Wholesome Mind Control

How’s that for a Deliberately Provocative Headline?

After my last few posts and the large influx of new subscribers —hello everyone!— I’ve struggled to figure out what I should write next. The closest experience that I’ve had to this one is writing a story several years ago that appeared on a popular horror podcast. It wasn’t really a horror story so much as a story about facing horror, finding meaning, and figuring out how to live. Which, never mind, I guess that’s still a horror story and now that I’ve written it down and read it back I’m just being pretentious to pretend otherwise. It’s still my favorite thing that I’ve ever written, even all these years later.¹

It turned out to be the favorite story of a lot of other people as well. One particular listener of the podcast liked the story so much that she decided to get a large tattoo with some of the words —my words, sorry, I always try to distance myself from it mentally whenever I think about it— across her entire back. Another gentleman commented that he would soon get a similar tattoo on his forearm. I did not feel pride that my work had meant so much to someone. Not even an ounce of pride. I felt like Chunk in that scene from the Goonies where he is captured by Fratelli crime family and promptly begins to weep as he tells them every miserable thing he has ever done.

A lot of the times when I write stuff it’s because something is bugging me and I can’t figure out what it is, exactly. Except, somehow, my fingers always seem to know. So I type it out and put it in front of my eyes so that my brain can know it too. In this case, I read a few pieces from someone I like about how people should try to live forever and it left me feeling very… queasy? Yes. Queasy.

If you agree with someone on 99% of all things that last 1% of difference becomes harder to swallow. There was a nothing transcendent or beautiful to me in that vision. Nothing but fear of death, or so it seemed to me anyway. I don’t quite think I took their meaning correctly on the first read, which I now think is just that people should try to stay healthy as long as possible and that means some of us might live a very long time. But it got under my skin and I couldn’t figure out why. Until I started typing and figured out it was because the transcendent piece was missing. The part that there is a higher order that we all fit into, and that it’s a good order and we should love our place in it. So I wanted to write about why I feel that way.

I think some of you might feel tricked because most of what this substack is about is long, weird spergy stuff about how to reform our news and political institutions into something I call “Algorithmic Republics.” Although someone recently applied the term “Adhocracy” to it, which I like more to be honest. This wasn’t something God commanded me to do, except I guess in the sense that after my experience by the canal I did start to think of the world in terms of recurring patterns, and that patterns themselves are the highest reality. So ever since then I’ve been trying to tease about how to set up prosperous patterns. Where is the sunbeam of truth and beauty in the attic of existence, and what dust must I blow toward it for it to become illuminated?

That paragraph is an over-long way of saying “Don’t think all I’m going to do is write super long pieces about God, because I have some super long pieces about how to reform the entire news industry and political sphere as well!”

In the interests of avoiding audience capture, and preventing myself from feeling like I’m starting a cult, let’s dive into a few of the more absurd parts of my ridiculous hero complex.

Dashed Dreams of a Sword Guy

When I was a child, I never wanted wealth or fame in any conventional sense. What I wanted most was a sword made out of meteorite that I would be unable to master without having first mastered myself. So, sword-wealth and sword-fame, maybe. Preferably this sword would be given to me by a Wizard but I was also willing to find it stuck in a stone or in the back of a wardrobe somewhere. Or maybe a talking animal could give it to me? It was negotiable. You can’t be picky with a sword like that. Besides, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the One True Sword of Your Ultimate Heroic Destiny chose you rather than you choosing it.

Despite knowing this, by the time my age hit double digits what I really wanted was a crystal sword with blue fire inside of it like Bran Davies had in The Dark is Rising books by Susan Cooper. Also, it would be for the best if I found out I was secretly the son of King Arthur when receiving this mystical blade.

Alas, it was not to be.

A brief history of the One True Swords of My Ultimate Heroic Destiny is as follows:

Night Whisper: A vaguely sword-shaped stick covered in black electrical tape that I found in the woods in my backyard. When my older sister became jealous of its unspeakable power she put her hand over her eye and started screaming. My father assumed that I had poked her in the eye with it and promptly broke it over his knee. My sister claims not to remember this, as if anyone could forget destroying such a magnificent and powerful tool of justice.

