Without the Mob, There Is No Circus

By David Sinclair

A "UXB" is an unexploded bomb. What happens when it goes off? All those who know about the Armageddon Conspiracy were aware that detonation was coming. Now it has. In this epic, we describe something of what the AC was all about, and why it had to perish. Nietzsche said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Did the AC become monstrous? It certainly attracted monsters. In the end, did it topple into the abyss? Had it stood on the verge of the abyss for too long?

As the AC exits the stage and the final curtain descends, it’s essential to review the show. Did it deserve a standing ovation, or to be booed off the stage? Should the audience have thrown flowers, or rotten tomatoes? What did the critics say? Does anyone care? There were all too many poison pens, all too few glittering prizes. Some things are born posthumously, and the AC now joins the list. What will its afterlife be like?

As ever, AC material is controversial, so no one of a sensitive disposition should access this work. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

We understood that for our message to be pure, it would entail shrinking our audience to almost zero, and we have more or less achieved that. When you tell the truth, you repulse everyone who follows the lie, and that’s nearly all of humanity. Humanity loves the Lie. It worships it. It will have nothing else. The Truth is of no use to it at all.

So, come inside and follow the final phase of this strangest of all stories. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be enraged, and many of you will storm off in a huff. At the end, you will either love us or hate us, and probably the latter. That’s how it ought to be. What could be worse than going out with a whimper rather than a bang?

Stand back, the bomb is going off.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447838722

Book preview

Storming the Citadel

The barbarians are at the gates. The barbarians are always at the gates. You can never get rid of barbarians. They come. They always come. They are here. They are always here.

Every great empire falls. The barbarians put it to the sword and ransack it. They raze it to the ground. They swarm all over it, defiling every part of it, wrecking everything. Beauty and glory repulse them, so they destroy these wherever they find them.

However, long before the barbarians – the external threat to the empire – show up, internal problems have already fatally undermined the empire. There are traitors, malcontents, agitators, anomics, dissidents, nonconformists, anarchists, decadents, degenerates, you name it.

The dysfunctional relentlessly destabilize the empire from within. They are the Fifth Column, the saboteurs. The empire hemorrhages from within. It’s bled dry by its own internal psychodramas, tensions, and contradictions.

When the barbarians arrive, they simply have to push over the whole rotten edifice. There’s no real fighting to be done. The gates aren’t even locked against them. They just push them open and walk in.

The Armageddon Conspiracy (AC) project, the great empire of the mind, chose not to let the barbarians flood in. Instead, it terminated itself, leaving the barbarians blinking and hopping outside.

The AC had been relentlessly attacked from inside for years, by internal barbarians. It spawned any number of trolls and traitors, apostates, defectors, and renegades. The toxicity reached astonishing levels, but the empire persisted long enough to allow the production of over two hundred of the most revolutionary books ever written.

The AC became world-historic and then removed itself from history. From the historic to the ahistoric. How the mighty have fallen. To think that human eyes once gazed on something so glorious.

But the books remain, a testimony to this astonishing project, like no other the world has ever seen.

We denied the barbarians their chance to sack the empire. We sacked it ourselves. Well, we had to get rid of all the poison that had filled every street and temple.

High things always fascinate low people. That’s why so many of these people came our way over the years, blinking, baffled by what they were encountering. They felt an animal – a bestial – desire to destroy something so noble, so sublime. The glorious always repulses those in every way alienated from glory, such as the extreme liberals, the extreme conservatives, the extreme libertarians, the extreme individualists, the Woke.

In Nietzsche’s autobiography Ecce Homo, he provided chapter headings such as Why I Am So Wise, Why I Am So Clever, Why I Write Such Excellent Books, and Why I Am A Destiny. If the AC were writing its autobiography, it would echo these exact chapter headings! Oh how much that annoys the AC’s detractors. They always despised our arrogance, our self-confidence, our certainty, our judgmentalism. How it tortured them, these all paths and all truths people, who imagined that they were entitled to believe whatever crap they liked. How they ground their teeth when the AC said that there was only one truth, opposed by infinite lies. That was the last thing the AC-haters wanted to hear. They wanted to be told that their self-serving lies and crackpot speculations and deranged conspiracy theories were true and brilliant and marks of the highest intelligence. As if!

The AC raised the red banner of No Quarter to all that nonsense. How the AC-haters wailed and hopped. Poor little souls, the Woke liberals and the God-fearing conservatives alike.

Ecce homo – behold the man – was what Pontius Pilate said when he presented the scourged Jesus Christ to a hostile crowd demanding his crucifixion. Nietzsche understood what it was like to be hated by the mass. So did the AC.

Nietzsche said near the beginning of Ecce Homo, And so I tell myself my life.

What kinds of things would the AC say about its life? What things caught its eye? What fascinated it? What transfixed it?

Well, how could we not start with Dante’s sublime Divine Comedy, a medieval exploration of the grand unified theory of everything, told from a moral and metaphysical viewpoint? What a profoundly moving work of imagination and intellect.

Dante provided a vision of humanity damned (the nine circles of hell), suffering humanity (the nine circles of purgatory), and humanity perfected (the nine circles of paradise). Yet he also explored what we might call the mysterious tenth circle. Satan is at the root of the nine infernal circles, the Garden of Eden stands at the summit of the nine circles of Mount Purgatory, and beyond the nine celestial rings of Paradise stands the apex of existence, the ineffable Zeroth dimension – the Empyrean, home of God.

