The Psychedelic Outlier
All That We See Or Seem Is But A Meme Within A Meme
A psychedelic experience is a strange thing. For some people, it manifests as a sense of connection to all life. For others, it takes the form of a dialogue with strange “machine elves” from another dimension. And yet other people perceive beautiful fractals which they later try to incorporate into their daily lives through art and music.
Similarly, there is no solid consensus about the duration of the psychedelic experience. For most people, it will last only a few hours. For others, their perception of a distorted reality will last for days, or even weeks. For a small number of outliers, their reality is permanently altered. For the rest of their lives, their “baseline reality” will never match up completely with the rest of the world, and they will always perceive residual effects from their psychedelic experience, like a transparent overlay placed over the world. Psychedelics are powerful stuff. I was unfortunate enough to be one of these outliers, experiencing a psychedelic trip that lasted for over two years, and this powerful and prolonged psychedelic experience is what I’d like to share with you in my next few blog posts.
The main thing I noticed during my two-year psychedelic experience was a persistent feeling of being watched. For example, I would jerk off in the privacy of my bedroom, then suddenly my Instagram feed would be filled with pictures of people who had orgasmic looks on their faces. Or I would be dressed up in a red hoodie, and then suddenly my Instagram feed would be filled with pictures of people wearing red hoodies.
Initially I attributed this to hyperactive pattern-matching. I had heard that a lot of social media algorithms use your phone’s microphone to spy on you without permission to gather keywords so that they can deliver more relevant targeted ads. But even after I uninstalled my social media apps and changed the settings, I still noticed these patterns.
In an earlier blog entry, I discussed how the brain is a prediction machine, and psychedelics have the ability to enhance that predictive ability by making it easier for you to spot patterns. This has both benefits and drawbacks. One of the benefits is that it is easier to predict significant patterns, such as trends in the stock market. As I discussed previously, my ability to invest successfully shot through the roof during my psychedelic meltdown. The drawback is that it makes you more susceptible to apophenia, a tendency to correlate random data into patterns that do not exist. This tendency towards apophenia can be guided by a skillful game-player and even used to manipulate elections.
Now the interesting thing about my psychedelic experience is that although my personality changed somewhat, and I was perceiving a lot of previously unseen connections that may or may not have been real, my reasoning skills and sense of rationality were left entirely intact. I have enough experience manipulating other people’s perceptions that I was entirely aware that my own perceptions might be misleading me, especially while I was clearly under the influence of a potent psychedelic. So I did what I always do when I am concerned that I don’t have accurate information: I decided to run a little science experiment.
Memetics is the study of ideas and how they spread. Hearing that description, a lot of people might think that a field of study as vague and ethereal-sounding as “how ideas spread” must be some squishy liberal arts “soft science” which is equal parts navel-gazing and woo. But I take a different approach. I believe memetics is a hard science, with which the spread of ideas can be very precisely calculated. Guiding the spread of ideas might not initially seem like something that has a lot of useful applications, but don’t all revolutions begin with nothing more than an idea? In just a few decades, Marxism conquered some of the most powerful governments in the world. The return of democracy to the American colonies brought down one of the largest empires that the world had ever seen, and replaced it with a brand-new superpower. And these were just ordinary ideas that happened to be catchy enough to go viral, not mathematically-designed ideas calculated for maximum potency. So I wondered, what could a mathematically optimized idea do?
The point of all this is that in order to test out the accuracy of my own suspicions, I decided to do a memetics experiment. If my privacy rights were indeed being infringed upon, and somebody was illegally spying on me without my permission, I could detect that intrusion quite easily through memetics. I decided that I would spread an optimized meme in the privacy of my own home, when I was all alone. The meme would be designed to have easily visible effects, so that I could easily measure and track its spread. That way I would be able to tell for sure whether the patterns and coincidences that I had noticed were the result of illegal surveillance or simply the result of apophenia caused by my psychedelic overdose. If somebody was spying on me in the privacy of my own home, then my meme would spread, because memes can only spread through the transfer of information. If I was not being spied upon, then the meme would have no effect, since there would be nobody watching for the meme to spread to.
The meme I picked was color-oriented. I said out loud, in front of the devices which I suspected were being used for illegal surveillance: “If you believe in my cause and would entrust your soul to me, wear monochrome colors with a splash of red. If you think I’m sexy, wear blue and purple together - or blue and pink, I’m a little colorblind.” There were several reasons I chose this specific meme format.
