WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Servant Limestone]

Posted by rgray222 (here)
I had to read your post twice: the first time, I found it somewhat off-putting; the second time, I actually agreed with much of what you wrote. Let me explain. The first time around, it appeared that your worldview was anchored to Marxism, but the second time around I understood that your view incorporates various left-wing traditions, such as anarchism, libertarian socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism and the flavor-of-the-day Democratic Socialism, without limiting its understanding to Marxism alone. If I am reading you correctly, we both believe that meaningful change begins with each person, and once enough people understand this, we will reach a tipping point where positive transformation happens naturally across the world. I find labels like Marxist, Imperialist, Capitalist and activist to be confusing and somewhat off-putting. Labels divide people and create an environment where unity becomes impossible. They often lead to misunderstandings and prevent collaboration, making it almost unattainable to find common ground. I believe unity is the key to unlocking necessary change, and oddly enough, that unity can be found through people taking personal responsibility.
I enjoyed your post.

Thanks for engaging with my work. I deeply appreciate that you enjoyed it.

To summarize: I started with the Left, stayed with it and justified my understanding of Wade's work in leftist terms for quite some time. Then, over the last few years, I effectively went through Marx(ism) and came out on the other side. So I got out of the Left through Marx(ism) telling me that I should get out of the Left. Wade pointed me in that direction before. But it took Marx (and some of his "followers") to spell it out again for me. So, in a strange way, I am now more Marxist than I've ever been before, and yet precisely because of that, I cannot be a Marxist. I’m closer to Marx than ever as an analyst, and further from Marxism than ever in terms of politics. There’s an old line from the left communist tradition that I’ve always found useful: they insist they are communists, not leftists. Their point is that those that came from “the Left” remain trapped inside the existing order’s assumptions about power and politics. It's why the Left always play the rigged games of mass movement politics and electoralism, which the left communists abstain from.

I don’t fully share their framework, but I do share that impulse to step outside “Left” as a label in order to aim at something deeper.

At the end of the day, Marxism is just an analytical instrument or tool that I'm utilizing for a wider goal, which happens to be aligned with Marxism's deepest intuitions. I'm only using the term "Marxism" the same way that left communists continue to use the terminology: as the name for a certain way of seeing history that emerged with the rise of the industrial working class, not as a personal identity or a closed doctrine. It is just the same way biologists use the term "Darwinian" or "Darwinist". But the label itself is a distraction. It becomes an identity badge that you adopt or reject. I don't want that.

There is a reason my Substack is called The Free Energy Communi-zer, not Communi-st. However, I am not in a position to avoid adopting Marxism and to conceal my worldview and framework that I am using, just because Project Avalon is dominated by those with right-leaning and "conspiracist" perspectives. Besides, my target audience for my Substack is different.

Marxism, in my opinion, also cannot be flattened and be treated the same as all the other ideologies from a Fourth Epoch understanding. To clarify, I’m not trying to rescue some “good” Left from a “bad” Right, or to suggest that apolitical centrism is the answer. Most of what passes for centrism or "anti-politics" or "apolitical" is just another way of defending the Fourth Epoch status quo. It avoids "labels" but still accepts scarcity, empire and institutional power as givens. So for this specific purpose, “left,” “right” and “center” or even "no labels" can become different ways of staying inside the same box.

Maybe the labels that I continue to use can be "distracting", but the framework that I am using shouldn't be.

Most of those other political frameworks that I've discovered never even come close to glimpsing what Wade calls the Fifth Epoch. They don't have the language. And that means 99.9 percent of the Left and 100 percent of the Right is not useful in this. I'd be happy to be wrong about that, but Wade's experiences (and mine) keep pointing in that direction.

My own expertise is not with the Right; it's with the Left. I spent a long time inside it and I understand its hopes and its traps. So part of what I’m trying to do now is to speak to radical left-wing people in a language they recognize, use that language to show them its limits, and then help them step beyond it toward the kind of inner and outer work Wade is pointing to.

I appreciate that you picked up that I’m not trying to stay inside the label game but I'm not sure if we share the same reasoning why, so I have to explain. The key is that every political identity badge, even the ones that once helped us make sense of the world, eventually starts to limit what we can see and who we can work with. At some point it becomes more important to just let the badge go than to defend it, or to quietly rename it while still holding onto the same underlying identity.

Thanks and much love,
Serg

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Serg:

As I look back at my journey, a central focus was a search for truth. I was raised to be a scientist, and I think that it helped me see through the ideologies, all of them. I was lied to nearly from the cradle, it continued in college and in my early career, before I met Dennis Lee. But like Brian O’Leary, I had paranormal experiences from a young age, and I knew that materialism was just another religion erected on a false foundation. After my radicalizing days with Dennis, I began my days of study, and one of the first things I did was study why the media lied like it did. That is where Ed Herman’s scientific approach came in very handy.

I was a budding comprehensivist but did not know it, until one of Bucky Fuller’s pupils called me that. After reading some of Fuller’s work, the lightbulb finally came on for me, and my work has been consciously comprehensive ever since.

From what I know of Marx’s work, it seems that he took a scientific approach. In one book that I read, the author said that since Marx’s passing, the social sciences have largely been in a dialogue with his ghost. That Marx did it before there was a science of energy was amazing. Marx’s greatest failing, and virtually all political theorists do this, was to use his work to justify violence. Violence is the ultimate expression of the victim, and while everybody sees themselves as victims rather than creators, they will always invoke rationales for violence and engage in the grim cycles of karma.

Eliminate scarcity and it eliminates the root of all violence. It is that simple, and only one thing can do that. But almost nobody on Earth understands, in their egocentric vying for survival, wrapping their minds around the scarcity-based brainwashing of their choice and staying trapped there for their entire lives, as they temporarily sate their addictions. Breaking out of the scarcity mindset is the key to understanding my work. All political stripes are about reshuffling the deck of scarcity (usually in their favor), so they don’t address the root issue. As you noted, they assume it and the basic societal structure that sits on it. One reason why I divided the human journey into Epochs was to make clear how each was based on its energy practices. In that way, I am like Marx.

So, another political philosophy is not what is needed, and you know how I feel about what I call retail politics. It is a Band-Aid at best.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

It has been challenging to decide how to present this material on my family and the Kansas days. I have tried to make this series of posts in the chronological order that they happened, but I heard about many of the Kansas events late in my grandfather Rees’s life, and my trip to Kansas with him and my aunt happened in 1994, soon after my grandmother died. Rees, died two years later. I took my aunt to Kansas in 2011, two years after her husband, who introduced me to hiking, died. A lot of my Kansas lore came from those trips, so I am going to discuss them in this post.

I met them at the Denver airport, as they came from Seattle and I came from Ohio. My aunt rented a van, which can be seen in that picture that I attached to this post. As I drove across the plains into Kansas, Rees told me to take a highway exit, and we drove for many miles on dirt roads, as he navigated the turns. I had no idea where we were going until we pulled into some kind of park, which was the site of what is called the Battle of Beecher Island. That battle happened in the summer of 1868, only a few months before Custer’s troops slaughtered Black Kettle, which I mentioned in the previous post.

My grandfather was stooped in that picture at the cemetery, which was taken the day after our trip began. When we visited that battleground, Rees became quite animated as he described the battle, which happened nearly 40 years before he was born. It obviously was a legendary place in his youth. For one of the many incredible “coincidences” in my life, which I have little doubt were orchestrated by my otherworldly “friends,” I had already read about that battle in Ralph Andrist’s The Long Death. It was just part of my days of study, and it had nothing to do with family lore. That battlefield was about 60 miles from Wallace, where that Indian-hunting expedition originated, which was likely why Rees knew much about it.

Like Custer several years later at the Little Bighorn, that Indian-killing expedition found more than it bargained for. The Indians pinned down the expedition as white men hid behind their dead horses. Andrist didn’t even present a number of Indians who died in the battle, but the exhibit at the battleground estimated 80 Indian dead, while the five dead white guys had monuments at the battleground. The exhibit at the battleground had an account of the mournful cries coming from Indian women on the hill above the battleground, as their men were killed in the battle.

It might have been that afternoon when we visited the cemetery in Plainville, where Rees visited the grave of his identical twin brother, who died as an infant. He joked that maybe they could not tell which child died, so that perhaps he was the dead one. There were many graves of my family at that cemetery, a fair number were of those who died as children.

That day, a storm came through that spawned a tornado or two, which was standard for Kansas in May. I had already lived through storms in Ohio that brought tornadoes, and they are scary storms to be in.

The next day we visited a relative in nearby Codell, who lost her home from the floods that also flooded the Mississippi the previous year. Codell’s claim to fame was making Ripley’s Believe It or Not for having a tornado on May 20 for three years in a row. Codell never recovered from the 1918 tornado, and its population in 2020 was 49. Plainville is a drab, dusty town of less than 2,000 people, but it is the “metropolis” of the area.

My grandparents would not acknowledge my wife until I married her. They considered it scandalous that we lived together for two years before getting married. Rees “dished” to me that the relative that we visited (the only living relative in the area, I believe) had a child out of wedlock. That was a mini-scandal to him. I will return to this topic later.

That day, we also visited the Chalk Mound Cemetery, which I wrote about. We also visited the nearby Shiloh Cemetery, where Rees’s grandfather Sam was buried, who died in the Dust Bowl. Quite a few family members were buried at Shiloh.

We also tried to find where Rees lived as a child, maybe even the sod hut that I had heard about, but the location had become part of a farm and there was no trace of it.
We then visited the nearby homestead depicted in that picture in the previous post. Somebody lived there, but it was classic in its dilapidation. There were several rusting car skeletons near the disheveled house, with dogs and chickens wandering around, and a man came out to greet us. He didn’t have many teeth left, but he was friendly enough. I later heard from my aunt that Rees wanted to buy the place and turn it into a nature preserve, but he didn’t.

We all shared a hotel room in Plainville, and the plan was to go to Wallace the next day, but Rees became sick, so sick that he was evacuated to a hospital in Hays, where I flew back to Ohio from. The day that Rees was too ill to travel, I drove the dirt roads to find those cemeteries again. Kansas is surely its prettiest in May, with the green rolling hills. I found the Shiloh cemetery and sat on Sam’s gravestone, looking across the plains and thinking about his life. I also thought about what it was like before white people arrived. I had a long prayer-meditation at Sam’s grave that left me happy and thoughtful. My visit to Wayne’s grave nearly 20 years later, combined with that visit at Sam’s grave, has given me an unexpected appreciation for visiting graves. Both men died with ruined lives, but there was something blessed about those visits.

In 2011, I took my aunt for her last visit to Kansas. Once again, it was tornado weather. While we were there, a tornado ravaged Joplin, Missouri. Our flight out of Denver was nearly canceled because of the weather that day. We visited all of the Plainville cemeteries, and I reproduced the photo that I took of Rees in 1994, as my aunt opened the same gate. Attached is my aunt opening that same gate, 17 years later. I also attached a picture of the stormy clouds from that day. The storm that hit Joplin was a few days later.

We then drove to Sharon Springs, where we stayed at the bed and breakfast that was originally the church where my grandparents were secretly married. My aunt found a relative that we visited at a retirement facility, and we visited Wallace. We visited the Fort Wallace museum, which kind of doubled as a natural history museum.

The Great Plains were once the bed of an inland sea, when dinosaurs roamed Earth. That is why Kansas is so flat. Also, the ice sheets of this ice age had a lot to do with creating the soils of the plains, as ice sheets grind up the bedrock. The ice sheets barely touched today’s Kansas, but they largely made Kansas’s topsoil, which has been rapidly disappearing with the farming methods of white people. Another impact in Kansas has also been a global issue: drawing down the water table. The ice age aquifer under Wallace has largely been sucked dry, and farming was dying around Wallace when we visited. In 2013, a huge sinkhole opened near Sharon Springs, and in 2022, Sharon Springs was visited by a tornado. In 2020, the population of Wallace was 41. Wallace was largely a ghost town when we visited, and part of the decay was something that I had not heard of before. My aunt pointed out a house that she visited as a child. It stood there, abandoned. It looked like a livable house, but nobody had lived there for many years. There was no vandalism, but homes just slowly collapsed on the prairie. The river that Rees played in as a child was a dry ditch when we visited.

My grandfather was a poet of international reputation, and he was likely where I got my brains from. In his later years, he admitted the awesome crime that whites committed against the Indians, and he described his ancestors as a bunch of “horse thieves.” My aunt also realized what a crime had been committed. She read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, for instance. Just like the Spanish, American “settlers” were accomplished rapists of Indian women.

I mentioned Sand Creek to Rees once, and he ironically responded with something like, “Wasn’t that glorious?” The “settlers” had a uniform exterminationist mentality toward the Indians, which can be seen in the newspapers of the day.

I’ll end my recounting of the Kansas days with a final observation from Rees. When he finished one of his stories of his Kansas days, with a trenchant observation, I replied with, “Ah Grandpa, the good old days!” He replied with, “I don’t know what was good about them.”

The crime of “settling” North America aside, pre-industrial life was grim, everywhere. No society in which half of its children died can be romanticized. There were no “good old days.” In her last years, I told my aunt of the awesome changes that she had seen in her lifetime, and she agreed. Energy-powered machines made it all possible.

My First Epoch of the human journey, of becoming human, lasted for more than three million years, from the first crafted stone tools to the arrival of behaviorally modern humans. The changes over that Epoch would not have been noticeable in a lifetime. Similarly, when Homo sapiens conquered Earth in the Second Epoch, which lasted about 50,000 years, any cultural changes would have also been unnoticeable in a lifetime. Even the extermination of the megafauna and all other human species would not have been realized by any human of the time. They rarely saw or thought beyond the next valley.

Even in the Third Epoch, which lasted about 12,000 years, and most of humanity still has at least one foot in it, especially before the rise of civilization, the basics of subsistence and the resultant cultures changed at a glacial pace and would not have been noticeable. The rise of civilization began to accelerate the changes, but still, the basics did not change much. Until only a few centuries ago, all societies had at least 80% of their members involved with subsistence. In the hunter-gatherer Epoch, it was about 100% of its adults.

Europe’s rise to global dominance inflicted great chaos to the world’s people and the greatest demographic catastrophes in the human journey. That conquest was fueled by exploiting energy resources like never before, and fossil fuels above all others. It was a quantum leap in energy capture. I am richer than Europe’s richest man of three centuries ago, and the machines that I rely on perform feats that were unimaginable only a few centuries earlier.

My grandfather was born in world where he traveled by horseback, dying young was typical, and he lived in a dirt hut as a child. His son helped put men on the Moon, and his son is trying to initiate the next Epoch. That is three Epochs in three lifetimes. Nothing remotely like it has been experienced before in the human journey.

Only because of industrialization is my society as humane and gentle as it is, even with our awesome imperial crimes that seem never ending, even though my nation is the most violent industrial nation. It is only the latest phase of a trend that began over three million years ago.

That my grandparents could never accept that men and women could live together before getting married in the 1980s, if they ever did, was normal. I was raised in an intensely racist environment (in history’s most racist nation) and I will always be getting over that. The various insanities that parade through our culture today, such as the Trans Craze, I see as partly due to the pace of change in our societies, complemented by the constant hum of scarcity. It is not easy to become a truly sentient species.

My studies since 1989 have greatly helped me put it all in perspective, and I have become far more sympathetic to the daily outrages that I see. People are ill-equipped for the pace of change in today’s world, and fantasizing about “good old days” that never existed is a natural reaction. We are animals, after all, trying to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity, and few of us ever awaken past the in-group indoctrination and conditioning that we received while young. Few people in the human journey ever have. That is part of what makes my task so difficult, even without the organized suppression.

With the above discussion, I am getting to the point of this series of posts. It was what I learned about my family’s past (and a lot more is coming), and what anybody could learn about their ancestry. My studies made so much of what I encountered understandable, in ways that I would not have realized without those studies.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

As previously discussed, my father’s family moved to Bellingham, Washington, in late 1935, and my father was born the next spring, underweight and with rickets, as his mother was likely poorly nourished, if not starving. They initially lived on a farm in nearby Ferndale. My father never got more than 10 miles from where he was born until he was 16. My grandfather, Rees, walked the streets of Bellingham, looking for work. My father paid for all the clothing that he wore from age six onward. He raised rabbits for their meat and fur, but he eventually could not do that to animals any longer and stopped that practice.

I have discussed the brutality of the past, and one of its manifestations was how Rees treated my father. Rees broke my father’s skull with his beatings. Beating one’s children was normal for the times. I discussed my family’s Quaker past. In general, Quakers did not beat their children, were early Abolitionists, and were pacifists. But by the 20^th century, that had waned among many Quaker descendants. Smedley Butler had a Quaker heritage, and when World War II began, Rees enlisted at age 35 and became a Seabee. He had five children with a sixth on the way, and his wife had to sign a release to let him serve. Here is a picture of him on leave in 1943, before being shipped out to the South Pacific, with his youngest child, who died last year.

Rees was in the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal, and nearly died a few times. Like all soldiers who have actually been in combat, Rees rarely talked about his wartime experiences. When I lived with him, he said that black American soldiers were treated like the lowest caste, and that fellow soldiers adorned their quarters with Japanese skulls and other “memorabilia.” Several years later, I read the works of Paul Fussell and Eugene Sledge, early in my days of study, and gained a greater appreciation of what Rees lived through. He came back from the war an emotional wreck. My college roommate Robert’s father was also in the South Pacific, while my wife’s father flew “The Hump” over the Himalayas. Both men were lucky to survive the war. My father-in-law’s entire crew died except for him. He got a head injury when his plane nearly crashed (which I discuss in the accompanying video), so he was not on the fatal mission a couple of weeks later. My other grandfather should not have survived World War I, which I will discuss in a future post. All of those men returned home as either emotional or physical cripples, including my father, who was in Korea in the 1950s.

When Rees returned from the war, he lived in Alaska for years, as that was where the jobs were. My father generally enjoyed life when Rees was not around. By age 16, my father paid rent to his father. Part of the family lore of the days in World War II was that a dime was lost. They turned the family farm upside down to try finding that dime. Its loss meant that the family went without something that month.

When I visited Washington every year as a child, coming up from California, the people there exemplified “lily white,” as everybody was so pale, and there were very few non-whites there. Not only did my father never get more than ten miles from where he was born until he was 16, he did not see his first black man until he was 16. He was a train passenger who stretched his legs at the train station during a stop.

Until the rise of companies such as Microsoft and Amazon, the Seattle area was lily white, and I didn’t think too much about it, figuring that blacks found the Pacific Northwest too cold. Only in recent years did I discover that racism was a big reason for that lily whiteness. As I mentioned earlier, Washington was about the least genocidal of the states that were “settled” by whites, but one reason why I did not see non-whites was because they were run out of the state long ago. In 1907, race riots, mainly against immigrants from India, swept Washington. A decade later, there was a shootout in nearby Everett over unionizing the workers. There is a monument in Bellingham to commemorate the 1907 race riot. No wonder my father never saw a black man until he was 16.

