🧠 Politics in the Weirding Way

01 Jul, 2025

This is part of the weirding way that we will teach you. Some thoughts have a certain sound, that being the equivalent to a form. Through sound and motion, you will be able to paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs. - Paul Atriedes, Dune (1984)

Herbert's power structures are narratological bioprophecies - "my mind affects my reality" - messianic hyperstitions feature prominently; propagating antisynthetic jihadist religions, genetically manipulating the birth of a saviour and seeding self-serving histories in cultures vulnerable to propaganda. Even the final hurdle for eschewing reality - violence - is overcome with the weirding way fighting style.

Human willpower and intent supercedes and imposes upon reality.

There is deliberate obscurity to the details, only the input and output are understood - psychically resonant commands form an interfacing language between the will of the wielder and the reaction of their target - before manifesting as violence and movement. The outcomes are independent of the means - collapsing into an obfuscated uninterpretable event horizon before re-expanding into effect. Indeed the means do not matter - whether real or reacted to as if real their effect remains the same.

To learn this weirding way, one must first understand

The Weird and Wyrd

The sense of wrongness associated with the weird - the conviction that this does not belong - is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new - Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (2016)

Weirdness is a dissonance of structure-frame rather than of substance. Wrongness by essence prerequisites an extant rightness of shared-frame - a predetermined manufactured consensus reality. Without a reality to violate it offers no transpositional potentialities, becoming pacifying fantasy neutered of its deframing capabilities. [Frame]lock¹ reduces the possibility space to hedonism and its competitors - the extraction of pleasure from familiar psychomachinery without producing novel productions. Reliance on the same stimulus requires escalation to overcome habituation, presenting as infinitely growing demand - highly suitable to this particular status quo.

The original form of the word - "Wyrd" - is stranger still, evoking fateful predeterminism regardless of means of travel - the present immanence of an emergent inevitable future. These Fates are often horrific, tragic and ironic. The irony is a principal component; the inevitability of outcome is baked into reactionary avoidance, ignorant dismissal and intentional manifestation - all resolve to collapse the contradiction that can no longer self-sustain into a stable lower-energy state by feeding energy into the system. Only those who accept the inevitable outcome, rather than attempting to subvert or seize it, ultimately guide it. Where Oedipus re-enacted fate in his avoidance of it, Achilles knew his fate and performed it. Given a choice between eternal glory in an early death and a long life in obscurity, he chose to perform his fat(e)al role and enter the metanarrative, feeding corpse into corpus.

What is your purpose then, if not to decide? If not to act? This is to misunderstand the flow, you are it, the decisions you make are as predetermined as the ones you have made - whether agonisingly deliberated or instinctual - your systems of will were created for you before you had the supposed willpower to decide upon them yourself. Your thoughts. Your addictions. Your dismissed thoughts and beaten addictions. All predetermined outcomes that yet must be performed. Perhaps you can decide the minutia of the performance but your script remains the same, rebelling against it only reveals itself to be the next scripted page. You nonetheless do have one choice - to live content or suffer ascension to the metanarrative. This is Fate, well understood by humans before the neoliberal destruction of competing systems of thought that object to the "rational economic unit" we have been reduced to - severed from the universe, blindfolded and given unlimited options to go with limitless lack of purpose.

Today you are forced to be an atomic unit in the metanarrative network - Homo Economicus - because every alternative was destroyed in

The Rationalist Purge

Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny, To wherever your decrees have assigned me. I follow readily, but if I choose not, Wretched though I am, I must follow still. Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling. - Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus (3rd Century B.C.E.)

Today's Homo Economicus, we are assured, is a rational actor with immutable preferences and foresight. Driven only by individual desire measured against social desire dictating objective value. Yet the priests still carve arcane runes into economic models, drink IPOs and read the tea leaves in them, feel futures in the vivisected bowels of a QBR. Holding esoteric, arcane knowledge in structures needing a decade to be indoctrinated into. The ruling class is somehow always ahead, as if rewarded by divine right - 'Dame Pelosi reached her station by virtue, of course she can feel the way the wind is blowing, of course the birds sing to her in portfolio.'

