Effective empathy is evil.1 I don’t mean that literally, of course, but the fact is that the most common way effective empathy is used in society today is evil. On the surface it seems good, biologically, it is good, but in a world with our population density and our communication efficiency, effective empathy has lost most of its true power for good.
Yes, there are still situations where it works positively, but those are exceptions. Most of the time, effective empathy makes you hate. It makes you turn your brain off and convinces you that your hatred is justified. But hatred doesn’t need justification. If you just admit you hate someone, and know you’re a hater, the hate is tempered. You might still be violent or self-righteous, but it isn’t the same as the hate of someone who thinks they’re justified, that they’re doing good. As the old adage says, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That saying has never been more relevant than in 21st-century politics.
Right now, both sides of this country are in a state of mass hypnosis, or psychosis, if you prefer not to assign blame. I’d call it mass hypnosis. Everyone thinks they’re right. Everyone thinks they’re doing good. And both sides see their opponents not only as ontologically evil, but as consciously aware of their evil. They believe there’s something rotten in their opponents’ souls that makes them worthy of violence and punishment.
Look at recent politics: the stabbing in the Carolinas2, the assassination of Charlie Kirk3, the Minneapolis mass shooting4. If you focus not on the spectacle, but on who benefits from it, a picture emerges. The truth is America is a police state, as sophisticated as China’s, maybe more so. The only difference is China is open about its authoritarianism. America can’t afford to be. America, in virtue, is schizophrenic. And the way you coerce a schizophrenic is through gaslighting.
That’s what American history has been since the CIA took over the country after killing JFK. Programs like MKUltra5 and COINTELPRO never really ended6. What they discovered was that mass trauma is the best way to manage a society that believes it’s democratic. Keep people under the hypnotic spell that their vote matters, that their opinions shape politics, and you can make them blame themselves when the system fails. It’s divide and conquer, turned inward. You want the peasants fighting among themselves. And Americans believe they’re in power, or that they’ll soon be in power if they just win the next election. But that’s not how it works.
Mass shootings, assassinations , almost all of them are “allowed” to happen. Not staged, but allowed, because they push agendas. As the saying goes, never let a good tragedy go to waste7. America takes that further: it needs tragedies to fuel the system. Look at 9/11. Whatever you believe about its origins, they were ready. They rolled out the Patriot Act8 almost immediately, stripping civil liberties. They launched a psychological media campaign to rally support for Iraq and Afghanistan9. People now describe that period as if they were in a psychotic episode. It was hypnosis.
COVID played out the same way. It doesn’t matter whether you were pro-vax or anti-vax, both sides lived in near-constant psychosis. And while everyone was consumed with their online wars, society was on pause. People stayed inside, did what they were told. And when the powers wanted it over, it was over. The powers that be remain the powers that be.
That’s the point: you cannot approach all this with emotional attachment. If you want to understand, you need cognitive empathy10, not affective empathy. Affective empathy is primitive, easy to hijack. Show someone the right images and sounds, and their critical thinking shuts down. The only people resistant to this are the ones who lack affective empathy, psychopaths11. That’s why so many CEOs, power brokers, and spooks test that way.
So what does all this mean? Put simply: since the end of World War II, when the CIA’s roots began, they’ve been working toward control. Once the CIA was established, they consolidated power. JFK was the surprise that didn’t play along, and that’s why he was killed.
Ever since that point, the country has been controlled by the CIA and the alphabet agencies. Eventually this expanded to the Five Eyes12 agencies. You have the vested powers, and then you have the intelligence agencies themselves, and together they form what is essentially an Anglophone empire. It’s everything but the name. Sure, you still have to present your passport and play along with the rituals, but if you were to analyze the Anglosphere through the same lens that Western historians use when talking about Chinese dynasties, the Five Eyes grouping is an empire. It’s a single entity. The intelligence agencies control the countries, and everything else is just a minstrel show.
Earlier I said America is schizophrenic, and I think Dan Carlin even put it that way. It has to act like a wokeoid, but you can’t be woke and also be the most powerful empire in the history of humanity. You have to be a chud. So the trick is convincing Americans to do chud things for woke reasons. If you look back at Iraq and Afghanistan, there were literally proto-SJW types making the case for invasion13. They were saying insane things like, “We’ll bring them democracy, we’ll stop them from killing gays.” And it worked. Those people probably regretted it later, almost all certainly did, but at the time it didn’t matter. In the words of Chomsky14, consent was manufactured.
That’s the whole point of these mass-publicized, televised events: to manufacture consent, to condition people, to keep the hypnosis running. It doesn’t matter if it’s left-wing hypnosis or right-wing hypnosis, both reinforce each other. At the end of the day, they convince people that the problems in their lives are the fault of the people around them, the other voters. Those are the enemies. No one looks at the vested powers that be, or at the factions within them.
