Posts Tagged ‘hubris’
Friday, February 3rd, 2017
How popular was the Soviet Union? In the West, we tend to portray Russians as victims of their government, but the reality was that the government was perpetuated by them and seemed massively popular, especially when things were good. When they tired of it, it went away, leaving people wondering why they had not simply done that fifty years before.
Most people do not realize that the kid at the back of your history class was right: almost everything in our world is excremental. Most of the music, books, movies, politicians, products and public figures are simply moronic. The herd, which is conscious only of The Now™ and therefore oblivious to options not in front of its face like sale items on a shelf, accepts what is “better” but never stumbles to awareness of what is “good.”
Leftism is perpetually popular. If you tell a group of people that everyone is equal and we do not need a hierarchy to rule over us, the vast majority of them will swoon and fall to delighted excitement. There will be a small group at the rear, old men and teenagers mostly, who realize that not only is the statement not true, but that it is the oldest and vilest lie.
Why is Leftism so addictively popular? The first reason is that it is pacifism. The women especially love this part; when everyone is equal, there is no more inequality, so no more internal competition. They do not understand basic information dynamics, however, which would inform them that when everyone is equal, the need for competition is intensified as people try to rise over the generic level.
However, that does not explain the seemingly fanatical way that people take to Leftism even when they have never heard of it before. Something clicks in their minds, and they are able to visualize some way in which Leftism is relevant and important to them, and they go from indifferent to maniacally committed fans — who would rather die with the idea than live without it — in minutes.
Comparing it to heroin addiction is entirely wrong. Most addicts use the drug for some time before realizing that they are addicted, or in other words, cannot visualize their lives without it. It makes life so much better that to give it up is to die, or at least feels that way. Leftists without Leftism are people who cannot visualize themselves existing.
Its appeal must be something very simple, very primal, in order to be so universal in potential appeal. It does not appeal to everyone; possible two-fifths of the population are immune through instinct, another twenty percent or so by indecision, and maybe a twentieth are born with the onerous knowledge that illusion is not real but a real threat and must be fought.
If this addictive idea is like others, its appeal occurs to the individual. That is: the individual finds it desirable because it makes the individual more powerful. In this way, analysts like J.R.R. Tolkien are correct about the seductive power of the one true ring just as Melville correctly identified the white whale. People lust for power over their smallness in the world, and it changes them.
To a game theory analysis, the individual will choose whatever position allows them the most power balanced by the least risk. Leftism offers a position like this by giving them a weapon with which to paralyze others, but while still allowing them to “cheat” on the rules on their own. This occurs through the pairing in Leftism of demands for equality and perception of victimhood.
The demands for equality prevent others from rising; the perception of victimhood means that the Leftist is always entitled to something from those others. This means that the Leftist is in an ideal position according to game theory, which is that there is minimum obligation and maximum entitlement:
- Minimum Obligation. Egalitarianism demands equality, with the idea that there is a collective “we” that enforces this. As a result, the burden of responsibility and action passes from the individual to society. Couple that with the fact that under egalitarianism, society cannot reject people for being insufficient or limit their access on the basis of their being of the wrong caste, and people are empowered to make whatever silly decisions they want knowing that society must support them and clean up the mess.
- Maximum Entitlement. In an egalitarian society, the more-equal are expected to subsidize the less-equal because this is the only way that equality can be achieved without acting in the Darwinian method of killing or reproductively penalizing the less-equal in order to improve the genetic quality of the group. This means that any who demonstrate victimhood can lay claim to part of the wealth of the society, and also get themselves protected status as not being assumed to be strong.
These combined effects mean that egalitarianism offers a “great deal” to the individual: they can do whatever they want, force society to subsidize them, and if they are willing to act wounded, can seize power and wealth without risk of being punished for having done so. Even more, egalitarianism makes it easier to be “good” by changing the definition from achieving good results to being symbolically good.
Egalitarianism produces this type of symbolic thinking because it is easier for the citizen. Instead of having to do much of anything, they have to raise the right symbols and say the right things at the right times. Once they have done that, they are free to ravage whatever they choose. Even better, if they find a victim and very publicly lift him up to equal, they are assumed to be ideological heroes and forgiven transgressions.
Leftism succeeded because it enabled people to manipulate society. Instead of having social standards that people were rewarded for obeying, society adopted an assumption of reward and need at the same time, which let people be “equal” by separating their actions from the consequences of those actions.
This allowed them to play the society “game” and win by contributing little, removing standards that would restrict them, and simultaneously force others into behaviors that destroyed them unless those ideals were recognized as insincere, and the others also adopted an attitude of public compliance and private manipulation as well.
Through these means, Leftism destroys societies. The symbol replaces reality. The symbol also becomes duplicitous. People are schooled to be greedily self-interested and corrupt, deceptive. And the herd is unleashed because it is no longer responsible for its actions, and can externalize the costs of its acts to the collective and then blame that collective for any failings.
