Podcast | Metanoia or the Reboot?

This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss.

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The first episode:

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For the past five episodes I’ve walked us all down into the dark where most of us live all day when we’re in Ukraine mode, and tonight, you’ll be happy to know, I’m going to walk you back up. This, of course, reflects the archetypal presence of the beast from the abyss that Larysa Yakubova — from the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, an expert on the Holodomor — it reflects the imagery and the archetypes that she uses.

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I’m Decoding Trolls. I write on disinfolklore.eu, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net, where you can subscribe, and powerofmana.net — and also on X, as Disinfolklore and as Decoding Trolls.

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Here’s the claim in this final episode. The beast is not answered with a better argument. It is answered with a truer image. Some of you who follow my work will understand why I’m so attracted to Larysa Yakubova’s Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss — because she works in archetypes.

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Episode 2:

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It is answered with a truer image, and this is also what I try to do in my work consciously, and what many other people, like Mockers, and many of you, do also unconsciously — in the sense that it’s not a purposeful strategy — when you’re talking about Infolklore.

The whole turn of the series, and the whole turn of Larysa Yakubova’s book, is to answer the beast from the abyss with a truer image. Don’t reflect the image it produces. Don’t share memes that have photos of the people you are critiquing, because that’s how we keep these memes alive; that’s how we reward these Ruschists with amplification. The small part we can play in stopping the spread is this: if we must share the image, if we must share the meme, if we must share the idea, then we can cross it out — like I do, I scrub it out in red, if I need to, so that you hardly see anything of it — but I also try to offer opposite images, Infolklore.

She spends 300 pages of Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss naming a horror with a forensic patience that would frighten us, and then, on the last pages, she does something the Ruschist apparatus can never do. She does not merely refute the nightmare. She replaces it. She holds up a different picture of the world and says: this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss.

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Episode 3:

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Behistun: Arta and the Druge

Many of you will know, in many of these broadcasts, I’ve spoken about the truth. I’ve spoken about Darius, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, 600 BCE, and his inscriptions on the Behistun Rock in Iran, where he talks about how he engaged against the usurpers — the druge, the Lie; druge, dragon; the Lie. We see today Donald tweeting and speaking against the inheritors of Darius’s great empire in Iran — the mad mullahs of Iran, whom Donald archetyped as liars. We see, from the rocks at Behistun in 600 BCE, where the truth — Arta — is archetyped as the rightful power, the rightful sovereign, the rightful speech, against druge, the Lie. Larysa Yakubova, as does President Zelensky, gets this intuitively as well. She holds up a different picture of the world to that of the Ruschists, and says this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss.

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Adjudicating the Claim to Right

The most common thing I get from people is: oh, but the Russians say this. I say: yes, but then we have to adjudicate it. That is a claim to right, and therefore we adjudicate that claim to right. When it comes to occupied Ukraine, they are the usurpers, they are the dragon, they are the serpent, they are the beast entering another people’s land — and whatever they claim is a lie is the druge. We adjudicate. It’s not ‘both sides’; both sides are not equal. Both sides have a claim to right, and then we adjudicate which is the correct claim to right, and we use the post-World War II legal order to determine that.

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In defence of Ancient Ukraine:

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Once we have that as a means of adjudication — and I use it in the Code of Positive Trolls; it’s completely integrated into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, but it also works on the micro level and on the macro level — once you have that, you have the Refugee Convention, the Genocide Convention, the laws of war, the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, where countries commit to removing discrimination on the grounds of sex or political views or other protected criteria.

Tool 6, Generosity, and the Grave-Diggers

The move she makes, Larysa Yakubova, is covered by Tool 6 in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, the 12-tool way — and Tool 6 is generosity. She’s been generous to the beast from the abyss. The move the whole series has been climbing towards is re-archetyping, which, as you know, is part of the 12 tools on disinfolklore.eu. The product of re-archetyping reality is Infolklore. It’s what Mockers does intuitively every day on her show, and Will too — both really fluently and excellently.

