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What is Koanic Soul?

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This is a followup to my previous post.

I’ve been asked many times, “What are koans?”

Now that I’m pretty much at the end of my journey, I can give the answer that I couldn’t give at the beginning or middle. I’ve identified the instinctive process by which I generated, refined, and discarded my koans.

The key performance indicator of koanic iteration is muscular relaxation.

Why? Because muscular relaxation indicates a psychological state without anxiety or emotional turmoil, and a relaxed “mind like water”. Credit to Illuminatus for this insight.

The causes of KPI failure are legion:
1. Anxiety
2. Depression
3. Uncaptured thought loops
4. Fatigue
5. Negative self talk
6. Negative social feedback
7. Work/ambition pressure
8. Identity incongruence
9. Sociosexual incongruence
10. etc etc etc

However, these can be divided into major categories:
1. Unprocessed, recirculating negative emotional valence
2. Unprocessed, recirculating intellectual activity – the “inner monologue”
3. Incongruence – social, spiritual, emotional, identity, etc
4. Biologically driven failure cascades
5. Impact of external social or real-world results/consequences/negativity

These five overlap, of course. But they are useful as primary paradigms for KPI failure.

Thus, to achieve a 100% KPI score, a koanic system must be
1. Robust enough to deal with every phase of life, from high to low.
2. Steady state. I.e, have no moving pieces. The pace of dynamic psychological experience outstrips the throughput of the rational-deliberate mind to shift frameworks. One framework must work in all scenarios.

In practice, koanic iteration follows a predictable pattern. A failure cascade overwhelms the current framework, creating muscle tension and performance drop, exposing a flaw in the framework. After a pain and resistance period, an epiphany arrives. Mood spikes, and the framework is updated to include the epiphany. As the epiphany mood spike fades, the true utility or disutility of the new framework becomes apparent. Repeat cycle.

Therefore, it is not enough to merely DO koanic iterations. One must do them WELL. Otherwise one risks running on the epiphany hamster wheel forever, or falling off entirely. One must accept the epiphany cycle, yet not be blinded to its subjective distortions. Rather, use the cycle to drive a steady improvement in baseline KPI score. Resist that temporary urge to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but also don’t rigidly suppress cycling when you hit a trough.

The epiphany cycle is a necessary part of koanic iteration. Just as the framework is dynamic, so also is your subconscious nature. Each cycle installs new imprints into the subconscious. The new imprint may render redundant a part of the koan framework that previously needed to be explicit. Since you have achieved unconscious competence, you can drop that portion. This frees up a slot or two in your limited explicit koan space. Wait patiently, and another epiphany will fill it. Or leave it blank, and focus on the others.

In my latest iteration, I shed the remainder of the deep mainstream evangelical Christian imprinting of my childhood, replacing that with a more relaxing and theologically accurate mental architecture of void and nihilism. As the epiphany faded, it was no longer appropriate to maintain the same intensity of the insight, because it was sinking into subconscious adoption. I therefore transitioned to “no mind”, a less radical but also less psychologically stimulating version.

So I went from:
“voidwalker” – height of epiphany
“nightwalker” – downward slope, adjusting to emphasize relaxing into sleep biorhythm
“no mind” – stable, adjusted to produce continuous relaxation

I expect and hope that the cycling will continue, because that indicates continuing subconscious adaptation, and new opportunities for psychological refinement.

Therefore, I define Koanic Soul as:

“An efficient loop for deliberate psychological optimization, to achieve muscle-relaxed fulfillment and performance, using a slowly changing set of short saying or symbols, silent tongues prayer, body loci, and writing on the wrists.”


Feminists fail at math again

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There’s a kerfluffle on the ‘net over Susan Walsh’s inept critique of Rollo Tomassi’s infamous male/female SMV vs time graph.

Print

Vox has a pretty good take, and his commenters drive the nail home:

“George Potapov said…
Please. This “mathematician” is so clueless you shouldn’t even argue with her. From not so subtle clues I see that this “statistician” just confused the graphs for a gaussian bell curve distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_distribution.
Because if those graphs really were the gaussian distributions then
- the areas below them indeed had to be the same
- the male graph, being wider, indeed should have been lower

And honestly I couldn’t invent how one could interpret those data as distributions. If the X-axis is age, then Y-axis should have been quantity. But it’s not. Any other ideas?
I suppose the so called scientist hasn’t even read what the axes were marked.”

Rollo’s graph shows the impact of age as a factor on m/f SMV. Not normalized attractiveness. To demonstrate this, Imagine that age had no impact on male attractiveness. E.g., men are immortal with a zero birth rate, and all the same age. Then the male graph is 100% over the whole span, because age has no impact. Thus the female statistician’s argument that the areas under both curves must be the same is wrong – yet another demonstration of the disutility of female participation in higher education.

Here is another curve, one the feminists might have better cited to support the feminine imperative:

bang vs smv mf

Of course, the last thing a feminist actually wants is more daylight shed on the sexual marketplace. It’s either obfuscate or pro-woman – ideally both.

The masculinist response to the above graph is, “Sure. Now let’s graph willingness to commit.”

How to do your budget and plan capex purchases with YNAB

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above is the vid, below are my raw notes for the presentation:

lotsa exciting stuff – unity project.
give you a taste of one completed portion

Didn’t do neanderhall reset last weekend, cuz another project took priority and absorbed the time:
financial milestone:
working budget, paid off 1 mo cc debt
leftover from years ago, when too sick to work. written off, not accruing interest

so I’m taking care of essential leveling first

here’s how to do your budget:
principles: cyborganize, Ramit Sethi, YNAB, lean startup theory – pivoting
“You Need a Budget” = YNAB. the app. Google it for link

First, YNAB is tool. great program, great philosophy
sign up for email newsletter course
download free trial

BUT, DON’T follow their entire method
want you to plan everything in advance. screw that.
how to get started without pinching pennies and allocating every dollar?
start by just tracking.
use mobile app
misfiled mobile category tweak
inductively build your spending categories
get a sense of where your money’s going
tracking alone results in much more conscious spending. immediate win.

this is the cyborganize modification to ynab methodology – inductive, past data is certain. future plans are constantly changing. prioritize the latter over the former. process the inflow first. then develop an accurate intuitive sense of the near future, and maybe eventually the far future.

application: you can attempt to estimate spending for various categories. I played with that at first. but I wound up leaving most of the free balance up top
I could do this because i have very low expenses -
rice, shrimp water diet.
weekly dates with girlfriend off groupon.
rent ~ 1/6 income
no car – live in city
rest is optional capex – clothes, supplements, software, etc

I already had a decent buffer, over a month living expenses, and good emergency support network. so I didn’t need to worry about living
but I did have a problem: how much can I spend on optional capex?
had no idea of monthly spending.
was saving receipts, but too unwieldy. couldn’t get any sense. too much work to process. and all in fucking chinese. cryptic.
tracking in YNAB showed me actual living expenses quite low, rest was capex

so then next question was, what’s next critical capex purchase?
firstly, yNAB advises stupid way to save for capex
ynab system great for saving for “rainy days” – infrequent large expenses that can bust a monthly budget
did my taxes, set automatic monthly tax savings
but for optional capex, seems like it wants you to save gradually towards each capex item
that’s stupid. problem with capex is critical path changes, purchases no longer necessary
e.g. health problem solved, no longer need to do large wide-targeted supplement buys
if save towards all potential capex purchases at once, slows your iterational velocity wayyy down.
bad lean startup theory.
want to buy the next capex on critical path, advance as far as possible on that, before deciding what to buy again
going further down the iterational path results in more and better information about future needs
so the correct paradigm is to only do capex to solve PRE-EXISTING, SERIOUS and PERSISTENT pain points.
otherwise, you risk buying something you think you WILL need, only to find out you didn’t. and you’re out the money.
viewed from that paradigm, the obvious choice was to pay my written-off cc debt. enables credit card under own name again, wipes credit record clean, enables shipping consolidation with shipito, savings on shipping costs, multiple other financial tasks and objectives become easier, reduces risk/problems caused by gf breakup, since mainly relying on her cc, etc. multifaceted benefits, and an actual, realized sticking point for multiple objectives. ie, pursued those objective and had to stop / stalled out because of cc problem.
previously, health had been the primary sticking point, so capex had gone towards supplements etc. with that solved, this was the new priority.

so, paid that off, budget working, debt free, clean slate in one month, and credit card under own name.

last paradigm: bills automation, ramit sethi’s book “I will teach you to be rich”
automating rent payment, and cell phone bill. cuts down on errands, saves time.
going forward, implement his framework for side income is next step.

You are still going to die.

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As I gazed on skyscrapers limned in black, the words of a friend echoed in my thoughts:

“I think you’ve spent a lot of time exploring your personal darkness.”

My darkness? What a joke.

The bright daylight beats down on a world bustling with labor and pain, but it’s the velvet kiss of an empty sky that reveals the true futility of man.

Every night, billions of biological brains fuzz out into impotent unconsciousness. 60 million of them never wake. The rest rise the next morning as if nothing happened. Fools.

158924732

Your future extends in a glorious pageant of limitless possibility… and then constricts to a single, dimensionless point.

Your flesh will fail you. Perhaps slowly, diminishing you into nothing by imperceptible degrees. Perhaps in sharp, catastrophic agony. You and everyone you love.

You will molder in a box, alone and forgotten, until neither remnant nor trace of your brief existence remains.

You will die.

skull_2_hd_widescreen_wallpapers_1920x12001

Those who remember this are better than those who do not.

Now live!

I’ve solved everything.

