Posted by DanielS on Wed, 07 May 2014 13:05 | #

This comment of Wobbly’s arguing (validly) in line with MacDonald’s thinking on the genesis of liberalism in Europeans, is a good place to segue into this thread..

Posted by wobbly on May 07, 2014, 07:53 AM | #

  The wrong people got hold of Television right from the start, they knew the most powerful instrument ever devised for mass hypnotism was the way to go.  Whitey never stood a chance.

If you look at the process of how things changed I don’t think you can come to any other conclusion than the other side targeted the children. Almost no adults were ever turned natural to liberal.

  Could television have achieved the transformation we’re talking about on its own?  I dunno.

I don’t think it’s the whole story. You can see the extent of PC influenced thinking running in a cline from north to south in Europe with a peak in Scandinavia so there is a genetic / cultural difference as well imo (which I assume exists because it was important for survival at some point).

I think what’s happened is a combination of that strong drive to build group cohesion around commonly held foundational ideals (as a substitute for clan-based cohesion) and the poisoning of those foundations by a malign priesthood (which includes genuinely universalist liberals as well as tribal nationalists masquerading as liberals).

Hence the segments of the White population who have been the most resistant to PC programming are either the most clannish segments or the segments that most sealed themselves off.

Posted by wobbly on Wed, 07 May 2014 13:08 | #

We have been getting a lot of argument at MR that Whites are somehow innately deficient in their ethnocentrism.
...........

Jews, such as Illana Mercer, will seek to promote this notion of innate deficiency in Whites. It becomes a way of deflecting attention and blame singly to Whites. It is another sleight of hand

I agree that the idea is often used by enemies to promote the suicide meme however that is not necessarily so.

If White people evolved past default clannishness to a form of group cohesion which combined blood relatedness with acceptance of commonly held group ideas then that doesn’t make them deficient - in fact it makes them capable of great feats of group cooperation - but it does create a vulnerability to cultural attack which can be ruthlessly exploited by hostile competitors.

If White people are to survive they need to understand that weakness and plug it.

Posted by wobbly on Wed, 07 May 2014 13:09 | #

snap

Posted by Nick Dean on Wed, 07 May 2014 20:30 | #

Has GW defined his nemesis, ‘liberalism’?

I take it his liberalism has nothing to do with our nationalist quest, anyway.

When Terrible Tommy suggested it would be easy to overthrow Christianity in the minds of White people still loyal to that train of thought, GW chided TT - it’s no easy thing to replace a religion, it grows organically over long time stretches, said GW. But he also said we nationalists had no time for that. Our window of opportunity was much narrower than would accommodate a new religion being squeezed through. But he also said ‘liberalism’ is everything we see and think, the very water we swim in. So presumably Christianity is only a part of the larger ‘liberal’ bydysawd - which would take even longer to overthrow than any of its constituent parts?   

 

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 08 May 2014 00:52 | #

Nick,

The question is always: what belongs to us, and what have we merely acquired from the external world?  This is also a question about what is real in the human personality and in the lived-life of peoples.  That which truly belongs to us individually or collectively is never lost.  It is permanent, totally authentic, whole and irreducible.  But it can be absent for long stretches of time, and in this state (which is the ordinary human condition, let here be no doubt about that) the lived life is in thrall to the power of other “facts”, be they ideas or historical processes, or the actions of men ... whatever.

To re-find that which belongs to us is to recover one’s truth, and with it one’s unity and will.  Through this means alone may we exert control over the life that is lived.  All other notions to that end produce results only in so far as they accidentally accord with this golden rule of human consciousness.

Now, as one examines Christianity in this light it quickly becomes clear that it does not speak of our particular self.  We are not the universalized gentile that Judaism requires us to be.  That is not our truth.  But nevertheless we have adopted Christianity over a period of centuries and fitted it to us as best we could, not perhaps in its dicta so much as in its practice.  It cannot be lightly dispensed with.  It cannot be replaced with a five-minute packet soup.

