Performance Ontology

What is the Current Currency that promises human its worth, its dignity in the updative consumption?

• Secular Humanism promising the rational subject the right to self-value was an arbitrary currency that had simply effaced the Judeo-Xt. God’s image on the coin with the face of Human in the name of enlightened reason, science, progress, etc. Humanarchization via VO tries to stabilize that arbitrariness. Not one among many currents, but the superior Currenc-y…

Sec. Humanism in itself is based on the J.-Xt. Currency of equality. The notion of ‘equality’ is directly linked to the codification of reality and its detachment from the aesthetic world of experience.
The tautology that 2=2 or that a=a refers to an ambiguity, a symbol referring to a mental construct with no connection to anything outside the mind, unless one draws the symbol on paper or on some material surface.
The symbol can now refer to anything in the real world, and its only consistency can be found in its strict adherence to a definition, which is itself encoded symbolically. This practice of providing a written definition is necessary because the symbol may lose meaning, being understood differently by every mind, since it has no shared reference point outside the human mind.

This stringent adherence to the code, the written down words, which enforce an intellectual consistency for the understanding of concepts which may or may not have a sensual reference point in space/time now creates the illusion of parity.
Because the word “human” must always be equal to itself no matter how many times it is replicated, or in what medium, or colour, or general linguistic form it is replicated, therefore the concept ‘human’ becomes a concept which implies equality for everyone it is used to describe.
The code must remain true to the definition, the book of definitions, and so the concept the word describes can now also remain constant and uniform no matter how many variation of the same is replicated.

Marxism is a variance of secular humanism, a variance of judeo-christian nihilism.
All are reduced to workers, producers/consumers.
Marxism emphasizes the production end; Capitalism the consuming end.
Both are part of the same mind-set.
Sex, race, heritage, do not matter within the economics where all is reduced to a number, a code, a market share.
In both the individual only matters as a part of the code: numbers being a linguistic symbol, a code, an abstraction of appearance.

The “us” is a construct.
Transhumanism proposes to surpass it through technologies, which are no more than extensions of memes, the physical projections of ideal(s).
The problem is the container: Earth.
It forces compromises, one of which is liberalism.
There are two methods:
Burn it or integrate it into a collage, a weave…requiring processing.
This “processing” part is what we call nihilism, feminization being a symptom of it…but it is better known as indoctrination, dumbing - down, humbling, eliminating identity, being methods. . .

Humanarchization of VO typically seduces with maximum Freedom as the new human currency…

Freedom, as a concept with no definition not related to human constructs, becomes, for the Modern the highest virtue.
For the modern Nihilist freedom means liberty form the past, from nature, from self as it has been determined.
The concept fills the mind with terror, and over time the first excitement turns to a sense of emptiness, and desperation, seeking for something to attach one’s self to, something to light the path towards an object/objective.
The most terrified are the simplest minds; the ones who are the least able to cope with an idea they have no thought through. These simple minds are the first to attach themselves to a new dependence.
Their original overestimation becomes a desperate cry for an alternative incarceration.

Independence is not possible as an absolute.
The moderns dream of detaching themselves from the past but they can do no more than forget, and deny its effect upon their presence.
They mistake their choices as free choices, when the very degree of their options is limited by the past, as it projects itself forward.
The consequences of this delusion is the loss of self, a denouncement of ego; self-hatred becoming a rejection of one’s inheritance, a resentment of presence/appearance, and the desperate attempt to castrate one’s body from one’s mind, as if mind were not the product of brain processes.

This is nihilism twisting a self-annulment into a “positive” value, by projecting it as some coming future state and by refusing to define the word used to represent the feeling the ambiguity gives the brain.
American “individuality” is the most popular manifestation of this drive to self-negate.
Its social purpose is to disconnect the mind form any supporting sources that would increase its resistance to indoctrination.

No, the Christian God didn’t die.
He changed his name, tore off the toga, shaved the beard, and came down from the sky.
He still calls Himself Love/Hope/Freedom…after a short phase where He was also called Jesus in the west…and He now resides in the future, the immanent, or in some magical realm of Platonic Idealism.
God also adapts, or else He really does die.

