Hey, John, thanks for the citation/shout-out, I really appreciate it and really appreciate that we can all educate, inspire and entertain each other here and elsewhere, in our little samizdat corner of the world.
I personally root the Marxcissists in 1960s California, more specifically a very swank place called the Esalen Institute, where various aspiring gurus (political and spiritual) helped create the New Left. This is where the delicate operation was made that excised the proletariat from their Messiah status and transformed "the redistribution of wealth" into the "redistribution of self-esteem". Once the proles had proved immune to the charms of the Vanguard class, Leftism became a luxury good designed to meet the spiritual, psychological and personal needs of the young, bourgeois and disaffected. I think this is where "The Personal is Political" went from slogan to cult to belief system for upscale liberals (especially women) and also where the state of California got the inspiration to create the world's first official Dept. of Self-Esteem (it may have also hosted the world's first "Diversity" seminar).
If so much of the 20th century's destruction was rooted in 19th-century German thought, so much of our 21st-century stupidity, self-absorption, and Personality Disorder Politics are rooted in 20th-century California.
Hopefully the Marxcissists can be tamed by granting their wish and holding up a mirror to their faces, and hopefully somehow they can see how ugly and hateful they've become.
The human potential movement California shit out in the 70s is absolutely the mother of abominations that inflicted Marxicissism on the world. If this little portmanteau can help these troglodytes crawl back into their cave in shame it will have done it's job.
In other news, wasn't exaggerating when I said you were a top commenter.
Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023Liked by John Carter
thanks is much appreciated...
as for the pathetic exercise in inflating the self-esteem of emotional cripples aka "Human Potential", there just seems to be such a deep need for spiritual meaning and psychological grounding in our deracinated post-Christian market state, and that goes double or triple for the refugees, exiles, drop-outs, burnouts and castaways that wash up on our Left coast.
Esalen fits alongside Scientology, Jonestown, and all the other California cults, where the lost souls and wannabe gurus begin their mating rituals, where moth and flame come together to fulfill their eternal roles.
I think the biggest mistake made by the rather euphoric, hedonistic human potential cults was their strong tendency towards wishful thinking. They'd grab whatever seemed useful or pleasing from whatever traditions they liked, discard everything they didn't like, filled in the blanks with made-up nonsense, and then disappeared into their own assholes as a result. As a path for spiritual growth it was entirely sterile, since they made it so easy for themselves to avoid anything that didn't feel good or really challenge them. Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was.
And that's all without even accounting for the possibility that there's something very real in the subtle realms, in which case they were like children playing with a fire in a dark forest stalked by hungry wolves.
"Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was."
If it feels good and flatters my ego, it has to be true!
Though it was a movement mostly crafted and led by exiled European shrinks and "thinkers", the entire New Age movement is deeply painfully inescapably American.
These were con artists much like the televangelists or the Tony Robbins types, and what they were selling was prepackaged drive-thru spirituality, just another accessory to bangle the holy Self with, like clothes or cars.
It seems that just about the entire New Left/Social Justice movement delivered benefits to those residing at the top of the upscale urbanite class (profs, journalists, the NYT/NPR/PBS devotees, most esp the women), while those lower on the ol' Maslow pyramid learned that shit runs downhill: they didn't get monetized self-actualization but broken homes and families, drug addiction and the other pathologies of maximum personal autonomy, and an endless supply of anxiety, depression, and personality disorders.
If only our aspiring overlords and "activists" put down the Foucault and picked up some Chuang Tzu:
'There is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.'
The emotional cripples of the 60s were supermen compared with the kids today. They were more colourful, wore better clothes and the music was incomparably better. Monterey and all that. A hippy picnic would have been healthier and more fun than any video game.
Ridiculous as it all was, people need to lighten up and someone as intellectually serious as you should recall Spinoza: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari sed intelligere.
Error has its rights...and its dignity. Honour both.
anything and everyone rooted in the Old World is vastly richer, deeper and more interesting than anything or anyone rooted in the New World...it's like the difference bw someone who fought in WW2 and someone who fought in "Call of Duty".
Agreed. The Old World can be erased in a generation or so. Jacob Burkhardt, Nietzsche's mentor, predicted the Americanisation of Europe and the process has pretty much been completed. Whatever remains is retained by literary and cultural traditions as delicate as a strand from a spider's web.
The polymath and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once wrote that all traditions disappear within a generation or so of its personal transmission (he was very big on mentors, master/apprentice stuff and the problems of the transmission of knowledge by tradition and the evolution of knowledge when constrained by tradition). The fragmentation of inherited forms of social and cultural life has now reached the point where we can expect catastrophic effects over the next several generations. The disruptions within academia (DEI, decolonising the curriculum, feminising the culture, deprioritising white men for hiring) have destroyed the conditions for the personal transferal of knowledge. What we cannot save now will not be saved at all.
Feb 9, 2023·edited Feb 9, 2023Liked by John Carter
Devon "Blackpilled" Stack did a dive into the sewer that was Esalen and the Human Potential Movement in his "Portal to Hell" insomnia stream edition. Judged that they "literally opened a portal to hell"... https://odysee.com/@Blackpilled:b/jewhellhole:3
CP, you are quite the optimist if you think that holding a mirror to their faces would shame any of them. They are more likely to be charmed by what they see or flattered by your attention.
The only thing that has ever been known to work with collective delusion on any scale is catastrophe.
Exactly. These people can't be shamed or reasoned with. Happily, they are working hard to collapse our society so perhaps the mass delusion will collapse soon too. Our only concern should be becoming independent enough to weather the storm.
Gloomy? You never come across as gloomy. But is all subjective. We have been cheated and disappointed by the system and our good sense abused by all the rubbish, but they own the system and their comfort zone depends on the pantomime of competence going on forever. Chin up, whatever happens a few tentacles of Cthulhu are destined to end up as calamari.
Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023Liked by John Carter
💬 The aphorism is the acme of literature
...second only to the meme, as the most esteemed feline pundit on interwebz would prob argue. Not presactly literature, them’s memes though 🙂
🗨 memes are the resurgence of rationality and the revenge of the shape rotators. they combine the speed of appeal to emotion with the informational density of long logical strings. it's intellectual jazz as a medium for rational renaissance. and it's a language the irrational cannot master.
They are all that you say. The next step is that the creative element need to go for the jugular. Plato said that if you change the music, you change the city.
When a resistance song becomes popular or widely known, then you will know that the opposition is making real progress. If I was a campaign manager for Trump, I'd forget polls and consultants and hire a songwriter/composer....someone from Los Angeles or Nashville with long experience performing live in front of an audience and who understands how to wind people up.
Take an old song (vintage folk, classic rock it does not matter) with a great melody and prepare lyrics that are carefully metrical and synchronised with the rhythm. It does not have to be overtly party political, merely reactionary and obnoxiously anti-woke....perhaps something on the theme of the Great Replacement or a lament for babies killed in partial birth abortions or a snappy and mocking ballad of George Floyd. Then get it out there via podcast. Project Orpheus. War by sound.
Ever see the Chilean movie, No? Reminiscent of this idea, although not musical per se.
Not sure music will work though; no shared musical culture. However, changing the topic, directing the flow of conversation by injecting new memes that spread on their own - this is the way. Victory through joy; assume the sale, communicate the idea of how much fun victory will be.
thanks, i do like Kraus, I recently read his "Last Days of Mankind", which was a bit of a slog and filled with maybe too many time- and place-specific references to be enjoyable 100 yrs later, but it is also filled w gems.
Respect is due. Milton, Wyndham Lewis, Sciascia, Calasso and Kraus. This newsletter attracts very rare birds indeed. The lights are going out, but not here.
CP, further to your very insightful observations about California I'd suggest that we need to understand why it happened.
California was a laboratory for the development of lifestyles because the system was under pressure from the expectations of the generation that had fought the war and the even greater expectations of their children.
The legitimacy of the pre-war social order had been abraded by the Great Depression and the political class of the US was very conscious of the expectations off the masses for full-employment, mass prosperity and opportunities for upward social mobility. Consumerism was the response. And they were terrified of the USSR and the threat of the industrialised working class turning to the pro-Moscow Left.
