[Previously on Beyond TPT: Indiana Jones has escaped from confinement in the tomb full of snakes and is in hot pursuit of the Nazis, who have the Ark of the Covenant hidden in their underpants. Can he regain control of the Ark and get rid of the Nazis without his hat falling off? Now read on...]

Beyond The Porcelain Throne

Series 1 / 3 - Lords of the Evil Toilet Empire

People who think they are "only out for themselves", by making a fast buck at other people's expense or the planet's, as we've seen in the previous chapter, are in fact deceiving themselves –they're not doing themselves any favors at all; in fact they're doing the equivalent of shooting themselves in the foot. But "selfish" is one of those words that means different things to different people, so we're going to use a term that we understand to mean only one thing. The term is "enlightened self-interest". It means following a path that is the best for both ourselves and for entelechy –and that means for life, health, intelligence and survival in general. Enlightened self interest is ultimately altruistic, because it benefits the broadest possible range of species and the planet itself, as well as ourselves. That's why it's enlightened. It's self-interest because of course we're a part of nature so we also benefit too. In enlightened self interest, everybody wins. This works because Reality isn't an 'a or b' situation; Reality is holistic. Because people can turn around and look at nature, they imagine that they're separate from it, but that's a joke, from Reality's point of view. You can turn around and look at your own foot, but try pulling it off to sell it for profit and see where that gets you.

The best term we can use for so-called selfish people, is "dumbass", because as we've seen, they're deluding themselves if they think amassing huge quantities of bits of paper with pictures of dead guys on them will in any way save them from senility, depression or heart disease in a couple of years' time. Maybe their descendants could build an ark out of wads of it, but the one thing it can't buy is sanity.

Since that's so, and everything these dumbasses are doing is not in fact really in their own interests at all, who is it serving? Who or what benefits from all these dastardly deeds?

It's time to learn about the Evil Toilet Empire.

The Evil Toilet Empire is very dark and very evil, so you mustn't get too scared, okay? Remember that we're learning about these things so that we'll be able to avoid them, because we're the good guys in this story. The Lords of the Evil Toilet Empire are the baddies, but they don't wear black hats, so we have to learn to recognize them by other means.

The most important thing to remember about the Evil Toilet Empire is that it doesn't really exist. That's funny, because it spends its whole time trying to convince us not only that it does, but that it's the only reality there is, and that we personally must buy into it at all costs....OR ELSE...

...And that's its trick. It catches people by their own anxiety, because a human being can only be controlled through his or her own anxiety. -Once they have you by the short-and-curlies, your hearts and minds will follow.

You might think "Not everyone is afraid!" and you may be right. For most people, it's a lot more likely that you're wrong, though, because I'd have to respond with "Consciously, no." –Sure, people may not be afraid of spiders, or heights, or the dark, or speaking their mind, or police brutality, or even illness, pain or death. They might be courageous enough to, say, give their life to save someone they cared about; even for a cause they cared about...so what's left to be afraid of?

Well unfortunately that's your Uncle Intellect talking, and you must learn the ways of the force if you're to come with me to Alduran. Intellect alone can't understand reality. For example, if you lose an arm, and the shoulder heals cleanly, what's left to hurt? Try telling that to the brain, or the many people who suffer 'phantom limb pain'. Intellect dismisses it as, "Don't be ridiculous! -How can something possibly hurt, if it isn't even there?" but that doesn't take the pain away. Fear is much the same. If someone's brain keeps producing anxiety hormones, it doesn't make any difference to have logical arguments with it about what they're not afraid of; their body will still respond to those hormones and so will their mind. This is how people can be afraid, without there being anything to be afraid of.

The brain produces anxiety hormones whenever it gets into a state that it considers "not beneficial", and that's whenever we aren't interacting. Since most humans spend most of their lives not interacting [we'll explore why later], those hormones just accumulate. Eventually they cause decline and death, but in the meantime people are easy meat for the Evil Toilet Empire.

The Toilet Empire works by suggesting things that folks may be feeling anxious about, convincing them that these things are the cause of the anxiety, and then selling them things to pacify the anxious feelings. Trying to acquire those things, people are enslaved for their whole lives by the Toilet Empire's system. "No wonder you're anxious!" its minions cry, "Come look down this toilet and you'll see why!" Actually you don't even have to, because they shove it in your face on the news, in papers, on the radio, on the internet...they throw it at people in fiction, in movies, in song lyrics, in TV programmes, in adverts. "Oh my god there's so much horrible shit going on!" folks think; "But never mind!" say the Toilet Lords, "We can get rid of some of that shit if we just get–[insert item, along with price]" The item might be Prozac, deodorant, a pet, a bag of chocolate donuts, beer, insurance, or a mortgage. Sometimes it's an item that doesn't appear to cost anything –such as a partner, enlightenment, a good job, competent world leaders, social status, qualifications, or friends...but in order to get those, you'll need –[insert item, along with price]. –Need self-confidence? Do this course at $600---Help starving children! Donate money to the third world, so that we can rip it off again---Lonely? Give a home to an adorable puppy, monthly food bill only £50---Unhappy with society? Vote for me, I'll smile, then twat the next generation's intelligence with your taxes---Help people with holistic healing! Study here, only $500 per course---Feeling sentimental? Buy this love song, only $10.99---Insecure? Get security with Assbiscuit & Co, Insurance Brokers---It's Christmas! Buy your kids loads of plastic sparkly shit!- If you don't do all these things, says the unconscious message, what would your friends think? They might not like you any more! They might reject you...abandon you!!! You'd be left all alone...hated...despised...nobody loves you...nobody wants you...depressed?---Buy this album by Total Sympathy-they feel just like you do- only $30 with free poster!

