MENTAL HYGIENE IN THE PHONE AGE
How and why you should avoid going insane online.
Today I begin a new series on how not to go insane online - and how to maximise your powers of thought, speech and discipline.
I will talk about how the information overload on which we are now socialised must be countered with new habits of self command, why mental hygeine matters, and how to cultivate a better mind and manner of speaking in a time of moral and social collapse.
I have written a thing or two about the technique and technologies which have repatterned Man on machine coded behaviours.
In this first post I will explain why you should not try to keep up with a permanent datafeed with no editor and no end.
Going insane online is not just for your political enemies.
We do inhabit a sort of madhouse - online and offline - but we are not obliged to go mad.
I encourage you towards new habits and show you what you are up against, and how and why they work to liberate you from the terms and conditions of the social algorithm.
This will help you flourish mentally, spiritually, emotionally and intellectually, instead of turning into this:
And it should help you not become this, too:
FUTURE CONTENTS
In later posts I will talk about:
Internetitis - how this viral infection paralyses people in a rageloop, making them ineffective in real life
Mental hygiene - how to clear out your mind and why you should feed it better food for thought
How to think, reason and speak better
Useful concepts in human flourishing
How and why the “Current Thing” is made - and how to make yourself immune from its spellbinding tricks
Explanations of how internet slop and the algorithm of social control detach our people from reality
How this helps the State demonise sanity, truth and demands for normality by means of “oversocialisation”
Why progressive messaging is authoritarian
In summary, how to survive and then flourish in a destructive system.
FOR EXAMPLE: MY LIFE
I detest celebrity, see the current internet as Satan’s Window, and view most things and people on it with suspicion.
Having been damned to fame by means of the Phone Age I consider my life to be a sort of practical joke played on me by God Himself for His own amusement.
I am currently managing not to go insane myself and what I have learned about the information age and its technique has proven very helpful - especially when combined with concepts of human flourishing and their practical everyday use.
I will talk about these, too, showing you what I have done and what I recommend to survive the slopwave which threatens to submerge us all.
BACKGROUND READING
Where does this wave of slop come from? Here are two posts which show you why and how the input and output of our minds is increasingly calibrated to the patterns of machines.
This matters, because it shows how the contents of your mind are furnished with convenient trash for the purposes of pacification.
The first post talks about how the Enlightenment worship of Man and his Reason is being replaced by a belief that technology is God.
I call this Machine Worship.
This second piece of background reading shows some of the ideas which promote as positive the transition from human to machine values.
To restore our civilisation requires that we comprehend what we have lost.
What we are losing today in the mind melting information age is the presence of mind which is fundamental to the recognition of what matters in our lives.
This is why I begin with a post about why you should stop trying to keep up - as doing so will only make you melt down.
The technique of information is so refined it has now overtaken our capacity to make use of it.
Instead, it is increasingly making use of you - and it also does this by making you useless.
When you glom onto the screen you become passive.
As you are saturated with perspectives your picture of reality dissolves.
This makes you a powerless spectator.
To recover your capacity to think and decide for yourself as to how we should live you must understand why this function is not an accident, and that it is vital you learn how to avoid remaining an impotent spectator of your own demise.
THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
Everything in our mass culture is a sales pitch for the global economy.
Lifestyles, politics, news, entertainment, values and the vices presented as virtues all promote the production of profit, whose byproduct is what we might call ourselves.
This is a total system - a system relying on repeat sales or consumption which could fairly be called an addiction economy.
You do not have to think of what you want, because it also supplies the desires its products promise to satisfy.
In this information age, this is the economic basis of our politics and culture. Data has replaced industry, and we now have a knowledge economy instead.
The knowledge it provides drives the demand for services, and the provision of this knowledge is an industry in itself.
How successful is this industry? As John Gray has pointed out, we now have a knowledge economy in which no one knows anything.
As his former student Maurice Glasman added - no one knows how to do anything either.
MAKING BELIEF
Yet something is being made - or remade. We are.
The feedback loop of our personal desires is returned to us with refined appeals, selling us beliefs, a system, a series of consolations in place of the rising aspiration of former decades.
It is only when we cut the feed that we realise that this is all coming at the cost of a great subtraction. Meaning first, then swiftly followed by the supersession of sanity with a permanent series of shocking sensations.
For more on this, see here:
The internet has no end and no editor. It is an eyeball competition, and to enter it is to have your brain consumed like popcorn - forever snapping off into new morsels of momentary savour which fill - for a while - but do not nourish.
The reason you should spend less time on the internet is it does not just drive your enemies insane.
