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What’s four years between friends This essay must serve as my reply to Daniel’s recent critique. Down the years I have been attacked for word or deed by a fair few here. Generally I will not respond. We have all observed how pulling apart instead of pulling together seems to be a characteristic, perhaps the defining characteristic, of the renegade kind which, because it alone can withstand the relentless moral attack from every direction, is left to uphold the true interests of our race and peoples today. There is quite enough ideological schism and personal in-fighting in our movement without creating more. So in this case, rather than respond directly to Daniel’s comments I will respond to some criticism levelled against the Ontology Project by James Bowery four long years ago in an unresolved thread discussion about the mathematician Gian Carlo Rota’s conclusion that, ultimately, all ontological investigation is made folly by the sheer indeterminacy of being. It might not seem a very fair or logical way to respond to the criticisms of my friend Daniel. But dig a little, and the logic might become clearer. James’s own summation of his argument was stated thus:
Ostensibly, James was demanding that this ineffable slipperiness be dispelled by an unremitting (but, in the event, not bowreyesque) intellectual rigour. It is, of course, disappointing that he did not hurl himself into the creative fray and resolve the matter for us. But I don’t think his interest in it extended beyond criticism. What he was really saying was: In its lack of a properly expressible, qualitatively certain foundation, none of this (ie, the pursuit of an existentialist and identitarian philosophy of Man and nation) has enough solidity to stand in the world. Helpfully, he did refine his critique to two schoolmasterly questions, and we can at least work our way through those. They are:
But intellectual rigour, if it is the exhaustive application of precision, is already absent from the first question: What is an ontology without reference to existence? Existing is not being. These terms are invested with different meanings and systems of reference. “Existing” shouldn’t be all that slippery to get to grips with. Every thing and every body within and without our sensory range has an objective factic existence, a there-ness, and a history as such. But being infers interiority, and it is this which is the slippery “something” for the outside observer. For example, the sun or the moon could be judged to have being, and not merely a mechanical existence as concentrations of matter in constant transformation, whirling through the void in conformity with physical law. But would this be only poetic, even anthropomorphic thinking on our part? One must be careful not to render the slippery as terminally ungraspable. The whole point is to make the concepts we have to employ as clear-cut and accessible as possible. For further example, metaphysicians have always been at pains to draw a distinction between the quality of being of living organisms and the more limited quality of being of objects – their factic there-ness. It is much more straightforward for us, as living organisms (sentient ones), to witness the being of other living organisms than to penetrate to the being of an inanimate object, but we can all see that both exist. A fine, connective proof of this is the mystery which, throughout human history, has attached to death. In the obviously ultimate context of the physical universe, the being of organisms vanishes in death into the being of objects. The human subject passes into objecthood. Human being is lost to us to witness. Any meaning attached to it proves so immediate and transient, and passes so completely into an eternity devoid of meaning, that meaning itself, as a commentary on the organism, becomes memorial or merely imaginary - in which form it too may exist, but only as mind-phenomena subject to error and the inevitable ravages of Time. In the same sense, it should be clear that an ontological approach to, say, the European life has to get beyond the dead and decaying objecthood of mere inventions and suppositions, constructs and prescriptions … mere products of the historical record or of imagination. For us, as ontologists, being must and does have a quality which is vital, and because it is vital it is, in an otherwise mechanical universe, constantly renewing. This is, if not what James would Germanise as fundierung, at least a fundamental truth. Only as this vital, renewing property could it ever be open to perception, to witness, to experience … to consciousness; which is the unique modus by which an ontologically-focused philosophy likewise vitalises, and appropriates to itself the potential to act as a change-agent in the world, and thereby renew it. Another reason why this distinction between what is and what exists is important for me, in replying to James, is that he quotes Rota as saying:
Well, let’s state clearly that the age-old philosophical question here is, in fact, whether identity is prior to being (not existence, obviously) or being is the ground of identity. In the first of his two lectures published as Identity and Difference Martin Heidegger traces a few bare threads of textual clues to the conclusion that the pre-Socratics considered that identity is prior. So, the precise terminology aside, Rota’s assertion is hardly original. But these abstruse matters apparently of interest only to dancing angels do, in fact, have profound formative effects on the political end-product and, eventually, on the life that is lived. The conviction that being is not only prior to identity but is the ground of it … its foundational constant ... opens directly to platonic theorising, mystical thinking, and abstract, notional teleologies of all kinds. The Christian soul saved by God’s grace ... the unfettered and radically free will ... the radically equal Homo sovieticus ... the palingenetic, morally masterful Aryan ... these have all inhabited this unnatural philosophical universe, and the first two still do, notwithstanding the fact that neither they nor the others can be made solid. They are idealisations that must always remain such. Forced into the life which Man must live, they induce pathology. If this is also what James meant when he wrote:
… then we are in agreement. The identity, the function, the content is what matters, and it does not have a factic existence…. a there-ness ... in what is, after all, only an unattainable idealisation. This is the problem of ground or foundation, and we do not need to persist with it. So, as we must reject being as ground, what’s left to us? The answer is being as relation, and the relation is that of a product or function - the vital function, actually - of identity. Because that function is vital, identity itself stands in a relation of care or concern for being, to use Heidegger’s term, or genetic interest in being, to use Salter’s. Here is synthesis. Here is what Mike Rienzi was seeking when he left MR, although he looked in the wrong place (Francis Parker Yockey instead of Martin Heidegger). Now everything changes. The abstract and notional element of ground excised, those idealisations which preoccupied us before (including Parker Yockey’s) fall away immediately. They are no longer possible. In contrast, identity is not at all given to the universalistic, featureless abstraction of the notional ground. It is solid and real, and genetic – a differentiated and particular yet connected thing. In its solidity it is now the fundierung, for there is nothing at all available to ontology beyond it. All that obtains is the necessity, in the fallen psychological world we daily inhabit, to know it in the consciousness. Of this thinking, and the further thinking it demands, I will quote from an observation I made in conversation with Matt Parrott here:
This thinking alone throws open windows to the authentic in us and to matters of mutuality and investment – ethnocentrism (in Heidegger’s terminological system being-with) and ethnic genetic interest – and, with that, the gentle understanding and love which leads us to unity. A politics of identity, therefore, is necessarily a politics of ethnocentricity and love, and of unity in the struggle for life. That is its glory, which should be glory enough for nationalists in this age of existential crisis. The tendency towards Naziphilia which one observes across so many nationalist sites is a childish and self-indulgent regression. My clear conviction is that the real-world politics we all want … a sustaining and affirming politics of the European life … can come only from the grand re-founding which I have gestured towards here. James’s own conclusion on that old ontology thread was this:
You see how close he is to what I am saying, though I am not sure he realised it at the time. One last thought. James has become interested in a new religion of late. Well, the faith instinct is in our genotype, whether it is expressed or not in every individual (of course, it’s not). Students of 666 and the Second Coming of Christ might like to ponder the interpretive possibilities of the return of identity to its ancient European house. I’d rather like to know what Matt Parrott would make of that! Comments:2
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 10:05 | # What is it, CC, that gifts you the sense of a common identification? 3
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 10:09 | # Let us say that a human being perceives that object 1 is an inch longer than object 2, and attaches some mystical significance to that happening. How is an Englishman’s “philosophy” to invalidate in any way the perception of the individual’s, or indeed the collective’s, perception of the former and the latter as such? I’m all ears. And that Nobel Prize is waiting! 4
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 10:23 | # Dissemination → extrapolation → discourse → wider adoption → general application. How do you think you came to be born into a liberal project? 5
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 10:39 | # Well, GW, I think that it is mirror neurons that, in short, gifts me, along with all self aware beings, the sense of group identification. Of course all animals with a collective instinct are not self aware. And some animals that may be self aware - I’ve read some things that suggest dogs may have a rudimentary sense of self-awareness - do not extend this sense of self beyond themselves. That is, not consciously to any collective. 6
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 10:47 | # So you claim a certain, healthy connectedness to the natural perceptual clarity provided for by the human sociobiology. How do you come to be granted this inner health and freedom from the darkness and error which afflicts all around you? 7
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 11:09 | # Let us say that awareness, consciousness, is a beacon which shines outward. For there to be self-awareness there would need to be some internal mechanism that distinguished this efferens from that which is refracted. The flashlight would know that it’s self-produced light was bouncing off a mirror. So I guess you were right all along. At it’s most basic level, the thing is rooted in consciousness, of course ignoring instinct. 8
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 11:28 | # The precise operation of the human brain is really best left to neurologists (one of the reasons I had high hopes for PF, during his engagement here). For its part, philosophy cannot stand in opposition to neurological facts, where they bear on the philosophical. We cannot, of course, live by neurology alone. It is a limited thing, as is all pure science. But we have to live with it. Identitarianism, as philosophy, does not exist today. It is a politics without the known essence it advocates for. Ethnic nationalism has some presence in the world, of course. But everywhere in the west it is reactionary and, therefore, self-limiting. It cannot make the jump to a creative, affirmative system for life because of the identitarian deficit. This is what ethnic nationalists have to address. 9
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 11:29 | # At its most basic analogous level, there is the light source and the mirror. Some mirrors are more felicitous than others. The “liberal project” is an infelicitous mirror. It does not provide an accurate reflection of the light source, but a distorted one. 10
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 11:41 | # So in evolutionary terms, it - the liberal project - pressages a surfeit of maladaptive choices over adaptive ones. Whether that organism is individual or collective, to bring that organism into conflict with it ... to create cognitive dissonance ... requires a conscious connection to the identity. This is not impossible to effect. One is working with the grain of the timber. And it has been done before, as we all know, something I pointed out to Matt Parrott just recently:
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Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 18:47 | # My absence from MR is not, as has been imputed here, motivated by hostility (at least on my part), but rather inadequate commensurability. When I brought up Rota, it was basically my last-ditch attempt to find some commensurability between myself and the ontology project. The hostility clearly directed toward me by some here, combined with with their value to the ontology project, is rather like the hostility that arises in a multicultural/multilingual setting: Any further attempt at “conversation” in the presence of such hostility can serve only to impede the project. Someone has to go and given my status at MR as an outlier or, to be more generous to my detractors, as defective, the decision is obvious. That I might presume to continue my own “project” despite “admitting my defect” is perceived as “hostility” only by those who are hostile to me. It is rather like the imputation of “hate” if not “supremacism” on separatists by multiculturalists. They are welcome to their opinion of me and my consequent absence, and I wish them well in their project. For my own part, I expect the ontology project is far more likely to come to a point where the conversation can resume productively, by proceeding without the confusion created by my presence. So why am I responding here at all? Well, for one thing, GW was kind enough to send me an email link to this post—that, and the fact that it responds in good faith to my last-ditch attempt to constructively participate in the ontology project. My interest does indeed “extend beyond criticism” but my understanding, at least of the language, is inadequate—some might say deficient if not destructive—to that interest. Nevertheless, there is enough here (and my thinking/language has further developed such) that I might hope to avoid trampling pearls under feet, turning again to rend GW, and, upon my response, vis versa (at least on GW’s part). Let me try this “expression”: The “liberal” notion of the “individual” (some might say “atomized individual”) is rather like the gordian worm which, having hollowed out the “individual” cricket, expresses its genes in the cricket’s actions as it dives into water so that the gordian worm can slither out the cricket’s anus leaving the maimed cricket to die. We are speaking here as though the hapless cricket’s genes still “expressed” in its body at all. In like manner we have the “individual” worker “insect” which, having been parasitically castrated by the reproductive queen, “expresses” its “individuality” by serving her genetic interests—however closely aligned her interests might be to the worker’s. The “liberal” notion of “individuality” (some apparently call it “modernity”) is rather like the hormones used by the gordian worm or the pheromones used by the queen, reducing the Being of the “cricket” or the “worker” to that of inanimate objects. For all Being entails, the “cricket” is not alive—nor is the worker “insect”. My notion of “sortocracy” (parsimoniously described as “sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them”) is, in the final analysis, simply my proposed technology to maximize what I think GW might call “the lived life”. The danger here is to imagine that all these “individuals” are not already dead—are not what I call “zombies”—as are the “cricket” and the worker “insect”. Many, perhaps even _most_ of these “individuals” are not living. They cannot even be revived by any known treatment. They would better serve Joy of Creation as maggot food—not just because, at least, maggots can be said to live, but because