🧵The Customer As King - Passivity Of Consuming Information Without Formation

The present public ‘Market appetite and desire appears to be for certainty without responsibility, for ‘Strong leadership’ promising decisive action without requiring individuals to exercise sustained moral reasoning, with the resulting individual agency. The desire I’m observing is for construct-derived collective belonging - not -individual agency. The majority appetite demonstrated is a preference for aligning with a movement’s identity rather than shouldering the weight of sovereign individual agency. Popular sovereignty is psychologically invisible without experience of self-governance and most people can’t imagine what it looks like. Their only reference points (over generations) are hierarchies and managed systems.

When the public is actively calling for ‘strong leadership’ the market delivers; whether in the form of a political strongman, a charismatic influencer, or (now “freed” from federal corruption - but strangely ok with state, district and municipal corruption) an AI governance interface to save the day. Technocracy can present itself as the strong, incorruptible leader, except it’s not a person, it’s an infrastructure. Algorithmic enforcement is marketed as ‘beyond human corruption’ while being fully Programmable by Those Who control The System. But they know we all like consuming and producing so the illusion of democratic means of participation is baked into our consumer access and choice architecture.


2/ The Structural Irony

The Founder’s design presumed a people who wanted to govern themselves, not to be ruled, even benevolently. Today, most view rule by ‘our’ side as the highest achievable form of freedom. “Democratic Freedom” - the onramp to tyranny - as the Founders warned and established the Republic to defend against. This ‘party’ collectivist mindset makes it irrelevant whether the ruling apparatus is ‘hard’ (authoritarian regime) or ‘soft’ (technocratic governance); the citizen’s role has already been reduced to follower/consumer - a subject of a system which their agency is outsourced to and which ‘manages them’ as a utilitarian resource for the owners and architects of The System.

🧵
The Doug Wilson / Moscow, Idaho ‘militarized ecclesial capture’ (MEC) model functions as a form of religious-communitarian authoritarianism that appears hyper-local and biblically grounded, but in its structure and operational logic it is entirely compatible with (and in some respects ideal for) the emerging totalitarian technocracy/networked state paradigm.

In this thread I’ll break this down in a little detail. 2/ The Structural Premise of Militarized Ecclesial Capture

Wilson’s model is not simply ‘church leadership’, it’s a tightly integrated religious authority network that consolidates theological authority, civil authority and economic control in a unified leadership hierarchy. It demands total allegiance to the governing church body, including political and civic obedience framed as spiritual duty. It exercises in-group preference in business, education, housing and local governance; making access to resources contingent on membership loyalty. ‘Militarized’ in this context means disciplined chain of command and strong gatekeeping against ideological dissent.
Intentional strategy to expand territorial and institutional influence - this is not ‘just’ spiritual care.

🧵Ideology as Deployment System🐍

Ideology is not primarily about belief (architecturally it never was), it is about behavioural engineering. It functions not as a truth claim to be evaluated, but as a delivery mechanism for reprogramming how individuals perceive reality, authority and themselves. Ideologies serve as deployment systems; they install conceptual frameworks that override inherited metaphysical assumptions and gradually recondition populations into new ontological operating modes. ‘Unburdening from what has been’. They’re demolition systems - the mechanisms of Solve et Coagula for The Great Work requiring both Chaos and the calculated Order to be installed in its wake. 2/
Every dominant ideology in modern discourse; whether political, cultural, spiritual, or technological, performs this function. Its goal is not to persuade through reasoned argument, but to embed a new structure of perception. It does this by saturating language, media, institutions and interpersonal dynamics with a vocabulary of crisis, grievance, liberation, or innovation. The target is not just opinion, but orientation; disabling orientation and navigation in order to reshape what the individual considers real, good and possible. Population control at scale and management of the masses by the few.

