How We Exit the Cave
On bullshit, why humans love it, and what happens when you realize most of human existence is a bullshit story, designed to achieve your compliance.
Once upon a halcyon (pre-plandemic) age, I wrote fiction.
I wrote stories and even a couple novels. I enjoyed it, and got a few things published. I was never successful enough at it to pay all the bills, but I did pay a few, and that’s something.
More importantly though, writing fiction taught me an invaluable skill: how to craft, and recognize, bullshit.
Writing fiction well really means learning the art of weaving bullshit. Of weaving it so convincingly that the reader, if only for a moment, cannot tell the difference between your bullshit and reality. It means putting your reader, however briefly, under a spell so hypnotizing that your bullshit seems as real as the air in their lungs and the earth under their feet. They can taste and smell your bullshit. They can feel it squish between their toes.
And here’s the kicker: people willingly sign up for this.
They want to be deceived. They want to be put into that hypnotic state. Even though they know it’s bullshit, they want to believe it.
To be bullshitted well is an ecstasy that people will pay for.
This should tell us something.
I don’t know why humans love bullshit so much. But they do. It’s deep human psyche stuff. What do children want? To be told a story. Or to act one out.
And, as I think we all now know, most people never advance beyond this stage. They stay in a more or less permanent childlike state of wanting to be bullshitted, and wanting to playact along with it.
And so, responding to this demand, who in society rises to the top?
Why, those who are most supremely skilled in the art of bullshitting, of course.
And maybe this is why I’ll never make a truly great fiction writer, because to bullshit on the level of Schwab, Fauci, Gates, Bourla, Tedros, Soros, et al. I would have to be… well, a psychopath. These are truly master bullshit artists. I doff my hat to their superior shittery.
Of course, when you bullshit on the level of these masters, you end up using a great deal, if not most, of humanity’s resources to make your fictions true. You must take humanity’s work, energy, happiness, family, friendships, institutions, money, time, and food away from them, and redirect it all into erecting and maintaining your wall of bullshit.
Which, of course, gives rise to an extremely troublesome (if you’re a bullshitter, that is) class of folks: those who make it their mission to question bullshit.
Being a thinker, I think , essentially means being cognizant of when you’re being told a fiction, and saying so, in the loudest voice you can. It means standing up in the middle of a darkened theater and crying: “Bullshit!”
(Of course, no one likes this, and it puts the questioner in a potentially dangerous, hostile situation. More on that, in a minute).
The predictable response to crying bullshit is to question the questioner: “Ah, but you’re not an expert on bullshit are you? How can you say what is bullshit or not? Are you a veterinarian?” (Thank you JP, for this wonderful and hilarious analogy.)
But this is only convincing for half a second.
After all, I’ve walked through a lot of rural pastures in my life, some of them even containing bulls. I have never, not once, encountered a steaming pile of shit in such a pasture and had any doubt what it was, or where it came from. Nor have I mistaken it for empty ground, despite not being a veterinarian. Somehow, I’ve known to step around it. Nor, if a veterinarian advised that I step into it, would I do so, based on their expertise. Similarly, if they advised that I rub it all over my skin, or ingest it, or inject it into my bloodstream, somehow, despite my never having attended a single veterinarian class, I have the sense not to do that.
Now why is that?
Well, despite the masterful levels of bullshittery in the world, I think it’s not that hard to spot bullshit. I think anyone can do it, once they learn what bullshit looks like. Furthermore, the more bullshit one encounters, I think the better one gets at spotting it.
We should all be highly-experienced bullshit spotting experts, by now. Like it or not, we’ve all had our bullshit radars turned up to eleven.
Of course, this is not true of everyone. We’re still rubbing shoulders with millions of hypnotized people who cannot tell bullshit from reality, and who insist that we bow feverishly to the veterinarians.
And that brings us to Plato…
The Allegory of the Cave, or, How to Keep Your Populace Enthralled with Bullshit
I’m going to assume some familiarity with Plato’s Allegory, and not retell the whole thing here. Go read it for yourself.
Short version:
The there are three types of people…
1) The prisoners in a darkened cave viewing shadows on the wall (or, we might say, the bullshit) and mistaking it for reality. (Most humans.)
2) The people casting the shadows (or, slinging the bullshit). (The few, the elite, the powerful, princes and kings, etc.)
3) The philosopher who makes it out of the cave and sees the actual world for what it is.
Now, this would seem to be a tale exhorting us to take up the mantle “philosopher” and proceed toward enlightenment, right?
