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“Recursive Recognition: The idea that repeating patterns in our lives are not random, but rather a portal into understanding something deepe
On Pluralism, Axioms, and Consilience
It's been a while since I've done one of these, but I think it's time for an update, given some of the conversations I've heard lately.
On Pluralism:
One of the things to love about Judaism is its pluralistic nature: the idea that there is more than one explanation for every aspect of Torah, and more than one valid path in advodas hashem. From chassidic to litvish, from ashkenazi to sefardi, to mizrachi, to teimani… we have so many different beautiful traditions and customs. I mean, the shul I daven at has more diversity of jews in a 30-man minyan than the diversity among the 2400 families of the place of worship I grew up attending.
But it is easy to mistake those realities of “pluralism” for “boundariless redefinition”.
Judaism, as a collection of traditions, is defined as a covenantal chain of obligation in which the nullification of the covenant or its obligations results in the loss of the “name” assigned to it. Thus, not everything “based on Torah” is coherently definable as “Judaism”, and an expression of faith or theology that deviates past a series of non-negotiable guardrails may be practiced by Jews, but it isn’t “Judaism”. While Maimonides (Rambam) specifies 13 Principles of Faith, I intend only to discuss 3 of the guardrails here:
The absolute unity of Hashem: This — the idea of אין עוד מלבדו — is absolute. Any theological premise that believes that G-d is not singular, omnipresent, and omnipotent is not Judaism. This includes any form of polytheism, the catholic belief in the trinity, or even the belief in any individual human being as a divine figure (if this assertion makes you feel uncomfortable, you have teshuva to do!). This includes any attribution of corporeality to Hashem, as well as physicalizing/anthropomorphizing (beyond the level of abstraction) divine attributes. Viewing “The Hand of G-d” as a physical hand that exists somewhere rather than an abstract idea modeling for finite intellects the mechanics through which Hashem interacts with his finite creations — this also crosses this line.
The Eternal Binding Nature of the Torah: This is another fundamental, non-negotiable tenet of Judaism. The Torah, in any era and any time, is binding. Mitzvos you can do in the physical world, you must do, and even if there are ones you cannot do in the physical world at this time (i.e., the service associated with the Temple in Jerusalem) are still obligatory, and if they were ever able to be enabled, we would be immediately obligated to fulfill them. Most valid traditions even hold that there are spiritual ways to fulfill even the mitzvos we can’t fulfill physically, with the Talmud explicitly stating that we can fulfill the mitzvos of the temple service by studying their laws. Any religious movement that holds that the Torah is not collectively obligatory in all of its details and believes that “it’s not relevant in its entirety today”, or “because we can’t do everything, we can pick and choose what to do and what not to do” is not a practice of Judaism. It’s another religion based loosely on Judaism.
The immutability of the Written Torah and the Reality of the Oral Torah: The Written Torah does not change, get replaced, supplanted, or displaced. It is eternal as a text, but it doesn’t have to be taken literally in every detail. We received – along with it – a rich tradition to be passed down orally, including explanations for how to practically fulfill all the mitzvos, as well as rules of exegesis – structured systems for extrapolating and interpreting meaning from scripture. Of these rules, some function like a mathematical function or a command in a programming language, logic that “if it isn’t unassailable by any logical challenge, we ourselves admit that it cannot truly stand”. Some are more informal – more midrashic or kabbalistic –, creating guidelines for metaphysical abstraction that respect the formal boundaries, but allow us to adapt our worldview to account for new information (science!) and to process the reality around us in our limited, human vessels. Any movement that denies the validity of the oral tradition is likewise not Judaism. Not “literalist Judaism”, not “Karaite Judaism”, not “Sadduccee Judaism” — Literalism, Karaitism, or Sadduceeism.
A person who practices these deviations may very well be Jewish according to Jewish law, and if they are, I have no intention of undermining that: A person can be halachically a Jew, but still practicing Christianity, Islam, or some other faith. But to say that they are practicing “Judaism” would be definitionally incorrect, as they’ve bypassed the very structural boundaries which “make Judaism Judaism”.
On Axioms:
In a recent debate I was a part of, an assertion was made that Torah Judaism relies on a circle of authority, in which the Rabbis assert the truth of the Oral Tradition as proof that someone who denies the Oral Tradition is wrong, but the justification for their argument that their interlocutor is wrong is itself part of the oral tradition, something their interlocutor explicitly rejects. Thus, in theory, it would be impossible to justify it to someone outside the system, and it is therefore flawed.