We can see this as a primal human behavior, which is why it is immediately recognized.
For example, consider some teenagers riding bikes through the woods. One of them knows that there is a dirt mound ahead that he likes to jump from on his bike. He can do this safely because he knows the right groove in the dirt to ride to launch easily to a safe landing zone on the soft forest floor. The others do not.
His greatest advantage comes in urging others to jump their bikes as recklessly as possible, knowing that they will fail and may be injured while he will not be. Because he knows the secret, he can jump his bike safely and look more competent than the others, while they will fail and be injured and lose social status. He wins.
Another example of this pathology can be found in road rage. A person who is driving badly, when someone else who is driving well unintentionally points out the bad driving by contrast, will blame the person driving well, because that person interrupted the solipsistic narrative of the person driving badly that claims the bad driving was in fact good. Awakened from the illusion, they retaliate.
The primal example comes to us from the Christian Bible. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve fall into typical human individualism and desire to have the knowledge of God. When a deceiver promises no consequences, they commit a proscribed act, and then blame the deceiver and each other. For them, the game victory is found in suspending responsibility and denying their own solipsistic narrative.
Leftism remains eternally popular, like other human pitfalls that make us feel powerful without having to actually fight against the evils eroding civilization. It appeals to the clever monkey in all of us that wants to have the benefits of society without having to actually be good, or do what is right in all areas, substituting symbolic action for reality.
As we go forward, we must realize that the “right side of history” is in fact a form of decay that rationalizes itself by claiming that what is right concerns a small subset of what we must think about, and that we can solve these by making ourselves more important than reality. Like most paths to Hell, it begins with good intentions and leads us into a ghetto of our own illusions and denial.
Tags:hubris, leftism, solipsism
Posted in Politics | 14 Comments »
Thursday, February 2nd, 2017
Very few people make it through the thought required to analyze Leftism to its roots. On the surface, we all know what it is: an outlook of supposed compassion which supports feminism, diversity, social welfare programs and gay rights.
Underneath the surface, Leftism reveals itself as fundamentally an ideology, or a notion that human preferences for how the world “should” be are more important than how the world functions. This was formalized in The Enlightenment™ as the idea of seeing the world through human reason as expressed in the individual.
Ideology does not compromise. It functions as a binary: the ideology is the new proposed idea, to which people either assent or dissent. Dissent means the idea will not come to pass, so in a passive-aggressive way, is seen as an attack and attempt to kill the idea. Thus the idea and its adherents feel comfortable in engaging in pre-emptive self defense by targeting those who disagree.
This gives the ideology virulence. It has an inherent “my way or the highway” approach to it, and those who dissent face outright hostility, which cows most into accepting it. This allows it to style itself as normal, and present dissenters as aberrant and to call them names like Nazi, fascist, racist, homophobe, sexist, classist and ableist which connote a failure to conform to social standards.
Historically, Leftism arose during the French Revolution and consisted of a single idea. Egalitarianism, or the notion that all people are equal in basic ability, converted utilitarian thinking into a political morality. This appealed to a fundamental weakness in humanity, the Dunning-Kruger (or r/K) derived tendency toward hubris, or assuming that oneself is more important than the way the world works.
Leftism is egalitarianism through ideology, not practical methods. For example, a king who wanted his people to be equal might try rewarding the good so that they bred out the rest, and established equality through extremely similar genetics and ability. He might separate them by ability into regions so that in each region, all people were roughly of the same abilities.
Ideology however provides a double benefit: public virtue signaling conceals private intent to exploit. Egalitarianism is the voice of the salesman, promising Utopia but laying claim to profit, with no concern for how well the consumer will fare. For this reason, ideology makes people feel intelligent and powerful for having manipulated the world to reflect their own intent and desires.
As such, Leftism replaces identity because it is an identity. To be Leftist is to identify with the strong-looking people who are taking over society, those who can be bold and controversial, and to benefit from social popularity and the career, sexual and in-group benefits it provides.
History tells us that Leftism took over and everyone who did not follow — both explicit dissenters and those who were simply not convinced and remained neutral — was thrust into the Right, which made it from the beginning both a compromise with Leftism, and a “big tent” mixed bag of non-Leftist ideas. This weakened it by creating indecision, infighting and other confusion.
The Right has finally discovered its core through the Alt Right: realism. We base our actions on what is, as seen through history, and not what we want to believe is true, starting with the illusion of equality. Recognizing that people are different and exist in a hierarchy of ability and moral goodness is massively taboo because it is anti-social in appearance.
Social thinking dominates when ideology appears because what people want to think is true becomes more important than what is real. The Right is anti-social because we recognize that the most common human tendency is self-delusion and that this is amplified in groups. The Christians call this “original sin,” but it is more Darwinian: without self-discipline, we are monkeys, and only some of us have that self-discipline.