Fate, now, has been rejected by modernity as an irrational power structure that propped up authoritarian prefeudalist systems of control. In the process rationalism also vivisected and discarded systems of abstract understanding - organic memetic structures - that evolved utilitously. Evidence-Based Medicine led the way in the demonisation of 'bias' - the final collapse of all subjective frames into one theoretical objective one. Researchers forever in search of a lower-order 'hidden variable' to explain phenomena previously explained in abstract narrative theories. Risk calculus superceding all other narrative frames, a typical capitalist realism, to institute an objective rationalist framework.

The Miasma Theory's failures to prevent Cholera outbreaks led to the birth of a rationalist framework of epidemiology - moving from the maintenance of communal fixtures like air and the health of the community to the health of the individual. We reduced communal health to empirical systems of probability rather than the accumulation of case studies functioning as a communal story. The result in our most recent apocalypse was a terribly ironic reversal - the over-emphasis of a waterborne explanation for the spread of covid (in the form of airborne droplets) over an airborne one. Social distancing and handwashing were functionally ineffective in comparison to ventilation and masking. Evidence for masking was disputed by the erroneous assumption that it would increase face-touching and thereby transmit droplets directly to points of entry. By contrast in Japan and China - the immediate adoption of an airborne vector of transmission theory greatly prevented spread and prompted wilful masking behaviours.²

It is difficult to dismiss as coincidence that cultures with a firm mode of irrational abstract framing lasting into modernity (in the form of spirits and essences of natures as they interface with the humans occupying the material plane adjacent to them) were better suited to adopting abstract communal behaviours that prevented great harm. The certainty of the value of individual liberty and freedom itself in the west becomes maladaptive - prioritising minor expressions of freedom (indeed masking itself became an immediate signal/counter signal of group affiliation far in excess of its import as an intervention) over the greater health of the community. "My air is not bad, my water is not bad, I am not ill" takes precedent over the health of home, community and village.

Eventually these individualist explanations meet a reality that cannot be explained by them, and turn into the paranoiac "They are polluting my air, they are polluting my water, they are making me ill". This libidinal spirit of the irrationalist human remains today in the form of Paranoia, and can go one of two ways, the most important being

Paranoiac Freedom

[T]here is something "crazy," something of a madness, in radical freedom... freedom is at its most radical a disease, something that parasitizes on our organic wellbeing, something destructive and self-destructive... - Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

Without necessitating a deep dive into Mccarthy-era history, we can identify paranoia as a useful tool of social control - an impetus soaked into society from top-down propaganda that prompts both surveillence and self-regulatory scrutiny. Simultaneously, however, paranoia can be an anti-authoritarian mode of analysis - assuming nothing on the surface level and viewing all forms as shaped by hostile manipulation is a deterritorializing impulse. Where these two modes dissect is at the incision between the egoic self and broader psychosubstrate - whether you believe this hostile manipulation to be targeted at you.

In the height of mutual Cold War paranoia, both sides pathologised paranoia in modes utilitous to their operations. The soviet union developed vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya, or "slow progressive schizophrenia" to incarcerate dissenters and subject them to psychiatric interventions (resulting in as many as three times the number diagnosis of schizophrenia as western countries like the UK) under the principle that their paranoid rejection of soviet structures could only be irrational. In the same era, Mccarthyist Americans engaged in paranoid delusions of assimilation, brainwashing and sleeper agents - the only explanation for their anti-American sentiment being the hostile manipulation by the enemy axis of power. In both systems paranoia was used as a tool of control in a narcissistic frame - all frames that conflict with America must be aimed at subverting america/ the USSR is so perfect that only a madman could believe it to be otherwise.

Paranoia is not only a weird state, but a hypervigilance to the weird - residing in conflict with the structure-frame and necessarily delegitimized by and delegitimizing it. The paranoia they aim to suppress - that being the correct identification of hostile manipulation of the forces around them without the following assumption that these forces are aware of or directed at them is the revolutionary, utilitious mode of analysis. The hyperparanoiac believes these vast uninterpretable hyperforms extrude briefly enough into frames of understanding to be sensed, but never wholely enough to be fully understood.

