“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.” — Slavoj Zizek A hidden hand sways us from beyond the veil of the unseen. Through the metaphysical purdah insulating our reality from the underlying substrate, we are governed by its secret laws. The ancients grasped the most foundational of these as the Golden Mean, or some variation thereof; the keeper of checks and balances, the taut string of harmonic tension as the self-regulatory backstop of order. When that balance is upset or destroyed, things go haywire.
"The world is welcoming, in other words. It was built by your ancestors, and they imagined you long before you arrived. They wondered what sort of work you might do, before you knew there is such a thing as work. Your parents may have recognized the echo of sibling or a parent in your face as you sought the nipple. They smiled at you”.
The Chinese world is like that. Has been for yonks. Works very well.
Hey there Godfree! I didn't realise that you had a 'Stack - I've been an avid reader of your output in other 'platforms', and you seemed to have dropped off the edge of the Earth.
I have often thought our culture has developed a kind of societal Alzheimer's, neither remembering the past nor thinking of the future but always trapped in the now, but with confusion all around.
As one fully inculcated in the cult of Progress, and who has largely rejected it...I ask the question...of what use is "progress" if the quality of my life is made worse by it.?..Our boys and I love camping in the absolute wilderness, where there has been no "progress" for many millennia, and I feel my soul being cleansed by the experience....
Loved Kenneth Clark's Civilization when I was in HS and it was presented as a "documentary" by PBS.
Everything you say about that moment of the solstice has been on my mind as the confounding number of talents and IQ which drove me mad in my youth are under control and a pleasure to explore in early old age and retirement having done my necessary duty as a divorced mother and a civil servant... but JUST as I have been getting ready to write that Biography and Memoir of more than a dozen phenomenal and famous relatives, deceased and a couple who are living, my health issues steal my time like a thief.
Sad reality that the accumulation of a lifetime of experiences and wisdom are held unreflected upon and often unspoken throughout that life due to what is necessary to provide for your progeny in this society. Only to realize the value when you are on that back side of the apex and your time is short to convey. If anybody would listen away. And if written and unpublished, would anybody read.
Whew, your hand was strong when writing this one! Got some real HP Lovecraft vibes there, especially the first few paragraphs.
A couple of notes:
1) I've said it before, and I'll say it again - if you don't believe that a Higher Power/God exists, then sooner or later, you'll start believing that human beings are God/the Highest Power.
2) Believe it or not, a civilization once intentionally DID build their foundation on a soft, marshy soil prone to flooding - Teotihuacan.
3) Rousseau lived so long ago that modern folks have forgotten the context in which he was living, especially the effects that Paul Le Jeune had on him. Le Jeune was a missionary to "New France" or what we'd call Canada today, and he wrote a supremely influential book called "Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France." In it, he described having many, many conversations with the natives on topics like liberty and freedom, you know, the same shit that Rousseau did a century later.
Effectively, the natives told the Jesuits "your civilization sucks" to which the Jesuits were forced to come up with counter-arguments, and what Le Jeune did was more or less "transcribe" these debates. Keep in mind that this was the FIRST time in centuries of European history that anyone had seriously questioned the status quo, including stuff like hierarchies (what kind of gov't structure is good), freedom (who can tell who what to do) and equality (are some people born "better" than others).
Remember, before the two big revolutions in France and USA, it was just assumed that the natural order of things was: 1) there is a class of people (nobles) who are just born superior, 2) the head of the gov't can tell anyone what to do, including enslave them (lack of freedom) and 3) that permanent hierarchies are the only way to govern a society. And the natives challenged all that, which Le Jeune was unusual in that he didn't dismiss them as "barbarian morons" and this percolated through French society down to Rousseau's day, when he famously wrote his weird thesis about these concepts.
3b) Speaking of which, it always blows my mind that Americans think that ideas like a representative form of government or a non-permanent/non-dynastic ruler/leader appeared spontaneously out of thin air, or that these concepts were "self-evident." They sure as fuck weren't. Those concepts all came from the indigenous inhabitants of North America.
Rousseau certainly knew it, but now modern people have forgotten HOW he knew it and are locked in a box that says "only Europeans ever invent anything" hence the endless circular firing squad of what passes for intellectual debate.
Wonderful points and bringing in the work of Le Jeune and Rousseau! Thank you.
I think it is so important to bring in this history and age old wisdom and also to always delineate between ordinary mortals, perhaps the majority of whom are modest, decent people, and the structures and aims of arrogant burgeoning nations and Empires motivated by greed and acquisition in all times and places. As you indicate, those assumptions of "the natural order" were held by those nobles and governments in power.
One of my ancestors came across with Roger Williams in the early 1600's to the first Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Williams and these eleven men stood up to the Puritans about the dwindling freedom of religion and over the treatment of the native tribes and they were increasingly scorned, flogged, jailed and finally banished from the Colony. They went on and founded Rhode Island and maintained friendly alliances with the Narragansetts until the ever greater Colonial structures began to undermine and betray them all and well founded distrust set in amongst the native tribes. The rest is history.