CUSTOMS OF A STRANGE TRIBE
To try to understand the predicament you inhabit, perhaps consider your culture as a grotesque work of art, and the behaviours and beliefs it promotes as the customs of a strange tribe.
These new totems and taboos are transmitted virally. The worship of George Floyd, the defence of war as peace, the transgender virus. The propaganda of competing tribes is sold in the same way as sugar saturated treats: it is weaponised social contagion via mass media.
It was once a mark of the educated to be well read. It is now more important to read well, or not at all - because so much of what we now consume is worse for us than nothing.
NARRATIVE COLLAPSE - AND DATABABEL
The collapse of the global system is also powering the meltbrain culture.
As people realise the Grand Narrative of liberal democracy was an advert for a death cult, they have become incredulous towards everything - and likely to seek alternative meaning anywhere they can find it.
Secondly, with no reliable narrator it seems wisest to hear as many voices as you can. This does not result in a balanced view but babel. What we receive from the Heraklitean flux of the ever-changing info-river is not a God’s-eye view of reality, but a series of shocking contradictions which cannot be integrated into a coherent picture.
The result is overload and meltdown. The byways to brain-boiled bafflement are constellated by apophenia - the drawing of connections between bright points of dopamined data where none really exist.
In this age of sensation many people are most incredulous at the sight of reality. It is hard to convince people that things are and even can be real, after a century of propaganda towards the contrary.
The liberal advert promised a life without limits. We live in a moment of correction, where this grandiose fantasy is colliding with the hard limits of reality.
One important dimension of this is in your head. Your brain has limits as to what it can integrate into sense. To overload it is to reduce you to a state of overstimulated paralysis, where nothing can reliably be decided or done.
In short, trying to keep up will make you useless.
This is very good from the point of view of an addiction economy, which seeks to create dependence on its products. It profits from your loss of self control and self command. The less you use it, the less it can use you.
The converse is true, as the more you interact with the algorithm, the less of you there really is. It is subtraction for distraction, and the side effects of this regimen include the dissolving of the very self you sought to enrich, or amplify, or entertain. In the end, perhaps the only cohesive picture of yourself which will remain is the one which is attached to your social media profile.
You can refuse to vanish into the mirror of course - though it has an appeal which began well before the digital age.
It was first used by the Aztecs to grant the vision of the demon Tezcatlipoca, “Smoking mirror”.
Obsidian mirrors were used to view the secrets of the lives of other men, with the caveat that the black mirror also looked into you.
Permitting the void to enter you did not just grant knowledge - its black economy also confused the viewer with lies and tricks - with no indication of what was true or false in the visions it gifted.
The simple alternative to meltbrain is to limit your exposure to the void. It does not become you, after all, and it cannot do so if you do not feed it with yourself.
Just as you should not dine forever on desserts, it is prudent to practice the discipline of “enough” with regard to what you are regarding.
And what is regarding YOU.
New habits - especially good ones - are hard but not impossible to acquire. You can set a timer on Satan’s Window.
You can refuse to keep up. After all, what is the fear of missing out against the danger of going missing altogether? Remember that every minute spent in the void of the black mirror is time subtracted from real life. How often are you really there?
This life is not eternal, it is limited - and we are in the end the sum of what we have and have not done. We will answer for this. All of us.
There is a higher spiritual purpose to life than information paralysis. If you can’t look away from the eyeball magnet you may not even remember it is there at all.
I will bring you more in-depth ideas, practical tips, suggestions on how to cultivate your mind and powers of speech - and of course some career ending memes in forthcoming instalments in this series.
If you think your friends would like this, consider the following:
If you have been conditioned by this post to believe your money should be immediately transferred to my current account, you can do that here:
God bless you all and I hope you have a splendid weekend.
One thing that helps clean my mind is reading the Classics: Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare, etc. I sometimes need to consult a dictionary with them, but there's nothing wrong with learning new words. Also helpful is decent literature, such as James Herriot, and history from before the age of Political Correctness/Woke.
With the printing press, tremendous amounts of "slop" came gushing forth too, in the form of trashy books and magazines. The key is to develop critical thinking and discretion.
Other helpful things: exercise, nature, socializing, good music, and of course prayer and worship. We're in a major spiritual battle.
The introduction of the iPhone has created a generation of distracted people with limited spatial awareness. Just try walking down the street. The number of people who walk straight into me while sucked into the black mirror. Most will suddenly turn at the last moment to avoid collision, but not all. Attention spans have shrunk. Cognitive ability has declined. But hey, we're all connected now!!