psychology

The Loop

by

I’ve been analyzing desires and obsessions lately as well as how we deal with them. I’m coming to the conclusion that some of the ways we deal with our obsessions end up fueling them. The poison isn’t the medicine, but the poison and medicine feed back into each other.

You think you’ve avoided negative thoughts by shifting to positive ones? Not necessarily.

I started coming to this conclusion two ways.

First, in my energy work, my own Quigong/Circulation methods (you know the ones I discuss carefully since such practices can backfire). Part of that practice is ensuring energies flow smoothly through the body, whether you consider these esoteric energies real or just a metaphor for awareness and relaxation. Such practices make you aware of how your body works, of when you are tense or loose, and how mind and body affection each other.

What I noticed was that, when dealing with stressful situations and ruminations, even when I turned to supposedly pleasant or virtuous thoughts, the tensions remained. In a few cases it would seem even if I’d directed my mind elsewhere, these supposedly more healthy thoughts made it worse. How could I get more tense despite having less negative thoughts?

In terms of Energy Work, it was like I’d have a loop of energy running around in my brain, powering negative thoughts – obsessions, fears, etc. But when I cultivated supposedly positive thoughts, it’d be just another loop. I’d play over something supposedly benevolent over and over, but I was still stuck in a loop.

(This is why, as I have noted, anatomical spiritual models are useful to rethink ourselves).

Secondly, as I noticed these tensions and such, I was analyzing the way my mind worked, supported by my breath meditation. Classic mind-on-breath/breath-on-mind meditations are important, as I’ve held forth on, but one useful side effect is awareness. Now I’m not saying you want to sit down to meditate with that as your goal (in fact, seeking is a barrier to meditation) but hey, enjoy the scenery on the trip

One thing I had noticed in meditation was how loops in my thoughts would work. It was easy to notice a bad habit, but also easy to try to replace it with a good habit. However, when you did that, you’d end up just leaping from habit to habit. Good or bad, obsessions are obsessions and habits can be for good or ill.

I also noticed that I could bounce between one or the other. Either way you got into a habit of looking to have a habit. Trying to get out of a negative obsession with a positive one was still an obsession. In a way you were creating a rut in your mind, and no matter what was in that rut, you would still be in a rut.

No matter the model I used it was pretty apparent – you can get into various negative psychological loops, and you could replace them with positive ones, but were still in a Loop. The two played off of each other.

That was quite a revelation as I had often found ways to cultivate positive habits and they were easy to use to replace negative ones. But the negative ones kept coming back. I had in short, worn a rut in my mind (or my energy channels) that was still there no matter what filled it.

Since that understanding, it’s helped me deal with emotional loops. I can recognize them and I have a metaphor (multiple metaphors) to understand them. I can cultivate habits to step out of the loops and just relax more in general. It’s also a reminder that it’s easy to think you have solved a problem, but are reinforcing part of it.

An emotional loop is a loop no matter how good it feels or what problem you think it solved. I’m also glad to everyone whose work and writing has helped me in meditative practices, they’re why I can see it.

–Xenofact

Cultural Cargo Cults Ethics and Taoism

by

I was reading the Tao Te Ching lately, and Chapter 18 struck me. Let me paraphrase (from Red Pine and a few other translations):

When the Great Way is left, kindness and justice arise

When reason arises, we encounter deceit.

When the six relations fail, we encounter obedience and love.

When the country is in chaos, we acknowledge honest officials.

I take this chapter to be one of failure. If people hold to the Tao, the Great Way, that connectedness-of-reality, you can have an orderly life. When you loose it things fall apart – even if we think we’re being virtuous.

The arising of kindness and justice sounds like a good thing. Reason is a good thing, correct? Yet the entire chapter is one of decline, ending with one of my favorite lines, the acknowledgement of honest officials – when shouldn’t they all be honest?

It’s a curious chapter indeed. Some things we’d think of are good are sneered at. When contemplating it, I had a useful insight relevant to political and social conversations of the day.

