Amerika

Currently, many of the “internet Christians” are complaining about Platonism.

Well, that is quite funny.

Let us first debunk a myth: “internet Christians” — the term “internet” implies someone who took up a belief last week and has made it their identity — are not significantly distinct from regular Christians. All of you are attention-seekers in the grip of symbolism.

There are some among us all who seek religious clarity. They will use whatever symbols and ideas are handy. Many currently think they are Christians, but over time, they will liberate themselves from the dying third world middle eastern faiths.

And let us be clear: Christianity obsoleted itself and now is dying. No one will miss it. It set up a symbolic and individualistic world in opposition to natural reality, and that failed, so now it is fading away. The Prozak Test applies!

The Prozak Test is simple: if a thing vanished tomorrow, would anything be worse? Supposing Christianity perished tomorrow, we might never notice. Things might even be better without individualistic self-pity animating many of the meat zombies around us.

Even more, we are leaving behind a primitive age where we assumed that appearance equalled a categorical, universal, and “objective” character to things. We now recognize that we simply picked one trait that we had encountered and used that as a category.

In this sense, Christianity was part of a four-thousand year project to elevate the human being above nature. The individualist wants to be more important than the natural world because he fears it; it is out of his control, and therefore can force him to change his thinking.

He does not want to change his thinking. He is good with the world around him changing, but he wants to keep the warm thoughts that make him feel good, and not interrupt them (he is sucking on them like a hookah) with interruptions from complex, gritty, and tempestuous reality.

Egalitarianism is part of it. Dualistic religion is another part. Economic systems based on consumption are in there too. Humanity moved from nomadic hunter-gatherer seed scatterers — likely they casually planted patches of useful plants — and into the world of agriculture.

Where hunter-gatherer life is about living by your wits, agricultural life is about consistency and using known techniques. It is knowledge-based but also methods-based, which makes it more like a social event where everyone does the same thing than an individual quest.

Out of that you get reward of those who do the same thing every time, and penalties for anyone who steps out of line. This punishes both blatant threats and honest dissidents, basically whacking off the tails of the bell curve and focusing on obedient mediocrity.

You use symbols to control them: repetitive task = good, not rocking the boat = good, thoughts outside the process and methodology = evil, but also the usual bad stuff (murder, rape, theft) is also “evil.” Be the bigger man! Maturity is about sucking up and being obedient.

Christianity and liberalism are the extensions of symbolism itself. That is, once you start using symbols to control people, you will get something like Christianity and liberalism. These are in fact very ancient things.

Speaking of Plato, he described a religion like Christianity: the dualism, the messianic prophets, the afterlife divided into good and evil, a belief in peace and not war. He saw it as a typical human stumble, a misunderstanding of the philosophy of metaphysics.

He offered instead his own view: there was a divine origin to all of reality, and the two were consistent, not different, so we were not struggling between good/evil but to understand reality and adapt to it through wisdom.

In his conception of the afterlife, he believed that the body died and the soul lived on because it was never really here, but existed in the acausal origin space of the divine which was the groundwork for all actions on Earth.

While he saw the divine as acausal in the sense that it had no prior cause other than logic itself, meaning that it evolved from the existence of the universe alone, he saw it as the cause of all the things we see in physical life, which were effects.

This radical monism derived itself from the observation that effects usually reflect far more complex causes, so if what we see on Earth are the effects, then something much vaster and more powerful was their cause and existed in some part of the world we could not see.

His vision differs from dualism in that the divine and earthly behave by the same rules and are continuous with each other, not separated by categories like good/evil and heavens/earth. In his view, gods and the afterlife were like nature, a logical process of continuity.

Some claim that Plato rejected heroism in favor of moralism because Socrates did not resist the death sentence imposed on him by Athenian democracy. More likely, he saw Socrates as a hero who sacrificed himself to make a point, and in doing so, carved his lesson straight into history.

That lesson was: democracy is terrible because it equalizes power between the unwise and the wise, leading to the unwise through their much greater numbers taking over and ruining everything. As it turns out, we can see these days that he seems to have been correct!

While Christians attempted to adopt Platonism through “neoplatonism,” what they did was actually to break Platonism by replacing its monism with dualism, exactly misinterpreting what Plato was writing about. They dumbed him down into the usual human superstitious mysticism.

Plato discussed a pagan morality that offended Christians as well and they simply avoided mentioning that. His idea — “good to the good, bad to the bad” — rejected the notion of univeralism and equality among people, saying instead that we should uphold hierarchy.

Many of his most radical ideas were thought experiments. If you want a certain thing, he would say, you have to take it to its logical extremes, which means that you are also bringing in other things that you would not like.

For example, much of The Republic equates virtue with political virtue and argues that if you are going to create a republic instead of a culture-run purposeful aristocracy, you are going to have to regulate things to the point that you soon approach totalitarian levels.

He also said that tyranny, properly understood, meant rule for its own sake, and this came not from the noble elites but from the “drones” (proles, plebs, serfs, dalits) who worked everyday dumbass jobs and were unable to rule; think of Keir Starmer or Joe 0’Biden here.

Platonism will always be radical because it offers us a scientific vision of humanity. Our job is to adapt to reality and understand the divine through reality, instead of as a symbolic replacement for reality, and through this process, we gain wisdom.

His quest for wisdom is his morality. Instead of good/evil, he sees greater degrees of wisdom versus lesser degrees. Those with more wisdom tend to noble acts, but very few are willing to trace cause-effect relationships to their root in order to learn enough to be wise.

Modern people fail to understand Platonism because they project Christianity and liberalism into it, forgetting that they are seeing a system of thought entirely outside of modern assumptions and means-over-ends style (“rule-based order”) thinking.

However, Platonism teaches us many lessons, including the only realistic origin of conservatism, which is the idea that we must have principles of wisdom applied toward an affirmative goal shaped around opportunity for the “good life.”

As all of our modern religions and politics implode, more are turning to the wisdom of Plato for understanding the way out of our current deadlocked and stagnant thinking. Naturally those who want to avoid change will find this threatening and say nasty things about Plato.

Tags: cause-effect, christianity, ends-over-means, means over ends, neoplatonism, plato, platonism, socrates, wisdom