AphorismsFebruary 2026

Intellectual morse code

Dots and dashes

Noah Blue · February 2026 · 4 min read

The banality of life becomes tragic when children are born. We are suddenly forced to admit that what didn't matter now does even though it still doesn't.

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We are all charlatans, neither who we appear to be nor say we are. Under every mask is another mask. We are masks all the way down in fact.

"There is nothing interesting left to say. Nonetheless, we must go on saying things anyway. We are compelled to. We are puppets all of us: pulled by words not strings."

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Nihilism is the last refuge of the enquiring mind or the place it comes to die, however slowly.

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There is nothing interesting left to say. Nonetheless, we must go on saying things anyway. We are compelled to. We are puppets all of us: pulled by words not strings.

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God is not so much dead as the living dead.

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Sensate experience is both the touchstone and the confounder of material reality. Whereof we sense, thereof we know not.

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Originality is a myth: the ability to acknowledge this is the cardinal virtue of a first-rate mind.

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Virtue dwells in the silent space around an individual's actions not in the actions themselves.

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X is always the obverse of Y unless synthesised into Z. From Z come all the antimonies of the universal mind.

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Spirituality is a hifalutin (and schmaltzy) word for expressing the following: i) I have no fucking idea how all of this came into existence or what I even mean by 'all of this', ii) I don't want to die, please don't let me die and iii) surely there is more to my life than parroting all the things everyone else thinks (note: there isn't).

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For the love of God, enough already with the Marxist baloney. It is time to revolt over something that matters (if anything ever does).

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If you are meditating, you are not meditating. Only when you are not meditating can you meditate. Meditating cannot be taught: it happens, if it happens, all by itself. Therefore: ask your guru for a refund. Your guru by being a guru is not a guru. Only by not being a guru can a guru be a guru and anyone being a guru by not being a guru is hardly likely to charge you.

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If you find yourself frequently agreeing with the majority viewpoint it likely means you are capable of inflicting abominable acts of cruelty given the right socio-political circumstances. It is not to be lamented ahead of time, but it is right for the rest of us in society to view you with circumspection. When the time comes, we must be prepared to strike first or, more likely, find a safe place to hide.

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If you spend any money on spirituality, you have immediately lost your way. Be warned: anyone who sells you spirituality is a huckster. Anyone who pays to become spiritually enlightened is an idiot. Spirituality is not subject to exchange value; enlightenment is not a tradable commodity.

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The natural state of being for most people is credulity, a state of being which ushers in all manner of speciousness in the name of reality. Those of us, the paltry few, who incline toward scepticism should not be surprised to find that the credulous majority will use any means, subterfuge, for example, or extreme violence, to stymy our self-expression. Which is ironic, given that our scepticism will ultimately seed the culture of the future, is in fact the genesis of new shibboleths for credulity to gorge itself on.

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Everything we cognise is provisional and conditioned. Therefore: anyone who is certain about anything is either delusional or a shyster (the two are not mutually exclusive of course) and anyone who lays claim to originality is a bare-faced liar.

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The herd, the herd. Stampeding across a desiccated landscape, a frenzy of hooves throwing up a great pall of dust that encloses and eclipses, blindly going wherever it is going.

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Poststructuralism is nothing more (or less) than the recognition that consciousness has been tainted by the semiotic. Tainted? Maybe say instead: hijacked. One wonders, what would consciousness be without the semiotic (language, signs, symbols, classificatory systems etc)? Shorn of its accoutrements in other words, what is left of consciousness? That is the great spiritual project. Ironically enough, the strategy of the poststructuralist progenitors was to move in precisely the opposite direction, to deploy a surfeit of language in an apparent (and ultimately futile) attempt to equivocate it into abeyance.

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Financial engineering beguiles and appals in equal measure. The exhilarating complexity exhorted by base motives. A case of clever people doing bad things.

End

Noah Blue

First published on Noah Blue, February 2026.

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