In case you were believing or wondering if Cambridge Analytica explains how and why Trump was elected and if you should be pissed at Facebook by extension…Don’t.
Because it doesn’t.
And you’d be missing for the forest for the trees in the larger messy trajectory of the evolution of society and culture.
Trump is a catalytic force for cultural transformation, perfectly tapping into the dynamic tensions and dysfunctions in society at large, bringing shadows to the surface so they may be seen and transformed or perhaps lived through more deeply until they are ready to be cleared.
He is a big part of carrying out the necessary evolutionary self-correction of cultural evolution as the status quo of liberal post-modernism failed in too many aspects of societal leadership and did not possess the capacity to break through the glass ceiling to the next level of cultural evolution. Therefore, culture is taking a step back with the Trump presidency, to self-reflect, clean and chart a new course in preparation to take two steps forward.
Biological and Cultural Evolution are smarter than we are and from the right perspective one can see how Evolution has never made a mistake.
The Trump Presidency isn’t a mistake.
It is necessary.
All is as it should be.
And if you feel a burning desire to fight or #resist then do that too, because that’s as it should be.
Great article explaining how most of the writing about Facebook’s “data breach” and the manipulative potency of the firm Cambridge Analytica are ironically Fake News.
(At least in the sense of being overly sensationalist and wrong on many objective facts to drive a particular agenda.)
So Facebook is now having Fake News weaponized against themselves, given how the stock has lost $50 Billion in Market Cap since this story broke.
I have a problem with all the attention being paid to Cambridge Analytica, The Facebook ‘Data Breach’, Russian Electoral Interference and Fake News.
First off, as Jordan Hall describes below, none of this is new and these latest political campaign tactics are just the next logical step in a long evolutionary trajectory of similar means of political pseudo-warfare.
“1. Cambridge Analytica has done nothing meaningfully innovative. This is not to say that it is mainstream – but what Cambridge Analytica was doing and can do is well within the boundaries available to any high tier analytics firm. Accordingly, any skilled enterprise can and likely is using similar techniques.
2. All of this has been known since 2016.
3. The use of data-intensive methods in both narrative framing and marketing outreach (online, offline and person to persons) has been on a clean accelerating curve (along with everything else) for decades. Clinton 92, Gore/Bush 2000, Obama 2008 – in each case, the ratchet for the capability of and use of data in candidate marketing was meaningfully moved. Which is to say that it is trivially predictable that something like CA must happen – and, frankly, if every campaign wasn’t fully using these techniques, they should be considered locally inept.”
It seems most people have the assumption that “in a fair world Trump would not have won, therefore the aforementioned issues must be the cause of the injustice of having this terrible President.”
This narrative fails to take into account the deeper, more fundamental dynamic:
People have many legitimate reasons to be upset with the socioeconomic establishment and status quo.
Hilary Clinton was the perfect representative of the status quo.
Trump’s candidacy, more than perhaps any other candidate in history, was built not on what it stood for but for what it stood against.
His candidacy was a means for many to say “fuck you” to the establishment of Neo-Liberal Economics and Post-Modernism.
Ken Wilber about 6 months ago put out a book entitled Trump and a Post-Truth world that I believe was once of the clearest big picture contextualization of the dynamics that really led to Trump’s election by articulating the larger trends of Cultural Evolution.
I see far too many people looking for reasons to reinforce the narrative that Trump Cheated vs. exploring the fundamental problems in Culture and Society that generated the anti-establishment backlash.
If you and your partner(s) can’t both reliably access a state of awakened awareness beyond the ordinary sense of self then any exploration of non-monogamy will inevitably lead to an increase in pain and suffering.
When you lose your cool, when you get triggered do you tell yourself to raise your game and live up to a higher standard?
Or do you justify why it was okay to lose your cool and ascribe fault to other people and external circumstances?
This is one of the key regular decisions that separates the extraordinary humans from the ordinary.
