BtF 9: Leaving Seahaven

(This is the final post in a series about our precarious existence “Between the Falls”. If you haven’t read any of the previous ones, you might want to go all the way back and begin with the first, which explains the idea behind this series, but here it is in a nutshell: technological progress and the move towards transhumanism have us on the precipice of a second great fall of man, the first one being that famous, symbolic or literal, bite of apple that drove us out of our primal state of ignorance and grace. In this post I test the theory that I am living in a personalized universe, I talk about the metaphor behind so much of this series, and I speculate on the ideal “set” and “setting” for this next great fall. I don’t want to give too much away, but there will be talk of falling pianos, freshly boiled snails, bent spoons, Bad Monkey, good monkeys, men behind curtains, and pithy quotes from the father of Dweezil and Moon Unit.)

Are some questions too dangerous to ask? Or too dangerous to try and answer?

Throughout this series, and in previous posts here at The Filter, I’ve spoken about the idea that our world is as carefully crafted and managed as the town of Seahaven in the “The Truman Show” movie. In 2022, I did this in the context of presenting Seahaven as a category of conspiracy theory, and in my last post I did it in the context of pointing out how much of the world we live in is the result of efforts to present us with a false reality.

I’m now going to apply a scientific test, of sorts, to a form of this theory, and discuss whether it’s an idea that should even be investigated. First, though, I need to present a model for understanding the Seahaven model, and how it relates to other worldviews.

Who is The Sovereign

One of my favorite political thinkers, Giorgio Agamben, defines The Sovereign as one who has the power to suspend the rule of law. The Sovereign is located within a legal context, but at the same time can transcend that context. In modern times, this unlimited power is unlocked by declaring a state of emergency, and collapsing the executive, judicial, and parliamentary branches into a regime that can rule by edict. In slightly less modern times, think of “Sun King” Louis XIV boldly declaring, “L’État, c’est moi.”

I find Agamben’s definition intriguing, but much prefer the idea that The Sovereign, or more broadly The Regime, is that which has the power to drive a wedge between reality and perception. This definition induces a spectrum, with levels of control. At the extreme edge, The Regime has the ability to hide obvious truths in plain sight, as in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone was afraid to acknowledge the obvious. As is often the case, I have a quote from my favorite story, Mary Renault’s “The King Must Die,” which captures this idea perfectly. After seeing someone bend down into the dust and salute an unknown figure hiding behind the curtains of a carriage, while everyone else looked away, the protagonist remarks:

“I had thought I knew a little about command, and what is due to a man of standing. ‘But this is something,’ I thought, ‘to summon invisibility, like a god.’”

The Regime, in its form of absolute power, is that which can convince the North Koreans they live not in a squalid country commanded by an over-fed tyrant, but in a paradise of abundance made possible by a benevolent god. 

The Regime is that which has the power to turn their country into Seahaven.

A universe of universes

This idea, of living in a carefully constructed reality like Seahaven, can be decomposed along two axes. The first is Secular versus Religious, the second is Universalist versus Individualized.

In “The Truman Show” movie, Truman inhabits a fake world that is ruled by secular forces, and is completely individualized. Director Christof leads a conspiracy to place Truman at the center of a realty TV show built around his life, all the while keeping him in the dark that this is happening. If you think your world is like Truman’s, you believe that your experiences are being deliberately curated to impact you, specifically.

To move along the axis in the direction of religion, substitute Christof for a god or spiritual force, while maintaining the idea that everything exists for you, or is built around you, in some way. Think about how in the Old Testament, God takes an interest in “toying” with individual lives, for example Abraham, Noah, Job, and others.

To stay in Truman's Seahaven, but move along the axis in the direction of depersonalization, instead of the word being filled with paid actors plus one person who isn’t in on the conspiracy, fill it with mostly blue-pilled Trumans, plus a handful of narrative-controlling elites and a coterie of propagandists who help maintain whatever narrative The Regime wishes to promote.

Filling out the chart, note that we have Deists in the lower left quadrant. They believe God built a well-crafted (perhaps clockwork) universe, and then went away. God is all powerful, but absent. Uninvolved in individual lives.