How much does today's western press tell us about the work being done in every sphere by the good people of this world? My point is that Colonial Empires run by a minority of those cynical, damaged, sub-human beings they attract (carrying big weapons) and those structures - increasingly run with the mechanistic precision of corporate drones and AI - are not comparable to the far greater number of decent human beings in our world (impressionable and exploitable by powerful forces of systematic coercion, yes), but intrinsically still human beings who care about the well-being and suffering of others. We see that true nature re-emerge especially after natural disasters. It is increasingly emerging around the world as we bear witness to the unspeakable suffering of the Gazans/Palestinians. It seems important we continually sort out and not conflate the individual, and their unseen countless actions motivated by compassion, truth and justice, however small, with the overwhelming in our faces dehumanized modern Systems/Entities of oppression trying to run, and destroy, our beloved Earth.
I had a long ride as a passenger and so have just hacked my way through the piece.
Be aware, I have never taken any formal course in philosophy, although I am slightly conversant with several of the ideas which once constituted such. A number of terms were thus in need of being googled.
Also, be aware my parents both had PhDs, particle physics (father) and psychology (mother). So the concept that "the map not the terrain" has been internalized for a LONG time. Dad bloody well KNEW all his theory was a crude map in constant need of revision. Being of part Scotts ancestry, dad also no more worshipped the wonders of ever accelerating technological advancement than a farmer worships their work horse... He just knew what he could DO with the new assets, and that old technology was not useless merely due to next year's model having expanded utility in some fashion. As a particularly American illustration of this, dad certainly knew what an automatic rifle does, was taught the use in boot camp & could well have afforded one, yet he never owned one & bequeathed me a single shot rifle built by a gunsmith he was apprentice to before WWII military service and GI bill college sent him on a different path...
Well. Enough background, except for one experience I'll bring up shortly.
Now, as far as these philosophical (and ideological?) "maps" of the present social (and still organic!) human terrain I must inhabit, some aspects of which I take to be the subject of your post.
I believe I do understand a bit about WHY theories of philosophy came to be, and a bit about that crazy Greek bastard who left a near indelible stamp on the Western school(s). A bit less about the several Eastern schools. Religion, a very old and diverse set of beliefs and tools? I understand why the (presently authorized) class of thinking originated and have just about the same relationship with it as that hypothetical farmer has for his work horse...
There is a very old sheaf of techniques for doing to/for an individual some parts of what the corpus of philosophy might (hopefully) do to the mind and world view, beliefs & etc. of people in connecting them to their society and what we can sense of the reality we inhabit. As noted, old technology doesn't STOP WORKING. Old tech might even be a more appropriate tool for some people in certain situations.
Ever heard of the Eleusynian mysteries?
Simplicius, if you are an organic hominid? Have you ever taken LSD?
Well, almost to the work site. More later if I survive. It IS a good day to die but I'm in no hurry...
Does an ideology enrich a culture- informationally- or not? Some would say that 'reframing' sic the idea of a person to release him-her-it from the confines of a biological definition, is enriching, expansive, and that this is what evolution beyond the 'confines' of the physical and its discourse - something early Darwinists pondered- is all about. You do not have to deny the biological definition ,just recontextualise it in terms of a greater whole. Why is that so threatening? To what interest? What emotive driver is acting behind the cool headed argument here- a challenge to testosterone rules OK? God is a bloke, right? And there is a divine family... family, gettit, and guess who rules that?
A culture has inherent degrees of freedom. An ideology may fit within the action space of the culture. If it does not, the ideology would remain fringe to the culture.
I find it fascinating The eternal obsession with Jews as Zionists that the vapid shkutzim yip to virtue signal their lack of objectivity while winking, hey mob, here we are, time to project our repetitive laments on them
You may want to read up on the Frankfurt School a bit. Particularly Adorno and Horkheimer. They went so far as to argue the enlightenment logically led to...Hitler! Not good company to be in. Before the empire managers had the power to destroy us all, they were adherents of the Frankfurt School and mortal enemies of the enlightenment.
"The work of Frankfurt School theoreticians Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, is undoubtedly the best known of all the post-World War II proclamations of petty-bourgeois despair. The authors’ attack on the Enlightenment, Reason, and the supposedly evil consequences of technology was to exercise far-reaching influence on an entire generation of left intellectuals. But the impact of their work arose not from its originality. Indeed, little of what they wrote was particularly original. Rather, Dialectic of Enlightenment articulated moods prevalent among broad sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia."
I do not endorse their political line, which has been awful on Ukraine and I think they are fatally weak on bourgeois idpol, but the WSWS is a good resource for some historical, philosophical stuff like this. The definitive book on the topic, which imo is weak because it's not written as a polemic, is "The Dialectical Imagination" by Jay.
