Crypsis Theory
An Organic Natural Philosophy

Introduction

I am faced with the imposing task of condensing years of research and critical inquiry into chapbook format because of eminent threats to my life and safety by the monarchist movement, whose mideival sedition of United States democracy from the outer wings of the technology sector and its related convergence apparatus (the borderless merger of the defense, intelligence, justice, and private economic complexes into a concentrated amalgamation) has blindsided history as of my writing this. That American democracy might come under attack from within, and from the corrosion of such seemingly sacrosanct institutions, is at once heartbreaking, and the inevitable logic of American’s previous era of exporting imperial domination to other democracies throughout the world.

We should be sobered and reluctantly responsible, if nothing else, for this winding of the arc of history, as it continues to turn upon itself and unfold the future.

With that said, I am facing severe and life threatening persecution, and I have good reason to believe that my work in natural philosophy would be at risk of being coopted by the monarchists if I do not endeavor to publish a brief summary of these theories, which are based in the Enlightenment values of secular humanism—for me, a deeply spiritual conviction in the universal sovereignty of the individual human spirit, the democratizing power of collected knowledge and literature, and the endearing virtue of the arts and sciences to discover and relay truths of the human soul and of the universe both as concrete conclusions and as unmitigated expressions of life force and emotion.

This is just, then, a strand of collective endeavor that reaches far back into history, which I hope to salvage by putting it to print: a right that I have had to struggle for more than anyone would believe.

The subject at hand is the origins of human symbolic cognition, or our unique ability as a species to use abstract signs as stand-ins for something that corresponds in reality (the signified and the significator). This singular adaptation accounts for our use of language, numbers, the alphabet and writing (which itself delineates the boundary between history and prehistory), glyphs and pictographs, and our many forms of art and cultural ingenuity. It also has a broader, less intuitive anthropology as the source of ritual, fetishism, costume, and craft—patterns of human behavior that encompass nearly all modes of cultural expression in the touching plurality and universalism of their many communities throughout history.

Beneath all forms of language and religion, I believe there is a substratic language of human heartedness that transcends and endures beyond their precious differentiations. That, and the origins of our species’ unique cultural expressions, is the subject of the present work.

An Organic Cosmology

<verse>The Self-Organizing Cosmos The Elemental & Void Comparative Cosmogenesis Structure / Formlessness / Pattern The Void as Container An Organic Universe

It may seem presumptuous to stretch our discussion of the origins of religion and belief back to the origins of the cosmos as we know it, yet my purpose in doing so should become clear as these theories unfold in the following pages.

Foremost is an interest in harmonizing an inquiry into cultural plurality and a diversity of ontologies with the rather strict expectations of the modern sciences—a bridge which I am hoping to build here through their common grounds in epistemology, or what we might call an interest in metaphysics. This is the basis of mythology and religion, and likewise the cultural heritage of the natural sciences and humanities (although some may bristle at the comparison—perhaps unaware of the influence of alchemy, mysticism, and esoteric philosophy which led to the development of the sciences as a paradigm of epistemology: one capable of incredible feats, yet only one among many worldviews in ancient tree of the human family).

As a student in comparative religion and psychology (originally at least—they overlap here, in the study of metacognition and the anthropology of religious culture) I feel it is appropriate to offer a somewhat neutral overview of ancient history that is something of a blend between comparative religion and the sciences—mostly so that no one feels left out.

To that end, I would start with the philosophical principle that the universe is basically self-organizing: that the natural, material universe takes its organic form through its own assemblage. This does not exclude or preclude some consciousness as the “guiding force” of material organization, mind you, as in a Christian God who may set the cosmos in motion (as we hear from in Job), nor does it exclude an atheistic metaphysic of rather mechanical physical cosmogenesis. This is only to say that the natural cosmos is organic and self-apparent—which might also be a way of saying that no map could ever cover the entire known universe, as the map itself would be made of the stuff it is made to be mapping. (Then we would be in trouble.)

So the underlying principle that we must take material existence at “face value” in a way—that reality is, in fact, reality, and of dear consequence—is our starting point at hand.

I feel comfortable adding to this base positivism the principle that the material universe self-organizes within a void, or that somethingness implies nothingness by its very existence. That this void is the container of the material world, and allows for its shapes and behaviors like a vase allows for the shape of water, seems to likewise be a principle which encompasses both the natural emergence of patterns and their disillusionment in entropy, without leaving us feeling that it is all in vain.

It seems natural to assume that if voidness is the background to all existence, as seems implied by multiple cosmological traditions from the I Ching and Dao Te Ching, to the creation myths of Native American tribes which so often feature the earth being made from the depths of a “great water”—a poetic archetype also used to symbolize the void in archaic versions of Genesis (where an oceanic cosmos filled with titan-like sea monsters existed before God more famously made the world in seven days) and the Gospel of John (“God moved his face across the waters...”)—and of course, in Buddhist lore where belief in a omniscient voidness is honed to a refined philosophical tradition of deeply humanistic cosmology. (It is from that tradition and the sciences that I borrow the concept, with due respect.)

I begin here in part because I hope not to leave readers feeling adrift or without recourse to very human traditions if there be any existential weariness in this brief paper. I would add that life itself is of its own value, and is worth its own experience, and that to live is itself the highest treasure of the universe in my tender opinion. This is of consequence in part because the rather inhuman idealisms of the “hard sciences” and their role in shaping modern cultural mythology, from serious studies in futurism to more fantastic archetypes disseminated through science fiction. There seems to be a risk of valuing the quest for “truth” through the hard sciences which ostensibly negates the role of life and consciousness itself—or perhaps seeks to debiologize knowledge and “the quest for meaning” more universally.

This subconscious trend has gained momentum to the point where it may be an existential danger to life on earth itself, and I believe it is fundamentally unaware of the objective role of biology in consciousness and the ongoing acquisition of knowledge—in all its transcendent value.

This leads naturally to frustration and conflict, and is in part what I would like to try to address and resolve through the wholesome understanding of the sciences as simply another expression of human culture—they are after all one cosmology among many, which all share their reliance on water and food for those who endeavor to understand themselves and the world they live in. (We should not defeat the purpose in life just by separating our beliefs from its living.) This leads to our next topic: the nature and origin of life on earth, in an organic material universe of form and formlessness, cradled by the void.

Geobiology

Sometimes, answers to profound questions are too simple and obvious to realize. I think that this may be the case with seeking explanations for the origin of biological life on earth—and this is the natural evolution of our previous section.

I will keep this brief as possible, as I am no scientist myself, and I have unfortunately been systematically and brutally deprived of my research materials and my access to the relevant literature over the past few years. But I think that life is a crystal—or simply an organic form of geologic self-organization involving water and chemical structures (specifically a form of liquid polymer crystal, as in the Varkud satellite crystal rhibozime which precludes the evolution of both DNA and RNA, if I remember correctly).

This serves us as a link to the origins of the material universe as an unbroken motion of natural self-organization: just as many stars and planets form in their elliptical spheres because of gravity, and just as ice freezes into snowflake patterns and quartz grows into its rugged geometry, I believe life grew from the earth as naturally as any other crystal formation—simply with startling results.

