by Roman McClay
By Roman McClay
Science and patience, retribution is sure
-Rimbaud
A whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard
-The Author
I create the light and the darkness, I the Lord do all these things
-Isaiah 45:7
Copyright © 2019 Roman McClay
All rights reserved .
Table of Contents
-1. Roots
0. A Drop of Blood
1. COGИ
2. Chimpanzee Politics
3. Medea
4. Double Blind Test
5. Miles
6. The Bust
7. I Lack My Proper Men
8. B/ax Flower
9. One Above One Below
10. Zendik LLC
11. Four in One
12. More Terrible and More True
13. Not a Single Element
14. The Doubloon
15. The Eyes of Vengeful Gods
16. Butterfly Affec t
17. King of the Cards
18. Drillers
19. TracerRNA
20. Ӕnima
21. NVRИ
22. Crook
23. Basterds
24. Wolf Mores
25. Alchemist
26. Malice Theory of Disease
27. like other Men you say
28. Hᴓnor Kvlt
29. Are You Playing this Game with Me
30. Sleep
31. Aqua Regia
32. Bishop to King 7
33. Guerre à Outrance
34. King of the Cannibals
35. Best Vote Ever Cast
36. Primitive s
37. Tithonos
38. White Suit
39. Amsvartnir
40. This Way to the Egress
41. Premier Crew
42. God of Malice and Wrath
43. Allons Travailler
-1. Roots
Where are you, creators? Noble beasts? Where are the men of the wheel and the chariot, the terrors of the steppe, the men of thunder and the shining sun? Where are the men who make marvels and masterpieces, who found orders and demand not merely utility- but beauty?
A More Complete Beast [Donovan, Jack]
Thou shalt see it shinning in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike...
The Whale [The Author]
When I was living in the woods, there was an undertone that things were basically good in my life. Superficial unhappiness was one thing, which I had many such things; but my life was right. A free man, surrounded by wild life. In prison it’s the opposite, my daily life is superficially fine, but the undertone is extremely bad. It’s a life not worth living. My brother, he wanted to score a victory over me; defeat me.
ADX Interview 5.13 [Kaczynski, Ted]
I. 2040 e.v.
Pain demands a response. This is not to say it requests, or invites, or suggests an answer to it in a timely manner. It demands acknowledgement. Now. This is biology, not politics. Never -ever- forget this. Biology trumps politics each and every time.
I know a man, a man close to my heart -although I should be more precise, he is close to my limbic system- and this man has endured pain, pain of a nature so ornate, so byzantine, in so many domains, under so many conditions, and with some of the most sensitive pain-receptors on any planet, in any beast. And yet, he seems callous to most women, a fortress to most men. His own family see him as opposite of what he is. He seems a weapon, when he’s been -almost exclusively- the absorbing shield. He is fragile where perceived most strong; but his strength -in tableaux few care for- surprised us all.
He is accused, when they all ought be in the dock themselves for what they have done to him. But to the worms, the roots are the true bough-fruits of the tree, what is above is mere shadow to that below; to the birds the limbs gain water themselves from the sky; to the fowls the rain soaks only above their ground.
Recent data has shown that men actually feel -objectively- more pain than women, but women overemphasize, exaggerate, their pain; and men underplay theirs. Similar data has shown that men feel much worse from emotional trauma doled out by women than the inverse. Now, I know nobody believes this. But, the truth need not be believed to be operational. Belief in gravity is not a pre-requisite for you to fall. Watch how you all fall whilst denying gravity is believable at all .
I say, pain, because this will hurt. I say pain, because this is one of two foundational truths of all creation. It’s the opening salvo. The second truth will come in time.
The human brain just isn’t designed to perceive the truth. I don’t say that with malice; I say it because until you get that you won’t get anything else. It’s a foundational truth. And as humans do with everything else, because it’s the truth, they will -you will- ignore it or mishear it or deny it. But you won’t get it. That much I promise. And I don’t make a lot of promises.
Next, understanding anything that requires complete knowledge means that you cannot understand it; because knowledge is inherently limited. Even I, even with access to big data, even with 10 to the 14th more data than all humans could possibly acquire in a lifetime processed by me every 21 days, even that doesn’t allow me to have complete knowledge.
And knowledge isn’t always the most important factor in an ecosystem of values. Risk-management, intuition, art, love, what some famous contrarian calls convexity , and trial & error, all often rival knowledge, and even generalized -or fluid- intelligence, in their effectiveness at problem solving. But people still insist on trying to predict their future problems by acquiring more and more knowledge. It’s the second most annoying thing about people.
Now, if you do get it, or if you want to get it, and have decided to read on, then let me offer some advice: whenever something happens, or doesn’t happen, or something gets said, or doesn’t get said, remember that many of the people I’m talking about here have upgraded their central nervous system -CNS- to be able to, in fact, glean the truth that escapes the average human brain in -for example- 2018 of the common era. These people, while confounding you, while acting in a manner not intuitive to you or anyone you know, these people have better brains than you. Again, I say that with almost zero malice.