But alas, the philosopher in the allegory is doomed. He sees the real world is superior to the cave version so he wants to enlighten his prisoner brethren and sistren. When he goes back into the cave his eyes have not adjusted. To the prisoners, he appears blind, sick, or mad. When he tries to drag them out into the light, not wanting to suffer the same fate, they resist, and kill him.
Remember, people love to be hypnotized. No one likes the person who stands up in the darkened theater and cries “Bullshit!” It spoils the mood.
This is why Socrates was considered “the gadfly of Athens”. He called out a lot of powerful people on the fictions they were trying to put off as truths. Essentially, he stood up and cried bullshit in the middle of a lot of darkened theaters, and broke a lot of people’s happy trances.
And it didn’t end well for him.
The cave allegory is not a tale exhorting us to enlightenment, but advice to a would-be tyrant: don’t worry about those pesky philosophers--your job is to be exceptionally good at slinging bullshit. Make your bullshit so convincing that the prisoners think it’s the same thing as reality. Remember, people want to be deceived. Even if someone stands up and cries: “Hey… that’s bullshit!”, the prisoners will take care of them.
Which all sounds a little painfully familiar, doesn’t it?
Some two millennia after Plato, not much has changed.
Except the bullshit weaving and slinging apparatus has gotten incredibly sophisticated.
So, is it even possible to get out of the Cave? Hopefully with our skin intact?
How We Exit the Cave (And stay out. Without the other prisoners killing us. We hope.)
I’m going to propose a set of thinking principles, or mindsets, to adopt:
The Principle of Ubiquitous Bullshit
The Principle of the Dark Unseen
The Principle of Light Orientation
The Principle of Interconnected Caves
The Principle of Compassionate Awakening
Feel free to adopt or reject any of them. As always, think for yourself.
(But obviously, I think they’re a good idea.)
Let’s unpack them.
#1: The Principle of Ubiquitous Bullshit
Bullshit is everywhere in human existence.
This is because we are essentially apes who tell stories, and who try to make those stories true by whatever means necessary. With armies, if we need to.
Assume that if your attention is being drawn toward something it is a fiction designed to keep you distracted, enthralled, compliant, and imprisoned.
It’s bullshit that someone hopes you mistake for reality.
If it’s coming to you from news media, social media, political speeches or electioneering, talk show hosts, media personalities or “influencers”, politicized sports broadcasts, or, these days, even much overt fiction with smuggled-in themes designed to influence your thoughts… turn them off.
We all know these are sources of bullshit. There is no need for any of them in an enlightened life.
The visible agents populating these mediums are not the same as real people speaking real truths. They’re actors speaking rehearsed lines, like the Truman Show (a brilliant, and more-timely-than-ever retelling of the Cave allegory).
Their job is to convince you their master’s bullshit is the literal truth.
This is just indoctrination, which in turn is really just behavior modification. You’re meant to act a certain way in response to what you’re seeing: becoming docile when you’re meant to, becoming enraged when you’re meant to, casting ballots when you’re meant to, consuming when you’re meant to.
Turn off the news. Drop any tribal or political affiliations you think you may have. They’re just prefabricated lenses designed to prevent you from seeing things clearly.
Just view the world as you, as a freethinking human.
Ask yourself what’s really going on, and really think about it.
And principle #2 would be an excellent place to start…
#2: The Principle of the Dark Unseen
If the bullshit is what you’re meant to see, what are you not?
What’s in the dark, that the bullshit-slingers don’t want you gazing upon?
What behavior do they want you to unthinkingly adopt?
Make this your mental habit: directing your attention where they least want it.
If you’re anything like me you have dozens of friends or acquaintances who are whipped into a frenzy by the cast of heroes and villains on their TV (e.g., Trump, Biden, Putin, Zelensky, etc.).
Of course, these acquaintances are prisoners. The story they’re being fed is that there are certain visible people to blame for all of the world’s ills and certain visible people who are the saviors of humanity.
Which, of course, is a load of bullshit.
I might point out to these prisoners that they’re being distracted from deep state actors who are really controlling things, that these actors are unelected, would not lose an iota of their power in the event of a “change of power”, wield far more actual power over our lives than any elected office holder, and that we have very little knowledge about their daily activities or whereabouts until they’ve visited some calamity upon us.
Name a federal agency, and I can almost guarantee it’s been captured by political, private, or foreign interests: the FBI, the CIA, the FDA, the Federal Reserve, the NIH (clearly)… all captured. These organizations wield massive power over our lives, and we do not elect any of them.