zombies enable Being more akin to demon possession than “the lived life”. These zombies do not, in fact, have any “social theories” at all. They lack the human capacity for philosophy hence science because, ultimately, they are not in possession of themselves as humans. What they express in their actions (including thoughts and resulting utterances we call “words”) is the genetic interest of their parasite(s). “We the living” must detect which of these erstwhile organisms (such as Randroids) are better turned into maggot food with all due speed. This is done by the simple expedient of offering them the opportunity to walk their talk and not abiding their imputation of “hate” (or the Randroid imputation of “collectivism”) on us—said imputation merely expressing the genetic interest of their possessing demonic parasites—parasites that depend on a continual supply of food in the form of “the living”, which they consume the way the gordian worm consumes crickets. To be sure, many will be inadequately possessed and may put up ineffective resistance to sorting themselves into, say, open borders governments, while being excluded from governments less subject to demon possession. Dispatching them to the relatively high estate of maggot food can wait. They, too, will turn into maggot food, the “social justice” due them, if they don’t recover from their zombie slumber. But at least they will have a chance to wake up. I do not think that slim chance too-generous an offer. Let me wrap up by talking about “genetic interest” in an ecological sense so that the notion of “identity” extends beyond the “individual”: The notion of a “gene” is frequently described as that set of loci which does not divide during the meiotic lottery. As I tried to describe in my first post at MR, this is the extension of “liberal” “individualism” to gene theory otherwise known as Lewontin’s Fallacy. It is not, to first order, that which is “indivisible” that defines the genetic correlation structures—but their relations aka their ecology. The “atomized gene” is, like the “atomized individual”, a construct serving virulent demons sometimes called “parasites” such as Lewontin and his kind. Their virulence is a consequence of the horizontal transmission of their genetic ecology between human ecologies. Human societies, like individual organisms, are expressions of the genetic relations known as “ecology”. When restricted to vertical transmission (parent to child) over many generations, those relations have a much lower level of “optimal virulence”. In the case of the meiotically reproducing organism, optimal virulence among the “atomized genes” declines to near zero as their prospective fate is united in pure vertical transmission. However, we are, each of us as individual organisms, an ecology in microcosm that extends beyond the ecology of our “atomized genes” to include such “replicators” as gut bacteria, dogs and ideas passed from parent to child in vertical transmission. Beyond that we have those with whom we mate, in our local ecology, that support the evolution of correlation structures of great fragility when exposed to high levels of immigration since these structures extend even to different chromosomes that are almost certain to be randomly recombined during meiosis. The idea that we, as “individuals”, would naturally express preference for such ecological relations as befits the preservation of such correlation structures is an obvious concomitant to healthy individual gene expression. 12
Posted by DanielS on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 19:34 | #
It is valuable attention paid to the idea that Being has vitality and internality (thus, a subjective aspect to it in the more complex internal systems of individual humans) to distinguish it from the there being of objects (though of course that is not the aspect of there being that we are talking about when we mention the non-Cartesian purpose for coining Dasain). Also well considered is the matter of consciousness of proper direction of the authentic stream of being from its source in adaptive discretion and further traced upstream in relationships cared for. That consciousness, however, can be confirmed or disconfirmed by the stories told which serve to glue together our incomplete place as a part of systems. And there is a point where a linearity and reductionism still hints in this concern - a non recognition that as advanced humans in particular we are not born deterministically finished, but require appreciation and cultivation of the hermeneutic realm (not just criticism of its abuses, whether Christianity, liberalism, Frankfurt School) to capture our historical and systemic breadth, to rescue it from the crassness of the puerile, from the pandering to the crass who would truncate our authenticity of its breadth - nowadays pandered to yes, with liberal narratives of limitless free will, the Frankfurt school… and where “thoughtful” “western” traditional systemic care is proposed as an alternative, what we are primarily offered is Abrahamic religion, it is this which is proposed to broaden our systemic concern, away from the moment and immediate relation only - a seeking for broad systemic authenticity that will find Sharia, waiting to truncate it (or behead it), while still others will be tricked out of their birthright by Christianity and the YKW wielding unilateral regard for their system only, replacing reconstructing narratives for gentiles with guilt trip narratives - there are a myriad of narratives which direct our people as individuals and as group systems, away from our authenticity. I believe the point where it becomes too lineal is being toward death (or an afterlife which has nothing to do with our biological system).
I believe this is inauthentic as well. What is natural and authentic is not motivated in a way guided by death’s delimitation. That is because Being is something that manifests its vitality in systemic process - both in an individual system but also in a group system, which both predates and outlives the individual being. And the being circulates systemically, with the group, beyond individual consciousness and individual death. It is in communication with that group history and future that being is reconstructed, in a non-linear way, as it were, which might go on indefinitely. As we are born incomplete, and as our individual and group systems are under determined by the facts, it is incumbent upon us, as adults, to institutionalize and normalize narratives which re-direct the reconstruction of our authentic ways. Yes, we need to deconstruct and be done with narratives directing our dissolution, that’s crucial, but we also need narratives that reconstruct attention to the importance of our Being, our genetics, our EGI, genetic systems, habitats, our midtdasein - there is no necessary conflict between that and science - on the contrary. In fact, one of the better narratives that we are proposing is something like an ecology and endangered species under threat. Equipped with measurable scientific evidence and highly precise differences, we can achieve not only operational verifiability but warranted assertability, providing the evidence to refute even our own most liberal minded opponents that much of what they are advocating is not only unnecessary but that if these issues are not respected and protected irreversible catastrophe will ensue: it is harder to conceive of any more worthy scientific concern and any greater drama than that. Their non-compliace with what we need to do will have catastrophic consequences and their ostracism is warranted. On the other hand, the reward for cooperation can be massive. 13
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:07 | # James, Thanks for the response. I will say that it is a highly idiosyncratic response, such that I could not possibly respond in similarly entomological terms. I can best assimilate your rendering as a uniquely Bowrey-esque dramatic device to make stark and unmissable, not to mention entertaining, meanings which I portray through grey, dense thickets of psychology (which, apparently, virtually nobody strives to penetrate). OK, your method allows a particular analysis and modelling of the Jewish ethnic struggle and, perhaps also, of the closely related struggle of the western elites generally. But the psychological reading has its advantages too, particularly in regard to amelioration of “the problem” of liberalism or modernity or economism, or globalism, or Jewish ethnic strategising, or whatever filter du jour one cares to apply. I think that at that time, four years ago, you may not have appreciated the rejection of “the ineffable” which was inherent to the Ontology Project. You were firing live rounds ... you and Rota were right. But your aim was 180 degrees out. I put that down then to a desire on your part to redeem the ineffable through intellectual rigour, which would, to my mind, only really have been explicable as a quasi-religious quest. I think now that you “get” it: the ineffable is not part of an identitarian project. We are discussing the same subject matter and observing the same truths in related and ultimately compatible ways. 14
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 04:40 | # Daniel, As ever, you are at pains to introduce your own specialisms into the process of turning from “darkness and error”, let us say, and towards light and self-awareness. This turn cannot ... cannot ... be got from cognitive elites prescribing for the masses for reasons I have set out at length elsewhere. Prescription and authenticity are strangers. In any case, the turn itself is not an interpretive process. It is a real event in the experience. That this is a mass experience, when we are accustomed to expect the word “mass” to be associated with the world “communication”, does not alter the character of the event. For the record, no man can prescribe what is real in another for that other. No man can interpret it for another. No man can communicate it to another. That leaves us with emergence as the operative principle. How that would articulate historically when it cannot be articulated in the manner you would wish is a nice problem, but one we shall resolve in due course. We are just not there yet, struggling with the foundation, as we are. 15
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 05:02 | # Maybe you will birth a child, leave it on a desert island with all it needs (food and shelter) alone for 30 years and then let it return - it will deal effectively with the rest of the world, its history and trajectory. It will be the first of its kind. Truthfully, science will attest to the fact that won’t happen. You are rendering a false either / or between what is emergent and what is stored in collective learning otherwise. I am not at pains to introduce communication, there is no way around it - it is at the crux of the matter - to take the issue farther, one cannot Not communicate; whereas psychology is an ill fit to the task. You are projecting your pains to make that angle more useful than it really is. 16
Posted by Al Ross on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 07:07 | # Just four years? Well to misquote an old adage - dissonance lends enchantment. In an early experiment on language ,King James IV of Scotland left two babies, in the charge of a mute nursemaid, on the hitherto uninhabited island of Inchkeith . Amusingly, upon returning to the mainland, the childrens’ vocal efforts were misconstrued as Hebrew. 17
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 11:25 | # Daniel, This question of the inapplicability and inefficacy of ordinary thinking in matters of what we might call “the turn” and which Heidegger, in narrow philosophical terms, called the step back (from the metaphysics he abjured) was touched upon, to some extent, five years ago here: The thread is short, but includes a further reference by James to Gian Carlo Rota. Quite interesting. However, the point is that a “turn” by a whole population, such as occurred in Germany in the 1930s, would demand that communications on the matter are wrought from (and possibly even in) Martin Heidegger’s essential thinking, which I wrote about in this post: https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/what_it_means_to_be_human_part_3 As you are well aware, he associated this extra-ordinary type of thinking with the quality of seriousness which attends moments of mortal danger. We are talking here about a very particular action, which I ask you to think about before you propose intellectual norms as suitable or efficacious products. 18
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:20 | # I will re-read these articles in a few. But before that, I must reiterate that it is not my purpose to understand every jot an tittle of Heidegger, but rather to make use of necessary cumulative understandings as they have utility and make sense as shown through the considerations of various capable people - Heidegger being just one. So, even if he had a specific and other meaning for “the turn”, I am not wedded to it, as the post modern turn is a common phrase and a meaningful phrase for reasons that make sense; and yes, it has been thought by intelligent people, it makes infinitely more sense than trying to re-boot modernity, it makes clear sense of what Heidegger was doing; but regarding an effort to try to understand, instead, what made Hitler and his audience tick, to the point of emulation? (I mean, what are you trying to get at?) enraptured in the sports stadium as they were ..is about the last thing we’d want to emulate ...how some errant, subhuman notion of causality led his people to disaster. You might even say that Hitler failed to take the White post modern turn - hmmm, that might work. But anyway… Am I really being irresponsible for making suggestions in comments? I think not. They are presented there to stand corrected if need be. To suggest that I have not thought about what I am saying what-so-ever? I admit to being offhand only in the part where I tossed in the bit about ownmost being toward death ...I had a hunch that was lurking in the background…I won’t belabor what I have said about that many times now… I saw it in the background, while seeing residual linearity in lead-up to it, a bit more clearly - also a problem. Regarding ownmost being toward death: You don’t have to be a scholar or a self proclaimed thinker to follow the Aristotelian idea that nature rarely works within lethal variables - it is geared rather in authenticity as it were, amidst life giving resources secured in optimal balance and flexibility. Ownmost being toward death looks rather toxic then, does not resonate as a stable plan, not even a stable battle plan. I know its a good idea and there is more to it than that, but I mean to shake people out of the Heidegger trance, so that they can use Heidegger, as all scholarship, and not be used by it. We’ve been through that before, and it is not my major point here. I assume that you are averse to anything but a static and monadic view of the universe and lineal causality at that; but still all my efforts to say and show, as I always to, that updated ideas are not anti-science, but work right along with it (and with being/midt/dasein) - necessarily - go unrequited. Anyway, while you, et al, continue to set aside and not deploy better ideas, I will have yet another look at what is so amazing in these articles that it can’t even be explained to a human audience…. and what a great deal of ineffable good it is at that! 19
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 19:58 | # You put me in mind of the conversation I had here with Alex Linder, during which I tried to explain that, for all his noisy anti-Jewish focus, I am more radical by orders of magnitude than he is. Obviously, it has occurred to you that our race has been thrust into an historically unique time which, as things stand, is going to prove to be the end time for us; and that this, therefore, is a full-blown existential crisis, and a crisis not only of modernity and politics but of the whole ideational system ... everything ... as it formulates the human personality. Nowhere in this are there the seeds of a European life. Those seeds have to be found not in some alternative political stratagem, but in the identity/identities of our European kind. Accordingly, all across continental Europe ethnic nationalism is taking hold. But it is making do without an identitarian essence; and that is what I am so concerned to address. I am responding to the politics of the age, as I (and most others, I believe) perceive them; not hiding away in some dusty corner of eccentric existentialist study. 20
