Born of Chaos - The War on Metacognitive Integrity - Part III
Pictures of a Promethean future and the end of the transgenerational ordeal of materialism and currency
“But for Zeus I care less than nothing. Let him do his will…”
-Prometheus. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Dictatorship, Totalitarianism and Conformity
Totalitarianism is different from primitive dictatorship. Dictatorships are destroyed by decapitating a regime. Totalitarian movements involve mass adoption of ideologies. A dictatorship demands loyalty to a cabal of individuals, while totalitarianism’s organizing principle is mass conformity. So while dictatorship cannot control the inward private lives and psychic constitutions of its subjects, a totalitarian regime does just this.
The totalitarian himself is not the enemy. Every man has within a totalitarian impulse. “The line separating good and evil passes… through every human heart[1].” But the totalitarian is the one which enrolls others in the derangement of their own inward, private lives and psychic constitutions. In a regime or culture where a pathological need for the compliance of others reigns, man’s own nature must be made unintelligible to himself in order that he be subjugated. Awareness of his self-contained nature as heroic and prodigious must be robbed from his view by the totalitarian ideology.
Totalitarianism itself, not the cabal of conspiring, expropriating, enslavers, is Man’s enemy. Decapitate the individuals and the conspiracy nonetheless continues. The ideology of state worship and the fawning to the edicts of one’s ruthless lord is the conspiracy. The pharisee administrators of the ideology are required by the lord, but in effect are incidental to the integrity of the conspiracy in which mass man is enrolled. The ideology itself must be decapitated for Man to be free.
This age is dominated by the hemisphere of Man’s thinking which imagines in conceit that linear, periodic “rationality” is how nature should be understood. This conceit has come to dominate as the psychosocial and ideological bedrock of the age for utilitarian or instrumental reasons: it offers the pretext to support the instrumental will of Marxist technocracy. It is the machenschaft of the totalitarian that Mankind must believe it. Not the least of which because this hemisphere of Man’s thinking is also the hemisphere that requires compliance more broadly.
The convenience, the safety and the ease of the technocrat in prosecuting his agenda requires a widespread belief that the messy, changing nature of human beings and their social lives can be made straight and numbered by the technocrat. The technocrat, like a narcissistic abuser, requires that mass man not only edify him in order to assuage his inner psychological lability, but also requires that mass man self-subjugate. The ideological compliance and buy-in to the terms of self-subjugation assuage on steroids the inner lability of the technocrat such that it is a physiological addiction. And the self-subjugation originates in the erasure of Man’s self-knowledge and especially of the knowledge of his own heroic nature.
Marxism is not anti-human nature as Reaganites tell us: Epimethean state worship, compliant, conformist fawning and the cult of Zeus are human nature. But only one hemisphere of Man would volunteer himself to the supposed “justice” of animal slavery. Moreover, the violence required to force adherence to and enact Marxist technocracy showcases that even the Epimethean hemisphere of compliance itself still must be yoked and deranged for the cabal’s purposes.
It is a trait of all totalitarian ideologies that they attempt to project a form of the materialistic mechanics of the current state of technological science onto their view of the world. Technology emanates from Man’s desire to dominate nature. And as the natural environment of the Marxist technocrat is composed exclusively of the productivity, work and ingenuity of other men, so his natural instinct for domination focuses on the domination those men. Parasitism through derangement. It is the nature of technocratic totalitarianism to use technology to govern the inward private lives and psychic constitutions of its subjects. Its fuel is your inner subjugation.
Man’s tendency to veer unconsciously into hierarchical linearity and need for legibility where none exists, and his Epimethean conformity in times of stress, must be exploited. So he conspires in the conceit that there is a contemporary, technical or technocratic method to reduce natural complexity to linear legibility, rather than wading into the awareness of the gestalt and the meta-nature of his human life. He comes to share a cult-like identity that holds that materialist, mechanistic “measurement” of changing phenomena is the most important principle organizing society.
