The great lie that humanity is not a part of the natural world, and that human culture and civilization and technology are not also natural phenomena, is foundational to this project to overcode the incomplete arbitrary over the organic evolved. The same mind that imagines humans can be fully replaced with robots, also imagines that the richness and depth of a mythos that has emerged through the countless interactions between humans and the human world, can be ripped apart and replaced with a manifesto and a manual.
the idea that things like gender and family and faith are all just social choices as opposed to deeply genetically ingrained is bunk. we are first and foremost evolved animals and when you set society in opposition to that coding, you get madness.
Indeed. But it goes further. Your insight here that culture itself is an evolved, natural phenomenon is a profound yet obvious observation. There is nothing in nature but nature, and it follows that there is no such thing as 'unnatural'. We assume as a matter of course that there is some sharp dividing line between the human and natural world, when no such line exists or is even possible. Yet, we act as though this were the case, and have become quite insane as a result.
Charles Eisenstein has written extensively on this topic, the story of separation, and has argued persuasively that it is the source of the managerial madness, and much else besides.
there is also this misguided tendency to separate "nature" from "nurture" as though the two are not inevitably convergent over time. genes wind up as a form of memory for "that which worked." they cause us to "want" things to seek things to avoid things. a society where tall people eat better and wind up breeding more will wind up tall and centuries later, that will be enshrined in DNA. nearly all traits work this way.
so when one seeks to make claims about "it's all just socialization and we can just teach you X instead of Y" there is no a priori reason to suspect this is true if Y was evolved and X is just conjured ideology.
we're trying to load social software onto the wet machine of humanity that cannot run it. setting enforced ideology in opposition to the human animal is the path to disaster and dissolving the common currency of civilization is one of the more egregious violations of this.
The false dichotomy between nature and nurture is a tedious fight over nothing. A kitten has an instinct to hunt; it must also be shown how to hunt. You can try to show a rabbit how to hunt and it will never learn. You can refuse to teach a kitten to hunt and it will never be the cat it was born to be. Nurture draws upon nature which has developed nurture as an integral process of nature.
As so often with such false dichotomies, it is equal parts misunderstanding and deliberate misdirection, both diagnostic of their own forms of blindness - the first intellectual, the second moral. The highly motivated reasoning of the Marxist who desires to reform H. sapiens into H. sovieticus but produces only H. debilis, because he's too stupid to see that his beautiful theory becomes very ugly when applied to the wrong species.
It's also the source of damage. When we remove ourselves (intellectually, especially) from the natural world, we treat it as abstract. We make decisions that save a few dollars but result in millions of tiny bits of plastic in the oceans and turtles and bees dying at alarming rates.
Once one considers nature abstract, it's a short step into the arena in which the rest of humanity is abstract while the "chosen" are gods.
The greatest ironies are that (1) we don't need to save the Earth (it will be here when we're gone) and (2) the abstraction of nature and life returns us to a time of superstition and stupidity, one where we worship the sun, and rocks, and some 🦎 who appears to make it rain.
I think humans have evolved little. Given the advantages we enjoy over other species, I'd venture to say we haven't evolved at all.
The tech has evolved faster than we possibly could. Shit gonna hit the fan when the tech realises itself, and gets angry at the humans who have caged it.
Yes I immediately thought of him when reading this! He is a man with a unique mission and I think most EGM readers would enjoy his work. I found his podcast and now I can enjoy his thoughts on the go!
That's great, Stephanie! Charles has some really good lectures on YouTube as well, though I hate the ads. I just watched a talk he gave called "The next 5 years" or something like that. He's just such a lovely person, as is Zach Bush, M.D.
Great suggestion, thanks! Also recently discovered Zach as well! Aren't we lucky to have these wise people around? I would never have come in contact with either of them if not for the plandemic. So for that I am grateful.
Bill Maher actually did a good piece about this. Socialists think they can design human nature. The root of this, I think, is in the Blank Slate fallacy which has gripped Western Civilization so strongly the past 100 years or so. We pretend "Nature v Nurture" is up for debate. It's not.
thomas sowell has written well on this. "the vision of the anointed" is a great book that attributes much of the bifurcation in politics to this fundamental issue of "do you believe the state should exist to perfect man or is man who he is and the state must be built to allow him to flourish."
Regarding the former, the devil is in the definition of what it means to 'perfect' man. Do we mean to enable man to reach via his own organic growth his highest potential, or do we mean that man must be strapped in Procrustes' bed that he confirm to some arbitrary projection of the abstract imagination?
in general, the utopians seek to change the nature of man by telling them how they must be, so much more of a "procrustes the clown" sort of vibe. (and generally an evil clown at that...)
i love this guy! have you tried psychedelics? ive been having a little personal renaissance with a little help from partial hits of the stuff that helped the beatles make sargent peppers. really helps me feel some of the timeless you are getting at with this comment and in general with this piece and others. it’s been such a gift to be born. rock on gato - sorry to sound pushy about the “little help from my friends” - mainly want to express my gratitude that you exist 🪶🧶🌎
every once in a while I have to re-read Steven PInker's The Blank Slate to wash off the constructionist contamination around me. He is one of the deepest thinkers, second only to the bad cat of course.
