Oeaohoo

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.

This video is a good example of this. At one point he even says, “Germany’s domestic policy has already for sometime been the destruction of its own society.” Dangerous words of wisdom from Shunyamurti! For sure. I even agree with him that society is collapsing and found it tiresome! I wrote a funny little parody of him a while back. Maybe somebody here will like it:

We’ve never spoken outside of this forum and AtheisticNonduality strongly disagrees with my attitude toward progressivism and related issues. I think you’re actually right about me to an extent, exaggerated accusations of QAnon and crude bigotry aside, but not so much about him. Not to gaslight you with psychologising but I also see a bit of projection here: you are only capable of interacting amicably with people who share your ideological sympathies, so you assume that this is true for everyone else. What I said above ought to be something you’d agree with anyway. Isn’t your basic fear of the “intolerant” destroying the “tolerant” society that has been created today?

That is a nice idea. But, to quote the Boomer classic “Revolution” by The Beatles, “You say you got a real solution / Well, you know, we’d all love to see the plan”!

I think there could be a lot more of this around here! Not that @DrugsBunny will be pleased to hear it… However, I do wonder how tenable this sort of thing is as you move away from analysis towards practice. How much tolerance can there really be for intolerance? In material terms, intolerance will tend to overpower tolerance. For example, it two people are talking to each other, one open-minded and the other narrow-minded, it is much easier for the open-minded person to constrict themselves to the constraints of the small mind than vice versa, so that the views of the narrow-minded person will end up dictating everything. What is the solution to this?

I wonder how much of this comes from our stupid obsession with the individual artist as “genius”. The general conception of the “artist” today owes a lot to Romantic poets like Shelley and Byron, who narcissistically stood aloof from humanity whilst plunging the depths of their individual subjectivity and regurgitating it for the rest of the world to digest. This stands in stark opposition to the great artists of the traditional past - for example, those who built and painted the Churches and Cathedrals of Christendom - who generally remained anonymous. This was an ideal of objectivity (I use this word not to refer to the idea of an “objective” material world but in a more or less Platonic sense) which allowed the artist to transcend their petty human nature. Now, however, our culture is obsessed with this petty human nature and actively denies everything beyond it. When you take this to its conclusion, you get millions of people poring over every word that is impulsively summoned up from the psychological puddle-depths of the supposed “geniuses” of our time like Kanye. Who cares what Kanye has to say about political issues? It’s not his area of expertise or what, as a “celebrity”, he is celebrated for. One of the main absurdities of democracy is the idea that we have to take every drooling morons “opinion” into account on every damned issue.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.’ Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols.

This was at least nominally a “free market”, so that it is always self-described Classic Liberals who make the most noise about free speech. In the 21st Century, freedom is subordinated to Safety. This is typical decadence as the feminisation of culture, though I know it is supposed to be “Stage Green” growing out of “Stage Orange”. Not that the “free market” was much better..! It is a peculiar phenomenon that this Safety is simultaneously the logical conclusion and the inversion of liberal values. Extreme liberalism as anti-liberalism.

Why don’t these people just come out and say it? They want to live in a post-liberal one-party democracy where everyone is forced at flower-gun point to comply to the progressive agenda. Oh, my mistake, we mustn’t call it an agenda, that might give it away! It is the entirely beneficent guiding of us undeveloped lambs towards the light by the Shepherd of our souls, those “most developed folks in the world” over at Silicon Valley of the Shadow of Death. The Right must stop appealing to “freedom of speech” because the age of “freedom” is already over. Liberalism was only ever a brief respite between two forms of illiberalism: the enforcement of Truth, and the enforcement of lies.

I haven't watched any of Kanye's interviews, except for a few clips were he comes across as extremely incoherent, but I like his new song! Nice Donny Hathaway sample. "Everyone's a Karen / Claimin' that they care"... "I forgot what fear is / Other than the fear of the almighty Yashua / Who knew you before you knew who you was"! My favourite line is: "You knew I follow God, so you should follow me". This is exactly how a hierarchy (which etymologically means "sacred ruler") is supposed to be: a leader who follows God and people who follow their leader! Then, everyone is following God... It confirms what I wrote about Kanye the other day, which I refrained from posting here: I could be wrong but my suspicion is that Kanye doesn’t really care about the actual content of what he is saying. All he cares about is exercising his notion of “freedom”, which is “my right to do whatever the hell I want whenever the hell I want to”. This childish sense of “freedom” is inhibited by anything which “they say you’re not supposed to do”. Since 1945, the ultimate thing that you are not supposed to do is everything that Kanye has recently been doing. He is essentially stuck in a vicious circle of taboo-breaking in the name of “freedom”… It is really a positive development for you progressives. Very few people will be convinced by any of what Kanye is saying because he is obviously unhinged. This bolsters the association in the common mind between conspiratorial thinking and mental illness. Not only that, but many on the Right will follow Kanye off the cliff of his own personal melodrama. This debacle can also be used to smear Trump and even Musk’s takeover of Twitter!

