The Marxists have seemingly been after the family unit and religion for some time. Hence, that horizontal transmission of "values." Family and faith are two of the strongest pillars holding together our societies. It has been increasingly difficult for many to maintain parental authority, when the education system is run by a generation indoctrinated into Marxiist principles. Many of us raised in earlier decades recognized the slippery slope, but were relegated to hurried whispers, expressing our displeasure behind closed doors, as many younger educators and administrators embraced what was setting off red-flags. E.g., political correctness gone amok, such as "thou must preach the religion of climate change," whilst big companies were given permits to dump raw sewage or take spring water to bottle from communities that were suffering drought (Ontario). Then, there was the march in the education system toward "encouraging" children they could be any gender they liked, in the name of "inclusion."
Fast forward a decade. In 2020, the world watched in disbelief as Portland burned, and a CNN reporter stood in front of the burning chaos reporting on a "mainly peaceful" protest. Family businesses, including Black-owners, were distraught, seeing their life's work destroyed. Calls to defund the police ensued, and many of us knew then, that this would not end well. Nothing made sense.
Now, Australians are under siege and not a chirp from the MSM. And despite the gaslighting, we know that what we are experiencing across the Western world is the destruction of society from the inside out. Small businesses have/are being destroyed, and families are being torn apart by the new religion: The Cult of Covid. The injections are preached as the "saviour," with the Pope going so far as to call getting inoculated, "an act of love." God, please deliver us (and I am Catholic).
The societal implosion appears to have been in the works for some time. Regardless of personal beliefs or faith, I think most would agree that a person who believes in a higher power (in my case, the God of Christianity) is not so easily broken or enslaved. And a family that is tightly woven together, will not be so easily torn apart.
I've had a good run - I believe growing up in the 70s was one of the best of times. But I despair for the children, including my own, while I remain grateful for all of the warriors, like Mathew, who continue to push against those who are driving this societal destruction.
The Malthusian mind virus is key to explaining the behaviors of elites, but more important is explaining why the "underclass" constantly fails to organize and rally for an alternative. We do not actually *need* the elite in order to bring about a new and better system, we need a substantive consensus around a moral method of governance. What blocks this are various mind viruses concocted by state-sponsored charlatans ("philosophers"), e.g. the alleged is-ought gap and utilitarianism, which claims that moral principle is beyond the reach of reason. If that is so, then brute force is the only possible ultimate arbiter, and guess who benefits most from such conclusion? The status quo.
"..Trained into blindness regarding the roots of The Great Flattening, the Malthusian Mandarins never shake the mind virus. Their distorted perception congeals into mass psychosis. This in turn leaves them viciously blaming the underclasses, whom they self-train to abuse, and looking for ways to replace them with centralized automated technologies that result in actual GDP collapse." - Truer words have never been spoken. This paragraph makes me incredibly sad.
Very interesting reading but I have an urgent concern. Can anyone refer me to a 1-2 page description of covid vaccine safety in children? Parents are under massive pressure to vaccinate their children. They receive information from “credible sources” like the CDC and FDA, and local health professionals who minimize known safety issues. We need an accurate, up-to-date, report that can be read by busy parents in 5 minutes and hopefully get their attention. I’m working on my own summary but if something already exists, it would be helpful for everyone interested in passing on accurate, clear, and balanced information as quickly as possible.
To really understand the level of control our hidden masters exert on the human race, there's an excellent documentary called "Human Resources". Folks like the Rockafellers were perfecting behavioral psychology a hundred years ago.
