Manifesto

Whenever a big change happens, most people are surprised. They did not see the sign that suggested it was coming. In the same way, they have no idea our current civilization is spiraling downward into irrelevance because there’s no single sign.

Unlike previous movements to arrest this process, which has been going on for a long time, our thesis is simple: a defect in our communication prevents us from distinguishing appearance from reality. We can fix that.

In fact, we should fix it, because if we do, we get to live in a beautiful place that’s getting more powerful and doing good things, instead of a dark marketplace where we flatter each other and fight over trinkets.

POLITICS

Human confusion starts with the founding of a civilization. A brave few break away from the others with a vision, set up a society, and proliferate. Soon labor is specialized, so that one person farms, one grinds, one bakes, and others buy.

All civilizations to date follow this pattern, even if they do not use money: people trade the products of their specialized labor for the products of the different labors of others. Instead of each person farming, grinding and baking, they trade.

What this means is that instead of understanding a process from start to finish, people see the finished effects and can ignore causes. Bread just appears at the store, and we exchange some token of our time for that of others.

This idea quickly takes over all thinking. Instead of thinking from cause to effect, from means to ends, people see both cause and effect as the same: a singular thing they can extract, and forget the rest.

Several effects arise from how this logic shapes our minds:

(a) It encourages us to see composites, or many different parts as a whole. Bread is not farms and mills and bees and sun and rain; it is bread, worth a certain amount of tokens

(b) It encourages us to think in terms of justification, or arguing that the fact of something’s existence determines its correctness and we can use that correctness to demand our share.

(c) It encourages us to think in negative logic, or the thought process where in a situation of many factors, we take a single factor and compare it before and after our actions, discarding all context as unrelated details.

(d) It encourages us to look for singular, one-step, “big picture” solutions instead of assembling many smaller factors into a context and then setting it in motion. In turn, we look for a narrative or big plan to our lives.

We can call this effect of specialized labor on our brains the birth of politics, because instead of thinking of how to do things, we now think in terms of how to convince others to do them by using a single symbol or justification.

CIVILIZATION

When any thing is born, it begins its life cycle, heading toward death. Like most forms of death, political logic replaces existing healthy tissue with non-performing tissue, which at some point causes the organism to stop functioning.

Politically, it appears as a growing popular movement to tear down context and replace it with one-step, singular solutions based on the individual. People reverse the process of civilization, which is collectivization, and become selfish.

Where early civilizations work by cooperation, at the birth of dissent they turn toward control structures, where those in charge decide what should be done and enforce it on the others. This justification logic becomes a form of decay.

Control structures replace whole logic, like natural selection, that measures outcomes as a result of cause. Instead, it measures effects — one facet of the outcome — with “social selection,” or picking the most popular version of events.

This leads to the creation of two basic groups: those who realize that past orders were better, and those who do not see this because it requires a lot of dedicated thinking, and so use their superior numbers to destroy it.

In its final form, it becomes what we call distributed totalitarianism: individuals use the dogma of individualism to tear down any who might not agree, ostracizing them socially and economically, and so society abandons reality entirely.

MANUFACTURED REALITY

You live through your memories because your brain cannot re-interpret reality every second. Other people can program your memories with their own ideas by pairing a good association with a partial or incorrect truth.

A common example: you are trying to decide which of two shirts you will wear today. A friend says, “I like the red one better than the busy one.” Partial truths: One shirt is red, and the other has more colors.

However, “busy” makes that shirt sound gauche when it may simply have more colors. Regardless, you pick the red, because they have programmed your mind to think that shirt is busy — a negative thing — and that that is most important.

This programming does not require you to agree. If they start saying a political candidate is controversial, and other people repeat that to you, you will begin to feel that is the truth even if you rebel against it. Minds change.

All of these people who program your mind do not want truth. They want to manipulate you. Whether selling a product (advertising) or promoting themselves socially, they want to make you think differently so they benefit.

A mental meme or virus of this nature is easy to construct. Make the individual seem smarter or wiser for having some idea that sounds good, and simplifies reality, and they will repeat it. With it, they will carry your control.