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 05:06 | # Beastly American I am. Is it that you are so much more radical, or is it just that you act like what it IS to be European in essence is near impossible to grasp (when it isn’t). Who and how we are - these are the first questions to ask, that’s true (Jews not White and crypsis, I will never take it away from those who embellish upon these distinctions; it’s important), but the questions are not impossible to answer well enough to proceed and then improve upon while we attend to other important questions. When in fact, what it takes to get our people to do something - to act in our own interests is very difficult to do given the layers of anti-White brainwashing and diversion - it is the pragmatic and important question. The stark difference between you and I and what you are mistaking for rosy optimism, is that I have already been through “the valley of the shadow of death” in terms of pessimism and despair - I was there long enough to see the end of its utility. I can see around your skepticism, discarding important things not because you are getting deeper, but because you are still in denial of skepticism’s limit, signaling the reality - yes, this existential crisis is real, it was a clear, looming danger in the 1970s. Already an emergency then, though nobody was acting that way besides me that I knew of, personally, at the time. What then after the despair at the augury of threats and rules that came more and more to confirmation of every suspicion and fear as the 80’s moved to the 90s and 2000s, only getting worse and worse ....with nobody to take our side against this insanity… What then? Keep despairing, keep pointing to the fullness of death and hoping that others will follow, stay skeptical and put our heads back into an esoteric hole when we can talk to people now? It is not getting deeper to remain in despair and skepticism, to remain in denial that people can understand, to remain in the state of justified horror. You are a chicken. We are pragmatists because we must be and your never being satisfisfied is more an expression of avoidance than anything. Who we are is an important question, and a deep question to correct our nature so that it acts in way toward its life and in aversion to its death - so that it will fight on its own behalf - naturally and uncoerced is obviously the best way. That is not easy to do, and it is a deep question necessarily; a pragmatic question that we ask. You may go into denial about that somewhere in your “mind” but you are no exception to the fact in truth - we are pragmatists because we have to be. What depth or shallowness you want to place under the rubric of pragmatism, how serious you take the practical issues to be, is up to you and your discourse with others - I suspect the right wing ones are spiteful and that is why they will not get with the existential program of alliance of European peoples of our genus and kinds. At least Bowery has us at the level of insects. You and Hitler want to go “so much deeper” still, so deep as to have humans acting like boulders hurling through space. 21
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:59 | # It is somewhat dispiriting that you have not grasped the secondary content of the main post, as it applies to you at this time. It IS a response to your criticism, but not a reply to your criticisms. It should be clear that (a) I will not criticise you personally, (b) I will always try to accommodate philosophical or political differences at some level, in the spirit of what should be a united and ecumenical movement. Confrontationism should be reserved for our common foes. As regards the main post, its background is well known. Graham treated James with a hostility that was wholly unjustified, and which I asked him privately to rein in. He was unable to do so, perhaps constitutionally. James’s individualistic nature and idiosyncratic thinking hit all the wrong notes for him. The personal nature of Graham’s comments were all the more unnecessary because his intellectual disagreements with James were perfectly defensible, and an extended debate around them would have been of interest. Instead we ended up losing an intelligent and valuable contributor, which was absolutely not what I wanted - that is NEVER what I want. I feel I should have been able to reconcile the situation, but I was not able to. I do not want it repeated. The main post is an ostensible attempt to reconcile differences with James, and it is made in good faith as such. It is also a demonstration for your benefit. 22
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 11:51 | # GW, when I call you a “chicken”, it is not something that can be taken seriously - just as the original title of my article (“Why people who argue against ‘THE Left’ and ‘post modernity’ are mentally retarded assholes” could not be taken too seriously, nor taken as directed at you personally - because many ‘people’ are doing that), but is rather a bar of friendly incitement being raised in order to do better - when you sweep aside some things that I have said (things that I am quite confident in) as utter bullocks and then tell me to “think” (not in private, but in comments) or say that I am just trying to use the instruments of my specialty, I put that in the light of the highest criteria out of respect for you - this is “rough play” in order to get at the truth - our personal egos may incur a few bruises, but so what? if we arrive at better theory. ...which evidently can be helped if you clarify what you mean to say such that it can be broadly understood - as true enough or not. I was a bit hard on you in the post, “Why people who”... It wasn’t planned, but as I started to think about various issues and I saw you blocking them at every turn (listing the examples would seem like I am deliberately building a case, which is not my point), it rather emerged the thing to do to try to understand perhaps why? “Residual, puerile contentiousness and grand egotism supported by friends with errant motives” are about the worst of it - and those are hard charges; but even if true, not the worst manifestation, even regarding those variants of character flaw - I am sure that I have character flaws at least as bad (as I come more into consciousness - largely with your help, by the way - I often shudder when things that I have said and done in my past come to mind). But the reason I address it is not to one-up you, not at all (I don’t want to do that) but to get past obstructions to better theory. When I hear you pooh-poohing Aristotle, etc, and time and again writing-off well considered ideas as insignificant, I begin to get a clue that the problem is not wholly an obstruction of mine. I don’t know how to get people to accept being one-down (the idea that they might be mistaken about an argument) at times when they should. I was forced to accept that and then mistakenly, narcissistically, assumed it was a typical lesson (to accept being one down at times) accepted by other socialized people as well - I got screwed that way. I learned that quite often they never accept the idea that when I say that I can be mistaken that it is a peace offering and the altercast is in place for them to acknowledge that I can see where they can be mistaken as well and should therefore amend their ways and reciprocate where they should. I’ve offered the anecdote several times to help people in that regard, of Aristotle’s discussion of optimal competence and its capacity to judge the value of an exchange as compared to the minimally and merely satisfactorily competent person. That the satisfactory is non-existent in the disorder of modernity. One must be able to judge equal exchange and be able to give more without being ingratiating or less without feeling overwrought with indebtedness. Now, I was a bit unfair in not acknowledging that you have talked here about the centrality of relationships, you went a little further with that than in the past even, so my chiding you that you were treating us like billiard balls crashing into one another was a bit of a characterization (Hitler was not even entirely characterizeable as such) to make a point. However, you are moving in a better direction, to a mammalian point of view on our ontology (almost). Regarding Graham and James. Of course James has very valuable ideas, but he also has (in my estimation) some mistaken and quite destructive ideas or habits of mind; because James is so intelligent and capable of both harming better ideas and institutionalizing some errant ones, I believe that Graham saw the need for very hard medicine (rhetoric) to be applied. I don’t think Graham does it (or not to that extent) to just everyone as a result of his nature. Nevertheless, as you know, I was hoping that he would leave a way for Bowery to save face. Graham was mistaken for not appreciating that Bowery’s response, at its best, is largely geared for the American context and at its worst is an over compensating reaction to it - Graham does not have enough empathy for the torture of the American condition, where an intermediate step of thorough liberalism is necessary in order to allow European peoples there to extricate themselves from association with others. Graham should have had empathy enough with those born in diaspora in order to allow them to save themselves at least. For some reason, however, his contempt for Americans was that intense at the time that he extended it to all of the people, not just the system and its powerful enforcers. I understand the contempt for America, but not for all of its people - many good ones there (along with the many totally crazy ones). Now, I will go back and re-read the Heidegger and Rota stuff; and I will try to see where I might stand corrected. If and where I am mistaken, I will readily acknowledge it in service of better theory.
23
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:51 | # There are two major problems with the “creative intelligences” that have come and gone here over the years: 1. While their diagnoses of what ails are often brilliant and correct their proposed cures represent a declension into lunacy that reveals a large eccentric streak. 2. They are easily butthurt pussies. These factors paint a huge target on their backs which makes trolling all but irresistible. 24
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 03:58 | # Not so fast CC: there is agreement here that international nationalism is the way, with a strong emphasis that the “nation is your skin”, i.e., your “genetic nation” has priority over civic nationalism (i.e., civic nationalism and native/or genetic nationalism should largely mean the same thing) - for the reality of the antagonism that the very racial idea has been up against, that translates to a more flexible racial defense for diaspora and an emphasis on native national defense in Europe. There is no necessary conflict between the concerns; they are practical emphases; one may prefer to concentrate on one (the species of native nationalism and its satellites in diaspora; or the genus of the White race in diaspora and in Europe) but it is possible and normal to do both. They become feasible when emphasizing separatism, rational coordination with non-native members and rational solutions for defectors (“they”, the defector, might choose that, but they will not choose it for the rest of us). There’s been some lunacy here along the way - but it’s come largely by way of trolls acting in imperialistic Jewish interests and right-wing reactionaries veering to imperialistic reaction, and not allowing nationalist species to work their subsidiary magic to rationally mediate differing concerns among the genus of the race and thereby participate in coordination of its general concerns with the other races. 25
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 06:27 | # CC,
Don’t forget that we are all renegades from the system, and although we gather together in internet nationalism, nevertheless we are alone in life, intellectually and politically ... we have always been so and remain so now. We came to our dissents in isolation. We fashioned our creative responses likewise. It would be a superhumanly confident intellect which had no need of affirmation amid all this, and no sense of frustration and failure when that affirmation is not forthcoming. Really, rather than dismiss, rather than troll, we should cut one another a little slack. We should act towards one another in good faith, always. After all, as a proposer of cures or as a critic, the Schmittian friend is by far the most likely to be heard, and his intellectual differences taken to heart. By way of example, here are eight of the words of Gian Carlo Rota which James employed in criticism of the ontology project:
Our: Of us ... of our togetherness, in our joint interests, for our joint venture. No bad criticism that, and not much to differ about. 26
Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 13:34 | # At this point it may be worthwhile to introduce the last paper Tom Etter wrote, Membership and Identity which, unfortunately, remains unfinished and possibly tainted by the onset of dementia, even though he ceased working on it some years before his death. I was able to recover the unfinished manuscript from his nurse just prior to his death, with his permission, such as it was. There is a shorter, and relatively flawless, introductory paper describing the importance of relative identity thence relative ontology in “Three Place Identity”. The first paragraph: Membership and Identity File name: Membership and Identity 9-13-06 Updated: 9-1S-06 By Tom Etter “Identity precedes existence” Gian-Carlo Rota Section 1. Zermelo’s set theory An ontology, or more exactly, a working ontology, is a classification of those things that
The last, unfinished chapter: Section 4. What exists? What matters? What happens? To exist: existere (to stand out) Existence: t exists for x means ~x(t=x), abbreviated t∈x World: The world of x (informal) means everything that exists for x. Containment: x’s world is contained in, y’s world, written x⊂y, means that for all t, t∈x ⇒ t∈y. Coextension: x and y have coextensive worlds, written x≡y, means that for all t, t⊂x if and only if t⊂y. What are existence and anti-existence? Rectangular worlds and x and y coordinates. http://www.gnosticchristianity.com/ch7.htm 27
Posted by Daniel J on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 17:27 | # Miss ya Gee Dubya. Rosie says “Hullo!” Baby William (the one your cabby mistook for your grandchild) is almost seven! I’d love to see you next year when I come to visit. Blessings friend. 28