Once I looked into it, it turned out that that racism may not have played that big a part of why Seattle seemed lily white when I was young. Seattle was relatively progressive for the times, although certainly not a black paradise, and I did not live where Seattle’s blacks did. They did kind of live in a ghetto, which is the poor part of Seattle today that I avoid. But that historic racism is still largely buried in the popular culture. My uncle who introduced me to hiking told me that in the nearby mountains is a place called China Cliff. Chinese immigrants built a lot of the Western USA’s railroads in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and my uncle said that China Cliff was where hundreds of coolies that built railroads were killed because killing them was cheaper than paying them, so they were pushed off of a cliff. While there is plenty to be found on the Chinese in the Pacific Northwest, including mass murders, I still have never seen any mention of China Cliff and I don’t know where it is.

In his senior year of high school, my father scored the highest score on the state math test in Western Washington, and he was offered a full-ride scholarship to the University of Washington. Back then, a man did not reach legal emancipation until age 21, and my grandfather inflicted his last act of petty tyranny on my father. He forbade my father to accept that scholarship, as the local college was good enough for my father. While Rees could prevent my father from attending the University of Washington, what he could not prevent my father from doing was joining the Marine Corps, and that was how my father escaped home. My mother was in the process of flunking out of the local college and had been casually dating my father (they first met when my father was six, as she was his older sister’s classmate, and my father worked in my mother’s family store as a teenager), and my mother essentially ran away with him to California. Late in her life, long after her divorce from my father, my mother admitted that my father was such an emotional wreck when he came back from Korea that she should have ended the marriage then, but they moved to Seattle, as my father was finally able to attend the University of Washington, and they had me in their first year in Seattle.

In the Seabees, Rees painted (his rank was “First Class Painter”). In the 1950s, he became the president of Seattle’s painter’s union and moved to Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, where some of my earliest memories are from.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

I have some more anecdotes about my father’s family to relate, and then I will try to square it with my studies. That poor rural white arm of my family was a big part of my upbringing, and little of it was good.

That aunt that I twice traveled to Kansas with never learned to swim. I do not know anybody from my generation who did not learn to swim. My next-door neighbor’s mother when I grew up in Ventura was illiterate. She was born the Deep South in the early 20^th century, and she is the only able-brained adult that I ever met who was illiterate. She was nice enough, but I remember thinking that she had some unfathomable affliction.

America’s poor have always been the cannon fodder for American wars. As I discussed regarding my Bakersfield relatives, almost none from my generation graduated from high school, the girls were nearly all pregnant by age 15, the boys generally became criminals who went to prison, and the best of them went into the military. The father of the family that I spent a summer with as a teenager was beaten to death outside a pool hall by either the Bloods or Crips, for dealing drugs on their turf.

I have a close relative in the Air Force, and he served with the other branches at times. The poor rural ones were in the Army. When he drove across rural Washington with them and they encountered a deer, while my relative looked at it in delight, all of the Army guys wished that they had a gun to shoot it. My grandfather, Rees, grew up as best friends with his wife’s brother, Fred, who was the Bakersfield patriarch. Late in Fred’s life, Rees took him to nearby British Columbia, which is spectacular country. After Rees showed Fred some of the grandeur, Fred said, “I wish that I could come up here and kill something.” Rees laughed and shook his head in amazement as he told me that story. But that is how such people see the world, as they live on the edge of survival. Fred could not swim, either.

As soon as white people began invading Washington, they began to deforest it. Only 5% of Washington’s forest has not been logged at least once. The virgin forests are almost all in the mountains, too challenging to log before the conservation movement began and those remnant forests were protected as wilderness areas, national parks, and the like. That is where I do a lot of my hiking. The use of fossil fuels is why much of the USA has regenerated its forests. Otherwise, the USA would have begun to resemble the desertified Fertile Crescent. Today, the USA imports lumber from nations that are deforesting themselves.

Even the Indians overtaxed the environment at times, but it was not easy for Stone Age societies to do that. Parts of the Eastern Woodlands were deforested in 1491, and after the Spanish-introduced epidemics wiped out Indian societies, the forests grew back before white invaders began to deforest them again. The Indians of the Eastern Woodlands did not have domestic animals other than the dog, which helped with hunting and dragged packs when traveling. Those Indians did not use the night soil method to fertilize their crops (although the Aztecs did), so their villages moved every generation, as the soil nutrients for crops were depleted, along with the dead-fall firewood.

Plains Indians could stampede bison over cliffs with too much enthusiasm, and there were other overtaxations of the environment, such as in today’s New Mexico, and the Mayan collapse may have been partly due to an overtaxed environment. But there also was found a harmony with the environment, a conscious managing, that the Old World generally did not practice. Today’s Amazon has an astoundingly high proportion of plants that are edible, which is strongly suspected to be because the Indians cultivated them, in the world’s biggest garden. The Indians of the Great Plains burned the plains each year to keep bison pasture from becoming forest. Even the Eastern Woodlands tribes had controlled burns to ensure forage for the deer that they hunted. The invading English soon learned that the Eastern Woodlands were a hunter’s paradise. I guess that some early farmers in the Old World had similar practices, at least before the rise of civilization, but I am speculating.

Peter Ward acknowledged the human-caused extinction of the megafauna, but remarked that if our ancestors hadn’t, humans would not dominate Earth like they do today. Giant predators would have been constant threats, and the large browsers and grazers would have dominated the lands. Ward admitted the benefit to humanity of the megafauna extinctions. Today, 96% of mammalian biomass is humans and their domestic animals. Humans have obviously greatly benefitted by those events, at the expense of almost everything else in Earth’s ecosystems.

Azar Gat stated it as succinctly as I have seen: the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence. Humanity’s increasing energy surplus over the Epochs, which is the source of all real wealth, is what has made human societies gentler and more humane. If I had been born 15,000 years ago, my chance of dying violently was perhaps 50%, from either my parents, who could not afford to feed me, or my neighboring society, as we fought over territory, resources, and women.

It got better in the agrarian Epoch, but that is relative. Half of the children still died, and infanticide was common until the Industrial Revolution. Some form of involuntary servitude was the human journey’s constant companion until the industrial Epoch, when energy-powered machines made slavery obsolete. Burning witches and heretics at the stake was standard European behavior until only a few centuries ago, and the English built grandstands to watch the festive executions (one of my relatives was the main event), not far removed from the endless human sacrifices of the Aztecs.

I know of no more stark contrast of the Epochs than the USA on the brink of its Civil War. The USA was comprised of a rapidly industrializing North, in which slavery had been abolished, and an agrarian South that was dependent on slave labor. One combatant was making the foundation of the Fourth Epoch, while the other was mired in the Third Epoch, and the North was able to grind down the South in a war of attrition. People living in earlier Epochs never had a chance when coming into contact with those of subsequent Epochs, and it was never more apparent than with Europe’s conquest of the world.

Farmers were the ideal soldiers, as farm life suited them for the rigors of a soldier’s life. Those soldiering farmers could also see the world, kind of, pursue sexual adventure, and maybe bring home a bride.

This is the bloody human heritage, and it is OK to be thankful that those days are behind us, but they are not as far behind us as I would like. I was raised to be a soldier, as nearly all of the men in my family were (father, grandfathers, brothers, nearly all uncles), and I was imbued with the idea that I would not quite be a man unless I had been a soldier. What a terrible way to raise a child. I was steeped in racism, with the N-word echoing through my home daily.

Today, my nation commits imperial crime after imperial crime, which is almost entirely about acquiring cheap labor and resources, and oil in particular. My great nation has shortened many millions of lives as it rampages across the planet. The World Wars were wars of empire, as industrial nations battled over resources. If we have another World War (the Middle East and Ukraine conflagrations increasingly look like one), humanity might not survive it. My great nation continues to lead the dance along the edge of the abyss. I am obviously trying to change that and end our super-Epoch of scarcity, but I can’t do it alone. One of my pupils is actively singing, which is leading to rewarding exchanges. That is all that I am looking for today.

This ends my posts on my father’s family for now. A much shorter treatment will be my mother’s family, which is coming.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

This post will be on my mother’s family. I don’t know its history as well as my father’s side, but it all came from Scandinavia. I have been told that my heritage from my mother is three-eighths Norwegian and one-eighth Swedish. That is consistent with my first DNA reading and especially the second. Scandinavia was under ice 20,000 years ago. When the ice sheets receded, hunter-gatherers moved in as soon as they could. There is no evidence that Neanderthals ever made it to Scandinavia, although the ice sheets seem to have scoured away any evidence. My guess is that Neanderthals lived there when they could.

White skin and blue eyes seem to be relatively recent evolutionary innovations, probably related, and white skin is related to adapting to less sunshine in northern latitudes, so that enough ultraviolet light makes it through to power the production of vitamin D. Like everywhere else in Europe, the region was the site of numerous migrations and invasions, and very rough lives. Life in and around the Arctic was always highly challenging, with short growing seasons, and ancient Arctic peoples were always primarily dependent on hunting and fishing. Some of the most brutal hunter-gatherer stories that I have heard came from Arctic societies, in which societies were wiped out and any strange man was killed on sight, as the likely accurate assumption was that he was there to steal a woman.

As I mentioned earlier, the Viking invasions were a bloody affair. Family lore has it that I am descended from one of the many illegitimate children of a king of Norway, as such elites generally took advantage of as many reproductive opportunities as they could.

Because of my studies of the New World’s invasion by Europe, I studied the Norse migrations across the Atlantic. I seem to have some Icelandic DNA, and long ago I was somewhat fascinated by the Greenland settlements. They were established during the Medieval Warm Period and they ended during the Little Ice Age. Abandonment is the primary explanation today for their end, and those “settlers” were not on friendly terms with the Inuit. The legendary Leif Erickson was the first recorded European to North America, and a subsequent voyage to North America a millennium ago killed the first Indians that they met. Hostile Indians likely ended the Norse settlement of North America.

I don’t know how much my ancestors may have participated in the Viking invasions. The region where my DNA came from seems to make it likely, as Vikings hailed from the fjords.

The rise of England meant the deforestation of Scandinavia, partly for mast wood for England’s sailing ships. By the late 1600s, Scandinavia stopped selling large trees to England, mainly because they had few large trees left. Then England turned to New England for its mast wood, and New England was completely deforested by the American Revolution. By 1850, Sweden was deforested and starving, which spurred a migration wave to North America. I do not know which wave my Swedish ancestors came in, but I will guess the late 1800s.

My mother’s father was born in Minnesota in 1891 to Norwegian parents. There was a standard Scandinavian migration route in North America. The earliest migrants to temperate North America and the early USA generally came from the British Isles and Germany. After about 1840, Scandinavians began coming, and by that time, the “frontier” of cheap lands had moved to today’s Great Lakes region. Wayne (AKA Mr. Professor) and his wife were born and raised in North Dakota, of Norwegian heritage. When I went to Wayne’s funeral, I met his relatives, and some grew up speaking Norwegian as their mother tongue. The Great Lakes region has a resemblance to Scandinavia, and the Pacific Northwest even more so, which is why so many Scandinavians migrated to the Pacific Northwest and the dominated the early fishing industry. My mother took me to the Ballard docks in Seattle as an infant, and the Swedish fishermen exclaimed over the “little Svede” in the stroller. My father fondly called me a “squarehead” for my entire childhood.

Bellingham was another fishing town, where my mother’s mother was born in 1905 and spent her entire life there. My grandfather moved there when young. As is common with Scandinavians, my grandparents were distant cousins. So, my mother’s side had less history than my father’s side in North America, which is partly why I don’t know that heritage as well. But with the wonders of the Internet, I just discovered that my grandmother’s maternal grandmother was also born in Norway’s fjord country (maybe why my grandparents were distant cousins), while my grandmother’s father was born in Minnesota in 1878, and his father was born in Sweden in 1839. All of them died in Bellingham, where I have many relatives. So, my grandfather was a first generation American and my grandmother was second generation.

My grandmother graduated from the nearby college in the 1920s, owned a store, and ran her Lutheran church for 50 years. She ran the family, too, as her sisters also generally did. It was the closest that I saw to a matriarchy.

My grandfather was in World War I in the trenches. He survived a mustard gas attack but nearly died from the influenza pandemic, which I discuss more in the accompanying video. My wife’s great grandmother died in that pandemic. My grandfather stayed at home and raised his daughters while his wife ran the store. They were prosperous for their time. They bought land cheaply during the Great Depression, but my grandmother also kept some families alive with free food from her store.

They built a house on the hill overlooking south Bellingham when my mother was one year old, and my grandparents owned it to their deaths. My mother was born in 1934 with a hole in her heart’s septum, and she was not expected to live to adulthood. Both of my parents should not have survived childhood. My mother was the firstborn, and a few years later, my grandmother gave birth to twins, but they were stillborn. The next daughter was born with a club foot, nine years after my mother, and the last daughter was born 12 years after my mother, and she had anemia. My grandmother was the only fully healthy member of the family, and her relationship with my mother was never close. I heard that it was because my mother was not expected to live.

My mother’s home was initially heated with coal, Bellingham hosted a pulp mill, and during her childhood, the smoke was so bad at times that to go outdoors meant stinging eyes and coughing.

My mother was classmates with my father’s older sister, and my mother and father first met when he was six, when my mother came over to play. My father eventually worked at my grandmother’s store when his family moved into Bellingham from the farm in Ferndale. My father’s IQ is likely around 180, while my mother’s was about half that. That kind of disparity is rarely seen in the USA today and was born of Bellingham’s relative isolation. My parents’ match resulted in children with either genius-level or low IQs (about Forrest Gump level). I am only the middle child, IQ-wise. I was too close to it while growing up how to realize how strange my family’s “intelligence” dynamics were.

When my father’s father essentially drove my father into joining the Marines, my mother ran off with him to California and got married. My father was soon shipped off to the Korean War and came back an emotional wreck. But they moved back to Seattle after his discharge and they had me during my father’s first year at the University of Washington.

I will make a final post that summarizes this series, which will include reflections on my heritage.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

This is the last post in my series of my family’s history and how my studies impacted my view of it. I go back to the beginning of life on Earth and the twin compulsions that all life on Earth obeys: survive and reproduce. As Azar Gat succinctly stated, meeting those imperatives in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence. Life’s greatest innovations in biochemistry came from microbes long before complex life appeared on Earth. Those advances resulted in the situation in which our bodies consume energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produces it, pound for pound. Life is an energy game above all else.

I then sketched the eon of complex life and the evolutionary journey to the rise of behaviorally modern humans. Many human behaviors have their roots in that journey. Humans are different than chimps more in degree than in kind: we are apes. Chimps are hundreds of times more aggressive and violent than humans are, but when some chimps found themselves isolated in a region of relative abundance, they formed the most peaceful ape societies in Africa and even became a new species.

When humans became behaviorally modern, it was not long afterward that they conquered Earth, while driving all other human species and the world’s easy meat to extinction. Bill Ryan asked about hunter-gatherer lives, and I covered them in some detail. Life was hard for hunter-gatherers. The men were “hyper-masculine” brutes that would have easily prevailed against any human today in hand-to-hand combat. About a quarter of hunter-gatherer men died violently, and that was only for the quarter that survived childhood, and their chances of being killed by their parents, who could not afford to feed them, were high, although girls generally had a higher risk of that, especially in cultures that predominantly hunted instead of gathered. Their lives were very rough, so much so that comfortable Westerners can barely imagine them.

I then summarized the lives of early farmers. In ways they were better than those of hunter-gatherers, who never had a chance when farmers arrived, at least in the beginning, but the honeymoon soon ended and agrarian life became one of drudgery, but with many times more mouths to feed. Chimps kill each other over territory, and the human journey has been a constant battle over territory (and its resultant resources), as well as a battle over women, as those compulsions to survive and reproduce continually guided human actions.

Another reader made a good comment on the “original affluent society” trope from the 1960s to describe hunter-gatherers, and I made a post on the friction between ideology and reality in academia. Hunter-gatherers were far from affluent. Any society that kills its children because it can’t afford to feed them can’t be called affluent in any meaningful way. There were related conceits in academia for many years, which are finally waning in light of the evidence: the human journey was peaceful until the rise of farming and/or civilization, and humans did not cause the megafauna extinctions or the extinction of all other human species. Those are understandable stances, as those academic defended their in-group: humanity. While those fantasies might have made academics feel better about themselves, they did a disservice to understanding the human journey. We have come a long way, in many ways, and Westerners can barely fathom how rough life was before the Industrial Revolution.

I then discussed the rise of civilization, which brought new blessings and evils to humanity, but it set humanity on a trajectory to the Industrial Revolution, which happened in the West, so I sketched the rise of the West, beginning with Ancient Greece and Rome. After Rome’s fall, I surveyed medieval Europe and its rise to global conquest and industrialization. That was also when I began to bring in my family history, which traced my European roots to the migrations of my family to what became the USA. I covered the rise of Europe to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, which were related.

I then came to the invasion of the Americas by Europe and the participation of my ancestors. After coming to Pennsylvania in the 1730s, my father’s side of the family migrated to Kansas in 1879, as they kept following in the wake of the dispossession of Indians, to get that cheap land. I then discussed my grandfather’s life. The Dust Bowl drove my grandfather and much of his family from Kansas, and they soon ended up in Bellingham, Washington. Other than my father, his family never left Washington. I then tried to put the journey of my father’s family into perspective. I then described the shorter journey of my mother’s side of the family to Bellingham from Scandinavia.

That journey took 15 posts to outline, and most of that journey applies to any family on Earth. There are no more pure hunter-gatherer or agrarian societies, as the Industrial Revolution has touched the lives of all humans on Earth.

During my studies, which began in 1989, after my preposterous journey radicalized me, I eventually divided the human journey into four Epochs, and we are on the brink of the Fifth, if we don’t make Earth uninhabitable before then. Each Epoch was founded on its energy practices, and humans have been tapping the energy source that the Fifth Epoch will be based on for longer than I have been alive. The technologies that tap that energy source have been sequestered from public awareness and use by history’s greatest cover-up, for reasons of Earthly power. I am trying to change that, which is what my work is all about. The arrival of those technologies for public use will be the biggest event in the human journey.

While the long journey that led to my life today was grim at times (most of the time, compared to today’s world), it resulted in me. That history is why I am here. It is foolish to stand in judgment of it, but it is OK to want to make life better for everybody and be glad that the worst may be behind us, and those sentiments have guided me from the cradle.

As I have written, donning mystical lenses to view it through is appropriate. I have been doing that since my first paranormal experiences more than 50 years ago. There is plenty of scientific evidence of the paranormal, and I became quite the student of spirituality, which helps inform my perspective today.

Shakespeare’s statement, that hell has been vacated and its denizens all live here, is not far from the truth, as I understand it. It is part of the challenge of being on the planet at this time, as we live through the reign of the psychopaths. But those going to their hellish heavens are a small fraction of humanity, on the order of a few percent. The vast majority of humanity is in what has been called the “waking sleep,” as their souls are here to grow through the fires of painful karma. It is not the only way to grow souls, as we can learn to grow through joy. If there is an underlying theme to my work, it is that. Those hellish and heavenly future Earths that Michael Roads visited represent futures that some of us will choose by our thoughts and actions. I know highly accomplished psychonauts who have taken similar journeys, so I do not regard Roads’s reporting as fiction, but futures that await at least some of us. We will determine what our futures are, as hard as that might be to believe when we are mired in Earthly life.