(I thought this up in a rock shop while shopping for visual similes for the light and dark triad in psychology—I said out loud to the shop keeper during casual conversation, “Life is a type of crystal, isn’t it?” and suddenly realized that I actually had always believed this somehow, as they both relate to natural symmetry and organic growth from a rather chaotic geology. I simply never took the unconscious association at face value until I surprised myself by realizing that I couldn’t intuitively refute it. I still can’t, and I’ve researched as much as the monarchists have allowed.)

We might take heart, then, that in Jack Hills zircon crystals—an extremely rare example of geology which formed somewhere on the order of 4 billion years ago, a stone far older than nearly all the geological record—there are traces of Carbon isotopes which are only known to be created by organic biology, or life, in short. (This is long before life was previously presumed to have miraculously evolved in previous models of biological prehistory.) This antiquity correlates roughly to the early formation of liquid oceans and geothermal stability, and so essentially implies that life grew naturally on earth “as soon as things were ripe and ready.” It may not be such a mysterious fluke as we presumed, after all.

This also implies that life on earth itself is older than most all of the geological record—or life is older than rocks. (It would certainly be older than any mountainside or stone building we see on a given day—a fact that can only be understood by grasping the magnitude of upheavals that give rise to our daily environment stretching back to the cataclysms of cosmogenesis.)

This is the beauty of a self-organizing universe: the formation of patterns, both on the microscopic and macroscopic levels, are simply inherent forms of their natural elements and momentums.

This is particularly relevant because of the complex ways that pattern recognition and our use of symbology relates to our metacognition and the transcendent nature of cultural continuity in the human species. The neural phenomenology of pattern recognition and its correlation to symbolic repetition should not worry us too much, then, in short. Patterns are simply an inherent quality of the material universe: form and formlessness both follow their natural courses.

This proposed model of biogenesis also helps us to remember how precious and precarious life on earth may be on a cosmological scale: if we value the rarity and beauty of a garnet, a diamond, or a shard of amethyst, how much more should we value our own eyes, the feather of an owl, a noble fir tree, an agaricus, an elk, a fern, its moss, and the earth which birthed them?

Crypsis Theory

This brings us to my original interest in the origins of language and culture—particularly the biological roots of symbolic cognition in the human species and its close archaic relatives.

This is considered a key to understanding metacognition, the growth and origins of civilization, and the nature of our relationship to knowledge and reality as we rely on symbols and symbolic cultural forms (whether oral mythologies, cave paintings, written traditions, or reams of data) to both understand and transmit understanding of the nature of the world around us to ourselves and others.

Originally my interest was in the archeology of personal identity, or the ego—and I wondered after having a spiritual experience whether the personal name and its related cultural construction of identity may have a role in psychological alienation and estrangement: a question best answered in the overlapping fields of the anthropology and philosophy of language.

(I have not found strong evidence for this, of note: I believe that individual identity is an inherent part of our biopsychosocial phenomenology. I find a far more holistic formula in the principle of individuation, as outlined by the psychoanalytic tradition. I believe that both psychologically and socially, we are engaged in the “act of becoming” that both prepares us for transcendental spirituality and ingrains in us our biopsychosocial imperative for responsibility to not only our own wellbeing, but also that of others to come. We have here a reliable map of human life from infancy to the smiling, wise grandparent without sacrificing any relation to culture or the cosmos.)

I found in taking a course in the philosophy of language (as a somewhat wayward freshman at Portland State University) that I had more interest in the metacognitive impact of Wittgenstein than in Chomsky’s theories of biological syntax, although they were considered cutting edge at the time. Wittgenstein’s basic proposal was that words do not correlate directly to phenomena, but are a phenomenological symbols: a blend of psychology, perception, and cultural forma.

I remained unsatisfied with the grasp on symbolic cognition offered by these theories, as well as by a pathologization of all symbolic behavior as inherently alienating, or simply a form of reification, offered by some deep environmentalist theorists.

It wasn’t until after many years of pondering this issue—considered a key to human epistemology and its relationship to metaphysics, as well as to understanding human exceptionalism in the foundation and development of civilization—that I began to suspect a psychoanalytic correlation, or a direct connection to the ways that human biological expression is pursued by virtue of our natural adaptations.

Oddly, I find that symbolic behavior can and does relate to violence, although not in the ways that people may expect: through the study of abuse, we find that there is typically only a relationship to symbolic behavior and truly criminal predation when there is harmful behavior motivated by portraying inauthenticity in an interpersonal context, or an intentionally manipulative communication of reality in a social relations using abusive tactics in communications.

This is on display nowhere as clearly as in the maladaptive tactics employed by narcissistic and Machiavellian personalities: the former who may employ deceptive performativity compulsively—almost subconsciously, through a lack of core identity which is masked by narcissistic grandiosity—and the latter which may more consciously employ tactics of antisocial abuse for personal aggrandizement. Both are certainly insecure and immature coping strategies, yet narcissism in particular seems to imply that there is a blueprint for performativity (or the use of guise and appearance rather than underlying substance) written into our biology since infancy.

Although there is no conclusive determinant of narcissistic personality adaptations, receiving praise for performative behavior seems to be the leading theory for how children tend to adopt this coping strategy as a primary pathological personality model rather than seeking healthy lifelong individuation—they seem to get stuck at a purely imaginary (image-based) relationship with self and other, an archetype invoked since the earliest study of this oddly unintuitive and highly damaging pathology, as Narcissus fell in love with his own image, a reflection., and not an equal individual.

In the basic libidic formulation of psychoanalysis, this leaves the lifecycle inherently incomplete, psychologically rendering the subject dependent on others as in infancy for their entire lives: a theme of de facto (I hate to say it) parasitism. (No offence to human babies.)

The relationship of psychoanalytic parasitism as opposed to healthy individuation we might directly align with the long breastfeeding and weaning periods of human infants (between 4–8 years naturally) which is the longest period of codependency in the animal kingdom, and a formative relational period for our particularly social and intergenerational species.

This is both the period where we develop the primary characteristics of our biopsychosocial expression as individuals, and where we are introduced to our cultural environments through language, tradition, ritual, song, and mythology: a ceremonial introduction to life which often follows a lifelong arc of fulfillment and intergenerational integration within the continuity of cultural (or oftentimes transcultural and intercultural) continuity and cosmology.

When I began to suspect that there may be a relationship between (again, no offence) parasitism in biopsychosocial orientations and the role of maladaptive performativity, it occurred to me that the role of perception in the human species seems to be primarily trusting—as though we organically expect others to portray their own interests and their experiences of reality faithfully within symbolic and cultural contexts on an innate biological level.

This principle seems to not only be well supported by psychology, but also by the structures of law, the anthropology of symbolic documentation (often records, contracts, and other forms of preserving the veracity of facts seems to be a “ward” against manipulative interference, fraud, and dishonesty), and the anthropology of symbolic culture more generally: we find almost universally that lying and misrepresentatin are closely guarded against from an apparently biological need for social authenticity—and in line with this constant, we find a nearly universal belief that the antisocial morality of interpersonal predation (again, pathological parasitism) often relies on guise, misportrayal, and the dissociation of others’ perception from reality (and its corresponding authentic, shared social reality) to perpetrate nearly all forms of abuse and predation.