Reading this beautiful but sad piece makes me feel the inner poverty that has grown in our de-civilized world. The profound inner poverty you are describing of the countries we belong to makes those, especially those, who have clawed their way to the topmost barrens of those echelons, devouring and hoarding everything in their path as they climb, just like hungry ghosts, addicts for they know not what. But where to go from the top? I imagine in addition to seeking ever more out in the world to fill that void, there also grows a great jealousy for those healthier, happier, cultures who still have connection to their indigenous roots, their past, present and future intact, their thousand year old olive trees, and with that grows the urge to destroy as well as to steal.
I'd like to offer some of the words from this indigenous nation, the U'wa in the Amazon, that most have never heard of, who have made a commitment with their very lives, in the face of years of aggressive corporations, to preserve the sacredness of their land:
"We will in no way sell our Mother Earth. To do so would be to give up our work of collaborating with the spirits to protect the heart of the world, which sustains and gives life to the rest of the universe. It would be to go against our own origins and those of all existence... Respect for that which is alive and that which is not alive, for the known and for the “unknown” is part of our law: Our mission in the world is to narrate it, sing it, and to fulfill this law in order to maintain the equilibrium of our universe..."
"We know that the Riowa (non-U’wa) have put a price on all that is alive, even the stone itself, he trades with his own blood and he wants us to do the same with our sacred territory, with ruiria, the blood of the earth which they call petroleum …All the economic offers for what is sacred to us, like the earth and its blood, are an insult to our ears and a bribe to our beliefs. From us, there will be no betrayal of our Mother Earth, or of her sons who are our brothers. Neither will we betray the pride of our ancestors because our land is sacred and everything in it is sacred. If to defend life we have to give our own, we will do it. (Excerpt from the Open Letter to Colombians, 1997)."
Light and well being emanates from their photos in the article below. I think of the Palestinians and remember reading early on during these last terrible months that the Palestinians in Gaza had decided they would not violate their land for oil.
I value your well written pieces a lot and read everything with pleasure.
there is one thing though I really have to get in opposition to (if that is proper english) ;-)
Your mentioning of Marx in your pieces shows me that you have never read Karl Marx or you would not press it in a context that is so far away from what Marx has written that it strucks me as simply repeating what the western capitalist class is telling the people about Marxism/communism. Look at your own piece what you connect with commune, communiality - this is what Marx is about hence why it's called communism.
Since I spend good a third of my lifetime in a socialist country, I can tell you that our values, culture and (child)-literature were about social connection, solidarity, not leaving another one behind, altruism etc.
We did not talk about it, we did it and it was never ever about individualism or liberty in a sense other than said by Rosa Luxemburg - Freedom is always the way the other thinks and my freedom ends where it starts to constrain your freedom - adding that it should be obvious that we are part of a society by birth and not able to be outside that society at the same moment.
just had to get it off my chest - for the rest I really appreciate your thoughts and admire the way you are able to express it, so we all can learn and enjoy
"Your mentioning of Marx in your pieces shows me that you have never read Karl Marx or you would not press it in a context that is so far away from what Marx has written that it strucks me as simply repeating what the western capitalist class is telling the people about Marxism/communism."
Well put. It seems this is especially true of those writing from North America; such as James Lindsay and the person writing under the pseudonym of Yuri Bezmenov. The analysis is often terrific but the elephant in the room is the fixation on midwits who they claim are following Marx. If they are, they've never read him either. More likely they are co-opting, reducing and twisting people like Trotsky and his "permanent revolution" as part of their playbook toward the Brave New World Simplicius deconstructs so well.
As you write, if they'd actually engaged with Marx, they may be aghast to find he's analysed and proposed possible solutions in deeply layered terms to the acute symptoms these writers complain about at the root.
This piece today I found really enjoyable and the emphasis on deep love most welcome.
Thank you for you responding to my thoughts and I can't but agree with you wholeheartedly. Sadly it seems indeed that many of those well meaning and equipped with a sharp mind, simply do not realize how they are themself are so soaked with anticommunism & antimarxism. They do not realize that they got it with the mothers milk, it is with them since their first concious political contact in the west.
Also they never seem to ask themself really, why it is simply no problem to be anticommunist but not to be anticapitalist.
In my time there was a song that said it very well: "Uns hilft kein Gott, kein Kaiser noch Tribun, uns aus dem Elend zu erlösen müssen wir schon selber tun" --No god, no royal or diktator will help us, the fighting to get out of the misery they inflict on us, we must do ourself --
Love, love for all human beings, nature and animals is what we are born with (unconciously), just the way we get treated in this world drives that out of us, rather for some more for others less and i like the latter people that keep that for themself.
Thank you, Frank Sailor and Anthony Dunn for your comments, you gave a voice to my thoughts, so to say.
I must admit to cross-reading Simplicius's elegy, since he put the horse behind the cart. By the way: Frank, it seems we have been citizens of the same country, I was born in the year of the first manned space flight.