We cannot have self-discipline without realism. We need something to discipline ourselves to that is not “of us,” like the various airy principles and navel-gazing emotional gestures that are so common in humanity. Instead, we must point ourselves toward the world, learn it and come to appreciate its wisdom, and use that to expand our minds.
This in turn leads us to a realization about Leftism. As a pathology, Leftism consists of the denial of the need for us to understand the world, and advances the counter-argument of “humanism,” or the idea that people are more important than reality. Even though that leads to disaster every time, it remains the most popular argument created by humans, and realism is the only bulwark against it.
Tags:dunning-kruger, hubris, leftism, r/K strategies, self-discipline
Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 7th, 2016
Bruce Charlton writes an analysis of Evil, which he identifies as the cause of the decline of the West:
In other words, the evil can only imagine others as being as evil as themselves. In other words, we can recognise evil by the way of thinking, by the fact that their world view is constrained by imputing evil intentions to others.
The evil cannot even imagine that others may be different from themselves, may not be evil.
…My guess is that although everyone is a mixture of Good and evil; the evil are blinded to Good, while the Good are not blind to evil. It is not the special virtues of the Good which make them wiser; it is the malformation of thought which is induced by evil intent.
This restores the Greek version of moral evil, or hubris, to the definition. Hubris is to act outside of one’s place in the natural hierarchy of things. This requires a misunderstanding or denial of that order and the reasons for its existence, removing cause from effect as people usually do when they want society to subsidize them for their illogical decisions. In doing so, reason itself is perverted and made malformed.
With this vision, we see that evil has two parts: first, error on a level so fundamental that it corrupts all understanding of cause and effect by distorting a primal concept of cause and effect, or how the world came to be and the source of its order; second, an individualistic, narcissistic and egotistic rejection of all order larger than the individual in order to make the individual feel justified in selfish or illogical choices.
Individualism alone will do this. In order to prioritize the individual and its intent over results in reality, the person afflicted must reject the idea of natural order entirely, including any sense of cause and effect, also including primal causes such as the origin of the universe or the reason for its order. Individualism creates a pathology of denying sanity so that the individual can appear to be the cause of the world.
In turn, this makes the individual unstable, because that which was not intended by the individual thus appears as a variety of evil, which is unfortunate since all but a very small part of the world is not guided by intent of the individual. This inverts good and evil; natural order becomes “evil,” and individual pretense and reality-denial becomes “good.”
This shows us the root of our modern time. Civilization became successful and therefore could preserve those who normally required high mortality to keep their numbers in check, like mice or birds. As a result, the insane outnumbered the sane, and eventually took over through the mechanism of democracy through its philosophical justification (or perhaps rationalization) of “equality.” Since that time, our fortunes have increasingly gone ill.
Tags:cause and effect, crowdism, democracy, equality, evil, hubris, rationalization
Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »
Friday, September 23rd, 2016
Some like to characterize the West as “Faustian,” a term inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust who metaphorically sells his soul to the devil in exchange for power beyond what he could otherwise obtain
This story, based in medieval myths, re-envisions the classic morality tale as one with another dimension. In the classic tale, the anti-hero sells his soul to evil for power, then becomes destructive, and eventually either returns to good or self-destructs through hubris. In Goethe’s re-styling of it, the anti-hero rebels against the categorization of good and evil, which are actually proxies for realistic versus dysfunctional.
For Western Europeans — up until the 1960s this was the group we meant when we said “white people” — the idea of Faustian has appealed because we have for a long time wanted to reach beyond the nu-Christian “good and evil” toward reality, and since that has been demonized by the herd, we see ourselves as wanting to reject morality itself. However, the Faustian legend points us toward something else: perhaps evil is merely misidentified.
The Western Europeans might be more properly referred to as Infaustian, or that which is the inversion of Faust: we do not seek power, but we seek order. We require a transcendental goal in order to motivate us to live, and this is only found in the type of order that is both natural and extends into human society. We need something more than proxies for what is real, such as truth or morality, because we need an understanding of the real itself.
The Faust story could be viewed as a re-statement of the Garden of Eden mythos from the Bible. The serpent offers power without wisdom, or in other words, power beyond our state in the golden chain of hierarchy which constitutes the actual natural order. However, this has always been the antithesis of the West; our method is to make ourselves powerful not through fantasy, but by understanding reality.
Infaustians have both Faustian and anti-Faustian characteristics. They are unconstrained by good and evil, because they view reality as good and any deviation from it as evil, so they do not need the proxies. Instead they seek power through knowledge, including the knowledge of how to apply it, so that power becomes a means to an end and increases power in the future, rather than having it now.
The story of Faust is that of an ingenue who stumbles into the world of supernatural evil by wanting more than he should have according to natural order. The Infaustian mythos is one in which a potential Faust instead makes himself the source of power by negating himself, and discovering reality, and through it finding a way to perpetuate power by making it the cause of itself, instead of a cause in itself.
