a new understanding of today, time and space.

the question, the personal question for Kierkegaard, was what it
meant to be a Christian? when it was clear to him, that the west,
Western society which at one time called itself, Christian, was no
longer Christian. And what did this separation mean to honest people
to engage with their lives? I am not a human being of faith because
those who engage in faith can ignore evidence that disproves their faith…

If I believe in God and there is no evidence for god, do I continue to
believe or do I follow the evidence and engage with the universe
as a man of reason and not a person of faith…

what does it mean to be a Christian in a world that no longer believes…
thus K. argues, strongly argues that the truth lies with the individual
because it allows the individual to hold belief in such things as god…
it doesn’t matter that the entire world or that the evidence is clear,
if one believes then the important thing is the belief, not any evidence to
the contrary……

to be able to hold his faith, he must argue for faith being an individual
requirement and subject to individual needs… faith doesn’t need
the world to agree… faith only needs one to believe and so K.
argues for the strength of the one and not of the few or the many…

what does it mean to be a Christian when the world has forsaken
that belief system? K. and Nietzsche would try to understand this
problem from opposite ends…what are we to believe in if
the world has stopped believing in god and Jesus?
that was Nietzsche starting point…how is morality possible when
the basic morality of the last 2000 years was Christian? and now
Christianity is dead, god is dead… what should the foundations
of morality be now?

I a man of reason… upon what foundations should I engage in
morality with, given that I don’t believe in god? What should be my criteria
for how I engage with my fellow human beings, or even the other life
I share this planet with?

now some may argue that any basis I find for my actions is really
just faith place in something other then the religious? in other words,
if I base my actions upon the laws or upon other agreed rational basis,
that is just another form of faith… I have faith in the rational
actions of other human beings and for some, that faith is misguided…

the man of reason doesn’t take into account that human beings don’t operate
under rational basis… human beings take actions based upon irrational
grounds, not rational grounds and this is where the man of reason fails…
because the man of reason fails to take into account the strength of
the irrationalism of human beings…… we are driven by everything but
rationalism… we have the lower instincts of greed and hate and anger
and lust driving our various actions…and greed and lust and hate
and anger have no basis in rational thought… but they drive human beings
actions and behavior above and beyond any rational thought…
rational thought can never be successful because human beings
aren’t rational… so says the man of faith… and because the man of
faith is driven by those lower instincts, he believes that others are driven
by the same instincts that drive him……… a man of faith assumes that
others are driven by the same forces that drives him……
a rational man assumes that others are driven by the same forces that drives
him… rational thought drives rational behavior… so says the rational man…

so how does one becomes or stays a Christian even though the society
itself is no longer Christian? K. answer was faith…

do you have faith?

Kropotkin

the man of faith argues for god because the primal instincts
that drive man are too great for man to control…
we are greed and lust and hate and anger and we cannot
by ourselves control those instinctual urges, thus we need
an outside force that can control it for us… that being is god…

for the man of faith, humans are weak and failures
and are so flawed that we are unable to succeed upon our own…
thus the need for god and thus the need for secular stand in for god,
the human secular version of god which is a dictatorship or monarchy…

that is why men of faith so desire and demand monarchies or dictatorships
that men of faith proclaim themselves to be weak and flawed is
not news… you hear it all the time from various sources and these
weak and flawed human beings, being weak and flawed want someone else
to shore up and give them salvation from being weak and flawed…

a rational man believes that salvation is found within
and the man of faith believes that salvation is found outside of oneself…

so, do you believe yourself to be weak and flawed?
is salvation from being weak and flawed found within
or outside of oneself?

