“Creating need” is another way to phrase “technological development”.
We have an entire branch of knowledge dedicated exclusively to finding places where there can be a potential need, and creating something to address it. It’s called engineering, and please let me be the first to say that if you or baudrillard think that engineering is a noxious occupation, you are out of your flipping mind.
People had been living just fine for millennia under candle/torch/lamp light before electricity came about. Does that mean that all of the things electricity make possible are futile?
That is not say that there isn’t pointless consumerism… selfie hat, anyone?
… but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, eh?
Again, I’m going to respond to this little by little either editing the post or replying in separate chunks depending how the conversation unfolds, since there is so much to hold it all in my mind would be futile (for my capacities anyway).
I get this, though I thought that the second formulation (capital determining labor) was always what Marx thought. I have never read Marx so it could very well be my misconception, but I took his formulation about capitalists monopolizing the “means of production” to mean just that (capital determining labour), because capital is supposed to be a representation of goods (including land) which are either already in possession in raw form, by having confiscated land or other means of appropriation, or which will subsequently be produced and appropriated by the capitalist, but ultimately it is the power (through possessions or even force) of capital in the capitalist system which brings labor to action.
Capital is defined
[mass noun] Wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available for a purpose such as starting a company or investing:
I see no reason force could not be an “asset” to one willing to use it, and surely it is used today in extraction or production some places in the world.
From what you post of Baudrillard’s writing, he is a clever and illuminating writer, I have no doubt of that, but his final sentence (bolded above) seems to aim at refuting the functionalist perspective of man’s rational and technological domination, but what he says above (also bolded) is understandable to modern man through a rational-functionalist perspective (and it even seems like this is the perspective he takes himself for his analysis). I would be curious about how it could be interpreted in another way.
He says that primitive man’s use of magic, ritual, and festival was not “behavior aiming to produce useful values for the group through technical means, nor behavior aiming at the same end by magical means.” but I don’t I see it that way.
Primitive man “chop[s] one tree or trace one furrow” which would be to some purpose, the furrow presumably to plant food for something to eat, which is useful and no doubt valued by the group. The appeasement of the gods was often to be spared of their wrath or else to ensure harvests, which, perhaps considered ineffective by our rational-functionalist perspective was still to an end and one that was valued for its purpose then.
“This is really why there is no scarcity. Scarcity only exists in our own linear perspective of the accumulation of goods.” This is again an appeal to our rational-functionalist perspective, us who have such a strong valuation for resources and presently fear their scarcity due to overexploitation and overpopulation. The way that such ‘giving back’ would be incorporated into our mindset would be for its value-sake of avoiding scarcity… This really must be why Baudrillard brings up scarcity at all, otherwise what relevance would it have, and without relevance it truly would just be words…
You said further down (in my question about whether value-theorizing would be in itself frivolous)
But the attaching of values to material objects is exactly what is taking place in the capitalist system by rhetoric and other psychological techniques used in advertising and public relations to have consumers flocking towards objects that they come to believe they value.
I might agree that if the goal (again a functionalist outlook) is to ‘emancipate’ society from its enchantment by frivolous objects then attaching value to a particular reference point may be necessary, though I am less sure whether that process wouldn’t itself be a sort of spell-binding, after all rhetoric has gone hand in hand with philosophy since its inception, and perhaps earlier in an unconscious manner for the sake of social influence.
I must read on here in your responses, but I am wondering whether there might be an attempt to romanticize the old relation to the gods.
To be honest, I’m not even convinced of the thesis that the “weak” have gotten in control, I think that the surface rhetoric was always just that. The Christian demand of humility, nonviolence and all the rest was just a control strategy to create a docile populus, but the warrior class was never out of power.
The rise of mass society was also budding at the time of the late medieval era/renaissance because weapons entered the field of battle which began to make trained knights irrelevant, and it really took off when firearms were introduced. Arming the populace with deadly weapons created the need to give them the illusion of more power.
