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| One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. -Nietzsche | |||||||
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December 31, 2011
That which is dead is in no danger of dying
Deemphasis on quality tacitly promotes low quality. Soon you can no longer gather enough brainpower to send a man to the moon. Essential social and material infrastructure break down, with no replenishment coming, as quality has degraded, unable to do what was trivial a generation or two ago. Decline hits in small ways from all sides, reducing the value of any proposition, a wave hitting business, education, and culture as they slowly collapse from the inside, no saving remedy able to help. Many sense something isn't right, but to get at it is off limits, with truth too offensive to be voiced. We're practically in utopia as we chant professed allegiances to honored sacred cows, yet nothing works, no one can figure out the basic principles of life previously known and constituting society, disharmony has become the norm, and one usually guesses right to expect all to be out of step and rhythm with what was once easy and natural. All are too decent and polite to blame the priests or accuses them of lying, and what does blame matter when it fixes nothing. Some seek peace and bliss, and say that is enough, even perfection. That is one way. Why take much care about the world when you can keep your head down, drunk, spaced out, and entertained?
"Science is supposed to be the pursuit of truth, but in secular cultures it has become the chief vehicle for myth. The human needs that were once expressed in religion have not disappeared. From the cult of cryogenics to absurd neo-Darwinian ideas, the core myths of western religion are being recycled as science. In the course of this transformation, the wisdom they contain is being lost. Growing scientific knowledge is not producing a more rational view of the world, but a secular mythology that is further from the truth of the human condition than the religious myths of the past."
Avert the childrens eyes Globalism as Renewer Though it is easy to mock the United States as a nation thrusting headlong into third-world status at an increasing rate since the 1950s, there are also a few curiously independent rip currents separate from the mass. When we see cycles of hopelessness, we cherish death for its gift of renewal. Something dies, good or bad, and something else takes its place. In preparation, we who desire positive outcomes work against the illusion of "progress" and instead attempt to create conditions to allow quality and sensibility to guide the future. Culture starts simply and organically, developing as it gains footing. When most people talk about culture they can put their finger on nothing, so babble about differences in clothing or food. This is stupid, but a sufficient beginning, for culture is subtle and as long as we believe that fast food, drug consumption, and entertainment are not our true goals and peak attainments, we remain free agents not yet enslaved to mediocrity. One must be aware enough to realize dissatisfaction with poor offerings. Someone noticed twenty years ago that American beer was terrible but had been mainstreamed and thus made normal. No one else dared say it, because no audience would have appreciated the truth, but most people had never tasted good beer, so the situation continued. Enough critical mass eventually gathered from people who had sampled a drastically different reality that a few daring brewers ventured to create excellence of their own. Friendly competition between aspiring experimenters followed, and soon the best of these brews spread throughout the locality, region, nation, and then were exported to joust against beer that originally seeded the effort. Wine took a long time also. The Beringer brothers established their vineyard in 1875 after being the first to recognize the features of the wonderful Napa Valley climate and topography. It was not until the 1990s that California wine became competitive on the global market, but now is available throughout the world. Coffee also just emerged. Not that coffee chain offerings are good, but they are a modest average that stand against the complete lack of effort that was previously an agreed upon standard. Discovered over 500 years ago, made excellent in Europe for centuries, but the U.S. only became aware of the possibility of good coffee ten years ago. Late to the party also means fresh eyes not exhausted -- maybe they will push old peaks further, as a new tide invigorating an old river, stirring paths gone dry, pushing resting sediment in unexpected directions. It is possible Americans might soon discover cheese or bread, and learn how to make them. And from there? In time, perhaps music, fashion, design, literature, movies, or something else that remains lacking, mediocre, and unknown except to those who venture outside the bubble to taste better attempts made in other countries. For as large, powerful, and active a trader as the U.S. is, it remains cut off from the world because its people are loathe to travel and explore, taught to turn inward to consume highly efficient assembly line gruel. Soft propaganda tells citizen comrades that the world is dangerous, backwards (i.e. Unamerican), inferior (especially France, a nation to hate because they insist upon excellence from life as a standard), and all forms of narcotics are kept readily available to tranquilize passion. American films and fast food are everywhere spreading low quality, but in return a few daring travelers smuggle in demonstratives alternatives that are then shown to friends. The idea starts to build. Conspirators throughout the world have learned English and make daring efforts to communicate to free inmates what the rest of the world has seen and knows, fomenting a jailbreak that steers consciousness to better choices. Globalism has always been disparagingly dismissed as a destructive leveler of culture, rushing the excellent to become inferior, and making the inferior greedily desirous. That is undeniable, but globalism is also a back channel secret passage through which old seeds can take root in new lands. We can always decide one day to stop descending into third-world values and people -- that is easy, but having an infusion that forces the consciousness to become aware of what has been standard for centuries in civilized nations, and then to create that standard here -- that is precious and its effects will not cease if a country changes course and decides one day to remain a first world nation. Melancholia
 For most, it is hard to be honest until the end is absolutely in sight. Then, with no lasting consequences for telling the truth, we let it out. This waiting is an error for we are always dying, running out of time, and nothing true can be held against us. Worse, blockades against truth, whether our self-censorship, or creation of barriers to prevent others from truth, serve only deception and falsehood. Consequences come, always looming, delayed for a while and then appear again with interest due. We can never cheat nature. The joke is on you! We have only been wasting time. 135 minutes, Lars von Trier (2011) Rational Delusion The Enlightenment disinterred and honed Greek rationality, separating it from spirit and humanity, whittling it beyond structural integrity to distill it into linear crystalline purity, a perfect preparation for the sterile monotony of technoindustrialism. Torn asunder from context and acknowledgment of reality, enlightened truths still contain some connection to facts so long as you maintain low expectations of correlation with the world. Proportions are askew, details smeared, counterpoints excluded from consideration, and assumptive projections masked with disingenuous modesty and formal disclaimers of uncertainty attached as a catchall. This approach creates an adult world consisting mostly of fantasy justifications. If someone thinks they want something, they work backwards to invent a vindicating story that others might find believable, establishing motives and ideals along the way. Children do the same thing, except with more imagination, honesty, and spirit, fully aware they are just playing with make believe. It takes a special type of reverse alchemist at the height of their powers of incompetence to make the simple become complicated, to parch lush fertility into barrenness, and compel the innate into paralyzed dysfunction. Not progressive, in that no one has yet proposed anything better than or exceeding nature, nor conservative, as the public lacks interest in preserving quality, value, or capability. Every mistake enters through doors held open with untested shining promises that will never be.
It is for good reason we burn witches, sorcerers, unbelievers, and the unenlightened as wicked offenders threatening a singular doctrine of self-referential brilliance. Late civilizations in long decline, such as ours, lack a means to understand how our ancestors could honor irrepressible instinctive drives and tendencies, and instead cling to a sacrosanct gospel of redemption called rationality. As obedient hypocrites, belief in reason is based on unreason, and great faith is placed in the future despite acting against its potential -- suggesting either supremely deliberate passive aggressive sabotage married to denial, or healthy psychology too stupid to see the results of actions and how the future is made. The devotees of rationalism further pledge to deny that any other sensory mechanisms might be greater or even equal to true beliefs that one learns mechanically by rote and reference, never soul, interaction, experimentation, or blood. Ancients took in the whole without filtration or pasteurization, embracing the irrational and provisioning for its primal force in harmony with the rational. Premise of the universe: everything has a home, yes? We must be human first and if some robotic tasks need be performed, or somehow our senses are unable to accurately grasp the rhythms of the world around us, we can make use of rationality, as with all tools fit for their purpose. All praise to the ineffable irrational force that propels and stirs without end! May we never deny it, betray it, or dress it up as what it is not. Love Prevents Objective Consideration When love is shattered and objective measurement returns, one often realizes that their former love, once eclipsing their sight of the world, and for whom they would have pledged their life or made deals with any devil, was not a rare beauty or great soul, but was basically average and without aspiration and desire to make an incredible life together, yet love enticed the imagination to believe something special was discovered needing to be merged for eternity. This is the sickness Shakespeare captured in Romeo and Juliet, driving the spectator into terrified empathy for the lost, rash, and delusional youth who suffer and die from their illness.
