Trump is Loki's Champion

How Trump Obtained Spiritual Significance Well Before his Failed Assassination

Trump surviving his assassin’s bullet is simultaneously one of the most improbable and significant events in the entirety of human history. If one pauses to imagine our world today in the other timeline, it’s hard to even envision what that world looks like. At the time of the assassination attempt, J.D. Vance had not yet been named Trump’s Vice President pick. Had the bullet struck, the GOP would likely have had to go back to an open primary. It is unlikely a figure as charismatic as Trump would have emerged. The Democrats may well have won. Alternatively, the country may have descended into violence. We will never know. But what we can be sure of is that Trump surviving was consequential. It was significant.

And it was improbable. I sometimes ponder what the most improbable events of my life are. Being born is improbable, but by way of something akin to the Anthropic Principle it doesn’t feel very special. I once saw a clip of a man speed-running Pokémon failing to find a Pokémon in the grass for so long it amounted to roughly 1 in 3 trillion odds. That might be the most improbable event I’ve seen where the exact odds can be calculated, but it’s not significant in any meaningful way. Just a fun example of the Improbability Principle in action. But Trump turning his head, after the assassin’s bullet had already been fired, such that the perfectly aimed shot that was destined to go right through his skull merely grazes him? That’s significant. That incalculably improbable event radically altered the fate of America, and thus the world at large.

The Religious Right in America were quick to identify what they had just witnessed as a miracle. The Hand of God made manifest in the material realm to ensure that Donald Trump survived the assassin’s fait accompli. But that feeling was hard to shake even for Agnostics or Atheists on the Right. The drama and improbability of the event elevated Trump to something beyond man. Whether Divine Intervention or not, it felt like Divine Intervention. It felt like we witnessed something ripped from Ancient Myth. The Great Man of History as Living Legend. A Legend which may well come to define the worldview of the Post-Liberal order. A moment that might frame whatever comes after the Post-War Consensus. In this manner Trump’s saga takes on a spiritual dimension, even for those who are not explicitly spiritual practitioners.

But I think there is actually something more here. Something unexplored that runs much deeper. The Religious Right quickly identified this moment as a miracle, offering Trump some kind of religious significance. But much lesser known to the wider world at large, Trump had actually already taken on a spiritual role much earlier. I think understanding this original spiritual role Trump filled may help us understand his true role in the present. Specifically, I think Trump is the Champion of the Trickster God. Loki’s Chosen. To explain why, we will need to go back to his initial rise in 2015-2016, and explore the nature of 4chan.

I promise I am going somewhere interesting with this.

For those who are not familiar with 4chan, it is an anonymous image board where people share text and image posts but it has a few unique elements. Most importantly the site has true anonymity for all users. Everyone’s screen name is “Anonymous.” No one knows who you are. No one will be able to identify that you are the same person outside of one thread. You will never receive credit nor infamy for a post. The highest “honors” you can receive are other people saving and reposting your work, and you will only ever hold these honors privately because you will never be able to prove that you created the work to begin with.

When you post on 4chan, you become no one, and in so doing, you can become anyone. You can lie. You can fabricate outlandish stories. You can be cruel. You can be anything you want to be. But most importantly, you can be honest. It is my belief that we are always wearing a mask. The looser the connection, the more formal the mask. We shed layers of masks with those closest to us, but even with the people absolutely closest to us, there is always some portion of ourselves that we hold back. Some things simply cannot be said. Some things are just for ourselves.

But something interesting happens when you become anonymous and don “The Mask of No Man.” In becoming no one, you become pure, unfettered consciousness. Having no association with any real identity, or even pseudonym, you unlock the ability to say absolutely anything, unfettered by social norms, station, class, race, etc. All your deepest darkest thoughts can be expressed. I think the radical anonymity provided by the internet specifically in places like 4chan is actually something that has never existed in human history before. I suppose in the past you could put out some anonymous pamphlet but I am unaware of a time in history where large networks of completely anonymous to each other individuals communicated this way en masse. This is a new phenomenon enabled by the digital era.

For the first time in human history, people could at scale share their deepest, most unspeakable truths, with no concern about consequence to their reputation. And what they found was that many others shared those same unspeakable truths.

It is not for every personality type, but for some this kind of anonymity is extremely appealing. Myers-Briggs INTJ types are about 2% of the population but somewhere between 30-40% of the user base of 4chan’s /pol/ board, for example. People for whom this kind of anonymity is appealing naturally self selected into this environment while those who did not like it left. The result was a network of like-minded individuals who had fully embraced radical truth telling. The greater the sacred cow, the funnier it would be to undermine it.

