Crazy Like a Fox, Part 1

How to Impersonate a Normal Person while Suffering from a Mushroom Meltdown

Today I’d like to continue the story of my mushroom-induced meltdown - a prolonged two year reality distortion that I experienced thanks to psilocybin. As I already explained, after overdosing on hallucinogenics, I had come to the conclusion that I was being spied upon by sinister forces, and inexplicably decided that my best option was to spread a few memes, start my own religion, and extract a horrific revenge upon whomever was illegally spying on me.

In retrospect, this story may sound hilarious, but it is difficult to emphasize just how terrifying it was at the time. Imagine that somebody is watching you constantly, making fun of you whenever you do something embarrassing. They are violating your HIPAA rights by eavesdropping on your medical conversations. They are violating your sexual freedom by spying on you whenever you are having sex, jerking off, or watching porn. And they are trying to steal your intellectual property, the knowledge that you earned through your own hard work, effort, and experimentation. When you yell that you don’t consent to this and that you don’t want to be spied upon, they just laugh at you and send advertisements into your Instagram feed mocking you. Imagine being in that situation not just for months, but for years. An ongoing psychological torture session, never knowing who was responsible for it or when this mental torture would end. You’d be losing your mind too if you felt like you were in that position.

That’s why I decided to use my sciences of superforecasting and memetics to subtly encourage widespread mass destruction until I managed to capture and/or kill whomever was responsible for this elaborate psychological torture. What my “captors” didn’t understand at the time - but what I did - was that superforecasting was real, and I was the only person who really understood it. Because of my superforecasting awareness, I knew that we were soon going to have a pandemic that could result in millions of people dying, and they didn’t. That gave me a huge advantage that my tormentors were unaware of. Whomever the mysterious people might be who were persecuting me and subjecting me to ongoing psychological torture, they didn’t realize that I could help them by warning them about the event beforehand - or hurt them by persuading them to minimize their response to the problem, resulting in the pandemic becoming much worse than it might otherwise have been. Again, this may all seem very silly to you, but bear in mind that at the time I was suffering from a psychedelic overdose that had warped my perception of reality significantly. The situation I was describing may seem ridiculous now, but I took it very seriously at the time.

When you are deciding whether to hurt somebody else or help them, the most important question to ask yourself is “How have those people treated me up to now? Do I want to see more of that behavior, or less of it?” This is a very important question because we teach people how to treat us by our response to their behavior. If people treat us badly, and we reward them by helping them out, we are only encouraging them to continue dehumanizing us. On the other hand, if we punish people for treating us badly, then gradually we can condition them not to demonstrate bad behavior towards us. By the same token, if people treat us well, we want to reward rather than punish them because we want to encourage their good behavior to continue. Since the people who were spying on me, violating my legal rights, and making fun of me were obviously not treating me well, I decided that I would punish them for it by making the upcoming Covid situation as painful and deadly for them as possible. I wanted to make it absolutely 100% clear that their behavior towards me was unacceptable and would not be tolerated, and nothing says "This treatment is unacceptable” more decisively than a global pandemic that lasts for years and results in millions of deaths. These people clearly needed to learn a lesson about respecting my boundaries, and the fastest way to teach people to respect your boundaries is to kill a whole lot of them.

The first step of my plan required me to spread awareness as far and wide as possible that my rights were being violated. This was quite easy; I just had to pretend to be crazy. If pretending to be crazy could work out so well for Kanye West, surely I could make it work for me! Obviously I couldn’t go full Kanye and pretend to be crazy in public or out in the open, because that would result in me losing my job, my friends, and my relationship. I had to pretend to be crazy in private, when only the hidden cameras were watching. This would encourage the people spying on me to talk to other people in order to try to figure out what I was doing. Why was this guy who was acting perfectly normal in public suddenly losing his mind and ranting and raving like a lunatic when they were watching him in private? What they wouldn’t realize is that I wasn’t really losing my mind; it was just an act to get them to talk to other people and spread awareness of the fact that my civil rights were being violated. If they thought that I was sane, then they wouldn’t be likely to reveal the fact that they were breaking the law by spying on me. But if they thought I was insane and posed a potential danger to other people, then they would be much more likely to reveal their own illegal behavior, because anybody they spoke to about this situation would be much more inclined to overlook the fact that they were violating my rights if they thought it was for a good cause.