Kropotkin

well they weren’t entirely wrong here, pete. rather what happened was, after discovering the basic rules of propositional logic a la aristotle, they began the long philosophical travesty (we’re still experiencing today) of fitting semantic nonsense to logical form, thus producing super-empirical statements that masquerade as profound truths… but which are in fact entirely void of content. and, in fact, this wasn’t completely by accident… which is to say some of them knew they were full of shit, and kept going, because it served an agenda; long story, basically involving the propagation of ruling class ideologies to secure the authority and luxury of the parasitic aristocratic class that didn’t want to work. i’ll give you some links that’ll have you up at night, if you want em.

but yeah, man was, and is, rational so long as he observes and preserves the difference between the natural sciences and it’s sidekick, philosophy. but this line has been blurred, and robin is often given the same authority as batman… and we all know robin is not half the bad-ass batman is. some of the greeks knew this (e.g., anaximander, aristotle, democritus), and some of them did not (e.g., plato, plotinus, pythagoras, heraclitus). so you can characterize general stages of the development of philosophy here. pre-socratics; precursor to scientific inquiry (minus that space cadet pythagoras minus his work in mathematics). plato; sudden spiral downward into metaphysical hogwash. aristotle; saves the day and cleans up all the bullshit before him. fast forward several thousand years. medieval philosophers get a’hold of aristotle and do everything aristotle did NOT want done with his work. scholastics come along and fuck it all up even more. that fat fuck aquinas… man you have no idea what that fucker got started. enter the enlightenment/age of reason; bring in bacon (or ‘the wolf’). let’s get rid of all this a priori bullshit and get back to the inductive methods of science. we’ve got six thousand years of shit to clean up and it’s gonna take a while. then, when we’re just about to start making some headway, that douche-rocket adam smith interferes and reinstates the very thing we were trying to get rid of; the ruling class ideology of the greek fancy-pants dandys who were too good to work. we were so close to finally getting rid of all gods and all masters… and then they cropped right back up at the turn of the industrial revolution. okay, you wanna do it like that? bet. bring in the beard (marx) and start the vienna circle up. the muthafucking death squad. them hard-hittin’ polymath niggas that have forgotten more than you’ll ever learn, homeboy. naw, don’t get scared now. say something ‘philosophical’, i dare you. yeah, s’what i thought. you betta put a fuckin’ muzzle on that shit and sit the fuck down.

all in all we doin’ alright, pete. the war is still on, and man is evolving to become ‘rational’ once again. we just had to go through a very long adolescent phase, that’s all.

Yeah right but midlife crisis demands a backward look by necessity, otherwise they would see nothing worthwhile to look back , and adolescents discern only a modicum of rationality that the old ones teach them

Nihilism can not sustain the brevity of duration which is known to be shorter for the young one’s, which is ironic and contradictory because for the older man, time appears to go faster.
That reverts to the forum’s title, and leaves in brackets how time travails from an objective to a subjective qualifier.

That is significant because it entails political expediency, which is difficult to negate or even negotiate , in it’s above mentioned rational passage, and that is why, as well intentioned that obscurance appears politically and socially, the derivitive has always assumed a veritable equiminity as reasonable backwards as forwards. Prove otherwise , and you’ll become a camera obscura for real.
That is why history is dying and really dead as a doorknob.- Gods die first, then followes reasons why they were even born in the first place.
Reason can never die, even of you were born in miserry, And that’s the ticket.

And don’t say that political correctness will ever die.

And that is why despots will always confidently subscribe to the well worn and healed role within reasonableness of despotism~nepotism.

Course despots come in various types, some even dress to the occasion, daring even complete nudity, like the emperor with no clothes . But that was before the advent of modern education.

youtu.be/5IpYOF4Hi6Q

Reason will die when the last mind dies because it is not something that can survive in a vacuum
When there are no more life forms and no more machines that will be when to write its obituary

I welcome each post… for human beings are collective creatures,
and not solitary creatures…

