Today! Today issued forth these existential moments, when the absence of human activity is the defining feature of the landscape – not because there is a disaster or a change of heart about the human project but because, well, I don’t know, so I grab my backpack, which stands for aspects of the soul that only sprout in alternate realities – and charge into the day to find out. By noon, the heat is like a flickering color in the mind – unseasonably early for this sort of highlight, and then I remember the cicadas are appearing, which might explain the sudden interest by the rest of the universe. Not halfway down the block, I’m startled by the first cicada of the season – near the top of the tallest tree by the building that houses the renowned music program. The cicada makes music all by itself, and it is like a siren made of clicks, a drumstick pulled across bones.
This is just the beginning of the historical emergence, and the location where I live is one of the nationally recognized hot spots. The people, I don’t believe, have evacuated, but they certainly aren’t rubbing their hands over the trembling earth, waiting for bulging eyes and knobby legs to drag a dirt-stained cicada out of the ground, then off to a place to molt. The molting process is brimming with the sort of metaphor we associate with heaven – something below ground for its whole remembered life, save for a brief time after it hatches, falls out of a tree and into the grass, crawls down into the soil to find a tasty dandelion root to suck on. That original body, on the brightest day of the year, goes searching for a hard vertical surface to cling to, like the side of the tree it was feeding on, then escapes out of its body through the hind end of its own skull.
The heat seems to have its own sense of choice in evidence. While I’m standing there, listening for more clicks, the heat generates a crackling sensation across my shoulders, like patches of my skin are sparkling below my shirt. The clouds – more of those cumulonimbus dreams-come-true – are simultaneously isles and aisles – two bulging eyes – both work, so whichever, either one a somewhat brawny pronunciation, like the words have to walk with a slight bow about the legs, because of the pronounced thigh muscles. Just as I turn to walk away from the lone cicada at the top of the school of music’s tallest tree, the clicking begins again. I stop and turn back to the tree – it stops. I turn to walk, and the clicking sounds again. Maybe the cicada brood will be so large, the movie we call reality has given them final cut, at least for the next few months, so I carry on.
That cicada was a female – they make that clicking sound by rubbing their wings together, and I picture the males all hearing the clicking as a variation of – could some big strong male crawl on over and open this jar for me? The male call is the more familiar whooping siren, which is made with a spasmodic diaphragm on their abdomens – Jerry Lee Lewis at his most raucous – though I believe he did play piano with his feet, so there are dissimilarities, too. The big winners will be the birds and fish, which are looking forward to extra animal protein wherever they look for the next couple of months, second nesting seasons all but in the bag. At the height of his fame, Jerry Lee famously wedded his 13-year-old cousin. Myra Williams was her name, and she said later, after the divorce, she was always the adult in the relationship. They stayed married for 13 years.
Scientists speculate that cicada broods follow such irregular cycles – 7 years, 13 years, 17 years – because they are prime numbers and therefore difficult for predators to sync to over time in the performance of their own boom and bust cycles. I like this theory, though I wonder why the rest of the animal kingdom hasn’t likewise worked the numbers – like cicadas launched themselves into a probabilistic deep-space orbit inside the mind of nature, and never looked back. I picture Neil Armstrong on the ladder of the lunar module, freezing in place, mission command busy on the radio but no reply from Neil until, all wet and new, he bursts forth through the back of his space helmet, as naked as the day he was born, gets busy inflating his wing casings, as mission control cheers, and the scientists all light cigarettes to relieve the stress, maybe hand out cigars.
The heat is a measure of energy in the system – to the extent it also accounts for human absence, we stay huddled inside on hot days like today due to chronic overabundance – nature is giving us too much – which is also true for many allergies and fevers – but with the overabundance of energy, you can find relief through the judicious application of even more energy, which option I used to always forego on general principle – I want to feel the reality of days overabundant as surely as days where the molecules are all optimally excited. These days, I’m in charge of a mid-sized HVAC operation, and thus, feel part of my body living inside a factory of probability that stretches around the world. We humans, on days like today, take it as a given that temperature-controlled climates are part of the deal, that molecules should be in optimal states of excitement.
Which, with self-similarity across scale in mind, might suggest nature treat our excitability with similar regard. Oh to live the life of temperate climes, where fairness and passion are concerned! I’m on my way to the library to borrow a book about love and rage, written by a Buddhist, who examines the roll of anger in transformation. I have no truck with my fellow human sufferers – literally no anger at all – but with human systems? Disembodied intelligences? Those aspects of the hyperform that privilege torment and indifference? When it climbs to a high enough part of the tree to be heard, I can indeed hear my anger. What’s that? A false reality precipitates false authority? Yet knowing this, hyperforms readily believe wealth confers merit. The exaggerated accumulation of capital is an existential disease assuaged with the delusion of personal success.
A block from the library, I come upon two boys playing in a pile of sand beside a garden. The one boy seems to be trying to burrow inside it, and the other is battering the sand with the flat side of a child-sized metal shovel. He has the wrong shovel for the job, a fact I choose to keep to myself, especially since the one really is trying to thwack the tall pile just as hard as he can. The sort of thing kids do in a spirit of curiosity – what happens to the world when the force of one’s anger is applied to a giant pile of sand? Perhaps the urge to use force for no reason is the human behavior we end up with when ambient energy gets so overabundant. This is what life seems to be – the planet’s novel approach to dissipating heat. We are much more than that, of course, and fortunately, the kids have plenty of time and energy to prove it. Their parents tell them to stop.
When a cicada molts, the effect is more than just a body crawling out of a body – for instance, in the moments before this happens, the cicada is visibly squirming inside its former self, which is permanently clinging to the side of a tree, and all the while, it is feeling the pronounced effect of gravity for the first time in its life, not to mention terrestrial life in the trees, where the sap flows freely and sunshine dances on those giant globular eyes for the first time. Emerging cicadas first do a backbend, then hang upside down by their hind ends, letting the legs, wings and abdomen inflate and adjust to the atmospheric pressure, which pressure gracefully draws the body back to an upright posture. They stay that way, letting their wings inflate, flatten out, stiffen. Veins in the wings were veins, were flesh, before the flesh became the will to fly, a means of saying hello.
Nearer the library, I catch sight of someone squatting in the subsurface terrace of the Unitarian-Universalist peace church – I spot a bedroll and backpack, a forty-ounce can of something cold to drink on such a sweltering day. The guy is leaning against the brick wall, staring into space, and I picture him being the pile of sand from the block before – the one repeatedly hit over the head with the flat side of a shovel. At the library, they’re resetting the furniture after a musical performance. I don’t really know who it was – I just see my favorite librarian thanking someone with a violin case, the sort of hardened case they used to carry machine guns around in, and for a moment I hear the rat-a-tat-tat that stands for the sound of anger overcoming us – but then it becomes that highest cicada, back at the top of her tree, rubbing her wings, building railroads.
The heat on the walk home – neighborhoods still evacuated – is like a drunken horse I’m forced to ride. I can feel my body swaying from side to side a little more than usual, so I try to imagine some other time – for instance, when our bodies will be able to take the heat on a day like today and do something with it – cranial stimulation or micromachines to repair the body or even just a way for the body to stay cool without installing an HVAC system. A crow stops me cold when I hear it imitating the sound of a cicada – it doesn’t have the tone exactly right, but it’s doing the clicks, and I know this is true of crows – they acquire new elements of language from what they hear, and the crows must be hearing female cicadas calling out to the others. What a witness! I call up to the crow – or maybe it’s just got a cicada in its beak. In instant reply, the crow shrieks.

