Still walking
What are the faces of God? Irrelevant to this post, but sometimes the question bothers me. That's right, I', going to rant about scale again.
Incomprehensible.
That is the face of something that exisists beyond spacetime. We (according to some interpretations of the blind brain hypothesis) not only limited by our inability to directly access the majority of our neural compute. We are also chained by it. A scratchpad floating on an ocean of calculation honed by thousands of years.
Have you read Echopraxia?
Marx & Freud: The Puppet and the Iceberg
Ever get that feeling?
That nagging, background hum of anxiety that suggests you aren’t really in the driver’s seat of your own life. The ‘cog in the machine’ feeling. The creeping suspicion that your anxieties about rent, your career path, even the things you dream about at night, aren’t really yours. That you’re just an actor reading lines from a script written by a vast, impersonal economic system that doesn’t know or care that you exist.
Or what about the betrayal from within? That moment you have a perfectly rational goal—to finish the project, to eat healthier, to be a better person—and you watch, as if from a distance, as your own hand steers the car directly into a ditch. "Why the hell did I do that?" is the question you scream into the void. The terrifying answer is: maybe 'you' didn't.
These two feelings—of being controlled from the outside and sabotaged from the inside—aren't just you being neurotic. They are glimpses of the very wires that pull the limbs of the modern self. They’re the shadows on the cave wall hinting at the true nature of the show.
Meet the two thinkers who first stormed the theater, flipped on the house lights, and exposed the puppeteers for all to see.
The Puppet Master: You Think What Your Wallet Lets You
First, let's look at the strings pulling from the outside. To do this, we need to talk about Karl Marx.
And before you spit out your coffee, let's be crystal clear: we are talking about Marx the philosopher, not Marx the communist. We are not here to praise or bury his political solutions. We are here to look at his terrifyingly powerful diagnosis of the modern condition. His core insight is a direct assault on the idea that you are a free-floating, rational individual. He argued that your consciousness—the very content of your thoughts, your values, your sense of what is right and wrong and possible—isn't something you bring to the world. It’s something the world, specifically the economic system you're born into, builds inside of you.
He called this Historical Materialism, which is a dry, academic-sounding term for a brutal, street-level reality. It means that the material conditions of your life don't just shape your opportunities; they print your entire map of reality.
Let's run the experiment. Imagine for a second that your sense of self is a house. To the entrepreneur who owns the factory, the doors of that house open onto a landscape of possibility. Agency, free choice, and risk-taking are the very air he breathes. His map tells him that success comes from individual will and cleverness, because his reality constantly confirms it.
Now, imagine the factory worker. The doors of her house open into a long, narrow hallway with a time clock at the end. Her map is one of necessity, of constraint, of following rules laid down by others. Her reality confirms that her life is dictated by vast systems far beyond her control.
Here’s the kicker: Both of them are right. Both of their maps feel completely, intuitively true from the inside. But both maps were handed to them by their economic position. You don't just have a job; your job has you. It dictates what you value, what you fear, and what you can even conceive of. The proud, "autonomous" Man in his fortress is a fiction that only those in a certain economic bracket can afford to believe in.
But the real monstrosity Marx identified isn't just poverty or inequality. It's a kind of soul-death he called alienation. This is the condition where the thing you pour your life force into—your creativity, your physical labor, your time—is taken from you, turned into a product you don't own, and sold within a system that oppresses you. You become a stranger to your own work, a ghost in your own life. It's a map that tricks you into forging the very chains that bind you, one miserable Monday at a time.
These are the bounded paths of agency that Marx describes. The destinies we can imagine are walled in by what the system allows us to believe. And that belief is instilled by the circumstances of our birth, our childhood, and our life after. These aren't ironclad rules or impermeable barriers, but they exist. The concept of the "American Dream" is in direct rebellion against this. We are told that anyone can be anything—a powerful narrative that forms the scaffolding of an entire ideology. But even if that dream were 100% true, the fact that it needs to be told so loudly and so often proves that it was built to fight something vast and terrifying. That something is the reality Marx describes.
The Iceberg Below: The Stranger in Your Own Skull
So, the map of your reality is drawn by the economic system you live in. A bleak thought. But what if, even within the walls of your own fortress, you aren't the one in charge? This is where the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud enters the stage, dimming the lights and pointing to a monster we had all agreed to ignore.
