Excellent essay Josh. Your voice is clear and important and I think we’ll read and see more from you as you ascend in this way. Kudos. The world will not only need your voice but will welcome it.
I love Kristine’s comments about the oncoming planetary shifts and how they may influence awareness as well as the quote by Morgan. I remember in your stories when you shared it and I was floored. They know. They’ve known all along.
Last I will add, it seems to me that those who acknowledge pattern recognition, in my view, seem likely to also have a decent grasp of basic psychology. When they have it, one just knows a certain behavior when they see it. That’s knowledge in part, as much as instinct and intuition. As someone who has consistently felt stumped by how so many still just don’t get it, this helps to explain it a bit. For me at least. You’re either insightful or not. You understand basic psychology or not. Part of this could be willful on their part but some people just aren’t wired that way. They’re the laggards who adopt trends well after the fact while others have moved on or avoided them with intent all along. They go along…but they’re at the back of the herd. They are so oblivious they don’t even know where they’re going and they’re unconcerned by it. They’re just following direction. Designed to follow, never to lead. Programmable NPCs. In the game but mainly in the way. They’re best steered around.
Anyway, another great piece Josh, thank you! I look forward to sharing!
Yes - exactly what I've been saying about pattern recognition and psychological insight. It really is wild how some people just see it while others seem completely blind (perhaps willfully) to even the most obvious patterns.
Your NPC/herd analogy is spot on. And yeah, Morgan's quote is utterly fascinating. They really do tell us exactly what they're doing if we pay attention.
Really appreciate you engaging so deeply with this piece. Having people like you who get it and are willing to explore these ideas is energizing.
the laggards and programmable NPCs are the *vast* majority of the human population, and in our (ever increasingly) very complex, and religiously, culturally and sexually indoctrinated, societies, the mass in society that Walter Lippmann described as ' that mass man functioned as a "bewildered herd" who must be governed by "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." '
Be it the bewildered, overawed, afraid or plain reluctant to react, steering around billions of our fellow humans seems unlikely to effect positive change.
The entrenched cultural hegemony / ideological state apparatuses (educational institutions e.g. schools colleges universities, media outlets, churches, social and sports clubs and the family ) / repressive state apparatus ( government, courts, police and armed forces ) have been used by the vested interests to keep us docile and distracted, and hopefully articles like yours can help bring about much needed change.
Josh, Powerful piece. It just might make a few more people stop and think (which I am sure is the whole point). It is amazing how hard it is to get people to do this. As you note, they get to an answer that tails off to nothing...and then move on. Weird but true.
Thanks, Dr. K. I've shifted from trying to convince people to simply documenting patterns for those willing to see them. The 'that can't be true' crowd can keep dismissing evidence while remaining proudly and willfully uninformed. At this stage, I'm more interested in connecting with those who've also noticed these aren't coincidence - bluntly, in a world full of sheep, I'd rather surround myself with the lions.
I love this piece, especially your prescriptions for 'breaking the spell'.
I'd like to add a couple of things:
First, it is high time we reclaim power - both the word and the energy itself - as our creative force, rather than domination and control. The more that the individual believes power is inherently bad, the more those who use it to control have even more.
Second, I would add to the spell-breakers the imperative that each of us learns to access and trust our intuition ("natural wisdom"). You can't know the truth from what you are reading or watching or listening to without honing your felt sense of congruence.
And last - let's look to Nature as the model for how to structure our systems and live our lives. Nature doesn't dominate, and certainly doesn't centralize.
As an astrologer, whose job it is to study patterns and correlations between the sky and earth, I wonder if the coming planetary shifts won't make the patterns too obvious to ignore for many more people. At least, that's the pattern I'm seeing.
"Have you ever considered that ownership of land might be the original fiat?"
I might follow what you mean but could you elucidate? I might understand what you mean but aren't sure. Are you thinking about how the artificial scarcity of land through *ownership* might be the original template for all the other fiat systems that followed? After all, who really gave anyone the authority to draw those first property lines and declare "this is mine"?
