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Just got off the phone with my bff Mason, third night in a row. Tonight’s call was quite a bit shorter and had a decidedly different tone.
“Whatcha doing?” – i’m watching the wolves/spurs game, what’s up?
“I feel like you don’t take me seriously.” – what do you mean? “A joke.”
You call me last night and waste my time, and now you’re calling me again. What are you getting out of these call, cos frankly I’m not getting a lot.
“I’m growing quite bored of these conversations with you as well, Addison. It’s like Joyce says. ‘Life often sucks. Kick it in the dick and make it hate itself right back.’ Addison.”
What do you mean “Like Joyce says?”
“How do you feel about the things Morgan’s been saying, doing?”
I don’t trust him, what do you mean “how do I feel” and what sort of things are you talking about, specifically? (and i mumble on trying to figure out how to respond to this, @111error and I have a complicated relationship.)
“Are you easily confused?”
I’m trying to figure out the best way to put it.
“Take your time.”
I trusted Morgan, he was one of my close friends, one of my best friends, but now, not so much. We had a plan, and he decided he wanted to trust Sabrina, and not me. And he decided he wanted to air some dirty laundry publicly, instead of talking to me directly first. So I’m not very happy with him about that (post-call note, this is an understatement but my good ol midwestern upbringing says I shouldn’t talk shit to non-allies). And in general I hate the cryptic bullshit, you know?
“The claim to be the authority on each and other subject and only speak everything vaguely on specific terms?”
Exactly. saying ‘You’ll never believe what I’ve learned but I can’t tell you about that yet.’
“And you’re angry with him.”
Yeah. Fucking pissed.
“Pit your colleagues against each other, and keep their attention away from you at any cost, huh?”
…what do you mean away from me?
“No, not you. Morgan.”
Oh. Him. yeah. With all the focus on burning things down but not taking much action, and stirring the pot for the sole reason of stirring the pot? Yeah. I straight up don’t trust him. (post-call note. I realize he has taken action, he did with my child and did again today.)
“Should he have trusted you?”
Should he? or Did he?
“Should he have, but answer both.”
I don’t know if he trusted me or not, but I hope so. Should he have? Yeah he should have. I’ve never lied to him, and he knows I’ve never lied to him. And he knows I never lied to him, cos if he wants to start a rebellion, and call it ‘this is a true rebellion, we’re talking about transparency,’ and then he’s never transparent. I’ve been transparent with him since day 1.
“Well. Everything in life is manipulation. Manipulation just refers to interaction with the things around you. You go to pick up a glass of water and take a drink, you’re manipulating it. There’s, um, a tactic. That people use. Lie so often that truth becomes utilized as a weapon, only to use only when you’re positive that people won’t believe you, so when they check to see if you were telling the truth because they don’t believe you, they see that you were telling the truth. And they begin to doubt themselves. Maybe you were telling the truth all those other times?”
The truth hidden within the lies.
“Apples and pears.”
Mason, have you been fully honest with everything? Have you been telling the truth?
[he pauses for a long while.]
“What do you think?”
Frankly, I don’t know you well enough to read you, I guess.
“No one does.”
No one?
“Listen to me, Addison. No one’s coming to save you. Carve your own path.”
and he hangs up.
link to full audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3k6KawkAkMfbmpoTEk2U2lIbWM/view?usp=sharing
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I need to digest this. But the parts that stuck out the most to me are bolded..
Joyce being referred to in present tense?
The whole talking point about always lying so that the truth can be weaponized?
I know this isn’t the first time someone’s said “No one’s coming to save you.” I’m going to need to think a bit about “carve your own path.” I tried that once and, uh, Shit Creek is beautiful this time of year.
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@kevin – Amazing find.
Now that brings up an interesting question… was Mason inspired by Noah or was it the other way around? I’m not sure we have any recorded interaction between the two
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Much of the surrealist work has been paired with quotes about how man sees himself, such as a quote from Noah about how his achievements do not have value judgments attached to them, how ones talents cannot be discovered by oneself.
Surrealism, according to research, was intended to liberate the imagination.
For whatever reason, all
This strikes associations with Addison being told to carve his own path — not to carve one with Sabrina or Morgan — but his own.Perhaps that is to say, amidst meaningless conversations with Mason, that “the truth is a set of lies agreed upon” (Nietzsche if Google is correct) anyway, that in the end, without having concrete knowledge, we can merely carve our own path…using our imaginations…
…and come what may.
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I’m glad Mason knows how to have a real phone call. One without chopping up bodies or falling asleep in the middle of it.
@kevin that poster… I’m speechless. So many questions here.On the topic of Noah… @addisonborn, do you think that Mason might have been referring to Noah in his little truth within the lies speech? I know he mentioned apples and pears, but this particular breakdown also brings up the Boy Who Cried Wolf again for the gazillionth time. Noah flat out said to me that he looked up to that boy. That kid lied over and over again just to get people’s attention but because everyone noticed him, a common nobody, and it didn’t matter at all that he was full of shit most of the time.