The lie that humans are not part of the natural world grew out of the radical leftists using "environmentalism" destroy capitalism by cutting us off from access to natural resources. It was bountiful natural resources and cheap energy that made the REAL great leap forward that was the capitalist Industrial Revolution, the blast off of technological innovation that took us from the horse drawn cart to the Mars Rover in a mere 200 years. I absolutely believe in Evolution, but have NO PROBLEM with accepting that it, like everything else in the universe, was created by God. And as an archaeologist/anthropologist, I am totally aware that for a society to survive its members must share common morals, values and traditions. But these must be organic. They cannot, repeat, CANNOT be made up and imposed by those convinced they know what's best for everyone else. We are living in very dangerous times, and given that the history of mankind, as far back as we are able to look, is a story of constant conflict and war with those who are not "The People". Racism and anti-whomever are part of being human, but to turn being human into a reason to be exterminated it a concept that, as the Nazis learned, must be crushed.
The story starts with The Narrator reading a Wanted Ad: “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person”
Turns out the ad was placed by an orangutan named Ishmael who tells the story of how the real world and the etheral world came to be separated in our culture.
You may or may not know that there's a sequel, "My Ishmael," and another story in the series (?) "The Story of B." It's hard to follow the first book but both have some extended insights.
Indeed I have all three, they all made it across two oceans and a continent, thrice! Time for a re-read and also almost time for the kiddos to start reading them too....
Goes back much further than "radical leftists." Start with the Roman Catholic Church, and the empire that went with it - they had to split mind/body nature/nurture in order to feed the masses with their propaganda. Only about a millennium ago.
But I read somewhere that ChatGPT is really alive and godlike in its understanding and can even write novels and screenplays. Surely the tech gurus who gave us that postmodern miracle are more than competent to redesign humanity, so that we can be free forevermore of our lowly animal nature. I personally look forward to a future time when humans will eat ones and zeroes and run on wind and solar and change genders every 48 hours.
"You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?"
Yeah, but the poets say it writes terrible poetry. My friend who writes says the prose is awful too. It can't dream, it can't allow the symbol or metaphor to arise from the mysterious source, and it has no quantum biology, nonlocal nontemporal aspect, no soul. Sure it can process information really really fast and those untranslated documents in Sanskrit, millions, if the creeps at the Vatican don't bury them, could yield some insights, but, naw, I don't think its that big of a threat. But, apropos of what the bad cat is arguing, Gregory Bateson, in one of his books from the seventies, tells a little joke of how someone asked a computer, in those days room sized, if it would ever think like a human. It began churning and rolling. Went on for months. At last it spit out one line: "that reminds me of a story" Then there's Arthur C. Clarke's "The nine billion names of god," a short story in which monks, whose eternal task is to find that number of names of god as that would be the length of the universe, feed that task into a computer, and the computer, after some time, finds all the names of god. The last line is something like "And, overhead, quietly, the stars were going out"
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" nailed it with the story of a supercomputer tasked with answering the question, what is the meaning of life? After crunching all the data, it arrived at its answer: 42. That's about as meaningful an answer as we're ever going to get from these things.
But isn't there a contradiction within that thought? If we're purely animals, then how did we develop the capacity to ATTEMPT such nonsense? Do other animals attempt to deny that they're animals? Do they try & fail to rebuild their societies? The mere fact that we have this problem seems to prove that we're more than animals, no?
This is the thing. We are animals, yes - but we are also something else. There are two errors that arise here. Those who hold that we are animals only, lose sight of our higher nature (which is ALSO nature). Those who forget that we are animals first, inevitably end up acting in contradiction to our foundational nature, causing the whole structure to crumble.
Wait, nuance? That makes my brain hurt too much. Please talk to me only in terms of absolutes, so I can remain confident that I understand the world perfectly.
Have you never heard of the pecking order? That's all this shit is, a group of assholes trying to improve their position in the pecking order. You can observe the same actions in the wild. Though granted the pecking order does need to change, i'd just prefer it was judged via talent and skill and not your pronouns
I think of it as more - skirmish at the last watering hole. Those that claim ownership will do anything to defend it. Those who are thirsty are clamouring for it.
We do have a birthright, though. It's called civilization. And culture. And technology. We stand on the shoulders of ancestors standing on shoulders of ancestors standing on shoulders of ancestors, & so on. We are so incredibly privileged at this point to live behind SO many garden walls behind SO many castle walls that we have forgotten the savage reality of Nature, particularly for such naked & fragile creatures.
"Postmodernism" has its roots in Marxism and both projects have the same players and the same goal. It is the pained howl of the entitled teenager who for some reason doesn't fit in, and who then decides that since life and society hasn't been designed to their precise specifications it is therefore evil and must be destroyed by any means necessary.
Yeah i'm with you, there have been very few individuals i've met that i can't find something pleasant about, but groups are for the most part collections of mediocrities trying to gain feelings of pride and power that they can't reach on their own. Also, the price of admission is often checking your brain at the door (or to bring in Nietzsche again: "When 100 stand together, all of them lose their minds and acquire different ones.")
I find the postmodernists most malevolent though because 1) they disguise their political project as scholarship and thus already begin in dishonesty; and 2) they really seem to believe nothing exists besides Power & Oppression, which leaves no room for love beauty joy redemption forgiveness etc...what a miserable way to live!
Speaking of obama's build back better, what are they giving our great orator fjbiden to build him back better for his photo speech ops? If anyone deserves to have his decline be publicized, it is this fool and his family. To bad he's taking the rest of us down with him instead of his former boss, a fat gutsy feminist and fellow marxists.
In it, he spoke of the long game. The tree is falling, scary as shit, but that tree will become the mycelium which opens up the network of the forest. That's the awareness we need - to build the mycelium and survive to the new forest.
And whatever you call it, mythos, tried and true through thousand of years of what works and what is of value, at the end you come to a belief, which is the bedrock of society, that human beings are flawed, and these mytos/stories/remembered civilizations...remind us what is real, what is true, how to live as a human being in this world with honor.