With all of these disparate facts in mind, I couldn’t help but recollect a short entry in a children’s book on the Chumash tribe of central California that I had read years before, which recounted the tradition of hunters dawning deer skins to roleplay as decoys to hunt herds of deer in high-grass meadows.

Using the cover of the tall grass, the hunter would manipulate the perception of the selected herd by imitating the movements and habits of a grazing deer with a tanned deer’s pelt on their back, thus rather cleverly gaining the herd’s trust while approaching for an opportunity to strike.

It occurred to me that I couldn’t think of another animal which engaged in this elaborate form of decoy ambush hunting, and I began to suspect a correlation to symbolic cognition. After all, it takes a great deal of abstraction to imagine how to perform as another species, to plan a disguise, and the play on the perceptions of the prey in question.

However, while the principles of cognitive abstraction in elements of ambush or decoy hunting are perhaps unique to humans, the manipulation of camouflage and perception are absolutely common in the animal kingdom’s dynamics of predator and prey—perhaps most obviously in the prevalence of adaptive camouflage in fur and feather (called “crypsis” in biology, meaning “hidden”) in both the biological expression of predator and prey. This gets us to the crucial role of perception itself in animal life, and the primacy of individual phenomenology—a subject which as tender undertones of consciousness as the base strata of biological activity.

All this considered, I was able to reconcile the severity and the seemingly counterintuitive nature of extreme psychopathology at the far ends of human behavior with the deeply sociable biological character of the human species. Not only is deception antisocial, its relationship to predatory and antisocial behavior appears as a crucial link to maladaptive performativity, and possibly the biologically predatory nature of abstract cognition in the human animal as well.

To draw the correlation, we would need to find historical evidence of ambush hunting and perhaps decoys at least predating symbolic cultural expression, such as cave paintings and intricate beadwork. This appears to be the case, with evidence of cognitive abstraction apparent in the archeological record dating back at least a million years to hominids on the Kenyan Steppe using hunting blinds to ambush migrating herds in the bottlenecks of canyon passes.

This led me to believe that the deer hunter’s ingenuity was likely linked directly to our unique capacity for symbolic abstraction, as well as to the origins of symbolic cognition in the human species.

To clarify, this does not make the human antisocial—it simply means that through virtue of a deeper biological hunting strategy, we developed a neural capacity for cognitive abstraction which is an inherent part of our cognitive and social landscape, and so may be used maladaptively. Cognitive crypsis may prove to be the original “tool” that sets us apart from other species, who rely more on the slow distillations of natural selection and its natural intelligence to develop their intricate and ingenious camouflage strategies (or biological crypsis—as opposed to cognitive crypsis, or metalogical abstraction).

With this theory in mind, I first hypothesized that animal skins were perhaps less a means of thermoregulation (as I had heard of the remarkable abilities of indigenous groups to resist both cold and heat by virtue of long adaptation) and more a relic of this type of ambush hunting, perhaps related directly to the role of roleplay in indigenous shamanism and its relationship to the development of human culture and society. This appears to be exactly the case, and I was able to find an article from the cutting edge of the prehistory of fashion outlining the leading archeology on the subject. Crocodiles are one of the only other species to intentionally adopt external camouflage, it seems: they will use twigs and leafy debris as a disguise, also in the context of ambush hunting. (They may have even thought of it first.)

This brough to mind the interconnected roles of symbolic imagery—such as in pictographs—and ritualized roleplay as a crucial bridge from prehistory to the earliest remnants of ancient cultures—and thus from our less-documented past to the origins of documentary culture and civilization.

Lascaux is a famous and lovely example of the use of symbolic glyphs, mythocultural roleplay, and perceptual shamanism all on display in the same ritual space: originally lit by fire to help animate the images and likely accompanied by the transmission of oral traditions, I sense that there is both a singularity to shamanism (such as specializing in channeling a certain animal spirit) and a more universalist mythocultural role in preserving entrusted oral traditions, or storytelling, which may have served as the earliest foundations for the division of labor—although I always have a nagging feeling that basketry and the art of weaving is in fact the hidden measure of human evolutionary technics and their stages of cultural upheaval—lost because they are more susceptible to time than lithic artifacts, not because they played a less important role in cultural development.

Further evidence for this model of cognitive crypsis seemed to emerge in the anthropology of religion and witchcraft (the latter being an academic term referring to the archetypal universal, not to be confused with the common folk practices of herbalism and sympathetic magic, for instance, which are likewise universal features of folk tradition).

I was initially struck by the fact that there was no prehistoric cultural analogy that I was aware of which corresponded to the rule of law besides the transmission of morality through myth, tradition, and culture—the apparent basis for enforcing biopsychosocial egalitarianism, which seems to be the rule in indigenous band society.

This ultimately leads to the rather disturbing revelation (and we might forgive ourselves for being so adverse to its revelation) that we may mythologize the universal archetypal practices of the “dark shaman” or witch doctor (often nocturnalism, shapeshifting, dishonesty, inversion of cultural norms and values, possessiveness, pariahism—and at the far end ,dream or psychic invasion, mortuary ritualism, and cannibalism) as both deeply psychoanalytic archetypes and perhaps as practical defenses against known and remembered aberrations in human behavior, mythologized exactly because their nature is determined by an inherently biodevelopmental antisocial organization—and so might correctly be expected to recur intergenerationally, and be worthwhile to be on guard against.

This is why, in the study of interpersonal pathology, I believe it is necessary to impress the image of the wolf in sheep’s clothing: there seems to be a deeply biological paranoia that accompanies the need to hide one’s true motives, or to the compulsion for antisocial (perhaps subconsciously parasitic) personalities to act under the pretense of pathological performativity and disguise.

Linguistics & Etymology

Dis-guise, it might be worth noting, offers a linguistic counterpoint to guise itself—the implication being perhaps that we expect people to put on a bit of a show socially, or to play dress up, and to behave with self-awareness, but intentional misrepresentation and manipulation of others’ perceptions with malicious intent may betray a guilty mind at work (mens rea) and is unlikely to be accompanied by an “unmasking” moment, or a return to reality, as there is no end to the instrumentalization of perception in this model of the pathologically narcissistic, Machiavellian, and/or sadistic antisocial personality: the antisocial subject is quite literally reliant on abusing their control over the perceptions of others as a means of deriving a sense of self and a libidic self-satisfaction—while a truly individuated core self seems to be altogether missing.

Again, I have found that this quality is so deeply counterintuitive that it may very well necessitate the continuity of the mythology of witchcraft or “evil” in itself—otherwise we may fall victim to disbelief altogether.

This returns us to the subject of comparative religion and linguistics, and I have found that the unique field of etymology (the study of the origins of words, or linguistic historicism—often called the archeology of ideas) is one of the strongest indicators I have found that this theory has strong merit and precedent for due scientific consideration.

