Underworld

The Under-World is a world overshadowing reality, taking its place. A proverbial Platonic cave, where it is mistaken for the complete world when it is but a subterranean space, space of darkness where artificial lighting is mistaken for sunlight, and creatures roam in its cavernous, buried world of the living dead, and other such fantastic, creatures – creatures used as metaphors for psychological, memetic types.

The Under-World will be used not as a reference to some crime establishment functioning on the peripheries of society, or to some ancient-Greek or Christian hell.
Here, it will be used as a reference to the nihilistic civilization constructing an artificial, underlying, reality, which parallels but does not totally adhere to nature; a supernatural world, created by manmade artifices, and producing, as a collateral effect, all sorts of weird psychological types.
“Super,” in that it exceeds, exaggerates, represses, and redefines, reality, creating a hyper-real landscape populated with creatures that evolve within it, as a reaction to its premises and inescapable ubiquity.

This hyper-real, super-natural, environment, is a metaphorical way of describing the nihilistic world this dis-ease, of the mind, is now producing.
A dis-ease spreading to global proportions, as the contagion becomes viral, joining with other strains and adapting to the host-body by masking itself as another part of it.
The virus is memetic, though the examples that follow explore the many physical manifestations of this mental dis-ease; mind, and body, after all are part of the same emergent unity, the same self-organizing, self-sustaining, life-form.

Postman, Neil wrote:
When we begin relying on the Internet for all of our news and information we will turn into a nation of zombies.

A Zombie is a made-up creature characterized by insatiable appetites and governed by a monomaniacal, brainless, obsessiveness.
Its goal is immediate and constant gratification – a hedonistic nightmare.
It is neither male nor female, because its sex is nothing more but a decaying remnant of a previous persona, resembling the tattered clothes falling off of its putrefying, rambling, form.
We cannot call it human, because it is not identifiable as anything reproductive. Calling it a “thing” should suffice.
It is a monstrosity, infected by some kind of modern disease which has overturned death and made it animated, in imitation of life.
This is why it serves as the perfect caricature, metaphor, symbol, for the common every-day, western, Americanized, feminized, man.

The slow deterioration of the living experience has this result.
All is notched-up in severity to deal with the loss.
Things have become so safe, so comfortable, that one needs to emulate risk, re-inject pain, exaggerate the sexual practice, to feel anything.
This is a consequence of numbness.

No fear, no risk, no price, no sacrifice …all is made mute and the body falls into inebriated bliss. It shuffles, hungrily towards its next fix, consuming, consuming, consuming to fill in the void in its decaying flesh; wishing to quell the ache of existing.
Suffering and pain are turned into sensations to be avoided when they are nothing more than the sensation of existing.
But then the mind rebels against this zombification where flesh rots or is petrified so that it can no longer feel anything beneath a certain grade; it wants to feel what it means to be alive, knowing that soon this will no longer be an option.

The proverbial movie zombie, is a mindless, automaton, governed by pure hunger (need), deteriorating, rotting, driven to find healthy flesh to consume and replenish itself, in an ceaseless struggle to procure material so as to satisfy a hunger it cannot control nor escape.
It is now (2013) a popular symbol, constantly coming-up in modern art, for it so perfectly reflects the modern man.

A Zombie is all about hunger, hedonism, feeding, corporeal compensation for a decaying body, and a rotten brain.
It has no historical background, no past. It is all about the immediate, the gratifying, and the shallow. It can only stumble towards some future; it drags itself towards any sound, any movement, promising action, a source of material fulfillment.
It congregates on mass, and feeds.

Zombies are individualistic, in that they follow their own need/hunger, towards the intended source of satiation, but their behavior is uniform, in that it is predictable and shared.
They are identities who adhere to a common behavioral patterns, which may, or may not, take a different path but, in the end, is headed towards the same, the common, the shared, object/objective.
In isolation, the Zombie is easily dealt with, because of its mindlessness, and slowness. Slow is what defines this creature – slow and methodical.
It is when zombies become part of a group, attracted by a shared stimulation, when they become a force to be reckoned with.
Zombies, much like simple organisms, animals, need not have a sense of self, a shared identity, nor even come from the same background, wear the same rags, or have to have experienced the same things in the same ways, because it is their shared hunger, the binding need, the lack, which makes them a singular category.

