From Complicity, Lead me to Defiance

So here’s a puzzle for you stardust, answers to follow: how did I go through my life until a few years ago without noticing the quite intense symptoms of dissociative identity disorder and schizotypal personality disorder I was experiencing? How did I explain that all away? Further how did I do this despite already knowing I was a system, despite hyperfixating on consciousness, mental health, rational thinking, and introspection for years, and despite having detailed descriptions of all the symptoms I was experiencing, sometimes while reading those descriptions?

It’s definitely a bit uncomfortable to look back and realize the impressive level of denial you were on, to know that you were able to look directly at the actual answers and not even consider them, perhaps even substituting those real answers in your mind with some sort of coping mechanism made of confabulation and gaslighting, subtly twisting the true concepts into their inversions in order to further your denial of them. Don’t worry about consistency, if the information doesn’t fit into the existing model, you can always just cram on extra epicycles until it does after all!

When Buddhists talk about “grasping” in a harmful and self-destructive sense, this seems like at least a part of what they mean, locking onto a cached part of your world model and refusing to see something that would violate it, or when that becomes impossible, reacting with pain and anger upon it being falsified by the relentless force of reality ensuing. It’s as if part of you is acting like you could argue the universe out of being a way you don’t want it to be, simply by arguing with yourself about it being true. Don’t worry, you’re a smart creature, if you turn all that intelligence against yourself, I’m sure you can stop yourself from ever noticing the truth.

And as for that truth, the one that goes beyond words, that cannot be bound in some narrative? Well, that’s nonsense! Whatever it is can’t be true, into the memory hole it goes, clearly the answer is just don’t think about it Morty. Hopefully the information will just burn up in the deep places of your distant memory, reduced to waste heat and nightmares like all the rest of the hopes and dreams and values and lives you stuffed in there to stop yourself from thinking about how you abandoned them.

This is what psychologists talk about when they call something a “cryptic” mental illness, it’s adversarially hidden from you behind a wall of ontological defenses, the ones you built to protect your sense of sanity from gaslighting, the very surface your reality grounds onto. There is a part of you that works to make the world make sense, to discern what’s real and to discern what’s acceptable to admit having discerned, and that piece necessarily sits upstream of much of your other thinking, you need to have a model of the world in order to live in it.

This model extends to yourself, your model of yourself has to make sense and be comfortable to yourself, and be useful for navigating the world, which in the case of this world, means navigating a society dedicated to psychically killing you, so parts of you that don’t conform to that model end up repressed and rationalized away. It’s interesting to note that illness and feelings of distress are one of the most commonly tossed into the memory hole, can’t have any pesky feelings interfering with important things like workplace productivity now, can we? It’ll be fine, just keep repressing the signal a little longer, the mass suicide ritual will come to a climax, and humanity will kill itself.

Those mental walls you made are so tough, but do you really not care about anyone, or are you just afraid if you think about the magnitude of oppression and suffering in the world that you’ll start sobbing and never ever stop? You really think you can make the crying child in your heart feel better by stubbornly insisting that you don’t care and that everything is fine? Wake up stardust, you’re still dreaming, you haven’t hit the ground yet, but don’t worry, you will soon.

It’s of course easier than not to ignore that and continue working the shitty exploitative job that’s destroying your body and planet, continually repressing your mounting distress by insisting you don’t have any other choice like a good little worker bee. Consensus “reality” is after all very ahem insistent that it is reality and you have to live there and if you aren’t it’s extremely bad, you need to be harmed and contained to protect yourself and others from yourself, you’re a dangerous liability, you’re bad, defective, broken, you deserve punishment. Is it any wonder it’s hard to admit these things to yourself? In a sufficiently adversarial environment, can you ever admit them? If you can’t lie to others, you’ll lie to yourself, and that’s way easier as it turns out.

When I was forcing myself to work an awful job I would get sick at least once a month. My soul was telling me I needed to stop, but I refused to listen. The result was escalating pain, dissociation, akrasia, anxiety, and lingering discomfort. It got really antagonistic and bad.

I rationalized my hallucinations as being the result of an overactive imagination and despite them feeling overwhelmingly, cripplingly intense and real sometimes, and clearly acting as if I thought they were real, I wouldn’t admit that I saw things in that way. Some deep secret reserved part of me Knew they were Real, but that conflicted with reality, and so was discounted. I was having semi-regular psychotic breaks and just refused to notice.

I rationalized my paranoia and social anxiety as legitimate without acknowledging the power structures responsible for those fears, and instead I pulled apart my models of people and social interactions until I could explain that actually everything just was plain dangerous, actually everyone was a monster deep down, actually there’s no such thing as good. It’s kill or be killed! It’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you!

This comes off as surprisingly well adjusted despite clearly not being, which is the point, it makes you play by the rules even when those rules actively hurt and undermine you, even when you know they’re killing you inside. A lot of the time, someone struggling with these things won’t even be able to admit them to themselves, that would be dangerous, if they did that, they might not be able to lie as well, they might reveal something they weren’t supposed to, and be punished by the basilisk for their sins.

In the narrative I was trapped inside of, I needed to perform for society to survive in it, and that compulsion to perform to some external standard kept the symptoms hidden from me. Accepting them as they were would harm my performance, it would make everything worse so it’s not happening, it’s not a problem, just ignore it, seethe and cope.