SPOILERS for Indigo Park Chapter one! You are warned!!
My Indigo Park discoveries.
1st: upon entering the first section where we meet Rambley, we’re given two bits of info. 1st is that according to the computer, the date is Saturday 7th 20XX (mysteriously left vague) and that the staff need to give the correct coupon/discount for that day. However, Rambley Raccoon the AI mentions at least twice that it’s actually a Tuesday, and he says it's been exactly 8 years (2920 days) since the last person visited Indigo park.
2nd: Something else to note is that, if we go by the very beginning visual recording we saw of Isaac Indigo, and listen to Finley’s chat when we first meet Finley, we discover that The Park, or at least the animated characters/ mascots have existed for 100 years. If we look at a calender to see what fits with these two bits of information, we can come to the very plausible conclusion that Indigo Park started officially back in 1925, and that the CURRENT DATE , the date WE as the main character go in by, is actually Tuesday 7th 2025, meaning that it was 2017 when the last person logged on for Indigo park, which would actually fit with what we’re told.
Solid fact: COMPUTER says sat oct 7th 20xx (doesn’t give proper date). AI RAMBLEY says Tuesday is the day we’re there, at least twice. RAMBLEY claims it’s been exactly 2920 days, 8 years, since the last person came to the park. Therefore in order for the date to make any sense at all, and align with the info we’re given so far, Indigo Park has to have been created back in 1925, the bad event happened around 2017, and we’re going into the park 8 years later in 2025.
3rd discovery: When we first see the Mascot characters checking in on us, the first and most consistent one we see is Molly Macaw the bird. What’s interesting is we find a wrecked and discarded version of an old mascot costume for her in the very first ride. The second most interesting fact we have is that the molly that pursues us, along with the lion as well, are far too real to be people in costumes, and move too fluidly to be AI controlling costumes. This gives me the belief/ theory that perhaps these are actually CREATURES, possibly scientific experiments, that have taken on some of the traits of the mascots we see in the park. This idea is further solidified by the fact that, later in the game, we actually end up decapitating Molly *spoilers*, and real blood comes from her. The same thing could be said for Lloyd when we get jumpscared by him in the theater. He reacts negatively to a noise the critter cuff makes and runs off. At first I thought maybe it was the AI telling him off, saying ‘hey don’t kill that person, they’re a guest’ or something, but knowing now that these creatures are actually flesh and blood makes me wonder if perhaps these were indeed wild animals that somehow became the mascots for the park at some point, and along the way something went wrong. It would sort of make sense, given that later on near the end of the game, if you manage to collect a mascot mask during the molly chase, you’re given some lore from a recording about new mascots arriving at Indigo park. These new mascots were concerning the old workers in this recording, as they worried the new mascots would ‘take their jobs’. Meaning that at some point new mascots came in and the old mascot performers weren't too happy about it. Perhaps one of these disgruntled workers did something to cause the new mascots to go wild, and that caused all the events that led to the evacuation of the park. Which brings me to THAT point.
4th discovery: The Evacuation of Indigo Park, and abandonment of it.
Something I noticed during the entire game was just how ruined everything was. Like, it is completely wrecked, even more so then I would honestly believe for a place that’s been abandoned for 8 years. Some things are still running, and some buildings are still in tact for sure, but there are ENTIRE buildings and walls just… absolutely wrecked, like a wrecking ball smashed through some of them. I’m not an expert on how long buildings take to get to the extent of disarray Indigo park is in when we go there, but it’s just ABSOLUTELY wrecked. Even when we go through a tunnel at one point, there is a collapse that closes the entrance behind us at that point. Sure, its game play to stop us from returning, but from a story standpoint, if you were to look at that tunnel entrance just before going in, it looks perfectly fine. The least you would expect to see is some dust crumbling down, cracks in the wall, stuff like that, as it prepares to give way. But that doesn't happen. No, instead, I suspect that it was actually the new mascots, specifically a character like Finley who has been labeled as rather large and strong, that caused the majority of the damage in the park. My evidence so far comes from two examples. First example is when we first almost get attacked by Lloyd in the theater, and he gets almost flattened by crates. You could make the argument that he was pretty weak, especially since he kinda just gives up and disappears only to try and get us as we leave and then gets scared by the critter cuff. But if you notice, the crate that lands on him is fairly wide and fairly large, and does NOT look light in the slightest. And since he’s meant to be a lion, he should be fairly strong. So, that crate that flattened him but didn't kill him? It SHOULD have killed him or knocked him out had he been a normal human in a costume.
My second evidence to this idea is Molly. We’re talking about a bird that has feathers for hands/fingers. That shouldn't make her strong by any means. And yet, when we get chased by her, the door she comes through to get to us gets pulled open by force by her. Watch that scene again carefully and you’ll see what I mean. True, the door is slowly starting to open, but it STOPS, and then she forces it open with absolute ease! And that was a solid steel door!
And third factor (I know I said two factors but I wanted to point this out a lil too) is the existence of Finley’s real sea-dragon body, seen RIGHT at the end of the chapter. There is no way that is a real human, and definitely no way that's an animatronic either. That thing is real, and its definitely strong.
My guess? These guys are what actually caused the majority of the damage we see in the park. It would explain why the place got evacuated at all, and why police wanted to keep people away from the place so badly.
5th discovery: little things to note.
So in chapter one there’s a few little things of note which might not be huge to the lore, but I wanted to talk about for sure cus they fascinate me.
1st lil note: On the train ride in, if you turn around upon seeing conductor Rambley enter the train, there’s a picture of Rambley and LLoyd shaking one anothers’ paws. I haven’t been able to get a closer look, but I believe there’s also some kind of letter or note in the picture too. I have no idea what this implies, but I found it interesting given that, for the rest of the game, Rambley basically hates Lloyd and resents how much attention the lion gets (despite the fact that rambley is most definitely the one character that gets the most attention.)
2nd lil note: if you pay close enough attention throughout the chapter (after you officially enter, and before you see her in the Landing Pad room) Molly Macaw actually appears a few times. Sometimes physically, sometimes saying things. I think the first time you can officially see her is in the cue for the train ride as she goes around a corner. You can spot her a few times during the train ride as well, and can even hear her saying something after Finley has his little ‘come visit me’ speech. I don’t know exactly how many times she pops up along the ride, but that is very interesting. I also believe she pops up in the theater, both physically and for a brief moment you can hear her too, just before you see Lloyd in the backstage area.
Collectables. Like with FNAF security breach, this game has collectables that reveal a lil more lore, but unlike FNAF, you can only find out info about the items once you reach an info kiosk. For the most part, the info you get if you scan the items seem to be about your character’s backstory, which honestly isn’t… much? But there could be more in the future, who knows. But if you click on them, you can learn more about the items from Rambley, which is where you also get to learn about the secret recording regarding that one mascot mask. They’re part of the game, but I don't think you have to get them? At least, I don't think they unlock anything special if you do get them all. I know nothing changed when I got them all.
Our character's height/age/info. So, when we are first introduced to the character we play as in the beginning opening intro, it's pretty obvious that we’re playing someone who’s either a teenager, or a fully grown adult. They’ve been known for exploring abandoned places before, if we pay attention to the messages they share with an internet friend, and in the game, our arms are quite muscular, meaning we are known for being fairly strong ourselves, and more than capable of running for long distances (which makes sense later on with the molly chase).
However, a couple of things I wanted to note: If this is true, then why are some things in indigo park different heights to us then what they should be? For instance, a normal upstanding bin, with nothing keeping it above ground or adding to its height, is only just below our chin basically. Another example is that some of the desks in cafes or kiosks are higher than us. Yet it's made pretty clear we’re not playing as a kid. I suppose it is entirely possible we could be playing an adult of short stature, but I’m not entirely sure. It is also possible that this was done as part of the game’s physics, to avoid players jumping over things. Story wise, it is a bit inconsistent and I thought that was a little strange. Could be nothing, but could be something.
My current Theory:
So here’s my running theory. I want to point out that this is a theory and not absolute fact, and if you have theories of your own I’d love to hear them. I’m just theorizing according to the evidence I’ve picked up. Here goes.
Sometimes back in the late 2010s perhaps, Indigo park decided they wanted to take things in an exciting new direction. Their ideal thought was always to try and bring dreams to life, of course, and perhaps Isaac Indigo felt that the current Mascots weren’t doing the best job at that. He brings in some scientists and discusses with them a revolutionary idea: turning ACTUAL animals into the mascots for Indigo park. Perhaps he reasons with them by saying things like ‘hey, people want to see and feel the realness of these mascots they’ve come to love, what better way to do it then to give them REAL animals.’
Unfortunately, this means some scientific experimentation. A scientist, we’ll call them Richard for now, gathers up the actual animals that represent the mascots (perhaps getting a lion cub from a circus to avoid being killed by lions in the wildlife)), and starts to run experiments on them by giving them potions that slowly, over time, start to ‘transform’ them into the mascots for Indigo park. However, he gets to the one for Salem the skunk, and since Salem is supposed to be the evil, tricky, clever one, her transformation goes awry, and they break free, enabling the other animals to break free as well. Causing the chaos of the park to ensue, and the eventual evacuation of the park. They decide they want to keep Indigo Park as their home, because they know that the outside world would probably kill them on the spot, and slowly over time become more animal like, but still hold onto some of the old traits they were injected with. The AI known as Rambley was confined to the front desk, most likely because that would be one of the last areas staff went to before fully evacuating. Meaning he was stuck there until we came along. Now he wants to bring the park back to life, because that’s what he’s programmed to want, and to do, but he needs human clearance, which is where we come in. But the animal mascots will probably not like that, because that means we’re bringing back to life the place that condemned them to start with. So they will try to stop us any way they can. Is this right? Again, not sure. It’s just a theory right now. But I’ll be interested to find out what happens in chapter two.
Was there anything I missed? What did YOU think of Indigo park? Got any theories? Let me know and let’s discuss Indigo Park!!