What I could not say to Tommy was the real reason why, which is that all authentic religions have an inner and outer form; and the inner circle is not provided for in the mythic narrative which is the object of worship in the outer circle.  The common worshippers are sublimely ignorant of it.  Faith as such is not even a requirement for it because it is not about the common notions of Man or God.  It is about, respectively, union with the All and self-perfectionment, in both cases according to very specific and austere practical regimens.  It must be treated with an amour propre that faith - an unwise counsel - does not apprehend.  It is also common to all authentic religious systems, and it is the principal stumbling block to all those who lay their impudent hands upon the work of making a faith system.

Liberalism does not present us with such a difficult problem.  What is it?  It is the philosophy of the age - the statement of all the grand ideas that stand over and condition the life we live.  It is, therefore, one of the “facts” which engender error and inauthenticity in us, and we can address it.  Just to propose a live alternative ... a thought-system which accords with our truth ... is to do that.

Posted by Henry on Thu, 08 May 2014 00:55 | #

James Bowery doesn’t seem to post here anymore, but I think he had a lot to teach regarding this issue.

Bowery always emphasized the importance of experimentation over argumentation. This issue is certainly one we could argue about endlessly. But we’d have to look to experimentation to get an objective answer. The problem, however, is that neither history nor the present are controlled experiments. They are uncontrolled, tainted, lived experience. Thus we’d have to introduce experimental controls in order to look to experiment to help answer this and related questions. But of course such controls are currently fervently opposed by people in power, and chief among these people are those with whom this issue is concerned.

As Bowery noted, parasites are terrified of empirical discovery.

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 08 May 2014 06:12 | #

.............
Henry, while there should be ways to test aspects evolved over millennia, it would seem that subjecting complex and protracted patterns to episodic analyses alone runs the risk of analytically parsing-out significant variables unbeknownst, with that method itself more contaminated by subjective motives and social influences than the scientific practitioner apprehends.

Hermeneutics remedies this by acknowledging subjective, social, narrative/synthetic influences from the start and rather than treating these influences as troubling matters to be ignored recognizes them as a part of the process of investigation, the hypothetical part which is particularly important of course, when trying to characterize complex and long evolutionary patterns. Hence, whether sheer scientific method is the only and always the best way to authenticate such patterns is questionable, particularly if unaided by a reciprocity with social motives and narrative influence.

I suppose that coming from my circumstances that I am as suspicious of inclinations of “scientism” as the scientifically inclined might be of my reliance upon the more admittedly shared realm of words – to come from a situation where words and any sort of intellectual concern was “all bullshit” can be an oppressive – harrowing - circumstance that I am, unfortunately, all too familiar with.

It is through the sharing and verification of words and narratives in the public domain that one comes to understand that one is not crazy or utterly deficient when otherwise surrounded by hostile and brute pragmatists who would ignore words as sheer pretentiousness, rather than the publicly exchanged and valued currency that they are.

Heidegger said, quite rightly I believe, that the language comes into being in writing. He also spoke of the wisdom of the language and its worthy investigation as such. He cautioned that science does not think but that thinking is more like poetry. Moreover, something to the effect that we come into being as individuals when we place ourselves into the sequential, interacting of perspectives yet delimited, historical, narrative context.

From that perspective, seeing the obvious and profound racial catastrophe unfolding as a child in the sixties - being caught between feminists aspiring for actualization just like men on the one hand, blacks (power and integrity), White right wing men striving for actualization and stereotypical masculinity as well, on the other hand, by contrast to the hippies unarticulated quest for the basic levels in hierarchy of needs - the messy, “dirty”, organic process of being (at odds with black quest for “integrity” and “power”), the white male quest for midtdasein being surrounded by denial, incitement, sarcasm, flouting and brute pragmatism, one is chased into the back of the brain, away from petty logic, planning and mere practical utility of necessity - though these are the kinds of logics so valued as mature adjustment to a healthy society by those looking for an associate, would one even want to keep the system working as it is, in the direction that it is when the ship is drastically off course? One becomes deeply suspicious.