By the end of this, I want us to think of Larysa Yakubova not only as a diagnostician of the beast from the abyss, but as one of its grave-diggers — her own word. The act of grave-digging she performs, and all of us who listen to Volya all the time, and participate, and who host — we are digging the grave of Ruschism. Larysa performs an act of re-archetyping so complete that it leaves the Ruschist apparatus with nothing to stand on. First, though, her condition — because she’ll not let us climb out of the abyss on cheap terms, and neither will any of us.

Her Condition: Call Things by Their Names

Larysa Yakubova offers hope, but it is a stern hope, and we have to earn the right to it. Her condition for escape from the abyss — for the Ruschists — is the same condition this whole mini-series has been built on, and it’s the same first move the Disinfolklore framework teaches: you must call things by their names. Once you recognise the Mana, the energy in a thing, in a phenomenon, in a meme, then you call it by its proper name. You adjudicate. You call it by its proper name. The Ruschists call whatever Mana they produce by its improper name.

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The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal Clock:

The Moon, the Menses, and the Maternal Clock

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I want to be precise about what she promises and what she refuses to promise. She does not promise rescue for the Ruschists — they’re beyond rescue. She does not promise that naming the evil dissolves it. What she offers, in her own grim arithmetic — in paraphrase, but the shape of it — is this: calling things by their true name buys only a meagre chance for at least someone to find their way out of what she calls, again in paraphrase, the mirror hall of perfected evil, which is where the Ruschists are living. It’s a meagre chance for at least someone out of a hall of mirrors.

The Meagre Chance and the Mirror Hall of Perfected Evil

This is not sentimental. She is a scholar of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, writing under the salvoes that interrupt her writing and her research, because she’s been bombed. They’re trying to kill her; they’re trying to murder her. The beast has come out from the abyss and is launching missiles and Geran drones to kill her. She will not sell us a happy ending. She’ll sell us a door — narrow, half-open, with no guarantee on the far side, but a door.

Here she says: here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe instead. Notice it is the exact opposite of her condition. The Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe that names don’t matter, that it’s all just narratives. How many of us have heard this? How many of us have heard ourselves saying this, or thinking this? Even if we haven’t heard of postmodernism, we’re imbued with it; it’s imminent, it’s in the air. Someone like Donald Trump would never have read a book on postmodernism in his life, and yet he manifests it in almost every sentence he speaks. Names don’t matter; it’s all just narratives; it’s all just framing; one side’s terrorist is another side’s freedom fighter; who’s to say?

“Names Don’t Matter”: The Bridge Troll of Meaning

Register the Mana in that move before you register the argument. It is fatigue dressed as sophistication. The feeling it installs is: why bother, it’s all spin anyway. Name the archetype underneath, and the voltage halves. This is the bridge troll of meaning itself — the keeper of the threshold who charges us our own clarity as the toll for being allowed to feel worldly.

Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? No. The claim that names are arbitrary is itself the most useful lie the beast tells, because the thing you cannot name is a thing you cannot resist. Is it generous? No. It robs the target of the one instrument that costs nothing and cannot be confiscated. The relativism that says naming is naive is itself Disinfolklore — the apparatus protecting its own camouflage. Larysa Yakubova’s whole book is the refusal of that toll. She names, and in naming she does the first thing the Code of Positive Trolls asks of us. She gets her eye in, and she’ll not look away.

Metanoia and the Reboot

Here is where Larysa Yakubova gets sterner still, and where she saves us from the earliest, easiest mistake of all — the mistake of mistaking a costume change for a transformation. She draws a hard line between two kinds of change. Remember, she’s writing in 2023, before this peace-process nonsense. A costume-change peace — ‘I want peace’ — a costume change, but underneath it, no change.

She uses her own word for a real one: metanoia. Again, an MN word — not the Greek of the seminary by accident; she means it precisely. Metanoia, in her usage, is a root-and-branch change of mind and of values. How do we denazify the Ruschists? How do we denazify the 90 million people left living in the Ruschist Federation? A root-and-branch change of mind and of values — a turning so deep that the person, or the people, who come out the other side is genuinely not the same as the one who went in. That is the real thing. That is escape. Metanoia — not just a naming, but a turning so deep that the people, the Ruschists, who come out the other side are genuinely not the same as the ones who went into the full-scale invasion.