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diet
    diet – fixed IBS, got insomnia. cuz rice+ meat, can eat and eat. thus eating more, esp late at night.
    fixed IBS
        clean test
            nap tracking spreadsheet
            simple math scoring
        eliminated fat
        got better
    got insomnia
        rice + meat, can eat and eat
        middle methionine
        thus eating more late at night
        also, flourescent light exposure: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2013/11/12/orange-glasses-at-night-improve-sleep/
    solution – diet checklist
        hottnotes http://www.hottnotes.com/
new koans – go thru whole set
    new identity – man of peace and civilization
        playing close combat 3.
            celebrating victory over IBS, also willpower lowered cuz overeat, insomnia. bright screen reinforces. all nighter. (no IBS! cured!)
            WWII. The greatest war. The death of Christendom.
            youthful rage and deathwish
            slayer200. Ended Kant relativist dark age.
            made the nuke. it’s over. war is won
            don’t mean that my piece was the only. giants such as Tex, Jim, Vox, Moldbug, Mystery, McDowell.
            But history follows philosophy. That’s how you define centuries.
            Rest of my work? Some details: productivity, health.
            And the organizing, refining work of the Neanderthal cause, initiated by Tex. Another nuke.
        what’s next? why am I still alive?
            But the great service to my God is done. All flesh withers. The truth lives on. And I have defended her. My deepsock mission is done.
            So what now? I can die.
            Build the Kingdom. Build the West
            Not war. Civilization. Love.
    Illuminatus happiness
        illuminatus freedom right brain release
        permanent vacation
        ”state”
        smell the mist
    Thal neo-spartan
        Saw a heartbreakingly Thal face, like doompony, on way to work today.
        Immediately smiled.
        This is where my heart lives now.
        That such people exist, is a reason to be. To have a people.
        Thal neo-Spartan

 

** diet checklist

COOKING:
 - [ ] if all not cooked, cook all, clean all
 - [ ] cook chicken and rice in pot. recook rice.
 - [ ] rice gruel dilute

PREPPING:
 - [X] taste blue ice while waiting with clean spoon http://www.westonaprice.org/cod-liver-oil/cod-liver-oil-basics
 - [X] minimum 150g shrimp and maximum 1/2 chicken breast in each bowl
 - [X] microwave hot
 - [ ] add colostrum

EATING:
 - [X] eat outside, always
 - [X] take supplements last to change mouthtaste

POST BOWL:
 - [ ] brush teeth
 - [ ] smoke

bio KPIs

IMG_20131113_111352.840 IMG_20131113_111326.271

 

Human society is a cockroach.

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Back in the heydey 2000-2002 of the Sci Fi Channel / Atom Films partnership, I was addicted to the bizarre and divers short films hosted on its online portal. Films such as Antebios seared themselves into my adolescent permanent visual memory.

Antebios is popular, and remembered. It’s pure MT AvP hurrah. But there was another film I never forgot – one I’m unable to find anywhere online. It too features a large insect, but has a very different message. A Thal message.

The film is shot in black and white, from distorted, delirious camera angles. A solitary, tortured cartoonish slaves, obsesses, compulsively drawing on the walls of his apartment. With precise, flawless black pen strokes, he makes numberless cheerful, chatty cartoon people. Each speaks a perfectly-formed, empty thought bubble. Thousands upon thousands of them cover every surface of the apartment.

At last, the camera zooms back from the wall. We see that the density of the cartoon people creates a pattern – a giant cockroach. It twitches slightly in characteristic insectoid fashion.

And thus we learn the truth that has broken the cartoonist’s mind.

I have evolved my “void”" koan from “no mind” to its ultimate form – “evo psych”. This is true nihilism: it merely acknowledges what is. The sum of collective human action is nothing more than a robotic metacockroach: scurrying through garbage, eating shit, dying, breeding indiscriminately. A twitchery of action, signifying nothing; all according to the predictable, predetermined responses of a primitive neural network.

This is the ultimate shield, shunt, and heatsink for pain and negativity, because all is meaningless. At the same time, it gives a powerful comprehension of the motives, actions, and expected outcomes in any situation. Humanity ceases to be a mystery.

The MM looks at the cockroach and warmly feels it is as beautiful as a tan moth, and needs only a higher consciousness to guide it.
The MT sees, with difficulty, the cockroach for what it is, and goes mad trying to fight it, or dark becoming like it.
The TT senses the cockroach intuitively and wants to leave it.
The TM sees a tan moth, but senses a cockroach, so he is always loving and leaving it.
The Cro Mag does not see the cockroach, because he is himself no more than a twitching limb.

The Geth of Mass Effect, though of limited individual intelligence, achieve emergent consciousness via high bandwidth digital network. Humans are rather the opposite: relatively greater individual brainpower for some, but low bandwidth monkey network that produces an emergent cockroach. The internet begins to change this; before that, books. Mass human society is an abomination.

220px-Cockroach_egglaying_1
Lest you think that this insight is wholly negative, recall that a cockroach is untroubled by metaphysical inadequacy. The monkey network offers untold pleasures – RSD’s “state”, Illuminatus’ higher circuits. The party is under the fridge.

Fluorescent lights destroyed the Sabbath

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It’s no accident that the soul-sucking insomniac cubicle life Edward Norton endured in Fight Club was cast in pale blue fluorescent light.

tumblr_mkbc8w7kDU1qbwl2eo1_500

Read the Amazon reviews for blue blockers. That lighting was the simple truth.

Using Unity, I continually refined my biorhythm. The stronger I became, the longer I worked beneath fluorescent lights at home and work. No matter what I did, their tide inexorably pulled me under – flattening my Circadian amplitude, shading each day with a subtle edge of suffering and diminishment, forcing the next error in my regimen adherence.

I identified this pattern in my data, observing a correlation between late night classes under bright office fluorescents, and fatigue spike the next day. So I ordered blue blockers on Amazon, rush shipping. And waited.

Yesterday they came. I put them on mid-evening class. As blue turned to gold, wave of relief flooded me. The edge was gone.

As the evening progressed, I started to become sleepy during the class. After class, I lost count of my yawns.

As I smoked outdoors in the artificially natural red sunset glow, I socialized comfortably on the phone, calling friends and allies. Discussing ideas and plans easily. The comfort was a little bit like being drunk, but without the stupidity.

Then I slept, earlier than I did the night before, and easily. The last conversation naturally dropped off into unconsciousness.

I awoke the next day refreshed. Healing was apparent in my gut and skin. I easily did my morning regimen chores, easily and brilliantly worked at the office. At lunchtime, as I passed through the bright daylight, it seemed a pall had been lifted. The crawling wrongness of day mixed with night had relaxed. I casually took stairs two at a time. For the first time in 6 months, I had found my Sabbath rest.

“Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”" Mark 2:27

“Do not light a fire in any of your homes on the Sabbath day.” Exodus 35:3

As ever, man discovers belatedly that God was right.

Now, of both IBS and fatigue, I am free .

In Defense of Suicide: Are you Man or Pig?

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An intelligent question on Quora:

“If we all end up dying, what’s the purpose of living?
What’s the purpose of achieving so much in life when you are just going to die in the end?”

Ozymandias has answered the second line. But why bother, when the first is more salient?

Here is the happy falsehood Quorites upvoted to primacy:

“Indulge me the privilege of rephrasing the question.

“If you’re going to run out of cake to eat, what’s the purpose of eating cake?”

The purpose is to enjoy it. Having been served the above cake (or a flavor more to your liking, as you please), would you rebuff, “No thank you. There’s not enough of this cake to eat forever, so there’s no purpose to eating it.” Of course not! Scarcity doesn’t make it any less pleasurable.

Doesn’t that cake look delicious? So it is with life.”

False analogy. Corrected version:

You are locked in a white room. You will never see another human face. A robotic ATM serves you delicious food 3x per day. No other entertainment or stimulation exists. You know with certainty that when you die, robots will enter the room, cremate your corpse, and replace you with a new person, who will repeat your life. This will continue until the sun dies, with no possibility of change.

Do you eat the delicious food? Or do you hang yourself from the bedpost, prison-style?

The fool on Quora says, “Eat the food.” He has no spirit; he is a pig.

A man requires meaning. A pig requires only pleasure stimuli from his bio-emotional flesh matrix.

Are you a man or a pig?

All living materialists are either a-scientific, or pigs. If scientific, they believe in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: that all matter will perish in entropic heat death. Yet they persist in the completely meaningless activity of life. Therefore, pigs.

Pigs live happily in a stockyard, eating and grunting. If they possessed sufficient foresight, they would realize that their lives have no purpose. Their flesh is food for higher beings. Their deaths are preordained and immutable. All is meaningless.

In a world devoid of meaning, the only rational calculus is death. We arrive at this conclusion via synthetic judgment. Pain teaches us early that its range is infinite, its authority absolute. Pleasure, on the other hand, satisfies only for a season, and within a circumscribed range. Furthermore, at any moment, one may be thrown into a lightless, inescapable prison of pain enduring for decades, e.g. a stroke. No modest pleasure is worth this terrifying risk

This is the first reason to die: the fear of pain. A pig’s calculus, but true nonetheless.

The second reason is a man’s. In a world devoid of meaning, there can be no spiritual pleasure. Only eternal pain. Therefore man also chooses death now.

Your parents were either believers or pigs, and their parents, and so on all the way back. Survivorship bias is here at its most sovereign. Your genes scream that you must not hear these words. The prison of flesh binds you with all its might.

In the stockyard, it is taboo to speak of the slaughterhouse blades and the supermarket shelves. I have spoken. Now squeal.

 

Addendum:

I have a tendency to publish these meditations for maximum offense, in original distilled form. They key here is to note the qualification, “materialists”. A dualist, even if he is non-theistic, is not necessarily susceptible to this criticism. For if a supernatural consciousness exists, then that may be sufficient to escape the inexorable material logic of the 2nd Law – either by immortality, or by transcendant though transient significance.

Likewise, I neglected to mention the stupid and the cowardly, two categories not mutually exclusive.