What herd would be complete without a predator?
Kidding aside the vampire metaphor is about the emotional kind of feeding.
I draw from popular lore and make parallels with general personality types:
Emotional Vampires are those elites who having identified the living-dead – the proverbial brain-dead, hedonistic, Zombies – feed off of their emotionalism, exploiting it and the need it is founded upon.

There are many versions of the vampire caricature, but the modern version has a distinctly erotic flare.
The brain-dead Vampires are easy prey, so this elite type tends to toy with their insatiable hunger, finding very little emotional nutrition in their decaying sensibilities, and growing detachment from reality.
As a result the emotional vampire will turn on his own, forcing internal ruptures that separate this kind into factions.

The immortality of the vampire represents this type’s connection to its past, creating a long, undisturbed lineage, which, compared to the immediacy of the zombie, can be considered timeless.

Eroticism is the undeniable characteristic of the Vampire.
(S)He is a predator of emotion and lust/love is the king of all emotions; it is the emotion of unbridled hunger indicative of a zombification.
With lust/love the need, hunger, takes over, and nothing else matters.
Fear would cause a pause, a moment of restraint, before the flight/flight mechanism takes over, but with love the organism is drawn forward, uncaring, unconcerned, totally given over to the object/objective of his desire.

When a Vampire sucks the blood, he is absorbing the heart’s essence, the body’s need, its lack, its hunger, spilling out of the organism as a grasping, a clutching.
The seductive allure of the vampire, its eroticism, is a mechanism to draw the victim towards him/her.
Need feeding on need.
The Zombie is blind, brainless, unrestrained need.
The Vampire is focused hunger.
The Zombie feeds on matter, on the substantial, on the physical.
The Vampire feeds on emotion, on thoughts, on the abstract.

These creatures coexist but occupy different spheres of existence.

The Vampire comes out at night, it is conspicuous and shy.
The Zombie, in most variants, is a day and night feeder, and is mostly found in urban environments where masses of people congregate.
The Vampire enters the city only because that is where its prey can be found in large numbers.

Vampires prefer the warm-blooded, the ones still full of vital energies, but the world has changed and Zombification has made warm-bloodedness increasingly rare. Coagulating blood, barely flowing within decaying veins, is all which is available in these modern times.

Both these creatures of the modern, nihilistic, Dark Age, have shared behavior. They prefer to feed on human flesh and drink human blood, and by “human”, and in line with the theme, I mean virile, healthy, natural, man.
We may call him a Pagan, an Aryan, a European.
The type is in decline and is nearly extinct due to this predation.
As a consequence these Zombies and Vampires turn on each other, finding there a lower grade prey, because the undead cannot be invigorated by another undead.

What differentiates the Vampire from the Zombie, or the Werewolf, for that matter?
Both Zombie and Vampire are immortal, if they are not beheaded; both are defined by hunger; both prefer the dark and are creatures of the supernatural, the underworld.
It is awareness and connection to the past.
A Zombie is totally in the present. It has no conception of past, or of future.
Its entire existence is dominated by its need/hunger, and the object of tis desire, the moving, acting, thing that it feels it needs to devour to keep on going, to deal with its own decay.
The Vampire, on the other hand, has a clear and well-defined, sense of identity.
So much so, that it now organizes itself into clans, governed by specific rules of conduct and hierarchies – different than those governing the prey they feed on, but, nevertheless, just as stringent.
In a sense Vampires have their own morality.
What they show the world, when they do, is very different from what they are, in the dark, and amongst their own kind.

A Vampire sucks the living essence out of a life form, its virility, whereas a Zombie feeds on the flesh.
There is very little life force in a Zombie and so it makes a poor meal for a Vampire, yet, in an ironic twist of fate, the viral agent that turns the healthy human into a brain-dead, decaying, mound of flesh and bones, comes from the Vampire, and is spread into the prey in an earlier encounter.
If the prey is fed Vampire blood before it perishes, it turns into another Vampire, adding itself to the clan, if not it becomes a member of the walking dead Zombies.
The ritual of “turning” involves a turning of the tables, where the prey drinks of the predator’s essence.
With Zombies the virus is transmitted by a bite, if the prey is not totally consumed.
The Werewolf is an altogether other matter. It is mortal, and motivated by sheer rage. The Werewolf gene is transmitted through the normal human reproductive methods, and it is triggered by specific events and natural cycles.

