The Map Isn’t The Territory But It Is Art

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For those of you familiar with my art work, you know I love surrealism and I love mashup work. Re-purposing art, finding combinations, and following my inspiration to create strange yet somehow insightful work. There’s a spiritual element to it as I’ve written about before, this kind of art seems to open a connection to something deeper, to part of the real me.

One of the things I’ve gotten into lately (early 2025) is creating “spiritual maps” using my surrealist mashup approach. You know those kind of things, attempts to portray cosmology or ethics or meditation as some kind of chart, or map, or other visual aid? We’ve all seen them, ranging from breathtaking creation to confusing charts that leave us feeling less enlightened (or possibly ripped off).

Well, I make parodies of them, with ideas of “Reincarnation Shards” or the “Primordial Historical Omniworld.” Complex diagrams (using repurposed art) and strange terminology that look like what you’d expect, but are mostly nonsense.

There’s something compelling about these “Spiritual Maps.” Creating my own surreal, parodic ones is both creatively stimulating, but compelling. I have multiple books on religion and alchemy, some of which (like Taschen’s Alchemy and Mysticism) are JUST metaphysical diagrams – and those are incredible to look through. Humans like taking the ineffable and putting it into lines and colors and shapes – even if our goal is to just sell some crappy book on the mystical.

(Honestly, some spiritual grifters are probably at least having FUN when they create their bullshit).

And while doing my work, I have come to understand something about the human mind. We humans do love visual portrayals of things. We love the symmetry and the detail, we love the use of colors and shapes. When that thing is spiritual, there’s something even more to it, that sense of a piece of art that takes us to something bigger.

In the classic “The Tao That Can Be Spoken Isn’t The True Tao” I know we can’t portray the truth on maps. Maps are just that, they’re not the territory, they’re not reality. A map is at best a guide or an inspiration – but those art important. More importantly, they’re inspiring when they’re ART.

A spiritual map that’s a few lines might not be inspiring (I Ching aside). But when a spiritual map is artistic, if it has those colors and lines and extras and details that inspire, then it’s exceptionally powerful. Art, in it’s forms, is critical to spirituality as it helps us connect thought, emotions, and the universe together. A good spiritual map that is also art can be amazingly effective – as long as we don’t take it too seriously.

When I make these parody maps I find it compelling even when I know it’s nonsense. I get why they can be addictive and compelling.

It’s funny, having started doing some surreal parody of ridiculous and graffiti spirituality, I find myself having these deep insights. The maps matter to us as long as we “grasp them little,” and I can see how powerful they are – all while basically messing around.

Art and spirituality aren’t far apart, no matter the kind. Which I may address next column.

-Xenofact

The Talent of Delusion

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I’ve been thinking about Conspiracy theories a lot. I mean as my regular readers I know I do that anyway, but as 2025 is the age Conspiracy Theories and reality collide at lightspeed, I’m thinking more. Mostly I’m asking how did we get here – not in the exact causal sense, but how the Conspiracy Theorist mind works.

Lately among my readings, viewings, and podcast-listening I realized that Conspiracy Theory Believing requires skill.

If you’ve ever listened to someone go on about Conspiracy Theories, you realize they are retaining a complex alternate world inside their head. They have a skill to retaining and organizing that information about things that are, let us be honest, not true, sometimes bonkers, and often very bigoted under the skin. Yet these folks can recall it.

More than that, they are constantly resolving conflicts in their theories. Conspiracy Theorists are having the world collide with their beliefs all the time. New facts come in, the apocalypse doesn’t come, the hated (often female and/or PoC) politician resigns, the space lasers don’t fire. Conspiracy Theorists have to re-spin their tales all the time or else they have to question them, and if they questioned them they wouldn’t be Conspiracy Theorists. They’re maintenance experts on believing an illusion.

But Conspiracy Theorists also collide, believers who believe vaguely different things come together – and they display a talent for taking new input and combining them. This is the infamous “yes, and” discussions you can see among True Believers, where a person states one belief, and a slightly different believer agrees, then adds onto it. If you’ve witnessed a Conspiracy Theorist get on a good rant going at an event or in a conversation, you can see this happen at amazing speed as people ask questions.

(The Knowledge Fight podcast focuses on Alex Jones, but has covered other subjects, and in almost all cases you can see their subjects build mythology in real time.)