One asks different questions, viz. who is it that cares about these racial patterns, to not put them at risk? Who is reasonable enough to see that there are some patterns here that we should not want to merely “test” but rather to cherish. And why would one want to labor by being useful to the obviously destructive powers that be – espousing liberal individualist objectivism, a kind of scientism at that?

I can see GW’s point that you don’t just get popular assent to a newly hatched religion in a few months or years and that liberalism is the more pressing and practical matter to take on.

I define liberalism for practical racial preservationist purposes as the transgressing, or the promotion of transgressing racial bounds, whether of the broad ship of our European race or of its inner compartments – the transgression of the inner compartments would be a lesser offense for the most part, depending upon the relative condition of the whole compartment and the quality of the individuals breaching the compartment. Liberalism has become the water we live in largely by means of the Lockeatine notion of civil individual rights as ensconced in the US constitution, though there are other well known sources of this “water”, the French Revolution, universal declaration of human rights, scientific liberation from superstition, religion, tyranny, monarchic rule, aristoractic privilege, tradition, custom and habit…I add spuriously, though it should have been mentioned right away - that international mercantilism is a chief source of the liberal water in which we swim ...but now a liberation from words and argument?..hmmm (that sounds like Wittgenstein at his most disingenuous…now that its time for White men to talk, lets shut them up).  I can see wanting scientific testing to make sure one is not being subject to sheer wordsmithery or Jewish casuistry, experts in pilpul that they are, but I for one believe their language games can be decoded. I have noted their abuse to name a few things, of ecology, diversity, multiculturalism, hermeneutics, postmodernity, social constructionism, marginals, incommensurability, leftism, civil rights..

I can agree that taking on liberalism is the more practical and necessary matter. Where I am unconvinced is that attending to the reverent and sacral is futile at this point. GW said that “we don’t know where religion comes from”, but I am satisfied that it comes from people in some sort of social negotiative process – that is how Christianity came into being and that is how a religion concerned with the authentic interests of European peoples will come into being. Its attendance will eventually gain adherence for its genuinely recognized importance and sincere appreciation – from there it will take on the complexity of former religions, while maintaining the core that GW notes should exist. Though I still find the word perfectament to be troubling, as one of the great things about the European pattern as I see it is our imperfection – it is a significant part of our pattern, not one to be eliminated, in my estimation; rather it corresponds with our degree of sublimation, environmental sensibility (social and natural) and striving that makes us the distinctly creative people that we are.

Perfectament seems to correspond with Self Actualization, which as Aristotle prescribed it is fair enough, but as it has come through popular American expression a disaster and part and parcel of creating the liberal ocean in which we swim - as the insistence upon and incitement to self actualization, to be all you can be and all that mess, ruptures social connectedness and responsibility, ignores profoundly important and enjoyable perfunctory levels, bypassing the at least equally imperative concerns of socialization, being (midtdasein) and routine.

I believe routine would correspond well to the sacral and the kind of discipline, skill and craft development that GW sees as being necessary to a religion worthy of devotion. After the unfolding and spreading out, it holds the taking to heart and giving thanks that Heidegger speaks of - particularly in special routines, such as ritual, ceremony and reverence of the sacral… but in other regards, routine would importantly take to heart as good, those ordinary practices inherited and habituated as necessary to our survival.

Nevertheless, rather than “perfectement”* what is of core necessity in religion is an appreciation of the transcendent aspect of our pattern, transcendent of our individual and collective imperfections. It is that view toward the transcendent in hermeneutically understood pattern that we need more than perfection itself. But need it we do, or I do, anyway, as I can understand all too well how one could look upon our people, individually and collectively and ask incredulously, I want to save and defend these people?

