Dismantling the Torment Nexus 2.27.26

“The whole system is fucked, from the ground up to the top down” is not a novel assessement of our current situation. Dutifully, I must couch such an observation with, if not solutions, at least a plea to better meta-analyze our society’s unfolding situation with greater rigor. I believe, considering the state of things around the world, we must conduct a postmortem on the status quo. All the tenets of progress we’ve ever been taught have led us to believe in a brighter, more hopeful future, yet upon closer examination it may seem more a deliberately orchestrated conspiracy than a series of unfortunate events.

Matthew Scully is an avowed conservative republican speechwriter who wrote Melania Trump’s 2016 Republican Convention speech. In Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (2002), we discover that he is a man self-aware enough of his faith that he is forced to confront the consequences of his belief’s tenets. This a difficult task for anyone, and yet, likely a necessary evaluation, considering the current state of the world. In this book, he identifies a single verse of the Old Testament that has informed powerful belief systems for thousands of years as a major nexus of suffering on earth. Genesis 1:28 reads: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Scully used his conservative credentials to access big game hunters, whalers, and factory farms, exposing a culture and economy of wanton animal suffering that he traces directly back to Genesis. I have chosen to use his journalistic efforts to underscore the sort of approach I believe is needed to unpack the failings of so-called progress in the modern age. Once the historic underpinnings of our contemporary mores are revealed, it can be easier to understand the culture. The Old Testament is, undeniably, in part, a survival guide for a Bronze Age desert-dwelling agrarian lifestyle. It is also the source material for much of the humanity fandom. By cherrypicking tenets from these texts, ruling classes, from priests long ago to oligarchs today, have created a framework of belief designed to keep the lower classes ignorant, superstitious, and afraid, so as to better manipulate them and enrich themselves.

In a biological system, the unchecked growth of a cell or group of cells is called “cancer,” and yet the rampant financial, political, and influential growth of certain individuals and organizations without regard to the impact on the system as a whole is seemingly expected to be lauded, at least from within the Colosseum of Capitalism. We have returned to a time when self-implied divine right informs the thoughts and actions of our masters as they exercise dominion over all, unchecked by whatever democratic or collective safeguards or processes we may have enlightened ourselves with during the interim between these ages of plenty for a very few, leaving scrapings, misery, and toil for the legions of serfs.

How has this regression been allowed to happen? It seems impossible that at a time when billions of people have access to the near sum total of human knowledge in their hands at all hours of the day and night, we have somehow collectively become less knowledgeable, less educated, and less able to apply critical thinking skills we should have learned in kindergarten? Part of it is that the technology has outpaced human consciousness, and instead of finding stewards of our minds and souls in the new priestly class, made of techbros and speculative capitalists, we have found opportunists, willing to mortgage our very humanity and any hope of actual, large-scale progress, to line their own pockets. And lest us acknowledge for a moment that a not insignificant amount of money has been spent by these collaborative, conspiratorial culprits on sex trafficking children. This is no longer the realm of tinfoil hats, but rather the world we are living in and funding. The monarchs have kept our outrage directed at their megayachts to keep our eyes away from their dungeons.

Dr. John Lilly was an outsider scientist and psychonaut who abandoned his government research when he saw his work on radios and mammalian brains weaponized by the army. Famously, J. Edgar Hoover kept Lilly’s file in his personal office, having been told by the CIA that the doctor was the one man who truly understood mind control. Lilly may be best known for his seminal book, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theories and Experiments (1968), which offers analysis and advice for managing consciousness. In 1975’s Simulations of God: The Science of Belief, Lilly presents nearly two dozen variables that people are likely to frame as the true object of worship in their lives. Chapters include “God as Money,” “God as Science,” and “God as Death,” “God as War,” and “God as Superspace, The Ultimate Collapse Into The Black Hole, The End” seek to elucidate the methods by which we insidiously deceive ourselves as our fragile biocomputers find ways to shoehorn faith into our flawed systems.

Scully and Lilly stand out to me, as their work is less about journalism, self-help, and theology, than it is a call to meta-analyze systems that are not working properly or working just as designed to nefarious ends. Diving deeper into these things can be extremely uncomfortable. Any meat-eater that reads Dominion will be called upon to confront some truly terrible truths about the system of suffering their habits and preferences make them complicit in. It is hard, but I believe such tasks must be undertaken from time to time, not to elicit new ways of thinking about things, opinions that may sway are a-dime-a-dozen on the Internet, but adversarial argument does nothing more than pinball a person back and forth against ideologies. Rather, I believe books like these may help a person, not change their mind on a particular issue, but rather change the way they think about thinking.