Peasants Jimmy the peasant works at the village newspaper making entertaining stories representing his master's viewpoints. Michael the peasant works at a wrench factory making tools for other peasants. Zack the peasant works at Peasant Shack making inexpensive stew that field hands pick up on their way home, happy to devour whatever cheap ingredients were hastily thrown together and overcooked. One day the peasants decided they were freemen. As independent agents equal to nobility but without the official titles or responsibilities, they rejected uniforms, yet remained instantly identifiable by the way they carried themselves. They rejected specialization, yet developed no secondary skills and displayed no talents. Their occupations irreversibly scarred them, carving easily discernible ridges into their faces and stuttered pensiveness into their gaits. After giving themselves freedom, they set about devoting themselves to higher callings of an unspecified nature. Except first they had to report to their daily jobs. After jostling all day with other ingrate peasants, they returned to their shacks, exhausted, too tired to reflect that their shelter was low grade construction shabbily thrown together by unskilled peasants working for pay, then marketed and sold as a well built structure by a lying peasant salesman eager for his commission. At every level the peasants scrap and corrupt unchecked, cheating one another out of good outcomes for temporary advantage. The whole society left in their hands was condemned to peasanthood. To be fair, none of the things they touched were really supposed to work. After all, they are made by peasants, for peasants, crooked and half-broken from birth.
 The working men are given a day of rest, spent on drinking, amusements, fighting, and fornicating with the peasant girls from the village and nearby. Couples form from this ritual of dysfunctional socialization, especially in the spring and late fall when sharing sex and dependency has the most allure. Most peasants eventually get married and have children, a cycle renewing bodies that are used up by the churn. Sometimes a trinketmaker married a buttonpusher, occasionally a papershuffler married another papershuffler. The marriage itself didn't really matter, as they were just listless peasants, and someone was going to marry someone else anyway for neither gain or loss, just a mutual null. It turned out that no marriage ever mattered much, as everyone was allowed to get married and then the two had to make due with the consequences of their decision, the practical considerations overwhelming greater possibilities. Nor was their meager skill a factor either in union or dissolution, as there was no great need in the world for workers of any particular occupation. In all the hustle and bustle offered by a drunken day of idling, a peasant could easily become swept away by a devilish mix of romance, optimism, and lust, seeing something special in a peasant girl, thinking her somehow different from the rest and all that had come before in the village, but this enchantment was illusion. Years came and went in the rolling cycle. Girls, boys, couples, and babies filled the stage and played out the plot. For all the promises that were so close for each couple, nothing interesting or ambitious was ever attempted, nor any inspired spark igniting before a fizzle, just the lingering dull hum of peasantry. Wealth
Corporate Lords live in the same dungeon. World-class CEOs can earn vast sums, but can't retire until they are too old to make much use of it. Instead, they spend decades streamlining operating procedures -- neither interesting nor rewarding, except for the useless money accumulated. Look at wealth collectors like Bill Gates, who has no talents or curiosities, so rather than retiring at 25 or 30 and doing something interesting with his life, spent decades of long days directing the production of mediocre products. After finally retiring at 52, he now devotes his time to bleeding heart projects that increase third world overpopulation and bring about consequences that could be achieved faster and with much less expense by hiring a few hundred thousand laborers to clear cut forests, poison large water supplies, and salt fertile farmlands.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
 A meme to repeat it, because you are a repeat monkey and that is what you do?
Dawkins's theory is that just as genes propagate themselves by moving from body to body via spermatozoa or eggs, so memes propagate themselves by moving from brain to brain. Actually, it is unclear whether this is really a theory or simply a rather inept analogy, for though he talks loosely of the propagation of memes occurring by a process of imitation, Dawkins never specifies a definite mechanism for the transmission of ideas. Nor is this surprising, given that no such mechanism exists. Dangers of Drinking
New Formulas Don't Work Motion impairs stability with ruthless judgments of every unsure unnatural step. Each lunging start, breakneck stop, diverging turn, and isolating wandering takes away stable footing. It is now permitted to do what was just two generations ago deemed impossible, illegal, recklessly destructive, corrosive, and self-imprisoning. In this brave new world without seatbelts, you're free to find out what happens when you go whereever. Never a pitfall in one step, but spread over three or four chained inevitabilities, sweetened with saccharine, numbed by nihilistic tolerance, spurred by adderall and bored purposelessness. Like a military ambush gone bad, ill-prepared friends and colleagues lay strewn about a dark forest floor, dead or incapacitated, relieved of ever reflecting how their cocksure clever uncharted adventures laid the perfect trap for themselves. Honesty still lurks somewhere if you're unable to silence it. Do you really imagine yourself different from the other failures around you when you all took the same paths, only some arrived sooner at the destination? There's no bargaining with a noose, no overruling will or dream narrative that forestalls nature, only the provisional spotlit stage of eternity with a simple way things work, and always will, contrasted with a million diversely innovative ways to hobble, cripple, poison, and wreck oneself. Jostle, rush, rage, habituate and whatever else you want. It all turns out the same way you see it go for others making similar choices, and the consequences are yours forever. Trauma The cute Argentine girl was adamantly averse to conversation about things that mattered. "No! I will not talk politics with you." So light-hearted was the rest as we drank delicious Mendoza wine, ate fine grass fed beef and Patagonia tender roasted lamb, laughing and playing the night away -- cheap diversions to distract from trauma and naked emperors.
Deep Nature Around us swarm lions, alligators, grizzlies, rattlers, scorpions, stray dogs, hustlers, and all flavors of opportunistic predation. Who's got your back baby? -- which is to imply we would also have some motive to save the front. You tremble at the prospect of your vulnerability, the situation forcing realization arising into undeniability as you lay stunned by momentary self-awareness. No high esteem assurance helps here. Your voice wavers, recognizing the untamed force you face, as you stressfully try to talk through it, reluctantly expecting it will overtake your resistance and do as it desires. You have already submitted to the prospect before any barbarity begins, yet you claim to disbelieve in natural hierarchy?
In these duressing instances we can be easily torn limb from limb, mugged, and maimed by the wild. Civilization is only an illusion and ideal, easily lapsing and eclipsed by what escapes the stillness or defies encirclement. We forever remain jungled beasts of the outdoors with impulses overriding arbitrary rules no one really believed as anything more than temporary convenience anyway. Only one force offers salvation from this: we who are cosmic warriors of justice and take interest in protecting you at our risk. Our services are of the highest value and not offered promiscuously. Money, height, big arms, intelligence, and a strong jaw are just proxies. Women swoon for men who can set situations right. Call it character if that helps ascribe a positive trait -- it's a bulwark against violations, and a dumb, ugly, poor man who has backbone enough to stop chaos and make it into order as an organic filtration system will get the pretty girl. He need only demonstrate that a threatening danger has been calmed and settled, that he can put disturbances to rest by standing up to face and dispatch what softer self-preserving beings cannot, and at once women are eager to align. After all, we are supposed to be making a world together, as we have done for time immemorial, paired into the only roles that sustain one another. This is just simple nature, a lasting truth when civilization's flimsy veneer slips away. Thanksgiving Table With vigor, love, and faith, I have labored to make a beautiful Thanksgiving feast in my home. What are you bringing to the table?