I have been thinking about a basic philosophical idea…
existence vs essence…this basic philosophical idea
has been around since Plato…what is our basic understanding
of human beings? the essence vs existence has been one of the
bedrock of human thought for thousands of years…

to be blunt, existence is I am… and essence is about what I am…
existence is simply about being and essence is about being
something…………if I am brave or smart or funny, that is essence,
I am something……

as it clear from my statements, I am an existentialist, I take
existence to be primary, to be before essence…
however with that said, that does not negate essence or
nullify essence…

we exist, we are born… we are as Locke said, Tabula Rosa,
blank slates, upon which understanding is written on…
on our blank slate, society and family and the state write indoctrinations
and myths and biases and prejudices and superstitions…

and from this writing on our blank slate, we take our essence…
we become who we are…but until we are old enough to begin the
process of becoming who we are, we are those indoctrinations of
the state and society and the family………

so in fact, our essence is at first, the writings of family and society
and the state and the church and then once we can engage in
our own becoming, then our essence changes to become who we
are after we have our reevaluation of values…

yes, we exists then we become essence… in other words,
we are both existence and essence……
it is not a question of either/or but a question
of being both… two sides of the same coin as it were…

and how soon to we begin to understand that essence and
existence is the same thing?

Kropotkin

so we begin with existence and then we spend our time
in discovering our essence… the who we are…

am I a god fearing man or am I an atheist?
that distinction is essence… my essence is
either discovering god or my essence is about
learning what it means to be a human being
outside of any metaphysical belief system…

so in regards to essence, it seems to me that I want
my essence to be written by me and not written
by others like society or family or the state or the church…
and that is what we mean by a reevaluation of values…
I discover what values are my values and not the values
written down by society/state/family/church on my
blank slate……

in my reevaluation of values, I rewrite the values listed on
my blank slate into values that I accept, not given to me by
my indoctrinations as a child……

I am born… I exist… the existential question of being born… which begats
the question of “what values should I hold?”

should I be honest or should I be brave or should I have faith or should
I be engage in rational thought or should I hold Arete as my value?
the question of which values we should hold is the question of essence…

what is my essence going to be? and how do I choose? and which values
should I engage with to fulfill my essence?

and in choosing our values, we choose what kind of person we are going to be…
if I want to be brave, I will choose as my value, bravery… the values we choose
decide what sort of person we are going to be…that is the question of essence…
what sort of person are we going to be?

and do I choose what sort of person I am going to be or does
society/state/family/church gets to decide what sort of
person I am going to be? who decides what my essence is going to be?
me or some outside entity such as family or the state or the church or the……

Kropotkin

as a question of essence, who we are… leads us to the many
names we give to who we are… I am a democrat,
a liberal, a man, an atheist, a rationalist, a humanist,
each name here tells us something about me, about
my essence… who I am… that I exists is a given…

my existence is taken for granted when I am asked, who are you?
and the question of , Who am I, revolves around this question
of what values do I hold…

but forgotten is the simple fact that my existence is of limited time…
I shall exists only for a short time and then I shall not exist…
I am transitory, temporary, impermanent…

my existence is finite… and my essence is also finite… for
my essence depends upon my existence…

and once I am gone, people will say, hopefully, he was a good person,
he was a kind person, he was… he existed and in that existence,
his essence was kind or good or whatever people might say about me…

so in a sense, my essence will live beyond my existence because
people will comment about my essence, he was ________…
and those values which create my essence are descibed… kind,
good, honest, fair, loving… or whatever…

think about names from the past… Julius Caesar for example…
we say he was ruthless…and that is part of his essence, part of his
values…….he was a dictator… and to be a dictator means you accept
certain values…

if I am a doctor, it means I accept certain values of being a doctor…
the Hippocratic oath… I take an oath that I shall use treatment to help
the sick… but never with a view to injury and wrong doing…
Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so,
nor will I suggest such a course………I will help the sick and I will
abstain from intentional wrong-doing and harm……

the essence of being a doctor is to treat the sick and not to
injure or engage in wrong-doing to anyone…
the doctor exists but he has values, his essence is to help others…

was he born engaged in the practice of treating the sick
or not to injure or engage in wrong-doing to anyone?
no, he is born, he exists and then later, he
comes to his values, his essence………

so by choosing values, you choose your essence… who you are…

existence is already there, you need to choose what values
you shall live by, thus creating your essence…

