Simulacra and Simulation

What is the Matrix? Red pills, capitalism, religion and existentialism: How the Matrix was the starting point of my awakening from a slumber in boba neoliberal hell.

Communism. The scary C word. As an American, I, as I’m sure a majority of people my age, associated communism with authoritarianism, inefficiency, corruption, laziness, greed and worst of all, mass genocide. But after spending most of my life as generally pro-American and capitalist, in the past few years, I have finally decided that I was a Marxist. And if I am able to change my political views, given the right information, I believe many of you will be able to as well.

In the past two years, I have talked much about socialism and political science on social media, despite almost never talking about politics before. Some of you who have seen this online may have thought some of my points were interesting enough to research a bit more into my past, something I’ve never hidden. My resume seems distinctly pro-capitalist:

• majored in Economics at Duke University, perhaps the most white supremacist of the top 10 universities in America¹

• worked as a management consultant for the financial services industry

• played professional poker and won millions of dollars in a zero-sum exploitive game

• moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of possibly the most individualist and egoist career in the world, entertainment

• Korean American, hailing from possibly the two most anti-communist nations on planet earth

You may have seen this and wondered to yourself, is this guy a hypocrite? How can he talk about communism when his life has been the antithesis of communism? Besides the fact that many Marxist revolutionaries came from well-educated backgrounds, this line of thinking assumes that people have static ideologies after adulthood and that it doesn’t allow room for reconciliation between peoples, which is necessary for mass line building. When examining the American discourse in leftist communist circles, it seems infected with a liberal neopuritanicalism that condemns anyone who didn’t have all the “correct” views (many of which are anti-Marxist) and should thus be cast aside like a leper, with absolutely no room for nuance or dialectics. I find this sort of inflexibility in thinking to be distasteful, unproductive and self-serving.

Thus, I wanted to write my personal story of how someone like me could have their worldview shifted so much to come to believe in communism, in order to show an example of how class consciousness (can develop for potential class traitors and to encourage people in my own class to rethink what a transition for the United States into a socialist state would mean (no, it doesn’t mean that all your money will be taken away and everyone will be poor farmers or you won’t have iPhones [You can’t even survive without a smartphone in China]).

Now looking back after finishing this autobiographical piece, it is a long read. But because the change of my world view and ideology was so severe, it does make me wonder sometimes how I even got here myself. I wanted to make sure I documented it all for others to maybe find something to come to similar conclusions.

So with that, free.

Your mind.

Let me tell you why you're here.
You're here because you know something.
What you know you can't explain.
But you feel it.
You've felt it your entire life.
That there's something wrong with the world.
You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.
It is this feeling that has brought you to me.
Do you know what I'm talking about?

In the 90s, neoliberalism dominated the zeitgeist in America. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 signaled that Communism (even though technically, the Soviet Union was a socialist state) was officially defeated and debunked as a misguided ideology. Capitalist ideals like “greed is good” permeated the air on both sides of the political spectrum, as neoliberal Keynesians celebrated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Films like Austin Powers would even poke fun at the James Bond series for being outdated, now that capitalism had “won”.

Austin Powers and Wayne’s World are heavily anti-capitalist films.

I grew up as a Korean American in a predominantly liberal white county north of New York City, mostly as an adolescent in the 90s. Although my family and I were never in extreme dire straits, my mother’s anxiety over financial troubles in my early childhood in a low-income city in the county colored the way I was raised to see the world:

1. It’s bad to be poor. (When I was around 6, my dad bought me a Nintendo game that was around $50, and said “man, that’s a whole month’s salary right there.” He probably meant in terms of disposable income, but it caused a horrific guilt trip every time I played that game. But lesson learned, more money means more games.)

2. Poor people are poor because they’re lazy or dumb. (When my sister and I attended Korean school in a decidedly less child-friendly Manhattan in the early 1990s, my mother would comment that if we didn’t study hard, we’d end up like the homeless people we would see outside after school. [she’s a lot more chill now, I promise])

3. America is a fair and just nation. Named after the Korean War general Douglas MacArthur, I was taught at a young age that MacArthur was Korea’s savior from both the Japanese and the crazy communists in the North. Therefore, America as a nation was good and by proxy, the American dream was an honorable one.

In addition to these precepts, the Korean American New York-New Jersey-Connecticut tri-state area community is probably THE harshest academic crucible in the United States. My dad went to Seoul National University, and many of his alumni made up the elders of the Korean church I attended. Our church’s college admissions roster would probably rival that of the many magnet schools in the city and private schools in the country². On top of that, being Asian in one of the most competitive regions in the country was like playing Oregon Trail as a farmer, so forget having anything resembling a social life³.

The difficulty and the amount of hard work it took to go to a good school to get a good job to make a good living made it easy for me to believe that capitalism was meritocratic. Most of my life was contained in that small suburban bubble of a predominantly WASP and Jewish neighborhood, with parents uninterested (and somewhat unable) in talking about anything except for school or church. In addition to literally never being absent from school from K-12, I went to Korean school on Saturdays and church on Sundays. (Did I mention not having a social life?)

If my childhood were a science experiment, scientists would likely conclude that my neoliberal indoctrination was inevitable. Never being fully accepted by Koreans or into Korean culture⁴, I leaned into my American identity and was proud of its history and culture absorbing everything I could from the media. I was primed to believe that capitalism was not only fair, but that it was actually the system that maximizes total utility of a society, buying into the lie that communism failed because it incentivizes most citizens to be lazy and is thus inefficient. Greed was not only good in the self directed material sense, it was a virtue that helped progress society.

But my yet unexamined neurodivergent⁵ mind obsessed with Christian philosophy and apologetica at the time couldn't square a lot of the inconsistencies and contradictions of capitalism being supported by what seemed to be an intuitively socialist⁶ religion. By the time I was in high school, I questioned the typical millennial Asian American upper middle class fate: getting into a top 25 college, becoming a doctor or lawyer⁷, and live a suburban life resembling most of American (white) upper middle class society. As I attended Korean church every week and listened to sermons, it seemed contradictory that this was the goal of life when Christians were supposed to be the salt of the earth, to feed the poor and fight the oppressors.⁸ How could I reconcile the idea of “the love of money is the root of all evil” with neoliberalism being shoved down my throat?

This didn’t square well with my increasing adolescent existentialism. At the age of 12 on a bus ride to school one morning, I wondered how sad life was because I had likely already experienced 14-16% of it and I hadn’t even hit the good part yet⁹. And I was depressed by the fact that this was everyone’s fate, that ultimately (and this is if you’re one of the LUCKY ones): you go to school, you go to college, you had to work for the rest of your life at a job you likely would abhor. Even the cushy version of it (such as the lives most of my contemporaries are living now) seemed monotonous, meaningless work for the sake of making money, without true purpose. It seemed empty. As a Korean American Christian, it seemed counterintuitive to spend all this time to make all this money only to be told that life is not about hoarding material wealth.

