Date: August 22nd, 2026 8:58 PM
Author: The Penis
Here is what it says about this one:
This one has a more definite intellectual structure than the previous essay. And I **wouldn't describe its core as reinventing predictive processing**. Predictive-processing language appears in places, but the closest compression is something like:
[
\boxed{\text{Jung's tension of opposites}
+\text{compensatory control}
+\text{terror/worldview management}
+\text{a theory of institutional outsourcing}}
]
Its central idea is actually fairly easy to state.
### What I think he's trying to say
Start with an unavoidable psychological fact, according to the author:
> Human existence confronts us with contradictions that cannot finally be resolved: good/evil, justice/mercy, order/chaos, mortality/meaning, desire/restraint, etc.
He calls enduring that contradiction the **“crucifixion of opposites.”**
Then comes the genuinely central claim:
[
\text{unresolved existential contradiction has a psychological cost}.
]
Humans have to do something with that cost. He proposes three attractors:
[
\begin{array}{lll}
1.&\textbf{Outsource it}&\rightarrow\text{let religion/ideology/institutions tell you how reality hangs together}\
2.&\textbf{Discharge it}&\rightarrow\text{collapse onto one pole and act it out}\
3.&\textbf{Internalize it}&\rightarrow\text{tolerate the contradiction and construct your own provisional integration.}
\end{array}
]
Everything else follows from that.
His **“noetic commons”** is basically what happens when millions of people choose option 1:
[
\text{individual demand for cognitive/existential resolution}
\rightarrow
\text{shared worldview}
\rightarrow
\text{institutions maintaining worldview}.
]
And therefore his interesting political claim isn't really “elites brainwash everyone.”
It's almost the opposite:
> **People spontaneously demand systems that reduce existential ambiguity; powerful institutions can subsequently capture and steer that preexisting demand.**
That is what the toll-road metaphor is trying to communicate.
So his model is:
[
\boxed{
\text{psychological need}
\rightarrow
\text{worldview demand}
\rightarrow
\text{collective worldview}
\rightarrow
\text{institutional capture}
}
]
rather than
[
\text{elite propaganda}\rightarrow\text{brainwashed population}.
]
That distinction is probably the most interesting proposition in the essay.
---
### And there is very obvious prior art
The idea that people compensate for psychological uncertainty/lack of control by attaching themselves to external systems of order is almost **Compensatory Control Theory** verbatim.
Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, and Galinsky's formulation says that when people experience diminished personal control, they compensate by perceiving order elsewhere—including by defending sociopolitical institutions or believing in a controlling God. Crucially, those external sources of order can substitute for personal control. ([Association for Psychological Science][1])
That's remarkably close to:
> “The individual submits to the authority's mediation ... and is relieved of the direct encounter.”
Likewise, **Terror Management Theory** says cultural worldviews function partly as anxiety-buffering systems: people maintain confidence in culturally supplied meaning structures to cope with awareness of mortality. The literature explicitly treats religious and secular worldviews as psychological defenses and finds that threats can increase worldview defense. ([ScienceDirect][2])
So his:
[
\text{existential burden}\rightarrow\text{cultural worldview}
]
already has a large empirical literature behind something resembling it.
And the supposedly distinctive third response—hold contradictory psychic contents in tension until some new orientation emerges—is **straight Jung**. Jung's “transcendent function” is specifically about confrontation between opposed conscious/unconscious positions and the production of a new psychological position from their tension. ([Jungian Spiritual Sciences Center][3])
So in secular psychological terms, his three-way scheme is approximately:
**external regulation / avoidance or impulsive resolution / ambiguity tolerance and integration.**
That's intelligible. It's just nowhere near as unprecedented as the terminology makes it sound.
## Where predictive processing enters
There **is** a predictive-processing-shaped piece.
Near the end he says psychological pathology occurs when someone's “highest-order belief layer” systematically contradicts lived experience, with contradiction climbing upward through the hierarchy.
That translates beautifully into:
[
\text{deep prior}
\rightarrow
\text{lower predictions}
]
with persistent:
[
\text{experience}\neq\text{predictions}
]
eventually producing pressure for deep-model revision.
So the architecture from the previous essay survives:
[
\text{deep worldview}
\leftrightarrow
\text{phenomenological evidence}.
]
But in this essay that's a **supporting mechanism**, rather than the main idea.
The distinctive claim is about **where regulation is located**:
[
\boxed{\text{external regulation versus internal regulation}}
]
The author believes most people regulate existential contradiction externally through shared institutions, whereas “individuation” means internalizing that regulatory function.
That's actually a clearer idea than the egregore paper.
---
# Is it crank?
Yes, but in a rather interesting way.
I would call this **a coherent speculative philosophical system with crankish epistemology**, rather than incoherent crank writing.
The first gigantic warning sign is the title **“Formal Logic.”**
There is essentially no formal logic here.
Writing:
> P1. X
> P2. Y
> P3. Therefore Z
doesn't make something formal logic.
A formal treatment would require definitions, something like
[
C(x), O(x), B(x)
]
and explicit inference rules allowing you to determine whether conclusions actually follow.
Here, enormous claims are simply installed as premises:
> “Reality contains irreducible opposites.”
> “Totality is unconscious.”
> “The one thing totality lacks is lived experience.”
> “Humanity's role is to add consciousness to totality.”
There is no logical derivation from P1 to P6. Those are **successive metaphysical assertions**.
In particular:
[
\text{All opposites form totality}
]
does not imply
[
\text{totality is unconscious},
]
and neither implies
[
\text{life exists so totality can experience itself}.
