Lately, with the gradual release and mounting awareness around the Epstein files, it seems like a great deal of the evils of our era are deeply connected enough that even just airing the laundry of a single person shows that they were implicated with pretty much everything, from the frequent elite parties featuring child rape, to the figures of recent rampant political violence, to the 2008 financial crisis, down even to things like Windows RT, Activision microtransactions specifically designed to target children, and JK Rowling and Elon Musk, and so on and so forth, in an almost interminable list.

It might seem at first like Jeffrey Epstein is at the root of all modern evil, but really the people surrounding him weren’t much better, and the overt focus on him and his deeds has more to do with how specifically it’s him that the court case that is revealing confidential state files is about. He stood out from his crowd by little, maybe by being the guy who regularly hosted parties for all his friends, and who knows, maybe not even that.

Which, in turn, paints the more horrific picture of the elite being more or less all like that, people with horrifying and taboo crimes to each of their names, taking part in lives of depravity and exploitation, possibly even justifying terms like the “secret pedophile cabal” of conspiracy theorists.

Such a situation beggars belief and basically pleads for denial. How could it be possible that they’re all like that? How could this mass depravity even exist for so long without anyone speaking up? How can these people even coexist alongside the rest of the world? Are they actually even human to do such atrocities on the regular? One might understand the temptation to bring alien influences or even infiltration into the picture, since it’s the easy way out of the moral puzzle, much like looking at Nazi Germany and thinking that it Shall Never Happen Here because the Germans were stupid and evil and we are not. It’s very likely that the reality is far more insidious and grounded; that as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn posed, the line separating good and evil runs instead through every human heart.

---

I’ve mentioned before how people can effectively lose themselves when in pursuit of goals that are lesser than what their intellect and power could aim for. The fundamental thrust behind this phenomenon is that Nature abhors a vacuum. Or more specifically, Nature is very eager to put resources to use, to vitalize, to motivate and to breathe life and movement into matter. If we abandon a city, Nature will reclaim it with other lifeforms. A piece of food, when not eaten by bigger beings, is eaten by smaller beings, such as insects, or even bacteria, yeasts, molds, and the like. When a capacity or some power sits unused with us for a long time, it remains eager to act (for that is what power does, it can act powerfully).

We humans are especially sensitive instruments, extremely impressionable in young age but continuing to operate in non-instinctual, learned way throughout our life. We are substantially different from animals in that regard, in kind of the same way a simple integrated circuit differs from a general-purpose computer: while made of much of the same basic components, one has a stricter mode of operation and can only respond to the environment in simple, predefined ways, while the computer is programmable and has the capacity to change its modes of behaviours after being assembled.

While the difference between humans and animals isn’t so black-and-white, this is still an axis that sets us as notable outliers. Compared to animals or other lifeforms on Earth, we are substantially more programmable. We can learn things at a much faster rate in much greater capacity, which enables us to adapt our behaviours to astonishing degrees, like finding out ways to inhabit much of every corner of the planet, and taking the distributed system that shifts our base behaviours after our birth in countless directions for a given (that is, the varied system of human culture).

We inhabit a sensitive apparatus, capable of taking the faintest stirrings of intent, of meaning, of spirit, and converting them to understanding, to action, to product. Great poems, great paintings, great inventions, great acts of love, all based on our ability to be very, very receptive. And like all sensitive, sophisticated instruments, we are more delicate and more prone to break. It is more difficult for an animal to forget themselves (though not impossible), and the more primitive it is the more difficult it is. In part, this is because earlier life-forms have more crystallized behaviour that they have held on to for longer, but also they have much simpler, smaller aims, since they are less intelligent.

(As an aside, intelligence here is meant as the ability to discriminate, and the main consequence of a greater intelligence is a sharper awareness of the world, and especially of how things are different from how they could be. The foundation of life is directed, intentional movement, from somewhere/something towards somewhere/something else, and a greater intelligence offers a greater ability to recognize how this intention could be put to action, a greater capacity to problem-solve. Even keeping the same goals in mind (eg. personal well-being), it presents more options as to how it could be accomplished, more avenues to pursue, more things to track. It recognizes more sub-problems, and thus realizes a greater distance between the present state and the idealized state, generating a greater, more diversified push to action. A greater ability to problem-solve means a greater awareness of problems. Not to mention, the technical term for the impellence to act is stress, so more intelligence, more stress.)

We are eg. at great risk of being traumatized specifically because we are very, very good at adapting to circumstances after birth through our ability to effectively program ourselves, and be programmed by our circumstances. So if we are so supremely receptive to intention, if we are so capable of putting our efforts towards any direction, what happens if we don’t put our resources to work, if we don’t put our power to use towards our goals? The answer is, something else will. Terence McKenna put it as, “If you don’t have a plan, you’re part of somebody else’s plan.” Same as the food on the kitchen table that will be eaten by something else, nature is eager to put resources back into the cycle. And if we don’t muster our forces in the direction of our greater aims, then something lesser will make use of them instead.

In alchemy, this lesser is termed parasite. It is the part that takes on the power of the whole, but still following the part’s aims – and we have countless cautionary tales about taking on power that isn’t commeasured to you and that isn’t yours (including the comical like say, Bruce Almighty).

An ecosystem is a sensitive and harmonious orchestration of very different beings, operating at very different scales, from tiny protozoa to mighty trees, each with their function and niche, and when one of these grows beyond its confines, it causes upset and disharmony. It is the times of plagues, of crsis, of mass die-offs or even extintions.