Conspiracy Theory is a skill, skill is similar to if not exactly the same as the worldbuilding done by writers, gamers, game designers, and artists. They have an ability to create on the fly, to recall vast information, and to adsorb and polish information. The jaw-dropping connections of a Tonspiracy Theorist are all too close to the clever ideas of a good writer to act like they’re not two branches of the same tree.

Conspiracy Theorists are easier to understand if you realize they had a skill at such creations (that they misused) or that they have developed it. It also means the evil grifters are even worse because they have some skill here and use it to screw up the world.

This gives me pause to other ways we might use such an insight to help those lost in these conspiracy worlds to get out.

  • We can recognize this “talent at fabulation” by asking “does this person sound like they’re worldbuilding?” It’s a key to detection. Also if the theorist in question is some evil grifter, we can help people avoid them.
  • If we’re trying to help the Conspiracy Theorist, realizing a skill is being deployed will allow us to help them find their way back with the various oft-discussed techniques.
  • This skill they developed might be channeled elsewhere. As facetious as it sounds, I wonder how many people who have developed this creative skill might find outlets elsewhere. I’m not saying they should write fiction, but who knows?

It’s strange as I think over this insight. I realize some people I’ve seen, some I despise, really do have a skill. It’s just been used or developed in ways making the world worse.

-Xenofact

Musings On The Lonely Men Who Hate Each Other

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The “Male Loneliness Epidemic” is something I see discussed a lot. Men feel lonely and isolated. Men fall under the spell of grifters. Men don’t find what they need and get bitter and angry. Being a pretty generic guy, I take interest in this for many reasons, including the fact a lot of (white) guys voted for Donald Trump who, as of this post, is sort of ruining everything.

Having lived many, many decades I get the concern about male loneliness. I also however was raised with the idea that you can find and make friends. I suspect some of this is really that I hit a sweet spot of how I was raised, role models, connective nerd culture, and region. I grew up thinking about making friends and connecting, and that it’s my job to do it. I guess some people missed that.

Beyond my very broad experiences, I’m not sure I can comment on the fine details of this supposed epidemic, if it is an epidemic (I don’t think so), and so on. I think what is obvious is there’s a grifty, fascistic part of Online Male Culture that uses this sense of disconnection to give vulnerable men a pathological and unsustainable role model, what one person on Tumblr called wittily the Buff Scammer.

The Buff Scammer is a sort of capitalistic/fascistic/comic book ideal of a guy as a jacked hustler always making scores and gains. You don’t actually enjoy yourself, you just have to keep up the gains and the money to show off . . . to other men. Even relations with women are ways to show off to men, meaning that you enter into the bizarrely homoerotic sphere of men thinking of men in their wooing of women. These men don’t have friends or lovers, just targets of various kinds.

What is funny is that, with my (ever-advancing age) and interest in history is I’m used to seeing far different ideals of male role models that are not the Buff Scammer.. A lot of them involved an idea of citizenship in many ways, even if there were other pathologies. The idea of a man was an idea of being engaged and part of things (even if there was plenty of toxic masculinity otherwise). It’s weird to see that in, say, 2500 year old writings, but also remember it in my youth and feel like it’s sort of been pushed aside in my lifetime.

Citizenship gives one some grounding, some sense of place – and you feel less lonely. You’re playing or seeking to play a role. Maybe it’s just me getting old, but I honestly see that completely lacking in large parts of culture, including some of the male grift-o-sphere. I meet plenty of engaged citizens who are happy, but there are zones where the idea of citizenship seems long gone.

Citizenship as an ideal leads you to not be alone and to seek connection. You have an ideal of belonging. The Buff Scammer and his ilk have none of that. That has to not just be lonely, but it resists a traditional gateway for not being lonely – the idea of being an active citizen. I mean you may not like everyone but you’re part of something.

This makes me think of the events of the first few months of the Trump administration. Trump destroyed alliances and trade deals built over decades – indeed over a century. He isolated the country in a temper tantrum, trying to look tough. He was, in short, a Buff Scammer (well, not that Buff) who has no concept of friends, of citizenship.

And then I think of the lonely men who voted for him. They have no concept of friends either. No concept of citizenship. No concept of belonging.

It’s just lonely people in a temper tantrum, disconnected, isolated, and running things, leaving them even more alone. Citizenship may be a solution, but people will have to learn to be active about it. Certainly they just found some grifter is going to make them more lonely.

-Xenofact