Laura said:
We should remember what they are battling against:
Man’s instinctive substratum has a slightly different biological structure than that of animals. Energetically speaking, it has become less dynamic and become more plastic, thereby giving up its job as the main dictator of behavior. It has become more receptive to the controls of reasoning, without, however, losing much of the rich specific contents of the human kind. ...This substratum contains millions of years’ worth of bio-psychological development that was the product of species’ life conditions, so it neither is nor can be a perfect creation. Our well known weaknesses of human nature and errors in the natural perception and comprehension of reality have thus been conditioned on that phylogenetic level for millennia....
Man has lived in groups throughout his prehistory, so our species’ instinctual substratum was shaped in this tie, thus conditioning our emotions as regard the mining of existence. The need for an appropriate internal structure of commonality, and a striving to achieve a worthy role within that structure, are encoded at this very level. In the final analysis, our self-preservation instinct is rivaled by another feeling: the good of society demands that we make sacrifices, sometimes even the supreme sacrifice. At the same time, however, it is worth pointing out that if we love a man, we love his human instinct above all.
Our zeal to control anyone harmful to ourselves or our group is so primal in its near-reflex necessity as to leave no doubt that it is also encoded at the instinctual level. Our instinct, however, does not differentiate between behavior motivated by simple human failure and behavior performed by individuals with pathological aberrations. Quite the contrary: we instinctively tend to judge the latter more severely, harkening to nature’s striving to eliminate biologically or psychologically defective individuals. Our tendency to such evil generating error is thus conditioned at the instinctual level. ...
The above-mentioned statements about human nature apply to normal people, with a few exceptions.
I have found that many of the most abrasive and difficult people I encounter, those who seem to work overtime seeking reasons to attack (not just in a SJW sense, but in all matters) have also tended to spend most of their lives feeling weak and frightened, vulnerable as a general state of mind. To such people, others around them who hold a degree of self confidence and strength are often seen as potential tormentors who, any moment now, will surly seek to hurt them. They find themselves living in a permanent state of fight or flight. Small, innocuous things can set them off.
I remember once observing this in action while playing a game of catch in a park with a bunch of kids. We were playing cooperatively, no winners, no losers, just tossing a frizbee around in a big circle. I suggested, “Hey, let’s make this a bit competitive. Let’s play 500!” (I was leading a camp troupe at a Summer gig.)
500, for those who don’t know, is one of the best games ever invented. It works like this: One designated person throws a frizbee out over a big bunch of players who try to catch it. If you snag the frizbee from midair, you get 100 points. If you touch it, but it falls to the ground, you lose 100 points! The first person to get 500 points wins, -the reward being you run up to the front of the field and get to be the one throwing the frizbee for the whole group. I remember this being a great game when I was back in grade school, and I still think so today.
-It gets kids running and jumping and exerting themselves, learning how to use their bodies effectively, and the prize while nothing terribly important nonetheless offers an actual, real reward. You get to throw the frizbee! The randomness and varying distances of a frizbee throw means that pretty much anybody has a decent chance of catching at least a few shots. -The athletic kid and the wobbly geek are just as likely to find themselves in range while everybody else is too far off to bother chasing.
But when I suggested it, there was this one boy who physically recoiled at the word “competitive”. He actually lost color in his face and seemed to shrink inwardly. I could recognize his reaction, having been a kid scared of certain challenges when I was young as well. I hoped that when the nature of the game revealed itself, he would lighten up and start having fun. It was only nominally competitive after all; it wasn’t something like dodge ball or even soccer. But this didn’t happen. He couldn’t get past it and became really bitter. I remember one of the bigger, stronger boys saying something, (I can’t remember what, except that it was happy with zero ill intent), and this kid instantly interpreted it as some form of attack, and responded with a biting remark. The bigger boy actually flinched with surprise.
It was an encapsulated example I’ve seen play over and over in life, to the point where I find my own “danger” sense gives off warnings when I find myself around low self-esteem people. The victims become the aggressors.