Because any conception of “strong” individuals cannot be a homogenous group, each will ultimately be vying for power over the others, and when mass armies are effective means of warfare, the ability to proselytize to the masses and win them over to a cause becomes a viable strategy for one seeking power. This is what we see in the French revolution, but the people never truly took power, it is not a “democracy” (rule of the people) and it never has been.
I even wonder if, as specialized weapons are created which are not in the hands of any person to land them on an equal basis, ideologies of supremacy and other control strategies might not reemerge and perhaps be accepted gladly by the populace who finds even their illusion of power slipping, and so seeks solace again in god figures.
Anyway, that was my rant for now. I will read on.
**Addendum:
It seems like you’re talking about two things here. “Money in ancient times was based on confidence”, you mean that the money was backed by something? God, silver or other precious metals it was created from, as apposed to a fiat currency? I’m not sure if I am getting that correctly, because in reality those precious metals hold no value except as symbols in themselves of rarity and the confidence would be that others would continue to uphold and value those symbols.
I agree with this to an extent, but it also seems that our confidence in money is due at the same time to a confidence that the money will still hold worth, and in other ways a confidence that there is something behind the money, namely hard work or status — at least the ability to procure such money and possess the “goods” of life.
Even this, I get what you’re saying and I agree with it, but I don’t think it’s all that different from what has always taken place. I think that idea that value was created by labor was always an illusion, value was created by the desire for the thing-in-itself.
I found in reading the ideas of Locke and other early liberals and capitalist philosophers that Marx’s ideas were already inherent in them only in a versed and embedded way. The fruit on the tree that Locke speaks of that causes someone to use their labor to take it was already the value free of labor, the labor did not add value to the object, the labor was what Locke had said gave the right of appropriation. Locke actually says that it is due to the power of those who can appropriate and keep a thing has right to it. The thought was meant to be institutionalized and protected by government, but it is made clear that scarcity had already begun to set in the sense that land had already become appropriated by feudal lords who then rented it to tenants or held serfs, and it was the power of the lords, who originally rode out and took the land and possessed it by force — if a peasant acted in defiance they would be quartered or worse…
And I get this and I agree with it, those are the techniques of advertising and public relations, but in certain ways they aren’t really that different from rhetoric, they are just more scientifically advanced and use the resources of cognitive science, psychology, sociology and other social sciences to be exacting.
All organisms intervene upon the environment, to one degree or another, because every action is an intervention, an imposition of will upon otherness.
The term Artificial describes the ambiguous point where the intervention of an organism upon the environment that made it possible results in repercussions upon the organism itself, which exceed the environment intervened upon.
The more extreme and fantastic the alteration to the environment that made life possible, all the more man exposes his death-wish through it.
In effect, Artificial denotes the degree man “changes” the circumstances that brought him about.
It has gone from natural to artificial…that is from one not determined by human interventions and conventions to one almost totally determined by them. Predator and prey are, now part of the same species.
Needs based on and reduced to the simplest of pleasure drives, yet detached from reality into a progressive social cocooning into happy children and proud consumers.
That the current modern economical system is unsustainable has been proposed by, I dare say while shamelessly even attempting a count, thousands of scholars before you and before baudrillard. It is clear enough that any layman can spend 20 minutes on the subject and reach that conclusion.
What hasn’t been proposed, at least broadly and effectively, is how to get rid of the bath water, while keeping the baby.
Would you care to take a shot, or would you rather polish mine while I polish yours for a few pages?
There is so much here to read I’m having a difficult time getting through it all, so you’ll have to give me some time before I can make a complete response. I’ve read a few more of the posts, the first one I had some issues with that you can find in the first response I made above. The second and third comments (here http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=187106&start=25#p2507855 and here http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=187106&start=25#p2507855) I found very interesting formulations, there was only the one issue which I inquired about in my first response above.
I also am becoming curious though what your stance is on why any given person would be motivated to do anything, or is the implication something like our motivations never change, it is just something like the throwing away the veil of illusion caused by the weaving of signifiers without signifieds will lead to a revealing of the motivation that was previously obscure, or something else?