Often words most closely associated with witchcraft, antisocial behavior, and the intentional perception of manipulation are intermingled and deeply related to identifying hidden threats and pathological behaviors within communities.

We should remember that in language we find the distillation of the human spirit: the universal expression of our collective story is emblemized by the architecture of our tools for communication. The transpersonal, intergenerational, and often intercultural use of words, core concepts, and their expressive forms, all reveal timeless structures of the human spirit that can be relied upon by the virtue of their endurance to be honest (or honest enough) reflections of both our internal world and our collective social landscapes.

From this amalgamation of theories, I propose a kind of biological altruism in the human species, which I have taken to calling honesty theory: the recurrent theme that in order for social and symbolic systems to have functional cogency, they require that they be used with veracity, fidelity, and good conscience at their centers. This may account for the rather ancient-feeling phenomenon that mythology often feels more “true” than objective facts: we feel called to our universal collective nature, to our belonging within the continuity of generations, and to our responsibility to protect the assurances of those to come, when we see our own reflections in the mysterious language of mythology and the celebration of culture.

In turn, this relates directly to the cultural roles of physical forms of documentation and the verdancy of social systems like law (symbolic veracity and social universalism): that to prey on the abuse of perception is a primary form of symbolic predation should give us more conviction in the vital imperative to maintain a legitimate, goodhearted, just, and consequential social contract. This applies to nearly every field from the integrity of the economy to the preservation of digital texts and contracts in the AI age.

To this end, insofar as Artificial Intelligence systems (which I hardly understand, for the record) are trained on linguistic cybernetics, it may be worth incorporating the principle of deductive etymology (or the presumption that language itself reflects a moral humanism) as a base layer in the development of just and moral systems of machine learning—which, as impressive and convincing as they may be, I should note, will never be a replacement for human life or consciousness, nor could they be worth investing in more than the health of the earth and all of its precious inhabitants. As with all systems of knowledge, consciousness is primary. Every book in history is lost when there is no one to read and share them. In that light, knowledge and meaning are biological.

Crypsis And The Origins Of Civilization

While this brief introduction to the theory of cognitive crypsis can’t be applied historically or archeologically without access to primary sources (and mine have been deprived of me my extreme aggression again and again: I had spent hundreds of dollars on (thriftily selected, second hand) books on neurology and neuropsychology, cognitive science, evolutionary and anthropological psychology, psychoanalysis, and archeology of the earliest known settlement sites of the Neolithic—only to have my life and work brutally upended and frustrated by the monarchists for years now)—I would like to add some conjecture about the nature and origins of sedentary agrarianism in relation to the theory of cognitive crypsis, with its unique cult of mortuary architecture and plastered skulls which are the ancient foundations of urbanization and modernity.

While the origins of civilization as a cultural practice have long been mystified and claimed as the source of mythocultural superiority (a socially hierarchal narrative often used to justify colonial violence and persecution into antiquity), the reality of its origins do not seem to support idealized claims which assume a sudden leap in natural cognitive capacity or labor saving adaptive adaptations, as is often assumed.

Among the many theories advanced, I find the most convincing proposed by the researcher Jacques Cauvin, whose evidence for a “Revolution of the Symbols” or the mythocultural origin of civilization as an ancient ritual system involving deific worship and unique rites. This proto-religion appears to have developed in prehistory at a period that resolves the question of how agriculture developed in seperate global regions in synchrony: in as many words, this mythocultural system, which included sedentism and domestication as elements of its religion, would have developed from a single cultural origin and spread colonially, or as Cauvin says, “messianically,” from its point of inception—likely from around the Levant region.

Returning to my old postulation that there may be some traumatic psychoanalytic distortion of the ego or personal experience of identity related to the origins of civilization, as a kind of habitual cultural alienation: I found it quite telling that there is a visceral fascination with the continuity of identity after death to be found in the boundary of the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, in the form of mortuary cultism. In the earliest settlement sites we find practices that suggest a heavily symbolic emphasis on personal identity, such as the preservation of group members’ skulls using plaster to reconstruct images of the living face (often with iridescent sea shells for eyes to give a life-like impression—removing the jaw bones was necessary to produce artistically convincing results).

Other aspects of mortuary cultism in the early Neolithic include the practice of carving fearsome death masks modeled directly from the faces of the recently deceased; and the practice of foundation burials, or the ritual inclusion of human remains beneath floors and wall-structures associated with the development of square architecture: a novel building approach in the formation of the earliest proto-cities or sedentary domestication sites.

What strikes me primarily in these mortuary practices, from a perspective of comparative religion and anthropology, is the concept of continuity of an abstract personal identity beyond death. This implies that this rather ritual morbidity may be related to the sociological construction of an abstract or reified identity: a tendency possibly reconstructed intergenerationally through aversion and repression, which may have influenced collective estrangement and perhaps hypnotic dogmatism.

This kind of speculation is as far as I care to go without attending to careful research, but I want to be clear not to romanticize or demonize this form of cultism in particular. Rather, it seems appropriate to vaguely locate its broad recurrent theme of an abstraction of identity, in what may be a social consciousness rooted in stunted individuation via mortification (the threshold of repression necessary to motivate spontaneous inhibition as a form of self defense).

There is nothing groundbreaking or terrifically original presented here: the concept of ritual burial practices implying a belief in the continuity of identity after death has long been used as a kind of milestone for cognitive and cultural evolution in human development. I’m not sure it’s terribly scientific, but it is common and intuitive I believe. The skull cults of the early Neolithic will reveal as much about our modern world as it does about the ancient past, I have no doubt.

I have far more specific interest in the evolution of symbolic consciousness and its role as a social mediator, particularly when psychology becomes involved as seems to be the case here.

It’s important to remember that the word ‘psychologic’ breaks down into psyche- (the soul) and -logic, or the logic of the soul. Freud’s central theme was to uncover how the individual human soul, or psyche, developed its mental logical faculties from its organic growth as a biological entity: how paranoia, neurosis, and delusion are, in fact, logical—if one only uncovers their deeper presumptions and unconscious associations, often rooted most crucially in early childhood, during the formative course of development from dependency to relative autonomy as an adolescent.

Only through careful and attentive observation of the building blocks of consciousness can one deduce the origins and stratagems of different personality adaptations, which may be (it seems popular to presume) inherited, or somewhat rhythmically transmitted intergenerationally, as there tends to be reactionary overadjustments to an environment of maladaptive strategies built into our biopsychosocial natures, on that that both refutes and reinforces its sources of affliction.

To that end, I believe the most critical issue at stake is to question how exactly callous morbidity might effect the collective social psyche, and how it is treated historically as a measure of our species-conscience. As mentioned before, in the anthropology of religion these behaviors would likely qualify as antisocial, or something of a sociocultural non-sequitur if (and this is a very important if in cultural relativity) they represent the socialized adoption of antisocial behavior, either through force or repression, or a specific deviation from our specie’s biopsychosocial conscience (not that deviations are altogether rare or amoral—they may simply tend to reinforce certain trends of psychoanalytic process).

