Distilled lecture

You Are Now The Pharaoh

Secret History #6: The Psychology of Evil (Graphic and Disturbing, Viewer Discretion Advised)

The lecture turns evil into a technology of dissociation: ancient priests allegedly learn to split the pharaoh into identities, modern institutions learn to do it to everyone, and the hard refrain is that social control begins by deciding what a mind can experience as real.

The psychology of evil is not cruelty by itself. In Jiang's reconstruction, evil is what happens when power learns to produce a person who can act without feeling: the ruler becomes unpredictable, stress-proof, and without empathy; myth becomes a script for installing selves; trauma, ritual, scent, and memory become control channels; and the War on Terror becomes a modern repetition of the same pharaoh-making machine. The lecture's most important sentence is also its warning label: this is speculation, and it must be read as a theory with source pressure, not as settled history.

Core thesis

The psychology of evil is not cruelty by itself. In Jiang's reconstruction, evil is what happens when power learns to produce a person who can act without feeling: the ruler becomes unpredictable, stress-proof, and without empathy; myth becomes a script for installing selves; trauma, ritual, scent, and memory become control channels; and the War on Terror becomes a modern repetition of the same pharaoh-making machine. The lecture's most important sentence is also its warning label: this is speculation, and it must be read as a theory with source pressure, not as settled history.

Core Reading

The lecture begins with a metaphysical reversal. The old world says mind leads to matter: the universe is a giant mind vibrating, and matter appears where the vibrations intersect. Modern school says the opposite: the brain creates the mind , only the measurable exists, and the eye must surrender to data, tools, and theory. That reversal matters because the whole lecture is about control. If mind can shape matter, then controlling experience, memory, ritual, and identity becomes a political weapon. Secret societies' alleged secret weapon is not a symbol. It is a programmable human being.

00:00-06:44

Mass Society Needs Control

The oldest civilizations are introduced as four social-control machines: bureaucracy, religion, war, and the god-pharaoh.

A mass society first has to solve one problem: how do you get everyone to obey, coordinate, and not tear the whole thing apart? China answers with bureaucracy, with the keju focusing family ambition into the state. The Indus Valley answers with a peaceful egalitarian religion that Jiang treats as a prototype of Buddhism. Mesopotamia answers with war because it has no natural defenses. Egypt answers with the pharaoh, the man who is not just king but God.

That is why the pharaoh matters. He is the social-control solution and also the weak point in the system. A human being is sitting in the place of God, surrounded by brothers, factions, priests, and enemies. If he is merely kind, stable, and empathetic, he dies. The lecture's answer is harsh: the ruler who survives needs the traits school does not praise.

06:44-12:52

Leadership Is Dissociation

Ordinary virtues are replaced by unpredictability, stress tolerance, and lack of empathy, all compressed into dissociation.

The class offers the usual leadership words: responsibility, wisdom, openness, empathy, respect, knowledge. Jiang crosses them out. The three traits that matter in historical power are unpredictability , high stress tolerance, and lack of empathy . The ruler must be unreadable, unbothered, and able not to feel what happens to other people.

All three traits become one word: dissociation. Your mind stops saying, this is happening to me. It says, this is happening to someone else. The image is exact: you are in the movie and watching the movie. That split makes the person hard to predict and hard to break. It also makes empathy optional.

Game theory supplies the political version. To win a many-player game, you cheat by forming secret alliances. But alliances demand loyalty and try to read your true intention. The only way to belong to several powerful groups without being captured by any one of them is to become a different person in each setting. The winner is the intersection of groups, not just a member of one.

12:52-19:44

Myth Becomes Script

Egyptian mythology is read not as belief but as a ritual program for installing Ra, Osiris, and Horus as identities.

Ra fights the serpent so the sun can rise. Osiris civilizes Egypt, is trapped, cut apart, and reassembled by Isis. Horus fights Seth for the throne. As a story, Jiang says, it is strange and not very good. As a script, it begins to make sense. The pharaoh is the reincarnation of these gods, so the story is not only heard. It is acted out until the pharaoh has their memories.

Kant gives the bridge. If we never touch the thing-in-itself directly, then whoever controls experience and memory controls the world we can know. Monkey Island gives the second bridge: descendants can inherit a founding ordeal if story, ritual, and psychedelics make them feel that it happened to them. Programming is not just teaching. It is memory installation.

19:44-27:21

The Controller Wears Isis

The speculative mechanism is made concrete: trauma creates dissociation, Isis becomes the trusted controller, and smell triggers identities.

Ra, Osiris, and Horus become three selves: virtuous hero, passive victim, vengeful child. The ritualized ordeal is meant to create trauma, trauma creates dissociation, and dissociation lets the priest program the ruler. The most important figure is Isis. The priest wearing Isis' mask and voice calms the pharaoh during terror, so Isis becomes the trusted controller. Later, the same voice can whisper a command.