You wrote to desire is to be incomplete, to need the desired thing and not be satisfied, but isn’t it also natural to be incomplete, because you value survival so presumably you accept that we become empty and need food and seek it, but where do you put the limits on that emptiness and say no more? I am not sure if you are calling for a limiting of imagination which would seek to employ means of the earth to fulfill itself, to create, and as such create values.
Stunted hedonist minds like the above here with typical utilitarian-eyes-of-the-flesh can only stomach-predate what all these authors supposedly said, down to their level of base appetites, as “current modern economical system is unsustainable”, as if! it were about economics. This is what happens when philosophy is indulged in as a hobby by any dick believing itself to be independent or self-valuing being, and information can be crunched and munched like a mindless happy consumer and 20 mins. is apparently enough to discern what’s been said by every author before like apparently they were just regurgitating idiots, is supposedly about economics! But 2 mins. are enough to expose what these authors were saying were the production of subjectivities and Idiot savants like the consumer minds of Phoneutria that can only process quantitative data of reality within the pre-set hedonistic framework of “keep the pleasure in, while throw the pain out”, because as just demonstrated what HM:PO is, what matters is civilization and therefore the Efficacy of Performance. They can dress it up and call their cynical cowardly sheltering of reality and the defence of being sheltered within it as “higher living”, but to the minds liberated from the HM:PO, this retardation of life, of reality shamelessly abstracted as human systems within human concerns, within the pre-determined parameters of pleasure/pain, goes to show the kind of systemic Domestication and narcissistic minds emerging from it like a disease.
This is more the case within social environments that prefer adolescent minds and immature dispositions.
Systemic sheltering breeds the very type of the poster here, but where the problem ensues is when the system requires immature minds with mature desires.
Participation in the system is a must, if it is to function at its peak of efficiency, but maturity beyond the level requires ensuring this participation becomes non-detrimental to social stability and the functioning of the machinery of civilization.
A balancing act is required; one involving a selective and partial maturing.
The ideal citizen, the perfect subject, is one mature enough to be involved, in a productive way, yet not mature enough to be disruptive with his involvement, more exploiting productivity than contributing to it, and certainly not immature to the point where he is not capable or even interested in participating at all.
The Peter Pan Syndrome, in this case, defines a type which has remained prepubescent in its attitude, and what the typical female hedonist minds favour inseminated by the system.
This War like no Other is a war over “hearts and minds” where the seductive appeal of remaining child-like of simply indulging without care or forethought, is used to manipulate minds not used to any level of need/suffering above what the system permits, turning them into delicate spirits that cannot tolerate anything over this socially cultivated median level of (memetic) pain tolerance.
The modern mind is so trapped in its memetic constructs that when it declares itself an individual it still insists that this can only be expressed within very limited socioeconomic and cultural directions.
It measures success and failure accordingly, and based on popular standards, and it cannot imagine anyone not wanting what it, and its kind, want.
This is also a form of social conditioning enforced by peer pressures, and more importantly by female sexual choice.
All individuals are considered “free” but their freedom is “wasted” if it does not follow the prescribed avenues of expression.
This type of peer pressure produces uniformity, reinforcing the idea that all choices must fall into specific acceptable categories of what is considered “valuable” and/or “useful” - code for communal value - and it inevitably results in individuals so miserable that they must then find justifications for choices they did not make freely, or made without fully understanding what they were doing; sometimes disappointed, given the reality of the outcome in relation to what they were told would bring them “happiness”, they either pretend to be more content than they really are - the pretense exposing the lie - or they show particular vigor in presenting the prescribed options as the only possible ones.
Their desperation is often revealed through their repeated mentioning of their credentials, their job title, or the continuous, indirect, bragging about how happy they are, by mentioning all the nice things they own.
You see this, most often, in relation to marriage, but also in relation to career choices.
What moderns mean when they use the word “freedom” is liberation from the past/nature, and all the possible dire consequences their choices might produce - freedom from responsibility, unless the outcomes are “positive”.
They are so protected that their choices are not only limited but also guaranteed to not result in anything life threatening.