At the the top left corner you find both Marxists and Objectivists, who believe the universe is depersonalized and secular. The difference, as we can see in practice, is Marxism depends on the construction of Seahaven-like levels of control over perceived reality, whereas Objectivism demands rigorous truth seeking at the individual level¹. The Matrix in “The Matrix” movie goes in the same quadrant but not quite as far to the corner, as it is occasionally upgraded to protect against specific rogue individuals like Neo, who is portrayed in quasi-religious ways (e.g. as “The One”).

Putting Seahaven to the test

Fifteen years ago, shortly after moving to Toronto, I got the impression that my new city had became newsworthy in a way that extended well beyond the metro area, and even beyond Canada itself. A number of local stories reached escape velocity, from the riots at the G20 summit in 2010 to the many adventures of the world’s most interesting mayor, Rob Ford, who smoked crack with criminals, said some amazing things², then died of cancer in 2016. This was also the year of the Ikea monkey, who wandered the parking garage of that Scandinavian furniture chain looking awfully handsome in his sterling coat. Maybe you missed the viral image of him that seemed to be everywhere in 2012, and these other stories may have been barely a blip on your radar. Maybe my impression that Toronto had become a major source of world news was nothing more than me noticing what had always been true, like when you notice a car model you hadn’t tuned in to previously, and then start to see it everywhere. 

When my wife and I fled Toronto at the end of 2020 for freedom in the Florida Keys, the same bending of news seemed to happen, though on a smaller scale. I noticed how the nearby town of Key West, with its mere 25,000 inhabitants, punched so much above its weight, especially in terms of culture. Among other things, while we were there the TV show Bad Monkey, staring Vince Vaughn, was filmed not far from our place, and in fact our own property was scoped out as a possible location for filming. But again, so what? Maybe this was just my own biased viewpoint.

Shortly after moving to Amsterdam in March of last year, and beginning to see the same pattern, I decided to put my perceptions to the test. I setup an experiment with the Netherlands as my test subject, and picked Australia as the “control.” I chose Australia because it was another Westernized, high-GDP nation with a population not radically different from the Netherlands. At about twice as big in population, one would expect it to generate, if not twice as much international news as NL, at a minimum the same amount. And that was my measure — how many times, in the course of browsing websites that had no more connection to one country than the other, did I come across references to NL or AU? This meant limiting my tracking to “random” mentions of one country or another, and carefully weeding out any exposure from customized news feeds or when I was searching for a topic that could be even remotely related to my new country. For example, that would exclude a search related to advances in farming techniques, which would be likely to pull up news related to NL’s amazingly productive farmers.

I abandoned the experiment after a few months, with a clear feeling about which way the results had gone, but I left the data I’d gathered unexamined another 6 months. Then, after meeting someone who unexpectedly had a huge overlap with me in terms of their interest in data science, and who encouraged me to run the analysis, I ran the analysis.

The results were highly, highly statistically significant. I live in an individualized Seahaven.

Maybe.

Putting the test in context

There are a few ways to calculate significance for this comparison. You can find some of the math behind that conclusion here³, should you wish to run your own calculations, though no matter how I do the numbers I come to the same conclusion. 

But, what does this mean? Maybe, despite my best efforts, there were hidden biases towards NL in my sources. Maybe I missed some references to Australia because I am less familiar with its place names and cultural institutions. Maybe my choice of a stopping point, meaning when I decided to end the experiment, biased the results. Perhaps I got an extremely skewed outcome by pure chance alone. Maybe, except for that brief moment in the 1980s when Crocodile Dundee seemed charming, “The Gods Must Be Crazy” seemed deep, and Men at Work seemed talented, no one actually cares about Australia. I can’t discard any of these possibilities. And yet, I also can’t discard the possibility that the universe is in some way bent around my experience, no matter how crazy that sounds. 

And, maybe, yours is built around you? 

I should note that I ran the NL vs AU test not just because I was finding the apparent skewing of my news odd, but because I found a lot of odd things that all pointed in the direction of me existing on the right side of the Universalist/Individualized axis. Country-level news was just the first bit of weirdness I figured out how to test in a scientific way. I have been noticing things my whole life that seem, somehow, beyond coincidental. Of course, this is an extremely tricky thing to quantify, something I am highly aware of. In a giant vat of randomness, there will be coincidences and synergies that arise entirely by chance. Did you know that President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln? Crazy, right? Or maybe a better way to put that would be, If you look for coincidences like this everywhere, you’ll find them everywhere, and run the risk turning your mind into one big conspiracy board. Crazy, right?