I see this pattern associated in part with the SJW movement’s particular focus on the White Male as enemy. The Patriarchy! -None of which is to say that there aren’t many countless examples throughout the history of British imperialism which can be used to explain this attitude. A sense of being threatened and a heightened readiness to respond to attack is a rational survival trait to be certain. But this reaction has taken on a huge life beyond anything seen before in recent memory. -The modes of attack from the SJW movement are generally cowardly in nature, deriving strength from appeals to mob strength and social pressure. Group shaming and threats of eviction from the group (“Fire the prof!”) -Hiding behind the cover of dogma rather than facing an opponent directly through objective debate.
The SJWs are, so far as I've seen, a vast band of weakened people, scared of the world. I wonder if this is in part due to a lack of male hormones?
"Austrian Talk" that Lobaczewski described in Ponerology.
[…]
America’s psychological recession drags in its wake an impaired socio-professional adaptation of this country’s people, leading to a waste of human talent and an involution of societal structure. If we were to calculate this country’s adaptation correlation index, as suggested in the prior chapter, it would probably be lower than the great majority of the free and civilized nations of this world, and possibly lower than some countries which have lost their freedom. A highly talented individual in this country finds it ever more difficult to fight his way through to his right to self-realization and a socially creative position. Universities, politics, and even some business areas ever more frequently demonstrate an united front of relatively untalented persons. The word “overeducated” is heard more and more often. Such “overqualified” individuals finally hide out in some foundation laboratory where they are allowed to earn the Nobel prize. In the meantime, the country as whole suffers due to a deficit in the inspirational role of highly gifted individuals.
As a result, America is stifling progress in all areas of life, from culture to technology and economics, not excluding political incompetence. When linked to other deficiencies, an egotist’s incapability of understanding other people and nations leads to political error and the scapegoating of outsiders. Slamming the brakes on the evolution of political structures and social institutions increases both administrative inertia and discontent on the part of its victims.
We should realize that the most dramatic social difficulties and tensions occur at least ten years after the first observable indications of having emerged from a psychological crisis. Being a sequel, they also constitute a delayed reaction to the cause or are stimulated by the same psychological activation process. The time span for effective countermeasures is thus rather limited.
I was curious about the 10 year time frame mentioned above, and while thinking back, I remember (more like 15 years ago now), after doing a stint of research regarding the tsunami of artificial estrogen-like chemicals flooding our food supply through soy-based products and leaching from many of the common plastics we use in food preparation and packaging, wondering what the eventual outcome would be for society. -Included were the specters of dropping sperm counts in males, girls reaching puberty at much younger ages, men complaining of tender nipples after eating plates of chicken wings raised on unregulated Mexican farms using growth hormones to boost productivity…
“Sexuality is going to get really weird as this current crop of kids grows up!” I thought.
The thing I find both expected and astonishing at the same time, is that rather than look at how we’ve been bio-manipulated on a species-wide basis, altered into a new hormone-skewed human offshoot, -and getting angry about that.., instead people feel what they feel, take their experience as though it were normal, and then attempt to reconfigure society to fit the new biological conditions they are contained by.
“The meek shall inherit the Earth”
Holy crap! I’d always taken that as a kind of promise of reward to those who weren’t psychopathic jerks. I’d never considered it might instead serve as a kind of dire end-times warning!
And finally…
(Several thoughts occurred to me as I read through this thread. What a great forum discussion this is!)…
luc said:
Here are some thoughts about the 'lines of force' of philosophical concepts and how this intellectual mess came about. This is a gross over-simplification and doesn't do the various philosophical traditions justice, but I thought it might be fruitful to put my thoughts into words here to get a better grip on all this:
One of the major philosophical questions is of course "what is more real - the objective world of things or our internal, subjective world"? Behind it lurk such question as "can we know objective reality, and how? What is reality anyway?"