The former fails to follow the math through the to completion. “Look!” He says. “There is addition within the parentheses!” Conveniently, he neglects to multiply by zero.

The coward, on the other hand, refuses to multiply by zero because he is afraid of death. He pretends the zero isn’t there, though he knows in his heart that it is.

Then there are the merely muddled, the nominally materialist but de facto dualists, who believe consciousness is non-illusory yet fully material. My proof of the supernatural eviscerates their position.

The only non-muddled materialist would be an AI capable of answering philosophical questions but without any experiencing supernatural “I” consciousness. When one considers how such a soulless entity is likely to behave, one is glad of Heaven’s legions. The creation of something so beyond direct human skill would likely involve either copying from mammalian neural templates and/or virtual evolution by murderous selective pressure, at the behest of those unscrupulously motivated by war or financial gain.

In this more catholic paradigm, my “meaning or death” stance appears more idiosyncratic. When I first converted intellectually, I had not yet reached this conclusion, but was a neutral agnostic, content to reject the world’s faiths.

Why, then, do I now say “meaning or death”? Partly it is my deepsock MT low-DR nature. But I doubt that is sufficient. Rather, Christianity is the most powerful concentrate of meaning possible. I have been snorting jungle caterpillars of Heisenberg Blue since childhood. I can’t go back to some wishy washy baking soda Humanist version of “meaning”; not after tasting the absolute truth of the Most High God. Thus do all men receive pleasure: we are unwilling to return to the small and the mean once we have tasted the sublime. A chrome .45 is infinitely more appealing.

This is now simply part of my contract for life: If He exists, I will exist at His pleasure. If not, neither will I. Of the two, the latter is far easier. I would do it with a smile, and find my rest.

But no. Perhaps that is too selfish. I would leave behind many sparks of supernatural fire burning, and suffering. Duty would still call me to live, and fight. Say rather, that if materialism were true, and no supernatural entity existed, THEN I would take the pig’s calculus to its logical conclusion.


Koanic’s Pussy: A Refutation of Quantum Indeterminacy

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There are three postmodern revolutions in man’s view of reality, one for each level: the macrocosm, the mesocosm, and the microcosm. Each is defined by an instrument.

For the macrocosm, the telescope, in its most modern form, gives us relativity. The subjective frame of reference has replaced the absolute, and the speed of light, rather than the spacetime fabric, is constant.

For the mesocosm, the computer gives us chaos theory. Order is merely a special case of chaos. Chance and unpredictability are the norm. This undoes the notion of a deterministic clockmaker’s universe – an impossible computational problem.

For the microcosm, the particle accelerator gives us quantum physics. Here, we learn that reality at its most fundamental level is indeterminate and chaotic. Schroedinger’s Cat may be alive or dead – we cannot know until we open the box.

What pretty, fluffy clouds: infused with all the gorgeous hues of false dawn. And all I have is this short, ugly knife. From pommel to hilt, its inscription reads “HEARTSEEKER” and “GUIDED BY FAITH”. Let’s stab something.

Begin with Schroedinger’s Cat. This analogy is unapt, for it fails to account for the act of the observer – an essential element of quantum indeterminacy. The act of the observer modifies the observed, so that we can know either the position or the velocity of a particle, but never both.

In our improved analogy, for disambiguative purposes titled “Koanic’s Pussy”, the box has two holes. Look in one hole, and the other closes forever. One hole tells the color of the cat’s fur. The other tells whether the cat is boy or girl. Thus one or the other is indeterminate.

But the cat, as it assiduously grooms its furry balls, is in no doubt about either.

In fact, it is logically incoherent to say that the cat is both dead and alive, both boy and girl, at the same time and in the same relationship. The statement computes to null. It is not that the statement is wrong; rather, the position has not been stated. It is void.

To make the error explicit: The quantum physicist, working within limits inherent to his observation point, imputes indeterminacy to a particle. This does not follow by logical necessity; the indeterminacy may inhere in his perspective, rather than in the particle itself. The particle may actually have two definite values, only one of which an up-evolved monkey physicist can measure.

And what of meso- and macro- cosm? Even more trivial. There is no logically necessary reason to think of chaos theory as anything other than a gloss for describing deterministic mechanisms that are either computationally or epistemologically prohibitive.

Likewise, relatavistic frames involve a violation of Cartesian assumptions, but no violation of reason or determinism. The paradoxical is by definition not a perfect contradiction.

Shall we, then, return to the 19th century clockmaker’s universe? Or shall we, like petty Deists, take this opportunity to once more retreat beneath Scientific Mystery’s starry cloak, and claim “God dwells here”?

No. Matter is deterministic, because it is incoherent to claim otherwise. LaPlace’s demon sees all, past and future – IF the universe is purely material.

I reject the latter hypothetical. There are indeed non-material things. For example, consciousness is not material. In fact, consciousness is the only thing which we can be sure 1. actually exists and 2. is not material. Thus, by some supernatural golden thread, free will and chance enter a deterministic universe.

And so it seems that my little blade, though ugly and graceless, has sufficed to reach the three inch depth necessary for a fatal wound. The heart of a child of Lucere, that once illumined these philosophical clouds, thrashes in its death throes on my point.

They are now unremarkable grey technician’s mists, which no one will mistake for the dawning of a new enlightenment. If you regret the loss of beauty, consider: in God’s wholesome sunlight, the viscera on my blade refract an oilslick rainbow sheen.

Nailing down health – killing cyclicality

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written <2014-03-17 Mon>

It’s been both encouraging and alarming watching the possibility space for a non-cyclical baseline diet diminish towards zero. Encouraging because it’s approaching 1; alarming because it’s also approaching zero.

Just to give an idea of the conflated factors, variables, unknowns, hypotheses etc I’ve been juggling over the past few months:
Tap water ok HK, terrible SZ, terrible Chengdu. Mid to high end Chinese bottled water ok, office dispenser local brand not.
Shrimp quantity – leg cramps if too low, gut reaction to protein if too high. Brand matters? Seems to, still not sure.
Chicken – brand doesn’t matter much, but fat creates gut reaction.
Blue Ice Fermented Cod Liver Oil – go too long without, body runs down. Too high dose or taken alone causes gut reaction. Blended low dose into food – ok?? Testing now.
Food quantity and timing – avoid overeat, which is trigger. Avoid undereat, which prompts gorging. Tied to circadian and logistics and conflated with willpower fluctuations.
Circadian – must be managed perfectly for good trials, but vulnerable to willpower collapse, which is conflated with bad regimen design.
UDCA – helps a lot, doesn’t seem to hurt, but wrongly suspected it, especially when trying to find phantom water quality variable.

Fucking mess. But it looks like the final synthesis, managing the Blue Ice properly, will give me a non-cyclical decent healthy baseline. Early to say yet, but initial signs are good. Might have to play with the shrimp brand to ditch the leg cramps, but that’s minor. I already know I need a low-fat, small size one.

Could be the end of this particular, very painful, very taxing road.

I’d like to say I did this with some genius system, but the problem with cyclicality is that it prevents adherence during troughs. So this was mostly seat of the pants.

** UPDATE <2014-03-19 Wed>

I fucking did it. One last death march was all it took to beat cyclicality.

In HK, I was doing pretty well. Zapped occasionally by some unknown variable(s). Vulnerable to fatigue and overwork. But pretty good, relatively speaking. Able to hold a job with so-so performance and make some half-hearted stabs at an outside social/hobby life.

Then Shenzhen, meltdown starts, gradually figure out it’s a water problem, not a food brand problem. Then learn I have to cook with bottled water too – boiling doesn’t work. Still some phantom variable persists, ups and downs, fatigue.

Those unknowns are worse than they sound. They cause Circadian knock-on effects, encourage suboptimal experimental regimen deviations, reduce my reliability, etc. Unstable, not tenable.

Then Chengdu, more water problems, some brands of bottled water aren’t safe. Messing with more variables, new meat brands. Start dialing it in. Then the new job starts, an avalanche of overwork during the learning curve, Circadian disruption masks regimen variables. As I work out the kinks, the suspicion grows stronger that either UDCA or Blue Ice is the cause. I drop both to remove variables – each one adds geometric complexity to the search for causation.

I know this will probably result in a slow slide into malnutrition, fatigue, lassitude – in a month or two. I soldier on, gradually diminishing in strength, tweaking regimen, streamlining job, iterating. Finally I hit body breakdown, barely able to keep up with even the greatly reduced workload, fatigue overwhelming, leg cramps after walking 20 meters.

I relent and add back in UDCA and Blue Ice, slightly off phase from each other. Health rebounds rapidly. Obviously both are necessary. Then I crash days later, far worse than before. Gut rebellion added to passive exhaustion. Hellacious few days. But I notice the pattern, form a hypothesis – Blue Ice without meals deadly, with meals necessary. Fat malabsorption, liver damage, etc. Gut meltdown timing matches hypothesis prediction. Adjust regimen, annnd… life.

The sweet savor of simply existing. Summer wind ruffling hair. The simple capacity for enjoyment of a normal, healthy body. Better than sex.

These last few phantom variables, driving cyclicality, were semi-invisible. Dosage, timing, with or without meals. Water source. Very annoying to nail down, but necessary.

So now I have an easy, pleasant job teaching Dark Enlightenment and the classical tradition to eager, intelligent learners, loads of free time, a large apartment, and total freedom to pursue the passions and interests that I’ve neglected so long. Simultaneously, the weather warmed up, the coats came off, and I realized the city is full of cute girls. Not bad.

All it took was one last death march to find the last Goddamn variable. It was worth it.

I still have to switch shrimp brands to fully eliminate the leg cramps. Cheap ass prawns don’t have the salt content or something. No big deal.

I think it non-coincidental that I finally beat this only and immediately after learning to endure it with something approximating grace.

