Most of us who are “natural” conservatives, meaning people who are inclined this way by personality or experience, are not fond of morality in its social form.
We are aware that there are two types of morality. The personal kind is the don’t-kill/don’t-steal type that also includes some “best practices” behavior like honor, chastity and environmental awareness; the social kind is the zombie brainwashed we-are-all-equal flattery and emotional manipulation.
When our patron Saint and progenitor of modern conservatism, F.W. Nietzsche, railed against morality as the “triumph of the herd,” he was speaking of social morality.
He would remind us, too, that it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because you don’t like herd morality doesn’t mean you get all Sandusky on some kids. Morality is one of those things that rises above all attempts to smear it through imitation and subsequent corruption.
But what is really interesting is how conservatism has drifted into two camps, with one taking a religious view of morality, and the other taking a social Darwinist view of morality, without both groups realizing that despite doctrinal differences they’re saying the same thing.
Because your brain has been conditioned by thousands of hours of television and pundit-blather to vigorously reject this idea, let me repeat it again: the notion of survival of the fittest, and the most Christian of the Christian notions of moral life, are one and the same.
In Darwinism, we posit that those individuals which survive and breed pass on their genes, and thus advancement occurs because in every generation the better slowly but surely predominates over the less-better. It does this through the gentlest means possible, which is sexual reproduction.
In personal morality, which is what the most religious people seem to describe as morality, the individual makes moral choices and by predominance in those choices, elevates himself or herself in the community. If God is rational, morality is rational, and thus success is.
This is why conservatives have long held the “big tent” open, because whether you are a hard-core materialist and Darwinist or a true nature mystic, you’re going to believe in roughly the same path to clarity. Always get better. Advance the better so it predominates.
Morality is an important measure of that “better”-ness. Competence is important, but competence without morality makes a psychopath and is rare. This is because the more competent people get, the wider of a scope they can perceive both in temporal and contextual modes, which means they are more likely to discover the need for social order and thus personal morality.
A half-smart person may find a way to steal ten million dollars and think himself a genius for doing so, but a fully-smart person would find that course of action to be a pointless risk that is guaranteed to have destructive consequences for someone.
Take Bernie Madoff. Was a he a genius for having conned the gullible, greedy and credulous out of their millions? He was charismatic, and obviously not stupid, but… anyone with any real intelligence would have realized that all Ponzi schemes collapse for a singular reason: they produce more “fake wealth” than they can ever hope to repay.
We live in a society that, because it has no shared values and thus no moral center, is dominated by the half-smart who think that manipulating the system for a short-term end result is genius, even if it comes with long-term bad consequences.
These people do nothing but waste time and resources while embittering those around them, but because our society refuses to call them out on this behavior, they get away with it. If you realized the true cost of these people, which might be that without them you’d have 50% more free time, you might be less tolerant.
Let’s look at a typical Friday afternoon:
- Work. You are seated in a meeting. People are talking because they need to feel important. No information is being conveyed. You fight to stay awake. After the meeting, no one gets anything done because everyone is covertly irritated that they had to sit through that massive waste of time, especially on a sunny cloudless day.
- Commuting. It is a simple process: drive down the road. Yet people are having trouble. Over half of the cars that you notice driving too slowly, not paying attention, or making dangerous moves are driven by people who are very animatedly into their phone conversations. The other half are people who look unfocused, as if they are so mad that they’re forced to be driving that their revenge is to pay no heed to the process. One person is eating. For each slow or oblivious car, everyone behind them in the line has to wait an additional thirty seconds, or get trapped at a light, or have to navigate around the idiot to get home on time. Resentment increases.
- Groceries. You need food for the weekend. This is a simple process: go to store, select items, put in cart and pay. But people wander down the aisles or become pointlessly aggressive, introducing traffic chaos. The worst is a fattish woman who pushes past you, nearly hitting you, as if she enjoys the feeling of power. Others simply dawdle. You notice that whenever you go to a new area of the store, other people show up, as if they’re afraid of missing out, and they won’t leave before you do. The result is that a crowd follows itself and makes every part of the store clogged with humanity.