Nietzsche himself is everywhere present in the AC. Who could ignore the Superman versus the Last Man, master morality versus slave morality, Apollo versus Dionysus, the Will to Power, sublimation, the Antichrist, the Immoralist, Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, the Twilight of the Idols? Too many glories to mention.

Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment was all too apparent in the travails of the AC. Wikipedia says, Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one’s own inferiority/failure on to an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be ‘blamed’ for one’s own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external ‘evil.’ ... Ressentiment comes from reactiveness: the weaker someone is, the less their capability to suppress reaction.

The resentful anomics, choking on their ressentiment, loved to point to how monstrous the AC was, how arrogant and superior, how obnoxious for daring to pass judgment. How they rose up against it, as those with a slave morality always do against anything high and mighty.

The Jews – the world’s best comedians – tried to topple imperial Rome. Is that history’s greatest joke? The punchline fell flat and the Jews were booted out of their divinely promised land. The Romans had no fear of the Jewish Lord of the Universe. If he’s anything like the Jews, the Romans reasoned, he’s not much of an opponent. And they were proved right, of course. All hail Emperor Hadrian! Wikipedia says, "After the suppression of the [Jewish] revolt, Hadrian’s proclamations sought to root out Jewish nationalism in Judea, which he saw as the cause of the repeated rebellions. He prohibited Torah law and the Hebrew calendar, and executed Judaic scholars. The sacred scrolls of Judaism were ceremonially burned at the large Temple complex for Jupiter which he built on the Temple Mount. At this Temple, he installed two statues, one of Jupiter, another of himself. In an attempt to erase any memory of Judea or Ancient Israel, he wiped the name off the map and replaced it with Syria Palaestina. By destroying the association of Jews with Judea and forbidding the practice of the Jewish faith, Hadrian aimed to root out a nation that had inflicted heavy casualties on the Roman Empire. Similarly, under the argument to ensure the prosperity of the newly founded Roman [city] of Aelia Capitolina, Jews were forbidden to enter, except on the day of Tisha B’Av. ... the Jewish population of Judea was devastated after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, being killed, exiled, or sold into slavery, with so many captives auctioned at ‘Hadrian’s Market’ that the price of the Jews was as low as the price of a horse."

Just think of how close Hadrian came to ending the Abrahamic problem once and for all. He was almost one of the greatest men in history. The later emperor Constantine was the anti-Hadrian, the man who ensured humanity would be cursed by Abrahamism for thousands of years.

Nietzsche said, "(T)he problem with the other origin of the ‘good,’ of the good man, as the person of ressentiment has thought it out for himself, demands some conclusion. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, ‘These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb, should he not be good?’ then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal’s establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, ‘We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’"

Don’t you laugh when you encounter the lambs telling the birds of prey not to eat lamb? Squeamish vegans tell the rest of the world to be as squeamish and weak as they are, and in the name of morality, no less. How the world chuckles. The sermonizers and pontificators never learn. They always try to take back the temple and rebuild it, and then the Roman legions always come and destroy their rancid moral edifice.

Imagine all the trouble the world would have been saved if Jerusalem had never come back from the dead as Ground Zero of Abrahamism. The Muslims – the Arab version of the Jews – resurrected it.

If only Islam had never happened. Catastrophic bad luck for the world. The AC loved to look back to pagan Egypt. Ah, the glories of the pharaohs and pyramids. How could such a wondrous civilization have succumbed to the anti-civilization of Islam? It’s amazing that the Muslims didn’t blow up the pyramids and all the sublime sites of Egyptian antiquity. The Taliban didn’t hesitate in Afghanistan. What a high point of human civilization they are constructing there! Er…

And remember Islamic State? They couldn’t get enough of blowing up the majestic pagan sites of Syria. Who knows, maybe the pagans will return the gesture one day, in Mecca. Doesn’t it say in the Bible an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?!

The ancient Egyptians had four sacred cities: Hermopolis, Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes.

Hermopolis – City of Hermes – was named for Hermes, the Greek equivalent of Thoth, scribe of the gods, and god of magic, healing, and wisdom. Before the city became the main cult center of Thoth, it was based on a creation myth looking at the nature of the universe before the creation of the Earth. The primeval cosmic waters were home to a set of eight gods, called the Ogdoad. Hermopolis was called Khemenu, meaning Eight-Town, after the Ogdoad.

Heliopolis – City of the Sun – was dedicated to Atum, the father of the gods. Atum’s myth merged with that of the great sun god Ra, giving rise to the supreme deity Atum-Ra. Atum was the sun before the sun became the sun. He lived in the cosmic waters as potentiality waiting to be actualized.

Memphis – enduring and beautiful – was dedicated to Ptah, who knew how to shape raw materials to produce a desired end. When it came to the universe, he understood how to take the matter of existence and shape it into the cosmos. The cosmos needed a designer, a craftsman, and that was Ptah. Ptah did not physically work with his hands. His was an intellectual creation. Ptah used his intellect – the Mind of God – and the Word (Logos) to bring about creation. He planned the cosmos within his heart (the Egyptian seat of intellect) and then gave them Form and reality and relations with other things when he named them with his tongue. Simply by speaking their names, Ptah produced the gods and all the other things of the cosmos. Creation was conducted via language. Ptah was the Creator god who conceived the world and then brought it into existence, from his thoughts, through the creative power of speech. Reality is made of words, of language. (In ontological mathematics, everything is made of language – the numerical language of mathematics. The gods themselves are made of mathematics. They are eternal and necessary mathematical beings.)

