John Carter, Esq.
If you're curious, the Trump trial self-immolationist's manifesto is available on SubStack. Was he a leftist with TDR (Trump Derangement Syndrome)? Outraged MAGA?
Nope. He's a schizo who thinks The Simpsons was a mind control plot to prepare the world for global fascism via crypto ponzi.
These things are happening more and more. Starting to wonder if burning oneself alive to draw attention to one's cause is the new mass shooting.
People are being driven off the edge by the confluence of a decaying social order and ontological fracture.As things fall apart this is only going to happen more. Desperate people with nothing to live for, no hope in their lives, perceiving no way out of a dark world they can no longer make sense of, atomized and alone, alienated by bespoke worldviews built by algorithms...
The hypernovelty of our environment isn't going away. It's only going to accelerate. Many minds will be broken by this. Holding on to sanity is going to be a challenge for everyone, and a lot of people are going to fail that challenge. Which is going to make it all the harder.
Returning to the manifesto, the most disquieting thing is how close it comes to an extremely high level of sanity.
Thematically, the running theme is a ruthless global technocracy moving to consolidate control of the world by herding us all into financial serfdom.This is pretty close to how I see the world, and I think, pretty close to how a lot of others see it as well. Our intuition is screaming at us that we are at a critical historical inflection point.
The specifics of his manifesto look weird, sure. Crypto driving the everything bubble? Crypto is a pimple on the sauropod butt of the derivatives monster. The Simpsons, specifically, as the mind control vector? The show has been a culturally irrelevant zombie for decades.
But the underlying themes, of extractive piracy via financialization, and mind control via media control, are simply correct. It's just what's happening.
He also talks about how we've been set against ourselves, as a divide et impera strategy, which, yeah. Discusses (somewhat ironically) the promotion of weird conspiracies as a means of cultivating a continuous state of mass hysteria, which again, yeah.
He comes so close to getting it right. The schizo mind as shamanic augur, picking up the transmissions from the zeitgeist and then trying to assemble the pieces he can see into something that matches the pattern he intuitively perceives.
But in the end, he couldn't quite make sense of it; he couldn't accept living in that epistemic fog we must all inhabit; he reached for more certainty than he could have; and it drove him mad.
His mind couldn't handle the load. It burned out, and he burned himself alive.
So.... going off the deep end here.
There's a guy by the name of Clif High (on Substack as well) that does what he call predictive linguistics. Kind of Jungian Universal Mind meets Nostradamus with computers.
In any case, he started talking about the concept of Hypernovelty last year, and did a podcast that mentioned it in January. Basically, the dust is clearing, we're beginning to see the world as it really is, and it's not pleasant. Lots of people (aka 'the normies') are going to snap because they can't handle it. I fear self-immolation guy is one of them that could not handle it.
Wow Emily, this is interesting! He doesn’t sound nuts at all! He sounds like he’s sane, in an insane world.
I think we’ll be seeing some intense, crazy stuff in the coming days.
And I understand how he feels.