- Parking lot. Again, this is not very hard. Park car. When done, remove car and drive on road. People either pay no attention and drive slowly through the lot, holding everyone up, or get frustrated and race through the lot at undue speed. The result is constant chaos and paranoia among those driving through the lot, expecting stupidity from all sides and also to be unreasonably delayed. Tempers simmer to a boil.
- Driving home. You might think driving is about getting there. It’s not. It’s about acting out your frustrations. People in SUVs seem to take pleasure in bullying you off the road, almost flaunting their obliviousness as if to imply that they, in their elevated state, can afford to treat you little people badly. Other people like to pretend that they are so wealthy and powerful they are never in a hurry. They drive slowly until the light is about to change, and then floor it through the intersection with tires squealing, leaving you to stop for the yellow.
- Neighbors. Down the street, Dale is having a barbecue and beer party. He has invited his friends and coworkers. You think this is great. That is, until they start driving home at 3 am with roaring engines and reckless speed. You wonder why this is necessary. Isn’t the point to drink, party, be merry and then go home quietly so as not to attract attention? It’s like they need to rub it in: I’m having a good time and you’re not, and if you’re happily doing something quiet which makes me doubt how good of a time I had, I’m going to wake you up and remind you that I’m the coolest, ever.
Infinite other examples abound: the problem in our society is not evil institutions, but corrupt individuals — and the norm is corruption, not the exception. Most people are self-centered and selfish, and they use any power they do get to try to force you to acknowledge them, despite their lack of quality as individuals.
This is where personal morality and Social Darwinism coincide. We need higher quality human beings. It is a pleasing fiction that our problems are caused by “evil” corporations, kings, leaders and politicians. The truth is that because most people are selfish, they create corruption in their leaders.
Liberalism would have you believe that we are all OK (they call this “equality”) even if we are inherently of low quality as people. Therefore, if something goes wrong, it’s not individuals; it’s The System.
Conservatism pursues the opposite idea. Institutions are made of people, and leaders elected by people. If something is going wrong, it is because people have abandoned (a) a personal morality of doing the right thing by all people as a collective, a.k.a. civilization and (b) adapting to their environment.
Our world was a happier place when we considered ourselves responsible for the consequences of our actions. This put the onus on those who could actually make a difference, the individual. With individuals making billions of moral choices a day, there is no way one government can enforce them all.
As we watch our society fall further apart as every individual pulls in a separate direction, we should ask ourselves what caused this. Was it us saying that everyone was equal, and therefore did not need to prove themselves morally? From the looks of things, it was.
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“This is why conservatives have long held the “big tent” open, because whether you are a hard-core materialist and Darwinist or a true nature mystic, you’re going to believe in roughly the same path to clarity”
I don’t really understand this argument that you make. Darwinism has always been the ally of every subversive movement from the 19th century onward.
They all pay religious adoration to it. The fact that it promotes a humanity risen from an inferior condition, without anything superior above it, goes very well with the deconstruction policies of the new-left. According to them, everything is a social construct, and every type of morality or superior values one might hold are nothing but a social convention, at best, or a tactic of those in command to restrain the individual, at worst.
Right-wingers whom I’ve seen that hold the evolutionary dogma as truth, have no choice but to opt for the institutionalizing of values based on nothing but brute power (either achieved through guile, in a macchiavellian sense, or through brute strength), since, it is obvious, that there is nothing higher to justify any codes of ethics.
Plus, according to modern darwinism, evolution is not really evolution, but merely “adaptation”. That it is, evolution has no actual direction (upwards), but merely a reaction to circumstances. This goes splendidly with the modern dogma of recency- what is the most recent is the best and just go along with the flow.
Darwinism is based, mostly on half-truths and on one big inversion- that something more can come from something less.
In regards to morality, a true morality was lost when its organicity was replaced by social contracts. The result of this is: the common-sense, unwritten laws that acted within a community, can no longer have any stability without “a contract”. So we have more and more written laws and a bureaucratic legislation that poses as the new morality. Basing everything on a social contract and written laws means that anything that is not explicitly forbidden by a law is permitted. Because of the social chaos that ensues for this, it quickly turns into “anything that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden”.
It is ironic that people who think they are liberating themselves by rejecting all traditional values and morality are actually chaining themselves under the slavery of bureaucracy and mechanical legislation.