They are free of care (careless), of anxiety/fear (fearless), since nothing they do will cost more than what they can pay, and what remains is some obscure, theoretical, benefit.
They become jaded, cynical of anything proposing a cost.
Being care-free is a condition we know as immaturity; a psychology in a perpetual state of childhood.
It’s that naivete, that retardation in development, which they must defend as “innocent,” offering their choices an added layer of protective distance.
The VO idea(l) of declaring yourself smart, or noble, of simply believing whatever you like or that makes you feel good and valuable, with no external to self standard, is another instance of PO: the games children play when they are bored with themselves or seek to escape their circumstances.
It is misconstrued as an internal source of self-validation, when it is simply solipsism and arrogance reaching an apex of shameless self-gratification.
Would I care to spoon-feed the comatose doping on happy trails and the dearth of their illiteracy guiding them and their infantile psychologies one step at a time holding hands, or would I say, Know Thyself?
3
2
1
…go figure.
I’m done with you.
For the others who can sincerely engage past 20 mins.
To me, both those questions revolve around one answer - Asceticism in the pagan sense, because decadence and attrition is a natural facet of reality, and one does not combat the system; affirmation is to accept the total character of life, and every growth is followed by cyclic depletions and back and so on. Systemic interference however catalyzes this attrition artificially. (Read the post just above this one on systemic Narcissism and Schizophrenia.)
Yet, one does not care about changing the system no more than one cares to change nature, or to alter natural environments.
Any change forces an adaptation stress upon the organism which has already analyzed and found his survivals strategies within the known.
To want to change what is by itself dynamic is a form of madness.
If anything the organism prefers a stable, predictable, known environment than one that is continuously changing its dynamics.
The organism is in a perpetual struggle to impose order, if not on the world it has minimal power over, then upon self in relation to a world that cannot but continue to change.
Any analysis of the environment whether it be natural or manmade, must be perceived as an analysis that does not necessarily propose a change upon what is already changing on its own, but it is an analysis of environment to aid the organism in its struggle to maintain self-order, within this tumult.
HM is when subjectivity is raised to a “just because I think so” there’s nothing more to do than find that shared, lowest-common-denominator, which makes us all human or alive, and place it as the standard for evaluating the objective.
At this point it really doesn’t matter what is proposed, because if someone gains from its belief then it good enough.
What is lower than any idealistic, abstraction of the world but the sensation we derive from it.
Whatever sensation it might be - love, pleasure - if it feels good then it is true.
And so, any opposition to this is also judged by a hypothetical reward in sensation.
Every idea, act, belief can now be reduced to that sensation.
No justification, no validation, no explanation…all that produces that sensation is that sensation; all that contradicts and/or challenges this sensation is untrue.
Dialectics through emotives.
The humanist, despite his rhetoric about progress and enlightenment, is really a conservative.
He wants to conserve the idea(l) of being human.
He does not want to surpass it and become more; he wants to return to the core principles that maintain it as a one, a singular unity; he wants to detach these core principles from the natural so that they can no longer divide with their brutal proclivities, and raise them to the status of divine where they can act as a beacon for lost souls; calling towards it the inferior and unfit.
That beacon is his en-lightenment: to make light, airy, noetic, spiritual, pure abstraction by cleaning away all the dirty, muddy, stuff of the soil, the earth; he wants to nurture nature away, and leave a pristine, innocent, clean, idea(l) in its stead; an idea(l) that can be appropriated, and imitated, by everyone.
He calls this humanitarianism, or gives it some new label to hide its common roots in the psyche.
He calls it selfless when he does all of this to grant himself the “right” to remain untroubled by the indifferent world before man intervened upon it; he calls it progress to describe the slow ascent into the beyond where all advancement requires an easy change in perspective.
He does not want change, he wants to exalt his condition; he wants to arrest evolution so that he becomes the “last” rung in the ladder of time; he wants to participate and move forward as one monolithic unity, where the idea of individuality becomes another game of shadows, and hidden honesty.
The only change he worships is the change in mind that keeps him adapting to a world that cares not for human deceptions.
Life relates to the world in a negative, antagonistic way, because it struggles to maintain, or revert, an unstoppable process of fragmentation and increasing randomness.
This is agon.
It is experiences as need, and/or suffering.
Balance is the temporary congruence of self-maintenance and entropy.
An Ascetic, in the Hellenic sense of the word, is a realistic idealist.
He wants to harness his genetic, primary, needs, and his automatic (re)actions to stimuli – including emotions – so that they do not drive him, reducing him to a simple animal, by exercising his will (askesis).
To exercise one’s will, to increase its power, a controlled regiment of self-denial, and a willful acceptance of stress, is required.
The motive can be anything, and it can be different for each and every one.
The shared theme is the idea(l) (the noumenon, abstraction), which I call the object/objective, projected as a destination, a goal, a purpose to direct and produce meaning.
This idea(l) is what the will strives towards, and it is the reason why it has been exercised using stress.
The closer to the organism’s nature the projected idea(l) is, the easier it is to attain, then fall back and attain again.
This would require less will-power to be developed.
The further away from the organism’s nature the projected idea(l) is, the harder it is to attain – perhaps never to be attained by the organism itself.
This would require more will-power to be developed.
The more attached the projected idea(l) is to the empirical world, the more realistic and attainable it is.
The less attached the projected idea(l) is to the empirical world, the less realistic and attainable it is.
When an idea(l) is completely detached from the empirical world, to the point where it contradicts it, it is a nihilistic idea(l) and is impossible to attain; the will must be replaced by an external Will to discipline it to the point where it denies itself completely.
In more primitive times the carrot/stick method was used to force the will to deny self, and even then it was not totally successful.
The method included a worldly, natural, genetic cost/threat, and a supernatural, other-worldly, memetic benefit/promise.
Modern methods use the substitution of self with an abstracted Self, the promise of absolute freedom in self-identification (escape from the immutable determining, past/nature), as well as the immediate threat of communal quarantine.
This has also proven to be inadequate to produce absolute success.
This replacement abstracted Self is another idea(l), leaving the organism’s sense of self void; producing this sense of alienation, disconnect, and schizophrenic confusion.
The organism having no past/nature to identify with grasps at the most immediate, the most present, reducing itself to an animal state, making of its sensation an end in itself; or it grasps at that projected Idea(l), in a future disconnected from a past…lacking a continuum.
Once the disciplining, determining, past has been forgotten, denied, dismissed, the seductive possibility of projecting any imaginable idea(l), overwhelms the organism’s mind: both joy and terror grip it.
Some define Nihilism as any idea that contradicts their interests, insults them, hurts their feelings, forces them to come to terms with the inescapable.
I define Nihilism as the attitude that denies, dismisses, rejects, reality, no matter how insulting, hurtful, and challenging it may be.
Two parts to the Hellenic/Pagan form of asceticism - not the Jew, Christian variant.
1- An awareness of past = nature.
To Know Thyself is to know thy limits.
Balance is different for each, because each has a different inherited limit, a different potential.
Excess becomes more fluid, and still no less decisive.
2- An eye to the future = nature to come.
A desire to preserve possibility by not overstepping the boundaries described in #1.
But also a balance of spirit. Not to wish to bring shame to your ancestors…preserved in your bloodline.
A temporal awareness where your existence is not restricted, like a cow’s within your ephemeral lifespan.
A desire to remain true to your past, and to pass it on unblemished, perhaps enhanced…but not diminished.
The two coincide in Time.
A simple hedonistic animal lives for the moment, and so is in the moment.
Of course it is easily contented, though temporarily, because it perceives and/or acknowledges nothing beyond that temporal box we call the moment.
If time is to be brought to its attentions it must be threatened with…yes eternity, …or promised what?..yes eternity.
Though some variants of this manimal type declare themselves as selfless, their motives can only become effective when they are brought down to the shallow selfishness of the ephemeral self…which they call, ironically, ego.
The more “complex” variant has no qualms about its egotism, limited as the concept might be for it.
It lives for the here and now…the other worldly words used to describe the absolute.