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." - John Watson
If you've ever wondered how a politician can be motivated to act so contrary to the interests of not just his constituents, but his own descendants, look up the term "Brownstone Operation". It's a reference to the type of activities carried out by the Mossad in Rep Barney Frank's Brownstone condominium. Which brings us to the subject of Epstein. "Epstein didn't kill himself" is a common refrain, but seldom do you ever hear anyone say "Epstein isn't dead" - https://youtu.be/9FeoeupYPBI?t=72
Speaking of Mr Tedros, Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO, who, as Health Minister, presided over the "disappearance" of 2.5 million ethnic rivals in Ethiopia, here's a window into the private life of this sort off elite. Granted, it's no brownstone, but it's typical of the double-life they lead, and which the media prevents us from ever seeing- https://youtu.be/lLFhhEbqtes
(I was at one point convinced this was a deepfake, but since coming across this high resolution version and contemplating the upward camera angle, and the disco lighting running across his face, I'm now confident this is authentic. You'll note he spots the camera recording him and is unfazed)
Your analysis continues to be fascinating and well thought out. I've been reading The Gulag Archipelago and it's fascinating how this offers a great view of how thinking can go massively wrong similar to the book.
> The role of intellectual property law in preventing vast amounts of investment in the growth and spread of technology, which in turn drives economic growth ...
I'm curious to hear your thoughts about intellectual property law.
This is possibly the topic about which I am most radical. The three pieces to IP law that I consider are: Patents, Copyright and trademarks. If it were up to me, I would eliminate the concepts of patents and copyright after a ~2 year sunset period during which no new patents would be awarded. I have less objection to the concept of trademarks; particularly where trademark enforcement is used to prevent fraud.
My chief objection is the straight-forward point that IP law attempts to regulate the flow of ideas as though it were a flow of matter, which it is not. States should never have been given legal right to regulate the flow of ideas in the first place.
That isn't to say that there aren't arguably up-sides to IP law for a nation. But that isn't sufficient justification for policy that takes away peoples' freedoms -- after all, there's also arguably an up-side (for most people) to murdering a quarter of the population and divvying up their resources.
Thinking of, or acting on, an idea (e.g. a new technology or a new movie) first should not give you any legal right to control the distribution of that idea or how it is used.
Very thoughtful, as always. I agree about the power of mind viruses and memes. Population rate has slowed but overall population has grown and every person's life is powered by energy of some form. You might find this interesting. It takes quite a few years and lots of money to build the nuclear plants needed. Not sure we can bridge the gap between where we are now and what would be needed to power our civilization. So called renewables aren't going to do it, that's for sure.
I was first exposed to the Malthus mind virus in 1970 in elementary school. The scholastic reader featured a story asserting desertification of the breadbasket states in the USA and zero oil by 2000 with food riots and mass deaths plus some mumbling about pollution killing everyone else. Nice work, pushing fear porn on 2nd graders. So I showed it to my dad who was a physics professor at the university of Kansas. He said it seemed like predicting the future wasn't very easy.
A few years after the Club of Rome came out with their garbage I was inoculated by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Heinlein, and Keith Henson and the L5 Society. I realised that not only does technology break Malthus, but the space frontier lets us access the energy and resources of the Solar system to solve problems here. A little later it became obvious that the places to mine and refine to build a civilisation beyond the Earth are themselves beyond the Earth.
“However, this drop in GDP growth fails to take into account all of the following:”
Should your list also include the capture of many fields by the so-called “experts” who then monopolize whole areas of research and lead these fields into dead ends and blackball any and all dissent?
Hello, fellow coworkers. I want to introduce into this discussion a Great American Hero, Col. John Boyd. Some of you have probably heard of him and his influence on 20th Century military thinking and well beyond, but many more have never and likely won't ever, Col. Boyd was a great systematic and practical philosopher without having the "credentials" of the academic who worked in designing the F-16, had a hand in the A-10, and was an unbeatable master of aerial combat. He had a penetrating and amazing mind and was able to condense some of the most far-reaching innovative concepts of the early 20th Century —the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems— into an eight page thesis document, titled "Destruction and Creation" that helps to understand in simpler terms why there will never be a Total System of All-Knowledge and why all learning and growth comes from a dialectic of openness and outwardness rather than a turn inward and away-from. I cannot do it all justice, but please start from this (https://www.goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREATION.pdf).
