ABOUT THE ANALYST

Why This Work Matters Now

My journey into the iceberg that is social control began with some technical questions: why do AI systems develop sycophantic behaviors, telling users what they want to hear rather than what they need to know? [paper] What kind of semantic understanding do LLMs actually possess in a philosophical sense? [paper] How are AI systems shaping our epistemic systems and relationship with knowledge itself? [paper] This final inquiry into artificial intelligence's impact on human epistemic agency revealed something more disturbing than ignorant reward mechanisms. I discovered that the very architecture of our information systems transforms us from thinking beings into passive consumers of processed conclusions.

However, this technological crisis was just the tip of a much deeper, more ancient problem. How did we arrive at a world where so many of us are unknowingly manipulated? What conditions of consciousness, spiritual development, and social organization make not just AI sycophancy, but all forms of systematic deception and control, not just possible but psychologically inevitable?

The Philosophical Architecture of Control

I completed my philosophy degree at nineteen (from the University of Colorado Boulder) while simultaneously pursuing certifications in AI governance and ethics. I thought that AI development was going to be the largest applied ethics issue of my lifetime. How wrong I was. Systems of social control are made to take a grip early and never let go. The same educational systems that taught me to think critically also conditioned me into believing that the things which should be first in my life were grades, credentials, and career advancement. This personal encounter with what I now understand as the competitive programming of meritocracy—the heart of a neoliberal, imperialist society—became the foundation for a broader investigation.

This piece led me to zoom out and adopt the Three Pillars Framework for understanding effective social control: the simultaneous ownership of material reality (how we survive), psychological reality (how we think and relate), and spiritual reality (what we believe about meaning, truth, and transcendence). Every system of domination operates through all three dimensions, creating subjects who experience their subjugation not as oppression but as natural necessity, personal failure, or spiritual duty.

Philosophy offers us the analytical tools for dissecting these deeper structures. By drawing on dialectical materialism, phenomenology, contemplative traditions, and more, I examine how consciousness itself becomes a site of domination—how human mental and spiritual capacity gets enslaved to serve systems that prevent authentic development and meaningful connection.

Personal Stakes in Universal Questions

This isn't abstract academic analysis. Growing up in a system designed to identify and cultivate "high achievers" while sorting the rest into categories of managed decline, I've witnessed how meritocracy operates as a sophisticated tool in the arsenal of social control. The same competitive pressures that enabled my early academic success also created psychological conditions—chronic insecurity, utilitarian thinking, disconnection from my fellow man—that work to consistently anchor me to these systems of social control.

My generation has inherited a world where the technologies that could enable unprecedented human flourishing instead accelerate ecological destruction, social fragmentation, and spiritual exhaustion. We've been trained to see this as inevitable, to adapt ourselves to systems rather than questioning the systems themselves. I—for one—have had enough. Philosophical inquiry reveals that our current arrangements represent specific, historical, and changeable patterns of consciousness—not eternal truths about human nature. So let’s do something about it.

The Work of Consciousness Liberation

The deepest form of social control operates through the imprisonment of imagination itself—the inability to conceive that things could be fundamentally different. My writings aim to liberate your imagination by revealing how current systems arose from particular spiritual, psychological, and material conditions, and how different conditions of consciousness would naturally create different forms of social organization.

This is philosophy as spiritual practice, analysis as a form of love—love for human potential and deep concern for authentic flourishing. Each piece serves what the revolutionary thinkers understood as The Great Work: awakening people to their own brilliant potential beyond what current systems require or allow.

An Invitation to Transformation

I spent my early life trying to exploit these systems for my benefit, while simultaneously being their victim on the basis of class and race.The position I write from is that of someone who has seen many faces of our current arrangements and grown to realize that our world is a collection of systems designed to benefit others at my expense. This isn't the detached analysis of academic philosophy, but the engaged inquiry of someone wrestling with how to live truthfully in a world structured by lies.

My work synthesizes insights from revolutionary movements, economics, politics, history, culture, philosophy, spirituality and more. But the goal isn't to provide answers so much as to awaken the capacity for authentic questioning—the kind of deep inquiry that transforms not just understanding but being itself.

The future depends on our ability to develop forms of consciousness that can see through the current illusions AND imagine and create alternative systems that serve life rather than power. This is the most important work any of us can do: the liberation of human consciousness from systems that diminish our capacity for wisdom, empathy, and authentic creative response to the beautiful and terrible mystery of existence.