Kropotkin

we cannot chose to exist but we can chose our values, our essence…
the essence we have is by choice… we choose our essence but we
cannot choose existence…

Kropotkin

we must choose our essence or have it chosen for us by the
indoctrinations of society/state/church/family…

and what happens if we fail to choose?

if we fail to choose our essence, our values, then when it comes
time to make a choice, to decide upon a course of action,
we are using values that do not reflect who we are,
we are using values that does not reflect our essence, who we are…
this alienation, this disconnect from acting with values that are not
our own, leaves us a with problem… and one possible solution to
our problem is to escape making a choice of values by
engaging in our worship of the material world, of objects…

in other words, to escape choosing our values, our essence, we
chose addictions to material goods like money or material goods…
this addiction allows us to escape our making a choice as what is to be
our essence, our values…

If you are addicted to something, you cannot make a choice outside of
the addiction… you can escape accountablity of the values you choose
by being focus upon your addictions to money or material goods…

in modern society, the goal isn’t to become our values but to
escape responsibility for our values… we hate to held accountable
for our choices and one solution for that escape is to hew to
the values and essences of society/state/church/family…

for if we hold to the values, the essence of society/state/church/family,
we escape responsibility for being accountable for our choices…
if I choose to hold a value, like honesty, then I am held accountable
for the value I have chosen… but what if I don’t want to be held accountable
for my choices… which is the modern way, attempt to escape being held accountable
for our choices, to be held accountable for our essence… the best way we can
do that is simply accept society values and then if called out, we can say,
I simply adapted those values from society… you escape responsibility for
holding values by claiming everyone holds those values and thus you can’t be
accountable for holding values that everyone holds…

escaping responsibility for our essence, our values is the great American pastime…
we hate to be called out for our values… which is why the idea of being “political
correct” is so despise in America… it calls out people for their values and people
want to escape responsibility for their choice in values and others calling out
those values, being politically correct, means you are force to account
for your values, account for your essence…….god forbid we are held accountable
for our values, our essence…

and those who are “politically correct” also escape responsibility for their choice of
values and they escape that accountability by calling out others… being “politically
correct” means never admitting your own responsibility or being accountable
for your own choices, your own values, your own essence…….

again the great American pastime is to escape responsibility for your choices
in values………how do you avoid taking responsibility for your choices in values?

Kropotkin

hold this thought in mind as you read this piece…

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility…”

In order to form a “more perfect union”… not to form
a perfect union, but “in order to form a more perfect union”

and the essense of the American ideal as established by the founding fathers,
is to adapt, change, modify to “form a more perfect union” by
“we the people” …now hold onto this thought of forming a
“more perfect union” and how do we go about forming a “more perfect union”?

we now return to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in which in which we understand
the basic needs of the individual… but we must understand that no individual stands
alone… we are social creatures who can only survive within a social context…
the statement that “no man is an island” is quite true in a literal sense…no
human being can survive alone…

we see in Maslow Hierarchy that the physiological needs of the body make
up the bottom, the base of the pyramid… to survive we need the basic
physiological needs of biological beings… food, water, warmth, rest, among
the biological needs of human beings… as an liberal, I am going to add
education and medical needs into this list… and the last thing I am adding is
love… we know that babies deprived of love in their first year quite often
die… so we can add love into the mix of basic physiological needs…

as it true for an individual, is also true of an society… a society must
meet its physiological needs if it is to survive… the society must engage in
providing food, water, warmth, rest and as I have included education
and medical care, we need to include those into our basic understanding of
what a society/state must have to survive…

the next step on his hierarchy is safety needs, which is security and safety needs

the interesting thing about this one is that if one knows history, we know
that both individual and the collective security needs were often neglected
or just outright ignored…we know from history that the average person
personal safety or security was limited at best throughout history…
the threat of violence was never far from the surface during most
of human history and this include our own “wild west” where personal
security was limited to the number of guns one might own……

it can be said that we can judge a society by how much security/safety
it provides for its individual members of that society… a
society that can provide security and safety for its members is
a stronger and steadier society then a society where security
and safety is problematic for the members of that society.