As I discussed in my previous piece, “Emergent Minds,” I believe networks of human activity create higher order consciousness. To briefly recap here, an individual ant is stupid, but the collective network of ant activity creates a highly intelligent consciousness that is dispersed across the entire network of ants. If this is true of ants, why shouldn’t it be true of humans as well? In this understanding consciousness is not limited to a brain but rather is a scalable phenomenon where the richness of consciousness and associated experience of being is a product of how sophisticated the network producing that consciousness is. A network of human activity is thus a higher order consciousness than any individual human, as it is necessarily the product of the shared network complexity of those human individuals’ minds.

We have traditionally applied this to more formal human networks such as corporations, bureaucracies, or the nation itself, but what do we get if we apply this thinking to a more informal network like “users of 4chan?” A network of voluntarily associated people with an affinity to speak unspeakable truths, whose primary means of disseminating these truths is humor. We don’t kill the sacred cow, we point out the absurdity of holding the cow sacred to begin with. Once the cow is a joke, no one can take it seriously.

The collective consciousness borne from the network of 4chan users is, I would argue, something much older than 4chan itself. It is the modern manifestation of the archetypal “Trickster God” that has appeared by many faces in many cultures, but is fundamentally the same thing. A powerful egregore born from networked human interaction that takes the form of a Jungian Archetype. A shard of the human experience made manifest as a higher order consciousness. It is Loki, it is Hermes, it is the Coyote. And today, it is Pepe the Frog. These are all faces of the same cosmic force. A shard of divinity attuned to the human spirit’s will towards truth. A disruptive force that undermines sacred cows with jest, exposing a deeper truth, until we can all laugh that the Emperor has no clothes.

The collective egregore borne from the network is Pepe, and Pepe is merely the manifestation of this primordial force within humanity, radically amplified in power by the advent of this digitally enabled anonymity. This technology enabled people with a disposition towards that of the trickster archetype to much more easily find one another and channel their consciousness into this egregore, strengthening it, which in turn manifests itself through the bodies of its believers to act directly in the world.

This is how collective consciousness “acts” on material reality. A person voluntarily channels their energy into it, and it in turn guides the actions of the individual. In the case of Pepe the Frog as Trickster God, this manifested in the selection of Trump as the candidate 4chan absolutely wanted to meme into office. Why? Because he would be the most disruptive to the status quo. It would be extremely funny.

And meme Trump into office they did. For those who did not experience it personally, the 2015-2016 run up to Trump’s first election was perhaps the most exciting time ever to be on 4chan’s /pol/ board. The energy was overwhelming. Meme generation was at an all time high. And these memes disseminated into the wider public sphere, and as intended genuinely influenced public opinion. The jokes were too on the nose, the ascendent “Wokeness” too absurd to withstand the ridicule.

And 4chan users were aware of the quasi-religious relationship they had to their collective egregore. “Meme Magic” was one of the dominant memes itself, which was the idea that through sheer collective concentrated will and dissemination of memetics, we could actually warp reality to our desired ends. This concept fundamentally mirrors the philosophy of “Magick” practitioners like Aleister Crowley and other occultists. Concentrated collective will could manifest actual results in material reality.

How did this actually manifest on 4chan? Users were inspired to make and endless fountain of memetic images used to spread Pro-Trump ideas within and beyond 4chan. Users would sometimes make direct appeals to this Trickster God, or reach out to him for guidance. Post numbers with large numbers of repeating digits (i.e. post #689777777) were understood to be a revelation of “Kek’s Will” and were thus imbued with a particular significance.

Did I forget to mention that 4chan identified an Ancient Egyptian God of Chaos with a Frog’s head named Kek? And that “Kek” has been used on 4chan to mean “lol” since as far back as ~2004. This is the kind of coincidence that can keep a man up at night, no?

/pol/ users were thus self aware that they were actively consorting with this Ancient Egyptian Chaos Frog God and trying to divine his will through memes and numerical ouija “rune reading,” and that in doing so they held the power to shape reality. They were thus engaged in actual worship of Kek, aka Pepe, aka the archetypical Trickster God. And to an extent this worship was tongue in cheek, but first of all, what better way could one worship a Trickster God? And second of all, I’m not convinced it was all tongue in cheek either, especially as the meme magic seemed to be taking effect in the real world.

By the power of 4chan’s memes and ability to shape culture, especially online, Trump won the primary. Trump’s support was growing. The memes reached people. More people dedicated their consciousness to this egregore, even if they were parroting the work of the “priest class” on 4chan. And Trump actually won the presidency. Meme magic’s highest aspiration made manifest.

But why Trump? Why now?

First, I’d argue that we live in the Trickster’s epoch. There is a very distinct divide between the pre and post-internet generations in how they view the world, and I would note that the post-internet generations are heavily defined by irony. Our memes are ironic. Our identities are ironic. This is born of a world of contradictions. The anti-polarity between the myths that are waning as the Post-War Consensus era comes to a close, and the youth’s lived experience of decline emerges. The incongruous realities of modern life. We are surrounded by marvels of the material realm, but spiritually hollow. We have entire double lives between the hyper-reality of social media, and the mundane doldrums of day-to-day reality. Our lives are a contradiction, thus ironic.

