On the dystopia rollout
Shakespeare, or rather Francis Bacon, who invented the first binary code and gave us much of modern science, also tried to articulate a moral code for scientific endeavor, saying it should be used for the benefit and relief of the state and society of man. Not for the enslavement of the human race by a few deranged computer dorks.
Bret Weinstein knows about this, he said if Bacon wrote Shakespeare, it’s significant because we have another polymath, another Leonardo da Vinci. But it’s even more than that, because you have the archetypal features of his life. More than that, the most important philosopher is being deliberately ignored. His academic reputation tanked around the same time he became associated with the Shakespeare works. Academia exists in a bubble completely isolated from reality. I’ve looked at the webpages of a lot of philosophy departments, and I see a great deal of wasted energy. I think Western philosophy is mostly a waste of time. If you can’t stand Kant or Hegel or even Plato for more than a couple pages, try Bacon. His essays are short and good.
Peter Thiel is calling me the Antichrist. I could be, I hope not, obviously, but one of my books has a 666 in the ISBN.
https://wipfandstock.com/9781666738407/the-precious-gem-of-hidden-literature/
I don’t have charisma and I don’t need worship or rule, and I’m not particularly good at life, but I can see why he would be concerned about my potential influence. “The philosopher to end all philosophers,” he said. I’m saying, if you amend your intellectual history, you might be able to help yourselves.
So my ideas in brief:
There is a deeper significance to the Shakespeare question, it has mythological dimensions and it also involves Machiavelli and our political science. The 1602 Anti-Machiavel has Bacon’s fingerprints all over it, and it’s relevant to the Shakespeare question, as all kinds of stories from Shakespeare are in there. Western philosophy is deliberately ignoring its most important figure.
Bacon wrote a number of alchemy tracts under pseudonyms. Thiel says he “dabbled in the demonic,” but these were not about sorcery. John Dee, Bacon’s older contemporary, was indeed a sorcerer, but Bacon’s texts reflect his experiences with opium and cannabis. Cannabis is the “green lion” and “green dragon” in alchemy, you can access remarkable levels of consciousness if you do certain work. That is not sorcery. I am not sure it’s advisable, but for the sake of the historical record, alchemy appears to have originated among Daoists in China around 200 BC; Eastern and Western alchemy are the same, but extraneous cover material accumulated as it moved westward. The wider tradition of drug references in literature goes all the way back to Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving written story, in which Gilgamesh seeks the plant of immortality. He attains it but immediately loses it to a serpent, who thereupon sheds its skin, a metaphor for rebirth and non-identification with the body. The academy has labored to conceal this about alchemy, but that’s the truth.
If you do this geometry work with some cannabis, you can open your third eye to a remarkable extent. Print out the pictures, tape them on a big paper mat, you only need two points to start drawing with a compass.
Palma Vecchio, I think that’s Saint Catherine looking at the viewer, whose toe forms the second point when constructing the grid with a compass.
Also, I think my 400-year cycle idea is interesting, seeing that our calendar is actually a 400-year calendar. And the sun is exactly 400 times the size and distance of the moon, giving us perfect eclipses. In 1620, we had two revolutions from top-down to bottom-up approaches, in politics and science. The Mayflower Compact and Bacon’s Novum Organum, which replaced top-down deduction with bottom-up induction. Then, four centuries later, everything flipped to top-down technocracy in the pandemic. Surely, you would have to be deliberately obtuse to not see order here.
I had hoped to help change the intellectual paradigm; yes, there is a God, consciousness is primary, it does not arise from inert matter. My idea was to establish a college of advisors who could be given moderate means, advising in a manner free from self-interest.
I should also repeat that general intelligence can be improved by exposing babies to music in the womb. Not my idea, but it deserves wider circulation.