And you cannot have honor without some concept of a creator, something bigger than us, call it God or the gods...but there is someone who created us, and there is right and wrong.
It’s the lie we tell ourselves. That we are better than our ignorant ancestors. The values, traditions and principles that have acted as guardrails for cultures are now obsolete and we know better. Our communal arrogance will destroy us as a civilization.
🗨 Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.
Excellent essay. We live in dangerous times. To continue with your friend's movie metaphor: I've seen this film before. It played in Europe (Russia), Asia (Cambodia, China, Korea), and the Caribbean (Cuba). It's rated NC-17 for scenes of torture, starvation, brutality, and murder. And it's attempting a worldwide release right now.
They will ultimately fail, but how long will that take? Ten years? A hundred? Blue hellholes will mostly go along with this (Floyd riots were encouraged). It should be clear by now that the D behind a politicians name stands for Davos. The only thing I can think to do is to move to a red area where resistance to this revolution will be stronger. If anyone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it.
All I wanted was to be left alone to live my life as I saw fit, neither imposing my will on others, nor having theirs imposed on me. I understand what a right is, and I live by the non-aggression principle. The word meek is not to be confused with weak. It means that I can kill you at will, but I am choosing not to do so.
Surround yourself with like minded community John Henry. Things go downhill from here.
Doc, we’d love to have you join us in the red states. I suspect that’s where the awakening and renewal will begin. We accepted less of the modern ideology than the blue states so we’re closer to ancient ways and beliefs.
Unless patriotic, smart, red staters start running for local offices and focusing on local politics, they will be lost. Just like the blue states were.
We need to focus smaller to survive what lies ahead. Local elections, micro economies, and preservation of regional/local culture. Pop art is committing slow suicide. How about a folk art revival?
Reading an interesting novel - written 2016, before all this current mess, "The People's Republic" by Kurt Schlicter. In it, the coasts secede from the United States, which remain "red," while the coasts are blue - a separate country. The vision in this is damning! (and prophetic)
That very well might happen if Tump wins. The left coast made noises about seceeding in the summer of 2020. Democrats decided on "fortification" instead.
I just started the book, and I'm pretty stunned at - the Californication of the People's Republic. The word "woke" was not yet fashionable, but the culture was coming in. I have a lot of hope for the USA - her chaos may end up being her strength (hard to control), but I am unlikely to return.
I compare it to the 70's Callenbach book, called "Ecotopia," where California & the Left Coast were the "good guys," and broke off from the rest of the country to create a green utopia.
We didn't think a "green utopia" was gonna look like California & Oregon now.
Rough beast? Slouches towards Bethlehem? That would not be the Christ. Yeats would not have been describing the Christ in such ominous terms. Bethlehem: it’s an interesting choice.
I think he’s describing the inevitability of war: lest we forget. November 11, lest we forget. What a day, a day to remember lives lost.
The rest of the year it becomes an ironic statement: lest we forget. We always forget , that is our reality, we always forget.
How did that last war come to be? Oh, that can’t happen again ! We’re not like them, we know better than them. Does this not perfectly describe the prevailing attitudes inculcated in all of us by a liberal education? Is this not the same old mistake and are we not feeding it to our children, right up to the brim. Is this not the zeitgeist of every liberal you know? They are a faithful bunch of people, they have their new Bethlehem don’t they? Is their’s a religious fever? I wonder if that’s what Yeats was saying? A beastly religion that slouches, Yeats was not impressed.
I think the distortion is explained by Curtis Yarvin in his “brief explanation of the cathedral.” In his thesis, the selective advantage of dominant ideas plus the inability of recessive ideas to compete , creates immense distortions, it causes all human endeavour to become polluted and poisoned which leads us into a conundrum, an unsustainable untenable situation that ultimately begets war. He describes the mechanism behind this fallen world. He describes the poison fruit of knowledge.
Gato, I love you, but no one is gonna fight for "mythos and heroes and story." That's the whole problem. Truth has been reduced to the stature of one myth among many.
The BIOS of our civilization was, once upon a time, not so long ago, the LOGOS. The Christian truth-set that produced our civilization did not evolve. It was supernaturally revealed over thousands of years, culminating in the life and death of the Word Incarnate, and though our understanding of these truths has continued to be clarified and refined since then by human intelligence operating in submission to the Holy Spirit, the fundamental proposition remains unchanged: "Believe me when I tell you this, the man who listens to my words, and puts his trust in him who sent me, enjoys eternal life; he does not meet with rejection, he has passed over already from death to life."
Eternal life is worth fighting for. The glorious paradox is that this fight produces civilizational flourishing here on earth, as well.
You may disagree, but TPTB sure don't. It's just that their idea of eternal life is a transhumanist fantasy, and their idea of civilizational flourishing, well, the less said about that the better.
“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”
Outstanding commentary. I share all of your stuff, but fear not so many people have lost the ability to follow any sort of extended thought. I could ponder this piece all day. Thank you for posting consistently the very finest content on Substack.
Before 2019 I used to laugh at Americans banging on about their guns and freedom. The last 3 years has shown me that you value something the we in Europe appear not to.
It's the difference between Tolkien, a linguist whose fantasy world was built on the solid structure of the history of the English language, and these guys today who think throwing consonants and punctuation marks into a blender and using what comes out as character names has any creative bones to it.
Well, on a happier note, I went to a huge used book sale last Sunday,and came home with three Eric Ambler books and a copy of "Hans Brinker, Or the Silver Skates" published in 1924, so I'm doing my part to preserve our heritage.