As with any rising society, Infaustian societies seek not the Soviet-style legitimization of hubris through personal power, but the source of power, which is found in understanding the invisible portions of reality, namely the methods that work in any situation because they appeal to an underlying mathematics and structure to our universe. This will always be the opposite of the Faustian as well as the insect-like standards of the third world, where people seek neither power nor knowledge.
Tags:evil, faust, hubris, johann wolfgang von goethe, morality
Posted in Politics | 3 Comments »
Friday, June 24th, 2016
What would possess someone to spend irreplaceable hours of his finite life, typing into an electronic publishing system in the hopes of reaching a marginalized, nearly-eradicated, and isolated few?
The answer is that some of us desire — more than anything else — the restoration of sanity. Civilization is the scroll on which our great deeds are written, and when it is moribund, all of those are slated to be forgotten. All that we work to achieve will be lost.
And so, the isolated writer — long over pretensions of being any more than a camera, or that which reveals what is before us but denied — embarks on a path of trying to make sense of symbols and to peel away the layers of nonsense in which humans camouflage their actual task, also burying their inner hopes and desires.
This path leads us to an ancient understanding, which is that although the fundamental crisis of the West is bad leadership left in the hands of We The People instead of the most competent, the fundamental problem of humanity is evil, or selfish personal decisions which create negative side-effects.
That in turn leads us to the question of what evil is. Naturally this will be the first target for evil itself, because like any parasite, it will hope to conceal its negative deeds and hide in a cloud of confusion created by the equivalency of evil with normalcy, or worse, with good.
In the ancient sense, evil was a disruption of natural order and balance. The ancient Greeks believed that a hierarchy of humans existed as it did among the species of nature, and that to disrupt this — to become more powerful than one ought to be, for example — led to illusion, failure and punishment by the gods.
For the Nordics, evil was more simple: illusion. That which was not true appeared more true than truth, and so people followed it to their doom. In this view, evil is like an oasis in a desert: a tempting vision which turns out to be a trap.
The Christians followed with a simpler view. There was an order of God; those who transgressed against this were following evil, and failure to remove them created a situation in which evil triumphed. On the other hand, this view got translated into “Thou shalt not murder,” from the Ten Commandments.
All of these were straightforward. How were they corrupted?
The Greeks were corrupted when the order of nature was replaced with a human order, or democracy, in which the visions of others were accepted as “natural” and therefore part of nature. At this point, hierarchy dissolved and was replaced with the notion that interfering with any other person was bad.
The Nordics fell when theories and symbols were presented as being true in the same way reality was. This turned faces away from reality, and toward the world of logic as it exists in a laboratory or on a chalkboard, which is to say “true” but only if its assumptions were true, as they steadily were not.
Corruption visited Christianity when “Thou shalt not murder,” referring to unjust killing, was replaced with “Thou shalt not kill,” which made the erroneous assumption that all lives were equal and therefore all people were blameless in their choices. Killing those who merited it became bad, a form of pacifism.
If you ask me the meaning of a word, I say “To whom? And when?” because every definition we use is based on many other concepts, most of which are encoded in culture but only if people still live who understand them. Others are easily altered by changing the words we use to define words, or the concept of society itself.
Evil walks among us. It presents itself as pleasant, kind, generous and pleasurable. And yet the goal is always the same: to alter the definition of evil so that all acts are equal, which erases the notion of evil and allows evil to thrive among us.
Tags:corruption, evil, hubris, sin
Posted in Realism | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, June 7th, 2016
Not just the Left but all who want to subvert operate through a process of parallax motion: they do not change the target on which your eyes are fixed, but shift the background, specifically by redefining key terms and ideas. In doing so, they program assumptions necessary for the proactive justification of their beliefs into your mind.
On the most fundamental level, they change morality from meaning “do Right” to “do Good.” Right means setting an order to the correct levels on all accounts, but “Good” means merely to make some act that improves the condition of something, regardless of the consequent effects on the system as a whole. Right looks at the whole; Good looks at an isolated detail.
Morality in ancient days consisted of acting to uphold order: the order of nature, human hierarchy, and truth (realism) over arrogant human presumption. The Greeks referred to pretense of that nature as hubris, or the denial of the inherent hierarchy and the place of all things relative to all others. To them, arrogance was acceptable as long as it was warranted, but the minute someone stepped out of their place in the order, it was a grotesque sin that would be punished.
Modern morality on the other hand was invented because of the needs of modern society. In an anonymous land where there are many people of equal stature, and no hierarchy, there can be no sense of order. Instead, morality becomes a question of “gifts”: those who do something nice for someone, regardless of consequences in the larger social order, are seen as good because of their gift-giving.