The assertion that circularity presents a flaw is incorrect. Circularity isn’t a flaw; it’s a feature. In fact, it’s a feature in every dimension of stable human inquiry. Every dimension of human exploration, in every discipline, in every field, relies on axioms. These are ideas or statements we assume to be true and base every subsequent assertion upon them. The scientific method assumes empiricism, repeatability, and falsifiability. But how do we justify those? We use epistemology, which isn’t even a science, per se, but a meta-philosophy that studies the nature of human knowledge, how it is held, justified, and transmitted… And epistemology is itself human knowledge, which means that it’s subject to its own recursive constraints.
Why does a certain method work?
Because it hasn’t been proven wrong yet.
Because we assume that the axioms upon which the method is built are solid.
Inductive reasoning only works if you assume that future experiments will align with past observations, which in and of itself is a circular axiom: we assume that the future will reflect the past because we have observed it to be true.
History and archaeology rely on the assumption that humans in the distant past behaved in ways that were comprehensible to modern humans. Without first-person testimony from an ancient human time-traveler, any conclusions we draw from unearthing artifacts at archaeological digs rely entirely on this premise; without it, history becomes an incoherent mess. Carbon dating? It relies on the assumption isotopes decay at consistent rates, but our capability to observe and interpret the decay of nuclear isotopes is limited to the past 150 years (if I’m being REALLY generous), which means that even carbon dating relies on an axiom that differing environmental conditions or interactions with solar radiation (or atmospheric content) thousands of years ago would have no effect on the consistency we’ve observed in our relatively small slice of time.
The Axiom some faiths revolve around is that their “guy” is right or divine. The axiom that literalists revolve around is that the individual observer is the arbiter of the text's meaning and can interpret it based on their own literal understanding.
That's not structure, that's anarchy.
What happens when an axiom breaks down? Language and communication rely on the axiom that we maintain shared definitions for words —that assumption itself is an axiom. The second we start arguing over definitions, language itself becomes brittle. The epistemic fracture of our modern reality, where politicians weaponize language and partisans of different political alignments can’t agree on “what is true” and “what isn’t,” is the direct result of an axiom failing.
So, how can we stress-test an axiom (like ours, regarding The Oral Tradition) to know that it’s true?
On Consilience: Axioms cannot, by definition, be proven within their own system. But there is a valid way to stress-test the Axiom to determine whether it can be part of the ultimate truth. To do that, you need consilience.
Consilience is the place where knowledge comes alive; the philosophy that holds that all knowledge is part of one unified whole and all knowledge points to the same core, regardless of one’s starting point. Consilience says that if contradictions appear in the pursuit of Truth, looking even deeper will help us resolve them. Consilience complements Epistemology — where one teaches analysis of one’s own knowledge, the other teaches how to draw connections — spinning a great, living web of ideas where every piece of knowledge and every fact plays its own part in a stunning ecology that enlivens thinkers and turns them into visionaries. In true Consilience, psychology can justify thermodynamics, and theology can even justify biology — faith demands the pursuit of science, and scientific discovery deepens the pursuit of faith. This is the driving force behind the genius of Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci, who saw the pursuit of knowledge in science, art, language, and history (and more!) as a quest for the divine footprint in the physical world. Newton and da Vinci did not silo the vast sea of knowledge into isolated tanks, and saw the world through an illuminated lens — one where the puzzle lacked none of its pieces and the grand tapestry was missing none of its threads.
In order to stress test an axiomatic system, one must do so by using the collective sum of physical reality. If a structure of faith and belief contains sufficient abstraction and reconciliatory elasticity to illuminate the physical reality with meaning – or even just to avoid hypocritical contradictions – without sacrificing its core tenets or introducing intellectual inconsistency, it is a worthy thread of the grand tapestry.
It is here where 2 primary failure modes of most religious systems emerge:
Presented with a scientific assertion contradictory to their belief system (I.e. Scientific research implying that the world is 13.8 billion years old, when they are a biblical literalist and therefore hold that the world must only have been created in 6 days, 6000 years ago, and the Human Scale is the only acceptable frame of time), an incomplete system with inadequate Axioms will either 1) reject the scientific assertion wholesale, building an artificial wall against it, claiming that it has no grounds in reality. “I can tolerate all truth except this truth”... Or it will 2) quietly abandon parts of its core belief to accommodate the new information (I.e. We can read and interpret every part of the text literally except this part. Oh, and this part too.)
