sj_zero on Nostr: Judas betrayed Jesus not with a dagger, but with a kiss. This is directly contrasting ...

Judas betrayed Jesus not with a dagger, but with a kiss. This is directly contrasting Julius Caesar who had a number of daggers forced into him at point blank range. Rather than being betrayed by overt hostility, he is in the end of a trade by a symbol of affection, intimacy, and warmth.

I think that that has very strong parallels to today. There are movements which either intentionally or unintentionally are going to break civilization. They advocate for things that are simply not in the best interest of the human race and over the long term, such as degeneracy, embracing hedonism, generally ignoring reality, rejecting deferring gratification, rejecting grit, rejecting the whole concept of virtue. But they do this with a veneer of affection, intimacy, and warmth.

It's a difficult tactic to deal with, because someone you love must sometimes be pushed back against if you love them. People will do things that hurt themselves or hurt others, and if you care about them, you do have to judge them and you do have to let them know that what they're doing is wrong, while someone who doesn't care can just keep supporting you right into the grave. Meanwhile, the person who loves another looks like the bad guy for pushing back, and the person who doesn't care about another looks like the good guy for supporting someone.

Another archetype is cassandra, someone who was spurned by the gods and given the curse to speak true prophecy but we considered insane anytime she did. And I think that we see this out there as well. I have to admit I've been as guilty as anyone of seeing Cassandras speak, and just assuming that the prophecy is insane ramblings, but here we are. The world is a mess and a large part of that seems to be the predictable and predicted outcomes of things people warned us about.

I think part of the issue there is that the people who would be the most conducive to the message are also the ones who in the moment aren't nearly as much the people that the message would apply to. In my case, I listened to all the messages that everyone warned us about, but for the most part it ended up finding a balance where I can take the good parts of that ideas. And integrate them, and the bad parts of good ideas and try not to integrate them, and so the outcome really isn't that bad because it becomes a synthesis of the best parts of many different ideas, whereas for a lot of people that's a lot of work and so they're just going to take things to face value. Some of the things that we're seeing as a result of that are absolutely abhorrent.

But for someone who's going to intuitively take the good parts of bad ideas and disregard the bad parts of good ideas, it seems intuitive that the bad ideas aren't necessarily going to lead to ruin, and so the prophecy seems absurd. But it isn't. Prophecy didn't speak of the sort of people who can build their own ideology, and spoke of followers and the consequences of people who just follow following something terrible.