Posted by DanielS on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 22:08 | # Ok, I have re-read: What it is to be human, part 1 https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/what_it_is_to_be_human_part_2 https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/what_it_means_to_be_human_part_3 Because the pieces are long, particularly taken as a whole, I will try to convey my general impression and critique in a relatively brief comment and then unfold examples later on from amidst the texts. First, I would like to say that it seems that either GW has reworked the essays since I first read them (which would be fair enough) or they are hitting me differently this time around. Of course my criticisms above, that he treated people like forces and impacts was never quite true, but rather expression of my anger at his being dismissive with regard to my perspective and the tools that I offer - as it turns out, I was correct to be angry about that. There was no reason for dismissiveness, particularly as what I am doing does not contradict what he needs to do from his end, but can work with it perfectly among the hermeneutic circle. It turns out that what I suspected is true: that he is coming from a habit of mind that I am bringing “Jewish” or alien perspectives and he is likely being encouraged by right wingers to maintain that stance, as if my input is mutually exclusive to his project of gauging events against the psychology of healthy adaptation. And that is totally wrong. In what GW pursues in these articles, there is some extraordinary yield. That is not surprising to me, coming from GW, nor do I begrudge him that - the problem is (like with Bowery), I can accommodate his perspective, but he does not see fit to accommodate the merit of mine - as mine can include his that gives mine an important edge, in a sense, so long as he remains intransigent. If you go to the last paragraphs of part three, you will see (to my surprise) that my assessment that GW was building off a perspective of Randian subjectivism (called “objectivism”) was even more true than I thought. He has faith that subjective interests will sufficiently guide the social group in a very Ayn Randian way. He maintains that by encouraging people to be more self interested that they will get more into the natural, native form of their interests and be more immune to alien, liberal thinking - he mentions “fairness” as one of the liberal concerns that would not trouble one if sufficiently preoccupied with subjective concerns. I don’t consider “fairness” a liberal concern, but I digress. GW is making real hay with this perspective, that there is something to be said for taking ownership of inherited forms and their direction from what he calls “the personality.” I believe advanced cognitive psychologists would probably suggest that his maps of the mind are just that, rather maps of maps, but I don’t need to attempt such a critique here; I suspect that his assessment of the three part brain, mentation, emotive and mechanical, is a useful criteria. What for me was the best gem from among these pieces is his suggestion that what is necessary to prepare the grounds for authentic nationalism is not a consciousness of mechanically implementable political analysis, but a quality of consciousness. That is excellent. And if GW never did anything else, that would be a big yield (he comes up with other things in these very pieces, but that is my favorite). However, he says that the unit holding this quality of consciousness is the personality - expressing its emergent qualities, no doubt. Ok, you might anticipate what I am going to say. Its a false either or and pejorative one. I have nothing against “the individual”, but I do have a problem with taking the idea to an extreme where it denies social indebtedness. GW does talk in terms of interaction and agency in these pieces and has a fairly subtle way of talking about relationships as well, but if you follow carefully, you might see contradictions and conveniently shutting off the notion of interaction in one place, agency perhaps conveniently shut off in another - still, perfect consistency is not something that I would suss him out about. I am bit more bothered by facile use of language - “negotiate” as if to strictly haggle and not a matter of making one’s way around obstacles; or referring to “out there” as strictly a contradistinction from interiorty and not as a criticism of the notion of “detachment” - a criticism which is badly needed in service of undoing the Cartesian divide ....a much more important critical use of the chide, “out there.” The quality of consciousness, yes, can be housed in the personalty (what we might alternatively call the autobiography) but its general orientation as a caring nationalist would be (in our case White/native) Left nationalist. That is, every one would be in the union, innocent until proven guilty, free to pursue their abilities and to be rewarded handsomely - but accountable not to transgress the interests of the group and to be reasonably fair in respect for one’s obvious indebtedness to it. Secondly, that quality of consciousness would allow for forays into interpretive critical thinking on the group - is it sufficiently fair; are these people being fair? etc. Then it would revert to the quality of mind, subjectively grounded, if you will, but ensconced in the relative interests of left nationalist perspective - there would be a feeding back and forth - ok, maybe it is correct to favor the subjective under the circumstances (where Jewish anti White social critique is pervasive), but the background default should be on the context of the group, its relative interests, boundaries and accountability. Heidegger advises taking a step back into the authenticity of our being as a means to gauge authenticity and I believe that is good advice. But it takes more faith * than anybody should have to say that it should be accompanied by zero social prescription and regulation to go along with critique of the culture of critique. It shouldn’t happen and it won’t happen. “Minds” exist in context, they are doing things, and one of issues that a left nationalist quality of consciousness will continually circle back to, and ruminate over, is how to jettison and extricate ourselves from alien and treacherous elites, especially; and how to facilitate accountability and willing participation in the union generally; what borders and boundaries mean * - yes, with our own subjective interests as a keen barometer - coming back to it regularly. Self assertion of subjective interests on the part of White men does correspond with a medicine that I have long seen the need to prescribe to Europeans against their penchant for self transcendence. Thus, I agree wit the general bias. *As regards nationalism, one can detect a dubious faith in “the magic hand” - i.e., of national boundaries/borders as hoped for upshot from this naturalist subjectivism. 29
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 22:58 | # James, thanks; I read the short Etter paper. Of course, I am at a great disadvantage, being non-literate numerically. I had to hop from philosophical thought to philosophical thought just to make it through; and came out the other side with gaps everywhere and some inevitable reservations. I understand the beauty of the proof, its definitional lines and certitude. But to my eyes there is something abortive about mathematical representation. Nothing gets beyond the graph-paper or the chalk-board. The experience is mathematical, not actual. If it is more than a struggle for symbolic structure I don’t see how. Rota’s use of the terms esoteric and exoteric is novel to me. I wonder why he would reject the human dimension of these terms. That last link is a 404, btw. 30
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 23:08 | # For my friend Daniel A, it would be great to see you and family as and when you visit. You have my email address, and I will look forward to hearing from you. Wasn’t Rosie’s parents’ home in Leicestershire? MR has its association with the county town. Maybe we can meet there. Keep well, and best regards to all. 31
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 23:08 | # DanielS, lots to say in reply. Probably not til tomorrow morning though. 32
Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 12 Aug 2016 03:46 | # All numbers can do is quantify something. They are utterly sterile and possess only what value sentient beings project onto them. Does Bowery honestly believe otherwise? If so, I await his mathematical proof of why GW should move from his country estate to an oil platform at sea; or better yet, a moon colony. Lulz 33
Posted by Self Assertion vs Self Transcendence on Fri, 12 Aug 2016 07:56 | # Adding the following remarks to my comment #28 above Self assertion of subjective interests on the part of White men does correspond with a medicine that I have long seen the need to prescribe to Europeans against their penchant for self transcendence. Thus, I agree with the general bias. *As regards nationalism, one can detect a dubious faith in “the magic hand” - i.e., of national boundaries/borders as hoped for upshot from this naturalist subjectivism. 34
Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 12 Aug 2016 19:21 | # Not to be critical but obscure papers on set theory seem of dubious relevancy to the collective political suicide of European people. Just saying.
I am really very busy with that thing we call real life. But I am very chilled out in general. James can look after himself & I thought some of my opinion at the time was useful in two ways. (1) pointing out some of the ideological errors informing various people & their take on things (we should all be humble enough to admit we all have our blind-spots) & (2) if I could mock/rip the piss out of a set of ideas how much more could someone that was genuinely hostile do? In science ideally concepts, ideas, arguments etc need to be stress-tested ditto in matters philosophical & political. Bad ideas are no-one’s friend. My politics is a mix of Darwin, Aristotle, Heidegger & Schmitt to name the main influences. Throw in some Marx, Bhaskar & Scruton into the mix. I think the burden of proof is not on emergent properties not those that think the ontological structure of the world is stratified & differentiated. Liberalism is literally absurd if taken seriously as a ‘model’ of the world in which all humans live. I think folks should feel they can contribute to MR without risking the full scorn & mockery of the worst part of my rather complex personally. Everyone should attempt to raise the discourse. Civility is an important virtue & being able to disagree without being disagreeable is vital to political discussion. Having said that I don’t suffer fools gladly as it seems a waste of time to enter into some version of American Republican/individualistic ideology time after time with side orders of “cray cray” on the side. So let’s try to find points of agreement & work out from those? Seems a sensible approach to me. 35
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 02:15 | # GW, I introduced Etter’s unfinished ultimate paper “Membership and Identity” primarily because it completes the set of Etter’s papers that I had previously posted at MR. I don’t expect any sort of immediate return from this. Nor will I repeat my comments, made here years ago, on the relevance of section 4 of “Three Place Identity” to ontology: the philosophy of “what exists”. I will add this, however: If the notion of identity is to have meaning formalized in law, it would be good to formalize it in arithmetic—although I would insist on the arithmetic of relations, which Russell laments has been ignored despite its importance in “the emperical world”. In particular, identity, as it pertains to population genetics of the kind I alluded to in my first response here, itself, refers the genetic correlation structures described in my first post at MR lo these many years ago. 36
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 10:29 | # Daniel,
I am gratified that you should make an effort to do so. Those four essays, particularly the onto-theo-logical one, are not the easiest read.
The latter. As I noted at the beginning of Human part 3, the relatedness of ideas of this kind has a particular strength and orientation. There is a threshold to surmount in terms of familiarity, prior to which all manner of seemingly logical but wrong associations will inevitably characterise one’s reading.
It’s not dismissiveness. It’s focus, which is elsewhere. The place within an identitarian philosophy for specialisms such as yours has yet to be found, and the time for finding it (which is close to the time for political activism) is manifestly not yet. For example, your emphasis on the social as some enclosing or maybe founding concept, and therefore on communication as the analytic gold standard within the system, and on the postmodern turn as a relevant tool, belong to another kind of thinking entirely. There will be parallels with the identitarian system, but they will have their particular relatedness, and they will almost certainly be different as such. But arriving at a relational structure can’t be forced. It has to be found - it is a found thing. What I would say at this point is if you can transfer or somehow correlate the thinking you have about the social and about communication to, respectively, the co-ethnic and fellow-feeling, even love, that might generate a profitable line of enquiry, and bring your conception closer to the identitarian framework. There are other possible bases for correlation, but the co-ethnic one is the most obvious and perhaps simplest to work with.
Honestly, Daniel, I have no idea where you get this. I have never associated you with anything remotely Jewish or alien in outlook. This division of left and right which you advance, almost moral but for its ideological character, does not mean a great deal in the historical British context, which is the political reality I inherit. Who, exactly, are these nefarious right-wingers. Are they, in British political terms, the typically middle-class conservatives of the shires? Or the instinctual working-class social conservatives of the old industrial landscape? They are brothers, by the way – that is the important point. They have fought and died for one another. They are one. We do not have to see them through the divisive socio-economic prism, or through the prism of individualism/collectivism. We see them as kind, and as such they are the beneficiaries of our love.
Please try not to react against some perceived intellectual slight. None is intended. Please consider the possibility that what I am saying about the unfamiliar particularity and exclusivity of the existentialist outlook is actually right.
There is nothing subjective or exclusively individualist in those paragraphs. What I have termed the ontological transit is not at all restricted in application to the individual, which fact should be perfectly obvious. It is fundamental truth of the human consciousness and/of identity. Whilst I am about it, my only very tentative advocacy of the term “being of” conjoins the individual and the group, which is why I quite like it. It is not key, and I am not pursuing it because there are some problems with ordering it within an identitarian ontology (which might be resolvable but I don’t think the gain would be significant – actually, I don’t much like Heidegger’s notion of different ways of being).
No, the transit describes the line of evolution and involution of human consciousness. The question, politically, of how one moves a population to the turning point (which is all that is required for a common, energising renewal) is not answered by self-interest in the individualist sense. “Self-conscious” would be a better term, though still inadequate as it leaves aside the whole question of authenticity; and the application would be collective as well as individual. However, your sentence would then read: “By encouraging [our] people to be more self-conscious they will get more into the natural, native form of their interests and be more immune to alien, liberal thinking.” That’s still not really accurate, but it would suffice as a thumbnail sketch by a casual reader.
It don’t doubt that, as well as properly divining the difference between that which belongs to us and that which does not, many cognitive psychologists also explore the inter-connection with the conscious/mechanistic, or attentive/inattentive, or detached/immersed operation of mind. After a fashion, philosophers also do so, of course (Foucault, Badiou).
And it sounds so obvious, even simplistic. But the simplicity hides a thorough-going and deeply radical revolution in the minds of the people, a totalistic shift which consigns all the old enslavements and humiliations to the waste bin and ventures upon a new-founded life which, because it is not prescribed, actually belongs … it is a “being of”.
The personality is an impoverishment which we absolutely take, through the mechanistic quality of ordinary waking consciousness, for the self. We do this because ordinary waking consciousness carries some of the passivity and suggestibility of the sleep state. Now, the boundaries between this entity and what is properly of us (ie, natural in and to us) are not strongly drawn, because nature intrudes into personality formation quite as much as the influences from the world external to the organism. But in the absence of a willed (ie, attentive) consciousness the three great domains of the perception run on, overwhelmingly on the basis of habituated patterns. These are the human personality. We can never be conscious for long, so we cannot live except in personality, for the most part. The question, then, is: how close to the conscious can we really get; what can we take from that closeness, and for how long can we dig it into the foundations of our collective existence before the whole process starts to involve and negatives re-enter, as they always will – it is a constant of the human condition. Obviously, I have jumped miles ahead with this last thought. But you will pick up the drift.
You must allow for the proverbial excuse of “work in progress”. Further, you are again taking academic concepts from outside … from another system … and that does violence to the integrity of, in particular, the transit. Those concepts would undergo quite definite internal change to equit them to a truly identitarian philosophy, so that they might emerge from its foundations as concomitant truth. There must be a relational unity to this, and it comes from within. You can’t just import things or bolt them on for some supposed gain. Everything can be developed, but we are not even close to where you would have us today.
So this is a wrong reading.