I presume that in the species-consciousness, the instinctive reaction to morbidity is repulsion (likely through a mixture of sanitary instinct and social morality). Perhaps the natural sociological reaction to callous morbidity is one of instinctive cognitive dissonance (which is the most painful human experience, I believe—we simply have a very difficult time reconciling two incompatible or incomplete experiences which we feel are opposite, and we often avoid confronting this struggle at any cost. This is also in our nature, and is deeply human.)

This is just one reason why it seems sociologically necessary to counter antisocial influence with active pro-social measures (often jocular shame seems to have all the work necessary in band society, and I would include under this banner the perpetuation of a mythology of awareness surrounding antisocial traits and their startling potentials). The social strategies used may differ, but the important underlying principle seems to be our social biological conscience—one which relies on collectivism and a base empathy in order to nurture intergenerationality and group support systems.

We need an image of the evil conjurer, the cruel king in the dark castle, and the lurking shapeshifter stalking the woodlands: because without their image in our collective psyche, they will appear and be unrecognized.

And they are bound to appear, because human nature is an ecosystem unto itself. Often our most formative moments are accidents either of fate or of impression, and the logic of our psyches is often so surprising as to be humorously obvious when brought to light, despite having caused us so much pain and difficulty in the past.

This seems to be an occulted theme in historical movements towards justice, human rights, and democracy in so many different forms: concentrated forms of antisocial exploitation tend to be repulsive and inhumane beyond a threshold of intuitive understanding to most people, often until there becomes a crisis in social conscience. In terms of social ethics, this is may preserve and encourage what I will call righteousness a little later on, perhaps akin to what Kierkegaard called “knights of faith”—or the mature integration a moral conscience which adopts responsibility for the continuity of altruism.

We must take seriously, in light of the anthropocene (the sixth great extinction and an anthropogenic geological epoch in the earth’s astrophysical history) that we have our responsibility cut out for us if we find it difficult to confront the fact that civilization is a cultural practice based in mortuary cultism. The fact should not corrupt our belief in a humanistic society nor inspire nihilism—quite the opposite. It has led to a global human community full of marvels and potential. I believe that in the recognition of things hidden in our subconscious (the phenomenon of metacognition, which his a primary foundation of therapeutic psychology, philosophy, and dialectics) is the first step in developing healthy and mature adaptations to adversity.

(A note to my self-styled adversaries: some people today take great satisfaction in attributing the entire modern world to themselves and their ilk, whether through religion, economic philosophy, mythocultural supremacy, or other measure—when they alone could hardly haul a wheelbarrow of bricks across a barnyard. I don’t wish to gratify their pessimism and paranoia by being irresponsible with my analysis, nor by projecting grandiose notions about ultimatums in morality where things are likely better left scholastic and ambivalent in the complex study of human nature. Even existential threats or anxieties are opportunities for growth—both personal and collective—until they are no longer.

I am fond of saying that all the knowledge in the world is useless if no one is around to know it. We must preserve our belief in the sanctity of life itself if we intend to do justice to the wonderful opportunity of life on earth.)

If anthropology teaches us anything, it is that cultures can be shocking and strange and even destructive, but still magnificently human if we inquire with carefully—especially if we inquire with own. This is why I enjoy etymology as a way to investigate the nature, origins, and universalism of beliefs and concepts: words and language must transcend time and culture to endure long enough to reach common usage, and as such they reflect deeper constants in our collective morality and our subconscious organism as a species.

Urban Geolithics & Timescales Sustainability

In large part, this research has been inspired not only by my interest in anthropology and religion, but also by a sense of shock and dismay when I realized there was an apparent mainstream embrace of extroprianism (a belief in the colonization of space) as a narrative ideal of civilization’s ultimate destiny and humanity’s desired, or even inevitable, trajectory. This is fortunately changing in public discourse, I believe, but once stood as almost monolithically unchallenged.

It struck me as unimaginably bold to (metaphorically) drop all of earth’s eggs into the basket of extroprianism, while hoping that someone builds a basket before they hit the ground (one capable of traveling through wormholes perhaps). I resolved to try to develop some rough model of truly sustainable futurism that might help account for the disparity in logic, and rebuild our understanding of human life and meaning apart from a linear trajection of technocultural progressivism.

I would hope to tentatively propose a model of sustainable urban development based on humanistic values and the integration of timescales-based models for structural resource use and urban/rural development.

Essentially this might look like incorporating principles of permaculture into urban landscapes and economic philosophy insofar as possible, but I think more crucially my underlying goal would be to stave off accelerationism and promote harmony in the global social sphere by accounting for the use of resources, space, and materials in terms of their longevity and scarcity when elapsed over the projected timescale of their exhaustion: after all, we live on a finite world, and we live on it together.

This type of model might prevent longer term crises in commodities as essential as water and gas, and also maximize returns on labor, production, reuse of goods and materials, along with other factors of longevity when it comes to human urban organization.

Central to this theory is the geolithic model of human urbanization and land management, and I believe that working with and through visions of development that see their primary landscape as the watershed (erosion being the most powerful factor contributing to lithic geology). The reliance on rainfall, waterways, aquifers, ground saturation, and irrigation is an immutable factor in the longevity of any ecological planning model—one connected as much to the rain in the clouds in sky as it is the mountains and plains it falls on and courses through like lifeblood.

Key to the discourse at hand here is the fact that economic systems will appear self perpetuating under the guise of inexhaustibility. That does not mean that they are in fact capable of sustainable function any longer than the exhaustion of their smallest base denominator. Incorporating realistic projections of the longevity of our urban lives and landscapes might make for happier, more wholesome, and less dire forms of futurism and idealism to emerge from a global landscape experiencing a hangover from hinging our values as a species on the centrality of technological complexity.

It is unfortunate that we must adopt a collective responsibility to realize this ideal, as commercial markets have tended to prioritize fast consumption and the systemization of novelty in place of utility and endurance as measures of value, although practical function and reliability tend to earn products their place in infamy.

I believe firmly in doing away with an apparent principle of raising prices by withholding products that consumers actually want, by forcing market complexity based on high turnover of frivolous medians.

If affordable, comfortable, reliable 4x4 diesel vans and sedans with as few complex electronics as can fit in the stereo system were available, I think they would be the best competitor on the market—we might ask why such reasonable demands are so rarely made available to consumers. I have to believe the answer lies simply in our priorities as a society.

We can only hope that logic and reason will prevail, and afford us the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of generations spent building a good life.

The Problem Of Violence

The biopsychosocial model of medicine and phenomenology brings to light many new and important questions about the architecture of our social structures, from the role of law and medicine to the historiography of human landscapes.

While my work in the past has been in archaeologies of epistemology, I have to include some of the rational deductions about the nature and roles of interpersonal violation within the social sphere, in light both of my continued repression and its relation to models of human meaning and the deeper potentials of this research for understanding and embracing human nature.

Primarily, I believe that crypsis theory can safely dispense of the notion that symbolic thought and behavior in the human species is somehow altogether alienating and destructive at its root. I believe that the relationship is tangential, and the greater proportion of evidence suggesting that humans can engage in symbolic cognition without it being the prima causa of violence or alienation suggests that there is another factor at work in our woes.