And factions do matter. One of the most significant events in American history since the CIA took over after JFK was killed is that the powers backing them, the old vested money interests, got couped15. A different faction took over last year, right around the time Trump almost got shot. I don’t know exactly how that incident played in, but you can see the shift in what happened next. J.D. Vance, backed by Peter Thiel and San Francisco connections, was made VP. Kamala Harris, with her own San Francisco ties, became the candidate over Biden. And now the tech companies are basically the only thing holding up the American stock market16.
The old guard, the ones people joked about when they said we were invading for oil, that faction has lost. It’s more complicated than oil alone, but yes, it was real, and they’ve been replaced by the new tech faction. I’m not even calling them left or right, because those labels don’t really apply here. Take Peter Thiel: he wants to push American interests, he wants to make money, but he’s also gay. Thirty years ago he wouldn’t be seen as right-wing. In fact, if you dropped him into that era, he probably would’ve been tarred and feathered as a communist. The ideas he represents are dangerous to the old guard. And now the old guard is out, groveling to hold onto whatever scraps of power remain.
The previous faction relied heavily on psychological warfare, hypnosis, and all the insane programs like MKUltra, COINTELPRO, Monarch. The new faction inherits all of that, the way a new dynasty in China would inherit the tools of the old one. You don’t throw away useful tools. Hypnosis is too effective. What they need to do now is reframe it, recontextualize it, and make it serve their purposes.
Both factions are “pro-American,” if by that you mean pro-American oligarchy, pro-business, pro-GDP, line must go up. The difference is how they see the ghost of the country, the spirit of America, and what future they imagine. The new group are futurists. The old group were not, or at best, they were Cold War futurists. And they’re dying out. The boomers are losing power and relevance, being replaced by Gen X and Millennials. That’s what we’re seeing now.
America is starting to take its mask off. It wants to stop being schizophrenic. It wants to be like China. The Peter Thiels of the world want America to stop pretending that it’s about liberty, democracy, and justice, because the charade is inefficient. It costs money to keep up appearances, and it gums up the system. It’s unprofitable. They want to strip that away.
The best way to strip it away is to push people into hating each other so much that they start tearing society apart. And once it reaches that breaking point, you hand them a solution. That’s the playbook. It’s obviously what’s coming.
This isn’t left versus right. It’s cliché to say, but it’s true: whatever side you think you’re on, you’re not fighting the real enemy. In fact, I don’t think you can. You’re not that guy. I’m not that guy. Nobody reading this is that guy. The best thing you can do is relax, smoke a joint, get yourself somewhere safer, and wait it out. You’re not going to change the tide of history. Even the people who seem to change history only get to do so because they’re allowed. They serve interests.
If you’re dumb enough to try to kill someone and the CIA lets it happen without stopping you, it’s because they think it serves their interests. And it will almost always have the opposite effect of what you intended, because you’re a pawn, and you’re being used. Don’t throw your life away. Don’t kill anyone. Political violence is never worth it. Because there's no point, and this is obvious, okay?
If you feel like you're being radicalized and the radicalization isn't trying to make you, like, get away from society and civilization, or at least get away from these horrible tangles and webs, these people, if it's doing anything else, if it's trying to lead you towards the maw, it's bad and you're being possessed. It's a cognitohazard17. The only radicalization that you should be undergoing is trying to, I don't know, get a farm and grow carrots and eat them, okay? Raising chickens, you know? Just getting away from Sumer, getting away from Ur18, okay? You need to get away from the maw of Ur, okay? You live in Samaria, you need to get away from Sumeria. It doesn't matter how you get away from Sumeria, but you have to do it, okay? And you have to live your life. You have to have a good life. You have to be happy. You have to take control of your life and be self-aware and conscious and mindful, and you can't let yourself be hypnotized.
You're not smart. You're not immune to propaganda. Many of you who I assumed were quite intelligent really seem to be under a spell of hypnosis and psychosis, and that goes for left-wingers and right-wingers alike. You're all fucking crazy. You're all nutjobs, and your righteousness is going to get you killed. As for me, I don't have any righteousness. I just want to relax. I want to take it easy, and I know I'm not that guy, and neither are you, so update your priors because Sumer will always wage war on Sumer19.
Even if Nineveh falls20 and the whole place gets salted to the earth, there will still be dudes wandering around planting their carrots and herding cattle and sheep21. Make plans to be one of those motherfuckers, and don't make plans to be kings and queens and nobles and warriors because it's all for nothing. Everything returns to ash, and it's true. Nothing ever happens on the grand scale of historiography. There's nothing in this life worth dying for except maybe love, I guess. But tangible, real, pragmatic love, not abstract, easily hijacked love.
Obviously most people are not going to agree with this, and they're going to see the claims I've made and think I'm schizo. Fine, I don't really care. I'm dictating this through voice to text22 as a way to be prudent for the future. In the future I'll look back on this and be like, wow, yep, I was right. So that's all.
Ignore spelling mistakes I used voice to text, I don't care, thank you