MAGA, Malevolent Design, and Meditations on Moloch

Hi there... and a warm welcome to anyone new here. Whether by chance or design (more on that later), I'm glad our orbits crossed. 

I'm sure it's due, at least in part, to the heady and unsavory circles I tend to run in, but over the past few years I've noticed a few old friends and colleagues being drawn increasingly out of their familiar, well-worn academic shells and into the deeper, weirder waters of vaccines, cults in disguise, and promises of a New World Order. They all seem much more measured and deferential to evidence, research, and published findings than they might have a year ago, during their rapid ascent into the disorienting sphere of hot-take-istan.

Between hot pod mics, TikToks, and twitchy fingers on Twitter, it's hard to stay provisional when all the incentives optimize for the outrageous and the outraged. 

But then, one of them (who happened to have an advanced biology degree) admitted very directly that they were "part of a group of people who had been fighting in parallel the same amorphous, well-resourced, diabolical enemy, (and I cringe describing it in these terms), but the way it behaves leaves no doubt by those who have been targeted by it, that there is a there there, even if I don't really know how it works."

Mind you, this just happened to coincide with my being on a trip (literal and truffle-induced) to Europe, which is when a little spark went off… and then spiraled fractally into the epic depths of Vondelpark. Seriously though, there's no better place on Earth to kill your ego!

Ah-ha, I thought! This is the storyline that so many of their tribes-mates are tuned into and listening for! I'm willing to bet that large swaths of their audience glaze over when they put on their science cap (or lab coat as it were) to discuss the pros and cons of spike proteins and furin cleavage sites, but perk on up when they hear hints of malevolent design.

And wtf is malevolent design you might ask? As far as I’ve been able to deduce, it’s a devious close kissing cousin of Intelligent Design (ID).

So Let’s Start With ID

That's the anti-materialist theory that set up shop between Creationism (and the Lord said, let there be light!) and Evolution (Darwin, finches, and Galapagos tortoises...torti?).

In a nutshell, ID posits that there's simply no way that the beauty, mysteries, and "fearful symmetries" (William Blake's, not mine) of nature could have happened by chance.

The prevalence of sacred numbers like Pi and the golden ratio (see fractal broccoli), the wildly improbable Goldilocks Zone of intelligent life in our universe, and the uncanny adaptations that David Attenborough is always babbling on about (see the fish that goes fishing) simply could not have occurred by random mutation and blind chance.

ID includes religious folks looking to soften their stance, but it also snags the new-age and SBNR (spiritual but not religious) types who yearn for a touch more enchantment in their worldview than cold evolution would allow.

And Malevolent Design?

‍So too with Malevolent Design (MD). It lures folks in from all sides of the spectrum: from the full blown MAGA deep state, to psychedelic media magnates, to QAnon manifesters, to microchip and tinfoil evangelicals. But what unites them is a conviction that there's simply too much patternicity to accept a world of random accidents. As my "sciency" friend noted, "there is a there there, [even if] I don't know how it works."

We know the term for that excess patternicity—it's called apophenia. It’s a term, at least for me, that has become a core psychological force in how I see our making sense of the world these days. But in a nutshell, apophenia is triggered by an excess of dopamine in our systems—an overwhelm of salience (a "pay attention, this matters-ness") and an overriding of normal and healthy skepticism.

It's the all-too-familiar, "there's too much of a consistent pattern of behavior here to ignore" observation that demands an answer....and the most viscerally satisfying answer is almost always "someone is surely up to something shady!" And unfortunately, visceral truthiness beats cognitive truthfulness every time, as the ever-wise Colbert reminded us way back in 2005.

And low and behold, this maps right onto malevolent designers. Whether it's WHO/CDC folks in bed with big-pharma, or the World Economic Forum "By 2030 you'll own nothing and be happy" NWO takeover, we are increasingly skittish about who's pulling whose strings.

(btw, the meme above is inaccurate and hysterical. The phrase "You'll own nothing..." was part of a 2016 slide deck of top-ten futurist predictions, which included other less sinister sounding statements like "we'll need to get much better at welcoming climate refugees." And it wasn't even WEF chairman and resident supervillain Klaus Schwab who said it. It was coined by a Danish politician and concluded with, "and many of your packages will be delivered to your front door by drone," which when you think of subscribing to Spotify and Netflix instead of owning CDs and VHS, is a rather predictable prediction). #DYOR #KnowYourMemes 

But that sneaking suspicion that our friend had is persistent, and intensifying. And once you start noticing those otherwise inexplicable Omens of the Millennium, you start seeing them everywhere. Images in inkblots. Ghosts in the Machine. Near endless pareidolia (a visually specific type of apophenia). 