My adolescent brain worked through these contradictions by somewhat settling on a plan: work hard, make a lot of money, and give back financially after you bought all the video games you need. I didn’t know how that would all square with the big guy in the sky, but I figured He would have plenty of time to explain it all to me in the afterlife.

---

What is the Matrix?

The Matrix is everywhere.
It is all around us.
Even now, in this very room.
You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television.
You can feel it when you go to work,
when you go to church,
when you pay your taxes.
It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

What truth?

That you are a slave, Neo.
Like everyone else you were born into bondage.
Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch.
A prison for your mind.

My church had a small youth group and we met every Friday night, ostensibly to worship¹⁰ but mostly ended up being chill hangs after an abridged service. One night, the pastor was sick, so the older kids, citing some vague connection to philosophy and Christianity, decided to show us a movie called the Matrix. A story about a regular dude, trapped in a never ending cycle of monotony, wondering if something is wrong with this life. His suspicions are confirmed and he breaks out of the system. He learns kung fu. He kicks ass and saves his friends. He can dodge bullets. And he has a pretty bad ass girlfriend in the end. Am I, in the Matrix?!

The action and special effects. The pacing. The cinematography. The melding of culture, counterculture, philosophy and guns. Lots of guns. They even made exposition mind blowing.

“Right now, we’re inside of a computer program?!” No, Neo, you’re just in capitalism.

For the rest of my life, I will probably remember the Matrix more vividly than the first time I’ve ever had sex.¹¹ Retrospectively, it had felt like my teenage brain had just been hopped up on 4 hits of acid. For the longest time, I had FELT the things Neo had felt in the movie. That there was something not quite right with the world. That those things needed to be fixed by someone, anyone. And yes, while Christianity does talk about the same sort of thing, there’s something about guns, kung fu, explosions and bullet time slow motion that makes it so much fucking cooler. I couldn’t explain quite what it was verbally, but my world view completely shifted to thinking, “wait, what ARE these limits I’m putting on life itself?”

Afterwards, I proceeded to buy a copy of the DVD¹² and turn it on everyday after school while doing my homework. I had watched it so much that eventually I could perform the entire movie myself: the dialogue with the proper inflection in the voices, the stage directions, the entire soundtrack and choreographed fight scenes.¹³ I even practiced limboing low enough to replicate the dodging bullets movement¹⁴ and would look like a total idiot running on lockers like I was Trinity during indoor track practice when our coach made us run through the hallways¹⁵.

I really really REALLY wanted that custom Nokia 8110. And those clip on rimless, temple-less sunglasses. Hot.

But more importantly, I started researching the philosophical ideas of the Matrix itself. The movie was the first time I ever took interest in the people behind the camera of a film (I had mainly focused on actors that I loved), and upon researching the Wachowski’s pasts and their influences, I also researched the various connections between the Matrix, religion and philosophy on those awful looking HTML Geocities personal websites.¹⁶ Although I was still strongly rooted in Christian ideology at the time, it was my first time looking into other non Judeo-Christian religions outside of Global History textbooks.

While I didn’t completely understand the anti-capitalist themes in the movie at that age, the movie made me reconsider what I was allowed to become in America. As an Asian American growing up in the 90s, it seemed that everything that seemed remotely interesting as a profession was only reserved for the white kids, that we had to know our place and do the grunt nerd work that was ultimately unsatisfying and soul sucking.¹⁷

Dealing with this for 40 years of my life as a kid seemed like mental suicide.

The white kids at school seemed eager to grow up, probably because they were considerably wealthier and had the privilege to do whatever they wanted¹⁸ when they became adults. Instead I wondered, with great economic anxiety from my parents, why anyone would want to throw themselves into a 9 to 5¹⁹ as soon as possible to just live out the monotony of the rest of their repetitive lives?

The Matrix also expanded the parameters of my adolescent existentialism which made me question the things I was doing, as I was literally being trained to become a neoliberal money making machine. My focus had primarily been in the maths and sciences, but afterwards I started to become much more interested in the humanities, showing a greater interest in American literature and history after the movie. I started taking an interest in music outside of the classical music I was forced to play on violin, performing 1990s KPop and punk rock emo music.

A true proletarian album, it got me through the drudgery of a worthless internship while I was in high school.

My first ever acting performance on film was for a fan fiction Matrix parody directed by a high school friend who was equally obsessed with computers and the film as I was and was a computer geek who would later go on to become a CEO of a well known tech company²⁰. I no longer wanted to be relegated to simply thinking and being, once awakened by the Matrix, I wanted to feel and do.

However, without a clear goal or idea of where to take these newfound impulses, I ended up continuing on the neoliberal plan: going to Duke University to pursue my studies in pre-white collar life. Once there, I would regularly question my Asian American contemporaries’ collective obsession with pursuing fields like medicine and law and engineering when it was clear that most of them were miserable. Around the time I was in college was when Asian Americans started to become much more involved in finance, and I drank the capitalist Koolaid that the financial services industry “greased the wheels of the economy” and it generated value for society by making business more efficient. I eventually acquired a financial services management consulting gig upon graduation.

But my rebellion against the machine would slowly seep through as I pursued other interests outside of academics: artistic endeavors and professional poker. Ironically, it was when I won over 2.5 million dollars from poker right after graduating college that made me even more jaded about capitalism. What did all the hard work and studying mean if people could just make money so easily playing a game for a living? Was society truly a meritocracy?

While the poker win was certainly a lot of money for a 22 year old²¹, living in NYC and its exorbitant cost of living dictated that I stay the course and so I started at my new job. I learned relatively quickly that “greasing the wheels of the economy” just meant making clients paying us to put out fires or to make them feel at ease about the decisions they made. As the financial crisis was taking shape in late 2007, one of my final projects was attempting to sell a mortgage insurance company a project that would be billed at an amount greater than the company’s market cap. I was laid off soon after in 2008 for pushing back, and decided that my firing was a sign that I was meant for other things. I no longer had an interest in “creating value” for banks and wanted to create film and art that resembled the work of my artistic heroes in high school, writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck who wrote stories that captured the social issues and existential moods of the early 20th century that woke society up.

---

3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

By the time I hit my 30s, although I had what many would consider an ideal life having the financial freedom to pursue my dreams, I was deeply unhappy with my lack of progress, not just in acting, but in starting a family and all those other arbitrary markers of nuclear family capitalist adulthood. My existentialism started to turn into nihilism as I experienced year after year of recurrent romantic and career failures.

But throughout it all, I never thought to consider the systems in place that were silently causing all of us misery. As an Asian American, you intuitively realize that American politics doesn’t care about Asians, and so I was still fairly apolitical, leaning somewhat libertarian. I was able to do well enough to maintain a modest standard of living by playing poker and investments, and as someone distanced completely from the corporate world for years, I was very isolated from society at large. Actors have less of a reason to meet anyone on a daily basis, and the one other social structure that I had left was the church.

