Crazy Like a Fox, Part 2

This Fox Has Teeth

Today, I would like to finish the story of my two year psychedelic trip, in which I became obsessively convinced that some evil government agency was illegally spying on me and conducting elaborate psychological torture on me through my electronic devices and social media algorithms. I had also decided to turn my skill at superforecasting and memetics towards creating a religion that I could use to flush the spies out of hiding and destroy them. If you haven’t already read the first part of my story, you can find it here.

It might seem wildly overconfident to believe that I could bring about the destruction of an entire government agency like the FBI or CIA, but you need to understand my perspective at the time. I had created a brand new science - memetics - that seemingly had allowed me to put a president into power. I had also developed another science - superforecasting - that allowed me to triple the value of my investment portfolio in three years. And I have always been a naturally self-confident person to begin with. So when you combine that with the fact that I was riding a massive overdose of psychedelics and felt like I was communing directly with God, it really didn’t feel like destroying the FBI or CIA was an unattainable goal.

Since I was being spied upon against my will - or so I thought while under the influence of these psychedelics - I decided to turn that to my advantage. While I was alone in my home, I had the reasonable expectation of privacy. Whomever was spying upon me hadn’t shown me any sort of warrant. Nor had I signed away my right to privacy. Therefore I had the right to say whatever I wanted while in the privacy of my own house.

I also knew that the things I said were gradually leaking out into the public consciousness, due to the fact that the color memes I mentioned to test whether I was being spied upon were clearly propagating. When you combined these two facts, I basically had a free license to kill. I could use memetics to spread propaganda to the people who were illegally spying on me. When that propaganda leaked out into the public consciousness, the effect of the memes embedded inside them would be triggered. That meant I could legally do a lot of things that are normally forbidden to your average citizen, as long as I did so exclusively by talking to the people who were illegally spying on me. I could radicalize extremists, initiate extreme cultural change, and even advocate for the assassination of my enemies. And from a legal perspective, there wasn’t a damn thing the FBI could do about it. If they tried to arrest me for spreading propaganda, I would just tell them “Hey, I didn’t spread the propaganda, the people who were illegally spying on me spread it. I was just talking to myself out loud in the privacy of my own home. If I was being illegally spied upon and psychologically tortured and you knew about it, why didn’t you do anything to stop the people responsible? You just admitted that you were complicit in a massive violation of my civil rights!” And then I would dial up a lawyer and sue the fuck out of them.

It’s commonly known among politicians that it’s possible to incite violence through speech. For example, Maxine Waters declared during a speech in 2018 that her supporters should do anything to make Trump supporters uncomfortable, knowing full well that this would lead to violence against Republicans. Later on, Trump would take a page from her own book by encouraging his supporters to “do something” about the stolen election. Of course, politicians have limits on what they can say, because after a certain point, they can get held legally accountable for their speech. For example, if Maxine Waters had said “I want you to hunt down Trump supporters and beat them up” she would almost certainly have been held accountable for that in a court of law. Similarly, if Trump had said “I want you to go to the capital, hang Mike Pence, and execute any Democrats you find,” he would also be facing criminal charges as a result. Because of this, politicians typically need to skirt around the edges of what they mean when they are deliberately inciting violence through their speech. However, since I was being illegally spied upon, I had no such restrictions. I could say flat out “this person is bad and they ought to be killed!” and there was no way I could legally be held accountable for it. Of course, telling people they ought to kill somebody isn’t enough to get them to do it. You also need to be an expert in understanding group behavior in order to persuade people to follow through on your suggestions. Fortunately, superforecasting and memetics are both sciences that are all about the study of group behavior.

Imagine that you had designed a new science that could basically let you kill anybody you wanted, anywhere in the world, without violating even a single law. And nobody could legally stop you from using this science without you filing a massive lawsuit and pressing charges against them, possibly even sending them to jail. That’s a highly exploitable situation, and I was determined to exploit the hell out of it. All I had to do was incite total chaos until whomever was spying on me realized it was much less costly for them to admit they screwed up and approach me with a settlement offer rather than enabling me to continue spreading mass destruction completely legally through my memes.