Just a little addendum to your comments. Very few of our generation seem to realize that Marxism wasn't a closed off, religion like, dogmatic philosophy. In contrary, what was called dialectic and historic materislism served as a basis and lent a tool set to social sciences. The community of soviet social psychologists for instance was not a group of surrogate priests trying to come up with hypotheses to accomodate the "Marxist dogma". They even developed into different strains, if not to say schools.
I'm a lowly woodworker with a history of absolving the so called secondary extended school, but I read a lot during my childhood and adolescence, including Friedrich Engel's "Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats", which is quite the opposite to the mystifying influencers who apparently cast their spell on Simplicius. Very enlightening and a very welcome supplement to the mentioned reading material from Engels was a popular science book on social psychology by a soviet scientist in this field.
However, I share your assessment of the dismissal of Marxism as a common occurrence in the modern intellectual's mind. Although the refusal to make themselves acquainted with it "first hand" surfaces as a conscious decision, it seems to be deeply rooted in the subconscious. I don't believe an eloquent comment here, if I was able to deliver it, would change that. I'm still glad to have learned that there are some like minded people around.
A warm felt hallo to you, Woodworker, what I by the way concider not low but rather the opposite. And since I own a boat, I know the value of someone who is able to shape something solid, nice and lasting by his knowledge and craftmanship.
We are from the same country and I am from the uneventful year '63, as many people only have heard of because that winter was quite cold ;-)
Of course I fell like your words could have written by me though I still have to read that Friedrich Engels book you mentioned. At the moment I am rereading the "Anti-Dühring" by Friedrich Engels, Dialektik der Natur.
We germans are blessed with some really great minds from the past, just what we made of it since the present leaves me with sadness, not resignation but with little hoop that I see in my lifetime changes that are based of what Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Marx & Engels and some others have wrote about, layed out for us to learn from, to prevent us from spending our time & energy to discover the wheel a third time.
In the west you can get a Phd in economics or 'politic science' without ever to have even heard about Karl Marx. So they are damned to invest in understanding the underlying laws of political economics. Since they lack the knowledge of the foundation of what they try to grasp and find explanations for, the symptoms of capitalism, they are resorting to spirituality and mysthic, desperatly trying to find what it is that western societies are missing to be worth living in them, if your idea of life exceeds owning stuff.
By the way, we are still many out there who are like minded and share the experience of having conciously lived in two different political & economical systems. Just our expertise is feard, not appreciated and often even dismissed as not relevant. I can live with that, I do not engage anymore in trying to convince others. Let them make their journey, let them sink back into the misery we once thought we had overcome for human kind. Even J.W.v. Goethe already was bored by talks about freedom in his Dr. Faustus and Janis Joplin had explained that "freedom was just another word for nothing left to loose" and they are able to even fill that phrase of wisdom with a 'wrong' meaningn as I learned just recently.
The fact that "We did not talk about it, we did it and it was never ever about individualism or liberty" just emphasizes that Marx and Engel themselves wrote in a very German cultural context. That they assumed the readers would bring the German communal instincts to the text, and thus did not address how Communism works in different cultural contexts. (And of course, they were under the Enlightenment delusion of human universality, that culture is a silly artificial/patriarchal/national construct.)
In other countries (Russia, China, et al), Communists tore apart traditional communities and cultures in the name of Progress. They moved individuals to and fro, building new cities dedicated to factories. That was not communal, and contributed to unmooring.
That the formerly-communist countries turned out more communal for their peoples than Western ones, is merely an artifact of their lesser economic development. The Western states had more economic activity from disaggregating families, which fueled more disaggregation, racing to the bottom. It was Materialism Uber alles.
It is indeed Contradictory, that the religion of Communism, which itself is a branch of godless materialism, is less effective at promoting Materialism than Western temptations.
Brilliant piece of work. Reading this, I thought about the recent referendum we had in Ireland which basically wanted to remove the word mother from our constitution. Failing spectacularly as it did, the progressives have now revealed themselves as anti nature, anti Irish even.
The damage done to Ireland by years of neoliberalism has dawned on the Irish population now, too late maybe, but this realisation is the first step in a long and painful journey back onto our natural path.
Thanks for the piece btw. (also sp. Barsoom, soz)
"The world is welcoming, in other words. It was built by your ancestors, and they imagined you long before you arrived. They wondered what sort of work you might do, before you knew there is such a thing as work. Your parents may have recognized the echo of sibling or a parent in your face as you sought the nipple. They smiled at you”.
The Chinese world is like that. Has been for yonks. Works very well.
Hey there Godfree! I didn't realise that you had a 'Stack - I've been an avid reader of your output in other 'platforms', and you seemed to have dropped off the edge of the Earth.
That means I've got LOADS of catching up to do.
Which is why Chinese "Communism" is a Marxian Contradiction waiting to collapse.
I have often thought our culture has developed a kind of societal Alzheimer's, neither remembering the past nor thinking of the future but always trapped in the now, but with confusion all around.
