Tantaman

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New here? This blog began in software engineering, then expanded into philosophy, religion, politics, and fiction. This guide organizes the writing into thematic paths. Pick what interests you, or follow the arc from diagnosis to ground.

I. If You Feel Something Is Wrong

The on-ramp. Something is off and the data confirms it.

  1. Materialism Is Killing You - Depression, loneliness, fertility collapse—materialism is failing as a fitness strategy
  2. Tyler Durden: How They Broke You - They dismantled every structure and called it liberation
  3. The Exhaustion That Cannot Rest - A weariness that forbids rest, a depletion that demands more
  4. Burnout Is a Modern Invention - Pre-capitalist societies didn't burn out because they hadn't moralized labor
  5. You Are Not Your Diagnosis - Pain is a catalyst, not an identity
  6. The Liquefaction of Being - Technology and materialism dissolved the self into standing reserve

II. If You Want to Know How We Got Here

Genealogy: how religion became secularism, and what was lost in transit.

The Christian Operating System

  1. The Husk of God - Western atheists still think in Christian—not in belief, but in structure
  2. Monotheism to Now - The cognitive style we inherited from one God
  3. Why Marxism Is Impossible Without Christian Eschatology - Marxism is a Christian heresy with the serial numbers filed off
  4. The Secular Eschaton - Christianity's structural inheritance in Marxist thought and practice
  5. From Galilee to Empire - How a radical movement became an instrument of state power
  6. The Alchemy of Power - Spiritual insights resist capture, yet institutions always absorb them
  7. From Calvinism to Capitalism - How predestination produced the perfect subject for the market

Patterns Across Traditions

  1. Monstrous Doubles - Girard on why opposing movements become mirrors of each other
  2. The Architecture of Harm - Modern secular ideologies recapitulate religious logic to justify violence
  3. Principalities and Powers - Paul's epistle describes self-perpetuating systems, not supernatural demons
  4. The Battlefield of Attention - You become like what you worship—and empires know it
  5. Secularized Worship - Revelation's pattern of total allegiance reappears across modern systems

III. If You Want to See the Machine

How power operates through structure, not conspiracy.

How Power Operates

  1. The Two Filters - Good ideas die because they must pass cognitive readiness and power alignment
  2. The Amplifier Theory of Human Hierarchy - Hierarchy isn't human nature—it's a function of specific amplifiers
  3. Why Power Chose Materialism - Disenchantment wasn't an accident; it was useful to someone
  4. How Power Uses Mass Education - Canons, curricula, and the shaping of imagination at scale
  5. The Capture of American Power - From the Epstein class to the Thiel class
  6. Financial Power and Imperial Rule - How Britain weaponized credit into empire

The Machine Today

  1. The Machine That Eats the World - Every institution built to help becomes a system of control
  2. The New Lords - Power no longer strengthens the state—it hollows it for private capital
  3. The Employable Subject - Education produces adaptable workers, not flourishing humans
  4. The Cage and the Argument About Its Curtains - Left and right argue within market totality without questioning it
  5. The Invisible Right - When an ideology becomes synonymous with reality, it disappears from debate

IV. If You Want to See Through Language

Grammar, epistemology, and the limits of knowledge.

Grammar and Thought

  1. Grammar Rules All - Grammar determines which values are available before you "choose"
  2. The Language That Thinks For You - Therapy grammar vs. moral grammar—mutual unintelligibility
  3. Grammar as Alignment: The WEF - How Davos generates the grammar that cascades through institutions
  4. Non-Conceptual Definitions - Some words are defined by examples, not principles

Epistemology and Statistics

  1. Understanding False Positive Rate - Base rates matter more than you think
  2. Regression to the Mean vs Gambler's Fallacy - They don't contradict
  3. Volatility Isn't Risk - Finance's biggest lie
  4. Manufacturing Luck - Luck is a system, not an event

What Knowledge Can and Cannot Do

  1. When Equations See What Eyes Cannot - Mathematics as a window into invisible reality
  2. The Incomplete God - Why science cannot ground itself: Godel, computation, consciousness
  3. Meaning at the Boundary - Meaning emerges from the interface between systems
  4. Dangerous Ideas - Ideas need frameworks like power tools need safety protocols

V. If You Wonder What Is Being Done to You

Cultural diagnosis and political critique.

The Structural Diagnosis

  1. The Theological Structure of Secular Progressivism - Progressive politics as Christianity without grace
  2. Pathologies of Western Secularism - Permanent guilt with no mechanism for absolution
  3. Pathologies of Eastern Secularism - Quietism, spiritual bypassing, and sophisticated indifference
  4. The Physicians of Decay - Foucault and Derrida as saboteurs disguised as analysts
  5. The Return - The demolition worked. Now what?
  6. Debugging Liberalism vs Leftism - Classical liberalism has been replaced by therapeutic leftism

Trauma & Guilt

  1. Diagnosing White Guilt - Original sin without absolution
  2. Diagnosing Trauma Culture - Suffering as currency, victimhood as identity
  3. Trauma Culture + White Guilt = Checkmate - Together they create epistemic and moral lockdown