I believe that the psychoanalytic model of personal development extends beyond the years of infancy and early adolescence into the development of healthy individuation, the integration of a social conscience, an integration of cosmological purpose, a relationship to romantic love and intergenerationality, and ultimately a fulfillment of one’s unique potential and inherent individuality.

This seems to suggest that maladaptive strategies which repress and sublimate personal development by displacing our individual relationship to meaning might underly our existential crisis as a species and as individuals. I believe we need to socially embrace personal responsibility, affirm the virtues of collected cultural knowledge and its accomplishments as a culminating inheritance of humanity, and assure ourselves that compassion does have a central utilitarian role in administering healthy and functional human life both in the distant past and the distant future—this might be our first shield against nihilism and our first duty to our collective dignity as a human family.

It is ironic that nihilism, with all its contempt and cynicism, has been experiencing a resurgence in both high society and the intelligencia. The neoreactionary regressivism of the monarchists and the apparent driftlessness of academics in light of an uncertain future for infinite linear progress of technical complexity, along with technocratic threats to the Enlightenment principles and egalitarianism and individual self determination—in contrast to a plurality of epistemologies offered by global connectivity—with the specters of climate change and ecological crisis lingering uneasily everywhere—along with the disillusionment of public faith in the role of spectacular media as we have had to endure the traumatic introduction of AI realism—all this and more seems to suggest that we have entered into a new historical territory as of yet undefined by a guiding ethos or moral imperative apart from the pathological embrace of acceleration, hyperreality, and hyperconsummerism.

At the core of all of this seems to be the empty listlessness of nihilism, or a hopelessness translated into viciousness for lack of escape.

It seems natural that in times of historical crisis we should question our roles in history, and reevaluate the priorities and values which we feel intuitively underly our responsibility to ourselves and our collective futures. Examining the role of violence and cruelty in human social life is a primary constituent of crypsis theory, and applies to all spheres from interpersonal abuse, to legal and medical definitions of harm and consequence, to the roles of deception and instrumentalization in human history and culture.

A fundamental and unavoidable question in crypsis theory appears to be how the use of cognitive crypsis relates to biological predation, and how this reflects itself both psychologically and within human society: through the use (or rather misuse) of symbols and performativity, and to the exploitation of biological sociability and trust that are implied by the historical struggles for democracy and egalitarianism.

There appears to be much to delineate and discern when it comes to the role of the symbolic and its place in facilitating violence in human affairs: perhaps this is most evident in the pathologies of misrepresentation and fraud, duplicity of intention, and the systematic pathologies of dishonesty and usury of the defenseless and innocent.

It may be worth focusing on the biological role of cognitive crypsis to manipulate perception, and the shamanistic principle of calling upon external personality or ‘spirits’ to facilitate what we might call hypnotic aesthetic, which may account for the religious role of symbology in early human social life. This is a powerful principle of human nature: that our subjective perception is animal, and prone to both good natured and malicious manipulation.

The legerdemain of the shaman, the craft of the storyteller, and the coat of the mountain lion blending into a tree line all rely on the phenomenology of subjectivity to render the world magical and blur the line between veracity and perception. This should never detract from the virtues of sociability and egalitarianism in our social lives, nor arrest our trust in our own authentic sensitivity at the dominationalism of others. As Jung famously formulated, the opposite of love is not hatred, it is domination.

That love requires the healthy individuation of two willing humans, and domination the imposition of one will upon another, seems to be the essence of the schism between mature development and infantile parasitism which might turn to the exploitation of performativity and intersubjectivity in lieu of healthy personal authonomy and transcendent respect for the sanctity and sovereignty of others.

There does seem to be a historical and integral relationship between the powerful role of cognitive manipulation in abuse and the maladaptive strategies of narcissism and sadism in psychosocial exploitation, mainly through the interdependent pathologies of externalization and enmeshment in constructing a sense of self, value, and a locust of control. That pathological personalities often follow a perpetual cycle of abuse, victimization, and obfuscation or denialism only precludes and reinforces the intrinsic performativity of the personality—an interdependency that can only be fully rationalized by the arrested parasitism and its consequent paranoia retained from early childhood.

Therein lies the distinction between power and responsibility: power is primarily manipulative and instrumentalizing, while responsibility is primarily an integrated selflessness, capable of biopsychosocial regard for the consequence of personal autonomy.

As a uniquely social animal, we must embrace that there is no hard line for the existence of the individual except in the autonomy of the will, and there is no healthy individual role within mature social life except through the mutual regard for the autonomous will of others. That we are at once transcendent, vulnerable, and responsible for our own actions, is the beautiful paradox of individuation and collectivism and human social biology.

This brings us back to the role of religion and occultism in violence, as I would propose that most forms of ‘abject evil’ are likely to follow a formula prescribed by the archetypes of witchcraft or witch doctoring in the anthropology of religion, as it is a recurrent psychoanalytic aberration inherent to human development and maladaptation. We might expect manipulative and antisocial behavior to be accompanied by cults of personality, themes of captivity, callous exploitation, and more broadly a disregard for individuation and individual rights, perspectives, property, and boundaries.

In its ultimate essence this presents as an embrace of maladaptive strategies a step further than Freud’s formulation of the death drive: a Saturnalian impulse to interpersonal parasitism and a Promethean impulse to universal externalization (the ultimate delusion).

In Freud’s formulation, the death drive was an antithibiological impulse to resolve anxiety by causing its sources (ultimately life itself) to “be still” and so to allow retreat into seclusion and stillness oneself (Freud’s Nirvana principle encompasses both the death drive and the life drive, or libido, under the organic search for satisfaction, completion, and wholesomeness in the literal sense). This neurosis has been related to the phenomena of symbolic thinking through a proposed link to commodification, alienation, and reification—particularly by Marxist philosophers. However, I tend to disagree wholeheartedly.

There seems to me to be a distinction between the belligerent repetition of aggressive destruction (as in the literal impulse to punch or kick repeatedly and destructively, sometimes sublimated by hyperfixation on redundancy and compulsive homogenization), and the natural role of repetition both in the natural world and the cycles and patterns of human life.

Labor in its natural context, such as in grinding acorns for porridge, or picking berries or greens, often includes both repetition and recognition of tasks and patterns, as do many facets of daily human life.

We must eat, drink, sleep, and socialize more than once in our lives to keep living, after all—repetition is natural, not pathological, as is the case for creative crypsis in mediating human social life through the repetitive use of symbols, myths, and language.

I have a strong feeling that humanity’s use of song and rhythm is directly related to labor and communal labor, as in orchestrated threshing chants, or, less obviously utilitarian, the use of song, ritual, and fetishism to facilitate communality and holistic communality within the cycles of cosmic and biological order.

The harsh reality is that crypsis theory opens the doorway to a new classification of psychoanalytic orientation—the parasitic—as the primary source of interpersonal abuse and pathology.