Here's where a comparison with the ecosystem of ID is useful, because structurally, MD matches it perfectly.

On How We Got Here

On one extreme you've got fundamentalist creationists who insist God made the world in six days (famously kickin' it on the seventh), and that the fossil record is merely a trick to test our faith. Shitty deal...sorry dinosaurs :(

And on the other extreme, you've got rabbit-hole Richard Dawkins evolutionists who insist that everything that's ever happened is a combination of survival of the fittest and random chance mutations in an otherwise indifferent, stop-thinking-you-matter universe.

But in the middle, you have the ID folks—not comfortable deferring to a crucified heavenly Father, but sympathetic to Einstein's insistence that "God doesn't play dice!"—that there is more order here than mere chance could ever explain.

On Who’s Pulling the Strings

And for the question of wtf (what or who) is pulling the strings (i.e. mega-corporate global takeovers and engineered pandemics), there's also a spectrum.

‍On one extreme you've got full-on tinfoil types, spooked by an international cabal of Adrenochrome sipping satanists—it's full blown spiritual warfare for these folks.

And on the other, blue-pilled sheeple of the normcore, insisting that we should change the system with our good ol' fashioned votes and wallets. It's business as usual as the Lamestream Media and our largely unchanged high school civics classes would suggest.

‍But in the middle, you have the MD folks—not comfortable assigning all the weirdness to truly supernatural evil, but sympathetic to the broader politics of suspicion where something is going on here, even if I can't quite put my finger on how it all works.

‍So this leads me to the question I'd like to ask my biologist friend and once colleague: if you come down on the side of evolution over ID (which I assume you would), if you refrain from assigning supernatural deus ex machina explanations to the miracle of life on earth no matter how complex or confounding it appears, then what is different about your willingness to entertain theories of MD in the realm of mere mortals?

Better Informed; A Little Less Certain

Because here's the thing—I've listened to arguments for ID that have sounded perfectly persuasive. They make a compelling emotional case for embracing awe and wonder in the face of the undeniable beauty of creation, and they refuse to reduce it all to randomness and brute survival. It feels truthy to me. I quite like the sound of it if I'm being honest.

But I bet if I sat down with those same evolutionary biologist friends in their academic wheelhouse, they'd help me calibrate my thinking. The first thing they’d do is to knock down the straw-man arguments of "evolution says all this magic is random chance and brute survival" and they’d argue convincingly for an updated vision of evolutionary theory that isn't frozen in time with Darwin's Origin of Species. Their more informed and considered perspective would provide a way to reconcile most of my what-ifs and come away better informed, even if a little less certain.

And that "better informed but a little less certain" has a name too! It's called Epoché (I'm tellin' you, the ancient Greeks had this shit figured out years ago).

It came from the skeptic philosophers—not the ones who believed in nothing, but the ones who believed that life was irreducibly messy and unknowable at its core, and that suspending judgment and "withholding assent" were keys to a credible life of the mind. The contemporary Colorado version might simply be, "don't get too far out over your skis!" 

So what if we apply Epoché to the symptom of apophenia (aka overheated pattern recognition)? One of the key unlocks is to ask ourselves the same question we might have asked about ID vs. Evolution. 

Just because there's a clear pattern of evidence, does it have to be coordinated by someone at the center pulling strings...be it man or God?

Mustache Twizzlers, or Complexity and Game Theory? 

If you believe there’s a sinister wizard behind the curtains, then I’m sorry to say that you've ventured into camp MD—thy truthiness hath seduced thee!

But if you recall my recent riff on egregores (those shadowy magical entities that have now arisen from our algorithmically ad-spend incented digital echo chambers to control our behaviors, or if you read Slate Star Codex's famous post Meditations on Moloch)—the sentient spirit of capitalism that unleashes game theory dynamics on us all, or if you dug into Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants (describing a semi-conscious Technium) then you've already wrapped your head around the notion that startlingly coherent behaviors can emerge from otherwise random incentives and constraints.

(kind of like how both sandy beaches and country dirt roads end up with the same familiar ripples (washboard) without a bunch of wild zen rock garden gnomes raking them while we sleep). 