Nicely put......
As one fully inculcated in the cult of Progress, and who has largely rejected it...I ask the question...of what use is "progress" if the quality of my life is made worse by it.?..Our boys and I love camping in the absolute wilderness, where there has been no "progress" for many millennia, and I feel my soul being cleansed by the experience....
Loved Kenneth Clark's Civilization when I was in HS and it was presented as a "documentary" by PBS.
Everything you say about that moment of the solstice has been on my mind as the confounding number of talents and IQ which drove me mad in my youth are under control and a pleasure to explore in early old age and retirement having done my necessary duty as a divorced mother and a civil servant... but JUST as I have been getting ready to write that Biography and Memoir of more than a dozen phenomenal and famous relatives, deceased and a couple who are living, my health issues steal my time like a thief.
Sad reality that the accumulation of a lifetime of experiences and wisdom are held unreflected upon and often unspoken throughout that life due to what is necessary to provide for your progeny in this society. Only to realize the value when you are on that back side of the apex and your time is short to convey. If anybody would listen away. And if written and unpublished, would anybody read.
Depressing that it took having a kid for this woman to realise a basic fundamental of human existence. Narcissism run amok.
I argue that the narcissism was engineered to do exactly what it is doing.
There's always a reason and usually we are oblivious to that reason until it's too late.
Whew, your hand was strong when writing this one! Got some real HP Lovecraft vibes there, especially the first few paragraphs.
A couple of notes:
1) I've said it before, and I'll say it again - if you don't believe that a Higher Power/God exists, then sooner or later, you'll start believing that human beings are God/the Highest Power.
2) Believe it or not, a civilization once intentionally DID build their foundation on a soft, marshy soil prone to flooding - Teotihuacan.
3) Rousseau lived so long ago that modern folks have forgotten the context in which he was living, especially the effects that Paul Le Jeune had on him. Le Jeune was a missionary to "New France" or what we'd call Canada today, and he wrote a supremely influential book called "Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France." In it, he described having many, many conversations with the natives on topics like liberty and freedom, you know, the same shit that Rousseau did a century later.
Effectively, the natives told the Jesuits "your civilization sucks" to which the Jesuits were forced to come up with counter-arguments, and what Le Jeune did was more or less "transcribe" these debates. Keep in mind that this was the FIRST time in centuries of European history that anyone had seriously questioned the status quo, including stuff like hierarchies (what kind of gov't structure is good), freedom (who can tell who what to do) and equality (are some people born "better" than others).
Remember, before the two big revolutions in France and USA, it was just assumed that the natural order of things was: 1) there is a class of people (nobles) who are just born superior, 2) the head of the gov't can tell anyone what to do, including enslave them (lack of freedom) and 3) that permanent hierarchies are the only way to govern a society. And the natives challenged all that, which Le Jeune was unusual in that he didn't dismiss them as "barbarian morons" and this percolated through French society down to Rousseau's day, when he famously wrote his weird thesis about these concepts.
3b) Speaking of which, it always blows my mind that Americans think that ideas like a representative form of government or a non-permanent/non-dynastic ruler/leader appeared spontaneously out of thin air, or that these concepts were "self-evident." They sure as fuck weren't. Those concepts all came from the indigenous inhabitants of North America.
Rousseau certainly knew it, but now modern people have forgotten HOW he knew it and are locked in a box that says "only Europeans ever invent anything" hence the endless circular firing squad of what passes for intellectual debate.
#2 Tenochtitlan, not Teotihuacan
Wonderful points and bringing in the work of Le Jeune and Rousseau! Thank you.
I think it is so important to bring in this history and age old wisdom and also to always delineate between ordinary mortals, perhaps the majority of whom are modest, decent people, and the structures and aims of arrogant burgeoning nations and Empires motivated by greed and acquisition in all times and places. As you indicate, those assumptions of "the natural order" were held by those nobles and governments in power.
One of my ancestors came across with Roger Williams in the early 1600's to the first Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Williams and these eleven men stood up to the Puritans about the dwindling freedom of religion and over the treatment of the native tribes and they were increasingly scorned, flogged, jailed and finally banished from the Colony. They went on and founded Rhode Island and maintained friendly alliances with the Narragansetts until the ever greater Colonial structures began to undermine and betray them all and well founded distrust set in amongst the native tribes. The rest is history.
How much does today's western press tell us about the work being done in every sphere by the good people of this world? My point is that Colonial Empires run by a minority of those cynical, damaged, sub-human beings they attract (carrying big weapons) and those structures - increasingly run with the mechanistic precision of corporate drones and AI - are not comparable to the far greater number of decent human beings in our world (impressionable and exploitable by powerful forces of systematic coercion, yes), but intrinsically still human beings who care about the well-being and suffering of others. We see that true nature re-emerge especially after natural disasters. It is increasingly emerging around the world as we bear witness to the unspeakable suffering of the Gazans/Palestinians. It seems important we continually sort out and not conflate the individual, and their unseen countless actions motivated by compassion, truth and justice, however small, with the overwhelming in our faces dehumanized modern Systems/Entities of oppression trying to run, and destroy, our beloved Earth.
