“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil.

Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.
Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

As promised, we follow up our prior episode on the forced retreat into the mental cave by explaining how the new social control scheme of no narrative at all is rapidly taking the place of the narrative/counter-narrative dichotomy that has been in place for nearly a century. Incapacitatingly stupid solutions are being supplanted by incapacitatingly stupid "noticing". All the wild opinions, conspiracies, and everything previously kept carefully outside the Overton Window - are now not just being allowed back in, but are being blasted at society like a bukkake fire hose - rendering people completely unable to function or organize due to total lack of agreement on the facts of reality itself.

If "God is dead" defined the 20th century, "consensus reality is dead" will define the 21st century.

As a bonus, you can hear out of touch with the kids Gen X'er Joel mix up Roblox and Discord.

This episode is an old (6/12/25), unpublished recording brought back from the dead, due to its high applicability to the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination. This was originally intended to be episode 33, but is now released as episode 35.

In this episode we talk about information overload and mental focus limiting, using the video game based concept of "view distance". We cover both how these things occur naturally - and, of course, how they're used as part of the social control scheme. These ideas are more relevant than ever in the context of current events.

We plan to do a follow up on this episode, directly tying these concepts to what we're seeing in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination.

“That a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a creature, has nothing to do with truth, one can see, for example, in the fact that we have to believe in time, space, and motion, but without feeling constrained to grant them absolute reality.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche