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.
The contrast of these times is intoxicating, is it not? Never have we faced spiritual evil of such depth. Yet never have the possibilities, if you remain aware, been so open.
In a real sense the accumulated wisdom of 5000 years is available to us, while the vast majority put most of their faith in the pretensions of a materialism that sees itself as the only narrative that has ever been true. It is so "true", like some western jihad it want's to close out the light for all time on anything but The Narrative.
Plumb the wisdom. There are great depths. The future is epic. This "liberalism" will mostly succeed in destroying itself.
It will be creative if more people take up DIY and refocus on skill and excellence. The infotainment industries (mass media, education, entertainment) are all caught up in regime ideology. Have heard good tidings...young people who are developing an interest in old movies (70s art-house etc) and there is a growing awareness of how dead and lifeless the official culture is.
all the great and interesting work of the next decade or so will be produced far away from the prying eyes of the corporate state and their Karen commissars.
And amongst the dross (the juvenilia, the half-baked nonsense and the amateur stuff) there will be one or two real gems. They may or may not ever get exposed to the attention of the world but their undoubted existence offers presumptive evidence that renewal is underway. They will function as esoteric treasures whose mere existence testifies to the persistence of vital thought. The care and energy that goes into their creation, the patience and caution committed to protecting the privacy of the creators, will rob Cthulhuland of the control needed to maintain the status quo.
The works themselves, however good, will be less important than the lives led by their creators as well as those who search for them. Creation and imagination are disruptive forces in their own right.
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.
I'm not sure imagination is precisely the correct term, since that has connotations of invention. Certainly when reading of it, one must try to picture it. The other aspects - entering into the beliefs and psychology of our predecessors, to really inhabit their world - draw on empathy and theory of mind.
The relationship Collingwood describes however is precisely the way we should approach history. By truly appreciating the vast range of the human experience that has already passed, one's perspective on the possibilities of the future is incomparably deeper and richer.
I love old things (and people) for precisely this reason: I am fascinated by the challenge of trying to see and think as they do, given how much leverage surviving things must have had in shaping our present. I live in an well-preserved old house to which I was drawn for this golden opportunity. There is a fireproof box of handwritten deeds, recorded on parchment, in the colonial vernacular, that record the first sale a quarter of a millenium ago. It’s hard for me to imagine that their biases are worse than those of contemporary life. The more you understand history the better you understand what has changed vs what is timeless.
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.
Reality itself is problematic. People immersed in digital infotainment (above all the ubiquitous mobile phone), cut off from the natural world and the seasons, de-skilled and miseducated, fed on industrially processed food, are living in conditions that inevitably destabilise and undermine them. Full spectrum dysfunction...sleep deprivation, chronic metabolic disorders, drug addiction, poor mental health ensue.
On the bright side, we now know what not to do. And what to do. The way forward: incremental, patient, re-vitalisation...unprocessed foods, sleep hygiene, exercise, reading for pleasure, hobbies, live music, skills, nature, friends and family.
Why should salvation be easy? The efforts involved are real, but they are a reward in themselves. Sacrifice helps to prioritise what is important. And the price we pay not making such efforts is truly crippling.
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.
It's much easier to identify a "problematic" utterance ("He dropped an n-bomb once!") or even better, simply note identity ("Dead white male") and then simply bin everything someone did, than it is to engage. Marxcissism is nothing if not intellectually flaccid.
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.
In other ways, the past was incomparably superior.
Both of these things are true. Insisting on one or the other is to get trapped in the myth of progress (in which case, we assume we can learn nothing, and don't), or the myth of the golden age (in which case we get lost in nostalgia).
The past.. as a slave? Or as a conqueror? Perhaps the modern bugmen instinctively recoil from the past, knowing where their place would have been. And the women who outwardly moan the injustice of being taken as spoils and concubines, yet in their hearts desperately wishing they were beautiful enough even for that.
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 would say rather - it was working, for a long time. Indeed probably longer than just since Marx; history has been falsified before, and I suspect the great intellectual project of the next age will be to rectify our understanding of what really happened in our past.
We are not out of the woods yet but the wheels are coming off of their lie machine. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.
Perhaps, but I rather feel that people don't actually enjoy it. There's a degree to which that's a fashionable stance, but in the true fashion of slaves to fashion, they wish to escape, but can't.
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.
I've been sensing the ice shifting for some months now ... nothing I can put my finger on, precisely. Just a feeling in the air, like the long freeze is finally coming to an end.
Mar 5, 2023·edited Mar 5, 2023Liked by John Carter
Things change. No collective mood lasts unchanged for any length of time. The mind is dynamic and requires stimulation and novelty. Popular culture experiences very sudden shifts. You see this in the history of the counter-culture of the late 60s and 70s, the rise of punk.