The Steel of Toledo: A sword my father purchased for me at Medieval Times in Las Vegas at the age of eleven some years after my sister confessed I had never actually poked her in the eye. It cost $85.00 and said “Made in Toledo Spain” on it. I don’t think it lasted much longer than two or three months. During the summer, I took it to the front yard and performed all kinds of awesome feats with it, and eventually plunged it into the ground. I heard a clink. Because of lies my father had told me in my youth so that I would leave him alone while he took naps —that I had only half-sorted out were lies— I assumed this was the buried treasure of the house’s original builder, Mr. Zumba. I recruited all the neighbor kids to dig up what I would later realize was our sewer outflow pipe. I promised all of them a share of the treasure as this seemed like the traditional thing to do in the Hobbit. When my dad woke up from his nap he witnessed a large twelve foot trench in the front yard, filled with half a dozen kids all eagerly digging up this strange cylindrical treasure chest, and yelled my name so, so loud. So I ran. When my dad caught up with me he took the Steel of Toledo and bent it over his knee twice so that it looked like half a swastika. I tried to bend it back, with tears in my eyes, like I was giving CPR to a dead loved one, but let’s be honest. It wasn’t going to ever be magical after that. I think I threw it away with into a common garbage can, sobbing harder than I ever had and feeling like an unworthy friend, because I wanted to bury it with a proper grave marker instead and my dad said no.

The Heron Marked Blade of Rand al’Thor: During high school, I worked a lot of roofing jobs with my father because my sister kept getting into car accidents and he had to find extra money to buy her new vehicles. His fourth wife also hated my sister so he “hired” me on as a means of laundering money to my sister. He mollified me by telling me that he needed me to work for free in order to make his child support payments. Then on the back-end, my sister received all of this laundered money in the form of a new vehicle. After the end of several years of this he finally did pay me for two roofing jobs. He suggested I use the money to buy a car and hook up with some big-breasted cheerleader. There was one in particular he knew about who, for reasons he could not fathom, was rumored to like “smart” guys. This was one of the few times my father was genuinely excited for me and he made all kinds of phone calls and cashed in all kinds of favors to find me a good deal on a new car. He would speak in a fervor about how I needed to be careful not to get anyone pregnant as I cruised around town. Upon receiving the money, I wisely used the money to buy a replica of the heron-marked sword of a true blade master in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and several crates of apples. I had decided that as I lacked a sword-fighting partner the best I could hope for was to throw an apple in the air and try to cut it in half twice before they hit the ground. If this was accomplished, I would be a true blade master. I figured I could get this down in a couple days, at most. After several hours and approximately a hundred apples I succeeded. However, it was at the expense of moving so fast that I tripped and stabbed myself in the leg. I gave this sword away at the end of high school out of sheer embarrassment and accepted that maybe I wasn’t meant to be the sword-fighting kind of hero. My father never attempted to pay me for a roofing job ever again after this happened and years later his best friend Dutch told me he had been despondent for months after. So far as I know, this is the only time my father has ever been emotionally wounded on my behalf.

Despite my poor sword-luck, my love of Fantasy novels remains to this day. It’s probably also why I have a hero complex and constantly bug substack execs on Notes to build something I call a “Trust Index.” As I grew older, it became apparent my talents were more in the project management, process engineering, and system design space than in totally heroic and awesome combat. Which brings me to the subject of Mind Control, which is both a real thing a magical fantastical thing.

Look at me, just linking all these things together.

Mind Control in Fantasy

In the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, a character named Breeze has the ability to ingest metal and alter the mood of other people. Magical Mind Control with extra steps, in other words. During a passage in the second book, Breeze finds himself alone with several young ladies. Reading this as an adult, and looking back on all of the books I read in my youth but now armed with the knowledge that a lot of the guys who write this stuff are huge not-so-secret perverts —never read the Sword of Truth series unless you have a high-tolerance for Objectivism and nipple magic— I sensed immediately where this scene was going. Mind Control. Young women. This would not end well.

And I would have been correct in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, except for the pesky fact that Brandon Sanderson is Mormon.

Breeze promptly uses his Mind Control powers to make the young women believe in themselves, lift their self-esteem, and ease the fears that were holding them back from living a better life. He touched everyone he met in order to make them better, stronger versions of themselves. He took nothing for himself.

I laughed out loud from sheer astonishment.

I had never once in all my life imagined such a thing. I could imagine not harming someone less powerful than myself. I could imagine bringing harm to someone who had caused harm to those less powerful than himself. I could most easily imagine just leaving people alone. What took me completely by surprise was a man with the power to take whatever he wanted, even the false consent of his victims, who instead used his ability to elevate those less powerful than himself. It didn’t occur to me that an inherently dangerous power like mind control could be… I mean… wholesome? That’s a pretty wholesome use of mind control, right? Am I alone in thinking that?

Check out Brandon Sanderson, if you haven’t. I feel like an even more of a piece of shit each time I come across a new way to be nice that I hadn’t even considered before.

If there’s any part of my personality I’m most wary of it’s the following:

“They did WHAT?!?! Well how about I go kick their fu—“

Then my internal Brandon Sanderson speaks up and says:

“Have you tried being creative for five seconds to see if maybe there’s some very simple thing you could do instead?”