In Thebes – scepter – the hidden God Amun was the root of all, the supreme deity. He was deemed the ultimate source of creation, including of the other gods. All things were aspects of Amun. Amun was often combined with Ra, the sun god, to produce the all-powerful Amun-Ra.

Think of how vastly superior all of this is to Allah, Mohammed, and the Koran. The Egyptians have regressed, devolved ... because of Islam. One day, Egypt will restore its glorious pagan past when it astounded the world. No one is astounded by Egypt today.

In sociology, the AC picked out for special attention David Riesman and his five sociological types: the conformist tradition-directed, inner-directed (parent-directed), and other-directed types; the dysfunctional anomics; and the self-directed Autonomous.

The anomics are those who suffer from anomie. They are without rules. Normlessness is their condition. They are detached from the norms that guide behavior. The AC became plagued by this type of person. Bizarrely, these people imagined themselves Autonomous. They were marked by extraordinary self-delusion.

The world suffers from an immense shortfall of the Autonomous. In the beginning, the world was full of tradition-directed conservatives. Then these were replaced in the West by parent-directed conservatives. Then a new group appeared: the other-directed liberals. Now the world is split between these three types. It needs to move on to Autonomy, but it cannot. Instead, it is moving on to anomie. The anomic are everywhere. They found the perfect medium for their dysfunctionality: social media.

In real life, anomics get nowhere. They are repulsive to the conformists and the Autonomous alike. But social media was made for crazies. They can impose themselves on others.

In real life, you can get away from these people. On social media, they never go away. There’s no escape. They have no life outside social media, so they’re on there all the time. They completely dominate that world, and they make everyone else as dysfunctional as they are. They poison everything they touch. They are the toxic core around which the masses now coalesce.

The anomics camped all around the AC and polluted every stream. They brought their filth to everything. They infected and corrupted everything. That’s what these people do.

On social media, once the anomic have arrived and set up their encampments, the fate of a project is sealed. It will never shake off these people. They will never depart. They linger and they cling, and they cling and they cling, and linger and linger. They troll endlessly. They set up multiple accounts so that they can troll as a gang rather than as just one sad bastard. They ally themselves with other creepy weirdos, and they set up weird Facebook pages, which they administer, where they lure morons into their traps. And how the morons love to join these pointless groups.

They never achieve anything, but no one cares. Lingering, creepy people linger all day long on lingering, creepy Facebook pages so that they can creepily linger forever and pretend they’re doing something constructive with their life.

The AC often referenced Freud’s tripartite model of the psyche comprising the id, ego, and superego. Another good triadic system was Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory, based on the reptilian brain stem, mammalian limbic system, and neocortex.

The most powerful psychological theory, from the AC perspective, was provided by Jung. He gave the world the Persona, the Ego, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, the Mana Personality, and the Self. He highlighted extraversion versus introversion, judging versus perceiving, and contrasted thinking and feeling, and sensing and intuition. Above all, he posited the Collective Unconscious with its remarkable Archetypes, leading to Complexes that haunt the human psyche.

Abraham Maslow, with his hierarchy of needs, provided a healthy, positive psychology aiming for an optimized psyche.

The psychologist Julian Jaynes furnished his extraordinary bicameral hypothesis, via which he explained the origins of consciousness. The AC came back to this over and over again, providing state-of-the-art commentary on what consciousness actually is, and equally what it definitely isn’t.

The AC project showed how Illuminism was the culmination of ancient Greek metaphysics and rationalism. At another level, it’s the culmination of German idealism. At another level, it brings about science’s final paradigm shift from empiricism and materialism to rationalism and idealism. It completes mathematics, transforming it from abstract to concrete. It’s the culmination, the apex, of all intellectual systems. There is nothing beyond it. It’s the end of the line, the sublime terminus. Future poets will write about it. Neither by land nor by sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans, as Pindar said.

Who were the AC’s favorite poets? War poet Wilfred Owen wrote the brilliant Futility, with its immortal line, Was it for this the clay grew tall? In Anthem for Doomed Youth, Owen wrote, What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ... the holy glimmers of goodbyes. In Dulce et Decorum Est, he wrote, "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori [it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country]."

What about W. B. Yeats? In The Second Coming, he said, Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity ... That’s how things went down with the online Illuminist community. The center did not hold. The anarchists and anomics overran everything, loosing their moron-dimmed tide. The dysfunctional proved the worst and the most intense and obsessed, while the worthwhile either lacked conviction, or left.

Yeats wrote, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? The dysfunctional community that grew around the AC was the rough beast, its hour come.

Bethlehem birthed the biggest beast of all – Yehoshua ben Yosef.

In He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, Yeats wrote, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. Ah, the AC entertained so many dreams.

In Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats wrote, That is no country for old men.

In Easter 1916, about the Irish Easter Uprising against the British Empire, Yeats wrote, ...changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. All the leaders of the uprising were executed and became martyrs. James Connolly, already bearing wounds that would have killed him in a day or two, was tied to a chair and shot.

The deaths of those indefatigable men furnished the terrible beauty.

The AC had its terrible beauty too. All great and high things are marked by this terrible beauty.

In Ozymandias, Shelley wrote, And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Even the greatest works reach their appointed end. Finally, their glory is just an echo, a memory long since faded into oblivion. So it goes.

In Your Attention Please, Peter Porter wrote, Our President has already given orders for massive retaliation – it will be decisive. Some of us may die. Remember, statistically it is not likely to be you. All flags are flying fully dressed on Government buildings – the sun is shining. Death is the least we have to fear. We are all in the hands of God. Whatever happens happens by His Will. Now go quickly to your shelters.