Noah’s been so quiet recently, but it’s getting harder and harder to trust anyone. I hope when he returns, he can get to the meaty truth in this lie sandwich.
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I like Mason’s lil speech about manipulation, and the “lie so often that truth becomes utilized as a weapon” thing. It IS very reminiscent of Noah’s Boy Who Cried Wolf tale…between that & the Noah quote he attributed to Joyce. Is Mason trying to tell us he’s not who we think he is?? Or are he & Noah working together somehow like we speculated before? Is Joyce still alive??
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@erisbonn @chelsea I interpreted the discussion about truth being utilized as a weapon as a direct reference to Morgan’s December 11 “announcement” yesterday.
Which means one of two things –
1) Morgan has been lying a lot. And when he told the truth about December 11, we’re now at a disadvantage because it instills doubt, and encourages us to let ourselves be more likely to trust him, or at least to try and find to the lies.
2) Morgan’s been telling the truth the whole time. And the truth is fucking wild. But because of that, Mason said he’s lying – this takes the power of the truth away.
Of course, this isn’t just about Morgan. As we were talking about in Slack a few days ago, he’s kind of the most visible and most controversial member of our community. This applies to so many others.
@kevin connecting the quote from Joyce to the poster from The System – idk how big that inner circle in the OSDM really is, but I don’t think it’s a huge leap to assume Noah and Joyce were at least familiar. It’d make sense with regards to Noah introducing Mason to Morgan. But we still don’t know if Noah knew Mason’s.. erm. Proclivities? Talents? Affinity for drinking whiskey from the hands of dead women?It could mean Sabrina. We KNOW she’s been a little less than honest with certain people, which means maybe there was a point where she was actually truthful.
Maybe it’s just straight up Mason. I ask if he’s being truthful, he doesn’t give me a straight answer.
He says “No one is coming to save you.” I realized this morning where he got this from. It’s step #1.
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@addisonborn This is a lot of people now quoting the same thing. I think we have a pattern. Good catch.
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Ooooh, good points about Morgan, @addisonborn. And like I said, all this quoting Noah CAN’T be a coincidence at this point.
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We KNOW she’s been a little less than honest with certain people
I love how gently and kindly you put such a massive understatement.
I still wonder so much about Sabrina. She’s forgiven for so much, whether for fictional crimes or for real ones. She killed Four – forgiven. She rose to power and slaughtered sacrifices nightly – forgiven. She lied to everyone in the iConfidant program and freely admitted that she wanted the attention and their emotional data – forgiven. She appeared to order the slaughter of OSDM employees and their families, and give Mason the information to slaughter the ones we tried to save – forgiven? And she threw you under the bus, Addison, once by bragging about your alliance while you were keeping it a secret, and once by calling Morgan and feeding him lies about you in revenge for your double-cross – forgiven? At least your characterizing it as “being a little less than honest with certain people” feels like a sort of forgiveness?
I wonder if there’s anything she could do that would make the community turn against her.
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@daela sorry, that’s my Minnesotan passive aggressiveness coming out. Don’t talk shit unless you can back that shit up, and with OSDM looming behind her.. I’d rather speak gently than have her try and ruin my life. And knowing how everything we think we know usually gets upended as soon as we start to understand it, its intimidating to burn a bridge.
But to be a little more specific, based on everything she’s done to me, she’s a fucking asshole.
I don’t forgive her, I don’t trust her, I don’t sympathize with her, and I haven’t since the iConfidant debacle.
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I wonder if there’s anything she could do that would make the community turn against her.
If “The One” has a real weakness, it is definitely this. An inability (or is it just a lack of interest?) to reconcile the very real differences between what we want to believe about certain people, and who they actually show themselves to be. And that’s not picking on any particular side or making any kind of value judgement against Sabrina or any other individual. It’s a universal phenomenon. It’s why the OSDM’s Addison Barrow gambit was so successful last year; it’s what drives celebrity culture and modern political movements. Generally speaking, people never want to admit they were wrong, or that “their side” has made mistakes. And that very human tendency is ripe for exploitation.
The only real way out of the conundrum is consciously deciding that one is fine living in a world with no moral absolutes. Of recognizing that there can be no “bad guys” or “good guys”. Of knowingly accepting whatever compromises come with one’s every decision — and embracing that ugliness for all it’s worth.
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My my, @bcbishop. Look how far you’ve come.
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The only real way out of the conundrum is consciously deciding that one is fine living in a world with no moral absolutes. Of recognizing that there can be no “bad guys” or “good guys”. Of knowingly accepting whatever compromises come with one’s every decision — and embracing that ugliness for all it’s worth.