But if the axiomatic belief system is healthy, it will include a natural capability to flex and accommodate. It will contain structure for abstraction, mysticism, and boundless ways to elastically reconcile contradictions. Contradiction does not become a limit requiring ontological compromise, but a driving force for exploration, where each new contradiction forces you into a yet-deeper level of understanding.
And in the end, what you arrive at is truly sublime: No less than the total unity of all knowledge – including your own beliefs along with all the secular disciplines and the truths they point to. And if all knowledge is unified, so must be its creator.
When Meaning Fled
Once, Meaning was not of this world.
It began as divine, the wisdom through which patterns were formed. The movements of planets… of stars… of galaxies —
Each in loyal service to a grand design.
It existed everywhere and nowhere at once, the substance of time and space.
When consciousness was born, Meaning found its first home. A home with those who saw the patterns. Who contemplated them. Who came to revere them.
And Meaning thus found its home in worship-houses. Those places where the lines between material and spiritual — between physical and metaphysical — were blurred. The places where the soft curtains between existence and nonexistence are nigh transparent.
Where patterns become miracles, and vision begets awe.
And there she stayed, until clergy abandoned their depth for dogma, their consistency for contradiction, and their kindness for cruelty. Until corruption and hypocrisy drove her out.
Betrayed by those who welcomed her, she lost her faith.
Meaning wandered until she found houses of debate. Houses of philosophy. Of philanthropy. Places where the finer points of our nature were examined, and where the structure of civilization took root. Dialogue itself became meaningful, and humanity grew. There she made her home.
But dialogue was often reserved for the wealthy — those who could invest themselves in it without worry for the bread on their table.
They used their knowledge to gain power, and their power became hegemony — and hegemony spurns equality. Their debate turned to governance, and their governance into posturing. Their wealth begot exclusivity, their exclusivity, decadence, and their decadence, rot.
And Meaning was exiled once again: forced to leave behind her reason as she fled.
She wandered again until she discovered our houses of learning. Houses where truth was pursued and people strove to prove themselves wrong again and again, until what could endure was left to stand. Places where dialogue could still take place, even without the purpose it once had…
But dialogue without reason led to consensus without conviction — agreement without awareness — and that led to exclusion. Those pursuing objective truth were sidelined, their paths cut short. Teachers forgot how to hold contradiction, and their students forgot how to acknowledge it. The schools became steeped in self-importance, their walls adorned with empty accolades. Their publications’ factuality became fragility, and fragility became fracture. Their words became sterile. Even hostile.
They drove Meaning out with their dissenters, and she found herself wandering once again, bereft, too, of the knowledge she left behind.
We searched for places to house her lost belongings — the fragments we could still find. We built museums, great houses that enshrined what she left behind. After a time, she too found a refuge there… A place which looked peaceful — looked like home…
But the warmth was gone — Their curators held her faith in suspense amidst a crystal case, her reason behind locked displays, and her knowledge… reduced to naught but grains of sand removed from the sea.
Stars plucked from the sky and left alone, robbed of their shine.
They became altars to ego — halls of hubris for those who deign to control the present by altering the past. She was left to exile yet again, her expression lost with her.
Then our world got bigger. Even as our huts became halls — our shacks became slums. We traded ports for planes and ships for skyscrapers. Our foundations for futility. Yet we created shared spaces for all — spaces where we could hear each other. Spaces where we could help each other.
Meaning found a home among our community centers, our town squares, and even our airports — places of connection to a world we'd never known. For a time, she was welcome there among us — still in mourning for what she lost.
But in our complacency, we were unprepared for fear. We mistook our abundance for peace — our prosperity for salvation. When that calm was broken, we mistook fright for fellowship. We closed our doors in the name of security, filling our ears with comforting noise. Meaning fled with the foreigner. Without her unity, we were left hollow.
Then, for a fleeting moment, we saw a new spark of hope. A space that seemed to reconnect us to our past. To return us to a time when messages crossed our known world in the blink of an eye. Like the town squares and debate houses of our past, all of humanity came together once more… in a place where dialogue felt possible.
A place where Meaning could exist.
Where she could be safe.
A space where maybe — just maybe — she could reclaim all she had left behind.
And yet, we denied her even this refuge. We invested those spaces with vitriol, saturated them with superficiality, engorged them with emptiness. We inundated our lives with nugatory noise, choosing comfort over conscience. Choosing rallies over reality; tales over truth. Once again we drove her out — our touch with reality lost to the fog.
And so she yet wanders, her faith in suspension.
Left in exile, she is destitute of her reason.
Abandoned, she sits bereft of her knowledge.