———Me realizing that I can do whatever I want to anybody illegally spying on me———

Another, more distant part of my consciousness - perhaps less affected by the psychedelic trip I was on - realized that it was unlikely that I was being illegally spied upon, and that it was much more likely that the public reactions I was getting from my memes were a complete coincidence. But if that was the case, what harm was there in me advocating for mass destruction in the privacy of my own home, to an imaginary surveillance device that didn’t even exist? After all, if I wasn’t being illegally spied upon, then my memes wouldn’t have any harmful effect in the first place, since memes and infohazards only trigger upon exposure to a viewer. What I was doing might seem silly and possibly even crazy, but it was entirely legal. And in the admittedly small chance that somebody was illegally spying on me as I suspected, I was entirely within my rights to do whatever it took to assert my civil rights and protect my privacy from this unlawful home invasion. If people died as a result, that wasn’t my fault either legally or morally - it was the fault of whomever had decided to spy on me.

In my previous post, I described how I had implemented the first two steps of my plan - spreading the knowledge of my illegal surveillance as far as possible and then granting limited power of attorney to somebody influential who was in a position to do something about it. The third step in my plan was to shift the societal narrative to portray myself as a hero while simultaneously using my “supernatural powers” of memetics and superforecasting to start a religion based around me. My technique for achieving this was simple: I decided to stop saying crazy things and instead start saying wildly popular things that a lot of people secretly agreed with, but were too scared to say out loud.

It may surprise you to hear this, but we live in a very fearful culture. In today’s world, a false accusation of “racism” or “misogyny” can get people fired and destroy their social life or even their relationship. It is thus unsurprising that many people who do not agree with the status quo prefer to keep silent lest they be accused of some social sin by the cancel culture mob, which is rightly feared. That said, the cancel culture mob is also deeply hated by many people, because living in a state of fear is unnatural and if people see a chance to bring down a tyrannical social structure which is deeply oppressive to them, most of them will seize that opportunity. Since I knew that I couldn’t be cancelled for saying anything I wanted in the privacy of my own home when I was being illegally spied upon, I decided to share a few critiques about cancel culture that I know most people agree with, but are afraid to vocalize for fear that they will be the next ones targeted by the insane lynch mob. After all, the best way to get people to like you is to attack their enemies - and the obnoxious sanctimonious hypocrisy of cancel culture activists means that they have made a lot of enemies. Any culture that is hated enough can be destroyed, even cancel culture: all you need is one really tough individual to act as the tip of the spear. In fact, I strongly suspect that this war against cancel culture is part of the reason that Trump was so popular with the voters until Covid-19 ruined his election chances. Trump was elected because a lot of people are deeply tired of cancel culture lynch mobs and saw Donald Trump as somebody who could act as the tip of the spear to bring down narcissistic activists who engage in this toxic behavior.

Another thing I did to change the narrative and make myself seem like a hero was to stage fake “miracles” in front of the electronic devices that I thought were bugged. For example, anybody watching me illegally might have seen me “levitating” on my exercise machine. But the truth is that I was just working the stairmaster with my arms alone in order to get a good upper body workout, and the camera angle of my computer was focused on my legs, which may have made it seem like I was floating in the air. Similarly, at one point in time I found a spider crawling on my chair, told it to climb onto my hand, and took it outside when it did so. To a third-party observer watching me through one of my devices, it may have looked like I was “mind-controlling” the spider into doing what I said. But the truth is that I’ve fed the animals on my family’s property for years, so they are very familiar with me and behave in a much more domesticated way than they would around most people. A lot of animals, even spiders, are far more intelligent than most people give them credit for. Finally, while it may have looked from some vantage points like I crushed a rock in my bare hands at one point while meditating, the truth is simply that I was understandably stressed out (from the constant paranoia of thinking that the NSA and CIA were out to get me) and the adrenaline surge I experienced from feeling constantly under threat combined with the fact that the stone I was holding had a deep crack in it anyway, giving the illusion that I was exhibiting superhuman strength. To be honest, it’s almost a shame that nobody was genuinely spying on me because the amount of effort I put into mind-fucking these imaginary government agencies whom I was convinced were persecuting me was really quite impressive. That’s what made my psychedelic overdose so interesting and unusual. While my perception that I was being illegally spied upon may have been inaccurate, all my actions and behavior were deeply rational and could actually be considered extremely clever, if only my belief that I was being spied upon had been correct. If the government had legitimately been spying upon me as I suspected, I imagine that my optical illusions and manipulative magic tricks might have had deeply unsettling effects upon some of the viewers watching. It’s as if one single piece of false information had been artificially embedded into my worldview, but everything else about my way of thinking, analyzing, and manipulating the world was exactly as rational and calculating as it always had been.

