Oeaohoo

There are two simultaneous aspects to the phenomenon of cyclical manifestation: a linear descent and a cyclical ascent and descent. Let us take the historical example of Christianity. Of course, the Christian religion was most potent when Christ was still alive. It has become increasingly impotent in the times following. This is the linear descent. However, the culture of Christendom as an embodied phenomenon was quite weak when Christ was alive. It took a millennia of cultural development (the ascent) for Christendom to become a dominant material power. It has also taken hundreds of years of cultural development (the descent) for Christianity to be deconstructed: the so-called “Renaissance”, the so-called “Enlightenment”, the secular ideologies of the twentieth century, all culminating in contemporary Clown World (in which, heresy is orthodoxy and orthodoxy is heresy, or as the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth say “Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair”). There is a hierarchy, it’s just not a hierarchy of “evolution”. To use Mircea Eliade’s phrase, it is a hierarchical descent, from the Sacred to the profane. Isn’t it strange that, amongst all of these cultures, we do not find a single claim to animal origins or “evolution”, but to noble and divine origins? One of the first things I said when I came back to this forum is: evolution is just an alibi for people who have regressed to the level of apes. I love this phrase and it is completely true. Nice quote, though I prefer his saying: “Progress is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea!”

The fundamental problem with this whole model is conflating the difference between esoterism and exoterism with that between historicised stages of development.

Not necessarily! He or she could just as well become the esoteric heart of the tribe: someone who is able to radiate transcendence within the plane of relativity, like you are trying to do with people around here. Even in the major historical case of this happening, Jesus Christ, the tribe has been engaging in ritual penance for this mistake for two thousand years…

Both are closed. The conservative is closed to chaos whereas the liberal is closed to order. Wherever you are starting from, understanding God is going to involve transcending your human limitations. A conservative can reconcile themselves with every permutation of relative existence by recognising the shared forms which animate them; in other words, recognising the stability which underlies change.

This reminds me of a significant statement from T.S. Eliot regarding the Christian Church: “But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.“

Ah, Actualized… When it isn’t obscurantist oneupmanship, it’s a tenuous appeal to logic culminating in the inevitable: “TA-DAAA!” God is also Truth, Order, Law, the Good, Necessity, the Absolute. Even the Infinite Freedom of God is one which contains every permutation of unfreedom, otherwise it wouldn’t be infinite! Therefore, and I find it amazing that I even have to say this, God is beyond both liberalism and conservatism.

I see very little here that is worth responding to. On the other hand, the recent Liberalism video literally implies that God-realisation is liberalism turned up to 11… This is such a childish worldview! It is always valuable to take things to their conclusion. Like holes in a balloon, you can see the absurdity of something much more easily when it has been inflated. This place and others like it are useful because they take “Spiral Dynamics” and Wilberism, and indeed all unconstrained visions of endless “growth”, to their absurd conclusion: “We’re just gonna get more and more liberal forever, dude! It’s gonna be awesome, totally rad, bro! And at the end of the road of liberalism - there lies God!” Ridiculous. ‘Inversion’ really is the key to understanding all modern deviations... “The Great Parody: Spirituality Inverted”!

The conservative equivalent of Ken Wilber would be the Perennial Traditionalist school of René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, Titus Burckhardt and various others. This school is represented today by people like Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Charles Upton. Wilber basically took the perennial metaphysics and mixed it with Darwinian Evolutionism, progressive leftism and his inane predecessors like Teilhard de Chardin. The conservative equivalent of Noam Chomsky would be Jewish libertarian theorists like Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. They are represented in the present-day by the Mises Institute. Some Paleo-Conservatives like, for example, Paul Gottfried, who has written very importantly on the uses and abuses of so-called “Anti-Fascism”, could also he considered here. The conservative equivalent of Schmachtenberger would be the so-called Neo-Reactionary Right: Spandrell, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), Nick Land and many others. See, for example, Spandrell’s blog and it’s articles: We Need a New Religion, The Game Theory of Leftism, Bioleninism, IQ Shredders… The guy who used to run Rebel Wisdom did an interview with someone from this sphere, demonstrating the affinities and differences between them. I appreciate that you are quoting Mr. Gura, but the idea that Jordan Peterson and PragerU are serious conservative thinkers is laughable. Jordan Peterson’s recent “Conservative Manifesto” is the absolute quintessence of mediocrity, revealing a complete lack of engagement with the actual conservative tradition in the name of the most vacuous pseudo-libertarianism. No wonder people around here have such a low opinion of conservatives if they are the reference point.

There are many beautiful expressions in the Schuon essay which I linked above. An example: ‘Relativism engenders a spirit of rebellion and is at the same time its fruit. The spirit of rebellion, unlike holy anger, is not a passing state, nor is it directed against some worldly abuse; on the contrary it is a chronic malady directed against Heaven and against everything that represents Heaven or is a reminder of it. When Lao Tzu said that “in the latter days the man of virtue appears vile”, he had in mind the rebellious spirit that characterizes our time; but for psychological and existentialist relativism, which by definition always seeks to justify the crude ego, this spiritual state is normal, and it is its absence that amounts to disease, whence the abolition of the sense of sin. The sense of sin is the consciousness of an equilibrium surpassing our personal will and operating ultimately for the benefit of our integral personality and that of the human collectivity, even though occasionally wounding us; this sense of sin goes hand in hand with a sense of the sacred, which is an instinct for what surpasses us—for what should therefore not be touched by ignorant and iconoclastic hands. As limited and degraded as man undeniably is, he yet remains “the proof by contraries” of the divine Prototype and of all that this Prototype implies and determines in relation to man. Not to acknowledge what surpasses us and not to wish to surpass ourselves: this in fact is the whole program of psychologism, and it is the very definition of Lucifer. The opposite, or rather the primordial and normative, attitude is this: to think only in reference to what surpasses us and to live for the sake of surpassing ourselves; to seek greatness where this is to be found and not on the plane of the individual and his rebellious pettiness. In order to return to true greatness, man must first of all agree to pay the debt of his pettiness and to remain small on the plane where he cannot help being small; the sense of what is objective on the one hand and of the absolute on the other does not go without a certain abnegation, and it is this abnegation precisely that allows us to be completely faithful to our human vocation.’ Wonderful.

Whereas every other cosmopolitan liberal is an enlightened sage… Ridiculous. Tradition provided a much better framework for transcendent realisations than the organised chaos under which we live. The exoteric expression of a religion is obviously going to be more limited. However, this is the only way that most of humanity can relate to transcendent reality: a passive participation in a hierarchical order. This is much better than just leaving the masses to themselves, to mindlessly eat, drink and dissipate in their shopping malls and their nightclubs. I am not denying that, given the decadence of our times, most of the religions have been reduced to an empty shell of themselves, a mere exoterism without an animating nucleus. Of course, this is only exaggerated by the urgent push for global democracy, egalitarianism, and all the rest of it. I’m just denying the idea that your relativised world is any better… It isn’t. We live in the most materialistic, fear-based and pettily egotistical society known to history. There’s your “development” for you!

Story of my life.

Anyway, I don’t see this going anywhere productive. This place is such a hive mind.

My idea of hell. Don’t you see how attached you people are to this one stupid system of thought? How do you know that this system is the truth? You appeal to it as though it is some sacred dogma. Again, I could just as well say: you need to read René Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times 10-15 times. But, again, if relativism and absolutism are both aspects of what is ultimately true, why is it more “developed” to prioritise one over the other on a societal level? Of course any earthly representation of the Absolute is ultimately relative; as if every traditional society didn’t acknowledge that. It is not a matter of a false Absolute; it is a matter of an earthly and therefore relative symbol of what is beyond relativity.

This is a very childish view of authority. In fact, life is much harder at the top. ‘The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct. They consider the hard task a privilege, to play with vices which overwhelm others a recreation… Knowledge - a form of asceticism.’ ‘Inequality of rights is the condition for the existence of rights at all. - A right is a privilege. The privilege of each is determined by the nature of his being. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights - the coldness increases, the responsibility increases. A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity.’ ‘Whom among today's rabble do I hate the most? The Socialist rabble, the Chandala apostles who undermine the worker's instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his little state of being - who make him envious, who teach him revengefulness... Injustice never lies in unequal rights, it lies in the claim to ‘equal’ rights… What is bad? But I have already answered that question: everything that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revengefulness. - The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin…’ Nietzsche in The Antichrist crushing all your delusions! I spoke about an esoteric priestly class, which you have immediately interpreted as “strong man”. You think you’re being clever when you’re just being silly. This attitude towards hierarchy is exactly what every stupid TV show, mass-market novel and mediocre atheist “intellectual” promulgates today. Oh yeah… Woke Capital is the perfect earthly embodiment of transcendent wisdom and beatitude. What could possibly be the problem?! It’s practically the Absolute incarnate!

Anyway, it’s 3:30AM here in England. I’m going to sleep… I will have wonderful dreams of an esoteric avatar of Absolute Consciousness destroying all traces of relativistic tomfoolery!

That is what democracy makes history show you. Every regime will of course rationalise it’s own existence. I agree that democracy is (or at least, was - there are many signs that it will be difficult to sustain democracy in the West for much longer) the best system for our time. As Schuon brilliantly expressed, however, that is not because of progress or “evolution” - it is because our times are extremely decadent. Consequently, there are so few people remaining who would be endowed with the spiritual integrity required to embody absolute authority. That is what “history has shown” most people who have enquired into this subject, the historical significance of democracy.

Joking aside, I’m not sure what you are getting at here. It is obviously important that there be a certain affinity between the rulers and the ruled. That doesn’t mean that you can’t “contrast” them.

The only thing which IS is Absolute. Everything else has only a relative existence! *The pseudo-religion of humanitarian egalitarian emerges…* “Oh no! A group of people with authority over others! It can only be… OPPRESSION!” “It is impossible that anyone could be selfless enough to rule benevolently! I know this, because as a relativistic pluralist, I am so selfless!”

Come on… That is just a silly word game, on the basis that anyone who wants to change the status quo is a progressive. We all know that certain historical trends have taken place over the last years, decades or in some cases even centuries which certain people regard as positive and others as negative: the former are progressives, the latter are conservatives. Society is increasingly ruled by people of the former camp. Most so-called “conservatives” are only conserving yesterday’s progressive victories, hence the joke: conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. Yes, Christianity is senile. Like an old man, it’s body is falling apart. Everything dies. Welcome to reality - and away from Spiral Progress fantasy world where everything just gets better forever! Why not have something within society which points to that constant? A priestly class, an initiated esoteric elite, perhaps… As your saying points out, there are so many universal features underlying this change. I still don’t understand why you want to focus on the relative. (I mean, I do understand. Like many people today, you clearly have some kind of personal complaint with dogmatic religion and are rebelling against this. Fine, but I’m not interested in that).

So what? Better than the pseudo-religions of evolutionary progressivism and humanitarian egalitarianism. So why prioritise one over the other? If the absolute is half of existence, why are you so keen to organise society relativistically?

I will even admit that, precisely for this reason, conservative complaints against “cultural relativism” are fuel for the fire of liberalism. Any intelligent person today knows that, short of a divine intervention, the present society is on the course of relativism. One of the reasons I admire people like Schuon and Guénon is that they understood this. They were able to uphold a Traditional perspective whilst acknowledging the water we swim in, which is cultural relativism. Not when the machine has been hijacked by liberals.

Heaven forbid! The ultimate goal of life is to escape the subjective state of relativism and realise the Absolute Truth! Subjective relativism is the endless wheel of generation; Absolute Truth is liberation. Of course. It is ridiculous to oppose relativism if you aren’t opposing it with something absolute. I, like Schuon in that essay, am opposing relativism from the perspective of an esoteric universalism, not from the perspective of a mediocre “classic liberal” conservatism which itself knows very little of what lies beyond the relative plane. Also, an objective view of things today ought to reveal that there can be no return to an absolutist Christianity, which is implicit in someone like JP’s critique of relativism. Even if it could be enforced, it would require an extreme tyranny which would not be spiritually fruitful. I’m just denying the idea that the new-fangled relativism represents some great advancement.

From this essay: “Be that as it may, one of the noteworthy traits of the twentieth century is the confusion, now habitual, between evolution and decadence: there is no decadence, no impoverishment, no falsification that people do not try to excuse with the aid of the relativistic argument of “evolution”, reinforced as this is by the most inappropriate and erroneous associations. Thus relativism, cleverly instilled into public opinion, paves the way for all kinds of corruption while at the same time keeping watch lest any kind of healthy reaction might put the brakes on this slide toward the abyss.” YES! Pure truth! There we have it - a Conservative who grasps contemporary relativism to the point of understanding its absurdity!

http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/public/articles/The_Contradiction_of_Relativism-by_Frithjof_Schuon.aspx