How Real Optimism Works
A manual of sorts
This story is half an important philosophical observation, and half a personal note.
First, the philosophy. The reason we are even talking about the need for optimism is because at the moment, the world is in a weird, neurotic, painful place. The evidence of our own eyes tells us vividly that there is very little harmony in the world right now, and too much abuse.
Why all the pain?
Why is the world in such a sad state? Without going on a 10-page tangent, it is in such a sad state for two reasons: the predators who are constantly turning everything upside down so that they can steal more—and the people who remain the predators’ victims because they are so broken and/or enchanted that they refrain from the quest for spiritual clarity and strength.
By the way, I worded it this in this lofty way deliberately. Fundamentally, steadiness or wobbliness of character are not about “correct” ideas or persuasions. They are more about one’s thirst for honest, non-ideological spiritual clarity and one’s total willingness do what feels right by the soul, even when it feels terrifying, lonely, uncomfortable, and no one else is doing it, etc.
Speaking of lonely and scary
This part, I hope, is a little inspiring.
You know how I often write about philosophy, right? Well, I do that deliberately and knowingly, at the expense of my “numbers” because making the world more beautiful is work, and work is not as attractive as the pleasant feeling that derives from being reaffirmed in that you are thinking all the right thoughts (which is how a lot of media works, regardless of the talking points). But I do it anyway because my soul calls for beauty, and I do what my soul wants.
In my heart, I think that understanding how life works is the most important thing in the world. And like many other truly important things, it is not terribly popular, and every time I say something of uttermost importance to my heart, I lose subscribers, and then I gain a lot of subscribers when I offer “information” (takedowns of DARPA, Klaus Schwab, etc.).
Now, I have worked in the media, and I know exactly what works for “numbers.” It’ is anything that follows the formula: “Look what this a**hole did!” It works like a charm. Every psychographic has their official villains, those villains constantly say or do unseemly things, and yelling at them on the internet is a thrill that gives the readers a sense of camaraderie, support and relief.
Thing is, I’ve been writing about Big Tech and transhumanism for close to ten years, and I’ve been writing about COVID and the Great Reset as soon as they showed up—and by now, I am a little bit bored saying the same thing again and again. Methinks that the really evil people in really high chairs are going to try to do what they intend to do anyway, and yes we can curb them, but it’s not by spending most of our “intellectual” time on yelling at them at the internet.
The only thing that can stop them in earnest, in due time, is if we stop generating the kind of energy that feeds them. Everything is energy, it’s not a platitude. They have a lot of predator power. If we think we can stop them by yelling at them on the internet, we are naïve. It’s a whole big existential mosaic, good, evil, soul, mystery, healing—and yelling at anyone on the internet doesn’t address the root of the problem. Soul work done consistently does—in time—and yes, acts of courage are a part of the soul work, and it’s a long haul.
I believe that one of the best things we can do to “stop the villains” is to first and foremost, look inward and attend to the unglamorous soul work—and do that soul work every day, every night, with every breath, for the rest of our lives. Our soul work will guide us as to what we need to do on the outside.
I believe that this is the way to resist this no-so-great reset and the rest of the not-so-great resets. And yes, each of us has a set of beliefs and a specific job to do, whether it’s brave medicine, brave art, brave journalism, etc. Doing our specific job on this Earth, with soul, is where it’s at. “Information” is a nice start— but on its own, is just more stuff in the brain. After all, most people agree, for example, that war is bad. Has it stopped any war?
People who choose to be dark
We’ve established that there is a certain amount of people with not so good intentions. By people with not so good intentions I mean the people whose modality of elevating themselves is theft. I don’t mean mentally unstable petty thieves whose behavior is used as an excuse to lock up soaps in the pharmacies all over America, I mean cold-blooded conquistadors who are willing to hurt good people and take from them and steal their love and energy and money if they manage to get away with it, to feed the ice-cold vortex in their troubled souls.
So.
These people want to steal from everyone but for obvious reasons, they flock to the places where they can steal a lot at once. They target people with money and resource-rich lands.
I guess the target depends on where they are on a social ladder. If they are relatively low, they would go after affluent or influential individuals and try to both seduce them in a traditional way and mess with their heads in a hypnotic way.
If they are higher on the social ladder or belong to the old money club, they would go after significant properties, such as entire nations, large natural resource deposits, etc. They would try the same approach as the socially humble vampires but on a much larger scale.
By the way, if we look at the modern economy, the largest initial fortunes are made on “developing” natural resources (i.e. taking something that’s just sitting there and claiming that it’s yours and no one else has the right to touch it) and on war. (At the same time, a person doing honest successful business can get to a certain level of prosperity but nowhere near theft-based wealth.)
The detail and the techniques used by predators may vary but the sentiment is the same: theft.
End result: pain
When good things get stolen, what remains is devastated terrain. When we look around, we see a lot of broken people living like zombies (and confidently so!), a lot of dysfunction and destruction, and a lot of barren emotional terrain where there could have been nourishing love.
