- Obfuscation - leading your nihilism
- Extortion - forming the new control
My understanding of totemism is quite different. Native Americans, and others I’m sure, who are not yet trained scientists or philosophers, see the world differently. They understand the natural world differently. For example, a skunk is playful because it can cause a stink. Porcupines are similarly playful, but obviously for a different reason. All animals are seen as having unique characters. These animals are then related to people. So, for example, if your totem is the skunk, then it means that you are playful because you do not fear other people because you know you can kick up such a stink if interfered with, that no one will bother you.
In the film Missing, one of the characters is a white man who has adopted an Apache way of life. Another Indian refers to him as having “two dogs fighting” inside him. What he meant was that the white man turned Apache had divided loyalties. This way of describing the white man’s psychological state is extremely accurate, much more so than a description that might be given by a western psychologist. It describes EXACTLY how the man feels and one can understand the consequences for him and understand how to deal with it — you deal with it exactly as if you were dealing with 2 dogs fighting!
In the west, we still have remnants of this sort of understanding, though we do not really know or use it. For example, one might refer to someone as being ratty. If a person is ratty then the consequences can be severe for the person. The fact is that rattiness can get out of hand (rats can breed to plague proportions) such that it turns on the person himself and subconsciously attacks his own thinking. There are other consequences also which can be understood by observing the nature of rats.
Reminds me of this piece of Western psychology, though:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiCrniLQGYc[/youtube]
Curiosity killed the cat? (Satisfaction brought it back.) I wonder how many people really understand what this means. It refers to the well known ability of cats to relax. Nothing can relax quite like a cat. So curiosity once aroused causes a restlessness, a need to be satisfied, and until it is one is unable to relax properly.
- Doesn’t overt rationality lead to nihilism as well?
- Extortion doesn’t explain how something comes to become so sacred, untouchable. Say race-reality today, and you are marked for sacrifice. The myth of equality or racial-equality is sacrosanct. Incontestable.
It doesn’t do any good to simply pull away the carpet beneath such feet; they have to topple.
But before that, we need to trace the aura.
How does a crown sit so tight?
yea, I understand that, and I am seeing it like that too, except sociologically.
The animals being totemized today are those that guard the herd. One ecology prospering at the near destruction of another. The native americans would have spoken out. They knew what balance was.
By the way, you should watch the film Le Jaguar. Best movie ever on totems, and Reno is so hot. drool
This is an interesting subject, but I don’t entirely understand what it is that makes something a totem.
Referring to your original questions:
Would a car have the potential to be a totem?
In a sense one would think that the practical side of buying and owning a car is about transportation, efficiency, safety. And the impractical side, which leads so many people to undermine the practical, is about exhibiting social status, whether actual or a pretense, and forms of compensation for personal failings. But perhaps some factors in the supposed practical sides could also contribute to the supposed impracticality of the cars so many people buy.
Safety, for example. Logically, one would get the car with objective safety features such as airbags, etc., but as a totem to the general idea of safe travel one may perhaps actually buy an extravagant car, with little regard for those objective features.
Then the idea of travel in itself, which in primal cultures is so often made a part of intricate rituals and myths, may now be substituted for simple extravagance in a car.
Totems had value in themselves. Were considered peers in a sense, certainly animal ones.
Totems today, like cars, fake tits, the right house, suit, tie, aftershave, daycare, hairstyle, jeans, Nails
and so on, all just reflect back on the self. The meaning does or is intended to though it often fails.
No mystery, nothing outside of what can immediately be counted and measured. Physicalism cannot really have totemism.
You can certainly overvalue objects and hallucinate meanings and have something like a religion in reverse and all that.
But even as a kid I knew a lego set castle was not a real castle and I was not suddenly king and that that Crow was looking at me and waiting for me to leave that part of the forest so he could go back to where he had been searching for something just Before I arrived.
That was my question. How does a thing come to be so sacralized, it becomes a totem?
What would render the totem so respected?
If I go with Foucault, I would have to ask, contra freud, do fetishes reinstate the totem?
For eg., does the slander through humour sacralize the object mocked?
It’s not just a capitalistic phenomena. Not sure where you got that from. It’s more of a modernism or transhumanist phenomena.
Capitalism is merely an expression of natural competition. You can find expressions of capitalism within nature.
There is however a difference between state governed capitalism and a more anarchist one. Unfortunately state sponsored capitalism is a disaster.
I myself am a supporter of the notion anarchist capitalism.
Totemism is the result of a regulation, a taboo, on resources valuable to self-preservation, the control of which inevitable invites a capitalistic approach.
Freedom is self regulation and capitalists aren’t opposed to that. 
You speak of central regulation regarding the interventions of the state. An entirely different beast.
It is the result of trying to grasp what is out of reach, to dominate more than reality allows.
It is Presumption and a desperate desire to control.
Capitalism is merely that same thing dispersed. The current regime isn’t Capitalism, but Controlled/Regulated Monopolies (strictly forbidden under capitalism).
Totemism was a necessary thing to disband in the early formations of the ancient state.
Totemism was all about individuals being independent living within the greater symbiosis of the land. It had to be destroyed in order for the state to enslave the masses of people into its civilization centers. The ancient priesthoods made sure of it.
Capitalism is the mobilization of oppositions and organizing them on some dimension, i.e. “around” something - that “around” is the Totem.
If society is to survive, the Father should not be killed - “around” him, his sacrality, the competition of the brothers are regulated, the regulation of their freedom is totemic.
Build further. And you have institutionalization.
And my question was how has it transformed today? What shape has it taken today?
I cited the war on terror as one.
All I just wanted to say is that a more anarchist form of capitalism isn’t incompatible with totemism at all.
What you really want to be looking at is modernism and transhumanism.
That is the real source of conflict against this totemism of yours.
The obvious answer for me at least would be that totemism is nonexistent in the modern era. It’s all about materialism now. What can be quantified and so on.
It’s a sickness for sure but it is what it is.
Not many people nowadays think considerably about living in balance with nature. The ones that say they do just give it lip service and that’s all.
That would have been my point all along if you had read my OP; its transformation today and its continuing evolution.
Ideology is a modern religion and more a neurosis than the non-modern religion, the normal religion. In parts Freud’s “Psychoanalyse” is an ideology, a modern religion, and thus more a neurosis than the non-modern religion, the normal religion.
Non-modern religious behaviour can be compared with some aspects of a child behaviour. Modern religion behaviour can be compared with some aspects of an adult behaviour. It is not possible to eliminate religion because either it resists all attacks as a non-modern religion or it becomes a modern religion, an ideology. By hiding behind an ideology, it is easier for the modern religion to enforce its nihilism. Modern religions - ideologies - are always nihilistic.