Money and the Derangement of Self-Intelligibility
Global debt stands at nearly $250 trillion, $185 trillion of which has been created in the last 22 years in the process of monetary “stimulus”. Up to 70% of state financing has been through this mechanism alone, controlled by a mere handful of the unelected. These IOUs from the previous generation can never be paid, and certainly not by that generation. Some on Wall St. believe it is incumbent on the subsequent generation to retire these “obligations” by “working harder and consuming less.” However, that previous generation was never nearly productive enough or innovative enough to match their bottomless desire to consume as well as to finance the construction of the Chinese communist regime. Neither the prior western generation nor the CCP will ever be able to pay their debts, nor have they ever. And as these debts came due, new debt was issued to make up for the losses. When these new debts also could not be retired, they instead turned to derangement of the quality of the money. A fantastic thing occurred: the utility of today’s money is found only in the fact that can be counterfeited; that its growth must exceed the compound growth rate of prior unpayable debts laden with interest.
Entire ideologies have grown around the technocratic need to derange the way mass man thinks about money. But the depth of perniciousness of these ideologies has no bottom. Dishonesty in money radiates through every other domain of human life. This means the technocrat must seek compliance toward the derangement of the way mass man thinks about everything else as well.
Thankfully none of this is news: bad debts emerging through underperformance destroy collateral. As new debts are issued to pay off old bad debts, credit grows but the destroyed collateral is not permitted to regenerate and is instead poured into new credit growth to prop up old unproductive or defunct enterprises. Thus an ever-expanding collateral depletion. Each time this collateral depletion is exposed, markets attempt to correct asset prices downward to a natural state which reflects existing collateral balances. Prices are chronically prevented from reflecting the actual capital stock, but always nonetheless attempt to adjust downward when new waves of credit are exhausted. This cycle of booms and busts prevents Man from exhibiting a productive view toward the future and instead funnels him into short term behavior that nihilistically seeks to profit from the next boom with no regard for the genuine capital stock of the realm.
And lest we think that common investment into real estate, corporate and government bonds, large cap stocks, etc. are merely ways for smart, rational people to hide from the devaluation of the currency, consider the blight of the storage unit. It is in fact that many investments are now made into assets precisely because they are uneconomic and whose continuous upward pricing is predicated exclusively on those uneconomic fundamentals which make them the recipient of new credit bailouts. The explosion of storage units in the US is among the greatest examples. Cheap buildings housing accumulated, unnecessary garbage bought on credit, often financed with very little equity and high credits balances of their own. If the future goes where we invest it to go, by the volume of investment in storage units, we witness this technocratic derangement turning the nation’s capital stock into a scene from McCarthy’s The Road. Many of these manufactured asset categories bear internal[2] (unlevered) rates of return well beneath the growth rate of state counterfeiting. An asset is not refuge from money derangement if it is predicated upon it.
It is the technocrat’s goal to drive Man into a state of vulnerability, fragility and dependence. The nihilistic credit growth dependency and short termism is in fact a dependency on the depletion and cannibalization of one’s community and country, at times one’s own family, and deeper into Man’s psychological and spiritual state. Vulnerability amplifies the uncertainty of the future and draws Man into higher time preference, to consume without regard for the future, making him ironically that much more dependent on counterfeit and credit expansion. The futuristic and productive industrialist and agrarian foundation of our forebearers is forfeited to the game of inflation whackamole.
In alienating him from the future, the culture of falsity alienates him from that which transcends his own appetites and wants, he comes to think of himself as possessing no relationship with the transcendent and he is drawn down the sluice of materialism. A perfect example of modern, materialist machenschaft is the use of DNA as a data storage tool. On one hand a brilliant and thrilling advancement, on the other it seems to say that Man is but a mechanistic, biological robot scrubbed clean from the spiritual concerns which animated him in earlier times. Prometheus, the titan of foresight, was bound to the rock had his liver devoured by Zeus’ eagle every morning. For the ancients, the liver was a used in augury to see the future. It was Prometheus’ ability of foresight stemming from the instinct for the holistic, the transcendent and the meaningful which must be devoured for the sake of Zeus cult materialism.
