach whichever dehumanizing label we decide fits best, we've transformed a potentially thoughtful discussion into an emotional catfight. The irony, in my mind, is that when we do so, it's most harmful to our own thinking.
People > Personas
Well done Mr Stylman. Very well put down. "They have our number" is my way of concisely phrasing this for some years now, but what you've done here is terrific in laying down the details.
Beautifully worded. Thank you Joshua.
Time is the ingredient to avoid getting sucked into the too-often misleading slick pre-packaged narrative. For example, it took two years before the "Kuwaiti babies thrown from incubators" lie used to help justify the US invasion of Iraq was revealed to be a total PR stunt. Never happened, the distraught girl who claimed to have witnessed it was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and wasn't ever anywhere near the site of the supposed event, let alone in Kuwait at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
About the Covid virus "lab leak" narrative: The complete facts on this still remain to be confirmed, but researchers early on in the "P(L)andemic" found additions at cleavage sites that ONLY could have been done in a lab. So the bat/pangolin/wet-market theory is disproved. But that still leaves the question of which lab was it "leaked" from? Given the ceaseless US/NATO push to 'blame China', it is no stretch that the US gov't funding (via serial liar Fauci et.al.) of the Wuhan lab was a deliberate set-up, to be used to provide plausible deniability and divert attention from other international US-controlled illegal bio-weapon labs. One thread to pull is the CIA-run bio-weapon labs seized by Russia in the 'failed' operation towards Kiev. which revealed all manner of 'research' targeting Russia, but also on ... you guessed it, mRNA and Covid. And somewhat circumstantially, there were military athletic games occurring in Wuhan the week of the "outbreak", with US and Canadian military personnel attending. The US came 35th in those games, so not the US's best and brightest were sent to compete... another 'mission' than track and field? Add in that the head of the Wuhan Institute immediately checked the DNA signature of the 'original' Covid strain and found it didn't match any Covid-type sample in prior possession of the Institute. Millions dead and injured, both by the virus and the "vaccines". Don't forget the attacks on PROVEN safe and effective Ivermectin, which could have saved the entire world from Covid suffering, without the Jabs and their residual harms. (no Big Pharma profits from that tho') Note the WHO and the FDA had to change the definition of "vaccine" to qualify it for all the 'emergency' measures and funding thereof.
And now we have Trumpty Dumbdy thrashing about with his Tariff-palooza, claiming the entire world has been "ripping off" the US for decades. Even slapping countries which the US DOESN'T have a trade deficit with. To the point that S Korea, Japan and China have negotiated a side deal regarding semiconductors and more. Hell may actually be freezing over, Russia allied with China, Iran cooperating with Saudi Arabia.
In short, the US/NATO has been openly declared "agreement incapable", a polite way of saying they lie and cheat. Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director clearly stated "we lied, we cheated, we stole".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac
So who ya gonna believe? Admitted and deliberate liars?
Time indeed reveals the patterns beneath the narratives.
Compelling comment, that not just 'any person' could have written.
Thank you, but I am indeed 'that' Any Person, no special access to the corridors of power or otherwise connected to the 'information industry'. The point of my moniker is that by observing a wide range of openly available sources for coherent information over a time-frame longer than the MSM click-and-forget cycle, any critical-thinking person can see what I see and should speak and write about. Of course wading through British Hansard for references definitively connecting the Rothschilds to arms-length fomenting violent Zionism isn't everyone's cuppa. Or better yet, searching Wikileaks for emails between best buddies Hillary Clinton and Lynn de Rothschild is also illuminating.
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/?q=rothschild%7Crothschilds
And still there can be surprises, like Putin and Peskov et.al. pragmatically saying they don't expect the US/EU/NATO to lift sanctions any time soon, and "Putin's Brain" (LOL) Dugin actually stating (Trump's) "Tariff plan is ethically marvellous and morally exceptional."
https://x.com/AGDugin/status/1908085643403460883
It may be that the Russians are applying a bit of Sun Tzu, not interrupting an opponent while they are making mistakes. Almost cheerleading the other side, while said opponent runs headlong into a brick wall which the opponent freely constructed. Like Trump railing against the USMCA "Free" Trade Agreement which Trump signed in his first term. With Trump's 'people', the Western garden-variety local-capitalists cheering the impending Crash as merely another opportunity to 'buy the dip'. Actually heard that exact sentiment from an asset manager we are thinking of hiring yesterday. Yup, crashing the Wall and Main Street economy is a good thing, as long as the Rothschild Class Oligarchs behind the curtain control the 'money supply' (aka $36Trillion in debt).
Josh: The person who attacked you does not want to "think together." He wants to win, and for you to lose.
For them, a tiny discrepancy or an honest mistake is a way to go to war.
Heh, I'm not terribly worried about it. Im a big boy with pretty thick skin.
I'm genuinely interested in these themes and curious if this person is just trolling me or lacks that much self-awareness.
Rest assured, as your 'reach' expands, the trolls and coordinated Nudge Operatives WILL appear. The long-term efficacy of various moderator strategies to deal with such (or not) can be seen at blogs like Moon of Alabama, SONAR21 and Unz Review.
Haha, reach isn't the goal at all. Many of these ideas have been percolating for the last few years - I was doing short-form quips on Twitter and Instagram, but those platforms are too constrained to let these ideas breathe. Writing here is pure catharsis. The community forming around these conversations is a surprising bonus. I actually didn't even allow comments initially, but @Dr. K convinced me - and I'm glad he did. It's helped me learn so much. If reach grows, I'll cross that bridge when I get there. As for those sites, I'm aware of Unz but will check out the others - another chance to maximize serendipity through genuine conversation.
