Talking in-depth with writer, linguist, and anon AMRX Mark II, a dissident voice from the Pacific on escaping the cults of ideology, the yearning for identity in a "no place" like Hawaii, and what it means to walk away from ideological affiliations. Political beliefs as personal alibi, the sickness of escapism, the craving for heroes, identity formation and linguistics, cultural alienation and mimicry. Objectivism and disillusionment, the false theatre of Hawaiian sovereignty movements, the psy-op of Mauna Kea, the flattening hybridization of Pidgin, and Hawaii as a laboratory of empire. We talk about Substack as a space for intellectual deprogramming/engineering, the ritual of purging belief systems, and the existential loneliness that drives the search for meaning. Code-switching, mirror languages, sovereignty as theatre, linguistic education, the bridging importance of Sanskrit, to finally becoming your own guru—no cope, no hero, no group—emphasizing self-improvement and personal responsibility.

Excerpts

Hawaiian Local Identity

 Here is where cultures seem to come to die. I see everyone around me losing their heritage. Like all the kids I grew up with they're all children of immigrants and they did not identify with their parents' languages or cultures at all. In many cases they couldn't speak their parents' language and they, were trying, they were like me.They were trying to find some alternative identity and so we were all alienated. And I think that's quite common here, but people just don't talk about it.

On Hawaiian Pigeon

 Pidgin is a very complicated thing in Hawaii because people have this strange relationship with it. People use it as a marker of local identity, but it's also something that they're ashamed of…

As a thought experiment for decades now, I've thinking about how pidgin can become like this new fusion identity in Hawaii. And one idea I had for a stack was writing about how the Hawaiian sovereignty movement here totally rejects pidgin

On Mauna Kea as Psy-op 

I think purpose of the psy-op was to distract from the military operations going on near Mauna Kea

On The Role of Social Dynamics in Political Affiliations

One of the major reasons I got sucked into all of this was just social, really. That's the sad thing. I am an extreme introvert, and I find it very difficult to talk to people. The thing about all these different cults is that if you believe that everyone, you deal with, is on the same page as you, then socialization becomes very easy.

 Affiliations as Surrogate Identity

 I've noticed that a lot of Objectivists are in the same, are in a similar position to me. There's like these Objectivists who come from non-white backgrounds and they want to be some sort of weird and some sort of new thing.

Ayn Rand herself and her own inner circle, they were all Jewish, but they were, they wanted to be something other than Jewish. They were trying to run away from it. And I was like them. I see that in hindsight now. I didn't wanna be Japanese. I wanted to be like this weird like new, what I've called new objectivist man, that was, not Japanese, not Asian, not anything. So all these ident, all these cult identities were attempts to run away from who I was and I just regarded so as just so cringe now, not that I embrace who I am, I still have identity issues, but I don't think signing up for a group and is really the answer anymore. But it, it was just so easy.

So I poured all my energy into learning Japanese and I went to university in Japan. And that was just a complete disaster. Because I realized I really did not fit in there. The language is not the problem. I could do the classes I could do the tests, I could write the papers.

That was not the issue. I, it made me realize how superficial my idea of Japanese identity was just because I could speak, read and write Japanese didn't mean I really belonged there. And I realized, yeah, this is just not for me anymore. And then I started doubling down on the Objectivist stuff, because as I just mentioned, objectivism is like a, is like for non main, like people of color…like this weird surrogate identity.

AMRX Mark II

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