Mar 5, 2023·edited Mar 5, 2023Liked by John Carter
I've been wondering lately about how dour the left has become, how miserable, how the past for them has become nothing but one long story of oppression, while their future requires the near total destruction of everything we have grown accustomed to, in favor of a renewable utopia where we are all trans, there are no borders or boundaries, yet there is no hierarchy because no one is oppressor or oppressed, that otherwise looks somehow like eternal progress, more or less exactly like the consumer lifestyle of the managerial class. Destroying everything on the way to utopia is easy, but that also assures the utopia never comes. The cognitive dissonance is deranging. I don't think we have reached anything like the bottom on liberal madness at this point.
Meanwhile I have never felt so optimistic. It is an incredibly creative time, for those who are open to it.
A true revelation for me was Collingwood's insight that knowing the past is an imaginative act: we need to try our best to feel, know and experience the history we study from the perspectives of those people in the past. That is, combine knowledge about the past with adopting the belief systems of those who lived in other eras. For that, we need to grow ourselves and understand ourselves in the present. It's a feedback loop that leads to a liberating sense of deep understanding of the human condition, although of course we can never fully achieve perfection. To love the past, and people, in that way, may unlock a brighter future.
A lot of "problems" trace back to lack of perspective. Most Westerners are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Both they and their parents were born into plenty, so they never had to struggle. They therefore lack the tools necessary to make sense of the past, observe the present, and plan for the future. Even though there has never been a better time to be alive, this makes it easy to fall into despair.
Well said. It’s frustrating enough when individuals practice revisionist history on their own lives but deeply troubling when a whole society engages in it. Today over at The Free Press (also on Substack), Douglas Murray writes, “...the only way to judge an artist is by his art.” We’ve clearly forgotten that, too.
So to become optimistic again we have to see the past through clear glasses. Good point. The past is way worse than the present. We get absorbed in the 24 hour 15 second news cycle and we lose perspective. Even in the past 30 years, poverty has improved so dramatically for billions of earth people, and we have so much to be thankful for that we didn’t have even 5 years ago, e.g. Substack. I’m working on practicing the art of optimism. It is something that improves with practice. I still look for all the landmines and take out insurance, and figure out what to do if the insurance company goes belly up...but I’m feeling better this way, by observing optimistic things everywhere, by proving to myself with evidence that i can see, that the world is actually becoming a better place.
John - brilliant essay. Marxism learned early on that those who control the past, control the future. It’s a power play. And it’s working.
The cynical hypocrisy of this effort is only surpassed by the poignancy with which human nature is slandered. We humans are neither all evil nor all good, and this nature is fixed. Yet those lusting after this power and control would, as you note, have us focus only on the evil they have invented.
Yet like William Hunter Duncan, I am optimistic. The power players are over-reaching. They can only deny reality for so long before reality turns and sinks its fangs into them. We may not have yet reached bottom but I begin discern its approach.
This (well-justified) pessimism is quite Anglo-specific. There are plenty of places where the future looks bright. See Korea, with its promise of reunification; Japan, with the potential of a steady-state economy -- a state and market synthesis that progresses beyond the shocks and cycles of the last two centuries, recreating in futuristic form the Tokugawa 'chained country', self-sufficient, stable, and socialistic; Bhutan, which has fixed its ethnic troubles with a decisiveness the West would do well to emulate; and here, Russia, where Orthodoxy with cautious but confident steps climbs back up to its crest of this largest of nations, this holy land, this Third Rome, where the more ancient past is celebrated, while the mementos of Marxism, in the crumbling concrete and rotting plaster facades of cheap Communist tower blocks, remain to remind us all of what happens when we turn away from tradition, and from God.
This is beautiful, John. You are an amazing, original thinker. And I agree with William that this is an optimistic, creative time, for those accepting the Thanatos that's always part of that.
The fundamental problem is that the schools teach a narrow and truncated history. Teaching U.S. history by itself is a prescription for anti-patriotism. Likewise, to read the Old Testament without
sufficient schooling in other Bronze Age civilizations is a recipe for becoming atheist.
Slavery is far less common these days because we have electrical and mechanical slaves in great
profusion. The main slave market this days is sex trafficking, a machines aren't up to replacing humans
for that purpose. (And fortunately, that slave market is illegal in the West and much of elsewhere.)
So to morally compare our past and our present is unfair. While perpetual slavery of the innocent was
a sin back then as well, moderns should throttle back their moral preening since they don't have
the same temptation.
The solution is more history. Start by requiring that history and literature teachers to take more history
classes of places and times other than US history. Have these courses replace the bull fertilizer "education" courses teachers must endure to maintain certification.
Then work in some ancient and other courses for the students.
I am probably so bereft of spirituality and appreciation for higher things, that all I can see from down here among the ruins and bodies, is the simple eternal equation of "KIll or be killed".
"So we are caught between the rock of an awful history, and the hard place of an unbearable future, trapped in an eternal present where these twin temporal horrors grind down on our souls like millstones."
My plan is to sit back and sip my coffee and watch the Millennials* get ground down into insanity by the dilemma.
*In my definition, anyone who doesn't remember life before the Internet.