So let's get back to Big Pharma/Plandemic and Davos/Great Reset conspiracies du jour. I'm told they pair well, but the hangover's a bitch.

Is it possible, is it Epoché-able, that Pfizer and Moderna are gonna seek to minimize liability while maximizing profitability while marketing the shit out of their newest banger of a drug and suppressing contravening studies and harms?

Well yes, it just might be! See their record breaking Celebrex/Bextra multi-billion dollar settlement for doing just that less than a decade ago.

Craving something even more sinister? See Purdue pharma's entire sordid history, culminating in the launch of an entirely orchestrated opioid crisis via Oxycontin and their weasley efforts to duck restitution (and watch Dopesick if you weren't following that story as it unfolded in real time).

But let’s keep going… big-pharma is just another bogeyman—too easy of a target to prove much.

Is it possible that our highest profile officials, like Fauci, Trudeau, Biden (keep filling in the roster depending on how much space you’ve got on your Fantasy FootCabal card) are some combination of well-meaning, bumbling, self-dealing, ass-covering political animals who are forever running traps between the public good, PR, and consolidation of their own power and funders, and are totally overwhelmed by the complexity and nobility required of this moment? Seems almost plausible, doesn't it?

But what about the soldiers in the anti-vax trenches? The ones "fighting in parallel the same amorphous, well-resourced, diabolical enemy" that's violently suppressing all their efforts to speak truth to power? Surely there’s a there there to what they’re experiencing.

Same As It Ever Was

To be fair to those soldiers, there's abundant evidence of anti-establishment perspectives like the Wuhan Lab Leak, or breakthrough infections, (or Roundup being not so great for kids and pets) getting ridiculed and outright suppressed before later vindication. 

And...there's even more evidence that this has been going on for ages. 

There's absolutely no need to assign a Covid conspiracy to what is and has always been MO (modus operandi) of the same when it comes to the powers that be.

See: Galileo.
See: Erin Brokovich.
‍See: Big Tobacco.
See: Exxon and climate research.
See: Max Planck's "science advances one funeral at a time!"

Or you could just dig into Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and it would kind of explain the entire lot.

The point being that anytime you get sucked over the falls into apophenia, it might be worth a deep breath before applying a bit of that ol' time Epoché skepticism. And ask yourself, does there absolutely, positively, have to be some mustache twizzling villain at the center of the plot to explain all the shitty or confusing things I'm seeing?

Or…

Could this be a host of micro-adaptations, on the parts of millions of different players, all seeking to optimize for fitness and survival in a bafflingly complex environment that no one has or ever will explicitly control? It's the same dynamics at play with the World Economic Forum. I've seen it up close. Don't make it more than it is. 

Btw...PLEASE read Meditations on Moloch for a deeper dive into the shitshow of market incentives and multi-polar traps. TL;DR: you can have recurring sociopathic behaviors without any actual sociopaths, with the net result that everyone is equally convinced that everyone else is psycho. That piece is, at least in part, why I believe in the promise of web3 and decentralization.

Isn't it possible that WEF represents a bunch of glad-handing elites looking to greenwash their own credentials, shape policy to their benefit, marinate in their self-appointed noblesse oblige, while transparently scheming to let the peasants eat just enough cake that they don't storm the castle? Careful, sometimes they do storm the capitol…err, castle. 

Doesn't that kind of cover it? You only need to be reasonably shitty as a human to play that game. You don't need to be super-villain level shitty. Which leads us to perhaps the most scary conclusion of all. All that we're fixating on these days, convincing ourselves of grand plans and evil schemes, could be little more than these two things:

A host of micro-adaptations, on the parts of millions of different players, all seeking to optimize for fitness and survival in a bafflingly complex environment that no one explicitly controls

AND...

MO for the powers that be… history (and business) as usual.

It's less comforting, and definitely less truthy. It leaves us less certain, but better informed. But it also allows us to reclaim our much heralded sovereignty and takes back our power from the shadowy forces and driving agendas we can't possibly understand.

As it turns out, there's quite likely no one at the wheel. The diabolical enemy we face is us.  Even if we don't know exactly how we work.

The only thing for certain, is that MD ain’t ID… as it always has been, it’s just the dopamine talking. 

Ok, on to the good stuff...

Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

• The Ecology of Work: Resilience & Rewilding

• Web3 Inspiration: The Optimism Collective

• Podcast: Alex Jones & The War on Information (highly relevant)

• Music: Caamp, The Otter

I love hearing back and always reply, so don't hesitate.