Cultural changes were required to adapt the tastes and lifestyles of the newly prosperous masses, above all their children (the Baby Boomers) and to create a New Left that could not be controlled by Moscow or function as any kind of autonomous leadership for the workers.
The research into psychology that had been undertaken at that time was harnessed to help with the marketing, but also with a vast range of the of issues.
The Counter-Culture was developed to adapt capitalism to the times (by dissolving archaic bourgeois culture) and to adapt the young themselves to the needs of the system. The Counter-Culture was about adapting the culture to the needs of a post-bourgeois social order, one in which a mass middle-class were given opportunities for consumption in return for their loyalty and docility.
It all ended in tears in Vietnam and the stagnation of the 70s but by then the cultural forces had a life of their own and were yet again refitted to meet the needs of the system.
That's my take in a nutshell. IMHO it is pointless to focus on the craziness or the hypocrisies. We have to see the logic and the forces of necessity driving things.
lately i've been seeing the marriage of capitalism and progressivism in almost everything (unless it's not a marriage but more twins conjoined at birth)
Has anyone else noticed there's a LOT of people that spend most of their time on the internet talking about narcissists? It's a REALLY popular topic to play armchair clinician and exchange stories of unpleasant interactions out in the world and dissect what aspects of narcissism were manifesting in the obvious narcissist that was the source of the unpleasant interaction.
There's even an informal credentialism in this where people describe themselves as "experts" or deeply experienced with narcissists; invariably this seems to be because one has had a long stream of usually boyfriends or husbands that were all, mysteriously, pathological narcissists.
I know exactly what you mean. Maybe it's just trendy idk but I kinda feel like maybe there really are more actual narcissists around these days. At least on social media.
It's probably pointless for me to care about it at this point in history, like a time-travelling Templar screaming in anguish that the Elks are doing the rituals wrong these days, but I draw a clear line around "clinical" narcissism or psychopathy or any of the other fun words.
We've been having lots of fun using clinical words for social behavior we don't like or want to Munchausen up since the 90s or so.
I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague.
"I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague."
Here fucking here.
My sort of rough understanding is that narcissists are generally made, not born; psychopaths at least in some cases the opposite. Dunno if that's true but I'm not a psychologist. In any case, like you say below, narcissism is definitely more prevalent.
The spread of psychic illness is integral to the survival of the regime. In medicine it is called iatrogenic morbidity...illness caused by physicians. A very well understood phenomenon in psychiatry.
Regime supporters benefit from crippling their rivals and subordinates in the best 'Darwinian' fashion, while the subaltern element manipulate their masters by encouraging their proclivities towards delusional thinking.
There's a lot of genetic predisposition for psychopathy, but it's by no means the only route.
But clinical narcissism is very much its own thing. The prevailing research was that it seems to be early childhood social development, so nearly always from parent/caretaker (which of course, at least in the case of bio parents, introduces a potential genetic confound we just haven't seen yet).
As long as we are assigning medical terms, it has been my general finding that most of the boyfriends/husbands who are described by their blue cheka tormentors are really Munchausen by Proxy victims.
I'd guess that most of them probably are actually assholes, maybe even pieces of shit, but they're the latest in a string of such men that the cheka consistently seeks out and cultivates.
But probably not all or even most actually disordered.
I think it was earlier. The trend of pathologizing and armchair-diagnosing the normal range of human behavior to make mundane things darker (does your partner have DARK TRIAD TRAITS?!?) and more important and make oneself feel like an expert is long.
Definitely began earlier. And once the blue checka diagnosed Trump with the disease, awareness and usage spread. And social media cultivates narcissisms, allegedly.
Speaking of Trump Derangement, fuck every "behavioral expert" doing their nonsense fortune cookie Barnum analyses on "nonverbal behavior cues" of politicians in public that amazingly always lines up with the party-line take on their diabolical personality disorder.
Been digging that sphere for a lot due to personal reasons like the ones you stated, probably before it turned popular (I think it was after 2020). More recently I stumble with the commentary of a psychologist called Sam Vaknin and other man (I am unsure of his credentials) called Richard Grannon. They work with an interesting model of the phenomenon. The latter in particular says that narcissism prospers not because of them but because of its complementary, which is rooted in the inability of people to say No.
Well, Vaknin's theory is a reiterating of psychoanalytic theory of narcissism going all the way back to Freud: overly permissive mother worships son during the age range of ego formation equals narcissism.
That we have a parent-like state and culture treating emotionally immature or vulnerable people similarly would give it fertile ground to prosper.
But ultimately it IS on the narcissist. A healthy mind is able to exercise self-control and self-criticism, even if others aren't.
And, well, for the people who become narcissism "experts" because they've had lots of relationships with them, my favorite expression has always been, "the only thing all your failed relationships have in common is you."
Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023Liked by John Carter
And there is one interesting thing Grannon and Vaknin say. Narcissistic behavior is kind of contagious, like being bitten by a vampire. There are certain type of people who tend to approach ''narcissists'', due to ''repetition compulsion''. And the interaction fosters their own bad traits. ''It is not them, is us'', as Grannon says.
It is rooted or take ideas from that but it is not only that. He describes these behaviors as a response to trauma. But, as you said, explanation is not justification.
Since White Christians seem to be the most hated group on the planet these days, and one quoting The Bible (gasp) is even worse, I realize I'm taking my chances. Regardless, there's nothing new under the sun. Or would it help if I began with a few Shakespeare quotations?
"O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!"
"Few love to hear the sins they love to act."
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."
Matthew 6 NKJV
“Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them...
when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do..."
Like, don't post it on Twitter and Facebook to display how righteous you are, because you're only proving the opposite.
Or, to quote John Carter:
"the incentive structures of social media incentivize and manufacture narcissists."
"... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Matt 6 NKJV
“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.
Truth hurts. It's supposed to. It sure pissed off the Pharisees when Jesus spoke it.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness."
Carter: "... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Jesus exposed their hypocrisy and they crucified him. The truth (pearls) does tend to elicit extreme reactions, like being torn to pieces, as quoted above.
So there you have it. Shakespreare, Jesus and John Carter. Great minds thinking alike and all.
"In which case, they’re usually narcissistic anyhow, practically by comorbid definition. ‘Catty, emotionally insecure fairy’ is a stereotype for a reason."
"If homosexuals weren't such jerks, 'fag' wouldn't be an insult." -- Jack Donovan (by memory)
As a member in good standing of the Dark Triad Libertarians, narcissicist has it's own cachet. It has a devil may care coolness worthy of Joe Camel.
I prefer Whinocrats.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, noble or virtuous in being a whiner. A whiner is both selfish AND pathetic AND ineffective. Slaves and little kids whine. Getting a degree in Intersectionality is just getting new excuses to whine.
Teaching once-oppressed minorities to be narcissistic is to compensate them from the days where it was dangerous for a negro to say No to a white man. (It wasn't that long ago, BTW.) Teaching once-oppressed minorities to whine harder, on the other hand, is simply deepening the slave mentality.
---
My other favored appellation is Puritanical satanist. This one is small beer for the young, but for older Leftists "puritanical" is poison. I'm old enough to remember diligent leftists who read John Stuart Mill and claimed to like it. These people mocked the Right for McCarthy and the Salem Witch Trials. Well, today's Left is just as bad as the witch hunters and commie hunters of old. (With the big difference that McCarthy was actually onto something...)
As for satanist, notice the small s. They aren't explicitly worshiping an anti Christian supernatural entity. They are merely reflexively anti all things Christian. Note how they overlook Moslems and others when they call out misogyny . St. Paul was a radical feminist compared to the pagans of his day or Islam today.
Finally, Marsicist is hard to pronouce.
---
With all this written, feel free to test drive Marxicist and prove me wrong. I will humbly do an "I'm not worthy!" bow if ti works.
Not sure accusations of satanism would work...the popularity of the occult (itself a symptom of cultural and moral decline) suggests that this would be water off a duck's back.
Depends on the audience. The old mainline Protestant denominations have long prided themselves on being Open Minded and not too legalistic or confining. Puritan and satanist both have sting.