I've been wondering lately about how dour the left has become, how miserable, how the past for them has become nothing but one long story of oppression, while their future requires the near total destruction of everything we have grown accustomed to, in favor of a renewable utopia where we are all trans, there are no borders or boundaries, yet there is no hierarchy because no one is oppressor or oppressed, that otherwise looks somehow like eternal progress, more or less exactly like the consumer lifestyle of the managerial class. Destroying everything on the way to utopia is easy, but that also assures the utopia never comes. The cognitive dissonance is deranging. I don't think we have reached anything like the bottom on liberal madness at this point.
Meanwhile I have never felt so optimistic. It is an incredibly creative time, for those who are open to it.
A true revelation for me was Collingwood's insight that knowing the past is an imaginative act: we need to try our best to feel, know and experience the history we study from the perspectives of those people in the past. That is, combine knowledge about the past with adopting the belief systems of those who lived in other eras. For that, we need to grow ourselves and understand ourselves in the present. It's a feedback loop that leads to a liberating sense of deep understanding of the human condition, although of course we can never fully achieve perfection. To love the past, and people, in that way, may unlock a brighter future.
A lot of "problems" trace back to lack of perspective. Most Westerners are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Both they and their parents were born into plenty, so they never had to struggle. They therefore lack the tools necessary to make sense of the past, observe the present, and plan for the future. Even though there has never been a better time to be alive, this makes it easy to fall into despair.
Well said. It’s frustrating enough when individuals practice revisionist history on their own lives but deeply troubling when a whole society engages in it. Today over at The Free Press (also on Substack), Douglas Murray writes, “...the only way to judge an artist is by his art.” We’ve clearly forgotten that, too.
So to become optimistic again we have to see the past through clear glasses. Good point. The past is way worse than the present. We get absorbed in the 24 hour 15 second news cycle and we lose perspective. Even in the past 30 years, poverty has improved so dramatically for billions of earth people, and we have so much to be thankful for that we didn’t have even 5 years ago, e.g. Substack. I’m working on practicing the art of optimism. It is something that improves with practice. I still look for all the landmines and take out insurance, and figure out what to do if the insurance company goes belly up...but I’m feeling better this way, by observing optimistic things everywhere, by proving to myself with evidence that i can see, that the world is actually becoming a better place.
John - brilliant essay. Marxism learned early on that those who control the past, control the future. It’s a power play. And it’s working.
The cynical hypocrisy of this effort is only surpassed by the poignancy with which human nature is slandered. We humans are neither all evil nor all good, and this nature is fixed. Yet those lusting after this power and control would, as you note, have us focus only on the evil they have invented.
Yet like William Hunter Duncan, I am optimistic. The power players are over-reaching. They can only deny reality for so long before reality turns and sinks its fangs into them. We may not have yet reached bottom but I begin discern its approach.
I think there's a luxury beliefs component to all of this. Pessimism is in vogue nowadays, it would seem.
This (well-justified) pessimism is quite Anglo-specific. There are plenty of places where the future looks bright. See Korea, with its promise of reunification; Japan, with the potential of a steady-state economy -- a state and market synthesis that progresses beyond the shocks and cycles of the last two centuries, recreating in futuristic form the Tokugawa 'chained country', self-sufficient, stable, and socialistic; Bhutan, which has fixed its ethnic troubles with a decisiveness the West would do well to emulate; and here, Russia, where Orthodoxy with cautious but confident steps climbs back up to its crest of this largest of nations, this holy land, this Third Rome, where the more ancient past is celebrated, while the mementos of Marxism, in the crumbling concrete and rotting plaster facades of cheap Communist tower blocks, remain to remind us all of what happens when we turn away from tradition, and from God.
This is beautiful, John. You are an amazing, original thinker. And I agree with William that this is an optimistic, creative time, for those accepting the Thanatos that's always part of that.
Fucking fantastic
The fundamental problem is that the schools teach a narrow and truncated history. Teaching U.S. history by itself is a prescription for anti-patriotism. Likewise, to read the Old Testament without
sufficient schooling in other Bronze Age civilizations is a recipe for becoming atheist.
Slavery is far less common these days because we have electrical and mechanical slaves in great
profusion. The main slave market this days is sex trafficking, a machines aren't up to replacing humans
for that purpose. (And fortunately, that slave market is illegal in the West and much of elsewhere.)
So to morally compare our past and our present is unfair. While perpetual slavery of the innocent was
a sin back then as well, moderns should throttle back their moral preening since they don't have
the same temptation.
The solution is more history. Start by requiring that history and literature teachers to take more history
classes of places and times other than US history. Have these courses replace the bull fertilizer "education" courses teachers must endure to maintain certification.
Then work in some ancient and other courses for the students.
This is Rule 3.
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-3-teach-more-history
I am probably so bereft of spirituality and appreciation for higher things, that all I can see from down here among the ruins and bodies, is the simple eternal equation of "KIll or be killed".
Perfectly said.
We need a title for the final artwork - Ein Wanderer uber die Clown-Welt
"So we are caught between the rock of an awful history, and the hard place of an unbearable future, trapped in an eternal present where these twin temporal horrors grind down on our souls like millstones."
My plan is to sit back and sip my coffee and watch the Millennials* get ground down into insanity by the dilemma.
*In my definition, anyone who doesn't remember life before the Internet.
The Party had to destroy history itself, the notion of another time where things were done differently reduced to a secular blasphemy.
Much like brave new world the cost of utopia is your humanity.