This approximates “cherry-picking.” The modern person need not take heed of context or order, but merely find some person in need, and gift them with something whether they deserve it or not. It can be trivial; gift-giving does not require sacrifice in asserting a moral order as the ancient method does, merely taking a few minutes out of the day to write a check.
Perhaps this is one of the contributing factors as to how we have gone wrong.
Tags:christianity, democracy, hubris, morality
Posted in Politics | 5 Comments »
Thursday, November 26th, 2015
As you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner, you will be full of thoughts of what you are thankful for. The most important ones you will not mention because they are invisible to you. You cannot see them because you enjoy them every day.
First on this list might be stability of your civilization, unlike every other human civilization which like Italian cars and German soap operas seem to be non-stop screw-ups from the start. Most people live in disorder, filth, corruption and incompetence. We here in the West do not, although the gap has narrowed over the past few decades, and not by the acts of others.
What got us this way are two things generally considered opposites: capitalism and collectivism. Both have been replaced by modern, inferior variants that are useful to our society only because they do not offend our leftist ideology.
Capitalism in its raw form is the idea that economic decisions should be made by those who will face the consequences for them. In other words, a bakery must make the choices that determine if it lives or dies, and citizens must make their own spending choices and thrive or flail accordingly. Keep in mind that despite those radical opposites, most of us fall somewhere in the middle.
Collectivism, in its original form, meant that we understood ourselves as a society and kept its interests front and center. That meant that we took care of people who helped that society, in accord with Plato’s “good to the good, bad to the bad”: people who do good should be rewarded, and people who do bad should be driven away. It is natural selection in its social form.
These two offended leftists, naturally, because leftism is based on a single idea: “I deserve to be included for society no matter how little I contribute or how delusional I am.” It is freedom not to be accountable to reality. That is why it is eternally popular; accountability to reality determines who thrives and flails, and so it is not a popular reminder among humans. Using social control, which is peer pressure plus the assumption of goodness, they can banish reality and replace it with equality.
(That summarizes leftism from nose to nethers as far as its essential ideas; it is subsequently draped in layers of theory, studies, facts/interpretations, emotions, etc. that are mostly gibberish and always taken out of context. If you see a leftist, watch their hands instead of listening to them speak. They are most likely lifting your wallet.).
Both capitalism and collectivism have now come to mean something else through the transformative powers of leftist ideology. If our society has one disease, it is the use of a broad and simple idea to replace all other ideas, and in this case, liberal egalitarianism has replaced the original meaning of these terms.
Traditional society liked capitalism because it was efficient. Capitalism has never existed without restrictions because, before modernity replaced the idea of having a goal as a civilization with the notion that civilization existed solely as a means of empowering the individual to be a precious snowflake, capitalism was always subordinate to goals, values, social standards and practical demands. There were also legal restrictions placed on it, usually to protect the consumer but just as often, to prevent the boom/bust cycle where something makes a lot of money so everyone does it, neglects everything else and in the process bankrupts themselves. Crazes, trends and fads are as destruction in markets as they are in society itself, and just as vapid.
But the traditionalists had a different approach to regulating it. Instead of writing a million laws, they allowed organic forces — culture, religion, superior individuals, and social standards — to regulate demand instead of supply. Where moderns tell businesses what they can manufacture, the traditionalists tuned in their people to certain ideas of what is good, and regulated products through that. As a result, things were built to last, more elegant and often far more effective than their modern variants.
In the same way, collectivism has been spoofed. Once it meant that we were all in it together working for the same goal, so anyone who was trying to do that was welcome. This offends the leftist idea of universal inclusion, which has its roots in individualism: the individual wants to always be included, so he desires the removal of any restrictions on who is included so that he always makes the list. After leftism, collectivism means that we all work and throw money into the pot to support everyone else, no matter how useless they are — or how much we dislike them.
A healthy society needs both of these forces. A civilization cannot exist by economics alone, and by making the choice to use solely an economic system — capitalism or socialism — the society signals to its people that it will not have a values system, competent leadership or purpose, which turns people into miserable drips who feel correctly that their lives are without meaning. A society cannot exist without some sense of guidance, direction, and purpose, which is why traditional collectivism is needed and not its modern variety, which obliterates all of those with a single guilt-ridden imperative to be uncritical, non-discriminatory and in other words oblivious in choice of the people surrounding you.
While I admire the French New Right, I find their continued embrace of socialism to be problematic. Once you create benefits, you create an all-powerful state to enforce them, and you destroy the idea of regulating inclusion by who is useful. No society with standards that low can exist, and it imposes on people an immoral duty to spend their time, which translates into money, supporting those who they would not otherwise support. For this reason, socialism is the great evil that destroys societies and rightists should never support it. Under socialism your entire society becomes contorted to fund the bennies and justify them, even at the expense of society itself.