Against this she sets the counterfeit — again, my paraphrase of her argument, not her phrase: the reboot. The machine switched off and switched on again, the operators the same, the slogans updated, the flag perhaps even repainted. The Ruschist empire: the czars, killed; then so-called fake communism; then Yeltsinism; then Putinism. The slogans updated, the flag repainted — turned upside down, a Dutch flag turned upside down — while the Ruschist apparatus underneath grinds on exactly as before. A reboot leaves the machine intact. Metanoia dismantles it.

The Reboot Wearing the Mask

The beast’s favourite tactic, when finally cornered, is to offer us a reboot and call it the metanoia. This piece is helping to prepare us for what is inevitably coming. We all see it coming. It’s Russia’s retreat from Donetsk, or from Luhansk, and the beast will try to keep their hands on Crimea, or perhaps bits of it, and then it will say it’s a reboot. They’ll get rid of Putler, they’ll hand him over to The Hague, and the people who haven’t been watching closely — the people who have no bone in this fight, or the people who have a bone in this fight because they’re being tortured by Geran drones each night.

A friend of mine in Ukraine wrote to me about his elderly mother in Dnipro, and her heart — she’s practically having a heart attack every night as she watches these Geran jet drones go over her house, knowing they’re going to kill someone or destroy something.

We’re waiting for this. The beast’s favourite trick, when finally cornered, is to offer us a reboot and call it the metanoia. New management; lessons learned; a fresh start; let’s open a McDonald’s — so that the substrate survives the show of contrition. We’ve already seen this move in the framework. It’s the deepest form of the lie: the Ruschist apparatus has spent a century learning that the most durable way to keep a thing is to perform its abolition.

Yakubova’s distinction is not a theological nicety. It’s a detection rule. When change is offered, ask which kind it is: does the mind and the value at the root actually turn, or is the engine merely idling, waiting for the cameras to leave? Here is what the apparatus wants us to think at exactly this point: people don’t change, nations don’t change, it’s naive to ask for metanoia, settle for the reboot and be grateful. Register the Mana. It’s cynicism sold as realism, and it’s the precise pressure designed to make us accept the counterfeit. Name the archetype: the merciful sovereign in his most seductive register — the one who says ‘I have changed, trust me, take the deal,’ while the boot stays exactly where it was. Is it true? It is a reboot wearing the mask of repentance. It is Disinfolklore.

The Iran Forecast and Ukraine’s Strategy

Note: it is exactly a year since I was speaking on these podcasts about Iran and the war in Iran, which will inevitably — I forecast then, and I forecast today — lead to an absolute catastrophe of American troops on the ground. We’ve just gone through a second phase. We went through it first last summer, and then we went through a second phase of Donald rebooting every single day, everyone going ‘oh, peace, yes, I want peace, it’s going to be peace,’ and then we hear it again today. This is one of the issues of our era.

In the context of Ukraine and Russia, and specifically Russia: how do we make Russia change? How do we force it? What is Ukraine’s strategy? What’s the thinking at the top of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences? Ukraine has to perform wanting peace. Ukraine has so many people, like my friend’s mother, who are being tortured every night — but they know that, unless this is the final war, we’re all going to be going through this again and again.

Larysa Yakubova has now given us both halves of the stern hope: the condition — name things truly — and the standard — demand metanoia, refuse the reboot. Everything in this mini-series has been the first half, naming the thing, the beast from the abyss, Ruschism. Now, finally, her framework gives her the second.

The Door for the Deep Folk

Here is the heart of the finale, and here is where I think the Disinfolklore framework completes Larysa Yakubova’s sternness — not by softening it, but by giving it somewhere generous to land. There is a question that a book as unflinching as hers leaves hanging, and an honest listener will have felt it through all five previous episodes. If the beast is real, and the Ruschist apparatus is what we have said it is, then what about the people inside it? What about the deep folk I described back in episode two — the ordinary millions pickled in the nightmare, fed the combat propaganda from the cradle, made into the substrate the apparatus runs on? Are they simply the beast? Is there a door for them?

