What is Loosh?
Darkness, possessing no means of its own, must abduct and abuse unwitting sources of light in order to derive a corrupted form of the power thereof
Faith is the absence of loosh. Faith is the refusal to wallow in its addiction. The progression of faithfulness itself involves a deliberate abstention from a specific set of logical conditions. This broaches the question: What therefore, is ‘loosh’?
Loosh is the intoxicating energy extracted from an ignorant, abused, and captive source. That source is us. It acts as a kind of spiritual tax, drawn from the visceral suffering of innocent victims and paid out to a hierarchy of sycophants. This energy fuels a spiritual madness in its abusers, numbing and blinding them to their own encroaching darkness.
Darkness will dark; it cannot help itself. For these, there is no such thing as free will.
I maintain a skeptical stance, rooted in epoché rather than cynicism, regarding the figure of the apostle Paul. I find it challenging to accept a non-verifiable, miraculous conversion as sufficient qualification for assuming authority over a movement that one, up until recently, had violently and vehemently oppressed.1 Such occurrences serve to raise questions about the introduction of agency. The primary responsibility of ethical skepticism is of course, to question the presence of agency, and the Roman Empire serves as an archetypal example of such influence.
However, within Paul’s letter to the Hebrews (provided that he actually authored the letter), one statement resonates with me, as articulated in Hebrews 11:1 (KJV): “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is noteworthy that The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the term ‘faith’ to its 14th-century origin, defining it as the ‘assent of the mind to the truth of a statement (principle) for which there is incomplete evidence.’ One could also contend that this is the definition of ‘belief’ (in contrast to ‘understanding’). My departure from this definition resides in the principle that, faith is not necessarily congruent with a special type of belief. Faith may involve belief, or it may not. Faith is an expression of will, and not necessarily a belief. Please be patient dear reader as I develop this further.
The above approach to definition by means of trait affirmation, otherwise known as cataphasis, is suitable enough. However, I argue that faith can be articulated more potently by delineating it through negation, or what it is not – emphasizing its characteristics using what is termed apophasis. In this context and to capture its ineffable nature, faith can be described, in a Wittgensteinian sense, as one’s resistance against a specific set of logical conditions - rather than by its exercise or presence as a logical object.
Faith—when defined as belief expressed through a specific set of confirmatory actions, as exemplified in the Bible’s Epistle of James 2:14–25—is not faith at all, but chicanery. Who in their right mind would withhold clothing from the naked, or water from the thirsty, regardless of their beliefs? These acts of benevolence are offered less as genuine compassion than as performative qualification rituals—gestures designed to gain approval from one’s virtue club or religious cohort (see The Riddle of Sin), a way to prove oneself 'worthy' (i.e., not dead to the club).
James, or more likely the person writing under his name, appears frustrated that people were joining the movement too casually. He had paid his dues and was now gatekeeper—defining boundaries, enforcing behavioral litmus tests. After all, it was his club, not theirs. This was anathema to the teachings of Jesus, as such concerns revolve around belief and social conformance—not faith. And the two are fundamentally different.
In reality, faith has very little at all to do with one’s religious institution activities, good works, observances, etc., and everything to do with how you conduct relationships with those who are not in the club, or those who cannot benefit you in the least – what you do when you are not conscious of your own actions – your quickness to punish, consider, or forgive – how you indeed act when real money is on the table (not in theory or in public purview) – the unity of your life, work, household, and family – and finally, to what you instinctively apply yourself, when left to your own devices for a long period of time. Faith is an iceberg, in that ninety percent of it is not readily visible.
In the scheme of Wittgenstein, one cannot, nor should one, define good. For in the day you cite something as ‘good’, evil will crucify it and wear its skin as a virtue or religious costume.
Nevertheless, the aforementioned set of logical conditions, which are mutually exclusive with faith, is referred to as ‘loosh.’ Faith, is an act of the will in refusing loosh – and is not tantamount to a ‘baseless belief’ or set of such beliefs. It is the result of a keen skill in ponerology, or the study of that which is evil in its essence.2 It is not an exercise in ‘doing good works’ (agathology), as we have recently and poignantly borne witness to the harm wrought in the name of applied virtue . This is something which the writers of the Bible should have known, but unfortunately never learned or realized, as a caution against this would have been very helpful to Western society through the middle and modern ages.