German Airport Fun
Negative Sum Games
You can passive-aggressively protest anything, no matter how absurd, by gently shutting down your opponents, not physically blowing up their property and infrastructure, or kidnapping them, but merely occupying it beyond capacity so it is overburdened into paralysis and effectively killed. If you have enough people participating in your soft attack, your victim will be forced to comply to your every demand in order to be left alone and regain functionality. If we're going to all be equal, it must be recognized that the herd also has the right to run this classic mafia protection racket. Moderns swirl in tightening spirals of decline with junk entertainment, junk food, junk relationships -- their forces unified only in quest to perfect oneself into worthless junk. Who resists or stands aside? They won't be with a mob. Chicken Roulette Hedonism and freedom marry repeated games of chicken and Russian Roulette. You could slow down, veer away, or abstain from certain destruction, but bouts of intoxication, denial, and low self-esteem wear their damage proudly. Sometimes you sneak a glance out away from the weight of it all, and reality is supreme for a moment, grasping the situation, but it is too late to arrest what you've done. Nothing cut up that bad ever really heals, and in any case you insist on picking at every small scratch until made into moderate trauma, a bad habit helping nothing. You get to call this gift your own. Elders tried to warn you, but were as inarticulate and dogmatic as you were headstrong, nihilistic, and bitter. You were once worth anything in the world; now no one can find much to salvage. Impermanence
With everything in constant flux, our main skill for life is swiftly surveying our situation, environment, and winds of change to assess direction, tendencies, and outcomes -- not clamoring for what is gone or repeating propagandistic ideals. Relaxed
This rigor yielded great works of art, literature, and philosophy for centuries, many of which are classics and remain definitive. Surely trivial works also were created during this period, and were quickly and graciously forgotten. As standards relaxed and trivial works became the standard, there was a rapid retreat of intellectuals and artists from the public realm. Suddenly no intellectuals comment on a nation's political events and future, and no artists appear active, their position overtaken by entertainers. What was once an intellectual class became just a few self-isolated intellectual individuals, typically considered annoying by the entertainment classes, even if their assessments are reluctantly deemed correct. Did this retreat and secession of high activity signify the victory of equality? Or was it merely self-preservation by a fragile minority and realistic recognition that quality was no longer of any public value? Like distant lighthouses gone dark, that too is a signal. Resist or Accept Who are we to say the world should not become leveled into third world conditions? No one who was once first world would want this result, yet a majority creates this dynamic and if unchecked will make it inevitable in short order. If this happens naturally, would we oppose nature? Perhaps there is some longer wisdom by which our decline serves as a useful example, or fulfills an eternal pattern of nature. Well intentioned people take decisions that create all sorts of terrible outcomes that they aren't aware of. We've taken all easy means of prevention off the table, in essence deciding our fate well in advance. As the ship goes down, some will record the history of our decline, with truth, blame, and obscuring narratives. Those books will later be burned for warmth. War Against Freeloaders I stood in the grocery store checkout line and tried to make sense of the formality of paying. My lifestyle is simple and my finances run a responsible surplus every month. Why were dozens of us stuck having to pay so much time standing in lines? Then it struck me that payment is verification that one is not a freeloader on society. If we had a responsible society where everyone created value, every transaction would require minimal verification that one is not a burden, tending toward hippie looseness if everyone could be trusted. As freeloaders increase, systems require more policing, a cost imposition that gets shifted to consumers and results in lines because your time is of no value. We could have many very different social structures, but once you stop having standards and allow everyone to participate, you have to cover the costs of dealing with unknown people and verifying that they can equitably complete a basic transaction. This takes every interaction to the lowest common denominator, requiring more manpower, time, expense, and barriers, for the dogma of having a society of random people without shared values together in a common space. Until you shake up assumptions, you are stuck defending them and working around their hobbled results. How to Grind
From a doctorate exam. - 'What is the task of all higher education?' - To turn a man into a machine. - 'By what means?' - He has to learn how to feel bored. - 'How is that achieved?' - Through the concept of duty. - 'Who is his model?' - The philologist: he teaches how to grind. We need principles (i.e. culture), not rules, not laws, not technomechanisms. Modern suffering comes from abundance and overload, a flood of options creating indecision from paralysis. Tim Ferriss surveys the aggregate to diagnose the individual case. One must be realistic, at least with oneself, yes? That five or ten item to-do list goes undone each day with exceedingly clever excuses. Dear robot, how to become human again? Stop reacting to virtuality, which means deprioritizing phone calls, texts, email, IM, web sites, etc, because if you allow these to interrupt your day, then surely little of importance will ever get done. Try instead doing one thing a day, but completing it. More than one is a bonus. We are meant to fix our gaze upon a goal, not to jerk spasmodically like paranoid rodents reacting to every irrelevancy before us. Academics and lawyers grind to produce their work product, ever in search of more information to satisfy rules. Head down, they churn, producing neither art nor anything intellectually admirable. Greatness does not live within the rules.
We are the 100%
We thought it was flattering to say everyone should get a college degree, so we systematically watered down the educational system to keep it open to all, making higher education into expensive adolescent daycare with almost worthless degrees. But at least for a moment we believed we had found a way to conquer nature's inequality. We thought it was right for everyone to own a house, so we invented dangerously innovative credit products so that unstable people with poor credit and insufficient income could partake in the dream. We imagined we could achieve goals without a realistic premise, and someone else could take care of the details later. We created these problems because we asked for them, promoted them, supported them, silenced their critics, and now pretend to be surprised by their obvious consequences. We act disillusioned and cheated because we lied to and cheated ourselves. We are the 100%. La Retardacion
Alternatively, you can speak to the child with adult standards from the outset and they will gradually rise to meet expectations. This immediate access to adult vocabulary, linguistic structure, and logical ordering will allow any smart five year old to adequately express themselves and begin to make sense of the world. Prior to the plebeian revolution, society's standards were based upon its best efforts, e.g. eternal art rather than trivial entertainment, with public discourse founded around ideas and topics of importance rather than popular banality. Quality was, as always, rare and precious, yet venerated and triumphing despite majorities.
vulgar - of or relating to the common people; in popular use; ignorant or deficient of good taste Modernity treats all as children and babbles noises at them. Ambition is replaced by safe and easy ready-made decisions, making most outcomes stupid and dysfunctional, perfectly as intended. The adult world of high standards gives way to a wave of trivialities, stunted facsimiles, and a succession of lies and delusion, undermining capability and excellence, stifling dynamism, agility, urgency, sense, and consciousness. They call it progress. With little risk comes little reward. A regimented path with few options and predictable outcomes cultivates the public for a childish mentality, in turn necessitating a robotic nanny state that functions for little more than churning out sleepwalkers by the millions. Is our goal to herd helpless, self-destructive sheep, or to accomplish something? And if some are destroying themselves, must all be sequestered out of an abundance of caution to preserve the defective? You can aim for the gutter but there's not much to feast on there.
All Vows I once swore a New Year's oath to no longer deal with low testosterone men. I lost a few business contacts and a lot of drama. Only those who welcome fight, ignore pain, meet setbacks with redoubled will, and keep their eye on victory regardless of cost create the conditions for lasting victory. The timid, overthinking, and measured will compromise you with their castrated approach, coming at all things with whining, nagging, begging, pleading, idle theory, and jolly dances of ritual panic. With them on your side, the battle is lost before it starts. They are unsuited for war, eager to ingratiate the enemy, prostrate themselves before tyrants, sell the village into bondage, obey corrupt priests, dwell on spectating and petty gossip, create rules and false knowledge from superstition, turn over oppositionists to occupiers, and react to every strip of chaff thrown their way. They mean well, wanting to make others happy with their helpfulness, a useful idiocy unaware of the corroding destruction they invite inside the community gates. A few determined men can accomplish more than legions of screaming effetes. It was a victorious oath. Promises
Welcome to paradise! You'll get your gold harp, cloud wings, 72 virgins, and equality. If you're ugly, you'll be made beautiful. If you're stupid, now you'll be smart. Because you subjugated yourself before big daddy like a good puppy, everything will be given to you while your superiors are punished for eternity by the judicial whims of the invisible sky monkey. Most governments control narcotics, but narcotizing religions are left alone to set the tone for secular society. We'll live forever, so there's no impetus to do anything, and the few things attempted are too much of a bother to do right. Our time is infinite, which means it's free and anyone can take some. We're in no rush to arrive anywhere or accomplish goals, so obstructions, lack of attention, lack of consciousness, and unnecessary waiting are considered normal. Our time on earth is completely unimportant after considering we'll soon be floating in the sky. We're just waiting out the promise, hesitant, drugged up, spaced out, well entertained, and self-imprisoned in a mockery of life.
Archetypical
That this friend has never had a good relationship goes unconsidered, and the costs of her dramatic solutions are not seen until later, too late, her venom performing as designed before what she is becomes apparent. Just as you must size up and engage a girl's friends when you first meet her, so too in a relationship must you survey and inspect the full set of her friends and their qualities. One of them might be a broken soul unable to resist spreading her vicious malice. Limits of Empathy
Just as you cannot demand someone be other than they are, everything else that accompanies what grows in their soil must be accepted. Having accepted those necessary relations, the voyage of their destiny is also affirmed, and everything that happens to them is appropriately earned and unavoidable. Not only do they pass through all this, they must pass through it. How then can you be troubled by the unfolding of obligatory events and circumstances? Into the Dirt No amount of pleading or reason can restore what is lost. Time had come and what stood for a while could not hold. Destruction was forestalled for a moment, and then prevailed. If something doesn't make sense, information is incomplete, but acquiring information changes no facts, and the situation is probably more about perception, projection, and frailty than facts anyway. We affirm whatever it was that happened and laugh at attempts to find a reasonable reason or conclusive narrative. There is not even a ledger entry in the books. What could you measure the loss against? The opposite of loss? "Certainly not fragile potential," said the insurance adjuster while surveying the collapse, a mess of rubble that no longer mattered. Judgments often have nothing to do with truth. They are just decisions.