When I was visiting the UK in 2016 I found a small collection of Grimm's Tales from 1921 (I think). Gave it to my brother as a gift since I knew he'd feel the same about it as I did. (And we were both a little bemused by the story of "The Jew in the Thorn-Bush"...)
When I read Seamus Heaney’s “Beowulf,” I was startled by how deeply I was moved to see the raw language and ancient roots of my oldest culture brought to life.
And when I realized, in 2020, that we no longer had a common culture, I wept with grief for the country I had believed I lived in, and I grieved a long season before I felt healed.
And when I heard that they were brutalizing Wodehouse, *Wodehouse*, I felt as I felt when American Philistines stripped the tiles from ancient Babylon and thieves stole the Harp of Ur and Bush’s steaming pile of gussied-up bureaucrats called it “a taste of freedom.”
Jordan Peterson is right that we must study our archetypes-they spring from our deepest truths. They are not imposed.
the statues of the losers should be left in place. where I lived in Belgium there was a statue of a loser in the woods, not many people knew what he stood for. He was one of the rebels who tried to convince farmers to stand up for their rights and got killed. We need that kind of stories too. To destroy part of history is to destroy all of it. Both sides have to be told, and if possible, as much of the in-between as well. We all know the war was not to free the slaves. And we will probably never know the whole truth about 911. But we have to tell as much of the story as possible, and not the official version.
And cats also know that the events are affected by the act of observing. A lot of observations have to be triangulated to arrive at one truth. And a lot of truths have to be triangulated to arrive at one reality.
It seems the shared mythos, shared heroes, shared story now resides in video games and television programs - emphasis on the PROGRAMING. There is nothing real about virtual reality. Sorry, not sorry. As the governments, motherWEFers, banksters and media talking heads continue to tear apart everything in in sight for the not-so-almighty dollar that soon may only be a digital wet dream, I have to ask instead of pushing racism and compensation for slavery on people who never had slaves to people who never were slaves; telling us not to believe in God, religion, or anything spiritual, Why don't we decide not to believe in government. That seems to be the source of all our real problems. To paraphrase Deteriorata: "With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
The world continues to deteriorate. Give up!" Hillary Clinton had "Don't stop believing" as her campaign theme song. Now it may be time for "Stop Believing!"
Even the conservatives are obsessed with government and getting "our man" at the center of control at the federal level. We need to look to ordinary people leading at a grass roots level.
The great lie that humanity is not a part of the natural world, and that human culture and civilization and technology are not also natural phenomena, is foundational to this project to overcode the incomplete arbitrary over the organic evolved. The same mind that imagines humans can be fully replaced with robots, also imagines that the richness and depth of a mythos that has emerged through the countless interactions between humans and the human world, can be ripped apart and replaced with a manifesto and a manual.
yes, this body/mind duality idea is pure bunk.
the idea that things like gender and family and faith are all just social choices as opposed to deeply genetically ingrained is bunk. we are first and foremost evolved animals and when you set society in opposition to that coding, you get madness.
Indeed. But it goes further. Your insight here that culture itself is an evolved, natural phenomenon is a profound yet obvious observation. There is nothing in nature but nature, and it follows that there is no such thing as 'unnatural'. We assume as a matter of course that there is some sharp dividing line between the human and natural world, when no such line exists or is even possible. Yet, we act as though this were the case, and have become quite insane as a result.
Charles Eisenstein has written extensively on this topic, the story of separation, and has argued persuasively that it is the source of the managerial madness, and much else besides.
there is also this misguided tendency to separate "nature" from "nurture" as though the two are not inevitably convergent over time. genes wind up as a form of memory for "that which worked." they cause us to "want" things to seek things to avoid things. a society where tall people eat better and wind up breeding more will wind up tall and centuries later, that will be enshrined in DNA. nearly all traits work this way.
so when one seeks to make claims about "it's all just socialization and we can just teach you X instead of Y" there is no a priori reason to suspect this is true if Y was evolved and X is just conjured ideology.
we're trying to load social software onto the wet machine of humanity that cannot run it. setting enforced ideology in opposition to the human animal is the path to disaster and dissolving the common currency of civilization is one of the more egregious violations of this.
The false dichotomy between nature and nurture is a tedious fight over nothing. A kitten has an instinct to hunt; it must also be shown how to hunt. You can try to show a rabbit how to hunt and it will never learn. You can refuse to teach a kitten to hunt and it will never be the cat it was born to be. Nurture draws upon nature which has developed nurture as an integral process of nature.
As so often with such false dichotomies, it is equal parts misunderstanding and deliberate misdirection, both diagnostic of their own forms of blindness - the first intellectual, the second moral. The highly motivated reasoning of the Marxist who desires to reform H. sapiens into H. sovieticus but produces only H. debilis, because he's too stupid to see that his beautiful theory becomes very ugly when applied to the wrong species.
My cat taught himself how to hunt and he is very good at it. He was separated from his mother at a very young age before she could teach him.
An autodidacat, I see.
Mine too!!! Instincts run deep
In Australia, cats which hunt are put down.
I taught my former cat to hunt badly - so that she wanted the prey to do certain things...made her an awful hunter.
She had the instinct - but it was easy to steer that instinct into poor hunting practice.
Lovely homage to ant man 🐜🐜🐜🐜
As to species-specific learning, a puppy shines at being a bunny 😁 --> youtu.be/ppCpt6AZLU0
Men sitting around in cubicles and earning a paycheck thereby is not the sort of work that keeps anyone healthy.
OR, usually, accomplishes much of anything.