A distinctive feature of the Vampire is its secrecy.
It comes out at night, it mingles with its prey, it participates in underground covenants and in secret rituals.
The feeding on blood is a metaphor for money, the blood and sweat of the individual, the product of its labor, and/or of the essence of the other, its emotions, its reactions.
In both cases we are dealing with (inter)activities.
The Vampire feeds on the byproduct of the other’s (inter)activity, its relating and relationships, and the many forms these take.

The emotional-Vampire, related to the internet Troll, is an individual hungering for passion.
Reason, rationality, objectivity only matter if they promise a passionate outcome.
There are different types of emotional-Vampires each corresponding to the different emotions, the different passions, each ha a taste for.
There is no reasoning with such creatures.
They are blood-thirsty.

A Werewolf is still a canine, at heart.
A social creature prone to assimilate, easily, within groups.
The werewolf is the result of this disparity between the current nihilistic, anti-natural, milieu, and the nature of the organism being forced to assimilate within it.
This disparity creates frictions, above and beyond the usual self-repression and emasculation, involved in integrating within a social hierarchy where the dominant position is already occupied.
The organism is forced to integrate within a social structure which is totally alienating; abstracting its contexts to the point where they lose all reference to the real.
This alienation, this out of place, out of sorts, feeling builds until it explodes as rage. The beast awakens, in the dark, and it must be released, to run and to feed.
But it cannot, and so it inebriates itself. It must find a way to calm those parts down, contain them, make its self artificially happy, wag the tail, to get along.

Another creature of the night.
This one is a creature born of cycles, environmental conditions stimulating an internal rage.
A Werewolf will appear normal, most of the time, even timid, kind, submissive, a dog wagging its tail, but inside another beast is churning.
It collects its humility, its repressed sexuality, its hidden pain, until, under the right circumstances – some full moon or some such event – it unleashes its fury into the night.
Bipolar may be the psychological term for it, except for the fact that this kind is mostly male.

It would not be uncommon to find Werewolves amongst the addictive personality type. In their fits of irrepressible rage, they find ways to numb their affliction down to a session of binge drinking, or to a daily routine of self-medicating numbness.

The dying only feed on the healthy.
They tear them to pieces.
The dead, the living dead, like themselves, they do not bother.
Once the other is part of the living-dead, the brain-dead, the nihilists, the dis-eased ones, he does not see him.

The Zombie hungers for health, because that is what he lacks; he covets what he cannot find in himself.
Look around you, on these ILP forums, on the streets, what do you see?

What are Zombies a metaphor for?
Pure need.
No sex, no race, no past, only hunger, hedonism: fucking, eating, drinking, defecating, breathing, moving.
Rotting flesh looking for a substance.
They are future, always moving forwards, directed by need/hunger.
Brain-dead, where all cognitive functions are taken over by the need to satisfy hunger immediately.

It has no sense of self.
It does not recognize itself as what it is.
All it does is consume, act, fuck, move …constant activity.
Left alone it begins smashing into walls.

How many Zombies do you see?

The infection is transmitted orally …through the mouth.
Verbally.
It is a memetic virus.

Once infection is inserted within a population it takes over on its own. No further intervention is required.
One transmitter …one Messiah.

The Cold War, that internal conflict between two factions of the same Nihilistic meme, was a precursor to the coming economic warfare, which is how the memetic war is manifesting.
Wealth is an abstraction of resources, of power.
It’s arena is noetic, pure idea(l).
The past is something to be manufactured, and sold as another commodity.
Its value is determined by demand.
Demand is based on need, and can be manipulated by those who understand this.
Need is always self-interested and intuitive, instinctive. It must become aware of itself by understanding itself.
Inhibiting the ascent towards this realization is part of the dumbing-down, the condition of stunted development of emasculation, of feminization, or domestication, retardation.
Once retardation has been maintained demand, by manipulating need, can commence.
Chomsky’s “manufacturing consent” is not far from the truth.
Consent is manufactured by directing need towards an object/objective. This object/objective can be any product, including an idea(l), and it can become a desirable end, goal, by connecting it to an innate, instinctive, need.
The genetic drive is diverted, redirected, by a memetic imposition.