This is no small danger, and one I try to be really careful about. All that said, my mind, trained in stats and having spent thousands of hours thinking about epistemology, can’t help but notice a lot of ways in which the world, and the people I end up interacting with, make it seem like my experiences are being curated, and that aspects of the world are tailored to me in particular. I must admit just stating this makes me very uncomfortable. Also, if I’m right, who am I writing this for? That’s kind of a mind melting question, no?

Years ago, while visiting the city where I now live, my ex and I, both non-tokers, overindulged at one of the many “coffee shops” here. Back in our hotel bed, snuggling after sex, I had a horrifying moment when I closed my eyes and the thought occurred to me that everything I was experiencing might be pure mental projection. “There is no spoon” may seem like just a fun meme from “The Matrix,” but if you believe it, if you really believe that nothing around you is real, then the warm naked woman next to you in bed, along with every other human on earth, doesn’t actually exist, and that’s beyond nightmarish. If the thing behind the curtain is just me making shit up for myself, that’s a curtain I honestly would rather not look behind.

It seems possible to believe in a metaphysics that places you at the far right of the Individualized spectrum without falling into existential dread like this, or falling prey to paranoid delusion, but both of those are hazards of this model of the universe. Among the many well-done aspects of “The Truman Show,” actor Jim Carry does an amazing job of portraying someone who, as he begins to uncover the truth about his world, exhibits behavior that is erratic, paranoid, mad. He may be on a path to understanding reality, to red-pilled enlightenment, but it looks like he’s losing his mind. Which in a sense is exactly what’s happening as his identity and worldview are being shattered. This is an ugly process. Chasing rabbits down holes is dangerous business. It seems possible that such a brutal psychological journey could end with an exit from Seahaven and into a previously hidden wonderland, but it seems at least as likely to end with you homeless and cursing at passersby about how the CIA won’t leave you alone. I’m sure you know the type.

Just before Truman takes a bow and walks out of the Seahaven dome, director Christof tries to coax him to remain on the set with a “voice of god” admonition. He tells Truman, “There’s no more truth in the world out there, than there is in the world I created for you.” Which, within the context of the film, is manipulative at best. But within the context of our world, I’m not fully convinced he’s wrong. Or, to pull in a reference to another movie, it’s entirely possible that whatever deeper truth I might uncover, I won’t be able to handle it. Much better, then, to accept the world as it is, and appreciate what I’ve been given here, no? Enjoy the hell out of that juicy steak, or do my best to savor the experience I had last night of eating escargot, despite the weird aftertaste and the fact that our plates were smeared with fresh blood on the edges, which I can only presume came from the chef or our server.

Embracing Dayenu

Let me go even further here, and game this out. Even if I’m right, and I discover that my reality is a carefully constructed veneer, then what? If I peel back the curtain and expose the great and powerful Oz as just a guy pulling levers, you might expect that man would be awfully pissed at what I did, and there’s no guarantee that pissed off guy will have the unassuming physique of Frank Morgan in the Wizard of Oz movie.

I’m guessing, whatever entity was great enough to make our world, is also great enough to make me pay for peering behind the curtain. Maybe even that entity is worthy of veneration? Awe. Reverence. And respect, at least in the sense that if you had to get in the ring with Mike Tyson, even today’s gray-bearded Mike Tyson, you need to respect his jab-uppercut combo and not lean in too close.

I am well aware that despite a few truly awful things that have happened to the people I love, and to myself, so far the universe has been awfully kind to me. I would like that to continue. I would like to continue enjoying the occasionally tragic, but generally peaceful garden I inhabit. I would like to continue enjoying juicy bites of steak that taste so very real, and even pesto-soaked bites of snail that taste so very odd. And I do feel a genuine sense of thankfulness, especially as my quality of life has grown along with the number of gray hairs in my own beard. I’m a firm believer in the Hebrew idea of Dayenu, or “that would have been enough.” As in, instead of cursing the universe for not offering me more, I should be truly grateful for what I have been given, and what I’ve been allowed to achieve in a universe that could have instead dropped a piano on my head at any moment. Trying too hard to peel back the curtain, or see through the metaphysical mist that shrouds my vision of the true nature of the universe, seems kind of... ungrateful. Not so Dayenu. It maps exactly to bitting into what seems like an even more dangerous apple than that first forbidden fruit. Do we really want to go there? Is that really a good idea?