There are basically two camps:
The empiricists maintain that objective reality is what's 'out there'. There is no a priori knowledge, i.e. there is no truth per se in our thoughts; in order to know the truth, we must look at the outside world and study it accordingly. Taken to the extreme, this view leads to the kind of naive materialistic world view we find today in many scientific disciplines and in atheists: an object is an object, an atom is an atom, screw you and your strange philosophies. Consciousness is nothing but a by-product of the material world, if anything, it only screws our study of the material world and needs to be eliminated from the equation. Of course, faith, 'objective morality' and religion have no place in such a world view. Ultimately, it leads to nihilism: it can't bridge the gap between 'what is' and 'what ought to be'.
The early empiricists still had God in their equation, if only as a distant 'watchmaker' who created the mechanical universe. I guess this left some room for moral reasoning, as in the social contract theories or the utilitarian ethics à la John Stuart Mill: maybe maximizing wealth and well-being while not killing each other might be a good idea. Although these ideas become contradictory once you eliminate God from the equation, as happened later, because you can't answer the question why not killing each other or maximizing wealth is something worthwhile or even what it means, these concepts are still reflected in today's atheistic, 'liberal democracy' world view. The problem remains though that without consciousness/faith/religion it's impossible to bridge the gap between 'what is' and 'what out to be'. No wonder that ultimately, this die-hard empiricist philosophy gravitates towards nihilism: it just doesn't give us any reason to act morally, and there can't be any 'right' behavior, any worthwhile goals, any meaning.
Now the subjectivists (let's call them that), on the other hand, think that we can never fully access the objective 'outside' world; our perceptions are forever filtered by our a priori restrictions/knowledge. That is what Kant thought, and it might have been partly an attempt to save the 'primacy of consciousness' and as such, religion: there are things we can't know about the world out of principle; this leaves room for the mystical. The problem with this is that it can lead to relativism, as in 'your truth is as good as my truth'.
Now the postmodernists took this 'subjectivist' view and warped it into their pathological, schizoidal view of the world. They eliminated God/the mystical from the equation. Everything is subjective, and everything is just a power play - everyone fighting for dominance. This leads to extreme nihilism - there is no good or bad, there is no point in even discussing what's good or bad, everything goes, there is no truth etc. Needless to say, this 'philosophy' is a direct attack on empiricist science, which, despite its philosophical shortcomings, has a lot of merit. Worse yet, concepts such as social contracts or even basic common sense (that the empiricists still somewhat adhere to) not only become obsolete, but a tool for oppression that must be fought. This is what's happening right now. It's the postmodernist mind virus we are facing, and it is all the more dangerous since it preys on the revolutionary drive that exists in many people, especially young people. It also preys on legitimate criticism of empiricist science and uses this as an 'opening' for the infection with pathological content.
The problem though is this: both the empiricist/materialist world view and the postmodernist view ultimately lead to nihilism (though postmodernism leads to a more extreme and dangerous form of nihilism). How to solve this?
I think the solution is to acknowledge that yes, as Kant said, there are things we can't know (the thing-as-such/the essence of things, for example), and there is a priori knowledge and a priori restraints. This leaves room for a 'higher' reality that we can't access directly, for the primacy of consciousness, and for the fruitfulness of contemplating our 'a priori' knowledge. But here's the trick: we can actually study this a priori knowledge and these a priori restraints of our perception by looking at the world! For example, as Jordan Peterson said somewhere, our a priori knowledge is, at least in part, shaped by evolution. It is also shaped by various psychological and psychopathological phenomena. It is shaped by the interplay of our consciousness with 'the real world', individually and as a species throughout time. It may also be shaped by mass consciousness and the influence of 'morphic fields' and other phenomena not yet understood.
