But unfortunately it leaves out the previous timelines in which Abe and Aaron don’t stop their doubles from completing new boxes.

That’s the best sense I can make of the movie. There is one more Abe and one more Aaron. The Aaron we see at the very end instructing French people to build the giant box they to manipulate the film’s protagonists into ensuring that their doubles don’t build new boxes.

Still waiting for you to deliver on your response to my three questions about your anti-orthogonality-thesis position.

1. New cultural medium emerges, languishes in obscurity.
2. New medium grows larger, standards improve, master craftsmen appear, yearns to be taken seriously as an art form.
3. New medium dismissed by cultural establishment, too weird.
4. New medium grows huge, dwarfs all other entertainment industries, gains mainstream acceptance (but not elite approval).
5. New medium opens diplomatic relations with cultural establishment (e.g., reviews in the Guardian).
6. Cultural establishment demands religious conversion for new medium to be accepted into the fold.
7. Some open-minded tribal rulers of the new medium invite in establishment missionaries.
8. Missionaries beheaded, dismembered and burned alive by angry mobs of narrow-minded peasants.
9. Cultural establishment declares war on new medium. “Submit to Hollywood-ification or die”.
10. New medium blessed with vast hinterland of independent media, youtube vloggers, and millions of suicidally loyal natives. Cultural establishment bogged down in Russian winter.

Interesting to compare to the general tech startup world of Silicon Valley, which is mostly following a policy of Cathedral appeasement and feeling the obvious consequences.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/69e70954-f639-11e3-a038-00144feabdc0.html

We can take ISIS to be a company that offers two services: (1) it blows stuff up for its donors (and sends them an annual report) and (2) it provides a “jihad experience” for bored young Muslims.

Hypothesis: In the wringer of Middle East conflict, where new movements seem to appear daily, Gnon / Natural Selection / Capitalism did its work and produced a lean jihadi organisation that has no other goals beyond those that sustain it – i.e., all it does it attract fighters and donors (and occupy territory).

Perhaps the devil isn’t on your side. If the dark powers that rule the universe are not elemental forces (sublime and terrible though these may be) but rational intelligences, one might expect their only use for men who aspire to be like them (or who in crude fashion identify with the elemental forces) would be as a decoy to gull generic ‘Christians’ lacking discernment or instruction. Classic conjurer’s misdirection, one might say. Cathedral decadence notwithstanding, perhaps the dark archons’ favoured instrument was always the Atlantean commonwealth whose rulers, their chosen people, possess a magic so potent one can scarce call it sorcery, surpassing as it does all other occult techniques and systems by an order of magnitude, in comparison with which the subtlest, most refined applications of the left-hand path are as but the brabble of children …

Even Jesus Christ recognizes this, however, which is why he said to be as wise as serpents, and as gentle as doves. Call that Christian “reaction”, if you will. Buddhism found it’s own reaction in the form of Zen, which was where it was melded with Taoism.

Taoism, of course, advocates neither complete altruism or complete selfishness, and realizes that the path is in the paradox itself.

I ‘support’ (not actively in any sense, with very low level emotional engagement) Scottish ‘independence’ because it is potentially and instance of (very low level) succession, and therefore indicative of the kind of thing we would like to see more of. I support it even though I think it may be detrimental to the Scottish, who I expect will end up with a more left-wing (read incompetent) administration as an immediate result (what use is oil / gas if you lack the intelligence necessary for its extraction?). Shifting things leftward is good if it either a) fragments centralised Cathedral power (even a little bit / symbolically) or b) makes the shift leftward patently appear to be a bad thing, or c) both, which I think may be the case here (how can a nation of dependants not realise that they are a nation of dependants? What do they think is going to happen; everyone is going to stop drinking and magically grow an IQ overnight?!)

Does this match up with your own thoughts on the matter, or do you have a different insight?