Still a fairly devout Christian at the time, I took my faith relatively seriously. I went to service every week, became an official member of a church once I moved to LA²², tithed regularly, rarely drank, remained celibate, used to be a praise leader²³ etc. But sometime in the past decade, I got tired of waiting for the Holy Spirit to enlighten me and I wanted to see what Satan had to offer²⁴. The answer? Drugs, sex and electronic dance music (EDM), apparently (though unfortunately, not yet all in conjunction). While I will spare you the details on an autistic 30 something year old’s first sexual experience, the drugs made me see things in a way I again had never seen things before.

In the early to mid 2010s, I would spend my summers in Las Vegas, playing cash games and World Series of Poker tournaments. In 2013, my friend, who I’ll call John, and I were staying with other friends who were in Vegas for another reason, the Electric Daisy Carnival, an EDM festival held annually at the Las Vegas Speedway. As we were nearing 30, we thought it was silly that our friends were running around half naked around the casino, getting ready to get trashed listening to repetitive beep boop bop music. My musical interests were more into hiphop, the independent music scene and general pop at the time, and EDM was not quite as ubiquitous as it is now.

The Matrix had a rave scene early in the film (and the sequels also would have a similar type of dance scene) that I actually didn’t like at the time because of my conservative religious views. Fate, as Morpheus would say, is not without a sense of irony.

I remember watching this scene as a kid thinking, “Oh I guess that’s what adults go to party, that’s kinda weird.”

A few years later, John had started getting into the EDM scene and slowly started to chip away at my conservative Christian exterior. He was about to get married and proposed that I at least try going to a rave and dropping MDMA once during his bachelor party. I agreed, but was immensely anxious about it. I had never even smoked a cigarette before in my entire life and got drunk on occasions I could count on one hand. With MDMA, however, I heard stories of people having seizures and dying, having holes in your brain and other sorts of scary shit, but John put me at ease pointing to research that debunked a lot of my worst fears.²⁵ After deliberating for a while, I decided to give it a go, and we all dropped (rave parlance for taking the drug) as our bachelor group went to a rave in Montreal to watch Adventure Club.

The experience was…disappointing. Apparently, my anxiousness about dropping MDMA was so high that I psychologically willed the drugs NOT to work, while I saw a successful liftoff for the rest of our crew. And while the rave was still fun, I spent most of the time waiting for something to happen. I ended up having to urinate profusely though, so I knew my body took something out of the ordinary.

This led to John insisting that I try it one more time with him. By this time, I had already started to smoke some weed as I broke the “drug seal”, and he told me that this would probably relieve some of the anxiety I had the first time. When I visited him later that same year, we decided to go to a Zedd show with his partner and their rave crew. Here was the experience:

The venue wasn’t the greatest, the Armory in Washington, DC, where it looked like we were going to a track meet. It didn’t help that the night apparently was an 18+ night, meaning that everyone at the venue looked like a literal child²⁶. Fortunately, my mind was put at ease since we were mostly with people our age in John’s crew, which rolled (pun intended) 20 deep. John had given me specific instructions that I would adhere to religiously for the next few years:

1. Tums makes your stomach more basic which prolongs the effects and slightly dulls it, while vitamin C accelerates the effects but makes it more intense

2. take one tablet 45 minutes before the main DJ (usually when we got there), take one if necessary (AND ONLY ONE) re-up 1.5 hours into the main DJ’s set

3. make sure water is available at all times

4. load up on sensory goodies: candies, strobe lights, peppermint/menthol

5. stick with the group, if super crowded, leave with a partner

6. accept any and all massages (yes I thought this was weird too)

After dropping our first dose and waiting for the main show to start, I was handed a weed vape, which I took a huge drag out of. As it was the first time I had even gotten high at a show, I said to myself, “oh, this is nice.” Then as the pre-show DJ started to wind down and the sequence below (build for the first two minutes) started:

I got fucked up in a spiritual way.

The scene was unlike anything I ever thought possible at a show before, with the lights and special effects quite possibly being the craziest I had ever witnessed in my life up to that point. As the crowd started chanting “ba! ba! ba!” I couldn’t help but join in the communal chant, as if we were all one, worshiping together in harmony. I could feel the energy of the crowd of the people around me. As the MDMA started to intensify, I started to feel the body high and chills. I was “coming up” in drug parlance, and boy Mikey, I liked it.

Although I did not know I was on the spectrum at the time, I noticed a certain ability that I acquired, I could tell exactly how someone felt by just looking at their body language. I connected instantly with strangers around me with incredible ease that I had never felt before and for the first time in a LONG time, felt childlike wonder at everything I experienced. While it is still incredibly difficult for me to relate or even empathize with others sober, on MDMA it felt like second nature because I no longer was so inwardly focused with my thoughts. And Asian or not, I was down to party with anyone around me and make sure that everyone had a good time, whatever their ethnicity and however they were dressed (and there was a lot of weird shit).

I ended up going to raves whenever I’d visit John, which was a great way to self-limit myself from over doing it. And after a few events, I had a Biblical revelation.

In Christianity, the Bible says to be in communion with everyone, not just people in your class or religious group. But practically speaking, especially within the Korean American church community (heavily influenced by white evangelical fundamentalism), this is most certainly not the case. Elitism is rife in the Korean American church community, where it’s all about what school you went to, what school you sent your kids, what job they have now, are they married, how many kids do they have, did they or did they not send their parents on a cruise to Tahiti on their 60th birthday.

Part of the insular nature of the Korean American church community is a defensive measure, being part of an immigrant community in a land where you don’t speak the language or know the culture can be daunting without a social support structure. Most of our parents came from extremely impoverished upbringings, where their whole reason for coming to America was to avoid that fate for themselves and their children in America. As already somewhat of a recluse, I mostly only hung out with Koreans growing up from church or school, while extending that to almost exclusively just Asians by college.

But as I grew up and graduated from college, I only really expanded my social network to other Asian Americans from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, people who I ultimately felt most comfortable with my entire life. I would meet non Asians of course in my daily life but my social circles were mostly Asian exclusive. However, any cursory understanding of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount would dictate that I go out into the world out of my comfort zone, to go out to people who I’m not familiar with and be in communion with the masses. For most of my life, I had felt ostracized from America, so why should I make the effort to go out to spaces I’m not familiar with? This rationalization, similar to the “why should I vote when American politics doesn’t care about me” rationale, simply justified my laziness and inaction and a lack of true belief in the ideology, which is perhaps why I ended up leaving the church in the first place.

One of the ideas that I always struggled with in Christianity was the concept of Heaven: The Book of Revelation describes it as a place where all creatures will join in unison and praise the Lord. I always thought that was extremely…dull and boring, and wondered, “really? That’s it? I mean it’s better than burning for eternity so I guess I’ll take it.”

So when I visited John for one of our routine raves, we were going to watch one of my favorite acts, Above and Beyond.

My current song is Gratitude.

As always, it was a banger of a night, but for whatever reason, the set ended early, at around 2 AM (usually closed around 3:30-4:30 AM) and the lights flashed on. A large collective groan was audible in the entire hall as the mess of shirtless, sweaty, drunk and high cabal of ravers realized that the party was over. As I looked around the surprisingly multiethnic²⁷ crowd collect itself, I remembered those passages in the Bible and thought to myself, “this is what He was talking about!” Perhaps I was not in communion with other Christians per se, but I was enjoying time with other people and realizing that life is a much richer experience with many different perspectives in your life. And at that moment, as it all shut down, I only wanted it to go on for eternity. As it is in Heaven. Hallowed be thy name.