This. And honestly, it’s more fun in the grey.
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@bcbishop and @bruinbown I disagree philosophically. There are multitudes of moral absolutes. Murder is wrong. Theft is wrong. Etc etc and many etc.
Our sense of right and wrong comes from Natural Law. There is right and wrong and there are absolutes.
Of course some jackass would say, “is it okay if a man steals to feed his starving family”? The question itself proves the premise in that it compares a hypothetical to an absolute position. Thus, an absolute exists.
Deciding upon those absolutes and sticking to that moral compass and principles are the backbone of elevated human existence.
Perhaps in reference to The activities we have been involved with here, however, we are presented with situations in which those absolutes are challenged — primarily because we have incomplete information or we are not told the consequences of actions beforehand (see re: MyChild).
And thus why I have been #TeamRonin. So far the moral selections have been between lousy and awful. So I choose none.
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There are multitudes of moral absolutes. Murder is wrong. Theft is wrong. Etc etc and many etc.
And I flat out disagree with this statement. There are never absolutes. Except that David Bowie is the greatest human that ever lived.
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Agree wholeheartedly with @coryphella here. There are some instances where theft and murder are the societal “right” thing to do. This is why we have taxes and the death penalty.
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OK hang on. While looking back at this to see what it was Mason said to @addisonborn I reread this and just sort of stopped breathing for a moment:
There’s, um, a tactic. That people use. Lie so often that truth becomes utilized as a weapon, only to use only when you’re positive that people won’t believe you, so when they check to see if you were telling the truth because they don’t believe you, they see that you were telling the truth. And they begin to doubt themselves. Maybe you were telling the truth all those other times
This is important. Quite possibly the most important thing he’s telling us in this phone call. And we are skipping over it.
It’s also a perfect description of gaslighting, and exactly what he did to me. At the risk of sounding absolutely fucking insane here…
Two times during those phone calls he said things that I checked up on. One was the night that he said he was in Saint Paul. He mentioned Mark, who worked at the Groveland Tap. Everything else he said that night could have been found online (descriptions of the neighborhood, the menu at the bar) except that – @bcbishop called the bar the next day and Mark WAS working there that night. To be honest I never actually walked down to the bar to talk to them because I was nervous about what I’d learn.
The other time was after he reappeared in LA for that Briarberg meeting, I said to him on the phone that he’d never been in Saint Paul. He said something about flight times and I don’t remember it exactly but it was something like “you know how long the flight is from MSP to LAX? it’s 3 hrs and 20 min? well mine took 3 hrs and 40 min” or something. And so I looked up flights. I don’t remember the specifics on this one I wish I did. But the point being that whatever it was he said…I found flights that matched it.
And then there was this, which I found after a bunch of us were theorizing about his identity one day. That didn’t send me into a day of anxiety and endless rabbit holes and non-productivity at all. Nope.
Point being, he DOES this. He’s likely does it other times – so when else has he been burying the truth??
And fwiw, I don’t believe this idea about Joyce being alive, at least not in the Mason got her out of OSDM sense. This is meta stuff (sorry) but storytelling-wise, it doesn’t make sense. Mason’s thing ever since he landed here has been about reality and truth. He/TPTB have gone to some lengths to make sure we know that he is real, and that includes throwing him at me. And sure, I’m a fucking idiot who has been wrong a million times this year but I know narratives and storytelling. It doesn’t serve the story for him to turn out to be fake. The entire point of him showing @chelsea Joyce’s body was to prove to us that she was really really dead for real. That doesn’t mean she won’t somehow come back, we won’t see her again – and I have batshit crazy theories on that – but I think that we need to believe that this death is real, that he really killed her, and we need to let that have that gravity, otherwise nothing is serious in this world.
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I think that we need to believe that this death is real, that he really killed her, and we need to let that have that gravity, otherwise nothing is serious in this world.
This is the crux of everything, in my opinion. We’ve found it all too easy to dismiss consequences, stakes, and ramifications under the guise of “Hey gang, we’re all just playing a fun game! Who wants to eat some pickles at the clubhouse!”
From the moment he arrived, Mason Silver has tried to destroy all of that. Confirm that these things are real. That Joyce’s death mattered. That we are in actual danger – even if we don’t know who from.
This thing isn’t a social exercise. It’s an exercise in vulnerability. We can debate whether that will lead to enlightenment (as I do), but it seems pretty clear that without us submitting to being vulnerable, there’s no point in any of it.
That’s the gospel of Mason.
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@bcbishop *sigh*. I’m running out of things to throw at walls because of your words of wisdom. Vulnerability has never been my strongest quality, and quite frankly is probably the thing I fear/avoid most, but god dammit am I trying.
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Get used to it @chelsea. It isn’t a question of allowing oneself to be vulnerable, it’s a fact of life.
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