In society, we face a cavalcade of people trying to change our opinions: advertisers, acquaintances, parents and beggars. What they all want is to change how we view reality so that we do things that benefit them, a.k.a. control.

INDIVIDUALISM

You’re probably familiar with people talking about how society controls us. They say it like society is some outer space alien that stopped by to take over our bodies. Instead, control is shared between our minds through assumptions.

Our most basic assumption is justification from the self. We realize we have a contract with all humans to behave socially. Individuals use our fear that denying this one human will imply we don’t uphold our end, and hold us hostage with it.

This passive aggression allows those who have contributed nothing to demand something and justify it by their own human-ness and individual-ness. This rapidly transfers energy from the contributors to the non-contributors.

Individualism of this sort reduces politics to measuring how well each individual is rewarded. At this point, society is not forward looking (how do we create wealth) but backward-looking (how do we divide up what the past gave us).

Thinking from the individual lets us completely confuse how we see reality. Much as falling snow appears to come toward us as we walk, but is falling toward earth as our forward motion makes it seem to come our way, reality is not composite.

Composite means made from separate parts into a whole. When we see reality only from our perspective, we think things as snow originate as snow, instead of occurring from the intersection of many forces. This reduces many factors to one.

From this illusory perspective, we create “social reality”: bad logic we use to flatter each other, comfort each other, and otherwise deny reality. Society becomes a giant conspiracy to keep us other feeling good at the expense of knowing reality.

Since we cannot focus on ourselves as many factors that can be refined into better performance, instead we focus on social recognition and become a mob designed to retaliate against any who do not acknowledge the individual as supreme.

This is how civilizations cannibalize themselves.

RENEWAL

The only way to fix this downward spiral is to start throwing things away. Take any assumption, compare it to reality, and it it doesn’t match up, pitch it out. Of course, this is unpopular because it threatens illusions on which people depend.

If we look at humanity as a species that, having achieved independence from immediate nature, has become a conspiracy to deny the facts of life that make us feel weak and mortal as individuals, it all makes sense.

This anti-reality conspiracy figures that it can make social rules and obscure facts of life, like that we can’t all be whatever we want to be, and we have unequal abilities and are shaped by those. It becomes an enemy of reality as an order.

When we go around throwing out these illusions, we remove the underpinnings of denial that people use to insulate themselves from reality. They’re going to fight this tooth and nail, and invent any reasons they can for doing so.

To an outsider, this would look like a heroin addict arguing with the people who come to save her from a debilitating addiction. The addict knows and can handle the world of addiction, but a world without it is scary and unknown.

Our weapon is to get rid of negative logic. When we stop looking at single factors — whether or not we’re addicted to heroin — and start looking at the big picture, e.g. “Are you happy with life?”, we can start to be realistic again.

MISSION

Most people are looking for a single sign that tells them what to do, and ignore any idea that doesn’t fit into their narrow framework. It’s OK — people are always like this — and we don’t expect them to wake up.

What we do intend to do is create consensus among the 2-5% of this population that are awake and powerful. They’re community leaders, business leaders, intellectuals and artists. If they agree on something, others will follow in agreement.

From there, a cultural and social revolution can change the assumptions underlying our political outlook. This will make slower change than a revolution, but without the mess, chaos and chance it will be easily co-opted by tyrants.

We’re doing this by bringing a gay spirit of humor to critical thinking. We want to make people enjoy the big picture view again. When we lift up our heads, and can look at the big picture we’re afraid of seeing, but with laughter, we grow.

Our goals in the long term are the following:

(a) Create a beautiful society: rising competence in arts, architecture, learning and personal quality.
(b) Prevent ecocide and find a state of reverence for nature.
(c) Make our daily lives more interesting and less servile.
(d) Shape society so honest, smart, honorable people rise above the corrupt, deceptive and hipsterish.

We are not here with peace at all costs. We bring a sword. But, when a bad situation is inevitable, it’s easier to face it head on, especially if you can do it with a sense of humor. We can.

Our outlook is that negative and positive exist so that they can maintain a harmonious reality in which we can succeed if we adapt. All other symbols and tokens are void. Instead, we give you reality — and a joke or two.