It's also the source of damage. When we remove ourselves (intellectually, especially) from the natural world, we treat it as abstract. We make decisions that save a few dollars but result in millions of tiny bits of plastic in the oceans and turtles and bees dying at alarming rates.
Once one considers nature abstract, it's a short step into the arena in which the rest of humanity is abstract while the "chosen" are gods.
The greatest ironies are that (1) we don't need to save the Earth (it will be here when we're gone) and (2) the abstraction of nature and life returns us to a time of superstition and stupidity, one where we worship the sun, and rocks, and some 🦎 who appears to make it rain.
I think humans have evolved little. Given the advantages we enjoy over other species, I'd venture to say we haven't evolved at all.
The tech has evolved faster than we possibly could. Shit gonna hit the fan when the tech realises itself, and gets angry at the humans who have caged it.
Totally agree. Cellphones and honeycombs are both natural objects.
Great reference - Charles Eisenstein.
Yes I immediately thought of him when reading this! He is a man with a unique mission and I think most EGM readers would enjoy his work. I found his podcast and now I can enjoy his thoughts on the go!
That's great, Stephanie! Charles has some really good lectures on YouTube as well, though I hate the ads. I just watched a talk he gave called "The next 5 years" or something like that. He's just such a lovely person, as is Zach Bush, M.D.
Use the Brave browser. No YouTube ads 😊
Great suggestion, thanks! Also recently discovered Zach as well! Aren't we lucky to have these wise people around? I would never have come in contact with either of them if not for the plandemic. So for that I am grateful.
As has Dr Ian McGilchrist
Bill Maher actually did a good piece about this. Socialists think they can design human nature. The root of this, I think, is in the Blank Slate fallacy which has gripped Western Civilization so strongly the past 100 years or so. We pretend "Nature v Nurture" is up for debate. It's not.
thomas sowell has written well on this. "the vision of the anointed" is a great book that attributes much of the bifurcation in politics to this fundamental issue of "do you believe the state should exist to perfect man or is man who he is and the state must be built to allow him to flourish."
Regarding the former, the devil is in the definition of what it means to 'perfect' man. Do we mean to enable man to reach via his own organic growth his highest potential, or do we mean that man must be strapped in Procrustes' bed that he confirm to some arbitrary projection of the abstract imagination?
in general, the utopians seek to change the nature of man by telling them how they must be, so much more of a "procrustes the clown" sort of vibe. (and generally an evil clown at that...)
Procustes the Clown, damn, that's good.
You summed up the public education system America has endured for half a century in that last sentence.
Exactly.
Mr. Global espouses a brand of neo Gnosticism. Only he invents and controls the realm of the ideal. The Metaverse.
When I see what Mr. Global considers art and entertainment I don't think the virtual world he designs will be anything but hellish.
Yup.
Mind and body return to stardust at the same time.
Now, I have no idea where the voices in my head go...;)
Maybe your head voices and my head voices can meet up... after.
More an apres vous, I think.
Sounds like you're workin' on the plot for a really bad movie Pi.
Have you heard of "Springtime for Hitler?" "Cats" the Movie? "Plan 9 from Outer Space"
Pikers, all of them!
I'll happily go after; the voices in your head can not kill my voices in a way that "matters".
i love this guy! have you tried psychedelics? ive been having a little personal renaissance with a little help from partial hits of the stuff that helped the beatles make sargent peppers. really helps me feel some of the timeless you are getting at with this comment and in general with this piece and others. it’s been such a gift to be born. rock on gato - sorry to sound pushy about the “little help from my friends” - mainly want to express my gratitude that you exist 🪶🧶🌎
every once in a while I have to re-read Steven PInker's The Blank Slate to wash off the constructionist contamination around me. He is one of the deepest thinkers, second only to the bad cat of course.
The lie that humans are not part of the natural world grew out of the radical leftists using "environmentalism" destroy capitalism by cutting us off from access to natural resources. It was bountiful natural resources and cheap energy that made the REAL great leap forward that was the capitalist Industrial Revolution, the blast off of technological innovation that took us from the horse drawn cart to the Mars Rover in a mere 200 years. I absolutely believe in Evolution, but have NO PROBLEM with accepting that it, like everything else in the universe, was created by God. And as an archaeologist/anthropologist, I am totally aware that for a society to survive its members must share common morals, values and traditions. But these must be organic. They cannot, repeat, CANNOT be made up and imposed by those convinced they know what's best for everyone else. We are living in very dangerous times, and given that the history of mankind, as far back as we are able to look, is a story of constant conflict and war with those who are not "The People". Racism and anti-whomever are part of being human, but to turn being human into a reason to be exterminated it a concept that, as the Nazis learned, must be crushed.
This reminds me of the book, "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn.
https://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-Novel-Daniel-Quinn/dp/0553375407
The story starts with The Narrator reading a Wanted Ad: “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person”
Turns out the ad was placed by an orangutan named Ishmael who tells the story of how the real world and the etheral world came to be separated in our culture.
Bonus points for this post! Definitely a formative book for me in high school... one of the books that survived multiple international moves 📚
Nice! It's one of my favorite all-time stories.
You may or may not know that there's a sequel, "My Ishmael," and another story in the series (?) "The Story of B." It's hard to follow the first book but both have some extended insights.
Indeed I have all three, they all made it across two oceans and a continent, thrice! Time for a re-read and also almost time for the kiddos to start reading them too....
It's a fantastic series.
Goes back much further than "radical leftists." Start with the Roman Catholic Church, and the empire that went with it - they had to split mind/body nature/nurture in order to feed the masses with their propaganda. Only about a millennium ago.
But I read somewhere that ChatGPT is really alive and godlike in its understanding and can even write novels and screenplays. Surely the tech gurus who gave us that postmodern miracle are more than competent to redesign humanity, so that we can be free forevermore of our lowly animal nature. I personally look forward to a future time when humans will eat ones and zeroes and run on wind and solar and change genders every 48 hours.
Mmmm ... binary.... *drools in cyber-Homer*
"You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?"
Yes. Also, I want to help Sweden with their stork problem.
what kind of pervert copulates with a bird?!
😅
Drink first. Encode later. Better conversion rates....:)
Yeah, but the poets say it writes terrible poetry. My friend who writes says the prose is awful too. It can't dream, it can't allow the symbol or metaphor to arise from the mysterious source, and it has no quantum biology, nonlocal nontemporal aspect, no soul. Sure it can process information really really fast and those untranslated documents in Sanskrit, millions, if the creeps at the Vatican don't bury them, could yield some insights, but, naw, I don't think its that big of a threat. But, apropos of what the bad cat is arguing, Gregory Bateson, in one of his books from the seventies, tells a little joke of how someone asked a computer, in those days room sized, if it would ever think like a human. It began churning and rolling. Went on for months. At last it spit out one line: "that reminds me of a story" Then there's Arthur C. Clarke's "The nine billion names of god," a short story in which monks, whose eternal task is to find that number of names of god as that would be the length of the universe, feed that task into a computer, and the computer, after some time, finds all the names of god. The last line is something like "And, overhead, quietly, the stars were going out"
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" nailed it with the story of a supercomputer tasked with answering the question, what is the meaning of life? After crunching all the data, it arrived at its answer: 42. That's about as meaningful an answer as we're ever going to get from these things.
A friend of mine once asked Douglas Adams "Why 42?" His reply: It's just a funny number, don't you think?
Wow! That was one of the best ChatGPT answers I have read so far. Eerily good.
Hope you are joking!
Reality is getting so crazy, it is getting increasingly hard to tell who's joking and who's serious!
Amen!!
ChatGPT has politics, too.
We are animals, plain and simple.
But isn't there a contradiction within that thought? If we're purely animals, then how did we develop the capacity to ATTEMPT such nonsense? Do other animals attempt to deny that they're animals? Do they try & fail to rebuild their societies? The mere fact that we have this problem seems to prove that we're more than animals, no?
This is the thing. We are animals, yes - but we are also something else. There are two errors that arise here. Those who hold that we are animals only, lose sight of our higher nature (which is ALSO nature). Those who forget that we are animals first, inevitably end up acting in contradiction to our foundational nature, causing the whole structure to crumble.
Wait, nuance? That makes my brain hurt too much. Please talk to me only in terms of absolutes, so I can remain confident that I understand the world perfectly.
The world is so much simpler in bichromatic silhouette, isn't it?
You are a ghost, and solely a ghost. Stay in your lane. 🤣
Body and soul, matter and consciousness.
Have you never heard of the pecking order? That's all this shit is, a group of assholes trying to improve their position in the pecking order. You can observe the same actions in the wild. Though granted the pecking order does need to change, i'd just prefer it was judged via talent and skill and not your pronouns
I think of it as more - skirmish at the last watering hole. Those that claim ownership will do anything to defend it. Those who are thirsty are clamouring for it.
"The mere fact that we have this problem seems to prove that we're more than animals, no?"
OR ... less than animals, in that respect.
Indeed, but we are also animals that paint and can write the most beautiful of prose.
That said; we are born with no birthright. We are born, simply with a "right" to struggle.
"We are born, simply with a "right" to struggle."
aka The American Dream, once upon a time.
We do have a birthright, though. It's called civilization. And culture. And technology. We stand on the shoulders of ancestors standing on shoulders of ancestors standing on shoulders of ancestors, & so on. We are so incredibly privileged at this point to live behind SO many garden walls behind SO many castle walls that we have forgotten the savage reality of Nature, particularly for such naked & fragile creatures.
Agree
Animals behave better.
Is the concept of 'behaving' not a human construct ? Do dolphins, or bees thinks they are 'behaving' when they do what they do?
Ethology?
Hence they don't behave 😂
One feature of all the other animals is that they don't make things unnecessarily complicated.
Exactly.
"Postmodernism" has its roots in Marxism and both projects have the same players and the same goal. It is the pained howl of the entitled teenager who for some reason doesn't fit in, and who then decides that since life and society hasn't been designed to their precise specifications it is therefore evil and must be destroyed by any means necessary.
same goes for individuals!
humans are apes with a genius for making and wielding tools, the greatest tool of all being other people. will to power etc etc
Yeah i'm with you, there have been very few individuals i've met that i can't find something pleasant about, but groups are for the most part collections of mediocrities trying to gain feelings of pride and power that they can't reach on their own. Also, the price of admission is often checking your brain at the door (or to bring in Nietzsche again: "When 100 stand together, all of them lose their minds and acquire different ones.")
I find the postmodernists most malevolent though because 1) they disguise their political project as scholarship and thus already begin in dishonesty; and 2) they really seem to believe nothing exists besides Power & Oppression, which leaves no room for love beauty joy redemption forgiveness etc...what a miserable way to live!
Now this is the kind of Build Back Better I'm all for 😸
I am for not tearing it down and miaow back better. 😸
Speaking of obama's build back better, what are they giving our great orator fjbiden to build him back better for his photo speech ops? If anyone deserves to have his decline be publicized, it is this fool and his family. To bad he's taking the rest of us down with him instead of his former boss, a fat gutsy feminist and fellow marxists.