One of the most significant things Boyd developed was his idea of the oodaloop, a conceptual tool for understanding, grasping, and controlling how concepts become actions. Essentially, the oodaloop describes an embodied mental process going from Observing to Orienting to Deciding to Acting —the OODA loop, but Boyd pronounces it as one quick word. While the simplified versions of his idea present this as four stations you pass through, the more complex version Boyd actively worked with in teaching (and living out) this model shows that the process is non-linear, interactive, constantly engaged/engaging —it is how we live if we are curious, inventive, dedicated, and wilful. Boyd presents this in the context of an entire metanarrative of "winning and losing", as a particular way of approaching all "patterns of conflict" whereby one competes with another for limited resources/time/space, at both individual and societal, even as species, levels.
What Mathew describes as a mind virus with its debilitating features works alongside Boyd's oodaloop account.
Our observations are what we make of our environment, but they come to us through our bodies as well as through our conceptual frames, and these conceptual frames are both given to us and developed by us. They are given to us through our culture, our educators, our social values, our role models, and in a reflected way from those who motivate and challenge us as our own "recipients" —the people whom we teach, whom we are models for, who learn from us, whether the little ones in our lives or the coworkers coming onto our shifts, in how they respond and react to what we are doing, saying, choosing. We also inherit these frames, literally: we are our families' previous choices and the choices parents, grandparents, greater-grandparents, ancestors made in the context of challenges pushed upon them, choices made over the entire history of our family, our race, our ethnos, our species.
We are never simply passive in making observations, but we are also engaged in orienting ourselves within the world and within these frames. We make a judgment about what to engage with, how long to keep that engagement, when to receive and when to interact, and how to perform those interactions. Orienting ourselves is more than just knowing where you are locally, but also extends backwards and forwards, inward and outward, through spacetime for as much as you deem relevant to the context of those observations. This is why I can look at a data plot of COVID-19 statistics and it looks like fancy dots and lines but Mathew can look at it and quickly conclude things about not only what is being presented about the data but also *the intentions and framing* of those who compiled and presented the data: his conceptual space for orienting himself among the observations is vast compared to mine. But there will also be cases where, perhaps, my conceptual space is vast compated to his: orientation is not *simply* "subjective" but it is one of the essential and defining aspects of who and what we are *as* subjects —we are each of us the protagonist of the narrative of our lives.
So once we have reckoned ourselves with our observations, we must make decisions about what we are observing and how meaningful it all is: we must decide what to do, even if our decision is to ignore, go passive, think about dinner, or proofread someone else's comment. Our decisions, again, are not simply something that arises inside us but occur within a conceptual space that informs what a decision even *looks like* or *feels like* for us. If you are not even aware there is a decision you could make, you won't ever recognize that it is an option for consideration, for something you could decide to do. A culture constrains the choices and options for its people, but this is not always a Bad Thing —if you agree with Mathew's consistent use of 'kunlangeta' as a model for thinking about psychopaths amongst us, you already agree that there are choices and options that need to be constrained if our culture is to remain *a culture that's ours*.
And so once you have made your decision, it is nothing until you act —but not all actions flowing from a shared decision will look the same. A husband deciding to marry his wife has a made a similar decision to his wife deciding to marry him, but both of them will act out that decision in different ways, and, again, in ways that are as much rooted in those physical bodies they have defining them as 'husband' and 'wife' as they are grafted into social bodies constructed by these labels 'husband' and 'wife'. We are (at least) both physical beings and virtual ones existing within societies, and our societies exist in physical ways having thermodynamic limitations and efficiency tricks. How one performs action involves all those ethical, social, practical, physical, fiscal, spiritual, &cal dimensions, some of which are consciously involved in the action itself but perhaps most of which are felt as the "intuitive" background for why we did what we do —"Your honor, it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time."
