think not, is my eleventh commandment
May 6, 2022
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Interior (1899) — Vilhelm Hammershøi
A Young Girl with Consumption (1888) — Vilhelm Hammershøi
Interior with Young Woman from Behind (1904) — Vilhelm Hammershøi
LETTERS HOME FROM THE WAR ON REALITY 🪖
Dear Lucille1,
I was at a bar celebrating a friend’s birthday and the conversation turned to taxes. A waitress overheard us and said, “Oh God, can’t you talk about something more interesting than taxes?” I walked into the bathroom and gave myself a swirly. Then, while blowing toilet water out of my nose, I tried to tell the waitress that for many in the Frantic Disco (San Francisco) there is nothing so interesting as taxes, because what we’re really talking about when we talk about taxes is magnumerals.
Magnumerals is a word I made up by googling the latin word for large (magnum) and the latin word for number (numerus) and squishing them together. I use it here as a placeholder for salaries, restricted stock units, and other sums of money that I can assure you are eye-popping. Magnumerals stand opposite parnumerals — parvus meaning small.
In the Frantic Disco, people love to talk about their magnumerals. They like to compare magnumerals and gossip about this or that person’s magnumerals. Yes, your compensation represents your value on the labor market and if you don’t have full transparency into that market it’s hard to know if you’re getting fucked unless you’re verifying your magnumeral against others. But then people get carried away with the formula that magnumeral = value and jump to the conclusion that magnumeral = worth as a human being, which is problematic for any number of reasons not the least of which is that it’s predicated on something we largely can’t control, something that can be taken away at any moment.
For my own sanity, I’ve put strict limits on some of my friends. I’ll say, “Please, no comp talk today.” Or, “You get three magnumerals before I stop paying attention.” Strangers outright ask me for my magnumeral and when I respond, I can tell that they think it’s a parnumeral. But to me it’s a magnumeral.
Anyway, this whole practice came as a great surprise. In Washington, everyone makes parnumerals right out of college. It’s enough to pay rent and little else. You rarely knew how much your friends made and even if you did, it didn’t particularly matter. A parnumeral is a parnumeral. Everyone was poor together and there was some sense of solidarity in the lengths you’d go and the inconveniences you’d bear in pursuit of $1 beers. Whenever I start to romanticize that period of my life, I remind myself of the weeks and weeks I ate microwaved hot dogs and stale cheese cubes for lunch and dinner at free receptions for the American Association of Snail Feeders or whatever.
In the Frantic Disco, everyone is theoretically flush with cash. Your magnumeral is inexhaustible and enables not so much a lifestyle as complete liberation from self-denial. Cost is no object: there’s no hobby you can’t afford, no trip you can’t go on. The only reason to ever turn down an invitation is because you’re already booked — busy doing something else, going somewhere else. This will never end. You’ll be rich forever.
I’m new to the tech industry and my first professional recession looms. My company’s stock cratered in the past few weeks and my coworkers are in a terrible mood. I’m pretty serene about the whole thing but frankly speaking I have no time value concept of money. Stocks go up, stocks go down. So far as I’m concerned, they’re not real until you sell them and they turn up in your bank account as American dollars. Sadly all that stimulus money I helped pass in Congress is making the value of my American dollars crater, too, so it’s all depreciating one way or another. The only question is if you do something fun or meaningful with your money before the music stops.
Therein lies the problem. My friends aren’t doing anything fun or meaningful with their magnumerals because nobody wants to deny themselves anything. Even those making parnumerals see no reason why they shouldn’t indulge in the same spending habits of their peers making magnumerals. Everybody has an “earn to” mindset — earn to give, earn to create, earn to serve. It’s fine and good to be a diplomat or a writer or an explorer but it’s best to make your fortune first. Only I’m not convinced the fortunes will come.
Per David Samuels, “The secret of real achievement in the arts, as someone wise once told me in my youth, is low overhead.” And I don’t know a single person with low overhead.
The waitress was right. We should talk about something more interesting than taxes. Maybe my friends are just boring. Maybe I’m boring. I’m going to start a terrorist collective and enroll all of my newsletter subscribers in it. See if that helps.
Until next time. Eat the sweet grass, drink deeply of the sun, defend reality.
Heart’s best,
Murdo
CONTENT CROP 🌾
Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy And Then Killing You: Toxoplasmosis Spotlight || Riva-Melissa Tez
Contemporary society champions neuro-diversity and makes it taboo to consider that our psychological issues could have a biological causation. Telling someone that their mental health issues could come from pathogen exposure demeans their experience in individualistic societies. Anecdotally, I know this firsthand from the amount of push back I get from suggesting highly depressed or anxious people try a blood or stool test. We need to change this mentality because people are suffering unnecessarily. Again, how many people are wasting their money on therapies focusing on the ‘mind’ and not on treating their hijacked biology?
note: our dive into the root causes of psychological issues continues. in this episode, I demand that my poor doctor test my shit for parasites
The Man Who Made Thinking Erotic || The New York Times
Over the years he had crafted a seductive theological-political patter in which terms like messianism, mysticism, eschatology, apocalypse, gnosticism, redemption and antinomianism swirled around in a gravity-free vacuum, never touching historical ground. Almost all his ideas were borrowed from others, yet they still left people impressed and sometimes enlightened.
note: Taubes’ ideas are better captured here — The Professor of Apocalypse — but I couldn’t resist this quote from the Times review. “Over the years he had crafted a seductive theological-political patter . . .” A seductive theological-political patter. Hey! He’s just like me!