Yes, it does, but now as an inversion. What you point out is what Zygmund Baumann called pomo. “Liquid Modernity” - this is not Diversity:

Consider also what Zizek says Diversity means now:

Fluidity is the new freedom, but Only within the paradigm of the already pre-determined frame of Sec. Humanism as the highest value; this fluidity being sold as Diversity.
Consumption as a “Must” is Efficaciously marketed as a “May”…
Therefore, you’ll find the political Right and Left are merely two sides of the same coin of nihilism: “conservatives” only conserve the change that “liberals” push the conserved limit. A continual self-dialectic.
The turning of reality upon its head, the reversed pyramid, indicates an overturning of hierarchies.
The “meek shall inherit the Earth” but only if they buy into a world where definitions are altered - a world of artifices created for them, seducing them into its promised liberation from their condition, using feminine tactics of word-play, verbal manipulation, selling a “positive,” emotional, product by negating, nullifying reality - a process of seduction and emotional manipulation - the Grammatology of Modern Dialectics slowly shelling the world into a Human World and embedding and displacing reality with human reality, human needs, human desires, human concerns of comfort and pleasure.
When a Modern speaks of the world he most often speaks of the world of man.
Even when engaging reality, nature, it does so through a mediating human proxy.
The world is never something it engages directly, and whenever the term “world” is brought up it is always a reference to human artifices, the world of man.
The human world rather than being a tiny part of the world at large, now becomes the all-encompassing paradigm swallowing up reality into its human simplifications.
The world becomes malleable, less stressful, more predictable, simply by incorporating it within human abstractions, expressed with numerical or linguistic codes.
The practice of using the term “world” when referring to man-made artifices, in time, and through constant repetition, becomes established as a norm.
The world can only be engage via a human proxy, or a humanitarian agenda – perceiving must wear the glasses of humanism and see the world through its self-serving decrees.
Having no proxy which would dare offer one which contradicted social conventions, the words are left to describe a subjective perspective.
No attempt is made to refer them to real phenomenon, in the fear of losing control over the words themselves, by placing the standard outside human artifices - artifices which can be controlled and altered at will.
All definitions must be filtered through proxies, referring and deferring to human needs.
When the need is based on the socio-economic, cultural paradigm trying to establish and maintain internal harmony (The Feminization of Mankind), then all definitions which connect words to a reality outside this paradigm are rejected, or judged using the most absolutest, stringent, standards so as to ridicule and then dismiss them out of hand.

A hedonist is a typical utilitarian who thinks in terms of pleasure as the innate good with his instinctive hatred of reality and reduces judgements of reality within this sheltered telos that he has pre-posited. A hedonist cannot make value-judgements on par with reality; his preservation and self-maintenance only and can only exist within a bubble.
Epicurus had a ‘Garden’. These Bubbles may come in different names. To a Master [in the sense Nietzsche meant], the hedonist is a decadent; to the hedonist, a certain kind of hedonist is a decadent. Ethical Hedonism like his which takes for granted Pleasure as the innate good automatically or Bentham’s Quantitative Hedonism changed into some quality for the common good, Aristotle’s Virtue Hedonism which cites excellence as the highest pleasure/good, Sloterdijk’s Sphere of Immunology are all variations within the same branch that posits Pleasure as an ends.
Good, Strong, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Power, Beauty, Self, One, all words describing the same absent absolute.

Each defining the individual striving towards it as an object/objective.

Pleasure = diminishment of need, a partial and temporary alleviation of the consciousness of existence.
Need = consciousness of Flux, a temporal attrition on an ordering/becoming emergent unity.
Suffering/Pain = need left unsatiated, the increase in stress, as the unity begins losing cohesion.

When any decadent mind can make anything that counts as pleasure as his or her end, then HM is an inferior indiscriminate outlook - Reality simplified to a sensation, and turned into an ideal.
A hedonist discriminates by already moralizing pleasure is good in terms of pleasure/pain. When discrimination itself is not an objective assessment, but a ‘pleasuring oneself’, then his reality is skewed, cut off from the sensation of pain, need, suffering, and he indulges in the pleasurable act itself. Hedonism is not ‘that’ noble asceticism where endurance of pain and building tolerance produces a consciousness of power [experienced as pleasure], of what one can do without - which is the opposite of that hedonism which avoids life to indulge in pleasure, or those Xt. asceticisms that engage in painful self-mortifications to repress, numb, and deaden the body so life can become tolerable…

The Master’s asceticism is about cultivating ‘indifference’ which does not mean living carelessly, but a steadfastness of undisturbed inner order manifesting as calm - it is being indifferent to fate to be able to love and affirm life for what it IS!, Reality for what it IS.

To put it simply within my HM:PO context here, it is abstracting the conception of good/bad within the human environment, and does not touch deriving value-standards outside human systems and life at large. The limitations of my reality and my good/bad does not limit reality at large.
HM is equivalent to the phrase “Just Because” - no explanations necessary when values detached from reality are pre-posited as the innate good or highest end. In HM:PO, Sec. Humanism presets the “us”, or humanism as the innate good already - “just because”…

The highest good is Knowing Thyself which is a continuous regressive process into the past, where I and AM are not separate since life is continuous self-(inter)activity… and there is no embedded telos.
“Knowing Thyself” is a be-coming,… a continuous looking back that does not end in some “built-in purpose” - That, would be a nihilism.