And, by the way, none of these kill shots should be aimed directly at your audience! The purpose of name calling is to get the Center Left to distance itself from the radicals who have taken over the Democratic Party, much as Republicans have to distance themselves from the Radical Right.
That is precisely the intent here. The cultists are not amenable to persuasion. They are, however, quite sensitive to social status. Descriptions that reveal them for what they are by making a new and, once seen, intuitively obvious connection in the audience's mind, are toxic to them - they go from being scary to vaguely pathetic.
One tip (and it is a good one). A friend who knew a vast amount about the behavioural sciences once told me that the one thing a clinician NEVER does is identify the underlying complex until the patient is becoming aware of it themselves. Do that and you get an explosive reaction.
I did the prac on that the hard way in a non-clinical setting when I straightforwardly told my boss at the time that I did not care what she thought about me or my work. That touched a nerve...she flew out of her chair in an absolute rage. Quite a nasty scene, but very funny in hindsight.
Find the right nerve and test it with a verbal bayonet.
Excellent point re aim: you cannot convince diehard believers with logic or evidence, the real target is those who remain capable of rethinking things.
The Democratic Party has become the Party of Charles Manson.
This one might be too old a reference for the young, but for aging Boomers it is dead on accurate. Charles Manson was a violent nutcase who believed that the path to Marxist revolution was to start a race war.
I have thought for a while that the Obama and Biden Administrations were applying a strategy out of Helter Skelter.
The scum in the Weather Underground adored Manson and said so publicly. This to be expected, they were probably a controlled opposition movement...you can see that from the leniency of the sentences given to the ringleaders and their post-prison careers. The contrast with the way the system deals with violent opposition that is not sponsored by the Deep State is telling.
Yes, I read Chaos a couple of years ago and was thoroughly engrossed in the connections drawn by the author. Definitely a tour de force on the subject of Manson and the Deep State. Helter Skelter is a reasonable definition of the strategy in play by the extreme left in charge of the democrat party.
O'Neill is at work on a follow up volume. I am thrilled at the prospect of that.
As for the current iteration of Helter Skelter, I would say that the Democrats are the preferred political agents of the Deep State. The extreme left within the party are simply useful to manage relationships with key constituencies and to enable various political projects to operate. The Squad and the Woke are not in charge at the top, though the Woke definitely run the party machine across the country and provide advice to the party leaders in Congress but these leaders still answer to donors as well as masters within the Deep State. The extreme left are a demanding constituency within the party but they are brought to heal when needed, as we can see over Ukraine.
The current real world Helter Skelter has been authorised by men at the top whose priority is control. Ideology is not a motivation for them, merely a tool. Unfortunately for them they are like the sorceror's apprentice...they have set forces in motion that are destabilising everything.
To put it another way, the extreme Left dance in ecstasy at the rites of Cthulhu, but Cthulhu focuses on the sacrificial offerings.
I'll keep an eye out for the follow up. Another book you may have read or would find interesting is "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream " by David McGowan.
I listened to the audio book. A turgid and gossipy look at the 60's-70's music scene. Good for when you want to engage in the somewhat tawdry act of reading People Magazine or some trash like that.
Description from Amazon:
Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, the Doors, and Love with Arthur Lee, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.
But there was a dark side to that scene as well.
Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would care to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians, and intelligence personnel - the same sort of people who just happened to give birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all of the canyon's colorful characters - rock stars, hippies, murderers, and politicos - happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is the very strange, but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a hippie utopia.
Yes. I have read McGowan. It did not live up to my expectations. I read it too late to verify details with an old friend and mentor, one of the first Baby Boomers and an exceptionally fine and decent man, who had worked behind the scenes in the music industry in Australia and the US very successfully. He knew everybody. As it happens my friend's father (a genuine war hero who piloted Lancaster bombers in the RAF and who died just over a year ago at truly advanced age) had once held a top-level intelligence position. My friend told me a few truly amazing anecdotes related to Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Nancy Sinatra etc. And he knew some very interesting stuff about Manson and his crew. I became interested in McGowan's book precisely because of my friend's many stories.
It is fascinating and disturbing...fascinating because of the impact of the popular music scene then and disturbing to think that there was anything as profoundly vile as the Manson Family caught up in any of it.
Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 4, 2023Liked by John Carter
Further to my remarks, I am not saying that Obama or Biden are conscious Mansonites, merely that the dynamics have an extremely eery resonance. Not sure what is going on. Hyperstition?
Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023Liked by John Carter
💬 when you possess the True Name of a dark spirit, you own the fucker + 💬 The labels were then appropriated by dissidents, at which point the egregore started distancing itself from them + 💬 Pepperidge Farm remembers
Curtis Yarvin from (s)lightly different angle ↓↓
🗨 Power hates to be named. Power has to stay ahead of its enemies. These labels evolve as private, informal codewords among cool insiders; are discovered by their enemies; and are abandoned by the insiders, who change their codes—then start to insist that they never used those codes in the first place. Power does not exist. But its memory can be hard to delete.
I would agree that oligarchic power, Yarvin's cathedral, absolutely hates to be named. Such power relies on the illusion that it is not power, that there's no such thing as power. It's the mild mannered middle manager speaking in the third person passive of bland bureaucratese, who isn't doing anything himself you understand, merely following best practices, listening to the experts, acting according to the manual. Just don't ask who wrote the manual.
Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023Liked by John Carter
Describing the psychic effects of a rapidly evolving mental health crisis on a civilizational scale is ambitious. You definitely are on the right track. Political battle requires destabilising the enemy. Identifying their raw nerves for target practice is essential (and fun).
My only qualm about Marxcissist is that by incorporating Marx it affixes the problem to 19th c. ideology. What we are seeing draws on the experience of Leninism, Trotskyism and Maoism but mostly grows out of very indigenous, non-Marxist, sources, above all race and gender relations in a thoroughly capitalist context and the neurocognitive decline induced by social media addiction couple with drug abuse. I get the impression that the North American right is way more comfortable with discussing Marxism than it is with race or class. Since this involves people discussing books that they usually have not read the standard of ideation is inevitably dismal.
And, frankly, given the condition of the SJWs etc, I feel nostalgic for the Reds of the past, quite a few of whom deserved respect at a personal level regardless of the nature of their beliefs. The Young Pioneers (or Putin's Young Army movement now) look like gods compared to the blue-haired misfits and rejects of the West. To see what I mean check out this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWtLuZQn6_8
As for narcisism, my understanding (which may be wrong) is that the condition is not about ego inflation, but trouble making subject/object distinctions. Since the SJWs make everything about themselves this is perhaps me being grossly pedantic.
My guess is that the eventual takedown word will involve an association with status...nothing produces an adrenal effect faster than intimations of changing relativities of status. We are apes that live in groups. Zoön politikon (political animal or social animal). Status determines who eats and who mates. The woke are tormented by two things: the erasure of individuality in a homogenised world where identities are plastic (and transparently derived from the infotainment industry) resulting in chronic uncertainty and feelings of inauthenticity and the experience of material frustration/downward social mobility (or the fear of it) hence the desperation to claw a position in an uncertain world.
The attraction of woke for the BIPOCs is simply collecting the rent from whitey one way or another and the thrill of seeing rivals degraded and humiliated. With the white wokes it is status or perceptions of a delusionary status as a prop to the ego.
You're not wrong in any of this, but you might also be overthinking it a bit. The intent of the term isn't academic precision so much as linguistic ego damage, and the primary context I have in mind is American since, frankly, America is the heart of this beast. So it's not so much a matter of what political historians or clinical psychiatrists will make of the word - it's the impact it has on Jane Normie, whose relationship to Marxist and narcissist is much more connotative than it is denotative.
I've taken the term out for a test drive with normies out in the real world, and so far it seems to work. Last night I ran it by the friendly lesbian bartender at the local tavern, and she immediately laughed and said it instantly brought to mind a person she knows.
As a European, me too I'm less inclined to use Marxism as a sort of blanket word for "evil", as seems customary for many Americans.
It is important to connect with the actual meaning people are trying to convey when they use words. For example, there are people in the US who use the term "Marxists" almost precisely as some Marxists use the word "Capitalists" - describing a corrupt and greedy clique of globalist oligarchs. And yet, they are at each others' throats! Some who call themselves Marxists are really more like American populists, while others are full-blown Neo-Marxist Theory-Believing Wokeies. And still others are influenced by the Neo-Marxists, but only took some good ideas from them and are pretty spot-on... Etc. pp.