Playing Out The Hand
Even if you realistically assess your own abilities, your scope of possibility is mostly limited to solitary efforts, and this quickly leads to Schopenhauerism. If you contain several lifetimes of creativity and curiosity, you might eventually come to see interactions with others as a net loss and withdraw rather than assume an unneeded burden. This retreat from society could also be interpreted as good taste asserting itself: we want others who understand and have something within them, a fertile society that is creative and curious from health, still alive and thirsting from desire. Perhaps the cost of spending time on the wrong path yields benefit by convincing one away from all idle conversations about weather, television, sports, gossip, and drug consumption. We can prepare for any worst case outcome, but none of those are really bad or undeserved, and deep preparations usually do more to knock one off course by inducing delay and hesitation than to prepare for an actual situation. We need only align ourselves for a normal, directed outcome and adjust as the situation necessitates. Knowing human nature for madness, and that most moderns are ADHD and bipolar, barely kept functional by SSRIs and stimulant cocktails, you can expect that whatever happens with others will tend to be unstable and short lived before their inner crazy prevails and tears it apart. Because we lack a means to communicate well enough to persuade people toward good outcomes and away from bad outcomes, neither can we be bothered by bad decisions or bad lives that could easily have turned out otherwise. As enlightened detached liberals, LIVE AND LET LIVE! Remain undistracted by drama and misfortune, focused on playing out your hand to the fullest, unconcerned with chattered opinions. How could you ever value the judgment of aimless people whose lives are distended catastrophes with no frame of reference to measure your attempts? We know well the cards we hold and what we could do with them. We need not reveal them, but might do best to quietly walk away from the square and go about our explorations as we must, unbothered by all the distractions that don't matter, swimming away from the drowning to avoid being pulled under as they flail about. It is not nearly as lonely as it sounds, for in the most remote places we still find companions who have undertaken the same search and walk the same paths we once thought were ours alone. Ideologized Guinea Pigs
Absurdity knows no bounds. Most beliefs are far from what they purport, and any belief demanding tolerance and open-mindedness hypocritically shows intolerance of any other beliefs that critically analyze it and shine a light on its actual effects. Where dogma, money, laws, indoctrination (typically as education), and manipulative social norms are necessary to propagate an ideology, you can be sure it conflicts with reality and damages society when people are coerced to obey it, feign acceptance in public, and treat its baseless claims as enlightened and holy. Because an ideology fails to provide advantage when voluntarily chosen, substantial effort must be used to force compliance, including suppressing serious criticism and evaluation. It is offered as a fanatical promise, lacking all historical basis for claims of benefit, and marketed like a vague beautiful dream. Its proven rivals are slandered and mocked with playground teasing, unconsidered prejudices, and statements of faith, never substantial or reasoned arguments. Fast talking salesman exhort immediate action to garner the great promises of this new ideology, without consideration of what it will displace and disrupt, as if its proponents have somehow stumbled upon a wonderful new way to artificially and at once replace and eclipse natural relations developed gradually and simultaneously in fragile interconnected cooperation over thousands of years. We must be more than educators talking about abstract concepts. We must be physicians concerned with the practical health of the whole, and philosophers explaining how each part works in small, subtle, and necessary ways to constitute the entirety. A stray ideology at odds with culture, or worse -- reality -- will always be at best dead weight to carry around, and more often an illness that must be quelled and excised. Throwing away ideas and approaches known to work and replacing them with a lunatic's speculations should not be expected to turn out well, despite toothy smiles and revolutionary hopes. Is the instability and rapid decline of the last 100 years a result of refined traditions improving and strengthening, or is it traceable to unhindered social experiments presumptuously let loose upon us? And if we have not resisted sufficiently to prevent them, yet are aware of the methods and results of these ideologies -- and able to inspect and articulate them clearly -- then we surely remain armed well enough to stand against any attempt to foist delusional experiments and their consequences upon us. Awkward Existentialism We could have warmth and unity, but cautiously abstain. The world is interesting; society tedious and of little value in its current form. Even the hopeless ones can inspire in ways they will never see or imagine. It is sad when one has to say "I understand", but what is understood is that someone can't make a sensible decision and their fate will come accordingly.
Japanese Spaceship
I recently borrowed an ES350 and enjoyed it as an odd but agreeable creation. The engine is just a V6 but revs high and upshifts smoothly when pushed, coyly playing the coquette and begging to be pushed so it can delight with sweet sounds. True to Lexus design philosophy, you don't feel the acceleration or shifts and it doesn't break a sweat at even twice the speed limit.
Quickly getting up to highway speeds
Verdict: It's not an especially pretty car or a fun car, basically functional like a better version of a Camry. It's a great car for your girlfriend or wife that will get you around without lament if you have to borrow it. And it's a terrific alternative to a minivan until you have a basketball team of kids and decide that life is about driving a small bus around. Corporations are People
This is where they would like you to politely nod and turn away, because to keep looking at how corporations exist and function would soon reveal that they are a filter that pays workers only a fraction of the value created, retaining the rest as their profit. Most people approach life from a position of fear and docility, so accept jobs and are easily manipulated with promises of safety even when that safety is undesirable in the long term because it cheats them of great opportunities (it is also undesirable in the short term for the same reasons, though less obvious to those who avoid looking behind the curtain). Obedience begets withdrawal and ignorance, and soon reluctant bourgeois cheerleading sprouts into full bloom. Jobs are an terribly inefficient vehicle for income. Corporations are most of all a bloated middle man offering a sucker's game, and don't we already have enough bloated do nothings among us? Equality or Excellence?
"Honor", "Accountability", "Integrity" -- these and related ideals held fast in civilization until hippie demons began gnawing on their meaning, questioning their purpose, mocking their advocates, undermining their world view, and with that victorious assault leaving the words archaic and laughable. The concepts they beheld had to die similarly, no longer tenable in a world too progressive to be restrained by reason or outcome. And then to lay a defeated word stripped bare on the campus grounds to be walked over without an appropriate epitaph for reference of what it once meant, maintained, and inspired? Students left to modern texts will have no means to make sense of these ideas. That is failed instruction worse than literal lectures or sermons. No expert would make such a mistake, nor allow others to entertain that kind of failed architectural design, unless it was specifically to demonstrate the undertaking of bad decisions. Now that the error has been taken and affirmed, one cannot easily correct its flawed design and then explain to insect media the decision for the removal of honor, accountability, and integrity from the campus grounds -- in any case, symbolic words now emptied of their meaning and strength, ruins from an older generation that suicided and bequeathed no inheritance after an exhaustive frittered life of indulgent vainglory. Dramatic Form I was in crisis. The situation with the love of my life lingered in the balance, soon to surely solidify or collapse, either outcome better than lukewarm idling. I knew I must immediately write her to win my deserved destiny, but there was too much to say -- I was searching for a concise form.
So I stole the form of his symphonic movements and my solemn composition fell into place.
1. Introduction: unassuming appearance, establishing themes, ranges, footing She eventually mumbled some kind of detached, incapacitated, lackluster response. We never spoke again. Hierarchy of Love Tolerance of confusion makes language bloated and lazy, and soon words no longer communicate. To talk about love, we must first discard the word "love" -- it has come to mean everything and nothing, spanning from the trivial to the precious and subtle.
The safety of a material life is nearly effortless: here's a house, food, and washing machine. That's enough to win a bride, but it's not love or even a relationship. Some still believe enough in what could be to aspire for something greater, not necessarily Tristan und Isolde, but for a lasting match of unity with another in nature's eternal dance. The narrative is waiting to write itself upon the ready: society is a sleeping irresolute housecat, exhausted, sickly, dull, and overfed with bon bons and cheetos. But the world remains rich, wild, inviting, desirous, and fulfilling. "Do you taste this? If so, let's go!" -- these are more appropriate wedding vows than rescindable promises of fidelity. We are not mere travelers who arrive in great places, flirt on the edges, check them off a bucket list, but never get inside. We are explorers who seek and find uncharted secrets, discovering what most locals have never seen, sensing every breathe and pulse, feeling quiet rhythms and undercurrents, the universal in its regional variants, and exceptions that also prosper in its soil. Do you too desire to see and live the total truth of what is here? To dare for what is possible instead of the easy and customary? To taste the entirety of their flavors? Some are unusual surely, but honest, and part of a larger mosaic. Material love is pedestrian and unsatisfying once you have experienced beyond it, and there is no way back to docility and drunken whoring. You can only find companionship with others who have gotten this far and are uncompromising in their insistence to live fully. Life Evaders It's not that drinking is bad for your health or a waste of money, but that it ensures a low quality of life. Substance centered living is most easily refuted as an unsustainable evasion, an appropriately modern denial of life. Sure, you can close your eyes for a while, and it's fun to care about nothing, smoke with irreverent hipsters and losers, and have free sex with other undirected suicides, but after your stretch of drunken whoring, the damage remains. You too can look like a sloppy mid-40s soccer mom when you're 25, natural beauty needlessly worn away, a now lusterless face marking great self-inflicted suffering, and nothing to show for the wreckage you've wrought.