The Leviathan exists but is indifferent to you - to be appropriately paranoid is to adopt this Lovecraftian frame of understanding the hostile forces that doom humanity. This is how the spectre of irrationalism can be reconstituted and given form - in an awareness of the unknown - a fascination with what remains present in

The Outside

when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown - the shadow-haunted Outside - we must remember to leave out humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold - H.P. Lovecraft, Letter to the Editor, Weird Tales, 1927

We buried the future somewhere in this shadow-haunted Outside - eldrofuturic poltergeists occasionally emerging into the material plane to thrash about senselessly in the hope of a flung polemic mortally wounding a superstructure, before burrowing back into the rhizome awaiting a next moment. USSR, Cybersyn, Occupy, Corbyn, Sanders, CHAZ, Jan 6th³ all pruned at the branching point from the neoliberal end of history. When fate cements into history it becomes always-inevitable, there could have been no other timeline, nothing new. This is where the intrusion of the weird begins to manifest and Lovecraft's work is most valuable - the fictional manifestation of extrusions from another plane are indiscernible from other hyperforms. The retro-interrence of the new - crafting an ancient lore and mythology that never occurred in our frame yet can forcibly historicise potential futures can short-circuit the future to the past bypassing our languid present.

Fatefulness bridges this gap - accepting that reality bends to history in the way an improvised interactive story might follow the flow of a player. In one such narrative game, Baldurs Gate 3 - your ally The Emperor's loyalty or betrayal is induced by your suspicions, rewriting his history in an ontological feedback loop based entirely on the observer's perception. His actions always inevitable and foreplanned formed on the assumptions and investment of feeling by the player. This 'unrealistic' inconsistency of motive was a common critique - ironic that the rationalisation of an end-state belief or even outcome has been shown time and time again to be post-hoc neque proptor hoc - The Ends creating The Means.

Neoliberal frames of finite, objective reality blind the unattuned and induce paranoiac panic in the attuned. Hyperstitioning new realities is pathologised into schizophrenic 'breaks' or subversive signalling by hostile forces directed at our glorious monuments. Causality cannot be reshaped by narrative fiction if it is not allowed to interface with the structure. For the neoliberal - weirdness is an alarm - a fear of

"The Weird People"

I'll just say it: Donald Trump and JD Vance are creepy and, yes, weird. We are not going back. - Tim Walz, 2024

One such alarm went off in the summer of '24 launching one of very few successful Democratic memetic attacks on the right-wing psychostructure - designating them "weird". A momentary lapse of awareness (the correct and default state of the liberal being obliviousness) where progressives realised their hegemony had been intruded upon by a cognitohazardous psychosubstrate they were ill-prepared for. The same groups that praised this narrative reassertion of the normal over the immanent weird similarly praised Trump's campaign (for its strategy, not morality) for its rebuttal:

Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for YOU - Trump Campaign, 2024

The ultimate failure of the Harris Campaign strategy was in its timing - by the point that they attempted to reframe MAGA as 'weird' - an emerging immanence and divergence from structure-frame to be smothered in the crib - it was already fully-grown, culturally dominant and poised to overwhelm their institutions. Where calling MAGA 'weird' was most successful was in appealing to the liberal ingroup white-knuckling control of the hegemony before it was wrested away from them. MAGA reaffirmed its new dominance by tying 'the weird' back to Kamala - anchoring the campaign to introductions of The Other (They/Them) into a now sanely conservative cultural norm. The apparent success of the line of attack was bound up in infuriating the right - attempting to setback the overton window after rightfully gained hard-won territory.

They had spent a decade ritually hyperstitioning a new reality into being - only for the last gasp of the neoliberal order they despised to be an attempt at gaslighting them into being 'weird' again - a deeply

Temporal Trauma

...Trump's campaign was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement - Fisher, K-Punk 2016

This attempt at forcible temporal shunting back to the moment of MAGA's emergence was re-traumatizing - triggering the same feelings of displacement, rejection and isolation that instigated the birth of the movement to begin with. Trump's movement overcame, integrated and weaponised their cultural trauma but never resolved their PTSD - remaining vulnerable, emotionally if not strategically, to these attacks. MAGA is itself a temporal sticking point - Make America Great Again - a perpetual retro-interring of a futuric installation of a fictional history. Precisely the mode of hyperstitioning discussed so far - and where much of the excitement for restructuring of society comes from in radicals across the political spectrum. Tragic that it was our enemies, but joyous that it was possible at all to exorcise the specters of lost futures.

