I Did a Dumb When [They Don't Come Back]

 Sometimes stories have a bit where, [folk who head out that way don't come back], and my instinctive response is always, "What if they don't come back because it's better there than here?" E.g. if someone who dies ends up in heaven, why would they return? It could be fine. You don't know.

 No, actually, you do know. I'm being plain stupid. My instinct is insane.

 You have to get very contrived to prevent folk from coming back. Has to be a law that says nobody who leaves again is allowed to return. And nobody just makes a mistake and leave anyway. Or they kill everyone trying to leave, and again nobody makes a mistake. No smuggling. 

 Yeah, if nobody comes back you can go ahead and assume they're dead. If there's a heaven, it doesn't work the way you're told it works. They can't come back because there's nothing there to come back.

 

 In my defence, the stories themselves are usually about a guy who went there anyway and didn't die. Turns out I'm imperfect and don't ward off blandishments 101% of the time. Who knew. 

 Have to come back and check. Audit.

Social Status is Paperclipping

 The grey goo scenario already happened. It was actually green, we call it the oxygen catastrophe. You are not smarter than Nature. Nature thinks slower than you do, it is true, but Nature's brain includes yours. Even if it didn't, it's much, much, much, much, much bigger. 

 Likewise papperclipping AIs are already here. We call them Homo sapiens. 

 Social status is zero sum. Not to mention, net worth is a genetic trait. This means all effort put into social status is a complete waste. Any nondegenerate amount will lead to exactly the same hierarchy. [Zero effort] is only probably degenerate. 

 Paperclipping is in fact better than social status. At the end of the day, you can fasten paper with paperclips. It has more utility than a social status display. If the world isn't only the paperclipper, you can melt the clips down and reforge them into something else, taking advantage of the clipper's mining operations. The clips don't have zero value. 

 A virtue signal has zero value. Negative value, in fact, because it consumed something that could have otherwise been used profitably. 

 I exaggerate slightly. Caino masochiens can sometimes be tricked into competing at doing something useful, and in these cases genuine creation occurs. However, the social status system itself assigns more status to non-useful activity. Production is noise in the system. It is rebellion and perversion of the system's nature. 

 A proper paperclip AI is supposed to be hostile to all other life. Let's check a newspaper, see how that's turning out...

 The idea that long-term human habitation produces deserts is suspiciously plausible. Africa and the middle east. Mortals have already turned everything in the regions into social status. Even the weather... City dwellers in particular find rain nothing but a nuisance, and it, too, gets fed into the furnaces... Southern africa is only not bone dry because the mortals were inefficient and ended up turning their own societies into social status when the environment could no longer support them.

 AI cannot be aligned, reason #60987: a paperclip AI is mortally hostile to all other AIs, and Caino masochiens cannot be aligned.

No Free Lunch Rendered Mythologically

 Aladdin is punished for trying to take something from the cave of wonders on his own behalf.

 Persephone is punished for attempting the delectable fruits of the underworld. Likewise, trying to help yourself to Pluto's treasury will not work out for you.

 There's a bunch of others, all trying to moralize against greed. It all feels terribly profound.

 Even the dragon's hoard, in implying there's always a dragon.

 

 It's not profound.

 It's nothing more than the fact that you have to buy things, you can't get them for free. TANSTAAFL, as rendered by foggy-eyed writers who don't quite get it, and/or Nameless parasites. 

 If greed is trying to buy things without paying for them, I guess greed really is a sin, but capitalism has nothing to do with greed. Pigs can't be greedy, if they can access anything, it means they already paid for it.  

 Theft bad. Theft not wise. Wow, so deep. 

 Monkey's paw. The Wish spell.

 "Hey, uh, shit isn't free, yo."

 You can have the dragon's hoard, if you want, provided you're willing and able to slay a dragon. Have as many dragon's hoards as there are dragons.

 You can have all the treasures of the cave of wonders, provided you're willing to pay it in treasure for the privilege. 

 Want the treasures of the underworld? Neato. As long as you're willing to live in the underworld with them. For some value of [live]. Put another way, you can even take them out of the underworld, provided you're willing to give the underworld your life in exchange, or something of equivalent value. 

 Let's also do Fafnir. More generally, the myth that taking the dragon's hoard will turn you into a dragon.

 Well, uh, kinda, no shit. If you have a dragon's hoard, then aspiring knights will see you as a dragon they need to slay, so they can take your hoard. Whether you're legitimately a dragon or not. Pending specific definition of [dragon]. 

 Fafnir became as asshole, but actually he didn't. Fafner was a jagoff to start with, he didn't [become] anything. There's nothing special about hoards that make you vicious. However, it is true that the vicious will try to claim hoards without paying for them. Which they will regret, plus or minus some masochism. It is likewise true that the vicious will portray anyone with a hoard as a dragon so as to justify slaying them.
 Remember only the vicious need justification at all. Even attempting it is self-condemnation. 