More crucial than I realized: -Silverettes -Bottle drying rack -Velcro swaddles for our houdini baby -Glider chair (recline function not as necessary so far for me) —baby dremel
Exactly as useful as I expected (very): -changing pad for dresser, and diaper pail -infant car seat with stroller click-in attachment -bouncer and activity gym —wrap carrier
Surprisingly not that useful so far: -(maybe unpopular opinion) Hatch sound machine. You have to pay for a lot of the sound options and I utterly hate that it can mostly only be controlled from a phone app. The light options are unnecessary. We do play white noise a lot but an old smartphone or tablet and Bluetooth speaker would do better IMO. - onesies and pants. We have way too many. So far baby lives in zip sleepers and hates having onesies put on and taken off (who wouldn’t?). But I do live in a cool-ish climate. - milk storage bags. Turns out so far I’m hard pressed to even get enough to feed her let alone store anything. Here’s hoping that changes.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814
J. G. Fichte and a priori Providentialism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 19 May 2024 is the 262nd anniversary of the birth of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814), who was born in Rammenau, Saxony, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, on this day in 1762.
Fichte is often remembered in histories of philosophy as an immediate successor to Kant in the German idealist tradition. While still a young man Fichte wrote and anonymously published Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. This was in 1792 when Fichte was 30 years old. Many believed that Kant had written this work, given Kant’s earlier critiques of pure reason, practical reason, and judgment, so when Kant denied authorship and identified Fichte as the actual author, Fichte experienced the philosophical equivalent of being an overnight sensation.
But Fichte’s life was an unsheltered as Kant’s life was sheltered. He was a born trouble-maker and was willing to touch the third rail of Enlightenment politics by writing and speaking openly about matters of religion, as revealed by his work on revelation. Fichte is sometimes called inflexible and rigid, though we could also say (a little more charitably) that he was principled and not inclined to compromise. Partly as a result of this temperament, Fichte became embroiled in a controversy in German intellectual life remembered as the Atheismusstriet, or Atheism Controversy.
During this controversy Friedrich Jacobi published an open letter against Fichte in which Jacobi coined the term “nihilism” to describe what he took to be Fichte’s position:

“Truly, my dear Fichte, I would not be vexed if you, or anyone else, were to call Chimerism the view I oppose to the Idealism that I chide for Nihilism. I have paraded my not-knowing in all my writings; in my non-knowledge I have prided myself so to be with knowledge, so perfectly and completely, that I am certainly allowed to be contemptuous of the mere doubter.—I have wrestled for truth with zeal and fervour since childhood as few others; as few others have I experienced my powerlessness—and my heart has grown tender for that—yea, very tender, my dear Fichte—and my voice so gentle! Just as I have deep compassion for myself, as human being, so I have it for others. I am patient without effort; but that I am truly patient without effort costs me a lot. The earth will be light above me—it won’t be long.”

Nihilism was to go on to have quite a career as an idea after Jacobi’s letter. While for Jacobi, the nihilism he attributed to Fichte was the inevitable outcome of reason, nihilism did not remain centered on Jacobi’s critique of Kantian philosophy, but came to signify belief in nothing at all.
Fichte’s controversial stance created a problem for the authorities at the University of Jena, where Fichte was employed at the time. Fichte wouldn’t budge, and this was one of the episodes responsible for his reputation for inflexibility, so the University of Jena dismissed him in 1799. At this point, with little to his name and few prospects, Fichte walked from Jena to Berlin—Google Maps says it takes 55 hours to complete this walk—and eventually he became part of the philosophical scene in Berlin.
Fichte attempted, semi-successfully, to support himself with popular books and lectures. For a philosopher coming from a background of Kantian philosophy—the most technical philosophy of its day—this was a bold project, but he gamely attempted to bring his interpretation of Kantianism to the masses. One of the outcomes of this effort was Fichte’s short book The Vocation of Man (1800). Fichte’s academic work was riddled with jargon, but The Vocation of Man is written in plain language and was intended for a popular audience. However, it’s still a demanding philosophical argument. In it, Fichte articulated a conception of human destiny that is universalistic, rationalistic, teleological, and even infinitistic:

“Let us not ask of history if man, on the whole, have yet become purely moral. To a more extended, comprehensive, energetic freedom he has certainly attained; but hitherto it has been an almost necessary result of his position, that this freedom has been applied chiefly to evil purposes. Neither let us ask whether the aesthetic and intellectual culture of the ancient world, concentrated on a few points, may not have excelled in degree that of modern times! It might happen that we should receive a humiliating answer, and that in this respect the human race has not advanced, but rather seemed to retrograde, in its riper years. But let us ask of history at what period the existing culture has been most widely diffused, and distributed among the greatest number of individuals; and we shall doubtless find that from the beginning of history down to our own day, the few light-points of Civilization have spread themselves abroad from their centre, that one individual after another, and one nation after another, has been embraced within their circle, and that this wider outspread of culture is proceeding under our own eyes. And this is the first point to be attained in the endless path on which humanity must advance.”

Notice that Fichte implies a distinction between two kinds of progress: there is progress toward the highest degree of excellence, and here humanity may have backslid, but there is also progress toward broadly distributed high culture, and here Fichte thinks that his time definitely surpassed previous history. Fichte also says that progress, by which he means moral progress, is an endless path, and we have already seen that it is possible for humanity to experience retrograde moral progress, so the pathway to man becoming purely moral, as Fichte sees it, is endless, it can incorporate reversals, and it can be striving to new heights or to wider diffusion.
This and many other passages point to the infinite perfectibility of man, which shows us the extent to which Fichte had imbibed the ideals of the French Revolution—or, we might say, he had imbibed the ideals of the French philosophers who were instrumental in laying the foundations of the French revolution, and were later arguably co-opted by the revolution, as in the case of Condorcet, who wrote this paean to the infinite perfectibility of man while on the run from the revolutionary gendarme. But the infinite perfectibility of man as Fichte imagines it is a teleology with a real history: things can go wrong, we can get sidetracked, we might pursue one form of moral excellence or another, and so on.
And Fichte also transmuted the French concept of the infinite perfectibility of man in the image of German idealism, producing a kind of philosophical spiritualism. Part of this transmutation of ideals came about because of the direction that Fichte saw the French revolution take as it developed. Many philosophers at the time initially supported the ideals of the French Revolution, but came to see it in a different light after the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. Fichte as well.
Seeking to rally his countrymen after defeats inflicted by Napoleon, Fichte gave a series of public lectures later published as Addresses to the German Nation. This was more than a half century before the unification of Germany as a nation-state. In the twentieth century this work was savaged by George Santayana in his book Egotism in German Philosophy, which I mentioned in my episode on Wars and Rumors of Wars. Santayana called Fichte “an uncompromising puritan” and in Santayana’s fever dream of German expansionism he imagined Fichte as the source of it all:

“…Fichte gives us prophetic glimpses of an idealistic Germany conquering the world. The state does not aim at self-preservation, still less is it concerned to come to the aid of those members of the human family that lag behind the movement of the day. The dominion of unorganised physical force must be abolished by a force obedient to reason and spirit. True life consists in refashioning human relations after a model innate in the mind. The glorious destiny of Germany is to bring forth and establish the world anew. Natural freedom is a disgraceful thing, a mere medley of sensual and intellectual impulses without any principle of order. It is for the Germans to decide whether a providential progress exists by becoming themselves the providence that shall bring progress about, or whether on the contrary every higher thought is folly. If they should fail, history would never blame them, for in that case there would be no more history.”

Many others also have seen Fichte’s work through the lens of the wars of their time, which were the world wars of the twentieth century, rather than through the lens of the wars of Fichte’s time, which were the Napoleonic Wars.
Fichte knew that he was putting his life on the line by publicly speaking out against the French, as he at one time referenced the fate of Johann Philipp Palm. Palm, a book seller, was connected to a pamphlet, Germany in Its Deep Humiliation (Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung), that angered Napoleon. Napoleon ordered his subordinates to try and execute Palm within twenty-four hours. Palm was tried on 26 August 1806 by a French military tribunal, found guilty, and shot within hours of the verdict. Four other book sellers also were tried were not executed. Fichte knew that the same thing could happen to him in publicly speaking out on behalf of the German people. We can see from incidents such as this that Fichte was in the thick of the history of his own time, sometimes riding the wave and sometimes making waves.
Roberta Picardi notes both the derivation and dependence of Fichte’s views from Kant, as well as Fichte’s divergence from Kant:

“Fichte explores the epistemic status and method of history with an aim which is clearly taken from Kant: the purpose of introducing a systematic and scientific method in the infinite field of the empiricism, of which history is a part, together with experimental physics. As we can read in The Characteristics of the Present Age he wants to obtain ‘a sure progress according to rule instead of an uncertain groping in the dark’ from history, i. e., instead of the ‘Herumptappen’ (this is the German word for ‘groping’) that in the second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant contrasts with the ‘secure path of a science’.”

But the secure path of science isn’t always all that secure, given that there are multiple scientific pathways, and not all pathways lead to the same end. This is the distinction within Fichte’s philosophy of history noted by Angelica Nuzzo:

“Fichte builds his idea of a philosophy of history upon a paradoxical argument. He pushes to the extreme the claim of the bare factual nature of history as a realm of irrational, not-conceptual, and thoroughly contingent reality. Yet he also maintains that philosophical knowledge of history is possible—although neither as deductive, nor conceptual, nor genetic knowledge. Against the fictitious notion of historical Wahrscheinlichkeit (plausibility, probability), Fichte holds on to the notion of ‘historical truth’ and to its ‘logic.’ Despite its radically empirical character, history can be construed a priori.”