Native cultures may have had it right with their concept of land stewardship rather than ownership. Curious to hear more of your thoughts on this.
My sense of history is that when humans began drawing artificial lines on the land and asserting ownership, we created scarcity and essentially broke our contract with the Earth as provider. I'm not sure we were even stewards up to that point, so much as just part of the ecosystem, just like all other forms of life.
The timing coincided with the advent of slavery (from what I know) and money, with money being essentially an abstraction of the creative power of nature (and humans).
This also coincided with the ownership of women and children, and what I see as the advent of what historian Riane Eisler (in her book "The Chalice and the Blade") calls the "dominator culture" - when the power shifted from cooperation and creativity to control and domination.
I'm most familiar with that story in the context of the Romans conquering the tribes of Britain, but we can certainly see the continuation in all forms of colonialism, where exploitation of the land was deemed more "civilized" than cooperation with the land.
And yes, it would have created artificial scarcity for those who did not come out as the 'owners', and then the hierarchy of power that would also lead to slavery and servitude.
I hear you! In the enegy healing I offer, it's always about supporting the client's journey toward reconnecting with their own presence - body and mind and spirit - offering them back to themselves and their own best instrument of perception. Like you say - connection back to power in the sense of their own empowerment within themselves as a point of essential contact with creation. If all goes well, they discover that they can best trust themselves as their own best authority on their own life. More clients are finding me. With that - and what you say of the coming astrology- I'm hopeful that will see more people awake to their power - and responsibility!
Indeed, it's all about helping people rediscover their innate wisdom and power that's been disconnected through all these artificial systems. The fact that more people are finding their way to healers like you is such an encouraging sign.
Something shifts when people realize they already have everything they need - it's just been obscured. And once they reconnect with that inner authority, there's no going back to outsourcing their power to "experts." It starts with us taking agency of our own lives.
I appreciate you sharing your front-line experience with this awakening. Makes me hopeful too.
"Once you understand that power coordinates, plans, and conspires by its very nature, the only wacky conspiracy theory becomes believing it doesn't."
There are "two trains running" here, Mr. Stylman. You clearly identify the core dynamic with "by its very nature," and one of the more interesting aspects of "accidentalism" is how incurious the average compartmentalized person is about that nature. You touch on this in the essay, and there are several intersecting cognitive/behavioral traits that at least partially, help to explain it.
Power ceases to exist when it fails to coordinate and execute its prerogatives; it is subject to entropy. There is no great mystery about this, other than the propensity toward obscurantism. It shouldn't be necessary for you to point this out, but it is.
Organizational power has its own structural "failsafe" mechanism, a protective shroud that obscures the "second train;' incompetence. Here, I think, is where some of the core confusion of sincere accidentalists comes into play.
The role of pattern recognition in categorization is poorly understood outside of the realm of behavioral science. Viewed at a granular level, the adaptive policy, procedure and process that compensates for organizational incompetence is mistakenly viewed as a discrete, disqualifying mechanism, subsequently metastasizing into an all-encompassing apologia. Viewing this mechanism at a remove, a coarser level of resolution, we begin to understand that the corrective mechanism is woven into the very fabric of power dynamics.
We may have a rudimentary grasp of The Iron Law Of Institutions, but "the devil is in the details," the nuts-and-bolts of individualized response patterns within the organization. There is the way things are supposed to work, and there is the reality, the endless stream of action and reaction, stimulus and response.
In theory, the organization consists of shared individualized self-interest. In practice, that "sharing" is highly constrained. It is constrained by internal power struggles, fierce competition for ascendancy. This, too, is obvious to anyone who has ever operated within an organizational milieu, but what isn't so obvious, is how that competition scales, how it affects planning and execution of the (stated) organizational mission.