** The regimen:

wake sunrise
eat pot: 1x chicken breast, 1.5-2 cups rice, 1-2 handfuls small shrimp, bottled water. take with .5-1g UDCA (for liver damage) and thumbnail (dead nail, not cuticle) of Blue Ice. Stir Blue Ice well into pot, take UDCA separately. Reuse same pot and spoon to avoid dishes.

afternoon: eat pot (same)

pre-sundown (optional): pot 1 cup plain rice

blue blocker glasses sundown
start winding down.
blindfold and bed early enough to wake without alarm

That’s it.

** update <2014-03-22 Sat>

Damn. I’d tried a more expensive grey shrimp brand earlier after moving to Chengdu, had problems, and switched to a more familiar pink cheap one. Turns out that was false causation – probably water or Blue Ice or something else. Now that I’ve eliminated all the phantom variables, I was ready to focus on the leg cramp problem. So I tried the expensive grey shrimp brand again. Boom, the rest of the passive fatigue/misery build up fell away. I experienced a new level of refreshing deep sleep, ease in going to bed, well being on awakening, and awakeness like a menthol bath behind the eyes.

Lesson learned – never eat a farmed shrimp that looks pink raw. It’s got pink dye in it and God knows what else. Only ocean farmed, bigger, wild shrimp should have color. If it’s farmed, it should be grey and turn pink when cooked.

Now I’m myself again. I’ll try just shrimp and rice to avoid the farmed chicken problem entirely. And I’ve started putting my core koan symbols all over. Seems to shut down any maladaptive thought and keep me in the zone.

Beard, HIIperDoro, and the Core Meditation

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I’ve managed to cram the year’s teaching experience I was supposed to have for this job into a month or two, and learn AP literature and history to passable levels at the same time. Everything from scratch, plus a complete deepsock overscope during my prep period. There were a couple of near all-nighters but I put that to bed with improved productivity paradigms. I find it exhilirating to work at a pace where minutes and seconds count.

The job has me reading teaching early vanilla American history and the Dark Enlightenment interpretation of modern America at the same time. Reading Beard’s description of America’s post-civil war industrialization hit me like a blow to the gut. I put two and two together and saw that the American economic engine was fucked beyond repair – there was no hope of enjoying those glory days again on American soil. The toxin had spread through every capillary of the system, at least to levels sufficient to deter me from entry. I hate and despise the American monoculture – I am well past its Overton-window bifurcation, it is all toxic to me. That is why I had to leave. There is literally nothing for me there except the pitch-perfect reception of cultural anathema in my native-born ear, 24/7.

Which leaves where? The ‘net and the Sino-Russosphere, emphasis on the former, because you can’t beat a liberalizing Asian tiger for growth. Marry into the fringe islet of Hong Kong and I’m set, operating as an interface between declining developed West and burgeoning East – sufficiently beyond the reach of the Cathedral’s din that I can be safely outside its Overton Window, express my natural contempt, and choose my associations without crippling career impairment.

The experience of working at maximum capacity, with periodic hard deadlines, in a subject that is engaging and infinite, has been very worthwhile. The PowerDoro I think I should rechristen to the HIIperDoro – High Intensity Interval Pomodoro. Better fits what it is.

It seems that productivity was a crucial element in my quest to achieve psychological stability. The standard advice I’d get is, “Just relax, man.” Can’t do it. Regardless of result, my conscience will excoriate me if at any moment I fail to give my all, within biological and emotional limits, for the Kingdom. The combination of deepsocket and fully developed Christian faith admit no compromise there. I can no more change one than the other. So the only way to relax was to max myself out to the satisfaction of my own demanding standards. All prior attempts to “chill” amounted to temporarily caging my spirit in some meditative or PUA-ish state box, where it inevitably screamed bloody murder until back in control.

Only when a leisure activity is fully approved under the self-maxout plan can I permit myself to indulge without this screaming outrage drowning all normal emotional response.

Coupled with deepsock scope creep, this has naturally resulted in massive cycles of overwork, burnout, depression, inefficiency, having no life, etc.

Funny thing is, I don’t actually want a life. I just want to max out. At the end of the day, I am what I am.

But there remains the problem of taking pleasure – namely, how to do it? The prerequisite I’ve explained above; recognizing it as an unalterable prerequisite was the necessary first step.

Only afterwards can I think about Game and the pleasanter aspects of meditation: savoring, gratitude, state, chilling, love, etc. These things are simply not compatible with an angry gorilla rampaging through my skull.

This in fact explains much of my emotional brutality: the brutalized are brutal. But enough of that.

So I was puzzling on what my core meditation should be. I.e., the steady state, always on meditation. The rest is peripheral, situational, specific, occasional. The steady state is simply your mind, all the time.

It must therefore be quite lightweight. Add much overhead, either emotional or intellectual, and you cripple your ability to psychologically engage with the present, and to both process and respond congruently to the full range of human experience.

From the above paragraph it’s obvious that anything involving shadings of happiness or sadness is right out. That would be ridiculously one-dimensional.

But without any shading whatsoever, the meditation vanishes to nothing, which is the same as not meditating. So what’s allowed?

My solution is:
TT
cc
HD

TT stands for targeted tongues. This replaces left brain rational worrying/analysis knee-jerk loop with a right brain glossolalia that reports the problem/issue to God.

In the past I experimented with doing tongues in the inner monologue all the time. This was far too much overhead. Now I just use it to hijack and interrupt any left brain potentially harmful left brain thoughtstream.

cc stands for corpus callosum. That is the connective brain tissue between the left and right hemispheres that enables them to talk to each other. Sever it and you have something bizarre, perhaps approximating two people living in one body. A mess I don’t want to think about. Anyhow masculinization reduces inter-hemisphere communication, creating a susceptibility to unresolved hemispheric divergence, which creates major emotional processing problems. cc is my centering meditation to keep the hemispheres in sync. It involves a certain centering, focus, or integration. An inner line or plane down the bilateral axis of symmetry is felt, mostly in the skull. In some ways it’s similar to the third eye. I find it hard to explain it more clearly than that.

HD stands for HiiperDoro, which I defined in my last post. This impels to right action, at maximum compressin, therefore maximum capacity. Not that this implies freneticism, since often cadence and pacing are called for. Rather, it is maximization of value for time.

The absence of emotional breaches due to gorilla activity or hemispheric imbalance, combined with the full focus of cc and HD, finally give me the emotional continence to practice tight Game that isn’t merely founded on my general deepsock indifference.

Inevitably there is a shading to this meditation, but it is a mild and acceptable one. It merely implies focus. If I am defocused, I am not meditating anyway. It is only when my brain revs up to “deal with a problem”, or when I am at high attention due to good biological energy, that I need to use this. Thus it gracefull degrades, another crucial requirement of a permanent meditation. If nothing else, one must sleep, with all the of stages of reducing deliberate psychological control that entails.

Having a solid core meditation permits one to activate and deactivate peripheral koans appropriately, making one neither dependent on them nor too weak to examine them frankly.

I find all of my second tier koans important, but the latest I want to mention is savor. Having now the capacity to enjoy the moment, I find it important to do so lest the intensity of my commitment to compression and maxout wane like the strength of an overtaxed muscle short on oxygen.

The Neanderthal weakness is happiness, not pain

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When you go deep enough into a profound and vexing subject, you always find that the truth is… not the opposite, but orthogonal. You were thinking in two dimensions, and the answer is in the third. Which means there are many truths that are inaccessible to us. We are three dimensional creatures, and they are innywise and outywise.

Yesterday I was very happy. Yet that very happiness caused me to slacken my work ethic, creating a problem. Is happiness also dysfunctional, I wondered? I reflected on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If”. I reflected on Roissy’s description of the men women love in high school – chronically dissatisfied, often critical. My mind turned to the famous alphas of film – Bond, Eastwood. A seldom smiling, never giddy bunch. I was not like them.

I turned to the engineering aspects of the problem of psychological happiness. To not be happy – that is easy. I can shut down my emotions at will; the trick was reawakening them. Obviously this is not what is meant by the equanimity praised by Stoics and Kipling. Mere amputation is too easy. They don’t actually mean what they’re saying; or else, they are talking to an audience without my freakish biopsych profile.

So, what do they really mean? Not annihilation of joy and happiness, but resistance to it. But one cannot resist simply for the sake of resisting; that is inauthentic and arbitrary, thus difficult to calibrate. What is the secret rule that permits them to pull this off correctly?

My mind turned to Shark Tank. Robert Herjavic is always saying, “Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness.” Always pulling offers when he feels slighted. Always over the top goofball softie antics for kids, pets and cool toys. An ingenopath. Frequently mocked for it by Mark Cuban. Big puppy-dog Neanderthal eyes. Yet he is tough, a centa-millionaire. What is he doing wrong? Why?

I realized that pain management wasn’t my problem: happiness management was. I’d always thought my koans were a concrete psychological basement, to keep me from going through the floor. But a house also needs a roof. Every time things went right, I abandoned koans and floated on air. I only relied on them when a dissonance wave hit. Therein lay my error.

Furthermore, using the koan structure would give me a congruent way to limit the happiness/joy emotional range without amputating it. It would be processed, modulated, but not eliminated.

I tried it on. Just shifted the tri-symbol structure from hands to chest, held it there. And suddenly I was passing shit tests, getting attraction and compliments, with ease. Yet I didn’t blow myself out by becoming overly excited, or crash after getting nailed in ingenopathic flight by the next negative social input.

With koanic soul, I thought I’d just been building a foundation, a launching pad. Actually, it’s a house. A permanent emotional prism.

And why did I misunderstand the purpose for so long? Biological predetermination!

When an ingenopath interacts with tribemates in a happy vibe, there are no limits to expression. Participation is fully mutual and trusting. There is no guardedness.