There is nothing wrong with fairness as such - even with equality, up to a point. But such notions are attractive to the prescriptive mind interested in social criticism. Fairness is not beautiful if it is not an emergent quality of the folk, and it may not be so. Actually, it may only be a disguise for the very individualism and sectionalism (nascent elitism) which you disparage. In evolutionary terms, it may only be a mode of mate competition, and have no legitimacy at all as a concern for the genetic commonweal. In the African racial context, we might easily conclude that. How can we know for sure in our own? How? Well, as an emergent property, the desire for fairness exercises the compassion and charity. It is being before the suffering of others. When you see that, and know it to be free of the contamination of egoism, then you are in the presence of consciousness and something constructive in the life of the people.
It does happen.
The context in which mind exists is Time and Place, the source of all those influences which situate and form personality. Little laborious “circling back” and probably no dictatorial prescription from politically motivated intellectuals is required for peoples to know in which direction their freedom and survival lies. Even so, the role of intellectuals and politicals is another issue that is far ahead of where this little exercise in existential thinking stands today. You are much given to hurrying to the battle front – perhaps as I am much given to tarrying over the design of the armaments and the training of the men. It is, however, the same struggle. 37
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 13:49 | # The most basic social unit is not the individual but the relation. Nothing social happens until there is a relationship (be it political, ideological or economic) between at least two types of agent. The totality of these relational interactions shapes the individual. 38
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 15:58 | # James, Here is a definition for my own ethnic group, which I take to be capable of rendering in statute: Subject to gene flow arising naturally from neighbouring territories, the English are that people wholly related to those non-Jews and non-immigrants present in England on 22nd June 1948, before the MV Empire Windrush arrived in British territorial waters. It addresses the questions of gene flow, immigration, Jewry, and political treachery in respect to the identity of the English. It backdates by one generation the issue of who is immigrated and not, therefore, ethnically English. Does it lack sufficient precision? Is it possible to arrive at a more accurate or more politically viable definition by the mathematics of relation? 39
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 15:59 | # Graham,
But which model of the individual, and which part of which model of the individual? By the way, Graham, thank you for your emolient words. 40
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:19 | # GW, your answer # 38 is long and so I will have to answer in pieces for that reason alone but for the most part you really don’t respond to what I am saying as far as I am concerned but rather to forms of straw-men. So it’s going to take a few installments to answer and will be a bit laborious - it is a bit frustrating because it means that you have either not read things that I said before or haven’t (tried?) to understand them. OK. let me see how much I can get through to begin with:
But they are worthwhile, and you are welcome.
OK.
No. I have not catalogued the many instances in which you were practically immediately dismissive of things that I’ve said. As I have said, I have not catalogued the instances because I don’t want this to be as if I am building a case against you. I can give you more examples if need be, but I will start with just a few examples: 1) I start a thread in the Forum saying that there are useful things to be culled from Epicureanism (and there is); first thing you do is respond that “there is nothing useful in Epicureanism.” 2) I re-post the Leftism as a code word essay together with the Kant (as accountability etc) piece in order to re-focus attention on it because it had been up only about 4 hours the first time before Richards tried to bury it with a subsequent, garish post. You posted the first comment, without reading it, saying that there was no utility in the Left/Right distinction and another short remark (I will dig up the comment and add it here later) indicating that you could not possibly have even read the essay.
Nonsense, utter nonsense! This is ridiculous.
It is metapolitics and it is the theoretical means for organizing ideas. The time is now and the time is always.
I don’t know what planet you think that you are on, but on this one we must communicate, we are inextricably enmeshed in communication - it is not a “founding concept” it is a perspective.
I am not forcing anything. People have been calling these people English for centuries. I take that as a working hypothesis and move back and forth between its closer verifications and broader historic, systemic comprehension.
If you want to talk about feelings and attribute love as a part of closer readings and/ or qualitative readings that’s fine with me - there are times when I will do that as a part of a closer reading, but it is not mutually exclusive to hypothesizing borders and boundaries delimiting the system (as opposed to some invisible hand, love or feelings which are supposed to magically keep them in place or reconstruct them).
I am generating profitable lines of inquiry and I am frankly insulted that you would suggest that what I am doing is not, and that this psychological stuff you propose is supposed to be more useful - it isn’t. But I must be forgiving for the sense that you haven not read what I’ve written (or not read it with the least capacity to believe that what I am saying is valid and true).
It is a f-ng co-ethnic framework that I am working with. What the F do you think that I have been doing? 41
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:30 | #
I still think this is true in the sense that you are use to reacting to things coming with university language as if they are necessarily antagonistic. Your automatic dismissiveness can only be explained by some extreme prejudice against certain ways of talking.
Yes it does. It means something across the board, which is very important, not only for nations but for geo-politics.
As I have said, you haven’t read my pieces. So I will give you examples later, but since I am having to repeat myself, I will take my time so as to keep my composure.
Not necessarily.
Maybe, but in either case, there is clear way to discern the matter.
Yes, and that is why I would tend to see them both as part of the union, unless they, as individuals amongst either, saw themselves above and not accountable - i.e., unless they were effective liberals.
I totally agree and have all along - so does my concept of The White Left.
Mine is a White Left concept, it does not divide them and rather seeks their uniting cause.
Well, absolutely. “Love” is a bit speculative, but hermeneutics can accommodate these things that dry, empiricism cannot - hale! hale ! the White Left! 42
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:38 | #
You can try to deny it, but you are prescribing a clearly Randian “objectivist” / subjectivist position in those final paragraphs (as opposed to a picture of the group) ... there are not clear and perfect bounds between objective, subjective, and relative, and yes, there are objective applications that you can ascribe across various consciousnesses, but you yourself emphasize the individual personality as the important moment of authentication. You emphasize that angle to the exclusion of any view, working hypothesis, on the folk as a system. That’s a mistake. You are doing with group boundaries and borders what libertarians are doing with economic regulation - leaving it to a “magic hand” to take care of it.
Yes, that is effectively what you said in the final few paragraphs, that the subjective/objective basis would keep people grounded in authentic motive against affectively prescribed language games. ..I understand that it connects to the objective pattern as well and that is what you mean.
It doesn’t sound simplistic to me in any bad way - it is an excellent idea.
There is relational unity and there must always be a breathing in and out between the general and the particular - the general is not pulled from out of nowhere, though you are ascribing that to me.
No, it is not a wrong reading. You ignored the most important thing of what I said: The quality of consciousness of a racial patriot is of left nationalism, it is conscious of borders and accountability, especially of elites, but of the well being and potential transgressions of rank and file as well. that quality of consciousness would also allow for forays into interpretive critical thinking on the group.- 43
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 17:15 | #
Obviously.
I do not fucking disparage elites! That goes to show that you are not concerned to pay attention to what I am saying. I am saying that elites are in a particular position to be destructive and therefore it is especially important for them to be accountable - I have said repeatedly that I do not begrudge wealth and achievement. I have said these things many times and I have NEVER disparaged people for elite ability. This confirms, as everything in this comment does, that you have not only not bothered to understand what I am saying in detail but not even generally - at best you propose to yourself straw men of what I am saying as convenient foils for your imaginings - as I suspected.
No, it doesn’t. We are back to the hypothetical child that is left from day zero to age 30 on an island by itself. It will turn out psychologically stultified and deformed.
There we are, I had the nerve to avail myself to some intellectual equipment - I am getting a got up version of “you’re a ‘psuedo-intecllectual”... As I’ve said, it is a residual puerile contentiousness to your autobiography.
I didn’t say there had to be much and this is the corollary to the got up “you are a pseudo intellectual” line - i.e., “That’s all bullshit, what we need is common sense!”
No, these matters are too important for intellectual insecurity and obscurantism.
Well, excuse me but this is an emergency, not everything is such a mystery and there are useful and important topoi to be worked with.
Indeed it is and I keep telling you that our perspectives and what we are attending to are not mutually exclusive. Somehow you don’t want to see that, but it’s plain as day.
44
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 13 Aug 2016 17:53 | # GW asks “Is it possible to arrive at a more accurate or more politically viable definition by the mathematics of relation?” So I conjecture. In my original post here at MR, I proposed to start, not at the level of the gene, but the only true “individual”: the nucleotide. This provides the reductio ad absurdum to Lewontin’s fallacy* and its risible extension to the anti-ontology of “race as a social construct”. One is immediately forced to the mathematics of correlation structure—from which all other genetic notions of identity find their place in relative proportion (ie: as ratios of quantities placing them firmly in the realm of the “rational”). I also conjecture that the “vehicle”, colloquially known as the “individual”, is, by this same relational calculus, put into rational perspective—particularly as the importance of vertical transmission to correlation structure becomes better understood as minimizing optimal virulence and maximizing each organism’s gene expression in ecological relation to others. *Imagine the absurdity of a Harvard Professor standing authoritatively before a class of admiring affirmative-admission coeds who are aspiring to be the elite courtesans who will bear unto the world the next Obama, and attempting to convince them of the relevance—or even veracity —of a statement like, “There is more nucleotide variation within than between racial groups.” 45
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 08:34 | # GW - I guess the question is broken down for me into these interrelated issues. Human beings as ineluctably social beings. No individual invented language but we all - in our normal bio-cultural & social context - inherited language. 1) Human beings will act in what they dimly grasp to be their own self-interest but our goals can be manipulated and our desires disordered. Structure is required for most of us to foster a healthy & sustainable space for genuine human flourishing. 2) Given the very basic insights of evolutionary game theory any social formation (from multicellularity upwards) is vulnerable to ‘selfish cheating’ from within which will undermine the benefits of ‘altruistically’ defined traits or phenotypes. Thus in order to prevent the rise of ‘cheating’ (free-riding) there must be a range of punishments directed towards cheaters which reduces the benefits of such ‘cheating’ and raises the costs of ‘cheating’ i.e. ‘punishment’ mechanisms. I think Daniel is perfectly right about intra-group accountability being a vital set of feedback loops necessary for the health of any collective group. What for example is liberal virtue signalling all about? An environment in which such behaviour is rewarding & with few immediate costs to the virtue signalling idiots. The liberal virtue signalling person gets a psychological benefit of thinking themselves better than less enlightend folks (self-righteousness feels so nice), have the benefits of social desirability biases (constructed on the virtue signalling idiot behalf by other people that perhaps do not have the ordinary liberals true, long-term, interests at heart) and any costs of the virtue signalling position passed on to others - at least in the short term. Thus virtue signalling of a liberal kind is our modern day form of puritan public virtue. Cost free & ‘moral virtue’ on the cheap. Is it any wonder why liberals, like puritans are such unoriginal & shallow dogmatists? Yes of course mass migration has terrible immediate consequences (but for other people - awful white working class people etc) but those virtue signalling liberals do not pay the costs of such negative externalities. Over the longer-term however they are busy destroying themselves but the incentive structure around their political postures do not reflect those costs. One example - do homosexuals really think 3rd worlders will get on board the gay pride bus? However people often are delusional and/or able to rationalise away the most absurd incoherency of their ‘thoughts’. As lies and liars are parasitic manipulations upon the truth and the honest thus liberal ideology is parasitic upon the genuine forces that sustain community over generations. Liberalism eventually results in a short-term form of individually rational behaviour/attitudes but at the long-term expense of collective well-being. Liberalism eventually becomes collectively irrational. So the debate isn’t really about individualism versus collectivism as such but about healthy forms of both as opposed to pathological variations. So really we must in a very cold & sober way ask what qualities would we want a social system to have/to emphasise, what trade-offs are required & what incentive structure is necessary? What feedback mechanism are needed to keep the system on track etc. And how is that all to be packed into an ideological package that’s attractive for Mr & Mrs Average? It’s essentially a problem of combinatorial optimisation. Here I think Aristotelian ideas about the common good & balance, between parts & the whole, are vital. And of course not to be a virtue signalling idiot does have negative costs - I for one came out as a Brexit voter and lost work-based ‘friends’ over the issue. One can only imagine the negative consequences of being openly honest about most of my political views! BTW that’s a great incentive to be economically autonomous (at least at a first-order level) from the state by being a business owner or self-employed etc. 2) Given that we live in mass society (way beyond any Dunbar number) mere personal intra-group accountability is not a viable option. It’s about systems. Inevitability of hierarchy & modularity & consequently power asymmetries brings us to Schmitt. There is no mass social world or political regime sans power & power relationships (both external to it & external from it), along with the very human temptation for those with power to abuse that position at the expense of others (again internally and/or externally). We all need to be realists about power. Some Heideggerian epiphany will not produce self-substaining moral virtue on behalf of any elite in any society. Instead, we need to think about the issues of moral economy & incentive structures/feedback mechanisms/forms of punishment for any putative elite. Again Daniel’s focus on the accountability of decision makers for their decisions is correct. The good or bad person theory of history is asinine. Political elites are a feature of life but politicians are and always will be a necessary evil - even post-liberal politicians. Anyway I have droned on for too long and not for any great purpose. I guess on the emergent properties issue it partly boils down to the asymmetrical relationship between composition & decomposition. One can dissect an individual body into all of its parts. But all of parts once decomposted are not a person. However, persons are composed of their parts. Ditto social & individuals. The totality of compositional relationships allows for persons & societies to emerge. But going the other direction leads to a bucket of slop to be thrown away after a hard day at the metaphorical dissection table. Autocorrect on my phone…grrr… power relationships internal & external etc. 46
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 09:46 | # Graham, On power and accountability, the deeper question is: how can political expression be free if the man making it is not free in himself, and freely his self? Like Daniel, in this respect you are thinking calculatively about the surface effects of a human condition produced from complex historical, philosophical, political, social, and economic circumstances, and not about the human life itself. 47
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 10:32 | # Bravo, Lister! That’s one of the best comments I’ve ever seen here. You are right, the only thing the bovine masses understand is punishment and reward - the bullwhip and the sugar cube, apply as needed. A bit too close for comfort to Nietzsche isn’t it! But that is the essential point you made, like it or not. Likewise, GW’s call for a deeply experienced consciousness rooted in a philosophic outlook is essentially Nietzschean in that only a select, elite few in terms of mental quality could ever be expected to achieve it. Optimally, these elites would constitute societies whip hand. 48
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 11:07 | # CC,
Elite few = nationalists, basically. Any and all of them in an age when an identitarian ethnic nationalism is the leading idea, and the philosophical foundation I am endeavouring to discuss has been expanded into a total politics. I would expect a revolutionary caucus to actively know how that works, and the mass of the people to find it natural and freeing to live by it.