It becomes a slave to its own shallow identifiers.
Asceticism becomes this training to be more efficient.
Now excess energies increase and focus brings them upon the object/objective with an impact multiplied by this focused synergy.
Whether we like it or not, suffering and pain are the natural participants in life’s experiment. We either recognize them as such, and use them to our advantage or we spend a lifetime running from them into futility.
It is this aspect of life’s truth that most spend their entire lives escaping from and in the process become weak, gullible, naïve, soft and easily manipulated.
How unfortunate for them that even the temporary escape from life’s truth cannot save them from its eventual inevitability.
The signs of human disorderly existence are everywhere plain to see; from the lack of self-discipline in nutritional consumption that leads to obesity and disease to the absence of sexual self-control that leads to promiscuity and immaturity.
The ‘easy way’ is searched for by all those lacking the discipline to go at it the ‘hard way’ and the realization comes to them too late, that there is no ‘easy way’ and those offering it are either con-artists or manipulators.
The controlled exposure to suffering, made possible through athleticism, creates a strong and durable body that will be ready, in a time of need, to meet life’s unforeseen challenges and come out of every battle, a survivor.
It will reveal itself to all in its harmony, symmetry and beauty.; it will speak of its superiority in graceful movement and efficiency.
But more importantly, the controlled exposure to suffering and pain through asceticism creates a strong and durable mind that will be easily adaptable to a variation of environments and challenges and come out of every confrontation the dominator.
It will reveal itself, more subtly than the body but no less magnificently, in its harmony, order, and virtue; it will speak of its superiority with noble ideals and strength of will. It will be something to admire and inspire.
But are you REALLY done with me… now, after editing your post 3 times?
I haven’t even read it yet. I’m going to assume that it contains the usual bile and spiteful drivel, and no actual answer to my question. I will read it, but I am not going to go into another silly flame war with you kiddo. I’ve got toys to deliver.
You’re fighting a war. Wonderful. What is the end game? The plan of action? What do you propose?
If you don’t know, than you are no better than any other cynic, hoping that somebody with an inch of pragmatism, which is more than you have, will agree with you and actually develop some strategy.
Hope you realize that this is not an insult, it’s a criticism.
But are you REALLY insisting that I take note of one more stupidity of yours… like editing an unwanted quote/ and “shite” like that has to do with you? No, its called taking a selfie with a sombrero hat.
I’ve actually been developing the ideas of realist idealism for some time in the way you described.
I don’t see this as a denial of pleasure, it’s just good sense.
The criticism of pleasure is that it leads to a drive to escape reality which often does not give pleasure, and such a drive is ultimately futile. I agree.
You’ve already thought ahead to contradict what I might say… so I suppose this might be an ultimate wedge between us, that I might say the same thing you have said only because I think it is ‘good’, and pleasure is just the term for the affirmative affect experienced due to chemicals in the body. I suppose I stand guilty as charged. I don’t think it is something that can or should be avoided.
I think the reason I see things differently about pleasure, humanism, functionalism and the rest is because I don’t see any of those things as stable or absolute categories, and as you’ve pointed out a few times it is not possible to encapsulate reality in words. Pleasure is less the highest good than it is a natural part of the human experience, not something to avoid entirely or something to obsess over.
It just follows from a realist outlook on pragmatic action. In a way, I almost find a lot of what you’ve written in this thread a detailed description of the way out of Plato’s cave.
Here I once again agree, and am sure it may also lead to potential disagreement. I am almost certain that in your philosophy there is much room for opposition, and opposition being natural, probably a good thing. I like that too, there is room for a ‘battle’ becoming an art, something to affirm. I am also sure we would agree that someone might be motivated by a given thing and take action which makes them a fool or at least act foolishly, though I might wonder what place you reserve for the jester.
I only spoke to Jakob a couple of times, once recently where he mentioned VO but didn’t explain it. I can’t imagine that he would disagree with much here, but maybe I’m wrong.
Thanks for introducing me to Baudrillard and linking to the aphorisms on/by him and Sloterdijk.