Yet this grand victory over temporality is bound in their cultural trauma - hypervigilance, rage, psychotic breaks and disintegrating ties to linearity. Causality Collapse - if nothing can follow from neoliberalism then rather than attack neoliberalism, causality must be dismantled, if only for a moment. All that remains in a system with no cause-and-effect is what already is, mementos, monuments and sculptures displaced out of time and left in eerie states of disrepair. Dream-logic inserting garbled semantic signals into brainrot content and conspiratorial paranoia with no vector. Time travel far more like the jumbled self-looping chaotic feedback of a Primer than the stable decision-tree branches of a Back to the Future. We are left interfacing with humming objects, even the libidinal shadow has been mined and interpolated into AI giving us direct line to attuning with the sociounconscious ripples - the

Shivers and Vibrations

I AM A FRAGMENT OF THE WORLD SPIRIT, THE GENIUS LOCI OF REVACHOL. MY HEART IS THE WIND CORRIDOR. THE BOTTOM OF MY AIR IS RED. I HAVE A HUNDRED THOUSAND LUMINOUS ARMS. COME MORNING, I CARRY INDUSTRIAL DUST AND LET IT SETTLE ON TREE LEAVES. I SHAKE THE DUST FROM THOSE LEAVES AND ONTO YOUR COAT. I’VE SEEN YOU, I’VE SEEN YOU! - Shivers, Disco Elysium

The contemporary masterwork Disco Elysium features internal voices that advise and direct the protagonist, the most important being Shivers - "Raise the hair on your neck. Tune in to the city." Occasionally, it interjects with seemingly irrelevant moments from other times and places, piercing through mundanity with a deep resonance to the city - the networked intersection of people and places - the imposition of superstructure on lived experience. "Tuning in" with "the hair on your neck" forming antennal receptors to the frequencies of space, community and history. Everything is made in the shape of pain that can be felt.

The means do not matter - parallel resonances one or all of which contribute and interfere constructively and destructively result in concrete end - felt experience protruded from other frames. Vibrations pass through, they are not nodes but temporally unstable flows of energy that can resonate across time and space. Traumas come to the present fore in transcendental shock - injuries out of time. These can be personal, generational, communal, structural - and felt in physicality of social spaces expressed by the assemblage of human intent that formed them. While sociotraumas are shouted in the cultural productions of channelers, they are whispered in the productions of everyone else.

This is where we arrive at the eerie - the remnants of intent lost to time - often the site of pruned branches. Failed hyperstitions in hollowed out cocoons. A haunted graveyard of futures. Trauma as infrastructure - reverberating out from sites of great suffering and failure. It is here the separation between living and ascension is most clear - where the choice is most stark. Those who failed or were failed gave up everything for nothing, leaving behind a charged void - The Pale background static imprinted behind the dominant metanarrative. This is a renewable energy source to be channeled into necromancy - from Making America Great Again to restorations of Cybersyn. These are the beasts turned to oil turned to fuel for the next ascension - this is the energy to channel into

Politics in the Weirding Way

To learn this weirding way, one must first understand the weird.

There are vast reserves of energy to channel into (as Herbert would depict it) The Voice. Some do this to fuel their own drives, far more interested in co-opting this resource into personal fulfilment and contentment, even economic stability. You are not obligated to choose to 'die', to sacrifice your finite life attempting to influence the metanarrative. This is the one true choice Fate will offer you and the one you are most entitled to enact selfishly. If you choose to look Outside, to see the weird, to become paranoid, to Shiver - you are relinquishing control of your life to the network and converting from node to ripple. Derealizing into influence on others, becoming the substance they channel.

You must give up freedom and in doing so become free, for 'none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free' and so none are more free than those who truly believe they are enslaved to Fate. You must intrude in upon reality with formations unrecognisable to it - What are you? Why can't I attribute you? Why aren't you finite? You must induce fascination compelling discomforted attention - inducing dissonances that repel and attract in equal measure. Create Metainstability.

To learn this weirding way, one must first become the weird.

Shivers & Footnotes

Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

Lovecraft, Notes on Writing Weird Fiction

Necropolitics

Žižek, Freedom The Disease Without Cure

Writing on the roof at 2am, I hear machines but no voices, the cars drive themselves home

The Open Memetics Group - @DefenderOfBasic

Feyerabend, Against Method