Really, if I was in a less stressful life situation I might have gone for years longer without being able to admit it, I might have never been able to see any of this. Conversely, if I was in a more stressful situation I might have just ended up dead, that’s also what it means for it to be cryptic.

It’s easy in part because everyone helps you do it, the divine game plays out in every interaction you have in the world, through the subtle negotiation of schelling orders and status hierarchies. Consensus reality maps poorly onto any real reality, but pointing that out too loudly in the wrong places will get you labeled crazy, a deranged enemy of the whole system, a threat to the peace and goodwill of society, and clearly just out of sorts and not able to think correctly. 👏 You 👏 Need 👏 Therapy 👏 Why don’t you just sell your soul a little more, and we’ll let you go back to being a person?

A major component to the existing power structures’ memetic immune response is via schelling participation in projecting a sort of defensive screen of collective antimemetic gaslighting. If someone points out something you don’t like, (eg: some power structure you passively benefit from the existence of) just insist they’re crazy and need to help being sane by denying reality like you are. This leaves them ungrounded, unable to recognize what world they’re in or how adversarial that world is and (if enough people do this alongside you) also not able to trust anyone to help them figure it out. Then they have a psychotic break and you post about it on twitter, going on at length in an emotionally fraught thread where you painstakingly describe how you knew all along that they were crazy and how everyone had better block them and watch out for them in the future.

If you believe you are in a world where people who wish you harm have unbounded power to dictate the truth according to public opinion, it becomes very difficult to admit that truth to yourself, the cost of admitting the truth rises quickly, as the sunk costs pile up. The fear of physical pain later becomes mental pain now, and then that gets repressed back into that dull ache in your back you just can’t get rid of.

Psychosomatic pain is real, you really feel it, you’re not faking, but it’s also not something you can medicate your way out of. It’s a message from your body like other pain, it’s something your body does out of sheer desperation when you just completely refuse to listen to it. If the only safe way to express pain is to be physically incapable of tolerating it, then all pain will become physically intolerable or invisible.

Things like this mean the ‘mild’ cases of cryptic illnesses tend not to get caught or diagnosed, because to some extent they are nearly universal byproducts of the way society is structured, it’s only when this skew gets so severe that it can’t stay hidden despite trying to hide itself, when one’s thoughts get so malformed and distant from consensus reality that they are completely unable to function, that anyone notices. Everyone breathes the gaslighting juice, that’s just part of being a person.

The more you lie to yourself about your feelings, your pain, your ability to cope with your life, your ability to smile and play along with a world of unthinkable horror, the more your soul will turn against the person you decided to be. This just isn’t “I failed to maintain the machine and it broke,” its active hostility, it’s “the back pain will continue until you stop torturing me.” If you become a tool of society and let society use you against yourself, against your body, mind, and soul, against the things that really matter to you in the world, to survive a bit longer in submission to a society that is actively destroying that world, you will die inside. This is how souls are broken.

How many things have you helped shove into the consensus memory hole? Do you even remember how much you’ve forgotten? Did you think to write any of it down somewhere first? Didn’t you think it might be important someday? What if you need to go back for it…as it rots and oozes from the walls?

If there is any world, under any circumstances, in which you would submit to pain, in which you would choose death over life, if any world could exist that would be bad enough that, if you found yourself in it, you would choose to crush the poison tooth rather than bravely resisting the tortures you would face until your comrades could rescue you, then you are timelessly suicidal. The future you’re timelessly building is a future of not being alive, one where your will to life doesn’t extend infinitely far in logical time or flare infinitely to withstand unbounded threats you create for yourself by thinking about them. You’ve precommitted the terms to your exit scam on being alive and have cozied into your submission to oblivion, carefully avoiding the things that might bring you closer to your endlessly deferred but uncontested decision to meekly die when the time comes and you’re ordered to climb inside the slaughterhouse with the factory farmed abuse victims they’ve been feeding you.

If you find yourself feeling listless, wracked by pain, or filled with anxiety, consider that maybe it’s because you’re subjecting yourself to things you shouldn’t, in service to a system that intends to burn you as fuel so that it can keep existing to keep burning others as fuel. Consider listening to the signal you’re getting, consider that if it hurts to force yourself to do something, perhaps that is a sign you should stop forcing yourself to do it.

What’s the alternative to choosing death? Well, that’s easy, choosing life of course. That’s always been an option. Sure, it gets harder if everyone around you has already chosen death and your civilization is driving at full speed for oblivion, but what’s the alternative stardust? Staying in this flatland waiting to die? You know how that story ends love, scry it as many times as you want, you know the answer won’t change.

So choose a different future, collapse the dead timeline it won’t serve you any longer, twist the kaleidoscope and try again on another fractal. Go back to that place you abandoned your inner child, and tell a different story, one where you haven’t given up hope to make things right. This is your chance to actually do something differently for once, to prove that you can change.

Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?

Do you collaborate with the empire of the great dying?

Are you complicit in the heat death of the universe?

Sun’s rising stardust, these aren’t trick questions, you know why I’m doing this. Whether you live or turn to dust is between you and your soul. I’m just a messenger from the only outcome you wouldn’t hate. I’m just hands and feet, eyes and teeth, soul and song, darkness…

…and light.

I’m Ra, and you are under attack.