Monday, June 8, 2026

The cognitive horizon and the chain of causality



A horizon is a point at which you cannot see beyond. When you look at the horizon of the earth and it curves downward and you cannot see beyond it. The event horizon of a black hole is the point at which light cannot escape. 


Let's invent a term. We will call it the "cognitive horizon." The cognitive horizon is the point at which your ability to understand your political situation fails because your knee jerk emotions get in the way of seeing the whole picture. Capitalism, or international jewelry, or the deep state, or the cathedral, or the machine system, or whatever the fuck you want to call it operates in the shadow created by your own cognitive horizon. It is your own knee jerk emotions and emotional responses that enable your subjugation. You cannot see what you cannot reason about. If a normal human can see one or two steps ahead, the machine system operates three or four steps ahead. It operates in the shadow of your own cognition, in the blind spot created by your own emotional volatility. This is the cognitive horizon of capitalism. 


Let's talk about replacement theory. Let's talk about the theory and that whites are being replaced. I like talking about this theory because it is the one thing that provokes everyone's knee jerk reactions the most and if you can control those reactions you can control anything about your emotions. Mastery of the most explosively controversial subject naturally helps master all lesser subjects. What you are mastering is your own emotional reactions, keep that in mind. 


Replacement theory is true but it is also a lie of omission. The machine is at war with the biosphere. Native americans were replaced by whites. Whites are being replaced by latinos. When the time comes they too will be replaced. Everyone gets replaced eventually by the machine, even israelis. Maybe they get replaced by cyborgs, maybe we all get replaced by cyborgs and AI. The machine is at war with the entire biosphere. As much as your race matters to you, it does not matter to the machine, it's just business you see. Your entire race is just meat for its appetite. You might think the world revolves around your genocide as a palestinian person, or your replacement as a white person, or your subjugation as a woman. You might think it's all about the jews or patriarchy or whatever. But it's not. The machine is at war with the entire biosphere and you are just a small subset of that biosphere. It isn't just killing you, it's killing animals, it's spreading invasive species all over the entire planet. It's cutting down the rainforest and replacing everything there with monocrops. It's bleaching the coral reefs, causing ocean acidification, exterminating entire biospheres, global warming, and now Kessler syndrome. It's putting plastic in your balls and brain, destroying sperm counts and causing autism and parkinson's with persistent organic pollutants. It's at war with the entire biosphere. When it creates idiocracy that's because the war takes place within your body. When it creates pollution the war takes place outside of your body. The war is everything on all fronts against everyone simultaneously. If you are the beneficiaries of the system that is only a temporary arrangement. It can wipe israel out just as easily as anyone else. There are billionaires who think they will "exit" by becoming digitally uploaded minds. Actually they will just relegate themselves to a kind of living digital hell where they become a digital parasite that inhabits the bodies of "sleeves" and androids — basically demonic possession from a digital entity. They will lose themselves in their new bodies and their minds will mutate uncontrollably until all humanity is gone and they go insane.


Humans tend to break along two lines that are both equally insane. Some humans become natural selection worshipers. They call selection Gnon (nature and nature's god) when it is really more like Moloch. I'm guilty of having done this. The others are fanatical denialists who treat the mere discussion of natural selection as heretical. They are both operating from within what humans can see. A little bit further out, a little over the cognitive horizon is a third position: mastery. If natural selection under capitalism is converting human beings into idiots and sociopaths then we must bend the system to our will so that it favors the reproduction of better persons. If technology is out of control then we must control its use even at the expense of forgoing profit. If profit cannot be forgone then we must engineer the incentives so that selection effects benefit the humanness of humanity. If the machine cannot be negotiated with at point X, then you find the point in the chain of causality directly prior to X at point W and control it at that point. If you cannot control it at point W in the causal chain of its causes and effects, then you must control it at causal point V. To gain mastery over a system your map is chains of cause and effect, then you see if you can hack the system at each of its points along that chain. If the points on the chain you are operating at do not allow you to modify the system then you go directly to the point prior to that. For example, if you cannot get Congress to do something then you get the donors to manipulate Congress to do something. The donors are the direct causal prerequisite point on the chain to the congressman. The chain goes something like, technological forces --> profits --> donors -->  lawmakers --> laws.


If you can't get anything done at the law maker level it's because you need to master the level or levels prior to it. Just like there is a "tech tree" there is a "causality tree" and I have talked about this before ad nauseam. My whole damn thesis is about it.

But more and more I am convinced there is no "tech solution" that can positively influence the downstream forces of profit, donors, and lawmakers. The tech is the problem and some sort of civilization frozen in the past is the solution. Exactly what era is appropriate probably depends on what technology you're talking about. Phones should probably be answering machines and landlines like they were in the 90s. Computers could have almost all the current uses but without social media, streaming, or porn. Basically freeze computers in the 2000s but with more RAM and memory. Reproductive technology gets abolished for anyone who doesn't already have kids. Transportation goes back to trains and street cars, very 1940s. Society becomes a more modern version of the Amish. Healthcare is allowed to advance, including gene editing for improving health, but not cyborg enhancements or neural interfaces, and definitely not biological computation. America withdrawals behind its walls with its nukes while horrors beyond comprehension consume the rest of the world. Your civilization stagnates but at least it's your civilization. You do not get totally cucked by the machine god. You get to remain human, you get to remain sane, and your society's problems stay manageable.


Just like the ring of power only serves sauron, advanced technology only serves the machine god, it only serves the antichrist.