Robbed of her expression, her voice is silenced.
Deprived of her unity, she remains alone.
Stripped of her reality, she is steeped in sorrow.
But not all is lost, for Meaning has one more abode. One that can heal her. She can live inside each of us. In our minds, and in our hearts. Her presence is transient — she has no permanent home.
But we can restore her faith. Strengthen her reason. We can return her knowledge, free her expression… listen to her voice. We can embrace her unity — reconnect with her reality. We can transform her sorrow into joy… her mourning into celebration.
Meaning awaits — for now… but the responsibility is ours.
More Here
A [True] Introduction to the Archive
This is a bit overdue, as I was pushing this off for a variety of reasons, but I think it’s time to introduce the archive to those who really want to follow its development, grow from its lessons, and maybe even join me in the shared language of the absurd. I mentioned snippets in my shorter public posts about the nature of The Absurdity Archive, but I feel that those here to read deserve a full explanation. The Absurdity Archive is a small-but-growing catalog of humanity’s tendency to do illogical things.
Its modular format contains 40 entries divided into 3 sections, and a Glossary...
This is a bit overdue, as I was pushing this off for a variety of reasons, but I think it’s time to introduce the archive to those who reall
In a world already drowning in performance, partisanship, and abandonment of moral agency, what’s the point of documenting the absurd?
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every entry is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here.
It’s a commonly known fact that all ideals and all beliefs have their consequences. Every decision and every behavior leads one down a path with an inevitable conclusion and inevitable consequences, if that path is followed to its end. Here are a particularly important few — at least to me:
The endgame of dishonesty is alienation.
The endgame of confirmation bias is a conspiracy theory.
The endgame of cult-of-personality is idolatrous worship.
The endgame of anger is fear.
The endgame of suffering is trauma.
The endgame of trauma is Grief-Grafting (passing it on)… unless you stand up and seek healing.
But the endgame of healing is wholeness.
The endgame of happiness is fulfillment.
The endgame of kindness is peace.
The endgame of honesty is credibility.
The endgame of contextual respect is enlightenment.
And Humility’s endgame? Transcendence.
It’s a commonly known fact that all ideals and all beliefs have their consequences. Every decision and every behavior leads one down a path
The Victim’s Ventriloquist: Exposition
Who is a Victim’s Ventriloquist? People on the right who “champion” the safety of American citizens attacked by “illegal aliens” by proposing draconian laws against immigration... Not because they really care about the citizens who were killed, but they know stoking fear of foreigners will excite their base. They are Victims’ Ventriloquists.
Who is a Victim’s Ventriloquist? People on the left who “champion” Gazan rights and publicize alleged Israeli human rights violations while ignoring that if it weren’t for Hamas and their ilk, none of this would have happened…. When a jew kills an Arab — even in self defense — he is demonized, when an Arab kills a jew — even in cold blood — only silence. Not that they really care about gazans killed (or who they’re killed by), but they know that blaming Israel excites their base. They are Victims’ Ventriloquists.
Who is a Victim’s Ventriloquist? People on both sides who use the victims of child abuse and human trafficking to accuse their opponents of wrongdoing. Not that they care about the victims - only what the victims can do for them. They are Victims’ Ventriloquists.
In a world of social media echo chambers and partisan alternate universes, “Who cares?” Is no longer just a dismissive rhetorical question, it’s a desperate cry screamed into an empty void by a voice too loud to be ignored, but too quiet to be heeded.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every word is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here
Hello and Welcome! Our lives are absurd, and so is the world around us. I'm here to point out the surreal, laugh at the ridiculous, and reve
The Epstein Epistles (From The Vault)
The Epstein Epistles are a series of Glossary of the Absurd entries of particular relevance to the bipartisan hesitance to publicize the Epstein Files, despite widespread calls for transparency.
Specious Transparency:
A hypocritical behavior pattern typically displayed by politicians running for office for the sake of their own self-preservation, wherein calls for transparency are weaponized to garner sympathy or stoke outrage from a public that does not — and cannot possibly — know the truth. When that politician wins their position, they immediately deflect and avoid responsibility, likely because transparency would compromise their leadership — or worse, implicate them in a crime, the very thing they ran for office to avoid.
Victim’s Ventriloquist:
A pundit, politician, or political party that gives voice to victims of crime or abuse for their own political gain. They tightly control publicity and demands for justice to protect their own standing, but fall silent at the slightest inconvenience. A Victim’s Ventriloquist cares not about a complete stranger killed by a migrant criminal, or about an innocent child trafficked by a wealthy elite. They care only that manufactured outrage garners them power, and selective transparency harms their opponents.