The way I read the chapter is the sense of the Tao, that unity, leads to harmony. There are kindness and justice, reason, good relations, and so on, but they are part of a “unified” worldview that is both mystical bust also practical. There may be kindness, honesty, and so on, but they are the result of holding to the Tao – not separate and distinct from it. “True” virtuous things, as it were, things that have a foundation.

But when you loose that sense of unity, everything is broken, out, separate, a substitute. That’s when I thought of the term bandied about these days (in 2026) – “Cargo Cults.”

The term “Cargo Cult Fascism” arose to describe certain would-be strongmen of our age who seemed to think that if they acted like fascist leaders, they’d have automatic compliance. The term spread to other areas of political and social discussion, noting just how much of our society was people acting out things but not actually doing them or caring about them or understanding them. Such people and their actions often failed and fell apart – bad but also dysfunctional.

But if you have “bad” Cargo Cults, that also means you can have ones of people trying to be “good.”

Suddenly, I understood this chapter of the Tao Te Ching better (especially considering the times of Taoist-versus-Confucian). It was about fragmented things, divided from a larger reality, imitative but with no foundation. Past a point you’re just going through the motions and not being anything, and not connected to the Way, the foundation of things, the depth of it all. Your kindness, your morality, no matter how hard you try, is going to be a bit hollow, a bit of an act, without that foundation.

I think that’s also why the last line hits me hard. Imagine a society in so much chaos that saying someone is an “honest minister” is a compliment as opposed to indicating that if that’s exceptional your government sucks. Also maybe that person is just a poser anyway.

Regularly reading great spiritual and philosophical works is good not just for your own spiritual “ecosystem” but for reviewing and thinking over modern and past times. This was a useful insight, helping me understand both past writings and our current situations.

(I mean the situations are both terrible but I understand them better)

–Xenofact

You Had QAnon, You Didn’t Get QAnon, Because You Had QAnon

by

(This is written in late February 2026. Please consider it a commentary on a period in time. In addition I am not an expert on Conspiracy Theories, but a follower as part of other interests, others have written and commented on this far better than I.)

In the second decade of the 21st century a kind of Conspiracy Theory community arose online around the persona of Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president. Christened QAnon around online personality and poster “Q,” a mysterious figure(s) who posted vaguely about a horrific conspiracy of corruption, child abuse, and more. It expanded, drawing in other conspiracy theories and past biases, evolving to a belief system with distinct traits:

  1. There was a global conspiracy of high-placed individuals – and most of them traditional liberals and figured hated by right-wing conspiracists.
  2. They were engaged in corruption at the highest level, and this included satanic child abuse. This in turn included feeding on “adrenechrome” from these children – a common chemical that achieved mythical status due to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
  3. Donald Trump and an elite group of military/government operatives were going to stop this.
  4. Some of this veered into aliens, time travel, and more as it integrated other conspiracy theories. It was extremely “yes-and,” almost a game.

I followed this Conspiracy Theory as it was having effects far off of internet message boards and family arguments, and because it was instructive. I saw familiar beat after familiar beat, having lived through multiple Satanic Panics, integrating other conspiracy theories and beliefs I’d seen since the 70’s. Of course there was also the shadow of anti-Semetism lurking around as always in the form of re-envisioned Blood Libel, and one could see the potential danger.

Any reasonably informed observation of QAnon would be hard pressed to ignore a bloodlust straight out of the worst of human history. Dreams of mass executions, of military tribunals, of coups. A great revolution was predicted, a kind of spiritual awakening combined with bloody purges. Needless to say some people did not wait, and there were actual crimes, threats, and so on. The glee one could witness in QAnon and QAnon-adjacent communities was disturbing, and was a reason to keep an eye on it.

As the various permutations of QAnon played on, it absorbed the real-life crimes against humanity surrounding public figure Jeffrey Epstein. It took little effort to discover how this well-connected monster and his allies had engaged in despicable crimes, and dangerous “Epstein Files” integrated into QAnon. In time, they even took on a life of their own, transcending QAnon, a belief that Epstein was a kind of key to unraveling a Global Conspiracy.

In fact, QAnon in many ways had become mainstream, had become “real life.” You’d see many a politician or political figure reference it, if only obliquely. The obsession with the Epstein Files also lived on, even in the minds of people not as connected to the original QAnon.

