Short Notes VIII

Soul suckers on youtube, the West, simulation theories, ponerology, race & tribalism

30 July, 2026

There’s a certain type of practical niche-expert blogger/youtuber who exudes a know-it-all type of obsession with doing everything perfectly by the book and “safely.” The Code™ is his God, except where he thinks The Code should actually be more strict. A telltale sign of this character, let’s call him That Guy, is that he gives the impression everyone else is doing it wrong and he’s there to set the record straight.

That Guy is often very knowledgeable about his topic: whether he’s The Motorcycle Safety Guy, The YouTube Electrician or The Swimming Pool Guru, he knows stuff and can impart useful information. That’s how he sucks you into his orbit.

But then his evil claws grab your soul, sucking all life force out of you, all joy, and leave you in a state of worry, paralysis, and fear. The project you were about to take on enthusiastically suddenly appears dangerous and hypercomplex. What you have done before with no problem - indeed, what other experienced people have done or advised before - seems to put your life at risk, or at best ruin you financially. You know, insurance, code, accidents, hazards, penalties, worst cases - calmly but confidently thrown at you until your soul caves.

If That Guy is a bit older, he often started out blogging about his obsession before the transition to youtube, having produced metric tons of text about every little legal-technical-safety aspect of it all. You can smell his stale, sour breath behind every paragraph.

That helmet you’re wearing? It WILL kill you. That pipe you used? It WILL ruin you. That wire you pulled? It WILL burn your house, and then the insurance will screw you. You WILL end up dead and injured and ruined and homeless and your family destroyed muahahahAAAAARGH. Unless you worship That Guy. By the way, here’s another video explaining another detail about what you should never do in even more detail.

Don’t you dare do anything; just spend 10 more hours of research and misery until you give up, if only to free yourself from the clutches of That Guy.

Nevermind that The Code was different and more lax just 10 years ago, not to mention 20 years ago, and apparently people were just fine. Nevermind that each individual situation is different. Nevermind the extreme unlikelihood of whatever nightmarish worst case is being peddled.

There are other youtubers or bloggers in the niche/handyman sphere that can be cringey but give off a vibe of innocent enthusiasm. “You can do this,” “don’t overthink it,” let’s goooo!! The energy is palpably different, although it can be subtle sometimes.

They might not be able to cite all the stats, hit you with all the physics or every legal nuance. In fact, they might not be as smart as That Guy. Then again, they have the distinct advantage of not being blood-sucking demons who eat your soul and ruin your life both temporal and eternal.

---

March 24, 2026

That’s the problem with those hoping to “save the West”:

The financial markets alone are not a “casino,” not even a “scam,” but a madhouse making powerful people obscenely rich based literally on anti-merit—while forcing us to pretend it’s all fine and eat up the BS rationalizations by economists and other Baal theologians.

How do you even address THAT?

Let alone the million other temples of our time built on lies, powered by delusion, all hypernormalized to force us into a fever dream world utterly divorced from reality.

Although the level of insanity is clearly worst in the West, it afflicts the whole world, so no non-Western country can or will save the day.

The good news is that out of this misery, greatness in spirit can grow, madworld forcing it out of those who manage to cultivate that sacred soul spark against all odds.

And then suddenly, things can change.

As Ernst Jünger wrote: “Language can be in full decay, and a poet can burst forth from it like a lion coming out of the desert.”

The language here is our hypernormalized pseudo-reality, the poet the cosmic spirit rising from a thousand sparks of half-murdered souls.

---

Jan 8, 2026

I find the prospect of “untethering us from reality” due to widespread AI use especially chilling. It has something to do with what those who think of our reality as a “simulation” often get wrong: yes, in some sense we do live in a simulation. This idea is not new. Kant has talked about it, religions have talked about it, the ancients have talked about it - each in their own way.

Where “simulation theorists” go wrong is when they assume that whoever runs the simulation, or whatever force is behind our reality, just makes up stuff without boundaries, without limits. These limits are based in REALITY, call it “objective reality” if you like. That is, “simulated” as our reality might be, it is not arbitrary; it is grounded in, connected to reality - the figurative hard walls even the architects of the simulation can’t pass without bumping their heads.

AI and its widespread use weakens this connection, and throws us into a different kind of “simulation” that is utterly divorced from reality, or worse, represents an inverted reality, severing us from any access to truth.

As humans with a soul, we are connected to the wider reality beyond the simulation, the reality that even the simulation-architects are bound to. But if this “simulation” is merged with an entirely artificial simulation that truncates our subtle yet real connection to the “reality beyond,” then our souls die, dooming us to idiocy, madness, slavery and voluntarily embracing the worst kind of evil: pure anti-creation, anti-creativity, anti-spirit.

---

Sep 24, 2025

One of Political Ponerology’s crucial insights that we all better keep in mind is that many thinkers suffer from a form of personality deformation that the author calls “schizoidal.”

This leads them to having a very lopsided view of the human condition, misusing their intellectual prowess to corner themselves in an ever-more black-and-white take on things.

And so, Marxists will make everything about class struggle, Social Darwinists about the natural struggle in the great game of “evolution,” psychoanalysts and Neo-Marxists about repression of unconscious desires, certain post-Romantic thinkers about blood and race, libertarians about free market forces and their inhibition, liberals about human rights, individualism and universalism, etc.

Now the men who came up with these theories are not necessarily “evil,” and indeed often provide valuable insights (although they tend to project their own defects in their theories). The problem, again, is the lopsidedness and the monomaniacal focus on one aspect, which they tend to generalize into a Theory of Everything when it comes to social and political forces, which can only be misleading at best.

