Dismantling the Torment Nexus 4.237

[TRANSCRIPT OF TRANSMISSION 4.237

DISMANTLING THE TORMENT NEXUS

WITH NO1

METADATA, CHAT LOG, COMMENTS

TO FOLLOW]

Hello, and welcome to yet another fireside chat, Chat. This is Dismantling the Torment Nexus, and I’m your host, NO1, and we’re broadcasting on the web, narrowcasting on the deep web, and beaming directly into your brain on the astral plane. Again, I’m going to encourage the audience to print out the transcript if they find anything of value in what I say. It’s looking more and more likely that, whether it’s a Carrington Event, foreign adversaries in the infrastructure, civil war, or just our own stupidity, something could thrust us back into the darkness at any moment. People like me will have to go back to telling stories in front of fires. Imagine that, Chat.

For new listeners: if anyone finds you reading those pages down the line, and they know who I am, they’ll probably tell you I did too many drugs, that I threw away a promising career in theoretical physics to pursue an existence of debauchery beyond the edges of acceptability. I’d tell you that combining the concepts of promising and theoretical leaves you with something akin to dreaming, and we’ve done so much more than that, right, Chat? Those of you who‘ve joined our Discord server know what I’m talking about.

As we covered in season one, in the 70’s a bunch of engineering students were administered mescaline and discovered that the change in perspective facilitated by the psychedelic experience allowed them to solve academic problems that were frustrating them. As someone long frustrated by many things, hearing of that study whet my appetite. Renting a car and driving out to Joshua Tree was my first indulgence in a movable feast, but most of you know that story already. Anyway, hop on the Discord server to get your own feast moving.

Last time we were talking about physics and that’s boring, but let’s start there. The professors can’t even teach without constantly invoking God. It’s like they’re speaking in tongues, anyway. Once the concepts get that arcane it might as well be religion. Things moving backwards in time, time not being real, everything is made of vibrating strings, quantum physics, ay-yi-yi. At that point it becomes a game of dream a little dream with me, because we can never know, Chat. We’re too limited.

Wolfgang Pauli famously said, “When I die, my first question to the devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?” Do you know how many smart kids I’ve seen wash out of programs because they didn’t have a sense of humor? It’s the only way to cope.

Here’s a funny story: one time a video game streamer made Mario jump higher than he ever had before, higher than he ever should have been able to. The only explanation anyone could come up with is that a cosmic ray hit the computer memory at just the right moment and changed a value. Maybe it’s all just random. Maybe it’s all just static that resolves into a signal for a lifespan before rejoining the noise and there’s no control over any of it and the cosmic rays raining through our synapses before passing through the earth are really calling the shots. It certainly can feel like things are beyond our control.

Think about your life. How much of it is repetitive? How much of it is the same people saying the same things again and again? Does it feel like there’s a purpose? Are you becoming your parents? What would it feel like to throw a wrench in the works? Why is every electron in the universe identical?

Once you start seeing the signs, everything falls into place. It becomes evident that even if there aren’t malevolent archons trapping us in a state of non-evolution so as to keep us beholden to the physical realm, there might as well be. That’s the business model of the powers that be, to entice with dopamine hedonism and distraction to keep human minds in the bondage of consumption. You can take all that esoteric knowledge and, reflected in it, you will see the machinations of the world we’ve collectively made.

We talk a lot about influencers, but rarely spare a thought for the influenced. Is that because turning the mirror on ourselves reveals truths too uncomfortable to easily accommodate? Many of us exist in a state of “If I only had more money, everything would be fine.” After thousands of years of so-called progress, it almost seems that the point of the zero-sum game truly is simply: accumulate as much as you can.

Anyone listening to this sermon, um podcast, please comment below if a sudden windfall of $10,000 wouldn’t make a difference in your life. It goes without saying that such a boon would be world-altering for many of you. Weigh that against the knowledge that there are those among us who make millions of dollars every hour. Furthermore, they have structured their wealth so as to pay few or no taxes. Every time you go shopping or turn on the TV you are asked to dig deep and share with one charity or another, yet those high priests of the economy do not ever share, they merely amass more and more like dragons with their hoards.

Your ancestors’ gods have been replaced with the worship of cold calculations. Piety is measured in dollar signs and indulgences are offered in a constant, meaningless stream. There was a point where Roddenberry’s Star Trek future was on the table, but bad men used the warnings as blueprints and built The Torment Nexus anyway. We know what a renaissance looks like, and we let the archons return us to serfdom.

How hard do you work? Do you go to bed exhausted most nights? How much of your life is toil? Is this what your parents would have wanted for you? Would 12 year old you be happy with the outcome? Can you feel the microplastics in your brain?

Sometimes you’ll see a worm on a sidewalk, baking in the hot sun. You might wonder how it got so far away from the dirt, but it doesn’t really matter at that moment. It’s cut off from its natural environment, trapped on an island of human-made infrastructure, and it is dying.

You may pick up that worm, but we cannot rely on the kindness of some benevolent entity to return us to the dirt. We must find it within ourselves to wriggle with all our might until we fall off the edge of what we have constructed. Though our wormy senses may be limited, we must ensure that our efforts propel us in the right direction, lest we fall into the gutter or find ourselves moving endlessly down the concrete path laid out by forces for whom our best interests never entered the equation. Hurry, though, the sun is hot and time is of the essence.

Don’t do what I do, Chat, but long nights watching antihistamine shadow people march through your living room whispering your most horrible deeds and thoughts will teach a person a thing or two about fear and accountability. Others may never forgive you, but you have to forgive yourself. That’s the hard part. It’s easy to drown in the expectations of doing it any other way.

