Selling Your Soul
by TAGA INC.
The Western world rarely conquers by force alone.
It absorbs what it does not fully understand, strips it of lineage, ritual, and cosmology, then reintroduces it as innovation. What once functioned as a bridge between inner and outer worlds, between meaning and material life, is flattened into product.
An honor, all things considered.
assimilate (verb)
To take in and understand fully; to absorb into the mind.
To incorporate or absorb into a larger group, culture, or society; to become similar or integrated.
To adapt or adjust to new conditions, surroundings, or norms.
Names are removed. Origins are blurred.
What remains is palatable, marketable, and repeatable. Until one day, a variable is born.
This process is neither deliberate nor accidental.
Culture is not stolen outright. It is hollowed.
Once emptied, it can be sold back lighter, cheaper, and disconnected from the intelligence that gave it power in the first place.
A paradoxical transaction in which value accrues to the holder as the originator forfeits what it no longer recognizes.
What cannot be extracted is first criticized. What cannot be dismissed is reframed as primitive, excessive, irrational, or obsolete.
This is how value is negotiated downward.
If you can be convinced that what is intrinsic to you is unrefined, unprofitable, or embarrassing, you will relinquish it willingly. Once relinquished, it circulates elsewhere, rebranded and sanitized, divorced from its source.
The most efficient form of exploitation is self abandonment.
A mechanism by which the world increases its own value by diminishing the value of those it has yet to consume.
It is important to note that no one is granted this power without the permission of the beholder.
The true question is not whether you love yourself enough to avoid being sold, but whether you are clever enough to outmaneuver those who assume they know better than you.
Human life becomes inexpensive the moment it internalizes lack. Not financial lack, but ontological lack. The belief that legitimacy must be granted externally.
Not only quiet distrust of one’s own inheritance, but a learned distance from what once provided coherence.
This is why remembering origin matters.
Not as nostalgia. Not as identity performance.
But as orientation.
To remember where you originate is to remain anchored in value that cannot be diluted by consensus.
Owning the creation of our ideas, rituals, and perception allows us to see how meaning moves through time, untethered and uncompromised.
This requires nonduality.
The capacity to hold spectrum without collapsing into sides. To integrate without being absorbed.
Essentially, to participate without being consumed.
Selling your soul is rarely dramatic.
It is quiet. Incremental. Often rewarded.
It happens through small concessions, repeated long enough to feel normal, until you accept language that flattens complexity and choose belonging at the expense of coherence.
The Avant-Garde Aristocrat is someone who has exited survival, mastered taste, and lives as though culture itself answers to them. A sovereign class defined by inner wealth, cultivated discernment, and intellectual gravity. They are not trying to be rich, common, or palatable.
They assume affluence as the baseline.
Not by rejecting the modern world, but by refusing to amputate intelligence from imagination, power from meaning, or commerce from dignity.
Sovereignty is not rebellion. It is remembrance, carried forward with discipline.
And nothing that remembers itself can be made cheap.
