Ego defenses

When your life is sufficiently pleasant, your brain just has all the nastiness around you blocked off. It’s simply not on your radar. It passes through one ear and exits through the other, without affecting anything in between.

I’m just thinking about this article I saw, of Taylor Swift saying she’s worried about climate change and buying double the offsets for her private jet. People like her just live in a very different mental landscape from others, with very little overlap.

If you’re buying carbon offsets for your private jet, that is, you pay the Africans who are going to die of hunger to use more efficient wood stoves that burn less wood, or you pay some company to plant trees that die a few years later of drought, then you still don’t get it.

And I’m not expecting of her to get it, because you can’t really function at that level when you get it. Like priests before them, these people have a calling. Their calling is to administer opiates to the masses. Worrying about what happens when the permafrost melts does not fit into that.

No I’m just saying we all live in very different mental landscapes. I doubt Charli XCX has ever seen any of the witch house remixes made of her songs either for example, whereas I’ve listened to them to death. I already knew about her back in 2011, I never thought she would get so big. But these people you see on TV just have a very strong identity, a very strong sense of self and they don’t let it gush out over all sorts of abstract non-self concepts like some sort of slut. No, in that sense they are more prude.

You see them get depressed or lose their mind sometimes, like the One Direction guy Liam Payne. But it’s a different kind of depression than the one you see in the proles. It’s not that dead defeated look in their face, it’s more like the kind of blues you feel after you just had the best two minutes of your life. It’s a kind of “tired of winning” look in their faces. I see it in Charli XCX too. Your world just becomes pretty empty without enough hardship.

I’ve argued this before, but when I see a low IQ low status white male on Twitter argue that global warming is all fake and Joe Biden is just using HAARP to steer hurricanes into red states and Bill Gates wants to give the cows bird flu to force us to eat his fake meat and CO2 is actually plant food and the great barrier reef is doing fine, you know what I’m seeing? What I’m actually seeing, is someone who believes in it more than Taylor Swift.

The other thing I have to point out, is that these people care a lot about their “fans” of course. They love their fans, they love all their fans. But that fundamentally doesn’t really mean anything. When a guy starts yapping about how he loves women, that doesn’t really mean anything. He’s just referring to how he has a biological drive that is well fulfilled by these soft round gentle creatures walking around him.

Similarly, when they say they care about their fans, it’s ultimately just referring to how they fulfill a need they have. They just need people cheering them on. And I’m not opposed to that, I think it’s kind of Nietzschean, to have that hunger for dominance, that need to have people look up to you. But it’s like people who worship some televangelist: You’re in an extractive relationship. And the televangelist mostly just goes for your money, but these celebrities consume your energy, your creative drive, your lifeforce, your vril. You have to remember that you are in a sense all Pygmalion, looking at Galatea.

You have to remember, that love in its most basic essence, is a small suicide. When you don’t have any ego defenses, then you will be consumed by what you love, it will drain you of everything you have to offer. As an example, the extreme Taylor Swift fans just tend to sink into a kind of schizophrenic state, seeing hidden messages in everything she does.

This is true for anything you’re passionate about, it can easily consume you and make you mentally ill. For low status white males that would be complaining about brown people entering their country, for others it’s environmentalism, sometimes it’s an ex-wife, but the most pitiable version would be to have your brain consumed by some wealthy pop star.

Without a strong ego, it’s easy to let yourself be entirely consumed by some “cause”. But that’s not an obligation you have. At any moment there are at least a dozen genocides going on around the world, half of Africa removes the clitoris of their daughters with a broken piece of glass, there will always be morons slaughtering elephants for fun, there are always going to be pollutants being dumped into the air and the ocean and all of this stuff will probably end up killing us all.

But you need to have some ego defenses. When you let your ego erode, this notion in your head that you are an individual whose needs matter, then you’re going to be consumed by something. If you’re a low status white male that means you’ll be on some street in Germany getting stabbed by an asylum seeker while you’re busy burning a Quran, if you’re a fat ugly woman you’ll probably be alienating yourself from your peers for the Palestinians who started a war they stood no chance of winning.

All these celebrities on TV have strong egos, so that doesn’t happen to them. They just pay lip service to it all: “Oh I’m not supposed to drink Starbucks coffee? Oh my bad, sorry!” Then they stop posting their coffee on Instagram. And you have to remember, that you just don’t have this obligation to solve the world’s problems. If you really think that’s what you came into this world for, then you arrived much too late.

I’m serious about this, you really need to be careful with this. We have a pretty constant influx now, of people who put themselves on fire, who will spend their lives in jail after shooting some CEO, who end up dead after trying to assassinate Trump, who go to jail for throwing stuff at paintings in the museum.

These are all people who were just consumed by a cause, unable to cope with being nobodies. Even someone like Greta is just consumed, drained of all her vril by an idea. Autism doesn’t stop girls from having a boyfriend, what stops Greta from having a boyfriend is being consumed by this one thing. I don’t see that as my purpose in life, I’m more eager to heal people’s souls.

What’s also an essential part of your ego defense, is to remember that you only ever see people from their most talented angle. I only ever see Charli XCX dancing and singing like a half-Indian goddess. Seeing her dancing on stage summons memories of the half-Indian girl in my gym class back when I was 14.

But if you asked her what she thinks caused the collapse of the Roman empire then I think it becomes clear these famous people optimized themselves for one or two variables. I’m not saying she’s dumb. I’m saying when you’re that famous your whole mind is forced to devote itself to one purpose.

It reminds me of this jreg video:

The message here is: “Hey autism makes you inclined to fill your brain with all sorts of information that’s never going to have any real actual benefit to you.” And it’s an obvious question I’ve asked myself as well: Should I really give in to this desire to fill my head with all sorts of information that can have no benefit to me? Isn’t the desire to open Wikipedia at some level just the same as the desire to open a porn site?

But I don’t think this is true, precisely because knowledge is ultimately a burden. When I take psychedelics, my mind is often drawn to the most dark chapters of human history, as well as to dark chapters I’ve seen up close. And I have enough respect for these plants and for my own mind, to believe that when we travel there together, they take me there for a reason.

At any given moment, about 8% of the Western population is clinically depressed. In large part, that is just a consequence of having unpleasant realizations about the world. And as a subjective idealist, I just don’t believe it to be true, that this is just some sort of error of the human nervous system, that our desire to truly understand the world is just a useless mistake.

I can’t prove any of this to you, but I think knowledge and understanding are a kind of burden that have to be carried and some people have to be willing to stand up and volunteer for that. Not just at a practical level, but at a metaphysical level. If everyone decides to dissociate and retreat to a land of unicorns and rainbows then this branch of reality will only have dead-ends.

I think this is the most important question a man can ask himself: How is our reality constructed? As you may know, I don’t believe there to be any sort of external material universe that operates independently of the human mind. However, I also don’t believe in the idea that there is some magic solution to life’s problems that consists of just resorting to positive affirmations and blocking negativity from your mind. When you pour the water out of your house, it has to flood into your neighbor’s porch.