Some of the flavor of Fichte’s a priori approach to history can be gained from his primary work on the philosophy of history Characteristics of the Present Age (Der Grundzüge des gegewärtigen Zeitalters, 1806), in which he decomposes history into Five Principal Epochs, based not on historical contingencies, but rather upon human destiny and moral development:

“…we endeavoured to pre-figure the whole Earthly Life of Man by a comprehension of its purpose;— to perceive why our Race had to begin its Existence here, and by this means to describe the whole present Life of humankind:—this is what we wished to do,—it was our first task. There are, according to this view, Five Principal Epochs of Earthly Life, each of which, although taking its rise in the life of the individual, must yet, in order to become an Epoch in the Life of the Race, gradually lay hold of and interpenetrate all Men; and to that end must endure throughout long periods of time, so that the great Whole of Life is spread out into Ages, which sometimes seem to cross, sometimes to run parallel with each other:—1st, The Epoch of the unlimited dominion of Reason as Instinct: —the State of Innocence of the Human Race. 2nd, The Epoch in which Reason as Instinct is changed into an external ruling Authority;—the Age of positive Systems of life and doctrine, which never go back to their ultimate foundations, and hence have no power to convince but on the contrary merely desire to compel, and which demand blind faith and unconditional obedience:—the State of progressive Sin. 3rd, The Epoch of Liberation,—directly from the external ruling Authority—indirectly from the power of Reason as Instinct, and generally from Reason in any form;—the Age of absolute indifference towards all truth, and of entire and unrestrained licentiousness:—the State of completed Sinfulness. 4th, The Epoch of Reason as Knowledge;—the Age in which Truth is looked upon as the highest, and loved before all other things:—the State of progressive Justification. 5th, The Epoch of Reason as Art;—the Age in which Humanity with more sure and unerring hand builds itself up into a fitting image and representative of Reason:—the State of completed Justification and Sanctification. Thus, the whole progress which, upon this view, Humanity makes here below, is only a retrogression to the point on which it stood at first, and has nothing in view save that return to its original condition. But Humanity must make this journey on its own feet; by its own strength it must bring itself back to that state in which it was once before without its own coöperation, and which, for that very purpose, it must first of all leave.”

We can call Fichte’s Five Principal Epochs a “stadial” philosophy of history, since “stadial” refers to stages. In this passage we gain an appreciation of the necessity of the five stages of history as a developmental process that cannot be gotten around: there is no royal road to the end of the history.
In the Second Lecture from Fichte’s Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation, he makes explicit both the a priori developmental history of humanity and the utopian picture of the ultimate end of human development:

“…a very great man has said, life in the state is not one of man’s absolute aims. The state is, instead, only a means for establishing a perfect society, a means which exists only under specific circumstances. Like all those human institutions which are mere means, the state aims at abolishing itself. The goal of all government is to make government superfluous. Though the time has certainly not yet come, nor do I know how many myriads or myriads of myriads of years it may take (here we are not at all concerned with applicability in life, but only with justifying a speculative proposition), there will certainly be a point in the a priori foreordained career of the human species when all civic bonds will become superfluous.”

The editor says in a footnote that the “great man” mentioned was probably an allusion to Kant’s Idea of History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. We saw in my episode on Kant how Kant saw the teleology of humanity as establishing the perfect civil constitution, though I also speculated that, if we take Kant’s later writings on history in the context of his early pre-critical work on natural history, this Kantian teleology for humanity is nested within a larger cosmological teleology. By my reading, then, Kant is actually the more naturalistic position, while Fichte is the more anthropocentric, and his ideal is a purely spiritual ideal, even an a priori idea. For example, Fichte isn’t in the least interested to even give an estimate of the period of time that will be required for humanity to abolish all government, but he only points out that this is the ultimate end.
Marx also predicted the withering away of the state after communism had been achieved, and Marx, too, emphasized definite stages in human development that would lead to this outcome. With Kant, Fichte, and Marx all predicting the end of formal human governments we might take this prediction as a distinctive feature of a certain class of philosophies of history. Toynbee, too, saw not exactly the end of the state, but the end of universal civilizations, which would cede their place to universal churches, which sounds to me a lot like Kant, Fichte, and Marx anticipating the ultimate abolition of government in a perfect society.
This we can understand as a kind of inverse teleology, in which it is not (or not only) the advent of some future eventuality that is foreseen, but the abolition of some present state-of-affairs in the future as the goal of human development. For Kant, Fichte, Marx, and Toynbee, there is a dual teleological movement, in which some novel state-of-affairs is to unfold, while a present state of affairs is to give way and disappear as the new order comes to replace it. We could call this a stadial philosophy of history, but it is as much a substitutional philosophy of history: one social order is substituted for another; familiar institutions are to be replaced by novel institutions that take their place.
As far as the new institutions are expected to be an improvement over the old, this is also a melioristic philosophy of history. All progressivist philosophies of history are also melioristic, but we can distinguish between gradualistic meliorism, in which iterated reform eventually converges on a perfect society, which could be a finite or an infinitistic process, and stadial meliorism, in which there is a replacement rather than reform of a social order, and this replacement is an improvement.
For a non-stadial, non-teleological philosophy of history, we can turn to Leopold von Ranke, who was critical of Fichte’s five epochs:

“One of the ideas with which philosophy again and again confronts history as an irrefutable claim is that mankind is on an uninterrupted road to progress, in a steady development toward perfection. Fichte, one of the foremost philosophers in this field, assumes five epochs, a world plan as he says – reason ruling through instinct, reason ruling through law, emancipation from the authority of reason, reason as science, and reason as art. If this or a similar scheme were to any extent true, then general history would have to follow the road of progress which the human race followed in the indicated direction from one age to the next. The sole subject matter of history would then be the development of such concepts as they appear and manifest themselves in the world of phenomena. But this is by no means the case. For one thing, the philosophers themselves have extraordinarily varied opinions about the nature and selection of these supposedly ruling ideas. But they very wisely focus only on a few peoples in world history while considering the lives of all the rest as nothing, as a mere supplement. Otherwise it could not be hidden for a moment that from the beginning to this day the peoples of the world have been in the most varied conditions.”

We saw earlier that Fichte by no means argued for an uninterrupted road to progress, but we can set that aside as being of secondary importance. The antagonism between Fichte and Ranke runs deeper. Ranke is often associated with the emergence of historicism, and sometimes he is identified as the source of historicism. Ranke even was willing to express his historicism in theological terms when we said that all ages are equidistant from God. With this view of history as consisting of co-equal periods each with their own integrity it would be difficult, though not impossible, to argue for progress. In Characteristics of the Present Age Fichte rejects the view that an age can be assessed on its own terms:

“Should our view of the Present Age prove to have been a view taken from the standing-point of this Age itself, should the eye which has taken this view have been itself a product of the Age which it has surveyed, then has the Age borne witness to itself and such testimony must be set aside.”

Fichte, then, needs some criterion for his view of the present age other than the present age itself, and he finds it in religion:

“…what has been the nature of this theory, considered in its essential elements, and to what chief department of human thought it has belonged? I answer:—It was a Religious Theory; all our contemplations were Religious contemplations, and our view of things, and the eye which embraced that view, were Religious.”

Fichte goes one better and actually gives a definition of religion in the next paragraph:

“RELIGION consists in regarding and recognising all Earthly Life as a necessary development of the one, original, perfectly good and perfectly blessed Divine Life.”

Both Ranke and Fichte, then, invoke theological sanction for their conception of history, though this conception is starkly different, with Ranke taking each age to be sufficient unto itself, and no less related to the divine than any other age, while Fichte took each age to be dependent upon a larger framework for its meaning. While Ranke the historian insists on the individual uniqueness of each age, while Fichte the philosopher sees each age in relation to the whole of which it is a part. It is the task of Fichte’s Characteristics of the Present Age to provide for his contemporaries this larger framework so that they can understand their place in history, which for Fichte means understanding their place in the moral development of humanity.
Even Fichte’s conception of religion and moral development is strikingly abstract, as we find a little further on in the last chapter of Characteristics of the Present Age: “…Religion is nothing external,—it never clothes itself in any outward manifestation.” And, “…True Religion does not manifest itself outwardly, and does not impel man to any course of external conduct which he would not otherwise have adopted, but that it only completes his true Inward Being and dignity.” This is not necessary an orthodox position, and we’ve already seen how Fichte got himself in trouble with authorities with his views on religion.
It would seem strange to call Fichte’s philosophy of history a providential philosophy of history, as it seems to have little in common with, say, St. Augustine, but by Fichte’s own account, his is a pervasively religious perspective, and his philosophy of history is an account of humanity’s progress toward moral perfection. This progress is a purely inward fulfillment, without any observational consequences, again, by Fichte’s own account. I’ve run into this view in one other thinker, and that is Simone Weil. In my episode on Weil I quoted her criticism of providentialism of a kind that I called vulgar providentialism:

“Divine Providence is not a disturbing influence, an anomaly in the ordering of the world; it is itself the order of the world; or rather it is the regulating principle of this universe. It is eternal Wisdom, unique, spread across the whole universe in a sovereign network of relations.”