In a way, our civilization is like a game of musical chairs where, yeah, the chairs are all cushiony—but the space between the chairs is one giant never-ending toxic slime-covered landmine, which is to say, there’s lots of pain.
However, the world was never intended to be ugly! The ugliness is a result of theft!
Challenges are a part of our learning—and life has a way of turning everything that happens into a useful learning experience—but challenges are meant to be overcome, and pain is meant to pass, giving room to joy. I know that for sure. For sure. The destination is always joy.
Way out of it: love
I believe that insisting on joy and learning to love your own soul (in a real way, not in a cheesy way) is a big part of getting there.
In my Russian culture, there is a habit of getting stuck in doom and gloom. It is what I ran away from when I left there.
Now, are there logical reasons for doom and gloom? Sure there are! People in positions of power are psychopathic and cruel, regular people are often broken (and the more broken they are, the more stuck they are in their ways). There is too much pain, and barely any explicit love.
However, this is just like swimming through sewage on the way to a beautiful destination. It’s important to be able to swim through as much sewage as existentially necessary to get to the destination but keep the focus on the island ahead. Which I think is what real optimism is. Real optimism is not denial of the existence of sewage, it’s perspective, self-love and self-respect.
And that is where one’s intrinsic sense of belonging and one’s trust in the universe (God, higher powers, however you think about those things) comes to rescue—and that is, by the way, the reason why the predators prefer it when people get stuck in pessimism, anger, or addiction to pain. Those feelings, legitimate and logical as they be under an ugly circumstance, have a tendency to take over the person and fog the way.
Scams
Like I said, predatory individuals like to steal from everyone but they particularly like situations where they can steal a lot at once. For that reason, they are densely represented where there is money, influence, abundance of energy, a big potential for love, etc.
Any area of influence is packed with them. It is not good, not bad, it’s a fact of life. They scam against the good people, they scam against each other, and it’s just really one ugly, cold-eyed laboratory of betrayal and lies.
When they start throwing wool at people’s eyes and fog at people’s minds, both by basic psychological manipulation and by hypnotic means, the people who have emotional vulnerabilities (usually from childhood emotional trauma and various cross-generational harms) often fall prey.
We don’t have to work hard to find examples. Three years of COVID fearmongering have turned many decent people into temporary zombies, and I feel mostly compassionate because in the end, all of us, sincere human beings, are on a journey to clarity. It is just that we are all walking our own journeys, and sometimes we walk in zigzags.
But honestly, COVID is far from being the biggest scam. The biggest scam in known history, in my opinion, was a slander campaign against our ancestors who have been labeled as “pagans” (“rural dwellers” in Latin) with an implication that they were void of spiritual connection to the Creator, etc. . That was quite a successful distortion of reality—playing on ignorance and fear—fully internalized today even by some of the best, bravest people I personally know.
The biggest scam in human history was convincing good people that God is a petty, territorial being who discriminates based on the names people use to pray, and who acts like an abusive parent toward those who think from the inside (and so when the authorities act like abusive parents, they do so in the image of God). That, now, must have been a piece of work to pull off—but look at us now, some good people still think that God doesn’t have the intelligence to understand the non-verbal language of our hearts and only protects the ones who pray “on brand.” It took me years to sift through that Mother of All Psyops—but once I started seeing it, I felt a thousand times sadder for my enchanted brothers and sisters than I feel even about the God awful but none the less secondary COVID scam.
The isolation tactic
Now, one of the things that really irritates the proverbial vampires is when they encounter people who are not afraid of them and who are protecting the people whom they want to steal from.
Those people stand in their way, and so the scoundrels unleash a bag of tricks, start throwing wool all over the place, waving their proverbial magic wands, and generating a lot of activity to create a mirage and a lot of pain.
One of the things they try to do this is to confuse and corrupt the targeted wobblier people so thoroughly that the person with a clear heart feels wounded by rejection and betrayal. Surely, it sucks when you try to protect someone from thievery, and they side with the thief!
What I learned in my own life is that feeling wounded needs to be processed as sincerely as it wants to be—and then parked waaaay in the back, as good as tossed out until the time comes to resolve it fully and be healed.
All this setup for betrayal is an operation. By tricking the wobblyfolk into acting like traitors, the predators hope to both eat the wobblyfolk who have weakened their protection by making the choices they have made—and discourage the people with clear hearts.
In the past, I’ve made the mistake of feeling very wounded by letdowns.
Today, I put the matters in the hands of the higher powers.
I say, may the predators all eat each other and leave us alone.
We are not traitors.
May it be so.
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I don't know about your other readers, but heartfelt, in touch with reality articles like this one are exactly why I follow your stack. I suspect I'm not alone.
Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed .
— Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s (translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti). Penguin Books, 2017, p. 566