Damn it Mihai you made about half my post obsolete, although i must contend that evolution still produces ‘advancement’ in the form of ever growing complexity of life.
The left and progressives traditionally claim Darwinism, but then use it to (ironically) argue that evolution has ended and we need no further self-discipline. That’s not applying it… that’s using it as a tag or adornment for the sake of looking “educated.”
“but then use it to (ironically) argue that evolution has ended”
In all honesty, I never heard this claim made from self-avowed evolutionists.
“Darwinism is based, mostly on half-truths and on one big inversion- that something more can come from something less.”
A crow arises from an egg. A tree from a seed.
I, myself, have grown from a useless freak into a responsible, productive man.
If there is paradox, there is truth to find, somewhere.
Here’s where I (surprisingly) take up for the Darwinist Pin-heads.
You get more from the same amount of stuff. You just optimize what you have more effectively. This would suggest an evolutionary learning curve so to speak. Eventually, if an organism is left in a steady-state environment, it becomes too slow to even notice.
lim (t->inf) of dE/Dt = 0.
An egg is an open thermodynamic system. In order to become crow it utilizes the influx of external energy, matter, and information. So there is no paradox; everything is from God.
All is paradox, if examined closely enough.
That is how you know it is from God.
well said ferret
@crow: you turned from irresponsible towards responsible by using means already present within you. You had self-consciousness, the ability to reason and to use your higher faculties in order to turn your life over. All of these were within your potential, as were the lower and destructive aspects of yourself.
In the animal kingdom said higher faculties are not present, not even in potential form.
The best arguments imply, but do not state.
Among the left today, where do you see Darwinist? Except as stated support, of course.
Everything they do opposes natural selection.
Mihai: animals don’t have these faculties (as far as we know) because they do not need them.
They need nothing at all to survive. Only what is already around them.
Humans, on the other hand, seem to need a mountain of stuff, just to feel secure :)
You hit on a glaring paradox of both the dogmatic left and traditional right.
Leftists typically believe in evolution but then argue that all humans are the same which is clearly impossible if the various groups of humans evolved in different environments.
The right dismisses the the notion of universal equality but believes we are all created in God’s image. Though there are some that believe we are all equal because God made us all. None of them have cared to observe the differences in African run rations or even cities.
WRT the lack of self-discipline: this is, I think, the crux of the leftist argument against traditional religion and social conservatism. Both of these things are elaborate ways to explain social contracts. We agree to meet a code of morality or obey the 10 commandments because without that agreement life would be brutish and short. The development of Morality and religion functions as a way to fight the Nash equilibrium of the traditional prisoners dilema of game theory. That is, the net benefit is greatest when we all agree to behave a certain way but we can outperform other players if we cheat. But if everyone cheat the net benefit is the least. The equilibrium is when everyone cheats, hence the constant battle between human animalistic nature and a higher code of conduct.
The leftist rage agaist such constraints is simple and childish: “I want I want I want!” in the nature of an animal instinct that ignores the long-term or society wide consequences. Ironically, the eco-zealots are the closest to understanding this
It’s also clearly impossible if you consider Darwinism itself, which requires different levels of adaptation for the process itself to occur, like how you need something “better” to appear on the market before you figure out you need to stop buying the older product which now looks less awesome to you. When the newest Ferrari comes out the old one seems slow but not before.
“So we have more and more written laws and a bureaucratic legislation that poses as the new morality” And what is also bad in this situation, is absence of justice that was replaced with the competition between lawyers. One who has more money for better lawyer wins.
The left plays a great deal of lip service to Darwinism, but that’s only to use it as a weapon against the Christians.
I don’t think they actually understand the implications of Darwinism, or they would not be champions of the less equal in their bid to become fully equal through government subsidies.
“the problem in our society is not evil institutions, but corrupt individuals”
Corrupt individuals = evil institutions. Again, constantly blaming the ‘proles’ is futile, since the reality is the system is now structured in a way that makes it almost impossible/undesirable for any specific individual to conduct themselves with integrity, just look at alimony laws. Anyone can point to one or the other as cause/effect with equal merit, and either could take steps to improve the situation but don’t.
