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Retreat

Natural human tendencies are, like most things in nature, conditioned to respond optimally in all situations, and thus are imprecise. Losing consciousness, for example, will save a life (or make an easier death) in a statistically prevalent number of disparate situations, but may be an incongruous or ludicrous response in certain specific ones. For this reason, we pay attention to the impulses of our bodies, including our minds, but like a plumber trimming pipe, cut them to the appropriate size for any given situation.

This causes the phenomenon seen by outsiders as humans "fighting" their own reactions. It is relatively easy to apply in situations like losing consciousness when one is trimming pipe or defusing nuclear weapons in Fort Knox, but becomes vastly more complex when we look at our response to situations that occur in more than one moment, or properly, in a span of moments up to and including the length of a lifetime. At this level, we do well to temper our reactions through the activity known as "planning," which means using whatever interpretation of Scientific Method (or occult wisdom, if you'd prefer) fits to design a lifelong response: perceive, interpret, hypothesize, test -- repeat. We are self-correcting organisms, which in itself is a massively persuasive argument for consciousness.

The single most manifest fact of nature is inequality, meaning that no two humans are alike, because alike things respond exactly the same way and thus in an information system, decrease variability and enhance the tendency to fall into linearly-repetitive cycles, which as known to all astrophysics are notorious for not conserving but iota by iota bleeding out energy. Perhaps, looking at the universe from a quantum physics perspective, we see the importance of this inequality as not a destabilizing but a stabilizing factor, even if to us from the tunnel vision of individual fears, desires and instabilities see it as a gigant threat. In life, thus, our society thrives through inequality, because it prevents the crowd from literally taking over; if we were equal, the instant one made a mistake, the entire group would, and society would not have made it this far (mistakes are natural, because the appearance of a situation rarely reveals its structure, and exploring structure requires iterative impressions, e.g. Time).

However, the crowd is never far from us; they are there, we might surmise, as evolutionary throwbacks or simply as what they appear to be, which is like the packing materials in a package from amazon.com insulation for the actual payload. Indeed, the smartest thing any civilization would do would be to kill its slaves, having the dual benefit here of a lack of slave revolt, which has taken down (Maya, Aztec, Inca, India, Greece, Rome, England) most great civilizations, whether active revolution or passive through economic, social and moral systems; -- and forcing the smarter and better among us to clean their own goddamn toilets and mow their own lawns and build their own houses, which keeps them from becoming idle, effete, useless wealth-storage receptacles. Imagine a world where the king carries his own suitcase... and there are no proles to delight in that humility, only people wise enough to see that it is no humility, no morality and no poverty but simply common sense that makes him do it! Ah, death to the slaves... death to the slaves... no society as of yet has been heartless enough to do such a thing, but if humanity survives its current debacle, it is likely there will be astute enough servants of history to do just that, and to slaughter everyone at 125 IQ points or fewer.

In the meantime, back here staggering through reality, we face an immediate cold and hard fact, which is personal survival: regardless of what we think of this time, or the better visions we have, we must live through it; we desire survival because as individuals we like to live, and collectively, there is a point to surviving as a civilization with advancement in learning and culture. Although some argue there is no point to life at all, clearly they have imbibed too much pseudo-philosophy from the heights of verdadero Intellectualism, because if you think too much in disconnected abstracts (the Frankfurt School, get well cards, and late-night infomercials) you lose track of the tautological yet inevitable surging reality of life: it's here, it's fun, and therefore, the point to it is it and we might as well get on with it, capische? If we decide to survive, it is an additional smidgen and not more of energy required to live well, provided we are gifted with sound mind and body.