See, I can't do all this justice and condense this down to something less than all these paragraphs. But the point of all this: a mind virus is a way to disturb the entire reasoning, deciding, acting process by breaking off an agent's oodaloop and disturbing the flow of it or otherwise constraining it. Having to respond to or address the viral in another uses up resources of your own, for your own conceptual flow through your own oodaloops. Competition and battle is about *tempo*, and someone with a very fast or tight oodaloop (which is not to say someone who thinks in *small loops*) will outperform and emerge victorious when in competition with someone with a very loose or degraded oodaloop. This is easy to understand with kinetic warfare, where if I can draw my gun faster than you I'll getcha, but you can also think about how someone with a "quick mind" can beat you at chess or checkers before you ever realize you've lost the game five moves ago. Psychological warfare —the infamous "psy op"— requires disrupting oodaloops by feeding into them false or conflicting information, constraining opponents' choices into pre-selected dead-ends or indefinite/indeterminate cycles (ever notice how trying to decide where to eat by running through all the options and tradeoffs and values takes so long that you end up either making a bad choice or none at all?), while also surveilling opponent reactions and responses through preemptively gathering together patterns of their choices. You can work quickly or slowly through the many historical examples Boyd uses to draw out this concept in fascinating ways in his "Patterns of Conflict" —where the sections on guerrilla warfare might be of great importance in understanding how a sovereign nation loses itself to an occupying force or how a decadent Empire collapses through concerted, parallel action. You can find this essay here (https://danford.net/boyd/) or there (https://www.coljohnboyd.com/static/documents/2018-03__Boyd_John_R__edited_Hammond_Grant_T__A_Discourse_on_Winning_and_Losing.pdf).
The Marxists have seemingly been after the family unit and religion for some time. Hence, that horizontal transmission of "values." Family and faith are two of the strongest pillars holding together our societies. It has been increasingly difficult for many to maintain parental authority, when the education system is run by a generation indoctrinated into Marxiist principles. Many of us raised in earlier decades recognized the slippery slope, but were relegated to hurried whispers, expressing our displeasure behind closed doors, as many younger educators and administrators embraced what was setting off red-flags. E.g., political correctness gone amok, such as "thou must preach the religion of climate change," whilst big companies were given permits to dump raw sewage or take spring water to bottle from communities that were suffering drought (Ontario). Then, there was the march in the education system toward "encouraging" children they could be any gender they liked, in the name of "inclusion."
Fast forward a decade. In 2020, the world watched in disbelief as Portland burned, and a CNN reporter stood in front of the burning chaos reporting on a "mainly peaceful" protest. Family businesses, including Black-owners, were distraught, seeing their life's work destroyed. Calls to defund the police ensued, and many of us knew then, that this would not end well. Nothing made sense.
Now, Australians are under siege and not a chirp from the MSM. And despite the gaslighting, we know that what we are experiencing across the Western world is the destruction of society from the inside out. Small businesses have/are being destroyed, and families are being torn apart by the new religion: The Cult of Covid. The injections are preached as the "saviour," with the Pope going so far as to call getting inoculated, "an act of love." God, please deliver us (and I am Catholic).
The societal implosion appears to have been in the works for some time. Regardless of personal beliefs or faith, I think most would agree that a person who believes in a higher power (in my case, the God of Christianity) is not so easily broken or enslaved. And a family that is tightly woven together, will not be so easily torn apart.
I've had a good run - I believe growing up in the 70s was one of the best of times. But I despair for the children, including my own, while I remain grateful for all of the warriors, like Mathew, who continue to push against those who are driving this societal destruction.
"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.". ― Mark Twain.
The Malthusian mind virus is key to explaining the behaviors of elites, but more important is explaining why the "underclass" constantly fails to organize and rally for an alternative. We do not actually *need* the elite in order to bring about a new and better system, we need a substantive consensus around a moral method of governance. What blocks this are various mind viruses concocted by state-sponsored charlatans ("philosophers"), e.g. the alleged is-ought gap and utilitarianism, which claims that moral principle is beyond the reach of reason. If that is so, then brute force is the only possible ultimate arbiter, and guess who benefits most from such conclusion? The status quo.