A whip hand would only be required during the phase of national restoration and demarxification.
49
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 11:27 | # GW - I am not sure what you mean by free in this context. People are free to commit suicide. It’s not a good choice in 99% of cases. Allow people - individually or as part of a particular social strata/class/interest group etc., - to behave badly (with a combination of low costs and/or high rewards) for such ‘bad’ behaviour and hey presto we have an incentive structure for anti-social traits or free-riding parasitism. Such parasitism is far more socially damaging when elites are allowed to get away with such behaviour as their relative power in any society leverages that parasitism into a potentially deadly toxin for the social body. Genotypes are important, but so is the environment in determining what phenotypes are ultimately expressed (at least for most continuously variable traits). Discontinuous variation tends towards a simple one to one relationship between genotype & phenotype (think human blood groups etc). The social - at least in humans - is a complex multidimensional array of emergent relational properties shaped by the historicity of individual agents & collective entities in a push-pull ‘ecological’ system. Yes men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. I am less concerned with what (or what is not) in people’s hearts than I am concerned with their behavioural & attitudinal choices & the collective consequences of those stances. I think politics is in the business of shaping the latter primarily; but, of course, going with the grain/realities (good & bad) of human nature whilst attempting to intelligently change the incentive structures involved (which includes moral paradigms). Nearly everyone wants to think of themselves as a good & decent person (no matter how shabby the reality might be). Man can only bear so much reality etc. Naturally emotions do inform everyone’s outlook on life & our ideological framing of these issue - including those ideas of what is ‘psychologically permissible’ to believe - can both illuminate & distort our relationship to the real. No-one’s ‘spectacles’ are free from grim. We all individually & collectively have our blind spots. Which is why robust feedback mechanisms on how decisions are taken promotes necessary correctives & allows for the full costs of decisions to be accounted for. To be sustainable any social order must punish those that would - if unrestricted - dump negative externalities (social, cultural, economic etc) onto others within the system. Big L liberalism is precisely the politics of such indifference to negative externalities (it’s my body I’ll do literally anything I like with it etc.). Now obviously everyone wants, very reasonably, individual autonomy but it is a relative concept that must pay homage to the first person plural of the ‘we’ - our collective life & the moral responsibilities to that collective life (the concepts of an intra & inter-generational ‘moral economy’ that transcends any individual). I think this is the territory of an ethnically informed communitarianism is really very powerfully strong. Both empirically & theoretically the maximally homogeneous society (again a relative concept) is best placed to maintain a healthy sense of the first person plural (the we) & the obligations required to maintain it. In this sense homogeneity is a first-order public good that facilitates high levels of social trust & social capital (at least in most European & some Asian societies). ‘Boring’ Denmark is just an objectively better place to live for Mr & Mrs Average than the ‘diverse’ Brazil. As someone put it in the Brexit debates which side your are on is really how you view the nation state - is it a home with priority given to those that are part of the family or a hotel which is open to all in which the notion of prior commitments is forbidden (all comers are welcomed!). Really the liberal mindset embraces a radical ahistorical form of total fungibility. Men can become women (as an act of individual ‘freedom’ or liberal volitional will) equally the UK can become, demographically, an outpost of sub-saharan Africa yet mysteriously still be the same historical entity that native Brits have always resided in. But reality constrains such notions of radical fungibility and freedom. Fungibility and freedom are good within certain contexts & quite disastrous notions in other contexts. Which I suppose brings us back to what you mean by freedom? I think no-one should suggest all human interactions should or could be micromanaged by the state or by explicit ideological rules, but human action does take place within a context of structures of incentives. It’s a bit like dealing with children. Give them good structures/incentives & clear rules then trust them to eventually grow into making reasonable behavioural choices via their own trial & error learning. That’s the issue with liberalism - a small dose is very healthy within an appropriate context - but given free reign it has all the depth (emotionally & politically) of the toddler throwing tantrums. Look on the issue of emergent properties, consciousness etc., whatever philosophical position one takes on the ontology of the world (basically reductionism versus emergentism) there is a set of unanswerable questions connected to both views. I think one has to accept which set of unknowables one can live with and what one thinks seems best to capture the realities we see. For example, for the committed reductionist consciousness is ultimately a mystery that cannot be allowed to stand (a collection of atoms is self-aware & has agency that simply cannot be right!). Hence must be argued away with a ‘deflationary’ ontology, but for the emergentist they take consciousness as being one part of the real world and must offer an ‘inflationary’ ontology. Something like Bhaskar’s early ideas of ontological differentiation & stratification (of mechanisms, powers etc.). Of course the emergentist has the mysterious idea that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts - which they can probable never fully account for (and certainly not to the satisfaction of the ontological reductionist). Are human beings determined or free? What do we mean by such terms? I really think such questions are beyond anyone’s ability to wholly answer. I don’t think that non-liberal politics really needs to answer them in order to have validity or important & truthful things to say. 50
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 11:44 | # Oh calling me a Nietzschean - now that really is a kick to the bollocks! 51
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 12:13 | # Graham,
I would argue that that isn’t evidence of free will but of a total enslavement to something.
Many problems with this statement. Think it through. What control mechanism is doing the “allowing”? From whence in the human psyche does “bad behaviour” arise? What is “bad”? How did the human psyche arrive at the point where it would choose the bad? What, as a thinking person, can one do about all this?
Shared distinctive genes, giving rise to shared distinctive phenotypic traits, are the group differentialisation mechanism among humankind, and the destruction of these genes by political cunning is a gene-killing (recognised by Raphael Lemkin, who was the driving force behind the 1948 Convention). Preserving the life of peoples IS preserving shared distinctive genes (always subject, of course, to the four classical modes of genetic variation).
For some time now I have been attracted (in an osmotic sense ... a sensing of a few stray atoms of truth) to the idea that “the individual” and “the social” are both problematic terms. By way of example, as a sexually normal male I have a definite and quite particular sense of female beauty which, very occasionally in life, I encounter (as do we all - there is no man or woman who will not understand this statement at some level). Somewhere in this my individuality finds itself not whole, and is striving to come to an end of itself and to find union and new life, and this driven need, which may be entirely inappropriate to the conditions under which one ordinarily lives, only ends with the death of the organism. There are at least two other driving forces in us of a similar power. One is ethnocentric love, for which men by the million will lay down their lives. Another is the religious desire for union with the deity (which is more complex, but still something tending to self-sacrifice in some form - and this, too, can be physical self-sacrifice). It is plainly inadequate to talk of the social as if it is the source of All. We need a more subtle self-understanding to make a more natural and complete politics. 52
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 16:31 | # The mechanism ‘allowing’ for ‘bad behaviour’ is Darwinian natural selection - intra-specific competition. A wish to gather more resources at the cost of other organisms/phenotypes within your own population. ‘Selfishness’ or self-interest is the driving the force or motivation. The framework that facilitates pathological forms of such behaviour is an inappropriate or dysfunctional incentive structure that doesn’t punish those given to generating negative externalities in their own short-term benefit at the expense of the longer-term health of the whole. Add in a lack of negative feedback loops between the distinctive parts of the social whole & there is a recipe for ultimate disaster. Given all human societies are shaped by resource distribution & power relationships those that stand to gain the most from manipulation of those power relations will seek to maximally do so unless constrained by robust ‘punishment/accountability’ mechanisms. Powerful groups tend not to behave well out of the goodness of their hearts - power corrupts & all that. Responsibility for how power has been used is essential to the well-being of any community (which is why the ‘great leader’ theory of politics is idiocy). I am not sure what female beauty has to do with it other than being another resource which shapes competition for resources. Beautiful women, on average, don’t date destitute tramps. 53
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 14 Aug 2016 17:33 | # Obviously, the role of self-interest in mate competition is accepted. But is mate competition really such a universal explanation, or is it particular and reductionist? What is the explanation in self-interest for aesthetic expression and for mysticism, for example? 54
Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 15 Aug 2016 10:27 | # Well female hypergamy & sexual selection are pretty powerful forces. What’s more powerful in human life than the urge to pass on one’s genes & in turn, via inclusive-fitness theory, that of one’s closely related kin? Female hypergamy has its own rationality (seeking ‘high status’ males). Hate the game but not the players. Now of course given the plasticity of cultural norms what a ‘high status’ male has always been somewhat malleable (it’s quite a context-dependent phenomenon in some regards). Hence the overvaluation presently of sub-Saharan Africans - males in particular - in our popular culture. The darker one’s skin tone the more ‘worthy’ one is in the liberal world-view. It’s a reworking of idea of original sin - the original sin of whites is not to be blacks in this case. Ergo we must genuflect before blacks (and any ‘others’) within liberal semiotics. Why? Well they along with ‘the tribe’ are the ‘universal’ victims of history - the only worthy victims (white slavery etc., simply doesn’t exist within the liberal fantasy) along with the continuing hauntology of a certain German regime. The thought is well look at how disastrous any types of politics of a non-universal & particularistic “we” becomes. As I have written before that regime is radioactively toxic. Naturally with human beings there are the ‘true believers’ of any ideology & those that acquiesce through self-interest &/or hypocrisy (consciously or unconsciously). The old ‘anything for a quiet life’ & what the liberal thinks is ‘cost-free’ virtue signalling; seeking what dim liberals think is a ‘high status’ or socially desirable position of being ‘open-minded’ & ‘anti-racist’ etc. Moral vanity is a vice that will always be part of the human condition. I’ll tell a little incident that happened to me recently. I became an acquaintance of a vaguely SJW, bleeding-heart liberal, millennial type that is superficially ‘well-educated’ (she’s a female medical doctor). It’s a long & dull story but I was, very reluctantly, roped into giving this person a lift from one part of the country to another. Given she is a total dullard with nothing remotely interesting to say on any topic I had decided to be a little mischievous. I suggested I could play some comedy MP3s in the car to pass the time (her idea of comedy is the likes of Eddie Izzard et al.). She agreed. Ok, so on came the infamous ‘Derek & Clive’ (she had literally no idea whom Peter Cook & Dudley Moore were). Anyway if people know the act then highly politically incorrect skits like ‘Bo Duddley’, ‘Soul Time’, ‘Endangered Species’, ‘TV’ etc., were to be listened to. For those that don’t know them look them up on YouTube. Cook is brilliant in them with the liberal – pardon the pun – use of the dreaded N-word, jokes about slaughtering Jews etc. I had arranged the playlist to start with the least offensive skits building up to the most politically incorrect. Now shockingly I don’t tend to willingly spend my time in the company of SJWs style liberals so I looked on my trolling exercise as a kind of ‘natural experiment’. This individual was in no way of any significant importance to me. So why not? What reactions would I observe? Quite amazingly one of increasing physical discomfort & increasing anxiety in my test subject. She showed all the physical signs of a very stressful fight or flight response. But despite the very obvious discomfort manifesting in her she didn’t say anything. OK so we stop in a service station for a break & she asks something along the lines of “Why do you find that act funny? I know you’re not a racist but most people would find them highly offensive”. I responded along the lines of how well-crafted the skits are, Cook’s obvious brilliance in improvisation etc., & finished with some comment like “I thought you are open-minded?” So back on with the journey & part two of the experiment. I said something like “I’m glad you don’t think I’m a racist – I love black music.” I put on some Miles Davis & John Coltrane. She became far more relaxed. Then I indicated that I ‘love’ gangster rap. On comes some NWA - “Fuck the Police”. Then I put the music off & said something like “Nigga’s With Attitude were fantastic back in the day”. And she was physically almost in panic mode at my daring to use the term. I just said “it’s only a word, it’s what the band are called nigga, nigga, nigga, niggas with attitude – just grow up will you.” To say she was unhappy/incredibly stressed out would be an understatement. What I found completely astonishing was the sheer visceral reaction & physical stress/anxiety observed in my test subject. I mean quite unbelievably so to me if I