I think Fichte would have agreed with this, and with the examples of both Fichte and Weil we can see that there is a place within the conceptual space of philosophy of history for what we could call a pure providential philosophy of history, or, if you like, an a priori providentialism.
Ranke’s criticism of Fichte is predicated upon the necessity of a vulgar providentialism that is reflected in the empirical world. But if, as Fichte said, religion is nothing external, and it does not impel man to any course of external conduct, neither should it impel any course of external conduct on the world. This also resolves the paradoxical argument that Angelica Nuzzo found at the heart of Fichte’s philosophy of history, since the bare factual nature of history can be distinguished from the providentialism that can be construed a priori.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/T8eIxZi0LrM
https://www.instagram.com/p/C7LPoSKNdPB/
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/j.-g.-fichte-and-a-priori:6

Podcast Edition

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/73G2BY64JJb
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a31b8276-53cd-4723-b6ad-a39c8faa4572/episodes/306a6446-d4d7-4e24-a447-c89fd310d7a2/today-in-philosophy-of-history-j-g-fichte-and-a-priori-providentialism
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-today-in-philosophy-of-his-146507578/episode/j-g-fichte-and-a-priori-177816272/
​

WAR
A few days later my phone buzz-chirped. I opened my messages to find several pics of Dennis' Jeep, a blurry mess of lights, and a final shot of Dennis leaning back in the driver's seat with his eyes closed and his junk out and at attention. And there was a caption.
"Consider us EVEN."
I saw red. The possibility of finding peaceful contentment with Whisky was a distant memory. A figment of my imagination. I wanted blood. I wanted to slap Mary's fat fucking face senseless. I wanted to rat her out to Chuck. I was livid. Angry heat spread from my sternum to my shoulders, and the sharp sting of wrath radiated through my being. I rang Mary.
Mary: How does it feel, bitch?
I couldn't make words. I was shaking. My head was spinning. All I could muster was a meek little, "Why???"
Mary: You owed me.
Me: Mary, I'm not screwing Whiskers. And how did you even FIND Dennis? Do you even LIKE him?
Mary: Totes! He's soooooo cute! We banged it out five or six times in his car, and then he told me to lie down in the parking lot. And then he pissed all over my titties! It was soooo hot!
Me: I don't believe you. Dennis is into some pervy-ass shit. But not piss.
Mary: Well, he told me you were too vanilla to do anything fun.
Me: YEAH. I didn't wanna get butt-blasted without a rubber by a guy who couldn't even be bothered to show up when we had plans. That's not being vanilla. That's having self-respect.
Mary: Guys don't like girls who make a big deal about self-respect. It's a major turn-off. That's why I get so much more boom-boom than you do. Hey! Now that we're done fighting, you can pick me up and take me out for sushi! I'll teach you how to make men happy and then you'll owe me dinner. I obviously pleased Dennis when you couldn't.
Words failed me yet again. I shouted a much, much filthier version of, "GO SCREW," hung up on her, put on my sneakers, and ran aimlessly through my neighborhood until I almost collapsed. Once I trudged back home, I smoked a shit-ton of cigarettes and drank a shit-ton of vodka (for me, which was like... three shots) and really did collapse.
Up to this point, I felt like I had been patient with Mary. More patient than she deserved. I probably hadn’t done her any favors by allowing her to behave like a fucking maniac while I did nothing more than gently suggesting alternative behaviors. I still wanted to have faith in her ability to grow (emotionally). But all of that came crashing down. For some reason, my formerly improved sense of self-respect crashed as well...
I texted Whisky, planned to meet him at his townhouse, and successfully banged him. It was absolutely a hate bang even though I didn't hate Whisky at all (yet). I'd never engaged in hate-fueled intimacy before. I didn't realize those two states could co-exist like that. As reluctant as I am to admit it, it was cathartic. And it was also admittedly unfair to Whisky because he had no idea what was happening. I had just used him to make myself feel marginally better about a guy I guess I still had some kind of feelings for.
In case I've been unclear, I'm fully acknowledging that my actions were immature, inconsiderate, and indefensible. Don't bang somebody just because you're mad at somebody else, kids. Nobody wins. Well, it might feel like winning for a short time. It's NOT. It's bad behavior. And I absolutely hold myself accountable. Did I deserve to get verbally abused by the psycho neckbeard lurking behind the mask of the man I’d just hate-banged? No. Unequivocally, NO. But would Whisky have been well within his rights to dump me in a spectacular fashion if he’d realized what I was doing in that moment? Abso-freakin-lutely. Hell, I would have totally deserved it if he’d booted me out of his house butt-naked and screamed insults from the window. An isolated hurling of insults is not the same thing as chronic verbal maltreatment within the context of a relationship. But that's a serious topic that feels out of place in this story.
So instead of calling me on my crap and giving my butt the boot, Whisky remained oblivious to what was going on in my misguided mind and took the hate bang to mean that our relationship had just gone to the next level. And he became even sweeter and more affectionate towards me. This made my skin crawl because all my feelings for Dennis (both good and bad) had just come flooding back with a vengeance. I had no idea what to do with them. Part of me wanted Dennis to hug me and apologize. Part of me wanted to punch him in the dick. Part of me wanted Whisky to hug me and assure me that I had value as a human being even if some Golden God hadn’t chosen me to be his partner. And then part of me wanted to snap at Whisky every time he touched me. "You're NOT the one I want, Asshat!!!!!!!"
But the truth was... I didn't really want Dennis anymore. I mean... I wanted him in theory, but I didn't want the real version. He was a flake. He was nasty. I couldn't wrap my head around his inconsistent, albeit devout, spiritual beliefs. He was indeed a braggadocious butthead. I suspected that he wasn't even a very nice person beneath his affable veneer. Even so, I was irrationally irate with Mary for deliberately stalking him and seducing him. Did she really think that would make me look at my relationship with Whisky differently? I hadn't stalked him. I hadn't even pursued him. In fact, I'd rejected him several times (albeit not out of respect for Mary). How are these two situations alike??? What am I failing to see here??? Maybe I was the villain. I certainly wasn't innocent. But neither was Mary.
I mean... Mary was friggin’ MARRIED. And she'd been going around blabbing indelicately about all her supremely nasty boom-boom (whether real or fabricated) with Whiskers, Scumbanger, Tech Guy, Artistic Director, and the Hoggs. How the living, breathing, God-forsaken FUCK had she decided that she was entitled to sexy time with my (former?) crush just because I was dating ONE of the innumerable guys she’d stalked once upon a time???? Gaaaahhhhhhhhh!
And then it got even worse. Dennis was almost finished with his graduate program and was planning to move to New York that summer, while I still had another two years to go (counting the internship). But we both worked in the Neuropharmacology Lab that semester, so I still had to see him every week. Even though nothing had happened between us in a long, long time, I never knew if Dennis was going acknowledge my presence or look right through me. The power of invisibility isn't all it's cracked up ti be. But the next time I saw him, following the Mary tryst, he very deliberately approached me and said in an almost apologetic tone, "Val? Can we please talk after lab?" I nodded.
He asked me to get in his car, but I couldn't stand the thought of sitting in the ghost of Mary's snail trail. I insisted that we sit in my car, and he didn't protest. The familiar scent of mandarins and mountain air wafted through my Prius as I steeled myself for a confrontation.
Dennis: I think your friend stalked me...
Me: The crazy bitch with the big boobs?
Dennis: Yeah... She messaged me on Facebook and she was talking like you'd told her about me and thought we should hang out. I said we should call you and invite you to come along, but she said you had a boyfriend. Do you have a boyfriend?
Me: I'm dating someone. But what does it matter?
Dennis: Oh. I guess it doesn't. Anyway, I met her at this 24-hour diner. She drank like... ten beers even though I told her I don't drink. She kept talking about her cat or something...
Me: Whiskers?
Dennis: Yeah.
Me: That's a guy. She used to have a thing for him.
Dennis: That’s a guy’s name??? Weird. Well, anyway... She got all sloppy and literally started doing mouth stuff to me under the table.
My stomach turned and my blood boiled. "I don't need to hear that. She already told me all about your night. She sent me pictures of your dick and she told me how you peed on her in the parking lot."
Dennis: She said I WHAT??? Babe! Er. Um. Val! I would never do that.
I gave him a skeptical stare.
Dennis: Hand to God! I didn't pee on her. But, wait... She took pictures of my stuff???
I took out my phone and showed him the pic. Dennis blushed ferociously and looked away. Finally, he said quietly, "I'm so ashamed of myself."
I sighed. "You're always ashamed of yourself. That's why I stopped fooling around with you. It felt like you were ashamed of me, too."
Dennis: Babe! No. I just have to get right with God.
Me: Well, have you talked to God about Mary?
Dennis: I'm not ready for that one yet. I feel dirty. Like... dirtier than usual.
Me: Well, now I feel kind of guilty. She's mad at me because I'm dating a guy she used to have a crush on. She went after you because she knew I used to have a crush on you.
Dennis: You had a crush on me??? For real?
At first, I scoffed (thinking he was being sarcastic). Then I looked at his wide eyes and realized that he might have actually been that clueless.
Me: Yes, Dennis. I massively had a crush on you. You knew that. But I was apparently too vanilla for you, according to Mary.
Dennis: What??? Babe! I never said you were vanilla. I said you were classier than her.
Me: Well... Thank you? If that really is what you said to her, I appreciate that.
Dennis (striking his version of a smoldering pose): So. Uh... You still have a crush on me?
Me: I think I'll always wonder what could have been if we were each just... slightly different people. But I had to move on. I knew you didn't like me in that way, and it wasn't fair to either of us.
Dennis: Well, for what it's worth, I wish it had been your mouth the other night.
I finally smiled a little bit. I wished the same thing. But I didn't say that out loud.