"..Trained into blindness regarding the roots of The Great Flattening, the Malthusian Mandarins never shake the mind virus. Their distorted perception congeals into mass psychosis. This in turn leaves them viciously blaming the underclasses, whom they self-train to abuse, and looking for ways to replace them with centralized automated technologies that result in actual GDP collapse." - Truer words have never been spoken. This paragraph makes me incredibly sad.
Mathew this is quite an insight.
So, we can choose our response to these issues, mentally and physically. Just how do we push these people off the ice?
Very interesting reading but I have an urgent concern. Can anyone refer me to a 1-2 page description of covid vaccine safety in children? Parents are under massive pressure to vaccinate their children. They receive information from “credible sources” like the CDC and FDA, and local health professionals who minimize known safety issues. We need an accurate, up-to-date, report that can be read by busy parents in 5 minutes and hopefully get their attention. I’m working on my own summary but if something already exists, it would be helpful for everyone interested in passing on accurate, clear, and balanced information as quickly as possible.
To really understand the level of control our hidden masters exert on the human race, there's an excellent documentary called "Human Resources". Folks like the Rockafellers were perfecting behavioral psychology a hundred years ago.
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." - John Watson
https://archive.org/details/HUMANRESOURCESSocialEngineeringInThe20thCentury
If you've ever wondered how a politician can be motivated to act so contrary to the interests of not just his constituents, but his own descendants, look up the term "Brownstone Operation". It's a reference to the type of activities carried out by the Mossad in Rep Barney Frank's Brownstone condominium. Which brings us to the subject of Epstein. "Epstein didn't kill himself" is a common refrain, but seldom do you ever hear anyone say "Epstein isn't dead" - https://youtu.be/9FeoeupYPBI?t=72
Speaking of Mr Tedros, Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO, who, as Health Minister, presided over the "disappearance" of 2.5 million ethnic rivals in Ethiopia, here's a window into the private life of this sort off elite. Granted, it's no brownstone, but it's typical of the double-life they lead, and which the media prevents us from ever seeing- https://youtu.be/lLFhhEbqtes
(I was at one point convinced this was a deepfake, but since coming across this high resolution version and contemplating the upward camera angle, and the disco lighting running across his face, I'm now confident this is authentic. You'll note he spots the camera recording him and is unfazed)
Your analysis continues to be fascinating and well thought out. I've been reading The Gulag Archipelago and it's fascinating how this offers a great view of how thinking can go massively wrong similar to the book.
> The role of intellectual property law in preventing vast amounts of investment in the growth and spread of technology, which in turn drives economic growth ...
I'm curious to hear your thoughts about intellectual property law.
This is possibly the topic about which I am most radical. The three pieces to IP law that I consider are: Patents, Copyright and trademarks. If it were up to me, I would eliminate the concepts of patents and copyright after a ~2 year sunset period during which no new patents would be awarded. I have less objection to the concept of trademarks; particularly where trademark enforcement is used to prevent fraud.
My chief objection is the straight-forward point that IP law attempts to regulate the flow of ideas as though it were a flow of matter, which it is not. States should never have been given legal right to regulate the flow of ideas in the first place.
That isn't to say that there aren't arguably up-sides to IP law for a nation. But that isn't sufficient justification for policy that takes away peoples' freedoms -- after all, there's also arguably an up-side (for most people) to murdering a quarter of the population and divvying up their resources.
Thinking of, or acting on, an idea (e.g. a new technology or a new movie) first should not give you any legal right to control the distribution of that idea or how it is used.