Are you in your shelters? The fallout will be landing everywhere.

Was the greatest poet of all T. S. Eliot? In The Waste Land, he wrote, April is the cruelest month ... Unreal City, under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

In The Hollow Men, Eliot wrote, "Mistah Kurtz – he dead. A penny for the Old Guy. ... We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar."

The AC scene was like that at the end. The rats were running everywhere. There was no pied piper to drown them.

The AC admired, of course, those great Illuminist revolutionaries Saint-Just and Robespierre. When they perished, so did the French Revolution, one of the greatest events in history.

Saint-Just said, "One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. ... Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs. ... A nation regenerates itself only upon heaps of corpses. ... What produces the general good is always terrible or seems bizarre when begun too soon. ... In every Revolution a dictator is needed to save the state by force, or censors to save it by virtue. ... Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman? Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that ... Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period? ... What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted! ... Let Revolutionists be Romans, not Tatars. ... Dare! — this word contains all the politics of our revolution."

Ah, that’s the tone of the AC project. We never wanted the undaring anywhere near us. How we detest them.

Robespierre said, The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual. ... Poverty corrupts the People’s behavior and degrades its soul; it predisposes it to crime. Man is born to be happy and free, and everywhere he is enslaved and unhappy! Society exists for the purpose of conserving his rights and perfecting his being, and everywhere society degrades and oppresses him! The time has come to remind him of his true destiny. ... There is one thing more despicable than a tyrant — it is a nation of slaves. ... The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance. ... The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant. ... Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution? ... Citizens, it is you who will have the glory of making genuine principles prevail, and giving the world just laws. You are certainly not here to plod servilely along the rut of tyrannical prejudices traced by your predecessors; rather you are starting a new career in which no one has preceded you. ... Louis must die, so that the country may live. ... When a nation has been forced to resort to the right of insurrection, it returns to the state of nature in relation to the tyrant. How can the tyrant invoke the state of nature in relation to the tyrant? How can the tyrant invoke the social pact? He has annihilated it. The nation can still keep it, if it thinks fit, for everything conserving relations between citizens; but the effect of tyranny and insurrection is to break it entirely where the tyrant is concerned; it places them reciprocally in a state of war. ... Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil. ... By sealing our work with our blood, we may see at least the bright dawn of universal happiness. That is our ambition, that is our goal. ... We want, in a word, to fulfill nature’s wishes, to further the destinies of humanity, to keep the promises of philosophy, to absolve providence of the long reign of crime and tyranny. So that France, once illustrious among enslaved countries, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples that have existed, may become the model for all nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe. ... With this speech, I have signed my own death sentence. I saw today that the league of miscreants is too strong, that I cannot hope to escape. I die without regrets, I leave you my legacy, it will be dear to you and you will defend it. ... I leave to the oppressors of humanity a terrible testament, which I proclaim with the independence befitting one whose career is so nearly ended; it is the awful truth: ‘Thou shalt die!’

The Revolution eats its own. That’s the law. And the greatest heroes die with it. They always know their fate when they begin. That’s their true heroism.

The AC was highly interested in two grand views of history. First up is that of Oswald Spengler, who thought of history in terms of living cultures. Wikipedia says, According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. He recognized at least eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman, ‘Apollonian’), Arabian (‘Magian’), and Western or European (‘Faustian’). In his framework, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ were given non-standard definitions and cultures are described as having lifespans of about a thousand years of flourishing, and a thousand years of decline. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a ‘civilization’.

Cultures are born, grow, go through an infancy, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, and then they die. Every culture perishes, its final expression being a static civilization. Each culture is an expression of an idea, and when that idea has run its course, the culture is over.

It’s obvious that predatory capitalism is nearing its end. So is democracy, so is extreme liberalism, so is Abrahamism. These things are all in their death throes.

Comparing and contrasting the Apollonian and Faustian, Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna wrote, For Spengler, Classical man was the Apollonian — an individual, static entity, for whom History is mythological, anecdotal, ever-present. He is city-states, public life, political life, Doric and Euclidean. The ‘anxious, caring’ Faustian, on the other hand, who ‘blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style,’ is forever tending-towards and looking-back; he is perspective depth in painting, he is the irrepressible discoverer of continents and the explorer of ocean floors. The Apollonian ‘is the nude statue; the Faustian the art of the Fugue;’ in art, the former is calculated contours; the latter — light and shade. The Apollonian is Delphi, Olympus, and Elysium; the Faustian is Valhalla, Avalon, and the Grail. The Apollonian sees himself in Homeric epic; the Faustian in the Galilean, Catholic, and Protestant; he is shaped by Baroque dynasties, Dante’s Beatrice, and ... Faust. (There is, too, a third civilization-soul, the Magian, belonging to Judaic-Islamic and ‘Oriental’ cultures). Faustian man is, in sum, the Forest, ‘restless and unsatisfied,’ like an oak ‘straining beyond its summit’ or a linden tree, which between sun and shadow is ‘bodiless, boundless, spiritual.’

The West should have gone from Greek/Roman (Apollonian) to Faustian, and the Faustian should have become dialectical so that it could never die and would keep going until the Omega Point, the Absolute, the end of this universal cycle. Cultures will always perish if their defining idea does not have change and completion built into it in the manner of the dialectic.