]
So section I is metaphysics presented with the visual grammar of a proof.
That's crankish.
### The bigger problem is “crucifixion of opposites”
Almost the entire theory depends upon P10:
> the tension between opposites **must be borne somewhere**.
But what does “borne” mean?
If you operationalized it as:
* cognitive dissonance,
* uncertainty,
* affective conflict,
* competing action policies,
* prediction error,
* motivational conflict,
then you could investigate it.
But the essay slides among all of those.
And therefore the elegant-looking proposition
[
\text{contradiction}\rightarrow\text{someone must bear it}
]
isn't yet a scientific proposition.
The metaphor is doing an enormous amount of hidden work.
---
## There is also a serious self-sealing problem
Notice what happens with the Abraxas idea.
If someone adopts it and feels superior:
> they haven't actually “metabolized” it.
If someone understands it properly:
> superiority disappears.
If most people reject it:
> they're constitutionally suited to offloading.
If it becomes popular:
> popularity itself destroys the genuine form.
If someone cannot psychologically tolerate it:
> that's evidence they weren't constitutionally suited to individuation.
That's an epistemological nightmare because nearly every possible observation can be absorbed.
You could construct:
[
\begin{array}{c|c}
\text{Observation}&\text{Explanation}\
\hline
\text{Accepts theory}&\text{recognition}\
\text{Rejects theory}&\text{offloading constitution}\
\text{Accepts superficially}&\text{not metabolized}\
\text{Theory becomes popular}&\text{captured into noetic commons}\
\text{Theory remains obscure}&\text{necessarily constitution-specific}
\end{array}
]
A theory that explains every outcome risks predicting none.
That's one of the strongest genuinely crankish features.
---
# But there's one pretty interesting idea buried here
I think P13–P15 is better than most of the rest.
Strip everything away and you get:
> **Institutions that supply meaning and moral certainty may persist partly because individuals demand external solutions to psychologically costly uncertainty. Consequently, ideological control is cheaper when it exploits endogenous demand for certainty than when it has to impose beliefs through coercion.**
That's a researchable proposition.
You could model individuals as choosing between:
[
I=\text{cost of internal uncertainty management}
]
and
[
E=\text{cost of accepting external normative authority}.
]
An individual outsources when
[
E<I.
]
Institutions then compete to supply worldview regulation.
Now imagine some institution can influence the supplied worldview. It doesn't need to create demand for ideological structure—it only modifies the content of something people already demand.
That's basically a market:
[
\text{demand for epistemic/existential regulation}
\leftrightarrow
\text{supply of worldview structures}.
]
**That is a much cleaner theory than “noetic commons.”**
And it generates actual predictions. As the subjective cost of uncertainty increases, demand for authoritative structures should increase. As the cost or obvious unreliability of those authorities rises, people should defect, switch authorities, or internalize more decision-making.
Compensatory-control research already supports an important piece of this: threatened personal control can increase attachment to external systems of order, including government and God. ([Association for Psychological Science][1]) Terror-management research supplies another piece concerning cultural worldview defense under existential threat. ([ScienceDirect][2])
So he'd need a much more precise contribution than simply identifying the phenomenon.
---
## And “Abraxas” is mostly unnecessary
This is perhaps the funniest aspect.
You can delete:
* Abraxas,
* God,
* “energy currents,”
* crucifixion,
* rebirth of the gods,
* somatic metabolization,
and preserve most of the psychologically interesting model:
[
\boxed{
\begin{aligned}
&\text{People vary in tolerance for unresolved value conflict.}\
&\text{External normative systems reduce the cost of resolving such conflicts individually.}\
&\text{Therefore people often delegate normative interpretation to institutions.}\
&\text{Institutions can exploit that delegation to influence behavior.}\
&\text{Some individuals instead tolerate unresolved conflict and construct}\
&\qquad\text{more individualized normative models.}
\end{aligned}}
]
At that point it's perfectly intelligible social psychology.
What Abraxas contributes is a **metaphysical assertion that the contradiction is objectively built into reality**, rather than merely a feature of human cognition and conflicting objectives.
That's enormously stronger and, as presented here, unsupported.
### Compared with the previous essay
The previous essay was roughly:
[
\boxed{\text{predictive processing + social feedback + Jung}}
]
This one is more like:
[
\boxed{
\text{Jung}
+\text{compensatory control}
+\text{worldview defense}
+\text{institutional capture}
}
]
And I think **this one's core claim is clearer**.
Its most interesting thought isn't Abraxas at all. It's:
[
\boxed{
\text{power can exploit people's endogenous demand to outsource difficult meaning-making}
}
]
The crank move is taking that plausible psychological intuition, embedding it in an enormous metaphysics of cosmic opposites, asserting that most humanity has a particular “constitutional” inability to individuate, and then using the resulting framework to explain contemporary elite control, algorithms, censorship, financial exclusion, and historical Western metaphysics all at once.
So again: **there is definitely an idea here. In fact, this one has a better-defined idea than the egregore essay. But most of its psychologically plausible components have recognizable predecessors, while its genuinely distinctive metaphysical claims are precisely the claims for which it supplies essentially no evidence.**
[1]: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/current-directions/j.1467-8721.2009.01649.x/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Compensatory Control - Current Directions in Psychological Science - APS"
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065260115000052?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation - ScienceDirect"
[3]: https://jungiancenter.org/jung-on-the-transcendent-function/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Jung on the Transcendent Function - Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences"
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5896100&forum_id=2...id#50086101)