Divine transports || Aeon
So there is a need for a new idea, and coming to the fore now is an old one revisited, revised and rendered more testable. It reaches back a century to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim who observed that social activities create a kind of buzz that he called effervescence. Effervescence is generated when humans come together to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are over. The suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them.
The explanation is resurfacing in what can be called the trance theory of religious origins, which proposes that our palaeolithic ancestors hit on effervescence upon finding that they could induce altered states of consciousness
note: argument in favor of this article: it’s a potentially useful contribution to understanding how we create the meaningful symbols in the world necessary for us to build and maintain societies. argument opposing this article: will encourage certain techies to keep nuking their brains with molly instead of going to church
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
The Inca Empire used a knot language, called quipu, to store information. Nobody knew how it worked until a friend of mine decoded the language and now quantum physicists are using something called quantum quipu to build a crazy computer:
For decades, physicists have used the concept of “world-lines” to visualize the motion of particles. To keep things simple, let’s suppose that our particles move on a horizontal plane and that we use the vertical direction to label time. That way, the history of how a particle moves becomes an ascending curve: its world-line. When we have several particles, their world-lines can get knotted up—or more precisely, they can form braids. There are certain particles, called anyons, whose quantum behavior keeps track of the braid that their world-lines form. The anyon world-lines form a quantum quipu.
I don’t know what any of that means.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
(Fiction, 1851. $4.)
Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ‘em. But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth — So here goes again.
note: Moby Dick is beautiful, painfully so, but the one thing that nobody prepares you for is that it’s also hilarious and I laughed more in the past month of Melville than in the past year of everyone else.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Vanity Fair wrote a buzzy piece, titled INSIDE THE NEW RIGHT, WHERE PETER THIEL IS PLACING HIS BIGGEST BETS. You should read it. Nothing in it comes as a surprise, so I won’t bother to excerpt. What is surprising is that the profile drew almost universal praise from its subjects and the wider dissident right. Jeff Bezos, a right-wing bodybuilder, called it “a fascinating piece.”
Another guy I follow on twitter, Venkatesh Rao, wrote an interesting if illegible thread about it, ending with this gem:
I wonder if this dissipation of a decade-old mystique in the harsh light of open political activation will have consequences.
Once the badass allure of illegible transgressive heterodoxy is gone, you’re just signing up for a new t-shirt, hat, and annual subscription tote bag
I started following the new right when I moved to DC in 2017. After Trump killed fusionism (the libertarian + social conservative pact animating Republican politics for the past twenty years), conservative think tanks panicked and cast around for new ideologies that would, at best, provide a coherent path forward and, at least, set clever people thinking remarkable thoughts. The new right took shape in the opinion pages of these think tanks’ journals and magazines, with controversial ideas and books (like Bronze Age Mindset) laundered through reviews, response essays, and similar commentary.
Which was all great fun to read and gave me something to talk about over cheap wine and cigarettes, but no more than a handful of Republican staffers in Congress were following these currents and none of my friends expressed any sort of commitment to the new right’s ideas or aims. Washington is largely populated by careerists. That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not. The federal bureaucracy does not need visionaries. It’s probably better off without them. What it mostly needs is honest people to show up and keep the lights on. Holding fringe views is a risk to your career and a waste of energy. When it’s time to get on board with a new ideology, someone will call and politely let you know.
So these ideas were sort of harmlessly circulating Washington until something strange happened. They escaped containment and infected New Gork City. Rogue elements of the podcast crowd, looking for an edge, started playing around with this new right material — interviewing pseudonymous authors, shooting guns with Alex Jones, slonking raw eggs etc. Transgression in New Gork is rewarded differently than in Washington. In Washington, transgression gets you a few clicks on your think piece, but that’s it. No parties. No sex. Not for you and not for anyone in DC.
Transgression in New Gork City is rewarded as an artistic and personal performance because it’s deeply rooted in the New Gork psyche as the domain of leftists transgressing against a flat, gray conservative culture. This is how you get whole boroughs of young people who are exactly the same in their supposed transgressions even though they’re culturally dominant and have nothing to meaningfully transgress against. Then a few podcasters picked up their heads and said, Hey. We’re not exactly standing out here by being bisexual. What if we started opposing birth control instead? And the young people in Bushwick don’t know what to make of right transgression against a flat, rainbow progressive culture that isn’t cringe conservative-libertarianism or religious extremism, so they gave the podcaster people the exact thing they wanted: an insane amount of attention.
This is how rogue leftists trying to make it in the creator economy began to publicly profess viewpoints that nerds in DC could only dance around. Their crowd features semi-prominently in the Vanity Fair article and lends the “badass allure of illegible transgressive heterodoxy” that will supposedly help the new right win first as an aesthetic. How the new right then wins as an ideology isn’t hard to parse: generally speaking, culturally right but economically left is a popular electoral strategy across the globe. Anyways, who knows if this new right thing has legs on it. Mystique can last well past a decade — after all, people are still attending DSA meetings in 2022.
one note on branding: “Conservative” is dead. When somebody says the word conservative, I want to shoot myself in the leg. “On the right” and “right wing” work fine (thus the New Right instead of the New Conservatives), but I’m seeing “reactionary” a lot. Reactionary. Inclined towards action. Perhaps violence. Mystique! What does it mean? It doesn’t matter, you’ll never have to justify yourself. You’re signing up for a new t-shirt, hat, and annual subscription tote bag. That’s all.
Lucille is a heifer