Jacob? James? Any reaction?

And if Lys is willing to bring her thoughts about nihilism down into the world of actual flesh and blood human beings interacting – interacting in a world of conflicting goods viewed from the perspective of dasein – I would like to participate in the exchange as well.

That is a big response, I’m going to need some time to read and absorb it all and formulate a response, if I have a response to make.

The first quotes from Parsons and Baudrillard are very good and throw a unique light on the fate of philosophy in (post)modern society. Much appreciated.

I have collected some of the relevant aphorisms and passages on/by Baudrillard here and here

Sloterdijk here

You’re welcome to read, at your leisure.

A very keen analysis, and perhaps implicit why James would be reluctant ,(perhaps?) to engage. The symbiosis of the production with the product, with the end result that VO becomes a new Dasein, where the thing is, not, that probable distinctions of
marketability no longer apply, but simply,…that they have reached their limit, and they have become nearly indistinct in probative value. Proba translates
into ‘test’ and the literal transformation of the Badrillard type tv test of various comparable products, have become integrated within the idea of what a test is all about. The simulacra eats up any semblance of logical distinction which may occur to the ordinary consumer. Advertisers, like Bill Gates know how it is easy to manipulate the image as a logical equivalency
with the modus operant of the product as reduced VO into it’s image. What is being done, is, that the product becomes a necessarily logical choice from then on. But there is a critique that could be introduced here, and Bill Gates would be the first to jump on that bandwagon/ vis, the emergence of generic prodicts appear to violate this almost totally accepted procedure. Perhaps, that is, the very reason that generics was allowed, to give the impression of a stable laissez faire.

I’m going to respond to this little by little otherwise I think I will lose my train of thought entirely.

First, since I am not very familiar with VO or RM:AO, I can’t speak for them or really much about them, so to be clear I will be answering on my own terms.

From your first two responses (http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=187106&p=2507627#p2507609 and http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=187106&p=2507627#p2507611) —

—what I gathered was that you were saying due to the mode of action (or performance) of the capitalist system which comes to deal in value by imbuing objects through an alchemical process (not sure if I’m using the right metaphor here — but the process would be ideological education, advertising (both of which deal with things like social arrangements, norms and so on) as well as with psychological processes, like cognition which guides us through an environment…) with a “significance” which divorces them from the traditionally understood capitalist system of production to meet needs.

A philosophy based around valuation, and which posits value as the measure, would be either ineffecacious or frivolous (again, since I am not familiar with VO or RM, I am just writing what I have gathered based on my own preconceptions and reading your comments).

I am not sure if I have this correctly, but it seems like you are proposing that the ontological measure of reality must be a measure of the act, because values, being represented by words have an infinitely malleable nature allowing a given subject to remain in the world of simulacra, whereas an ontology based in the act would reveal such a situation and make it amenable to interpretation?

Perhaps you could inform me whether I am on the right track here. I will proceed to read the rest.

Addendum:

Your description of an alternative to hedonism here (http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=187106&p=2507643#p2507619) is intriguing, but again I need clarification.

When you say:

Are you saying that at the bottom, valuations arise just because?

Earlier you wrote

it seems you are trying to point to a reality outside of the human interpretation that humanists reject, but how could we ever have access to such a reality if all information must be filtered through our minds? It would seem that this obstacle is what gives impetus to humanism to declare the human as the ultimate measure, even the measure of phenomena.

I am just anticipating that an objection that might arise is that, because as humans we are ‘condemned’ (so to speak) to our own minds through which and into the mixture of which we perceive, the positing of any interpretation or valuation (including Being-in-itself, and so the pain, the suffering and all else) would be just that, an interpretation from the human and an attempt to encapsulate reality in our terms — and the expansion of our ability to encapsulate through terms or even to drop the boundaries of applying signs (while I might agree is a good) would again be an act of the human will to interpret the world, and in that sense at least control it.

Again, I will need clarification to the first questions about what you are proposing as performance ontology, but isn’t all performance of the human an attempt to control the world, or at least some aspect of it? Even the reinterpretation of the capitalist system into something which necessitates doing away with it or otherwise circumventing it would in that sense be a controlling nature so that the destiny of humanity could be channeled in a certain direction.

I’m just wondering, when you say

how can you have a problem with the manipulative tendencies of the capitalist system and yet not wish to liberate yourself from the situation, which would subsequently become past, which is at present determining?

I would also like to ask, it seems like you are using nihilism in a moralistic sense, but I wouldn’t mind if you made it clearer exactly how the things you have spoken of (humanism, hedonism, etc.) are nihilism, and how you’ve come to the conclusion nihilism is a bad thing in such a way that the term is applicable to the other terms.