Excellent reflection on the probably engineered breakdown of critical thinking and the schism that has been born out of this breakdown. I would add only this: polarization, confirmation bias, and inflexibility are probably more than cognitive styles that are shaped by misinformation: they are the product I believe of what Mattias Desmet has talked about in The Psychology of Totalitarianism: an emotional and spiritual state of anomie, where there is anxiety, interpersonal disconnection, and lack of meaning in people's lives. This is the emotional and spiritual matrix in which cognitive rigidity and poor perspective taking thrives.
Hi Josh. First time poster. Your writing is brilliant. You MUST read and listen to Dr Iain McGilchrist's work on the divided brain. He has come to the same conclusion as you and argues that the reason we (animals) have two cerebral hemispheres is that each hemisphere sees the world in a different way. According to McGilchrist, the left and right hemispheres "pay attention" to the world in different ways.
The left brain is about narrow focused attention on the tree, the target, the goal, the object, the tool, the data, reason, logic, power, control.
The right hemisphere maintains broad attention and sees the forest, the context, the pattern, the relationships, the nuance, the complexity, the uncertainty, empathy, humility.
The left hemisphere is clever but hubristic; the right hemisphere is wise.
The left brain APprehends (grabs); the right brain COMprehends (understands).
McGilcrist argues that since the renaissance, humanity has been shifting towards a left brain dominant culture, slowly at first, and now quickly.
https://youtu.be/dFs9WO2B8uI?si=gN7_JKUPZlq_nJjA
Thank you.
Jonathan Gordon
Hey Jonathan, thanks so much for the kind words and the thoughtful comment.
Someone else in this thread recommended McGilchrist. Clearly, I need to dive into his work... I'll be sure to soon.
https://stylman.substack.com/p/patterns-of-paradox/comment/106207050
Yes, it may warrant some exploration. On the other hand, I am seeing such widespread hyping of this person's work, it makes me uneasy. :-)
I understand your skepticism towards promoted ideas. I think much of the hype is due to his prescience. His first book. “The Master and His Emissary” was published 2009. Also the explanatory power of his observation is profound.
He is legit according to my reality testing and pattern recognition. 😉
I found this conversation to be an interesting introduction Iain McGilchrist's perspective - https://civilizationemerging.com/media/the-psychological-drivers-of-the-metacrisis/
https://www.conciliators-guild.org/media/blog/brain-hemispheres-and-the-politics-of-polarization
Great essay, thank you. I've been exploring self-awareness of this phenomenon by having people reflect on where they get attached, and what that feels like. If a person gets triggered, defensive, starts attacking, overly consuming a narrative, etc, that's a sign for them to look inward. Is the info hooking into their head center - their need or insistence on being right, a particular piece of info being right, unable to tolerate the very uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance (considering an opinion/perspective different from one's own), etc? Is it hooking into their emotional center, their care or anger about certain people getting hurt, people suffering? Is it getting hooked into their instinctual center, activating their survival or social instincts, that their survival is in danger, their community is in danger, fear, tribalism?
Brilliant observation. The centers of attachment reveal more about our inner landscape than the content itself. I suspect the awareness of where we're being 'hooked' may be the first step to liberation from manufactured narratives.
This relates to the psychological mechanism I explored in this piece...
https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-prison-of-certainty
Yes! People think they are objectively consuming media narratives that are outside of themselves. They think there's a separation between themselves and the narrative. But that's not true, that's not what's happening. People have "relationships" with / people are relating with - these narratives based on their previous life experiences, biases, attachments, etc. (just like other relationships with people are conditioned by their past experiences). Getting people to recognize the relationship they are having with media narratives (I've chosen attachments and self-awareness of the direct experience of cognitive dissonance, and you're great writing is another way) I think is the beginning steps to loosening the power of media narratives over people and people's perception of what they take to be reality (or various realities based on the narratives).
Thanks for your great writing! 🙏🏼💕
Kirsten, I appreciate your perspective on this and share similar thoughts about how people get hooked. I would add that spiritual bypass and intellectual bypass (impulsively going up into our heads) can also be about survival as we retreat into what feels comfortable, familiar or structuralizing (meaning formative to our identity) when we are faced with experiences that are overwhelmingly complex and uncertain. It can be very disorienting when beliefs integral to our identity are challenged. I think it's a capacity we can build through self-refection that is sorely lacking these days. I appreciate Joshua's essays because they help me reflect on my inner state when I fall into those polarity patterns with people in my life.
I think you're exactly right. There are some deeper survival issues underneath. The way I see it/feel it is it challenges our actual sense of self. Our sense of self is a fundamental organizing principle of our own consciousness, and is also fundamentally connected to how we see the world. So our sense of self can be challenged either directly through inner work, or by deeply looking at how we see the world. For anyone who has faced their sense of self dissolving tvia inner unfolding knows how challenging it is. It is quite scary sometimes fragmenting, feels like you're losing not only yourself but everything you're associated with, etc. This is the depth of the challenge, no small thing really, and some preparatory work is needed. The way I've approached the preparatory work is by having people turn inward and look at their attachments - head, heart and belly.
Yes, I resonate strongly with what you are saying here. The fragmentation certainly can feel scary. The other side of the journey is a much more solid foundation where we can look at the bigger picture with more inner resilience and solidity. It also can cultivate what one of my mentors calls embodied cognition - the capacity to be connected to the direct experience of our thinking rather than thinking being a strategy of disconnection.
I like that - embodied cognition.
This situation reeks of the farms of people in 3rd world countries hired to distract and mislead via comments. There are also bots that do this.