Don’t Skip Leg Day

Although I usually enjoy spending time chilling with Rabbits, sometimes it’s worthwhile to climb out of the warren, up through the rabbit hole you’ve been drawn into, and find a Default Reality explanation for a revelation you’ve too credulously accepted. If you don’t, you’ll end up looking as silly as a gym rat who spends all their time on their chest, back and arms and gives off vibes of an upside-down triangle perched precariously on toothpicks.

If You Spend All Your Time in Rabbit Holes, Your Only Friends Will Be Rabbits. 

The problems of internet echo-chambers are increasingly well-understood. In The Social Dilemma, activist Jeff Orlowski tells the story of Surveillance Capitalism sowing discord with addictive technology that nudges us into ever more alienation. This radically new form of capitalism doesn’t aim to show us what we like, the film claims, it’s to modify our behaviors—and personalities—toward more easily predictable patterns.

Practically, that means pausing a few more seconds while reading some spurious headline inspires the social media algorithms to promote content that takes you an inch farther away from Default Reality. Even with each step logical in the light of those that led to it, you can, alarmingly quickly, find yourself rambling semi-coherently about the clone who has replaced Joe Biden. Or about essential oils being a viable alternative to the measles vaccine. Or about the idiocy of “globe-heads” who buy into the oppressive mainstream narrative about the Earth’s shape.

Many of these groups come across as twitchy, easily startled Rabbits. Tinfoil hat wearing paranoids. This isn’t me punching down, though: it’s more of a lateral jab.

A month ago I was captivated by the conclusion that the “Angelic Language” of Ennochian used by practitioners of magick represented a legitimate way to contact extra-dimensional aliens.

Actually, I still like that idea. I haven’t really given it up at all. I just found my feed getting stranger and stranger. I found it was beginning to change me. To make life difficult.

Anyone who’s owned one knows rabbits will poop anywhere and everywhere, with very little shame. As the esoteric topics my feed suggested began to dominate what I wanted to talk about, even around entirely the wrong audiences, I found myself alienated from my meat-space friends, from my family, and eventually from my wife. 

I realized I needed to pull up from a nosedive.

Seeking professional skeptics, I quickly downloaded the episode of Sam Harris’ podcast, with guest Neil deGrasse Tyson, on which the topic of aliens is scathingly discussed.

Who Are the Surface Dwellers?

The term “Default Reality” isn’t familiar to everyone. If you’re someone who has never heard of that dimension of experience, you probably exist there.

You can’t be blamed for being focused on surface minutiae; day to day life in our boring, post-modernist dystopia is demanding. Rent must be paid, credit scores need maintenance, retirement requires planning. Shower. Brush your teeth. Change your oil. Nearly everyone agrees paying attention to these exigencies will help you effectively navigate the world. Everyone who Dwells on the Surface, at least.

Rabbits are often worse at navigating the demands of materialist reality because they have built identities out of exploring the avenues of contemplation that run counter to consensus. Once you have exposure to a captivating idea that challenges the narrative prioritized by mainstream society, it is harder to buy into fictions—like the value of hoarding money—that only have power because everyone agrees they do.

Occam’s Razor suggests, however, that the simplest explanation satisfying all symptoms is the best. To paraphrase Scrubs’ Dr. Cox: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. That concept is so useful, it defines our culture. 

Surface Dwellers wield Occam’s Razor to wave away consciousness as an emergent property of the brain. That model is useful; you can harness it to develop SSRIs that help us cope with lives devoid of meaning. Nevermind that meaning is often exactly the thing cleaved off by Occam.

Again, I am aware of the judgmental tone that is seeping into my writing, but again, I am really only punching laterally. I’ll freely admit I benefit from medication for Bipolar Disorder. Destigmatizing mental illness would buoy countless people like me who need some extra help getting up to the Surface and taking care of the problems up there that everyone agrees are important.