City people like bars because intoxication and easy sex are the joys of city living, especially when there is nothing to do at night and no one interesting to spend time with. One can drink for hours, trying to bury realization of where everything went wrong, sowing fertile seeds of sorrow. The bad bar music is always too loud for conversation, and after a few good natured attempts of screaming and being screamed at, all that's left to do is drink up and go home with strangers. You've come a long way baby.
Pale Spectre You cannot be defeated when thought, belief, and action are fully unified. Wet blankets ignite, ice queens melt, and rigid logical defensiveness gives way to emotional spilling, spontaneous comedy, non-interpretive dance, and impassioned romantic drama. I have the warmest blood and bring fire. If you resist, I will enchant. Stonewall and I will use you as a stage to show others your ridiculousness, make fun of your quicksand traps, and sabotage your lemons. What poor manners to drape yourself with barbed wire and thorns! You cannot poison me with mumbled slander against life, nor succeed in any effort to justify self-destruction or resigned inevitability in my presence. We are menacing terrorists of possibility and holy warriors of joy. We fight with total conviction and our desire is unstoppable. Nothing was Changed
"Although the shrewdest judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchery, this guilt nevertheless did not exist. So it is with all guilt."Night is calm, solitary, and resting. Day illuminates migratory movement, and we mistake the visible for purposeful action when it is usually begrudged compulsory routine. We are always trying to seduce with convincing explanations to wrap what is before us into a simply story, and it is usually grand fraud. All things begin with nothing. We attempt gradual incremental growth, whether we are creating art, love, a community, or picnic table. Then it stands, formed as it is, subject to expansion, refinement, decay, obsolescence, and ultimately desacralizing stories invented with proclamations of innocence, victimhood, blame, and other passive-aggressive hiding places. With spotless white gloves and a straight face, we end up at the end: our desire and effort has failed. Now what? In reality, nothing has changed; everything remains as it always was, only we wish to dispose of it so have constructed a clever court case to explain things away. We tell the distracted judge and jury our winding narrative, contrasting the innocuous conditions of the past with the wicked spotlighted event, followed by the promise of a harmless and redeemed future, bathed in our newfound wisdom and desire to teach and protect others from such an unexpected consequence.
The explanation roughly makes sense. "This was thus" -- and other sleights
of hand, rearranging reality into a puppet show and soap opera, the same
conditions as today but deliberately distorted, painted over, and fogged
up into a dramatic justifying fiction.
 If we are to have art, love, community, or a picnic table, we need to act on behalf of an idea we believe in, desiring its existence and continuity. When the will is gone, usually from self-defeat, we scramble to build alibis and cover stories. Our rationality is pretense. In reality we court witchcraft and accuse others of being witches, attributing false guilt, phony motives, and fake history so we can claim we won by burning innocents. What essentiality was changed when we gave up on our art, love, community, or picnic table? Nothing.
Wealth Our wealth is everything we don't need. We are self-sufficient and unreachable as a result of our supreme simplicity, not spite or hostility. We are the least needy with the lowest expectations of others. We expect you to trip over your own feet, and that's probably fine -- we're not going to laugh at your situation or point it out to others. Realistically assessing expectations, what are you likely to offer that is positive? What are you going to bring but burden, entanglement, obligation, and pointless work just to get back to where we already are? We're doing okay here; you could be alright too. Life is short; we still burn with desire and curiosity, making magic where we are. If we see you're just going to squander our time and snuff our flame, why would we give you the chance? Diet Book I've published the ultimate diet and exercise plan after receiving a very lucrative book advance. Instead of promoting complex and speculative systems, my plan is historically based and supported by thousands of years of verifiable success. May your health be exceptionally unmodern! Hot Fantasy
fantasy - the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need Those aren't even intended as ideas or relations to reality, but as hiding places of slothenly escape to flatter others as foreplay for recruiting. Clumsy open-minded suitors are willing to lie and obscure to create your perfect fantasy -- a torrid, sexy unreality sweeping you off your feet and into their flaccid arms, where you are expected to use the same fraudulent methods to coerce others to join the crusade. With good intentions of course. It's fine to lie and promote make believe worlds for the sake of fine feelings, right? And all of us here are liberal enough to tolerate dysfunction, destruction, and decline for a greater good. It we wanted truth, we wouldn't have created speech codes propped up by implied obedience, unresisting and unquestioning of all nonsense, complete with shameful apology rituals expected of anyone who thinks for themselves outside of the bland conformity of the blissfully numb. Believe whatever you want. At some point reality will violently intrude and the illusion of respect for your crazy dogma will be unsalvageable. They Leaned Too Long to Stand a Fall If you live at the shoreline, you see the tide rolls gently, punctuated by occasional storms. Every few years a hurricane rolls through and damages infrastructure, people rebuild, and then life goes on. Who but a dramatic maniac rejects the regular course of things and instead proposes that an irregular snapshot of a bad moment justifies a parade of hysterics? When we abolished considering consequences because they were judgmental for suggesting what was likely to happen, we relinquished the future to blind experiments. This too yields answers eventually, though disembodied, and since we aren't going to be thinking, we can adapt to this approach while we live under the progressivism of the entertainment era. Despite being forbidden thought and judgment, we still don't need any moral or legal system to measure. It remains impossible to not consider the most likely and plausible outcome. Will a choice or action make you stronger or weaker? Will it lead to a better or worse outcome? You are free to watch TV, play video games, take drugs, and eat junk food. Either those will harm you or make you more successful. If you can't guess which, double or triple your dosage to yield clearer and faster results. If you hesitate, is it because some instinct in you still clings to the possibility of having a good life that you imperil by bad choices? And if you rush to bury yourself in consumption and escape, what is at the root of your destructive desires and lack of reverence for life? Everyone Else Knows You're Crazy In youthful idealism, we believe what people profess as their goals, purposes, reasons, and principles. Later we discover it's robots all the way down, all trained to hide behind politician masks and strategic phrases appealing to all constituencies. Even academics, the most literal, rigid, insensitive, and maladroit machinery, have become aware of what Schopenhauer wrote over 150 years ago, long before narcissistic culture made it obvious. When one sees the number and variety of institutions which exist for the purposes of education, and the vast throng of scholars and masters, one might fancy the human race to be very much concerned about truth and wisdom. But here, too, appearances are deceptive. The masters teach in order to gain money, and strive, not after wisdom, but the outward show and reputation of it; and the scholars learn, not for the sake of knowledge and insight, but to be able to chatter and give themselves airs. Nietzsche sketched numerous attacks on the pretense and arbitrary nature of what men call truth. I. Truth as a cloak for quite different impulses and drives. Uneducated academics unfamiliar with the thoughts of better minds end up clumsily rediscovering partial truths that previous generations wrote about at length, still in print, but no longer fashionable. Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Linear mathematical relations are useful in describing fictional universes, but rarely match real world details. Nature delivers quality by taking pains for long routes of extended testing, skipping none of the steps that oversimplified scientific models bypass for efficiency. Just as nearly all mutations result in death, thus ceasing their propagation, perhaps beliefs and ideologies utilize a similar mechanism. The essential glue is that everyone quickly detects a crazy and irrational person, and they kindly announce themselves just as nature does with Down's syndrome and many other traits. Often the crazy person is unaware of how they are perceived, just as people will confess undeniably indicting statements without cognizance of what they imply. Imagine political and ideological discourse as a giant dartboard with every possible belief. Actors throw darts and become advocates of whatever they hit. Listen to their clever justifications, how this idea is separate from all others, how it alone is correct, how all alternatives are deficient. Smile and encourage them to keep talking -- they spill unaware of their madness in bloom. Nature's system works expensively by showing us many examples, often tragic and beset by failure and utter ruin, brutal outcomes sometimes seemingly unnecessary. From the general human inability to make abstract assessments, these blatantly horrible, unforgettable examples of destruction serve the purpose of a vast warning system by demonstrating fatal consequences and what are connected to them. Ghetto Insight Stripped away of pretenses, bareness reminds us to remain vigorous and vigilant. Tomorrow is not assured. Rest on no laurels; atheistic toward laurels, dismissive of rest, even as the bourgeois flatter temporarily good outcomes. What have you done for me lately? For a fine yesterday tells us nothing about tomorrow. Soulless bankers robotically mumble "past performance does not predict future performance" without understanding its implications.