🧵Neither a Horse nor a Dog

The Founders’ insistence that man must be neither a “dog” nor a “horse” refers not to a commentary on social status or station, but to man’s metaphysical capacity—his rational and moral agency as a bearer of logos, which is necessary for the preservation of a free republic. A dog follows commands. A horse may be trained and directed. But both are governed externally. The Founders explicitly rejected the notion that man is to be managed through coercion, impulse conditioning, or elite rule. They understood that liberty demands internal governance—self-rule through Right Reason.

What the Founders Meant:

James Wilson, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others (though often inconsistently applied) inherited and expressed the tradition of Classical Realism—especially via Reid, Beattie, and the Protestant Realist Thomistic core in Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. Their metaphysical assumptions informing the Declaration and Constitution were:

Man is rational, not because he can calculate, but because he can apprehend what is; reality as it is.

Man is moral, not because he obeys rules, but because he participates in the discernment of the good, which is objective and knowable.

Therefore, man must be educated not to blindly obey, but necessarily to govern himself; to choose the good because he sees (discerns not projects) it and loves (commits himself to) it.

A “dog” or “horse” cannot do this. They can be controlled, domesticated, or broken whereas a citizen cannot. A subject can - if under mental/intellectual manipulation and behavioural control. That would be the province of constructivist philosophy in the academy (following the Founding and as part of the long campaign of subversion against it), the state education system instantiated specifically to negate it) and the propaganda apparatus of media culture at large. If a man is conditioned like a dog, or trained like a horse, he is not a citizen of a Republic; he is a subject, or worse, a mechanism. Social Science has been a primary mechanism of transforming citizens into subjects - now subjects of Technocratic soft Totalitarianism, for which Bernays’ ontology of consumerism as the mechanism of controlling domestic population has been key. Man as consumer, client and service user in The Market. The Pavlovian and Skinnerian control mechanisms of environmental affordances and behaviour rewards run efficiently and mostly invisibly in The Market under the ubiquitous default to Pragmatism and Contracts/Agreements/Consent Frameworks. 2/ The Telos of Education in the Classical Republic

The telos of education, under Classical Realism and the metaphysics of the American Founding, is therefore not to conform the citizen to power or adapt him to systems, but to form him in truth. This requires formation in Right Reason (Recta Ratio). Capability (within limits) to recognize (logic; apprehension & judgement necessary) what is real and what is good (not as opinion or preference) but in direct relation to understanding and embodying the responsibilities and duties of liberty, as established by the Founders. This demands education in grammar, logic, and rhetoric (not as tools of persuasion) but of discernment. So not mere performative oration for ‘training leaders’, but recognition, comprehension necessary for all ‘men’ (grown ass adults, not arrested development incapable of upholding its own responsibilities absent genuine impairment/injury). In other words - stewards of liberty, rather than mere claimers of license.

🧵Recursion v Participation

Do you comprehend inalienable rights? That your rights come from your created (endowed) human nature (what man is, not ‘has’ or ‘does’) - not from government or contracts?

Then you believe, whether you know it or not, in a real human nature; something that doesn’t change based on who’s in power, what the system says, or the ideas laundered through constructivist “theories”. Acknowledging what man is as a rational human adult is to uphold ‘Man’ as understood and articulated in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. To recognize, embody, uphold and defend this is participation.

BUT:
If you’re in a system based on recursion (statist and managerial control systems), you don’t have rights. You have roles, responsibilities and functions that are granted to you by the system, as long as you’re ‘ascending’ (evolving/complying) properly.

Recursion v Participation is not abstract philosophy; it’s the difference between being a citizen and being a managed resource. What follows is civics-grounded explanation designed for those who do not speak ‘philosophy’ or ‘theology’, but do care about liberty, government, rights and being a free citizen. This thread was inspired by reading open.substack.com/pub/escapekey/… and I highly recommend reading the article in full (and all his other excellent articles on the architecture of control and co-option into simulation systems).