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I love my morning meditation view so much.
There is a reason yogis go to the mountaintop.
The sparkling, harmonious, blissful, spacious, luminous nature of reality is unassailably clear.
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People who don’t utilize the tool of debt and credit in their life have been afflicted by a false sense of lack.
They lack sufficient belief in themselves.
And they lack a willingness to invest in themselves for the long run and to bet on themselves.
The question for analyzing whether debt and credit is worth utilizing is very simple:
Can you create more value, faster with the money you are loaned than the interest rate you are given?
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One of the worst decisions the masculine can make is to seek comfort.
The masculine grows through setting big goals, pushing to exhaustion and then savoring accomplishment in the recovery phase before setting a new bigger goal that lies beyond the new expanded comfort zone.
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From the higher perspective there is no such thing as rejection.
There is just energy jostling around trying to find its way into proper alignment.
From the higher perspective there is no such thing as failure.
There is just feedback about what needs to be improved and recalibrated.
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Black Panther was so much better than the Last Jedi.
Plot and Story Arc.
Character Development & Consistency.
Visual Effects.
Empowering portrayal of Cultural Minorities.
…the script for Luke Skywalker was particularly terrible…acting like someone who was never a Jedi
…so many of the Star Wars characters felt like forced affirmative action plays rather than authentic casting.
…One disappointing feature of the Wakandan’s was that for being so technologically and culturally advanced in many dimensions, they still had an Ethnocentric Worldview when looking to the outside world, opining about how to help downtrodden and oppressed blacks around the world rather than how to help downtrodden and oppressed humans with their technological prowess.
All for now. No time to be a detailed movie critic.
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I am currently reading the Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.
Who else has read it?
My personal website is titled In Quest of Super Humanity and I’m coming to see how my intuitive guidance has been (previously unbeknownst to me) plugged into the same source as Aurobindo’s, especially with respect to his articulation of the Supermind and its Divine Unfolding through Humanity’s Involutionary Process.
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Your body is an instrument that the Consciousness of your Soul learns to play.
An Evolved Soul is therefore a masterful musician.
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Back on my own again and restarting my cooking skills after 2 years of dormancy.
Immediately noticing a shift in my relationship to food preparation as I’ve deepened my relationship to the fundamentally universal nature of subtle energy in all things.
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Succinct infographic of a lot of misguided class warfare and anti-wealth sentiment from the Liberal Left.
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Always remember that how we react to every moment of our life will reinforce either our negative habits or positive habits. No matter how challenging life may be, each moment can be seen as either a problem or an opportunity. If we can understand this, we can start to bring our entire life to the path.
~ Chamtrul Rinpoche
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You might ask, ‟If I have Buddha nature, why can’t I perceive it right now?”
It is because, like gold hidden in its matrix, that nature is hidden by our habits that we have accumulated since beginningless time. These habits have been created by our disturbing emotions and then reinforced by the actions that those disturbances have produced.
~ Shechen Gyaltsab
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The ultimate nature of the mind is empty and without basis. It is intangible like empty space. But this is not a nihilistic view. Self-arisen, primordial consciousness is original, clear consciousness. Self-arisen and self-illuminating, it is like the essence of the sun.
Your triggers are no one else’s responsibility but yours.
One of your duties here on earth, as part of your spiritual unfoldment is to take responsibility for all of your triggers.
In pursuit of becoming trigger-less.
Like Lord Buddha, Jesus and Krishna.
Like an Awakened One.
In the Awakened State, the energy that previously triggered you is still coming at you, but you respond from a place of Unshakeable Clarity, Wisdom and Compassion.
May the pain of your every trigger be met with a desire to Liberate your self through the Path of Awakening and an Inspire a Commitment to Practicing to make it so.
One things I’ve been mulling on with the #metoo movement is reconciling the statistical prevalence of all the people who do depraved shit: Domestic Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Pedophilia, Incest etc
And who the people are who are committing these crimes?