Ever in flux, not a placid suburb where nothing happens but solitary addictions and consumptive entertainment. Read the situation, not the words and other hiding facades. Street smart and able to fend for oneself because in the time it takes police to arrive, the outcome is long over. Your girls might forget you're the greatest thing they've ever had. Love them recklessly, fervently, and assume they are likely to flake and botch. Life goes on; worry not when the disposable dispose of themselves, but appreciate nature's curious and consistent character and smile at its comedy. The urgency remains though those outside the ghetto deny it and look away, seduced by cheap comforts to sleep through subtleties, and often the whole. But we face life raw, with honor, and do what must be done. Nature's Imperative Nature trumps morality. Women are too practical to favor abstract philosophical systems over the tangible. Consider carefully her motives:
She plays hardball, and does it best by pretending to be soft.
"The men who fathered my children are much better looking, more masculine, and healthier than my hubby. If you were to ever meet my husband, you would agree that he is not the ideal man to mate with, but he would be a good dad." Everyone wishes they were above average, i.e. they can take pride in having an excellent lineage and thus possess a natural right to flourish as an exemplar of humanity's ascension. As such, they want to be one not to be cheated on, nor stolen from, nor cuckolded. It is easy to see how one could want this for themselves to affirm their genetic worthiness for reproduction, but to say this should be the case for all is madness. Not everyone can be of above-average lineage, and that which is low does not wish to remain low, but rather aspires to claw itself upward by whatever means necessary. Only the base and low insist that all scales and yardsticks be abolished so the inferior can be treated as equal to the exceptional. That which has timeless value needs no special rights or social propaganda to protect them from nature's preference for the superior. No Outlet The planet is teeming with smart people. Intelligence is raw potential rendered negligible when culture is democratized to average low tastes instead of greatness. If idiotic non-efforts become currency then we'll get more that matches those standards, and we'll adopt them as normal. But, go Taliban and it all changes. No TV, no Hollywood movies, no disposable pop music, no video games -- in short: no trivial outlets with which to throw your life away. Suddenly life is restored before you, virile and visceral, undeniably inescapable and everpresent. Easy answers and hiding places cheat you of life. Coexist Civilization is always burdened with surplus proles. Even if well educated, they tend to be generally stupid from indoctrination and culturelessness, getting in the way of thinkers, artists, and organizers. How best to deal with one more obstacle holding back humanity? It is unclear whether better to drive out the pollution or to extract profit from them while incapacitating them with a lifestyle of consumption and entertainment. Considering this question, it is possible that Lady Gaga is not merely a laughable creator of trite pop garbage, but rather is a diabolical genius fully aware of the snares she sets to catch diverse swine.
She vaguely promises a better future for the lost with no action or specific plan, a magical offering of wish fulfillment, while distracting them with fantastic but meaningless spectacles. She promotes her $100 ticket concerts as important and life altering historical events, flattering those who selflessly fill her coffers in the revolution of misfits she professes to lead, urging all to a steadfast rebellion by purchasing her products. On track to earn $100,000,000 this year, she tells people what they want to hear, reaching a stadium of lost souls at a time. But why fix a complex problem when you can let it choke itself while getting rich at its expense? She is untroubled that millions of surplus prole children are wasting their youth in narcissism. It's a feast of pure predation. And why shouldn't you pounce on what is so submissively offering itself up to be taken? Big Dream Before the Big Void They call life a big dream, an extended episode of exploratory consciousness before endless nothingness. It's real in that we live it and can make almost any possibility come true, but then we die and it's all gone forever, like the dreams we have each night that tempt us with great events and enactments that fade away by morning, unrealized. Life is longer than dreams and shares a reality with other people who remain here at least temporarily, though our lives are of the same ephemerality. This realization about the preciousness of our short but open existence should color all of our actions and hopes. There is no recompense for holding back or chance to do better next time, but instead we should always make the most of each moment and take it as far as our imagination and vitality can carry it, making the universe larger, more beautiful, and more profound at every instance. It's a dream, but it's real. Dream big and enrich the world while you can. Embracing Dysfunction To best enjoy dating in the modern landscape, ignore all of the obvious obstacles preventing positive outcomes and take no action, even easy ones, to make things right. Rather, tolerate everything leading to dead ends and mutually assured destruction, pretending they don't exist. By living only in the moment, you can enjoy what is there today without any expectations or preparations for the future. It's modern society asserting itself: meant to be disposable, deliberately made not to last. If you are accustomed to responsibility, this will be difficult at first. In the real world, you can't complete a project with ambiguous goals and unclear actions, nor run a division without strategic intent. In the dating world, a purposeful objective is hampering. Most of us can improvise well for any situation, but here it is the only method in play. You are entering a different world with different expectations. It's a dystopia like diversity in that you should expect nothing to succeed, but if it does, it happens despite all efforts against it, whether by sheer random luck or an underlying strength that outlasts the forces working against good results. And it is a totalitarian dictatorship that is so open minded that no alternatives, rational assessments, or corrections are acceptable. Overlook and say nothing critical to an attractive, smart, well educated girl who is doing herself harm with repeated bad choices. Every choice is equal and to be tolerated. Who could ever judge? Despite everything in her favor to have a good life, she is wrecking herself and won't wake up until she has burnt herself out and come to a rest, now sparkless. That's the end game, and many can see where small things create the future years in advance, but don't let it bother you. It's possible that she'll see it too and decide not to go the way of the rest. Just not likely. Spend Yourself Forward Soon you will die and become nothing. At that moment, all of your potential will have expired. Everything you could have done will never be. But that is only the final death, an anti-climatic and appropriate one. You will first live many small deaths from many choices and potentials rejected and unrealized. You did not win them, so they passed away stillborn, never brought into existence. In this space between temporary being and eternal nothingness, raw brutality reigns. One must perform the necessary while it remains possible, or resign it to lasting obliteration. Turned back on ourselves, it is endless triage; given the prospect of the looming void, we can always find a way to give more of ourselves to anything that matters and is worthy of the effort.
Every opportunity will soon be taken away and eventually we will
extinguish our last tomorrow. But that comes later. For now, and the rest
of your consciousness, you are active in the universe and can shape it to
your abilities. For every setback, we neither despair nor yield ground,
but remain courageously on our path.
Life is one long battle; we have to fight at every step; and Voltaire very rightly says that if we succeed, it is at the point of the sword, and that we die with the weapon in our hand--on ne réussit dans ce monde qua la pointe de l'épee, et on meurt les armes la main. It is a cowardly soul that shrinks or grows faint and despondent as soon as the storm begins to gather, or even when the first cloud appears on the horizon. Our motto should be No Surrender; and far from yielding to the ills of life, let us take fresh courage from misfortune. In time we will surely be snuffed, but today we fiercely stand to fight, love, and venture with relentless passion, fully aware that there will never come later any second chances to make things right. Mismeasured
"Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually.
No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or
less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world."
After the Blossom: the Wilt The sun caressed her carefree 18 year old face. Her clear eyes sparkled playfully, bright against milky skin needing no make up. With a smile full of joy, she had effortlessly peaked. She would never again be so beautiful. In traditional societies, a man would take a young bride and go off to make something of himself in the world, nourishing the needs of their united life inspired by the instincts a young bride provokes. It's a simple formula of nature, without which men have little interest performing superfluous work, but for the sake of a beautiful woman any amount of effort is easy and seems worthwhile. This chemistry goes awry when nature's dance is subverted. No longer in tune with seasons, instincts, and purpose, women spend their youth and freshness studying, sitting in cubicles, and making a succession of errors in judgment that can never be undone. Men, often finding no young brides interested in making a life, go their way alone into the world or drop out for another decade of adolescence, both rational choices in a barren environment. Modern man and woman both miss out on what they could have created together. He becomes hardened and indifferent from austerity, and she has spent her innocence, charm, and beauty to yield lead rather than gold. It seemed there might be no consequences for defying nature's eternal rhythm, but the cost was the brutality of mutual loss. Passive Aggression If you take someone's possessions or money, they can always get more. But to really hurt them, take up their irreplaceable time. Such an attack imposes permanent injury from which they can never recover.