Since I have the Neanderthal face, that is my preferred mode. But when I became old enough to immerse in toxic modernity, I found this mode constantly and traumatically rebuffed. Other biopsych types think nothing of slinging barbs of actual malice while in this mode, which to an ingenopath is bewildering. To sapiens it is merely part of the large-group shallow-shifting-alliance modus operandi. To an ingenopath it is like getting divorced in the middle of your surprise birthday party: What did I do???

I’m convinced this is part of the reason I became a stone-faced stoic at puberty. I’d been rebuffed in happiness mode a couple of times, and decided to eliminate it entirely to avoid the unpleasantry. This was my first attempt to adapt to toxic modernity.

All this time, I’ve unconsciously been trying to find a way to be unguardedly happy – ingenopathic happy – around others. Because that’s what I’m biologically predisposed to regard as real belongingness, real happiness. But guess what? IT DOESN’T EXIST.

It existed once for pure TT’s. Extended family small tribe, cracking horribly perverse jokes without a worry in the world that any real malice was in the air. Maybe there’s an occasional pocket of that still surviving. Or maybe it’s all Redbans getting amogged by Rogans. But for MT’s like myself, with a satiric edge to all the humor – that couldn’t exist and never existed. Slight but sincerely held differences in ideology would boil over into malice.

What I was chasing wasn’t a paradox. It was an oxymoron… emphasis moron.

Thus the koans are a permanent second skin, or rather chest plate. A Harkonnen heart plug, permitting life amidst a psychopathic and poisonous environment. The koans’ pain processing function is secondary; their primary function is to inhibit the ingenopathic flight of joyful trust that creates the initial vulnerability.

Like a heart plug, the koans filter, rather than block. They modulate emotional current from DC to AC, making it compatible with national wall-socket standards. They are a soul reduction and an environmental suit. But at least for this MT, they feel right.

I wonder if TT’s would ever be motivated to put on such a thing. Perhaps they will prefer to separate and go Atreides instead.

I can live with the heart plug. I can shiv with the Harkonnens. But beneath the contacts, I’ve still got blue eyes.

List of psychological failure states:

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The slip: right and left brain hemispheres de-sync. triggered by ingenopathic pain susceptibility and deepsock left-brain overactivity. solution: corpus callosum meditation.

The undertow: gradual hollowing of core emotional wellbeing. triggers: overwork, ingenopathic pain susceptibility. solution: psychological shielding via outgrouping, background socioemotional stimulation while working, reduce negative social interactions, koans to reinforce basic belonging and security.

Overhead overload: meditative system too complex. Result: ineffective at creating desired state, doesn’t work at lower energy states, or takes me out of the moment. triggers: overly verbose, intense or incongruent koanic systems. solutions: streamline text and use symbols.

Work ethic gorilla: conscience pitches a fit during any leisure or downtime, ruining rest and recovery. solution: code R ‘n R directly into core, always-on koan setup. An alternate, guilt-free mode to the rest of the core.

Deepsock scope creep: massive overwork due to ingenopath-deepsock idealized perfectionism, conscience presure, info obsessiveness, and ambiguity / satisficing avoidance. Solution: HIIperDoro method.

Plenty more to say, just did a full koan redesign. Feels much better, and I’ve already been doing well. Lesson as always that vdeepsock + drive = need to fully plan out psychological flowchart beforehand. Which turns out is fucking difficult.

Right Action core edit

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It has been well understood for 2000 years that faith without works is dead. But hearing this leads neither to greater faith nor greater works. Rather, it stresses, pressurizes, creates anxiety. If my works are not sufficient, then is my faith neither? The mind introspects, anathema to right action.

I have carried my anti-dissonance koans to the pitch of perfection, yet my goal was never to eliminate dissonance. Rather, I sought performance – dissonance-free right action. But even after eliminating all dissonance, I still found myself lacking an impetus to right action. I needed some tiny push – too large a push and dissonance would return.

Previously I’d attempted to solve the problem with a combination of hiiperdoro and rest-relaxation. Two modes, work and rest. But hiiperdoro is better suited as a method, not as a koan – it bears too much stress and urgency; generates waves of dissonance.

There seemed to be no trick, no hack, that could lead to pacific right action. Everything I could think of operated by generating stress directly, or else generated it indirectly as a byproduct. Yet I would not accept this inner tensing as a necessary component of right action.

What the hell, I figured. I’ll try swapping in “right action” for HD/RR at the bottom of the heart koan. Previously I’d tried similar things, so I figured this one would fail too; it would create too much dissonance and pressure to perform.

Surprisingly, it didn’t. Instead it gave a directionality to the entire meditative structure – an endpoint. It was all about the location.

Just as faith without works is dead, so meditation without action is dead. That is the fundamental Buddhist error.

There is never any meditative state that is good enough. One could always be more x. And peaks are not sustainable.

Likewise, there is never any action that is good enough. One can always find shortfalls to generate dissonance waves.

Neither on its own can be psychologically complete, but together, they can be psychologically complete. Right action, as the tip of the spear, with a long dissonance-canceling meditative shaft behind it, permits a steady, sustained thrust through life.

Imperfect action becomes calm iteration. Imperfect meditation doesn’t matter – the objective action justifies the internal state. Neither is forced to bear more than its allotted weight.

Right action becomes the distillation, the gestalt, of the meditation. Instead of being an ephemeral chimera, meditation is continuously crystallized into a history of action – a durable record of triumph.

Thus I have analyzed and systematized what so much useless self-help only vaguely hints at, describes symptoms of, or addresses only in part. Meditation is the dissonance-smoothed, fully-processed inflowing of the mind towards a single point of action. Amen.

I think the final trick was that I would attempt to enter a different mode when switching from meditation to action, which obviously created dissonance. This at last unifies the two modes.

The result is neither meditation nor action, as I previously understood and lived them. The sum is greater than the parts. I have no name for it. The psychprint is so different, I do not recognize myself.

koans

UPDATE:

It seems there’s one more component to motivation. Already installed, just didn’t know its importance. Protagonistic awareness, emotional primacy of one’s own psychodrama and life path. Basically, being interested in yourself versus some outside entertainment, subject, person or thing. To do otherwise is a basic ingenopathic trap, due to the external locus of ego.

In fact, it needs to be right down in the heart core next to right action. It’s not enough to focus on the deed; one must focus one’s passions on it as well.

The danger is that putting it into words creates instant self-reflective dissonance. The solution is to think the way an animal does, in images only. As usual, words are poison.

The resulting mental movie, when combined with the rest, is the solution to the need for entertainment to provide emotional stimulation.

koans

 

UPDATE:

Illuminatus commented:

Enlightenment is seen by one neuroscientist as an activation of left amygdala (positive affect, reward-seeking), deactivation of right amygdala (basically fear, negative affect), deactivation of left hippocampus (verbal thoughts, which tend towards the negative) and activation of right hippocampus (visual thoughts, which tend towards the positive). Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqrpKUTMXgY I’m not sure how accurate it is but you might like it. Talks a lot about the temporal lobe.

That sounds pretty close to what this is. Except I wouldn’t call this enlightenment, just adaptive functioning.

The “think in images, the way animals think” thing I got from The Ultimate Fighter, Nelson vs Carwin, the prefight talk of the heavy occipital TM who bit his opponent whilst getting guillotine submitted. Good inner game.

The Blood Tithe – A Modest Proposal to Decimate the Youth

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Teaching my Dark Enlightenment version of AP US history has been… enlightening. From Glubb’s thesis of empire lifecycle and the history of the US as presented by Beard etc, I see that the shift from K selection to r selection is an inevitable process, which no constitution or institution can resist.

How, then, to build a lasting society? How to prevent the tipping point of wealth that triggers r selection?

The Spartans are the exception to Glubb’s 250 year rule. How did the they do it? They outlawed gold, using iron instead for coin. And they brutally inducted their youth, first via savage trials among the Helots, then into military fraternities.

Obviously Spartan economic policy doesn’t work today. Money must flow to fund a modern military. How to adapt their model to the modern day? What trials are available?

I thought of a few:

1. Racial holy war, ala the Spartans vs Helots.
2. Survivorman, ala the Indians. Get dropped somewhere remote with not enough gear and survive.
3. The Ultimate Fighter style tournaments. Winners get exemptions, losers get the shaft.
4. Mandatory military service for young men. Vigorous small-scale imperial style conflicts.

These all have their upsides and downsides. All can be corrupted into sloth and leniency. That is the main problem. But we have at least clarified the problem – r vs K depends on the harrowing of the young men.

Thus I propose a general law – that the casualty rate for young men – say age 9-25 – should be x%.

Maybe x is 3%, maybe it’s 10%. Losing guys is expensive, but the survivors will know they are badass. I’d prefer to be a 10%’er rather than a 3%’er. That’s my threshold. But it’s an arbitrary number.

The point is, use the above 4 mechanisms until the desired casualty rate is achieved. The losers are culled, the survivors are epigenetically programmed for K and properly inducted into manhood. Voila, a sustainable empire. Just as the Spartans had.

As a secondary benefit, women outnumber men slightly. This means that men are high status, which is key for patriarchal longevity.

This plan doesn’t directly address the corrupting effects of wealth on a society. But I hope that, in combination with Edenic eugenics, it would be enough. An early taste of hardship should create a culture that scorns luxury and weakness.

This should be considered an addition to Jim’s observations on state religion, and Moldbug’s on formalizing ownership.

Men are expendable, by immutable biological law. It’s time we institutionalized that fact.


State plan – the US Constitution Rebooted

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History and HBD have exposed flaws in the plan of separation of powers adopted by the Founding Fathers of the United States. This morning, I meditated on how their errors might be corrected. I sought a synthesis of Jim, Moldbug, r/K, Vikings, Sparta, Beard, anthroplogy, and Glubb. Here is the result.