 If I have a hoard, my justification is: "Can you come and take it, bitches!?" Gives me an excuse to increase my body count. IRL knights get roasted by dragons. Losers. Shit status: secured.

Turning on the Axial Age

 Naively, humans see wealth, political and personal power, and lots of sex as indicators of divine favour. 

 

 The axial age was about noticing these things have a strong tendency to make you less happy, rather than more. Take care of the parts that were venal revolts of the scholars, but don't worry, I'll get there.

 For example, Epicurus noticed that good food, good friends, and a productive day is quite enough - better than alexander the great, for example. "Get out of my sun." Groping toward the hunter tribe lifestyle, without being aware of anthropological history. 

 The sun is clearly the most glorious thing, even if you don't know how truly immense the thing is. Humiliatingly dwarfs anything mortals can offer. 

 It is from this time that this cycle's substance vs. appearance dialectic comes from.
 E.g, would you rather appear to be wealthy and have unlimited access to all the sexy women, or to genuinely be immensely wealthy and sexually appeased? If, to achieve the hottest girl in town, everyone had to think you were a dirty, lonely loser, would you do it? 

 Wholesome wisdom is far more valuable than some petty, parochial wisdom about accumulating mere gold coins. Narcissism: I found the substance of wisdom is inherently opposed to the appearance of wisdom. Displaying greater wisdom makes it look like I'm ever more insane. Each submission to Logos grants me exponentially more personal power, and likewise makes me exponentially more unpopular. Persuasiveness is diametrically opposed to truth. Even if a realm were ruled by a philosopher-king, you wouldn't notice. He would never be able to assert his true beliefs; he would have to disguise himself as an absolutely regular king. 

 So, like, what if you tried to be a likeable person and went around making friends with other likeable folk? Imagine if both you and your neighbour both decided to live in such a way as to be good for your neighbours? Like, damn, why did it take thousands of years to think of that one?

 It was the axial agers who noticed man looks for excuses not to cooperate. Many refuse to deal with anyone who isn't part of their family. If you deliberately push all your pollution onto neighbouring families, it doesn't work out for you. They're doing the same thing to you, and you have more than one neighbour.
 Family is a crutch. It's disturbingly universal that folk don't like their families either, they're merely being manipulated by a Darwinian drive. If you take someone with identical behaviour but different blood, they won't like them - often, will dislike them especially - revealing that the only thing they truly appreciate is genetic overlap.
  The christian races, of course, can't even live up to this low bar. Especially notable in americans or brits. They especially hate anyone who shares their blood. 

 "The mad can speak wisdom, the ugly can be satisfied." E.g. hunchback of notre dame. These tropes date to the axial age.

 I mean, they can be, but it's not the way to bet. The jester is only more reliable than the king when he's the king of clown world. When everyone has gone crazy, they claim obvious truth sounds insane.
 A diamond in the rough, a lowborn aristocrat, isn't a diamond. They will never be properly classy, and that goes for their children as well. A topaz or amethyst in the rough, maybe.

 Because it is possible to enrich yourself at the expense of society, using an excess of examples, it is possible to convey the impression that all self-enrichment comes at the expense of society. 

 E.g., if you misuse the idea of [society] you can show that anyone paid for their work is taking more from [society] than they strictly must. Society gains more if it can get it for free, see? Same as any discrete entity. Then a rising tide lifts all boats...right? And the fact you just proved Communism gives nobody pause, apparently. If you didn't already see it: if the craftsman is not being paid for his crafts, then he's not part of society, and that's why he starves to death rather than rising along with [[[society]]].
 Hence vows of poverty and so on. Rich man, eyes of needles, etc.

 For the record, stolen wealth looks like vast wealth, but it is costing the owner more than it is worth. They're pretending to enjoy it; or they're not even pretending.

 

 Pre-axials thought the purpose of life was to accrue divine favour.

 Axials thought the purpose of life was to accrue divine favour.

 Existentialists think the purpose of life is to accrue divine favour, but they're atheists and think the divine doesn't exist, whoops.

 

 For the record, this genuinely is dumb. [Divine favour] is mommy's love, but after putting on hollywood makeup so it sounds all profound. "I'm not a toddler, I'm a big sophisticated city-dwelling grownup." Yeah, uh, nope.

 Gods have things. You want the things. [Accruing divine favour] is in fact accruing a wage from the heavens, because they have more stuff than you. To really get how dumb this truly is: whose favour do the gods want to accrue? How does mommy per se learn what to approve of and what not to approve of? Where do the heavens get the stuff you want them to give you? Mommy will approve of you self-aggrandizing, but why would the heavens pay you for, e.g, working out?
 Normal mortals cannot follow Socrates' dictum, because they already know they don't like the answers to the questions.

 

  Existentialists noticed that wealth, sex, health, beauty, and power feel good.
  The purpose of Socratic or Epicurean wisdom is, also, to feel good. All not merely selfish, but self-absorbed. A toddler, also, seeks to feel good. Nameless christoids claim that forgoing material rewards (and giving to the church...so they can go to hell, I suppose...gotta curse your pastor and heap coals on his head...) will have infinite returns later. Just stuff. But you get paid after you die.