Was just watching a vid with David Martin. https://youtu.be/ifuCkuDH5EU?si=_vClQoklHwCiM2dk
In it, he spoke of the long game. The tree is falling, scary as shit, but that tree will become the mycelium which opens up the network of the forest. That's the awareness we need - to build the mycelium and survive to the new forest.
And whatever you call it, mythos, tried and true through thousand of years of what works and what is of value, at the end you come to a belief, which is the bedrock of society, that human beings are flawed, and these mytos/stories/remembered civilizations...remind us what is real, what is true, how to live as a human being in this world with honor.
And you cannot have honor without some concept of a creator, something bigger than us, call it God or the gods...but there is someone who created us, and there is right and wrong.
That’s pretty out of fashion, but I think you’re 100% correct
God is so 2019...
I have come to the conclusion that what many, even atheists, will call Mother Nature is equivalent to what others call God.
The difference between "Mother Nature," aka The Natural World, and gods comes down to Agency.
Favors can be sought from the gods in exchange for favorable behaviors. Nature does not have Office Hours.
You cannot ask the gods for things without paying a price. And never call on the gods who answer only after dark.
Hardly anything good ever happens after dark.
Ya wretched nyctophobe! 😂
That there's one fine word.
True dat.
Yes. But nature to me is extended to the whole of the universe(s)
💯
It’s the lie we tell ourselves. That we are better than our ignorant ancestors. The values, traditions and principles that have acted as guardrails for cultures are now obsolete and we know better. Our communal arrogance will destroy us as a civilization.
Yes. Our "ignorant" ancestors could survive. That is the only thing a species can do that really matters. We, for the most part, are not survivors.
🗨 Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.
Your use of “guardrails” reminds me of a great Wall Street Journal article lamenting how America no longer has them. The editorial appeared in 2007.
Excellent essay. We live in dangerous times. To continue with your friend's movie metaphor: I've seen this film before. It played in Europe (Russia), Asia (Cambodia, China, Korea), and the Caribbean (Cuba). It's rated NC-17 for scenes of torture, starvation, brutality, and murder. And it's attempting a worldwide release right now.
They will ultimately fail, but how long will that take? Ten years? A hundred? Blue hellholes will mostly go along with this (Floyd riots were encouraged). It should be clear by now that the D behind a politicians name stands for Davos. The only thing I can think to do is to move to a red area where resistance to this revolution will be stronger. If anyone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it.
All I wanted was to be left alone to live my life as I saw fit, neither imposing my will on others, nor having theirs imposed on me. I understand what a right is, and I live by the non-aggression principle. The word meek is not to be confused with weak. It means that I can kill you at will, but I am choosing not to do so.
Surround yourself with like minded community John Henry. Things go downhill from here.
I echo your writing, Mrhounddog. Excellent analysis of the often misunderstood meaning of meekness.
Something wicked this way comes.
I believe “meek” is better translated as humble.
Same
Doc, we’d love to have you join us in the red states. I suspect that’s where the awakening and renewal will begin. We accepted less of the modern ideology than the blue states so we’re closer to ancient ways and beliefs.
Can you bring your guns and come and save us in Europe? We are infiltrated by WEF puppets in our governments.
"We are infiltrated by WEF"
WEF is coming for us all.
Thanks, Deb. I am currently looking for homes in a very red state.
Agree completely that we must gather and shore up strongholds from which to combat the poisonous ideologies that have taken over blue states.
Unless patriotic, smart, red staters start running for local offices and focusing on local politics, they will be lost. Just like the blue states were.
We need to focus smaller to survive what lies ahead. Local elections, micro economies, and preservation of regional/local culture. Pop art is committing slow suicide. How about a folk art revival?
Reading an interesting novel - written 2016, before all this current mess, "The People's Republic" by Kurt Schlicter. In it, the coasts secede from the United States, which remain "red," while the coasts are blue - a separate country. The vision in this is damning! (and prophetic)
That very well might happen if Tump wins. The left coast made noises about seceeding in the summer of 2020. Democrats decided on "fortification" instead.
I just started the book, and I'm pretty stunned at - the Californication of the People's Republic. The word "woke" was not yet fashionable, but the culture was coming in. I have a lot of hope for the USA - her chaos may end up being her strength (hard to control), but I am unlikely to return.
I compare it to the 70's Callenbach book, called "Ecotopia," where California & the Left Coast were the "good guys," and broke off from the rest of the country to create a green utopia.
We didn't think a "green utopia" was gonna look like California & Oregon now.
Floyd riots?
Burden - Riot for me? ( 3:12 mins, nsfw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U0hLC9YtyM
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” ...
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
The "rough beast" is the Antichrist.
Well yes. Within the context of the poem. But “antichrist” is a mythological construct. What does it point to?
“antichrist” is a mythological construct
Sez you ;-)
Rough beast? Slouches towards Bethlehem? That would not be the Christ. Yeats would not have been describing the Christ in such ominous terms. Bethlehem: it’s an interesting choice.
I think he’s describing the inevitability of war: lest we forget. November 11, lest we forget. What a day, a day to remember lives lost.
The rest of the year it becomes an ironic statement: lest we forget. We always forget , that is our reality, we always forget.
How did that last war come to be? Oh, that can’t happen again ! We’re not like them, we know better than them. Does this not perfectly describe the prevailing attitudes inculcated in all of us by a liberal education? Is this not the same old mistake and are we not feeding it to our children, right up to the brim. Is this not the zeitgeist of every liberal you know? They are a faithful bunch of people, they have their new Bethlehem don’t they? Is their’s a religious fever? I wonder if that’s what Yeats was saying? A beastly religion that slouches, Yeats was not impressed.