Then in 2025 during the second Trump administration, after a year of dodges, publicity, and ultimately Congressional action under duress, some of the government’s information on Epstein was released. Heavily yet poorly redacted, handled by a Department of Justice clearly covering for Trump and his allies, the information was still explosive. As I write this it has spawned arrests and investigations across the world – except in the US.

And the result? Was there Satanism, was there alien technology? No, there were a lot of famous, connected, rich people doing assorted crimes, looking for new opportunities at the expense of others, and engaging in cultural and financial manipulations. Even in documents filled with black bars and selective release, it was apparent that there was conspiring by Epstein’s crowd over the decades, sometimes involved directly in cultural and financial trends.

You didn’t need aliens, Satan, or anything else. You had a bunch of banal assholes.

Of course, even with the limits of what was revealed, Epstein was deeply connected to Donald Trump and his circle, along with other figures from internet culture, finance, science, and so on. Some were already reprehensible before any connections were publicized.

The QAnon and QAnon-adjacent crowds – which in many ways had been subsumed into the Republican party – had a crisis. They could face the fact that there were really conspiracies (which anyone could have told you). They could try to ignore it. They could try to cover up for “their people” who had allied with if not been monsters – as was joked by some, “Epstein was in the Trump files.”

What I saw at this time was a lot of the latter two. Among people who followed conspiracy theories and politics, showcasing “covering for Trump” was a bit of a sport, in the “can you believe this type” attitude. Some of it was strange, brittle people saying words out of a mouth that wanted to scream something else. For some you could see the horror of what they were doing to themselves trying to cover for this.

QAnon’s theories were not real. But they were real in a different way. QAnon was wrong, but also right. The problem was they were the assistants of the monsters.

But as people once ready to “save the children” rushed to preserve some people from accountability for and association with child sex crimes, they missed an irony. They who had decried cover-up, decried conspiracy were now part of cover-up in their online streams and chats. They needed their internet clicks and merch sales, and so would suddenly try to cover for some of Epstein’s associates.

QAnon and it’s allies and descendants thus became became part of the conspiracy. Watching reactions of various conspiracist theorists, QAnon or QAnon adjacent, was disturbing – to see people rush to defend people clearly involved in crimes they once decried. They were helping people they should have despised, but these people were their people and they got a pass.

Also, where was the glee at going after the sex predators and abusers of children? Where was the desire for tribunals and bloody vengeance? That too had faded, which was strange, because the utter joy at imaging the deaths of hated political figure seemed to motivate so many of them. Now where was that joy?

I think they had missed all along that their passion for harm was a sign of how bad they could get. These people who had claimed that children were abused, tortured, made afraid, and drained of vital chemicals were themselves motivated by the suffering of others. They joyfully awaited the horrible deaths of people they hated as part of a conspiracy theory that they then happily became part of.

Had they asked for a moment what they were, maybe they would have seen what they might be. They were the monsters all along, they just didn’t know it.

QAnon was a fever dream online of people who thought they were fighting a conspiracy that fed on pain and suffering. All these years later it turned out they were part of the same, covering for monsters and having never seen how they fed on dreams of human agony. For every conspiracy theorist and conspiracy influencer out there, one has to ask how many have always taken joy in the pain of others, and how much evil they will cover for their own needs.

Here now, as I try to learn from this, it’s a challenge as there’s so much. Academics and historians and psychologists have decades if not centuries to dwell on. Books will be written. Documentaries will be made. What lessons are revealed may we listen to, if only because we clearly have much to learn as we failed so far. I will assuredly write more.

But if there’s a reminder for me. The belief in an other means you can too easily become it or find you were it all along. Decide evil is outside of you and you’ll never see when it sprouts inside, never see when you’re supporting it, never see when you create it. You are so dedicated to a worldview, you’ll destroy it to preserve the illusion you haven’t.

It’s up to build a world where people are safe from the monsters, and hopefully that the monsters don’t gain power at all. Make sure you’re doing good before you decide to hunt evil, or you just might not like what you see in the mirror one day.

-Xenofact