I mean, Michael Parenti self-identified as a Marxist, and he was brilliant! His son is also a hardcore leftie but he's spot-on in many ways. Bottom line: at some point, labels can stand in the way, and people just need to talk.
The trouble is that with repeated use of labels, people become lazy. They prioritise assumed similarities and neglect direct observation, thus missing what is singular.
The trouble with the b.s. about Marxism in America is that you need to read books to understand any theory and most self-described Marxists barely read, let alone read in order to undertake any disciplined thought. Hence the absurdity of people who champion racial resentment and the lumpen proletariat over skilled workers and entrepreneurs.
What I find ludicrous about the US right is that many discuss books that they have not read. Imagine dismissing the Frankfurt School without understanding how much they had in common with Heidegger!
In my experience truly serious people read what their opponents actually write and they read it carefully.
Unfortunately, we are living though an era of escalating neurocognitive impairment from poor education, widespread use of psychoactives (above all cannabis) and infantilised infotainment. A zombie herd is being formed.
"The trouble with the b.s. about Marxism in America is that you need to read books to understand any theory and most self-described Marxists barely read, let alone read in order to undertake any disciplined thought. Hence the absurdity of people who champion racial resentment and the lumpen proletariat over skilled workers and entrepreneurs."
Indeed. Meaning they aren't really Marxists; it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption.
Exactly. Most politics is larping. The central feature of Western society is maximum immersion in infotainment. Monkey see, monkey do. Television explains more about the cultural and social psychologies than anything else. The self-understanding of people who brand themselves by their political beliefs is almost always next to non-existent. And the numbers radicalised by books are probably equivalent to the numbers taking up falconry as a hobby.
The current political fevers are strongest with those parts of the population who are either desperate for personal distraction or a career in misdirection. Those who are economically surplus or at risk of becoming so. The redundant or soon to be redundant. So they dream up a role and play it...usually very badly. And the roles are invariably taken directly from TV. HOUSE OF CARDS (US version generallly, but the UK one as well for the dedicated) has had a bigger influence on the formation of political staffers in the Anglophone world in the last decade or so than any book. Just ask any of them what they watch and you'll see...and then compare it to the pitch those shits put on for their employers.
Exactly, yes. And ideologies are merely decorative costumes for the staged mummery. They can be taken on or off, switched out, combined without regard to logical consistency. Ideology in this world is faek and ghey, which is why the dissident faction increasingly doesn't bother with it.
One fights the entropic pull of clown world not by adopting beliefs, or by critiquing them, but by cultivating physical and spiritual virtue. I suppose one could argue that vitalism is an ideology itself, which it is in part ... but it's an ideology that demands results from self work, and is resistant to fakery for this reason. One cannot merely PROFESS vitalism, one must by its very nature live it. Same with stoicism etc. They are praxis first and foremost.
Living well is the best revenge. Not in the consumerist sense, but in the sense of achieving a degree of self-realisation through purposeful actions.
The success of infotainment (which is all about vicarious experience and parasocial relationships and the falsification of everything) in taking the place of real experience creates a need for authenticity and activities that provide a sense of being present and alive.
Feb 4, 2023·edited Feb 4, 2023Liked by John Carter
One point about reading. Here is a passage from an interview with Bret Easton Ellis:
"I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel."
That sums it up. Reading of any kind is a minority thing and getting rarer by the day. The claims people make about themselves (above all in politics) need to be tested against the evidence.
In case anyone is interested, here is a link to the interview.
Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023Liked by John Carter
⚠️ Scam alert! 📢 SOS!!
🗨 I bring you good tidings / Let’s converse ㈩𝟏𝟕𝟖𝟔𝟔𝟑𝟐𝟑𝟓𝟐𝟕
↑↑ goes in many a stack comments, purportedly from authors but *no*! Avatar pics & names hard to differentiate at first glance (though of course without author's mark and orange tick where applicable) 🤦
Care to announce loud to Deimos publisher crowd? I wonder how long until Barsoom's top-form
Yep, saw that on TGC's blog. I'll spread the word, and will certainly be keeping my eye out for any pollution of my own comments section by these vermin.
I propose the refusal runs deeper than stylistic, to subcutaneous fascia at least. Anywhoo, caps a lousy saviour make, as the curious case of GC readily demonstrates.
Still can't figure out what a secret sauce this s/fucker rustled up to bold zer number string 🤔
“SJW has largely fallen out of use…” Leftists always reject the names that they apply to themselves. “Liberal, socialist, progressive…” at some point leftists renounced them all and demanded that they be called something else. Maybe it’s because their labels for themselves become associated with their Marxcissist ideas, which are nonsense and untruths (as I discuss in “Leftist Untruths”).
Progressive is one they've stuck with for a long time, actually - they still wear it quite proudly, as despite conservatism's best efforts it's very difficult to make 'prog' into a hurtful slur. Like, who hates progress? Similarly with liberal, albeit the meaning of this is fuzzy since it's changed so much; but you still get plenty of conservatives saying "I'm a CLASSICAL liberal!", which is basically accusing the left of heretical deviance from the true faith. Finally, socialist is something that doesn't hurt them, either; they're proud to be socialists, and talk about it all the time.
Narcissists maintain the perfect self image to compensate for their total lack of self-esteem. That is, the don't feel any sense of self worth. Therefore they try to create a persona which will have worth, and victim Olympics works very well. It's just perfect for them so they can immediately and on the cheap become double plus good persons, by attributes although not in essentia.
This lack of essence, ie dasein, or väsen, is the same thing as lacking spirit and ultimately capacity for love. Which means, they hate.
If you don't love yourself, you hate the world, so they are haters, and self haters.
This is also why they hate Christians with such venom, because they are in total rejection of truth, beauty and love. But I digress in my Platonic underpinnings...
Just ask them "why don't you love yourself? Why treat yourself with such little respect? It's undignified.
If you want to go for the kill, kill them with kindness and aim for the heart.
"If so much of the 20th century's destruction was rooted in 19th-century German thought, so much of our 21st-century stupidity, self-absorption, and Personality Disorder Politics are rooted in 20th-century California."
Bernardo Kastrup, in his Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, mentions what a disaster it was that Hegel rather than Schop triumphed in German philosophy. He means that Schop's idealism would have provided a better metaphysics, compatible with quantum mechanics, than scientific materialism, and I suspect he is a total shitlib himself (he's written an "open letter" to Putin demanding he resign and let Biden bring muh democracy to Russia, literally) but I would adopt that idea and adapt it along your lines. Without Hegel, pompous bullshit would not pass for super-knowledge in Germany; no Marx, no Nietzsche (a clear writer but simply obsessed with reversing all of Schop's ideas); thus no Communism or Fascism to duke it out in the 20th century. Also no Heidegger, although he's a bit sui generis anyway (and on record as "loathing" Schopenhauer). Heidegger is a classic narcissist, btw, writing 100 volumes to bring "the message of Beying" (sic) to a fallen world, etc. Carl Jung privately said he was clearly a schizo and a graphomaniac.
Anyway, before California there was Frankfurt. If you read Grand Hotel Abyss, you can see that the Frankfurters were the original Marxcissists. They were from rich Jewish families, whose money enabled their fine classical German educations, but they were ashamed of their uncool, merchant parents and became "Marxists" to piss them off. Hence the need to "reimagine" Marxism as having nothing to do with revolution or workers, but a dreamy state of mind where you imagine Utopia (but never try to actually do anything about it). Horkheimer, the head of the school, spend his whole career caging grants etc. to keep things afloat, which required him to spend his time stamping out any hints of revolutionary action, which would scare off the rich donors. Towards the end of his life he abandoned the whole thing and just wrote about his real hero: Schopenhauer.
Kastrup also strikes me as a shitlib. My introduction to him was a dialogue between him and Christopher Langan. The contrast between the two couldn't have been stronger. Kastrup is a powerful argument that the world, or at least his corner of it, doesn't need more metaphysics - it needs hormone therapy.