the next level of needs is love/belonging…we are social creatures and
we need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance among our social groups…

as I work in a system, as a checker, I need to feel a sense of belonging
and acceptance in my engagement with my peers, with other checkers
and baggers and others that I have contact with in my store…

and the next level of engagement is the self-esteem need in which
our ego and status needs need to be met…
gaining recognition, status, importance and respect from those within my
engagement with others, either in my work group or in my day to day group,
any social groups I may belong to…(in which I don’t in fact, belong to any other
group beside my work group and I don’t want to belong to that group because
my fondest goal in life is to retire from my crappy job) but I am a exception to the need
that wants status and recognition and respect from my peers… I just don’t care…

and the final need according to Maslow is self-actualization…
the quote that best defines this is

“what a man can be, he must be”

to discover one’s full potential is the high point of one aspirations in one’s life

and what is true individually, is also true collectively… societal needs are the same…
from the lowest need of physical needs to discovering society’s full potential,

and what is stopping us from reaching our full potential?

I would suggest that our failure comes from our failure to choose
values that bring us to our full potential… now recall my comments
on “we the people, in order to form a more perfect union”

we have held these thoughts in mind as I have written the last few
paragraphs…so how do we go about “forming a more perfect union”?

we choose values that engage us on a higher level of existence…
that is to say, we find values that reach up instead of down…
we don’t choose values that are lower, instinctual values of anger
and hate and lust and greed and violence… we choose values that
lead us to becoming human, even more human…… and this is the case
for us to reach our “forming a more perfect union” we don’t hold values
that are the lower values of instincts, of hate, violence, anger, greed,
lust… we hold higher values of peace, love, charity, justice…

it is our engagement/choice of higher values that will lead us to
“form a more perfect union”…….it is our engagement with higher values
that will lead us to try to fulfill, not only for us but for everyone,
the Maslow hierarchy of needs……

we choose the values that enables us to fulfill the possibility of a “more perfect union”
and we can choose the values that makes it possibility for us to complete for everyone
the Maslow hierarchy of needs………

the values we choose… values that compel us to rise to becoming more human,
not less… thus we must reject such values as nationalism and hatred and
superstition and prejudice and intolerance… these values cannot help us
form a “more perfect union” and these negative values cannot allow us to
achieve our goal of moving up the hierarchy of needs from the basic necessities
to achieving self-actualization…… hate and anger and lust and greed
is not the path to the creation of a “more perfect union”… but justice
and love and charity and peace are the path to the creation of a “more perfect union”.

thus we reject IQ45 values of anti-LGBT and misogyny and racism
and intolerance and sexism and hate and anger and greed among
the values IQ45 supports and promotes… why do we reject?
because those values are in conflict with the goal of a “more perfect union”
and those vile values of hate are in conflict with an attainment of
the goal of achieving Maslow hierarchy of needs……. if we hate,
we don’t care if those we hate have food, water, warmth, shelter,
education, health care… to achieve our individual and collective goal
of “forming a more perfect union” and achieving our collective and individual
goal of rising from one level of Maslow hierarchy to the next level, we
must engage in the inclusive goals of love and peace and hope and charity, to
allow others to achieve their goal of rising to another level of Maslow hierarchy…

we are social creatures… we exists collectively and as such, we must engage
with each other collectively and attempt to rise together to “form a more perfect union”
and to rise to another level of the hierarchy of needs…….and the method of
engagement is to choose values which allows engagement with others on an equal
basis… tolerance and love and peace and hope and non-violence are some of those
values we must choose if we are to form a “more perfect union”

so, choose, which values are going to choose to create a “more perfect union”
and which values are you going to choose to allow both yourself and others
to move up the hierarchy of needs?