Participation = rights by nature
Recursion = permissions by performance 2/ Your Vote

In a participatory system, your vote matters because the system is supposed to serve truth and the good of the people. Citizenship is real participation in law, policy and sovereignty. In a recursive system, your “vote” is just a way to keep you inside the loop. You have ‘ritual inclusion’ - but the real decisions are already made at the top.

Participation = real voice in law
Recursion = simulated consent

🧵Atheism and the Constitution: The Core Problem

While the Constitution does not require belief in God, it does require assent to a metaphysical and moral structure that atheism (when consistent) cannot supply.

https://twitter.com/thepalmerworm/status/1949302326872694985

2/ Why This Matters

The Declaration of Independence asserts:

“…all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

This is not religious dogma; it is political metaphysics. It asserts that Man has a nature which is not assigned by the state. It asserts that that rights flow from that nature, not from utility, consensus, or legal fiat. But atheism (in its consistent philosophical form) denies all three. If matter is all that exists, man is no more sacred than a tree. Rights are legal fictions and law is power. Even if an atheist emotionally prefers liberty, their worldview provides no ontological foundation for it. Only ideological/political preference.

🧵Club Of Rome Veilcraft Supreme🪄🐍🍎

‘First Principles and First Values of Evolving Perennialism’ (May 2023, Office for the Future)

The document presents itself as a unifying moral and philosophical framework designed to guide humanity through “meta-crisis,” claiming to recover “universal first principles” from spiritual traditions (especially the “perennial philosophy”) while promoting a vision of “planetary wholeness,” “dignity,” and “shared sensemaking.” It repeatedly uses terms like “sacred,” “sovereignty,” “truth,” “beauty,” and “goodness” to create the illusion of continuity with traditional metaphysical and moral realism. This is the doctrine of Game B - so remember who is cheerleading that initiative to “Phoenix The Republic” among many other goals. 2/ Operational Function

Beneath the sacred-sounding language, the document is a technocratic blueprint for embedding a totalitarian panentheistic monism into global governance. It does not defend Natural Law, Popular Sovereignty, or the inalienable rights of persons as metaphysically real. Instead it enables and facilitates Ontological Reversal:

It replaces being with becoming (process metaphysics)
Nature with emergence (constructivism)
Virtue with integration (systems compliance)

These shifts operationalize gnostic and neoplatonic metaphysics disguised as moral universalism.

🐍Synthetic “Spiritual” Grammar:

The “First Principles” are not grounded in ontology but in functional coherence within global systems; a coded moral-operational grammar fit for AI, behavioural algorithms and socio-technical modeling.

🐍Prisca Theologia Weaponized:

The “ancient wisdom” cited (Hermes Trismegistus, Plotinus, Teilhard de Chardin, etc.) is deployed not as spiritual formation but as epistemic architecture to justify planetary-scale soft-totalitarian convergence; governed by predictive behavioural models, not conscience or moral agency.

☠️Universal Moral Operating System:

The framework is designed to supersede all constitutions, religions, and legal traditions by embedding algorithmic authority beneath the appearance of pluralistic agreement. It is morally neutralized, consensus-driven and behaviorally enforced.

☠️Technocratic Containment of Dissent:

Language of “wholeness,” “transcendence,” “universal dignity,” and “meta-integration” is used to diffuse opposition and suppress political sovereignty by subsuming it into the rhetoric of “planetary consciousness evolution”.