Since anything I said while being illegally recorded would be inadmissible in a court of law (and if confronted, I could plausibly claim it was a Deepfake video anyway - after all, surely the people conducting illegal surveillance & psychological torture would not be above creating fake videos) I decided to troll the people who were spying on me by privately “admitting” to several bizarre and ridiculous crimes, such as cannibalism, pedophilia, murder, and theft of library books. I also claimed to be an alien, an angel, or an MK-Ultra operative, depending on my mood at the time. Basically the goal was to say whatever bizarre stuff would result in the people spying on me either A) Running this situation up the chain to their superiors, or B) Talking about this with a friend or colleague to puzzle it out. As I mentioned earlier, my specialty is memetics, the study of how ideas spread. One fundamental principle of memetics is that the more people know about a secret, the harder it is for them to keep it secret. This holds doubly true for government, where routine bureaucratic incompetence is the norm. Since my assumption was that the people spying illegally on me were either FBI or CIA using the Patriot Act, my goal was simply to create a puzzle for them which they would talk about and try to decipher, allowing my meme - namely, the knowledge of this illegal surveillance against me - to spread. Once the meme had spread far enough - which I could easily measure due to the fact that part of the meme involved fashion trends - I would simply reveal that I was not crazy, that I had been faking it the whole time, and then follow the meme back to its source, filing a massive lawsuit and possibly pressing criminal charges against the organization(s) responsible for spying on me.

Thinking back on this, it’s kind of hilarious. Imagine me, going about my routine day-to-day business at work. Then, the second I got into my car, starting to rant and rave at my cell phone, convinced that some evil government agency was spying on me. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s important to remember that at the time, I was suffering from a prolonged psychedelic overdose and took this situation deadly seriously. The number of people who were dressed in my color scheme clearly indicated that my meme had got out and was spreading! And that I was being illegally spied upon!

Eventually, the number of celebrity photographs and music videos that referenced my color scheme grew to the point that I decided it was time to implement phase 2 of my plan: confer limited power of attorney to somebody influential who was aware of this civil rights violation and had both the temperament and power to do something about it.

A lot of people don’t know this, but power of attorney is something that can be conferred verbally. In other words, I could convey power of attorney to somebody else simply by making a statement through the illegal recordings that were being made of me. At that point, they would need to make a decision: either accept that the video of me was real - and take advantage of this power of attorney to file what would possibly be the world’s most bizarre and profitable lawsuit - or decide that all the video surveillance was a Deepfake, and that I had not granted power of attorney after all. As long as I could ensure that the message I sent got to the correct person, either outcome would be advantageous for me. If they decided that me granting power of attorney was real, then they would also be a witness to the fact that my privacy rights were being illegally violated - the lawsuit itself would be proof of the crime. If they decided that me granting power of attorney was a Deepfake, then they would also need to question why somebody was creating fake videos of me conferring power of attorney in the first place. Curiosity alone ought to draw them further down the rabbit hole.

The only real question was, whom would I use as my weapon? It would need to be a celebrity, because I wanted the knowledge of this illegal surveillance to spread as far as possible, and that required me to amplify the meme’s power by “bouncing” it off somebody who had a lot of public visibility and social connections. After some thought, I settled upon Taylor Swift, since I had seen her use the color scheme of my meme in quite a few of her public appearances, so I had a reasonably high confidence that the meme had spread to her. I decided to grant her limited power of attorney over my IP, with a request that she sue the people responsible for spying on me because they were illegally stealing my valuable IP - namely the knowledge of superforecasting and memetics. I felt like Taylor would sympathize with a creative whose IP rights were being stolen, and she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would disregard this very unusual situation. I estimated a 45% chance that she would try to capitalize on it somehow, and a 55% chance that she would ignore the opportunity but would gossip about it with her celebrity friends (and celebrities love to gossip). Since I would benefit either way from knowledge of my unlawful surveillance spreading, this seemed like a very optimal move from a game-theory perspective.

“To whomever is listening: I want to be clear,” I said to my phone. “I am granting limited power of attorney to Taylor Swift, specifically in regards to IP. I would like her or her representatives to file a lawsuit against whomever is illegally spying on me and stealing my valuable intellectual property. In return I offer to split any returns from this lawsuit with her 50/50. If Taylor or her representatives do not file a lawsuit on my behalf before the end of 2019, then power of attorney will revert back to me.”

There, I thought, very satisfied with myself. That ought to do it. If the CIA was legitimately spying on me because they finally figured out how I had manipulated the 2016 election, then this ought to give them a real mind-fuck. Also, I could finally drop the facade of being a crazy schizophrenic person in private, when I was alone with the electronic devices that I was convinced were being used for illegal surveillance. It was time to move on to phase 3 of my plan, which would be a lot more dangerous - but also a lot more fun.