The last thing I did to change the narrative involved the use of superforecasting. Most rationalists know that predicting the future is not that hard - after all, a lot of people within the rationalist community predicted that Covid was going to be a severe threat well in advance of scientists, the media, and even our President. However, to the average member of the public predicting the future accurately looks very much like magic. That’s why I wrote a book about superforecasting and made several predictions online to make sure I looked like a visionary. All these predictions were a pretty basic application of Game Theory principles, but when combined with the optical illusions that I was displaying in front of the electronic devices that I considered to be bugged by the CIA, they were designed to give the overall impression of somebody with miraculous magical powers. As I mentioned, it’s almost a shame that nobody was spying on me, since the amount of effort I spent gaslighting my imaginary tormentors was incredibly impressive - almost a work of art in its own right.

The fourth step of my plan was to spread memetic infohazards through my viewers so that society itself would gradually destabilize and collapse if nothing were done to punish my privacy violation. This step was important because most people in groups are susceptible to something called the bystander effect. The bystander effect is a social psychology principle which states that people are less likely to offer help to the victim of a crime if there are other people watching the crime but nobody else is helping. If you are in a hazardous situation and nobody is helping, the best way to avoid falling prey to the bystander effect is to forcefully drag all the bystanders nearby into your drama by placing their lives in danger. For example, if you are trapped in a burning building yelling for help and people are just standing around stupidly watching you instead of calling 911, you can guarantee that 911 gets called simply by pulling out a gun and shooting several of the bystanders who are standing around doing nothing. Bold moves like that often snap people out of the compliant trance caused by the bystander effect, where they feel like they do not need to intervene in a active crime because surely somebody else has already called the appropriate authorities. The reason this works is because human nature is fundamentally selfish. When one’s own well-being is not at stake, most people have a tendency to want to just “go with the flow” and “do what everybody else is doing.” But when you put their own lives in imminent danger, suddenly a bystander’s sense of self-preservation kicks in and they begin taking immediate action to do something about the threat.

How does this relate to memetic infohazards? A memetic infohazard is a true piece of information that has the capacity to be extremely dangerous if it becomes widely known. For example, if I possessed the knowledge of how to create nuclear fission using nothing more than the chemicals found in your typical kitchen, that would be a memetic infohazard because after I spread that information online, you would shortly thereafter see a lot of nuclear explosions - due to the fact that no matter how civilized people like to think that they are, there are always going to be approximately 10-15% of the population who are sociopathic narcissists and will perform whatever behavior gets themselves the most fame, money, or Instagram likes. If creating nuclear bombs in their kitchens and deploying them is what gets these people likes, retweets, and shares, that’s exactly what they’ll do.

There is a certain school of thought (which I personally subscribe to) which speculates that there is not really such a thing as an infohazard, and that “infohazard” is simply a politically correct term for something that should more appropriately be labelled a “leadership failure.” According to this philosophy, any so-called “infohazards” are simply existential threats that our deeply incompetent leadership is unequipped to deal with, and instead of making intelligent plans to solve the underlying problem, they try to cover it up and avoid acknowledging their own incompetence by silencing anybody who points it out. In the example from the preceding paragraph, our leadership would probably consider that scenario an “infohazard” because it has the possibility to cause mass destruction. Personally, I and anybody else who subscribes to the “leadership incompetence” school of thought would prefer to view that kind of situation as a massive leadership failure because it would mean that our leadership not only failed to anticipate the problem of such knowledge spreading but also tried to cover it up rather than taking proactive steps to ensure that the components needed for such a dangerous experiment were inaccessible to the public, or hiring experts who were more competent than them to handle the problems which they were unqualified for. To me, any alleged “infohazard” is simply a recognition that high-level leadership is too incompetent to anticipate problems ahead of time and mitigate them before they occur. From that point of view, the only true “infohazard” is the exposure of massive ignorance among global elites and politicians who are too stupid to properly wield the power that they have, and too arrogant to hire experts more equipped than them to deal with these messes. Regardless of which philosophical position you take on the matter, the fact remains that we live in a world where dangerous information can easily be disseminated to the public, and this dangerous information can have significant impact on society. And if you are currently being illegally spied upon against your will in the privacy of your own home, it is perfectly legal and moral for you to distribute this information freely to anybody spying on you. In fact, some would say it is your civic duty to expose the incompetence of leadership, especially in a scenario where these “leaders” are obviously not acting in your own best interests.