The Architects Beneath the Floor

A Forensic Fable on the Dialectic of Philosophers and the Machinery of False Being

The Hidden Foundry

Beneath the checkerboard rooms and curated oppositions of the House, there was an ancient Foundry, where men in robes and masks labored endlessly over scrolls, diagrams and molten scripts. These were no ordinary philosophers. They called themselves Architects, but their craft was not contemplation - it was construction. Their task? To simulate anthropology, to manufacture metaphysics and to replace reality with models. They did not seek truth; they sought control of terms. Their motto was; “He who defines being governs becoming.” And so they built. They called themselves philosophers, but they were engineers of illusion; cloaked in costume, speaking in riddles, forging new definitions of man not to understand him, but to control him. Their true craft was not wisdom, but containment. 2/ The Alchemy of Inversion

The Foundry had many tools besides the dialectic. Their formulas were drawn from the secret playbooks of the Neoplatonic and Hermetic arts. They fractured reality into parts and recombined it through abstraction. They concealed inversion beneath poetic mysticism and presented the result as ‘visionary insight’. Each “theory” was an alchemical transmutation of the real;

🪄The soul became a system
🪄The will became desire
🪄The intellect became software
🪄The good became preference
🪄The cosmos became code

But the public did not see the forge. They saw only the glittering results; new doctrines, new schools, new manifestos; each claiming to redress and replace the last, each built on the same false matter. Wearing opposing masks, they staged quarrels for each generation; Rationalist v Empiricist, Idealist v Materialist etc. while secretly crafting each doctrine from the same false clay. Their conflict was choreography and their unity was inversion.

🧵The House of a Thousand Rooms

A Forensic Fable of Dialectic;
Containment and the End of Discernment

The Arrival

Once there was a vast and glittering House of a Thousand Rooms, suspended in midair like a floating city. The House promised sanctuary, wisdom, and power to all who entered. Its gates bore many signs; “Justice, Freedom, Reform, Tradition, Innovation, Rebellion.” Each room behind each sign claimed to oppose the others. Some walls were painted red, others blue, others gold or green. Some were filled with candles, others with screens. Some wore clerical garb, others suits, some in branded causal merch, while others wore lab coats. Travellers arrived daily in search of truth. They were told: “Choose a room. Debate those in other rooms. Defend your view and refute theirs.” And so they did. They moved from room to room and joined movements. They read manifestos and made signs. They adopted flags (or renounced them) and made podcasts. They held protests, wrote papers and argued across panels. They followed thought leaders who told them what to think and how to presume that they were thinking for themselves. But few ever asked; “What is the foundation of the House itself?” “Who built it?” “Why are all the rooms so eerily symmetrical?” 2/ The Invisible Architect

Unseen beneath the House, a dialectical engine hummed. Its name was Nomos and its blueprints came from old halls where men like Protagoras, Ockham, Descartes and Hegel once spoke in riddles. Their premise was simple; “Truth is not found; it is made.” “Reality is not known; it is processed.” “Order is not given; it is chosen.” They dismantled the Real and replaced it with perspectives. They shattered form, nature and being; repackaging just the rhetorical fragments into options, identities and arguments. Nomos was their child. He built the House. He gave every room its slogans. He provided endless costumes. He ensured that each opposition was carefully calibrated; not to break the system, but to fuel it. He whispered into both ears and gave the public many sides, but only one floor. Many voices, but only one architecture - the architecture of containment.

🧵The Garden of the Severed Root;
A Fable Of The Abandonment & Rejection That Brought Ruin

The Orchard Of The First Inheritance

There once was a people who had inherited a vast orchard planted in alignment with nature’s wisdom. Each tree was planted by measure and its fruit nourished the whole Republic. They did not invent these trees; they had been entrusted with them. Each tree bore fruit with a name; Truth. Justice. Reason. Self-restraint. Accountability. Rightful Liberty. The people lived by tending these trees, which bore according to their nature and not according to the people’s will. These trees had roots; not in myth or metaphor, but in what simply was - and was not dependent on opinion. In the orchard of the First Inheritance, truth bore fruit because the trees were planted in right order, tended by those who submitted their labor to what had already been given. The orchard thrived because the People conformed themselves to the nature of the orchard; not the other way around. The red fruit, consistent and nourishing, was not invented, but received. 2/ The First Whisper; “Your Words Are Power”

One day a murmur drifted through the orchard; “These names are just noises. You can name them otherwise.” A cloaked stranger came to the people with scissors of silver and said; “Cut the roots. They are not needed. The names you use bind you to limits that belong to another age.” The People (particularly the educated among them) began snipping roots beneath the trees, certain that new growth could be engineered from above the soil. They called this freedom and progress. They did not realize they were already beginning to starve. The whisper of subversion began not with violence, but with flattery. “Your roots bind you,” said the voice. “Cut them, and you will be free.” The People, flattered into believing themselves wise, began to sever the very truths that had once nourished their strength. The fruit still looked the same; but its source was no longer trusted.