Which was one of Nietzsche's core insights really. Much philosophy isn't really philosophy, it's indigestion and a lack of healthy exercise.
I think I know what you mean. At the same time, if that's the same YT vid I saw, I thought Langan was a bit too high-T, inclined to try to make points by talking over and louder, like an academically trained Bill O'Reilly. I find this all the time on "dissident right" podcasts, like TDS and especially Myth of the 20th Century, where one of the podcasters seems drunk at times.
Nietzsche has a point, but the problem is that very different people can, in fact, assert the same views. My only interest in Kastrup's work is that he seems to have unknowingly stumbled into putting forward a metaphysics that would provide a nice, academically respectable background for what I'm really interested in, positive thinking or New Thought movement, especially Neville Goddard. Neville is basically the anti-Kastrup: tall, matinee idol handsome, smooth talking, married and raising children: all the things the "dissident right" talks about but never gets around to doing.
It's less rooting the philosophy in the lifestyle, more along the lines of "good optics." Use Kastrup but keep him in the back office, while Neville attracts the ladies at his lectures. (This is where I came up with the title of my first book on the topic, Magick for Housewives, although it turned out that people thought it was about "kitchen magick" which apparently is a thing, so the 2nd ed. was given a boring title that hits all the Amazon key words. Live and learn).
The postmodernists might call this "intellectual bricolage," appropriate the arguments for ones own purposes, whatever the other guy is or thinks. What could be more manly than such intellectual swashbuckling?
Langan's problem, or one of them, is precisely that he's too high-t. The man is a mountain, and risks crushing others merely by shifting his weight. That said, I actually found his performance in that debate to be highly restrained, given that Kastrup started off by admitting that he hadn't even bothered to familiarize himself with even the rudiments of Langan's thought, which was massively disrespectful. Kastrup's breakdown afterwards was rather typical of emotionally insecure, easily intimidated males.
That isn't to say that Kastrup's own ideas are entirely without value. Frankly, the dialogue with Langan wasn't a good platform for either of them to do much more than posture. Goddard I'm not aware of (any relation to the rocket scientist?), but he sounds interesting.
It occurs to me K is rather like Jordan Peterson. I think K is vastly more intelligent, and into more interesting things, but JP is another PhD, also an actual professor (for now...), obsessed with Carl Jung (as is K, who has a book on "decoding" his metaphysics), prone to hysteria (much more so), and now thinks, like some Hollywood celebrity, he should be giving out political advice (eg. "The West should get its act together" and attack Iran. Note the "clean up your room" language) like some geopolitical expert.
I don't think the two Goddards are connected, but Neville has a slight connection to A. Crowley (Crowley's ex-secretary met Neville and wrote the first book discussing him, back in 1947, while Crowley is connected to Jack Parsons, another rocket guy, through L. Ron Hubbard).
"Examines New Thought teacher Neville Goddard's sources in the Western esoteric traditions. Special mention is made of Julius Evola, Alistair Crowley and Colin Wilson."
However, there is a strong tendency on the right to dismiss Schopenhauer and everything Romantic as New Age mumbo jumbo that supposedly led to Wokeism. They tend to dismiss much of the German tradition as pure evil, either from an atheist-scientistic perspective or from a mainstream Christian perspective. Funny, that!
As for Wokeism, that's a perfect example. Schopenhauer abhorred slavery in "the United States of North America" as he calls it, as an example how evil men are (his famous "pessimism"). At the same time, when arguing that the more intelligent you are, the more you crave solitude, he casually notes that Negroes like to live together in one big house, "and cannot get enough of the company of their snub-nosed kind," while "everyone agrees" they are the least intelligent of all races. So he would be abhorred by both the Confederacy-loving Right and the Woke. Of course, his infamous essay "On Women" would be enough to be cancelled today; not a likely source for Wokeism. More abstractly, he denied the very idea that we could substantially "improve" the world, much less that such improvement was "inevitable" ; those Woke assumptions are from that airy-fairy head in the clouds Hegel (Obama's "the arc of history bends toward justice" is straight out of Hegel; of course so is the neocon's "end of history" -- see how complicated this is!),
True. Schop doesn't fit into their neat categories.
As for the "atheist-scientistic perspective," he's actually cited as "the first prominent atheist" in the Western tradition. (You could lose your academic job for that, like doxing today, but he had his own money and never "worked" as a philosopher). And he studied medicine, and kept up to date in the sciences, especially biology, as he found confirmation of his metaphysics of the Will there. He was, in short, pro-science and considered Hegel and the others as ignoramuses who were just juggling concepts. OTOH, said metaphysics was anything but "materialist" which is where Kastrup links it with QM; hence my original claim that philosophy took a wrong turn back then.
And as for the "mainstream Christian perspective," he despises Christianity and even more Judaism; actually he despises Christianity BECAUSE it promotes Jewish ideas, so he'd fit in with the anti-Christian side of the dissident Right. BUT another but: his metaphysical goal of overcoming the Will and his ethics based in compassion are aligned with some elements of mystical Christianity, and like his reading in science he's happy to quote lots of mystics in support thereof. That distinguishes him from the Nietzschean Right, since N largely just reversed both ideas to "discover" the Will to Power; obviously a more popular idea!
There's the official version of all these guys, which supports various ideologies, but then there's the reality. For example, everyone hates Nietzsche or loves Nietzsche as some kind of proto-Nazi; yet he loved Jews and hated German nationalist. OTOH, Hitler himself carried Schop's main works with him in the WWI trenches, and later said to Leni Riefenstahl "I can do nothing with Nietzsche; it's all in Schopenhauer." It seems like people just take whatever bits they already agree with and create their own version, and claim to "followers of X" or Y.
> as for the "mainstream Christian perspective," he despises Christianity and even more Judaism; actually he despises Christianity BECAUSE it promotes Jewish ideas
Can you recommend the appropriate work to read about this?
Well, that rather depends on which faction of the right we're discussing. The Christnats, especially, do tend to be Teutonophobes. Other factions are big fans of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Goethe, Spengler.
(clears throat, adopts exaggerated non-specific Slavic accent) WITH THE KIDNEY GRAVY it is how you say, fortifying for the spirit and satisfying for the palate
This is NOT FOOD, you understand, you fucking American gourmands, mash potato with kidney gravy is not there so you can stuff your fat bellies with it, it is MEDICINE for the BODY, you must RESPECT *coughs* you see how they attaq me!
OK, all this talk of foods has caused me to feel hunger, I have not time for thisnow but now must take quick smoke break to quell gnawing rodent in my gut, enjoy beautiful vital Slavic orchestral music in meantime.
Hell yeah! "Marxcissists." Now if they were Groucho Marxcissists and at least had a sense of humor about things, that would be one thing, but it's "communist manifesto" except that the pampered bourgeoise have swapped places with the proletariat. "Geez, this communism thing hasn't worked out too well -- in fact, it's even been one of the leading causes of death during the last century . . . Hey, I know, let's just get rid of all this 'concern for the working class' nonsense and make it all about my pronouns and my sex life and forcing everyone to pay attention to ME and celebrate MY self-identity on pain of CANCELLATION!!!"
Wrt no-editing experiment. Disclaimer: just for laughs!
💬 I’ve been looking for an Atomic Word with which to nuke this hateful egregore from orbit for years now.
Cf: 🗨 One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. (*)
To be fair, it’s more of a weak garden-path sentence (the final now ruins the illusion), but the association sprang to mind, and feels too funny not to share 🤸
Hey, John, thanks for the citation/shout-out, I really appreciate it and really appreciate that we can all educate, inspire and entertain each other here and elsewhere, in our little samizdat corner of the world.
I personally root the Marxcissists in 1960s California, more specifically a very swank place called the Esalen Institute, where various aspiring gurus (political and spiritual) helped create the New Left. This is where the delicate operation was made that excised the proletariat from their Messiah status and transformed "the redistribution of wealth" into the "redistribution of self-esteem". Once the proles had proved immune to the charms of the Vanguard class, Leftism became a luxury good designed to meet the spiritual, psychological and personal needs of the young, bourgeois and disaffected. I think this is where "The Personal is Political" went from slogan to cult to belief system for upscale liberals (especially women) and also where the state of California got the inspiration to create the world's first official Dept. of Self-Esteem (it may have also hosted the world's first "Diversity" seminar).