The Code of Positive Trolls answers, and it’s a generous answer, even to the adversary’s own population. Tool 6 does not ask whose side you’re on. It asks: is the meaning generous? A meaning that writes off an entire people as irredeemable fails its own first test. The Code holds a door open even for the deep folk — and that’s why I do use the word Ruschist. Ruschist is a subset of the Russians. If we use ‘Ruschist,’ then it cannot not describe that subset of the Russians who are part of the beast — but there are Russians who are not part of the beast, and the Code of Positive Trolls holds a door open even for them, for that part of the deep folk, and especially for them, because they are not the authors of this nightmare. They are its first and largest victims — the ones pickling the world in a horror that was poured into them before any of us.

This is the move the Ruschist apparatus structurally cannot make and cannot fake. The beast offers no door to anyone, not even its own. It needs its deep folk locked inside the hall of mirrors forever, because the day they climb out is the day the machine loses its substrate. Here is the asymmetry that wins. Disinfolklore must dehumanise to function. Infolklore must refuse to dehumanise, or it stops being Infolklore. The generous door is not weakness. It is the one weapon the Ruschist apparatus has no counter-move against, because the only way it could close that door is by becoming us.

Generosity Is Not the Reboot

Do not mistake generosity for the reboot. Holding the door open is not the same as accepting the counterfeit transformation. Larysa Yakubova’s two disciplines run together here: you demand the metanoia, and you hold the door open for the one who might walk through it. The door is held open precisely so that a real turning has somewhere to go. That is the Code of Positive Trolls working at full stretch — stern on the standard, so metanoia, a complete and utter change of everything, a complete turning; but generous on the threshold, and that is Tool 6, generosity, at its limit.

Re-archetyping: The Move That Completes the Series

Now watch what Yakubova does with it, because she does not just describe the door — she walks through it, and she shows us what is on the other side. Re-archetyping the beast: the move that completes the series. Let me name it cleanly before I show it to you in her own images.

Re-archetyping is something I’ve been talking about all year — for over a year, since Wendy’s first co-hosting show, and my first show as, I’m not quite sure what I am, host, guest, whatever, participant. Re-archetyping is the act by which we do not merely dispossess the Ruschist apparatus of its archetypes; we replace them. It’s not enough to strip the beast of its costume — a stripped beast is still standing there in the dark. We have to replace the image, the way water reaches for the sea.

The product of that act — when the rival image is proofed clean against the Code, generous, true, patient — is Infolklore: the same deep narrative grammar the apparatus parasitises, turned instead to the service of life and the post-World War II legal order. Same folklore, same deep machinery, opposite Mana. The Ruschist apparatus rides the old stories down towards death; Infolklore rides the very same stories up towards life. That’s the whole game in one sentence.

Now, Larysa Yakubova does exactly this, and she does it at the largest possible scale. Her title is already the first move. She takes Russia — which spends untold billions performing itself as the guardian and guarantor of civilisation, the so-called third Rome troll, the katechon, the holy sovereign — and she re-archetypes it as the beast from the abyss. That is re-archetyping in three words. She has not argued Russia out of its self-image; she’s replaced the image. She has put the beast in the throne room, and once you’ve seen it there, you cannot unsee it.

The Madonna in the Cellar

This is the part that takes my breath, and it did when I first read her in the first weeks of the war. An article that she wrote appeared in the newspaper in Dnipro, and I tweeted it straight as soon as I saw it. I’ll repost it after the show so you can see it — I can’t do it right now, because it’s on my Decoding Trolls account, but I’ll do it afterwards.

She re-archetypes Ukraine as the resurrection — not as the beast’s mirror twin, not as the counter-beast. Some of you might remember I used to talk about counter-Disinfolklore. I don’t talk about counter-Disinfolklore any more; I talk about re-archetyping. Not as a counter-beast, but as the figure the beast was built to counterfeit and could only ever counterfeit: life that rises. She takes the deepest folk grammar there is — death and rebirth, the buried seed, the rising god — the very grammar the beast uses, and she turns it, fully proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls, to the service of the living.

Listen to how she does it, in her own words, her own verified words, because this is Infolklore on the page. She gives us the Madonna in the cellar. The quote, verbatim: the Kiev Madonna nurses the newborn hope of the future Ukraine. Dozens of Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson Madonnas give birth in cellars beneath the salvoes and bear witness: life is indestructible.