Faith is a long-suffering service in the critical path of comprehension, through evasion of the snares of dark addictions.
Faith is less about doing or being something, than it is about becoming something – as the latter requires the greater courage.
Faith is the childlike desire to abstain from loosh (addictive habitual abuse of others)… it is powerful. More powerful than your adversary and captor will allow you to even know.
~ The Ethical Skeptic
But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.
~ Matthew 5:39 (NIV Bible)
When Christ spoke in this manner, it was not an exhortation to ‘being good’ nor serving as a victim. He was citing the critical importance of not partaking in this drug of choice, loosh. The more specific set of abuses which compose loosh (or ‘not-faith’) are tallied in Exhibit A at the end of this article. In this particular context as well, one should note that you can 'take it with you'.
Do not be deceived however, one’s addictions will follow them into the beyond.
Nor does faith itself mandate that one believe in a specific model of God, spiritual realm, or hereafter. One does not have to believe in God at all. Faith is not expressed through one’s understanding or doctrinal allegiance to a specific teaching. If actual intellectual, religious, doctrinal, or cosmological correctness were the litmus for getting into heaven, then none of us would get there. Moreover, many of the Gods of our crafting or imperious scriptures come suspiciously close to the Lycurgian insane entity defined on the right hand side of Exhibit A at the end of this article (the Cupholder of the Lycurgus Cup). This false model of God is the only celestial parent we have been presented unfortunately. Atheists comprehend the incumbent logical inconsistencies therein, and understandably reject such an entity.
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
~ Anne Lamott, progressive author and activist
The skeptical mind can therefore indeed exercise a rationality based simultaneously upon the principles of the scientific method, as well as faith. The exclusion of the former, in the name of the latter, constitutes merely an invalid act of ignorance.
The function of such ignorance is defined as the ‘Veil’ in Exhibit A at the end of this article. A comprehension of these principles may well explain the dramatic disconnect that exists between the exhaustive Near-Death Experience (NDE) data and the teachings of punishment-based or hell-worship God-Devil polytheism.3
Enterprise Virtue is Not Faith
Faith is not doing good works, being moral, attending services, tithing, blathering scripture at walls and altars, giving to the poor, traveling and delivering sermons, taking donations, and believing without evidence a full slate of mandatory doctrine – as such things are nothing but enterprise virtue, a form of works-costume one wears. These things may help ‘bind together’ those of similar mind (hence the derivation of the term ‘religion’), but they have little to do with faith itself.
Faith is working in a steel mill for 35 years to put 4 kids through trade school and college. Faith is getting up every morning at 6 am to prepare meals, clean, manage a family, tend to the sick, and nurture those who are growing. Faith, is working two full-time jobs to make a future for a child disabled by medical incompetence and scientific arrogance. Faith is undertaking the last course of action at your avail, because it is all you have left.
Decades ago, I had the distinct honor of sharing dinner with a colleague while strategizing for an oil extraction client in Texas. My colleague had recently returned to work after a long period of recovery from a heart attack and extensive bypass surgery. He needed the job, and I was grateful to have his expertise on my team.
That evening, he confided in me something he had kept secret from almost everyone, even his closest friends. He began, “TES, I haven’t told anyone this except my wife. A few months ago, I died—right there on the operating table. I was unconscious under anesthesia when, all of a sudden, I was conscious again, standing there in the operating room. I could see the doctors and nurses, panicked, working desperately to revive my heart. Then, in the next moment, I was above the hospital, rushing through a dark corridor toward a light.”
He then paused, struggling to process the event in its very telling.
“When I reached that light, I knew I was dead. Waiting for me were my mother and an aunt and uncle—long since deceased, but smiling at me as though they had been expecting me. What really shocked me, though, was seeing Jesus there—or at least, I think it was him. I was a bit unsettled, to be honest. I was never one for church, having gone only a handful of times in my life. But just as that thought entered my mind, I was presented with a memory from the Korean War—something I had long forgotten.”
He lowered his head and voice a bit as he recounted the details. “I was a young artillery lieutenant, and during a heavy barrage, one of our shells misfired in the breech after a long period of continuous fire. The gun was scorching hot, and we were at real risk of a cook-off. So, I grabbed my gloves, opened the breech, and pulled out the round. I carried it to the cook-off bin, locked the lid, and bolted. Not two seconds later, the round detonated inside that bin.”