Therefore, while a religion for European people, born of its authentic motives and interests will not happen quickly and perhaps not on time to be of practical public service, hence not a matter to forefront, it ought to be an occasional concern, as it is, in effect, what we are doing whenever we turn reverent attention to our authentic patterns and sacrosanct aspects – attending to transcendence of the episode or reverence in the episode. In fact, I don’t see how this can be mutually exclusive to the project of analyzing liberalism and prescribing remedy, priority though that may be.

One aspect of sacrament is to connect the episode with relationship and their protracted patterns, that does not seem to conflict with science either; it should work quite well with it.

…......

Note:
I did not mean to gloss over Bob in DC’s observation that greed, gullibility and empathy might be looked into as characteristics of Europeans that leave us susceptible to those who would take advantage.

* We’ve discussed this, and I believe that GW was calling attention to discipline and development in practice, a focus of reverence, which is well in good - it is more the word perfectament that I have trouble with.

Or perhaps it is authentication and confirmation that is the sought necessity here?

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 08 May 2014 13:03 | #

Daniel,

Self-perfectionment, in the sense of this inner or esoteric circle, is a precise term and could have nothing whatsoever to do with commonplace understandings of self-actualisation, realisation, or development.  It could not attend to any need or personal potential, skill or interest.  It could not concern virtue or ethics or belief, or anything like that.  All these would be entirely beside the point.  The personality itself, as it is temporalised and emplaced, is entirely beside the point.  The state of consciousness in which it is operative is not beside the point, however.

The state that is ordinary waking consciousness, while it is inevitable and all too human, is the thief of time and the maker of absence where presence should reside.  It is also a fertile soil for ascripted identities, moralities, ideologies, etc.  The point, then, is: what facilitates movement out of that state and, thereby, out of all that is acquired from time and place, which constitutes the known person, the personality ... out of that and towards the other, the moment of the conscious apprehension of being, free and clear of everything.

So now perhaps we can say that self-perfectionment would, on the one hand, be a challenging of the dominion of habituality and mechanicity over our intellectual, emotional, and motor systems of Mind; and, on the other, a strengthening of the capacity to separate from and exert control over these systems by means, for the most part, of work on the attention and will.  Beyond that would be matters pertaining to a destiny of a “being” exposed to the wind and sunlight, so to speak, to age like oak.  Possibly.  At a wild guess.

http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/from_the_final_pages_of_heideggers_the_onto_theo_logical_constitution_of_me

I should add that neither union with the All nor perfectionment, as the twin paradigms of the inner circle, are relevant to the movement that would be an ontological nationalism.  They are relevant to discussion of what religion truly is, how it is structured, where it comes from (not from the people but from the inner circle), and perhaps how we, as nationalists, can hope to create a life in which religious change becomes possible, even if we cannot create it directly ourselves.

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 08 May 2014 19:01 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on May 08, 2014, 08:03 AM | #

Daniel,

Self-perfectionment, in the sense of this inner or esoteric circle, is a precise term and could have nothing whatsoever to do with commonplace understandings of self-actualisation, realisation, or development.  It could not attend to any need or personal potential, skill or interest.  It could not concern virtue or ethics or belief, or anything like that.  All these would be entirely beside the point.  The personality itself, as it is temporalised and emplaced, is entirely beside the point.  The state of consciousness in which it is operative is not beside the point, however.

I am not trying to be a pain, but rather trying to place how your thinking about these matters might correspond with ways I’ve conceived to organize and understand them.

Ok, so you are placing self perfectionment on what I would term a continuum between Being and a kind of Actulization - though not a popular understanding of actualiztion; and it has nothing to do with the social world, anything acquired there, nor does it require a platform of routine by which we may meditate on profound inheritance and a connection of the episode to the sacral.

The state that is ordinary waking consciousness, while it is inevitable and all too human, is the thief of time and the maker of absence where presence should reside.  It is also a fertile soil for ascripted identities, moralities, ideologies, etc.