This is epitomised in Nietzsche’s phrase: “That which you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster!”

When a Conservative knows they can no longer conserve, they will instead seek to destroy. Out of that destruction, there is the hope that something new might arise that is worth preserving. As a thirst for something new, this can look like Liberalism. You see this in the more extreme and iconoclastic strands of Conservative thought, for example in Nietzsche’s Antichrist. Nazism also was extremely destructive of traditional German culture. On the other hand, when a society is extremely liberal, Liberals will of course want to conserve it!

They come full circle in the life-cycle of a civilisation. For example, look at the American situation today and how inverted it has become. The Conservatives want to destroy America and the Liberals want to conserve it… Conservatism and Liberalism have come full circle!

To illustrate the key point: By the 5th Century AD, the Roman Empire had grown to encompass all of Western Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. An extremely pluralistic society, religious cults and cultural customs from all across the empire were tolerated. In amidst all of this, the North African bishop St. Augustine launched a polemical assault, The City of God Against the Pagans, on the abject decadence which surrounded him: This fiery polemic applies word for word to our own time... And what happened in the end? Did the pluralistic and liberal empire keep on spiralling upwards forever? No! The empire was ravaged, they were conquered by barbarians and, out of the ashes of their decline, emerged Christendom.

He also brought a bottle of the drink Yoo-hoo. “Net” and “Yoo-hoo”… Worst pun ever!

But which way is the spiral going? “Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”! This seems closer to the truth…

Not in itself. The agenda is the force-feeding of these values onto everybody else. I suspected that someone would say this. It is the logical deduction from viewing everything in terms of linearly ascending stages of development. Looking through history, I see no evidence for this view. Instead, it is clear that development eventually becomes the downfall of human societies. The pluralistic values that you speak of have existed many times before. The trouble is that every time a civilisation has become excessively liberal and cosmopolitan, it has collapsed. The Tower of Babel and all that jazz. Liberalism is largely parasitic upon decadence. This is naive. As an example, I recently read that Sociology was created under the Nazi party: ‘It was under Hitler’s regime that statistically based sociology and social history got their start at Leipzig and other German universities. It is an irony bordering on the absurd that such a discipline was repackaged as a decisive break from the Nazi-tainted German past when it was promoted in the postwar period. In the late 1940s this relatively new discipline was brought back counterfactually or mistakenly as an effort to “overcome the German past.”‘ In a very short time, Sociology went from being a vehicle for the refinement of Nazi ideas to a vehicle for the likes of Adorno and Marcuse to express their Freudian-Marxist lamentations. This shows how quickly and radically the ideological agenda of an academic discipline can change. Many of the Nazis were extremely intelligent and capable scholars, and yet they were still “undeveloped” enough to follow Hitler off of a cliff, like you spoke about in your recent episode. By this point I probably sound needlessly argumentative, but this also rings false. Leadership requires intelligence, organisation and an intensity of vision. You can have these at any “stage of development”. If a leader is too far beyond the people he is leading, they won’t resonate with him, which is precisely what is happening in the tech world. There are many times in history where a leader has even taken people “backwards”. Isn’t that what you Americans fear with somebody like Trump? The short version of everything that I have said above is that development is a circle and not a straight line.

Reflecting on it, what I wrote about Musk representing some kind of counter-elite is almost certainly too sympathetic. We always have to remember that the primary function of democracy is to hold together a society of people who have very little in common. Rather than letting these people fight amongst each other, as they really want to do, an abstracted form of conflict is ritually played out every couple of years in the form of an election. As the democratic society becomes increasingly strained under the chaos of diversity, increasingly regular bouts of this abstracted conflict are required just to hold things together. The whole mechanism is little more than a way to divert conflict into controlled and contained channels, so that the mediocrity and decadence may flow on into the night of civilisation itself, and the “enemy party” is the secularised form of the ritual “Scapegoat” which René Girard spoke about in his books. Musk is just the right-wing form of this regime containment. At best, he will dial down the Woke messaging a little bit and make Twitter a less “anal-retentive” dominant space. Nothing will really change and Clown World will keep on Honking, until eventually it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Nothing to see here.

You mean the book by Jonah Goldberg? I haven’t read it personally but I can’t stand guys like Shapiro and Goldberg. They are mediocre minds who got where they are through nepotism and in-group preference, not through high-IQs and an unrivalled work ethic… I don’t mean to be rude but that is a very silly term. Liberalism and Fascism are completely antithetical. Goldberg was clearly trying to make a silly move, smearing liberalism with the “evils of Fascism”. Typical kvetching. Conservatives try to be clever like this sometimes but it never works out. I understand that you mean a kind of enforced liberalism, which is indeed more or less what I am referring to. A much more profound author, who also happens to be Jewish, Paul Gottfried, calls this “soft totalitarianism” and “therapeutic managerialism”. These are much better terms.