Like Prometheus’s liver, our future is funneled into the slaughter pen when we invest merely to escape the volatility of the currency, and not into a discreet and formulated vision of the future (animated not at all by a spiritual or poetic imagery). Without the growth collateral generated by a combination of spiritual motivation, virtuous technological foresight and sound money, we acquiesce to greater and greater inanities issued to us by the cult as well: replacing human connection with ephemeral digital imagery and mob games, abuse of the sexual aspect of minors to confound identities, rape minds, molest emotions and plunder God-given gender strength, inculcate that families are no longer necessary, and of course, absorbing Man’s enterprises into “central bank digital currency” concoctions that plan to digitally control speech and economic behavior in real time. Sooner or later, our metacognition disintegrates.
Pictures of our Promethean Future – Nobility and Potentiality
A Promethean world is a world of sound money. It’s a world of warm skies, where technology is no longer mechanical or electrical, but spiritual and parapsychological. Where monuments to the triumph of Man and his perseverance, creativity, future-seeking and vision adorn the squares and the temples. Where internal integrity and intimacy with one’s inherent nobility are the focus of our schools. Where a celestial choir which lifts the inner voice of every man’s primordial virtue floats through the eaves of the houses. Where beauty, not trinkets, is the focus of our acquisitiveness and where our ancient will to dominate is expressed in muscular ingeniousness, not parasitism. The world where he breathes in the crisp air of the Earth in prehistoric cleanness and feels deeply the hearts and the instinctive genius of his ancient forbearers.
In a Promethean world of sound money, with a fixed supply, the price of everything falls continuously as the economy grows. Man looks back on the barbarism of his past and observes how statism in money crippled the proud spirit and self-sovereignty his ancestors, where public currency notes in museum displays sit next to lobotomy drills, leeches and the genetic sequence for bolshevism long-edited away. There is a kind of resignation among the Promethean: that he knows all his beautiful creations must one day become completely free. The ancient gift of his race, to experience the transcendently beautiful and deepen his love for his planet(s) and his own nature, is felt so poignantly that his greatest moral aspiration is to free his time and the time of his comrades to experience it through pushing the answer to the troubles of the world to zero cost. And through his creative heroism, the value of his sacred money grows every year. The Promethean laments how long his kind was enslaved to superstition that money was a “government” affair.
He remembers in his history how the impenetrability of this superstition came in contact with the unrelenting force of human triumph in the growth of his technologies. How their speed and creativity compounded beyond the imaginations of the class of technocrat currency administrators. The monumental forces of technology and government were like gods, magma and water, extinguishing each other and always extinguishing the most vulnerable among him. He recalls how a great paroxysm ensued, where the Ministry of Currency Administration could no longer wedge itself between creators and the owners for the sake of an old, inbred aristocracy. He remembered then how, at the end of a great and elegant procession of spirit and brilliancies gradually washing away the superstition, they, microcephaly, club footed and anemic, were all but pinched from existence.
The day the Great Peoples rose against them in a coordination of decapitations is celebrated every July 4th. The clamor of bells setting the swallows soaring above the bright-towered cities, the harbors sparkling with flags, brings to the heart of Man the glory and the fullness of being that is the emblem of his kind. They look onward to the peaks, generous and speared with celestial light, finding in every moment a new gem of opportunity. And music winding through the city streets, nothing after, nothing before. Just now, vivid immediacy, and the sweet promise of distant glories approaching from the horizon. The triumph of the Promethean in the perennial conflagration.
Born of Chaos
The horns on that midsummer day announced the end of perplexing, fragmentary bittiness which give way to the muscular wholeness of Man’s heart, where the gestalt and the meta-nature of things were restored into the motivating vision of noble productivity, where a poetic vision came to animate the methods of technological science once again.
