Ask most people to consider something different (maybe you can get Y without having to do X; maybe Y isn’t even that great to begin with) and they will react with fear and anger, which is usually a defence built into their conformist belief system. Their implanted conditioning tells them, if you don’t hurry up and get in line for Y, other people will get it before you and there might not be any left—so don’t waste your time with anything else.
It’s the same herd fear that causes high school kids to gang up on the “social outcasts.” It’s the same professional anxiety that causes research scientists to overlook potentially radical paradigm shifts out of fear of being laughed at or deplatformed. It’s the same fear that causes hoarding in an emergency. Tribal fear. Swarm fear. Herd stampedes. Everyone’s running for something they think is going to make their lives more secure or less miserable (usually some degree of higher status dressed up as more money, better job, better spouse, better house, more online clout, fleeting media notoriety).
You can’t wake people up from “if X, then Y” because it’s constantly economically, interpersonally reinforced from every social angle. People can only wake themselves up. And this usually depends on them getting a random shock that jars them temporarily awake (death, accident, serious illness, loss of job, chance meeting with someone already awake, paranormal event, powerful experience with some kind of art or literature, or some other catastrophic life change).
Just for a moment, forget about social upheaval and current events. Instead, consider that there is something in you which does not reside in your neurochemistry or your social conditioning. The ancient Greeks called it the psyche and symbolized it as a goddess. Let’s imagine that it exists and that it is buried under all your nature and nurture, invisible to your everyday consciousness. But sometimes, when no one is pressuring, shaming, gaslighting, accusing, seducing, terrifying, extorting, or otherwise manipulating you, you can feel it.
Once you realize and accept that the most central part of you is not determined by others or even by your flesh and bones, you might wonder what, exactly, this “psyche” is. You might want to know more about it. You might want to test it and discover this aspect of your self that conformist culture tries to suppress. That’s when you step out of the “if X, then Y” robot-think and onto what occultists call “the path of initiation.” And then your life changes forever.
The hippies of the 1960s called it “Doing your own thing”—figuring out who you really are and then doing what you really want to do according to that discovery.
Aleister Crowley called it "finding your True Will": “[E]ach individual has a unique and incommensurable inherent nature (which is identical to their 'destiny') that determines their proper course in life, that is the mode of action that unites their purest personal will with the postulated course that pre-exists for them in the universe.”
The Temple of Set calls it “Xeper”: “Xeper is the experience of an individual psyche becoming aware of its own existence and deciding to expand and evolve that existence through its own actions.”
Matt Zane, in Transcendental Satanism, calls it “The Satanic Aspect”: “The Satanic Aspect has one purpose and expresses elevated will in its most realized form: the will to present situations and to lead to opportunities that cultivate consciousness. Its purpose is to work towards potential through a highly personalized path that in turn creates a completely unique and powerful individual” (40).
You can call it whatever you want. The point is, once you discover the psyche, you know it’s there. It’s “doing your own thing” because it is unique to you. Nobody else has that particular pattern of individuality. It’s “finding your True Will” because it cannot be changed by nature or nurture and it cannot be compared to anything else (“incommensurable”). It’s “Xeper” because it functions as a verb, it involves “coming into being”—it’s dynamic, constantly evolving, constantly making you more of who you already are in essence. And it’s “satanic” because it goes against everything society wants—your conformity, your blood and sweat, your money, your time, your life—in order to give those things back to you (like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity).
Anything that goes against the laws set forth by society is inherently satanic and transgressive. It isolates you from those caught up in the robot logic. It makes you seem strange and threatening. It aggravates everyone not ready to look in the mirror, which is usually most people.
So how do you start down this difficult path, sometimes described as “the path of spiritual dissent”? Do you want to? If you feel like you do, you’ve already taken a step. If this bothers you, you probably want to take a step but your conditioning is defending itself. If you think this is nonsense, get some sleep. Work starts early tomorrow.