That sounds true enough, and I may have erred in that direction in trying to connect with a sense of discipline that I gleaned from you as a requirement of religion; as such, there is a bit of deliberateness there which may be un-zen-like, but really, in attempting to connect with the sacral, something more than the ordinary is implied. Perhaps ceremony or reverence would have been words to make the matter more clear than the word “routine”, but I meant by it the same thing in this case - though I am, nevertheless, trying to keep us in the temporal realm.

But yes, after I’d written the comment, I felt most uncomfortable about that part connecting “routine” with what you are saying.. a bit spurious, but something that I felt could be teased apart for what I actually meant.

The point, then, is: what facilitates movement out of that state and, thereby, out of all that is acquired from time and place, which constitutes the known person, the personality ... out of that and towards the other, the moment of the conscious apprehension of being, free and clear of everything.

Reverence and routine are part of what I proposed as a platform for breaking out of the ordinary.

From there an optimal flow between basic levels of being, socialization, routine and actualization.

So now perhaps we can say that self-perfectionment would, on the one hand, be a challenging of the dominion of habituality and mechanicity over our intellectual, emotional, and motor systems of Mind;

Ok, but you have to know a rule in order to break it.

and, on the other, a strengthening of the capacity to separate from and exert control over these systems by means, for the most part, of work on the attention and will.

I guess that is what I was hoping to capture in a discipline and reverence in routine.

Nevertheless, there are somethings that are best left to habit, and the unconscious, of course. The unconscious is not as hard to believe in as consciousness.

Beyond that would be matters pertaining to a destiny of a “being” exposed to the wind and sunlight, so to speak, to age like oak.  Possibly.  At a wild guess.

..will look at the Heidegger link in a few…for now.. while still giving my off-hand impressions, it seems that you are interested in a continuum from being to actualization..

I have noted before that this is a strong appeal for White men, understandably so – it has been for me, anyway; as socialization into this Jewish, mercantile, multicultural sociality, is a nightmare; and routine has been the realm of some kind of unionist or another, if not the angry mother’s guild, then the sharp elbows and big egoes of the proudly ignorant regarding their gainful tautologies -

http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/from_the_final_pages_of_heideggers_the_onto_theo_logical_constitution_of_me

I should add that neither union with the All nor perfectionment, as the twin paradigms of the inner circle, are relevant to the movement that would be an ontological nationalism.

I am not so sure. It sounds like a very White man thing to me – very White nationalist. Midtdasein is about being among the nation..

  They are relevant to discussion of what religion truly is, how it is structured, where it comes from

If a religion is about our people, their patterns worthy of transcendent reverence, anyway, which I believe it should be, then it is relevant to nationalism.

(not from the people but from the inner circle), and perhaps how we, as nationalists, can hope to create a life in which religious change becomes possible, even if we cannot create it directly ourselves.

I can agree that we may not be able to do it, or do it correctly and with sufficient depth, by deliberate means… Nor do I particularly object to your concentration on the inner circle of authentic nature, and insistence that it is not exactly graspable..but there does seem to be a (understandable) motive to avoid social nature and involvement, for all its horrible abuses as well as to avoid an elevation of the status of routine (which I see as necessary structuring when conceived of correctly) in as much as it, routinization, strikes of brute incitement in the least – inasmuch, a quest for being is something of a reaction. It is not necessarily a wrong reaction, but it may explain in large part why hippies took drugs, why drunks drink, why we sleep when we could be doing something “productive.”

Posted by Dude on Fri, 09 May 2014 08:58 | #

Self-perfectionment,... The state of consciousness in which it is operative is not beside the point, however &c

This sounds to me (tapping into the higher level consciousness towards self-perfectionment) to be almost Buddhist-like, or maybe not too far away from the likes of Guenon and the other perennialists. But if this assumption of your meaning is correct, as seen in the expanded comments, I find it hard to grasp as an acceptable solution for the following reasons.