He continued, “That Jesus-looking figure turned to me and spoke—not in words, but in a way I’d never felt before. He said, ‘It is the littlest things you do that are the most important.’”
Faith is indeed doing your job without concern for self, while a missile is inbound on your ship or an artillery shell on your command post and everyone is about to die. Faith is running your business with integrity when every motivation around you begs you to cheat and show margin to investors instead – or your payroll is larger than your backlog, and you have no idea if you will be able to financially keep your home, but you choose to protect your employees first.
Faith is not a creed, nor a catechism, nor any polished enterprise of virtue—for these are often little more than costume, clique, and commerce. True faith is applied throughout life, not adorned by ritual piety. It is the quiet, relentless undertaking of what is difficult, done not for applause or employment, but to shoulder the weight of those at risk—to stand in the gap against the cause of pervasive suffering.
Faith is not handing water to the thirsty, clothing the naked, or visiting the imprisoned. Those are club-initiation rites—hollow performances meant to render us acceptable, to drape ourselves in borrowed virtue. In doing so, we risk exploiting the afflicted just as surely as their tormentors. That too is loosh.
True faith is the long, weary labor of uncovering why that man thirsts, why she stands unclothed, why the prison holds so many. It is the courage to confront the machinery of loosh itself—and oppose the quiet, ravenous lust that made such suffering possible in the first place.
The writers of the Bible clearly failed to understand this basic ethical foundation, raising questions about authenticity—both in terms of authorship and spirit—within the framework of Pauline-Constantinian-Mithraic ecumenical Christianity.
From the context of our original perspective however, faith is the intentional and life-long avoidance of loosh on the part of a sound mind. It involves the avoidance of enterprise virtue and the sucking of lifeblood out of others, as the essence of one’s existence. It reflects the wholeness of one’s recaptured authenticity. The progression of faithfulness involves a deliberate abstention from loosh, as a set of logical conditions. This prompts the question of course: What, then, is the nature of ‘loosh’?
What is Loosh?
Many years ago I was asked late on a Friday, by a Chicago based retailer, to come visit with them and ‘offer critical strategic advisement’, with the urgent project starting that very next Monday. My presentation to the CEO was scheduled for two days later, that Wednesday, at 4 pm. Moreover, the methodology entailed a quick vetting of the entire business from top to bottom, as an effort to stave off an impending bankruptcy. Accordingly, the table in the conference room I was to work in, was aligned from one end to the other with stacks of accounting ledgers and operating summary reports when I arrived at 7:30 am that Monday. My team worked 18 hour days until our Wednesday summary of strategy and necessary defensive action.
In order to summarize the results of the strategy in short order, the retailer had mistakenly clung to an old paradigm of viewing itself as a Big Box storehouse of highly-desired goods, and not as a supplier of perishable fashion. Every service and good sold bears an element of fashion. Unwise is the merchant that does not grasp and work this concept to their competitive advantage. In fashion, time is the enemy of margin – because margin always erodes – demand always erodes.1 The task at hand for the savvy consumer goods company is to use time adeptly in the capture of identified flows of value, and as a result, margin. If an entity does not comprehend what is indeed value, and cannot respond to it with agility, they are doomed to obsolescence. Walmart and Target teeter on the precipice of such a mistake even now.
Failure to comprehend how demand erosion works is the reason why epidemiologists missed the Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality that showed within months after the vaccine rollout. I caught it and published it inside a series of well-documented charts. As a result, I was contacted by several US Congresspersons and legal initiatives, who all listened and agreed.
Millions of persons globally listened as well. This initiated an entire grassroots dissenting movement among the vast majority of American citizens sounding the alarm over the now-manifest harm caused by the mRNA vaccines. These models were confirmed as correct, by the Society of Actuaries Research Mortality Survey Report of November 2023, a full two years after I found the signal.
Nonetheless, the old days of luxurious margins covering extravagant real estate and exorbitant overhead had come and gone for this retailer – and no future existed for them which did not involve a high degree of painful restructuring. Plus there was this small matter of what they dismissively called ‘direct sales’ eating their lunch. Small fleet-of-foot companies, many of them my clients as well, selling more recent product ‘on the web’, at a better price, and delivering it right to the customer’s door. Of course, the prevailing wisdom persisted inside the client organization that ‘we tried that and it didn’t work’ and ‘it’s merely a fad’.