Isn’t knowing oneself a humanism? The focus being on the human (oneself). It seems like you take something like Mirandola’s treatise Origin on the Dignity of Man to be the core expression of all humanism, but as I see it, humanism is just the beginning of taking the interpretation of the world away from divine revelation and centering the persuit of knowledge in the human. To my mind, the foremost figures of humanism are Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Rabelais.

I say this because it seems that your criticism of what you call nihilism would ultimately be for the sake of the human, unless you are positing Being as a quasi-revelation? Even if the latter was the case, by what authority would the revelation be followed, because prior revelation was demanded under the sight of God (or gods), whereas Being only asks what is, and what is possible, and so capitalism at bottom would not be in breach of Being’s revelation (I am trying to understand your argument against humanism and ‘nihilisms’).

As far as I can tell, all of this has very little, if anything, to do with RM:AO or VO.

VO is the serpent in the tree.
RM:AO is the garden.

Shakespeare said it best about this entire thread:

This is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Kropotkin

Okay, but it would just seem that you would be eager to set her straight. After all, like you, she seems mostly interested in going about this as a serious philosopher might. She deduces certain assumptions based on the manner in which she defines the meaning of particular words set in a particular order. And then her argument is either right or wrong depending on the extent to which you share these intellectual assumptions about what either is or is not logical.

In other words, she seems to go about asserting things that are said to be true in much the same manner as you do.

Or so it seems to me.

It’s just that, while I did not understand much of the science that you exchanged with Eugene Morrow a while back, I still enjoyed following the exchange. I thought perhaps that this might become another one of those.

Value has always preceded the emergence of a man made object.
We do not cause objects to emerge, only to then consider if we can find a use for them or not.
The very value of an object is originated by the need for it.
How is that a cancer industry?

Reality is broader than the utilitarian reality that is typical of HM.
“Need for it” is what being manufactured.

This is the blind and extreme potlatch… unhooked to any person-ality and spilling cancerously beyond any borders.

Deleuze can then thus speak of, "Since desire produces reality, social production, with its forces and relations, is “purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions.” - PO.

That’s exactly what I said about HM:PO — When RM:AO meets VO, it is God meets Satan within the same manichean paradigm in the hedonistic promise of maximum self-realization or self-valuing, but only is self-idolizings. When Anentropy is an ends in itself, an innate good, that is one more variant of hedonism.

If you have a concrete intro. thread here to RM or any other forum, do link me to it if you care to.

According to Baudrillard the traditional Marxist frame of viewing capital as a production of labour is now displaced by capital determining labour.

Money in ancient times was based on confidence, now our confidence is based on money - money being a code detached from any real tangible standard and replaced by any code, any value that is made to precede the emergence of the object. Desires and wants and value are manufactured first which sets labour to work, rather than labour determining value, or creating demand-markets. The show detachment from the real leads to a simulacra, where what is processed in repetetion is the simulation of that desire which creates the desiring subject. Baudrillard’s main point is individual choice is a myth; the very choice is being manufactured by the very production of codes that determine and reinforce communal standards against which tastes are then measured, compared, disseminated as ‘unique’, ‘freedom of choice’, ‘true individuality’, ‘happiness’, etc.;

The Artificial relates to the environment [as in social and cultural and economic environment (memetic)] - as a designation for that imprecise point (because there is no point precision can never be absolute) where an organism’s interventions upon its environments, and the consequences, begin to affect it to a greater degree than the environment originally intervened upon.
Needs can be Artificially manufactured by taking an organism’s basic requirements, for nutrition, hydration, safety and its alter requirements of companionship, sexual satisfaction and directing them towards an artificial object/objective which promises to satisfy them all or any one in particular.
Since need is the sensation of existing and the satiation of need is never completed, therefore anyone promising that an object/objective constitutes a final and complete end to need/suffering, is accepted as a promising power beyond man’s imagining.
Playing upon basic human frailties and hopes coping with fear and anxiety, the soothsayer manipulates the weakest of the weak, and controls their every activity; taking control of their will:

The three scriptures: Tabula Rasa - The Noble Savage - The Ghost in the Machine - are directly linked to Judeo-Christian and liberal scripture.

The first equates all, leveling all into a blank slate awaiting instruction;

the second purifies all, making all the problems of modern living a product of industrialization and urbanization;

the third implies an immutable, shared spirit, uniting all under the greatest generalization of all, the group called: Humanity.