Kropotkin

what the Maslow hierarchy does for us is give us
an understanding of a goal, a destination for us to try
to reach…and the goal of every human being should be
the final step on Maslow hierarchy which is self-actualization…

reduced to the statement

“what a man can be, he must be”

the entire human question revolves around this question
of “what can we be?” but that is the final step on Maslow’s
hierarchy… how do we get from whatever step we are on
be it the lowest step of meeting our physical needs, the lowest
level of our needs, the base of the pyramid, our needs for food,
water, shelter, education and medical needs or the next higher step
is the security/safety needs and the next step is the need for
love/belonging and the next step is self-esteem need… then
we reach the final need, the self-actualization need…

so each of us is on a different place in regards to Maslow’s hierarchy,
some are on the basic, lowest level… just trying to meet the physical
needs of food and water and warmth/shelter, education and medical needs

some are on the security/safety needs and some are on the love/belonging
level and some are on the self-esteem level… but the goal for each of us
is to reach the final level of self-actualization level… and we need
to reach it both individually and, and collectively…what would
self-actualization in a society look like? the statement for the self-actualization
level would look like this,

“what a society can be, it must be”

so, collectively, what can we be? as a society, what is our best?

a society where we make sure the lower levels of human needs are met…

we are engaged in making sure individuals needs are met with support
to reach individual needs of the lower levels of the pyramid, society
makes sure the individuals within that society have the lower level
support of the lower levels, we feed and house and educate and
ensure their safety and security and we allow them to love and
feel like they belong and we allow individuals to reach the next
level which is the self-esteem level and then we allow individuals
to reach their final level, which is the self-actualization needs…
a society can be able to support each and every single member
enough to reach their individual level of self-actualization…that
would be a successful society, one that allows its members
to reach the highest level of engagement in being human…

so a society should be engage in allowing its members
to reach their full potential…that is a successful society…

so when we damage individual members of society
by our engagement with the lower levels of human
instincts which is hate and greed and lust and anger and
prejudice… we prevent them from reaching their individual
goal of self-actualization…by our use of myths, biases,
habits, prejudices and superstitions, we prevent people
from reaching the final goal of self-actualization……

Kierkegaard goal was for individuals to reach their full potential,
he place the individual above society and we can within, a societal
context, be able to achieve K. goal with the aid of society/government
to fulfill individuals lower level needs and wants… society engages in
helping individuals reach their lower level needs of food and water
and shelter/warmth and education and medical needs and then
by governmental actions, we can help people feel the next level
which is safety/security need…and even conservatives who reject
every other level needs of people agree that society/government is
best designed to meet the security/safety needs of the population…
that is why they fight so hard for government to meet the
needs of people on the security/safety level… because their lower
physical needs of food and water and shelter and education are met…
but these people fail to account for the higher levels of people’s needs,
the need for love/a sense of belonging, or of people need for
esteem… conservatives focus on the second level of needs when
we must engage with all levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and
society/government can aid in meeting their lower level needs with
actions that ensure the lower level needs are met with the
goal of allowing every single person to reach the self-actualization
level… to become who they can be… that is the goal of society…
to allow people the ability to become who they can be…
and by doing so, we help create a “more perfect union”
by allowing people to reach their full potential… a society/a union
is only as strong as its members and we must remember this basic
understanding of groups at an size or level, the group is only as strong
as its individual members… to ensure the strength of a group/society/state,
we must make sure its individual members are strong… and that is the goal
of our pursuit of equality… to increase the individual strength that then
improves the overall strength of the group/society……

if we create a Kierkegaardian society of strong individuals, we create a
strong and stable society/state………if the individual members of society
are weak is because they are unable to engage in a pursuit of the Maslow’s
pyramid……. to make society strong, we must make the individuals members
strong by allowing them to reach the final goal of self-actualization…
is there a goal above self-actualization? of course, the goal is to discover
and reach that next step and then overcome that step and reach another…
their is no such thing as a absolute and final goal/destination for individuals
or society… there is simply just another goal to reach, once we discover it…