And again i am waiting on some evidence showing that ‘liberalism’ only equates to false equality in a mechanical sense, that might be the ‘mainstream’ perception and what the system mandates but I don’t get the sense an entire major political philosophy is really that simple when deconstructed.
Also, when exactly was this ‘happier’ time, before the french revolution/’enlightenment’? When the poor and subsequently society were prevented from advancement by being denied the right to educate themselves? During the various inquisitions, or before christian times altogether?
As far as i can tell, in all the major societies/cultures there has been a constant and huge imbalance of wealth/power, and no it was as is now typically passed down through biological lines, NOT inherited through merit. You could say technological innovations have added to the stresses of daily life but i doubt it is more than the absence of the constant threat of disease and famine. Was life really better, or society inherently more ‘fair’/moral or is it merely that most are beginning to become more aware they are getting the short end of the stick due to information dispersal and increasing lifespans, and that this inevitably results in increased hostility?
And in response to ‘social darwinism’, natural selection does not determine/progress ‘worth’, but merely capacity to survive within a set of parameters. You think Steven Hawking would have been favored by ‘natural selection’? An obvious genius, and one of the minds most responsible for expanding our understanding of the mechanical universe gone, because he couldn’t raise a fork to his own mouth let alone hunt food.
We are not animals anymore, unlike them we have developed the capacity to effect/shape our environment profoundly and fear our own death. I am curious as to how you would have social darwinism applied, but at a glance it appears as subtle hypocrisy, since you are condemning others for not being unable to survive on their own, but NOBODY is able to survive on their own, without the aid of society. Absolute self-sufficiency is as much a myth in a human context as absolute free-will, it has to be carefully assessed from a relative standpoint since there are many who are unable to look after themselves yet have something valuable to offer.
“In Darwinism, we posit that those individuals which survive and breed pass on their genes, and thus advancement occurs because in every generation the better slowly but surely predominates over the less-better. It does this through the gentlest means possible, which is sexual reproduction.”
“When our patron Saint and progenitor of modern conservatism, F.W. Nietzsche, railed against morality as the “triumph of the herd,” he was speaking of social morality.”
Nietzsche was railing against more than morality. for him morality was just a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. What Nietzsche was in fact railing against was not “slave morality” per se, but the slaves themselves. The thrust of his philosophical sword was not aimed at mere ideologies, but at genetics.
Incorrect. Darwinism is flawed in that it posists that only the “best”, most well adapted “humans” survive to reproduce. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The “best and the brightest”, if you will, have the lowest birthrates on the planet, whereas the birthrates in Fourth World shitholes like Mexico, Haiti, and Africa are exploding exponentially.
Nature, as I never tiring of saying, abhors quality and only concerns herself with quantity.
Clearly, reproduction is not a measure of success in the Occidental sense.
“We live in a society that, because it has no shared values and thus no moral center, is dominated by the half-smart who think that manipulating the system for a short-term end result is genius, even if it comes with long-term bad consequences.”
An erroneous assumption. Values still exist and are still shared among racially homogeneous groups. The problem is that Anglo-Saxon values are being forced to compete against Black and Hispanic subcultures for dominance.
It is the importation of racially/culturally unassimilible elements into the US that is causing our current problems, not Whites losing their moral/ethical compasses.
As for the conservatism vs. liberalism argument, why allow yourselves to be forced into this “either or” set of circumstances? This kind of rigid thinking is the hallmark of the herd, who can only perceive the world in sets of binaries. If the Occident is to survive, it needs to evolve past such smallness and find a third path between these two poles.
Of course the herd itself won’t be able to accomplish this on its own. It will need to be steered in the proper direction by those who have themselves evolved past their humanity.
Interesting argument. Here’s where I kind of think you goofed.
>>>>Clearly, reproduction is not a measure of success in the Occidental sense.
A bridge is missing between this statement and the next. Or, perhaps thinking big picture, Brett accidentally put these two paragraphs out of their logical order.
>>>>“We live in a society that, because it has no shared values and thus no moral center, is dominated by the half-smart who think that manipulating the system for a short-term end result is genius, even if it comes with long-term bad consequences.”