If so much of the 20th century's destruction was rooted in 19th-century German thought, so much of our 21st-century stupidity, self-absorption, and Personality Disorder Politics are rooted in 20th-century California.
Hopefully the Marxcissists can be tamed by granting their wish and holding up a mirror to their faces, and hopefully somehow they can see how ugly and hateful they've become.
Cheers!
The human potential movement California shit out in the 70s is absolutely the mother of abominations that inflicted Marxicissism on the world. If this little portmanteau can help these troglodytes crawl back into their cave in shame it will have done it's job.
In other news, wasn't exaggerating when I said you were a top commenter.
thanks is much appreciated...
as for the pathetic exercise in inflating the self-esteem of emotional cripples aka "Human Potential", there just seems to be such a deep need for spiritual meaning and psychological grounding in our deracinated post-Christian market state, and that goes double or triple for the refugees, exiles, drop-outs, burnouts and castaways that wash up on our Left coast.
Esalen fits alongside Scientology, Jonestown, and all the other California cults, where the lost souls and wannabe gurus begin their mating rituals, where moth and flame come together to fulfill their eternal roles.
I think the biggest mistake made by the rather euphoric, hedonistic human potential cults was their strong tendency towards wishful thinking. They'd grab whatever seemed useful or pleasing from whatever traditions they liked, discard everything they didn't like, filled in the blanks with made-up nonsense, and then disappeared into their own assholes as a result. As a path for spiritual growth it was entirely sterile, since they made it so easy for themselves to avoid anything that didn't feel good or really challenge them. Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was.
And that's all without even accounting for the possibility that there's something very real in the subtle realms, in which case they were like children playing with a fire in a dark forest stalked by hungry wolves.
"Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was."
If it feels good and flatters my ego, it has to be true!
Though it was a movement mostly crafted and led by exiled European shrinks and "thinkers", the entire New Age movement is deeply painfully inescapably American.
These were con artists much like the televangelists or the Tony Robbins types, and what they were selling was prepackaged drive-thru spirituality, just another accessory to bangle the holy Self with, like clothes or cars.
And in the process they ruined a lot of lives. Fast food poisons the body, and commercialized spirituality poisons the soul.
It seems that just about the entire New Left/Social Justice movement delivered benefits to those residing at the top of the upscale urbanite class (profs, journalists, the NYT/NPR/PBS devotees, most esp the women), while those lower on the ol' Maslow pyramid learned that shit runs downhill: they didn't get monetized self-actualization but broken homes and families, drug addiction and the other pathologies of maximum personal autonomy, and an endless supply of anxiety, depression, and personality disorders.
If only our aspiring overlords and "activists" put down the Foucault and picked up some Chuang Tzu:
'There is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.'
The emotional cripples of the 60s were supermen compared with the kids today. They were more colourful, wore better clothes and the music was incomparably better. Monterey and all that. A hippy picnic would have been healthier and more fun than any video game.
Ridiculous as it all was, people need to lighten up and someone as intellectually serious as you should recall Spinoza: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari sed intelligere.
Error has its rights...and its dignity. Honour both.
anything and everyone rooted in the Old World is vastly richer, deeper and more interesting than anything or anyone rooted in the New World...it's like the difference bw someone who fought in WW2 and someone who fought in "Call of Duty".
Agreed. The Old World can be erased in a generation or so. Jacob Burkhardt, Nietzsche's mentor, predicted the Americanisation of Europe and the process has pretty much been completed. Whatever remains is retained by literary and cultural traditions as delicate as a strand from a spider's web.
The polymath and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once wrote that all traditions disappear within a generation or so of its personal transmission (he was very big on mentors, master/apprentice stuff and the problems of the transmission of knowledge by tradition and the evolution of knowledge when constrained by tradition). The fragmentation of inherited forms of social and cultural life has now reached the point where we can expect catastrophic effects over the next several generations. The disruptions within academia (DEI, decolonising the curriculum, feminising the culture, deprioritising white men for hiring) have destroyed the conditions for the personal transferal of knowledge. What we cannot save now will not be saved at all.
...<pinned Clever's comment> 😂
A top commenter should, after all, be at the top.
Devon "Blackpilled" Stack did a dive into the sewer that was Esalen and the Human Potential Movement in his "Portal to Hell" insomnia stream edition. Judged that they "literally opened a portal to hell"... https://odysee.com/@Blackpilled:b/jewhellhole:3
CP, you are quite the optimist if you think that holding a mirror to their faces would shame any of them. They are more likely to be charmed by what they see or flattered by your attention.
The only thing that has ever been known to work with collective delusion on any scale is catastrophe.
Exactly. These people can't be shamed or reasoned with. Happily, they are working hard to collapse our society so perhaps the mass delusion will collapse soon too. Our only concern should be becoming independent enough to weather the storm.
i know, i was just trying not to be so gloomy for once!
Gloomy? You never come across as gloomy. But is all subjective. We have been cheated and disappointed by the system and our good sense abused by all the rubbish, but they own the system and their comfort zone depends on the pantomime of competence going on forever. Chin up, whatever happens a few tentacles of Cthulhu are destined to end up as calamari.
Karl Kraus (CP, you'd love his epigrams, https://www.amazon.com/Half-Truths-One-Half-Truths-Aphorisms/dp/0226452689) once wrote that Vienna was the laboratory of world-historical destruction. Truer words, as they say...
Someone who knows Karl Kraus, yay! He was something of a John Carter of his day, burning the zeitgeist and its minions alive in his prose.
The aphorism is the acme of literature: style, density of meaning and acuity of insight are displayed to best effect.
I'd say that we need K.K. more than ever but it would be torture for him to be alive in times like these. It certainly is for us.
💬 The aphorism is the acme of literature
...second only to the meme, as the most esteemed feline pundit on interwebz would prob argue. Not presactly literature, them’s memes though 🙂
🗨 memes are the resurgence of rationality and the revenge of the shape rotators. they combine the speed of appeal to emotion with the informational density of long logical strings. it's intellectual jazz as a medium for rational renaissance. and it's a language the irrational cannot master.
They are all that you say. The next step is that the creative element need to go for the jugular. Plato said that if you change the music, you change the city.
When a resistance song becomes popular or widely known, then you will know that the opposition is making real progress. If I was a campaign manager for Trump, I'd forget polls and consultants and hire a songwriter/composer....someone from Los Angeles or Nashville with long experience performing live in front of an audience and who understands how to wind people up.
Take an old song (vintage folk, classic rock it does not matter) with a great melody and prepare lyrics that are carefully metrical and synchronised with the rhythm. It does not have to be overtly party political, merely reactionary and obnoxiously anti-woke....perhaps something on the theme of the Great Replacement or a lament for babies killed in partial birth abortions or a snappy and mocking ballad of George Floyd. Then get it out there via podcast. Project Orpheus. War by sound.
Ever see the Chilean movie, No? Reminiscent of this idea, although not musical per se.
Not sure music will work though; no shared musical culture. However, changing the topic, directing the flow of conversation by injecting new memes that spread on their own - this is the way. Victory through joy; assume the sale, communicate the idea of how much fun victory will be.
thanks, i do like Kraus, I recently read his "Last Days of Mankind", which was a bit of a slog and filled with maybe too many time- and place-specific references to be enjoyable 100 yrs later, but it is also filled w gems.
the man had a very clear head.
Respect is due. Milton, Wyndham Lewis, Sciascia, Calasso and Kraus. This newsletter attracts very rare birds indeed. The lights are going out, but not here.
I salute you, from one bibliomaniac to another ;)
CP, further to your very insightful observations about California I'd suggest that we need to understand why it happened.
California was a laboratory for the development of lifestyles because the system was under pressure from the expectations of the generation that had fought the war and the even greater expectations of their children.
The legitimacy of the pre-war social order had been abraded by the Great Depression and the political class of the US was very conscious of the expectations off the masses for full-employment, mass prosperity and opportunities for upward social mobility. Consumerism was the response. And they were terrified of the USSR and the threat of the industrialised working class turning to the pro-Moscow Left.
