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One of the downsides of the Substack app is (for me, at least) that it has a "notes" feature that seems to operate like Twitter (okay, X I guess) or Facebook, where people can make comments and engage and get caught up all of the garbage that led to me deleting my social media accounts in the first place. I really enjoy a lot of Substack authors and the essays published there, but I suspect the app is going to get deep-sixed from my phone pretty soon.
It has been useful to get a lot of information that is going mainstream much quicker on Substack. I've been absorbing a lot of information about the Trump assassination attempt, as politics is a bit of a hobby and this event obviously has serious implications for the country moving forward.
There is a lot of back and forth about how much incompetence or malice was displayed by the Secret Service, who certainly failed at their officially assigned duties. I can't say I haven't been caught up in a great deal of speculation as well. In all of this, I have forgotten some of the core lessons of magecraft imparted by JMG in his very insightful essay www.ecosophia.net/getting-beyond-narratives/.
Reality, as such, is fundamentally unknowable due to the fact that we process sensory information through our nervous systems and brains. We assemble our models of reality from this thin trickle of data, which is further shaped and filtered by evolutionary, cultural, and personal "filters". Mages recognize this and consciously shape the "stories" they tell about events that seemingly occur in the outer world, using narrative to shape both their own and other consciousnesses in accordance with their own objectives.
If the stories and narratives drift too far from the more concrete realities of everyday experience, mages can of course easily get caught up in their own bullshit (no matter how many times you insist that Russia can't win their war against Ukraine in spite of the military realities on the ground, for example, bullets and drones, muscle and steel will be the deciding factors there). Still, there is great power in shaping people's opinions, in that people tend to act in ways consistent with what they believe to be true.
In the case of "what really happened" on the 13th when someone tried to kill Trump, someone may know, but it isn't most of the people opining on it. In fact, as JMG states in his essay, it's the wrong question.
Doomer conspiracy theorists who insist that it was all set up by someone or-other for this or that purpose are just making "the system" look infallible and their victory inevitable. Portraying the system as being "a brittle, ungainly, jerry-rigged contraption whose managers are vainly scrambling to hold it together against a rising tide of crises", to quote the above linked piece by JMG, is a narrative frame that offers agency and hope. Is it "true?" Does it matter?
Whether politicians like it or not, the consent of the governed is a real factor that must be taken into account. "The system" is made up of individuals, which we reify into various groups and factions. Sometimes they act monolithically, other times they don't. Political power, while it is often derived from the barrel of a gun, still relies on people following the will of the political leaders, which includes the men with guns who enforce it.
People who don't believe in a system and who have stopped deriving benefit from it will stop acting in service of it. All of the power of the "elites" is based on an illusion (even great wealth and the like is an illusion; it's all just numbers in databases ruled by nerds).
The first thing a mage decides when he contemplates doing magic is his intention, which must be chosen very carefully.
It has been useful to get a lot of information that is going mainstream much quicker on Substack. I've been absorbing a lot of information about the Trump assassination attempt, as politics is a bit of a hobby and this event obviously has serious implications for the country moving forward.
There is a lot of back and forth about how much incompetence or malice was displayed by the Secret Service, who certainly failed at their officially assigned duties. I can't say I haven't been caught up in a great deal of speculation as well. In all of this, I have forgotten some of the core lessons of magecraft imparted by JMG in his very insightful essay www.ecosophia.net/getting-beyond-narratives/.
Reality, as such, is fundamentally unknowable due to the fact that we process sensory information through our nervous systems and brains. We assemble our models of reality from this thin trickle of data, which is further shaped and filtered by evolutionary, cultural, and personal "filters". Mages recognize this and consciously shape the "stories" they tell about events that seemingly occur in the outer world, using narrative to shape both their own and other consciousnesses in accordance with their own objectives.
If the stories and narratives drift too far from the more concrete realities of everyday experience, mages can of course easily get caught up in their own bullshit (no matter how many times you insist that Russia can't win their war against Ukraine in spite of the military realities on the ground, for example, bullets and drones, muscle and steel will be the deciding factors there). Still, there is great power in shaping people's opinions, in that people tend to act in ways consistent with what they believe to be true.
In the case of "what really happened" on the 13th when someone tried to kill Trump, someone may know, but it isn't most of the people opining on it. In fact, as JMG states in his essay, it's the wrong question.
Doomer conspiracy theorists who insist that it was all set up by someone or-other for this or that purpose are just making "the system" look infallible and their victory inevitable. Portraying the system as being "a brittle, ungainly, jerry-rigged contraption whose managers are vainly scrambling to hold it together against a rising tide of crises", to quote the above linked piece by JMG, is a narrative frame that offers agency and hope. Is it "true?" Does it matter?
Whether politicians like it or not, the consent of the governed is a real factor that must be taken into account. "The system" is made up of individuals, which we reify into various groups and factions. Sometimes they act monolithically, other times they don't. Political power, while it is often derived from the barrel of a gun, still relies on people following the will of the political leaders, which includes the men with guns who enforce it.
People who don't believe in a system and who have stopped deriving benefit from it will stop acting in service of it. All of the power of the "elites" is based on an illusion (even great wealth and the like is an illusion; it's all just numbers in databases ruled by nerds).
The first thing a mage decides when he contemplates doing magic is his intention, which must be chosen very carefully.