Would you bring a poor, innocent toddler into a world like that? Gad Zooks! No wonder the ofay don’t breed. They are smart enough to be pessimistic.
Thus, I think Brett gave us an effect first, and then a cause. Had he said. “Basically, Amerika is increasingly an amoral suck-hole run by Beavis and Butthead, therefore no one in their right minds wants to punish a baby by having one here,” his point would be more lucid.
On one hand you have the people of the Occident who, because of their superior culture and intellects, do not need to breed like cockroaches. They do not, as Blacks and Hispanics do, have to breed in uncontrolled numbers in order to ensure their continued survival as a species. Hence my comment that reproduction just for reproductions sake is not measuring stick by which success is measured in the Occidental world.
There is nothing inherently wrong with America, or with its culture or its form of government. The problem is simply that the non-Whites currently being imported as cheap labor are of such inferior quality that they actually pollute the very air surrounding them. Contrast this to the primarily white Europeans that immigrated to the US back in the early part of the 19th century. For the most part the Irish, Italians, and the Germans all, more or less, assimilated.
I certaintly didn’t have kids solely to propagate a species. You have a point about serious people making a careful decision wrt to sexual reproduction.
“On one hand you have the people of the Occident who, because of their superior culture and intellects, do not need to breed like cockroaches. They do not, as Blacks and Hispanics do, have to breed in uncontrolled numbers in order to ensure their continued survival as a species. Hence my comment that reproduction just for reproductions sake is not measuring stick by which success is measured in the Occidental world.”
Darwinism states that the species with the best reproductive strategy survives. Clearly Whites do not have the best strategy. While more intelligent, cooperative and empathetic than Africans; the combination prevents even replacement level breeding along with funneling resources to the needy Africans at the expense of their own children.
An alien anthropologist may some day dig up our documents, decode old harddrives and conclude that the smarter races on planet earth were best adapted for ice-age Europe but not for a fully colonized planet with high technology. Thus they voluntarily died off to let the less intelligent but more reproductive species survive. Just like when rats found their way to isolated Pacific islands and killed off more elegant but utlimately less practical species.
Blacks and Hispanics are allowed to breed in the numbers they do because they’re needed for cheap slave labor. Because they are allowed to by Whites does not make their culture superior even in a Darwinian sense because their numbers are unnatural to begin with.
If the Third/Fourth World stopped receiving Occidental welfare, they’d have probably gone extinct by now.
“On one hand you have the people of the Occident who, because of their superior culture and intellects, do not need to breed like cockroaches”
Check out the fertility rates in different countries; the Western people have it much less than 2, i.e., less than replication level (don’t remember exactly, I believe it’s 2.2 for developed countries). That means, there will be no Western people left after a while. If the people of the Occident had sufficient intellect, they knew that the family has to have more than 2 children. A culture that endorses less than 2 children in a family should not be considered as superior, but rather suicidal.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with America, or with its culture or its form of government. The problem is simply that the non-Whites currently being imported as cheap labor are of such inferior quality that they actually pollute the very air surrounding them.”
So you mean that cheap labor import is happening without the government involving? Are they coming against the will of America, and this process has no connection to the current American culture?
Note that I said form of government, meaning representative republicanism.
American culture is, at its heart, an Anglo-Saxon based culture, and is still prevalent in the less mongrelized belts of the US.
Humans, and only humans, defy the natural order.
Any living thing that is not human, performs to design specification, or it simply doesn’t make it.
I made the probable mistake of feeding a female raccoon. Within three years there were twenty-five of them.
Clearly, something was going to have to change. I strung my bow and reached for the arrows.
But instead, I simply stopped feeding them, by degrees, and within a few weeks, there were only five that remained. None got shot.
Most wandered away to discover new sources of food.
Those that remained were the ones who kept checking back, to see if there was food, while also searching out other sources.
Is this Darwinism? I imagine it probably is.
It favoured smarter raccoons.
They are even now planning a mission into orbit.
damn coons! always leeching off my resources!
Only the human herd is content to follow the natural order.
All great men act in defiance of natural order.
The rule of the greater over the lesser is a most natural order.
Yet, we see it denied within present society. Is it great for doing so?
I think a much too loose definition of “natural” is being used in these cases.