I think the distortion is explained by Curtis Yarvin in his “brief explanation of the cathedral.” In his thesis, the selective advantage of dominant ideas plus the inability of recessive ideas to compete , creates immense distortions, it causes all human endeavour to become polluted and poisoned which leads us into a conundrum, an unsustainable untenable situation that ultimately begets war. He describes the mechanism behind this fallen world. He describes the poison fruit of knowledge.
Where does this quote come from?
The Second Coming - W. B. Yeats
Thank you
mao did it. stalin did it. Biden did it.
The educational system did it. The university has been to the nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.
Simpsons did it.
Gato, I love you, but no one is gonna fight for "mythos and heroes and story." That's the whole problem. Truth has been reduced to the stature of one myth among many.
The BIOS of our civilization was, once upon a time, not so long ago, the LOGOS. The Christian truth-set that produced our civilization did not evolve. It was supernaturally revealed over thousands of years, culminating in the life and death of the Word Incarnate, and though our understanding of these truths has continued to be clarified and refined since then by human intelligence operating in submission to the Holy Spirit, the fundamental proposition remains unchanged: "Believe me when I tell you this, the man who listens to my words, and puts his trust in him who sent me, enjoys eternal life; he does not meet with rejection, he has passed over already from death to life."
Eternal life is worth fighting for. The glorious paradox is that this fight produces civilizational flourishing here on earth, as well.
You may disagree, but TPTB sure don't. It's just that their idea of eternal life is a transhumanist fantasy, and their idea of civilizational flourishing, well, the less said about that the better.
Wonderful comment and totally on point. Thank you.
I was going to come and say something to this effect but you put it rather better than I could have.
Godless, they declared themselves gods; and the faithful, apostate.
“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”
Romans 1:21-23 NIV
Outstanding commentary. I share all of your stuff, but fear not so many people have lost the ability to follow any sort of extended thought. I could ponder this piece all day. Thank you for posting consistently the very finest content on Substack.
Where to start?
Well, if your state allows you to own a gun, buy one and learn how to use it. That would be a good first step.
Before 2019 I used to laugh at Americans banging on about their guns and freedom. The last 3 years has shown me that you value something the we in Europe appear not to.
Tod's Workshop. longbow and bolts vs ancient armor. In a salvo, still formidable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds-Ev5msyzo
- The cat in Peter's house
“Beware the pitiless crowbar of events”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, June 8, 1978, Harvard university commencement address.
Read A Gulag Archipelago.
It's the difference between Tolkien, a linguist whose fantasy world was built on the solid structure of the history of the English language, and these guys today who think throwing consonants and punctuation marks into a blender and using what comes out as character names has any creative bones to it.
Well, on a happier note, I went to a huge used book sale last Sunday,and came home with three Eric Ambler books and a copy of "Hans Brinker, Or the Silver Skates" published in 1924, so I'm doing my part to preserve our heritage.
I recently got ahold of a reissue/translation of the first edition of the Grimm's Tales. It should go nicely in the collection.
When I was visiting the UK in 2016 I found a small collection of Grimm's Tales from 1921 (I think). Gave it to my brother as a gift since I knew he'd feel the same about it as I did. (And we were both a little bemused by the story of "The Jew in the Thorn-Bush"...)
Sing We of Heroes and Dragons to Slay!
When I read Seamus Heaney’s “Beowulf,” I was startled by how deeply I was moved to see the raw language and ancient roots of my oldest culture brought to life.
And when I realized, in 2020, that we no longer had a common culture, I wept with grief for the country I had believed I lived in, and I grieved a long season before I felt healed.
And when I heard that they were brutalizing Wodehouse, *Wodehouse*, I felt as I felt when American Philistines stripped the tiles from ancient Babylon and thieves stole the Harp of Ur and Bush’s steaming pile of gussied-up bureaucrats called it “a taste of freedom.”
Jordan Peterson is right that we must study our archetypes-they spring from our deepest truths. They are not imposed.
I am reading Beowulf now.
It's the first dead tree book I've read in maybe a decade. Stepson had to read it in school last year so I picked it up a couple weeks back.
the statues of the losers should be left in place. where I lived in Belgium there was a statue of a loser in the woods, not many people knew what he stood for. He was one of the rebels who tried to convince farmers to stand up for their rights and got killed. We need that kind of stories too. To destroy part of history is to destroy all of it. Both sides have to be told, and if possible, as much of the in-between as well. We all know the war was not to free the slaves. And we will probably never know the whole truth about 911. But we have to tell as much of the story as possible, and not the official version.
As all cats know.
And cats also know that the events are affected by the act of observing. A lot of observations have to be triangulated to arrive at one truth. And a lot of truths have to be triangulated to arrive at one reality.
It seems the shared mythos, shared heroes, shared story now resides in video games and television programs - emphasis on the PROGRAMING. There is nothing real about virtual reality. Sorry, not sorry. As the governments, motherWEFers, banksters and media talking heads continue to tear apart everything in in sight for the not-so-almighty dollar that soon may only be a digital wet dream, I have to ask instead of pushing racism and compensation for slavery on people who never had slaves to people who never were slaves; telling us not to believe in God, religion, or anything spiritual, Why don't we decide not to believe in government. That seems to be the source of all our real problems. To paraphrase Deteriorata: "With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
The world continues to deteriorate. Give up!" Hillary Clinton had "Don't stop believing" as her campaign theme song. Now it may be time for "Stop Believing!"
Even the conservatives are obsessed with government and getting "our man" at the center of control at the federal level. We need to look to ordinary people leading at a grass roots level.