A human, likewise, is a complex ecosystem, both physically and spiritually. We are made of many cells plus several times more other unicellular organisms within us. Inside us live many needs, many impulses, many desires, many intents, at many different levels, and in a healthy human being they are carefully organized and orchestrated to allow the pursuit of greater aims while still keeping all levels appeased and in working order.

A great number of people don’t manage to put their resources to full use (being repressed, or having given up, or whatever else) and they are akin to someone who regularly leaves crumbs and sugar on the kitchen floor as they work; done regularly enough, that can result in an ant infestation, which has to be continuously managed as to prevent things getting any worse in the kitchen. In the same way, many many people are in an active war with themselves and within themselves, because of overreaching parasites acting on resources that are not put to greater use.

Still, the situation can get worse from here. For example, the ants can completely overcome any efforts to repel them and eventually drive the occupants out, eat everything in the kitchen, and then leave for other food sources. This is the parallel of acute infestations/illnesses that result in death.

But in our scenario, there is a third, and possibly even worse outcome (it strains the metaphor but bear with me): in the unlikely case that the ants somehow figured out how to compel you to do things, they could compel you to spill more food and give them more to eat, while at the same time punishing you for trying to deal with them, allowing them to grow stronger and more plentiful. Pushed in such a way, you would end up buying more groceries just to throw on the floor for the ants to eat, as they take over the house with you as their enabler and servitor.

While this is unlikely to happen from an ant colony, the systems to do so multiply in availability and power once inside the physical body of the person in question. We are already vitally dependent on the chemical output of several strains of bacteria within us (including for several neurotrasmitters such as GABA, serotonin and dopamine!), and they have a direct feed to our bloodstream and from that to our whole system, including the brain. It is very easy for eg. an altered gut microbiome to upset our nutrient and neurotransmitter balances, which would turn us into quite different persons. If a fungus can manage to make an ant climb to the top of a grass stalk and die there, you can only imagine how much worse it can get for humans, which have so many more levers to be pulled than an ant does.

And worse it gets, indeed. It can get bad enough that a person’s goals get entirely subsumed by that of the parasite, under chemical direction, under threat of internal retaliation, under fear of illness and great internal upset. Note here that the parasite is not necessarily a physical organism – the same can happen with eg. sufficiently violent ideas or ideologies, that capture people with both the allure of presenting a neat vision of the world that slots people in place, and the threat of punishment for deviation (including shame, guilt, feelings of being adrift, or even physical violence, and consequent trauma). Again, we are very sensitive beings that are receptive to a great variety of signals and stimuli.

And what happens when someone gets completely enslaved by the parasite? That is the emergence of devils and vampires. It is the condition under which horrible mass-scale murder is rationalized as historical necessity, careless and cruel exploitation of people and resources waved away with dismissal and disinterest, when child rape and ritual sacrifice are things that people do for fun or because that’s what it takes to keep the system standing. When someone is entirely captured by the lesser idea, the lesser being, the lesser goal, then everything they do is in service to that, in disregard of any higher goal, of any moral quandary, of any of our gentler voices or inclinations. To people’s eyes, they become agents of ontological evil, bringing ruin and destruction to all of the things that we labor so much to uphold, much like a plague would sweep through a city and leave corpses in its wake. This is what Hell on Earth means. And when this happens to people with power, such as political, economical, or social power, or with greater intelligence, they have that much more ability to wreak havoc.

This is the reason, for example, of the utility of a culture of pursuit of excellence among the elite (as in, the people possessing the greatest power of some kind in a system), since it is entirely crucial that those with explicit power over others don’t fall to lesser aims. That whatever they do, that they shall do so with their whole being, lest they fall into stagnation, and from that stagnation a swamp develops, and from that swamp a plague oubreak moves outwards.

For another, this is the reason why aggressive civilizations implode after reaching their dreams of conquest – after getting everything they wanted, they reach the position where they have simultaneously the most power and the least goals left to achieve, which is as we’ve seen a disastrous combination. At this point, the society at large (generally starting with the elites) often turns parasitic in pursuit of smaller goals such as accumulation of personal power and hedonistic self-interest, and in short order leads society to decay, ruin and collapse.

Nowadays people with privileged positions of power are both those with the potential to cause the most harm, and also those with the least amount of guardrails/reality checks available to them to steer their course. Someone robbing a deli for a thousand bucks gets summarily arrested and imprisoned; a megacorporation evading billions of dollars in taxes every year is the most rote, commonplace occurrence of our modern political landscape.

Once again in history, we’ve been faced with one of the most dangerous situations of any time – the culmination of our dreams, having all the power but with nothing left to do. Once upon a time, we had at least technological advancement to galvanize the hearts and dreams of the civilized nations, but even that quietly took on a downward slope since the Moon Landing and has nowadays become mostly an arms race for exploitative value extraction.

In this kind of situation, it can be no surprise that the elite everywhere only got more and more passive, corrupt, and diabolic. They had only the pursuit of keeping themselves in power left to achieve, and they accomplished that very successfully, both by removing any obstacle to their continued individual supremacy (tax cuts for the rich, demolishing of antitrust, extensive bribing of the political process, worldwide protection of their own assets via IP and copyright, weapons of mass distraction, the list goes on and on) and by establishing an ironclad pact of mutual trust and support via essentially a system of Mutually Assured Destruction: through periodic collective participation in unspeakable acts, such as child rape, ritual sacrifice, and the likes, everyone at the top was basically collecting blackmail material on everyone else, almost guaranteeing that everyone at those parties would stay mum and keep each other out of trouble if they didn’t want to be asked why they in turn were also at the Devil’s Sacrament. When one would fall, everyone else also would, as we are witnessing with Jeffrey Epstein.

(thanks to Emily for the