The almost nirvanic state that it implies is out of reach to all but a few. This few will need to continually reinvigorate their relationship with this plateau - it is usually not considered a permanent state. These types of breakthroughs are usually not associated, with earthly materialist concerns, but with otherwordly, non-temporal and non-materialist concerns.

Coming from this position, the elite otherwordly consciousness, to the many, worldly life as it is lived position, it’s hard to see its application. My sympathies with an organic, traditionalist, conservative oriented outlook is such that we see man born into a world pre-existing him, with all the interplay between culture and biology, which this implies.

How we might get from this to a reorienting towards that with is truer, a sort of tabula rasa reprogramming of the European mind, is to me unfathomable from these given snippets, unless the suggestion is that on encountering it we will see a natural gravitation, a eureka moment of tapping into a spring of group (un)consciousness. How we might naturally and solidly retain such in the face of other competing non-European evolved lifeforms, is questionable.

Of course I have jumped off here from a few sentences with other similar but partially retained comments made here previously, which may be in error as to intention.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 09 May 2014 23:16 | #

Dude,

All I am saying here is that whole religious systems have an inner core of theory, knowledge and practice which is not inherently faithistic and has more in common with the inner cores of other systems than with the outer core of its own.  This inner core cannot be invented from without, and presents an insuperable difficulty for those ambitious enough to try to invent a religion of race.  I state quite specifically that it has no particular or direct relevance to an identitarian political philosophy or ethnic nationalist movement for European peoples.

Having said that, philosophically I certainly see the way forward in terms of transporting our people from an ascripted ontology to a true one, and from this consciousness of self towards action for self.  You are right that there is a certain break between consciousness and action, requiring an additional impetus to carry us over into the political world.  Most thinking nationalists, if asked about their credo, will tell you that something suitably Nietzschean or Fascistic will accomplish that.  But to my way of thinking, a life of glory, say, or nobility, mastery or whatever is both inauthentic in itself and an answer to another question from another time - specifically from the 19th and early 20th century age of the massifying events and ideologies of industrialisation and urbanism, liberalism, communism, and democratism.  This is not that age, and grand projects of the will are not the answer to the question of our time.

That question, of course, is: how do we secure the existence of our people and a future for white children?  We are at a moment in our history when the focus is existential and the challenge that is set us is to rediscover the reality of our being and identity, our interests, our natural right to struggle for life, our ethnocentrism, our profound attachment to freedom, and so forth.  It is from the rediscovery of these foundations that the move into politics can develop, and the European world can be made anew.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sat, 10 May 2014 04:06 | #

If racism is implicit, why is it constantly overridden by sexuality?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 10 May 2014 07:44 | #

Why do European men and women, especially women, sometimes select for maladaptive traits?  Obviously, because circumstance arise in which judgement is narrowed or corrupted.

Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 10 May 2014 09:04 | #

GW@11

There is an implication here that Christianity is somehow inadequate to the modern needs of Western survival. Why is that so? If it is that we are all atheists now (or soon to be), then how could any new religion arise? Moreover, if we are all atheists, why should intelligent white men make sacrifices for the WN cause? Trust me: outside of a multiracial prison, it is ALWAYS personally easier to (at least ostensibly) sell out than to remain usefully/publicly loyal to the cause. My WP commitment has never gotten me either sued or imprisoned or even fired, but it has cost me professional opportunities, at least indirectly, and it has definitely cost me social and even sexual opportunities. It certainly hasn’t brought me any personal benefits.

OTOH, if the rejection is not of religion generally, but of Christianity specifically, then we must inquire why the West was far more powerful, internally (demographically and psychologically) as well as internationally, when the faith was so much greater, both horizontally (percentiles of believing Christians across the West) and vertically (intensity of Christian belief), than today. Yes, ‘correlation does not equal causation’, but ... WN atheists never adequately account for the brute historical facts that the West was racially stronger when it was more Christian, and it has gotten ever weaker in tandem with Christianity’s Occidental decline.