While the Bible isn’t 100% clear on what heaven will look like, it does talk about a redemption of the created physical world, where heaven comes to Earth. While most of us have Dante’s Inferno’s imagery of pearly white gates in the sky, a non-canonical imagining of Heaven, the Biblical interpretation is more akin to the earth’s return to the state of Eden. Out of all the church services, retreats, bible studies I had attended, going to raves was the closest I’ve been to imagining what a heaven on Earth could look like, with all the people with one voice in worship to a single ideology.

Of course, instead of religion, that ideology was getting fucked up and raging to EDM, but I was reminded of Nietzsche’s idea that the Enlightenment, for all intents and purposes, had proved that God was not real and that meant that Europe was bound to descend into nihilism. He warned that this nihilism would cause social decay unless a new moral grounding was found. As the 2016 Presidential election campaigns raged at the time and divisions in America were becoming more rife than ever, that moment at the rave of pure unadulterated unity without agenda reminded me of the political climate and how this was a nice reprieve, proof that people of many different backgrounds COULD get along, even if only for a moment, despite cultural, ethnic or political differences.

MDMA had renewed my optimism for society by giving a new perspective on the rest of the non Asian American people in society, that at our core, humans are social creatures and it is our natural instinct to cooperate and get along. While America is more divided than ever before, at the time the moment gave me hope that reconciliation was possible, not dissimilar to my feelings today about revolutionary optimism and why nihilism is incompatible with Marxism.

But where was that optimism to go? Still unengaged with politics, I squirreled it away as something “other people will handle and fix”, while looking forward to those trips to the DC area to rave and hang with John’s friends (pretty diverse group as well). I would have a totally different and much less rosy experience with drugs soon after.

---

Lysergic Acid Dythylamide

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I want to make clear that I do not endorse or condone the use of Schedule I drugs. Even controlling for all those factors, the long term side effects are still not fully known as not enough research has been done to ascertain them. I’ve also heard some say that it is not even effective for them, so YMMV. I am merely sharing my own personal experience with them to describe how my own world view shifted.

And after acid, they shifted a ton.

In the summer of 2016, the same friend John tried LSD for the first time. He recounted a mostly pleasant experience, as he had tried it with a group of friends outdoors, some of whom were experienced trippers who could manage any sort of what I would later call, technical difficulties. He described everything just seemed more vivid and lively, things just seemed more interesting. It was like seeing “life in HD”. John talked about how he read about how artists used it to open their minds and that it had no negative physical health effects.

Hold up, no bad health effects? Where do I sign?

I did a bit of research as before, but since MDMA had been such a good experience, I had more of a cavalier “why not?” attitude. In my readings, my eyes may have glazed over the sections on “Bad Trip” and more focused on the “no bad health effects” part of it all. Momentarily though, my eye did catch two interesting tidbits. First, acid apparently accelerates the onset of schizophrenia if you’re naturally prone to develop it. I was around 33 at the time and reasoned that I probably wasn’t schizo since I was at the tail end of when symptoms should’ve shown if I was, so I was good to go. Second, that the CIA experimented with acid for mind control purposes but ultimately abandoned the project.

So late 2016, the week before the end of the year, I was at John’s house ready to rock and roll. The stage was supposed to be a controlled environment, where he would be monitoring me (in drug parlance, he was “trip sitting”) while I was tripping to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. The house was just going to be me, him, his wife and their three dogs. I was a bit unnerved when my friend's wife Jenny²⁸ brought over her friend Marisa²⁹, who at the time I had a mini crush on yet also a slight aversion towards³⁰, an unexpected variable in the equation of this petri dish of experimentation. By the time I knew she was going to arrive, I had already dropped 140 ug of lysergic acid dythylamide at 2:46 PM.

In my research, I had skimmed over the bad trip sections, as they warned caution of having a bad mindset or having mental health or depression issues (I was years later to be diagnosed with moderate Major Depressive Disorder). At the time, I was not as in tune with my mental health, and thought that my other drug experiences had been fine and controllable so I didn’t think too much of it. That was probably my first mistake. I was on the east coast and it was during the holidays, so we were going to be confined indoors and it was going to be dark soon. However, at the time, I was still pretty cavalier and was excited for things to start going.

3:21 PM: I felt a little antsy at nothing happening. Remembering the failure to launch with the first time I did MDMA, I anxiously wanted to “boost” the trip, so I made the ill advised idea of suggesting that we watch a movie to put me in the mood, and popped in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

Probably the absolute worst movie to watch while tripping for the first time.

3:36 PM: I clocked the first sign of the drug taking effect. Similar lightheaded sensation as cannabis, nothing too out of the ordinary hit me until around 4PM, when visuals started glowing, lights in kaleidoscope type shapes kept rotating on surfaces from reflecting sunlight.

4:07 PM: I suggested a different movie, and we started watching Pixar’s Up. The cartoony imagery was soothing at first, my friend’s dog turned into a little cartoon cloud by my feet. However, by the time the house went through the thunderstorm on the way to Paradise Falls, I felt fully immersed in the action, feeling acutely the danger of falling thousands of feet from the sky in a destroyed house. After the house finally escaped the storm, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I turned to my friend John, and ask, “Hey, uh, it doesn’t get any more intense than this does it?”

John looks at his watch and says, “Dude, you’re not even peaking yet.”

“Peaking yet.”

“Yet.”

I distinctly remember saying in my head, “Oh, I don’t think I like this trip very much anymore.” And that being the beginning of the end.

4:58 PM: In my notebook where I was documenting my trip, I can read John’s handwriting that took the place of mine, where I no longer had the capacity to write words, let alone see straight lines on a piece of paper. I started descending into what I now know as thought loops, what I can only describe to the layman as terrifying perpetuating mental recycling: unending circular reasoning focused on the question of, “How did I get here?” Paranoia that my mind was being controlled by some CIA operative started to gestate, that somehow they had tricked me into taking this drug through this extremely circuitous manner in order to control me.

I became overwhelmed with the amount of neurological input my brain was going through, it felt like the wires of certain synapses were being reconnected in ways that would’ve never naturally connected had I lived 1000 lifetimes. Everything started to make total sense and total nonsense simultaneously; in some ways the early parts of the trip were glorious in that I remember feeling like I had ascertained the meaning of life, but was unable to articulate it.

Once the fear set in, the light quickly shifted dark. I glanced at one of Jenny’s two tiny chihuahua’s, who looked back at me and shivered. Now this particular dog shivered all the time (she’s really small), but that shiver made me believe that she was scared of something, and that I too, needed to be aware of this something that was scary immediately. What could it be? I looked around and the black leather couch I was sitting on turned into a black hole. I immediately got up and ran to the kitchen area with bright fluorescent lights.