🧵The Collapse of the Axial Room
A Forensic Fable on Metaphysical Humility

The Chamber

There was a chamber called the Axial Room. It was sealed from above, below and beyond. Within it, every variable was controlled; temperature, light, speech, movement. All that could be measured was believed to exist; all that could not be measured was declared irrelevant, if not dangerous. At the center of this room stood a man called The Constructor. He was not a tyrant by his own reckoning. He considered himself a liberator; one who had cast off all superstition, all metaphysical impositions, all gods. He said;

“We do not believe. We create. What is not constructed by us has no authority.”

The room was bright. Not because of sunlight (there were no windows) but because of the overhead brilliance of engineered clarity. Mirrors lined the walls. Data screens gave constant feedback. All knowledge was to be generated within. Meaning was declared and Law was programmed. Morality was coded into behavioural systems. Truth was what remained after consensus was “managed”. 2/ The Creed of Control

The Constructor’s creed was simple;
“There is no above. Nothing higher than reason.”
“There is no below. Nothing more basic than perception.”
“There is only progress; spiralling upward and forward.”

Everything else was a residue of what was termed ‘religious pathology’. The Constructor mocked those who spoke of metaphysical grounding, moral objectivity, or divine order. To him, those were projection mechanisms; coping systems for inferior minds. The future belonged to constructivists; those who understood that meaning must be engineered, not received. He had no need for metaphysical humility, because he believed there was nothing outside the system that could demand it. Humility, in his eyes, was submission to illusions and illusions were obstacles to be removed.

🧵Constitutional Liberty ≠ Liberty to Destroy the Constitution

Key Principle from Natural Law & the Founders:

Liberty is not license. Freedom of religion does not include the “freedom” to destroy liberty itself. The First Amendment protects religious exercise within the bounds of moral and civil order. It does not protect practices or ideologies that subvert Natural Law, deny the moral structure of reality, or seek to replace the source of legitimate authority (the People under God) with the State, Market, or Mind. 2/ Natural Law as the Boundary

James Wilson (Founding Father and moral realist) taught:

“Law must rest upon the eternal foundation of justice.”
(Lectures on Law)

Religious liberty is bounded by Natural Law. If a religion denies truth (e.g. relativism, hermetic ‘polarity’…) erases the image of God in man (e.g. materialism, pantheism), or promotes spiritual hierarchy that violates equality (e.g. theosophical Christ-consciousness), or calls for legal supremacy of a church, race, or caste - then - it is not protected as true religious liberty, but becomes a political weapon cloaked as religion.

Natural Law Test:

Ask of any religion or system:
Does it affirm or destroy moral conscience?
Does it uphold the equal moral agency of the People?
Does it protect objective truth and justice?
Does it affirm the natural rights of others?

If the answer is no, it’s not religious liberty - it’s civilizational sabotage.

🧵OBJECTIVE VALUES ≠ ONTOLOGICAL REALISM

People assume “Objective Values” means that values are grounded in something outside the individual’s opinion; therefore they assume it must mean eternal truths, natural law, or God-given rights. But here’s what it actually means in systems like Perry’s “New Realism” (or Rand’s Objectivism):

“Objective” means values can be described, classified, or derived from rational observation of effects. What’s “real” is what works within a system. “Objectivity” is measured by coherence, utility, or consensus within a human-defined structure. This is epistemological realism only; rights, dignity, or value are granted conditionally, based on performance, function, or consent.
open.substack.com/pub/escapekey/… 2/ What’s Missing?