And yet.

And yet here I am, talking around the topic of the thing I’m not sure I should be talking about, trying to make sense of this moment before the next great fall of man, which means trying to make sense of whether the universe I appear to inhabit has been, in some sense, constructed for me, and perhaps yours for you.

The inescapable simulation, the unavoidable metaphor

For a moment let me back out, to what seems like safer epistemological grounds. It’s clear that whatever the true nature of the external world we inhabit, it is most certainly simulated in our own heads. In other words, whether or not the tree I see exists as a real object in a real world, it most certainly exists as a mental abstraction⁴. We model the universe we perceive, and this model is filled with all the components of a good simulation: it has objects, events, and consequences. These internal simulations often do a good job of tracking our external world (or at the least, they appear to be wonderfully consistent). My internal simulation tells me that if I raise the cup of coffee currently in front of me to my lips, the liquid will be warm but not hot. And sure enough, it is. Most of the time our simulated worlds model the world we perceive with accuracy, and these not only predict banal consequences (walking through the doorway leaves the room), they help us identify which situations have highly uncertain outcomes⁵.

In my very first BtF post, I defined humans as bipedal mammals who can digitally traverse most of the world’s streets in whatever random way they want. We are what we can do, and one of the things we can do is play out different scenarios in our mind, in advance of playing them out for real. We spend a lot of time “living” in these simulated futures, and sometimes even simulated pasts (“What I should have said...”).

Note that I’ve now covered all the tenses. We build our view of the present in our mind, recreate the past, and speculate about the future under different scenarios. Even if our external world is 100% objective and tangible, our perception of it happens completely within our minds as a simulation⁶.

Is there any way to break out of this simulation? To experience real, raw reality? That’s been a central theme of The Filter, and of this series. It’s part of why I’ve argued that the next great fall of man could get us closer to a true perception of our world, by removing the lenses that skew our view of what’s really going on.

Throughout this series, I’ve invoked various versions of the same metaphor, which is very much related to the idea of removing the filter, or seeing beyond the simulation. This seems like a good time to recognize it head on. Maybe you already know the metaphor I’m referring to. It’s passing through the portal. Swallowing the red pill. Going down the rabbit hole. Walking through the wardrobe. It’s peering behind the curtain. Unplugging from The Matrix.

Over and over we tell some version of this same story. The protagonist, willingly or swept up by a tornado, finds themselves in a world of previously unknown mysteries. This journey is perilous, chaotic, and challenging, but in the end they emerge with deeper wisdom and a stronger sense of agency. Often this journey reveals that the protagonist’s view of reality was fake, or severely limited, and the truth turns out to be much more fantastic than they could have imagined. Other times their journey to an alternative universe helps them see the truth about their own world.

In all of our famous, pop-culture versions of this metaphor — and I see it as a foundational pillar of Western culture — this journey of discovery is a worthy one. It’s the trip the protagonist was meant to go on. But in its religious and mythological versions, our stories about portals send the opposite message: don't steal fire from the gods, don't fly too close to the sun, don’t open pandora’s box. The first great fall of man was triggered by an act of disobedience, of God’s commandment not to partake of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It plunged us into sin.

What makes us human, of course, is that we ignored that original prohibition, and continue, in all but a handful of fundamentalist religious communities, to seek knowledge that might unlock for us the powers of gods. From Ponce de Leon’s failed search for the fountain of youth, to the transhumanist quest for the singularity, humans have forever sought out immortality and other super-human powers.

As an American, I grew up in a culture where the secular perspective, that peering behind the curtain was good, far outpowered the religious notion, that one should know one’s place. If Dorothy, a young girl living in early 20th century America, had the right to expose a pyrotechnic powerhouse claiming to be the Great and Powerful Oz as merely a naked emperor, then peering back curtains must be the birthright of all of us⁷.