Hold all the elections you want. But if a central bank digital currency gets issued and people unthinkingly adopt it, it’s game over and the baddies win. The state will possess control over nearly every aspect of your life through the ability to switch on and off your purchasing power as it sees fit. They’ll control your ability to travel, your ability to buy food (and which food), whether your currency “expires” (and therefore your ability to save or not), how far away from your house your currency will remain “active”, with whom you may spend your currency, from whom you may earn your currency, whether you have a high enough social credit score to access your currency, whether you’ve accumulated enough “climate points”, whether you’ve taken the latest FDA-approved toxic cocktail, etc.
This is totalitarian control, and it could be achieved without casting a single ballot, or firing a single bullet. It will be sold to the hypnotized millions in the name of “convenience”. Don’t trust the brochure.
Point all this out to a prisoner, and the response, inevitably is: “Well, I hadn’t thought of that.”
Exactly. You weren’t meant to.
You were meant to fear the rise of “fascism” as supposedly exemplified by Trump and his tweets, and you missed the fact that we’ve already backed ourselves into a nearly worldwide fascist police state, controlled by a pharmahealth/biosecurity cartel, who are backed by a tech cartel, who are backed by a banking cartel, etc.
This isn’t dark conspiracy stuff or Illuminati in robes. These are bankers and bureaucrats and lifelong political maneuverers, operating without our say so, without any checks on their power.
We’ve suffered under an NIAID director who has somehow held his position for 38 years, who uses his power to fund illegal gain-of-function research, and who has more power to shut down your life and prosperity than the worst tyrant you can imagine. Schwab brags about the infiltration of various governments around the world. Soros has bought up virtually all of mainstream media. Gates is buying up farmland and conceiving of new and horrifying ways of medicating everyone on the planet.
These are powerful players who are actually controlling the government, and your lives, at the top level.
It doesn’t have to be vast conspiracies. All it has to be is regular, ugly, banal, workaday bureaucrats in positions of power, fucking ordinary people over in such tiny increments that no one even realizes it.
Look into the darkness, into the unseen. Find what is really going on.
Consider that looking into the darkness, these days, might consist of something as simple as reading. Congratulations, you’re engaged in subversive behavior right now! They want you to get your information from the telescreen. By running your eyes over a page covered in these squiggly lines, you’re committing a heretical and seditious act, which, if widely adopted, could bring down the entire bullshitting apparatus.
I’ve lost count of the number of friends and acquaintances who’ve said to me, with some air of snootiness, that they “just don’t have time to read anymore.”
Behold ye, the society whose populace has scorned literacy.
I get my “news” in my inbox, curated by yours truly, from people I trust. My daily news hardly mentions any of the “heroes and villains” that comprise the bullshit story of the day. But it does contain a fair amount about what the unelected deep state operatives are up to, the bullshit they’re slinging as “truth”, and the people heroically standing up in the theater and calling them out.
I consider that a good look into the dark unseen.
#3. The Principle of Light Orientation
Ask yourself: where is the light? How can I move towards it? Can I even exit all the way?
Maybe most importantly: how can I remove my unwitting compliance with the bullshit?
Is there a corporation you unwittingly support that you could now, wittingly, remove your dollar from?
Do you currently work for a corporation whose objectives you don’t agree with? How could you withdraw your co-operation, work for someone else, or even do something else entirely to earn your living?
Is there a social institution that you’ve participated in your whole life without questioning, like banking, for example, that you can find an alternative to? Can you move your money into physical assets that will hold their value, even if the currency collapses or gets replaced with a programmable currency?
Is there a skill you could learn, gardening, for example, which could provide you and your family with abundance and remove your reliance on the GovMediaCorp Cartel that would otherwise “provide” for you?
How much could you reduce your reliance on the current food system by producing your own food, or trading for it with other food producers you know?
Are there things you’ve always thought you should learn, like self-defense or how to fire a pistol, that you think might now be more of a “must”?
How far off the grid could you comfortably move?
Are there alternate sources of “news” and information you could rely on?
Have you neglected something, a joy, from years gone by that the world has subtly trained you out of, like playing an instrument, or having dinners with friends, or identifying constellations, or reading books?
Here’s a hint: if it seems like something that would be outlawed in the WEF/UN-envisioned biosecurity dystopia, then it probably constitutes moving toward the light.