...And when people have gotten all this but still feel anxious, round they go again. A different partner, a new car, a new bunch of friends, a better house, another packet of donuts, more beer...and so on.

The Toilet Lords can only succeed as long as people are insecure and dependent. They play on people's need "to fit in" with their peer group, make them unconsciously terrified of what their friends or family might think of them if they don't do 'the right things', through a deep ingrained fear of abandonment. The Toilet Lords love guilt, jealousy, anger, self-pity, outrage and dismay, which make them more money. They fear self-confidence, independence, fun, self-sufficiency and individual autonomy more than anything else except interaction. So they make sure any possibility of that is taken away. They teach people at an early age that they can't do what they want; they can't do what feels right, and whenever they try to, they're made to feel guilty or inadequate. And that produces what the Toilet Lords want more than anything –more anxiety hormones. If people try to break free, to 'opt out', they use the fear of abandonment like a tractor beam to pull them back into that toilet, and they spread and spread their megasociety of doom, gloom [and occasionally boom!] until there is no longer anywhere to opt out to. Try raising children [or even having one] without them interfering, and see how far you get.

Humans have an open-ended potential for entelechy encoded into their DNA; you are born like a garden ready planted and sown with seeds for the perfect beautiful plants, but the keys for decoding that potential via RNA keys, lies with your environment. Nature and nurture, you need them both [as I said, Reality is never 'a or b'.] 'Environment', in the case of humans, comes largely from people and society. Only intelligence can nurture intelligence [and by 'intelligence' I don't mean IQ. I mean the capacity for entelechy.] Don't think I'm about to blame the production of dumbasses on their having dumbass parents though, because that just shifts the problem one step backwards –what made those parents dumbass?

Any ability can be lost, or never developed at all, in a society whose very design ignores it or destroys it. And that includes entelechy. Entelechy depends on the ability to bond, on the ability to interact. These in turn depend on abilities like full empathy, synchrony, and synergy, abilities only achievable by an optimally functioning mind in a fully working brain, which hardly any of society is aiming to achieve. What we have instead is a society that nurtures stupidity, and what is benefiting from stupidity? –the Evil Toilet Empire.

The Empire has no secret base of operations, no elite cadre of evil minions. The Evil Toilet Empire is everywhere. You see it when you go to work, when you go out shopping, when you pay your taxes. You see it in nurseries, in schools, in offices and warehouses, in hospitals and care homes for the elderly. If it were a Matrix [like in the movie] at least we could pull the plug on the simulation. But the Empire simulates reality in real life, not in a program in your head. It is everywhere, replacing peace and happiness with anxiety and fear, replacing passionate emotion with weak sloppy sentiment, replacing empathy with sympathy, replacing bonding and genuine love with possessive attachment and paranoid jealousy and fear of loss, replacing intelligence with intellect, replacing centered calm with chaotic panic, replacing competence with helplessness. Constantly pulling people's eyes and their attention away from all that is good in the world, towards all the shit that lurks in the bottom of its own disgusting toilet.

For those who support the Empire, the course of action is always "error-correction-error". The drug company concocts a potion to give to a sick person to 'destroy the disease'. This it may do, but produces side effects that cause another problem. To offset these side effects, another drug is given. This brings on a further side effect that causes further problems... the process can take years, but eventually the patient "dies of complications".

Lords of the Evil Toilet Empire consider "not having vast quantities of money" to be an error. They introduce all kinds of deadly products and marketing schemes to correct this error, producing errors on a global rather than a personal scale. Because of this, one day in the not too distant future, a bunch of aliens may pass by the earth and write sadly upon its progress chart, "died of complications".

Who are the Evil Toilet Lords? Are the richest people on the planet the biggest villains behind its destruction? Is there some secret corporate group controlling the scene in a giant, behind the scenes, government conspiracy? Is it the multinationals? The Illuminati? The Antichrist? The little spotty guy who works down the off license? Nope, it's not that easy.

Any society, or any person, that has discarded, forbidden or destroyed the abilities that produce entelechy is part of the Evil Toilet Empire. The Evil Toilet Empire has no Emperor and no hierarchy because it doesn't need one –it is self-perpetuating, like a virus that never dies. It is made of people like you and me. If people are not part of the solution, they really are part of the problem.

To make sure we remain the former instead of the latter, we have to be able to interact. In the next chapter we'll meet Floyd, Rush and Margaret, who can explain what that means.