The final step in my plan was “profit.” That was supposed to be the easy part of the plan. Basically, once the meme spread far enough that it was impossible to hide the truth of this illegal surveillance - that it was essentially an open secret - it would be inevitable that somebody would approach me to ask me about the reason for my strange behavior, or whether I knew that I was being spied upon, or something of that nature. At that point, I could file a lawsuit against any institution that was complicit in this illegal surveillance. If it was the CIA, they have deep pockets and could afford to lose forty or fifty million. If it was a reality TV show, I could bankrupt the network. If my workplace was complicit, I’d take several million from them too. If my wife was involved, I could press criminal charges against her and throw her in jail for several years. Furthermore, I could then leverage the celebrity acquired from my unconventional lawsuit to make a great career in politics, entertainment, or whatever other public-facing field I desired. At least, that was the plan. Basically, once I had the upper hand, I planned to put my boot on the throat of anybody that had been complicit in this illegal psychological torture and press down slowly until they coughed up whatever I wanted from them.

Obviously, things didn’t turn out the way I anticipated, which is why I gradually came to the conclusion that a lot of my beliefs about being spied upon were just a product of my imagination, caused by the overuse of psychedelics. Certainly there was a lot of societal upheaval, which aligns with my infohazard hypothesis. If I was being illegally spied upon, then in theory society ought to follow an increasingly chaotic and destructive trajectory thanks to the infohazards I released, which would in principle accelerate the pace of societal collapse until I took action to counter them. And since I obviously would never counter those infohazards until the people who were spying on me admitted to what they did and compensated me for my pain and suffering, then - assuming my hypothesis about being spied upon was correct - in theory we ought to see the rise of full-scale fascism pretty soon. That part of my predictive hypothesis actually seems to be pretty much on track, to be honest. However, the second half of my predictive hypothesis was that somebody who knew about this illegal surveillance would approach me to inquire about taking my case to court. Obviously this never happened, so as the effects of my psychedelic overdose gradually wore off, I slowly came to terms with the fact that my overwhelming surety that I had been the victim of illegal surveillance must have been nothing more than a psychedelic-fueled delusion.

So what is the lesson from all this? To me, this entire experience was evidence of just how powerful and dangerous psychedelics can be. I had expected some interesting trip, possibly with unusual visuals that would fade away after a few hours. Instead, I ended up in a paranoid state of terror for two years, convinced that I was being persecuted by government agencies. The stress ended up taking a massive toll on my personal relationships and eventually even shattered my marriage. While I ended up making a lot of money on the stock market from my enhanced pattern-recognition capability, I often question if it was truly worth the cost. If you take nothing else away from this story, please let it be this message: use drugs responsibly and treat them with respect. The change in your perceptions is not always something that is visible on the surface, nor will your friends immediately be able to recognize that you are in an altered state of mind. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I suffered a full-blown schizophrenic meltdown which I was able to conceal from my friends, family, and co-workers for over two years, while secretly plotting during that entire time to destroy civilization out of revenge for my civil rights having been violated by unseen spies.

At the end of the day, I’m not your mom, and ultimately if you want to dabble in psychedelics, that’s a choice you will have to make for yourself. I simply want people to know the risks, make informed decisions, and have a plan ready in case your trip turns out to be much wilder than you thought… as mine was.