Oeaohoo

The end of what Guénon aptly called The Reign of Quantity would be a start. I don’t think that anything grand can take place until the enforcement of smallness is ended. The Last Men who surround us are deadly opposed to all greatness of character and nobility of soul! The Last Man is the absolute antithesis of grand plans and aspirations. For so long as he rules, aspiration must be a private affair.

Yeah! Rage WITH the machine!

Every aspect of this is just absurd. 1) You can study a theory without agreeing with it. 2) Even within the confines of the theory, merely studying it is unlikely to change your “stage”. 3) Spiral Dynamics is just a booster pack for progressive leftism. I could equally well say: it’s impossible to be a liberal after studying Plato’s Republic, Polybius’ Anacyclosis, Vico’s The New Science, Spengler’s Decline of the West, Guenon’s Perennial Traditionalism, and so on… You’re just putting this one stupid system on a pedestal. Maybe. I still see no reason why a metaphysical understanding of relativism has to translate to relativism in the political sense. What about the understanding of absolutism? Is there not an Absolute?

There is the important caveat to what I have said above: it is metaphysical, but only in so far as the culture which is dissolving was itself a vehicle for the realisation of metaphysical truth. For example, the dissolution of Christendom is simultaneously the death of Christ as a way to God. I’m just not interested in discussing this. I don’t understand how you could have no sense of what is censored today. I also see it as somewhat irrelevant. The main thing here was poking fun at the self-satisfied liberal’s view of conservatism.

I think you are conflating an abstract grasp of relativity with the idea that we should apply relativism on a societal level. When conservatives complain about something like “cultural relativism”, they generally aren’t talking about anything metaphysical. They just mean the failure of their culture to uphold the values which it once held dear. The failure of a culture to uphold its values is equivalent to the dissolution of that culture, in the same way that the failure of your body to maintain life is death. Of course, you are instead filtering all of this through a framework of progress, in which case this trend towards relativism is framed as an enlightened advancement.

Far-righters just want to boot minorities out of their countries. Mainstream conservatives go on about assimilation. The real question there is: assimilation to what? What is really left to assimilate to? “Here, minority, take your pick: which sports team do you want to support? which generic urban housing unit do you want to feel a vague sense of “community” within? are you woke or are you libertarian?” There is barely any culture left to assimilate to… Anyway, the supposed double standard that you are pointing out here seems extremely tenuous to me. Come on. You are not a little babe who has just opened their eyes on the world for the first time!

I have noticed that some conservatives have started trying to co-opt the claim of being “oppressed” recently. I think it is a really weak strategy. As if any progressive is going to shed a tear for the poor oppressed conservative… They’re just going to laugh at them because they hate them. I would prefer the word suppressed. I think people in general have a sense that, given a level playing field, ideas that are considered “conservative” today (which for any normal age are mere common sense) would triumph, hence the need for heavy censorship everywhere to maintain a liberal consensus.

No need to overdo it… Although, I do expect something like this.

Marvellous! If only all wars could happen this way. A lot of lives could have been saved in Ukraine if a similar strategy had been taken…

It is debate itself which goes round in circles; experto crede… As such, I am not really interested in debate. I’ve shared many of my views around here already.

Of course. Doesn’t mean that we ought to submit to nonsense. Yes, absolutely. In most cases, the liberal ideology is a pure expression of selfishness: whether it is a case of marginal communities who benefit from the weakening of the old order, or the majority who just want to enjoy a “cosmopolitan” lifestyle by tasting every cuisine, going on fancy holidays and enjoying a buffet of sexual partners from all around the globe… It is so grotesque that all of this masquerades as some grand expression of selfless compassion. I don’t understand how so few can notice that, in practice, “caring about everybody” looks identical to caring about nobody other than yourself. I don’t agree with the claim that the truth must lie in the middle. Of course there is the “golden mean” and the “middle way” and the “via media” and all of that… However, these are metaphysical notions referring to an “immutability in the middle” (the Taoist equivalent) of dualities which are fundamental to existence. The polarity between “Survival” and Leftism is not really innate to existence. It is only the more or less arbitrary product of a certain place and time. As such, the truth might lie anywhere between them… I, for one, clearly don’t think that it is to be found on the side of Leftism!

It must be the mystical power of prophecy you have developed from watching all that Byron Katie!

Exactly.

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!