You can only define ‘natural’ accurately if you are exposed directly to nature. City folks are mostly not.
@crow: yes, if we understand nature only as trees, wildlife etc.
I was taking a more extensive view, referring to the totality of means commonly at our disposal.
That’s the problem I have- that people always define “natural” according to “the wild” or to our lowermost instincts and impulses.
Only men considered great by other men, defy the natural order.
This does not make them great men.
To defy natural order is a sure sign of greatness, whether that greatness remains manifested or not depends on mere chance.
History is often made by coincidence than anything else.
@Robert W:
And there is a wise saying that goes like this:
To dominate nature, you first need to obey it…
If not for leftism, Africa as well as the other third world peoples–including India and China, would be dying off, not propagating. All of those people benefit from Western technology and largess. Were it not for Leftism, that technology would not be shared. Ultimately, those people are in competition with “us” for the word’s resources. There is not reason to share one’s wealth with an enemy or competitor. As a case in point, the Chinese are able to survive because American geneticists spliced a fish protein onto rice and then gave it to them. This was done to keep a billion from walking into Europe and taking food–the only way to stop being nukes.
But leftist utopianism is a trait of european peoples and thus makes them unfit for survival in a modern world.
Humans will go extinct when the last person smart enough to propagate the species gives his/her last bit of food to a savage who will die anyway shortly afterward.
Without slave morality though the people who are above slaves don’t hesitate to put those slaves in their place.
Without the best and the brightest subsidizing the world’s poor and foolish those people would soon die out of their own inability to adapt. It’s not just in the third world, we have plenty of stupid that is European in origin.
Incorrect. Darwinism is flawed in that it posists that only the “best”, most well adapted “humans” survive to reproduce. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The “best and the brightest”, if you will, have the lowest birthrates on the planet, whereas the birthrates in Fourth World shitholes like Mexico, Haiti, and Africa are exploding exponentially.
In a true Darwin world. We would let the infirm infants die, we would not feed the poor who don’t wish to work, there would be no welfare system, abortion would not be on demand, etc. Only the best, the brightest, the most cunning would survive. Instead we pay ridiculous taxes to support countless inferior individuals who are conning the system (against our wishes), giving up our own right to a large family because we can’t afford it or because women have been conned into believing they must become successful career women to have satisfying life. Third world shit holes don’t produce the best and the brightest, they produce litters — some happen to survive, some don’t. Idiots send money to them to try to help keep more inferiors alive to live in a place where humans were not meant to live — because we have a “responsibility”. Fuck that responsibility.
In a true Darwinian world, it would only be the best and the brightest. A true Darwinian would not give aid to the inferior who will eventually take what the Darwinian has remaining. The best and the brightest would also know you can’t kill the cow if you want to get milk in the future and would act with survival in it’s best interest.
It’s us versus them.
Very true.
And if you want to lay the blame for this terrible situation, lay it firmly at the feet of Xtianity.
It doesn’t need to be that extreme. Darwinism is just that those who adapt and reproduce and then have those offspring reproduce will survive. If we stopped all the subsidies and welfare we would see natural selection take over.
Not all human beings have souls, you know. Up until about a hundred years ago, this was the widely held belief amongst Christians–who were almost all Europeans. This view was altered by the various churches because their missionaries had too much trouble converting non-Euros to Christianity. What was the point, if you were not one of God’s chosen and therefor not going to Heaven anyway? I first encountered this in grade school–I kept asking inconvenient questions in religious instruction class–like, “if God created Adam and Eve in His image, who was it that Cain married?” or “If God created Adam and Eve, and they were the only ones, then how did we all get here?”. Well, no one would answer that question or a lot of other ones I had. So, instead of me going to religion class twice a week, I was sent to play chess with a priest twice a week. It wasn’t until I met a Rabbi and got to know him that the question was finally answered. God does have a chosen people–they are not all Hebrews. There were other people and that is what the story of Cain illustrates. Cain married a Gentile–Europeans are not Gentiles, we are the children of Noah–what Jews refer to as “Noahides”–he then smiled and said–”there were no ‘Wongs’ on Noah’s Ark”. We, as non-Hebrew Europeans, are the descendants of Noah’s son: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Noah. There were no shonequas on his Ark, as well.