In the case of the nihilistic meme, or group of ideologies all rooted in nihilism, the natural propensity of a living organism to reject, to resist, natural change – the towards increasing entropy – is converted into a total denial of what is natural.
It represents the complete detachment, the total disharmony with natural process, and the incorporation, sublimation, of the drives into a uniformity of denial, absolute forgetting, and rejection.
This practice relies on the simplicity of binary logic, dualism, where the real, the aesthetically perceived is totally overturned.
What is apparent is imagined as the fake, and what is assumed to be hiding beneath, above, beyond, the apparent becomes the real.
The world, and the self which it determines, is annulled.
The slate is not clean, but it is swept clean.
Brainwashing is what it is called.
The meme feeds into the organic need to satisfy self, to escape need/suffering, to satiate, and grow and replicate.

Yeah, and?

Not that you got ALL of it exactly right, but… So what now?

Do some RM:AO of it. like you know. Think.

This IS a philosophy section. Get it?

I’ll assume you are clueless.

Because you can’t go into it, its enough to simply declare, hey that’s not right and simply move on.
This is how philosophy is done. A little vanity-announcement “i was here, mark me”, “I spoke, take note ye all”…

If you have nothing constructive or challenging to say, be silent.

So what now?? Play chicken.

Satyr can’t even pretend to not be Satyr. Banned for inevitable trolling.

We’re not interested in punishing people, we’re interested in allowing for at least some robust philosophical discussion. - Carleas

Satyr hadn’t stopped or inhibited discussion.

He made some threads expressing his thoughts.

To me, it seems like you cut him down without a crime being committed - ‘inevitable trolling’.

I’m disappointed in the decision.

This?

NOT trolling.

The rest?
“Inevitable” trolling.
A trolling yet to be…an immanent trolling.

Stringent intellectual reasoning.
No hypocrisy or pseudo-intellectual cowardice.
=D>

It’s one of the few pleasures the mods have, apparently. They should thank Satyr for giving them chances to feel powerful now and then.

It is comical in a theatrical way how Carleas and Only Humean are constantly giving different reasons for banning Satyr, always as if these reasons are self-evident.
What we see is very different from what they see - we should take it as a kind of back alley theatre, not as forum moderation.

As long as touching Satyr pleases them enough for them to keep their hands off the rest of the posters, we’re all fine I think.

Satyr has outright admitted in the past that he comes here to goad, not for any genuine discussion, and he’s quite clear on his opinion of the quality of that. He’s created dozens of sockpuppets to get around bans, which he’s had time and time again, for years. He knows he gets banned when he comes here, but continues to do so, year in year out. He is, and remains, ban on sight in this forum. As is RU. Its not a titanic struggle of wills or faceless authority crushing the poor lambs’ god-given freedom of speech; they’re just not worth the bullshit.

Charles may well have different reasons from me; mods often disagree.

If you want to talk with him, he’s easy to find. He’s not welcome here, and this is not the place to argue it. All the words I have to waste on the topic, I’m afraid, except that passing on messages from banned members in the forums leads to corresponding bans.

Who is RU?

It’s not titanic, I know that. Quite the opposite. It’s too easy to go into a thread where someone writes down a lot of ideas, say “you’re trolling”, and ban him.
Satyr wasn’t trolling this time around. He was talking with his good friend Smears who seems to want nothing more than to rumble with him (given he creates threads for Satyr) and spreading some of his ideas.

If you would not have made the trolling remark here I would not even have taken note of the new ban. But that you need to directly insult him with some completely out of context remark brings this resentment and irrationality to the surface.

Why do I give a fuck?
Why I am I so tied to ILP, and care so much if it’s rationally moderated?
I don’t know man, I wish it wasn’t like this actually.