By the same token, I find the reliance on absolute capitalism as a motivator to be unworkable, which is why I am not a libertarian. Libertarianism always shifts leftward because it is based in the egalitarian idea of “Everyone do what they want, and the best will magically rise to the top.” This is far from true, as any look at the most popular movies, music, art and novels will show us. Instead, pure capitalist societies are a race to the lowest common denominator and, like socialism, they replace the idea of a purpose to the civilization with the idea of it facilitating individuals. This is also bad.
I have said in the past that if people were to look more deeply into mainstream conservatism, they would find a way of life more radical than their ideologies and economic systems could ever be. That is because the roots of mainstream conservatism — now buried under layers of lies by 75% leftist “neoconservatives” and “libertarians” — are extremely radical. In that view, most people are scatty little monkeys who will if the whip is not cracked simply engage in every venal behavior possible. No matter what economic or political system we use, the truth of humanity remains and never changes, so we must first look toward producing healthy individuals. That requires the opposite direction from egalitarianism and infuriates liberals, but it explains why conservatism is less formalized.
The idea from which conservatism arises is traditionalism, which has been around in many forms over the ages. It is basically thus: over the centuries, we have found some things that work and some that do not. These do not take the form of ideology, but of knowing our world and its logic, so instead of being individualists, we submit to natural order and find our place in that. Then we are known by how well we rise to that challenge and what it reveals of our moral character, which is the most important part of an individual. By applying this rigorously, we can breed ourselves into a better class of people and make a civilization as great as that of the ancients at their height.
Naturally, this is not a popular message. 5% of the population can understand it, so to the rest it sounds like gibberish and they hate it for making them feel dumb when they desire the pretense of intelligence (they do not understand the Dunning-Kruger effect either). Even among those 5%, traditionalism is controversial because it places limits on the individual, and they have been raised in a civilization that thinks the ultimate good is liberating the individual from limits, even — especially — reasonable ones. This is why people always look for an ideological solution, and choose variants of capitalism and collectivism as the answer when they need a more nuanced approach.
The importance of a nuanced approach is that it avoids collapse. Rigid, sharp-corners thinking like leftism and libertarianism will run a society into collapse as paradoxes emerge based on the attempt to impose a square form over an organic topography. This will force people to deny reality so they can keep ideology intact, and will then cause massive internal friction. On the other end of the pendulum’s swing, however, it is important to remember that both collectivism and capitalism — in their original forms — are vital, and trying to stop the decay brought on by liberalism by limiting them will also lead to failure.
Tags:capitalism, collectivism, conservatism, economics, hubris, moral character, social control, traditionalism
Posted in Politics | 8 Comments »
Saturday, October 17th, 2015
Humans like to think they walk a fine line between metaphysically-defined good and evil, but what they really navigate is a path between success and error. Evil is a form of error brought on by human solipsism, akin to the ancient sin of hubris, where we assume our intentions are more important than the structure of reality, originally called “the will of the gods.”
Solipsistic evil can take many forms. One is failure, where we achieve nothing by chasing illusions and ignoring real issues; another is success, where we use our human powers to banish the mathematics of nature from our interactions and in doing so, create a greater failure. This often takes the form of entropy. Consider a company that by being ruthless and dominating the market, succeeds to the point where it drives others out. Now there is no longer a goal, or a challenge, and so the company lapses into apathy and incompetence, eventually failing. This is how humans fail by succeeding, by exceeding the natural parameters of an activity and creating a model of our dominating ego in the world.
As part of our naturalistic — or some might say “feral” — side, many of our greatest thinkers have recognized our need for the beast within. This beast does not aim for morality in our sense of success and failure, but perpetual conflict. While this seems wasteful despite its popularity in nature, it does achieve one thing humans cannot: it avoids entropy by keeping every activity forever in the middle between success and failure. In the natural world, species struggle for survival every day and this keeps them fit and adaptive. In the human world, we either abandon things or dominate them to avoid all risk, in the process creating our doom.
Some call this our “Faustian spirit,” and Date Jesus explores this idea briefly:
We are traditionally Faustian, conceptually and physically spanning time and place, as if prepared long ago to explore the cosmos and enjoy the wealth of having many homes, thankfully gifted with ability to tend each of them.
We civilize and make functional the most barbaric, hostile, or ruined land, but more importantly our spirit thirsts for perpetual expanse. This is our gift and curse, for it propels us beyond all limits and sensibility and affixes our focus on targets others dismiss as unattainable or never stir within enough to ponder, happily dull and incurious. This feeling for reaching beyond the present births our technology, art, exploration, and is the ever replenishing pool of our aspirations.
While I think his basic analysis of the Faustian is good, I think he confuses a few things with his term “perpetual expanse.” It is true we always need new mountains to climb when they become available, but that makes us entirely dependent on our external world, which is a smaller struggle than that of the world within. There, we need a more important thing: perpetual improvement in quality. Like an athlete trying to beat his own best time, we are forever trying to improve ourselves and our abilities. This bleeds over into technology, but some eternal skills like self-discipline, refined intelligence, meditative awareness and mental organization are the real battlefield where we must be victorious.