TL, DNR.
I was waiting for your response. I kept you in mind when writing. Hope you enjoyed.
I had a long ride as a passenger and so have just hacked my way through the piece.
Be aware, I have never taken any formal course in philosophy, although I am slightly conversant with several of the ideas which once constituted such. A number of terms were thus in need of being googled.
Also, be aware my parents both had PhDs, particle physics (father) and psychology (mother). So the concept that "the map not the terrain" has been internalized for a LONG time. Dad bloody well KNEW all his theory was a crude map in constant need of revision. Being of part Scotts ancestry, dad also no more worshipped the wonders of ever accelerating technological advancement than a farmer worships their work horse... He just knew what he could DO with the new assets, and that old technology was not useless merely due to next year's model having expanded utility in some fashion. As a particularly American illustration of this, dad certainly knew what an automatic rifle does, was taught the use in boot camp & could well have afforded one, yet he never owned one & bequeathed me a single shot rifle built by a gunsmith he was apprentice to before WWII military service and GI bill college sent him on a different path...
Well. Enough background, except for one experience I'll bring up shortly.
Now, as far as these philosophical (and ideological?) "maps" of the present social (and still organic!) human terrain I must inhabit, some aspects of which I take to be the subject of your post.
I believe I do understand a bit about WHY theories of philosophy came to be, and a bit about that crazy Greek bastard who left a near indelible stamp on the Western school(s). A bit less about the several Eastern schools. Religion, a very old and diverse set of beliefs and tools? I understand why the (presently authorized) class of thinking originated and have just about the same relationship with it as that hypothetical farmer has for his work horse...
There is a very old sheaf of techniques for doing to/for an individual some parts of what the corpus of philosophy might (hopefully) do to the mind and world view, beliefs & etc. of people in connecting them to their society and what we can sense of the reality we inhabit. As noted, old technology doesn't STOP WORKING. Old tech might even be a more appropriate tool for some people in certain situations.
Ever heard of the Eleusynian mysteries?
Simplicius, if you are an organic hominid? Have you ever taken LSD?
Well, almost to the work site. More later if I survive. It IS a good day to die but I'm in no hurry...
I enjoy your comment(s). A man who has lived a “good” life is, in, no…hurry to die.
This piece would be at home in First Things, The New Criterion, or City Journal. Submit for publication and grow your readership ( submit & grow ).
Does an ideology enrich a culture- informationally- or not? Some would say that 'reframing' sic the idea of a person to release him-her-it from the confines of a biological definition, is enriching, expansive, and that this is what evolution beyond the 'confines' of the physical and its discourse - something early Darwinists pondered- is all about. You do not have to deny the biological definition ,just recontextualise it in terms of a greater whole. Why is that so threatening? To what interest? What emotive driver is acting behind the cool headed argument here- a challenge to testosterone rules OK? God is a bloke, right? And there is a divine family... family, gettit, and guess who rules that?
A culture has inherent degrees of freedom. An ideology may fit within the action space of the culture. If it does not, the ideology would remain fringe to the culture.
I find it interesting that the author is subscribed to Frank Furedi who is
- the founder of the Revolutionary Communist Party
- very pro-Zionist
- whose website spiked.com advocates for normalizing pedophilia
He's like a caricature representation of his ethno-religious group.
I find it fascinating The eternal obsession with Jews as Zionists that the vapid shkutzim yip to virtue signal their lack of objectivity while winking, hey mob, here we are, time to project our repetitive laments on them
🚫🤡💩
If the shoe fits.
I think you mean https://www.spiked-online.com/
You may want to read up on the Frankfurt School a bit. Particularly Adorno and Horkheimer. They went so far as to argue the enlightenment logically led to...Hitler! Not good company to be in. Before the empire managers had the power to destroy us all, they were adherents of the Frankfurt School and mortal enemies of the enlightenment.
Do you know a good book on it? I would love to read it.
Here is an excerpt from a good essay on it.
"The work of Frankfurt School theoreticians Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, is undoubtedly the best known of all the post-World War II proclamations of petty-bourgeois despair. The authors’ attack on the Enlightenment, Reason, and the supposedly evil consequences of technology was to exercise far-reaching influence on an entire generation of left intellectuals. But the impact of their work arose not from its originality. Indeed, little of what they wrote was particularly original. Rather, Dialectic of Enlightenment articulated moods prevalent among broad sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia."
This and more can be found for free at https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/frankfurt-school-postmodernism-politics-pseudoleft/05.html
I do not endorse their political line, which has been awful on Ukraine and I think they are fatally weak on bourgeois idpol, but the WSWS is a good resource for some historical, philosophical stuff like this. The definitive book on the topic, which imo is weak because it's not written as a polemic, is "The Dialectical Imagination" by Jay.
