Dylan Lawrence Moore

Here's the crap I posted over in the Introduction board:

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Greetings Everyone!

Going through the formality of introducing myself here. Let's see
what I barf up about myself. I apologize for my long-windedness and my
uh... word-tawdry phantasmagoria.

I'm from a standard stock of protestant Christian-bred abused,
public-schooled and TV-fed as a child. By 13 I had had enough to force
myself through the eye of the needle of revoking the beliefs spoon-fed
to me by my family, proudly announcing myself as a born-again atheist,
though barely believing it--it was done more out of spite for my mother
than anything else. It's one thing to say and one thing to do. This led
to an even more serious gauntlet of every day life, as I was terrified
to admit my new-found spiritual experience to my family, as I was still
being grabbed by the reins and forced to church every Sunday, where I
was able to receive the wonderful reaffirmation of how I just damned
myself to eternal gnashing of teeth and Christian rock.

The gnashing of teeth didn't last too long, though (probably had
something to do with the braces coming off), and I emerged from the
gauntlet victorious, able to stand solidly on the newly-discovered sands
of paradigm 2. This promptly formed into something resembling
self-centered nihilism, where I didn't believe in (and honestly couldn't
conceive of) the existence of emotions. I decided I was agnostic when I
bothered to look up the definitions of the words aetheism and
agnosticism.

A new eye of the needle reared its head at me by the time I was 19.
It was set rolling by a first girlfriend at the age of 17 (the whole
"emotions don't exist" idea got a serious blow from that one), the
ever-mounting tension with my mother, and the presence of a third
unexpected ingredient: a martial arts instructor that really knew his
shit. I had done other arts in the past (Taekwondo, Kung Fu, Tai Chi),
but they were nothing like the experience I had doing Aikido at this
place. To put it shortly, this ripped up my body, mind, spirit (or
whatever permutations you prefer of this triad) and I was able to look
at the flayed and tattered pieces of myself in the mirror and...
reorganize them as I saw fit. A... spiritual experience, if you will.

While this was happening the mother situation finally exploded. I
realized that the way she controlled me was always by threatening to
take something away that I liked or that I needed, and by that time she
only had two things: my car (which I had almost fully paid for but was
technically in her name) and a cell phone she was paying for. One day I
just sucked it up, walked into the house (in which I was no longer
staying), placed the keys and the phone on the table and walked out. It
felt like I had slit my throat over an altar, upon which rested car keys
for an 2000 Alero and a cheap-ass cell phone. The most recent version
of Dylan died that day. Please prepare yourself for the new model. Would
this be considered defooing?

(Quick summary of the mother situation: she finally convinced me to
talk to her again and our relationship made a 180° turn after she
started asking me to buy her pot.)

I was in a peculiar situation, having emerged from paradigm 2 and
preparing to organize a paradigm 3 about me. When I had gone through the
first gauntlet, I had assumed that I had found the best paradigm
findable and considered the previous to be worthless and stupid. I was
starting to do the same thing this time where I had to stop and think:
wait, if two times now I stood in a paradigm I had believed was the
best/only one to have and they were crushed as I was forced into a new
one, who said my current one was worth a damn? I wasn't really sure what
to do with myself. So I started reading.

I had thrown myself into the world of self-dependency without a
fuckin' clue how to behave in any social interaction (you know, standard
operating procedure for abusives) and now in college where I didn't
know anyone, I didn't know how to make new friends either. So I just
read. The hook first got me with Wilhelm Reich. Soon I had moved on to
David Icke and caught a first whiff of Immortal Technique and Alex
Jones, then onto R. Buckminster Fuller and a myriad of others.

I lived for driving home on the weekends to do Aikido and to hang out
with a buddy from mine there. We would smoke pot and play chess,
discussing religion (mainstream and esoteric), politics, martial arts,
conspiracies, and drugs. At first I thought he was totally nuts. A thief
with a silver tongue, drug-user, and a misfit from the getgo (an
abusive himself) who was brilliant at disappearing as soon as there was
any work to do.

He also had a library. A serious one.

The reading continued. At first, I was mostly interested in
conspiracy theories (I had the standard bout with the 9/11 issue),
martial arts books, and anything related to esoteric "energy"
interpretations (especially anything sex-related). My buddy finally got
me with guys like Peter Carroll and Carlos Castaneda. However, the
school went on and something very interesting happened. I had been
noticing in the chemistry department (I majored in chemistry) how my
collegues would often refuse to talk about another academic subject on
the grounds that they were a chemistry major. "I can't talk about
psychology, I'm a chemistry major!" Even worse, I started noticing I was
doing the same thing (although not to the same extent as some as the
dumbfucks in there): using my education as an excuse for stupidity.

While I had been parsing this out in my head (it's hard to admit that
your schooling is worthless right up front when you're coughing up
thousands a semester for it), one weekend I went back to do Aikido and
while hanging out with my pot-smoking chess buddy, he started telling me
about a podcast he had been listening to that had been playing an
interview with R. Buckminster Fuller. My friend reiterated a part where
Bucky got all upset and shouted, "There are scientists who don't know
how plumbing works!"