Low Ask
If you want an idea to spread as rapidly as possible, you need to make it as low-cost as possible to the people spreading it. For example, if I said “If you believe in my cause, send me $100,” not many people would do it, because it is high-cost. But wearing clothes of a particular color format is easy, which is why it makes the perfect meme.
Plausible Deniability
You can’t expect the people who are illegally spying on you to do something that basically amounts to an admission of “Hey, we’re illegally spying on you.” Although it is probable that there are some people within their organization that may not agree with this espionage, you can’t exactly expect them to openly betray their masters. So you need a meme that carries plausible deniability for the people who are secretly on your side. This way, when somebody asks them “Hey, why are you wearing those colors?” they can pass it off as a total coincidence.
Easy to Quantify
When measuring the spread of a meme, it’s important to be able to easily assess who has been impacted by the meme. That’s because the frequency at which a meme reoccurs in the wild is a function of the meme’s virality. If you see the meme being repeated by a lot of strangers with no direct connection to you, then your meme has been highly effective at spreading. Clothing colors thus make a good meme because they are easy to observe and count.
Useful Signalling to Fellow Believers
Memes and religions are very similar in some ways. Both are ideas that have gone wildly viral, spreading to all corners of the earth. In a sense, religion is just the ultimate meme: a meme so powerful that it cannot be contained and eventually gets absorbed as a fundamental component of society. As I mentioned in a previous post, all religions are fundamentally based around a secret truth that only believers know. This shared secret is what connects believers together and creates a special bond of solidarity between them. Therefore it is very important for believers to be able to recognize each other easily. Having similar outfits and symbols fulfills that purpose.
Tie-In Potential to the Fashion and Advertising Industry
One of the most efficient ways to spread a meme is to tie it into capitalism somehow. This is because people will always do what makes them money, no matter how unconventional or socially abnormal it is. (The Kardashians have already made a fortune from this fundamental principle of human nature.) Having a color scheme associated with the meme would allow corporations to tie into it through branding. It would allow celebrities to raise their profile through their fashion choices. As the meme spread more rapidly, it would generate fame for the people associated with it, and they in turn would be incentivized to spread it farther, because the farther the meme spread, the more their own brand would spread along with it. Establishing these kinds of self-reinforcing cycles is key to maximizing an idea’s memetic virality.
Over the next few months, I watched the internet to see whether the color choices in my meme were replicating. To my surprise and horror, they were. The only logical conclusion was that I was being illegally spied upon. It may seem unusual that I leapt to this assumption so quickly, but please remember that at the time, I was still suffering from a massive overdose of psychedelics. Additionally, I had very good reasons to be concerned about being spied upon. My superforecasting experiments were starting to pay off handsomely, making me a lot of money on the stock market. And my attempts to use memetics to influence politics seemed to have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. So under the circumstances, it was not particularly unreasonable for me to assume that somebody with wealth and power might have noticed my experiments at reshaping society and decided to keep an eye on me.
I decided that if my privacy rights were being violated, the best thing for me to do would be to first use my superforecasting and memetics skill to start a religion, then expose the people responsible, and finally use my status as a religious figure to ensure that the people responsible for this privacy breach were either murdered by religious zealots or in some other way brought to justice. Regardless of whether the source of this privacy violation was my wife, the authorities, or some shadowy globalist cabal, I think it’s very important to be vindictive toward people who violate your rights, since most people are fundamentally narcissistic and so the best way to disincentivize people from taking advantage of you is by making a public example out of the people who try. Additionally, people who dehumanize others by violating their fundamental rights - such as somebody’s right to privacy in their own home - are unquestionably evil and need to be removed from society. My plan to accomplish this had 5 phases.
Spread awareness as rapidly as possible of the fact that my civil rights were being violated.
Confer power of attorney to somebody influential who was aware of the civil rights violation and had both the temperament and power to do something about it.
Change the societal narrative to portray myself as a hero while simultaneously using my “supernatural powers” of memetics and superforecasting to start a religion.
Spread memetic infohazards through my viewers so that society itself would gradually destabilize and collapse if nothing were done to punish my privacy violation.
Profit. Always a good final step in any plan.
In my next few journal entries, I’ll tell you more about how I decided to execute upon each phase of this plan.