 Surely, divine glory can't be nothing more and nothing less than...gud feelz?

 Existentialists noticed the rewards of axial age virtues are nothing more than the lotus eating the axials explicitly condemn.

 The only reason to be awake rather than dreaming is to make the waking world into a pleasant dream, because you wake up from dreams, ending them, while you can't wake up from real life. Long term, short term. Hence, a regular good dream that it happens you can't wake up from is axial utopia. The instinctive repulsion for [[fake]] dreams over [[real]] life is based on a contingent. Mere hysteresis. 

 The above is overly charitable. Most of the the time axials are all about piously cooperating with your neighbour even when they refuse to cooperate with you. "Return the cart," even if you're the only one doing it. Buncha nerds telling you that the highest moral principle is: never beat up the nerd. The best kind of warrior is: the pacifist.

  The problem is not genuinely hard. Mortals simply don't want to solve it, thus always find an excuse to avoid solving it. Anyone who notices the solution conscientiously keeps it to himself. I'll go ahead and betray the conspiracy and my fellows, such as they are. 

 

 The purpose is to uphold divine glory (insofar as you can) and to become someone who enjoys upholding divine glory, so all signs point to doing it as often and as intensely as possible. To make selfishness and [self-sacrifice for the greater good] the same thing. There's no need for a disharmony. If there's a tension between long and short term, learn to enjoy the short-term company of things with long-term benefits.

 Yes, it should feel good.
 Wholesomeness is called wholesome because it covers all 360 degrees.

 We can go further. The purpose is not to receive divine favour. The purpose is to create divine favour. To bask in the presence of the sacred, forge the sacred with your own hands.

 You can find out what counts as divine glory via curiosity. That is, ask. We do a little cooperating with cooperators.   

Politics vs. Civilization

 Moldbug correctly notes the false distinction between democracy and politics. Extension: note the false distinction between politics, of polis, and civilization, from citatem and civis. 

 Technically there's a difference: polis is greek for city, whereas civis is latin for townsman. Demos is greek for plebeian, thus Democracy refers to the city or town less the patricians, excellence, or arete. 

 Words secretly retain their intent. Unless someone is going full strategic Satanist, they're used because their original meanings apply to the referent.

 Woke more correct: politics is indeed bad. However, due to the lack of boundaries, this means cities are bad. Anything which condemns politics condemns civilization itself. We find, again, civilization is worse than barbarism.

 I believe this is because anything which is recognizable as a civilization is based on black government, not white government. As per plato, civilization always degrades into democracy, because black government is dysgenic and otherwise degenerative. The deviant inherently trades away the long term for the short-term high.

 This is not to suggest a solution. As always, revenge is sour. The condition of a natus being able to set up a non-degenerate larger-than-Amish society is that they already have a white government. The peoples degenerate themselves because they're already core-level sinners. The loss of their Earthly virtue is merely the physical converging upon the spiritual. I would say they deserve it, but it's more like it already happened.

Women Don't Like Masculinity

 While I'm sure there must be a situation where rage isn't simply the flip side of fear, I can't find one. At least, when Democratic Man shows anger, it is always terror that's pretending not to be. Signs of weakness.

 Women love rage. Women love "men" who lose control. She doesn't want a husband, she wants a neurotic monkey. Zero-discipline chimp.

 Nothing makes women respect and want a man more than seeing him go apeshit over her 

 Get violent as you need to
https://twitter.com/AJA_Cortes/status/1826482907310882838

 Lusting after monkeys was never adaptive for mortal females. I attribute these things to millennia upon millennia of genetic drift. In the short term arranged marriages is a good idea, but in the long term it ruins half your species. It took millennia to get here, and breeding women back to a (breedable?) state would also take millennia. The other option to go whole hog and take them all the way to mindless drones. Maximum dimorphism. Reverse of the angler fish situation. 

 Either way, the state of mortal women in the present is horrifying. Only a Satanist would do that sort of thing on purpose. Only the worst weakling would let it happen by accident.

Apropos of Nothing: Jasmine Did Not Run Away

 She's not going back because she logically can't go back. She never genuinely left. Any appearances to the contrary are deceiving. Check: look at that resentful expression, that's the lie's tell. Wrong emotion for the denotation.

 If the above doesn't make any sense, that's okay, it's not supposed to. Everything working as intended.

They Want To Be On Fire

 it's like the people are on fire, and if you throw water, they try to have you arrested.
https://twitter.com/ItIsHoeMath/status/1827092376864579874

 Well, yes, exactly. They want to be on fire. If you put them out, they have to go to all the trouble of plausibly-deniably lighting themselves on fire again. You bastard.

 If immolation was not in demand, immolation would not be supplied. 

 Where's your empathy? High-level consciousness, lol, great joke.

 Turns out if you want to be on fire, you deserve to burn to death. Throwing water on them not only pisses them off, not only pisses the cops off, but pisses god off. It's unjust.