5 PM: As darkness had already fallen, I glanced out the window and only saw black. I felt like I was in a scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where the whole world around me was starting to fall apart, and the only plane of existence was the kitchen I now found myself in. I can still remember various little details of that kitchen, the grease spots on the stove, the dimensions of the kitchen island, the arrangement of the seating, the look of the outlet. For around 3-4 hours, I would stand in that one spot, repeating phrases over and over again, like “No.” or “Whoa.” or “It can’t be…” If my brain was a computer, it was having trouble clearing the cache memory, as the same thoughts would repeat over and over again.

Experiencing this in real life is a lot less sad and a lot more terrifying.

By this time, John, having never trip sat before, became a bit concerned. He tried to throw me a joke by referring to something in my TV show I had just produced, to which I gave a laugh that he described as:

The sort of nervous laughter that comes when you know what was said was supposed to be funny but you aren’t sure why, but also knowing that at some point in the past you would have found it funny.

As I started to freak the fuck out, he texted his friend who was more experienced with acid who told him, “he just has to ride it out, there’s nothing taking him to the ER can even do.”

In the kitchen, I started to go deeper into the trip, amidst thought loops I was thrown yet another curve ball, in the form of what I would call a sort of time distortional field, something that I can only describe as such:

Let’s say there are three events, A, B and C, that happen in chronological order, from A to B to C. What I experienced was seeing event A, then C, then B. Because the order of operations was wrong, it seemed like I was going back and forth in time, and that I was being boxed into a mental time loop.

6 PM: My neuroses reserved a backup plan in case of a bad trip: I had read that a bar of Xanax could help hasten the comedown from the LSD entirely by relaxing the mind into relief. Around my 9th time asking for one, I finally took a Xanax. At first, perhaps because of placebo, it felt like it was working, and I said, “The plane is landing.” Jenny had put on a soothing YouTube video for barking dogs in the background, which had a gothic and ethereal like quality to the music. While the Xanax did relax me, my mind started to almost feel like it was separating from my body, and the heaven inspired music in the background made me think that it may be possible that I was in fact dead: that my body was now in another dimension still in the trip back where my soul used to reside.

While I had stopped going to church by then, my subconscious was still stuck in the Christian tradition. I remember my mind saying, “Whelp, if this is it God, I guess it’s time for me to come home” hoping that a chariot like the one carrying away Elijah was on its way to pick me up like an Uber. The YouTube video on their widescreen TV, which looked like clouds in my blurred vision of reality, seemed to open up to me. As voices started coming into my head, I wondered if I should have taken the schizophrenia warning a bit more seriously.

“This is it. I’ve made a terrible mistake and now my existence will just be relegated to this small sliver of reality for the rest of time itself. No more trying to fight it, it’s time for your existence to now end.” My mind fought back. No! I can’t give up, I have to fight! For survival! But why? What does survival even mean? The pillars of epistemology were crumbling where even solidly proven tautologies started coming into question. Descartes would have been unsure of his own existence. As I started to contemplate my situation, I started to realize that the only thing I didn’t try during the ordeal was to simply…give up. As someone who intellectualized every problem in life, I relied on my intuition to get me out of hairy situations often. I had always tried to control my surroundings with my intellect but a voice was telling me to let go, let go of trying to control things. In all my years in the church, I had never felt an experience as spiritual as this, almost assured that another reality existed outside of the one I was in.

I had experienced what I now know as an ego-death, where it felt as if my soul detached from my physical self and I could now objectively see myself with a self-awareness that I’m sure would take Buddhist monks years of training to accomplish. As autistic people usually can only relate to things as it relates to themselves, experiencing an ego-death was particularly harrowing because it felt like my very grip of reality was slipping from me. But in many other ways, it allowed me to see beyond myself in a way that I had never had been able to under the fog of my autism. Existence was all connected and dependent on each other for maintenance and sustenance, and the eternal source of newness was needed or life itself would be redundant and predictable and thus, meaningless. For the first time I was able to take stock of my entire life as if I were a third party observer to it.

I started to lament that it was only now that my existence was near its end that I had this new sense of self-awareness, things that seemed important to me no longer did, and I had a clearer understanding of what my desires and wishes were and how they related to my sense of self. But, almost as if I were in a movie where everything gets better for the main character once they learn the lesson of the ordeal they are going through, I started to come back to earth.

9:13 PM: While I was still high and had visual sensations from the acid and somewhat still dazed from the experience, my mental faculties returned to the point where I could interact normally with reality. John had some of his friends in the area over at that point, and I was just relieved to be alive and present in the reality that I was familiar with.

11:45 PM: Although I was completely overwhelmed, one of John’s friend convinced me to go to a Zedd show that day, to which I eventually agreed. I also took MDMA, my third substance for the day, and while not quite as intense as my usual experience from the residual heaviness, the positivity of the effects completely lifted me out of the bad place and cleared my head in thinking about the implications of what I had just experienced.

Most of my life I had been trying to search for an existence outside of my reality with religion, more specifically, through the Protestant tradition of the Christian faith. But I was also fascinated with existentialism, more specifically, what purpose your life had on Earth. The Christian faith says to simply follow Christ’s teachings and to spread his Word to those who are willing to listen, but practically speaking, this seemed so distant in practice from my life up to that point that it made me leave the faith to begin with, as I felt spiritually dead for most of my time in the church.

But my acid experience convinced me that everything WAS all one and interconnected, in ways that I couldn’t quite explain. Setting aside ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God, what I experienced defied logical explanation. I became obsessive about acid afterwards, researching various artists’ and engineers’ experiences with it in the 60s and 70s, trying to gain some sort of insight into what I saw by extracting whatever commonalities existed between my observations and theirs.

What I gleaned from most of the western experiences with psychedelics made them more prone to believing in collectivist ideologies, Buddhism in particular, as many cited the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a book that helped them process many of their trips, as the ego-deaths and dissociation simulated the feeling of death (without the part where you actually die) being the reason one gains the sort of wisdom one usually only receives on their deathbed. To me it made sense, when someone believes that their time is nigh their life “flashes before their eyes”, because there is nothing left to contemplate but your life’s history.

The individualism of the west, especially America, leads to egoist self-centered thought. Materialism eventually causes people to worship greed and be constant consumers, to be constantly distracted by products or Hollywood and media propaganda. And as you work harder and move up the corporate ladder, you simply develop more expensive tastes due to hedonistic adaptation, rendering statements like “I’ll cut back on work once I’m making X amount” meaningless, as each time it is uttered the X becomes larger. By the time most Americans are on their actual death bed, they’ve found their constant pursuit of capital to be spiritually empty and are filled with regret of not searching for something deeper earlier in their lives.

This is something I’ve always believed through my Christian faith before Marxism, which is why I always had a deep interest in existentialism, despite my status as a “capitalist” millionaire. Not only in spite of, but because of my experiences as a professional gambler, I understood on an intuitive level how capitalism incentivizes sociopathy. And on a grander scale, zero-sum games necessarily increase class antagonisms, ultimately leading to civil unrest and violence.