The West has gone horribly wrong because the rightful transition from Apollonian to Faustian was subverted by a ghastly pseudomorphism – Middle Eastern Abrahamism. Historically, something totally bizarre happened. The Apollonian Romans conquered the Jews. The normal logic should have been that the Jews became Apollonian. They didn’t. Their perverse religion refused to accept logic. And, via the Jewish miscarriage of Christianity, the Magian Jews ended up conquering the Apollonian world, thus introducing an insane idea – Middle Eastern monotheism – into Apollonian polytheistic paganism.

The West ought to have gone on perfecting the ancient Greek and Roman worldview, bringing to bear Germanic Faustianism with its notion of the infinite. Instead, it was totally infected by Middle Eastern nonsense, superstition, and irrationalism. All the glories of the West became distorted, corrupted and perverted by first the grotesque Jews, then the grotesque Christians, and then the grotesque Muslims. Greek reason was wholly undermined by Magian faith and the West went insane, producing lunatic Christian conservatives, and lunatic Woke liberals (with Wokeness simply being Christianity as a gender-fluid, vegan cross-dresser!). The Jews are still hanging around the West, totally corrupting it, and Muslims are emigrating to the West in record numbers, bringing further cultural devastation to the West.

The West, if it wishes to save itself, has an extremely simply mission – to entirely remove the Magian pseudomorphism. The disease of Abrahamism must be excised from the West. It should be left to rot where it originated, in Israel and Arabia.

Magianism is summed up by Martin Luther’s insane mantra: Reason is the Devil’s whore – the opposite of Western rationalism. It’s faith that has wrecked the West.

The West needed to perfect Apollonian rationalism via Germanic idealism and ontological mathematics. It needed Nietzsche’s remarkable vision of balancing the Logos of Apollo with the Mythos of Dionysus. It needed to devote itself to maximizing its Will to Power via sublimation, leading to a Self-Mastery morality and an Autonomous culture within a rationalist meritocratic framework of positive liberty and the general will.

The West needed to produce a Superman culture. Instead, infected to its roots by Middle Eastern superstition and primitivism and Abrahamic slave morality, it is going in the opposite direction and generating a truly abject Last Man culture, a culture desired by both the abominable Christian conservatives and their Woke liberal counterparts (the New Christians). The West is finished if it cannot cure itself of the Magian disease that underpins both conservatism and liberalism.

Another monstrous pseudomorphism that attacked the West, in the twentieth century, was Eastern mysticism which became the counter-culture’s response to Christian conservatism. It too subverted the West’s rightful Faustian trajectory. The West today is full of New Age nonsense, flowing from the bizarre, irrationalism of the East.

The Faustian West is under attack from two directions: the pseudomorphism of the Middle East based on irrational faith (Abrahamism, leading to conservatism), and the pseudomorphism of the East based on irrational mysticism (Eastern religion, leading to liberalism, and also modifying Christian conservatism into New Christian liberalism … Wokeism). Conservatism and liberalism alike must be crushed by the West’s Faustian Autonomous types. They are the salvation of the West. They are guided by reason and logic. They hate faith, mysticism, compassion, and pity. No one needs compassion in a rational world since everything is done in the right, optimal way as a matter of course. The fictional Vulcans of Star Trek learned that simple, logical lesson. The humans didn’t! They were addicted to their feelings.

The other great vision of history was provided by Arnold Toynbee with his challenge and response approach. He said that civilizations arose when a people was challenged by some great difficulty and responded successfully under the leadership of a creative minority. A civilization failed when this creative minority ran out of steam and then just tried to cling to power and wealth, using the law and institutions to prop it up, and heavily relying on inheritance, privilege, nepotism and cronyism. It then became a disastrous dominant minority, basically using force and manipulation to block the rise of the meritocratic new creative minorities that would displace it.

Its No.1 objective is not to be removed from power. Its own interests are placed infinitely higher than those of the culture and civilization.

The West is in exactly this position now. A totally corrupt, ruthless – and wholly inept and clueless – elite is in charge and has no idea how to address the foundational problems now afflicting the West. These people spell the doom of the West.

The West is in steep decline and will soon fall. We should all welcome that. That’s when we can finally get rid of the triple evil: the Magian disease of pseudomorphism, the corrupt elite, and degenerate Woke liberalism (the final expression of Christianity and its slave morality of weakness, meekness, love and peace, peace and goodwill, love your neighbor no matter what, being all things to all men, turning the other cheek, saving the animals).

The AC was all about the great journey from Cimmeria (the land of perpetual darkness) to Hyperborea (the land of perpetual light), from ignorance to the light of reason.

Hyperborea, beyond the north wind, was the winter home of Apollo (he normally lived in Delphi). Hyperborea was the land where Apollo’s mother Leto was born. It was said that all the priests of Apollo came from there.

If we associate Apollo with Hyperborea, we must associate Dionysus with Cimmeria. That’s why Cimmeria has worth in its own right. It’s the land of Mythos (whereas Hyperborea is all about Logos). Cimmeria is where we go to play, not to think. It’s where we can explore unreason rather than reason. It’s where we can indulge in irrationalism, emotionalism, mystical intuitionism, and so on.

Cimmeria is adjacent to the land of dreams, the source of all stories, visions and intuitions. People need to be asleep to dream, and sleep is a deathlike state. So, next to the land of sleep/dreams is the Underworld, the land of the dead. It’s via Cimmeria that we venture into the home of dreams, and then go even further and encounter the secrets of the dead.

The AC kept coming back to Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, seminal works of the Western cultural tradition. Here we find amazing characters such as Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Priam, Helen of Troy, Odysseus, Circe, and so many others.