Interestingly enough, the fable of the Seven Daughters Of Eve turns out to have genetic truth in it as well: http://mctiernan.com/mtdna.htm
So, when you see the savage nature of some “humans”, remember, there is a reason for it. This was the first great lie told by The Left–that we are all God’s creatures. We are not–at least not all in the same category. Some are no better than the beasts in the fields. Thus, they are incapable of morality on any level.
I would like to say that’s a bunch of crap. But you know…
You never know.
My experience of humans has left me wondering if – in general – they have souls, at all.
There is good reason for this.
I spent most of my adult life searching for enlightenment, and so, you could say, I earned it.
So it is probably quite close to the truth to say:
You have no soul, until you create it for yourself. When you do this, you are changed in a way so fundamental, that whatever you were before, you could never be again.
How can you create your own soul?
God created man in his own image.
We can do what God can do, within ourselves. But first, we have to discover that we can do this.
Creativity is our birthright.
We create ourselves, you could say, out of clay.
And so what Robert says makes a certain sense, even though it seems initially outrageous.
Great post, Robert. Stuff like that makes us pause.
Most people don’t have souls. They are like the red shirts on Star Trek, just there as background characters and they get killed a lot and no one notices.
I had to read the bible twice in my life–first as a child it was read to me by mother–we spent entire summers on a remote lake with no television, no radio. There was nothing to do but fish, hunt, read and play cards. My older brother got smart with her one day and her punishment–or reward, was to sit use down and read the bible, cover to cover, for three hours per day.
Later on, in college, I took a course titled “The History Of Political Thought In Western Civilization”. It took a full year of class time, two hours per class, to get through it to get full credit. We began with the Old Testament and finished with Karl Marx. Our people have always had a Chosen. The Hebrews were not the only children of Noah–they were the children of one of Noah’s sons, we are the children of another one of his sons. At no point is there ever any mention of Wongs and there is only a disparaging mention of sub-Saharan’s.
i have thought a lot about this as I have traveled through life. There is no way a Human with a soul could skin alive a dog, as the Chinese do, to enhance the flavor of the meat. It is so insanely cruel that it is worse than bestial. Likewise, how does a human with a soul hunt down another human and eat them? Meso-Americans as well as Africans did this–but our people always had prohibitions against it–since time immemorial. Likewise, we have always prohibited incestuous relations, but not others. How does a human with a soul rape a baby? Or an old woman? Or a young boy? How do you beat a child to death?
The list is a long one. They have no souls.
When you claim someone has no soul, it becomes easy to do these things.
To be Godlike is to be creative–but who has created the world? What people is it that have, over time, created almost everything of value in this world? Was it Africans? Or Chinese? Or native Americans?
Europeans. The rest of the world only feeds on our crumbs.
This is true and it even extends to whites. These OWS protesters don’t have souls.
No–they are truly zombies. Utterly amazing how low the level of cerebral function.
Could somebody explain to me how one can be both Christian and an admirer of Nietzsche and it not be a contradiction?
You can not be a Xtian and, at the same time, be a follower of Nietzsche.
But don’t take my word for it. Read for yourself what Nietzsche had to say on the subject,
Christianity as antiquity.– When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God’s son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed – whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions – is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross — how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?
and,
After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
That was well written. I like it. The thing is, though, is that Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be the son of God. He only said that we were all the children of God as he was himself–very different from claiming to actually have been born of God, akin to having been born of Zeus. It was the Apostle Paul who claimed he was the son of God–and Paul never knew him.
It was the Pagan Roman Emperor who set up what became known as the Holy Roman Catholic Church. He made it the state religion and he gave them the power of the tithe–a tax that had to be granted by the State. In return for the tithe, they allowed him, Constantine, to decide what would go into the Bible as well as what would be believed and what wouldn’t. Prior to this, the Christians were simply a sect of Jews who practiced all of the Jewish traditions as Jesus had commanded them to. They did not worship Mary, or pray to “Saints” or any other Catholic nonsense. There is no “Hell” in the Old Testament–that was another invention of Constantine. There had to be a reason to be good and obey the laws. The old tradition stated that our souls had to pass through this plane at least once, but could come back as many times as they wanted before the end. At which time, whatever state your soul had arrived at, is where it would be forever. This is what is actually meant when Jesus says “my Father’s mansion many rooms”. That is, that the purer your soul, the higher up in the “mansion” your soul will reside, the ultimate place being a position in God’s chorus where your soul will sing the song of God’s love for all eternity. Quite beautiful, actually. Constantine saw this as a problem, since if a person could keep coming back until he/she got it right, there was no need to bother being good in the here and now–so he changed it and Hell fire and Damnation were invented.