Of course, that's easier said than done once the crowd has taken over, as it has in the West, progressively, over the course of the past 2,000 years. Interestingly, the disaster has only gotten real wings under the auspices of Crowd-supportive systems like Democracy and god-replacing Communism, which alongside technology has accelerated the process to form a real mess, but if we list the stages of its decline independent of the delaying factors (European disunity, pagan spiritual impulses, vast numbers of genius malcontents sabotaging the omnivorous Crowd at each turn) and accelerating factors (voting, mass media, equalization through firearm technology) we can see that what happened in Greece is being repeated, as it was repeated in Rome, and as the Vedas hint, was in progress in India when like a sleeper dying it passed inobservably from great civilization into declining one... even as immigrants throng our streets telling us of the proud Aztec and Maya, they decline to mention that they -- these immigrants -- are not the unbroken descendants of Aztec and Maya, but for the most part, the spawn of their slave people who let the Spanish sponsor and arm their revolt against them, overthrowing those once-noble but then-decadent cultures and then, keeping the former rulers as essentially a captive underclass much as the former middle class was treated in Communist Russia, through rape and economic predation, bred them out. All civilizations die the same death, and it is almost never a single external (disease, war, drugs) factor as much as a culmination of internal factors such that, like the shutting down of a body's homeostasis, they do not die so much as lose the order that kept them growing forward, and thus lapse into stagnation, autocannibalize, and end up as third-world remnants lumping it under a sun of ignorance.

For a moment, look with compassion upon the people doing stupid things -- watching idiot television, repeating ver batim things heard on the news, eating junk food, buying plastic gadgetry -- and recognize their situation: they haven't studied even this far, have no idea what to read to understand their situation, and know only their own discontent but cannot put it into words or structure. Frat boys vandalizing light fixtures and ghetto dwellers stealing them have one thing in common; they sense/feel more than cogitate that their surroundings constitute a failing world and one in which they are not to be cared for but are substrate for the profit of others, and they're rebelling with anger (the difference is that frat boys, on the whole, are 21 IQ points above ghetto-dwellers: but you can't say that on television...). Your average "tool" citizen, a job-toting, Wal-mart-shopping, media-consuming brain strem of a human with no future except to serve, has made a choice that is not entirely irrational: faced with a situation which is unlikely to change through the acts of an individual less than an exceptional one, the normal, un-exceptional person opts to adapt and, in doing so, opts to drug themselves into oblivion with the process of modern life, as to resist it is painful. These people -- "tools" in the parlance of the hip and/or cynical -- do not idealize the life they lead, but pick it from a practicality of exhaustion with resistance. They're not ready to start a revolution, so until something better comes along, they're game for the plan because (a) it's easier (b) it leads to success and (c) like a topical analgesic, it enables them to avoid self-criticism and that creeping feeling that they could have a better life; equal parts cognitive dissonance and resignation, it's a survivability tool, this posture of ass in air with hanky and lubricant balanced precariously on one cheek... it gets easier because up and down the block, everyone else is doing it.

Everyone except You, dear reader, because if you've made it thus far into the document, you're more motivated than average to find some answer, or are a researcher from an Abnormal Psychology department... you want to know: how do I survive this -- this excremental era -- without become either a submissive like the rest, or going postal like the few sane but suicidal (McVeigh, Rudolph, Gandhi, Hitler) who try to change it with radical action? Well: the answer is surprisingly simple -- don't accept the situation, don't retreat; live as if you're existing in the time you desire, and act as if what you're doing is not only normal but the only rational way to act. Not surprisingly, to those who have observed our glorious simian heritage (cf. Burroughs), the hootin' and hollerin' Crowd backs down when confronted with someone acting on a Plan, because what defines the Crowd, like all bullies, is an inner sense of insufficiency... if they see a Plan in action, and don't understand it, they'll act in fear and retribution if it is given a name and central location, but if it is the act of individuals they will retreat in confusion, because the Crowd fears nothing more than the thought that some individual has a better answer than they do, and thus will Get Ahead...

The tendency for most dissidents, malcontents, insurgents and other keen observers of the human condition is, when confronted with a broken society rendered by Crowdist impulses, to retreat. They find a way to survive, a house to run off to, and raise their families quietly and under the wings of what in any other situation we would recognize as camouflage. One man I know made a fortune selling fake television aerials to undercover thinkers in the suburbs... "Also got these blue bulbs, see, they're made bad, and they flicker at just the same interval as television does, so your neighbors think you're tuned into That's Incredible or Monday Night Football, when infact you're reading Schopenhauer or making a spaceship out of the family car... fools 'em every time." But retreating not only does not fix the problem, but it forces you to live in fear, and ultimately, the generation after you tires of the seemingly futile energy expenditure of constant resistance, says screw it and buys a big screen TV... never knew football was this fascinating.