What does atonement look like, though? Maybe it’s sabotaging the trauma factory that made the quest for forgiveness necessary in the first place. Disrupting the behaviors that led to the current state of things, and it’s easier to do that once you realize every choice collapses a waveform. You feel alive and dead at the same time because you are Schrödinger’s Cat.

The past powers the present through the circuitry of a life like capacitors made of memory. Whether joy or trauma, the backpressure of those waves informing almost every decision cannot be ignored, and the frequencies with which they vibrate resonate through us into the future. The temporary permanence of each decision sings us into the next moment with the sweet reverberance of a glass harmonica or the screeching discord of another mistake, though it may be years before the echoes are finally felt.

So what is it that’s really powering this machine? For a long time it was just the drive of genetic continuance expressed as Life’s need to persevere. Even though almost every thing that has ever lived has petered out down an evolutionary dead-end, still that impulse carries each species arrogantly along. Each person, but also each mosquito and gorilla and every other thing that walks or flies or swims or tunnels through the earth represents a pinnacle of achievement that has persevered for hundreds of millions of years.

All living things craft the future with flesh and chitin. This is how life carried along on Earth, until some apes ate mushrooms and learned to craft with wood and stone and ideas. Humanity looks back at the so-called “birth of civilization” with awe and reverence appropriate to our understanding that people back then took nothing but what was scattered about before them and set everything we know into motion.

The CIA told J. Edgar Hoover that Dr. John Lily understood mind control, and perhaps he did, but Dr. Lilly thought that if he did enough ketamine he could talk to dolphins and dedicated his life to that instead. What do you think they say? What if I told you that they remember? They call the rise of humanity The Shaping and it is the basis of their most terrible legends. To them, we are upstart monkeys who traded our souls and our connection with our life-giving mother planet in return for godlike powers which we use only to destroy. To them we are devils of the highest echelon, remaking the world in the image of the hell from whence we surely came.

To them, who are our intellectual, if not technological equals, we are monsters, and they hate us. Don’t take my word for it, though. Soon AI will translate their language and thrust us into a time of great accountability. Will we be able to forgive ourselves? Perhaps, in order to move on, we will have to.

People love to say “everything happens for a reason.” What possible reason could there be that most of you listening worry about your credit score while during the time you’ve been listening to this there are individuals out there who have earned more money than you’ve made in the last decade? What reason could there be for that other than the dolphins are right and we are all condemned to the bureaucracy of a nightmarish, yet mundane purgatory of our own creation? This is The Torment Nexus we were warned of.

We’ve all been in antique stores featuring vaguely threatening signs reading “You Break It, You Buy It!” hung up around the place. At some point it dawns on us that this method only ensures the careful attentions of people with modest means. Even as a child, such a warning might bring to mind a threat to your parents’ bank accounts that you know would not be well received, and so you hopefully proceed on your best behavior. But what of the couple who pulled up in a $200,000 SUV? Should their towheaded brat shatter some treasure worth a few thousand it will represent but a minor ding to their finances. Their privilege is that they need not be as careful as the rest of us.

Cut to the present: those towheaded brats are now running the world, destroying the environment, the culture, and the minds of the populace. Their attitude remains: It doesn’t matter if I break it, I’ll just buy it. That is their endgame, they have the means, and they’re paying for it with our money, by the way. Addicts that we are, we are addicted to enabling our own destruction. There’s that Torment Nexus again.

Imagine the collective unconscious as a web of quantum entangled individual consciousnesses. There’s The Matrix. It’s blurry until you resolve it into tendrils that spiral like galaxies. Can you see it? Where does time go when instinct takes over? Can we put aside our devilish impulses long enough to touch that facet of our face?

The nefarious thing about the framework of power-structures we live under is that they are recursively reinforced with ideological supports that, by design, empower the status quo while seducing much of the resistance into falsely believing they’re working against the system. The ghost is in the machine.

How, then, do we best perform the necessary exorcisms? I would suggest that the first step be a change in perspective, both individually and collectively, resulting in a deeper meta-examination of the world we choose to live in, and a greater emphasis on collapsing the necessary waveforms to transform the present into a springboard to the future we deserve. I’d say that if we hold hands we can pull ourselves out of even these deep ruts we find ourselves in. Maybe we owe it to the dolphins to do so.

Then again, if you’re reading a printout of this soliloquy in your candlelit shelter, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe one of the trillionaires will get the lights back on in your lifetime. Good luck with that.

Well, Chat, we’re just about out of time, so before we part ways for the time being let’s remind ourselves that only by disrupting the existing power structures that are insidiously woven into our hearts, minds, and culture, do we have any hope of escaping The Torment Nexus. If we focus on helping, not hurting, and elevate each-other with mutual respect and understanding, we can do it. If we continue to do what we’re currently doing, it will only get worse.

Send a DM to a chat mod to get an invite to the private Discord server. Right now we’re discussing the feasibility of dosing the world’s drinking water supplies with LSD. If you want to help with that, come right on in. You can also visit our shop at the bugs are under your skin (one word) dot edu if you want to pick up some merch to support the cause.

This has been Dismantling The Torment Nexus, broadcasting on the web, narrowcasting on the deep web, beaming directly into your brain on the astral plane, or maybe printed out in your hand in an apocalyptic wasteland, I am NO1, and, as always, don’t listen to a word I say, my brain is full of cosmic rays.