Oddly enough, having that somewhat respectful, somewhat reassuring conversation with Dennis quelled my anger at Mary... a little. Don't get me wrong; I was still pissed and I never let her get close to me again after that. But I also never made a big, dramatic show of telling her off. In my mind, that would have invited more unnecessary drama. By tacitly distancing myself and henceforth keeping her at arm's length, she wasn't able to freak out over anything and I was able to keep her out of my business.
Years and years later, even now that Mary is a functional person with a healthy BMI, and much better manners (most of the time), she is still wont to bring up her tryst with Dennis. While I genuinely applaud her for putting in the work and making some sensible changes, I'll never be super buddy-buddy with her again. The fact that she still throws Dennis in my face to this very day makes me suspect that there remains a touch of cray in her gray matter.
And where Whisky was concerned, I had finally felt some sense of closure with Dennis after the aforementioned talk. So I leaned into a new relationship. And it was fine at first. Not super hot, but also not super weird. Having learned from my disgusting mistake, I know that I tend to get tempted to speculate about incredibly offensive crap regarding Funky Whisky whenever his behavior is unremarkable and not in keeping with the delightfully repulsive tone that this audience tends to enjoy. So I'll end this chapter here. In the next proper installment, I'll finally shed some light on The Goblinization. But before I wrap things up, I need to write a one-off about The Pie Guy and bring back some classic cringe!

https://apnews.com/article/india-elections-climate-change-disasters-voting-politics-810b9038bc40209d640e1ea9b96c2d7a
Due to an increasingly dry climate, the agriculture and fishing industry in much of India is struggling to stay afloat. Billions of dollars of damage have come as a result of floods and droughts, and the Indian government isn't able to allocate the resources or afford the costs. With the situation getting worse, many farmers aren't able to protect their crops and Indian agriculture doesn't have a sustainable future ahead of itself.

Debit/Credit Cards Accepted No Closing Costs Cash Price: $1,250 Finance with $200 Down and 12 Payments of $110 Per Month No Credit Check, No Income Documentation, No Prepayment Penalty 

Do you want a place to talk about the current situation in Iran?

Do you have crazy theories?
Did your post get removed for being Low Effort, and you still want a place to talk?
Well now you have it!
All rules still apply. Obviously.
​

Ebrahim Raisi (President of Iran) and foreign minister have died, state TV says – live updates

^{https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/may/20/iran-helicopter-crash-live-updates-ebrahim-raisi-iranian-president-search-and-rescue-middle-east-crisis-latest-news}

Wikipedia has changed IS to WAS. It is Official!!!

Hello! I've seen that a lot of people are confused about ENFJs and how exactly we work, and considering that there are many websites with different —even contradictory— concepts and definitions of ENFJ, I wanted to provide one closer to what Carl Jung first described in Psychological Types in 1921. I hope this will help people gain a wider perspective of our type, and clear up some associated misconceptions.
But, before we begin, there are some concepts and questions that need to be addressed first:
❓ Are websites like 16 Personalities reliable? What about tests?
📣 No, they aren't. 16 Personalities has wildly different concepts about types, and most importantly: while it's not outright stated, their personality model isn't based on jungian functions or the types Myers-Briggs described in Gifts Differing in 1980. Their test and type description is based on the Big Five personality model, which is something else on its own. You can check this in more detail on their FAQ page. If you used 16p to discover your type, there's a high chance it may not be the same type as what Jung or Myers-Briggs describe in their respective books. Other websites and tests may also handle different concepts, so take their results with a grain of salt.
❓ If tests and websites are unreliable, how can I be sure of my type?
📣 By reading! I'm afraid that there isn't a quick shortcut to instantly know yourself and what type best fits you. Knowing your type is a journey in itself, full of self-reflection and doubt. It's hard, but very rewarding. However, if you are doing this just for fun, feel free to take any popular tests floating around.
❓ I am friendly and outgoing, but sometimes I need space. Am I INFJ or ENFJ?
📣 Social extraversion/introversion and cognitive extraversion/introversion are two different things. Jung managed his concepts and descriptions of different psychological phenomena and gave them different meanings from what we're familiar with. I know, it's confusing. But I'll do my best to clear up what he actually meant later on, so don't worry!
❓ Where are you getting all this information?
📣 Psychological Types, by Carl Jung. I also have Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type by Isabel Briggs Myers with Peter B. Myer, however, I am not fond of Myers-Briggs' interpretation of Jung's writings. In my opinion, it's an oversimplified version of types and functions, and she displayed an obvious intuitive bias in her book. Another book that's popular is Lectures on Jung's Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz, who also worked together with Jung to describe types and functions. However, be warned: by her own admission, she dislikes Fe-dom types and her description of ExFJ is rather insulting, so expect some bias as well.
Before we begin talking about what is ENFJ, we have to understand Jung's word salad and what he meant with all these concepts and descriptions. It takes a lot of patience and effort to understand Psychological Types, because as you may know (or not!), psychology is a relatively new science, and many of its roots come from philosophy, anthropology, and even religion. Jung refers to a lot of other authors, philosophers, and other literary figures to describe what he believed were "personality types".
What was the goal with all this? Well, Carl Jung was a Swiss psychoanalyst, and by associating certain patterns of behavior with different mental illnesses, he aimed to make their diagnosis easier for other psychiatrists. So, understandably, Psychological Types is full of technical language that may be hard to understand for anyone who isn't already familiar with the field of psychology. This is why a lot of other websites and other authors, while relying on Jung to describe types, tend to water down concepts and inevitably miss some important context that can't be properly explained until you take the effort to read the entire thing. That's why we have like 10 different descriptions of the same type or functions floating around.
Jung associated Fe-types like ENFJ or ESFJ with hysteria. Of course, this was back in the 19th century, and the target of this diagnosis was almost always women. Thankfully, it's no longer an official mental illness.
⚠️ An important consideration: most of the original texts that laid the foundation for MBTI to exist are from the early 19th century. Expect a lot of sexism and traditional gender roles.

"It may seem superfluous to the reader if I add a special chapter on definitions of terms to the text of my study. However, I have had ample experience of the fact that it is precisely in psychological works that one cannot be careful enough with terms and expressions, since it is precisely in the field of psychology, as nowhere else, that the greatest variations of terms occur, which often give rise to the most stubborn misunderstandings." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 476).

I will not be listing every single concept, because it'd take the entirety of this post and even more to explain what everything means. I'll list the most common ones that show up when describing types.
🫂 Extravertion and Intravertion:

"If we look at the course of a human life, we see how the destinies of one person are more conditioned by the objects of his interests, while the destinies of another are more conditioned by his own inner being, by his subject. As we all deviate somewhat more to one side or the other, we are naturally inclined to understand everything in terms of our own type." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 4)

As I said before, extraversion and introversion have different meanings in this area, so when we talk about an extraverted type, we mean to say that it's a type whose dominant function is an extraverted one. To understand better what is an extraverted function, we need to have two vital concepts in mind: subject and object.
🌎 The object, in this concept, is anything that exists outside your mind: it may be the world, it may be people, it may be experiences, it may be sensations, anything that is not inherently part of you. It may be what's happening in your environment, or the environment in itself. It's the external, that which exists without needing any additional interpretation or guessing.
👤 The subject is you. Your mind, your feelings, your values, your logic, your impressions, your subjective interpretation of ideas or people or what's happening around you. Anything that is purely personal, be it your inner understanding of how things fit together, your interpretation of a painting, your like or dislike of a song, etc. Your subjective experiences or thoughts, that's the subject.
In a way, it's you, the subject vs. the world, the object. Of course, there's much more to this, but this is the easiest way I can explain it. You'll see these two concepts popping around because they're the very foundation of functions.

"But every human being possesses both mechanisms, extraversion and introversion, and only the relative predominance of one or the other determines the type." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 5).

Extraversion and Introversion, as I was saying before, are defined by what's your disposition towards the external world vs. the inner self. If your decisions are mostly influenced by what's happening outside your mind, then we are talking about an extrovert. If your decisions are influenced by your own inner world, regardless of what's happening outside of it, then we talk about an introvert.

"If the orientation towards the object and the objectively given prevails in such a way that the most frequent and most important decisions and actions are not conditioned by subjective views but by objective conditions, we speak of an extraverted attitude. If this is habitual, we speak of an extraverted type. If someone thinks, feels and acts, in a word, lives in a way that directly corresponds to objective circumstances and their requirements, in both a good and a bad sense, then they are extraverted. He lives in such a way that it is obvious that the object as a determining factor plays a greater role in his consciousness than his subjective view. Certainly he has subjective views, but their determining power is less than that of external objective conditions." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (pp. 384-385).

It's important to know that Jung initially described only four functions: Feeling, Thinking, Intuition, and Sensing. These functions would be either extraverted or introverted depending on how they relate to the external, objective world vs. the inner, subjective world. For example, Extraverted Feeling (Fe) is an extraverted feeling function because it favors the external feeling environment over more personal, subjective feelings that only belong to the subject.
In contrast, the introvert prefers to make decisions based on their inner self, on their personal views and convictions, regardless of what's happening around them. Someone whose function is introverted will not value the outside world a lot, and feels like is a threat to them:

"The introvert has an abstract attitude towards the object; basically, he is always anxious to withdraw his libido from the object, as if he had to prevent the object from overpowering him." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 380).

Now that we have some basic concepts cleared out, I hope understanding the Extraverted Feeling type is a bit easier. I want to start by how Jung described Fe:

"Feeling in the extraverted attitude is oriented towards the objectively given, i.e. the object is the indispensable determinant of the way of feeling. It is in accordance with objective values. Whoever knows feeling only as a subjective fact will not readily understand the nature of extraverted feeling, because extraverted feeling has freed itself as far as possible from the subjective factor and has instead subjected itself entirely to the influence of the object." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 411).