Unfortunately, many lives were due to be disrupted if this retailer was to survive. Innocent lives, kids’ college hopes, homes, retirements. The subjective implications of my work involved much more difficult questions, than did the very objective strategy itself. These were not questions I could answer between a Monday and a Wednesday. I struggled with the ontological impasse, and still struggle with it to this very day. We were in essence going to deliberately cause short-term harm to some, in order to save the long-term livelihoods of others. While we opted for the pathway of least human suffering, there indeed was no clean pathway available. I found no joy in the execution of this strategy as well. I acknowledge and stand accountable for my role in the evolution of such events, much in the same way a soldier might learn to live with their participation in military conflict, or a coach might in cutting hard working athletes from their team.
Feeding Darkness: Its Addictive Lure
The abuser of loosh, in contrast, views every matter as an opportunity to punish those whom would dare defy their virtuous insistence. They justify their darkcraft through the quo facto malo 'sins' of their victims.
But there are those in society who do find glee in their dysethical handiwork. Those who pose in costumes of virtue and science, deny the injurious ramifications of their work, and readily wallow inside the opportunity to harm political opponents for material, clout, or even spiritual gain. They will speak often of ‘cost-benefit analysis’, yet not having taken the first step in, nor even knowing how to professionally conduct one. They speak often of ‘justice’ and ‘equity’, yet we observe that things get substantially worse under their rule.
They set up illegal collusion between media and government which actively censored Americans who dissented. Once authors of myriad a brazen book and song, they abandoned those ethics when push came to shove, cowering in the presence of Narrative, and celebrating harm to those who refused to obsess over their quod fieri final solution. As for me, they entered my property and threatened my family because I issued an early warning and dared to examine the data before falling for their jackboot shtick. Lamentum exempla:
Ain’t No Rock and Roll – Five Times August
Mistakes Were Not Made – Written by Margaret Anna Alice & Read by Dr. Tess Lawrie
When the victims of their work speak up, loosh addicts deny there are any victims at all, and hide from the responsibility to justify their actions before a broad audience of at-risk stakeholders (their victims). They crave power, virtue, and the spoils of deception with a sadistic glee. We lay witness to their horrific rhetoric on Twitter over the last four years. Currently, as we assess the substantial increase in global excess mortality, reaching tens of millions, all critically since the implementation of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines – there exists only widespread silence, ridicule, and denial from loosh-motivated power holders. The low 2% vaccine uptake serves as a clear indication of the public’s skepticism toward the vaccines, reflecting it as a recognized issue among Americans.
The Covid-19 mRNA vaccine was not the result of sound strategy or science – it was a profit-motivated and unsound action called quod fieri. It was a symbolic and untested act of fecklessness and harm. We risked killing millions of heavily older political opponents, as it turned out, for no gain in terms of lives saved whatsoever.
The fake actors who drove the solution found joy and fulfillment in causing harm to those they hate. They were spiritually unaccountable.
The diabetes treatment and diet industries comprise $150 billion in annual revenues derived from the American obesity epidemic. The root cause of obesity (hepatic and pancreatic toxic dysfunction) is never addressed and abject suffering is perpetuated through therapeutic falsehoods on a grand scale. This stands as a key analogue and example of loosh addiction. The loosh addicts themselves blaming and gaming the victims out of their money and sucking the very life energy from them.
Such is the nature of loosh. It is dispensed through a rigid hierarchy, ruled by occult royalty, demanding unwavering fealty and obedience. You are bound to bow to those above and show little mercy to those below. You are to punish those who violate its awesome insistence. At its core, this is a spiritual dilemma, for the participant remains trapped in this realm—doomed to face the same trials, again and again, until they learn to break the cycle.5
Loosh is not merely a product of the harsh and unjust decisions inherent in our contentious world, as seen in the retailer strategy example above. Rather, it speaks to the habitual gluttony of a compromised soul—one enslaved to the intoxicating energy and fleeting rewards it offers. Loosh thrives in the absence of faith.
The Lycurgian Prison (Loosh Addiction)
Loosh is the intoxicating energy extracted from an ignorant, abused, and captive source. That source is us. It acts as a kind of spiritual tax, drawn from the visceral suffering of innocent victims and paid out to a hierarchy of sycophants. This energy fuels a spiritual madness in its abusers, numbing and blinding them to their own encroaching darkness.