How many of them silently live in the communities and social events we co-mingle with?
As many people who I have intuitively sensed there was something ‘off’ with them, have been outted as Alleged Depraved Abusers, I’m wondering how reliable the intuitive impression of something being off about somebody is a predictor of Depravity?
By my back of the napkin calculations, it seems like it very likely is a very good predictor.
Take a look at the statistics:
Domestic Abuse: 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have been victims of [some form of] physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime.
Sexual Assault: One in four women and one in six men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
Pedophilia: Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;
Incest: an overwhelming incidence of sexual abuse happens within the family. These statistics are well known among industry professionals, who are often quick to add, “and this is a notoriously underreported crime.”
So unless all of these crimes are highly clustered amongst a very small subset of people, rather than these types of crimes being more individual distributed
i.e. is it more likely there a few people who commit domestic abuse, sexual abuse, pedophilia and incest, or is more likely there some people who commit domestic abuse and others sexual abuse but not both?
I would lean to the crimes being more evenly distributed.
And if that’s the case then I roughly estimate 15-25% of the population commits these Depravities.
And I would wager that the intuitive sense of something being ‘off’ about someone is picking up on connection to these Depravities… either as a Depraved Perpetrator or a Depraved Victim, or more likely both — as abusers were usually at one point in their life the abused. As abuse is a notoriously hard behavioral, physiological and karmic cycle to break.
What are your thoughts on this?
Does this rough bayesian inference estimation method of Off-ness correlating to Depravity make sense? Can anyone better at Bayesian math tan me put some more rigorous bayesian math behind this?
As 2017 comes to a close I was taking inventory of the books I’ve read this year.
All of the ones I read were pretty great and I would highly recommended them.
What are some of your favorite books that you read this year?
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1) Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level by Mark Divine (H/T to @Daniel Schmachtenberger for the recommendation)
2) The Precious Treasury of Pith Instructions (The Seven Treasuries Series) by Longchen Rabjam (A core text in the Buddhist Dzogchen lineage)
3) The Dark Challenge by Nick Scott Ram (A lord of the rings style allegory of the battle between light and dark in the universe. Fiction that is much closer to reality than you might think.)
4) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
5) The Everything and the Nothing by Meher Baba
6) The Divided Mind by John E. Sarno
7) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
8) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
9) The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by Jim Rickards
10) Answers by Mother Meera
11) Trump and a Post-Truth World by Ken Wilber
12) The Accelerating TechnOnomic Medium (ATOM) by Kartik Gada
And liberals have a victim belief induced opioid crisis.
I mean seriously look at all the people who liked and shared this drug cocktail.
If you want to take drugs and numb yourself from real living by believing you’re a victim, endlessly trapped in the trauma of your past, then follow the advice of the post in this image.
If you want to live the great adventure of chasing the destiny of your Higher Self then, naturally, follow my feed.
Yesterday a facebook friend of mine posted this — and it got a lot of attention, energy and engagement:
I’d like to mention another phenomenon I’ve noticed regarding male behavior: the sensitive spiritual guy who loves women SO MUCH that he just has to LOVE THEM ALL (i.e., is constantly engaging in quasi or blatantly poly emotional or sensual or sexual behavior, is surreptitiously or blatantly “checking other women out,” is puppy piling every chance he gets – and all of this even when in a committed relationship, etc). And he can get away with it because he’s the rare appealing spiritual guy in a sea of 100 other amazing & awakening women. This one’s a bit more pernicious, because it LOOKS like men trying to “heal” or “appreciate” the feminine, but my experience is that it’s more shakti stealing….Can anyone relate? Feels like a continuation of male privilege behavior in new age guise. I’ve also recently been at some mixed gender awareness events & I heard the confession of men that “I simply can’t help myself when an attractive woman is around, I go all to pieces, even if I’m married, and what do I do with that energy?” Something feels off to me with that, as well.
I agree.