Feel what that does. The apparatus deals in the mother and the maiden as a weapon — the grief of mothers conscripted to license the next strike, the way we traced through this series, and all of my work, since I first discovered the Russians used the mother and the maiden on that fateful day in eastern Ukraine that I’ve spoken about a lot. She re-archetypes it into the true form: not grief weaponised, but life that the salvoes cannot reach. They’re in the cellars, giving birth. Same figure, opposite Mana. The mother, in her hands, is no longer a key the Ruschist apparatus turns. She is the witness that the beast cannot kill what it is trying to kill. That is re-archetyping. That is Infolklore.

The Ukrainian Prometheuses

She gives us the heroes who carry fire — the Ukrainian Prometheuses, verbatim: those who, even perishing, transmit their inner fire to people and ignite in them a flame of dignity. Those are her words. We’re thinking of the emergency workers helping to rescue the mothers giving birth while they’re being double-tapped. Those who, even perishing, transmit their inner fire to people and ignite in them a flame of dignity.

The apparatus offers the merciful sovereign, who hoards all light and doles it out as a favour. Yakubova answers with the opposite figure — the one whose whole nature is to give the fire away: Prometheus, to spend himself igniting dignity in others. Generosity, Tool 6 of the Code of Positive Trolls and the 12-tool way on disinfolklore.eu, rendered as myth. The sovereign hoards; the Prometheus pours. She has not argued against the sovereign; she has put a truer fire-bearer in his place.

Grave-Diggers and Cornerstone

So we arrive at the last words of the series, and I want to give it to Larysa Yakubova, because she has earned it by writing this masterpiece across 300 pages of looking the beast in the eye. She calls Ukraine, verbatim, the grave-diggers of Ruschism, page 280 — and in the same breath, the cornerstone of the world of the future, page 282. Hold those together: the grave-diggers of Ruschism, and the cornerstone of the world of the future.

Hold those two together, because that pairing is the whole framework. Grave-digger and cornerstone: the hand that buries the beast, and the stone the next world is built on, in the same people, in the same act. You do not get to be the cornerstone without first being willing to dig the grave, and the grave you dig is not for revenge — it is to clear the ground for what rises. Diagnosis and re-archetyping, the two halves of this mini-series, named in five words by a woman writing under fire.

Her final image, verbatim, is the resurrection itself: genuine Rus resurrects; the false one expires. We go back to Behistun. I have no idea whether Larysa Yakubova knows who Darius is — probably she does; maybe she doesn’t think about it all day, the usurpers and the truth — but she gets it intuitively, as most of us do. Genuine Rus resurrects — the druge, the Lie, the dragon, the druge — the false one expires. Ukraine and the world at the beginning of a new historical epoch. Glory to Ukraine, she ends.

Read that as the framework reads it: the false one, the counterfeit, the reboot wearing the mask, the beast performing the holy, expires; the genuine resurrects. That is not a better argument against the apparatus. The apparatus is immune to better arguments — it eats them, it turns them, it accuses you of the very thing you’ve proven. What the apparatus is not immune to is a truer image. That is the generous door.

Closing: Become the Light

Here is the thing I most want us to carry out of these six episodes. The door is held open not because the beast deserves it, but because we would cease to be ourselves if we closed it. Yakubova names the beast with forensic mercilessness, and then she holds the door open even for the deep folk pickled inside it, because the resurrection she is writing is large enough to include anyone — anyone willing to undergo metanoia and walk through. Stern on the standard, generous on the threshold: that is the Code of Positive Trolls at full stretch, and it’s the only thing that has ever defeated an abyss.

The beast tells us there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Yakubova’s answer, and ours, is not to argue the point. It’s to become the light, and hold it until the tunnel can no longer pretend the dark is all there is. See the archetype, name it — and then, when we have named it, do the harder and more beautiful thing the Ruschist apparatus can never do: put a truer image in its place.

I’m Decoding Trolls. See the archetype, name it, halve its power. That’s the end of the Larysa episode. Out.

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Previous episode:

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First episode in the Beast from the Abyss mini-series: