3/28/20 - Detroit, Intellectual Distancing, The Glowing Antichrist

Can Detroit and rural Michigan bear what they say is coming? Social distancing as an apt metaphor and how it can be useful. A crisis instinctively prods a frightened herd into a closed-tribe psychology, which is nationalism. How data overload contributes to it and helps obliterate the utopian Brotherhood of Man mythology. Why many quietly want Trump to fail, whether they admit it or not.



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2/29/20 - Authentic Courage vs. Crying With The Pack

"God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." Genuine courage is required to stand apart against the deafening conformity of the cowardly mob. Ask Andrew Sullivan! People are inherently tyrannical. Shared secular delusions: our 21st century religions. God needs the devil; Sapiens need an enemy. Lippmann, the fragility of free speech, and democracy's Achilles Heel: an ignorant "public."



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2/27/20 - Conform Or Be Cast Out

Social validation & conformity: the evolutionary default setting. Why choosing intellectual autonomy over the herd is nearly impossible. Also, standing apart in self-reliance, the drifter, and mending holes in the firewall.



--Don't settle for imitations! Be sure you're subscribed to an authentic Escaping The Cave feed!

2/21/20 - Authenticity, The Mask, and The Beast Unleashed

On independent thought, authenticity, social momentum, and permitting redemption. Also, You're not the Elephant Whisperer, let Dumbo feed! Detecting doctrinaires, the Warm Glow of the Herd's Fellowship, manipulative monkeys dancing for their lunch, and a mask, the core, and the id walk into a bar.



A format change is underway. Make sure you're subscribed to an Escaping The Cave feed!

2/6/20: The Wokeflake Follies

The Iowa Boner, The Rips Heard 'Round the World, and impeachment fails. All by Wednesday. This is the alternative?



ALSO:

• Scripture, agitation, and The Herd Mind
• Democracy implodes without the public's consensual trust
• The means, ends, and Salem Witches
• Romney, Amash, Manchin, and the Principled Pit of Hell
• Howard Dean says Democrats will challenge November's election  

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* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

2/1/20 - Criminal Conformity & The Beautiful Mutant

"Imitation is suicide." How independent thought gets smothered in infancy, the need to belong: why standing apart from the impaired herd is not only hard, it runs against our social and evolutionary grain. Also, collective and self-delusions protecting us from unpleasant discoveries that might destroy our notions of being special, divine, or even "good."

Listen to "Your Undivided Attention" here: https://humanetech.com/podcast/



ALSO:

• Tending to personal and commercial attachments
• How political and marketing swine manipulate attachments via identity
• Meditation and Buddhist philosophy as tools to disconnect
• Blank Slatists: Beware
• Emerson's Self-Reliance: read it. 

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* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

1/28/20 - The Boldness of the Herd, Political Atheism, Our Glowing Christ

The next great war: intellectual autonomy. The bold certainty of the herd, the challenges of independent thought and why seeing someone who is genuinely their own Man is so rare, the media has supplanted the church, disengaging from the ideological Holy War in favor of political atheism, and Toddzilla's Paradox: the conflict between intellectual independence and the desperate human need to belong. Still available for children's parties! Now doing bat mitzvahs!



ALSO:

• A quick impeachment fart
• You want an authoritarian
• Political Vampires
• Algorithms, Lippmann, Bernays, and You
• Silver Spoons: A Hate Crime
• The filthy Centrus Americanus
• Friendship: Loyalty & Support vs. Honesty
• Nothing can be done about climate change
• Data Overload revisited 

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* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

1/21/20 - Mobsters (2013)

This isn't being presented as an elegantly polished piece of Pulitzer-worthy prose. (Gaudy alliteration intended for sarcastic effect!) Instead, this theme--intellectual conformity and our tendency toward tribalism and the groupmind--is part of a near-future podcast and an example of some old writing that has not only stood the test of time (2013), but enhanced itself over 7-years. What's changed: gaining a better understanding of the evolutionary and social psychology leading to it. And its exploitation.

Still wondering why my comments are off? This might help. The pickup LeBon!

8/6/19: Propaganda: Autonomy Lost, Fake Tensions, Exiling Sectarians

How propaganda acts as an informational virus to destroy critical thought and alienate the person from himself. More on data overload, the uninformed Current Events Man knowing a little about everything and a lot about nothing, mistaking feelings for thought, having to accept or reject an entire doctrine in total, losing intellectual autonomy, and how artificial tensions are often accompanied by dubious solutions.



ALSO:

• Artificial solutions to real needs
• Real solutions to artificial needs
• "Influencers", their product, and their Patreon
• The Tribal Dance of Rhetorical Fuckery
• We're a species of sleazy lawyers and pathological liars
• Self-stereotyping caricatures
• It's fine to generalize then exile sectarian fabricants

Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747


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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

7/28/19: Propaganda's Mindcrime, Partitioning, The Verbal Universe

More on agitation propaganda and the psychological effects of propaganda including: loss of individuality, the suppression of critical thought, creation of the mob and how critical thought is literally impossible as part of a group, the creation of a fanatically self-righteous social conscious leading to the demonization of the out-group, and more on the sphere of the sacred. Then, how propaganda partitions society (identity politics) via verbal fiction creating sects of victims who only speak "to themselves."


Also: 

• Propaganda's only heard by its choir creating alternate factual universes
• Manchurian activists primed for provoked outrage and action
• The creation of an abstract verbal universe: fake news
• Sacrificing self-dignity to "the cause"
• The danger of surrendering to "something bigger than yourself"
• Stereophonic propaganda
• Reclaiming individuality by removing your dog from the fight

Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda":
https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

READ IT!


*Like it? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuckerbeast & Twitter. YOU are my marketing team.

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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com

5/23/19: The Social Media Disease - Illusion of Knowledge & Democratized Opinion

Technology enables, and social media perpetuates, prioritizing the cheap appearance of knowledge instead of fostering knowledge itself.  Also, how the Internet changes cognition and the abandonment of expertise to the holy opinion: "my ignorance is equal to  your knowledge."

Also: 
-The DIKW pyramid and drowning in data.
-The Id on Parade, the natural state of man, and Leviathan.
-What happens when reasonable voices abandon the public square to mindless mobs of roving avatars?
-When avatars attack
-A classic full-frontal Toddzilla rant salvaged from The Lost Episode about Twitter, and more.






Elias Aboujaode's Virtually You: 
https://www.amazon.com/Virtually-You-Dangerous-Powers-Personality/dp/0393340546

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: 
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death: 
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558613196&sr=1-1


More episodes/subscribe:
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

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5/14/19: The Social Media Disease - Virtual Mobs, Conformity, External Truth

Unsophisticated media consumers and the failure to take personal responsibility for our own intellectual maintenance. The surrender of the individual's intellectual autonomy to the conformist mob. How mobs-cells no longer need to leave the couch and are now free to anonymously molest & terrorize the "other" via Twitter, Facebook, and their phones.

Also:

• Social Media Influencers and how the Media 101 Model applies to them
• Emerson on independent thought, conformity, and consistency
• The abandonment of external truth and the path to authoritarianism 

Need more Toddzilla?

1) Seek help.
2) Click the links.
3) Gorge on your way to therapy.

More episodes/subscribe:
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

Subscribe: iTunes and Google Play

Media 101 - It's The People

Escaping The Cave returns! 

Are you wondering why every source of "news" and information sucks? It's because everyone from MSNBC to NPR to FOX to Alex Jones to Social Media "Influencers" operate according to the same for-profit model: drawing eyeballs to their product to sell someone else's.

Need more Toddzilla? 

1) Seek help. 

2) Click below. 

3) Listen on your way to therapy.

*Like the pod? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuckerbeast & Twitter. You are my marketing team.

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