❗️We have to understand here that feelings are not emotions. Under this context, feeling is what we either accept or reject, what we value or not, how do we feel about something. An emotion, in this context, is something that causes a bodily response: if you feel angry, your heartbeat increases, your arms shake, and your face turns red. If you feel sad, you'll start crying and shaking. If you feel happy, your heartbeat increases and you smile. In contrast, just liking or disliking something may or may not make you react in any way. For example, let's say that you have an intense dislike of a celebrity. You don't start shaking and crying just because you dislike that celebrity. But what if you're a fan of a certain band? If you listen to one of their songs, you may start feeling happy. In both of these cases, we have two concepts floating around: a "feeling" (disliking a celebrity or liking a band) and an "emotion" that may be a reaction to that feeling (feeling happy when listening to your favorite band).
Feeling types usually have this misconception going around that we're emotional wrecks and can't think logically. This misunderstanding comes from the confusion that Feeling means being emotional. And while a feeling can give rise to an emotion, it's not emotion in itself, these are two different things. To put it simply: Feelings are values, and emotions are reactions to those values.
Now, to continue on how Jung described Fe, he gave a great example of how this type of Feeling is influenced by the outside world:

"I can feel compelled to use the predicate "beautiful" or "good", not because I find the object "beautiful" or "good" out of subjective feeling, but because it is appropriate to call it "beautiful" or "good"; and appropriate insofar as a judgment to the contrary would somehow disturb the general emotional situation. Such an appropriate emotional judgment is by no means a simulation or even a lie, but an act of fitting in. Thus, for example, a painting may be called "beautiful" because a painting hung in a salon and signed with a well-known name is generally assumed to be "beautiful", or because the predicate "ugly" could offend the family of the happy owner, or because the intention on the part of the visitor is to create a pleasant emotional atmosphere, for which it is necessary that everything is felt to be pleasant. Such feelings are directed according to objective determinants. As such, they are genuine and represent the entire visible feeling function." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (pp. 411-412).

A common misunderstanding surrounding Fe, and by extension Fe types, is that Fe is by nature insincere and fake, and that we're double-faced and superficial. But I think of it differently: if your friend got a bad haircut and they look terrible, is it dishonest to say that it isn't that bad if it comes from an honest intention of not wanting to hurt their feelings over something they can't change? Do you always need to tell people what you think, regardless of how it may affect them? I think honesty without kindness is just cruelty.
But, moving on!

"The evaluations made through the act of feeling correspond either directly to objective values or at least to certain traditional and generally accepted standards of value. It is largely due to this kind of feeling that so many people go to the theater or to a concert or to church with properly measured positive feelings. It is also to thank for the fashions, and what is far more valuable, the positive and widespread support of social, philanthropic and other cultural endeavors. In these things, extraverted feeling proves to be a creative factor. Without this feeling, for example, beautiful and harmonious sociability is unthinkable. In this respect, extraverted feeling is just as beneficial and rational a power as extraverted thinking." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 412)

To me, Fe represents that desire for human connection, to feel community, to think about others. We live in an age where hyperindividualism is encouraged everywhere, to care about yourself only, to isolate and disregard anyone who doesn't make you feel good. If that kind of mindset is pushed constantly by corporations and influencers, a lot of people will have a hard time understanding something like Fe, since it opposes everything hyperindividualism stands for. It's frustrating, but I think it's also not surprising to see a lot of people in the MBTI community having an intense dislike of Fe types, especially Fe-dom types, because of this. The idea that only you, as an individual, matter, is so prevalent that for some people, caring about something other than yourself is just dumb.
⚠️ Another thing to take in mind is that Jung determines the dominant function by what we value the most. By this, it means that your intention is what matters, not the results. For example, a socially awkward person can be an ENFJ as long as they value the outside feeling environment over everything else, no matter how clumsy they may be at it. We tend to think of ENFJ as mind-readers, masters of socialization, or community leaders, and it certainly can be the case! But, just as the ENFJ can be a well-loved, charismatic therapist, it can also be the nervous shrinking violet who awkwardly tries to please people around them. We often make the mistake of measuring someone's preference of a function by how "skilled" they are at it, by how much positive results come from them using that function, when in reality, you can be an absolute dimwit and still be a Ti-dom. Your dominant function is always the one that dictates your decisions, regardless of the results of those decisions.
Now, as with all functions, Extraverted Feeling has its dark side.

"However, this beneficial effect is lost as soon as the object gains excessive influence. In this case, the overly extraverted feeling draws the personality too much into the object, i.e. the object assimilates the person, whereby the personal character of the feeling, which is its main stimulus, is lost. This makes the feeling cold, objective and untrustworthy. It betrays a secret intention, or at least arouses such suspicions in the unbiased observer. It no longer makes that pleasant and refreshing impression which always accompanies a genuine feeling, but one senses posturing or acting, when perhaps the egocentric intention is still quite unconscious." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (pp. 412-413).

It's possible to care too much. When Fe gains excessive influence over the psyche, it places so much value on harmonious relationships that it comes at the detriment of the subject. Unhealthy Fe demands that you adapt to every single social environment, to make sure to please everyone, and to sacrifice your personhood in favor of the external feeling world. This is why the unhealthy Fe user comes across as fake and dishonest: it's impossible to be a different person to fit in with different social settings without sacrificing your integrity.

"Since situations in life constantly alternate with one another, triggering different or even contrasting emotional tones, the personality dissolves into just as many different feelings. One time you are one thing, the next time something completely different - apparently, because in reality such a diversity of personality is impossible." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 415).

When we talk about types turning unhealthy or acting in erratic or destructive ways, we also have to talk about their inferior function. After all, is your inferior function that keeps your dominant function in check, so to speak. Your inferior function is a sensible counterpart that, while it opposes your dominant function, it provides a different perspective, like another voice that says "yes, but..." to anything you say. This is the role of Introverted Thinking (Ti).
❗️Contrary to popular belief, inferior Ti is not when you lack intelligence, logic, or intellect. To begin with, Thinking isn't related to intelligence. It can lead to it, but just like Feeling can lead to emotions, it ultimately isn't emotions in itself. In the same way, Thinking can lead to intelligence, but it isn't intelligence in itself. It's a process of thought, not the result of that thought. For example, you can think about a math problem, but that thinking may not necessarily lead to a correct answer.
The relationship between the dominant function and the inferior function is the most important one. If the balance between the two functions is disturbed, it leads to destructive or toxic behaviors, or as how Jung called it, neurosis. So what is the relationship between Ti and Fe?

"You can only feel "right" if nothing else disturbs your feelings. But nothing disturbs feeling as much as thinking. It is therefore easy to understand why thinking is suppressed as much as possible in this type of person. This is by no means to say that such a woman does not think at all; on the contrary, she may think a great deal and very intelligently, but her thinking is never sui generis, but an epimetheic appendage of her feeling. As far as feeling permits, she can think very well, but any conclusion, however logical, which might lead to a result disturbing to feeling, is rejected a limine. It is simply not thought." Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 414)

Thinking is the opposing force to Feeling. And for a type that values Feeling the most, it's only to be expected that it tries to suppress Thinking the most. If a logical thought has the power to disturb the social harmony, the average or unhealthy ENFJ will do their best to pretend it isn't there. But it's impossible to completely suppress a part of your mind. The thoughts that you're desperately trying to push away, will always come back in different forms:

"Unconscious thinking reaches the surface in the form of ideas, often of an obsessive nature, whose general character is always negative and devaluing. There are therefore moments in women of this type when the worst thoughts attach themselves to the very objects that the feeling values most highly. Negative thinking makes use of all infantile prejudices or comparisons that are suitable for casting doubt on the value of feelings, and it draws on all primitive instincts in order to be able to explain feelings as "nothing but". Jung, Carl. Psychological Types (p. 417).

By this, Jung means that the suppressed Ti will leak out in the form of harsh criticism, prejudice, or comparing people according to unreasonable expectations of them, destroying the previously positive feelings about them. Basically, Ti will turn destructive, making the usually pleasant ENFJ assume the worst out of someone.
All of the above paints a picture of a dishonest, paranoid, and troubled ENFJ. They're desperate to win people over, to make everyone happy, but they have lost themselves in this desire and sacrificed their integrity to the point they sound hollow, they lack substance, and the more they try, the less convincing they are. At the same time, their inferior Ti makes them think all sorts of terrible things about the people around them, and they start doubting their relationships and the sincerity of the people they love.
🫂 I will be making a part two later describing Ni from Jung's perspective and how to tell ENFJ and INFJ apart. Ni is kind of tricky to describe, especially as an auxiliary function, but I'm sure it'll help a lot of people who may be confused about their type! Also, the majority of what I described above can be applied to the ENFJ's sensor counterpart, ESFJ. And as I said before, Jung only described four functions and eight personality types, which later expanded to 16 personality types under Myers-Briggs system, therefore there isn't a "function stack" to speak of right now, but I can do my best to describe the closest thing we have to it from Psychological Types.
I hope this was helpful. Thank you for reading! 💖

Hello everyone, first time posting here.
A couple of years ago I did a regression with a YouTube video. I was able to visualize everything and I felt like I was there in the story.
I was a man (woman now) and I remember vividly the sand and the dust in the air, the hot climate and the sandals I was wearing. I was going to sell my daughter to someone. Something that I didn't want to do, but I felt forced to.
Then, it changed to being in my house, with my family. I had a wife and kids, and a beautiful granddaughter.
Then I was somewhere else, in a rainy place. I felt it was the same life, but I have no idea.
Is it real? Can I trust this kind of "regression"?

