For years, Pepe was just an innocent comic book character, shared in memes to express happiness or sadness, for when you feel bad, man. During the 2016 US presidential elections, Pepe started to take on another meaning entirely, being the unlikely symbol of Trump's presidency. Some people even attribute Trump's unlikely victory to being the result of Pepe meme magic, a case which is supported by Hillary Clinton's seemingly irrational fear of a frog from the Internet.
Transcript
Here's something interesting. What do you know about Pepe as a totem? Have you heard this story? This idea...
This whole pepe thing came out maybe about ten months or a year after the penny dropped for me on politics as religion. So it was super interesting and it was completely unsurprising because when you when you see that there's this technology for synchronizing the actions of individuals. Let's put it that way. And this technology is applied to all sorts of organizations that are intended to synchronize the actions of individuals from churches to states, to companies.
The recipe goes something like this - it's also a totemic tribe recipe. You raise a totem, you come up with a story around it, characteristics maybe. For example, Zapo shoes shoes "We're super funky, we're super good to our employees." You imbue that totem with as much energy as you can and you come up with a code around it, which is essentially in a lot of simple cases, it's just the operating procedures for your employees.
But the technology of it whether you're starting a religion, a state or company, as you raise a totem you rally people around it, you articulate a code of conduct of code or a law, rules if you prefer - there's a catch-all term "rules" - and you use that to synchronize actions of the divisions.
It's obviously stood the test of time and it's been tweaked and enhanced like with separating the totem from the leader and so on. It's gone through various upgrades and iterations, but essentially that's the technology for synchronizing the actions of individuals. So you start to see it everywhere.
Now there's a big difference obviously between a company which is like doing a very similar thing - you're erecting a totem, picking a logo, maybe it's a cloud or something, you synchronize actions of individuals around that. There's a big difference between the company which you're essentially putting an offer on the table, people buy into it or don't. Employees join it or leave, and so on, and an organization that is imposing itself on people, where you're not voluntarily subscribing to its services, it's coercing you and so on and that's the difference between a good organization and a bad organization.
It's compulsion, the use of force.
It's one key distinction.
Back to Pepe. So the people who haven't seen this this theory there's a website talking about chaos magic and one key component of chaos magic is sigil magic or the magic of symbolism I suppose. So when you get your symbol out in the world and in certain places and people recognize it, that gives power to your symbol. So just like with McDonald's golden arches, that logo has a certain power to it, and there's obviously a big question whether it's just psychology or whether it's something with external reality like some kind of spiritual thing, but the point is, it's true - symbols do have power.
I'll just say two things first of all, no matter how materialistic you are, you have to admit it has the power of recognition, and then recognition invokes certain feelings, behaviors, emotions. So in a very real sense it can drive behavior.
Yes, exactly.
The mere sight of a symbol.
Yep yep. So before Trump's election there was a bunch of people on 4chan and they branched out on social media. They were posting these pictures of Pepe, the depressed frog. The comic book character.
Kek.
Right, Kek.
So Kek is a thing, which came from World of Warcraft because the way that Korean write instead of writing "lol" they write "kek". When they're laughing they write "kkk" or "kek".
It so happens that "Kek" is also the name of an Egyptian deity or like an Egyptian god, symbol.
Yeah it's not it's it's not exactly a god, it's more like an archetype.
Yeah it's the archetype of the border between order and chaos. Peterson says that an amphibian, it's a water and a land dweller, it has a foot in each world It has a foot in the world of the water and of earth, of chaos and of order, it can also be hermaphroditic or can change sexes. It's got a foot in both sexes. That's why it's a symbol of a chaotic kind of force.
Yes, and the strange thing was they were promoting Pepe as a sort of hate speech figure. He would be redrawn with swastikas on his biceps.
(points) He gets flustered when he talks about boy's muscles.
Sorry? Okay (laughter).
So the thing was Hillary Clinton came out and made this speech talking about "Oh we can't allow Pepe. We can't allow these symbols of hate speech" and it all seemed very bizarre because why would she be so animated -
I see what you did there.
-- about something - just a cartoon character which they shared on the Internet. But when you put it in the context of this symbolism and talking about bringing something to reality using the power of symbols or sigils, then it starts to make sense why Hillary would be very angry.
She should know how that works, being a witch herself.
Yes.
Order of the Eastern Star.
I'm sure she has some understanding of it so that puts the whole thing into context.
The other thing which which kind of clicked to me the other day like you were saying, this character who comes from chaos. If you look at the Internet I think most people would agree the most chaotic place on the internet is 4Chan.
4Chan, yeah.
Because it's an anonymous imageboard. It doesn't necessarily need to be one person or one thing. You never know exactly if one person is speaking to you or multiple people.
So that would be a chaotic place, so if some kind of entity from another world wanted to manifest into this one - especially a being of chaos like some kind of trickster god, that would be the place.
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