So, will it be the Fifth Epoch, the Sixth Mass Extinction, or a world in which George Bush the Eighth wages war against Eastasia? That is up to each of us to decide. Bucky Fuller called it the choice of Utopia or Oblivion. I seek those who want to help the Fifth Epoch arrive, and I know who I am looking for. There are not many of them on Earth today, but it won’t take many, either.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

George Washington called the new nation an infant empire, and he did what he could to grow it, such as architecting history’s greatest swindle, to steal a continent. He was followed by a string of empire-building presidents. The “patriotic” culture in the USA did not begin until after the USA was drubbed in the war of 1812 and the “Era of Good Feelings” began. The 1826 celebration was the first big Fourth of July bash in the USA, only a few years after the Monroe Doctrine staked out the Western Hemisphere as the USA’s imperial backyard.

As I wrote several days ago, George Custer tried to take advantage of the 1876 celebration with the slaughter of Indians, but that didn’t work out. Calvin Coolidge’s speech on July 4, 1926, is full of lofty rhetoric and the invocation of holiness. Fifty years ago last month, I graduated from high school, and in the accompanying video I hold up my red, white, and blue yearbook. The theme of that year was that we embodied the “spirit of 76.” The year before, I attended a mock-government exercise known as Boys State, hosted by the American Legion. Several months before my graduation, my mother prevailed on my father to talk me out of going to the Air Force Academy.

Here we are, 50 years later, with another Fourth of July bash, during a bit of a lull in the endless Middle East wars that the USA excels at, as we dance along the edge of the abyss.

When World War II ended, the USA had unprecedented global dominance, but the conceit is that the USA is not an empire, but a beacon of freedom. In what is likely his last book, Noam Chomsky challenged that idea. The work that Noam and Ed Herman did together was largely about chronicling the USA’s imperial behavior, which was frequently genocidal, and the media’s enablement of it.

Albert Einstein said: “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” The original is here. From kindergarten through high school, I was compelled to say the pledge of allegiance each day in the classroom. The original Bellamy Salute to the flag eventually looked too much like the Hitler’s Sieg Heil, so we put our hands over our hearts while reciting the pledge, which is a form of idolatry.

In what I call the Fifth Epoch, when humanity lives in absolute abundance for the first time, nations will not survive, and nobody will miss them. Until then, we will continue to have these orgiastic celebrations.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

My pupil Serg will soon put up his latest (he did here). He saves his best for last in his posts, when he directly addresses my work, and his latest has inspired a series of posts, which start with this one. Serg compares my “choir” concept to what he has encountered on the left, mainly Marxists of one stripe or another. Serg compares my approach to Italian communists, among others, and concluded that we took different paths to end up in the same vicinity, as far as an effort that can work. I know that my approach will work, if I can find the people for it.

I came to my approach through the fires of my adventures and those of my fellow travelers, not via theory or academic work. I have done something similar in the past, but this will focus on how I came to my choir approach, step by step, by each learning experience. I hope that it becomes evident that every step was toward my goal, which was a far better world than what we live in today. Mental horsepower definitely played a role, but it was my Boy Scout nature, above all, which was responsible for my taking the path that I did.

I was trained to be a scientist from the cradle, but I was raised fairly normally until that fateful day in 1970 when my mother told me that the cornflakes that I was eating were bad for my health. Thus began my journey on the fringes. Our family changed its diet from processed food to whole food, which resulted in a health miracle for my father. He told everybody who would listen, but the only person outside of our household who tried it was one of my father’s coworkers, who also had a health miracle. Everybody else either politely listened and went about their business or openly disparaged it as “that fresh crap” and other epithets. I was made fun of over my diet for the rest of my pre-collegiate school days. A woman in our neighborhood embraced certain death over changing her diet, which she knew was killing her. I later learned that that was normal, at the same time that I learned that the book that inspired our dietary change was banned in the USA for being contrary to medical dogma. It turned out that the book’s advice was right, medical dogma was wrong, and that banned book’s advice forms orthodoxy’s first line of defense today for circulatory disease. I am surprised that I lived to see that.

The year 1974 was a watershed for me. My first professional mentor’s engine began making the news, which gave me my first energy dreams, my parents sent me to Europe for two months that summer, but the most important event was taking a meditation course that December, which gave me my first paranormal experiences. I would never see the world the same way after that. I did not know it at the time, but it ruined me as a scientist before my career ever began. I could never drink the Kool-Aid of the materialism that guides most scientists. Five years later, Brian O’Leary, who sipped sherry at his soft berth at Princeton as his colleagues ridiculed any and all accounts of the paranormal, had a nearly identical experience to mine while performing the same exercise, which ruined his scientific career. Those events set our lives on a collision course.

During my second year of college, I had my first existential crisis when I decided that a career in chemistry was not for me, and a desperate prayer was answered, which changed my studies from science to business. I then embarked on eight years of idealism and disillusionment, getting record test scores, asking naïve questions, and eventually realizing that my profession was worthless. I was thrust into an urban hell to begin my career, and the more that I learned about our world, the more that I wanted to end it.

I read the newspaper every day since age nine, but during my days in Los Angeles, I subscribed to Christian Science Monitor, looking for something a little more thoughtful. My years in Los Angeles were my life’s unhappiest and I developed a drinking problem (drinking was part of the job). One day in early 1986, I felt trapped in my career and Los Angeles, and for the second and so far last time in my life, I made a desperate prayer, which was again answered. That time, the voice told me to move to Seattle, a thousand miles away. Ten days later, I was interviewing at Dennis Lee’s company, when my adventures really began. Even I sometimes have a hard time believing that it happened like that.

At that stage of my life, what I had I learned, particularly regarding my eventual choir concept? The lessons were many, but most of them were early versions that became much more developed in subsequent years. Those lessons included:

• As an idealist, I was somewhat of a freak. Those reactions to our family’s dietary changes seem to have been the first time that I was aware of that. Few people really wanted to know about it. I had developed a fasting regimen since age 17, and almost nobody else in my life could even fathom it, as they considered it the height of strangeness. I began questioning my professional indoctrination immediately after college, but none of my colleagues wanted to hear it.
• Our world was unlivable in places. My days in Skid Row Los Angeles drove that home to me, but I was also aware of famine in Africa and other catastrophes around the world. I was oblivious to the USA’s imperial behavior in those days, and other contributors to the situation.
• I was not pursuing my teenage energy dream. That looked further away than ever when I made that second desperate prayer, and it was one more source of anguish.

I had many lessons ahead of me, but those ones set the stage for what came next.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

I have written at great length on my ride with Dennis Lee, and I do not plan to revisit it in much detail in this series. That morning, when that recruiter told me to be ready for a an interview that afternoon at a “solar company,” it was like a lightning bolt hit me, and in that instant, I knew why that voice in my head told me to move to Seattle. The lightning bolt still reverberates, more than 40 years later. The day that I met Dennis, I heard him speak in front of several hundred people and camera crews as he announced his intention to compete with the electric companies. On the walk back to my grandparents’ home after Dennis’s speech, I was kind of dazed by what I had walked into. I ended up working for free for months, reconstructing the company’s records. But I was exhilarated, and thought that I was surrounded by people who cared about the effort’s goals.

From the day that I met Dennis, I could call my learning curve slow in ways, as I would experience events but not understand what I seeing until later, sometimes many years later. For instance, when the news clip lied about the company, I didn’t really understand what had happened. I didn’t appreciate it until much later, when I began understanding how brilliant Dennis’s marketing program was.

Dennis told me about how his employee had died because of the hit man from the Bonneville Power Administration, which was a sobering moment during my Seattle days.

When I watched Dennis’s company get stolen, in a theft engineered by my boss on behalf of Mormon grifters, I didn’t learn until nearly 20 years later that the global elite were likely involved. Watching Dennis’s employees cheer the theft of Dennis’s company was my first big awakening moment during my ride with Dennis. My second big moment came soon afterward, as I watched several groups fight over the company’s carcass.

I began waking up fast. Dennis initially tried to talk me out of following him to Boston, but my persistence won him over. When I arrived, Dennis had recently finished making many hours of video for an heiress, which I watched, as Dennis told his story. It was highly informative, and I began to understand Dennis’s surreal journey.

Soon after I arrived in Boston, Dennis had me call the inventor who was with him in Seattle. That inventor yelled at me and tried to extort money from us the next year. The family who took in Dennis’s family treated Dennis like some wayward salesman. Within two months of my arrival, I was Dennis’s partner. That family fought Dennis the entire way.

What did I learn between the time that the voice told me to move to Seattle and the day that I became Dennis’s partner? I learned quite a bit, but I will still quite naïve, as Dennis’s wife said when I became his partner. As I mentioned, those lessons were learned in stages, often over many years, but here are some key lessons that I learned or began learning during those days.

• The level of personal integrity in the general population was far lower than I had previously believed. I was well on the way to learning my journey’s primary lesson.
• Even in seemingly idealistic organizations, nearly everybody was primarily there to serve their self-interest. The theft of Dennis’s company unmasked the motivation of many people to me, but it was only a gentle prelude.
• Inventors did not belong on the pedestal that I had set them on. I was in the early stages of that realization then, and it was one of the last delusions that I shed during my journey with Dennis. Creativity does not confer integrity.
• The media was not devoted to the pursuit of the truth. That lesson would eventually be driven home very forcefully, but that was when I began to learn it.
• Our society operates very differently from how it is popularly presented. Once again, it was the early stage of that lesson for me. Dennis should have been dead many times over by the time that I met him. If it was not gangsters trying to steal his companies and kill him, it was his business associates and vested interests. I was beginning to see the real world of capitalism in action and began to learn that the American legal system did not operate anything like it is popularly presented. It is essentially a weapon of elites to keep the masses subjugated, but the harsh lessons were still ahead of me.

This series of posts is about how I came to my idea of a “choir.” These were the early days of my awakening, and the two years after I chased Dennis to Boston was the steepest learning curve of my life.

Best,

Wade

[Servant Limestone]

Hi Wade:

Sorry I posted too late, and thanks again for your edits.

But here is my new post from Substack, the part 2 of my previous post about my realizations about how the choir.



What Cats, Anime and Sports Taught Me About What the Choir Might Look Like (Part 2)

I’ve just read from the r/byzantium reddit server almost a week ago that Professor Anthony Kaldellis, the Byzantinist scholar that I’ve talked about in my Byzantium post, just became a guest in the Lex Fridman podcast.

But first, a caveat: I don’t like Fridman.

My apologies but I cannot stomach his obfuscation through how he present his rather minor credentials and inflating his rather minor academic position into an aura of professorial authority he doesn't actually hold and manufacture outsized scientific credibility for a media and interview career, which I don’t like at all. His “two-sides” boring interview style, that is somehow reminiscent of Joe Rogan, except that Rogan is actually more entertaining, also tend to manufacture a false balance over many serious topics. It is one of those dangers of trying to say that you are “independent” or that you have “no labels”. In that situation, you make yourself an accomplice of the elite because you practically advocate for basic power structures in the world to remain as they are. His close association with the “tech bros” pretty much answers where he stands on that question. But at your own risk, you don’t get the theoretical clarity that you need to have, which is actually a very important thing to have because it guides your actions and your sense of direction. Not to mention it also contributes to your shift of consciousness, which as I’ve discussed in the Byzantium post, is actually should be in the base part of the Marxian base-superstructure model.

The central issue of our time is the energy transition. It is the primary struggle. It is the primary contradiction. There is nothing more than it, right now. Not even UFO stuff or alien disclosures.

There is also the possibility that Fridman is an asset of foreign intelligence agencies. His rise is also a product of Elon Musk and the “tech bros”.

I’ve watched videos of his podcast in the past but I cannot do it any longer. I just made an exception since I like Kaldellis enough.

I don’t know if I should email the professor and tell him to keep his distance from him. I doubt it will work so I will just congratulate him, perhaps.

Nonetheless, I did watch the video. I may have attacked the medium of delivery of the message. The interlocutor. But the messenger (Kaldellis) and the message is still important.

It’s a great interview and it’s now approaching 500k views on Youtube. This is a real breakthrough and I give credit to Fridman in giving him the platform.

Anyway, let’s get to the topic before I get derailed again. I intend to finish everything here.

As I’ve mentioned back in part 1, the realizations that I’ll be discussing here in part 2 about the “choir” didn’t necessarily came from watching Cat Planet Cuties or by watching the FIFA World Cup. Speaking of the World Cup, President Trump’s decision to mess with FIFA and the U.S. men’s national team made me turn my support over to Belgium, and thankfully, they won in convincing fashion, 4-1. But going back to the discussion, my realizations happened during a conversation in one of the Discord servers that I am a part of when we started talking about football/soccer’s place in the alternate world that we are building inside that server. This is a worldbuilding/alternate history server that I am part of. I’ve mentioned before how this community contributed a lot in my political journey from left-liberalism of the first Obama term to my libertarian socialism that I embraced for the rest of the last decade and that also introduced me more to the “Bordigist” communist left, whose analytical framework and stances now I’ve somehow adopted for roughly three years as of today.

I’ve been part of that online community since 2011, when we were still on an old forum, and I’ve now decided to step away from active participation in that community for good, with lessons that I believe is of significant importance in imagining the dynamics of the “choir”, while speaking as a non-choir member, though I can still be part of the 100,000 people that Wade imagines that surrounds the choir and joins in the singing. I already ruled myself out of the “choir” itself for a long time due to a variety of reasons and Wade himself is already aware.

There is a recurring problem in small, mission-driven projects that call themselves collaborative. This is that they are often collaborative in labor, but not in power. The labor is distributed widely. But the power is not. The labor is visible when something has to be written, edited, synthesized, explained, defended, or reconciled. But the power is most visible when a decision is made quietly, when a preference suddenly becomes doctrine, when one person's informal access outweighs another person's long record of effort, or when a contributor discovers that years of careful work can be displaced by a few private conversations.

That experience is not unique to political organizations. It is not unique to intellectual circles. It is not unique to fandom, worldbuilding, or long-running creative communities. But niche ideological and creative projects are especially vulnerable to it because they often imagine that shared commitment is enough to substitute for structure. Everyone is here for the same thing, supposedly. Everyone is devoted. Everyone is serious. Everyone has sacrificed time and energy. Therefore, the thinking goes, formal roles can remain blurry, decision-making can stay informal, and authority can remain partly hidden because the group is small, close, and bound together by trust.

This arrangement can function for a while. In its early stages, it can even feel liberating. There is no bureaucracy. There is no rigid chain of command. There are no procedures to wade through before ideas move. People contribute where they can. A few trusted figures synthesize. Things advance through habit, affection, instinct, and shared reference points. To participants who are enthusiastic and still discovering the project, this can feel organic in the best sense.

But as a project matures, as the archive grows, as more people enter, as a larger body of writing accumulates, and as some participants invest years of intellectual labor into it, the absence of structure stops feeling organic and starts feeling uneven. That is the moment when a project discovers whether it truly has a collective method or whether it has merely been running on the informal authority of an inner circle.

Given this online community that I am talking about, it made me start thinking of the concept of “organic centralism” again, which I’ve discussed briefly in my previous posts here.

I’ve noted the similarities between Wade’s concept of the “choir” and an organic centralist “party”.

Organic Centralism

One of the existing International Communist Party organizations today in their website has a 1965 document about “Considerations On The Organic Activity Of The Party When the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable”. They also have this nice document under the title, “Lenin: the Organic Centralist”.

Before examining how the name started to got misused, it is worth establishing what organic centralism actually says, because the concept is richer and more demanding than most of its invocations suggest.

The term comes from Amadeo Bordiga and the Italian Left communist tradition. It was first formulated as a response to both the bureaucratic rigidity of Leninist democratic centralism and the factional fragmentation it was meant to prevent. Bordiga’s key formulation states:

"The communist parties must achieve an organic centralism which, whilst including maximum possible consultation with the base, ensures a spontaneous elimination of any grouping which aims to differentiate itself. This cannot be achieved with, as Lenin put it, the formal and mechanical prescriptions of a hierarchy, but through correct revolutionary politics." - Lyon Theses, 1926

And in his later elaboration, from the “Considerations On The Organic Activity Of The Party When the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable”

"The meaning of unitarism and of organic centralism is that the party develops inside itself the organs suited to the various functions... but nothing can be inferred from the number of comrades destined for such functions, as on principle no comrade must be left out of any of them."

Several things stand out in these formulations.

First, organic centralism is supposed to be explicitly anti-mechanical. It does not mean a rigid hierarchy or top-down command. It means that party unity is produced through shared political orientation, not enforced through formal prescription handed from the top. The party center holds not because it commands, but because the political line is genuinely shared and genuinely correct.

There is synergy, for lack of a better word. There is chemistry. Almost like a hive mind.

Second, it requires maximum possible consultation of the party center with the base. This is often forgotten or quietly discarded by those who invoke the term. Organic centralism is not an excuse for bypassing discussion; it is a claim that discussion, when it is sufficiently grounded in shared revolutionary politics, tends naturally toward unity rather than fragmentation.

Third, it makes explicit that organic centralism is not a formula or an organizational regulation. This comes from the website of the latest organization formed last year that also calls itself the International Communist Party;

Organic centralism is neither a formula nor an organisational form. There are no articles of an internal “organic regulation” of the party, as an absolute guarantee against crises, against its degeneration. Organic centralism is nothing more than the dialectical overcoming of the democratic mechanism within the party, from which it has come to free itself spontaneously in its historical journey.

This is the most important and also the most dangerous sentence in the whole tradition. Organic centralism is not a procedure. It is a result. It describes a condition that a party achieves after passing through history, clarifying its line, burning off internal confusion, and arriving at a unity that is genuinely political rather than merely disciplinary.

The danger is that this result can easily be declared in advance, by the group of people who happen to form the existing center, as a justification for treating their own informal authority as organically legitimate. If the center is already correct, if the line has already been established, then disagreement with that center is not a legitimate contribution to ongoing clarification. It is merely noise, faction, bourgeois deviation, or lack of discipline. The structural result is that organic centralism becomes a philosophical license for oligarchy dressed in the language of political science.

This is the critique that Onorato Damen, Bordiga’s longtime comrade and later opponent, anticipated when he suggested the term should instead be called dialectical centralism.

As per Damen from his sort of an obituary tribute to Bordiga in 1970 called Bordiga: Beyond the Myth and the Rhetoric ;

Organic centralism? Democratic centralism? We would call it dialectical centralism, in greater coherence with the Bordiga of then, who is for us not the best Bordiga but the consistent Bordiga. Dialectical centralism because it starts with pressure from below, even if it is irrational, received and rationalised by the leadership, it returns to the rank and file to be translated into action in a concrete political way.

Onorato Damen’s version, at least for me, sounds better because it keeps the directional flow alive (from base to party center and back) rather than freezing the party center as a permanently established truth.