The trigger is not abstract. It is smell. One scent activates Ra, another Osiris; the throne room can be filled with the emotion needed for a decision. Then the argument widens: everyone already lives this way in a smaller register. School, home, friends, and work each call up a different self. The pharaoh is an extreme case of a normal human vulnerability.

The soccer-player example makes the memory theory plain. If the best player in the world loses every conscious memory, the trained body still knows how to kick. Muscle memory sits in the subconscious. Jiang's dangerous extension is that a person can also be trained into violence, sex, obedience, and murder. Then he stops and marks the boundary: this Egyptian reconstruction is speculation. Doubt it. Question it. The records are gone.

27:21-35:03

Hell Is Feeling Again

Near-death experience becomes the reason elites accept the ordeal, and the afterlife becomes a life review where dissociation finally fails.

A student asks whether the method was only for the pharaoh or also for relatives. The answer is everyone in the royal family. A pharaoh may die; factions may need a brother; priests may split into rival groups. The ruler is not the sovereign center. The priest class, compared here to the deep state, is the class that knows the controls.

Why would anyone agree? The ordeal promises contact with the spirit world. Near-death experiences and psychedelics become technologies for feeling God, love, peace, and wisdom. The priests know because they experiment on themselves. The public horror of the ritual has an inner reward: for a moment, you feel truly divine.

The heaven-and-hell question sharpens the moral structure. If everyone who nearly dies can meet the spirit world, why do good and evil matter? The answer is the life review. Hell is not external punishment. Hell is the moment dissociation stops working and you finally feel the pain you caused. Heaven is seeing the good. Love, in the second theory, is the physical force that lets the soul ascend.

Then the lecture returns to evil. Dissociative power is not happiness. The dissociated person can never feel happiness, only misery. So the way to feel less miserable is to make others more miserable than you are. That is the psychology of evil in its tightest form: power manufactures suffering because suffering outside the self is the only relief left inside the self.

35:03-44:46

The Modern Script

The War on Terror is pulled into the Egyptian frame: Abu Ghraib, learned helplessness, ISIS, Guantanamo, and MK Ultra become modern pharaoh-making.

The modern comparison begins at Abu Ghraib. The official story says rogue soldiers went crazy. Jiang's version says look at the psychologists, the CIA payments, and the program design. Enhanced interrogation is then mapped onto the mythic identities: learned helplessness is an attempt to turn Ra, the active fighter, into Osiris, the passive victim.

But the conversion reverses. Torture does not pacify; it radicalizes. The United States thinks it is making Osiris, the citizen-victim, out of Ra, the fighter. Instead Osiris becomes Ra. The lecture then folds ISIS into the Egyptian frame, noting both the name and the recruitment pipelines from prisons and torture.

Abu Zubaydah's reported torture is used as the proof-image: force-feeding, strangling, confinement, drowning, cutting, sexual humiliation. Jiang asks the class what story it recalls and answers: Egypt. The claim is not that interrogation failed. The claim is that it worked for a different purpose: to turn people into drones, human weapons that could be programmed and unleashed.

MK Ultra names the wider modern apparatus. Drugs, hypnosis, interrogation, foreign sites, destroyed documentation, and brainwashing are treated as the twentieth-century continuation of the old problem: how to control a mind. The ancient claim was about controlling the pharaoh. The modern claim is that the same toolkit can be scaled to anyone.

44:46-50:24

You Are Now The Pharaoh

The final turn brings the model home: social media, psychology, mass education, and internet infrastructure are read as modern control surfaces, then Jiang closes by warning students to be skeptical.

The punchline is almost comic and not comic at all: good news, you are now the pharaoh. The results of MK Ultra, Jiang says, have spread through social media, drug regimes, psychology, mass education, and mass culture. The old ritual chamber becomes the whole environment. The control surface is no longer only the throne room. It is the feed, the classroom, the clinic, the cable, the mood.

A student asks the practical question: if social media is social control, shouldn't government control it instead of private owners such as Elon Musk? The answer shifts attention from platforms to infrastructure. Twitter and Facebook are the public face. Beneath them are cables, networks, and military-built infrastructure. Ownership of the app is not the deepest layer of control.

The closeout matters as much as the provocation. Jiang says the Egyptian theory is a nice theory, but he has no evidence that it is true. The class is speculation, theory, questions, and possibilities. The right posture is not belief. It is skepticism strong enough to follow the model without mistaking it for settled proof.

Questions

Were only pharaohs trained this way, or were relatives such as brothers trained too?

Jiang answers that the whole royal family would be trained, because priests need replacements if a pharaoh dies and because rival priest factions can program brothers into civil war.

If social media is social control, should government control it rather than private owners?

Jiang answers that the deeper control layer is not the visible private platform but the internet infrastructure he says was built and protected by the US military; Twitter and Facebook are only the public face.

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