Relief of sorts is on its way. The underlying issues of control and power, the relationships of exploitation, poor governance etc will remain. But the mood will lighten and there will be aesthetic and intellectual improvements. The thing to look for is better music, more realism in drama, more colour and style in fashion.
Utopia certainly isn't coming, but yes - better arts and culture, and maybe a scientific paradigm shift or two. And better looking people on the streets, my God. I think there is a real hunger for all these things ... an end to irony.
Did you ever read New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson? There's that scene where they watch the ice break in moments and shatter into floes and everything changes--all the imperceptive thawing suddenly giving way. That's how I've always felt it would happen.
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".
By sheer coincidence I was gifted a Caspar David Friedrich calendar for this year, very apposite. The Sturm und Drang flowing from a disgruntlement with the somewhat clinical Enlightenment then amplified by the Romantic view of history, giving us Neo-gothic art and literature, which in turn fed a love for the fantastic, and ultimately gave us the infancy of sci-fi by end (nineteenth) century.
I’d have to think about this a lot more, but I suspect that once notions of a future shaped by a past history are divorced from eschatological views, which were the dominant older premodern views (think medieval people yearning for the “end of history” as the apocalyptic second coming), then the cultural stage is set for individualised imaginings of futuristic possibilities.
This is very interesting, the romanticization of history leading to the elaborate weirding of the present in turn feeding a fascination with the future. You are certainly onto something.
End of history in an eschatological sense is of course not my meaning. I don't believe in eschatology. Rather simply that every present is, by necessity, the terminal point of history.
"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.
The contrast of these times is intoxicating, is it not? Never have we faced spiritual evil of such depth. Yet never have the possibilities, if you remain aware, been so open.
In a real sense the accumulated wisdom of 5000 years is available to us, while the vast majority put most of their faith in the pretensions of a materialism that sees itself as the only narrative that has ever been true. It is so "true", like some western jihad it want's to close out the light for all time on anything but The Narrative.
Plumb the wisdom. There are great depths. The future is epic. This "liberalism" will mostly succeed in destroying itself.
Globohomo WEFism is Dunning-Kruger on a cosmic scale.
A most banal tyranny of midwits, doomed by cosmic-scale hubris...
That line should be on T-shirts, hysterical!
It will be creative if more people take up DIY and refocus on skill and excellence. The infotainment industries (mass media, education, entertainment) are all caught up in regime ideology. Have heard good tidings...young people who are developing an interest in old movies (70s art-house etc) and there is a growing awareness of how dead and lifeless the official culture is.
SAMIZDAT!
all the great and interesting work of the next decade or so will be produced far away from the prying eyes of the corporate state and their Karen commissars.
And amongst the dross (the juvenilia, the half-baked nonsense and the amateur stuff) there will be one or two real gems. They may or may not ever get exposed to the attention of the world but their undoubted existence offers presumptive evidence that renewal is underway. They will function as esoteric treasures whose mere existence testifies to the persistence of vital thought. The care and energy that goes into their creation, the patience and caution committed to protecting the privacy of the creators, will rob Cthulhuland of the control needed to maintain the status quo.
The works themselves, however good, will be less important than the lives led by their creators as well as those who search for them. Creation and imagination are disruptive forces in their own right.
It would be a mistake to take the "left" at its word. Mind games and trolling are their standard tools. SBF is not an outlier.
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.
I'm not sure imagination is precisely the correct term, since that has connotations of invention. Certainly when reading of it, one must try to picture it. The other aspects - entering into the beliefs and psychology of our predecessors, to really inhabit their world - draw on empathy and theory of mind.
The relationship Collingwood describes however is precisely the way we should approach history. By truly appreciating the vast range of the human experience that has already passed, one's perspective on the possibilities of the future is incomparably deeper and richer.
Invention, no, a certain form of creativity, or filling-in-the-blanks-archetype-connection: yes, I would say.
Yes, filling in the blanks - visualization, I suppose. Although that also doesn't seem quite right.
The issue here may be a limitation in the English language - one word, imagination, to cover very different functions.
I love old things (and people) for precisely this reason: I am fascinated by the challenge of trying to see and think as they do, given how much leverage surviving things must have had in shaping our present. I live in an well-preserved old house to which I was drawn for this golden opportunity. There is a fireproof box of handwritten deeds, recorded on parchment, in the colonial vernacular, that record the first sale a quarter of a millenium ago. It’s hard for me to imagine that their biases are worse than those of contemporary life. The more you understand history the better you understand what has changed vs what is timeless.
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.
Reality itself is problematic. People immersed in digital infotainment (above all the ubiquitous mobile phone), cut off from the natural world and the seasons, de-skilled and miseducated, fed on industrially processed food, are living in conditions that inevitably destabilise and undermine them. Full spectrum dysfunction...sleep deprivation, chronic metabolic disorders, drug addiction, poor mental health ensue.
