NitN 6 - Queen of Swords (A Head in the Clouds)

In an episode that should really have been sponsored by the Muse Headband, Geoff rants about his goals regarding using a brain scanner to master focus in order to become a reincarnation of Ram Dass. JT tries to bring him down to earth by advocating for genuine spirituality. We’ll let you decide whether he’s successful.

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Intro!

I.

Were you aware that the entire mission of science started with a series of rape metaphors from one of the founding fathers of the Renaissance?

Francis Bacon quotes would be good candidates for compilation under the TikTok hashtag #StopGivingMenMicrophones. I learned from Douglass Rushkoff that in order to persuade people to adopt his method of inquiry into “nature’s secrets”, he suggested we should grab nature by the hair and have our way with her.

That’s the foundation of the world we live in. This boring dystopia of scientific materialist emptiness. This nihilistic void of late-stage capitalism.

The way we’ve done science, the way we’ve done culture at large, for the last couple hundred years has been dominated by what Terrance McKenna called dominator culture. Those familiar with the Occult will recognize it as Divine Masculine energy: active, analytical, and directed toward a sort of Incel-alphamale overlording over our subjects of study.

We use science to pesticide our farmland into a vitamin and mineral depleting monoculture.

We use science to extract stored sunlight from billion year old trees and burn it in our cars so that we can make post-work beer runs.

We use science to divide humans into demographics, the behaviors of which are more easily predictable.

And now, as we discuss at the beginning of this episode, I am using science to try to master my own brain waves using an EEG headband.

Somehow it’s become our objective to reduce the entire human experience to soulless, mechanistic number crunching.

Is the divine masculine really serving us? Am I making the right call to ignore the spiritual traditions from which meditation springs and make it a tool to simply increase my productivity?

“What the bourgeois produces are its own gravediggers,” as Marx said. These toxically masculine pursuits of science are making civilization’s countermoves inevitable. Solutions like permaculture, decentralized energy production, Decentralized Autonomous Organization and spiritual awakening are the Divine Feminine embodied.

II.

So yeah, “Stop giving men microphones!”

I can’t sing, I know. But it’s a catchy tune. I find I’m humming it to myself about eight hours a day.

You might think, hey, this is a cishet guy with a microphone… isn’t he butthurt that people are trying to deplatform men?

I’ll admit it does tickle my shadow in a pretty unpleasant way as I’m cuddling my wife and watching the shade get thrown in every other video on her For You Page. Like any American White Guy, I have self-aggrandizement and narcissism programmed into me by a culture that considers my skin’s photon reflectivity and my genital configuration the societal default. I have fought for years to dismantle and sublimate the brainwashing and become an ally driven by more than what Bo Burnham called the “myopic lens of my own self-actualization.”

But no, when it comes down to it, I’m not butthurt. I think that what is being deplatformed isn’t actually “men,” but the Divine Masculine. And that’s for sure a good thing. The Divine Masculine is in everyone who has a desire to conquer and it’s useful when you’re a doctor combating cancer or something, but it’s become the hammer that is turning every societal issue into a nail.

Not everything is cancer.

Ironically, even the videos that get labeled with this #StopGivingMenMicrophones hashtag have a very Divine Masculine energy. Call-out culture is all about directly confronting and shaming people for indelicate or outright abhorrent patterns of speech. Even though it’s primarily women making the content I’m currently discussing, these aggressive challenges have Masculine energy in the Occult sense. But are these toxic men actually going to listen, or will they double down?

It turns out that’s an irrelevant question when you’re looking at what really makes them valuable to people like my wife.

In reality, their true power is that they function as a sort of life-saving gossip.

III.

Margaret Atwood said, “Men’s greatest fear is that women will laugh at them. Women’s greatest fear is that men will kill them.” Call-out culture might prick some pricks’ desire to be taken seriously, but it could also save lives.

It should be obvious that it’s enormously unlikely it will get the Joe Rogan’s of the world to change their ways, but to the bystanders it represents something more positive: gossip.

As others have pointed out, gossip only became taboo because men were realizing it was granting women too much power. When the women got together and shared information about—and devised strategies for coping with—their domineering male peers, the men felt rightly threatened.

So that’s the service provided by these brave women who must be literally polluting their own For You Page with disgusting, enraging, outrageous degenerates. They’re like meerkats erect above the colony with an eye on the horizon for predators and the clarion they sound lets all women know that it still isn’t safe to let their guard down.

You never hear about a meerkat colony that has been decimated.

They work together to stay safe. Gossip—the Divine Feminine energy of connection, observation and networked power—keeps them alive.

Participating in the drama is almost always a self-destructive choice, whether it’s made heroically or through callous complacency. But those martyr’s who spelunk into the internet’s caustic pipes to bring back chunks of crap-covered comedy gold keep my wife and women like her apprised of the drama in a way that helpfully populates their Red Flag encyclopedia.

And much like permaculture, which ensures higher crop yield by creating an entire, thriving ecosystem on a single patch of farmland; just like decentralized energy production, which ensures greater power security by distributing solar panels to every home; like Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which harnesses the power of network connections to form leaderless movements; and like the spiritual awakening I and many others have been traversing since Spring, 2020… The power of gossip is that it isn’t hierarchical, subjugating, aggressive or direct.

It’s based on the power of systems. Of networks—the defining metaphor of the internet age. Together, through diversity-buoyed decentralized collaboration, we are more than the sum of our parts.

Looks to me, the next age will be one where the Divine Masculine is deplatformed and the Divine Feminine thrives.

Can’t wait.