Cultural changes were required to adapt the tastes and lifestyles of the newly prosperous masses, above all their children (the Baby Boomers) and to create a New Left that could not be controlled by Moscow or function as any kind of autonomous leadership for the workers.
The research into psychology that had been undertaken at that time was harnessed to help with the marketing, but also with a vast range of the of issues.
The Counter-Culture was developed to adapt capitalism to the times (by dissolving archaic bourgeois culture) and to adapt the young themselves to the needs of the system. The Counter-Culture was about adapting the culture to the needs of a post-bourgeois social order, one in which a mass middle-class were given opportunities for consumption in return for their loyalty and docility.
It all ended in tears in Vietnam and the stagnation of the 70s but by then the cultural forces had a life of their own and were yet again refitted to meet the needs of the system.
That's my take in a nutshell. IMHO it is pointless to focus on the craziness or the hypocrisies. We have to see the logic and the forces of necessity driving things.
lately i've been seeing the marriage of capitalism and progressivism in almost everything (unless it's not a marriage but more twins conjoined at birth)
Thomas Frank's THE CONQUEST OF COOL.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3618721.html
Has anyone else noticed there's a LOT of people that spend most of their time on the internet talking about narcissists? It's a REALLY popular topic to play armchair clinician and exchange stories of unpleasant interactions out in the world and dissect what aspects of narcissism were manifesting in the obvious narcissist that was the source of the unpleasant interaction.
There's even an informal credentialism in this where people describe themselves as "experts" or deeply experienced with narcissists; invariably this seems to be because one has had a long stream of usually boyfriends or husbands that were all, mysteriously, pathological narcissists.
Luckily, I am not an expert.
It was one of those things I just woke up to one day and noticed I started seeing a previously uncommon word over and over again.
I know exactly what you mean. Maybe it's just trendy idk but I kinda feel like maybe there really are more actual narcissists around these days. At least on social media.
It's probably pointless for me to care about it at this point in history, like a time-travelling Templar screaming in anguish that the Elks are doing the rituals wrong these days, but I draw a clear line around "clinical" narcissism or psychopathy or any of the other fun words.
We've been having lots of fun using clinical words for social behavior we don't like or want to Munchausen up since the 90s or so.
I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague.
"I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague."
Here fucking here.
My sort of rough understanding is that narcissists are generally made, not born; psychopaths at least in some cases the opposite. Dunno if that's true but I'm not a psychologist. In any case, like you say below, narcissism is definitely more prevalent.
The spread of psychic illness is integral to the survival of the regime. In medicine it is called iatrogenic morbidity...illness caused by physicians. A very well understood phenomenon in psychiatry.
Regime supporters benefit from crippling their rivals and subordinates in the best 'Darwinian' fashion, while the subaltern element manipulate their masters by encouraging their proclivities towards delusional thinking.
There's a lot of genetic predisposition for psychopathy, but it's by no means the only route.
But clinical narcissism is very much its own thing. The prevailing research was that it seems to be early childhood social development, so nearly always from parent/caretaker (which of course, at least in the case of bio parents, introduces a potential genetic confound we just haven't seen yet).
Anyway, there's certainly more narcissISM.
As long as we are assigning medical terms, it has been my general finding that most of the boyfriends/husbands who are described by their blue cheka tormentors are really Munchausen by Proxy victims.
I'd guess that most of them probably are actually assholes, maybe even pieces of shit, but they're the latest in a string of such men that the cheka consistently seeks out and cultivates.
But probably not all or even most actually disordered.
It really kicked off when Trump was around -- all about his "Narcissism." Maybe started with the Hillary people?
Seemed to coincide with the rise of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I think it was earlier. The trend of pathologizing and armchair-diagnosing the normal range of human behavior to make mundane things darker (does your partner have DARK TRIAD TRAITS?!?) and more important and make oneself feel like an expert is long.
Definitely began earlier. And once the blue checka diagnosed Trump with the disease, awareness and usage spread. And social media cultivates narcissisms, allegedly.
Speaking of Trump Derangement, fuck every "behavioral expert" doing their nonsense fortune cookie Barnum analyses on "nonverbal behavior cues" of politicians in public that amazingly always lines up with the party-line take on their diabolical personality disorder.
Been digging that sphere for a lot due to personal reasons like the ones you stated, probably before it turned popular (I think it was after 2020). More recently I stumble with the commentary of a psychologist called Sam Vaknin and other man (I am unsure of his credentials) called Richard Grannon. They work with an interesting model of the phenomenon. The latter in particular says that narcissism prospers not because of them but because of its complementary, which is rooted in the inability of people to say No.
Well, Vaknin's theory is a reiterating of psychoanalytic theory of narcissism going all the way back to Freud: overly permissive mother worships son during the age range of ego formation equals narcissism.
That we have a parent-like state and culture treating emotionally immature or vulnerable people similarly would give it fertile ground to prosper.
But ultimately it IS on the narcissist. A healthy mind is able to exercise self-control and self-criticism, even if others aren't.
And, well, for the people who become narcissism "experts" because they've had lots of relationships with them, my favorite expression has always been, "the only thing all your failed relationships have in common is you."
And there is one interesting thing Grannon and Vaknin say. Narcissistic behavior is kind of contagious, like being bitten by a vampire. There are certain type of people who tend to approach ''narcissists'', due to ''repetition compulsion''. And the interaction fosters their own bad traits. ''It is not them, is us'', as Grannon says.
It is rooted or take ideas from that but it is not only that. He describes these behaviors as a response to trauma. But, as you said, explanation is not justification.
Sam Vaknin is himself a narcissist, just something to know
Indeed
"Blue Cheka." LOL.
I can't take credit for that, that's pure frog Twitter.
Frog Twitter....Radio Free America broadcasting from a secret location.
Supported by the Rainbow Cheka, Glitter Cheka and the Nouveau Tonton Macoute (BLM). The zombie herd is proud of its diversity.
Since White Christians seem to be the most hated group on the planet these days, and one quoting The Bible (gasp) is even worse, I realize I'm taking my chances. Regardless, there's nothing new under the sun. Or would it help if I began with a few Shakespeare quotations?
"O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!"
"Few love to hear the sins they love to act."
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."
Matthew 6 NKJV
“Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them...
when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do..."
Like, don't post it on Twitter and Facebook to display how righteous you are, because you're only proving the opposite.
Or, to quote John Carter:
"the incentive structures of social media incentivize and manufacture narcissists."
"... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Matt 6 NKJV
“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.
Truth hurts. It's supposed to. It sure pissed off the Pharisees when Jesus spoke it.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness."
Carter: "... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Jesus exposed their hypocrisy and they crucified him. The truth (pearls) does tend to elicit extreme reactions, like being torn to pieces, as quoted above.
So there you have it. Shakespreare, Jesus and John Carter. Great minds thinking alike and all.
Mark is great, don't ever apologize for Mark-posting, bro.
Mark is the BEST!!!
"In which case, they’re usually narcissistic anyhow, practically by comorbid definition. ‘Catty, emotionally insecure fairy’ is a stereotype for a reason."
"If homosexuals weren't such jerks, 'fag' wouldn't be an insult." -- Jack Donovan (by memory)
Great line. So true.
Not evil enough. Indeed, the Diet Coke of Evil.
As a member in good standing of the Dark Triad Libertarians, narcissicist has it's own cachet. It has a devil may care coolness worthy of Joe Camel.
I prefer Whinocrats.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, noble or virtuous in being a whiner. A whiner is both selfish AND pathetic AND ineffective. Slaves and little kids whine. Getting a degree in Intersectionality is just getting new excuses to whine.
Teaching once-oppressed minorities to be narcissistic is to compensate them from the days where it was dangerous for a negro to say No to a white man. (It wasn't that long ago, BTW.) Teaching once-oppressed minorities to whine harder, on the other hand, is simply deepening the slave mentality.
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My other favored appellation is Puritanical satanist. This one is small beer for the young, but for older Leftists "puritanical" is poison. I'm old enough to remember diligent leftists who read John Stuart Mill and claimed to like it. These people mocked the Right for McCarthy and the Salem Witch Trials. Well, today's Left is just as bad as the witch hunters and commie hunters of old. (With the big difference that McCarthy was actually onto something...)
