It is a curious thing to watch the human animal in its natural habitat, surrounded by the dizzying abundance of the modern world, yet choosing with strange enthusiasm to fight over the crumbs.

We have the sum total of human knowledge in our pockets, yet we use it to argue with strangers about the shape of the Earth or to work ourselves into a lather over the private lives of people we will never meet. But why is this?

Well, as I have mentioned over and over in my work, from the inner alchemy perspective there is a parasitic force (let’s call it the Archon) that has performed a bit of psychic surgery on the species. By stitching its own cramped, fearful mind onto ours, it transforms potential magicians and creators into morose, self-centered beasts. We become fools by design, separated from our own brilliance by a mental fog that makes us prioritize our own smallness.

In short, we become stupid.

“Stupid” though can be a hard word to pin down and define, often thrown around as a simple insult for someone who can’t do long division. But to truly understand the connection between stupid and the Archon and how a perfectly functional brain turns into a brick, we have to look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He was both a Lutheran pastor and a theologian/philosopher, and he was a man who had the misfortune of watching an entire cultured society descend into a collective fever dream during the dark days of 1930s Germany. From a prison cell, he realized that stupidity isn’t a lack of grey matter. It’s a choice, albeit an unconscious one, as I will explain as we go along.

Bonhoeffer’s big reveal was that stupidity is actually a social disease. You don’t usually find a “stupid” person living alone in the woods; the condition requires a crowd. He noticed that when a group is seized by a powerful ideology or a charismatic cause, the individuals within that group undergo a transformation. They don’t lose their ability to think; they simply give it up. It is as if they have been hypnotized by the glare of power, rendering them unable to process any fact that doesn’t fit the script they’ve been handed.

You can see this in action when you try to reason with someone caught in this grip. You can present mountains of evidence, logic, and common sense, but it bounces off them like pebbles off a tank. They aren’t interested in the truth because they are “self-satisfied.” They feel protected by the herd and empowered by the nonsense they spout. In this state, the person becomes a puppet, a mouthpiece for a system that has hollowed them out.

The most chilling part of his theory is the “cure,” or rather, the lack of one. Bonhoeffer argued that you cannot talk someone out of this kind of stupidity. Since it wasn’t logic that got them there, logic won’t get them out. They are under a spell that only breaks when the external system itself fails. The internal mental fog only clears when the power structure that created it collapses or loses its grip. Until that happens, trying to reason with the “stupid” is like trying to explain color to someone who has firmly decided to keep their eyes sewn shut.

The Archon: Bridging Bridge Bonhoeffer’s observations

This mental hijacking usually starts when someone decides that thinking is simply too much of a chore. They opt for the pre-packaged, microwaveable reality of dogma instead. It is the path of least resistance where you let a man in a tall hat, a person with an officially sanctioned badge, or a dusty book from a few millennia ago do the heavy lifting for you. These authority figures are often appointed behind closed doors in meetings you weren’t invited to, yet people hand over the keys to their consciousness without a second thought. They treat these external sources as the final, unmovable boundaries of truth, and in doing so, they build a comfortable little prison cell for their own intellect.

But as I explored in my work on Overcoming The Archon Through Alchemy, this isn’t just about a few people being lazy. We are talking about full-scale memetic warfare. You see it every day on your screen: people screaming themselves hoarse over battles that have absolutely nothing to do with their actual lives. They’ve become soldiers for a cause they didn’t choose, fighting for memes they didn’t create. It’s a mind virus, a term that’s been trendy lately but has been lurking in the shadows of human history since long before the internet gave it a high-speed rail system. Bonhoeffer saw the symptoms in the streets of Germany, and today we see them in the digital trenches.

This is where the psychic reality of the Archon gets truly weird. We aren’t just talking about bad ideas; we are talking about a contagion that exists in the very fabric of our shared reality. Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance suggests that when enough people start vibrating at the frequency of a particular thought, that thought becomes a “habit” of nature. It creates a morphogenic field, a sort of invisible blueprint that makes it easier for the next person to catch the same idea, like a cosmic cold that skips the lungs and goes straight for the soul.

The classic example of this is the 100th Monkey Theory. The story goes that on a remote island, a group of monkeys started washing their sweet potatoes before eating them. Once the “100th monkey” learned the trick, the knowledge supposedly jumped across the ocean to monkeys on entirely different islands who had no physical contact with the first group. Whether or not the monkeys actually did the dishes is less important than the principle: once a certain threshold of consciousness is reached, the idea becomes a property of the field itself. It cascades. (This is a complex theory with many critics, so I will make a dedicated video on this, stay tuned!).