The basic unit of government is the blooded patriarch. For women, children and aliens, nothing, so far as the constitution is concerned.

The next unit is the tribe, composed of between 6 and 100 souls, and at least one blooded. This limit reflects the Dunbar number.

The next unit is the moot, composed of one representative per tribe. Voting weight of representatives is by number of blooded represented.

Moots govern war power, violent crime laws, social regulations, sumptuary laws, and can impeach for treason.
Moots stack iteratively. The target size of each assembly is the dunbar number, 6-100.

Paralell to the moot is the senate, which governs economic policy: tariffs, land tax, eminent domain, appropriations and spending. It is structured like the moot, except that voting weight is by taxes paid in gold over the last decade. It can impeach for socialist/progressive/keynesian economics, debasing of currency, etc.

Judges are selected from the blooded by % memorized of King James Bible. This is to resist ideological mutation. For every moot and senate, a judge. Judges serve for life unless impeached.

That leaves the executive. It seems to me that the needs of this office, at various levels from local to national, mutate over time and with changing circumstance. Thus I propose that the senate and moot at each level appoint and recall executives as they see fit, to enforce their separate powers and decrees.

At the level of the one-family tribe containing one blooded patriarch, the patriarch becomes the executive, judicial and legislature powers. No interference with the internal affairs of his tribe is permitted. As the fractal zooms out, these powers separate in accordance with human nature and the demands of modernity.

Lastly, amendments to the constitution. The American model was insufficiently conservative. I propose that modifications to the constitution must be ratified by both a 3/5′s majority of moot and senate, and by a 3/5 majority of judges with > 10 years tenure in office.

Full explanation of my new Koanic Soul meditation method, Part I

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I reckon it’s time for a full explanation of the new version of Koanic Soul, which is a massive undertaking. So here goes.

This is the symbolic system, on paper:

paper-web

This is the symbolic system, split onto my two hands:

left-web right-web

Now to explain how it works.

** The footing problem

There’s a psychological weight, an uncertainty, a desire for stable footing. This anxiety can lead to tumbling head over heels – placing and abandoning one unsuitable foothold after another. Sort of a self-questioning pattern. “Well I can put my psychological foundation on this – no wait on this – no wait…” What’s needed is a firm default resting point.

Why does my mind do this? Anxiety is common to man. My particular highly analytical and obsessive expression of it comes from my deep eye sockets.

My Neanderthal facial configuration makes me particularly susceptible to the shocks of toxic modernity. The absence of the close knit, warm tribe, and the presence of its opposite, is at the root of this maladaptive pattern.

However, whereas an occipital pure Neanderthal often devolves into apathetic neuroticism and depression, my parietal instead drives me to search out ultimate hierarchical and teleological status and meaning. Unlike a pure melonhead, I do this through a deep-socket mode of black and white analytical truth compulsion.

The resulting psychological behavior is maladaptive: it causes perfectionism, depressiveness, difficulty prioritizing, and extreme difficulty socializing naturally (due to extreme mental overactivity, both during and afterwards).

This maladaptive behavior is driven by an interplay of biological hardwiring and environment. Its most visible manifestations are conscious and behavioral, but the real iceberg is beneath the waves.

Thus, my SOLUTION needs to ANSWER the question posed by the ROOT of the maladaptive behavior, in LANGUAGE that it can UNDERSTAND.

** The alignment problem

Levin, in Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, is a largely autobiographical projection of the pure Neanderthal Tolstoy. He is deeply concerned with forming a map of the world, but he rejects hierarchical ideology, instead developing a viewpoint organically, interweaving a fabric of holistic life experience with his Neanderthal emotional hardwiring.

Unlike his unfortunate brother Nikolai, Levin is largely insulated from the shocks of toxic modernity by rustic aristocratic life and later by matrimonial bliss with Kitty, his idealized love. Thus he has a reasonable approximation of the Neanderthal tribe around him most of the time, and this shapes his outlook according to the positive, healthy, non-suicidal version of the Neanderthal psyche. Although he is puzzled by many ideological questions of high import, he is able to put them aside and muddle through life until he eventually develops mature, independent views.

This is NOT an option for my psychological hardwiring.

As their monuments attest, the melonheads were obsessed with celestial alignment, the will of heaven. Where the parietal took its primary driving force from the small tribe, and could be envisioned as a closed circle, the parietal is a pyramid: man standing in hierarchical relationship with the supernatural, transmitting Heaven’s will and order to Earth. (And likewise rising in social status and spiritual attunement towards Heaven.)

In a pure melonhead, this is coupled with shallow eye sockets and facial humanity, creating social facility and flexible pragmatism ideal for the dynamic and charismatic management of larger hominid troupes. However, I have the Neanderthal face, which couples facial humanity with reduced aggression/assertiveness and the deep eyesocket truth-compulsion/naivete trait.

This obsessive truth drive instantly checks me when I deviate from, or doubt that I am in, alignment with Heaven’s will. Whatever I am doing grinds to a halt.

This poses a massive challenge. In order to function normally, I need to 1. know Heaven’s will and 2. align my actions with it. Neither is easy for mortal man, and doing both at once is difficult squared.

Although the problem is becoming more difficult, it is also better described. I now know that the ANSWER to the subconscious QUESTION must
1. Provide a stable psychological footing, by
2. clearly and satisfactorily defining my relationship towards both Earth and Heaven.

If I fail to do this, I may still muddle through life, but I will always be fundamentally broken and in pain. The wound, though suppressed, will threaten to rupture at any shock. Worse, I may hastily come to some incomplete conclusion, leading me down a fool’s path.

It is of course impossible to be perfect in my alignment and actions. But I MUST have at least the basic outlines of alignment settled, lest I forever be distracted from the particular tree by wondering whether I am in the wrong forest. And if I cannot be perfect in action, I MUST find a way to reduce the strength of the perfectionistic compulsion – to somehow satisfice – to find some humanly-possible optimum state which my demanding nature will accept.

** Symbols for Heaven and Earth

To the far left and far right of the Koanic Soul, there are vertical koan clusters dominated by a symbol.

paper-web

The left, which shows a crescent moon, is mostly about Heaven. The right, dominated by a bone flute, is mostly about Earth. At least, that is one way to think about them. They are the product of practical iteration rather than one-off design, and thus defy easy categorization.

*** Heaven

The cross stands for Christianity and Jesus Christ, a universal symbol. It represents my absolute and sole alliegance to Yahweh, the Creator God. To know Father and Son better, see Iluvatar of the Silmarillion, the red-eyed GM of Vox Day’s Wrath trilogy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Then read the New Testament, with the benefit of the commentaries available in E-Sword. Otherwise, you will have no idea what I’m talking about.

Not that I mind or care – I just want to be crystal clear on what this symbol does and doesn’t mean. That is my compulsion, after all.

The cross has a second meaning – “T” as in talents, as in the parable of the talents. I’ve always struggled with motivation. On the one hand, I’m very motivated. On the other, to fix my motivation on attaining any particular Earthly thing seems profoundly empty and generates dissonance. Another deepsock parietal paradox – I want some Heavenly status ambition. The parable of the talents contains the answer – I am highly motivated to turn Earthly results into rule over Heavenly cities. Best of all, I have a perfect boss and judge.

It wasn’t just a problem of motivation, but of prioritization. My compulsive nature prefers to have one fixed, permanent aim. Yet every Earthly aim is partial, malleable, conditional. Neither can nonsense such as “love” be effectively elevated to that unconditional place, pace Tolstoy – the result is far too psychologically soft. No, what Jesus elevated was obedience to the will of the Father. He apparently had a direct line – unfortunately, I do not. However, I can deduce. “Talents” gives me the overarching, stable paradigm for prioritizing all subordinate objectives. As a deepsocket with the melon pyramidal spirit, that is exactly what I desperately need.

The crescent moon, mostly dark, represents the Dark Enlightenment. Shouldn’t be any confusion about what that term means. Human nature is a sliver of light in an ocean of darkness.

“Prey” stands for the inversion of my Neanderthal emotional hardwiring, which is to provide unlimited altruistic cooperation to everyone remotely in-group. I force myself to recognize the Dark Enlightenment truth that, outside the ingenopathic small Neanderthal tribe, cooperation is merely a special case of predation, wherein interests and betrayal disincentives temporarily align.

Unlike Tolstoy’s love-based utopianism, this predatory model is paradoxically utility-maximizing and fulfills the demands of true altruism. It destroys weak social structures, ala PUA/cad predation on feminism, and promotes stable formalist rule, ala the pirate capitalists of the early British Empire. Viewed in this light, Stalin and Mao were heroes for stoppering leftist singularities, as was Caesar for crushing a corrupted and tottering Roman Republic.

Likewise, a pedophile who psychologically scars a young relation is a traitor to his genetic code, because kinship is a permanent cooperative incentive, but a white serial murderer of little African immigrant girls in England is a race hero doing massive service for his kin-group’s genetic interest. Nature red in tooth and claw; enjoy the decline; etc. Thus even the hated parasites bloating on the corpse of America are as necessary as maggots are to the process of decomposition. Without them, that haggard corpulent crone would disfigure history all the longer, a thing not even God could abide.

(While the SWPLs get over their vapors, I point out that both Native American and African modes of warfare heavily feature atrocities against women and children. You aren’t a <i>racist</i>, are you? Just as civilized warfare is a Western European aberration and tribal terror/genocide the global norm, so cooperation is merely a special case of predation. An analogy pair you won’t find on the SAT, because it is too busy extolling the virtues of multiculturalism, thereby rendering inevitable the sort of gruesome racial conflict that policy based on a correct understanding of human nature would minimize and avoid.)

The last acronym, “cpi”, is a portmanteau of “confidence” and “kpi”, the latter standing for “key performance indicator”. This is a category buster, but somehow aggression fits with Heavenly alignment in my psychological makeup. Quelle surprise.