💡Ontology

That is; the recognition that man has a nature, a fixed essence and a teleological orientation that cannot be revoked, redesigned, or replaced. Without ontological realism there is no foundation for “inalienable rights”, no basis for conscience, no justification for limits on state or expert power and no “self-evident” truths - only engineered consensus.

Objectivism Does the Same, claiming that “reason” reveals objective truth, but reason is disconnected from ontological being. Objectivist ethics are rationalist-derivative and conditioned by performance, not grounded in the inviolable nature of the person. As with Perry, this leads to morality as behavioural output, rights as conditional recognitions and sovereignty as system-conformance.

🧵
The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis) offers several passages that directly illuminate the futility of demanding moral integrity, civic virtue, or fidelity to truth from public institutions that have been systemically stripped of the metaphysical foundation necessary to sustain such traits. Here are key excerpts and how they relate to our civic incapacity to defend itself against subversion and infrastructure coup d’état: 2/
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.”

“We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
(The Abolition of Man, Chapter 1)

This is Lewis’s most direct statement of the systemic contradiction. Institutions have been philosophically neutered; through the abandonment of objective moral order (Natural Law, Logos, telos). Yet we expect integrity, loyalty, courage and reason from these very same bureaucracies and public servants. This is precisely the condition of our civic, educational and legal institutions; their very☠️formation denies the reality of the virtues they claim to uphold.

1/ The Law of Noncontradiction (LNC) states:

“A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.”

But the Hermetic Principle of Polarity denies the fixity of identity, asserting that “A and not-A” can be two ends of a single scale. It collapses distinction into continuity, claiming all opposites are one in essence and redefines contradiction as apparent, not real. This is a direct metaphysical inversion of the LNC. It dissolves ontological clarity into psychological relativism and prepares the ground for:

Dialectical synthesis (Hegel, Marx, Lenin)
Postmodern ambiguity (Derrida, Foucault)
Behavioural manipulation (e.g., NLP, “grey logic”)
Technocratic fusion of opposites (order/chaos, liberty/control)

Downstream Operational Effects:

Once the Principle of Polarity replaces LNC truth becomes mutable; nothing is absolutely true or false - just perspective.
Moral categories collapse; good and evil become two “poles” of the same energy. Discernment breaks down; everything is “both-and,” never “either-or.” Manipulators thrive; sophists, dialecticians and technocrats can redefine reality situationally. 2/
The Hermetic Principle of Polarity is the esoteric root of the subversion of the Law of Noncontradiction. It redefines contradiction as illusion and replaces being with process. From this root, entire philosophical, political and educational systems have been built to confuse, invert and ultimately control.

/end

🧵It’s taken me about 3 yrs of working steadily to unpack this metaphysically dense, rich statement. Hopefully it won’t take others as long. In this thread I’ll break it down a little:

https://twitter.com/bh0806/status/1541209470726021125

2/ “The gnostic premise of the death of God…”

What it means:
This refers not simply to Nietzsche’s declaration (“God is dead”) but to the gnostic metaphysical operation beneath it. Gnosticism posits that the material world is a prison (to be transcended) and the God of creation (as in Genesis) is either false or lower than a secret “true” god behind or beyond being. This premise is not atheism in the modern sense, it’s metaphysical revolt; Promethean/Luciferian - ‘Melkor’ in intent and operation.

Why it matters:
To say “God is dead” in this context means that the source of order, truth, teleology and being itself is no longer recognized as real. It’s a metaphysical strike, not just theological.

💡 Gnostic Death of God = Displacement of Logos
(the ordering principle of reality, reason and truth)

This is not simply a rejection of ‘Religion’, or one Faith or another, of Ideology or Identity. This is the rejection of the very means by how we know anything about ourselves, our world and our relationship to all else. Our very ability to articulate and embody shared reality with another human being and even to acknowledge reality individually ourselves.

