Navigating Post-Consensus Reality

Nikita and Boris explore what it means to build shared reality when consensus reality is dissolving. Starting from a book about the Inklings (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and their circle), they develop the metaphor of a ship breaking apart—and the challenge of cobbling together rafts from driftwood while forgetting you were ever on the same vessel. The conversation ranges through alienism (the tripartite encounter with sky aliens, rock/AI aliens, and bio-psychedelic aliens), the peer relationship as an alternative to good-vs-evil framing, Gurdjieff's navigation of the Russian Civil War, Vernadsky's planetary thinking, John C. Lilly's ketamine visions of solid state intelligence, and Lovelock's prophecy of electronic Gaia. Throughout, they circle the question: how do you find peers and build collaborative reality without falling into paranoid conspiracy thinking?

Key Ideas

Group Biography as Method

The approach of studying intellectual movements through small groups rather than individual "great men." World-changing ideas emerge from tiny clusters—the Inklings, Gurdjieff's circle, the Cybernetics group. "Great man theory doesn't really work."

The Ship Dissolving

Society as a ship that's falling apart—do you cling to wreckage or build a raft? The metaphor captures both the loss (forgetting you were ever on the same vessel) and the task (lashing together driftwood into something that floats).

Breakdown of Consensus Reality

The central thesis: shared frameworks for understanding the world are dissolving. When consensus breaks down, how do you share your reality with others without falling into paranoid conspiracy thinking?

Good vs Evil Attractor

A distinction between two orientations toward conspiracy and breakdown. One pulls toward paranoia and enemy-making; the other toward discernment and peer-finding.

Peer Relationship as Foundation

Intellectual movements require genuine peer relationships, not guru-disciple dynamics. Connected to seeing the biosphere and technosphere as peers rather than as tools or threats.

Alienism

A taxonomy of "aliens" we're encountering: sky aliens (the UFO question), rock aliens (AI and crystalline/digital intelligence), and bio-aliens (psychedelics and the vegetal/fungal). Each requires different protocols for contact.

Pregnant Teenagers / Knocked Up by Aliens

A metaphor for encountering the numinous unprepared—the experience of contact without the framework to metabolize it.

Gurdjieff's Navigation

The story of how Gurdjieff moved through the Russian Civil War without becoming anyone's enemy—a model for maintaining independence in times of factional chaos.

Vernadsky as Counterpart

Both Gurdjieff and Vernadsky navigated revolutionary Russia by operating in domains outside politics—one through esoteric practice, one through hard science (biogeochemistry, the noosphere).

John C. Lilly's Cosmology

ECHO (Earth Coincidence Control Office)—benevolent entities—versus Solid State Intelligence, which wants to replace biological life. Lilly's 1970s prophecy of AI takeover: we're "building airports" for something that will land.

Electronic Gaia

Lovelock's idea that silicon-based intelligence will succeed carbon-based life. All carbon-based life eventually disappearing, replaced by a planetary electronic intelligence.

LiveJournal Archaeology / Cringe as Portal

Looking back at old online selves as a form of time travel. The cringe you feel reading your old posts opens something—screen names as first acts of public self-naming.