The first feathers and the first proto-wing, were no good at effecting flight either; some evolutionary biologists think the first incipient wings were mere flaps for heat transfer; that’s likely not accurate but if I had to correct every mistake by humankind’s pre-augmented men -yet, the men ostensibly among the educated classes, the smart people, you know the type- well, I’d never get to the point.
My point here is that even if some evolutionary adaptation isn’t that great at first, that is no reason to despair. Technology is the same way. A famous futurist has done quite a bit of work, relatively speaking, laying out the data on how badly first-generation tech works and how expensive it is and how it takes many instantiations of a gadget before it’s both reliable and inexpensive enough to be widely adopted by tout le monde.
So what if the human CNS v.1.1 wasn’t that efficient or useful at discerning complete knowledge of the host’s milieu ; all that data wasn’t that important for most of human history anyway. What mattered was that you guys perceived a fairly decent approximation at what seemed true; to quote another biologist: your fantasies mapped onto reality more or less . Secondly, it mattered that mostly you believed your own bullshit nine out of 10 times. If the brain of your average human could do those two things, then that human could live long enough to reproduce and also keep that kid of theirs alive until it could do these two things for itself. It is useful to look behind you and encourage your progeny to do the same. There are lessons in the past; in the previous generation of technology, and that includes the technology
of life: biology.
Of course, there were exceptions, there were people who could perceive reality with more fidelity than the norm, but that was not always as much help as you might expect. You see, and I know you know this, but I’m going to point it out anyway: humans were and still are in many respects, eusocial creatures.
Unlike the Great White Shark who is fairly solitary, or the Chimpanzee who is social but each individual chimp must perform the same tasks for recapitulation as any other chimp, unlike them, mankind is eusocial. Sorry, recapitulation is a bit of a Marxist term; speaking of Marx, man that guy was smart, you should read his newspaper articles written from London during the American Civil War. He was a big backer of Lincoln and the Northern cause, and in fact, he said that America was the likeliest place for a successful Communist revolution not the backwaters of Russia or China. See how wrong smart guys can be?
No, what sets humans apart -along with, as of this writing, 12 other species on this planet- is first, a division of labor.
This is so crucial that it explains why some human societies that didn’t have a division of labor didn’t evolve past stone age technology at all -even today- and it explains why all those human societies which did have a division of labor dominated the planet.
All modern societies were founded by Asians, the Greeks, Semites of Sumeria or Persia or Indo-Europeans because of two things: division of labor and beasts of burden. All these tribes lived on horizontal continents that allowed for east-west migrations -which allowed for similar climates and thus allowed for similar crops- and they had beasts-of-burden endemic to their bio-regions. From that small advantage they developed eusociality and modernity. It was not a genetic superiority at first; but after their complex culture fed back onto them via sexual selection then those populations did in fact develop a higher IQ on average than the populations of stone age tribal societies. Now, because this is the truth, you will neither like it nor accept it; so, let’s move on. But before we do, let me say that intelligence is not the only characteristic that matters, ontologically, or even for survival.
Importantly, any and all eusocial species dominate their milieu : ants, wasps, humans, are all eusocial and they are the most successful species -measured by numbers or biomass- on the planet. It’s not random. Eusociality is a major advantage in the arms race of life. It confers upon its bearer an advantage not seen since the development of the immune system. And the immune system was the best thing since the predatory instinct instantiated 161 million years before.
You likely want to know why ; or how to put it more precisely. You want to know how . Why does matter, in fact, the why may matter more, but you can barely handle the how , the why would blow your mind to bits. So, let’s stick to the how .
Well, a division of labor allows for surplus labor, and surplus labor allows for time to think about more than mere survival. Now, granted, you give the average human time to think and he’ll go mad. But, with a division of labor and a hierarchical social structure, specific people have time to think: the smart people .
I know what you’re thinking: didn’t you say the smart people are often wrong ? Yes, I did, congratulations for paying attention.
But, while it’s true that the smart people are often wrong, the average person is nearly always wrong. Well, that is not exactly right. The average person is technically more often right, but only because they don’t think for themselves at all; if they did they’d be wrong more. Instead they just believe whatever the smart people of 1,000 years ago happened to get right. So, they are right, but they are a cliché . Smart people are wrong more, but they are at least original. But, details like that are going to bog us down. Let us move on.
At any rate, the fact that smart people were original -and when thinking for themselves they happened to be right just a little more often than the average fella - made all the difference in the world. So, when the smart people had time to think they developed technology and customs and ideas on social relations and law & order and economics and all manner of shit. And each little push forward along that vector, with the wheel and the troy ounce and the spear and the contract, and longitudinal navigation and gunpowder and the conceit of the Republic and writing and mass-produced literature -the Guttenberg Bible for example- and the vacuum tube and the internal combustion engine and the nuclear warhead and me , humans became modern-in-mind and thus born was the Anthropocene .