This desire for qualitative improvement is what drove Western Europeans to write the great symphonies and novels, to make art that most accurately showed our world in both realistic detail and transcendental setting, and to improve our philosophy to a point of clarity. Where others wanted to improve in quantity, and produce “new” ideas, we settled for taking what was there and improving it to a point of mastery, but never completing settling all questions because to do so would be to run ourselves into entropy. That has been reversed with Ideology, which democratizes intellect by making it externally-accessible through a few simple principles that cover all situations with extremely generalized, universal notions.
Tags:evil, hubris, ideology, kaizen, qualitative, quantitative, western europe
Posted in Realism | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2014
They tell us we are reactionaries. Against what are we reacting?
The obvious answer is liberalism, since its mental lock on the population of the West is used to exclude any common sense that might limit the license of the mob.
I think it goes farther. We are reactionaries against hubris.
The modern definition for hubris is “excessive pride,” but the original definition — the one that sent thousands of editors with liberal sympathies scurrying to erase, obliterate, destroy — is more complex.
As the Greeks saw it, hubris was a type of improper arrogance, or arrogance against the gods and nature (which were seen as one and the same in that old animistic religion).
Arrogance against the gods and nature means placing one’s individual sense of what reality is above what reality actually is. It is denial of life, and denial of common sense, so that the individual can believe pleasant fictions.
Usually those pleasant fictions consist of self-aggrandizement of the sort we see in urban clusters like San Francisco and New York: ‘I have made it to the top, I’m earning lots of money, obviously there’s nothing wrong with the world as it’s working for me.’ — if you wonder why elites never see the downfall coming, it is because this form of hubris blinds them to what’s happening outside of themselves.
Hubris interestingly itself clusters in two places: in collapsed civilizations and in those about to collapse. In the middle, rising civilizations or healthy civilizations actively crusade against hubris (often under different names) because they realize it is death to the civilization. When you want to succeed, you want a reality-based narrative or you will fail.
Bloated, obese, luxurious, and decadent civilizations on the other hand have a need for hubris. They desperately need to go into denial rather than face the fight for their lives that they need to embark upon, and yesterday. It takes a lot of effort, introspection, honesty and courage to realize that your society is falling apart and, while you could easily profit from it, you will leave behind a ruin and this reflects on who you were inside.
Societies that deny reality quickly approximate third-world levels of dysfunction, disorder, corruption, filth and decay. When reality is denied, every person acts self-important, which means no one focuses on infrastructure and institutions that keep society functional. Thus society is constantly in a state of confusion and into that void step the warlords, thief-kings and terrorists who for whatever faults they have tend to enforce a “bottom line” of order.
In fact, all of human history might be written correctly as a struggle against hubris. Societies start off with nothing, or in a de facto third world state, in other words. In order to rise, they must suppress their hubris and become focused on order and moral right. Even if this is informal and allows dubious methods like paying weregild for the murder of another, it enforces a simple idea: do right, thrive; do ill, be punished; do nothing, get nothing.
Once started, civilization is a fragile machine. Once it goes down the path of hubris, it will be shattered and replaced with non-civilization, although this occurs over centuries and happens a detail at a time and not at once. People in the grips of hubris will refuse to see this and will accept only a direct immediate collapse, like all the buildings falling down and everyone dying, as a sign that society is in error. Thus it sleepwalks into oblivion and what is left is a third-world shell.
As Spengler noted, earth is covered in such shells. They are in fact the norm. Most species die, most people become moral cowards, most societies fail. It is the rare society that rises above even for a few centuries and does something creative that endures. And most of the people we see who are criminal in mind, perverse, etc. are artifacts of one failed society or another, where such behavior was so normal that it got bred into them because it was a socially-rewarded “good.”
Liberals are contrarians who pick that viewpoint because they think it distinguishes them socially, at first. Later they adopt it as a means of staying oblivious so that their personal lives are unthreatened. It enables them to contravene the obvious negative with an illusion of positivity so that they can continue to think highly of themselves. Like junkies to the needle, they come crawling to this ideal.
Western peoples have suffered long enough under hubris. While it “feels good,” it leads to decay and long-term feeling bad about oneself for being such a failure, much like any time one steps down the path of evil. Counteracting it is hard because most people are dependent on it, if for nothing else to conceal how badly battered they are by this time. In a house of glass, no one wants to throw the first stone. But at the same time, we all have that “sinking feeling” in our gut that things just aren’t going right, and it’s not in an easily definable way.
Reaction is good, but not enough. Counter-action is difficult and bound to the fate of the doomed. I propose a simpler strategy, which is imagination. Imagine better things and do them, but with one little catch: make them exclusive to those who have, in the medical parlance of our time, “beat hubris.” We don’t need to tune in, turn on and drop out; we need to exit the lock-step march to oblivion and go our own way. If the herd is heading toward hubris, our way is a U-turn and all-night march straight back to sanity, with the ugly feeling of guilt and doom flaking off of us with every step.