I can see why you want VO to signify in other arenas than in Humanarchy. It does. VO is not tied to Humanarchy, as it is an ontology, not an ideology. It applies to fascism, monarchism, democracy, aristocracy or any form of state or society, or to any realm of nature. But it was adopted by Humanarchy just like RM tried to adopt it. The difference is that Humanarchy does not contradict it (seek to “fix it”) - it simply relies on it.
From a VO perspective, the chemicals are due to the phenomenon that goes as pleasure in animals - self-valuing, continual being.
Indeed mans memetic cosmos allows self valuing to be displaced from the historical body into less reliable sources of affirmation. This is always the point from KTS, but they seem to take this as a negation of the ontological factuality of self-valuing. It would be like blaming the concept of the atoms for feminism or Marxism. Yes, a Marxist relies on atoms, as much as he relies on his own selfvaluing.
The mistake that I have been perceive to make from that side is that I have chosen a platform that puts forth individual liberties as a value. This has been seen as a negation or misinterpretation of my original conception of selfvaluing, as it is based on the Will to Power. Apart from the fact that my social preference is confused here with the ground to my logic (if only my world was so well organized) Lyssa here makes a good point - what of rank?
But I discussed this with you/Artful Pauper. How can this be done while practicing philosophy on an open forum? All politics is conspiracy. If you want to know my political preferences, look at my teacher. But the difference between him and me is that I need to take steps to make this stuff happen. A game of masks is required as long as war doesn’t break out.
I had lazily thought it sufficient to say that Humanarchy is not Humanity or Humanism - and still take it for granted that it is not seen as fully reflecting the meaning of VO. It is an experiment with ground-up activism. So far it’s not very ground up or active, it’s just where we write.
But what else is it then? What if not Humanist values are propagated. I never answered that question. I am still finding out for myself. I just had a talk about Marxism with Tom and I was able to say some truth and to stutter a great deal - my true feelings about Marxism, which I take to be political Christianity, are intertwined with the daily reality I inhabit. It is not a pleasant world, the Dutch society - “although there are some nice folks there” - there are also very many aggressively fearful and deliberately dumb deaf and blind ones. We do not only harbor relatively the greatest muslim population in Europe, but we also lack, seem to have lost, the indigenous genius to protect us from the silliness.
As an answer we attach ourselves completely to the Unites States and glorify her culture, but resemble in our feeble obedience and gullibility nothing of the American spirit. So it’s the worst of both worlds for us now. We have American fear, bigotry and arrogance and no American pride, courage or imagination. And on top of that the country is very very small and populated. I am out of the city for a while now but it’s not far away enough. I need to get the hell out of here. Perhaps when I settle again I can start to accumulate thought about human order of rank. What is in any case clear to me is that the democratic masses must be valued as a layer in the work of the artist tyrant just as Nietzsche said. But right now I find myself in that pliable mass, and I am not at all pliable, so I cause a lot of discomfort, and find very little direct resistance, thus very little ground to act and enjoy myself.
Where is the greatest resistance? What human nature produces the most natural happiness of instinct? Where are the humans I can value in my own terms? Where is cultural ascension? But that is the problem, nowhere. I need to get to a place where there is at least cultural conservatism, ground to stand, to build on. Marble to shape, bronze to cast.
VO posits that all being is self-valuing and (or more accurately, by) valuing in terms of that self-valuing. Being is thus described two fold as the implicit function (selfvaluing) and the explicit function (valuing-in-terms).
It is a fact, and Relativity shows this, that a perspective, which is what a self-valuing always constitutes in an equation (situation) - always has a ‘distorted perception’ of other perspectives. All other motions are appropriated in terms of ones own momentum. This is ‘the terms’ of the selfvaluing - in order to exist, it must distort, or must falsely appropriate.
Herein VO is both an ontology and epistemology at once; it describes the object prior to the distortion - as the distorter.
Rather than existence ‘the relative’, every existent is the relator, the one to whom things are relative.
Except there is more than one.
This is all that is given. From here on, you can give the resulting causality any name you wish. It is in any case never a linear affair.