Political Analysis

  1. The Epistemology of Impotence - How identity politics guarantees its own failure
  2. Leftism Is Worse Than Fascism - Invisible tyranny is more total than announced tyranny
  3. The Socialists' Convenient Blindness - Domination predates capitalism; capitalism just made it visible
  4. What Would Marx Say Today? - The credentialed class is the new ruling class
  5. The Fence You Cannot See - Inherited structures encode solutions to problems you've never had to face
  6. Education Cannot Save Us - Reason can't resolve disagreements about values
  7. The Executive Function Curriculum - Teaching children to be optimizable

Direct Addresses

  1. To My Friends on the Left - A difficult reckoning with what the left has become
  2. The Violence You Fear - You overestimate their violence and underestimate your own
  3. The ICE Protest That Changes Nothing - The illusion of moral action
  4. Malcolm X on Kendi and DiAngelo - The DEI complex as a new form of dependency

Historical Patterns

  1. The Recurring Pattern: Left-Islamist Alliances - Tactical alliances that end the same way every time
  2. The Ideological Trap for the Left - When anti-imperialism becomes defense of dictators

VI. If You Want to Build Something

The constructive heart. From diagnosis to ground.

Know Thyself

A six-part series on how civilizations have understood self-knowledge:

  1. Greek vs Christian - The Greeks examined beliefs; Christians invented the opaque interior
  2. Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu - Three traditions that dissolve, relate, or transcend the self
  3. Gurdjieff, Kierkegaard, Eckhart - The self is not given; it must be constructed or surrendered
  4. No Self - Daoism, Nietzsche, and Indigenous traditions that challenge the premise entirely
  5. The Kingdom Within - Early Christian wisdom on the divine spark already present
  6. Through What? - Wittgenstein and Heidegger on whether language can even do this

Counter-Traditions

  1. Countering Materialism - Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Weil knew what was being lost
  2. A Return to Polytheism - Monotheistic thinking reduces plural goods to a single metric
  3. What If Religion Is Last? - Religion as culmination, not precursor
  4. The Secret Every Political Philosophy Shares - Every political system is containment disguised as liberation

Ground and Community

  1. What Holds You - The four-layer map: market, power, violence, colonized body
  2. The Body as Ground - Restoration before contemplation
  3. Mystical Meaning - Meaning arises at the boundary, not from within objects
  4. The Economy of Refusal - Resistance requires alternative communal structures
  5. The Table - A rupture: living in communion now, not waiting for permission
  6. What If the Thing You're Protecting Yourself From... - ...is the only thing that can save you?

Prophetic Writings

  1. Letter to the Therapeutics - Permanent Friday with no resurrection
  2. The Epistle to the Managed - The two beasts: therapeutic management and technological platforms

VII. If You Write Code

First Principles

  1. The Almighty Function - Objects are closures, closures are objects, everything is functions
  2. Inheritance, Aggregation, and Pipelines - Why pipelines beat inheritance for extensibility
  3. Practical Laziness - Lazy evaluation improves API design
  4. Oh Lisp - Code as data, minimal syntax, domain languages

Types and Abstraction

  1. These Are Not Types - int and string are storage types, not application types
  2. Understanding Generics - Generics are for the caller, not the callee

React & State

  1. React Anemic Models - The problem with property bags
  2. Missing Mutation Primitives - Mutation isn't bad; untracked mutation is
  3. Reference Equality - Nominal vs physical identity
  4. URLs as Display Data - Invert the router

Minimalism in Practice

  1. The Shortest TODO App - ~200 lines, zero dependencies
  2. Skipping the Bundling - ES6 modules make bundlers optional

VIII. If You Build Distributed Systems

Local-First Architecture

  1. Why SQLite? Why Now? - The manifesto for local-first
  2. Meta's Graph Model - How constraining SQL enabled scaling to billions
  3. Large Local Storage - A 2013 solution to browser storage fragmentation

Clocks and Consistency

  1. Lamport Clock - The simplest logical clock, explained
  2. Do LWW Registers Need Vector Clocks? - When simpler is enough

Query Systems

  1. Query Builder - Linked lists of expressions
  2. Query Planning - Converting builders to executable plans
  3. Chunk Iterable - Streaming results in digestible pieces

Infrastructure

  1. Pi Cloud - Building cloud infrastructure from Raspberry Pis
  2. Observability Driven Development - If it's not monitored, it's not done
  3. Services and Coupling - Why dependency injection isn't enough

IX. Fiction

Stories as another way of knowing.

  1. The Mirror Room - A collection of short stories exploring identity, consistency, and becoming
  2. The Lamb - A man optimizes himself into a magnificent emergency—then stops
  3. The Lamb, Part II - Awareness of wrongdoing strips away comfortable ignorance
  4. Nine Months, Two Men - Same man, same trauma, two ways through
  5. The Ironist - Gen-Z irony vs. the capacity for genuine encounter
  6. The Gaze - Each generation builds a self to avoid the judgment that destroyed the last

The Big Picture

What Holds You - The map: four layers from market cage to colonized body.

State of the Union - A synthesis of everything here, written looking back over a decade.

Vision - What I'm building toward.

Still lost? The throughline is this: understanding is liberation. Whether it's understanding how monotheism shaped our cognitive style, how grammar constrains what values are available to you, or how every institution built to help becomes a system of control—deep understanding leads to better choices. But understanding alone is not enough. Something must be built.