Of course progressiveness, in all its forms, is but a secular adaptation of the old Judeo-Christian slavishness.
Secular humanism, beginning with Marxism, is an evolution of Judeo-Christianity.
It adapts to an environment of universality, seeking to coalesce heterogeneous populations, and in environments with demographic and resource pressures.
And Baudrillard shows after Marx, how this meme has mutated via a 4-fold precession:

To demonstrate that through the example of money - which is but one code;

When the words that the mind uses increasingly refers back to its own constructs detached from any reference to tangible reality, like paper money, its own abstraction, it begins detaching itself off from the real world…in effect it becomes delusional, completely immersed in its own imagination, its fantasies, and tending towards complete rupture: solipsism.
The only factor that prevents a mind from going down this easier, more comfortable road, is sensuality itself.
It is the continuous influx of immediate stimulation which disrupts this process of introversion.
I would say that it is because of sheltering systems that this process of disillusionment and introversion becomes possible, or a viable life-style.

This is the alchemical process I meant, where money liberated from tangibles can circulate like free credit capable to lend itself to any Performative Value - a magic trick:

Baudrillard:

No, only values detached from real references. For my post on Value-standards, pls. refer here .

It was not the “word”.
This myth has been perpetuated through the Judaic code for centuries; it has now become ‘common sense’ for the common and the senseless.
The word is a description of the action.
A reversal has been perpetrated.

Referring words to phenomena means referring them to the past.
If this reference is shallow or deep determines the quality of the reference point and the subsequent projection of the object/objective, the idea(l), into the future, as an extension, a continuance of this past/nature.

A modern begins with the shallow reference and limits himself to within the conventions, the historical narratives, he was raised on.
He does not go further back, towards more self-knowledge, but limits himself to the artificiality his meme has constructed for him.
Within nihilistic Modern memes all are included, all have value, all deserve, all are equal; the concepts of race and sex are referred to the established narrative.

From this flawed starting premises all projections of idea(l)s cannot but be flawed, or detached from reality.
From a starting error in judgment in reference, only error can come.

And because error is forgiven in a system that thrives in manipulating it, no correcting consequence can ever come of it.
The idea of utility is also shaped in this context of self-supporting reproduction of delusion, self-flattering narcissism and error in judgments.
Money and the means of acquiring it, the career, the job, the utility, becomes central - a decisive standard for evaluating quality…via quantity of abstraction.

With a restricted reference to the past/nature what extends forward is a caricature, a human contrivance of varying degree of absurdity, just because it ‘can’ when systems keep society sheltered from reality.

Man confuses his representation of the phenomenon, the noetic devices, methods, for the real, the phenomenon itself.
The malleability of the noumenon, since it is a human contrivance, makes it an easily manipulated tool of escape.
The phenomenon remains indifferent to human interpretations of it, but the noumenon is man’s care, and it expresses a living organism’s need to survive to know and understand.

The demystification of the world is part of secular humanism.
In the past the problem of an indifferent, cruel, and unknowable otherness was dealt with by projecting a more real reality outside the world, or by presuming an underlying, thing-in-itself, a thingness, an absolute unity and unity…a particle, a one, a quanta…
The idea(l) that the mysterious can be absolved by assuming its knowabiltiy, is what modernity is built upon.
Man can now create his own reality, adjusting it as he proceeds towards godliness.
Words, numbers, as representations of his abstractions (simplifications, generalizations), his tools, become universal powers which will reshape reality to his tastes.

Simply by declaring himself noble or strong, or smart, the produced-subject has already taken the first step towards self-actualization.
He is master of himself, he thinks, and so I am a world upon myself…luckily no nature/past is ever permitted to bust that delusional bubble.
He thinks he is 'free" because no external to himself standard enters his abode to disrupt his narcissistic masturbation.
The walls are built and maintained by others, with his participatory offerings, and so he begins to feel liberated within their premises.

Here, in a world where “all deserve”, he can pretend to be anything and anyone, at any time, if and only if this pretense does not disturb the other patrons from their self-gratifying personal labors. This minimal disturbance is what I call Efficacy of the magician’s Performance.

The manipulation and application of symbols, metaphors signs harkens back to idolatry, where the belief that evocation, or the ritualistic repetition of words, and the usage of symbols, could affect nature, and reality at large.
Christian faith did not differ in this, and saw in idolatry, a satanic competitor to its own ritualized words, and symbols.
Satanism is this evocation of natural powers using symbols and words.
Religious rites, in general, practice the same thing.

The power of the word is found in how it may manipulate nature, not in its entirety, or directly, by through the agency of man.
The word transplants an idea(l), a belief, in the mind of the other, turning him into an active agency of that idea(l), and thusly affecting nature with his behavior.
This is the “magic” of words and rituals.
Christian magic, or Abrahamic magic (power of its rituals and words), is antagonized by the earthbound pagan magic, later placed within its own contexts as satanic, or the Devil’s work.
Christian evoked power from the unreal, the beyond space/time, whereas paganism evoked natural powers, through self, and how the brain, affected by rituals and words, can influence the body.

