Yes, and I really should give Eye’s the same consideration I’m asking them to give humanity and note the complexity that applies to them. (And I do apologize to them for being so harsh -just something about the authoritarian puts me in a the-best-defense-is-a-good-offence mode.) First of all, I, myself, when I was young, have succumbed to the seduction of the negative out of the misconception that it would insulate me from sentimentality. What I later found out, through a book on writing poetry, was that sentimentality is a little more complex than children and puppies with big eyes in that it is anything that elicits a response that it fails to justify. As Tennyson put it:
“I distrust any poem that holds out its lips to be kissed or blackens the eyes.”
In other words, one can take negativity to the point of being sentimental. For instance, Pink Floyd, who was a major influence on my succumbing to the negative, put out three major albums at their peak, albums that showed a great deal of technical mastery coupled with creative energy that also utilized cynicism and negativity -that is as compared to say Yes: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals (my favorite). Unfortunately, by The Wall, what we were getting was Roger Waters doing a lot of snarling expecting us to feel his pain. Even though the seeds of reverse sentimentality were always there, it became truly so with The Wall.
And I think such a sentimentality can find its way into philosophy as well. One only need look at the heavy handed approaches of KTS and its grand guru, Satyr, to see this.
Furthermore, I think we need to consider the natural human gravitation to the negative. This was suggested in the imperative of the news to sell the news through negative events. I mean it wouldn’t sell if people weren’t naturally disposed to the negative. And we see this as well at a personal anecdotal level in that we tend to best remember the most negative events in our lives. At the same time, we should qualify this by recognizing that we also tend to remember the most positive times in our life, which suggests that it’s not so much a matter of negative or positive, but rather the intensity of the experience. Therefore, if there is a lean to the negative, it may only be because negative experiences tend to be more intense.
At the same time, there is research that indicates that this natural gravitation to the negative is actually hardwired into us. Dream research shows that around 80% of the content of our dreams are actually negative. And my personal experience supports this in that the bulk of my dreams tend to involve feelings of frustration or fear. And given that the foundation of our dreams lies in brain activity while we’re sleeping, there is every reason to think that this gravitation to the negative is more about the hardware than the software.
Now as far as the authoritarian implications of Eye’s position, I think we can see a parallel between the social/political aspect and the aesthetic. Back when I was a musician and songwriter, it was always like I was caught between 2 impulses. On one hand, there was this dark art-as-witchcraft will to power thing going on. On the other, there was this art-as-seduction impulse that always risked falling into a kind of la-la-la effect, much as Yes did as a general strategy and Guns and Roses did with Sweet Child of Mine. Ultimately, I think the best strategy would be to work towards a balance that walks between the 2 extremes that constitute sentimentality.
And I think it likewise as concerns the authoritarian aspect of Eye’s position.I mean I get it: there are clearly some people in the world who are in need of an externally imposed structure. I have such people around me. And I, myself, have often said that many of us find ourselves caught between predators and parasites. I have even found myself in situations in which, through DUIs and the probation that followed, I was more than happy to let someone else take the wheel. In both cases, I did what I had to do not just because I had to, but because I knew I needed to. But this does not justify some sweeping statement about the bulk of humanity. Nothing about it justifies the Very Bad Faith of acting as if everything will be right if we allow a handful of so-called rational people (people as susceptible to the corruption of that kind of power -philosopher or not- as anyone) to structure every aspect of our lives.
Hobbe’s and Machiavelli’s positions (much like Rand’s) were the result of half-assed reasoning in that they were the product of cherry-picking the negative acts of humans and letting themselves be motivated by their own self serving agendas which they passed off as “real reason” -much like KTS and Satyr do. At the same time, I think we have to be weary of the “beautiful soul” that would ask us to give the authoritarian equal consideration simply because it is one opinion among others.
Ultimately, I believe it will be a middle ground, without any kind of guideline, that will get us through this. We are condemned to play this by ear.