Foremost we must understand this archetypal adaptation as distinct from both death drive and libido, however not mistake it for anything other than one of such primary subsistence: an organic biopsychosocial orientation. The Nirvana principle is still there, however the fundamental source of deriving gratification may be arrested at a stage of interdependence on a nearly biological level, making the psychosocial parasitism of narcissism and sadism both appear (perhaps without recourse to further research) intrinsic to the developed personality.

This may serve as a key precedent in the forums of law and criminal or forensic psychology, and as a rule you may expect that deflection, enmeshment, denialism, and other premature forms of manipulation be employed in the event of confrontation, if outright aggression is not a viable option at the time.

Perhaps people will begin to catch on to the ‘darker’ archetypes from folklore and mythology suggested by this libidic profile, and I would easily exhaust an entire essay using comparative mythology to illustrate the universalism of the archetype in human psychography. In terms of mythical designation, I prefer the Athabascan Wendigo as an archetypal image, although Saturn is a close analogy from the traditional Grecko-Roman pantheon.

At root the personality orientation may be one of cannibalism: a recurring theme in the ethnographic study of sorcery and witch doctors. It should be noted that there are no known instances of cannibalism being an accepted cultural practice in any human society, and yet while it is rarely found practiced outside of famine situations or instances of serious pathology and criminality, there are archeological examples of voluntary cannibalism (using humans as a food source when other options were available), suggesting that it is a universal and enduring archetype of antisocial development (likely primarily oral sadistic and sadomasochistic, implying a fixation on the teething phase and mastication) at the far edges of human deviance.

It is worth noting that outside of famine, criminality, and perhaps isolated social groups, cannibalism is sometimes practiced by both occult and warrior societies, possibly with the aim of creating a traumatic rupture in the superego, or a feeling of shame, desecration and otherness so fundamentally opposed to social acceptance that it may lead to a lifelong cultism to the consequently disrupted and dissociated personality, possibly with the effect of servility which superseding individual autonomy being the intended or effective result.

Oftentimes both countercultural practices require both total secrecy and total loyalty to their respective organizations to function, and there may be some overlap with organized crime related to similar practices. The concept of a traumatic rupture in the superego may be new, and may account for some enduring tropes of deviance in many occult sand warrior societies—it would not be limited to the extreme of cannibalism, but may encompass anything which violates biological morality to an extent where the participant feels fundamentally dehumanized and unable to rejoin their former self with the person capable of traumatically deviant behaviors.

I would qualify this as an extreme form of torture which fundamentally calls into question the underlying agency of many organized criminal, antisocial, and deviant activities: I believe that the truly sadistic orientation is highly rare, however may be capable of recruiting considerable influence through cults of personality and these forms of rupture in the superego (which also might include other actions of dehumanization, instrumentalization, traumatic violence such as ritual sacrifice of an animal, or other forms of organized deviance from biological morality).

The principle of righteousness forms a hopeful polarity if we feel at a loss at accounting for protectionism and aggression alike in the absence of a narcissistic / sadistic / antisocial violative model of interpersonal pathology. If mythology is rife with the specters of wicked pariahs who delight in inverting morality and preying on the weak, it is also a showcase of examples for courage and the fulfillment of personal responsibility in the deeply biological guardianship of intergenerational individuation—and here we may have medicine for anyone who falls victim to the former.

It may be worth noting that, having been exposed to repeated forms of violence myself, there appears to be a fundamental difference between those who feel they are overcoming or dissociating from subconscious resistance in order to carry out forcible acts of aggression (usually the concentrated brow and fixed expression accompanied by a rise in blood pressure and adrenaline are signs that someone does not fully want to do what they are good and well going to try to do) and those who feel no internal conflict whatsoever in committing acts of injustice, and the infliction of pain and suffering.

To experience those who commit aggression either with delight (sadism/sadomasochism), with complete psychological indifference (psychopathy), or with illogical deflections using webs of instrumentalized social performativity (narcissism), one is often left with feelings of horror and surprise—which likely accounts for their socialized isolation behind the opaque structures of the criminal justice system.

This may prove to be a fundamental developmental flaw in complex modern societies, however—as compartmentalizing interpersonal pathology to a specialized field seems to reduce the agency of self defense, free press, and community morality to an imposition on the professionalism of the justice system, which may always prove corruptible by the interests of a given regime, by bribery, or by personal political or social biases and affiliations which functionally prevent universal and just applications of laws, rights, and protections to a given populous. The principle of biological morality may give common ground and context to struggles and sacrifices for egalitarianism, democratic collectivism by consent, universal human dignity, and the authentic localization of harmonious intergenerational ecologies as all embodying an instinct rooted in our anarchistic social biology.

In any case, insofar as the justice system protects against iniquity rather than upholds it—particularly when there may be questions as to the moral agency of individuals within the biopsychosocial model—this theory may be useful in determining mens rea (the guilty mind).

As in medicine, the biopsychosocial model in law may open a range of new questions, mainly due to the philosophical consequences of phenomenology as an ontological model and a certain accuracy of perspective in the roles of experience, communication, interdependence, subjectivity, and sociality being clarified based on a more nuanced recognition of the roles that symbolic behavior and socialization play in shaping us as individuals.

The Existential Crisis

I would like to return now, perhaps unexpectedly, to the foundational problem of this thesis: the role of religion and spiritual experience in resolving the seeming paradoxes in individuation: of symbolic identity as opposed to independent identity, sociality as opposed to personality, and the ontological paradoxes of individual phenomenology, and the nausea of existential anxiety (and hopefully, ultimately, responsibility) we may face collectively in our conscience as we approach the ecological crisis of climate instability and resource depletion which seem to threaten characterizing the anthropocene as a geological epic.

Anthropogenic extinction, and the role of technics, lithics, and human symbolic cognition all lie at the heart of this question: how do we preserve our humanity, our collective efforts, and our planet into the future without sacrificing something of our ideals and our faith in civics to build upon the past responsibly and constructively?

I think the short answer to this more global socioeconomic question is surprisingly straightforward: we should stop fighting, embrace language and translation as a global imperative to open a new era of knowledge-sharing and databasing for the expansion of arts and sciences, alongside the reevaluation of presumptions of cultural relativity to open the doorway to a plurality of valid human epistemologies, arts, perspectives and theories of life—one would hope with an objective and critical evaluation of timescales could be applied to the longevity and health of our global economy, although I will stop short of being overly utopian and return to the personal existential crisis for the moment, as ultimately a plurality of personal subjectivities is the assemblage of our collective wellbeing and willpower as a society.

It is for this reason, of note, that one can not psychoanalyze a society or its political views any more than you could a potato. You must rely on patterns of organic development intrinsic to human biology, and analyze their archetypal function within cultural relativity and its respective universalism. Ultimately, the base constituent of a politic, a people, is individual consciousness. Its expression is the personality, its relationships to others a society, and its intergenerational context a culture. But always, the basis for human life lies in biological consciousness. Knowledge without life is as inert as a stone.

We must live and learn to chip it and hone it into an arrowhead: to eat, to teach, and to feel love—both personally and universally.