Subjectively, though, I do get extra mileage out of my meds when I view swallowing them as a Rabbity magickal sacrament. 

Christian Hell, a Rabbit Hole No Longer

Exposure to the story that sinners are doomed to fire, brimstone, and suffering in a realm ruled by a powerful, vicious, free-will-obsessed patriarch doesn’t require plunging into a rabbit hole now, thousands of years after it was written down. I get that. Still, at one point, it was just a prophecy. The first people to hear about it undoubtedly found it as outlandish as today’s Surface Dwellers find magick practitioners’ postulations about the literal existence of incorporeal beings.

In the search for Rabbit-friendly fringe ideas about Hell, I have a contribution: Hell has held a place in our collective imagination for so long, we’re manifesting it via New Thought. As Rhonda Byrnes wrote in the admittedly cheesy book, The Secret, “Set intentions for your life. Visualise your dream life in your mind and you will eventually see it all around you.”

After all, the climate of Hell actually sounds a lot like Venus, which NASA believes owes its surface conditions to runaway greenhouse gas effects. Not only does that planet swelter in temperatures of almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit, its atmosphere is predominantly sulfurous, an element once called brimstone. And who runs our own increasingly climate-imperiled world? As a Silicon Valley resident my answer is probably biased; I don’t have to look far to find a handful of nearly all-powerful libertarians with little regard for our suffering. 

There’s something to the whole “Satanists run the world” thing, but as usual, not exactly the narrative that the Rabbits have latched onto.

Those who avoid diving down rabbit holes—dwelling instead among surface-level explanations of issues like Climate Change—are satisfied by banal brush-offs centered on humans’ innate myopic avarice. 

The Rabbity explanation is more fun, for sure. But is “fun” the only priority?

Become Unpredictable

When I became convinced that ET was communicating to humans through the “Angelic Language” of Ennochian and then started pooping my new fixation into every conversation with reckless abandon, I was able to escape social self-immolation because too much credulity has always bothered me. I was keen to allow space for Sam Harris to talk me down because I prefer to exist in a liminal, polygnostic space between buying into Default Reality and being tantalized by the bizarre.

The truth is, whether you’re down deep in some dark, cobwebbed corner of the Internet or obsessed with the Surface games that are condoned by society but ultimately meaningless and potentially globally catastrophic—shallow pursuits like accumulating wealth and status—you’d be better served by a catholicity of intellectual taste. 

Credulity makes you vulnerable. The elite preserve their grasp on god-like power with an army of algorithms that divide us into true-believing tribes, enabling us to be conquered. As discussed in The Social Dilemma, we are being nudged into these little tribes of Rabbits to make us more predictable. 

This is profitable because being more predictable means we are more easily manipulated into buying what we’re told we want. 

But, by becoming predictable, we also enable ourselves to be manipulated into civil wars that are safe for the elites; battles we fight with very little civility. While the planet looks more like Venus daily, we are lured by algorithmic targeting toward demonizing each other over wedge-shaped social issues like bathroom access. That issue in particular directly impacts 0.6% of the population and any rational analysis suggests it’s no one else’s business. Almost that same number of people—1.71 million—were displaced by natural disasters just last year. 1.9 million were displaced by the January 2008 North American storm complex, a single weather event. When drawn into conflict about where certain individuals are allowed to relieve themselves, maybe we can all agree to pee in the street; it might cool the pavement.

“Become ungovernable” is an oft-parodied anarchist slogan. One component is not skipping leg day—being conversant in the languages of both Surface Dwellers and Rabbits. Talking to each other is key to collective bargaining and whether you’re pro- or anti-union, the vast majority of people don’t want to live in a manifested Christian Hell and we need to get together to stop that from happening.

Befuddle the algorithms so they can’t nudge you into an ideological cage. You’ll only be stuck there moldering while you wait to be trotted—or hopped—out for the benefit of the powerful’s divisive strategy for conquest.

Become unpredictable; it might be the real key to unity.