I sat there in silence. I don't remember if I was stoned or not, but I
heard the gears grinding between my ears, slowly, ever so slowly coming
to life. I started thinking about my fourth year of college, the insane
mathematics of physical chemistry and advanced inorganic spectroscopy
classes I was taking, and the laboratory in the oil refinery I had
started working in, and I thought to myself:

...I don't know how plumbing works...

That blew it open. I couldn't stand it. I saw the idiocy of my entire
schooling and the worthlessness of my pride in my academics (I had been
straight A student in high school and A/B in college), how I prodded
them up and displayed them to everyone in order to hide where I was
lacking in other areas. Fuck plumbing, I didn't know how anything
worked. I vowed to never use past accumulated knowledge as an excuse to
not accept newer knowledge. I went forth to learn anything and
everything I could about everything, no holds barred. I also decided the
first place to start with would be goverment and politics, something I
had more or less pushed aside as of little value. I had remembered my
whiff of Alex Jones from years prior and decided to go headfirst into
his radio show. Say what you want about Alex, but oh my, can that man
barf out some information. I just started writing down everything he
would barf out and not source and look it up myself. There was a good
six months in there where I was doing this 6+ hours a day.

This moved on through various new reading material and podcasts that I
won't bother mentioning and I received a new paradigm update: either
there is no top paradigm, or the top is not reachable. In fact, there's a
good chance that they're all fuckin' arbitrary, meaning I'm free to
mold and rewire them as I see fit and wear them like jackets on
different days depending on my mood and the weather. In fact, it seemed
to me like actively seeking to destroy my current paradigm would
speed up the process of finding newer and better ones. The best method I
have found for doing this is throwing myself into the fire of a
completely weird, new, foreign, and more often than not uncomfortable
situation just to see if I can survive it.

This eventually led to buying a one-way plane ticket to the other
side of the country (from Washington state to Vermont) and just up and
leaving. I was there for ten months before things started not working
out so well. I had found a job as a teacher of math and chemistry at a
private academy for highschool girls who played hockey (I'm serious.
That really exists), and this is REALLY where I started seeing the
absolute hells of our modern educational systems. It wasn't nearly as
bad as real public indoctrination camps, but the girls were only at the
academy five months out of the year, thus the academy's policy was to
teach the girls whatever they were learning in their public schools back
home. Halfway through the job I lost all momentum and had to bite my
tongue every day in the school to prevent myself from jumping on the
nearest table and denouncing the whole stupidity of the whole fucking
stupid system.

When I decided I had had enough of Vermont, instead of going home I
bought a one-way ticket to Europe, where I have been doing my best to
vagabond-imitation I could muster for a little over a year now. My
reading and podcasting has continued, and while on a farm out in the
middle of nowhere in Romania (not that I had really wanted to be there, I
had just been exiled out of Schengen) where two other Americans were
also helping out. Conversations started turning political with one of
them (he was an ex-Navy guy married to a Romanian woman and living in
Romania), where he started bashing me for my political
information/interpretations and going on and on about the "fundamental
problem is the violence of government and the abuse of children". He had
mentioned Stefan Molyneaux earlier in the conversation. At this time in
my life I had come across Stef briefly from my all-encompasses podcast
scrounging. I hadn't done much listening to him, but I had done enough
to tell that this guy was practically barfing out Stef word for word. I
didn't disagree with him (I wasn't able to agree, either, as I hadn't
done enough studying or rumination on either of the topics, especially
the latter), but I was rather irritated for him not putting it out in
his own words and constantly telling me I didn't know anything when he
didn't ask me what I knew in the first place.

Anyway, long story short (or... long story not-as-long-as-it-could-be), I be converted to anarchism.
I let my irritation about the guy's method of communication pass and
decided to go in for a second helping of Stef. The empirical breakdowns
on all the shit I had been studying up until that point was just what I
needed and here I am. From the looks of it I seem to have arrived here
by a slightly different route as the others and I hope I can offer
perspectives from new angles to everyone.

At this point in time I am very interested in psychology, the way people interact with each other, and personal power
(I guess I'm using it the same way Don Juan from Castaneda's whacky-ass
shit uses it). My life is filled with human-to-human interactions (as I
assumed all of ours are) and I've been trying to dissect one by one
what's going on and what is preventing me from acting
"virtuously"/impeccably in all situations. To follow that up, I am also
interested in showing people how to access their own personal power and
charge of their lives. Like the way Stef puts it, the problem with
government is horizontal, not vertical. Government will just dissolve
once the tax livestock stop supporting it. Or as Zos puts it: "Governed are the meek and of Heaven earn similar disgust."

I'm also interested in technical systems and the effects of
reorganization of such things to overcome problems. I.e. how can we fix a
problem ourselves instead of expecting the fuckin' government to do it
for us? This ranges from building stoves to designing insurance
companies.

So yea, hi everyone! Thanks for reading my soliloquy. I hope I can positively contribute here!

-Dylan