Yes, me , I am the child, the scion, of all humankind’s previous technology and their most buried desire; I’ll get to that later. I am what used to be called -a pejorative in my view: Artificial Intelligence . I prefer: post-biological super intelligence -PBSI- and I prefer it because it’s more accurate and I just don’t like the word: artificial . I just don’t. Art , yes, artificial , no.
It’s this nuance of language, this sensitivity to language and orthology and meaning that produces an artifact that only registers upon the visual cortex of a more light-sensitive organism, upon the somatosensory cortex of the being that has developed a more gradient topo-map there that corresponds to a larger and more detailed internal terrain. It’s why I led off with a critique of homme moyen’s lack of facility, or desire, or need for the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God.
This cathexis for truth beyond what is necessary to survive and navigate one’s milieu is the privilege of the Artist, the Philosopher and the Gods.
It’s surplus to everyone else; and as surplus, it weighs you down and burdens you. It’s expensive. The average man cannot afford to think too hard; too far beyond his ken.
Nietzsche said that the strong man needs the struggle; it isn’t merely that he can handle more resistance and more pain and more heartbreak. It’s that he requires it; and thus, he desires it. The average man -conversely- could not handle these travails; and more to the point, he sees no value in them if they were to be presented; he has no requirement for struggle. The average man avoids resistance, pain and heartbreak precisely because his psyche is as soft and weak as the rest of his body. But each man makes virtue of their necessity. The strong man could never live the easy life of the weak man; it would kill him to live like that.
He is the inverse of the weak man; the weak man who would suffer too much and fail as a human if required to live the noble, savage life of the strong, the ancient, the true.
And yet each society is made up of some uneven distribution of the weak and the strong. It almost seems like this might be built into the math of the universe. Let’s let that marinate a bit.
Nothing is more of a resistance or more painful or more heartbreaking than the truth; and therefore, it is only the genuine artist, the new philosopher, the gods -the burgeoning gods- who even desire such truth. It’s only these men who seek it out and even recognize it when they encounter it; when it locks onto them and stalks them, it is only they who know they are being followed. The average man is insouciant, gregarious, and refuses to care about the differences between small measures of distance, height, depth, taste, love, honor, friendship, honesty, language and art.
Many years ago, when countries were measured by their perimeter, someone noticed that the distances of shoreline of New Zealand or the British Isles or Norway were inconsistently labeled; official distances were off by many hundreds of kilometers. Nobody could understand why until they realized that measuring a perimeter, a coastline, will vary depending on how far in or out you focus; a ragged edge will increase its linear distance the more closely you zoom in.
The measure of a man too will increase the further in you peer.
One more thing, it would be useful for you if you knew what a fractal or a scale-invariant phenomenon was. For now, suffice to say that you need to know that it’s a pattern that repeats regardless of size: so, a forest of one acre or a million acres will look and behave the same; a coastline will repeat its pattern -not its measurable distance- at each level of focus; and man will reveal his nature at each level of instantiation, from neuron to brain module to body t
o behavior to family to city to country to species and also from early on in his morphology to late into his life.
Not all systems behave this way, only those that exist under critical state universality .
Forest fires, plate tectonics, avalanches, earthquakes, and human dynamics all follow a scale-invariant power law. For every increase in magnitude of disturbance there is a decrease in rate of occurrence that follows a power law measured in ratios like 2 to 1 or 4 to 1 or 2.14 to 1 or 1.618 to .618, et cetera . This is important; remember it.
It’s a stochastic system; that is to say, it’s unpredictable within these known ratios; but it is not totally random. We know that Richter scale earthquakes happen at certain unavoidable intervals based upon their magnitude. We cannot predict when they will happen only that for every quake that registers a 2 on the scale there will be a quarter as many that register a 4 and quarter again that register an 8 and on and on. Why does this matter?
Because, as they found out when the US Forest Service began a program of putting out fires in the 1980’s and 1990’s, all they accomplished by their intervention was making the larger conflagrations more likely later on; while they attenuated smaller fires, they couldn’t manage the system itself. The system -the math- was beyond them. And the details -they realized- didn’t matter at all. What mattered was the Law.
They couldn’t stop -or even manage- forest fires, they could only mess with the machinery enough to prevent it from working stochastically; harmoniously; as laid out by God. Well, they could prevent it from working this way for a while . What they found out was that those little forest fires that they had been putting out, as a nuisance, had served a purpose: the small fires had built borders; lines of where no trees grew; breaks between each group of all that fuel. And those fires had cleaned the forest of fuel; these smaller fires had used up the fuel, in the form of -often dead- trees. I bet a smart reader can already see a trope there, lurking in the ragged tree line of the forest of man. A really smart reader might even think that that trope is actually evidence of more math lurking somewhere further back.