This helped me a lot. Thank you!
My pleasure! There is too little emphasis on the philosophies that guide our maniacal masters.
Just to continue the arc of this thought, someone interested could find a lot of clarity when studying Sabbatian Frankism.
Reading this beautiful but sad piece makes me feel the inner poverty that has grown in our de-civilized world. The profound inner poverty you are describing of the countries we belong to makes those, especially those, who have clawed their way to the topmost barrens of those echelons, devouring and hoarding everything in their path as they climb, just like hungry ghosts, addicts for they know not what. But where to go from the top? I imagine in addition to seeking ever more out in the world to fill that void, there also grows a great jealousy for those healthier, happier, cultures who still have connection to their indigenous roots, their past, present and future intact, their thousand year old olive trees, and with that grows the urge to destroy as well as to steal.
I'd like to offer some of the words from this indigenous nation, the U'wa in the Amazon, that most have never heard of, who have made a commitment with their very lives, in the face of years of aggressive corporations, to preserve the sacredness of their land:
"We will in no way sell our Mother Earth. To do so would be to give up our work of collaborating with the spirits to protect the heart of the world, which sustains and gives life to the rest of the universe. It would be to go against our own origins and those of all existence... Respect for that which is alive and that which is not alive, for the known and for the “unknown” is part of our law: Our mission in the world is to narrate it, sing it, and to fulfill this law in order to maintain the equilibrium of our universe..."
"We know that the Riowa (non-U’wa) have put a price on all that is alive, even the stone itself, he trades with his own blood and he wants us to do the same with our sacred territory, with ruiria, the blood of the earth which they call petroleum …All the economic offers for what is sacred to us, like the earth and its blood, are an insult to our ears and a bribe to our beliefs. From us, there will be no betrayal of our Mother Earth, or of her sons who are our brothers. Neither will we betray the pride of our ancestors because our land is sacred and everything in it is sacred. If to defend life we have to give our own, we will do it. (Excerpt from the Open Letter to Colombians, 1997)."
Light and well being emanates from their photos in the article below. I think of the Palestinians and remember reading early on during these last terrible months that the Palestinians in Gaza had decided they would not violate their land for oil.
https://www.lifegate.com/uwa-resistance
Soul~full. Deep gratitude❤️🐈⬛
🐈 ❤️ 🐈
I value your well written pieces a lot and read everything with pleasure.
there is one thing though I really have to get in opposition to (if that is proper english) ;-)
Your mentioning of Marx in your pieces shows me that you have never read Karl Marx or you would not press it in a context that is so far away from what Marx has written that it strucks me as simply repeating what the western capitalist class is telling the people about Marxism/communism. Look at your own piece what you connect with commune, communiality - this is what Marx is about hence why it's called communism.
Since I spend good a third of my lifetime in a socialist country, I can tell you that our values, culture and (child)-literature were about social connection, solidarity, not leaving another one behind, altruism etc.
We did not talk about it, we did it and it was never ever about individualism or liberty in a sense other than said by Rosa Luxemburg - Freedom is always the way the other thinks and my freedom ends where it starts to constrain your freedom - adding that it should be obvious that we are part of a society by birth and not able to be outside that society at the same moment.
just had to get it off my chest - for the rest I really appreciate your thoughts and admire the way you are able to express it, so we all can learn and enjoy
"Your mentioning of Marx in your pieces shows me that you have never read Karl Marx or you would not press it in a context that is so far away from what Marx has written that it strucks me as simply repeating what the western capitalist class is telling the people about Marxism/communism."
Well put. It seems this is especially true of those writing from North America; such as James Lindsay and the person writing under the pseudonym of Yuri Bezmenov. The analysis is often terrific but the elephant in the room is the fixation on midwits who they claim are following Marx. If they are, they've never read him either. More likely they are co-opting, reducing and twisting people like Trotsky and his "permanent revolution" as part of their playbook toward the Brave New World Simplicius deconstructs so well.
As you write, if they'd actually engaged with Marx, they may be aghast to find he's analysed and proposed possible solutions in deeply layered terms to the acute symptoms these writers complain about at the root.
This piece today I found really enjoyable and the emphasis on deep love most welcome.
Thank you for you responding to my thoughts and I can't but agree with you wholeheartedly. Sadly it seems indeed that many of those well meaning and equipped with a sharp mind, simply do not realize how they are themself are so soaked with anticommunism & antimarxism. They do not realize that they got it with the mothers milk, it is with them since their first concious political contact in the west.
Also they never seem to ask themself really, why it is simply no problem to be anticommunist but not to be anticapitalist.