Very thoughtful, as always. I agree about the power of mind viruses and memes. Population rate has slowed but overall population has grown and every person's life is powered by energy of some form. You might find this interesting. It takes quite a few years and lots of money to build the nuclear plants needed. Not sure we can bridge the gap between where we are now and what would be needed to power our civilization. So called renewables aren't going to do it, that's for sure.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021/09/26/the-march-of-folly/
I was first exposed to the Malthus mind virus in 1970 in elementary school. The scholastic reader featured a story asserting desertification of the breadbasket states in the USA and zero oil by 2000 with food riots and mass deaths plus some mumbling about pollution killing everyone else. Nice work, pushing fear porn on 2nd graders. So I showed it to my dad who was a physics professor at the university of Kansas. He said it seemed like predicting the future wasn't very easy.
A few years after the Club of Rome came out with their garbage I was inoculated by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Heinlein, and Keith Henson and the L5 Society. I realised that not only does technology break Malthus, but the space frontier lets us access the energy and resources of the Solar system to solve problems here. A little later it became obvious that the places to mine and refine to build a civilisation beyond the Earth are themselves beyond the Earth.
“However, this drop in GDP growth fails to take into account all of the following:”
Should your list also include the capture of many fields by the so-called “experts” who then monopolize whole areas of research and lead these fields into dead ends and blackball any and all dissent?
Well said.
The great Asha Logos has released a new video "A Call for Parallel Institutions" revealing the psychology of those who make up the great majority of those carrying implementing this crime against all that is Good, Beautiful and True. https://video.thesetruths.com/S7q11kg/asha-logos-a-call-for-parallel-institutions/
Hello, fellow coworkers. I want to introduce into this discussion a Great American Hero, Col. John Boyd. Some of you have probably heard of him and his influence on 20th Century military thinking and well beyond, but many more have never and likely won't ever, Col. Boyd was a great systematic and practical philosopher without having the "credentials" of the academic who worked in designing the F-16, had a hand in the A-10, and was an unbeatable master of aerial combat. He had a penetrating and amazing mind and was able to condense some of the most far-reaching innovative concepts of the early 20th Century —the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems— into an eight page thesis document, titled "Destruction and Creation" that helps to understand in simpler terms why there will never be a Total System of All-Knowledge and why all learning and growth comes from a dialectic of openness and outwardness rather than a turn inward and away-from. I cannot do it all justice, but please start from this (https://www.goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREATION.pdf).
One of the most significant things Boyd developed was his idea of the oodaloop, a conceptual tool for understanding, grasping, and controlling how concepts become actions. Essentially, the oodaloop describes an embodied mental process going from Observing to Orienting to Deciding to Acting —the OODA loop, but Boyd pronounces it as one quick word. While the simplified versions of his idea present this as four stations you pass through, the more complex version Boyd actively worked with in teaching (and living out) this model shows that the process is non-linear, interactive, constantly engaged/engaging —it is how we live if we are curious, inventive, dedicated, and wilful. Boyd presents this in the context of an entire metanarrative of "winning and losing", as a particular way of approaching all "patterns of conflict" whereby one competes with another for limited resources/time/space, at both individual and societal, even as species, levels.
What Mathew describes as a mind virus with its debilitating features works alongside Boyd's oodaloop account.
Our observations are what we make of our environment, but they come to us through our bodies as well as through our conceptual frames, and these conceptual frames are both given to us and developed by us. They are given to us through our culture, our educators, our social values, our role models, and in a reflected way from those who motivate and challenge us as our own "recipients" —the people whom we teach, whom we are models for, who learn from us, whether the little ones in our lives or the coworkers coming onto our shifts, in how they respond and react to what we are doing, saying, choosing. We also inherit these frames, literally: we are our families' previous choices and the choices parents, grandparents, greater-grandparents, ancestors made in the context of challenges pushed upon them, choices made over the entire history of our family, our race, our ethnos, our species.