It also isn't obvious what is more damaging; a high incompetence quotient or a more competent wielding of organizational power. Both are subject to error; the former individualized and the latter, more structural. perhaps a better way to say it would be that a high incompetence factor is "bottom up" and a lower quotient "top down." Myriad small errors or a small selection of errors stemming from leadership decisions.
None of these distinctions really matter when regarding the effective malevolence of an organized power structure. They are only relevant to the application of accountability. Anyone attempting to reform a corrupt or inherently malevolent power structure, will be familiar with the "hall of mirrors" and "circular firing squad" obscurantist dynamics. Overcoming those protective mechanisms is an extraordinarily daunting series of tasks. We cannot wonder at the average person's overpowering impulse to elide any acknowledgement that incompetence does not obviate collusion.
Very good. Now look at "climate change/global warming" in the same light as the "pandemic".
The appeals to authority, media blacklisting of contrary studies, the outcasting of experts not willing to back down, the authoritarianism.... All this was honed in the demonization of CO2 (with the fine tuning done in Event 201) so SARS-COV-2/Covid-19 hit the ground running
You only look at the edges of the scam where there are corporate profiteers. You don't recognise the underlying authoritarianism of the climate change narrative. It fits in perfectly with the other themes in this article of yours but you need to be willing to investigate the credibility of the climate change "experts", especially at the failed predictions which continually move
Actually, if you read the weather manipulation piece I linked, you'll see I explicitly address the authoritarian pattern: governments using invisible threats (drugs, terror, COVID, climate) to expand control and erode liberties. I agree completely about examining expert credibility and failed predictions. The climate narrative follows the same template as COVID - manufactured crisis, coordinated messaging, suppression of dissent, and forced 'solutions' that always seem to require more control. We're tracking the same patterns.
Sorry but you haven't gotten my point. Even in your weather manipulation article, you start with the underlying premise that climate change is a real threat. From there, as well as getting into weather manipulation methods that may be being used, you go on to discuss various ways this is exploited.
From that article, you state:
"We are left to wonder whether the climate crises we are experiencing are genuinely natural or the result of human intervention."
You question which experts should be listened to since the authoritative bodies impose actions based on the most pessimistic projections.
But you never question the basic premise itself - is meaningful anthropogenic climate change real or is it a construct of data manipulation backed up by cherry picked data?
Actually, I intentionally took no position on climate science in that piece. I have been working with several top scientists in the field and have learned a lot that rewired my (limited) understanding. I chose to present a balanced view so readers would consider my core argument with no pre-existing baggage: no meaningful discussion of any so-called climate crisis is possible without acknowledging geoengineering's role. The piece was about institutional power, not climate science itself. All that said, I'm not losing sleep over any hysterical extinction scenarios. My issues is with how fear of 'weather apocalypse' is being used to justify unprecedented policy changes that reorder the rules of society.
l just read your essay on Brownstone, the one about Dems and the mind virus. Since you nixed comments on it, I'd like to say that I agree with everything (pretty rare! :-) and will pass it on to an old friend who has since gone woke. I am hoping we can begin talking again. So, thank you, thank you!
Thank you - I'm glad the piece resonated. I only opened up comments here recently because I knew it would be another thing I'd have to manage (as you can see from my reply time, I'm still getting the hang of it). Either way, I hope the piece speaks to your friend too - and more importantly, that your relationship can heal.
Excellent essay Josh. Your voice is clear and important and I think we’ll read and see more from you as you ascend in this way. Kudos. The world will not only need your voice but will welcome it.
I love Kristine’s comments about the oncoming planetary shifts and how they may influence awareness as well as the quote by Morgan. I remember in your stories when you shared it and I was floored. They know. They’ve known all along.