Block your enemy from enjoying what is good in life. Frustrate every attempt at a goal and impose arbitrary obstacles so they give up. Encourage quitting and offer surrogates and simulation to draw them away from reality. But most of all, waste their time and take joy in knowing you have stolen potential from them and imposed hardships that will last forever. Little Deaths They are easy to forget when no longer in your present or future, but when you explain your life's discoveries to others and recall past adventures, you at once remember how these people were an inseparable part of your days and hopes, and then it seems strange they are gone. The moment could not have lived without them and we remember it kindly. Cares scatter in the wind and desiccate in the sun. Like a senseless car accident or overdose, their absence feels stupid. No last words, no revisable clarification, no confessions of undying desire, no pleading with the universe to bring back what is long gone. Yeah, we killed it pretty good baby. Poisoned Thoughts There is a school of thought in executive management that any employee ever heard to utter "it's not my job" should be immediately fired. If a company is accepted as a structure for effectively achieving goals, dysfunction and resistance are internal threats, and should be removed like diseased limbs. Just like deciding one is not responsible to fellow man, especially when they are on demonstrative crusades of self-destruction, renouncing one's position in life is a destabilizing sickness. One rejects the past, then the future, and is left floundering in the present with neither history nor purpose. You could be anything, except for everything you are not and could never be. Until that realization, the illness manifests in extreme vacillations, evasions, paranoia, doubt, and wildly complex explanations consisting almost exclusively of imaginary connections and premises. Conversation as Test Initially it's about determining limits. They will bring prejudices, dogma, cliches, and taboos marking where honest conversation is halted and truth cannot be discussed. Rarely can you change someone's limits or force them to acknowledge the world; they must do that for themselves without external pressure. Nor is it about intelligence or life experience. You can have a good conversation with a six year old because they are honest players and will go where curiosity leads, faking nothing, but talking plainly about how things happen, innocent of any political identity to defend. Something Good To Die For People who live for a purpose will also happily die for a purpose. This threatens systems premised on compliance; accordingly they respond by poisoning desire, vision, passion, and will -- sniping the purposeful before they infilitrate sleeping societies and stir them alive. Spill Yourself While you Can Osama was like Akira Kurosawa in that he did not look away from what was in front of him, but took it in and penetrated to its essence. As a Yemeni-Syrian in Saudi Arabia, he was the perfect outsider to notice grand fraud as strange rather than accepting it as normal or defending it for personal gain. The leaders do not lead, nor do they sustain the people's traditions or values. As hypocrites and swindlers, they suck away the nation's wealth, stealing from the future. Many get this far in diagnosing problems. Few devise solutions or participate in restoring healthier states. Osama had a vision and saw it exceeded him, making him only an expendable messenger of a greater idea. Enemies far away need not be confronted on their terms when they could be more brutally stretched thin until they had exhausted themselves. His notion of time was longer, unmodern, with an extended attention span. No matter needed to be settled in days or months when years remained plenty. The force of foreign armies was considered firm by others, but he saw them as flimsy, easily subverted and remade. Rulers of nations could be toppled and replaced to reshape coming centuries, in accordance with the history of the region. When you think you see a way and it draws you toward it, it's worth spending your life on it, especially if the alternatives (cocaine, video games, loose women, etc) easily bore you. You know it's high stakes, not poker, but a life contest of visions and wills. You might as well do something interesting that you believe in instead of quietly tolerating errors, harm, sickness, and purposelessness. In doing so, you also fight for a better form of life, not just for yourself, but restoring the natural order in preparation for what will come after you are gone. Other People Nassim Taleb writes: Other people's rituals look ridiculous. Cultural diversity gives us more "other people" we can't understand, with more rituals we can't understand, with different worldviews at odds with ours. How else could we get along well but by mutually ignoring each other and maintaining a safe distance? We might enjoy their food and colorful clothing, but until they renounce their culture, heritage, and beliefs to parrot ours, or we both renounce everything to adopt consumer culture, our measurements will remain totally divergent and our efforts oppositional. Unless you are part of a modern consumer culture, which is only a fabrication of replacing culture with disposible products and entertainment, your culture is vast, rich, inspiring, and full of curious works from dozens of your country's best geniuses. Why would anyone but a depressed person give that up to spend a weekend buying junk from China, moving cartoon characters around on a screen, or watching grown men throw a ball? Our people, whoever they are, are incredible. By becoming familiar with their greatest works, our spirits remain alive in our shared exploration of life and aligned again with our eternal chain. Missed Opportunity What if we still had natural religion, i.e. religion based on the things we see and experience in the world around us instead of supernatural religions promising us incredible invisible worlds elsewhere that we'll experience by dying? What if religion still told us about real life and was honest about humanity instead of being a drug to comfort, pacify, and paralyze the broken to stop their wave of destruction? Religion could inspire greatness and innocence, but now is used to restrain human potential and excellence under the guise of salvation.
I say to the world: your harmony is mine. Whatever time you choose is the right time, neither too late nor too early. I say to Nature: Whatever the change of your seasons brings me is like the fall of ripe fruit. All things are born from you, exist in you and return to you. Imagine natural religion as serving a community's rebalancing. Sermons would be interesting, relevant, and about the natural world. They would be thoughtful but plainly within someone's experience and understanding. Whatever errors and progress one was subjected to would be remedied by reestablishing the connection to life that had been temporarily severed. In these examples, Schopenhauer tells us a parable about human life, and though not inspiring bliss, it is honest and does not require supernatural characters and faith in unknown worlds. Aurelius follows with advice about how to properly understand death and cease fear of it.
Schopenhauer:
Aurelius: Every attempt to avoid and cheat nature is assured certain failure. Religion eventually topples from too much unreality just like every other ideology. Noise and Fumes War is a violation of boundaries, asserting one's power to encroach and impose damage upon others for full effect. Terrorism is gentler, seeking only to create disruption, feelings of powerlessness, and submission to chaos. We jihad in the suburbs to undermine the possibility of peace and quiet. Loud motors call out for martyrs at all hours in the streets, skies, and yards; benzene is the holiest of carcinogens; Mohammed runs the local filling station.
The approach is perfectly modern: there are no corpses to show on television for outrage, only psychological scars and progressive tolerance for disruption, dysfunction, and collective sabotage. We feel a surge of power when making a mess aggressively forced on others, while at the same time seeking advantage by exhorting them to be impotent and not pollute back at us. This is grand war by subterfuge, a contest of impositions. You might be just a cubicle dwelling cog at the office, but when you run your motor or throw trash in your neighbor's yard, no one can ignore your wrath. With Love Like an indulgent rock star, I've been spending a few hours a day in the studio recently, recording frameworks and playing with ideas, but deliberately keeping everything a track or two from completion. As long as a song remains open, it is also an expansive and explorative relationship. When the recording is done, it's inevitably a breakup -- nothing more will ever develop and from all the great chemistry, only memories and sonic pictures will remain. Once overfull with possibility, then we moved on. Just as with summer romance, I pick out the best ones, love them with abandon, taking them recklessly far, not only unconcerned that the end will come, but fully appreciative there is little time left until our delightful moments together will be no more. As with a good song, she'll remember me forever, and every time I listen to the recording, I'll recall the details of how passion burned that season. More Light The state of humanity after 50 years of hippie progress is so bleak, causing most to passively tolerate mass irresponsibility and dissolution as we watch collective decline and contribute to it through inaction and superficial soap opera drama. And yet, as soon as we meet someone who seems to be special, who is not an obvious victim of this wreckage, our outlook becomes quite different. At once, we have a companion and everything is again possible, making aspiration seem like more than a solitary personal indulgence in the dark. Was this all just a type of depression, where even we cheerful spirits who reject mourning and ignore sadness are susceptible to a larger sickness? Even when our instinct is stage five acceptance, answering the doctor with "okay" when he tells us we have terminal brain cancer -- still we make good lives for ourselves and hedge for many possible futures, but expect nothing short of disaster everywhere else, because that is what we see from moderns. Whether what we see is truth or illusion, we should remain as lighthouses visible to those who travel in search of better destinations. All who know their value mask it in public, yet seek others worthy of it. This too is nature's design - let those who are not broken find us and come play for a while. Outsourcing Effort In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein tried to reduce all statements to logical assertions, dismissing anything incapable of forming itself appropriately. But the world does not consist of philosophers (perhaps a dozen exist at a time) and most people lack language to articulate ideas, presuming they first have thoughts to express. The ease of making utterances makes communication more difficult and almost completely devalues it. 100 years ago, writing and publishing a book took substantial effort, dissuading dabblers. Now anyone can self-publish, no longer ensuring a basic level of effort or quality. Consequently, the quality of literature has diminished and with rare exceptions there is little point paying attention to books published by moderns. When people wrote letters there was effort and time invested because there was a purpose and something worth communicating. With the trivial effort now needed to send email, a text message, or tweet, we correspondingly have trivial, effortless communication lacking substance. Little can be said in a tweet or text message, and email is mostly an effort to outsource work to others, where letters contained ideas and discussions about one's actual efforts. Progress is regressive and reduces our quality of life. Desert Wandering It's open, bare, wild, brutal, silent, and enticing. I've been wandering and enjoying the west for the last few months. We should taste a little of everything.