We are never simply passive in making observations, but we are also engaged in orienting ourselves within the world and within these frames. We make a judgment about what to engage with, how long to keep that engagement, when to receive and when to interact, and how to perform those interactions. Orienting ourselves is more than just knowing where you are locally, but also extends backwards and forwards, inward and outward, through spacetime for as much as you deem relevant to the context of those observations. This is why I can look at a data plot of COVID-19 statistics and it looks like fancy dots and lines but Mathew can look at it and quickly conclude things about not only what is being presented about the data but also *the intentions and framing* of those who compiled and presented the data: his conceptual space for orienting himself among the observations is vast compared to mine. But there will also be cases where, perhaps, my conceptual space is vast compated to his: orientation is not *simply* "subjective" but it is one of the essential and defining aspects of who and what we are *as* subjects —we are each of us the protagonist of the narrative of our lives.
So once we have reckoned ourselves with our observations, we must make decisions about what we are observing and how meaningful it all is: we must decide what to do, even if our decision is to ignore, go passive, think about dinner, or proofread someone else's comment. Our decisions, again, are not simply something that arises inside us but occur within a conceptual space that informs what a decision even *looks like* or *feels like* for us. If you are not even aware there is a decision you could make, you won't ever recognize that it is an option for consideration, for something you could decide to do. A culture constrains the choices and options for its people, but this is not always a Bad Thing —if you agree with Mathew's consistent use of 'kunlangeta' as a model for thinking about psychopaths amongst us, you already agree that there are choices and options that need to be constrained if our culture is to remain *a culture that's ours*.
And so once you have made your decision, it is nothing until you act —but not all actions flowing from a shared decision will look the same. A husband deciding to marry his wife has a made a similar decision to his wife deciding to marry him, but both of them will act out that decision in different ways, and, again, in ways that are as much rooted in those physical bodies they have defining them as 'husband' and 'wife' as they are grafted into social bodies constructed by these labels 'husband' and 'wife'. We are (at least) both physical beings and virtual ones existing within societies, and our societies exist in physical ways having thermodynamic limitations and efficiency tricks. How one performs action involves all those ethical, social, practical, physical, fiscal, spiritual, &cal dimensions, some of which are consciously involved in the action itself but perhaps most of which are felt as the "intuitive" background for why we did what we do —"Your honor, it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time."
See, I can't do all this justice and condense this down to something less than all these paragraphs. But the point of all this: a mind virus is a way to disturb the entire reasoning, deciding, acting process by breaking off an agent's oodaloop and disturbing the flow of it or otherwise constraining it. Having to respond to or address the viral in another uses up resources of your own, for your own conceptual flow through your own oodaloops. Competition and battle is about *tempo*, and someone with a very fast or tight oodaloop (which is not to say someone who thinks in *small loops*) will outperform and emerge victorious when in competition with someone with a very loose or degraded oodaloop. This is easy to understand with kinetic warfare, where if I can draw my gun faster than you I'll getcha, but you can also think about how someone with a "quick mind" can beat you at chess or checkers before you ever realize you've lost the game five moves ago. Psychological warfare —the infamous "psy op"— requires disrupting oodaloops by feeding into them false or conflicting information, constraining opponents' choices into pre-selected dead-ends or indefinite/indeterminate cycles (ever notice how trying to decide where to eat by running through all the options and tradeoffs and values takes so long that you end up either making a bad choice or none at all?), while also surveilling opponent reactions and responses through preemptively gathering together patterns of their choices. You can work quickly or slowly through the many historical examples Boyd uses to draw out this concept in fascinating ways in his "Patterns of Conflict" —where the sections on guerrilla warfare might be of great importance in understanding how a sovereign nation loses itself to an occupying force or how a decadent Empire collapses through concerted, parallel action. You can find this essay here (https://danford.net/boyd/) or there (https://www.coljohnboyd.com/static/documents/2018-03__Boyd_John_R__edited_Hammond_Grant_T__A_Discourse_on_Winning_and_Losing.pdf).