Although I’ve lived more than half of my adult life abroad, I still strongly identify with this very American ethos, at least at the level of culture and politics. Looking around, there’s no doubt that the worst people are the ones trying to convince us not to seek the truth, to content ourselves with the prepackaged narratives presented by our legacy media outlets. They are the ones attempting to censor speech. To control thought. The ones trying to convince people that it’s wrong to “question an election,” a masterful Dean Scream if ever there was one. They are The Regime that’s been building a Seahaven-like dome of control above all of us, a project that began, of course, by taking control over our educational institutions.

This time it’s different

It’s tempting, when you see someone take the red pill and wake up to the understanding that their reality has been manufactured, to pull out a version of the classic astronaut meme:

But I think it’s worth noting that something is different this time. As we approach the next great fall of man, we are, not coincidentally, at the culmination of two strongly opposing forces, plus the wildcard of what happens after the next great fall. On the one hand, we have the internet and its promise of decentralization. Of censorship resistance. Access to all the information. At the same time, technological advances and a rising culture of mass formation offer those in power the chance for a level of control over perceptions that could be absolute.

These two forces came to a head during the Covid regime, which I described as the establishment of a state-sponsored religion. My two takeaways from that period are that: 1. The regime has the capability to manufacture reality and impose it to an awesome degree and 2. Doing this is costly and fragile.

One measure of power, fully compatible with my definition of The Sovereign, is to what extent a regime can invent a new religion and drive adherence. By this measure, the successful mass formation around Covid as singular point of focus revealed that we have an insanely powerful regime.

At the same time, this regime had to put a huge amount of effort into censorship and bullying. Remember how aggressively everyone in the regime-aligned press went after Sweden for not locking down? Recall how anyone who engaged in heretical thinking, like speculating about the lab-leak theory, had to be banned from social media? Because the internet and social media now allow ideas to spread faster than the Wu-flu, the regime had to wage an all out war on free speech, which it couched in Orwellian language about “misinformation” or “hate speech”. Not a single Truman can be allowed to spread the dangerous conspiracy theory that Seahaven is fake⁸. Truth anywhere is a threat to lies everywhere.

As the forces collide, we are reaching the moment Frank Zappa described in one of his most brilliant quotes:

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

The Covid regime, with its doors literally welded shut in places like China, with its quarantine camps in Australia, with its stay-at-home orders in America enforced by police shooting paintballs at people standing on their own porches, was a brick wall moment. As too is the all-out attempt to force system-disrupter Donald Trump to exit stage left, using any and every means necessary. In order to Save Democracy, the regime is in the process of destroying the illusion of choice. You now have Democrat party leaders openly saying what they have no doubt forever believed, that they want the First Amendment eliminated and the entire constitution is an undesirable restraint on their power. When you see the quiet part being said out loud, the curtain is being pulled back to revel what many us have suspected for a long time.

For the oligarchic ruling class, the ultimate wet dream isn’t their boot on the head of their subjects, stomping down forever. While I have no doubt that some of our elites actively enjoy the feeling of pressing rubber against the peasant’s faces, most would prefer that the boot isn’t even necessary. This is why the illusion of freedom exists and why so much effort has gone into crafting it. As Christof explains when asked why Truman hadn’t yet figured out the truth about Seahaven, “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.” Our elites would like to control that presentation so thoroughly that we don’t even see the boot, and anyone who claims it’s there is treated like a crazy conspiracy theorist.

“The Truman Show” is a story of triumph. Through unstoppable curiosity and force of will, Truman identifies the truth and frees himself from the oppressive rule of a controlling tyrant. It’s a fairy tale, filtered through Hollywood’s lens. In the movie, after Truman overcomes his deliberately instilled fear of water and begins sailing to the edge of the dome, director Christof unleashes a torrential storm to try and prevent him from making it out. After nearly drowning him in the process, Christof relents and lets Truman go. In our real world, America’s controlling agencies are not so merciful. The CIA trains foreigners on the art of torture and they take out threats to their power, up to and including presidents. “Taking the Loss” isn’t exactly in the playbook of the people who epstiened Epstein. 

I predict that, as the curtain comes down and soft power is necessarily exchanged for direct force, we are in for a level of chaos that’s unprecedented in my lifetime. We’re headed into a tempest that will make the one Truman faced look like the gentlest of breezes by comparison. My bet is that the insanity of the Covid regime was only the sneak preview.