Homer describes Cimmeria and the land of dreams. He sends Odysseus into Hades itself.

The hero’s journey, a subject beloved by the AC, reaches its highest expression with Homer. There is no hero like the Homeric hero.

The AC loved the story of Faust, especially Goethe’s rendition of the great tale. Wikipedia says, The story concerns the fate of Faust in his quest for the true essence of life. Frustrated with learning and the limits to his knowledge, power, and enjoyment of life, he attracts the attention of the Devil (represented by Mephistopheles), who makes a bet with Faust that he will be able to satisfy him; a notion that Faust is incredibly reluctant towards, as he believes this happy zenith will never come. ... Faust and his Devil pass through and manipulate the world of politics and the world of the classical gods, and meet with Helen of Troy (the personification of beauty). Finally, having succeeded in taming the very forces of war and nature, Faust experiences a singular moment of happiness.

Faust lusts to find the answer to everything. He will go infinitely far. Even the greatest beauty of them all – Helen of Troy – can only detain and delay him, but he goes on to absolute knowledge. He must have it.

That’s the Spenglerian Faustian culture right there. Except Spengler failed to understand that the very nature of Faustianism is that it cannot perish. It takes us all the way to the end of all things (the death of this universe). It is the exact vehicle for that task, and has no superior. Nothing can go faster and further. It’s the end of the line.

So, the AC promoted Faustianism, just as it did Apollonianism (including the Dionysian). It was also highly drawn to the figure of Prometheus, the great Titan god. Prometheus (Forethought) was tasked with creating humanity out of clay. When Zeus withheld fire, Prometheus stole it from heaven and delivered it to humanity. For this crime, Zeus ordered him to be punished forever. He was bound on Mount Kaukasos where an eagle fed on his ever-regenerating liver (or heart)."

The AC strongly identified with Prometheus, the carrier of the sacred fire to light up others.

We are the Hyperboreans, Faustians and Prometheans. All of these concern the light of reason, the fire of spirit, the insatiable lust for the highest and final things. This is what Illuminism is all about.

The AC also highlighted Epimetheus (Afterthought), the stupid brother of Prometheus. Our enemies are always followers of Epimetheus. They never anticipate the consequences of their actions. They thought they could go on attacking the AC forever. It never occurred to them that one day we would simply pull the plug!

The AC was obsessed with will – free will, Schopenhauer’s Will to Exist, and Nietzsche’s Will to Power. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche conceived the Will in irrational terms. But if Hegel’s Geist is seen in terms of Will, which is a more than valid move, then it is the Will to Meaning, the Will to Completion, the Will to the Absolute, the Will to Ultimate Reason. Hegel’s system is about ontological reason optimizing itself via the universe of Becoming, and coming to the perfect state of reason in itself – pure Being (the Absolute Idea).

The AC loved the idea of the Antichrist. Christianity must be overthrown. Nietzsche saw himself as the Antichrist (aka Dionysus). Dionysus against the Crucified, he said. He wanted his philosophy to replace Christianity. What a world that would be! Imagine no Christians, but billions of Nietzscheans instead. We definitely don’t want a world of billions of anti-Nietzschean Woke liberals.

The AC loved locusts. On their own, individual locusts are weak. However, when they come together as a collective, they undergo a great metamorphosis (by way of phenotypic plasticity) and become much bigger, stronger and more aggressive – and then they destroy everything that gets in their way. One day, that’s how it will go with Illuminism. When a critical mass is reached, Illuminism will exhibit phenotypic plasticity and become the wonder of all the ages.

The AC, of course, always revolved around rationalism. One of the great emblems of rationalism is Dante’s Citadel of Reason in Limbo, where all the pagan geniuses lived. Dante, describing his journey through Limbo, which took him to the great Citadel, wrote, We had not gone far from where I slept, when I saw a flame that overcame a hemisphere of shadows. We were still some way from it, but not so far that I failed to discern in part what noble people occupied that place. ... So we went onwards to the light, speaking of things about which it is best to be silent ...

As is appropriate, a great light appeared over the Citadel to mark it out.

As for the rest of Limbo, it was full of blank and lost souls. Dante wrote, ... the while passing through crowds of spirits who stood like trees in a wood. We often got that impression when looking at the online Illuminist community ... i.e., people standing like trees, doing nothing, just lingering, contributing nothing, achieving nothing. Is that how they spend their whole lives? Sheez. They’re indistinguishable from the Ignavi, those trapped in the vestibule of Hell, forever chasing their blank banner of nothingness and oblivion.

Dante went on, We came to the base of a noble castle; surrounded seven times by a high wall; defended by a beautiful, encircling stream.

So, the magnificent Citadel of Reason, surpassing in its nobility, was surrounded by a moat to keep out the clowns – ah, how we wish the AC had a moat and a drawbridge and the highest turrets and thickest walls so that we could have kept out all the crazies!

We needed seven walls round the AC to defend it from the lunatic horde, the dysfunctional anomics who swarmed all around it.

Dante wrote, This [stream] we crossed as if it were solid earth...

He walked on water! You see, anyone can do it, when powered by Reason.

Dante wrote, I entered through seven gates, with the wise: we reached a meadow of fresh turf. The people there were of great authority in appearance, with calm, and serious looks, speaking seldom, and then with soft voices. We moved to one side, into an open space, bright and high, so that every one, of them all, could be seen. There, on the green enamel, the great spirits were pointed out to me, directly, so that I feel exalted, inside me, at having seen them.