A lower spiritual form of value exchange. The opposite of faith. A spiritual intoxicant/currency derived from the acute suffering of higher sentience beings, including and especially those who are human or of an unblemished, young or innocent nature. The addictive essence which is derived from a blood sacrifice, broad scale destitution, war, pandemic, and/or sexual exploitation, which imparts a temporary rush in its abuser, mistakenly perceived as spiritual power. A currency or wage which is doled out among those who have unwisely addicted themselves to it, which is used to control and direct the actions of an addicted dark hierarchy.
An intoxicating and addictive spiritual ambrosia - distilled from tapping into the potential difference between two realms - by means of an abused and captive innocent. This intoxicant produces a spiritual insanity in its abuser, anesthetizing and blinding them to their own encroaching dark nature.

The Original Sin
We are indeed powerful spiritual beings, endowed with a benevolent blessing: our inherent right to return to the source, as depicted on the left-hand side of Exhibit A above. This gift is irrevocable, as nothing within our power can serve to cancel it. We may request that it be made dormant, but we cannot erase this blessing, for we do not possess the power of ‘un-creation’.
True creation, defined as ‘ex nihilo‘ (from nothing), is a capability exclusive to the Monad (a placeholder for a higher power, distinct from the wrathful Enlil-Saturn-Elohim entity confined in Eden). This act of creating something from nothing is within His/Her/Its domain alone. Similarly, reversing creation, or the process of ‘ex aliquo nihil‘ (from something to nothing), is also beyond our abilities. Consequently, this gift of return to source is one we cannot lose.
I hold to a naturalistic view. However, the natural world is more large, richly complex, and layered than our minds can sense, or even comprehend. Therefore, I live my existence by Faith—not as in the correctness of a held set of doctrines, but rather, in striving to live with integrity and meaning in every moment of my day. Meanwhile, something in that natural realm—I don’t know what it is—while not intervening to solve my problems, helps me carry the burden, whispers encouragement into my soul, and rewards me with love.
However, as potent children of the cosmos, we must be cautious with our desires. If one chooses to self-appoint as God, judging one’s own actions and especially those of others, and deriving power from the worship, punishment, and suffering of those deemed lesser or more ‘sinful’ than our superior self, then such a wish shall be granted: becoming a God of one’s own crafting, confined in their ‘little kingdom of darkness’ – stuck here in this universe for as long as one remains in this state of cruel-mindedness.
“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.” ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Darkness therefore, possessing no means of its own, must abduct and abuse unwitting sources of light in order to derive a corrupted form of the power thereof. Chronic abuse of such wrongfully acquired assets transforms the participant into a self-fashioned deity, standing in defiance of matters of faith or knowledge and succumbing to the ensuing madness. The only reward these receive is the cold dark intoxication of loosh—the antithesis of love.
The astute ethical skeptic will take note that the exploitation of loosh by its Lycurgian insanity controllers and dark hierarchy of sycophants is critically founded upon the spiritual captivity, tallying of sins (a demonic proclivity), and existential ignorance of both major religions and secular/atheistic nihilism. In this, ignorance on the part of the victims is absolutely essential. Both of these philosophy groups therefore suffer the same delusions and impart the same result, ignorance – as unwitting allies in this overall theater of the absurd.
The Ethical Skeptic, “What is Loosh”; The Ethical Skeptic, WordPress, 24 Nov 2023; Web, https://theethicalskeptic.com/?p=76710
This was the most fascinating bit from your discussion with Greg Carlswood on the Higherside Chats. I’d not heard of loosh, but I’m familiar with David Lynch’s “garmonbozia” which he defines as “pain and suffering” that’s craved by those damned in the Black Lodge. This is what drives the story in all of his work, although he only names it in the Twin Peaks universe. I’d be shocked if Lynch weren’t reappropriating loosh and making it his own. Instead of a heavenly ‘ambrosia’ he depicts garmonbozia as creamed corn (his sense of humor; it looks gross).
Thanks for re-visiting this! It’s very apropos to COVID-19.
That's not the way I remember the story. First, the Christian leaders in Damascus initially were very afraid of him. Second, Paul disappeared for several years to learn about Christianity from the early Christians.