Last I will add, it seems to me that those who acknowledge pattern recognition, in my view, seem likely to also have a decent grasp of basic psychology. When they have it, one just knows a certain behavior when they see it. That’s knowledge in part, as much as instinct and intuition. As someone who has consistently felt stumped by how so many still just don’t get it, this helps to explain it a bit. For me at least. You’re either insightful or not. You understand basic psychology or not. Part of this could be willful on their part but some people just aren’t wired that way. They’re the laggards who adopt trends well after the fact while others have moved on or avoided them with intent all along. They go along…but they’re at the back of the herd. They are so oblivious they don’t even know where they’re going and they’re unconcerned by it. They’re just following direction. Designed to follow, never to lead. Programmable NPCs. In the game but mainly in the way. They’re best steered around.
Anyway, another great piece Josh, thank you! I look forward to sharing!
Thanks for this lovely reply.
Yes - exactly what I've been saying about pattern recognition and psychological insight. It really is wild how some people just see it while others seem completely blind (perhaps willfully) to even the most obvious patterns.
Your NPC/herd analogy is spot on. And yeah, Morgan's quote is utterly fascinating. They really do tell us exactly what they're doing if we pay attention.
Really appreciate you engaging so deeply with this piece. Having people like you who get it and are willing to explore these ideas is energizing.
Hi @wildurthhealing,
the laggards and programmable NPCs are the *vast* majority of the human population, and in our (ever increasingly) very complex, and religiously, culturally and sexually indoctrinated, societies, the mass in society that Walter Lippmann described as ' that mass man functioned as a "bewildered herd" who must be governed by "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." '
Be it the bewildered, overawed, afraid or plain reluctant to react, steering around billions of our fellow humans seems unlikely to effect positive change.
The entrenched cultural hegemony / ideological state apparatuses (educational institutions e.g. schools colleges universities, media outlets, churches, social and sports clubs and the family ) / repressive state apparatus ( government, courts, police and armed forces ) have been used by the vested interests to keep us docile and distracted, and hopefully articles like yours can help bring about much needed change.
https://chomsky.info/mediacontrol03/
Another great piece, Josh!
Thanks, Ann. I know I'm a broken record on some of these themes but the view is certainly crystalizing.
Nope, not at all. Every angle matters. You never know what message will resonate and break through.
And all of them serve as validation to the people who are still recovering from the gaslight abuse.
Absolutely beautiful and brilliant. Tha ks Josh.
Josh, Powerful piece. It just might make a few more people stop and think (which I am sure is the whole point). It is amazing how hard it is to get people to do this. As you note, they get to an answer that tails off to nothing...and then move on. Weird but true.
Thanks, Dr. K. I've shifted from trying to convince people to simply documenting patterns for those willing to see them. The 'that can't be true' crowd can keep dismissing evidence while remaining proudly and willfully uninformed. At this stage, I'm more interested in connecting with those who've also noticed these aren't coincidence - bluntly, in a world full of sheep, I'd rather surround myself with the lions.
I love this piece, especially your prescriptions for 'breaking the spell'.
I'd like to add a couple of things:
First, it is high time we reclaim power - both the word and the energy itself - as our creative force, rather than domination and control. The more that the individual believes power is inherently bad, the more those who use it to control have even more.
Second, I would add to the spell-breakers the imperative that each of us learns to access and trust our intuition ("natural wisdom"). You can't know the truth from what you are reading or watching or listening to without honing your felt sense of congruence.
And last - let's look to Nature as the model for how to structure our systems and live our lives. Nature doesn't dominate, and certainly doesn't centralize.
As an astrologer, whose job it is to study patterns and correlations between the sky and earth, I wonder if the coming planetary shifts won't make the patterns too obvious to ignore for many more people. At least, that's the pattern I'm seeing.
Thanks for the kind words. Two quick replies:
1) On your point about the natural wisdom, I wrote a related essay here:
https://stylman.substack.com/p/fiat-everything
2) With regard to astrology, this alleged JP Morgan quote caught my attention about a year ago: “Millionaires don't use Astrology, billionaires do.”
Good one, on "fiat everything". Have you ever considered that ownership of land might be the original fiat?
And yes, I love that quote. There are lots of powerful people who use astrology but just don't call it out.