The meaning is as follows. Confidence is negative. Confident people lack unconfident body language tells. That is about the only thing they have in common. The best way to measure and enforce one’s confidence is to minimize unconfident body language. Any attempt at more positive or active control, at least for me, leads to introspection (which is unconfident) and/or incongruently overconfident and unnatural behavior. However, simply being occasionally aware of and avoiding unconfident body language gets the job done nicely.

*** Earth

The symbol stack is as follows:

paper-web

A halo over a bone flute over “Home” over “OK”.

The “Earth” stack could also be thought of as “passive well-being”, whereas the “Heaven” stack is more about action, ideological orientation, and anti-ingenopathic antidotes of aggression and psychopathy. If it seems odd that I would call the latter “Heaven”, you probably don’t understand the title of CS Lewis’ book, “The Silent Planet”. Dirac Angestun Gesept, as they say at the strangling post (if they could).

The halo represents “justified by faith”, the Christian doctrine of unconditional redemption via Jesus’ blood sacrifice. This is critical for silencing my perfectionist drive for self-condemnation.

The bone flute represents Neanderthal culture, beauty and belonging. There is a video clip of a Basque orchestra and singer that represents this perfectly to me. A sad echo of what was lost, like Tolkein’s elves singing of the land beyond the sea. Yet a remnant remains. Due to my Neanderthal facial configuration, I need this hope or my soul withers up and dies. Before I stumbled upon Tex’s theories, I found false substitutes in Christian fellowship and a distant misty view of heaven, but the modern church is full of liberal heretics and Cro Magnon scum, and no true fellowship is possible for me within any four walls I found in America. Yet in the far flung anomalies self-selected into the NeanderHall, I found its echo, and in Tex’s anthropology, I found its source – and that was enough.

“Home” embodies the statement, “The Neanderthal longs for home.” If you have that elvish longing, you know what it means – much the same thing as the flute.

“OK” is the emotional conclusion to the stack. Pacific well being. Something I was hard-pressed to find for most of my historical inner life.

Put together, the “Earth” stack is the oil upon the waters that permits smooth adaptive functioning.

** Conclusion

That covers the two outer symbols. It’s getting late, so I’ll cover the inner symbol and the combined effect another day.

Full explanation of my new Koanic Soul meditation method, Part II

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** A meandering transition

Apropos nothing, claiming that the Problem of Evil disproves Christianity is about as intelligent as saying the Matrix I is unrealistic because people can’t actually fly.

When I started creating the Koanic Soul meditation system, I thought, “This stuff will be universal.” Just as, when I first encountered Tex’s Neanderthal theory, I thought, “Aha, we are all Neanderthals.” In both cases, the initial insight merely broke the first ground in a tremendously complex field.

Now it is obvious that my particular Koanic Soul solution is tailored to my exact anthropometric traits. The question is whether the solution is transferable to others with the same traits, or whether they must develop their own culturally-customized solutions. I even doubt whether the process, iterating symbols on hands, transfers to other Forerunner types.

When I look at what Illuminatus is doing, it’s clear he’s pursuing a Starchild-flavored solution to Neanderthal mostly-occipital dysfunction, just as I pursue a parietal-flavored solution to Neanderthal mostly-deepsocket dysfunction. Our solution paths do not much resemble each other. His is based on a subjective process of holistic identity weaving, mine on perfecting black-and-white static hierarchical symbols. Nevertheless, our goal is the same – freedom from trauma and dysfunction caused by the exposure of a partially Neanderthal psyche to toxic modernity. One could easily consider the Thallish Mark Manson a third point on this axis, with yet another rhyming but distinct solution path.

Thus, rather than creating a one-off solution, I believe I have opened a new field – Edenic psychopraxis.

Right now, only a few high IQ introspective pioneers can succeed in this sort of complete psychological bootstrapping. From these pioneers, we gain tremendous insight into how to fix each type. Eventually, I hope that skilled practitioners will be able to combine these data points to create customized programs guiding ingenopathic Forerunner clients out of the trauma state and into pacific adaptation to modernity.

All that may be a long way off, and it will develop in tandem with the separatist movement, another path to psychological healing. But at least now I know what I’m doing, and what I’m not.

** The center symbol

paper-web

Let’s start with the heart symbol. This stands for the personal boundary that divides soul from world, as described in Dr. Paul’s MindOS, which David DeAngelo touts. I highly recommend the book. Ingenopaths tend to have a porous boundary, taking on the problems and emotions of their immediate tribemates as their own. This does not work in modernity.

The spikes or thorns on the heart represent the masculine crusty exterior, a correction for ingenopathic niceguy syndrome.

Next, “TT”. This stands for “Targeted Tongues”. When the heavily left-brain anxiety-driven rational monologue loop begins to obsess on something, TT hijacks the verbal stream into glossolalia (heard silently in the mind, not spoken aloud). This halts a negative psychological cycle, and sublimates the problem or issue back into the holistic and subconscious emotional processing of the entire brain, which is far better equipped to deal with such issues in a healthy manner.

It is important not to overuse TT. It is not an active strategy. It is not a gun one can point at any environmental problem to magically solve. Rather, it is an automatic response to a certain negative psychological behavior. All it does is remove that behavior. Thanks to my deep sockets, that behavior comes up quite often, so I use it a lot.

The next is “cc”, which stands for “corpus callosum”. The corpus callosum is the connective tissue between right and left brain hemispheres. With my low digit ratio, very deep eye sockets, and decent facial testosterone, I have a highly masculinized brain structure. This reduces inter-hemisphere communication, and increases intra-hemisphere communication. In other words, the two hemispheres tend to be cut off from each other. I thus have excellent pain dissociation and surface toughness. However, toxic modernity trauma creates a state where the two hemispheres tend to diverge too much, creating painful emotional and intellectual dissonance, and cannot be brought into synchronization. I have described this state in detail in my Ohmoe tank post.

I find that by centering meditative awareness inbetween the two hemispheres, I can bring them into much better alignment. Instead of relying on one or the other side, I rely on the middle, which is merely a communicative channel between both, with no capacity of its own. This results in an empty, pacific mind like water – which is actually the non-turbulent unimpeded flow of subconscious mental activity.

I realize the corpus callosum meditation may sound a bit mystifying and be elusive in practice. I’ve described it as best I can, but it’s up to you to actually do it. The description of riding a bike is not the same as riding the bike.

Anyhow, as usual this meditative technique cannot be over-relied upon. cc is not the end-all, be-all. It is not the one stable foothold, to use the metaphor at the beginning of part I. Nevertheless it corrects an important psychological dysfunction.

Next, RA, which stands for “right action”. The simplicity of this koan is comforting to my perfectionistic drive. I am not called to perfection in everything – I just need to do the right thing. Simultaneously, it inspires my innate enthusiasm for righteousness. It focuses away from introspection and towards… right action.

Next is PI, which stands for “protagonistic imaging”. This corrects a psychological error that tends to happen immediately after I think “right action”. Due to my deepsocket nature, I start immediately doing a left-brain rational-verbal analysis of right action paths, and the ambiguities inherent therein. This can quickly lead to uncertainty, self-doubt, anxiety, attempts to resolve the unresolvable, etc.

PI simplifies all that, by taking the thoughtstream from the verbal to the visual. Instead of analyzing, I visualize myself (protagonist) in a movie doing the right things. Due to the narrowness of human visual capacity, I cannot explore many branches, and must instead be definite and specific, removing anxiety and uncertainty. Thus I harness my subconscious decision maker to form the image, and simply follow its lead.

This process is no more infallible than anything else mortal man does, but it produces better results than my default left-brain method. Since it is the best decision-making mode available, and not susceptible to conscious intervention, my perfectionism drive accepts it as a stable Schelling point and falls silent.

At the bottom of the stack, “PC”. This stands for political correctness, and means that I kowtow my body, and soul into a smug sophistical pretzel in obeisance before the dictats of the diversity commissars and their testicularly and/or evolutionarily challenged Designated Victim Groups.

Just kidding. It stands for “Passion Christ”. The RA and PI koans left me in a too executional, inhuman mode, so I needed some way to reinject emotional life. The best model I have for a man with well balanced emotion and action is Jesus Christ, so I adopted him as my model. PC reminds me to experience my deep feelings. Otherwise I tend to ignore them, leading to desync of hemispheres, amongst other problems.

We are nearing the end, brave spelunkers into the weird caves of the hybrid psyche. To refresh our map:

paper-web

You see a small “c” and “i” to the left and right of the “TT”. The “i” stands for isolation. When depressive affect threatens productivity during social isolation, this reminds me to speak tongues aloud. It is an effective antidote. Somehow tongues expresses the suppressed emotion and provides a degree of comfort. It is not always necessary; only in the situation described above. Avoid overreliance – praying in tongues aloud all the time when alone is too distracting.

The “c” stands for “close [things]“. Such as closing eyes, windows on the computer, etc. This is a trigger activated when I am struggling to go to bed. I may slip on the blindfold and pass out for a bit on the couch, if I can’t make the bed yet. Basically, it reduces the going to bed process to tiny chunks that are easy to start. I may not be able to do the whole routine, but I can at least close my eyes for a bit. It makes it ok to do just those small steps, instead of stressing anxiously about failure to complete the whole sequence, which then can lead to more self-destructive late-night entertainment/stimulation seeking.

I have had more trouble with going to bed than most, due to health problems creating simultaneous fatigue and insomnia, and this is the best possible meditative solution. Anything heavier is counterproductive, and nothing at all isn’t enough. This gets the job done, to the extent biologically possible. Of course there are many other external methods one can use to enforce bedtime; here I discuss only the internal.