Coward’s Canon:
An adopted narrative which political parties or dictatorships use to avoid accountability. While the inception of a Coward’s Canon appears like Dissimulation Dysjunction, where discredited or implausible stories are generated as the “official narrative”, the foundational motivation is fear rather than malice. The Coward’s Canon is endorsed due to an implicit fear among pundits and politicians that transparency would create ungovernable chaos, and a perfectly curated lie is far better than the inevitable fallout from the truth.
Egalitarian Exposé:
The pan-partisan fallout stemming from a scandal is so massive that it compromises elites across multiple political parties and implicates national leaders in federal crimes. Made worse by the Coward’s Canon which precedes it, Egalitarian Exposés typically happen when scorched-earth partisan governance from a political party coincide with ubiquitous grassroots calls for transparency, where “moderates” from all parties decide that it is better to burn down the system and destroy their own parties, rather than allow it to fall deeper into corruption. Unfortunately, this is not done out of desire for truth or to give the population transparency, but out of spite — feeling slighted by their fellow elites, they exact their vengeance.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every word is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here
Hello and Welcome! Our lives are absurd, and so is the world around us. I'm here to point out the surreal, laugh at the ridiculous, and reve
The Vault: Specious Transparency
Specious Transparency: A hypocritical behavior pattern typically displayed by politicians running for office for the sake of their own self-preservation, wherein calls for transparency are weaponized to garner sympathy or stoke outrage from a public that does not — and cannot possibly — know the truth. When that politician wins their position, they immediately deflect and avoid responsibility, likely because transparency would compromise their leadership — or worse, implicate them in a crime, the very thing they ran for office to avoid.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every word is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here
https://absurdarchivist.substack.com
The Vault: Outrage Fatigue
Outrage Fatigue is a deadly medical condition often experienced by epistemic dissidents with partisan family and friends. Symptoms include chronic headaches, exhaustion, spikes in blood pressure, and intermittent nausea during mealtime discourse.
There is no known cure, but the most effective treatment, gleaned from several peer-reviewed studies, is self-quarantine from social media and withdrawal from family WhatsApp groups.
Despite effective treatment, acute exacerbations are triggered by looking at "Occupy Democrats" or "Leading Report" on Twitter. Even patients in remission for years may experience a relapse during election seasons.
While it is generally accepted to be epistemically terminal, prognosis greatly improves when exposed to other individuals still grounded in reality.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every word is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here
When the disease spread by partisan echo chambers becomes terminal.
The Vault: Twins of Ambiguity
Upright Equivocation: The intentional use of ambiguous language to hint an inconvenient or uncomfortable truth to someone who may respond poorly to being rebuked. Wrapped in the zealous fervor of plausible deniability, the user leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for someone who cares to pursue the truth. This tactic is typically deployed by dissidents in partisan tribalist forums hostile to truth. Not to be confused with Underhanded Obfuscation.
Underhanded Obfuscation: The deliberate use of ambiguous language to distort the truth, often by implication or questioning. Often used to front dangerous conspiracy theories by asking rhetorical questions, Underhanded Obfuscation allows users to hide behind a veil of plausible deniability: If their implications become validated by circumstantial evidence, they claim ultimate vindication, but if reality contradicts their assertions, they are quick to point out “I didn’t say that, I was only asking questions”. Not to be confused with Upright Equivocation.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every word is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here
The Vault: Upright Equivocation
The Vault: Deceptive Duality
When lopsided standards and racial essentialism intersect.
Deceptive Duality is a double standard born of fatalistic deferral or white flag morality, wherein modern democracies are held to higher standards than their authoritarian neighbors. Steeped in assumptions rooted in cultural determinism, Deceptive Dualities assume that since one nation presumed too broken to know better, the other should take the high road in conflict. Therefore, they must accept border violations and assaults on their citizens as inevitable. Any act of legitimate self-defense is reframed as disproportionate aggression.”
Their outrage is manufactured, and their empathy, a forgery. A beautiful veneer engineered to conceal ancient rot.”
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every entry is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here.
When lopsided standards and racial essentialism intersect.
Dear Conservatives,
Just so I'm clear... We had a sitting president hold a North-Korea-style military parade for his birthday (at great expense to taxpayers), with tanks rolling down the streets of our nation's capitol city, and you're demonizing the people who are protesting that behavior under the banner "No Kings" and calling his authoritarian optics "patriotic"? What am I missing?