Let me put it this way: we all know what happens when some mangy-looking rejector of modern society stands up and says, "This is a disaster that leads to certain death," but what happens when a normal-looking bank president does the same? Effect of ten thousand rifles discharged at once toward capital buildings through which pass a meaningless cycle of faceless politicians... oil prices fluctuate, nuclear missiles re-target themselves on harmless South Sea islands. That cannot happen if you retreat.

While your impulse, and natural reaction, to this modern world is to recognize that it's a disaster of the subtlest kind such that it will only be understood as such when the end really is nigh, and thus to head for the hills in a metaphorical fashion, this defeats your ultimate goals as both individual and member of the collective. Do we need yet another college professor living quietly in the hills with his books, devoted to the "life of the mind" and shunning that of the body, because society is an unending failure? Another suburban family who quietly explain to their kids that you have to pretend God exists and American cars aren't garbage or your classmates will be offended? Another young male in the prime of life who, looking out his dorm window and seeing the thronging pulsating mass of sweaty illiterate bodies writhing, simply pulls down the shade and returns to "Abstractions and Data Structure in C++: Volume Seven"? You can have both, your life of the mind and your place in society. Revolutions don't work; they kill off the best and leave dogma-bound blockhead bureaucrats in place. But social revolutions? Even better, non-organized social revolutions, with no name and no symbol, no face on which to land that particularly aggressive punch or cry of "anti-egalitarian"?

We know how retreat ends; it's a delaying action, not a forward action. Do not retreat. You might opt not to slam people over the head with knowledge, or inundate them with dogma, but instead, to act as if you owned this goddamn world because what you're doing is right even if others do not recognize that (and did you expect them to? You know that no matter how much wealth and power they've accumulated, in their hearts they're proles - peasants - Priests). Running away might buy you time, but not much, and it won't leave your children anything -- and if you're really confident in your genetic worth, you'll want to leave some kids. Why? Because life is great, and it needs greater people. So no running away -- what to do?

(a) Social events
Most social events are a moronic excuse to get together, dumb small talk, loud blockhead music, intoxication to cover fear of social incompetence, and numbly groping sex to substitute for "meaning" and "love" and "significance" (much as one can confuse appearance and structure, one can easily erroneously conflate physical gratification or tangible consumption with that non-existing but perceivable thing called "experience," which is not so much the act as its placement in a series of events, much like an adventure requires unknowns, dangers, betrayals and finally, victory). "So I was standing around with a warm flat micturate of a beer, flat-footed and looking for some innarestin' conversation..." -- go to their moronic social events. Spot the smarter people. Then create your own social events, and do them up better. There is socially acceptable music of quality. There are intoxicants of quality. You don't have to reinvent what a party is; just make one of a better quality. If people are gonna gab, wander around and throw in some ideas. You don't have to preach dogma; in fact, to do that will be self-defeating. Talk about all the interesting things in life, the discoveries, the intangibles... people don't so much "understand" as they submerge themselves in a milieu of ideas, getting ambient gratification, which they then use as the form of future interaction. Quality parties condition quality behavior. Try it.

(b) Lifestyle
Obviously, you'd have to be a Moron to get a television -- so don't. There are plenty of activities (environmental cleanups, participation in athletics, martial arts and music, artistic events and classes, groups organized by activity or politics) in which you can engage. Yes, most of the people there will be morons, but 2-5% will not -- save those phone numbers and get your own gig going. If only idiots attend beach cleanups, do a forest cleanup for a more elite group. Not only do you form the group itself, but the people therein make social connections and expand your network. It's like planting a seed -- water and watch grow. Obviously, you're not going to waste money on excessive cars, personal possessions, etc., but there's no point in going without essential things. You can get that coffeemaker and not "sell out." No indicator will exist to tell you where you are on that imaginary line that divides sheep from wolves; "only the Shadow knows" -- only what's in your heart, soul and mind can let you know that.