The systems that we live under that we believe to be immutable, ineffable, and necessary are often just social constructs which have been sold to us by those who benefit from said systems. Gutenberg struck a blow to the powers that be when the printing press arrived in Europe, as it facilitated the faster spread of ideas, resulting in a widespread increase of literacy rates and a transformation of western society’s oral traditions into broader written ones. We have seen a similar situation unfold with the advent of the Internet, which again transformed the information landscape, but have failed to enact the sort of educational initiatives which are required to safely navigate the new media landscape.

All this is complicated by the fact that these emergent technologies are very new, and rather than being stewarded by wisdom and an understanding that we now possess something akin to a genie that must be treated with caution and respect, we have been ushered into the new age by the worst sort of capitalists, the same kind of men who have always been willing to mortgage the greater good for personal gain. The quest for power drives them mad and their desires grow ever darker.

The effect on our individual consciousnesses and collective unconscious has been catastrophic. Where does one even begin to inventory the costs associated with this paradigm shift? Flat Earthers are back, evidence of just how much of our ability to think critically has been lost. Despite their position necessitating a hundred year conspiracy among aviators to keep the truth from so-called globists, a quick search of YouTube or various Internet forums reveals a world where actual academics, instead of doing actual research, have become content factories doing nothing other than debunking and debating issues that were settled thousands of years ago. This counterproductivity has turned an era where the sum total of human knowledge is in our hands at all times into a sort of anti-enlightenment.

The resurgence of Flat Earthers, though hardly innocuous, is quaint by comparison to the dangers other elements of the system have foisted upon us. “Fuck The Patriarchy” is a phrase often invoked, but a closer examination of the system we all live in reveals a staggering level of subconscious complicity, even among women. There has been much discourse over the years about whether violent video games cause violence, but I have never seen a clear distinction made between yesteryear’s low-resolution, cartoonish video game violence and today’s ultra-realistic violence simulators. Similarly, pornography has changed. Steamy encounters with randy cable guys have been replaced with increasingly savage scenes.

In his 2015 paper Hooked Up and Tied Down: The Neurological Consequences of Sadomasochism, psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty writes, “Neurons that fire together wire together. BDSM causes the neural networks controlling sexual arousal, aggression, and fear to become dangerously intertwined.” Though most sexual encounters may not include the sort of well thought out, systematic abuse depicted in popular media like Fifty Shades of Grey, sex and violence have become so entwined in the minds of many people, especially young people, that in 2025 the U.K. banned pornography that involves choking. This comes after studies suggest that more than 40% of sexually active 16-17 year olds had been choked during sex, an act that the medical community declares cannot be done safely, as evidenced by the fact that this practice is now believed to be the leading cause of strokes in women under 40 in those countries.

The increased normalization of sexual violence against women, targeting younger and younger demographics, has been deliberately inserted into the culture by The Handmaid’s Tale as a blueprint crowd. They are aided in this by various neurolinguistic programming techniques, including the insidious concept of “kink shaming.” This technique is used on the collective to flip the script and make anyone who accuses these abusers seem illiberal and close minded. This weaponization of tolerance represents a legitimate attack on the population and an existential threat to a truly tolerant, progressive society.

Recently, ex-taxman Brendan Banfield went on trial in Virginia for the murder of his wife and another man. Allegedly, he conspired with their nanny to impersonate his wife online, soliciting a violent sexual encounter with a knife-wielding stranger. The buried lede in this story is how easily he was able to find someone to agree to such a thing, but currently, a pervasive sexual trend known as Consensual Non-Consensual (CNC) has become quite popular. This is a comtenporary semantic refraining of what was once called a “rape fantasy” and an example of linguistic warfare. I would argue that Banfield’s ability to exploit several loopholes in the system is de-facto evidence of the system’s existence. Examining the case of Dominique Pellicot, the Frenchman who solicited dozens of men to rape his drugged wife, we can see the larger framework of the system.