When I went on the acid trip, Donald Trump had just been elected president, but was not yet inaugurated. The optimism and hope I had from my experiences with MDMA were soon going to be challenged as his presidency would reveal antagonisms that had been festering unnoticed in America for decades. My LSD experience made me look truthfully inward at my own selfishness and greed, and, extrapolating from myself, that this cold capitalist avarice existed in the hearts of Americans. From MDMA, I believed a better world was possible and, from LSD, I now knew what was in its way of its realization. While these obstacles seemed overwhelmingly insurmountable, it opened up my curiosity as afterwards I started paying a lot more attention to politics, especially after my experiences in promoting the TV show I had produced that year.

---

The Road to Salvation from Black and Russian Messiahs

What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this [holds up a Duracell battery].

As I stated before, my artistic inspirations for going into entertainment were driven by my love for American early 20th century literature. Stories like The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye spoke to the social ills that I would later realize were the result of capitalism (the Great Depression, the Roaring 20’s and the soullessness of American culture of consumerism, respectively). I always felt something was off about the world and how it worked, and I’ve lived my life searching for why, especially in my artistic writings and expression.

While there are of course the perks of being a celebrity that anyone can cite as reasons to go into entertainment, my primary goal was always to humanize Asians so that we too could be considered American and integrated not just economically, but politically and socially into American society. My resentment came from the idea that as an Asian American, my destiny was pretty much set for me. I saw my departure from consulting and the professional Asian American sphere to be a rebellious act in and of itself, that many Asians would need to do in order for us to self actualize: we needed to pursue the arts, create ideas and ideologies and make our imprint on society in order to really be a part of it instead of merely being continually outsiders looking in.

My first impression of the industry almost 15 years ago was that Asian representation was hampered by talent, as I found many Asian American actors at the time to be severely lacking. However, from watching Korean films, I knew that it wasn’t that Asians don't have personalities³¹, but that they simply weren't trained in the same way other non Asians were in the arts, many of the best actors at the time³² had trained from an early age. As someone who had succeeded in life by first learning a subject and then applying that knowledge, I reasoned that Asian Americans needed to put in the preparatory work to become successful as a group, and enrolled at an acting conservatory in NYC.

During my first few years in Los Angeles after moving in 2012, I started to realize the systemic reasons by which minorities, and Asians in particular, were not represented fairly in Hollywood: the American media machine is only driven by what maximizes their own profit, that is, playing into preconceived biases of the majority of the audience to make them feel comfortable about their racist views of the world. A lot of the change from the way African Americans seized control of their own narrative came from them independently building media infrastructure separate from the Hollywood system starting with Blaxploitation in the 1970s and continuing with hip hop culture and Harlem comedy in the 1980s. Spike Lee and Tyler Perry created their own media empires by creating content that spoke to Black audiences first over the mainstream. Asian Americans had done almost none of this, because they lacked first and foremost a unified idea of what it meant to be Asian American.

The pilot TV show that I had finished by the end of 2016, was something I had written that really highlights the soullessness of the Hollywood system, particularly for Asian Americans, the most excluded from their own narrative control in the west. I’ve already written about my experiences pushing the show in the past, but what I wanted to highlight about it specifically here was that I did feel like it was my magnum opus, having the grand aim to be the show that not only launched my career, but changed the way Asian Americans were perceived in America. Like Spike Lee, I wanted to make a show for Asian Americans by Asian Americans, as 90% of the cast and crew were of Asian descent.

As I mentioned in a previous article, the biggest disappointment I had with the show itself was not that it didn’t get picked up by Hollywood, but that it seemed like the self-appointed “tastemakers” of Asian Americans ignored its existence in favor of their pet projects with Asian actors already established in traditional Hollywood verticals. My conclusion was that most Asian Americans in the media didn’t really care about representation, but rather their own place within the white media power structure. They wanted to cavort with celebrities that had made it in Hollywood already, those people who had already been ordained by the Hollywood system, selected to be the next Marvel superhero or in the next Star Wars film. I couldn’t care less about either of those things, because I didn’t see them as our stories.

As a result of my disappointment, my advancing age into my mid 30s and the anxiety over losing millions in the cryptocurrency market, by 2019 I had become exhausted emotionally over the industry. While re-evaluating my life, I was at a loss for what I was going to do for the remaining 40-50 years I had left. When I told my mom about my depression, she suggested that I do what I did in the past to figure things out: read.

So read I did. I read many books about the entertainment industry first, autobiographies such as those from Ovitz and Iger, as well as general history about the industry and the history of the technology trends that transformed it. I then started to read about Netflix and Steve Jobs, as both stood at the intersection of entertainment and technology, Netflix with disrupting the entire Hollywood model and Jobs with disrupting the way artists collaborated on projects with his involvement with Pixar. Afterwards, I read many books about tech titans like Musk and Bezos as well as books about business from other big tech giants. While I still wanted to be an artist, from a realistic financial standpoint, I concluded that my best move was to exit the entertainment industry and go back into corporate, and so by the end of the year, I started studying for the GMAT and learning Python programming.

However as the new decade ushered in a cascading of events that I could never have predicted, my own perception of reality would go through yet another monumental shift. Not a week after COVID-19 started spreading in the United States, horrific hate crimes including the slashing of a 6 year old boy in Texas started happening. And the worst part was that these stories were being suppressed by the media.

Jay Taters 🧢🌹🚩🍟🥔🍠 @JayPotato1

@realDonaldTrump You see this? Two children and two adults were stabbed at Sam’s in Midland, Texas, bc ppl associate Asians with the coronavirus. Calling it the Chinese virus encourages fear and racism. I will hold you personally responsible for every hate crime here on after.

It was sickening that this was barely covered by mainstream media.

Unable to concentrate on my GMAT and Python studies, I went into an obsession into figuring out why this was happening. While I was aware of anti-Asian hate crimes in the past, the viciousness and the deafening silence from the media made me think that something else was going on. While my experiences in Hollywood had me started on the path to searching for answers about racial identity, the actual red pill for me came in the form of an autobiography written by the real life Morpheus, Malcolm X.

The NYC suburb school system is heavily influenced by white liberalism. When talking about figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. during elementary school, we were essentially taught that he essentially solved racism simply by preaching a message of unity and equality. However, it seemed curious that the contradiction that there were very few Black kids at school in one of the wealthiest counties in the country, never seemed to be addressed or questioned. We barely even touched upon Malcolm X, or if we did, it was all under the impression that he was the “evil” Black leader who chose hate over MLK’s more conciliatory message, one that was inspired by Gandhi and Christianity, vs. Malcolm X’s message which was inspired by violence and Islam. What made this most ironic of all is that Malcolm X’s body was buried less than two miles from the public schools I attended.