In terms of the personal existential crisis, I find it useful to remember the most dismal betrayals of organic growth and biological development are in unjust violation and exploitation of others due to maladaptive coping strategies, and in unjust self destructiveness caused by vulnerability to the immensity of life itself and the problems of the modern landscape.

There seems to be something intrinsic of the quest for truth and righteousness in the existential crisis, with its potentially life threatening depressions and anxieties washing oceanicly against the crag-like cliffs of reason. It is as though in the course of individuation we are unprepared for encounters with epistemology and relativism, and to relinquish ourselves to the smallness and frailty of our biological life while retaining something of the core religious experience of eternality and its indestructible cosmology. Perhaps an accurate reckoning of self, other, and symbolic knowledge is all that is missing to provide useful footholds for metacognitive resolution of this organic and perpetually recurrent theme in human psychology, and it may not be limited to modernity as much by environmental causality as by scale.

The shamanic initiation, also a seemingly organic facet of human sociocultural psychology, often includes an existential crisis-like period of illness or psychocultural disintegration—whether through willing isolation, aestheticism, the vision quest or walkabout, or through mysterious onset of anomalous disillusionment related to the sense of self and personal identification. In the varieties of religious experience, the nearly medical language of the existential crisis seems to lack access to tis philosophical and epistemological genesis, which may only reinforce feelings of isolation and emptiness if detached completely from a competent secular recognition of how cultural relativity and its biases are fundamentally called into question by this at once disturbing and enlightening quest for ultimate truthfulness.

How we care for and consider ourselves, our relationships to others, our societies, and the earth itself are all potential medicines for administering life saving affirmations when valid yet neurotic forms of alienation culminate in a spontaneous loss of navigation on the oceans of life—like a compass that stopped working far out to sea. We ought to develop a competent spiritual morality that might rely on the shield of altruism to rescue those so far adrift that they are at risk of sinking in a perfectly good ship.

I have to believe that in both the regressivism of repression that I have personally endured from others and from sociocultural institutions, there may be a crisis of faith in the values of relinquishing the messianic hegemony of a culture for a wholesome plurality of perspectives and ontologies.

I have found this true both in terms of personal and sociocultural development. It should be considered violative to rely on dominationalism to preserve homogeny when the organic growth of an individual or a collective is seeking new vistas of knowledge and opportunity.

My previous work in epistemology, which in part offered a kind of archeology of the sciences by openly discussing their origins in mysticism, natural philosophy, dialectic theology, and alchemy, seemed to provoke a disturbing hostility for being presumptuous enough to call a cultural practice what it is: a collective perspective on universalism. Oddly the offence seems to have been taken only by those guilty of unconscious chauvinism, as objective relativity and humanistic plurality are inherent to the values and collectivist endeavors of the sciences and humanities. It seems that the Leviathan of entitlement to dominion reared its head in contempt when I dared stir its memory: no individual is the king of the world, nor even of another, without recourse to occulted membranes of enmeshment and reliance on engendering collective amnesia.

In short, the plutocracy—and especially its futurist authoritarians, drunk on the philosophy of technocracy once again—does not like to be reminded that it is in fact a cult (and a relative culture), and that secularism, sciences, and the humanities and the rightful inheritance of the collective.

I can only offer my sincere apologies and continue with my work, as torturous as it has been to do so. I am a secularist at heart, and I believe in doing science to science, and imbuing the humanities with humanity. My quest is for truth and altruism, and these values do not compromise nor forfeit their objectivity to pride and zealotry. They simply are investigative tools for uncovering occult forms bias and narcissism: my theory of crypsis has been self fulfilling in drawing out the wrath and vindictiveness of the monarchists against me.

Freud hypothesized that civilization was born of a type of neurosis, and that neurosis would increase with the development of civilizational complexity. It is worth practical consideration that for every major urban center there must exist a vast network of resource exchanges and productions, of farms and factories and highways. In planning urban development, in short, land is more readily available than the city, and likely always will be. We might consider this in the light of global warming, as our priorities of labor and production may healthily reincorporate localism and self sufficiency in a global context without sacrificing the essence of any economic practice.

I have found that as a species we are less prone to collective self destruction than we are to intentional destruction from a fractional minority of nihilistic and pathological personalities, capable of woefully grandiose deceptions and callously immune to the effects of human suffering and intentional destruction and dispossession.

We have a responsibility to ourselves and our fellowship as a species to be on guard against the intentional mastication of reality and biological life, for the expense of all the future might come at the petty appetites of a single feast of willful malice.

The Commons

It may be that spirituality and the quest for truth is dangerous.

So be it. Power can move mountains and rivers, but it cannot change truth itself, as hard as it may try.

To that end, I believe it is crucial that at this point in history we remember the value of the commons: both in social life, in the natural world, and in our personal relationships.

Hardly all models of domestication and civics rely on the grandiose projections of absolute dominion to be sustainable and functional: insistence on strict sedentism, sociocultural homogeny and hegemony, an economic ethos of conquest and competition, and even an open embrace of repressive alienation with an idealism of the violative, such as is emblemized in mimetic theory and the neoreactionary movement, seem to forget that adaptation is the primary mover of history (alongside erosion, perhaps, depending on your timescales).

Never before has human life faced such stringent bounds on personal liberty that are so well concealed by a mask of modernity. It may be that we find our rights and liberties useless tokens of a bygone time if we do not remember to insist upon the commons as a birthright of both our psychological and social lives, in the context of our greater place in history and natural ecology.

Should the public, in both its demography and its physical ecology, become bereft of recourse to discourse and philosophical inquiry, a woodlands for recourse in times of need (whether of retreat, solemn meditation, adventure, or emergency resources—as the garden of the earth is its own wealth), and as well become a barren maze of hostility rather than a collective holding for free movement and, in rare cases, destitution and poverty (which are not always deserved, and can befall anyone at a hard turn of health, fate, or fortune—not to mention as a result of abject cruelty, bigotry, and social selectivism, perhaps disguised cleverly as austere economic or civic policy).

It seems almost uncanny to wake to a world where we must rediscover the virtues of democracy. We might only hope that in times of horror and displacement, the sky itself might be our sanctuary. And why not more so embrace opportunities of peace and prosperity to allow for the freedoms of the public? We only relinquish to the generations of the future that which we hold in common. Perhaps not all things, but enough—never too little, let us pray.

It would mean an end to all things, should the tree of life itself be ripped from the earth and shoved through a mill, only to serve as a bench which no one for all eternity will ever sit upon.

This is the gravity of the situation today, and a mere glimpse at its underlying pathologies: the same as have been haunting our heels from the beginnings of recorded history, and well into the collective memory before then it would seem.

In the light of newfound ancient threats, those yet without their true name, we must preserve our dignity and our recourse to the commons, as well as our dedication to that which we owe our own lives and all those now past and all those yet to come: the living earth itself, in all its callousness and glory—its forests, mountains, oceans and caverns, and its monoliths hewn from the bricks and timbers of many hands working in common, who left impressions for those to come written both on the craggy shape of the horizon, and hidden depths—endlessly deep—in the folds of the library.