At least for this Discord community of writers that I am a part of, organic centralism is being silently invoked (by its left communist writers) as a way for a collective to cohere around a line, a center, and a shared sensibility without reducing everything to proceduralism. At its best, the phrase suggests the gradual formation of unity through common work, common perspective, and genuine political convergence. But in practice, especially in small circles like this one, it seems that it becomes a cover for something much less noble. It can become a justification for opacity. It can become a way of saying that formal roles are unnecessary because the "real" center is already known to those who matter. It can become a way of naturalizing unspoken rank. It also goes without saying that the inner circle is not necessarily left communist-oriented.

But the first lesson is simple: a project is not truly collaborative just because many people contribute to it. A project can absorb large amounts of distributed labor while remaining highly concentrated in prestige, influence, and interpretive authority.

This distinction matters. In many long-running collective endeavors, there is a broad zone of contributors who write, edit, comment, brainstorm, and occasionally produce major pieces of synthesis. Their labor is real. Their output can even become indispensable. But if they do not have a stable relationship to decision-making, if they are not reliably part of the process that determines what becomes central, what gets revised, what gets sidelined, and what counts as authoritative, then they are not full collaborators in any meaningful sense. They are laboring in a structure whose center lies elsewhere.

That kind of arrangement creates a peculiar exhaustion. A person in the second ring of influence often has to do far more emotional and intellectual work than the person in the first ring. The second-ring contributor must think strategically before posting. He/She must consider tone, personalities, old conflicts, unspoken territorial lines, and the likely reactions of those who possess informal authority. He must calibrate. He must anticipate. He must often reconcile contradictions that he did not create. He must do synthesis under conditions where synthesis is necessary precisely because the central figures have left things unresolved.

Meanwhile, those closer to the project/community’s center often do not have to think in the same way about the second-ring contributor. Their place is less fragile. Their access is less conditional. Their relation to the project feels more natural because the environment was shaped by them and around them. This is what makes the arrangement unequal even when everyone uses the same language of comradeship, collaboration, or shared mission.

The inequality is not only material. It is also symbolic. Titles remain vague. Recognition remains informal. Contributions are appreciated but not necessarily institutionalized. The laboring contributor may be respected in a diffuse way and yet remain permanently suspended in a nebulous status: important enough to be used, not central enough to shape the whole. For a while, devotion can compensate for this. Eventually, it cannot.

For short, burnout arrived.

Burnout in these settings often appears to come from something trivial: a dispute over a side issue, a small disagreement, a niche topic, a familiar contradiction that suddenly becomes unbearable.

In my case, it’s a discussion about football/soccer.

I didn’t even really fought for my position. I just argued for it and received a slight pushback from one of the contributors until I just made the realization: why am I still here?

The real cause in this instance is an accumulated asymmetry.

A person can live with many small frustrations so long as he still believes the project is moving in a direction that justifies the strain. He can tolerate under-recognition if he senses that serious work will eventually change the center of gravity. He can accept temporary second-tier status if he thinks the distance can be closed through sustained effort. He can even endure humiliation, drift, inconsistency, and favoritism if he still believes that the work itself is worth redeeming.

That belief collapsed in the middle of that football/soccer conversation.

It is the realization that people entrusted with key parts of the project are still making decisions on the basis of familiarity, aesthetic comfort, nostalgia, private influence, or personal whim rather than method. At that point, I just thought, "If even this topic cannot be handled seriously, why am I still here?"

The topic itself is not the problem. But it reveals a general pattern that I refused to recognize. I didn’t see not just a bad discussion, but a total structure of who gets heard, who gets overruled, whose contradictions are tolerated and on my part, whose labor is expected to reconcile them, and how little is likely to change no matter how much effort to do that reconciliation is expended.

It’s not about anger or even drama. I had a fair amount of those incidents before in that online community. The trigger is the end of the belief that my labor will produce a proportionate return, either politically, intellectually, or spiritually.

This leads to the second lesson: not everything that calls itself “organic centralism” is worthy of the term.

There is a rather false spirit of “organic centralism” (or dialectical materialism) happening in that community:

Its center is informal but unmistakable.

Its hierarchy is denied rather than clarified.

Its decisions often crystallize in private rather than through visible synthesis.

Its symbolic economy is vague: people are expected to contribute for the cause, while recognition remains discretionary and undefined.

Its standards fluctuate depending on who is speaking.


Its claim to unity masks the fact that some participants must constantly adapt themselves to a social and interpretive terrain they did not shape.

A true organic centralism would look very different.

It would still have a center. Every serious project has a center, whether admitted or not. There are always people who hold the longest memory, carry the most synthesis, and guard the fundamental orientation. The question is not whether a center exists. The question is whether the center is explicit, legible, and accountable to the collective purpose.

The community’s center that I am talking about is not the same.

To be fair, there is some kind of a structure and the main author acts as the center and can overrule everybody. But it’s the rise of the courtiers around the author that became the problem.

In a healthier form, organic centralism would mean that unity develops through common work that progressively clarifies roles, standards, and lines of responsibility. The center would not be hidden inside personal networks. It would not depend on reading moods or interpreting whispers. It would emerge because certain people have demonstrably taken responsibility for specific tasks and because the collective recognizes that responsibility openly.

Where the false version says, "let’s trust the process; things sort themselves out organically," the true version says, "As the work grows, the structure must become more explicit so that the growth remains organic rather than arbitrary."

Where the false version conceals power, the true version names it.

Where the false version expects people to intuit their place, the true version clarifies paths of participation and advancement.

Where the false version romanticizes informality, the true version disciplines it.

Epistemic Community

There is another conceptual frame that may describe a future choir more accurately than organic centralism, at least in its early phases: the epistemic community.

The concept was developed by political scientist Peter Haas to describe networks of knowledge-based experts who share a common understanding of cause-and-effect relationships in a complex domain, hold similar normative commitments, and develop authoritative claims to policy-relevant knowledge. As Haas formulated it: an epistemic community is "a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area."

What makes this concept useful for thinking about Wade’s choir is that an epistemic community centers “knowledge production”, not organizational loyalty, as the primary bond. Members of an epistemic community are bound together by what they know together and what they are collectively trying to understand, not necessarily by formal membership, ideological discipline, or personal affection. Their authority, where it exists, comes from demonstrated competence in a shared domain rather than from seniority, friendship, or proximity to a central figure.

An epistemic community also implies a sense of a division of labor between members: different people bring different areas of knowledge and different analytical frames, and the collective intelligence of the group is produced through the interaction of those differences rather than through their suppression. The group thinks together by thinking differently in a shared direction.

This is closer to what a serious choir might actually need to be, especially in its early stages, than the fully-formed party unity that left communist organic centralism imagines.

A choir beginning to gather around questions of energy, civilization, and historical transition would need:

People who can understand energy physics, engineering, and the history of suppressed technologies.

People who can understand political economy, class analysis, and the structure of power.

People who can understand culture, narrative, and how human beings process civilizational change.

People who can synthesize across those domains and translate between them.

That is a division of labor, not a party line. And the unity of such a group would be produced not through political discipline but through the ongoing production of shared knowledge - which Wade calls as the choir “hitting the notes”.

The crucial difference from both organic centralism and from the kind of informal hierarchy described earlier is this: in a genuine epistemic community, authority follows demonstrated contribution to the shared knowledge project. It is not inherited from old friendship networks. It does not flow from private access to a central figure. It is earned and visible, and it is bounded by the specific domain in which a person has demonstrated competence.

This kind of structured, domain-specific authority is very different from the diffuse, undeclared authority of an informal inner circle. And it is also different from the flat, procedurally democratic but intellectually incoherent "everyone's opinion counts equally" model.

A choir that might understood itself as an epistemic community would not abolish leadership or synthesis. It would ground both in demonstrated knowledge rather than personal proximity. It would make the basis of authority visible. It would protect the division of labor rather than allowing the person closest to the center to override it at will. And it would measure its own progress not by whether everyone agrees, but by whether the collective understanding has genuinely advanced.

That is a harder standard to meet than either Bordiga’s organic centralism or an open-door pluralism. But it is probably the only standard that can hold together people serious enough to actually matter in a civilizational transition.

These are not abstract matters. Any future choir, especially one oriented toward a civilizational transition rather than a narrow hobby, will face them immediately if it begins to attract serious participants.

A choir that remains small can get by on goodwill for longer than it should. A choir that begins to gain momentum cannot. The moment people start committing years of thought, care, and reputation to a common undertaking, organizational form ceases to be secondary. It becomes ethical.

Possible Challenges of a Growing but Undeveloped “Choir”

If a choir reproduces the hidden-center model that I’ve experienced, several things might happen.

First, it will silently rank people while refusing to acknowledge the ranking. This creates resentment without giving language to it. Participants will feel the asymmetry before they can explain it.

Second, it will squander high-quality labor. The most reflective contributors are usually the first to burn out in opaque environments because they are also the ones most sensitive to contradiction, symbolic exclusion, and the gap between stated principles and lived reality.

Third, it will confuse emotional intimacy with political cohesion. A group of friends can mistake its own comfort with each other for the emergence of a genuine collective form. But friendship cannot substitute for method. It only delays the crisis.

Fourth, it will drift intellectually. If disagreements are not processed through clear mechanisms of synthesis, the project will accumulate contradictions, local accommodations, and mutually incompatible assumptions. Over time, those contradictions become too expensive for anyone outside the center to reconcile.

Fifth, it will moralize sacrifice. People will be expected to give labor without clear reciprocity because "the work matters." But if the structure does not honor and stabilize that labor, the appeal to mission becomes exploitative, even if nobody intends it that way.

A choir that wishes to avoid these outcomes must learn early what many niche projects only learn after they have already exhausted their best people.

The Choir as an Organic Dialectical Centralist Epistemic Community

Here are the things that I believe a future choir, if not the present choir, should follow closely as it grows as a “dialectical centralist” epistemic community:

Name the center

The first principle is that the center should be visible. Not theatrical. Not authoritarian. Visible.

Who carries the long memory of the project? Who is responsible for maintaining orientation? Who decides when a proposal becomes part of the shared line? Who arbitrates disputes when synthesis fails? Who speaks for the project publicly? If these questions already have answers in practice, then refusing to state them openly only guarantees confusion and resentment.

A visible center is easier to trust than an invisible one because it can be evaluated. It can be challenged. It can be joined through demonstrated work. Its responsibilities can be defined rather than mystified.

At this time, Wade is the center. And I believe the choir intends to see the historical transition to the Fifth Epoch with Wade continuing to be the center.

I don’t think we have much time left anyway. The transition is an imperative right now.

I want to see this transition happen in our lifetime.

So this is not a problem.

Make “advancement” visible

This might more of a situation applicable to the 100,000 that surrounds the choir as it involves itself with multiple projects and experimentations. But it’s important that the choir cannot ask people for years of labor while keeping them in a permanent novice or auxiliary condition.

There must be a way for sustained, serious contributors to move into deeper layers of responsibility. That path does not need to be gamified, bureaucratized, or reduced to hollow badges. But it must exist otherwise the structure will default to favoritism and personal affinity.

Separate friendship from authority

This is one of the hardest lessons for any small circle.

People who build something together naturally form attachments. That is not a problem. The problem arises when friendship becomes indistinguishable from governance. If private closeness determines interpretive weight, then the collective will eventually become opaque to everyone outside the oldest bonds.

A healthy choir would not abolish friendship. It would simply refuse to let friendship remain the main channel through which legitimacy flows. Authority should rest on responsibility, clarity, and demonstrated alignment with the project’s principles, not on who has known whom the longest or who speaks most comfortably in the innermost room.

I think Wade, as the center, is doing fine in this right now.

Bring synthesis into the open

Private conversations will always exist, and not every exchange can be public. But a project that relies too heavily on backstage resolution creates a culture of permanent second-guessing.

People begin to ask themselves: what was decided elsewhere? who already talked to whom? is this conversation real, or has the outcome already been shaped offstage?

That mentality is corrosive. It forces contributors to practice a kind of double consciousness every time they speak. They are not only making an argument. They are trying to infer an invisible field of relationships around the argument.

A choir that wants durable trust should do as much synthesis as possible in shared spaces, with public reasoning attached. Not because publicity solves all problems, but because opacity multiplies them.

Institutionalize appreciation

One of the most underestimated questions in collective work is how appreciation is expressed.

A choir should assume from the beginning that symbolic recognition is part of justice inside a collective. People need to know whether their labor is trusted, whether it mattered, and whether it changed the shared work. This does not require celebrity culture. It requires culture in the deeper sense: rituals, language, roles, and practices that make gratitude concrete.

Treat coherence as care

The desire for coherence is often dismissed as rigidity, overthinking, or lack of flexibility. Sometimes it is those things. But often it is an expression of care.

The person who notices contradictions is not necessarily trying to dominate. He may be trying to protect the integrity of the project. He may be doing unpaid synthesis work that others are unwilling to do. He may be registering the long-term costs of leaving things vague.

A choir should not reward every insistence on consistency. But it must avoid treating coherence as a personality flaw while privileging vibe, familiarity, and rhetorical ease.

A mission-driven project that does not know how to honor synthesis will eventually lose its best synthesizers.

Understand labor politically

A future choir, especially one concerned with a just civilization, cannot afford to treat internal labor naively.

People bring finite time, finite attention, finite psychological energy, and often difficult life conditions into collective work. If a group asks for high-level labor without stabilizing the conditions under which that labor is recognized, integrated, and reciprocated, it is participating in the same extractive logic it may oppose in theory.

This does not mean every contribution must be paid or formally compensated. It means that labor must be understood as precious and non-inexhaustible. The language of mission does not cancel the political economy of effort. It makes respecting that economy more important.

Prefigurative Politics and its Pitfalls

Before going further, it is worth drawing a sharp line between two things that often can be conflated: prefigurative politics and the idea of building a new society "within the shell of the old" vs the idea that I’ve introduced of “changing the consciousness-base” within the base-superstructure model.

They are not the same operation, and confusing them has been one of the quieter sources of failure in many left and communizing projects, including the kinds of choir-shaped collectives this essay is trying to think through.

Prefigurative politics is a practice of organizational form. It means enacting the desired social relations now, inside the present struggle by doing things like organizing horizontally, practicing consensus decision-making, building alternative institutions, treating the means as identical to the ends. The logic is that you can model or rehearse the future society from within the old one, and that doing so both builds the new world in miniature and demonstrates its possibility to potential participants. The anarchist commune or the non-hierarchical working group: these are all prefigurative institutions. There are other examples provided here. They are all meant to demonstrate that another way of organizing collective life is real and doable right now.

But changing the “consciousness-base” to enable more profound transformations is something fundamentally different. It is not about what organizational forms you adopt. It is not about what social practices you model inside a movement. It is about whether the interior configuration of perception itself like the scarcity conditioning that makes free energy literally unthinkable to most people has actually shifted at the level of individual consciousness. One is a political and organizational practice. The other is an ontological transformation.

Prefigurative politics assumes you can practice your way into the Fifth Epoch and that organizational rehearsal precedes and enables interior transformation. You build the horizontal structure, you learn to make decisions collectively, you inhabit the new social form, and the new consciousness follows as a consequence of the practice.

Wade's framework inverts this entirely. The shift in consciousness is not the product of the right organizational practice. It is the precondition for any organizational practice that can hold. Scarcity conditioning does not wait to be dissolved by good organizational design. The scarcity conditioning enters the organization with the people who join it, shapes how they behave inside even the most carefully designed horizontal structure, and reasserts itself under pressure regardless of the formal rules in place.

This is the critical limitation of prefigurative politics: it operates entirely within the superstructure. It reorganizes social relations, communication styles, and decision-making procedures, but it does not touch the material configuration of the “consciousness-base” that Frazier identifies as the actual bottleneck. You can run a perfectly horizontal, consensus-based, prefigurative organization whose members are nevertheless completely saturated in scarcity thinking. Their organizational form may model some form of a more benevolent social relations, but their perception of what is possible: their ability to recognize and receive the free energy alternative remains unchanged.

This is also why the communist left tradition converges with Frazier on this point, even though the two arrive from completely different directions.

Left communism's explicit rejection of "activism", that is of doing something because doing something feels morally necessary, is structurally identical to the critique of prefiguration.

The communist party during a period of intense counterrevolutionary reaction does not prefigure communism through its internal organizational forms. It maintains theoretical clarity against the pressure to adapt, perform relevance, and demonstrate present-tense alternatives to a world that is not yet ready for them.

Prefigurative politics is, in left communist terms, the organizational form that voluntarism takes once it has given up on seizing the historical moment. It turns inward and makes the movement itself into a product, a commodity. That should not become the choir's function, in my opinion. The choir does not exist to model the Fifth Epoch. That is literally impossible. But it can exist to hold the knowledge of the Fifth Epoch coherent through all this dark age of suppression, so that when the suppression starts to fail, the knowledge can still remain intact and recognizable. That’s one possibility.

The track record here is instructive and consistent. Across the long history of prefigurative movements; from the Spanish anarchist collectives of 1936 to the council communist experiments to the more recent alter-globalization networks; the demonstrated failure mode is the same. When external pressure intensifies, when the resource base contracts, when the crisis deepens, the prefigurative organization either collapses or it reconstitutes hierarchy. It is not because the prefigurative practice was insincere. It is because scarcity consciousness reconstitutes scarcity social relations regardless of the organizational form you have built around it. The consciousness base was never touched. The form was redesigned but the interior remained the same.

This is what makes the choir concept, if it is taken seriously, structurally different from a prefigurative institution. The choir does not ask people to practice the Fifth Epoch within a mass movement. It asks whether people have already, through whatever path brought them there, genuinely broken from scarcity conditioning far enough that they can recognize post-scarcity possibility as real. You do not arrive at choir-level consciousness by joining the choir. You join the choir because you have already moved far enough in that direction on your own.

The organizational implications are significant. A prefigurative project must constantly maintain its prefigurative forms through procedural discipline because the members have not necessarily done the interior work. The choir, by contrast, should be far less dependent on elaborate procedural safeguards, not because authority disappears, but because members who genuinely operate from abundance-level thinking are less likely to reach for dominance, territorial behavior, and credit-hoarding when things get difficult. However, the structural safeguards that I’ve described here previously are still necessary. But they function as clarity, not as control mechanisms over members whose scarcity conditioning would otherwise run wild.

That distinction matters enormously for how a future choir should be designed and recruited.

The dynamics described above are not unique to small niche projects. They reproduce themselves at every scale where informal hierarchy replaces explicit structure, and where devotion is expected to substitute for method.

The lesson from both scales of a small project or a large organization is basically similar. If you do not design your structure, your structure will design you. And in the absence of conscious design, what fills the void is almost always the social networks that predate the project's mission.

Wade’s Prerequisites For Choir Membership

If organic centralism as Bordiga defined it describes an aspiration for mature political unity, and if the epistemic community describes the knowledge-production logic of a serious collective, and if the distinction from prefigurative politics clarifies what the “consciousness-base” shift is and is not, then Wade Frazier's choir requirements go one step further: they describe the human qualities that make any of the above possible at all.