On the bright side, we now know what not to do. And what to do. The way forward: incremental, patient, re-vitalisation...unprocessed foods, sleep hygiene, exercise, reading for pleasure, hobbies, live music, skills, nature, friends and family.
I agree with you. Unfortunately, all of this requires effort, and there is nothing that our "culture" hates more than effort.
Why should salvation be easy? The efforts involved are real, but they are a reward in themselves. Sacrifice helps to prioritise what is important. And the price we pay not making such efforts is truly crippling.
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.
It's much easier to identify a "problematic" utterance ("He dropped an n-bomb once!") or even better, simply note identity ("Dead white male") and then simply bin everything someone did, than it is to engage. Marxcissism is nothing if not intellectually flaccid.
And debating ad nauseam whether or not, for example, the Audubon Society should change its name, does nothing to save the birds.
Are you suggesting that manipulating symbols does not immediately alter reality? Sounds like hate speech.
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.
In some ways, yes, the past was a terrible place.
In other ways, the past was incomparably superior.
Both of these things are true. Insisting on one or the other is to get trapped in the myth of progress (in which case, we assume we can learn nothing, and don't), or the myth of the golden age (in which case we get lost in nostalgia).
The past.. as a slave? Or as a conqueror? Perhaps the modern bugmen instinctively recoil from the past, knowing where their place would have been. And the women who outwardly moan the injustice of being taken as spoils and concubines, yet in their hearts desperately wishing they were beautiful enough even for that.
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 would say rather - it was working, for a long time. Indeed probably longer than just since Marx; history has been falsified before, and I suspect the great intellectual project of the next age will be to rectify our understanding of what really happened in our past.
We are not out of the woods yet but the wheels are coming off of their lie machine. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.
I think there's a luxury beliefs component to all of this. Pessimism is in vogue nowadays, it would seem.
Perhaps, but I rather feel that people don't actually enjoy it. There's a degree to which that's a fashionable stance, but in the true fashion of slaves to fashion, they wish to escape, but can't.
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.
Who's pessimistic? My commentary is directed precisely at the West and its current malaise ... but I do not share the ambient pessimism.
This pessimism, to which your article refers.
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.
I've been sensing the ice shifting for some months now ... nothing I can put my finger on, precisely. Just a feeling in the air, like the long freeze is finally coming to an end.
Things change. No collective mood lasts unchanged for any length of time. The mind is dynamic and requires stimulation and novelty. Popular culture experiences very sudden shifts. You see this in the history of the counter-culture of the late 60s and 70s, the rise of punk.
Relief of sorts is on its way. The underlying issues of control and power, the relationships of exploitation, poor governance etc will remain. But the mood will lighten and there will be aesthetic and intellectual improvements. The thing to look for is better music, more realism in drama, more colour and style in fashion.
Utopia certainly isn't coming, but yes - better arts and culture, and maybe a scientific paradigm shift or two. And better looking people on the streets, my God. I think there is a real hunger for all these things ... an end to irony.
I can live with irony. I'll be relieved to see girls wear something other than grandma dresses with boots.
I feel it too, John. Now, a long freeze coming to an end: spring time? Or Great Flood? Both?
Why not both?
Did you ever read New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson? There's that scene where they watch the ice break in moments and shatter into floes and everything changes--all the imperceptive thawing suddenly giving way. That's how I've always felt it would happen.
Nope, haven't read that particular book by him. Just the Mars trilogy, and a couple of the other space novels.
Fucking fantastic
Glad you enjoyed that. Thank you for the cross-post, that is greatly appreciated!
Absolutely
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
I rather considered him to be gazing upon the cyberpunk vision of a cooler tomorrow, than the insipid sewer of the androgynous, obese present.
Forgive me, it's been a while since I've enjoyed the futurist asthetics of the old Social Matter site
https://archive.ph/h0V2a
I miss Social Matter.
The pdf links seem to be dead but the archived links are live
https://socialmatterarchive.wordpress.com
Excellent.
* der Clown-Welt
Pardon my pedantry, I’m a native German speaker.
By sheer coincidence I was gifted a Caspar David Friedrich calendar for this year, very apposite. The Sturm und Drang flowing from a disgruntlement with the somewhat clinical Enlightenment then amplified by the Romantic view of history, giving us Neo-gothic art and literature, which in turn fed a love for the fantastic, and ultimately gave us the infancy of sci-fi by end (nineteenth) century.
I’d have to think about this a lot more, but I suspect that once notions of a future shaped by a past history are divorced from eschatological views, which were the dominant older premodern views (think medieval people yearning for the “end of history” as the apocalyptic second coming), then the cultural stage is set for individualised imaginings of futuristic possibilities.
This is very interesting, the romanticization of history leading to the elaborate weirding of the present in turn feeding a fascination with the future. You are certainly onto something.
End of history in an eschatological sense is of course not my meaning. I don't believe in eschatology. Rather simply that every present is, by necessity, the terminal point of history.
"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.