After reading the biography, it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

For the uninitiated, Malcolm X had extremely different experiences from MLK growing up, the first of which was location, while MLK grew up in the South, where segregation was much more pronounced, while Malcolm X grew up in the Midwest, and later on moved over to the Northeast, to Boston and finally Harlem, New York. While MLK grew up a preacher’s son, Malcolm X’s father was a Black liberation leader who along with 4 of his brothers, was brutally murdered by white supremacists. MLK was well educated and attended college at the age of 15, while Malcolm X was told by a teacher that he’d never become a lawyer and chose a hustler’s life instead.

After being arrested for larceny and breaking and entering when he was 21, Malcolm X turned his life around in prison. Although he never attended high school, he admired another inmate who was self-educated and commanded respect in prison simply through his intellect. He started to read from the prison library everyday for hours like a man possessed, even when the lights went out, holding his book up to what little light there was. While in prison, he was told about a Black Nationalist movement called the Nation of Islam, and eventually became one of its adherents after corresponding with their leader Elijah Muhummad. He first got on the radar of the FBI when he declared himself a communist and wrote a letter to Truman protesting the Korean War in 1950.

As a practicing Muslim, he gave up all vices of smoking, drinking, etc. and after his parole in 1952, he quickly rose in the ranks of the Nation of Islam as a minister, and brought many African Americans into the Islamic faith. Through he preached Islam, he also preached Black Nationalism and his views of the Civil Rights Movement, the NAACP and MLK, which were not particularly favorable at the time as he considered them Uncle Toms because they were reliant on white Democrats for change, who he did not trust. By the late 1950s he became a national figure and a hero to many African Americans not just in Harlem but many of those who believed that the Civil Rights Movement did not effectively convey all of their grievances. His influence was credited with swelling the ranks of the Nation of Islam from a few hundred to tens of thousands by the 1960s.

In 1963, the Nation of Islam gave Malcolm X a gag order when he commented on the assassination of JFK, essentially remarking that JFK’s death reflected the karma from America’s continued violence not just against African Americans, but colonized people around the world, especially during America’s violent Cold War proxy wars. After breaking with the Nation of Islam, he started to aid some of MLK’s efforts during the Civil Rights Movement, and in 1964, he made his personal pilgrimage to Mecca, which made him start to believe in a racially integrated society, so long as all the members of the society believed in a unifying ideology (in this experience, Islam). He spent most of the year traveling to various places internationally, and calling out western imperialism in Africa as well as racism in Europe. Upon his return to the United States in 1965, he became one of the most sought after speakers around college campuses in America.

Unfortunately, Malcolm X was assassinated shortly afterwards, ostensibly by members of the Nation of Islam. While foul play by the FBI was not proven, it was at least suspected that they had a hand in the assassination: at the very least they likely had information that a hit was going to happen but left the venue curiously unguarded with little security that day, and as NYPD officers arrived on the scene, they seemed strangely unalarmed for a crime scene with multiple gunshots.

The white liberal publication known as the New York Times in Feburary 22, 1965, published an obituary gloating over Malcolm X’s death.

As I read through Malcolm X’s biography, every page was filled with interesting anecdotes, ideas, philosophies and most impressive of all, predictions of which many came true. My then roommate was tortured by my constant cries of “No way, holy shit!” I dogeared so many pages that it soon became a worthless indicator of important passages. His breadth of knowledge of not just American history and politics, but global politics allowed him to see the bigger picture, the forest for the trees. While MLK was down South fighting the obvious racism of segregation, Malcolm X went deeper into the racial issue, sinking his teeth into the white supremacy embedded into the imperialist power structures of America, and how that related to the suffering of nonwhite people around the world.

One of the points that stuck out the most to me, as an Asian American, was that Malcolm X pointed to China as an inspiration for how Black people around the globe should resist white supremacy. He mentions the history of China and the Opium Wars in the 1800s, pointing out the absurdity of western powers going to war with China in order to exploit them by selling them narcotics and using their own gunpowder invention against them to do so. He noted that for a while, there was derision towards Chinese people when China was weak and exploited, but that after WW2 and the Korean War, when China demonstrated its military strength against the West, that same derision turned into fear and respect.

I cannot capture the entirety of the wisdom contained in that book to this post, but trust me when I say that this is a book for all nonwhite people around the world, not just African Americans. He pointed to every historical instance of western imperialism in shaping his views about the west and white supremacy, showing that through different methods of violence, deception, coercion and manipulation that whites for centuries have been terrorizing ALL nonwhite people in the world. He revealed the hypocrisy of the white liberal, the one who is able to say all the right things and make false promises to the African American community not for equality, but for their votes. He showed how the media, government and capital all worked in concert to maintain white supremacy, especially in the North, which was not segregated but had even more economic inequality than the South, especially in a city like New York.

This is why the New York Times and many other liberal publications hated Malcolm X, they were comfortable blaming all of white supremacy on Republicans and the South while pretending to be morally righteous by working with Civil Rights Movement leaders. Not unlike today’s Democratic president and party.

Afterwards, the question formed in my mind: “If America was lying about all this, what else were they lying about?” I read MLK’s memoirs as well, seeing that white liberals had even sanitized his more radical teachings in order to create the aforementioned kumbayah figure I was presented in elementary school. While he did adapt Gandhi’s nonviolent strategy, he also understood that that strategy required leverage, as many white churches at the time still denounced King’s actions, and that he relied on the soft power of the USSR and China in order to win concessions from the US Government. Towards the end of his life, King also fought for equal rights not just for African Americans, but for all of the working class in America, and also spoke out against the war in Vietnam, against the wishes of many of his fellow Civil Rights leaders. Communism, not racism, seemed to be the common factor uniting the two’s assassinations.

I became encouraged to read even more vociferously about my own identity, reading books on the Korean War, modern Korean history, Asian American history and more. More than ever, the hate crimes started to make sense, as I viewed it as a machination of white liberals convincing other minorities that Asians were white-adjacent and were thus defenders of white supremacy and thus oppressors right alongside white people. I wrote this article soon after the hate crimes started happening, essentially using the insights I gained to explain what was happening, a full year before Asian journalists decided it was okay to talk about after the Atlanta shooting, since in that instance, the assailant was white.

My article caught the attention of a Black journalist who’s a Marxist Leninist. He recommended a few Marxist texts for me to read, most notably was Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladamir Lenin. The book, more like a short pamphlet, was extremely well written and well reasoned and explained the exact economic forces that caused political turmoil, and why capitalism, through its need for continual growth and profits, sought to exploit the entire world. These forces, he reasoned, would end in global catastrophe, either as competing countries begin to try to gain more territory to exploit and go to war over those territories or in a market collapse precipitated by overproduction inherent in capitalist economic cycles. Lenin wrote Imperialism during the Russian Revolution in the middle of World War I, explaining what drove the war and essentially predicting the Great Depression over a decade later.

Afterwards, I started reading more texts from Marx, Engels and Lenin, and through my education as an economics major and familiarity with the finance industry, I found that empirically, many of the statements they were making about the nature of capitalism and how the economy functioned started to make sense. The labor theory of value, that value in things we buy and sell comes not from speculation or demand but labor: everything that is useful to a person has had some labor imputed onto it. The pandemic highlighted that these labor value intensive jobs were vital not only to our economy but our actual survival, whereas many “professional” stay at home jobs seemed superfluous.