Wade has been developing his choir concept for decades. Its core premise is disarmingly simple: building free energy technology and giving it to the world cannot be done alone, and it cannot be done by just anyone. What is needed is approximately 5,000 people of very rare qualities, that is of people who can genuinely "sing," meaning people who understand the issues at sufficient depth, have done the inner work necessary to move beyond scarcity-based thinking, and are capable of contributing seriously to the shared vision without evangelical ego or factional noise.

As Wade put it plainly: "I know that I seek needles in haystacks, people of very rare qualities, to help with what I am doing, and that they are going to be rare people is normal."

What does it mean to qualify? Wade has articulated several interlocking prerequisites over the years that together address the structural problems described in this essay.

The first and arguably most important requirement is that choir members must have genuinely internalized an abundance mindset as a deep epistemic and spiritual orientation. People still operating from scarcity; from competition for recognition, from zero-sum thinking about status and territory, will reproduce those dynamics inside any collective they join. The informal hierarchies, the protective inner circles, the territorial behavior around intellectual credit: these are all expressions of scarcity operating inside a project that claims to be about abundance.

This is also precisely why “prefigurative politics” cannot reach the threshold the choir requires. Prefigurative politics redesigns the organizational form while leaving the consciousness-base intact. The scarcity-conditioned mind will find ways to dominate, hoard, and exclude even inside the most carefully designed horizontal structure. Because the problem is not the structure, it is what the person is carrying into the structure.

If this requirement is taken seriously, it directly addresses one of the core failure modes described earlier: the tendency of small collaborative projects to become theaters for the working-out of personal insecurities, old social injuries, and status competition.

Wade has also been explicit that the only free energy effort with a real chance will be comprised of members who think for themselves, have their own internal anchors of knowledge, and are not taking much, if anything, on faith. This is a direct structural requirement, not just a personal preference.

This means that a genuine choir cannot be built on deference, faction loyalty, or the uncritical acceptance of any central figure's line (including Wade's own). Members who do their own thinking, check claims against their own knowledge, and are willing to disagree on the basis of evidence rather than social alignment are precisely the ones who will notice when a project's internal structure is becoming exploitative or incoherent. They are also the ones who will sustain the project's integrity when social pressure pushes toward conformity.

This is the quality that makes a choir genuinely different from a sect or a fan community. A sect reproduces loyalty. A choir is supposed to produce understanding. And understanding is only produced by people who genuinely process information rather than simply receive it.

I believe that another requirement Wade emphasizes is that choir members must be able to practice discernment. They should not parrot the latest clever work for lay audiences that does not pass scientific or scholarly muster, and they should let go of thinking that they can evangelize to their social circles. The choir's song is not intended to reach the general social circles of its members. It is intended to reach the vanishingly few people on Earth who are genuinely ready for what is being offered.

This is an organizational principle with profound structural implications. An organization built for evangelical reach will always degenerate toward the lowest common denominator of its audience. It will simplify, popularize, and soften its message to maximize resonance. The choir's mission is the inverse: to maintain the integrity and depth of the message even at the cost of smaller immediate reach, trusting that depth will matter more than breadth in the long run.

Wade has also noted that choir members will likely need to be urban-minded (since the urban city is the center of the Fourth Epoch) and have a basic scientific education, not for credential reasons but because the practical work of civilizational transition requires people who can navigate modern institutions, communicate across disciplines, and engage with the technical and political structures that currently govern energy, policy, and capital.

This does not mean the choir will not have organizational challenges. It still needs, as argued above; a visible center, legible paths of contribution, explicit appreciation of labor, and synthesis done in the open. But those structural requirements become far more manageable when the people inside the structure have already done the inner work necessary to operate from abundance rather than scarcity, from genuine knowledge rather than performed loyalty, and from long-horizon care rather than short-term status seeking.

The danger is always when the emotional and psychological economies of the real world enter with people entering various political organizations. Bu when entry is selective in the way Wade describes (not elitist in the credential sense, but genuinely demanding in the character and orientation sense) the structural pathologies that destroyed so many collaborative projects become far less likely to reproduce themselves.

The future choir, if it ever begins to gather force, will likely start small, personal, and improvisational. There is nothing wrong with that. But as it grows bigger, it will likely face the old temptations to confuse familiarity with form and devotion with structure.

That temptation should be resisted early.

The real promise of Bordiga’s “organic centralism”, if the phrase is worth preserving at all, is not that structure can be avoided. It is that structure can arise in a way faithful to the living movement of the work rather than imposed mechanically from outside. But living growth does not mean hidden hierarchy, symbolic vagueness, or informal domination. It means that as the work deepens, the form becomes clearer. As trust expands, responsibility is named. As more labor enters, power becomes more legible. As a common line emerges, the path toward it can be seen.

And the common line, in a choir of this kind, cannot be produced by organizational practice alone. It requires that the people inside the project have already moved through whatever combination of personal crisis, intellectual honesty, grief, love, or direct encounter with what the materialist framework cannot hold and then go far enough past scarcity conditioning that they can hold the vision without it being distorted by the territorial instincts of the unshifted self. That is the threshold. Not a credential, not a procedure, not a performance of the right politics. A genuine interior crossing.

Prefigurative politics tries to build the crossing into the organizational form. The choir's wager is different: that the crossing must happen first, individually, before any organization can hold the weight of what is being attempted. The organization then becomes not a rehearsal space for the new consciousness but a gathering of people who have already, in their own way, begun to inhabit it.

A choir worthy of the name would not pretend to be flat when it is not. It would not hide its center. It would not romanticize exhaustion. It would not consume serious people under the banner of mission. It would try, however imperfectly, to build a culture where labor, clarity, synthesis, and recognition reinforce one another rather than pull apart.

That may sound like a modest ambition. It is not. In a time when many groups either collapse into bureaucracy or drift into invisible oligarchy, even a small grouping that learns these lessons would already be doing something rare.

Perhaps that is where the future choir would have to begin by the time that it is growing: not just with making grand declarations about a future civilization, but working with the difficult ethics of how human beings share work, authority, and care in the present.



Much love,

The Free Energy Communizer

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

As I stated in my previous post, soon after I arrived in Boston, I watched 20 hours or so of videotape of Dennis, as he told his life’s story. Two months later, when I became his partner, Dennis began to see me as the heir apparent, although he was rarely very explicit about it. During that winter in early 1987, I stayed up with Dennis late into the evenings as he watched TV, and he told me about his life and many topics related to his efforts. Like my mentor, Dennis was a world-class genius, and I happily learned at his feet.

Dennis got his first free-energy idea the day after I arrived, as we watched electricity being generated by hot water. It would not be until years later, when I began studying thermodynamics, that I really began to appreciate that Dennis had the world’s best heating system, and that what happened in Seattle was the greatest run ever made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace. Those realizations were largely ahead of me, and I soon brought out my mentor, to see if Dennis really was onto something. Several months later, my mentor proposed to marry the panels of Dennis’s heat pump with his engine to make free energy. Then the boom was lowered on us, but I get ahead of myself.

As I mentioned in the previous post, it took a generation for me to realize that the global elite were likely involved in the Seattle events. They got involved in Boston, but once again, it took me many years to realize it. When some non-descript businessmen arrived at our office and offered us $10 million for Dennis’s idea in the spring of 1987, I did not realize that it was an offer from the global elite until I heard Tom Bearden talk about it in 1998. Ten million dollars was the going rate in those days.

But another series of events was stranger in ways. It happened a few times between the time that I became Dennis’s partner and his arrest. They were encouraging phone calls in the night, made anonymously. I eventually came to believe that it was the so-called “White Hat” faction of the global elite. It was likely a similar faction that gave my friend an underground exotic technology show nearly a decade later.

Those were such days of innocence for me, but I quickly began becoming disabused of my naïveté. For instance, one of my smallest investors thought that her $500 gave her the right to attack me each week, until I got rid of her by paying her $1,000. It was only a gentle prelude to what was coming.

As in Seattle, officials were sharpening their axes in Boston, but they could not find any laws that we were breaking. New England’s electric companies had secret meetings to decide what to do about us, which led an audience with the most powerful electric executive in New England. The big media would not touch us, and we moved to my home town in California before the officials might have just made up something and attacked, as they later did in my home town.

My life’s happiest year ended soon after our first shows in Boston, and I soon began to have drinking problems again.

What did I learn in those early days of being Dennis’s partner? Again, they were largely the early innings of lessons that would eventually be driven home in no uncertain terms, and below are some of the more important.

• Involving family and friends in business efforts is perilous. What the small investor (and former girlfriend) did was only a gentle preview of the problems that I would later have with friends and family.
• The global elite are real, even though we had no idea that they existed when we began our efforts. Dennis and I initially had no idea that we had attracted global-elite attention, or that there even was a global elite. In Seattle, a U.S. Senator came to Dennis’s home to warn him about what he was up against (as David Rockefeller would later do), and Dennis likely suspected far more than I did in those days, especially with those strange phone calls in the night. But I was oblivious, and I did not begin to learn it for many years. When I began to understand, those events in early 1987 made far more sense.
• Dennis’s free-energy idea might work. Not only did my mentor come forward with his idea of how to make free energy, but I have seen several scientists state that the idea had merit, even people who attacked Dennis. But I also know that far superior technologies exist. Heat pumps and heat engines are primitive compared to what the global elite possess.
• The small-time entrepreneurial waters are quasi-criminal. I began to learn that lesson in Seattle, when Dennis’s company was stolen, but when I heard about Dennis’s life, I learned that the Seattle theft was only one of many attempted thefts of his companies, and several were successful. Dennis had nearly been killed by mobsters repeatedly in his early entrepreneurial days. The Mafia and capitalism are natural bedfellows, but I eventually learned that mobsters play at a low level of the game. Global elites make “retail” mobsters looks like schoolboys.
• Bringing disruptive technology to market is insanely difficult, even leaving aside organized suppression. I began learning that lesson in those days, as we tried to build a company from scratch. It is one of the hardest feats on Earth, even leaving aside the organized suppression.

And then my steep learning curve began.

Best,

Wade

[Servant Limestone]

Hi everyone:

I thought I'm done with my post, but here I am, making an addendum.

What Cats, Anime and Sports Taught Me About What the Choir Might Look Like: An Addendum regarding Retail Politics
My realizations in participating in Left retail politics

This is a continuation of Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. I thought Part 2 was already the ending.

It turns out that I have more to say.

Before continuing, I just want to explain this part again: I am not in the choir.

I ruled myself out of it a long time ago, for reasons Wade himself is aware of, and I have made my peace with that. What I am, instead, is one of the 100,000 that Wade imagines surrounding the choir, joining in the singing without carrying the lead voice.

But I am concerned about the choir’s future composition and dynamics. So, I wrote about it, based on my recent experience with an online community.

Part 2 of this series was about how the future choir should organize itself internally, if it takes the lessons of organic centralism, epistemic community, and Wade's own prerequisites seriously. It’s a warning of sorts. But there is an assurance that I’ve inserted there that it’s more likely that such pitfalls will not happen to the future choir. The threshold of inner transformation that is required for the choir helps.

This part 3 post is actually about something Part 2 did not completely answer: what does someone in my position, a member of the 100,000, can actually do?

I promised in Part 2 that I would eventually get to the frustration that made me step away from that online community that I’ve talked about. I thought that I’ve already discussed everything already in complete detail, but it turns out that there is more that I can say.

Two Answers I Used to Confuse

For most of my adult life understanding what Wade calls “retail politics”, I just realized that I’ve confused two questions that should not be put together as the same question at all.

The first is: which political tendency will help deliver the emancipated, post-scarcity world that Wade calls the Fifth Epoch?

Call this the categorical question, because it concerns the actual telos, the rupture, the qualitative transformation that makes the whole scarcity-organized Fourth Epoch obsolete.

The second is: which political tendency, right now, in the world as it exists, best preserves the space in which people can still organize, dissent, contest power, and refuse domination?

Call this the instrumentalist question, because it concerns tools and conditions, not endpoints.

I’ve spent twelve years (2011-2023) as a self-proclaimed “libertarian socialist” in political discussion circles while discovering the Bordigist-inflected communist left in the process and all throughout that time, I was quietly assuming that answering the second question correctly was the same thing as making progress on the first. I am trying to reconcile the two questions.

Today, it is clear to me.

These are two questions that I cannot reconcile, because I shouldn’t.

The instrumentalist question is not instrumental to the categorical question. It has its own terminus and that terminus is the only standard by which I should judge it. I suppose it still is close to the classical means-end instrumentalism of Weber or Dewey, where the instrumental is always instrumental toward something else. But in this case, the instrumental question is left to justify itself entirely on its own ground, precisely because I have already concluded it cannot reach the categorical.

I can claim that the two questions above have almost nothing to do with each other, and that the great confusion of nearly all modern political engagement - Left, Right, liberal, socialist, anarchist, fascist, reactionary - is the assumption that answering the second question well is the same thing as making progress on the first. It is not. You can win every instrumentalist battle available to you and still be no closer to the categorical rupture, because the categorical rupture was never a political achievement in the first place.

This is where “retail politics” is completely useless, which Wade is always stressing.

The categorical rupture that we are all looking for, in this case the post-scarcity communist Fifth Epoch, requires a change in the material and technological base of society, and in the corresponding shape of human consciousness deep enough to actually receive that change rather than reproducing scarcity logic inside a post-scarcity context and that no amount of “retail politics” via voting, political platforms, party discipline, and electoral coalitions can ever manufacture that.

Only the choir’s quiet, largely invisible work does, and it does so entirely outside the terrain where retail politics operates.

So, the categorical question has been completely answered for me now, thanks to the influence of the Bordigist-inflected communist left.
I’ve been discussing that part from the start of this Substack.

But once I’ve fully accepted and internalized that no political tendency currently on offer can contribute to the categorical rupture, then the next step is no longer “which tendency comes closest to Wade’s framework in terms of teleological correctness?” but to answer the question “which tendency preserves the available space for political contestation?” but now for purposes of preserving an environment for free expression that can help with the growth of Wade’s future choir.

As a result, the instrumentalist question gained further importance to me, ironically, but not for categorical ends that I’ve tried looking for but to no avail.

My Instrumentalist Axis: Ranking Political Tendencies by Contestation-Space

What I call “contestation-space” is the capacity of ordinary people to organize, speak, dissent, strike, assemble, and challenge concentrations of power without being crushed for doing so (at least in theory). It is not the same as material equality, though the two often correlate. It is not the same as electoral democracy, though the two often correlate. It is a narrower and more useful measure: how much room is left, structurally, for people to keep fighting for something better, regardless of what “something better” ultimately turns out to require.

Contestation-Space as More Than Free Speech Absolutism

I should clarify something about contestation-space before going further, because the term can easily collapse into the version of “free speech” that dominates political Right discourse today and that is not what I mean by it. The Right’s version of “free speech” is almost always framed as a purely negative, individual, legalistic guarantee: the state, specifically, must not jail you or fine you for what you say. Measured this way, “contestation-space” looks like something that either exists or does not exist based on a single constitutional or statutory fact, and once that fact is secured, the concept has nothing further to say.
This is a real and necessary floor.

But is also a dramatically incomplete one and treating it as the whole of “contestation-space” is itself a subtle form of the “equality-of-opportunity” trick that I will describe below: it guarantees a formally equal starting line, everyone is nominally free to speak, while leaving the actual structure of who gets heard, amplified, funded, and taken seriously completely untouched.

Contestation-space, as I use it, is structural before it is legal. It concerns who owns the infrastructure through which speech actually travels: the platforms, the algorithms that decide what gets amplified and what gets buried, the advertising markets that determine which outlets survive and which collapse, the concentration of media ownership into a handful of conglomerates and billionaire-controlled properties, the access asymmetries between a well-funded think tank and an uncredentialed dissenting voice with no institutional backing.
A society can have an excellent formal legal guarantee against state censorship (like the United States) and still have almost no real contestation-space, if the infrastructure of speech is privately concentrated in ways that make certain positions functionally unhearable regardless of their legality (which is true in the United States). This is not a hypothetical. It is close to the actual condition of most media environments right now, including the one the loudest free-speech absolutists on the Right claim to be defending, while several of them simultaneously own or are bankrolled by the very concentrated platforms that determine who gets algorithmic reach in practice.

This is also why I do not treat the Right’s contemporary free-speech framing as a reliable proxy for the thing I actually care about, even when it is not acting in bad faith. A political tendency under this measurement can score very well on the negative, state-censorship axis while scoring very poorly on the structural axis, either by actively concentrating media ownership in friendly hands, by treating platform algorithms as legitimately private and therefore off-limits to any accountability, or simply by lacking any framework for thinking about speech infrastructure as a site of power at all.

Conversely, a tendency can hold what looks like an uncomfortable position on formal free-speech absolutism while doing far more to protect actual contestation-space, by supporting public media, fighting to break up concentrated platform ownership, or funding independent journalism that would not survive an unregulated attention market.

Measuring contestation-space only by the first axis, and ignoring the second, produces exactly the kind of category error I am trying to avoid throughout this whole framework: mistaking a formal, minimalist guarantee for the maximalist, structural thing it merely gestures toward.

I also want to clarify that "contestation-space" can sound, on first pass, like a restatement of the liberal "marketplace of ideas," and it is not that, for reasons that matter to the whole framework. The marketplace-of-ideas metaphor assumes something close to a level, self-correcting field: put enough competing claims into circulation, and something like truth or consensus will rise to the top through open competition, the same way price is supposed to emerge from open competition among goods. This metaphor has always been doing ideological work rather than descriptive work and it does that work by hiding the same thing the actual market economy hides: that the field was never level to begin with, and that "competition" between ideas, like competition between firms, takes place on infrastructure that specific actors own, control, and shape according to their own interests.

This is not a passing analogy. It is the literal base-superstructure relationship applied to speech itself. The marketplace of ideas is superstructure, a set of ideological claims about fairness and openness that legitimates an underlying material arrangement, namely who owns the presses, the platforms, the airwaves, the advertising markets, and therefore who actually gets heard regardless of the formal openness of the field.

The ruling class does not need to censor a single dissenting idea to control the marketplace of ideas; it only needs to own the marketplace itself, the way it owns the actual means of production, and then let "open competition" do the work of filtering out whatever threatens its position without ever needing to look like censorship at all. This is precisely why contestation-space, as I use the term, is not a claim that a free, ruling-class-independent marketplace of ideas currently exists, or ever existed, and needs only to be protected. It is a claim that this marketplace is itself class property, structured like any other piece of capitalist infrastructure, and that what I actually care about preserving and, where possible, prying open, is the material capacity of people without capital, platforms, or institutional backing to contest that ownership, not faith in a free market of ideas that was never free to begin with.

Of course, this should not be surprising for a left-wing reader of this Substack, especially for those who read their Chomsky.