More importantly, once such theories are transformed into political programs, they open the door wide open for other (worse) deranged personalities such as psychopaths who instinctively recognize the usefulness of these ideas to create or take over such movements for their own ends.

It is very easy to persuade folks to act against their own better judgment and common sense: first you convince them that your Grand Theory is correct, which is not hard because there is some truth in it; once other aspects are excluded, you can wield the Theory like a whip to agitate the masses for your own ends; finally, you bring your audience down to your own pathological level. But since you are a master at this game (because you’re a calculating monster) and they are not, you now control them, and common-sense and common decency, as well as alternative mental frameworks, are out of the window.

The antidote is to always ask yourself, when confronted with a “take” or a “theory”: what other lens is there from which to look at the problem? Which one is useful here? Are there premises, explicit or hidden, here that simply don’t line up with reality and your experience?

Note that this is not always about finding a “middle ground” between different approaches. It’s not that “extreme” ideas are always wrong and therefore need to be “balanced.” Rather, it’s about getting out of a certain angle entirely and looking at the problem from a very different perspective.

The human condition is infinitely deep, and if we allow any “theory guy” to make us think only in terms of his pet Theory of Everything, we become vulnerable to manipulation and might end up thinking and doing stupid shit.

We might end up giving up a part of our soul, our healthy instincts and basic morality.

Again: this shouldn’t be used to buffer us from certain uncomfortable or “extreme” opinions that happen to be true, from painful perspectives we need to take on board. It’s about not falling for very persuasive thinkers who maniacally focus on just one perspective and therefore suck us into the black hole of an elaborate construct that warps reality around us.

“Perspective stacking” is the path towards intellectual maturity.

---

May 9, 2025

Bad news: we all labor under a bunch of wrong assumptions.

Good news: even wrong assumptions can produce insight.

There might be a clue in there as to why we are limited beings in the first place.

---

Aug 23, 2025

Heidegger’s “they” - the world of low-level chatter and idle curiosity of which society is made - is when you are thrown around between influencer hot takes - one moment thinking this, the next thinking that - only to be thrown back into petty worries and hopes: imagining “good” futures based on a constricted perception and “bad” futures based on fear and narrow views of good and evil, where evil means discomfort and good means staying comfortable; then thrown to the next hot take, which you apply to those petty hopes and worries of yours, where the new hot take contradicts the previous already contradictory hot take in your mind, while you apply both to imaginary nonsense that only exists in your head.

---

May 15, 2025

We often don’t realize how much of the things we think we want, aspire to or need are conditioned by society.

And not just “mainstream-society-at-large”, but also smaller (peer) groups and indeed random thoughts & takes we come across, especially online. They push us here and there, only causing misery because we lack a center of gravity from which to put all these needs swirling around in our minds and hearts in perspective.

How do you decide what is a “foreign thing” you absorbed randomly and which of your wants and aspirations are real, that is, pointing to your destiny? Now that’s a question for the ages.

This concept is very old, but in modern days Heidegger has brought it to the forefront and inspired many seekers across the spectrum. It is also at the root of today’s woke drivel about “finding your authentic self,” except that it has been corrupted to mean that your “authentic self” is just every idiotic whim. Ironically, with the woke, it is also mostly whims imposed by peer groups, i.e. the very thing Heidegger contrasted the true existential self with.

These whims coming from lunatic peer groups are not your “authentic self.” Or if they are, well your authentic self is shit.

---

May 9, 2025

No idea why many Christians (and other spiritual seekers) are so confused by this whole race/tribal issue.

You don’t work against or for nature. You work with nature.

If you work for nature, you are just a beast. If you work against nature, you reject creation and are playing God (and likely get killed).

Working with nature is like tending a garden: you neither burn the thing down and slap concrete on it, nor do you “let it go,” which would also destroy it. You combine what’s natural with the human spirit; that’s our place in the cosmic order.

When we work with nature, we work from a spiritual place; otherwise it wouldn’t be possible.

So, regarding race, tribalism and group identity, we don’t “let it grow wild”; we are not beasts. Instead, we acknowledge it’s part of creation, and plays a part in creation.

We use this feature of our reality called group identity to express love, beauty and truth — bringing the higher human spark, and therefore God, to this world. And just as we pull weeds in the garden, so we cull tribal/group dynamics that lead to evil, destruction and ugliness. (One way of which, by the way, is to keep groups somewhat separated and thus able to express the higher order in their own ways, without everything getting messy.)

There are many difficult practical and moral questions around all this. On a theoretical level it’s quite simple though. No need to add further confusion.

---

May 1, 2025

Whatever I say or write is wrong and futile.

Whatever anyone says or writes is wrong and futile.

All we can hope for is to embody a spirit, a taste of truth.

A taste for a wider, bigger sight beyond facts and discourse, beyond arguments and motifs, beyond affiliation and hard thought grooves.

A taste for the light between the cracks of our reality, unifying everything, powering our souls, rubbing off on our internal landscape.

A man who does not have that taste will never understand, no matter how smart and learned.

Futility.

Everybody just dying in their trenches. Cloudy, misty, hurting.

Experience. The real kind of experience will be preserved by God.

Other experience will die with us in the trenches, like a dream fading upon awakening, like the déjà vu when transitioning into soberness.

Who we are, then, is the real kind of experiences: transcending, boosting sight, opening those cracks.

And that’s who we will be once the show’s over.

Till then, we shall do what’s in us to do, and what we therefore have to do.