In my time there was a song that said it very well: "Uns hilft kein Gott, kein Kaiser noch Tribun, uns aus dem Elend zu erlösen müssen wir schon selber tun" --No god, no royal or diktator will help us, the fighting to get out of the misery they inflict on us, we must do ourself --
Love, love for all human beings, nature and animals is what we are born with (unconciously), just the way we get treated in this world drives that out of us, rather for some more for others less and i like the latter people that keep that for themself.
Thanks again and for translating that song.
Your last paragraph is very poignant.
I wish you the best.
Love, deep, love.❤️🐈⬛
Thank you, Frank Sailor and Anthony Dunn for your comments, you gave a voice to my thoughts, so to say.
I must admit to cross-reading Simplicius's elegy, since he put the horse behind the cart. By the way: Frank, it seems we have been citizens of the same country, I was born in the year of the first manned space flight.
Just a little addendum to your comments. Very few of our generation seem to realize that Marxism wasn't a closed off, religion like, dogmatic philosophy. In contrary, what was called dialectic and historic materislism served as a basis and lent a tool set to social sciences. The community of soviet social psychologists for instance was not a group of surrogate priests trying to come up with hypotheses to accomodate the "Marxist dogma". They even developed into different strains, if not to say schools.
I'm a lowly woodworker with a history of absolving the so called secondary extended school, but I read a lot during my childhood and adolescence, including Friedrich Engel's "Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats", which is quite the opposite to the mystifying influencers who apparently cast their spell on Simplicius. Very enlightening and a very welcome supplement to the mentioned reading material from Engels was a popular science book on social psychology by a soviet scientist in this field.
However, I share your assessment of the dismissal of Marxism as a common occurrence in the modern intellectual's mind. Although the refusal to make themselves acquainted with it "first hand" surfaces as a conscious decision, it seems to be deeply rooted in the subconscious. I don't believe an eloquent comment here, if I was able to deliver it, would change that. I'm still glad to have learned that there are some like minded people around.
A warm felt hallo to you, Woodworker, what I by the way concider not low but rather the opposite. And since I own a boat, I know the value of someone who is able to shape something solid, nice and lasting by his knowledge and craftmanship.
We are from the same country and I am from the uneventful year '63, as many people only have heard of because that winter was quite cold ;-)
Of course I fell like your words could have written by me though I still have to read that Friedrich Engels book you mentioned. At the moment I am rereading the "Anti-Dühring" by Friedrich Engels, Dialektik der Natur.
We germans are blessed with some really great minds from the past, just what we made of it since the present leaves me with sadness, not resignation but with little hoop that I see in my lifetime changes that are based of what Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Marx & Engels and some others have wrote about, layed out for us to learn from, to prevent us from spending our time & energy to discover the wheel a third time.
In the west you can get a Phd in economics or 'politic science' without ever to have even heard about Karl Marx. So they are damned to invest in understanding the underlying laws of political economics. Since they lack the knowledge of the foundation of what they try to grasp and find explanations for, the symptoms of capitalism, they are resorting to spirituality and mysthic, desperatly trying to find what it is that western societies are missing to be worth living in them, if your idea of life exceeds owning stuff.
By the way, we are still many out there who are like minded and share the experience of having conciously lived in two different political & economical systems. Just our expertise is feard, not appreciated and often even dismissed as not relevant. I can live with that, I do not engage anymore in trying to convince others. Let them make their journey, let them sink back into the misery we once thought we had overcome for human kind. Even J.W.v. Goethe already was bored by talks about freedom in his Dr. Faustus and Janis Joplin had explained that "freedom was just another word for nothing left to loose" and they are able to even fill that phrase of wisdom with a 'wrong' meaningn as I learned just recently.
Have a good one, woodworker!
Frank,
The fact that "We did not talk about it, we did it and it was never ever about individualism or liberty" just emphasizes that Marx and Engel themselves wrote in a very German cultural context. That they assumed the readers would bring the German communal instincts to the text, and thus did not address how Communism works in different cultural contexts. (And of course, they were under the Enlightenment delusion of human universality, that culture is a silly artificial/patriarchal/national construct.)
In other countries (Russia, China, et al), Communists tore apart traditional communities and cultures in the name of Progress. They moved individuals to and fro, building new cities dedicated to factories. That was not communal, and contributed to unmooring.
That the formerly-communist countries turned out more communal for their peoples than Western ones, is merely an artifact of their lesser economic development. The Western states had more economic activity from disaggregating families, which fueled more disaggregation, racing to the bottom. It was Materialism Uber alles.
It is indeed Contradictory, that the religion of Communism, which itself is a branch of godless materialism, is less effective at promoting Materialism than Western temptations.
Brilliant piece of work. Reading this, I thought about the recent referendum we had in Ireland which basically wanted to remove the word mother from our constitution. Failing spectacularly as it did, the progressives have now revealed themselves as anti nature, anti Irish even.
The damage done to Ireland by years of neoliberalism has dawned on the Irish population now, too late maybe, but this realisation is the first step in a long and painful journey back onto our natural path.
Big Thanks! too the Author; for This Lucid Illumination!!