WN atheists also never fully answer my observation that it would be far more useful (even to WN atheists; ie, even if Christianity is false belief) to resuscitate a racially reformed Christianity than to either proselytize some ridiculous new religion (or ontology meant to substitute for religious sensibilities), or to preach atheism while expecting patriots to accept secular martyrdom.

Cleanse the faith of PC pollution, then re-Christianize the West. That’s my preferred solution (along with emphasizing the dangers of impending white minoritization via economically and ecologically destructive mass immigration).

(Note: Christianity professes no special attachment to Judaism or Jews, outside of some admittedly influential but theologically ridiculous American-based evangelical sects. Torquemada etc would have been bemused and later amused at the allegation that their faith was in the service of Jewish interests.)

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 10 May 2014 21:47 | #

Leon,

There cannot, in my view, be any sudden change to the underlying tendency for faithism in a population, though expressions may be suppressed or subverted into a non-religious form.  Secularism does not necessarily indicate an absence of faith, but people are suggestible and are easily led into harmful behaviour.  A true absence of faith, btw, is indicated by the inability to feel anything whatsoever that the faithful feel for their gods.  To the faithless, religious feeling is alien.

In the past, I recall, Desmond has posted some interesting snippets here on the claimed reproductive success of the early northern European Christian populations over the pagans still living about them.  Faith is surely genetically coded.  It may be selected for more or less over the generations.  One might argue that over the last three or four centuries it has been selected for more in eastern and southern Europe, and in America, than in northern Europe.

I would not agree that Christianity was ever “racially-formed”.  It always approached the non-Jew by offering an abstract, universalistic ontology which includes the novel notion of a personal redemption from “sin” and a millenerian reward that was not material and not in this world, as with Jews, but only to be got after death.  Nothing “racial” in that.

You may as well claim that liberalism is “racially formed”, since a hundred years ago Europeans were more overtly and confidently ethnocentric than now.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sat, 10 May 2014 22:24 | #

How can racism be implicit if it’s subject to judgement?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 10 May 2014 22:29 | #

Without discrimination there is nothing.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sat, 10 May 2014 22:50 | #

Secularism does not necessarily indicate an absence of faith, but people are suggestible and are easily led into harmful behaviour.

Surely for this to be true, the opposite must also hold. If people are easily suggestible then they must be led to good as well as harm. The difference must lie in the meme not the suggestibility. And if the meme produces a reproductive differential then it will spread more rapidly.

I would not agree that Christianity was ever “racially-formed”.

Yes, because it arose, in large part, from the individualism and cosmopolitanism of Hellenistic Greek philosophy for both Jew and gentile.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sat, 10 May 2014 22:53 | #

Again, how is racism implicit if founded upon judgement (discrimination)?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 10 May 2014 23:47 | #

Desmond,

Suggestibility is particular to how, in our ordinary waking consciousness, we internalise so much so uncritically.  I wouldn’t say there is no gatekeeper, but he is often feeble in his attentions to his duty.  We let a great deal in.  It can easily stay with us and we become it.  To cease being suggestible is to become aware of self and the world without ... to become differentiated from that which is not us.  At the level of population even a small movement in that direction is enough to create large-scale effects.

Yes, people can be led to the good as well as bad.  But the social tendency is always for involution ... disintegration.  It takes psychological energy for the centre to hold, if I may borrow from Yeats.

We have already discussed Hellenism and Judiasm.  The First Temple period ended nearly one hundred and twenty years before Socrates was born.  OK so, much later, a part of the Jewish world was hellenised.  But contrast Paul’s no doubt hellenised view of the gentile with that of “the circumcision group” which triggered the Incident at Antioch - and these were early Christians, not Pharisees!

I don’t see why you would ask about racism?  What do you mean by that word?  Do you not discriminate between “racism” à la Magnus Hirschfeld and the universal human trait of rejection of the foreign?  To me, “racism” simply means: a negative discrimination for adaptive genes.  It is a basic form of natural discrimination.  But, like everything else, it can be corrupted and compromised.