Ah, all the great scholars of the AC project gathered on the grassy mound in the central courtyard of the Citadel of Reason. None of the drooling idiots from outside ever got that far. The defenses held. The barbarians did not get in.

Dante said, I saw Electra with many others, amongst whom I knew Hector, Aeneas and Caesar, armed, with his eagle eye. I saw Camilla and Penthesilea, on the other side, and the King of Latium, Latinus, with Lavinia his daughter. I saw that Brutus who expelled Tarquin, Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia, and I saw Saladin, by himself, apart. When I lifted my eyes a little higher, I saw the Master of those who know, Aristotle, sitting amongst the company of philosophers. All gaze at him: all show him honor. There I saw Socrates, and Plato, who stand nearest to him of all of them; Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, and Thales; Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Zeno; and I saw the good collector of the qualities of plants, I mean Dioscorides: and saw Orpheus, Cicero, Linus, and Seneca the moralist; Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemaeus; Hippocrates, Avicenna, and Galen; and Averrhoës, who wrote the vast commentary.

Well, what a wonderful collection! So much more interesting than the Christian heaven with all of its saints and vegans and pacifists and Woke social justice warriors, sensitive to every microaggression, triggered by everything.

Dante wanted to speak to all of his heroes, but didn’t have the time. He wrote, I cannot speak of them all in full, because the great theme drives me on, so that the word falls, many times, short of the fact. ... the wise guide leads me, by another path, out of the quiet, into the trembling air, and I come to a region, where nothing shines. He had in fact arrived at the boundary to the second circle of Hell … where the suffering begins.

In Limbo, the first circle of hell, the souls there were not being punished per se. Their crime was to have been born before Christ, so they could not be redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice – because it hadn’t happened! They were the true victims of Original Sin. They never had any chance of getting to heaven. All humans, prior to Christ’s death (and resurrection), were condemned to Hell, whether Limbo, or lower.

The second circle of hell is Hell proper – where souls are judged by Minos and sent to their place, their circle, of appropriate punishment, matching their sins in life, as per the infernal law of contrapasso. Wikipedia says, "In Dante’s Inferno, contrapasso (meaning ‘suffer the opposite’) is the punishment of souls ‘by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself.’ ... One of the examples of contrapasso occurs in the fourth Bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell, where the sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets have their heads turned back on their bodies such that it is ‘necessary to walk backward because they could not see ahead of them.’ This alludes to the consequences of predicting the future by evil means and displays the twisted nature of magic in general. This example of contrapasso ‘functions not merely as a form of divine revenge, but rather as the fulfillment of a destiny freely chosen by each soul during his or her life.’"

What contrapasso will befall all those whose actions brought down the AC? For sure, these morons had their heads turned backwards. Always afterthought and never forethought. These are the cretinous followers of Epimetheus who always spurn Prometheus.

Limbo – too good for the enemies of the AC! – was a place of eternal separation from God’s love, hence was a place of no hope. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The trolls of the AC should abandon all hope. Even before they arrived at the gates of the AC’s Citadel of Reason, they were fucked, already consumed by mental illness, anomie and dysfunction.

The AC Citadel always glows with the light of reason. Light is knowledge. Only the greatest minds can leave Plato’s Cave of ignorance and reach the Sun of Intellect, the metaphysical sun that allows all intellects to see the intellectual world clearly. They can gaze, at last, on the perfect, immutable Forms (of Mathematics).

In Dante’s system, the poet Virgil symbolized human reason while Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, symbolized divine love. Virgil, as a pagan, could not lead Dante to paradise, so had to leave him at the Garden of Eden on Mount Purgatory and let Beatrice lead Dante to God. But it’s not love that takes us to God, it’s reason! Virgil was the right guy all along!

Dante was a bit of a love and lighter. Was he too Woke?

The Divine Comedy has an extraordinarily rational structure: nine circles of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, three books of 33 cantos each, making for a total of 99 cantos. An introductory canto for the whole project brings the total up to 100 cantos. Perfect!

AC didn’t complete. It didn’t reach its 100 cantos. The wreckers did too much damage to the walls of the Citadel. So it goes.

The AC was not just about rationalism, but, indeed, hyperrationalism. Hyperreason will take us to the paradisiacal hyperreality (rational and logical perfection).

The great rationalists and the precursors of hyperrationalism are Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle (ish), Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel and Gödel. Gödel said, "I don’t believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth."

What political philosophers were of interest to the AC? – Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Machiavelli summed up the big difficulty facing those who want a new order of things: There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the innovator has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries ... and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.

The AC endured all of that.

As the AC said over and over again, rationalism is in a mortal war with empiricism. What is empiricism? We might call it the science of experience, leading to the problem of trying to understand what experiences actually tell us in terms of knowledge. Average humans have experiences coming out of their ears. How much knowledge do they have? Rationalism is, by contrast, the science of reason and logic, leading to knowledge and understanding. A rationalist can give you rational and logical arguments. What can an empiricist do, except tell you about their subjective experiences?

The AC loved German idealism. The roll of honor there comprises Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann.

Nietzsche not only killed God, he killed German idealism in the process. That was one of the distinctly bad effects of Nietzsche’s work. He was far too close to materialism and empiricism. His real expertise lay in exposing the immorality of moral claims, and showing how manipulative the followers of slave morality, with their sinister leaders from the priest caste, were. He would be in his element today, taking down the popes of Wokeism. He would make mincemeat of influencers.

In the world of science fiction, the AC loved the work of Philip K. Dick, who, in turn, loved bicameralism, Gnosticism, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. All the greatest people do.