Kropotkin

now one may accuse me of nihilism and that is certainly their
right to make such an accusation… but my thought is engaged
in exposing the current nihilism of the modern age… we, in fact,
could be considered “the nihilistic age”…

we engage with such nihilistic concepts and ism’s as capitalism
and communism and Catholicism and all types of religions that
are nihilistic by the negation of human beings and their values…

any time we see humans or their values being negated, that is
nihilism…and that is what I fight… a nihilism that is so
embedded within society that is it virtually unseen…….

learn to see what is being negated and you will see the beginning of
wisdom…

Kropotkin

Yeah yeah. Every generation of man calls the era that follows, nihilistic, and they’ve been doing this for thousands of years. And yet the world keeps in turning, getting better in many respects, and worse in others. But the general economy of life remains the same; whatever is new and unfamiliar will always be unsettling for the old, because the old cannot be impartial to the concept of change and progress. They see values and virtues as eternally fixed… habits and customs as absolutely and unconditionally good. Behind all this nonsense lies only a single statement; ‘this makes me uncomfortable and I don’t know what to do.’ Even N could not get away from this insipidity when he announced the coming of European nihilism. As if the knowledge that God was dead presented a real problem for anyone that mattered. You can’t judge ages by the sentiments of their masses. Their distress is nothing more than a silly spectacle.

K: I am old granted but I didn’t say what you think I said… I said that this was
a “nihilistic age” and it is, but I wasn’t making the statemtent you think I was…
I wasn’t refering to our age as being less so or more so, then any other age…
I have read the Greeks and Romans complaining about how that particular age
was less then the previous age before it and the kids are mucking things up…
but that isn’t it… we are a nihilistic age because our offical ism’s and
ideologies are nihilistic…we devalue and dehumanized people and their
values in striking ways, new and modern ways… there is no reference to
how the past was nihilistic…they had their issues and we have ours…

your statement is in fact, far more cynical and pessimistic then
my statement was…and to focus on one particular point, the
statement about “god being dead”…the masses for the most part
don’t know and don’t care if god is dead… that is problem for
“intellectuals”, not the masses…because if “god is dead”
then upon what do we base morality upon? the masses don’t
know or care about morality… the masses needs are basic and simple…
it is the intellectual, the well fed intellectual that cares or notices such
things as “god is dead” and what are the implications for us…

people lives are about putting food on the table and getting
little Jon to school and which crappy disneyland resort
they are going to for vacation…most people engage in
the day to day thing, not the “bigger” questions…

people want their lives made safe and secure and constant…
no surprises or change… or said another way…
KISS… keep it simple stupid…if you ask yourself what do people
want, that would be it…KISS…

as for me… me calling this age, a Nihilistic one is to simply name
an age, just like we had a “scientific age” and “the age of Reason”…
we have our own age… and it is the “Nihilistic age”…

Kropotkin

the masses… they are too busy engaging in the lowest level
of Maslow’s pyramid… to busy trying to get and maintain
the basic’s, food, water, shelter, education, health care,
to bother with the intellectual games we play here…

the masses don’t have the time, energy, money, inclination to
engage in the pursuit of values that we engage in…
that is not a knock, it is a statement of fact…

look at some intellectual hero’s… Plato, Descartes, Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer, they came from wealth as did Russell and Wittgenstein…
because they had wealth, they were able to pursue philosophy in
ways working class people cannot.

we intellectuals create the viewpoint of the working class…
if the working class supports democracy, it is because the
intellectuals working from an Enlightenment perspective,
have taught the working class what it means to
be in and have a, democracy……

I am working for a world where the working class tells the
intellectuals what the working class stands for and is all about…