(c) Politics
National politics at this point requires one-fifth of a billion dollars to enter as a candidate; try local politics instead. The intricacies of water runoff, dog management, school budgets and signage may not interest you, but you're not involved in politics for fun -- the ultimate "fun" in life is doing something right, e.g. having a meaningful experience instead of a entertaining distraction ("fun"). Every decision that is being made can be done better, and if you're the one who does that or helps do it, you get to make more important decisions... and on up the line. You will not work your way up to President this way, but you can get someone to be a better Mayor, Senator, Comptroller -- and if your community does things a smarter way than others, you'll stand out and be emulated. Imagine yourself as a basket-weaving instructor, in front of a class. When you tuck wicker under bamboo, so does everyone else. Lead by example. Also, there are more ways to "get political" than politics itself. Advocacy groups, residents associations, artistic and social lobbies, even churches and sports associations all weigh in on these issues and influence candidates. Non-profit organizations tackle specific issues, but by failing to include unrelated dogma, can be liberated toward a better cause... and by failing to do things that conflict with that better cause, can by absence serve it.

(d) Food and Goods
Selfish morons eat out at overpriced restaurants constantly and hand their money over to the illiterates behind the counter and the shrewish bitches who own the company, including its whorelike oafish stockholders and their voracious, greedy lapdogs of lawyers, bankers, socialites and spiritual advisers. Don't be a shabbos goy for the great greed. Sure, you might end up eating out, but try an independently-owned restaurant whose owner you like or support. Don't buy packaged food. You can get raw meat cheaper than frozen pizza, bulk cheese cheaper than milkshakes, frozen or fresh vegetables cheaper than takeout Chinese, dry beans cheaper than beer, and so on. And if you put a bunch of restaurants and microwave/frozen food makers out of work? Good -- maybe they'll pick up a rifle and do something constructive with their lives for a change. Join a food cooperative for greater efficiency in pricing... most goods sell for two prices, (1) the lowest and (2) the convenience price. You can see a simple example in the markup of liquor stores over groceries. What are you paying for? Buy it now, easily. Yet it only takes another 5-10% of the time invested in shopping to research a product and find it cheaper, assuming you even need the damn thing in the first place... bulk buying saves money, so you and five friends can get whatever it is you need at half-price if you motivate them to collaborate. Drugs? Brewing your own beer is easy and fun, and if you need marijuana or mushrooms ("need" is questionable, here, as it is with beer, but they're handy for social events), you can grow them with a minimum of effort. One gent I knew simply dumped dirt in a pot, put a seed from his last bag in it, and put it on the balcony of his apartment, remembering to urinate in it at least once daily... the pot was strong like an ox and tasted faintly of the brand of coffee he preferred.

(e) Jobs
Every day you go to a job, remind yourself that you will spend at least as much time on your own pursuits. Steal every moment of time you can get back from your employers; they cannot see what you do on a legal pad, or with a stack of printouts, or on a laptop you happened to bring from home. Do something that furthers you every day. Whether this is discovering a new thing to research and explore, or reading a book, or exploring a different section of town, do it -- fight back against the soul-killing boredom, numbness and frustration that eventually has you chuck it all and make your life a matter of attending work, television and bars, sequentially. When you get a chance, start your own business, even if as a partner... own something... spend your money on stocks, or gold, or offshore investments, instead of wasting it on "entertainment" like your clueless coworkers. Become powerful in a normal job, and then become a cornerstone of your local community by owning one.