And I wanted to offer a script to beat these men at their own narrative control game.
If he says something like, “I simply can’t help myself when an attractive woman is around, I go all to pieces, even if I’m married, and what do I do with that energy?”
Tell him, “You might want to focus on spiritual development over attending to the Feminine, because spiritually developed people have mastered their impulses and reactivity.”
Then ask him, “What’s more important to you: your spiritual development or fulfilling your sexual desires?”
He will probably say ‘spiritual development’ to keep the act going.
Then when he says “spiritual development”,
Tell him, “Probably the best way for you to progress spiritually would be to take a vow of celibacy for a while until you have control over your sexual impulses. Then once you have control over your impulses you can reintegrate your sexuality into your spiritually.
This would both serve your Higher Self and the Collective Feminine.
That’s what you really want right??
Because right now your un-integrated leaky sexuality is perpetuating the problem.”
My assessment of the situation is that most of these Sensitive New Age Guys (SNAGs) are just unconscious Wolves in Sheep Clothing.
They unwittingly move towards the behaviors that confer evolutionarily advantages towards advancing the base desires of sex, power and genetic replication.
Imitation is rampantly successful in the Evolutionary Record and the history of Natural Selection.
It is much easier to imitate Spiritual Development and attempt to reap the rewards from that status than to actually BECOME Spiritually Developed.
“[Life After Hate is an organization] founded by former white supremacist leaders in 2011, it studies the forces that draw people to hate and helps those who are willing to disengage from radical extremist movements.
Life After Hate’s approach focuses on compassion, counseling, and redemption. The idea of redeeming a white nationalist or neo-Nazi is understandably shocking to many Americans — and for many but history is full of examples of people who’ve shed their hatred and repented later in life.
Rangel is a believer. He himself comes from a life of redemption. He rejects the idea that people drawn to extremism can’t be redeemed based on his own experience.
“The rest of the team were all members of white supremacist groups and were in leadership roles. They were the core of those groups.”
“I had a lot of mental health diagnoses that said I was incorrigible, I was anti-social … basically that I couldn’t change, and yet here I am.”
“What we all have in common, for the most part, is that compassion and empathy are common themes in what helped turn us around,” he said. “What finally got through.”
That puts Rangel’s organization on the opposite side of activists and organizations that are using punitive tactics, such as online shaming and physical fights, against white nationalist groups.
The negative things that we think to do to challenge the other side only help us dig in. It’s only through kindness, it’s only through understanding, it’s only through compassion and peace that people were able to get past all of our armor. It was never aggression, it was never shaming.”
Rangel said that white nationalist organizations promote a sense of belonging to individuals who join, something that is hyper-charged by the internet — where extremist groups can confirm and exacerbate people’s fears and vulnerabilities
“We get online and then we follow a rabbit hole of algorithms that takes us down a deep but narrower path … that helps validate our concerns, helps validate what we’re afraid about, and then we realize we’re not alone,” he said. “Where it turns into extremism is when they promote this sense of social obligation as a sense of activism, and that the only way to be activist is to be violent. That’s where it goes into extremism.”
“I would say is what we would offer would come from a place of being nonjudgmental. Whatever we would talk about would definitely stay between us. And that we would like to share our own experience as Formers and share what has been helpful to us in turning around the way we participate in life … whenever they’re ready our door would be open to them.”
Critics may accuse Life After Hate of naïveté, and argue that the only way to deal with such elements of our society is with shame, not compassion.
If the goal, though, is not immediate moral satisfaction but actually reducing the strength of white supremacist movements, the more effective path may lie in empathy.
For Rangel, the dozens of white nationalists the organization has convinced to give up their past ways are proof enough to him of his approach. “I would say show me the evidence,” he replied. “Tell me not what you can think or feel but what you can prove. If you can show me someone you have shamed into changing, beaten into changing, by all means I want to see that. But I don’t think that’s the way for anyone.”