In other words, by studying our minds/our a priori restraints and a priori knowledge while simultaneously looking at the 'objective world', we may be able to overcome our internal restraints to an extent, to better tune our perception, and expand/transcend our a priori knowledge. This would be a form of esoteric growth to become better 'consciousness reading units'. It also bridges the gap between the 'objective world'/empiricism and the 'subjective world'/the world of thoughts and concepts. It's the marriage between science and religion, which also leaves room for a deeper discussion of ethics and uses consciousness as a tool to get a better understanding of 'what is', but also 'what out to be', what objective morality would look like.
I think it's useful to think about such things because otherwise we can easily get caught up in the conundrum of 'postmodernists' vs. 'enlightenment', which makes it look like it's a battle between 'science' and 'anti-science', 'liberals vs communism' etc., when the issues go much deeper than that. What's missing in both camps is the mystical, faith, consciousness. I think part of Jordan Peterson's popularity lies in the fact that he critizises postmodernism not only from an empiricist perspective but brings back religious and mystical concepts into the discussion. In his critique of materialism, he criticizes die-hard empiricism and postmodernism alike.
Just my current thoughts on the matter.
I find when I get caught (trapped) in a debate over issues of race that, (after running into the common wall of people simply not listening, avoiding the crux of the matter, etc.), that things cool down and end when I note:
“Okay, but I believe in reincarnation, that we’ve all lived many lives, each of us in bodies of many different races and genders, all across history. I think a lot of these race and culture arguments hinge on people getting far too wrapped up in the material world. These bodies of ours are very temporary experiences, I think. The soul is what matters.”
People get distinctly put off by that line of thinking. -Partly because to object changes the nature of the argument altogether. “Oh. That guy is one of those a spiritual weirdos. I.., have no pre-programmed dogma to fall back on. I just wanted to do a bit of guilt-shaming about race. I don't know what to do with this. Retreat.”
So..,
The idea of “Nature got it wrong! I’m really a man/woman” I think is (very) clumsy and myopic. The Big Picture is that souls (or soul fragments or whatever we are), as I understand it are not inherently male or female. -That when you incarnate, you get a meat costume to wear, and you do the best you can with what it provides. The human animals we ride in are equipped to function along their most efficient genetic programming. Trying to be male in a female body can’t possibly be a terribly efficient or effective way of moving through the world. It looks downright difficult, adding heaps of trouble to an already full plate of challenges. So how does that come about?
The C’s once said that homosexuality is sometimes (or perhaps often?) the result of childhood trauma. (Need to find that quote).
Maybe the mass-altering of our food supply is partly responsible.
So.., is it that a person is certain they are a particular sex out of sync with their body upon birth, or is it that their body and brain are making them feel a particular way because of a bunch of chemical and social programming hoisted upon them by a toxic socio/industrial environment? -And they mistake those feelings as being their genuine “Big i”.
It would seem to me that the body, if unmolested and left to a natural course, would exert a very strong pull toward one gender feeling or the other matching up with the plumbing it was born with, -the gravity of millions of years of evolution being what it is.
-None of which is to say that being gay or trans or whathaveyou might not be an interesting lesson worth investing a lifetime on.-Something people might choose to experience, all experiences being valid explorations in the infinitude of God. Why not? Karma will wash it all out in the end.
But to make any such ride count, it becomes vital to forget about the soul and get super-attached to the body. Identifying as male or female? (Or “Kinder kind”) -Even going so far as to elect for surgery just to maximize the value of a handful of juicy years in a human being’s active sex life? -Remembering that so much of this gender stuff resolves down to the very simple base motivation of who boinks who. Such is the power of our reproductive drive.
That this motivation can be leveraged into a fascist lockdown of reality, soul smashing and a nihilist anti-creation war on reality probably shouldn’t come as any surprise. If you were a dark lord of chaos and had to pick the most powerful human springs to harness for your doomsday machine, you couldn’t get much more bang for your buck than from the human sex drive.
just wow. This is all insane. What a world we are living in. I can’t believe it’s got so bad that I agree with tucker Carlson, of all people. Every day I see more and more how truly horrifying it is living with psychopaths and “their” world. Call me bitter but I pray for cosmic intervention everyday now.