Practical, Real-World Mind Control

In real-life, Mind Control takes the form of polite nudges.

“SEE THIS PACKAGE? IT IS RED! YOU LIKE RED! PICK UP THIS PACKAGE!”

Or:

“DO YOU THIRST? BEHOLD THIS DELICIOUS BEVERAGE COVERED IN DROPS OF DEW! THIRST NOW FOR THIS BEVERAGE!”

And a mountain of “not quite true, but technically correct” headlines that were deliberately written to solicit your engagement. Like this piece, which I called “Wholesome Mind Control.” Also laws with names that mean the opposite of what they do. Google also does things like deliberately alter search results so you see things from a certain point of view. The important part is the plain, practical reality of this. People figure out what they want you to do, not people that you chose or trust, and then they figure out how to “message” whatever is happening in the world to get you to do what they want. And this is just everywhere, all of the time. We don’t even see it or think about it hardly because it’s just so everywhere and so pervasive and how would you even fix it?

Well, I’ll tell you how.

Despite what you might think, I’m not going to suddenly zag into the territory of “And now that you know that, here is why I specifically should be the only person able to do place these kinds of tugs and you should be submitted to my supreme authority.”

The only person who should be in charge of what filtering is done on what you see, and what you hear, is you. You have the fundamental, unalienable right to follow the dictates of your conscience. Freedom of Speech is also the Freedom of Conscience, Assembly, and Association. You have the right to work together with other people to advance the specific causes that you believe in. You don’t have ownership of the truth and other people can convince you to change your mind, but they should be required to do so honestly.

Almost a full third of my subscribers are from the last two pieces, so all of this is my way of transitioning to what this substack is primarily about. This substack is primarily about how to create Wholesome Mind Control on the internet. The alternative is what we have right now, which I call “Attention Epilepsy.” This is a real problem to which most people’s solution is something like “Yes, let’s just give one person total authority to do what I personally want and if that person does something I don’t want, then and only then is it bad.”

My ultimate personal source of truth is me, in the fifteen minutes immediately after I’ve eaten an Oreo Blizzard. Man, that guy knows so much stuff. Especially about how I never needed to eat an Oreo Blizzard in the first place and probably shouldn’t do that ever again. Definitely the wisest person I know with the longest time-horizon to produce a good future.

But just imagine if you read the news, or went to vote, and every time you did something like that you had all the collective intelligence and knowledge of the people that you specifically trust. That all of those people had to prove out that they were right and it was all done automatically, in the background so you could have high confidence in what you saw.

I’m going to link to a few pieces here that I’ve written on the topic and if you don’t care to hear more, totally understood. This is weird but also simultaneously totally, completely sane.

A Boring Utopia, my novella/manifesto about how we could build specific interfaces between us, the news, and the law-making mechanisms to produce self-propagating, emergent order. If you read anything, read this.

Attention Epilepsy, wherein I describe the current problems we have where we are all just swimming in a sea of crap all day.

The Basic Things that Make Civilization Work are Good, Actually in which I lay out a lot of the specific rules that such a system would follow in order to produce that kind of order.

I’m not trying to make money off any of this. Maybe that’s cowardice on my part because I have a comfortable job in something close enough to the business world of a start-up that I know how hard it is to build anything, let alone something with a lot of complex rules. Maybe it’s because I have a heroic destiny as His Purple Mountain Majesty, the Trunk which Upholds the Three Branches of Government, Presumer of Innocence, William of Rights, Father of the Founding Fathers, Amberer of the Waives of Grain, the King of the United States of America who was born on the Fourth of July after a bolt of lightning struck the Statue of Liberty and she became pregnant with me?²

My main hope with this substack is that I build up enough of an audience to produce a strong demand signal to substack execs to build this themselves. I’ll write the whole three hundred page requirements document for free! This place has all the right components, lots of regular citizens, a pay mechanism to capture their money and funnel it, and journalists who are too disagreeable to do anything other than pursue their own personal version of the truth. Bring those things into order and you’ve got magic. If I were a substack exec, I wouldn’t build any of this without a strong demand signal. So this is me, trying to build a demand signal.

I’ll say this for whatever I saw by the canal. We all have a duty to be excellent to each other. This is what I perceive as my pice of that duty. Never mind, that was Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But you get the point.

No worries if you don’t want to follow anymore of this stuff, but I think I’m right. I can’t talk myself out of it. And if it all works out, my plan is to ride my red, white, and blue buffalo named Amendment off into the distance to live a quiet life on a farm somewhere.

1. No, sorry, I won’t link to it. Genuine apologies, but my real name is attached.

2. Fun fact, I was actually born on April Fool’s Day. Yes, I am aware I am not actually the King of America and that it’s “not a thing.”