All of this has festered from a broad-spectrum normalization of incest that may have originated via the normal channels of pornography with its visceral appeal, but has certainly permeated the mainstream. If you wish to see an actual mind virus at work, examine the “Call me Daddy,” crowd, made of legions of self-described “dominant men” who have made it, not just acceptable, but expected to have familial terms invoked during sexual congress. Dr. Kheriaty’s axiom: “neurons that fire together wire together” paints a dark picture of this fad, brought to us by the same sort of men that demand to be called “sir” in the bedroom, as if their penis inherently endows them with authority worthy of respect. Herein we find the mechanisms of The Patriarchy exposed. These mind virii are being inserted into your fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons.

This is mass mind control, both chronic and acute. Whether it started as an urban legend or not, the so-called Blue Whale Game has resulted in deaths and criminal prosecutions around the world. It is a “game” aimed at children, administered by an anonymous online taskmaster featuring a series of escalating dares that culminates in the child’s suicide. I cannot adequately express how this breaks my heart. The odds that anyone reading this beat me to the internet are incredibly slim. I have been with this beast since nearly its inception, in many ways growing up in lockstep with the technology. By the time I was a young teenager, before most people had heard the word “Internet,” I was on it, I was in it, and in my naivety I knew it was going to usher in a utopia. I have never been more wrong about anything in my life.

It has been my privilege, and a horror, to know this beast well, and I am pleading with you all now to please see it with new eyes. The beauty of the internet is that it can be whatever we want, but the truth of the internet is that, like all resources, it has been co-opted and commoditized by powerful men. It could have been a true global town square providing frameworks for an open-source society where the best ideas naturally find the strongest support. The issue is that, by no stretch of the imagination, do the best ideas include concepts like “trillionaire,” “manifest destiny,” and “global domination,” which seem to have become the end goals of the current system set up all the way back in Genesis, with the crony-industrial complex stoking the flames of the fire to this day.

One reason the internet is so effective as a convincing machine is that it exploits users’ inability to use the full defensive spectrum of their instincts and senses. It is often said that “tone cannot be identified from text,” and while this limitation can be overcome with judicious semantics, altered text, and tone indicators, by and large this represents the surface of the issue. A message delivered face-to-face allows a human to infer a significant amount of information from tone, demeanor, expressions, pheromones, etc. Absence of these indicators leaves the recipient at a disadvantage.

Everyone alive in the western world today grew up under siege by advertising. None of us have ever known a world unassaulted by commercials and billboards. For better or for worse, this inoculated us, to some degree, at least against the most gratuitous superliminal appeals we encounter. The attention economy has necessitated a paradigm shift in advertising techniques, resulting in the current hellscape of algorithmically presented content, much of which relies on the time-tested mind control tactics of keywords, repetition, and visceral appeal. We have been sold a great, big lie and have become so complicit in its perpetuation that if we do not act now, things will certainly change for the even-worse. We must acknowledge our vulnerability and be empowered by what we see, for despite what has been done to us, we are many and they are few.

For a society obsessed with conspiracy theories, alien invasions, and zombie apocalypses, we have allowed ourselves to be distracted while evil conspirators have invaded our frontal lobes, turning us into the zombies we fear. Astrology and magick are as popular as ever, but even adherents of the arcane seem blissfully unaware of the spells being cast on them. Social media may have started with the best of intentions, but having been co-opted by men like Mark Zuckerberg, it has become a trap. Visiting any of his platforms reveals an ecosystem of bullshit posts designed to generate precious “engagement” by stoking the fires of faux-outrage and division. By the same token, the unfettered adoption of AI has snared many people who were less susceptible to prior vectors of mind-altering technologies. So-called AI psychosis has resulted in casualties among bright people who should have known better than to trust a homunculus, but again, many of us lack the psychic defenses to engage with these things.

The quote “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people,” has been attributed to various sources throughout history. I believe we must each examine what we spend our time discussing, and make a concerted effort to reframe the impetus of our discourse. No longer can we let the distraction engines and the evil men behind these systems dictate the course of our culture, unless we want to further reap the whirlwind of what they have sown.

Allow me to conclude this sermon with another passage from scripture. By one account Ezekiel 25:17 reads:

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.

Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.

And you will know my name is the Lord, when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Let us take this opportunity to not just reflect on the content of the passage, but by how this one Bible verse, which some reading this may know by heart, was written by Quentin Tarantino some time in the early 1990’s. If we do not embrace its sentiment, let us at least acknowledge how, in its etching upon the collective unconscious, we prove that we can write and rewrite and redefine our own laws, lessons, and programming as we, the people, see fit. The system is not broken, requiring fixing, the system is working entirely as designed and needs to be destroyed.