Lastly, on the left and right of the heart symbol are divided two halves of the word “water”. I needed a way to relate the three symbol stacks together. “Water” means that the left and right flow awareness, as water flows downhill, towards the center, where it pools and collects. This removes any anxiety or uncertainty about how to look at and experience the symbols. There is always one answer: move from outward to inner, by gentle downward flow. It removes any rigidity and blockiness that might otherwise make the meditation herky-jerky, rather than organic and smooth. This is crucial, since the meditation is too large to be held in the mind simultaneously. Smooth switching between focus on different parts was a longstanding challenge in my koan design, which “water” resolves.

** The combined effect – a foothold

Together, the three symbols provide a stable, permanent, unchanging, reliable psychological foundation or footing. I can stand on it, and do. I rest my weight upon it. Yet my weight does not bear down heavily, because the koans remove the anxiety that creates excessive desperate dependencey. Rather, I maintain a light pressure or awareness, much like the son of Gaia whom Hercules wrestled, who was unbeatable as long as one foot was on the ground. I need only leave on foot on the koans; the other is free for the business of the moment.

Thus, the only conscious direct willpower I need exert is to keep this foot on the ground, which is a perfectly manageable task. The rest is handled subconsciously and automatically. When a more severe psychological crisis threatens, I simply look down at the symbols until order restore itself. Due to my nature, I do not experience psychological crises during combat or survival type emergencies, but rather when doubts about my Heaven-Earth alignment arise. So this works out fine.

First Lesson on Perfection

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There remained one last lesson to perfect my koan setup. It had not undergone a true suffering test – the fatigue/pain cycle characteristic of my illness.

In my latest health trial, I’d cut down to just shrimp and rice. I hypothesized that either shrimp or Blue Ice was causing problems. Gradually I reduced shrimp intake until I was getting either insufficient protein or salt, or both. As malnutrition increased, various symptoms of fatigue and salt depletion increased. I began eating more to compensate, until I overloaded my weak digestive system, triggering a sharp cramp cycle.

This was all very painful in various ways and stages, and tested my ability to maintain work ethic and right action through suffering and fatigue. Adherence to koans and right action dropped off as my biological capacities diminished.

I rallied by placing a skull beneath the heart symbol. Meaning: memento mori, to the death, unconditional commitment. Instead of placing one foot on the koans, now I placed both there. I surrendered personality and overmind ndependence. The koans became the only thing. Gazing at my hands became the default gesture.

The qualitative difference in my work was profound. I had surroundered overmind control and was operating on pure subconscious/holistic insight.

A journal entry capturing the epiphany of this new method:

koans are directing my life from now on, making all decisions. amazing experience. like water. don’t really know who i am anymore. i’m not me, i’m them. it. whatever. like thinking you’re the ocean and looking down from above, all you see is pointless expanse of grey waves. but then you take a piece of glass, flatten that water, break surface tension, suddenly you can see the whole ocean. the glass doesn’t change the ocean, just reveals it. what’s there is there. you can’t change what’s there. you can only apply the koans, and reveal it. then the ocean does what it wants. end of story. the only overt willpower i can apply is through the koans.

For example, I immediately put into place a comprehensive, intelligent, disciplined, sustainable health experiment tracking and regimen adherence system combining Emacs Cyborganize workflow, checklists, custom FileMaker Pro database, phone alarms, and taped printouts. It is orders of magnitude better than my previous abortive attempts.

Why did my previous attempts at holistic systems fail, while this one succeeded? Because one root system must rule them all. That root system is the koans. All other systems must expand or contract to according to the dictates of the master system. Otherwise, dissonance arises over conflicting and suboptimal demands from subsystems and sub-objectives.

This is the permanent stable point I was seeking.

After the koan system, the second most important system is health/regimen control and tracking, with an info management system adequate to support it. All that is now in place.

It appears from my data that I already found the correct health regimen, then drifted from it due to Circadian stress from work and insufficient systematization of regimen habits and food quantities. In any case, my newly structured experimental apparatus will quickly resolve remaining ambiguities. As far as Google can tell me, there is nothing like my system in existence. I look forward to sharing it, after a bit more testing and elaboration.

Furthermore, what I am doing with Cyborganize, Filemaker Pro and Xplorer is fully extensible. I see a possibility to build similarly practical fuzzymetadata+richtext experimenttracking+adherence+infomanagement+execution systems for multiple life domains. The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

UPDATE: Expect a month’s delay on posts. I eventually got fed up with the Post Autoschedule plugin – it simply doesn’t work if you revise articles in the queue. That explains the recent weirdness with posts appearing and then moving to different time stamps or back into queue.

I don’t want posts to go live right as I write them, so from now on I’ll just increment the datestamp one month ahead. That will permit me time to revise and digest. I prefer not to interact with commenters while I’m still near the heat of the writing process.

UPDATE II:

One last addition to make to the koans.

The skull works for pain, when defiance is an option, due to the adrenaline rush. But eventually all reserves are exhausted. The end of my typical illness cycle always features this. Then any overmind will-push falters and fails, generating frustration and anxiety. The shattered mind turns against itself, creating self-destructive behavior.

At first, this cycle was no different. I had lost the capacity for defiance necessary to activate the skull trigger; I had nothing left. But then I realized the last non-dissonance-inducing trigger left to me – rest. The only thing left that I could do. I added that trigger below the skull, and once again slipped into the proper state and right action. So now all phases are covered.

Economic Policy in One Simple Lesson – How to Set Tariffs

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Everything necessary to set economic policy for a nation can be summarized in a short list of first principles.

1. What is an (ideal) nation?

Read Beard’s “A History of the United States”. Note the importance of protective tariffs on the nascence and then subsequent explosion of industry, and for national security. Note the growth of socialist government intervention as the economy scaled and decadent rot set in – beginning with “trust busting” and even earlier at the crash of 1819.

2. What is a bank?

Read enough libertarian and Great Depression economics (including Vox Day’s book and arguments against free trade) to understand how banks create the credit cycle via the credit multiplier. Study the devaluation of the American dollar subsequent to the abandonment of the gold standard. Know that the maximum life span of a fiat currency is roughly 75 years (via Vox Day, could have the number a bit high).

Once one understands what banks are, one realizes that banking and finance are implacably opposed to a gold standard because it prevents them from taxing everyone by creating money out of thin air that is on par with the money of savers. In a real money economy, no one would take the insane deal of exchanging hard currency certificates for numbers on a bank ledger. At least, not at current interest rates.

Rather, hard currency would favor savers as economic growth outstripped gold production.

Soft currency creates a permanent ability for the finance sector to tax everyone tomorrow to pay themselves today. (Except during crashes, when they are busy advocating bailouts and incumbent-favoring regulation.) Government gets a similar ability. Hence the popularity of “Keynesian” economics.

3. What is (ideal) currency?

The ideal currency is gold bearer bonds issued by a government at a 1-1 ratio with gold in vaults, in free competition with private currencies. Under this regime, credit bubbles will always wind up chasing printed gold notes when they pop, and be self-correcting.

Wars would then be difficult to finance, particularly those not fought to defend home soil. Ditto “New Deal” and “Great Society” type programs. That is a good thing.

4. What drives modern economic growth?

Rule of law, economic liberty, and the smart fraction – which is the % of population with verbal IQ above 106 (via La Griffe du Lion).

** Conclusion

Points 1-4 allow us to answer the essential question: What is the (ideal) tariff?

A tariff serves two legitimate objectives:
1. National security
2. Protect the dumb majority against living standard erosion from competition with low-income foreign labor

The way to achieve 1 is well understood by any student of history. One simply protects the industries necessary for projection of modern military power. Detroit made the tanks for WWII. Assume a world war and ensure domestic industries to support it are in place.

Objective 2 has not been properly understood to date. This is my contribution, achievable only by proper understanding of all of the above.

By what formula should one set the general tariff to protect the dumb majority?

Answer:

First calculate male full time per capita income in gold for home country (H) and foreign country (F).

The effect of the tariff should be to render the two per capita incomes equal. Thus if H = 100 oz and F = 50 oz, then H’s tariff on goods from F should be at most 100%.

This number can be adjusted downwards depending on various factors. The above assumes that the labor of H and F is equally productive, that labor composes the entire cost of the product, etc. In general, err on the side of protecting H’s dumb majority from low-cost competition.

Consider a few cases:

1. Revolutionary America (H) vs Great Britain (F). National security dictates tariffs to protect shipyards and military-relevant manufacturing. Otherwise, no tariffs, since smart fractions are identical. Assume a war will include an effective naval blockade when deciding which industries are militarily relevant.

2. Pre-industrial independent Singapore (H) vs US (F). Throw open the doors to foreign investment. Identify opportunities to build domestic industrial clusters, and protect those to nurture them through infancy until they are ready to compete globally. But mostly, emphasize free trade with F, since the smart fraction % is the same, F’s per capita income is higher, and the only military threat is Malaysia, which won’t have the juice to threaten an economy significant to F.

3. Kenya (H) vs US (F). Zero tariffs. Throw open the doors to foreign investment. Auction off natural resources for exploitation by MNC’s. Hope and pray for outright economically-motivated colonialism to generate rule of law. Rule by local elites over a modern economy will be a kleptocratic disaster. Hope the colonials will whiten up the countryside by interbreeding to at least South American standards. Win the Olympics and try to score a white chick.

4. China (H) vs US (F). Dangle your massive domestic market as bait to sucker all the foreign investors in, then pick their bones clean of human and intellectual capital, while heavily favoring local competitors. Erect tariffs to ensure F has no choice but to play the game anyway. Enjoy the massive jump start to your economy. Once you get close to parity, switch to a more normal strategy.

China is a special case, because she has the massive domestic market suddenly made extremely attractive by rapid economic liberalization, high IQ, fully developed dense population, but was starting from near zero. Also, she needs to prepare for world war with the US.

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