Of course, none of this means the negative, anti-censorship floor does not matter. It genuinely does, and any political tendency that fails it, any authoritarian reversion that jails dissidents outright, sits correctly at the bottom of my instrumentalist ranking for exactly that reason.
But it means that ranking a tendency near the top of the instrumentalist spectrum requires asking a second, harder question after the first one is satisfied: does this tendency also work to keep the actual infrastructure of speech, ownership, amplification, and access, from concentrating into a small number of hands that can effectively decide what counts as sayable in practice, regardless of what remains sayable in law?

A choir member, or someone from the 100,000 that decided to help defending the Constantinopolitan wall (based on the metaphor that I will be describing), should be suspicious of any politics that declares victory the moment the first question is answered and refuses to ask the second one at all.

Contestation-Space Is Not Propaganda-Free

I also anticipate a specific confusion here, so let me address it directly before it takes root. Widening contestation-space, in the structural sense I just described, does not mean producing a propaganda-free environment. These are not the same axis, and conflating them is its own category error, distinct from but related to the one I have already been warning against. A contestation-space can be genuinely wide, meaning many actors have real, structurally supported access to speak and be heard, while still being saturated with propaganda, manipulation, bad-faith argument, and manufactured consent from multiple competing directions at once. Widening the space does not filter what fills it. It only changes who is capable of filling it and how many different, competing sources of distortion get to participate rather than just one.

This matters because it is tempting, once you start caring about contestation-space, to quietly start treating a widened contestation-space as a stand-in for the contestation-space’s healthiness, as though more speakers and more platforms automatically produces something closer to truth. It does not. A wide contestation-space with five well-funded propaganda operations competing for attention is not obviously healthier, in truth-tracking terms, than a narrow one with a single obvious state propagandist, and in some respects it can be worse, because a diversity of manipulative sources is much harder for an ordinary person to triangulate against than a single, easily identified one.
What a wide contestation-space actually guarantees is not truth, but the structural possibility of contestation itself: that no single actor, faction, or narrative can become permanently unchallengeable simply because it controls the only channel through which people can speak or be heard.

That is a real and valuable thing.

It is also a much more modest thing than “propaganda-free,” and I want to be precise about not overselling it.

This is actually the same distinction, one level down, between the instrumentalist and categorical questions that structures this whole piece.

Contestation-space is instrumentalist.

It preserves the conditions under which propaganda can, in principle, be challenged, corrected, or out-argued over time, rather than guaranteeing that it will be. Whether people actually do the work of sorting distortion from clarity inside that space depends on something contestation-space alone cannot produce: the same consciousness-base shift I have been pointing toward throughout this Substack, the capacity to recognize manipulation as manipulation regardless of which faction is doing it, including the factions one is otherwise sympathetic to.

A choir member or someone from the 100,000 should want the widest possible contestation-space precisely because it is the only environment in which that deeper clarity has any chance of spreading and being tested against competing claims, not because the space itself is expected to arrive already clean.

Wanting a fair fight is not the same as expecting a fair fight to produce the correct winner on its own.

A False Widening of Contestation-Space via Big Tech and Government

I also want to take seriously, rather than dismiss, the version of this argument coming from people who see Donald Trump’s alliance with the tech-bro cohort, Musk’s acquisition and restructuring of Twitter into X, the loosening of content moderation regimes, the stated commitment to challenging what they call “legacy-media” and academic narrative monopolies, as a genuine attempt to widen contestation-space rather than narrow it.

The underlying diagnosis is not wrong. Legacy media did calcify into a narrow band of acceptable narrative for a long time, algorithmic content moderation regimes did suppress or throttle positions well outside anything resembling incitement or genuine harm, and there is a real, legitimate grievance underneath the complaint that a small number of institutional gatekeepers had accumulated disproportionate power over what counted as sayable. If contestation-space is the thing people actually care about, then they have to take a claim to be expanding it seriously on its own terms rather than assuming bad faith from the outset just because of who is making the claim.
Where this account runs into trouble is exactly where I flagged the deeper issue two paragraphs ago: it treats loosened moderation as equivalent to structural de-concentration, when the two are not the same thing at all.

X did not become more structurally open when its ownership shifted; it became more concentrated, resting entirely on the preferences of a single owner who has since used the platform’s algorithm to visibly boost his own content and political allies, and who then, once upon a time, sits in explicit personal and financial alliance with the head of state whose narratives that platform disproportionately amplifies.
X under Musk is NOT a wider contestation-space.

It is the same narrow-ownership problem I described above, now merely occupied by a different faction than the one it replaced, with the added complication that the new occupant controls both a major speech-infrastructure chokepoint and, through that alliance, significant influence over state power itself. A genuinely wider contestation-space would mean structurally harder for any single actor, tech billionaire or state, to determine what gets algorithmic reach. What actually happened is a change in who holds the leash, dressed in the language of freedom, which is precisely the pattern I described earlier as hierarchy dressed in updated language: a maximalist promise, an open forum where all narratives compete fairly, delivered through a minimalist, ownership-concentrated mechanism that guarantees the opposite outcome the moment the current owner’s interests are threatened by what the space actually produces.

There is a broader point buried in that X example that deserves to be pulled out and stated on its own, because it cuts against an instinct a lot of instrumentalist thinking carries by default.

It is the assumption that state power is always the more dangerous threat to contestation-space, simply because it is the actor with a monopoly on legitimate coercive force.

A nominally pluralist, formally democratic state, whatever its failures in practice, remains at least theoretically accountable to the people whose contestation-space it threatens. It can be voted out, sued, protested, investigated by its own oversight bodies, or bound by a constitution that predates and outlasts whoever currently holds office. None of these mechanisms work well, and Wade have spent countless times cataloguing their limits that I do not need to do them again. But they exist, at least in form, and their existence in form is itself a kind of contestation-space, however degraded.

On the other hand, a private, unaccountable actor who comes to control a critical piece of speech infrastructure, a platform, an advertising network, a media conglomerate, has no equivalent structure of accountability built in at all. Nobody can vote an algorithm out of office. A platform owner answers to shareholders, if even that, and to nothing resembling the public whose speech that platform carries. This is precisely why I consider Musk's ownership of X, independent of any particular administration or alliance, a more structurally dangerous concentration of power over contestation-space than an equivalent amount of formal state authority would be, because state authority, however corrupted in practice, still carries the theoretical apparatus of removability that private ownership simply does not. The moment that private, unaccountable power then aligns itself with state power, as it plainly has here, the two failure modes stop being separable at all: the private actor borrows the state's reach and legitimacy, while the state borrows the private actor's freedom from public accountability, and contestation-space gets squeezed from both directions by something that answers, structurally, to neither the ballot box nor the market it claims to represent.

There is a related, and for this Substack’s purposes more direct, vulnerability in the same “benevolent tech-bro opens the gates” narrative: it primes people to expect that free energy suppression or extraterrestrial disclosure will likewise be handed down from above by a benevolent faction of insiders, once the right billionaire or the right administration decides the public is finally ready.

This is exactly backwards from how I understand the actual structural situation, and Wade’s own account of decades of suppression makes clear why.

This is also why I treat any narrative in which Trump, Musk, or a similar tech-aligned figure is positioned as the one who will “finally” bring disclosure or free energy to the public with the same suspicion I apply to their free-speech claims, and for the identical structural reason.
We are willing to give credit to a tech bro or a president that could make free energy disclosure possible. But there is a reason why this is not going to happen.

A benevolent handoff from a concentrated power center is not categorically different from the suppression it claims to end; it just relocates the chokepoint rather than removing it, and it trains the public to wait for permission rather than to recognize and organize around the thing once it actually surfaces on its own terms, likely through exactly the kind of choir-adjacent work Wade described multiple times.
Genuine disclosure, in the sense that would actually matter, is far more likely to look like an uncontrollable leak that no single faction can re-capture or re-frame after the fact, than a press conference granted by whoever currently holds the leash on the platform announcing it.
With that, let’s continue with my instrumentalist axis.

The Instrumentalist Axis Coinciding with Categorical Epoch-Constrained Commitments

My instrumentalist axis is originally a left-to-right horizontal axis but to make it look less politically “biased” (even if it still biased), I am going to make it a vertical axis for the purposes of this discussion.

Ranked purely on this axis, and purely as an instrumentalist ordering rather than a moral one, the political tendencies fall roughly as follows, from the least to the most contestation-space preserver or expander.

But first, some clarifications.

I want to be extra precise about what this instrumentalist axis is not measuring, because in the American context especially, political debate almost always collapses into an argument about the size and scope of government itself: “small government” vs “big government”, deregulation vs the welfare state, non-interventionism vs an activist foreign policy, and it would be a serious misreading of this framework to think contestation-space preservation is just another entry in that same argument.

It is not.

The size of government, as a question, is largely a distraction manufactured by, and fought out entirely within, a ruling class that controls the state regardless of which faction currently holds it. A shrunken state answering to capital and an expanded state answering to capital are still both states answering to capital; neither configuration, on its own, says anything about whether ordinary people's capacity to organize, dissent, and contest power actually increases or decreases; and neither configuration touches what I consider the actual primary contradiction of this epoch, the energy transition away from the fossil-fuel and scarcity-based material base that the entire Fourth Epoch has been organized around exploiting and defending, which requires a rupture no faction of the ruling class, small-government or big-government, has any material interest in permitting.

This is also why the question of war and peace, in the American context, cannot be adjudicated on a small government vs big government axis either, or why I do not try to place them there. The state, in its imperial core function, has never been meaningfully more or less war-like depending on which faction of the ruling class currently staffs it. It has been consistently organized around securing resource access, market dominance, and geopolitical position for capital, regardless of which party happens to be responsible over delivering that function in a given decade.

This is precisely the insight the left communist, communizer, and anarchist tendencies already hold, and it is a large part of why I rank them the way they are on my instrumentalist axis: they do not confuse the question of how government should be sized with the actual question of who controls it and what it is structurally for.

The old radical-left slogan "no war but class war" is not a rejection of the war-and-peace question. It is a refusal to let that question be answered inside the small-state-versus-big-state framing at all, insisting instead that the state's imperial violence and its domestic economic function are the same ruling-class project wearing two faces, and that no amount of retail-political tinkering with the size of that state changes which class it ultimately serves.

This is also why I treat the recurring hope, revived every election cycle by some segment of the American left and libertarian right alike, that the right anti-war or pro-peace candidate might finally be elected and meaningfully redirect American foreign policy, as a foolish one, not because peace is undesirable, but because it has simply never happened, and there is no structural reason to expect it will start happening now.

American history does not offer a single example of a genuinely anti-imperialist candidate reaching the presidency, let alone using that office to dismantle the imperial function of the state.

It’s structurally impossible.

The office of the President was never structured to permit that outcome. Nowadays, we have the permanent security apparatus, the arms industry, the diplomatic corps, and the deep bipartisan consensus on maintaining global military reach that all persists untouched underneath whichever administration claims the ballot. Every candidates who campaigns on “peace” either moderate that commitment beyond recognition once in office, gets boxed out by the apparatus around them, or, more commonly, never make it far enough through the primary process to be tested at all, because the same ruling-class control that shapes government size also shapes which candidates are allowed to become electable in the first place.

So, to move forward, without any surprise, the Right is at the bottom. The biggest reason is due to the fact that the ideologies of the so-called Right are the closest to, at most, minimalist Third Epoch ideologies predicated on hierarchy-preservation.

Of course, today, most right-wing ideologies are savvy enough to speak the language of equality and settle for a minimalist, Third Epoch-style hierarchy dressed in updated language.

I mean this in a specific historical sense, not a loose rhetorical one.

The Third Epoch, in Wade's periodization, is the epoch of settled agriculture, private property, and the emergence of stratified class society out of what came before it. Its basic social technology is hierarchy: a permanent, naturalized ranking of who commands and who obeys, who owns and who labors, who decides and who is decided for.

It doesn’t matter what the ideologies are called - Nazism, fascism, Toryism, traditionalist conservatism, liberal conservatism, libertarianism (right-wing), Christian nationalism, Zionism, Third Position politics - it is all the same.

They all require the existence of an elite, the “right kind”, more importantly, and a social underclass.

The Fourth Epoch, the industrial and now late-industrial epoch we are still living inside, promised something categorically different: the promise of technical and organizational capacity, for the first time in history, to actually abolish that hierarchy rather than merely rearrange who sits at its top.

Liberalism, the dominant political ideology of the world today, actually started as a late Third Epoch ideology and truly straddles the historical transition between the two epochs, and it did promise equality for all.

It is why there is a divide between the classical version and the modern version. The modern version is a product of the early Industrial Revolution.

It is not a surprise that the classical liberal orientation of American conservatism makes sure that its one foot is firmly inside the Third Epoch while the other foot is inside the Fourth Epoch, but it’s probably only the toes.

Anarchism and early socialism, like liberalism, are transitional ideologies straddling the late Third Epoch and the early Fourth Epoch in its origins.

I consider them to be early attempts at updating classical liberalism and making sure that the other foot is completely on the Fourth Epoch while not leaving the Third Epoch entirely.

Marxism, on the other hand, is firmly a Fourth Epoch ideology. It is perhaps the only real one. There is no question about it.

That promise of flattening hierarchies is the maximalist promise of the Fourth Epoch. It is also the promise almost every actually existing Fourth Epoch political formation, including many that call themselves “socialist” or “communist”, has quietly abandoned in practice while still invoking its language.

Nevertheless, there is still a significant difference in meaningful outcomes between betraying nominal commitments to a Fourth Epoch maximalism that historicizes hierarchies vs actively promoting an organic politics of a minimalist Third Epoch society that naturalizes hierarchies.

Speaking of liberalism, this is where the distinction between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome” becomes genuinely useful to me, rather than the exhausted debate-club cliche it usually is.

Equality of opportunity, taken seriously rather than as a slogan, is a minimalist, essentially Third-Epoch-compatible demand.

This is why the modern Right and the liberal centrists like to believe this.

It says: let the hierarchy remain, let the ranking of winners and losers continue exactly as before, but ensure that the starting line is “fair” before the race that produces the ranking begins.

It does not ask whether the race itself, the ranking, the winner-take-most structure, should exist at all.

It can be, and historically has been, fully absorbed by liberal-capitalist democracy without threatening that system's basic hierarchical architecture in the slightest.

Equality of outcome, by contrast, is the maximalist, genuinely Fourth Epoch demand, because it asks the harder and more dangerous question: why should the race produce a permanent hierarchy of winners and losers at all, when the material and technical capacity to simply provide for everyone, race or no race, now exists or could exist?

This is not a demand for identical people living identical lives. It is a demand that the accident of where you finish should stop determining whether you have dignity, security, and a voice.

What I have come to believe for a long time is that hierarchy-preserving politics of the Right does not always announce itself as hierarchy-preserving.

Some of its most effective forms are the ones that purport to fight for equality while quietly ensuring the fight never graduates past the equality-of-opportunity floor. A party, a movement, or a faction can use every available vocabulary of justice, equity, and liberation while its actual institutional practice, who holds real decision-making power, who can be overruled and by whom, whose labor gets absorbed without being reciprocated, functions to preserve a hierarchy underneath the language rather than dissolve one.

Not that the hierarchy-flattening left-wingers are immune to this. This is precisely what I watched happen in the worldbuilding community I described in Part 2. Nobody there would have described themselves as hierarchy-preserving. Many would have described themselves as anti-hierarchical by temperament and politics. But the actual structure, an informal court of access and influence surrounding a nominally collaborative center, was hierarchy in its Third Epoch sense wearing Fourth Epoch clothing: unaccountable rank, naturalized rather than named, protected by the very language of equality and collaboration that should have dissolved it.

This is also why I can no longer trust all the equality-talk unlike before, and why I have come to care more about the structural question than the rhetorical one.

Marx himself criticized this in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx attacks the demand for "equal right" and "fair distribution" as still trapped in bourgeois categories, arguing that even distribution "according to labor" retains an inequality because it measures unequal individuals by an equal standard, and calls this "an inequality" that is "inevitable" at communism's lower stage. His famous formula, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," is presented specifically as going beyond the entire discourse of equal rights, not as a more perfect equality but as the abolition of the measuring standard itself, since needs and abilities are precisely what all of the bourgeois equality-talk cannot capture.

The question I actually ask of any tendency, party, faction, or community now is not does it say it believes in equality (they all tend to agree on that part) but does its actual distribution of decision-making power, recognition, and reciprocity move toward the maximalist Fourth Epoch content of that word or does it quietly settle for the minimalist, opportunity-only, hierarchy-compatible version while borrowing the maximalist word to describe itself.

Hierarchy-flattening politics is my attempt at an honest answer to that question. It does not ask what a faction says about equality. It asks what happens to unaccountable power under that faction's actual practice, because that is the only place where the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, between Third Epoch minimalism and Fourth Epoch maximalism, actually shows up and can be measured rather than merely declared.

To continue my ranking, I also consider any authoritarian reversion and Stalinist-style command “socialism” at the bottom but just above the Right. They extinguish that contestation-space almost entirely in the name of efficiency, unity, security or historical necessity. It does not matter whether the extinguishing is done in the name of the nation, the race, the party, or the proletariat. The structural effect on ordinary people’s capacity to organize and dissent is the same: it collapses to near zero, and the apparatus that collapses it tends to entrench itself indefinitely once in place.

We have very little time left to tolerate such shenanigans.

Liberal-capitalist representative democracy sits above that, not because it is admirable but because it tolerates a genuine, if heavily constrained and unevenly distributed, space for organizing, dissent, and electoral contest.

The problem is that its instrumentalist value is limited: it diffuses power across institutions specifically designed, going back to the framers of nearly every liberal constitution, to prevent majoritarian mobilization from threatening property relations. It preserves contestation-space mostly for those who already have resources to use it.

Social democracy and democratic socialism sit somewhat higher because unlike liberals, they tend to pair the liberal-democratic toleration of dissent with material supports like welfare provisions, labor protections, public services that make actual use of contestation-space more available to more people.

A person working two jobs to survive has less real capacity to organize than a person with a stable income and healthcare, even if both are formally free to do so.

Anarchism and libertarian socialism do rank higher again on this specific axis, because both ideologies are organized explicitly around maximizing horizontal contestation and resisting the calcification of any center of power, including ones that claim to act in the name of the working class.

And at the top of my instrumentalist ranking sits something that looks, paradoxically, almost like a reversion: the abstentionist communists associated with the (Italian) communist left and figures like Amadeo Bordiga.

To their credit, this tendency refuses to invest revolutionary hope in electoral or at most, trade union participation, because at its best moments, it can make the argument that it is not because participation is forbidden, but because it insists on never confusing tactical engagement with categorical achievement. It ranks highest on my instrumentalist axis not because it does the most, but because it is the tendency that comes closest to my awareness that instrumentalist politics cannot produce categorical rupture, and even then, they are not really close.

What all these tendencies share, from top to bottom, is that none of them can produce the categorical telos, that is the Fifth Epoch. That is not the point. But they all differ enormously in how much contestation-space they can potentially preserve while we wait for the right conditions that no tendency on this list can itself create. That is the entire point of ranking them this way: the ranking measures “preservation capacity”, not revolutionary content.