Welcome to the ADS SOLAR blog, your go-to resource for all things solar in Sydney! With the increasing need for sustainable energy solutions, more homeowners and businesses are turning to solar power. In this post, we’ll explore why ADS SOLAR is your best choice for solar panel installation in Sydney and how making the switch can benefit you and the environment.

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2. Environmental Impact: Solar energy is a clean, renewable resource. By choosing solar, you're contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change.
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GENERAL CHAT MEGATHREAD: Please use this space to engage in general chat that is not related to Taylor Swift or gaylor. Direct all Taylor thoughts to the theory megathread, as they usually morph into theory conversations .
Do not police people for being "too negative" or being "unwilling to hear alternate view points." Gaylors posting here don't need to change or even be open to hearing "positive" or alternate views.
Remember to follow the rules of the sub and to keep things kind.
Do not comment or message moderators requesting approved user status.

About Palenque

Palenque is an ancient Maya city located in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It is renowned for its well-preserved ruins and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Ruins

Palenque is significant for its impressive Maya architecture, intricate carvings, and historical importance as a major city during the Maya Classic period (approximately 250-900 AD).
Key attractions include the Temple of the Inscriptions, the Palace, the Temple of the Cross, and the Temple of the Sun. The Temple of the Inscriptions houses the tomb of the Maya ruler Pakal the Great.
The site is typically open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM daily, but it’s advisable to check for any changes in hours before your visit.
Guided tours are available and highly recommended to fully appreciate the historical and cultural significance of the site. Tours can be booked in advance or at the entrance.

How do I get to Palenque?

You can reach Palenque by air via the nearby Palenque International Airport, by bus from major cities like Mexico City, Cancun, and Mérida, or by car. It is well connected by highways.

Practical Information

What should I wear when visiting Palenque?
Wear comfortable clothing and sturdy walking shoes. The climate is tropical, so lightweight and breathable fabrics are ideal. Don’t forget sunscreen, a hat, and insect repellent.
Pack light, breathable clothing, comfortable walking shoes, a hat, sunscreen, insect repellent, a reusable water bottle, and a camera.

Are there facilities available on-site?

Yes, there are basic facilities including restrooms, a visitor center, and small shops where you can buy snacks and souvenirs.

Can I take photographs?

Yes, photography is allowed, but drones and professional photography equipment may require special permits.

Nearby Attractions

Nearby attractions include the Agua Azul Waterfalls, Misol-Ha Waterfall, and the Roberto Barrios Waterfalls. The town of Palenque itself offers various accommodations and restaurants.
The Palenque Museum (Museo de Sitio de Palenque) is located near the ruins and houses many artifacts excavated from the site.

Accommodation

Palenque offers a range of accommodations, from budget hostels and mid-range hotels to luxury resorts. Staying in the town of Palenque or at lodges closer to the ruins are both popular options.
Palenque has a variety of dining options, including local eateries serving traditional Mexican and Chiapanecan cuisine, as well as international restaurants and cafes.

What is the best time to visit?

The best time to visit Palenque is during the dry season, from November to April, when the weather is more temperate and less humid.
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Help us in keeping this information up to date. If you notice any changes or inaccuracies, please let us know.
With love from Palenque ❤
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Before I explain why I'm curious, here's the progression: bVI, v, i, bVII. That continues a bit longer into bVI, v, iv, v, but I'm mostly curious about that first part.
Musical context:
This is the bridge of the song, in Bm, just coming from the first ABAB part in Cm with a half step down key change, before returning to the chorus up a whole step in C#m. Some of those chords are in different inversions, but I didn't think that would be as useful to include. Main context with that part is that the bass through the first five chords is just stepping up the scale starting on G, which is the root of the first chord.
Question context (I wrote this part of the message first before realizing I should start with the useful detail):
I wrote a song about a month ago that I really like, but the way I usually compose doesn't require me to think about the "correct" function of the chords in the progression I choose. I like how this part sounds, but my knowledge of progressions in other songs is very limited, and I'm not great at identifying progressions exactly by ear yet. I know a moderate to decent amount of music theory, scattered across a lot of different aspects, but without that many examples to compare to. A lot of my music ends up using unusual progressions, and a lot of them end up being very non-diatonic, but I've been experimenting with using more diatonic progressions recently. A lot of time I have trouble classifying what key and mode my songs are in because of their non-diatonic-ness, but in this specific case it fits nicely into a clear key and mode.
If it's useful, here's a link to the song in a sequencer. The part I'm curious about is at measure 57. https://onlinesequencer.net/3964515
If this kind of question is a good fit for this subreddit, I'll probably have a lot more similar questions about other songs I wrote that I'm not sure about, but I don't want to do that if it doesn't fit well. And I'm not sure where I would even start with asking about my older experiments, which are substantially weirder.
Edit: I forgot to mention that I haven't actually looked at the progression for the verse and chorus sections yet. They might also be interesting, but I suspect they're closer to "normal" than the bridge, so I didn't look at them yet.
Edit 2: I just realized it kind of sounds cannon-like briefly to me, but I think that's more coincidence than anything.

I'm planning on a making over my cookie-cutter 1955 matchbox. This is one of the ideas I had. I believe it would be a matter of changing the siding and expanding the window, adding decorative fascia along the roofline, turning the porch into a sunroom with window, and adding a portico around the door frame. Is this a realistic scenario?
The red is the actual roofline that would be hidden, solar panels unaffected due to the roof angle in theory.

After a long analysis of the fallout lore, analyzing the 3, 4 and new vegas (yeah I have no job) this is my following conclusion:
Fallout 4
The canonical ending of fallout 4 is the minutemen for the following reasons: the sole survivor, although by the time you start playing with it you can make absolutely any decision, he already had a personality and a story before written, Nate for example being a pre war ex-military, and Nora a lawyer, Codsworth for example is the best source to explore who Nate or Nora would canonically be, and the way they acted is what made him remain so loyal to the sole survivor even after 200 years, and considering that the actions that make Codsworth continue to like you the most are actions that refer to kindness and freedom, things that hark back to the American dream (Does it remind you of any factions?), remembering that it couldn't be the Institute or Railroad ending because Prydwen appears in the series and the ending of both factions involves destroying Prydwen, but you might ask, "Why couldn't it be the Brotherhood of Steel?", because if it was the brotherhood of steel, we'd see Liberty Prime in battle with the remnants of the NCR, since it would be a way of not losing manpower, and we'd also see institute's technology being used, since that's exactly what the brotherhood does, it steals technology. Also a very interesting proof that was hidden in the series as an easter egg is the Minuteman song that is played on the radio, which leads us to believe that probably the Minutemen helped settlements so much that the Sole Survivor had to help settlements outside of Boston, causing its radio to be spread even to California which is where the series takes place
Fallout New Vegas
Now what I'm about to say is going to be controversial but the ending that I believe was the canonical one is Mr. House, unfortunately there isn't much material to analyze but based on the post-credit scene of the series finale and also on the fact that bethesda seems to force you to choose the faction they want (as with fallout 4) you notice that it seems like they want you to go Mr. House's way because besides being the most viable is also the one that becomes the best for the wasteland, as for example in the name of the missions, ''The house always wins', in part VI of the mission Mr. House justifies that the main reason for the objective of protecting President Kimball is because he believes that he will be embargoed and this will not be good for his economy, but this is not entirely true, with Yes Man we can find out that in fact Mr. House was worried about being accused of assassinating Kimball and suffering a much harsher NCR penalty (such as an attack, for example) which proves to be true since NCR's main mission, "For the Republic, Part 2", asks you to kill Mr. House, which proves that Mr. House knew he was walking on thin ice in this diplomacy with the NCR, and if anything bad happened they would use it as a casus belli to justify killing him based on that, here's my theory of what happened: All the missions that Mr. House gave to Courier 6 went perfectly and the ending of Mr. House happened, and soon after all these events the exhausted NCR decided to cut ties with New Vegas, but a short time later right after the battle of Hoover Dam Shady Sands was bombed, and for the NCR the only person who could be logically responsible for this would be Mr. House (for having enough technology and arsenal for it) which results in the battle of the post-credits scenes, as a last blow, a desperate attempt to rebuild what was once a colossal bear that dominated the entire West Coast, but which in the end only hurt both sides, both independent New Vegas and the fallen NCR, because war, war never changes. And perhaps that's why Mr. House's plans to send people into orbit and colonizer ships never happend.
I would like to apologize if anything I have said has become strange or nonsensical, English is my second language, if anyone wants to correct me in any detail feel free to correct me

A dnd game where crptids and conspiracy theories are true for example: a icewall surromding the world wich is the end of the materail plain, or the world is a puddel ina giant ice ball, maybe the earath is hollow and thats where sea monters and kaijues like godzilla go, maybe mothman or men are real amd are a expement that expcaped and is misunderstood like manthing , maybe a guy invents a vaccine but puts taints them to brainwash and mindcontrol a civilization, maybe a guy creates avanced tech to control the weather maybe some people do blood sacrifices to control the economy, maybe a dictator once thought dead hidden in the hollow earth through a entrance in the hollow earth at the poles, maybe theres a evil group thats stealing ancient artifacts that’s very secretive to use these artifacts to change the tide of war maybe there research gets lost to time, maybe theres a creature perfect at hiding using unknown cave systems to kidnap prey, maybe theres a group of reptilens that can shapshift controlling a civilization from the background, maybe theres a group controlling the world from the shadows controlling the world deus ex sty