The priest is the conjurer of magic, the institutionalized magi, legitimized by popular appeal, and not because of any other standard.
The more minds he can move, with his rituals and words, the more “true” his power becomes.
Popularity, through otherness, becomes the standard of measuring value.
If he can convince others that what he says is true then it does not matter if it is ridiculous and has no references to reality.
Any claim that uses others, or self, as the standard shares in the potential effectiveness of this inverted method of reasoning.
The world becomes more of a “problem” do be explained within the contexts being promoted as a mass belief.
Interest in reality is minimal and only in as much as it contradicts the implied power being proposed, and the mass hypnosis being magically transmitted through a subtle suggestion.

In a secularized world the power of symbols, ritualized behavior/thinking, and of the word is still with us.
The way we name our children, the routines we repeat daily as if they were self-evidently necessary, how we greet each other, and, most importantly, how words are used to produce, and transfer a mental state, a mass movement, conjuring up images, feelings, sensations, as if by magic, on a mass scale, unprecedented in history, due to the current development of technologies, mass distribution and data sharing, all reveal the mystifying power of words.

Their power-direction is inverted, as mentioned before, because words do not affect nature but can only affect the individuals indoctrinated within a linguistic tradition and a ritualized type of living, who can then be manipulated into affecting nature with their actions.
Here words no longer describe (inter)action, but produce it.
And it can produce it on a large scale only by integrating as many minds into its “logic” as possible.
Therefore, within that context the “word comes first” because it is the foundation upon which an alternative reality can be built – to the point where the very idea of reality can only refer back to this manmade, artificial, alternate reality.
Within this context to hate man is to hate nature, reality, and to be nihilistic is to deny the existence of manmade concepts, such as meaning, and morality.

Once the logic, the method, the ritualized (re)activity, acquires the strength of numbers, all participating in it become repeating agencies, validating its “truths”.
The words refer to constructs within the shared contexts, and so become self-referential; their effectiveness contained within their own premises and how they can move populations to act, and affect a reality that does not participate in their shared beliefs.
It’s why quantities matter, more than qualities.
The communal synergy of all this ritualized behavior, even if based on a lie, becomes a force no quality can withstand for long.

The lie’s effectiveness is found in how it can seduce as many helpless, desperate, inferior minds to act in alignment with its premises.
It need not have a reference outside its own paradigm – in fact the more absurd, unrealistic, it is, all the more comfort it offers to those who find the world unappetizing.

The unrealistic making it all the more attractive to those who are hurt, or insulted by reality.
Those who are called to follow are the weakest, the weakest, the one most desperate for relief.

The priest becomes a “healer” using rhythmic psalms, ritualized melodic words, as soothing balms.
The words need not be understood for them to have an effect.
Their power is accentuated by their exotic incantation.
That they are incomprehensible makes them all the more magical.

This priestly power is mysterious to the laymen, those not included in his holy order.
He gathers all the magical forces and focuses them for all to become mesmerized by the experience.

Yes, correct. There is no separation between I and AM - I am my action - there is no “word” divorced from self in the beginning - the nihilistic premise that Judeo-Xt. begins with and continues on into secular humanism.

The Counter-intuitive approach is the act of distance-without-detachment.

A fundamental part of understanding this distance between noumenon and phenomenon, this separation of subject and object, or the discrepancy between the idea(l) and the real, is intuition.
In this case by “counter” I do not mean in opposition to, but only in opposition to the Modern understanding of what intuition is and why it evolves; an opposition to the automatic, instinctive, (re)actions with their own evolved methodology and intent.
The opposition is this tension between reasoning, or connecting words and the abstractions they symbolize (beliefs) to the world, and intuition, which is an automatic, emotional, passionate, instinctive, (re)action to stimuli - the tension the reigns produce upon the rider’s hands in the Socratic metaphor representing the human psyche.

A simple organism need not understand what it perceives.
It need only (re)act to it, usually by finding similarities which trigger these evolved automatic (re)actions.
The expected outcome is its reward…usually in the form of pleasure.
Pleasure indicates, to the primitive mind, that it did well…that it achieved and accomplished something it need not understand how or why, only enjoy the outcome which only demanded a surrender to automatic (re)activity based on a simplification/generalization it inherits as an intuitive, innate, understanding.
The primary role of consciousness is to increase survivability and so understanding need not be present if the (re)action to a phenomena results in survival.

But reason needs to understand and to do so it needs to distance itself from the survival interest, to achieve clarity.
To understand is to perceive patterns in the perceived which may or may not benefit the organism.
This is why philosophy is a byproduct of leisure, and of minds who are comfortable enough to detach their passions, their self-interests, from what they are perceiving, or who have mastered their passions and can now direct them rather than the passions directing their reason.
In the Priestly (Abrahamic), slavish, psychological dynamic, God is placed before the rider, and the rider’s inability o reign in his own passions…the priest becomes the representative of a reason which is beyond man.
Man surrenders to a noumenon…a fabrication.