My Metaphor of a Besieged Marxist Constantinople

I have been developing a more general public-facing metaphor recently that I think makes this split easier to hold onto than abstract language does, so let me lay it out here in my Substack for the first time, since it has only existed in a more rudimentary form in another conversation that I did a year ago in another part of the Internet until now.

Picture a near-empty, almost abandoned and hollowed out Marxist Constantinople under a century-long siege. The “barbarians” at the gates are the various forces of neoliberal capitalism, state capitalism, activism, populism, moralism, and authoritarian reversions, including the Stalinist command “socialism” that extinguishes contestation-space in the name of historical necessity. They all do not need to share an ideology to function identically.

What most of them share though is a willingness to hollow out the very thing they claim to be defending, the way the Fourth Crusade sacked the city it swore to protect in 1204.

The City once held the theoretical architecture and historical clarity of the communist program, but the working class that would actually inhabit and reactivate it hasn't returned yet.

Defending the incredibly durable walls of my Marxist Constantinople are three groups working together without pretending to be the same thing.

First, the “archivist monastic soldiers” that are mainly in the city’s palace-library, guarding doctrinal clarity based certain old, if not updated, archives. Their entire function is custodial: protecting historical clarity against the barbarisms of left activism, populism, moralism and post-Marxist mystifications until the city is repopulated.

I couldn’t help but think of the Bordigist and left-communist tradition here specifically.

Reinforcing them are the provincial soldiers, standing in for the broader instrumentalist spectrum of contestation-preserving tendencies like anarchism, council communism, and even the honest wings of liberal-democratic proceduralism.

The ideological tendencies that scored high in my rankings for the preservation of contestation-space (anarchism, council communism, even liberal-democratic proceduralism) are like the scattered provincial populations and monastic networks still practicing civic and religious life in the late Roman empire's shrinking territory. They are dispersed, imperfect, but keeping the practice of contestation alive in the outskirts of the City even while most of it sits empty.

They're doing something more like the provincial themata soldier-farmers. They are not guarding the palace-library and they are not part of the clerical-monastic preservation apparatus, but they are maintaining a dispersed, self-governing base that keeps the empire's material and political center of gravity from over-concentrating in a court clique.

And alongside both are the remnants of the Hippodrome circus-faction militias who never left the City, standing in for what I have started calling the general hierarchy-flattening politics of the Left: action whose only goal is preventing any single faction, network, or individual from accumulating unaccountable power, regardless of that faction’s stated ideology. Historically, the Hippodrome factions were exactly this, contributing to Byzantium’s genuine mechanism of popular accountability that could depose an emperor who overstepped, however imperfect and occasionally brutal that mechanism was.

None of these three groups can produce the categorical rupture on their own, even if almost all of them are trying to while defending the city. But for now, their primary job is to keep the barbarians from finishing the sack, reminiscent of the Left’s anti-fascist popular frontism, before something they cannot see coming arrives and creates the necessary breach and go past both the barbarians at the gates and the wall’s defenders at the same time.

That something else is the citizen-soldiers of the Empire of Nicaea…. with modern industrial technology. In the actual history, the Empire of Nicaea spent fifty-seven years in exile after the 1204 sack, quietly building capacity, an army, a treasury, a bureaucracy, while Constantinople sat occupied by the Latins. Nobody inside the occupied city could see this coming. Then in 1261, a small detachment found an unguarded gate at night, slipped in, and the city fell in hours. It looked instantaneous. It was actually the terminal moment of decades of private accumulation.

In my metaphor, the Empire of Nicaea is the categorical, backed by the choir and the 100,000 who, in Wade's own account, are quietly building the technical and consciousness-based capacity that makes the Fifth Epoch's arrival possible.

My general public-facing terminology for the Nicaean choir with a free energy device is thermodynamic rupture.

Within this metaphor that I created, it makes my own position into something two-fold: a provincial soldier or Hippodrome militia member on the walls, doing real, necessary defensive work, while working as a spy for Nicaea and recruit people that can work with me in creating a breach in Constantinople’s walls for Nicaean troops, without the barbarians noticing.

This is not deception toward my fellow defenders. My commitment to holding the wall is real. What I do not share with them is the categorical horizon that makes my wall-defense provisional rather than final.

I hold all three sieges of Constantinople in mind at once when I think about this. 1204 for the character of the enemy that is opportunistic, self-justifying, and claiming friendship while sacking the thing it protects. 1453 for the exhaustion and diminished resources of actually doing this work today. And finally, 1261 for the only reason any of it is worth doing at all.

This is the position that I choose to be in. An ordinary Nicaean spy.

Nicaea and the Right

There’s another piece to this metaphor that also clarifies something important about who the choir actually is and is not.

The Empire of Nicaea was never a sealed fortress facing only inward toward the dream of retaking Constantinople. Historically, Nicaea sat on a live frontier with the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the actual “barbarian” power of the age, and its relationship with that frontier was not simple hostility. Nicaea fought the Seljuks when it had to, but it also traded with them, built fortifications in dialogue with their own building programs, and even provisioned the Seljuk state during the Mongol crisis of the 1240s, because a stable frontier served Nicaea’s interests better than a frontier full of adversaries. At the very same time, Nicaea absorbed the actual human refugees of 1204, the aristocrats, clergy, scholars, and officials who fled occupied Constantinople and rebuilt its patriarchate, its bureaucracy, and its intellectual life in exile, becoming a genuine center of Greek learning precisely because it had somewhere for the displaced to land.

Extended into my metaphor, this means Nicaea’s actual position was never simply “outside Constantinople and opposed to the barbarians.” It was outside Constantinople, doing something more complicated on two fronts at once: drawing people out of barbarian territory itself, standing in for the political Right, who arrived compromised, or self-interested, or simply pragmatic about the frontier, without ever fully joining the barbarian project of extinguishing contestation-space and destroying Constantinople, while also absorbing refugees who either fled occupied Constantinople directly or had spent time transiting through, or even residing in, barbarian lands before finding their way to Nicaea, standing in for the Left, including people whose political formation happened partly outside left spaces altogether.

Nicaea did not ask either group for a clean ideological pedigree before accepting what they brought. It asked what they could build, restore, or defend.

This is exactly why I keep insisting the choir cannot be class-determined, or party-determined, or determined by which side of the instrumentalist spectrum someone currently occupies. As I’ve mentioned in my Byzantium post, the threshold towards joining the choir is interior and immaterial, which means it can be crossed from anywhere and is guaranteed from nowhere.

Wade’s own biography is a version of this: someone who moved through corporate America, through networks that would read as thoroughly “barbarian” by any left-coded standard, before arriving at the diagnosis he now holds.

If Nicaea had required instrumentalist ideological purity as the price of entry, it would have had no patriarchate, no bureaucracy, no army, and no eventual gate opening in 1261, because the people who built all three had passed through, or come from, exactly the territories the metaphor casts as hostile.

The choir works the same way. It is not recruited from the correctly-positioned; it is recruited from whoever, regardless of origin, actually arrives carrying something usable, and part of what makes the wide, propaganda-saturated contestation-space worth defending in the first place is that it remains the only kind of space porous enough to let that kind of unpredictable, cross-frontier movement happen at all.

Voting, Reconsidered

This is where the practical stakes of the whole framework that I’ve created land in terms of retail political activities like voting.
So, if no tendency on my instrumentalist axis can ever produce the categorical rupture that I am looking for, then a vote cast for any of them cannot carry categorical weight.

Voting, then, using this framework, is becomes nothing more than a tool, evaluated solely by this question: does this action, in this specific instance, widen or narrow the space in which people can still organize, dissent, and contest power?
This produces a genuinely different relationship to bourgeois elections than either the enthusiastic partisan or the principled abstainer typically holds.

The enthusiastic partisans treat the vote as programmatically decisive, as though the right electoral outcome is a meaningful step toward the categorical rupture.

Unfortunately, a lot of people still believe this. This is the mystification of democracy that left communists tend to criticize.

The principled abstainers, on the other hand, like left communists, treats the vote as a categorical betrayal since participation in a rigged system is treated as itself corrosive to achieving revolutionary clarity.

My position sits outside both.

I am still going to vote in our future elections, not because of the benefits that it gives to me in terms of access to government services, but I can now vote the way a garrison commander allocates scarce defenders along a besieged wall: not because holding this particular stretch of wall actually wins the war against the barbarians, but because losing it needlessly makes everything that follows harder.
On the other hand, refusing to defend it changes nothing about what actually wins the war in the end.

Losing the election to those that ranks lower in your axis, under this framework, can no longer be treated as a categorical defeat. It is merely a contraction of “contestation-space” that needs to be managed, mourned if necessary, and worked around but it can never be mistaken for the failure of the actual project, because the actual project was never contained in the ballot box to begin with.
Those that I’ve ranked the highest in my instrumentalist axis know this intuitively already.

More importantly, winning is not categorical progress either. It can be potentially way worse than losing. It is not even an instrumentalist progress in the long run as long as the system that we are living in is capitalist. But it can, at best, give more time and more room in which the actual work, that is the work that has nothing to do with electoral politics, can continue.

This framework clarified something that does not fit neatly into either programmatic voting or principled abstention: voting or acting specifically to flatten concentrations of power within existing structures, independent of programmatic content.

This is not about picking a candidate whose platform you agree with most, though they may tend to align a lot. It is about identifying, in any given contest, which outcome most reduces the capacity of any single faction, network, or individual to accumulate unaccountable power, and acting to produce that outcome regardless of your feelings about the substantive platforms on offer.

This function matters because concentrated, unaccountable power is dangerous regardless of the ideological content it currently holds. A political faction that has captured unaccountable institutional power is, structurally, still a threat to “contestation-space”, because power that cannot be checked today can be turned against the very people who built it tomorrow, the moment its internal composition changes.
Practically, this means I might have to vote or advocate in ways that have nothing to do with which platform I find most persuasive, and everything to do with which outcome keeps power more distributed and more checkable. This is uncomfortable to explain to people who expect political action to express belief because this is voting not because of agreement to programmatic content.

It’s about voting based on structural risk.

Of the tendencies discussed above, the broad electoralist Left still comes closest to the posture I am describing, for reasons worth naming honestly rather than flatteringly. The Left has already done real work dismantling two of the illusions that make instrumentalist confusion possible: it has a structural analysis that does not reduce social outcomes to individual bad actors, and it has never fully accepted the sacralization of capitalist markets as neutral, self-correcting, or beyond political construction. Both are genuine intellectual achievements, and they clear away a great deal of underbrush that the political Right, in its dominant contemporary forms, has not cleared away at all.

But the Left’s own traditions carry barriers that are, in some ways, harder to dissolve than the Right’s, precisely because they are embedded in the Left’s self-image as the tendency of structural sophistication. A structural analysis that is allergic to the possibility of deliberate, coordinated action by specific actors will systematically misread situations where such coordination is actually occurring, translating everything into impersonal system-effects even when the evidence points to something more specific. This is precisely the situation with their denialism about free energy suppression. And a tradition built around collective organization as the answer to every problem will experience any suggestion that organization alone cannot produce the categorical threshold as an identity-level threat rather than a tactical observation, which is exactly the wall the Bordigist tradition itself ran into: it kept the anti-voluntarist discipline without ever having the diagnosis of what the actual threshold requires.

This is the octave Wade has spoken of, with the Left already holding the right note with its categorical rejection of the existing order and of capitalism, scarcity (in name) and of exploitation, but needing to leap to a higher register where free energy suppression and the Fifth Epoch live.

Most of what I write in this Substack is an attempt to help a specific kind of reader make that leap faster than the twelve years it took me.

Since anarchists and left communists do not necessarily participate in elections, my tactical instrumentalist vote will tend to go mostly to people that call themselves progressives, liberals, social democrats or democratic socialists, at most.

It’s the default, but there are inevitably going to be exemptions.

That discussion is for another post.

And it doesn’t matter much if they win or lose.

An important caveat is that NONE of the rankings I’ve made are moral verdicts on the people who believe in these various tendencies.

They are measurements of preservation capacity while Nicaea does the work none of us on the walls of Constantinople can do ourselves.

“Retail politics” just stops being categorical.

So they’re not really important.

Where the Categorical Actually Lives

If retail politics (voting, party formation, electoral coalition-building, even organized activism) cannot produce the categorical rupture, the obvious question is where the categorical rupture is actually supposed to come from. My answer, following Wade, is that it requires the suppression of already-existing energy technology to fail, publicly and irreversibly, paired with a consciousness-base shift wide enough to actually receive what that failure of suppression reveals rather than dismissing it on arrival. This is not a task retail politics, or any organized political movement, is built to perform. It is not a failure of any particular party or platform that this task remains undone. It is a structural mismatch between the kind of transformation required and the kind retail politics can produce.

The people doing the work relevant to that transformation, the choir Wade describes, operate almost entirely outside the terrain of retail politics, and that is not an accident. A consciousness-base shift deep enough to receive a post-scarcity reality cannot be manufactured by campaign messaging, party discipline, or a general assembly. This is also, not incidentally, why the choir cannot be a prefigurative institution in the sense I discussed back in Part 2. It does not rehearse the Fifth Epoch. It holds the knowledge of it coherent the way Nicaea held its army and treasury coherent for fifty-seven years before anyone in Constantinople knew a gate was about to open.

Unfortunately, right now, we are still far away from 1261.

We may not have fifty-seven years left to get to it. In fact, we may do end up with 1453.

None of this means retail politics is completely worthless. It just means that retail politics has a specific, limited, bounded, honest job: to hold the line. To keep contestation-space as wide as possible. Prevent the worst foreclosures of dissent and organization. Check concentrations of unaccountable power wherever they appear, regardless of their ideological coloring.

And to do this work seriously without illusions about what it can accomplish on its own.

That’s all I’m asking for, as naive as this may appear to be.

Summary and Final Reflections

To state the whole framework as plainly as I can: I treat the vote, and retail politics generally, as a tool for preserving contestation-space and checking concentrated power, not as an expression of categorical belief. I evaluate political tendencies on an instrumentalist axis measuring how much room they leave for organizing, tolerate dissent, and produce structural accountability, understanding that no tendency on that axis, including the ones I rank highest, constitutes or produces the actual transformation I am ultimately oriented toward. I hold that transformation as a separate, non-electoral, largely non-visible project, and I do not expect retail politics to deliver it, because it was never built to do it. And I try, as much as I am able, to have some minimal investment in retail-political work honestly and without cynicism, precisely because the people doing the deeper work depend on those that do hold the line in keeping the space as wide as possible, even if they don’t know it.

I no longer expect a ballot to deliver anything categorical, and I have stopped mourning elections as though they were failures of the whole project, because the whole project was never on that ballot to begin with.

Looking back, this really explains my continued deep emotional investment in retail politics for a long time after encountering Wade’s work fourteen years ago. It explains my old social democratic hopes, which I cannot admit to myself, that left-wing activism can somehow indirectly or accidentally open the doors for a free energy revolution.

I already have this unacknowledged and unconscious separation of the categorical question with the instrumentalist question, while still trying to justify a way of tying them together.

I now understand it better, and this understanding can now help me with better decision-making rather than just doing it instinctually while getting it mostly correct like in the past.

I am happy of how I got this far into this underlying understanding of what am I doing in terms of continuing to be heavily invested with retail politics.

It also trained me from having false hopes on alien and free energy disclosures, except that my personal heroes that are doing them are left-wingers, not right-wingers.

It stops all of that.

I think about the actual Nicaean spies sometimes (I’m sure they existed), the ones history does not record by name, who spent decades inside Latin-occupied Constantinople passing word of troop movements to an exiled court most of their neighbors had already stopped believing would ever return. They could not have known, in year thirty or year forty of the occupation, that 1261 was coming. They had no proof that Rhomania would return back by the time an opening appeared, only a discipline that made sense whether or not it ever paid off. I imagine most of them died holding that discipline without ever seeing the gate open. I no longer think that makes their work meaningless, and I no longer need my own version of it to resolve neatly inside my lifetime to justify continuing.

So I hold the wall. I vote when voting narrows the barbarians' room to maneuver. I may do what I can to keep some faction's power checkable, and I do this without asking either act to redeem itself categorically, because I finally understand that it was never supposed to. But somewhere outside the City, the actual work continues. My job was to help them do that work through what I can do inside the City. It was only ever to make sure that when the gate finally opens, whenever that turns out to be, there is still a City, and still people in it, worth returning to.

Peace be unto you,

The Free Energy Communizer

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

Serg has made another post, and that one is primarily about political stripes, freedom of speech, what I call retail politics, and an astute comparison between what I call the Third (agrarian) and Fourth (industrial) Epochs. It is an important post. This reply will discuss some of Serg’s post, but I will also focus on what I am attempting and why. Serg has used the Byzantine Empire as his touchstone recently and in his latest post, and it is a good point of reference.

I want to make one thing clear: If there was an enlightened electorate, retail politics would work for bringing humanity into what I call the Fifth Epoch. But few people on Earth see past the horizons of their immediate self-interest, the system actively brainwashes them, and the politically active are almost all trying to butter their bread in some way or see elites as the root of our problems when they are only a symptom.

In a world of scarcity and fear, everything eventually becomes corrupted. Ostensibly Christian Europe, which theoretically followed the teachings of Jesus, inflicted the greatest catastrophe in world history onto humanity. The most enlightened teachings can be corrupted into justifying the greatest crimes, as humans can believe and justify anything. As Dennis Lee once told me, our systems are corrupt because people are corrupt. I see it as the challenge of becoming a truly sentient species. This issue can be seen in all walks of life.

In the USA, for instance, whatever the public wants does not matter much to those who run things. Noam Chomsky discussed that issue in his latest and likely final book. I know that John F. Kennedy was not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, and sitting American presidents have been outright puppets ever since. That alone should give anybody pause in thinking that what I call retail politics really matters much. If the world’s most powerful politician is a puppet, which politician isn’t? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes literally auditioned to become a candidate that the political machine supported.

So yes, the retail political system is largely worthless on many fronts. Soon before he died, Brian O’Leary informed me that electoral politics was a dead end, and he would have known. What I call the retail elite (Trump, Musk, Gates) is far down the hierarchy of power on Earth.

There was a big reason why I divided the human journey into four Epochs. Each Epoch was founded in its energy practices, and in each Epoch, humanity accessed far more energy than in the previous Epoch, generally an order of magnitude or more, and that energy leap is what made the next Epoch possible. Without those energy breakthroughs, the Epochs would not have happened. We would still be bipedal apes, with brains the size of a chimp’s. There would have been no explosive brain growth, no arrival of Homo erectus on the evolutionary scene, no conquest of Earth by behaviorally modern humans, no agriculture and civilization, and no Industrial Revolution. None of it would have happened without those energy breakthroughs. The so-called political changes were an outcome of those events, not a cause. People adapted to the higher energy levels, which led to Epochal changes in the human journey. Politics is a side-effect.

The limitations of each Epoch are very clear. Take the Byzantine Empire, for instance. I have studied it a bit in recent years, and about 90% of its members were farmers. The agricultural surplus only supported a tiny elite and professional class. Agrarian civilizations always lived on the thin edge of survival, as they constantly rose and fell, at the mercy of the climate. Multi-year droughts spelled the end of many agrarian civilizations.