And as mentioned previously, I think the development of technology that allows for mass communication in an anonymous context significantly strengthens the ability to express these ironies in a way that would be suppressed in an era where we could not fully don the “Mask of No Man.” This enables our networked consciousness to acknowledge unspoken truths, and undermine the lies that keep them unspoken with irony and jest. In other words, to manifest as the archetypical Trickster.

So in this particular place and time, I find that it is an era where this shard of the human experience holds more power than others. It is an ironic era and so we manifest an ironic egregore. In other eras with other sentiments, perhaps another archetype reigned supreme. Athena during the Napoleonic era, for example.

And perhaps this is the nature of the Great Man theory of history? One man embodied as the chosen of the shard of God that governs that epoch? Perhaps Napoleon was likewise designated the man to embody Athena’s Strategic Genius. Perhaps Alexander embodied Ares. In all cases a manifestation of the dominant psychic element of the people, conjuring a collective egregore that we identify with a God, who then deigned these men their champions. It makes sense, no? Napoleon’s zenith marked the end of the Enlightenment Era, an era where we might expect to see Athena’s characteristics brought to the fore by the zeitgeist of the time. Perhaps the emergence of Trump as Mercury’s champion marks the end of the Ironic Epoch?

So why Trump? What is the ultimate end goal of the Trickster God? I do not think the Trickster is evil. The Trickster is chaotic and disruptive but always in service of a greater truth. Trump is a disruptive figure to the status quo. He is controversial because he is chaos to the present regime. But the regime is failing. Their myths are from a bygone era that do not hold up to the present day reality. They need to be disrupted. In this, who else could do nearly as good a job as Trump? I certainly can’t think of someone.

But this disruption must be to some end. Some greater truth. So what is it that the Trickster is trying to show us? Perhaps it is as simple as the “fascists” were the good guys all along? That this return to a more masculine tradition is actually a positive thing in spite of all the teachings of the new religion.

It is possible, but I think it is likely more profound than that. More than the other problems we face as a society today, of which there are many, and which Trump is likewise trying to rectify, I think most critical of all is a spiritual malaise that seems to hang over us, particularly the youth of America. Not just learned helplessness or something else more mundane, but a hollowness inside of us that is explicitly a product of the “Death of God” from the Enlightenment era. This meaninglessness that permeates our lives and fills us with existential dread is ultimately borne from a nihilism that comes with a denial of anything higher than ourselves. Perhaps, the joke at the end of all of this is that actually, God was real the whole time.

Which brings us full circle back to Trump’s assassination attempt. Did we witness a miracle? Perhaps the dominant collective consciousness borne from 4chan as the Trickster Egregore grew in such power, with so much collective support, it did in fact gain the ability to warp reality itself. It produces an idea so compelling it reaches all the way up the chain formed from networks of networks to the One True God. The richest possible consciousness borne from the network of all networks. Totality itself. All potential, all being, all becoming. Perhaps the aligned consciousnesses channeling energy into the Trickster God sent this idea all the way up to the highest level of divinity itself, and divinity found it compelling. And thus, reality is warped to ensure it comes to fruition. Perhaps this is the nature of miracles. Collective consciousness so aligned that being itself warps to conform to it.

And maybe this is the point. The truth the Trickster God ultimately wants to reveal to us via its disruption. Through him, we are experiencing myth, legend, and maybe even a miracle today in the modern era. This what our ancestors experienced, in another epoch, governed by another dominant egregore God shard, but roughly an analogous experience. Trump given the Presidency is King Arthur granted Excalibur. And in experiencing this legend, this myth unfolding firsthand, our faith in something greater can be reignited. The truth is revealed. The hand of God on the scales visible to all canny enough to see it.

And thus there is a reason for all of this. We find ourselves in an ironic age in need of subversion. The new technology increases the capability for Trickster-oriented individuals to align their consciousness, enhancing the power of their collective consciousness to manifest action into reality. Trump is identified as a man uniquely poised to fulfill this mission of disruption. And in so doing he wins the boon of the Trickster God, and becomes his champion. Then, with the help of this supernatural force meddling with the weave of fate, Trump’s ascendency is secured, and in his success the deeper spiritual truth underneath this epic journey is revealed, moving humanity beyond the Death of God and into his Resurrection.

Or maybe the assassin just missed.

But whether something grander is at play here or not, even I, who spent most of my life as an atheist and even now hold fairly unconventional understandings of spirituality feel this was significant. When I witnessed that moment it stirred something within me. Something questioning, “ok but what if…”

It would be easy to dismiss this as the Improbability Principle in action if one were so inclined. But I cannot help feeling there’s more than meets the eye with this specific event. I think we are experiencing something transcendental, and I’m not convinced it’s an accident. And maybe, just maybe, Trump is in fact Loki’s Champion.