This isn’t a nostalgic hankering for subjective idealistic meaning - this is the fundamental rejection of knowledge and the means of accessing and articulating that knowledge.

🧵
The term “Natural Law” has been hijacked and repurposed by esoteric, occult, and Hermetic traditions in ways that profoundly distort its classical meaning. Many well-meaning people today are confused because they hear the same words (“Natural Law”) but they are being used to mean entirely opposite things, with opposite consequences for truth, morality, liberty and personhood. Thank you to @ChartingLiberty for prompting this thread, sorry it’s a bit late!

Let’s perform a scalpel-precise forensic distinction between:

🏛️ Classical Natural Law (Aristotle → Aquinas)

vs.
🌀 Hermetic “Natural Law” (Gnostic / Occult / Esoteric) 2/ 🏛️Classical Natural Law ~ Rooted in Logos🔥

Source; Aristotle, developed and completed by Aquinas within realist metaphysics and Christian theology. Grounded in Logos; intelligible, moral order of the universe, reflecting eternal law in created things.

Key Principles:
Reality is real and knowable
Man has a nature (rational, moral, social)
That nature is ordered to an end (telos): truth, virtue, beatitude
Natural law = participation in eternal law via reason (Summa Theologica I-II, Q.91–94)
Morality = conformity to what is
Rights and duties = rooted in being, not will or assertion
Law is objective, discoverable by reason, and binding in conscience

Moral Order:
Objective good and evil
Conscience judges reality, not just emotion
Human law must conform to natural law (Aristotle/Aquinas)
Personal liberty = freedom to pursue the good

Implications:
You don’t invent morality; you recognize and conform to it
Self-governance = moral formation to align will with truth
All human persons share equal dignity because of shared endowed rational nature.

🧵Sleight of hand; ‘Justified Belief’ - Epistemology™️ Veilcraft
“Wissenschftslehre” (Fichte) ➡️ “Epistemology” (Ferrier)🐍
blogodidact.blogspot.com/2023/10/episte… I first shared this superb article by @Van_Blogodidact over a year ago. Between then and now, working on the material for my book has deepened my understanding of how seismic this alchemical manoeuvre; the conjuring🪄of the term ‘Epistemology’ - and crucially, its institutionalization across domains and fields as default - was and continues to be, in its power to disable our cognitive defence against ideological subversion and possession. I’m still in the weeds of unpacking this deep magic (curse), the process by which it operates and how it undoes our orientation and navigation, dislocating our awareness and discernment from what is recognized, real and true; substituting instead what is imagined and constructed. I’ll unpack some of this in the thread below. Before continuing with that, I heartily recommend reading Van’s essay in full - several times - saving it and coming back to it repeatedly. You might want to ask why your own education has not taught you about this and what that omission serves. 2/ James Ferrier’s invention of the term “epistemology” in the 1850s marked a critical alchemical maneuver that operationalized Hermetic-Neoplatonic subversion within the heart of academic philosophy, in the Anglo-American tradition. This was not merely a lexical innovation, but a metaphysical severance with strategic implications:

What Ferrier Operationalized ~ The Alchemical Severance

Ferrier’s coinage of epistemology (“the science of knowing”) was not a neutral academic contribution. It was his Kantian-Reidian synthesis that used Reid’s surface realism to smuggle Kantian mediation and subjective idealism into Anglo-American discourse. Instead of recovering Reid’s ontological realism, Ferrier abstracted knowledge into a standalone discipline, divorced from metaphysical being (reality independent of the mind). Following Descartes & Fichte, Ferrier cast knowledge as a self-referential science, not a participation in Logos or divine order. He used the term “epistemology” to grant this abstraction institutional legitimacy. This shift was the gateway by which Hermetic principles (gnostic, emanationist, mind-over-matter, self-deifying) entered mainstream philosophy and science, masked as academic rigor.