Freud's devastating move was to reveal that the rational 'you'—that confident, self-aware consciousness that Descartes and Kant placed on a pedestal—is just the tip of a vast, dark iceberg. Below the waterline, submerged in the freezing depths of your own mind, is the unconscious: a chaotic, sprawling basement packed with primal drives, repressed fears, forbidden desires, and forgotten traumas.
And this submerged part isn't just passive storage. It's the engine room. It's the nine-tenths of the iceberg that has all the momentum. It's what's actually steering the ship.
Let's run another experiment. Think about the last time you desperately needed to do something important—finish a project, make a difficult phone call—and instead, you found yourself three hours deep into a YouTube rabbit hole about medieval siege engines. Your conscious, rational mind issued a clear order. Someone else slammed on the brakes and steered you toward trebuchets.
Who was driving the car in that moment? Who chose the catapults over your career?
Freud's answer was terrifying: it was the stranger in your basement, and he has the keys to the car. Your conscious mind is just the press secretary, standing at a podium frantically inventing plausible-sounding reasons for why you're suddenly an expert on counterweights.
And here's where we plant the seed for a future nightmare. Freud had to map this hidden territory using crude tools—dreams, slips of the tongue, stories from the analyst's couch. He could only ever describe the shadows the monster cast on the wall. But modern neuroscience and cognitive biology have brought floodlights and high-resolution cameras into the basement. They are the evil sequel no one wanted, confirming Freud's darkest suspicions with the brutal, empirical language of brain scans and biochemistry.
The coming articles on concepts like the 'Blind Brain Hypothesis' will explore their findings:
that your conscious self might not even be the press secretary. It might be the last thing to find out what happened, a storyteller desperately making sense of actions the deep, non-conscious brain has already taken. We'll see how this new science isn't just describing the self, but learning how to rewrite it with neurochemical and magnetic tools.
For now, the ethical monstrosity born from Freud's original map is a subtle but venomous one. It creates a perfect alibi for our worst impulses ("My unconscious made me do it!"), dissolving personal responsibility. More insidiously, it destroys the very idea of self-sovereignty. If you are fundamentally a mystery to yourself, you must submit to the new high priest—the psychoanalyst—the only one who claims to be able to interpret the shadows in your basement for you.
It's a map that redraws the path to self-knowledge as a permanent, expensive detour through someone else's office—a detour that modern science is threatening to make obsolete by simply taking over the building.
Note: this essay is weak.
Incomprehensible.
That is the face of something that exisists beyond spacetime. We (according to some interpretations of the blind brain hypothesis) not only limited by our inability to directly access the majority of our neural compute. We are also chained by it. A scratchpad floating on an ocean of calculation honed by thousands of years.
Have you read Echopraxia?
Marx & Freud: The Puppet and the Iceberg
Ever get that feeling?
That nagging, background hum of anxiety that suggests you aren’t really in the driver’s seat of your own life. The ‘cog in the machine’ feeling. The creeping suspicion that your anxieties about rent, your career path, even the things you dream about at night, aren’t really yours. That you’re just an actor reading lines from a script written by a vast, impersonal economic system that doesn’t know or care that you exist.
Or what about the betrayal from within? That moment you have a perfectly rational goal—to finish the project, to eat healthier, to be a better person—and you watch, as if from a distance, as your own hand steers the car directly into a ditch. "Why the hell did I do that?" is the question you scream into the void. The terrifying answer is: maybe 'you' didn't.
These two feelings—of being controlled from the outside and sabotaged from the inside—aren't just you being neurotic. They are glimpses of the very wires that pull the limbs of the modern self. They’re the shadows on the cave wall hinting at the true nature of the show.
Meet the two thinkers who first stormed the theater, flipped on the house lights, and exposed the puppeteers for all to see.
The Puppet Master: You Think What Your Wallet Lets You
First, let's look at the strings pulling from the outside. To do this, we need to talk about Karl Marx.
And before you spit out your coffee, let's be crystal clear: we are talking about Marx the philosopher, not Marx the communist. We are not here to praise or bury his political solutions. We are here to look at his terrifyingly powerful diagnosis of the modern condition. His core insight is a direct assault on the idea that you are a free-floating, rational individual. He argued that your consciousness—the very content of your thoughts, your values, your sense of what is right and wrong and possible—isn't something you bring to the world. It’s something the world, specifically the economic system you're born into, builds inside of you.
He called this Historical Materialism, which is a dry, academic-sounding term for a brutal, street-level reality. It means that the material conditions of your life don't just shape your opportunities; they print your entire map of reality.