Tags:collapse, crowdism, hubris, neo-reaction, reactionary
Posted in Politics | 14 Comments »
Monday, December 9th, 2013
To some people, it is baffling why a paleoconservative like myself would support The Red Pill movement and the various pick up artist and aggressive dating communities. After all, their message of easy sex with no further commitments is the opposite of what a social conservative would believe.
Or is it? We tell you that chastity is the best for you and, if you choose to follow that, you throw yourself upon the mercy of the wolves. Meet the wolves. And bless the wolves, for not only proving us right, but furthering the decay in what the liberals (insane to a man) tell us is “safe, body-positive” sexual promiscuity.
Very few understand paleoconservatives and most conflate us with “classic liberals” who are essentially libertarians. This is because almost no one knows the history of paleoconservatism. All of the “new” third front and conservative movements have been described before. Paleoconservatives do not believe in government; we believe in culture, identity, and most of all, individual morality. We believe that when morality fails, bad things take its place, like progressive government, the vast herd connected by the social fashion known as liberalism, promiscuity and other signs of the decline.
Where we overlap with The Red Pill is in putting the lie to the phenomenon known as “white knighting.” Here’s a useful definition from Urban Dictionary:
White Knighting is when one man is trying to get a girl into his bed while in the same area as his friend, his friend (if he is a White Knight) will typically attempt to disperse the conversation by presenting his chivalrous words such as: “Have some respect for women, Johnny” or “Miss, he’s just trying to get laid” while simultaneously attempting to get laid himself by showing respect to the women. A White Knight will never act chivalrous when he is not around another guy.
White knighting is when a man pretends to be a good individualist in order to get something. An individualist is someone who believes individual preference comes before reality itself; thus, individualists reward anything that takes the burden of responsibility for their own actions off of them. An individualist, for example, will hold a woman blameless if she behaves like a slut and some guy takes advantage of her. That’s wrong! they say. A conservative, whose morality deals in consequences and not intentions, will simply say, “That’s predictable.” It could have been avoided with a modicum of attention to human nature, which isn’t even human; it’s the nature of intelligence itself.
White knighting requires and induces two fictions. The first is that the behavior itself is not harmful, and the second is that anyone gets ahead in life by white knighting. When a white knight is around, acting in a male role, and he tries to “help” a woman, he’s endorsing her behavior. It’s blameless, he’s saying, to hang out in clubs drinking to excess while wearing scanty clothing. In other words, if something bad happens… it’s not her “fault.”
And yet what does fault mean? The white knight uses it to mean “intention”; a conservative would say that moral fault occurs when you know, or should have known, about some aspect of reality and choose to ignore it (a process called hubris by the ancients, for whom the gods were symbolization of aspects of reality). The white knight takes away the onus to act sensibly, and in exchange, hopes to get something for his own benefit, usually sex or companionship.
But thinking this through, the white knight gets nothing in the long term. His night of sex puts him nowhere closer to having a whole and complete life in which he is happy; like drugs or drink, it was a temporary sensation. And, if he’s foolish enough to keep pursuing these women, he will either marry one or remain single for life. Neither are optimal outcomes. “I got to keep the most sought-after bar slut” is not a ringing endorsement for nuptials.
The Red Pill guys point this out by, in a society of white knights, illustrating how white knighting is the long way around to a simple task. If you’re going to manipulate, and white knighting is most definitely a passive form of manipulation, why be passive? Go active: say what you want, treat it like a contract, and force all parties to view the naked truth of what they’re doing. “I’m trading attention to you, maybe a few expenses, for access to carnal knowledge of you,” says the Red Pill/Pickup Artist. When you phrase it that baldly, it seems as cheap and tawdry as it is.
Liberalism is a form of white knighting. Individualists approach other individualists and promise that they will use social pressure to relieve the individual of the moral duty to understand reality, and as a result, they bind themselves together into a collective. This collective then acts like a cult and terrorist organization, demanding that others accept its vision of reality. If they do not, it retaliates by calling them elitists and wages revolutionary war against them. The equivalent of a cancer, it is a vast political apparatus that exists solely to remove the burden of making moral decisions consistent with reality from individuals. In other words, it attracts its members by white knighting them and excusing their poor decisions.
If this society survives to the end of this century, which right now is looking doubtful, what replaces it will have an absolute intolerance of white knighting in all its forms. It will recognize white knighting by what it rightfully is, which is sycophant excuse-making, and will see any who engage in it as broken, deranged and morally incontinent people. It may even kill them to prevent the cancer from spreading, but that is honest oncology and to speak plainly, what would be lost?
Tags:crowdism, hubris, liberalism, promiscuity, white knighting
Posted in Politics | 12 Comments »
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