"Have you ever considered that ownership of land might be the original fiat?"
I might follow what you mean but could you elucidate? I might understand what you mean but aren't sure. Are you thinking about how the artificial scarcity of land through *ownership* might be the original template for all the other fiat systems that followed? After all, who really gave anyone the authority to draw those first property lines and declare "this is mine"?
Native cultures may have had it right with their concept of land stewardship rather than ownership. Curious to hear more of your thoughts on this.
My sense of history is that when humans began drawing artificial lines on the land and asserting ownership, we created scarcity and essentially broke our contract with the Earth as provider. I'm not sure we were even stewards up to that point, so much as just part of the ecosystem, just like all other forms of life.
The timing coincided with the advent of slavery (from what I know) and money, with money being essentially an abstraction of the creative power of nature (and humans).
This also coincided with the ownership of women and children, and what I see as the advent of what historian Riane Eisler (in her book "The Chalice and the Blade") calls the "dominator culture" - when the power shifted from cooperation and creativity to control and domination.
I'm most familiar with that story in the context of the Romans conquering the tribes of Britain, but we can certainly see the continuation in all forms of colonialism, where exploitation of the land was deemed more "civilized" than cooperation with the land.
And yes, it would have created artificial scarcity for those who did not come out as the 'owners', and then the hierarchy of power that would also lead to slavery and servitude.
Thanks for asking!
I hear you! In the enegy healing I offer, it's always about supporting the client's journey toward reconnecting with their own presence - body and mind and spirit - offering them back to themselves and their own best instrument of perception. Like you say - connection back to power in the sense of their own empowerment within themselves as a point of essential contact with creation. If all goes well, they discover that they can best trust themselves as their own best authority on their own life. More clients are finding me. With that - and what you say of the coming astrology- I'm hopeful that will see more people awake to their power - and responsibility!
Indeed, it's all about helping people rediscover their innate wisdom and power that's been disconnected through all these artificial systems. The fact that more people are finding their way to healers like you is such an encouraging sign.
Something shifts when people realize they already have everything they need - it's just been obscured. And once they reconnect with that inner authority, there's no going back to outsourcing their power to "experts." It starts with us taking agency of our own lives.
I appreciate you sharing your front-line experience with this awakening. Makes me hopeful too.
"Once you understand that power coordinates, plans, and conspires by its very nature, the only wacky conspiracy theory becomes believing it doesn't."
There are "two trains running" here, Mr. Stylman. You clearly identify the core dynamic with "by its very nature," and one of the more interesting aspects of "accidentalism" is how incurious the average compartmentalized person is about that nature. You touch on this in the essay, and there are several intersecting cognitive/behavioral traits that at least partially, help to explain it.
Power ceases to exist when it fails to coordinate and execute its prerogatives; it is subject to entropy. There is no great mystery about this, other than the propensity toward obscurantism. It shouldn't be necessary for you to point this out, but it is.
Organizational power has its own structural "failsafe" mechanism, a protective shroud that obscures the "second train;' incompetence. Here, I think, is where some of the core confusion of sincere accidentalists comes into play.
The role of pattern recognition in categorization is poorly understood outside of the realm of behavioral science. Viewed at a granular level, the adaptive policy, procedure and process that compensates for organizational incompetence is mistakenly viewed as a discrete, disqualifying mechanism, subsequently metastasizing into an all-encompassing apologia. Viewing this mechanism at a remove, a coarser level of resolution, we begin to understand that the corrective mechanism is woven into the very fabric of power dynamics.
We may have a rudimentary grasp of The Iron Law Of Institutions, but "the devil is in the details," the nuts-and-bolts of individualized response patterns within the organization. There is the way things are supposed to work, and there is the reality, the endless stream of action and reaction, stimulus and response.