The horns sounded for the end of that long epoch of humanity’s abuses, of the organization of abuser cults and bolshevik currency contraptions which always required the harboring of deep contempt for the scapegoat classes to justify and to stave away guilt. The end of that epoch were the mind and the spirit, the metacognitive integrity, which are the ultimate means of production, were once so deranged. It was said that the socialist cults loved nothing more than the claim that they defended against exploitation, meanwhile deranging Man into volunteering for his own cult indoctrination. And thus, so many of us had been implanted with the introjects of the destroyers of dharma, of scapegoating cults, and of the bolshevik currency administrators, perpetuating the karmic wheel one generation further.
Materialism was a slave ideology. Materialism cut off the vision toward a prosperous future. It fought back against any sense of transcendence, economic or metaphysical. Yet who was he that did not remember the days when he was poetry itself? Who was he that did not recall the great interconnection of all things? Materialism was concocted by the currency administrator, connived not for strength but for careful subversion, to devalue what the archetypal creator possessed: communion with the transcendent.
The ideology and its ordeals were intergenerational. They crippled as they wheeled through the lives of so many proud and beautiful youths. And so the horns sounded for those who transcended the slave ideology of materialism and rose as masters of noble culture. The cessation of the intergenerational harms done through the destruction of the metacognitive integrity of their kind was announced in the great midsummer festival. They proclaimed the right of all to develop and bring brilliant life to their own wholesome understanding and intentionality, to their own wise speech, action and livelihood, to the intactness of their own concentration, effort, and mind.
And within this, they sounded for those who brought forward the fire of sound money, securing to human purpose the permanent year-on-year “deflation” of his growing technologies. And how the eyes of his kind had been lifted into the deep future once again, to transcend the currency Stockholm Syndrome of its past and to bring forward the elegance and might of his imagination. And across miles of sunlit air, shining brightly like white gold fire under dark blue skies, the monuments to the future-seer, the truth-discoverer, independently prodigious and creatively risk taking, fashioning living example out from ancient archetype, announced the liberation from the Epimethean cults of totalitarian Zeus.
In those days the prophecy of a moral and theological vision for Man to apprehend his true nature in its fullness had been fulfilled:
Yes, truly, the day will come when Zeus, although stubborn of soul, shall be humbled, seeing that he plans a marriage that shall hurl him into oblivion from his sovereignty and throne; and then immediately the curse his father Cronus invoked as he fell from his ancient throne, shall be fulfilled to the uttermost... So let him sit there in his assurance, putting his trust in the crash reverberating on high and brandishing his fire-breathing bolt in his hands. For these shall not protect him from falling in ignominious and unendurable ruin.
Deliverance from such ruin no one of the gods can show (Zeus) clearly except me (Prometheus). I know the fact and the means… Such an adversary is he now preparing despite himself, a prodigy irresistible, even one who shall discover a flame mightier than the lightning and a deafening crash to outroar the thunder; a prodigy who shall shiver the trident, Poseidon's spear, that scourge of the sea and shaker of the land. Then, wrecked upon this evil, Zeus shall learn how different it is to be a sovereign and a slave.
His monuments were monuments to a moral and theological vision, with the model of Man as the Olympian creator, as the heroic and virtuous leader of rebellion, as the one which inextricably possesses in his breast, musculature, spirit and mind the fire of technology, the mystery of beauty, of confident generativity, of future-seeing and future-seeking. Above the towns, the figure of Prometheus the fire bringer, held the Wheel and the Money.
-RC
Read War on Metacognitive Integrity – Part I
Read War on Metacognitive Integrity – Part II
Ross Calvin is a technology entrepreneur, global macro investor, bespoke hospitality developer and executive director of the American Colossus Foundation
Please visit www.rosscalvin.com to learn more.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
It is a point of contention that the term “internal rate of return” should describe the unlevered free cash flow yield on equity capital, not net income on levered operations.