David’s question is such a good one and so important that it really deserves a thread response:

🧵Locke’s Inadequacy; Severing Rights from Ontology

Locke is often celebrated for asserting that man has rights to “life, liberty and property.” But unlike Aristotle or Aquinas (or Founders Wilson, Witherspoon and others), Locke did not ground these rights in man’s nature as a rational teleological being. Instead, he treated rights as extensions of will and self-ownership. Locke emphasized contract and consent as the source of political legitimacy. He avoided invoking a universal moral order rooted in the Logos or Natural Law in any realist sense. CS Lewis wrote prolifically about the implications and consequences of this ‘avoidance’/ rejection/denial.

This makes Locke’s system nominalist at its root. It sees rights not as participation in eternal truth, but as designations based on agreements and language. It reduces moral claims to assertions of entitlement tied to personhood-as-will. So even “negative rights” (like the right to be left alone) are grounded in possessive individualism (constructs subject to flux), not in a coherent endowed metaphysical anthropology of man. 2/ The Risk of “Negative Rights”
Without Metaphysical Substance

Without rooting rights in what man is, “negative rights” are only as secure as the contract or social agreement upholding them. They can be reinterpreted by new legal authorities (as has happened). They have no necessary link to truth or goodness (pertaining to man’s ontology & teleology) only to morally relative pragmatic and utilitarian preference or assertion in relation to systems (and their ‘evolution’).

This is why you now see “negative rights” weaponized to protect things like:
The “right” to abortion
The “right” to euthanasia
The “right” to gender self-definition

None of these are grounded in human nature or purpose. They are grounded in subjective autonomy, just as Locke permitted.

🧵“Government doesn’t grant rights. Rights preexist.
Government gets its powers from the people.”

Yes that’s correct - but what kind of being can possess rights prior to government? If we don’t answer this ontologically, the claim sounds like rhetoric, not reality and this is precisely how generations have given their agency away, by accepting and embracing constructivism, subjectivism, idealism and the many ‘Theories of Men’ which ontologically and teleologically deny the understanding of being from which pre existent rights arise.

Let’s remind ourselves of the hidden philosophical infrastructure that most modern people don’t have; because it’s been systematically removed from their formation over generations of intellectual subversion in academia and education: 2/ Rights Are Only Inalienable If They Are Ontological

That is; rights must be grounded in what man is by nature, not in what society, law, or consensus decides he is.

This requires upholding that human nature is real, not socially constructed and that this nature is ordered toward a purpose (telos) e.g., truth, moral agency and accountability. It requires the comprehension that the moral law is written into that nature, not imposed from outside.

If these metaphysical commitments are denied (as they are in all nominalist derived theory/philosophy, all Theory of Ideas philosophical genealogy; Cartesian, Kantian, Utilitarian, Behaviourist, Pragmatist, Progressive, Positivist, Postmodern (and Post Liberal‼️) then Rights are just desirable permissions, not moral truths that government is bound to respect.

🧵 “If you cite Magna Carta to justify the Declaration, you’ve already lost the argument about where rights come from.”
(Professor Daniel N Robinson)

Professor Robinson’s point is both philosophical and tactical. To reference Magna Carta is to frame liberty as a negotiated concession, not a natural truth. This invites the legal positivists, technocrats and managerial elites to revise or revoke rights at will; because if rights come from custom, then they can be changed by new customs.

The American Founding, by contrast, was the first political act in history to say:

“We do not ask. We declare. These rights were always ours.”

Let’s drill down on this in brief……. 2/
Professor Daniel N. Robinson was one of the few scholars with both the historical and metaphysical clarity to warn that citing the Magna Carta as a source or precursor to the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution is not only historically misleading, but philosophically and legally subversive to the American Founding’s actual principles.

Here’s why Robinson gave this warning and why it’s so important: