Oeaohoo

I don’t know how any of you can watch this Fridman guy. He’s such a creep that it makes my skin crawl. I just watched two minutes of his interview with Destiny and I literally feel sick. Grotesque! It’s much easier to excuse this kind of creepy passive-aggressive autism when it conceals a towering intellect. In this case, however, it just seems to conceal deeper layers of creepy autism… It’s funny that he got all of his meaningless university letters at Drexel University, the same place where Sam Hyde brilliantly mocked all of his kind with the best TED X talk ever, “2070 Paradigm Shift”! The internet has really destroyed people’s sense of spiritual hygiene. I’ve once again lost interest in this forum and so might as well go out in a blaze of glory… We must declare spiritual war, armed not with violence but with the Truth, on all internet pseudo-intellectuals! No more “artificial-intelligence nano-tech synergies”, no more empty praise for the “power of conversation”, no more “emergent phenomena”! A new age of noble and manly virtue, of heroic and transcendent splendour, must be brought forth from the ruins of all this effeminate degradation and vain pontification! All praise to the super-rational discernment of virtue and good character! There can be no neutral discussion with these crepuscular maggot men who make us want to vomit with disgust! We must not waste our time with “good-faith dialogue”, sitting around “debating” and pushing ideas back and forth like dung-beetles pushing bullshit around in the mud! We must destroy the enemy with bedazzling inspirations of super-rational clarity! Anyway… I notice he uses Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey as his YouTube banner. Unsurprising that he would resonate with Kubrick’s amoral autism. This scene from that film is a beautiful portrait of the cosmic loneliness that I feel when reading through some of the nonsense on this forum. The way that Kubrick introduces HAL 9000 with the descending melody in the music is so amazingly creepy!

As a general point, people on the Right really need to stop complaining about double standards. It is a futile strategy: the Left don’t care about double standards because they think they are better than you. Much more importantly, it is inconsistent with the values that the true Right is supposed to uphold. Like Carlyle pointed out: ‘Certainly, by any ballot-box, Jesus Christ goes just as far as Judas Iscariot; and with reason, according to the New Gospels, Talmuds and Dismal Sciences of these days. Judas looks him in the face; asks proudly, "Am not I as good as thou? Better, perhaps!" slapping his breeches-pocket, in which is audible the cheerful jingle of thirty pieces of silver. "Thirty of them here, thou cowering pauper!" My philanthropic friends, if there be a state of matters under the stars which deserves the name of damnable and damned, this I perceive is it!’ This is the insane conclusion of holding everyone to the same standard (which is implicit in complaining about “double standards”): a “level-playing field” between Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot. Absurd! The true Right should want to uphold a double standard: Tradition above subversion, virtue above vice, dignity above debasement, and so on. By whining about double standards, the Right is reduced to the level of the leftist rabble and their egalitarian pipe-dreams.

Woah! Hot take, bro! Keep up this level of heat and you’ll set the place on fire!

“Let the traditional and the modern concepts of the universe - or, if one prefers it, of reality - be placed side by side. According to typically modern thought, reality is supposed to have originally consisted of the material world alone. It is said that life must have been 'sparked off", in some as yet unexplained way, from matter, and that living organisms developed psychic faculties, first of all the senses, then sentiment and memory, and then, as man himself gradually evolved, imagination and reason. According to the traditional explanation, on the other hand it is not the higher which proceeds from the lower but the lower from the higher; nor is existence limited to the psychic and the corporeal. The Supreme Origin—and End—of all things is Absolute Truth, which alone has Reality in the full sense, and which manifests or creates, at lesser degrees of reality, the whole of existence. The traditional theory of existence, common to all religions, is summed up in the Islamic holy tradition: 'I was a Hidden Treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the world' The psychic and the corporeal, soul and body, are the two lowest levels of reality, and together they constitute what we call 'this world’. Above them is the domain of the Spirit, known as 'the next world' from the standpoint of life on earth, but first in order of creation, for it is no less than the primal 'overflow’ of the Divine Reality Itself. From that immediate reflection of the Hidden Treasure, the psychic domain is a projected image which in its turn projects the bodily domain.” Hmm… Which one to choose? Tough decision!

This is possibly the worst combination of things ever: obscurantist appeals to direct experience mixed with evolutionary progressivism. “Have faith in evolution” - how much more explicitly could this parody of a religion be stated? The only thing missing is the capital letters: Progress, Evolution, Change… It is interesting that the original pretence, on the part of rationalists and scientists, that evolutionary progressivism was some kind of empirically proven ideology has largely been jettisoned nowadays in the name of dogmatic and faith-based appeals like this. “Have faith in Evolution. Put your trust in Change. This is all part of Progress’ plan.” It’s almost as if evolutionary progressivism is a surrogate religion…

Socrates’ views on Democracy are much more interesting when viewed within his overarching framework of history as cyclical decay and rebirth, as laid out in The Republic. This vision was also adapted by Polybius and called Anacylosis. The cycle is something like this: 1. Monarchy, 2. Kingship, 3. Tyranny, 4. Aristocracy, 5. Oligarchy, 6. Democracy, and 7. Ochlocracy (mob rule). As a cycle, the final phase (mob rule) brings about a rejuvenated form of the first phase. The view of democracy as a progressive innovation is of course an inversion of this traditional view. Technocracy is a complete parody of what Plato was talking about!

You’re telling us to watch out for this… on the Actualized forum? By the way, did I tell you about my latest Awakening? It was amazing! Like nothing anyone has ever experienced before! None of you understand! No one understands! Only I understand! Follow me, minions! Off the cliff we go! Maybe I’m wrong but this all seems a bit hysterical to me. The idea that some people chatting on Discord was likely to lead to the formation of a suicidal millenarian cult, just because that has happened once before, stretches credulity.

This photo is so funny for some reason. These bunnies are from David Lynch’s film Inland Empire:

I haven’t personally looked into this, partly because I’m not interested and also because it is quite perverse, but - with respect to the accusation of things that haven’t been appropriately moderated on sites like Twitter and Facebook - this isn’t a matter of horny teens. It’s a matter of underage kids being sexualised before they have the capacity to understand what is being forced on them. It’s obvious that this is what is being referred to by child exploitation, and it seems a bit insincere to pretend that this is just people over-reacting to horny teens.

True. I should have said “intentionally trying to sow discord”!

Yeah, that is the strange thing about this issue. The people who complain about the sexualisation of children today are appealing to the moral tenet of “children’s rights”, when even the doctrine of formalised “human rights” in the modern sense was only developed within Classic Liberalism and fully cemented in Europe after the Second World War. This is one aspect of the contemporary “conservative” perspective which has never really resonated with me for precisely this reason. It’s not that I hadn’t understood this objection, I was just framing the issue in more narrow present-day political terms. It is true that the Classical Liberal tradition - which is all that most contemporary Conservatives really seek to conserve, even if they sometimes dress it up in religious garb - granted children certain rights, and it is true that some of the more extreme factions of the progressive Left want to subvert these rights. The issue of “Stage Blue” attitudes towards child marriage as a whole is much broader than this. In the present-day, in the “developed” world, most Conservatives are opposed to child marriage because they are heavily influenced by the Liberal tradition. The postmodern Left has “progressed” away from Liberalism towards deconstruction and absolutist moral relativism. In Spiral Progress terms, this is a “Blue-Orange” reaction to “Green” and an issue that you wouldn’t hear so much about from people who were solidly “Blue”. The main thing I was drawing attention to is that many people today are being pulled back from “Green” relativistic pluralism towards “Orange” forms of Conservatism by people making these complaints, and that from the progressive point of view this is a problem.

The atoms need to recognise their quantum duality as waves! The solution will inevitably depend on how we frame the problem: is atomisation an emergent phenomena of some system (like “late capitalism”, neoliberalism) or is it something which has been intentionally created and promoted (“anarcho-tyranny”, divide and conquer)? If it is the former, some new system (one or another form of post-liberal communitarianism) might be able to solve the issue. If it is the latter, a revolution will have to replace the people who are promoting the problem. So which is it… Questions to be answered!

This isn’t overly surprising. The pioneering intellectuals of “Stage Green” all signed a petition to drastically lower the age of consent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws. The normalisation of child sexuality is one of the logical conclusions of the “Stage Green” form of moral relativism - that is, of a “relativism” which ironically imposes itself absolutely. According to this immature form of relativism, every moral stricture of the past has to be violated in the name of “liberation from the super-structures of oppression”. As we move further into Stage Green, increasingly fundamental strictures have to be “challenged”, and protecting children from sexualisation is one of the most fundamental for most people. Not to mention that “Stage Green” culture is characterised by a low-level obsession with sexuality in general. “Free your mind and your ass will follow”… Whilst I don’t believe in the Spiral of Progress, even those who do must admit that “Stage Yellow” must transcend this dogmatic relativism through a more profound form of inclusivity, one which is capable of meeting people where they are at rather than forcing a pet ideology onto them. Many people are converted to right-wing ideology today as a result of this and closely related issues. The demonisation of “Stage Green” today is often fuelled by the desire of ordinary parents to protect their children from miseducation, perversion and, in the worst case, exploitation. Of course, the “lower Stages” are hardly immune to this problem either. In most cases, though, they don’t go around actively and openly celebrating it like the more extreme advocates of “Stage Green” relativism do today.

This isn’t something that I have been personally involved with, though I noticed discussion of it whilst posting in “The Journal.” I think it was started by @thisintegrated and later joined by @AtheisticNonduality as well as probably some other people. I don’t know so much about the former user but neither of them strike me as people who would want to sabotage this forum or steal your followers. My impression is that they just wanted a space to discuss their views in a more private and efficient way. The open forum encourages a lot of lame posturing and grand-standing, making big statements about things rather than just having a friendly discussion. It’s also much slower than other messaging services. In other words, even if it might have been against the rules, I don’t think they were using Discord to sow discord! Obviously what I think is more or less irrelevant here but I don’t think it should be necessary to ban them. Yeah, exactly. I mostly only write anything on here so as to clarify/distil my own thoughts on something. Socialising with pixels on a screen gets a bit lonely after a while…

The progressive Left don’t need war as much because they dominate through soft power: manufacturing consent, relentlessly pushing for more radical change, never giving in or settling with what has already been “achieved”, gradually altering demographics, implying narratives of guilt and retribution through entertainment and education, creating an atmosphere of fear by enforcing denouncements of the “enemy” on every political issue, framing the opposition as “insane” rather than misguided or even evil and psychologising them through various other appeals to “mental health”, maintaining a therapeutic managerial state organised around a cult of normality and avoiding “extremism” (in other words, opposition to progress), forcing cultural change by claiming that it is “inevitable” because the “course of history” must bend towards progress (whilst simultaneously being terrified that it might not), systematically smearing the past whilst overlooking the evils of the present, using “anarcho-tyranny” or the deliberate sowing of chaos and discord within society (and particular within dissident spheres) so as to dispel any threat to their power, and so on ad nauseam. Who needs war and physical conflict when you can just gaslight everyone into agreeing with you? A question posed by many women…

Democracy Now! Demagoguery Then!

The ego can graft itself onto anything. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the thing itself. The atheists also think they’re right and they aren’t attributing divinity to anything! They aren’t necessarily playing God either because God created all of the religions as paths back to Himself. What you are describing here would be a sort of straying off of the path by mistaking the path for the goal. Also, some of what you are describing here is not primarily the result of a belief in a theistic God. Christianity and Islam are ways of life as much as they are systems of belief, and these ways of life are in many ways incompatible. On the exoteric plane, there is always going to be conflict. It is an inevitable product of the diversity of life and a beautiful thing in its own way. Unity, on the other hand, is esoteric (though it includes all of this conflict within itself). I’m not sure that I agree with this. When an ego becomes convinced that it is divine, that is called megalomania! It is only true to say that the self is divine when it has reclaimed it’s original divinity.

If you ask me, this is a classic New Age mistake. Hardly anybody knows that they are God. It’s the ultimate Secret. Simply telling people, “You’re already divine! You don’t need any guidance or a framework to facilitate your spiritual development!”, will not create a society of God-realised beings. It will mostly just produce confusion and chaos.

It is more senile than infantile. If you were a 2000 year old religion, you might be a bit senile too! Extending this analogy, Fundamentalism is like the rigidity and brittleness of the elderly body. Christianity has become an increasingly intolerant religion as it has “progressed”. The main appeal of early Christianity to the late-Roman converts was its universalism, which suited an expansive empire. After this Empire fell in the West, Catholicism peacefully co-existed with residual forms of paganism and ordinary life for quite some time. The fusion of Christianity with pagan European spirituality can be seen beautifully depicted in the Grail myths, illustrated Christian texts like the Book of Kells, the chivalric love poetry which culminated in the greatness of Dante, and even just the general ambience of medieval Christendom. It was only towards the end of the Middle Ages that the famous persecutions and inquisitions came to predominate. The endless panoply of sects within Christianity, and the intolerance between them, mostly emerged with Protestantism, particularly in its Puritanical expressions. Many of these Puritans became the American settlers, such that contemporary American Evangelicals are the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to Christianity. We should try to think more systematically about religions, not as static entities to be generalised about, but as organisms with a life-cycle. Christianity today is a dying organism gasping for air… I was recently fascinated to discover that, according to the Prophecy of the Popes written in 1595, the present Pope is the last Pope! If all forms of Christianity were as brittle and intolerant as you make out, Christianity wouldn’t have survived for as long as it has.

I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that the political revolutionaries of the past century were just straightforward traitors when they betrayed their ideals. One of the reasons that these people were so dangerous is that they were essentially failed artists; art being taken here in a very general sense as the domain of idealism, and politics as the domain of realism. For example, Communism didn’t start from a realistic version of how the world was but with a romantic and poetical vision of how it ought to be. The revolutionaries were able to betray their ideals so frequently because they never really cared about the mundane realities of politics. Any material hypocrisy was warranted so long as it served the cause of the attainment of their ideal world. Of course, in the long run this makes any revolution a sick joke: “In the name of my ideals, I am willing to betray all of my ideals!” As a failed artist myself, there is a little bit of confession in this analysis… A true Democrat is a Republican who rocked up to the party a few years early. A true Republican is a Democrat who got lost on the way and arrived a few years late!

René Guénon probably set the precedent for framing conspiracy in spiritual terms. I was recently reading Alexander Dugin’s critique of the Perennial Traditionalist idea of “counter-initiation” and the “counter-tradition” and he described it as follows: The meaning of counter-initiation is set out by René Guénon in his book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. In brief, we can say that Guénon understands counter-initiation to be the sum of secret organizations which, although in possession of initiatic and esoteric data, nonetheless direct their activities and efforts towards a goal which is the direct opposite of normal initiation. In other words, instead of striving towards the absolute, they head towards fatal disappearance and dissolution amidst the “reign of quantity” in its external twilight. In line with Islamic esotericism, Guénon called the hierarchs of counter-initiation Awliya es-Shaytan, that is to say the “saints of Satan.” In Guénon’s point of view, representatives of counter-initiation stand behind all the negative tendencies of modern civilization and are secretly administering the course of affairs down the path of degradation, materialization, and spiritual perversion.

Sorry if that all sounds very airy-fairy. I agree with your assessment of present-day society and I have no idea how you deal with the terror, other than just pulling through and recognising it for what it is.

If you mean this as some kind of absolute philosophical statement then it is very cynical. People can want what is best for each other, and the obvious fact that people often don’t want what is best for each other shouldn’t obscure this. I remember a passage in Aristotle where he pointed out that if you truly wanted what was best for your friend, you would want them to become a god. But if they became a god, they couldn’t be your friend anymore! So as a friend - that is, someone who truly wants what is best for someone else - you are stuck in a paradox. Of course, as long as we are flawed finite beings there is always the possibility of covetousness and all of the pettiness that comes with that. Alchemical texts always described “envy” as the greatest sin… Maybe Nietzsche caught the tail-end of this with his theory of “ressentiment” as the greatest sin.

Glad that you liked the parody! Whilst I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that he is harnessing fear to exploit his followers, I’m still somewhat ambivalent. The so-called “ego” does love to use this kind of paranoid skepticism as a defence mechanism. For example, a while back I studied Nietzsche’s book The Antichrist extremely closely, copying the whole thing by hand from the page to a notebook of mine. Whilst it is a very powerful and prescient text, it is extremely egotistical to the point of megalomania and full of just this kind of paranoid skepticism. Here is a typical passage (when he says “priest”, you can substitute any spiritual guru you are skeptical of for these reasons): This is a passionately exaggerated expression of what we are accusing Shunyamurti and others like him of, when we say that they are exploiting the fears of their followers. But I’m not so sure… Maybe we’re just too cynical to believe that anyone can be truly selfless. It’s always hard to know when you are projecting your own nonsense onto somebody else and when it is truly they that are flawed.