No Epoch was ever energetically sustainable. The human journey is a story of burning through one energy source after the other, generally to exhaustion (megafauna, forests, soils, fossil fuels). We are currently burning through the fossil fuels that power industrial societies a million times as fast as they were created, and they will largely be gone in this century. Humanity has inflicted an awesome toll on the planet. There is not enough fossil fuel on Earth to support all of humanity at industrial-society standards, and even if there was, it would create an environmental catastrophe even faster than our current trajectory

But the rising energy capture and surplus has also made human societies far more humane and less violent, because they could afford to be. As Azar Gat stated, the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence. Solve scarcity and we solve violence, and only one thing can do that: abundant and harmlessly produced energy.

Bucky Fuller stated that politics was obsolete as a fundamental problem solver, that its primary function was determining who got access to scarce resources, and that when humanity knew absolute abundance, what we call politics would largely vanish. In a world of abundance, the exchange aspect of economic activity becomes meaningless. Politicians and economists will almost entirely vanish in the Fifth Epoch (and what would remain will be unrecognizable), but so will most aspects of our world.

I am in the middle of a series of posts that Serg’s posts have inspired, on how I came to my “choir” approach. It was a process of life-ruining and life-risking trial and error, the kind that few on Earth have ever undertaken. What I saw can’t be seen from the cubicle or by surfing the Internet. I have written on the people I seek for this Epochal task: disillusioned idealists. They woke up from their brainwashing the hard way, by witnessing their ideals as they met reality. My message to them is that what they experienced is a universal situation with humanity today. But their willingness to pursue their ideals, to then honestly see how far short reality fell, is what led to their awakening, and my effort requires the caring and awakened. Anything less will lead to nowhere, in some of the ways that Serg describes in his writings.

Serg clearly lays out what freedom of speech really means, and at minimum, it is the freedom to make statements without being punished for them. Serg then argued, quite successfully, that that was just a minimal baseline, and that it was a small freedom if there was no way to be heard. Ed Herman also wrote on this issue. Incidentally, Serg interacted with Ed and Noam back in the day, and they were their usual responsive and helpful selves. Serg is right that the “left” is more evolved than the “right” is. I see it as an issue of older souls. The right sees self-servingness as the key to life, while the left is largely other-serving. This is a theme in my work.

One of my sayings is that all politics is about reshuffling the deck of scarcity (largely to the reshuffler’s benefit), and that is no help in achieving abundance. I have lived through, witnessed, and heard of the many ways to fail at this Epochal task. What those failed approaches all had in common was being mired in scarcity.

Serg wrote about the folly of waiting for some benevolent elites to deliver that sequestered technology. The global elite know very well that the delivery of those technologies for public use means the end of elites. That is why they have been so active in preventing public awareness and use of them. Elites made “sense” in the Third and Fourth Epoch, but they will make no sense in the Fifth, when everybody is richer than Bill Gates is today. Slavery made “sense” in the Third Epoch but became an obsolete social role in the Fourth.

Serg also remarked on the limitation of the left’s version of structural analysis, which is blinkered in key ways, such as denying that global elites even exist. Global elites have the most unaccountable power on Earth, and it is almost entirely invisible to humanity, which is why it is so unaccountable. The key existential issues that humanity faces today have both structural and conspiratorial aspects to them, but the left and right have lopsided perspectives, largely because they think like victims rather than creators, and creators create with love.

Serg discussed the infighting and other failures of leftist movements. My choir will be comprised of awakened Boy and Girl Scouts, and infighting will be the last thing on their minds. If they can hit the notes in chorus, the rest will be easy. They won’t be singing to their social circles, but singing to attract more like them. Hitting the notes is the only price of admission, and as Serg noted, anybody can do it. There will be no sneaking past the global elite. This will happen in the light of day. I am doing it now.

The greatest triumph of the global elite is making the Fifth Epoch unimaginable. My work is all about making it imaginable.

If that choir can hit the notes, there will be no need for leftist “struggle,” defeating elites, and so on. The safe delivery of those technologies for public use will form the foundation of the Fifth Epoch, and everything else will be noise. Years ago, I wrote what the first century of the Fifth Epoch can look like. I hope to live to see it begin, but I am at peace if I don’t.

These are my initial thoughts on Serg’s beautiful post, and I invite discussion of it.

Best,

Wade

[Servant Limestone]

Hi Wade:

Thank you for engaging with my post so generously.

I want to make a point that I made only implicitly in the last piece. I know you get this already but I just want to make it clear for the wider audience.

I am not against those who choose not to vote anymore, or who vote third-party in the US context or in any other national context.
My left communist and old libertarian socialist "heroes" did abstain from electoralism for a very good reason that I agree with.

I built my instrumentalist axis for a specific reason: the vote isn't about expressing your beliefs or your conscience. It's about defending contestation space, full stop. That's its only use for me.

That's a very narrow, tactical function of voting, not a moral one. "Vote your conscience", in my opinion, still quietly assumes that the vote carries expressive weight it usually doesn't have, especially in a two-party system where both dominant options converges on similar policies anyway.

Voting for more localized stakes is a bit more different, I guess, but I am talking more of the national level.

In my personal case, I still vote, but not necessarily because I think my ballot expresses some ideological commitment. It is a transactional process, and I think that's the honest way to describe most functional voting behavior of people once you strip away the mythology and ideology.

You referenced AOC as an example of someone who "auditioned" for the machine, and I want to add texture to that, because her standing on the American Left is genuinely contested, not settled.

The DSA's own relationship with her has been... quite rocky. Back in 2024, the DSA's National Political Committee tried to impose new conditions on her before giving an endorsement, largely tied to her positions on Israel, and AOC effectively let her national endorsement lapse as NYC-DSA had already independently re-endorsed her and pushed back against the national body's move. That fight didn't resolve cleanly. Ahead of her 2028 considerations, DSA members held another formal internal vote in 2026 on whether to re-endorse her, and internal caucuses like Reform & Revolution were still publicly pressuring NYC-DSA to extract further concessions from her (on a full arms embargo, for instance).

The point isn't that AOC is secretly a sellout or a hero. In fact, I don't think that she see herself as a sellout. It's more of that people treating her as some figure of "universal adulation" on the left misreads the actual internal politics of the organizations that are supposed to be her base.

This is worth explaining structurally, because AOC's situation make more sense once you see DSA's organizational structure.

NYC-DSA is legally and financially distinct from national DSA, with more than 13,000 of its own dues-paying members, and given DSA's decentralized nature, it can run and fund its own campaigns independently even though it's nominally bound by national convention decisions. That's exactly how NYC-DSA could re-endorse AOC on its own terms while national DSA hesitated, and it's why NYC-DSA endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor without even routing it through a national endorsement process. In a way, the national DSA and NYC-DSA are two very different organizations and they may not be able to coexist for much longer.

There are real, differing visions of what "democratic socialism" even means operating under the same brand name, and DSA's internal caucus map (Socialist Majority Caucus, Marxist Unity Group, and others) reflects genuine ideological splits, not just tactical disagreements.

The same trap is happening with Mamdani right now. Mamdani was clear during his mayoral campaign that his mayoral platform does not align with the platform of the national DSA, and it's kind of obvious that it's going to be the case to me, as someone who closely observed the DSA's growth from 2017. The national DSA since 2023 is dominated by revolutionary left tendencies while the right-wing of the DSA has always dominated New York.

Both AOC and Mamdani are right-wingers within DSA. I think that's what most people don't know.

They are social democrats and there's a reason why I don't like them, dating back to the days of the aborted German revolution of 1918-1919.

It's even worse in the Philippine context since the left-right axis mostly doesn't work in this country. Politicians here are tied by clientism and patronage networks rather than programmatic ideology, with the exception of the "progressive bloc" that gets roughly 15% of the vote here. Politicians here changed parties like they are just wearing this set of clothes today and then dumping them for another set the next day. It is brazen.

So there isn't much to vote for here too. Not only do the mainstream options share the same economic paradigm, the contest between them isn't even organized around competing ideas in the first place, but around competing patronage networks fighting over the same scarce resources you described as the underlying grammar of all politics.

But I think the most important part of how I developed the framework is because I live in a country where there are real threats in narrowing out that contestation space. It is real. Journalists here are always getting killed. The last administration forced a major TV station to lose its license to operate in free TV. They didn't really close down but they moved online and in cable and also made deals with other TV stations to broadcast their shows while starting to operate more as a major production company as well.

I treat the vote as a narrow defensive act, preserving contestation space for the future, rather than as a moral statement about who you are.

That's all there is to it.

Much love,

Serg, The Free Energy Communizer.

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Serg:

I fully realize that I live in a nation with the freest speech on Earth, as far as punishments go, but it is really not all that free. Kara Dansky got canceled out of her career for speaking out on the trans issue, many medical professionals who dissented from the draconian COVID response lost their careers, which is nothing new in medicine. Ralph McGehee had hell to pay tor publishing his CIA memoir. Many free-energy inventors came to untimely ends. Getting “debanked” for speaking out was becoming common in the USA before Trump signed an executive order about it.

Many have been punished in the USA for straying from the herd, speaking out, etc. And that does not even get to the other level of free speech that you discussed, of being heard. Beginning about 20 years ago, wherever I appeared on the Internet, trolls swarmed, and they allied with forum admins to get me kicked out or chased out of several forums, before I embarked on what I do today. The trolls know that I can zap them at Substack, so they generally don’t even try (I have comments turned off at my YouTube site), but my forum has been subjected to DDOS attacks recently. I have to wonder who is behind that.

And that is the low-level stuff, far below the media control that Ed Herman spent his life writing about. I can appreciate how people in other nations genuinely fear for their safety if they speak out, which is one reason most of my “choir” will likely be Americans, although they are not really my target audience. I am taking advantage of our relatively free speech while I can.

On retail politics, my point on AOC is that she literally is an actress who auditioned for her current role, but many politicians have come from entertainment (Reagan, Trump, etc.). Sam Husseini worked for the first Arabic Senator, and Sam considers “The Squad” to be a fraud.

The left largely fights over crumbs. Going to the root of it all and fixing it is simply beyond their imagination. Near his life’s end, Brian O’Leary was beside himself on how even the idea of free energy was completely shut out of all “progressive” venues. Of course, the New Energy Movement was a disaster, and the other board members kicked Brian out of it, although he founded it, which was standard “progressive” infighting and empire-building.

Yes, be pragmatic about your voting.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

My reply to Serg had me read a little Dansky this morning. As Dansky clearly makes the case, the trans craze is specifically an attack on women and children, and the DSA and ACLU lead the way on that insanity. What is wrong with that picture? I really try to ignore the many political stripes, as none of them are going to get the important work done. That Serg sees my work as aligning with some historical leftists is his recognition of a kind of convergent evolution. Evolution is about what works. I am just trying to get a job done.

Best,

Wade

[Servant Limestone]

Hi Wade:

Great stuff.

Yes, Historical leftist is the key word here.

"Convergent evolution" seems to be the right word.

What you call the "trans craze" has afflicted almost the entirety of the Left political tribe today and I can understand why this is a deal breaker for those from the Right political tribe in crossing over and joining the Left today.

Good thing that this is not my problem and is not what I am concerned about in my Substack writings.

What I fear from the Right more today is their naivety in terms of supporting policies that closes out the contestation-space. It is those hierarchy-preserving instincts that are not serving them well. Their blindspots are larger than those from the Left, but we already know that.

As for the trans craze and the Left, of course there are exceptions to the rule that did not join the craze like the Old Left and its remnants today as well as individuals like George Galloway from Britain, who calls himself "conservative" and a "socialist", among others.

The rise of the credentialed professional middle class in the Left (and now the downwardly mobile credentialed professionals in the radical Left) is such a massive shift, dating back from the 1960s, which I assume is something that served the global elite very well.

Educational attainment seems to be the great dividing line nowadays in Western democracies.

French economist Thomas Piketty calls it "the Brahmin Left" vs "the Merchant Right".

http://onala.free.fr/amabledarcillon21.pdf
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/GMP2022QJE.pdf

In recent decades, high-educated, low-income people is becoming the core of the Left while low-educated, low-income people is now joining the Right with its historical core of low-educated, high-income people.

High-income, high-educated people form the so-called "bloc bourgeois". They're roughly the "center" today while previously, they're more to the Right.

That's the divide.

And it's not like this in the past.

It does lend credence to the theory of "elite overproduction".

And of course, given the situation, this is where the dogmas of "scientism", "rationalism", and "materialism" that you've talked about comes into play.

The "trans-craze" falls into the Brahmin Left's embrace of the scientism dogma.

I've never fully embraced the so-called "New Left" and a ton of its garbage that the Brahmin Left is now eating, even before.

My deeper understanding of the left communist current just helped me understood why.

Even then, as far as I know, the left communists themselves have embraced the "trans craze" today, with some exceptions. Very fringe ones.

It's not surprising to me that there is a surprisingly large amount of transgender people that have entered the existing leftcom organizations or are its sympathizers today.

Left communists sadly has become the very thing that they were criticizing today.

So there are these obvious limitations of retail politics, which is why I consciously placed retail politics on an instrumentalist axis, with a very limited use, and unchained the pursuit of the Fifth Epoch from it and rightfully so.

The Marxist Constantinople analogy is also all about that.

I am your "spy" that slipped into the walls of the besieged City while looking to get recruits that I can either slip quietly outside to Nicaea (the choir) or join me while engaging with the palace-library guardians or the wall's defenders.

Hope they don't kill me in the process, especially once they found out that I am a "spy".

Nowadays, the defenders of the City can't recognize that Nicaea is their inheritance.

Thanks,

Serg (The Free Energy Communizer)

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Serg:

I doubt that you will sneakily recruit somebody to the choir. The people that I seek will immediately understand that my work is something different and don’t need to be enticed into it. The best of them dive in and come up for air months or years later. You read my work for at least a year, as I recall, before you approached me. It took one pupil two years to digest my big essay.

That was what it was like for me during my early studies of Noam’s work. I was an eager student, and it took about two years before I really understood what Noam was saying, as it was so alien to what I had been taught.

Yes, all of those flavors of left have their virtues and failings, mired in scarcity as they are, and none of them can really imagine the Fifth Epoch, even though the idea of “post-scarcity” is discussed in some mainstream corners, and it is becoming a more prominent idea in these AI days. The best of Star Trek hinted at the Fifth Epoch, before the franchise went down the woke drain. It peaked a few years after Roddenberry’s death (the TNG/DS9 overlap), and has been on a steady decline since then.

I use “craze” for the trans movement because it is like the eugenics and lobotomy crazes, among other abominations. They really were crazes, all of them involved highly invasive medical interventions that were lucrative for the medical racket, none of them were on solid scientific ground, and they all targeted the vulnerable. No mammal can change its sex, including humans. The trans craze really is crazy, and I live in the epicenter of it. That the “left” has embraced that insanity, which is primarily an attack on women and children, is horrifying. It is another indicator that becoming a sentient species is not easy. In every book that I read on the subject, Michel Foucault was “credited” as the grandfather of the craze. Postmodernism is bizarre, as if gravity could be wished away.

On your “elite overproduction,” I have studied a bit of Turchin’s work and learned some new things, but when I see speculation from his corner on what elites will do in the future, but planted firmly in the Fourth Epoch, I sigh. The Fourth Epoch will likely not continue for long, one way or another. Fossil fuels are running out fast and the traditional alternatives will be a kind of a net-zero return to the Third Epoch in ways. But nobody ever saw the next Epoch coming, so it is no different with today’s academics and virtually all political stripes (and not one of them has even seriously entertained the idea of free energy, and people like Brian were voices in the wilderness). There won’t be elites in the Fifth Epoch. That sounds good to me.

Going to bed now.

Best,

Wade

[Servant Limestone]

Hi Wade:

Good morning.

I think this is a good opportunity to explain more of my Constantinople analogy because of a possible misunderstanding.

This is actually what I wanted to write about more in my Substack because I think my last post can be improved better and may even deserve a part 2 of sorts, but I'll go for it here right now.

I think the word "spy" triggered a few misconceptions and misunderstandings here.

I wasn't describing myself as trying to sneakily recruit people into the choir by using Left theory as a gateway for them understanding Wade's world.

That's not the approach here.

If I said that in the past, I think I wasn't able to explain myself well.

But that's why I developed this analogy better.

To go back to my analogy, as a Nicaean spy, I slipped inside the walls of the besieged City, with potential access to some of the palace-library guardians, but more importantly, to the wall's defenders. My purpose there isn't to lure them out under false pretenses and sneak them to Nicaea. It doesn't work like that. I'm not trying to recruit (at least overtly).

My goal is to find those who ALREADY quietly found out about Nicaea's existence behind the walls on their own, however incomplete the information that they have, and then to engage directly with them about it to clarify their misconceptions.

In other words, disillusioned defenders of the walls of the City and hoping that Nicaea somehow saves the City, but everything that they have heard about Nicaea is from imperfect data.

I want to be there to tell them the complete one (Fifth Epoch). That's up to them to believe me.

Another important caveat: I'm not asking them to go to Nicaea. But if they choose to do so, I'll be there for them. That's the "sneaking out" part.

Because once upon a time, you offered that to me.

How? It's because of YOUR own role in this analogy.

In my analogy, you are a spy of Nicaea too. Well, kind of. Even better, you are from Nicaea's royal court. You are a diplomat of sorts. And you say it so openly. You always sneak up inside the City every time you visit but you don't stay very long though you've also left behind a treasure trove of documents about the barbarian lands beyond the City and of Nicaea itself and its promise. You've always kept them in a house inside the City that you are always staying at. I found that house. Someone told me about you. And I then found your writings when you showed them and offered them for me to read and occasionally, I'll find you making your visits and bring some friends and talk more.

Some strangers may also go to the house as well and we listen to you talk.

But people are so busy defending the City and being always at the walls that a lot of people can't be bothered even when you ask them to visit you.

And when you talk, many from among the wall's defenders either call you "crazy" or just find your stories too unbelievable that they may politely listen to you but never believe you.

They can't believe that you and your friends are from Nicaea.

Those are the kinds of reactions from some of them who may visit your house and see your documents.

But many don't.

The vast number of them don't. Or they don't care. They couldn't be bothered.

But I was still young and I got some experiences that many of the wall's defenders don't have, so I was able to rest and then go to your house and then I finally talked to you and I listened to your stories as you listen to mine.

Then one day, you finally asked me if you want me to come with you.

I told you - "No, I have to stay here. I think I'll find some people here. I want to find them, talk to them and then help make their own decision if they want to come to you. Besides, you're not asking for all of them to come. You only need 5,000 men and a lot of them will come from among the barbarians themselves".

Of course you said to me that you are doubtful about my plan, but you offered some help, which I appreciated. You lend me some of your documents so that I can bring them home and hopefully, I can set up a little library of my own and invite people to come pay a visit. Of course inviting them means going to the wall and ask people to come.

That's really all this is.

Just to clarify this before it calcified into something I didn't say.

Thanks,

Serg (The Free Energy Communizer)