hadn’t seen it at first hand. I can’t fully account for it other than some psycho-physical response to the notion of a potential catastrophic loss of ‘social status’ to be ‘caught’ in the proximity to some form of socially disapproved ‘moral evil’. The power these ‘magic words’ have over some people is bewildering. Taboos are seemingly extraordinarily powerful. Anti-racism/SJW liberalism - it’s like Voodoo or some cargo-cult religion. Call me cruel but I found the whole thing funny as fuck. Highly amusing. I am guffawing now as I type this. I found the Brexit debate to be quite illuminating in this regard. The shear emotional response & general irrationality of the ‘true believers’ on the Remain side after the result was something I didn’t expect. Crying in the streets of London, suggestions that ‘fascism’ had won. Notions that staying in the EU represented moral virtue & leaving it some form of moral evil. Again a truly insane way of viewing the issue in its own terms. Idiots like the ‘journalist’ Paul Mason – a half-wit Trotskyite with a Guardian column seemed to react to the Brexit vote with a mix of apoplexy & discombobulation – as if the apocalypse had just been announced. More over the most important issue for the ‘left’ in Mason’s view was to fight for open-borders. Wait a minute. There is a perfectly valid left-wing Brexit case. Around sovereignty & democratic accountability & the unequal distribution of the costs & benefits of EU membership. The people that get the least benefits & suffer the highest costs of unlimited mass-migration are the indigenous working class. They disproportionately lose both economically & culturally. It’s the inner cities of our towns & cities that traditionally were working class neighbourhoods which are becoming like foreign zones of occupation. In the city which I live nearest to one inner-city library/community centre had leaflets in some twenty languages explaining the services on offer. I think apart from the staff I was the only native to be in the place! Back to Mason – has he never read about the Marxian notion of a ‘reserve army of labour’ – how the fuck is an effectively infinite supply of cheap labour to be brought into the UK ‘progressive’ or in the interests of people already towards the bottom of the socio-economic distribution? Mass-migration simply makes their lives more difficult & less secure. But Mason is just another unprincipled virtue signalling fraud oblivious to reason, facts, evidence or rational discourse. Anyway that brings me full circle GW. Of course any complex phenomenon is at risk of being simplified by an over hasty, on the cheap reductionism. I agree with Roger Scruton about the vulgarity of ‘nothing but’ reductionism. The human condition is extraordinarily rich & nuanced, full of subtly & the mysterious nature of being in the world & consciousness etc. But frankly many people – especially our liberal friends – seem to be verging on being philosophical zombies. I am sure they do have inner-lives of some perfunctory, mundane & quotidian sort. I don’t really care what’s in their hearts, as such, or indeed their so-called minds. I am more concerned with changing their behavioural choices & the attitudinal matrix that informs/shapes their world-views. And that leads on to a focus on the incentive structures we create, reward/risk ratios, cost-benefit analysis & ultimately a redefinition of what most people see as the ‘common sense’ doxa of the age. I have been reading Swift recently. He might be more useful in this matter than Heidegger! Human nature might have it’s fixed points but one of them is surely that people’s behaviour changes as the incentive structure (cost versus benefits) changes. 55
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 15 Aug 2016 13:09 | # Graham,
The need to live is felt more powerfully than the need to reproduce, because the latter need can be met at any opportune moment during which the organism is - and, anyway, our life and being is also Nature’s life and being, and is a singular function in itself and the whole point, basically. Now, I wholly agree that the transmission of genetic information for adaption is the imperative of Nature in her struggle to subsist, in the teeth of Time and Entropy. But that tells us plainly that the transmission of genetic information for adaption is consequent upon and, ontologically, subsequent to the mortality of the organism (which, itself, is subsequent to the identity of, or in, the organism - hence, somehow, Heidegger divined and spoke of sorge, without ever having read Darwin, so far as we know). I am asking for subtlety of thought here, and a little flexibility in the evolutionary narrative.
So let us explicate it.
Time and place, Graham. We cannot escape the moment of being in the world even when our conscious condition ... ordinary waking consciousness in my terminology ... mists the glass and takes us away into absence. But, then, we become slaves to Time and Place and no longer masters of our own self. To be so would be to will rather than be willed by those who, for example, establish the incentive structure. 56
Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 15 Aug 2016 18:05 | # Although I did mention “ideas” as part of the ecology subject to transmission, both vertical and horizontal; including cultural evolution in a rational manner requires greater emphasis. It is significant that the political cesspool known as Wikipedia has permitted my edits on the “horizontal transmission” article to persist. Those edits targeted the inclusion of cultural selection as potential agents of virulence in human ecology. I purchased “The History and Geography of Human Genes” when it first came out because I found Cavalli-Sforza’s ground-breaking book to fire the first round in the impending bioinformatics war on Boazian anthropology and its social science spawn now widely regarded as “The Standard Social Science Model” or SSSM. I did not realize, until someone added it to the references in the Wikipedia “horizontal transmission” article, that Cavalli-Sforza had directly addressed horizontal transmission of cultural traits clear back in 1981. (Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and M. Feldman. 1981. Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.) To even mention “horizontal transmission” in the same breath with “cultural evolution” is profoundly subversive to the SSSM but is visibly so only if one is sufficiently literate and perceptive. So there is some nascent awareness in academia but the follow-up on this angle of attack has been notably lacking. I attribute this to a lack of seriousness on the part of nationalists. We certainly can’t expect acolytes of the SSSM to pursue it since they are well versed in the art of what Orwell called “crimestop”—so it is left to nationalists to do it. Beyond that there are the foundational issues in the philosophy of science that remove the human from its sterile equations—foundational issues that, IMHO, result from not only a lack of seriousness in the philosophy of science, but from the profoundly subversive consequences of vitalizing formalism—consequences that are far more subversive than, say, forcing all population genetics to address correlation structures as the primary formalism. This is another reason I was attracted to the work by Etter and his colleagues going back, interestingly, to Cambridge, UK: My work with Tom Etter made me aware of the 4 levels of the number theoretic combinatorial hierarchy’s uncanny correspondence to the 4, dimensionless, scaling constants of the 4 physical forces, as well as constructing a variety of other dimensionless constants, starting with the mass ratio of the proton to the electron (accurate to over 8 decimal places). Such correspondences had, in 1979, motivated the founding, in Cambridge, England, of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association. This then led, in the US, to the founding of ANPA West—for which Tom Etter was the editor of its now-defunct journal. The person who initiated the formation of ANPA West was Pierre Noyes—a respected high energy particle physicist with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. I was aware of the “Noyes” name from my time at the PLATO project at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where the chemistry building was named after Pierre’s father, William Albert Noyes. Noyes and Etter were co-authors on a number of papers, at least one of which was published in the Science Citations Index while I was working with Etter (and, indirectly, with Noyes*). I go into the background to emphasize that Pierre Noyes is no slouch, that there is a connection between the previously-reference vitalization of formalism and that there is a connection to the following paper by Noyes which proposes an a priori connection between the evolution of physical, biological and cultural forms. The Combinatorial Hierarchy: An Approach To Open Evolution by Pierre Noyes Specifically Noyes conjectures that the third level corresponds to biology and the fourth level to what we think of as culture/humanity/sentience/consciousness/qualia and even “morality”. To verify this conjecture is even more of a challenge than to verify my conjecture about formalizing genetic identity by reformulating the foundation of mathematics to include relative identity and relation arithmetic. However, validation of the CH conjecture would be unsurprising to participants in the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association, particularly under the condition that Etter’s reformation of mathematics is validated, if not my own more specific conjecture about genetic identity. *I had a quite recent (last year), professional, encounter with Noyes (although he is fully retired now in his 90s), when an experiment in which I was professionally involved measured a force that is inconsistent with special relativity. No, this is not some group seeking to debunk “Jewish science”. This is a commercial enterprise seeking to replicate and refine results of a highly respected professor in the West—results that have great commercial potential (although I would’t say “profound” commercial potential—no “free energy” “anti-gravity” or anything of the sort as one might expect from “Einstein was wrong!” “crackpots”) . Indeed, it wasn’t even appreciated that this experimental result had such a theoretic implication until after we did reproduce and refine it to the point it is now being taken seriously enough, by key specialists in US government agencies, to pursue further experiments to eliminate post hoc explanations by critics. It was during the analysis of the data that I ran across a book published in the 1980s titled “Heretical Verities” that one of the physicists involved (who has been a key plasma physicist in the US Tokamak program) asked me to get in relation to that analysis. It turns out the foreword to the book was by Pierre Noyes—and Noyes had, as early as the forward to that book—admitted that experimental tests of the Lorentz contraction (as opposed to Lorentz time dilation and Lorentz mass increase) had not been adequately measured to dismiss the force that we measured—and that this would, indeed, “debunk special relativity” and require a major restructuring of physical theory. If anyone should be intimately familiar with the empirical tests of Lorentz contraction, it should be a high energy physicist at SLAC. 57
Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 15 Aug 2016 18:39 | # Speaking of fours the crucial role of the fourfold in Heidegger’s thinking is interesting to note? Graham Harman gives his take on Heidegger’s approach with Harman’s object orientated ontology approach to the the fourfold object. It’s above my pay-grade to say if it’s horseshit or not. 58
Posted by Captainchaos on Mon, 15 Aug 2016 22:33 | # Bowery, I finally manned up and got that oil platform. Next I’m going to convert that bitch into a spaceship. We’ll see if the Jews can fuck with me with their horizontal transmission black magic in outer space. Lulz 59
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 16 Aug 2016 13:34 | # Erratum: The aforelinked article by Noyes on “Open Evolution” does not make the specific case I mentioned for the third level of the hierarchy as associated with biological evolution and the fourth level associated with cultural (sometimes called “memetic”) evolution. My recollection of this specific conjecture may have been from direct conversations with Etter and/or Noyes. The thing that sticks in my mind about it is that the third level is associated with the scaling of electromagnetic interactions (the dimensionless fine structure constant)—which dominates at the approximate scale of the organism: macroscopic but, at the cosmological, scale giving way to the dominance of gravitational interactions. How cosmological scale would be associated with “memes”, human consciousness (as opposed to primary qualia, etc.) I do not recall. I’ll try to find the paper(s) making this argument but thus far I’ve come up dry. . 60
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 16 Aug 2016 14:22 | # A possible point of correspondence, between the vitalization of mathematical physics and Heidegger’s notions of “Being and Time”, is in the last paper Richard Shoup wrote before his death last year titled “Emergence of Space and Time From Ultimately Simple Mathematics”. Although Heidegger’s focus is on the mortal experience as essential to the authentic human life, if we are to vitalize physical notions of physical time emergent from vitalized mathematics, we must admit it is not mere anthropomorphization to attribute Being to, at least, the primordial act of creation. This was, in fact, a discussion that Shoup and I had in the months leading up to his death—a discussion that we never resolved and which did not contribute in any way that I can see to this, to his last paper (although he did credit me at the end of the paper among others who clearly did make contributions to its content). Our disagreement was essentially this: Shoup posits some notion of ordering of discriminations—even in the absence of self-reference. I posit that if we are to vitalize the primordial, the only sensible interpretation of a primordial discrimination is between self and not-self—between Being (subject) and not-Being (object or “a being”). This discrimination entails self-reference—hence “time”. Not only that, but not-Being, as the primordial object is identical with the primordial notion of “existence”. In this respect, Rota’s “exoteric slogan” may be seen as consistent with my position—declaring the identity of Being as preceding the identity of not-Being which, in turn, by virtue of its self-reference, coincides with existence/time. Those more familiar with Heidegger may correct my terminology. 61
Posted by Graham_Lister on Tue, 16 Aug 2016 15:49 | # We are each of us employed in the creation of an illusion: that society is only an emergent by-product of our self-interested interactions. In reducing us to individualism, liberalism engages all the resources of society, forcing each of us to work to undermine ourselves. You, who are by nature part of something bigger than yourself, are reduced by liberalism to a loathsome creature: a ‘sovereign individual’. Liberalism co-opts society, which is inherently greater than the individual, and uses all of its power to make the individual feel isolated. 62
