Counterspell Book

Selected Excerpts

In any free time from legislative duties I am working studiously towards the completion of my first major written work: Counterspell (a working title). The book itself is essentially complete, existing as a whole manuscript that is presently being polished, edited, and expanded upon where appropriate. I would like to offer you a first-look at some of the content underway.

I have endeavored to keep the focus of this Counterspell Group project exclusively on the work. I have attempted to minimize myself in the whole project. However, in this first major work you’re going to get introduced to my own background, because I think it’s important to connect in that more intimate way…

“I was raised on the Left, and the foremost orientation of that upbringing was not, in fact, the goodness of Leftism, but a hatred of — and an assurity of the evil in — conservatism. The goodness of Leftism was, in most cases, simply presumed, without evidence, by merely framing it as the opponent of the evils of the Right. It was a long series of events that eventually brought me over, first in seeing the reality of the consequences of Leftism, and then in understanding the reality that, while not explicitly argued and presented along ethical lines, the effects of conservatism were far more beneficial to individuals and society than Leftism. This experience, and the slowness by which I transitioned from one side to the other — primarily slowed by the absence of explicit ethical dimensions in Rightwing discourse — made me realize that the utilitarianism of conservative argumentation was a major stumbling block. People are ethical creatures, and ethical arguments should be first above all else.

I understood the effect of social mediation on beliefs quite strongly, as it was my mother who functioned as a perpetual link to Leftism, and whose opinions of me kept me constrained, mentally, outside of the realm of reality, unwilling to break free for fear of disappointment and relationship damage. Little did I realize at the time that the act of being disowned by my mother for my faith and politics would, though devastating emotionally, set me free both mentally and ethically to pursue truth and goodness.”

Longtime readers will recognize very much of the content, as the work was initiated as a collection of years worth of essays and topics, which are then edited, updated, expounded upon, and linked into a comprehensive whole that will bring you a more full picture than any read-through of the essays alone could accomplish.

“What I have just described — the long, painful process of breaking free from one worldview and building another — is not unique to me. You are going through a version of it right now, whether you know it or not. Let me propose an analogy that may assist you in recognizing how this all works.

What if I told you that within your mind there were prisons of both minimum and maximum security, and that these prisons were constructed and enforced in a partnership between society and yourself? What if the prisoners held captive were ideas?

You will be introduced to more complete and actionable paradigms for information and sorting that will assist you in all truth-based efforts.

“This theory of mind maps cleanly onto the tripartite model we established earlier.

The wizards are those who have been fully given over. The conscience is effectively extinguished. They take pleasure in evil. They wield the cliches and the escalation deliberately, as weapons, with full clarity of purpose. In the Christian Scriptures, these would be understood as demonically possessed — not in the culturally distorted sense of involuntary seizure, but in the sense of volitional alignment with the demonic, a reprobate mind operating in service of wickedness. They are the operators of the system.

The spellbound are the majority. They are caught in the feedback loop at varying degrees of callousing. Their conscience is still functional but increasingly suppressed. They are dependent on the cliches. They are increasingly disordered. They are, in a very real sense, victims of the system — people operating in the world in a way that is not conducive to flourishing, because the ideas they have internalized are psychologically taxing and conducive to harm. They are the target audience of the wizards and the raw material of the revolution.

The based are those who operate from a foundation grounded in reality — whether or not they have yet arrived at the fully transcendent. They have either never entered the feedback loop or have broken free of it. Among them are those who have survived the dam breaking and rebuilt on firmer ground. They know, from personal experience, what the spellbound are going through. That knowledge is both a burden and a weapon.”