In theory, the organization consists of shared individualized self-interest. In practice, that "sharing" is highly constrained. It is constrained by internal power struggles, fierce competition for ascendancy. This, too, is obvious to anyone who has ever operated within an organizational milieu, but what isn't so obvious, is how that competition scales, how it affects planning and execution of the (stated) organizational mission.
It also isn't obvious what is more damaging; a high incompetence quotient or a more competent wielding of organizational power. Both are subject to error; the former individualized and the latter, more structural. perhaps a better way to say it would be that a high incompetence factor is "bottom up" and a lower quotient "top down." Myriad small errors or a small selection of errors stemming from leadership decisions.
None of these distinctions really matter when regarding the effective malevolence of an organized power structure. They are only relevant to the application of accountability. Anyone attempting to reform a corrupt or inherently malevolent power structure, will be familiar with the "hall of mirrors" and "circular firing squad" obscurantist dynamics. Overcoming those protective mechanisms is an extraordinarily daunting series of tasks. We cannot wonder at the average person's overpowering impulse to elide any acknowledgement that incompetence does not obviate collusion.
Very good. Now look at "climate change/global warming" in the same light as the "pandemic".
The appeals to authority, media blacklisting of contrary studies, the outcasting of experts not willing to back down, the authoritarianism.... All this was honed in the demonization of CO2 (with the fine tuning done in Event 201) so SARS-COV-2/Covid-19 hit the ground running
Thanks for the comment, Greg.
I discussed this in The Information Factory (https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-information-factory) and Institutional Power: A Tale of Two Worldviews (https://stylman.substack.com/p/institutional-power-a-tale-of-two).
You may also be interested in this investigative piece, Is Our Weather Being Manipulated?
(https://stylman.substack.com/p/is-our-weather-being-manipulated)
You only look at the edges of the scam where there are corporate profiteers. You don't recognise the underlying authoritarianism of the climate change narrative. It fits in perfectly with the other themes in this article of yours but you need to be willing to investigate the credibility of the climate change "experts", especially at the failed predictions which continually move
Actually, if you read the weather manipulation piece I linked, you'll see I explicitly address the authoritarian pattern: governments using invisible threats (drugs, terror, COVID, climate) to expand control and erode liberties. I agree completely about examining expert credibility and failed predictions. The climate narrative follows the same template as COVID - manufactured crisis, coordinated messaging, suppression of dissent, and forced 'solutions' that always seem to require more control. We're tracking the same patterns.
Sorry but you haven't gotten my point. Even in your weather manipulation article, you start with the underlying premise that climate change is a real threat. From there, as well as getting into weather manipulation methods that may be being used, you go on to discuss various ways this is exploited.
From that article, you state:
"We are left to wonder whether the climate crises we are experiencing are genuinely natural or the result of human intervention."
You question which experts should be listened to since the authoritative bodies impose actions based on the most pessimistic projections.
But you never question the basic premise itself - is meaningful anthropogenic climate change real or is it a construct of data manipulation backed up by cherry picked data?
Actually, I intentionally took no position on climate science in that piece. I have been working with several top scientists in the field and have learned a lot that rewired my (limited) understanding. I chose to present a balanced view so readers would consider my core argument with no pre-existing baggage: no meaningful discussion of any so-called climate crisis is possible without acknowledging geoengineering's role. The piece was about institutional power, not climate science itself. All that said, I'm not losing sleep over any hysterical extinction scenarios. My issues is with how fear of 'weather apocalypse' is being used to justify unprecedented policy changes that reorder the rules of society.
l just read your essay on Brownstone, the one about Dems and the mind virus. Since you nixed comments on it, I'd like to say that I agree with everything (pretty rare! :-) and will pass it on to an old friend who has since gone woke. I am hoping we can begin talking again. So, thank you, thank you!
Thank you - I'm glad the piece resonated. I only opened up comments here recently because I knew it would be another thing I'd have to manage (as you can see from my reply time, I'm still getting the hang of it). Either way, I hope the piece speaks to your friend too - and more importantly, that your relationship can heal.