Constantine ruled over a multicultural empire that was already cracking. The invention of a state religion was meant to shore up the underpinnings of the Empire. It worked, for a brief period of time. The Catholic Church evolved into it’s own state and ruled over Western Europe for centuries–until the Reformation. The European states which overthrew the Vatican’s power are the states that progressed the furthest and achieved the highest standard of living–culminating in America. Those old WASPs who decried large scale immigration from Catholic countries were right, in the end. The Catholic Church has become one of the most divisive and destructive forces in America today. They are all about world government and the destruction of the Nation-State, an institution that was developed only after the over throw of the Vatican Imperium. The whole purpose of the Nation-State was to protect the people within and preserve their culture for their own posterity.
It’s pretty easy for a Christian to ignore Nietzche’s adolescent religious ramblings but admire some of the wisdom in his philosophy.
I agree with quite a number of comments you made regarding early christianity and the catholic church, but I disagree with your comments regarding the nation-state.
The nation-state was the first step towards globalization, not a preserver of culture and identity. On the contrary, the nation state meant the arbitrary throwing together of territories with different customs, languages, culture (that in the past were united by a common idea) and leveling them all to a centralized, bureaucratic state with arbitrary and counterfeited standards and values.
England and it’s Monarchy is considered to be the world’s first nation-state. It was not a contrivance. That little bitty island nation believed in itself and proceeded to first protect itself from what seemed like over whelming force and then went out, because of it’s belief and conquered two thirds of the world’s surface and one third of it’s people. Think about that, for just a moment.
Honestly, who cares what Jesus, assuming he even existed in teh first place said or did. That some seditious Jew supposedly got himself nailed to a tree two thousand years ago and that White men are still getting killed over this is, to me at least, proof of de-evolution.
How much more presumptious bullshit is Prozak gonna have to write (e.g. “But what is really interesting is how conservatism has drifted into two camps,” “your brain has been conditioned by thousands of hours of television and pundit-blather to vigorously reject this idea,” “Liberalism would have you believe that we are all OK”) before everyone realises how fucking autistic and stupid his attempt at brainwashing is?
I’ve been banned from commenting at ANUS. That shows you how secure these people are in their convictions.
You’ll be banned here too, shortly.
Not because people are insecure, but because nobody really needs the gratuitous nastiness which is the only thing you seem able to contribute.
Even the name does nothing but insult. Still, it does describe rather well someone who never really wakes up.
I have to say to all of you, that I have appreciated your views here for a while. I read through much of what has been written and the responses. One of the ideas that I like is that none of you regulars seek scapegoats to blame–invisible powers that be who mysteriously guide the common “man”. You seem to put the blame where it belongs–on the common man himself. On other sites that I visit, the authors do not do this, but those who post do.
I have often pointed out them, while they wail and nash their teeth, that it was their own parents and possibly they themselves, that voted for the politicians who enacted the laws that enabled the downfall of our civilization. They don’t like to hear this. And they scoff at the reasonable answer to their question of how to fix it. I believe the way to fix it is to simply live apart from the herd. That is to say that one should eschew the popular culture and instead embrace the high culture of Western Man. Live it, eat it and breath it. They scorn the idea of attending The Opera or The Symphony. They laugh at the notion that there are good reason to go to church or the former–especially the idea that one might find a good mate, male or female, there.
No, they wallow in the lowbrow pop culture, and then blame their lives on the mysterious other that they believe wants to destroy them.
Damn, I forgot to mention ZOG and the space alien Aryans at the Bohemian Grove.
Does anyone have the URL to the article about how humans are hardwired for “vocation, family, religion” or something along those lines? Lost it, would like to read again.