In the hands of the Archon therefore, this becomes a weaponized stupidity. As more people surrender to the dogmatic mind virus, the morphogenic field of “The Useful Idiot” grows stronger. It becomes a psychic gravity well that is increasingly hard to escape. You aren’t just fighting your own bad habits; you are fighting a global resonance of self-centered morosity that wants to keep you small, predictable, and remarkably easy to manage. The cascading effect means that as the number of infected minds increases, the virus doesn’t just add up… it multiplies. You’re not just seeing a trend; you’re seeing a dimensional imposition that turns the magical potential of the human mind into a mere relay station for someone else’s agenda.

Alchemical Retuning: Shielding Yourself from Morphic Contagion

In my book, Overcoming the Archon Through Alchemy, I dive deep into the energetic mechanics required to survive this never-ending radio broadcast of dark horror we call stupidity. It is a frequency, a low-vibrational hum that seeks to sync your heartbeat with the thrum of the herd. To withstand it, you need more than just a clever retort; you need an alchemical shield.

If the dangers of this condition aren’t obvious, a quick glance at history provides a grim reminder. Bonhoeffer didn’t just write about stupidity; he was eventually consumed by the very machinery of it, executed by a system that had traded its soul for a collection of slogans. Stupidity is not a harmless quirk; it is a lethal force. It can kill you just as surely as any poison, often while wearing the mask of virtue.

We see this frequently in movements that drape themselves in the guise of “love” and “protection.” Consider the suffocating neighbor or the overbearing collective that, in the name of “keeping you safe” or “helping the cause,” strips away your agency, monitors your thoughts, and eventually smothers your spirit. It is a helpfulness that destroys, a contagion of “care” that acts like an autoimmune disease: the body of humanity attacking its own healthy cells because it has been told they are a threat.

Bonhoeffer’s ultimate advice was a radical form of survival: do not fight it. I advocate the same. When you are facing a tide of a million lemmings, you don’t stand your ground and argue with the lead rodent about the geography of the cliff. You get out of the way. If you don’t, the sheer mass of that unthinking momentum will crush you.

The trap for the modern seeker is the “group.” Inner alchemists are not known for their social clubs or their membership cards. They don’t sit in circles swapping meme identities or handing the Archon a convenient list of names and addresses for future annihilation. Instead, the true work happens in the sanctuary of aloneness.

If you catch a fleeting glimmer of lucidity (that rare second where you realize you’ve been an unwitting foot soldier in a memetic war over nothing) the only sane response is to run. Run away from the screens that function as the Archon’s nervous system. Run away from the digital noise that keeps you tethered to the hive mind.

Finding solace in aloneness is the primary methodology. It is about a physical and mental removal that allows your own frequency to stabilize. You can use any meditation that works; simply closing your eyes and focusing on the mechanical rise and fall of your breath can be enough to break the spell. But for a more profound detachment, I recommend a technique I developed called “Amnesia Walking.”

You can find a detailed breakdown of this practice below, but the essence is simple: you go for a long walk and, for the duration of that journey, you pretend you have complete amnesia. You forget your name, your debts, your politics, and your history. You move through the world like an alien who has just dropped onto a strange planet. You look at the trees, the pavement, and the people as if you have never seen such things before. By shedding the “you” that the Archon has spent years building, you detach from the morphogenic field of the crowd. In that silence, you don’t just find peace, you find yourself!

Reclaiming Your Magical Potential

The beauty of the amnesia walk is that it serves as a hard reboot for a system currently clogged with the Archon’s malware. When you successfully drop the heavy baggage of your identity, you are doing more than just taking a stroll to clear your head. You are actively starving the parasite. The mind virus requires your personal history, your grievances, and your social standing to maintain its grip. Without those anchors, the signal of the crowd starts to flicker and fade, replaced by a quiet, shimmering clarity that has been there all along.

This is the moment where you finally reclaim your magical potential. True magic isn’t about waving a wand to turn a neighbor into a toad, tempting as that might be when they are blasting the Archon’s favorite radio station at midnight. Real magic is the ability to perceive reality without the distortion of a pre-packaged lens. It is the power to stand in the center of a chaotic world and remain unswayed by the morphic resonance of the mob. By pretending to be a stranger in your own life, you break the contracts you never signed and dissolve the dogmas you never actually believed.

Once the static of collective stupidity is silenced, your mind ceases to be a mere relay station for external authorities. You become an originator of thought rather than a carrier of a contagion. You start to see the world not as a collection of lack and limitations, but as a playground of infinite probability. The Archon wants you to be a morose beast of burden, but through the alchemy of aloneness and the simple act of forgetting who you were told to be, you step back into your role as a creator. So, the next time the world feels like it is closing in with its slogans and its badges, just keep walking until you forget why you were supposed to be afraid in the first place.