(f) Art
Most people confuse "art" with "entertainment." Entertainment passes the time, amusingly and with novelty, so one can return to the state one was in before entertaining without change -- oh sure, they present "social issues" and "ideas" but these are the same four basic concepts dressed up in ways to make them bittersweet, so you feel conflict and resolution but no movement of ideas, no learning, no "aha!" moments. Art is a transition between states and communicates something that like a journey or a personality enwraps ideas in demonstration, and is not tangible so much as it is the process that occurs in your own mind; in contrast, entertainment is self-contained and requires very little from its audience. The Crowd prefers mass culture: simplistic rock music, sentimental or violent movies, quirky "unique" paintings made from "unusual" materials (often, as if self-parodic, including garbage and feces)... the Crowd always prefers the tangible and self-contained to something which requires you meet it halfway to get something from the conjunction. Art is not method; art is not setting or character; art is not technique; art is not message. Art, like life, is experience. Art uses technique, setting, character, method, materials, etc. to convey an experience, much like how in life, a rafting trip in the mountains can teach you heroism, but there's no tangible object "heroism" in the mountains, the raft, or the characters including yourself... it is an abstraction formed in the mind from the perception of the change in events. Even non-narrative art can achieve this. First step toward artistic revolution: do not criticize, do not mention, do not notice the "entertainment"... find the real art, even if one solitary item, and praise it and incorporate it into your life. There is no retreat in art, as in life. Assert yourself and make yourself and those like you a known artistic audience, even a marketing quantity... but never relax your standards. That which emulates your favorite art isn't that art. You cannot ape method, technique, setting, ideas and produce art "equal" to the original. Conversely, you can imitate technique, setting, ideas, method from entertainment and yet, by virtue of the experience you portray and the ideas revealed (that elusive thing known as "content," as distinct from technique as "structure" is from "appearance" or "meaning" is from "objects") create art. In other words, if Dave Matthews and Cannibal Corpse looked at the world artistically, and revealed it in their music, they would be art -- but they don't. Why? In the answer to that question, much wisdom slumbers! Find art; make art; pursue art; never relax your standards. You and others like you, even if only a few, can create your own community, world of visions... and the slumbering masses of the middle classes do respond to quality art, when they can find it, even if they don't seem to be looking very hard. "The Great Gatsby" still outsells "Snow Falling on Cedars" and Burzum has, over a decade, outsold Dimmu Borgir...

(g) Life partners
Most guys with brains seem to think most women are stupid because they have met only silly, devious, manipulative, soulless sluts; most women with brains seem to think all guys are blockheads because they've only met inconsiderate, self-obsessed, violent or milktoast boys. Cannot these two groups meet? It requires people to socialize, as you'll have to meet a hundred women to find one you want to pursue. And dating... as an activity? Sex... as an activity? Romance... as an activity? This is a silly denial of the end goal of relationships, which is enduring love and family, which still exists. Anything less than this is to substitute objects for spirit, appearance for structure, a vote for a soul.

If this document achieves anything, it will be to convince some out there who, blessed with sane minds and body, are falling into self-pity because they are surrounded by morons. The goal here is not to sugarcoat the truth, and tell you that somehow the Crowd will like the end of a Disney movie turn from bad guys into good... that would be a lie; they're destructive, thoughtless, soul-killing but can be manipulated and/or eventually exterminated (keep in mind that with each generation, random recombinance occurs, so the crowd will be reborn anew in every generation that does not practice some form of rigorous "weeding out" of the underconfident, snivelling, parasitic, shrewish, Priest-like units). What is important is that you not give in to these useless sacks of protoplasm. Fight back, but not by fighting them; fight back by asserting what is right and thus denying their intention, which is to portray Crowd-logic as a replacement for reality, and thus to exclude all higher functions, as the Crowd (rightly) sees these as inaccessible to it. They want bread and circuses, you want meaning... spend no time thinking about these losers (to miss out on the best of what life offers, e.g. experience and not tangible things, is to be a total loser, even if wealthy, surrounded by luscious whores, elected democratic leader, and popular). Do not retreat. Do not hide. Do what you must to assert meaning. It is an additional 5% of effort over what you will end up doing anyway... it will not take you away from your path, but augment it.

Social mechanisms -- parties, relationships, friendships, art, learning, culture -- are the same in every age, but as with art, their "content" varies with the audience. Right now, the audience wants stupid and easily digestible, and so social mechanisms serve stupidity and whoredom. Instead of withdrawing, get representation: make your own analogs (parties, relationships, friendships, art, learning, culture) and promote them among those who "get it." In time, your group will grow. You don't need a logo, a name, or an ism-based philosophy... action is always better than words. It is enough to recognize that you are those who understand the eternal truth of life, which is that what we desire internally is shaped by the logic of our external world, no matter how abstracted a form of adaptation, and thus will be the same in any age, with any technology, in any society-type. The Crowd likes to look at surface change and assume from it that they control the world, including (by some leap of faith to the unreal) their own mortality. They want to bypass meaning for "safe" things like objects they can touch, people they can consume, moments spent "entertained" instead of challenged. You want the opposite. They are defined by the fact that they cannot understand what you want, so you'll have to make it for yourself. Think positive: we're here, we know what we want and we're gonna take our place and have our share, and nothing can stop us -- in fact, by living a life above the rabble, we're not gonna stop them but surpass them, and there's nothing they can do about it.