All the pieces from the past experiences started coming together. There are countless Bible verses that talk about how it is sinful to deprive a laborer of their wages³³, to practice usury³⁴ and I again recalled that the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10). The book of Acts talks about how the church should be organized into a commune where everyone sells all of their possessions and has church leaders redistribute their wealth. None of the churches I had ever been to looked like that. It seemed odd to me that during the Cold War, American propagandists would claim that communism was anti-Christian and heretical, when here it seemed quite the opposite.

While as a teenager I wondered what inspired the Wachowskis, the connection between Marx’s Capital and the Matrix now almost seem too obvious. Marx describes the industrial revolution and capitalism slowly enslaving humanity, causing many early deaths from terrible living and working conditions. To be a slave to a system and not even be aware of it: capitalism was precisely that system. Certain choices the Wachoskis made during the movie started to make sense: making most of Zion and the resistance nonwhite people, while making all of the Agents white men. And that red pill that right wing groups love to appropriate? The prop for the movie was actually an estrogen pill, an allegory for being transexual, as both Wachowskis ended up transitioning years later.

And the drugs that I took that opened my mind so that I could see these connections: the MDMA opened me out of my introversion and helped me emotionally connect with many different types of people I never would have sought out naturally while the LSD allowed me to temporarily break out of my self-directed autistic mindset and look at my life from an objective standpoint and be honest with my misguided self-righteousness, and admit that I too was indirectly responsible for the exploitation of the global South by dint of just existing in America. The past few years I’ve also met and conversed with many more working class people than I have in my entire life, letting go of my intellectual elitism and realizing that people’s character and value has little to no correlation to their wealth or level of education.

Malcolm X and Vladamir Lenin became my personal Jesus Christs.

---

Freedom, the Highest Stage of Communism

Many times throughout my life, I asked the question exasperatingly, “Why is the world the way that it is?” Although I knew the Bible from an intellectual level, I never really consumed its wisdom from a spiritual one, and so while the answers were always there, I had rejected it because the reality I saw did not match with how the world appeared. All of the western Christianity that I was presented with seemed to be filled with hypocrisy; how can the west purport that the religion that teaches equality and fairness aligns with capitalism? How could South Korea, heavily Christian due to Syngman Rhee’s influence, claim to be the “good guys” when a handful of oligarchs control the majority of the economy?

I’m attracted to Marxism Leninism not just because I want to live in a peaceful harmonious society, but because the way it analyzes history and social events is scientific. It is pragmatic, asking the main question of political science: "What works and what doesn’t work?” All too often, I see the American government repeating the same mistakes, and more egregiously, against the public opinion of those who elected government officials to begin with.

Keynesian economics sprung out of the Great Depression, attempting to explain its causes and how to avoid similar devastating events. Although many regulatory Keynesian policies were adopted by capitalist countries, there have been terrible market cycles ever since, most recently in 2008, showing that these policies might mitigate capitalist bust cycles but they can’t prevent them from happening. And as we stand on the precipice of a possible global financial catastrophe, it seems almost inevitable that history will repeat itself on a 100 year delay, only this time, a World War with nuclear weapons would spell humanity’s self-destruction.

I choose to be a Marxist Leninist first and foremost because I firmly believe that it is the only economic and political ideology that can stop these antagonisms from destroying us all. But I also believe that it is also the most efficient economic system (one only needs to look at the USSR’s incredible transformation from 1925-1945 or China’s from 1980-present) as well as the fairest one that will lead us into a new humanitarian age.

My entire life I was looking for a purpose, a cause that would make sense to me, and I have found it. Classical Greek philosophy, many Eastern philosophies, many of the major religions and indigenous traditions preach an ideology similar to communism. Marxism Leninism provided the logic and reasoning behind what seemed to be intuitive to many of these ideologies. While I wouldn’t yet call myself a practicing Christian again (still want to do research on various other religions as well as Eastern Orthodox Christianity), for the first time in my life I felt a true fusing of my intellect and my spirituality, a way for me to connect my mind with the rest of society. And I feel compelled to dedicate my life to trying to spread the Good News, starting with this post.

If you got this far, I hope you will walk away with some curiosity enough to read some of the texts I mentioned or to think about some of these things. As I recently became a Marxist, I admittedly still don’t have all the answers. I still have much to learn about not just Marxist theory, but about the political theater of the past century and how Marxism relates to modern economic theory. I will be trying to parse through my thoughts and journey on my Youtube channel here, as well as whatever strikes my fancy. Catch you online.

1. valuable for my personal racial awakening

2. Every kid in my family’s small group get together went to a top 10 school.

3. My typical hangs in high school would be playing Starcraft over modem connected internet, when online gaming was considered to be extremely nerdy and not ubiquitous as it is now.

4. More on why probably in a post related to my autism.

5. I was not formally diagnosed with autism until earlier this year, though I had suspected something since my 30s.

6. I find it hilarious when Christians attack communism for being anti-Christian values.

7. Back then tech and finance weren’t occupations we were familiar with.

8. Malachi 3:5 (NIV) - “So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty.

9. Little did I know that that was the good part.

10. And to keep us kids out of devilish American teen trouble!

11. To the potentially offended party, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was anyone else.

12. In 1999, DVDs were cutting edge technology, and our family just got a computer that had a DVD drive in it.

13. How I didn’t know I was on the spectrum after this is a mystery

14. My AOL Instant Messenger screenname was “I DoDGe BuLLeTs”

15. Pre-Naruto run weirdness.

16. “Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.” - Morpheus

17. The opening scene to Harold and Kumar when the white coworkers dump their work onto Harold to party is incredibly accurate. 18 years later.

18. My county was home to some of the richest white people in America

19. Nowadays, 9 to 5 sounds pretty reasonable judging the current white collar job market

20. It is not Elon Musk.

21. I joked that I didn’t have “fuck you” money, but “fuck off” money. Even back then Manhattan real estate prices were insane.

22. At the time, a popular one for 2nd generation Korean Americans in LA where I met some actors you may have heard of

23. lol

24. That’s a joke, mom.

25. Disclaimer: I am in no way saying the use of MDMA is harmless or safe, but that I have merely made my own personal decision as to the risks involved. I am also not promoting the use of MDMA, but recounting my experiences.

26. For those counting, I was almost 32 at the time.

27. The Washington DC metropolitan area has a surprisingly even distribution of minorities.

28. another pseudonym

29. another pseudonym

30. this becomes relevant later

31. as Harvard might have you believe

32. these days, casting for new talent is much more dictated by influencer follower counts

33. Leviticus 19:13, James 5:4, 1 Timothy 5:18, Jeremiah 22:13, Luke 10:7, Malachi 3:5, Romans 4:4, Deuteronomy 24:15

34. Ezekiel 18:13, Ezekiel 18:8, Exodus 22:25, Deuteronomy 23:19, Leviticus 25:37, Proverbs 22:7, Psalm 15:5, Proverbs 28:8