I trust that day comes soon…

Kropotkin

yeah butcha really can’t say an ‘age’ is nihilistic, though. you could say that an age consists of peoples who are in opposition to each other… and one group calls the other nihilistic because they don’t share their values. but even this isn’t an entirely accurate definition of nihilism because there is no absence of values here, only opposing values. but i know what you mean. you wanna say that the elites don’t give a shit about the averages joes, so the elite are nihilistic. but they aren’t. they just don’t give a shit about your values, that’s all.

any time you get a fundamentalist of some variety or another, he’s going to call any deviation from, or disagreement with, what he thinks is ‘right’, an instance of nihilism. very rarely these days do we find a real philosopher doing impartial diagnostic work like fritz did when he called a stage in history ‘nihilistic’. what i mean is, there’s a huge difference in noticing a crisis at the loss of belief in god and calling that crisis nihilistic, and pointing at an ideology and saying ‘that’s a nihilistic ideology’. the former is a report of the facts… the latter, substanceless complaining. because any ideology is entirely value-laden, it makes absolutely no sense to call one nihilistic. so that’s what i mean; post modern philosophers use the word ‘nihilistic’ as a catch-all phrase to begin a polemic with. what would be more honest and accurate would be to begin the polemic simply with ‘what i think sucks’. but that doesn’t invite any credibility and is much less professional. giving a thesis in sophistry the grand title ‘NIHILISM’ is far more effective. i mean just look at it all in caps like that. it’s positively frightening, isn’t it? all you need now is a sound track… maybe the opening notes of strauss’s thus spake zarathustra.

dun… dun… DUN!!. dun-dun dun-dun dunnn; ((((NIHILISM)))

forget about all those dudes but the last two. then forget the second to last, too. none of these great intellectuals did as much for the working classes as the last one. we’re talking about a heavy artillery full frontal assault on the entire edifice of western continentalism. about the only thing W didn’t destroy was american pragmatism, and that’s only because it was just getting started at the time.

anti-dialectics.co.uk/was_wi … eftist.htm

Indeed, yet Trumpism is reviving the faux dialectics, under differing presumptions of game play, of the naive realism of his conservative fans. Pure transvaluation of his inverted paradigmn.
And , it works pragmatically.

The game play as it has come down through the ages from functional usage. No one claims the absolute as absolutely self ontaoned5, at least not since Leibnitz, resulting in two almost absolute models differing merely by a theoretic indiscernability. The necessity for this reduction set the stage for subordinate language games to the ordinate games of signs through sets. Necessity requires the structural basis to be primordial to the knowledge of it before it can be understood by languages of modal logic.

All determinations’ sources are derivitive of prior resemblances, and their anti derivitive is only an approximated hypothesis reversely.

the engine of evolution is competition between species and species and their environments. danger must be present in order for progress to be made in either respect. what we have today is a particular version of channeling that competition into an outlet that allows it to be expressed without putting the competitors in great danger. the element of competition, the thing pursued and fought over, is property. and think about the strange silliness of this; this competition really translates into ‘compelling another individual of the species to do the work so i don’t have to’. that’s it. the species, having grown fat off its abundance, no longer needs to strive against meaningful dangers. now they simply split up into groups and fight over resources and pushing mops. how paltry, pete. that’s what I’m gonna start calling you: paltry pete.

this is why i don’t get along with your species. where i come from, we had gotten rid of capitalism in the 15,000th year of our evolution, and had collectively colonized every planet in our solar system. while you idiots were still arguing over stupid shit like minimum wage and who has rights to the gaza strip, we were building amusement park complexes as big as your new york city on katalax (its a moon that orbits one of our planets).

really man. i don’t even know why i’m in this cartoon room you call earth. i tried to convince the intergalactic counsel of space exploration to just exterminate you idiots, but they were like ‘nah let’s let em live for a while longer and see if they can get their shit together, first.’