Intuition is about revealing, exposing…the phenomenon appears, to a degree, and never completely, as it is never complete but ever-changing, to the perceiving subjective mind.
The organism reliant or organization, on order, simplifies/generalizes the phenomenon into a static thing, and then develops (re)actions to it, through trial and error - natural selection.
This is primitive intuition, where children, women, and effete males remain.

Counter-intuitive is when these automatic intuition are comprehended as automatic, and symbolic, and the mind seeks to see beyond them.
Not to dismiss them but to place them into a more lucid context.

So, to understand reality, beyond automatic survival methods, and intuitive (re)actions, one must take control over instincts and passions.
Not reject them but dominate them using reason.
This distancing from one’s own passions, one’s own automated noetic devices, is an approach towards the phenomenon.

No, that’s what the Hedonists say.
When pleasure is pre-posited as an innate good - be it god, excellent, honour, food, money, fame - whatever Code that can be abstraced into pleasure, then the basis of value-standards can be stated simply by a “jsut because”. Just because - one has pre-concluded pleasure as the innate good.
I will may be start a separate topic on what Knowing Thyself means in relation to founding value-standards.

No, the absent absolute God can be replaced by any code that provides a similar Security, and such security can only be validated in an environment severely abstracted by reality, where natural evolutionary forces cannot cull the ideologies and expose the cost of their consequences.
Nihilism is the psychological disposition which negates the real because it is incapable of adapting, coping, or accepting it.
“God” as the representation of this immutable, determining, higher order, residing in the “immanent”, the receding past, dies, in this slow falling back.
Man can now shape the past - as Orwell described it - taking God’s place as the creating “word.”

The word is freed from a Being.
Man becomes the shaper of his own reality, by taking control over the word.
Man becomes the shape-shifter, the doppelganger.
And what is shaped more easily than flesh, but inanimate matter: plastic, fabric, metal.
To take control is to pull away, to dislodge.
The word is detached from the phenomenon, becoming purified…a holy word.
Sacred being what is unsoiled by the earthly, the base, the primal = enlightened, made light, placed on a pedestal, on metal boots, for instance, as if floating above reality, detached/detaching from it.
The skin feels, but behind the metal it is numbed - the metal is an added padding, a thickness.
Sunlight does not burn it…it only heats its surfaces.

The word is its own definition, in the same way God was defined as the Creator of Himself, and of the world.
A solipsistic innuendo - the end of the causal chain.
A word is what is written, using words, in the dictionary. When used linguistically it refers only to the mental abstraction - abstraction being a form of detachment, simplification/generalization being the cutting away of dimensions.

Dictionary offer a general outline, just as the Bible does.
Both are taken literally, rather as representations, an art-form…just as the armor and the arks are taken as literal additions, extensions of the human embodying them.
The human becomes spiritualized, the behind the scenes, the masks, animating energy - the ghost in the machine, in the armor, the contrivance.

Behind the word, emotions.
The word refers back to human abstractions, or, when it dares, to human emotions. A hint at the primal.
But, now, the emotions are stripped of their worldly utilities, the reason they evolved.
They becomes expressions of the divine, which is always masked, armored, hidden, in the dark.

The noumenon comes to the forefront, as does the armor. The phenomenon, is hidden, distanced…placed into lethe, forgetfulness: covered, concealed.
The armor is human contrivance. It is the new apparent:

A cosmetic cosmology emerging because one Resists War, facing and competing with the Other… when the very frame of competition is being artificially produced and pre-determined in a performative model.

On one extreme mythos and logos are separated through abstraction - extreme drying up, and on the other extreme - everything is mythos or everything is equally logos - extreme fluidification.

There’s been a lapse into two extremes.
In other words, there is a negative Apollonian tendency where order tends to petrification, abstraction and a severance of word to phenomenon characterizing Modernity, and there is a negative Dionysian tendency where order tends to extreme fluidity and undifferentiation, an extreme merging of word into the phenomenal current, characterizing the simulacra and the polysemantic fictitiousness of Post-modernity.

Nihilism is a tilt in either way. Balance in the aesthetic sense, is a Dionysian checking on apollonian petrification, and Apollonian checking on the dionysian over-fluidity. A healthy synergy.

In aristocratic social systems where authority was not centralized an individual leader of a clan could withhold his particular group’s, his family’s, excess energies, or offer them partially, to a central figure, representing the Head, the King, of many clans/bloodlines.
This King was nothing more than a figurehead; first amongst equals.
He symbolized the groups and their shared past; their common ancestry and culture: common Ideals.
The King was not only a genetic marker but also a memetic one.
This decreased the synergy of the group directed by the will of a King, yet it retained a degree of autonomy, resulting in a relationship of equals rather than one of master towards his slaves.
This loss of synergetic force was compensated, somewhat, by the shared genes, the shared blood, which united all the families/clans, making their actions towards outside aggressors more passionate.
The fearsomeness of the old pagan warriors, the famed berserkers, was due to this empowerment, through free-will, which bonded the different strains of the same blood into unions rooted in history; deeper roots fed into the shared trunk upon which the different branches grew and extended themselves over the world.