Let's run the experiment. Imagine for a second that your sense of self is a house. To the entrepreneur who owns the factory, the doors of that house open onto a landscape of possibility. Agency, free choice, and risk-taking are the very air he breathes. His map tells him that success comes from individual will and cleverness, because his reality constantly confirms it.
Now, imagine the factory worker. The doors of her house open into a long, narrow hallway with a time clock at the end. Her map is one of necessity, of constraint, of following rules laid down by others. Her reality confirms that her life is dictated by vast systems far beyond her control.
Here’s the kicker: Both of them are right. Both of their maps feel completely, intuitively true from the inside. But both maps were handed to them by their economic position. You don't just have a job; your job has you. It dictates what you value, what you fear, and what you can even conceive of. The proud, "autonomous" Man in his fortress is a fiction that only those in a certain economic bracket can afford to believe in.
But the real monstrosity Marx identified isn't just poverty or inequality. It's a kind of soul-death he called alienation. This is the condition where the thing you pour your life force into—your creativity, your physical labor, your time—is taken from you, turned into a product you don't own, and sold within a system that oppresses you. You become a stranger to your own work, a ghost in your own life. It's a map that tricks you into forging the very chains that bind you, one miserable Monday at a time.
These are the bounded paths of agency that Marx describes. The destinies we can imagine are walled in by what the system allows us to believe. And that belief is instilled by the circumstances of our birth, our childhood, and our life after. These aren't ironclad rules or impermeable barriers, but they exist. The concept of the "American Dream" is in direct rebellion against this. We are told that anyone can be anything—a powerful narrative that forms the scaffolding of an entire ideology. But even if that dream were 100% true, the fact that it needs to be told so loudly and so often proves that it was built to fight something vast and terrifying. That something is the reality Marx describes.
The Iceberg Below: The Stranger in Your Own Skull
So, the map of your reality is drawn by the economic system you live in. A bleak thought. But what if, even within the walls of your own fortress, you aren't the one in charge? This is where the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud enters the stage, dimming the lights and pointing to a monster we had all agreed to ignore.
Freud's devastating move was to reveal that the rational 'you'—that confident, self-aware consciousness that Descartes and Kant placed on a pedestal—is just the tip of a vast, dark iceberg. Below the waterline, submerged in the freezing depths of your own mind, is the unconscious: a chaotic, sprawling basement packed with primal drives, repressed fears, forbidden desires, and forgotten traumas.
And this submerged part isn't just passive storage. It's the engine room. It's the nine-tenths of the iceberg that has all the momentum. It's what's actually steering the ship.
Let's run another experiment. Think about the last time you desperately needed to do something important—finish a project, make a difficult phone call—and instead, you found yourself three hours deep into a YouTube rabbit hole about medieval siege engines. Your conscious, rational mind issued a clear order. Someone else slammed on the brakes and steered you toward trebuchets.
Who was driving the car in that moment? Who chose the catapults over your career?
Freud's answer was terrifying: it was the stranger in your basement, and he has the keys to the car. Your conscious mind is just the press secretary, standing at a podium frantically inventing plausible-sounding reasons for why you're suddenly an expert on counterweights.
And here's where we plant the seed for a future nightmare. Freud had to map this hidden territory using crude tools—dreams, slips of the tongue, stories from the analyst's couch. He could only ever describe the shadows the monster cast on the wall. But modern neuroscience and cognitive biology have brought floodlights and high-resolution cameras into the basement. They are the evil sequel no one wanted, confirming Freud's darkest suspicions with the brutal, empirical language of brain scans and biochemistry.
The coming articles on concepts like the 'Blind Brain Hypothesis' will explore their findings:
that your conscious self might not even be the press secretary. It might be the last thing to find out what happened, a storyteller desperately making sense of actions the deep, non-conscious brain has already taken. We'll see how this new science isn't just describing the self, but learning how to rewrite it with neurochemical and magnetic tools.
For now, the ethical monstrosity born from Freud's original map is a subtle but venomous one. It creates a perfect alibi for our worst impulses ("My unconscious made me do it!"), dissolving personal responsibility. More insidiously, it destroys the very idea of self-sovereignty. If you are fundamentally a mystery to yourself, you must submit to the new high priest—the psychoanalyst—the only one who claims to be able to interpret the shadows in your basement for you.
It's a map that redraws the path to self-knowledge as a permanent, expensive detour through someone else's office—a detour that modern science is threatening to make obsolete by simply taking over the building.
Note: this essay is weak.
26-30