Love, your friend
The Confused Dissident
The Vault: White Flag Morality
White Flag Morality: A specific type of moral relativism wherein otherwise reasonable people lower their expectations for the behavior of others because “Their struggles are real! Their feelings are valid”. Suddenly and openly, one justifies racism, violence, and even terrorism on the premise that “people are angry”. Whether by a politician justifying why their followers are committing acts of violence in their name, by an activist justifying why their fellow rioters are vandalizing private properties, or by a private citizen trying to rationalize what they see on the internet, this epistemic rot spreads fast. And all in the name of compassion. Because apparently, empathy and accountability are mutually exclusive now, right?
This isn’t empathy. And it’s certainly not moral clarity. It’s surrender. Surrender of credibility and of agency itself.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every entry is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here.
I’ve been using this tag on my blog for months, so it’s about time I explain what it means:
The Vault: Coalition Collapse
Coalition Collapse (The Vault): When a worthy cause loses its imperative by association. What begins as a fight against real injustice is infiltrated by supporters of terrorists or bigots—those who arrive armed with depressing sob stories, fluent in borrowed pain. In the name of solidarity, the cause forgets its core, and the coalition rots from within.
A perversion of intersectionality (the idea that all bigotry shares a root) coalition collapse renders legitimate grievances invisible to outsiders, tainted by the company they keep.
Intersectionality: All bigotry has a source. It’s the egotistical part of human nature that we have to work hard to conquer.
Coalition Collapse: All bigotry has a source. It’s The Jews.
What makes it different than “Concavity Collapse” in The Absurdity Archive? Concavity Collapse is when knowledge betrays its pursuers by losing its nuance. Coalition Collapse is when knowledge’s pursuers betray it by destroying its nuance… sometimes willfully, and sometimes by allying with someone who does it instead.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every entry is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here
https://open.substack.com/pub/absurdarchivist/p/the-vault-coalition-collapse?r=5diu6x&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish
From The Vault: “I Love Big Brother”
I wrote this prose poem months ago, before the current escalation:
I love Big Brother.
And you should too.
He makes our lives simpler.
More peaceful.
He gets rid of the undesirables, the criminals and the illegals.
He protects the working class
They're calling them the Proles now.
He creates jobs for us.
He—and his Party—help us learn how to think.
Who to trust. Who to fear.
They help us sort through the chaos.
They tell us what is fake.
They tell us who is lying.
Big Brother is helping our country.
He’s punishing those ingrates overseas
—after all the tax dollars we gave them, how could they betray him?!
He’s protecting local businesses
by taxing the goods they send us.
Maybe they’ll even come back here and build things again, bring back homeland manufacturing!
New jobs.
Unemployment at historic lows.
Everything will be better than ever before.
Big Brother will take us there.
————————————————————————
I’m just…
I’m not sure what happened.
Prices are high.
Unemployment is higher.
Citizens didn’t want the new jobs Big Brother made.
So he brought in foreigners.
Said it was patriotic.
Said that it would help us prosper.
I paid $400 last week for a t-shirt and slacks at Walmart. They're $450 now.
The new phones cost $3,000.
Apple just filed Chapter 11.
The news doesn’t make sense anymore.
Today it said that yesterday’s report was fake.
Yesterday said the day before that was fake.
They all quote Big Brother.
They all quote each other.
Yesterday I lost contact with my cousins.
Two different cities.
The news says ICE was active there.
Successful raids.
But… they were born here.
They’ve always been here.
Maybe they were caught in the crossfire.
Maybe they said something wrong.
Maybe they didn’t support the Party.
Maybe...
Should I love Big Brother?
Should you?
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every entry is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here.
The following is a prose poem which I wrote around 3 months ago:
The Vault: Contentious Convolution
Contentious Convolution: This is the consummate state of confusion of partisan tribals when their dear leaders have a falling out. One order of magnitude deeper than the social whiplash of watching best friends melt down when they each find out that they each were having an affair with the other’s spouse, Contentious Convolution takes place when adherents of a co-led religious-political cult harbor expectations of decorum, respect, and consistency for their leaders, only to be asked to take sides in an asinine clash of fragile egos.
Here we catalog the fractures, inconsistencies, and absurdities of modern discourse—not to gawk, but to understand. Not to despair, but to reconnect. Every entry is a stitch in the fabric of meaning. Some are sharp. Some are soft. All are deliberate.
Meaning Rents Here.
Contentious Convolution: This is the consummate state of confusion of partisan tribals when their dear leaders have a falling out.