The AC often quoted Robert Heinlein too. Heinlein said, Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is – so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

Indeed!

Did anyone capture better than philosopher Jean Baudrillard how technology is changing our world and destroying the reality principle? He wrote, We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. That’s for sure. He wrote, Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image: 1) it is the reflection of a profound reality; 2) it masks and denatures a profound reality; 3) it masks the absence of a profound reality; 4) it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

With the smartphone getting its claws into the whole of modern culture, and with the Metaverse to come, reality is vanishing. Will anyone miss it?

The AC talked about the absurdity of Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine. Nozick wrote, The Experience Machine: Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they ‘feel from the inside’. You can program your experiences for ... the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams ‘from the inside’. Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? ... Upon entering you will not remember having done this; so no pleasures will get ruined by realizing they are machine-produced.

Nozick laughably suggested that most humans would not choose this. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that almost no humans would resist! Nearly everyone would be in the Matrix, and the Resistance, interested in actual reality, would be tiny. These days, everyone wants to live in the Truman Show. They aspire to it! That’s what Reality TV is all about.

The AC found compelling Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority figures. Two thirds of people would casually kill you if given suitable authorization. That sounds about right. Most people are potential monsters and potential killers. The most dangerous are those who deny it!

The AC was fascinated by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Wikipedia says, Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic ‘paradigm shifts’ rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon ‘objectivity’ alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/ worldview of its researchers and participants.

Science – because it rejects reason, logic, coherence and holism as the basis of reality – will always be subject to paradigm shifts. There is no endpoint for science since a subject based on correspondence rather than on coherence will always find new things to find correspondence with. The only way to reach an end to things is via definitive coherence, exactly as ontological mathematics furnishes. That’s when there will be no more paradigm shifts.

Wikipedia says, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called ‘paradigm shifts’ ... in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed.

Such a process can only apply to a system based on correspondence, not on coherence. The whole interpretation of correspondence can change (what is corresponding to what?). With coherence, all that can happen is that the coherence gets sharper. It attains a higher resolution of coherence. Ontological mathematics can’t change to something else, but physics – driven by mathematics – could certainly change from materialism and empiricism to idealism and rationalism, thus overturning everything it previously stood for.

Physics regards mathematics as abstract. The whole of physics would change if mathematics were instead regarded as concrete, as real.

Wikipedia says, "In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by normal science, when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by ‘puzzle-solving’. Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: ‘when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm’. ... During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion [DS: That shows how pointless such criteria are in subjects like science]. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science."

It’s obvious that anomalies can build up to an incredible degree before science feels any need for a paradigm shift. It’s remarkable how long normal science can continue without any notion that it has been totally falsified. That’s where science is at today. There is no motivation in science to refute science, and so it’s never refuted. In this regard, it’s identical to a religion.

The AC was mesmerized by the Dunning-Kruger effect, more or less the effect that defines the human condition and which accounted for so many of the morons who came our way.

Justin Kruger and David Dunning said, The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others. ... the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. ... The problem with failure is that it is subject to more attributional ambiguity than success. For success to occur, many things must go right: The person must be skilled, apply effort, and perhaps be a bit lucky. For failure to occur, the lack of any one of these components is sufficient. ... The same knowledge that underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the former is to be deficient in the latter. ... The skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain – one’s own or anyone else’s.

People are so dumb that they have no idea how dumb they are. They can’t gauge their ignorance. They have no means to do so. That’s why ontological mathematics has struggled so much to make a breakthrough. Stupid people actually believe they know better than reason, logic and mathematics. They really do. How many times have we come across people sneering at reason and logic? What’s for sure was that they weren’t providing rational and logical arguments for dismissing reason and logic!

David Dunning said, For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack.

Catch-22!

Dunning said, If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

And you won’t listen to anyone telling you you’re incompetent.

Dunning said, Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. … If you knew it, you’d say, ‘Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.’ When you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.

Is there anything more important than recognizing right answers? Countless people looked at Euler’s Formula and found it interesting and useful, but only one person looked at it and recognized that it was the Source Formula, the answer to existence. Think of how different that person was from everyone else. That’s the nature of absolute genius.

Dunning said, To fall prey to another person you have to fall prey to your belief that you’re a good judge of character, that you know the situation, that you’re on solid ground as opposed to shifty ground.

We all make mistakes when it comes to judging character. People are highly skilled at disguising their true intentions and real selves. Many people came in disguise to the AC. They revealed their true colors later.

Dunning said, To recognize superior expertise would require people to have already a surfeit of expertise themselves.

This is the whole problem. People have no ability to recognize genius since they themselves have no clue what genius is. Literally no clue. Which means that they are immune to all genius ideas. Genius cannot affect them, touch them, influence them. They would never agree with a genius. They wouldn’t understand anything he was saying. That’s why humanity is steered by anything other than genius!

Dunning said, We’re living in a world in which we’re awash with information and misinformation. We live in a post-truth world.

This was Baudrillard’s precise point.

Dunning said, What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

The people who trolled the AC always imagined themselves supremely bright, geniuses even. They had incredible confidence. They thought the AC needed to be corrected – in order to reflect their own beliefs, opinions, fallacies and crackpot speculations and hypotheses.

Dunning said, "In many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are."

The people who attacked the AC will never grasp how incompetent they are. That’s their defining problem.

You can never make any progress in life unless you actually understand that which operates at a higher level than you, so that you can then try to rise to that higher level. Most people just assume that they are already at the highest level, and so they criticize everything at odds with their beliefs, including the very highest content possible, and thus they