In modern social systems this is no longer the case. In fact the previous aristocratic synergy would be detrimental to modern-day unity.
In modern systems heterogeneous peoples are forced into cohabitation, and into cooperative (inter)actions.
To exploit the synergy of each, by reducing the lost energies produced by the frictions between them, the system must reduce the individual’s appreciation/awareness of its past; it must detach it from its heritage, from the trunk it has grown upon; it must lower self-identification to a level where all can find commonality within the all-encompassing, all levelling fold; it must redefine individuality and free-will, associating it with behaviors and activities and thoughts that increase service or that increases actions which produce a surplus of energy the centralized agency can then exploit…and direct.
By defining freedom in a way which is antithetical to its nature, turning dependence into independence, the system brainwashes generations of minds, turning them into willing, happy, servile automatons, content to find self-worth in communal appreciation, and forever measuring their own quality by using the popular standards.

Any residual free-will present within a unity can only decrease the unity’s overall synergy, as this individual will, not being totally subdued by the central Will, may withhold or deny, in whole or in part, what aggregate energies are in its control.
This loss represents a loss of internal efficiency.
The reduction of free-will is necessary if the parts participating in the sum are to provide, as close to total, the surrender of their individual synergies, in this way increasing the synergy of the larger unity.
What (inter)actions occur between individual parts within the whole, leads to the loss of energy which then dissipates as heat, or lost energy (lost wealth).
Conflict, or the rejection of otherness, which is a part of being an individual human being, is another way of saying: friction, or internal strife, resulting in this loss of aggregate energy.
To carry on with the metaphor, this loss of energy dissipates within the system as heat, which may, if the energies which are lost are large enough, result in an internal systemic overheating.
The decrease in any friction caused within the unity is a necessary part in increasing the system’s total synergy.
This includes, within human social unities, the elimination of anything that may cause interpersonal frictions.
Certain morals, attitudes, behaviors, values, can produce the desirable outcome.
Any identity which separates or distinguishes in ways that increase internal friction or in ways that produce energies the system cannot exploit, are deemed worthless or even dangerous.
In effect, what is occurring here is that the individual is losing all sense of self, losing itself within an Identity outside itself, which then reduces any friction its (inter)actions may possibly produce. The reduction of internal friction entails a loss of individuality – or the sense of self – by the individual parts.
For a human system (unity) it is essential to reduce all internal friction, increasing, in this way, the efficiency of the utilization of the synergies of the participating parts.
Eliminating all natural distinctions is important to the wealth of the system, if it measures its own value in this way, and if it identifies with wealth or the control of resources – money being the abstraction of resources.
In time, as we shall see, this elimination of natural distinction also leads to the elimination of money’s connection with anything tangible. The disconnection with reality increases to the point where money has no reference to anything material.

Dumbing-Down, or the manipulation and seduction of the participants minds, making them associate servitude with self-worth, or the goodness of the whole with their own good, is one way inner friction is reduced and the total synergy available to the centralized Will (the government) is increased.
Laziness is then defined as a reluctance or avoidance to offer one’s own energies towards production/consumption.
Promoting certain values, such as the work ethic, and by retarding and repressing the development of any personal will the system manages to exploit its individual parts more effectively.

But to continue with the symbolisms…
Given that an increase in internal (inter)activity, in an efficient way, leads to an increase in the system’s aggregate energies, and therefore to the increase of synergy available to the centralized agency (institutionalized Will) it is no longer necessary for wealth to refer to resources.
Here we have the beginning of this detachment from nature/reality which abstractions can facilitate.
By abstracting resources into monetary codes, credits, and by making activity, energy the system’s source of synergy, turns (inter)actions between the individual parts into an exchange of services, or potential services, with no correspondence to anything tangible.

Interactions, interpersonal exchanges, become more about concepts than substance.
All is expendable because exchanges are now about ideas…the hypothetical.
No resources, no substance, is at play…because all has been reduced to a concept.

The market system finds its ideal in the manufacturing not of goods but of exchangeable concepts, representing services rendered or promised and yet to be rendered. Now (inter)actions become based on expectations and probabilities, rather than resources and reality.

But this is not the entire truth, because resources are in play, only they’ve been abstracted out of mind. Those who control the resources control the game, the rest play on a theoretical, idealized, Platonic level, trying to find substance in a world where it has been taken out of play.