#4. The Principle of Interconnected Caves
There’s something that Plato never mentioned in his Allegory, but I think we’ve all now realized: it’s not just a single Cave.
Many of us started off abhorred merely by covid policies, and in backing away from these, realized we had moved not into the light, but into a bigger cave called Tyranny, and that it had many side passages, and insane, nonsensical public health policy only constituted one antechamber.
And this larger cave might be encompassed by an even larger one.
A reality check: this may seem daunting or terrifying, but we may be fighting this fight for the rest of our lives.
I don’t say that pessimistically. In a way, it is right that we should be fighting tyranny for the rest of our lives.
We got caught napping. We cannot ever assume again that things are wonderful and that there are not forces hard at work to spread evil and tyrannical control in the world. If this entire plandemic episode has taught us anything, it’s that we have to remain ever-vigilant.
There is not now, nor will there ever be, a utopia of freedom. In fact, you might even say the utopian project is what leads to tyranny in the first place: the belief that we can fix humanity in place “perfectly”, once and for all. It doesn’t matter if our intentions our good—in the tyrant’s mind, they always are.
The human impulse to tyranny is eternal. There will always be someone who thinks they know what’s best for humanity, and are willing to break things in order to force their vision of the beautiful society on everyone else. From now until forever.
Accept it now. Tyranny will always have to be fought.
Even if things seem to be going pretty well, freedom-wise, as they have for most of my and your lives, we now know that tyranny is not really dead, but like Sauron in Mordor, it is biding its time, working away quietly to reestablish itself, waiting for its moment. Each new generation will have to fight for freedom anew, and its our job to hold the line, and to teach them, as best we can.
But also, consider that we are in another eternal fight, one that every human must face: we are fighting ourselves, our own tendency to adopt and become hypnotized by bullshit stories.
We’re prone to error and biases and blind spots (essentially, piles of bullshit) in our own minds, and enlightenment is not achieved overnight, or once and then never again.
It’s our eternal task as humans to free ourselves from these self-made caves, too.
Maybe moving away from bullshit is a lifelong journey. Striving but ever falling short of getting all the way out of the Cave. Aristotle said: “the happy man is the dead man,” which is not pessimism, I think, but an acknowledgement that it takes a lifetime to achieve eudaimonia, or bliss, or enlightenment, or whatever the heck you want to call it.
There’s no such thing, while you’re alive, as a mind with no work to do, or a society with no tyranny to fight.
If you’re still breathing, it means there’s thinking to be done, problems to solve, and bullshit to muck out of the mental pasture.
I don’t see this as futility.
I’d much rather spend a life being a light-seeker and cave explorer than an unwitting prisoner staring at a wall of bullshit.
#5. The Principle of Compassionate Awakening
The mistake of the philosopher in the Allegory was attempting to drag his fellow prisoners out of the cave.
This is not your job.
The prisoners don’t want to be freed. It will get you killed. (Or at least get you treated with hostility, something I think many of us have experienced over the past couple of years.)
No one has to think what you think, or see the world in your way. That’s not how cognition works, anyway. Even if you were to tie someone down and force them to look at some data, for example, they will not see it. They have a scotoma, a blind spot, that will not allow them to see the data in the way you see it.
The blind spot is the bullshit story they have accepted as the literal truth.
Instead of dragging, invite others to the light, but do not fret if they choose to stay in the dark. They’ll come when they’re ready. Meanwhile, seek other light seekers, other fellow journeymen making their way out of the Cave alongside you.
You’ve probably had this experience (I know I have): you share a thought, everyone around you calls you a lunatic, then five years later everyone is expounding the same thought as though it sprouted anew from their own mind. Time has a way of trending towards truth, I think.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about bullshit, it’s that it only sticks for a limited time.
If the bullshit fiction maps badly onto reality, people suffer. And given enough time people start to realize that perhaps the fiction is the cause of the suffering.
The longer the bullshit-weavers spin their bullshit as the literal truth, the more skilled (and populous) the questioners become. The apparatus of bullshit falls apart, and the more people start walking out of the Cave, under their own power.
Don’t force them. Welcome them, with compassion, when they arrive.
This, friends, is how we exit the Cave into the light. And stay out.
Who’s with me?
" ...and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." -Nietzsche
Nice dancing along side you, sir.
BRILLIANT article James. Thank you!
I am with you!
“I’d much rather spend a life being a light-seeker and cave explorer than an unwitting prisoner staring at a wall of bullshit.”
Amen James. Amen