I want you to picture in your mind a large room filled with intelligent, witty, charming, and attractive people, much like yourself. It is a theater and there is a vibrant hum of chatter and anticipation. The small talk begins to muffle and silence pervades the environment. A spotlight opens on a svelte, tall, angular man dressed in a white four-piece tailor-fitted suit. He has maybe seven days of stubble growth in an immaculately-trimmed beard framing a debonair and slightly swarthy face. He gives a smile, one that does not condescend, but rather entreats you to listen to this lecture. However, to certain members of the audience, this smile portends a more mysterious and precarious destiny.

“Marhabaan, my name is Dr. Faisal Marzipan, PhD, but you can call me the Lebanotarian. I study paranormal occurrences in Los Alamos in my professional career, but here, I want to tell you about a little hobby of mine. Maybe you can think of it as experiment in exceptional duration on the collective egregore of the United States. I will explain myself by way of metaphor.” Slides illustrate his point as he begins.

“A French swimmer voyaged across the Pacific Oceans and while he was swimming, he kept bumping into garbage, plastic. Our entire planet is being filled with garbage; how have we come to accept this? In order to accept that, for example, it is okay for your daughter to prostitute herself for strangers on the Internet, or that it is okay to allow children to change gender or that you must buy clean water…you must be neurolinguistically programmed for many years, maybe decades in advance. The collective unconsciousness is curated and guarded by gatekeepers, as these pens without sharp edges that lead the cattle in one direction smoothly and with no warning as to the end result. Phoenicians are natural navigators, whether it is the ocean or the egregore, and I, Faisal, can help you and your loved ones navigate this storm.

“Certain types of psychoanalysis, which are all derivative from the sacrament of Confession, you have to retrace your steps and visualize clearly in your mind your situation. The difference between the two is that psychoanalysis, the ‘patient’ primarily focuses on external forces outside their control, and through weekly or monthly visits, you dwell on this and at best you cope with the situation.”

The slide changes to a picture of Jack Nicholson with a fearful face.

“Consider a famous but old movie, The Shining, which has been analyzed several times over. In one particular scene, the lead character, Jack Torrance, enters a room that is considered haunted. He sees a beautiful nude woman, embraces her, and in the mirror notices she turns to a rotting old hag corpse, who begins laughing. A well-known scene, but the important detail here I wish to impart is that when he exits, he closes the door and walks backwards while watching the door. One of the tropes of modern horror, at least since Turn of the Screw by Henry James, is childhood trauma. Jack Torrance tries to escape his trauma, and this scene is finally replayed in his interaction with his son. Jack snaps and tries to murder his only son, who escapes by entering a Kafkaesque hedge maze (a brilliant upgrade over the novel, which had garish hedge animals). His son, Danny, knows the maze well but it is snowing, and in a stroke of genius, he walks backwards in the snow, leaving his father to a dead end.

“So although our world is surrounded by garbage, and is physically and mentally poisonous, as a master navigator, Lebanotarian will help guide you back to safety, in part by retracing your steps but in part providing some clues on going forward. Modern society is the trauma, and I will provide guidepost not so that you may shrink back in fear, but navigate to safe harbors. In current society, most are conditioned to learn from me already because part of the training prioritizing the novel over the familiar. Science for the most part does not exist, but some brain doctors call this attention to exploration versus exploitation. A squirrel may look for acorns and exploit a cache before switching gears and exploring new territory. Social media gears our brains to seek novelty and scroll through the familiar. One endpoint of this is the promotion and hiring of corporate executives in American industry of immigrants. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that is a harbinger for the closing of an era. The founder of Uber were Americans and Canadians, but after some trumped-up scandal, one founder stepped down and replaced as CEO by a Persian whose main experience was managing a failing Internet travel agency. When a computer and printer company Hewlett-Packard was poised to enter the 21st century, they chose a female CEO and promptly imploded. Throughout American industry and particularly in technological fields, immigrants who set foot on American soil in their early twenties and attend business school are fast tracked for C-level jobs. These people are few in number but wield enormous power and can be far more dangerous (or, in my case, helpful) than the average agricultural worker from Guatemala.

“Imagine you are one of the 280 or so million Americans that have ancestors fought in World War II, or Civil War, or Revolutionary War, or even the French and Indian War, and even multiple iterations of these. Maybe you have grandfather that pulled trigger in his sleep advancing on a bird’s nest in Longues-sur-Mer. Maybe your parents have to sell family farm to avoid estate tax. Then here comes Nimrata Randhawa Haley to tell you that you must take down a state flag because it contained images of the flag the countrymen of that state (and maybe your ancestors) carried in battle. Observing this from Beirut, I thought, perhaps there is something Lebanotarian can teach the Americans about nationalism amidst foreign and hostile powers.

“The good news is that if Nikki Haley or Gemal Harris can be ‘good Americans’ and dictate national policy, then, my friends, the converse can be true. The average American can now become Trans-Indians, trans-Native Americans, even trans-Lebanotarians. It is now the American citizens turn to subvert the subverters, and this can be done with the tools of social media that were meant to be a weapon to control Americans. We must mock and humiliate the journalist class, the executive class, woke corporatism, globalists relentlessly. This is my key message to you, dear reader. For the uninitiated, I will help guide you; you must understand that every single piece of media you consume is propaganda, or, rather, has a metaphysical underpinning that it is going to promote and market. No one is immune to propaganda, and it is your civic duty to become a propagandist, if even in a modest way.

“Now, I have entitled this collection of essays The White Swan because of both my respect and respectful disagreement with fellow Lebanotarian Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Taleb’s book The Black Swan is a prominent best-seller and an inspiration for Faisal.

“But The Black Swan works within the framework of heightened expectation of a top-down centralized media that manufactures consent, often despite all objective indicators suggesting the opposite. In 2008, this meant that every economist was touting the strength of the American housing market right up until, all at once, they did not. Taleb was a wise contrarian trader and he deserves credit for acknowledging how this system works, how a contrarian mindset can help you succeed in this framework. However, the title and even thesis of The Black Swan implies buying into a framework of manufactured consensus in order to seek opportunities for profit. That is fine, but Faisal argues that a Black Swan is not any more beautiful than a White Swan, even if it is rare. There are many ways to survive or thrive in life without being an outstanding trader or bestselling author (requiring one percent or 0.1 percent talent).

“Imagine a plot of land with ten acres. This is enough land to grow all your own fruit and vegetables, have horses and even your own cattle. In one acre of land, I saw a dedicated trans-Lebanotarian build an automatically irrigated greenhouse for trees. Pine, oak, and of course cypress trees that he would sell to nurseries. He initially invested $20,000 in the greenhouse and the rest was literally acorns. In six years, he sold 6,000 trees at $50 to $250 a tree, all with minimal effort. People need trees, people need beauty. This is the life of the White Swan.

“This book of essays is roughly broken up into sections. First, there is my origin story. Every hero has an origin story, and so it is fair that you know mine. Then I will discuss some anecdotes from rural life, observations on politics in a broad sense, and semiotic analysis of mass media throughout the ages. Following this, I will discuss our internal culture, how psychotropics of different kinds influence our behavior and mind. Finally, I will add some song parodies that many of you will find humorous. My friends, as you turn these pages, meditate on the vision of the White Swan, which started as an ugly duckling and blossomed into a creature of elegant and graceful visage. Knowing this, then ponder that it was you that was destined to be the White Swan this entire time.”

***

This is an excerpt from Faisal Marzipan’s new book, The White Swan. You can purchase the book from Terror House Press here.