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 16 Aug 2016 17:01 | # I’m not sure if that is a response to my attempt to bring Heidegger into contact with vitalized mathematics thence primordial Being and Time, but to the extent that it is, the primordial “individual” is only “sovereign” in that Creation is “division” between “self” and “not-self”: Being in relation to Creation—Creation as both verb and noun. This Creator is the only true “sovereign individual”—but “sovereignty” expresses only in action and, as primordial, only in the act of Creation which is division—abdication of sovereignty to existence. Heidegger’s mortal Being may, in this context, have its primordial roots in self-sacrifice for Creation. However, long before we get to the point of self-sacrifice for “society” co-opted by liberalism, there is a society of “things” that exist relative to one another but not relative to themselves. This kind of egolessness is the essence of primordial Being and is the only truly sovereign state. What then of the human being? He exists relative to himself only to the extent that he has sacrificed his sovereignty. My point of departure from those who object to “individualism” qua “individualism” is not in the recognition of the essentially relational (social) nature of existence and the concomitant essentially paradoxical (self-sacrificial) nature of sovereignty, but, rather, in the “purpose” of human beings. The idea that our primary purpose is to relate to other human beings rather than to all of prior Creation—including other human beings within that Creation—is to, I think, get the cart before the horse. Only when one is sufficiently grounded in prior Creation can one meet others humans at the level of “human society” without losing perspective hence losing one’s “sovereignty” by becoming a self-aware ego with the concomitant loss of Being. 63
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 18 Aug 2016 14:57 | # James,
1. For discrimination to occur there must be a beneficiary in the form of an organism, ie, an organism with a Heideggerian care for being (or Salterian interest in continuing to be). A universe in which discrimination for being does not (yet) exist would, at best, be a universe in which Life as such is initiated over and over again, only to be extinguished in the instant by the mechanical forces which are at work. All through aeons of failure this would obtain, until there arose, also mechanically, a particular circumstance in which a possibility of continuity is presented, yet still there is no interest and no agency. But on it goes, over and over again until, somehow, continuity is rewarded and preferred and finally there develops agentive capacity ... the discriminative power to subsist. 2. Time, ontologically speaking, can be presented as the distinct and particular, inescapable moment of being (from which we are either (broadly) absent or present, depending on our conscious state - but that is a separate discussion point to consideration of the primordial). I prefer this momentary model to a linear model. It would be necessary mathematically to account for the subjectivity of experience of it, but that is the price of noting that we cannot live outside this moment. Our history in Time is not Time itself. 3. Again ontologically, the prior element becomes identity, and the organism’s now secured process of living in Time becomes being as we would know it. That is the ordering I have pursued, and I think that, subject to some fine definitional detail, it is also yours, or substantially so. 64
Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 19 Aug 2016 09:25 | # Not wanting to be simple-minded but on time & human consciousness isn’t it obvious that individuals are inevitability shaped by the notion of the past, the present & the future & that any healthy social order is equally so. Liberalism’s psychological appeal must rest, in part, in a throwing off of the obligations & responsibilities to the past & the future. In an ultimately solipsistic ego-fest of me, myself & I forever in the eternal present. Sure everyone has the natural tendency towards valuing what they think is their own self-interest (rightly or wrongly identified) & very few people, do not as some level, resent obligations & moral responsibilities they see as ‘externally’ imposed upon them but really liberalism unconstrained by any other serious ideological framework is a form of the tragedy of the commons upon social capital & the sources of social capital. The liberal ego trumps all other considerations even if the end point of such juvenile indifference is the ruination of all. To quote Aristotle’s Politics - “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god”. I don’t think we live in an age of gods! Given that we now have people claiming to have born into the ‘wrong’ species (they are really a cat or a dog or whatever) I do wonder just how low this collective madness can sink. 65
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 19 Aug 2016 15:04 | # Graham,
The question here is not “what works” from any particular perspective, even that of saving one’s people. It isn’t a utilitarian question. It is a question about “what’s ultimately true” of human identity and being as a foundation of all else ... of a structure that is solid and consists of human truth all the way up, if you like. If, along the way, there are apparent parallels or similarities with the liberal ontology that is of no matter. We are not building the liberal ontology and we will not end up with liberal individualism. We will end up in the only place we can end up, with a true understanding of who we are and how we are, and why we naturally will our continuing to be. This will be true of us as individuals (of course, not liberal individuals) and as a people.
Let’s put that into the appropriate psychological context - Man is of Nature and so his mind is of Nature, and the complexity of his mind. All this is of Nature. But his complexity is so great and, perhaps, so distant, so attenuated from his ancient roots, the sheer weight of it is ordinarily too much for his imperfect powers. Sloth and passivity and inattentiveness overtake him. Thereby, his life hazards reduction to a half-life in which error and illusion go out to the world and come back from the world, and confirm themselves, and deepen his distress. Thus the world both proceeds from his error and illusion, and precedes them, taking from him and giving to him without beginning or end: a vicious, mechanical cycle of transmission, escape from which will become possible only when not just his error and illusion is made known ... that’s not enough ... but his conscious mind and nature also. 66
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 20 Aug 2016 01:39 | # One of the nice things about thunderstorms is that when the power goes out, it reminds you that the universe powers itself. 67
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 01:52 | # George Spencer Brown, author of “The Laws of Form” died August 25, 4:05pm Devizes, England. Heinz von Foerster introduced me to “The Laws of Form” in 1974. Its notion of imaginary logic as the genesis of time resolving the the “paradox” of self-negation is essential to the vitalization of mathematics. Spencer-Brown came up with this as a consequence of “descending” out of the ivory tower where he was a professor of logic, and into the traditional Scottish pursuit: Railroad engineering. Dick managed to preserve a 1973 seminar where Spencer-Brown described this experience. Note: He left that seminar in frustration with the attendees—possibly because they were too eclectic or maybe just had too many dilettantes. 68
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 02:10 | # I suppose it may bear mentioning the double coincidence that I wrote this teen-musing before I had met Heinz ... and I came into possession of it again within a week or so of Spencer-Brown’s death: The money-quote being: “And then he began to Realize that a paradox is not an entity, but a process.” 69
Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 13 Oct 2016 04:34 | # The late George Spencer Brown, after writing The Laws of Form, wrote a book “Only Two Can Play This Game” with this “prescript”:
70
Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 02 May 2018 14:09 | # An Introduction to Mathematical Metaphysics by Christopher Langan is a potentially more fruitful approach to the radical constructivist project (of the likes of George Spencer Brown “The Laws of Form” (inspiring Shoup), Heinz von Foerster “Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, Frederick Parker-Rhodes “The Theory of Indistinguishables” (inspiring Etter), etc.). Lagan’s Mega Foundation is pursuing this line of thought and we’ve struck up dialogue over the last few months, including the Laws of Form discussion group. One reason I’m particularly interested in Lagan’s “ontology” (which he laconically relates as “The map is the territory.”) is it promises to unify the threads of the radical constructivists. Another reason is he’s serious about saving Western Civilization starting with its genetic correlation structures. Other reasons are he’s never graduated from “higher education”, is a body builder, breeds horses on his own farm not too far from where I grew up, he doesn’t go haywire thinking about my perspective on “individualism” and he’s tested out at 200 IQ. 71
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 02 May 2018 15:31 | # Hi James, Our one-time colleague PF was also in touch with Langan, for more personal reasons. So I know his name and a little about him. Accordingly, he may know of me. If the opportunity arises to join a discussion which is not only mathematical in form, then I would very much appreciate the opportunity. 72
Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 27 Sep 2019 20:43 | # I owe Chris Langan a bit of an apology for the prior reference to his purported IQ, as my reference lacked much-needed nuance. That much-needed nuance is presented at this FAQ. Long story short: He didn’t fit in with the hipster culture of Reed College at its high point in the late 60s and dropped out to pursue his interest in the nature of reality by taking blue collar jobs. When he finally got to the point, in the late 80s, when he thought he had something, he realized his lack of academic credentials would be blocking so he took advantage of OMNI Magazine’s much hyped IQ test purporting to show extraordinary intelligence, which he suspected he had due to skipping grades early in life. The point of this was to overcome his lack of academic credentials so he could get some attention for the CTMU. What it _actually_ did was put him into a pathological community of status seekers including such charmers as NXIVM-founder Keith Reneir who extended to Chris and his wife an invitation to join, which they rejected. Ever since, his association with the “High IQ Community”, such as it is, has been more hate than love. The best that came of it was an invitation to a TV game show where he won enough money to buy a ranch and some buildings in a small northern Missouri farm which, coincidentally, is 2.5 hours from me by car. Anyway, having said all that, here is a reasonably concise intro to ontology taken by the CTMU:
73
Posted by Hermeneuticist on Sat, 28 Sep 2019 07:40 | # I don’t think the Cartesian anxiety has seemed an impassable gulf to philosophers. The hermeneutic engagement in a circulating process of inquiry (incl. imagination, hypothesis and verification) serves as reconciliation. Unfortunately for Langan’s “Theory of Everything”, however, there will be other stories to tell. Those stories successfully spun to become a tradition of putting our people on a course of runaway and dissolution of our erstwhile social systemic homeostasis are in need of correction, firstly, by restoring the centrality of praxis - concretely, our human ecology, the protection of our species and its requirements through the accountability facilitated by a kind of unionization. Science is one indispensable pole at one side of praxis, but poesis is indispensable at the other end, that is where hermeneutics comes from, the arts, story telling - again, not necessarily fiction story telling. Along with Coherence and Coordination, the Communications Perspective also talks about Mystery - that there are other stories to tell. The best Langan can hope for is that his stories are better, more useful to people, usually make more sense, that he has at least one way of interpreting the stories that others tell which are different than his… It’s doubtful that everyone will agree to his theory of everything, likely that some will find it destructive to their world view if not species, even, and will fight to not have it imposed. [The UN is trying to help one such universalizing theory of everything - Islam - impose itself on the rest of the world, which should, of course, resist] Coordination is a much more wisely modest and useful piece of equipment and aspiration for an overarching perspective to negotiate the coherence of other peoples, maintained of some basic necessity in order to makes sense of their place in the world, but which can sometimes be conflicting and almost impervious to large reconciliation with others (sometimes to the destruction of themselves, others and environment/habitat). One good nomination for an overarching perspective upon which all peoples might coordinate is pervasive ecology - including human ecology - we may assume that most peoples retain their natural instinct to survive and those who want to survive have a better chance of survival. Islam and Christianity have gotten people to de-emphasize survival and the lived life, personal and species, in favor of a proposed reward in the after life - putting species, including our various human species and environment at risk by definition - and thus, a new overarching perspective that can successfully challenge these, what have been and remain overarching perspective for many, is indeed necessary. 74
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 28 Sep 2019 23:15 | # Relaying to Chris this “bit of an apology”, results in an “unnecessary” (according to Chris) correction to my sentence: “He didn’t fit in with the hipster culture of Reed College at its high point in the late 60s and dropped out to pursue his interest in the nature of reality by taking blue collar jobs.” To quote Chris’s public statement on this detail:
I bother with this correction because a high degree of ad hominem afflicts discourse regarding philosophical issues—particularly those broaching theology, not to mention theology with racialist implications. Post a comment:
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Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 09:41 | #
The identity, the function, the content of whatever is internal to an English woman that keeps her from spreading for a nigger, given the opportunity, is what matters to English/racial preservationists.
Well no shit!
GW’s Nobel Prize should be arriving by mail shortly. In the interim, Rushton’s genetic similarity theory shall just have to suffice.