Satisfaction You don't even notice it at first: a perfect day, then several in a row; eventually a few weeks and even sustained months of near perfection. Everything comes easily and playfully until the notion of difficulty seems to be just someone's catch-all excuse for dysfunction. Let others who lack inner satisfaction argue and angrily oppose one another while we enjoy Californian warmth and indifference. This contentment becomes utter clarity that brings all possibility to the forefront. Once we see what is possible, we need only entice and seduce the best to emerge, a sort of wrangling with nature to yield the bounty she is capable of providing. All pieces fit together from beginning to end and even the improbable is attainable with the right beckoning. This sustained feeling of magic sacralizes nature. From this clarity comes quiet because speaking about plans seems at best redundant. Of course you have to do something and what must be done is obvious, so why discuss the obvious and certain when you could instead talk about something interesting? What you need to do lacks not communication but action, specifically rearranging whatever is not aligned with nature in order to free what is otherwise blocked. I am still able to have fun conversations with adventurers, lovers, and dear friends, but with everyone else it always goes back to the fruitless core of why they are not making their destiny and instead struggle against reality. They are usually too socialized, justifying, and reactive to calmly know themselves and see what can be. |
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Even when celebrities are paid millions of dollars to entertain bored
spectators, they are little more than well paid jesters, amusing a crowd
of peasants instead of a single ruler. Whether they throw a ball around,
sing, or act, they do so on a fixed schedule, often determined years in
advance. They are not free to do as they wish, but must perform as their
masters have decided, and must do so with sufficiently believable
enthusiasm as to portray that they find repetition of the same act to
be of incredible interest.
It's easy to be a terrorist and harm others by violating trust and
blowing things up. To prevent these attacks is almost worthless;
an expensive burden diverting funds from productive purposes.
Even if you could have certainty, it would not be desirable.
What comes tomorrow was not here today. What stands today will soon
be gone. Anything memorized is a map to old terrain.
For centuries we had intellectual and cultural standards. A gifted person
wishing to participate in the community needed to reach these standards,
or else remain silent, under pain of appearing ridiculous, lazy, and
obnoxious. Trivial efforts were not even debated because they were
considered transparently lacking in substance.
Corporations get all of their money from consumers. We give power to
McDonalds, Coca Cola, Bieber, Britney, and everything else we sustain
by throwing our money at it. In turn, these shoddy products become our
standards and replace organic culture with a baseline of the lowest common
denominator, never aiming for quality or good outcomes. We are modern,
and we create modern societies without desire for what was previously
known to be rewarding, robust, and reliable.
You can introduce a child to language in two ways. First, you can come
down to the child's level and babble imitative sounds at them with
goo-goos and ga-gas. This nonsensical communication fills the room
with noise about nothing and leads nowhere. You might as well be
broadcasting the day's news.
One day you'll be rewarded with heaven. You earned it because you are
so special and wonderful, a self-caused unique shining star, unmistakable
among billions of deficient surplus people of no discernible value.
The biggest threat to lasting mutual satisfaction is the envy of her
bitter friend sniping from afar. She announces herself loud, sarcastic
and ugly, her joy comes from exercising an instinct for destruction,
with subtle and overt suggestions aimed in your young love's ear to wreck
relationships under the banner of anarchic freedom.
It's no one's fault when they are involved in a brutal event. Even creating
the conditions making it probable or inevitable are blameless manifestations
of that person's essence.
The cards are dealt and you are both armed and boxed in accordingly. But
the limits of the situation are not those of the individual's limits
so much as the inability for diverse groups to assess and agree on a
direction. Humans are mostly superstitious, irrational, and paranoid,
projecting imaginary realities as their expectations, usually wildly off
the mark. To avoid embarrassment for their falaciousness, all supposition
found to be false is summarily forgotten and never mentioned again,
keeping no reminder as a cautious warning of their poor judgment and
inability to reliably predict conclusions.
Everything goes well until ideology is put first. Now the world must be
turned on its side and denied according to a conjured definition to win
this religion. New rituals are born, new sins ascribed and assigned, and
one must discard reality, make excuses, beg for patience and money, and
be silent about obvious questions in order to achieve brave compliance
with sacrosanct rules of doctrine.
The relationship began easily. She was mine for a while and I was curious.
She wanted me to take her away and show her a good time. I approached with
interest and sensing the key in my pocket, her doors invitingly unlocked
beckoning me inside her.
The side effect of this engineering approach is you lose all sense of the
road. Driving is abstracted to motion over distance with trust that the
vehicle is working well enough to complete the mission. Quiet cars make
long drives easy and stress free, so after a day of driving you arrive at
your destination fresh instead of worn and tired from prolonged noise and
rumbling.
The premise is jarring and a half-measure -- obviously corporations are
made up of people (not cats, not trees, not insects, not compost heaps,
or at least not those that make laws and vote). From the value of
organized work, wealth is generated and distributed to workers as
incentive to retain contributors.
We lack experts, specifically those able to recognize excellence and
instill it as a standard. We still have attempts, a step better than sullen
resignation, but they are mostly phoned in and rarely criticized or dismissed
even when far off the mark, hanging around as if somehow able to make a
beneficial contribution, and because of that longevity, eventually accepted
as a legitimate part of the community's exemplifying efforts.
While considering how to briefly tell it all, I went back to Beethoven's
3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th symphonies, the most spiritually aspiring and soul
wrenching tribulations with a proven history of yielding answers when lost
on my own. Beethoven tells stories as a journey with a development of
perspectives, tensions, contrasts, relations, possibilities, attainments,
and unifications, like the natural romantic progression unfolding over of
a long, strenuous, dangerous, and uncertain mountain hike far from anything
familiar or safe. It's a perfect approach for love letters, speeches,
and other forms of expression more ambitious than reporting mere data.
In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, each ascending level of existence
is premised upon satisfying the needs of the previous. The essentiality
of the prerequisites can be questioned as assumptions of Maslow's era, as
Western nations have done away with job security, sexual intimacy,
achievement, and other previous standards, largely replacing them with ad hoc
temporality and self-medication through drugs, newspapers, and television.
The physical trauma is dwarfed by the psychological toll. All of your
free time has been spent with other addicts -- misery selfishly enabling
greater misery to flourish. One's relation to the world has been framed
by a never ending succession of bad events and situations brought upon
oneself by not embracing reality. Druggies say they want to explore
consciousness, but they only care about temporary fantasy, not the
infinite attainable and lasting possibilities of the actual world. What
memories they have are clouded and revolve around bars and drug dens,
and worse: the people who are attracted to those and consider them a
good use of a short life.
Nothing is granted, everything is threatened. Are you going to fight
and maintain yourself against those who challenge and poke from the
edges, or let crumbs start trouble and hoodlums take from you?
She understands liberalism perfectly and how to profit by repeating
its message of pity and victimization to the very people who support it
and remain unaware why they are alienated and unsuccessful. She calls a crowd
of losers her "monsters" and tells them they are special snowflakes who
should believe in their dreams, a preacher's twist on the empty "hope
and change" slogan. Their problems in life aren't their own fault or
shortcomings, but an invisible oppression that someone else has been
secretly plotting against them to keep their incredible dreams from
realization.
Drive slow on the highway. Make customers wait in long lines; after all,
their time doesn't matter to you, and you can subject them to impulse
purchase advertising. Why punch your enemy in the face when you can bury
him in tedious paperwork? Don't kill his pets and set his house on fire,
but buy him a television and free Netflix subscription. Take him to
sporting events and force him to play video games. Drown him in drink
and drugs. Ruthlessly incapacitate by stealing time and forcing him into
a spectator's existence.
Pollution is passive-aggressive revenge against one's neighbors, and a
frustrated lashing out to antagonize and unsettle others. You can't escape
noise and fumes, and the attack can be easily instigated and then sustained
for hours. Once unleashed, the barrage renders large territories unusable
with a crushing wave indiscriminately crippling all in its midst.
