The Zizian Inside You
“We’re all just one hyperlink away from a new cult.” Adam Lehrer
Everyday Neurology 101: The right hemisphere receives sensory input, feeds it to the left hemisphere for processing, receives a report from the left hemisphere, synthesizes it, feeds its synthesis back to the left hemisphere for more processing, which reports back, and on and on until a decision is made.
This “lateralization” occurs rapidly, but in a healthy brain, the final decision takes a considerable amount of time.
When filmmaker Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monks at the Grand Chartreuse if he could film a documentary about the monastery, they said “yes” . . . . 16 years later.
A healthy mind moves quickly but finishes slowly.
An imbalanced mind moves and finishes quickly.
Jack LaSota, a technically brilliant computer scientist, moved from Alaska to the Bay Area in 2013,1 changed his name to “Ziz” and switched his sexual identity. He joined the area’s rationalist clubs: effective altruism, Center for Applied Rationality, and other groups where big intellects feed massive amounts of information to hyper-siloed left hemispheres.
By 2016, Ziz was writing a blog and attracting readers. By 2017, Ziz was the leader of the “rationalist fleet,” a group of people living on boats because they couldn’t afford Bay Area rent. By 2019, the Zizians were violently thrashing against the other rationalists in the Bay Area, at one point launching a protest at a rationalist retreat by donning black robes, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and blocking access roads, prompting local law enforcement to send in a SWAT team.
By 2022, the Zizians were murdering people. At least four, and they’re “persons of interest” in other killings.
Blog to murder in nine years.
It took the Carthusians 16 years to respond to a request to allow a documentary to be filmed at their monastery.
Gnostics, Adamites, Marxists . . . now Zizians. They’re all freaks of left-hemisphere nature, their right hemispheres sealed off tighter than the Epstein files. Different approaches, different times, different flavors, but all one big Venn of jackoffs marinading their mental illness in a paradoxical sauce of intelligent ignorance, the recipe for which only the left hemisphere has.
Ziz attracted followers with a blog.
That’s why Adam Lehrer says, “We’re all just one hyperlink away from a new cult.”
Modernity is left-hemispheric. That’s its calling card, that’s its essence.
A “normal” person today has a left hemisphere silo full of dry wood just waiting for a spark to ignite it.
The Internet contains more sparks than a comet, it creates more flames than a Bay Area Pride Parade, and causes more fires than homeless meth addicts.
Pew Research Center data from the late 2010s indicate that during the previous decade, people on the left shifted significantly more to the left than those on the right shifted to the right.
It’s the left hemisphere at work.
Semantically, “left hemisphere” and “leftist politics” are unrelated. In the real world, they’re fellow travelers.
Rationalist reductionism is the left hemisphere’s modus operandi. The left hemisphere gets information from the right hemisphere and, instead of processing and returning it to the right hemisphere for further synthesis, keeps the information, ruminates on it, and spits out conclusions faster than a baseball dugout spits tobacco juice.
The right hemisphere is the hemisphere of big-picture awareness, which brings caution and a measure of trepidation. If the left hemisphere took its findings back to the right hemisphere, it would just slow things down . . . and for no reason, as far as the left hemisphere is concerned. The left hemisphere by default deems its conclusions--spawned from its mighty IQ and rationality-- sufficient.
That’s why an imbalanced mind moves and finishes quickly, while a balanced mind moves quickly but finishes slowly.
The Left has been finishing quickly for hundreds of years, starting with the French Revolution, which was fueled by the mainstreaming of the French Enlightenment and its celebration of raw, naked rationalism: of a left hemisphere unbridled from the control of the right hemisphere and its seemingly endless hurdles like the ineffable, paradox, and the gestalt—sticks that tend to slow the spokes of progress.
Empirically, I don’t know if left wing violence is more prevalent than right wing violence. Both political poles are marked by the dogmatism born of a rogue left hemisphere, so both are capable of violence, which is always the product of a brain that reaches conclusions quickly.
But the left wing’s historical cornerstone--faith in rationality--makes it inherently left-hemispheric. Its cornerstone has no ground underneath it, detached from those things that tend to give right-wingers at least a little bit of pause, like tradition, religion, and family.
Ziz and many Zizians are in jail as the investigation continues to unfold. So that’s good.
But modern culture, combined with online culture, is cranking out more Zizians every day.
Or she arrived in 2016 . . . I’ve seen references to both years.