As for satanist, notice the small s. They aren't explicitly worshiping an anti Christian supernatural entity. They are merely reflexively anti all things Christian. Note how they overlook Moslems and others when they call out misogyny . St. Paul was a radical feminist compared to the pagans of his day or Islam today.
Finally, Marsicist is hard to pronouce.
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With all this written, feel free to test drive Marxicist and prove me wrong. I will humbly do an "I'm not worthy!" bow if ti works.
Whinocrats! That is brilliant.
Not sure accusations of satanism would work...the popularity of the occult (itself a symptom of cultural and moral decline) suggests that this would be water off a duck's back.
I've met bluehairs who are pretty much open satanists, so yeah.
Depends on the audience. The old mainline Protestant denominations have long prided themselves on being Open Minded and not too legalistic or confining. Puritan and satanist both have sting.
And, by the way, none of these kill shots should be aimed directly at your audience! The purpose of name calling is to get the Center Left to distance itself from the radicals who have taken over the Democratic Party, much as Republicans have to distance themselves from the Radical Right.
That is precisely the intent here. The cultists are not amenable to persuasion. They are, however, quite sensitive to social status. Descriptions that reveal them for what they are by making a new and, once seen, intuitively obvious connection in the audience's mind, are toxic to them - they go from being scary to vaguely pathetic.
One tip (and it is a good one). A friend who knew a vast amount about the behavioural sciences once told me that the one thing a clinician NEVER does is identify the underlying complex until the patient is becoming aware of it themselves. Do that and you get an explosive reaction.
I did the prac on that the hard way in a non-clinical setting when I straightforwardly told my boss at the time that I did not care what she thought about me or my work. That touched a nerve...she flew out of her chair in an absolute rage. Quite a nasty scene, but very funny in hindsight.
Find the right nerve and test it with a verbal bayonet.
Excellent point re aim: you cannot convince diehard believers with logic or evidence, the real target is those who remain capable of rethinking things.
Oops! I forgot one! (I was getting tired):
MANSONITES!
The Democratic Party has become the Party of Charles Manson.
This one might be too old a reference for the young, but for aging Boomers it is dead on accurate. Charles Manson was a violent nutcase who believed that the path to Marxist revolution was to start a race war.
BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU GOT IT TOO.
I have thought for a while that the Obama and Biden Administrations were applying a strategy out of Helter Skelter.
The scum in the Weather Underground adored Manson and said so publicly. This to be expected, they were probably a controlled opposition movement...you can see that from the leniency of the sentences given to the ringleaders and their post-prison careers. The contrast with the way the system deals with violent opposition that is not sponsored by the Deep State is telling.
Are you aware that Charlie was quite possibly working for the Man? There is a great book on the Deep State and the killings. https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Charles-Manson-History-Sixties/dp/0316477559
I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Yes, I read Chaos a couple of years ago and was thoroughly engrossed in the connections drawn by the author. Definitely a tour de force on the subject of Manson and the Deep State. Helter Skelter is a reasonable definition of the strategy in play by the extreme left in charge of the democrat party.
O'Neill is at work on a follow up volume. I am thrilled at the prospect of that.
As for the current iteration of Helter Skelter, I would say that the Democrats are the preferred political agents of the Deep State. The extreme left within the party are simply useful to manage relationships with key constituencies and to enable various political projects to operate. The Squad and the Woke are not in charge at the top, though the Woke definitely run the party machine across the country and provide advice to the party leaders in Congress but these leaders still answer to donors as well as masters within the Deep State. The extreme left are a demanding constituency within the party but they are brought to heal when needed, as we can see over Ukraine.
The current real world Helter Skelter has been authorised by men at the top whose priority is control. Ideology is not a motivation for them, merely a tool. Unfortunately for them they are like the sorceror's apprentice...they have set forces in motion that are destabilising everything.
To put it another way, the extreme Left dance in ecstasy at the rites of Cthulhu, but Cthulhu focuses on the sacrificial offerings.
I'll keep an eye out for the follow up. Another book you may have read or would find interesting is "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream " by David McGowan.
I listened to the audio book. A turgid and gossipy look at the 60's-70's music scene. Good for when you want to engage in the somewhat tawdry act of reading People Magazine or some trash like that.
Description from Amazon:
Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, the Doors, and Love with Arthur Lee, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.
But there was a dark side to that scene as well.
Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would care to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians, and intelligence personnel - the same sort of people who just happened to give birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all of the canyon's colorful characters - rock stars, hippies, murderers, and politicos - happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is the very strange, but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a hippie utopia.
Yes. I have read McGowan. It did not live up to my expectations. I read it too late to verify details with an old friend and mentor, one of the first Baby Boomers and an exceptionally fine and decent man, who had worked behind the scenes in the music industry in Australia and the US very successfully. He knew everybody. As it happens my friend's father (a genuine war hero who piloted Lancaster bombers in the RAF and who died just over a year ago at truly advanced age) had once held a top-level intelligence position. My friend told me a few truly amazing anecdotes related to Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Nancy Sinatra etc. And he knew some very interesting stuff about Manson and his crew. I became interested in McGowan's book precisely because of my friend's many stories.
It is fascinating and disturbing...fascinating because of the impact of the popular music scene then and disturbing to think that there was anything as profoundly vile as the Manson Family caught up in any of it.
Further to my remarks, I am not saying that Obama or Biden are conscious Mansonites, merely that the dynamics have an extremely eery resonance. Not sure what is going on. Hyperstition?
They will take glee in the satanist label but whinocrats YES
💬 when you possess the True Name of a dark spirit, you own the fucker + 💬 The labels were then appropriated by dissidents, at which point the egregore started distancing itself from them + 💬 Pepperidge Farm remembers
Curtis Yarvin from (s)lightly different angle ↓↓
🗨 Power hates to be named. Power has to stay ahead of its enemies. These labels evolve as private, informal codewords among cool insiders; are discovered by their enemies; and are abandoned by the insiders, who change their codes—then start to insist that they never used those codes in the first place. Power does not exist. But its memory can be hard to delete.
I would agree that oligarchic power, Yarvin's cathedral, absolutely hates to be named. Such power relies on the illusion that it is not power, that there's no such thing as power. It's the mild mannered middle manager speaking in the third person passive of bland bureaucratese, who isn't doing anything himself you understand, merely following best practices, listening to the experts, acting according to the manual. Just don't ask who wrote the manual.
Theodore Dalrymple is the go-to expert of all things ‘mild mannered middle manager’ 😉
🗨 To treat all people with equal contempt and indifference is the bureaucrat’s idea of equity.
Describing the psychic effects of a rapidly evolving mental health crisis on a civilizational scale is ambitious. You definitely are on the right track. Political battle requires destabilising the enemy. Identifying their raw nerves for target practice is essential (and fun).
My only qualm about Marxcissist is that by incorporating Marx it affixes the problem to 19th c. ideology. What we are seeing draws on the experience of Leninism, Trotskyism and Maoism but mostly grows out of very indigenous, non-Marxist, sources, above all race and gender relations in a thoroughly capitalist context and the neurocognitive decline induced by social media addiction couple with drug abuse. I get the impression that the North American right is way more comfortable with discussing Marxism than it is with race or class. Since this involves people discussing books that they usually have not read the standard of ideation is inevitably dismal.
And, frankly, given the condition of the SJWs etc, I feel nostalgic for the Reds of the past, quite a few of whom deserved respect at a personal level regardless of the nature of their beliefs. The Young Pioneers (or Putin's Young Army movement now) look like gods compared to the blue-haired misfits and rejects of the West. To see what I mean check out this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWtLuZQn6_8
As for narcisism, my understanding (which may be wrong) is that the condition is not about ego inflation, but trouble making subject/object distinctions. Since the SJWs make everything about themselves this is perhaps me being grossly pedantic.
My guess is that the eventual takedown word will involve an association with status...nothing produces an adrenal effect faster than intimations of changing relativities of status. We are apes that live in groups. Zoön politikon (political animal or social animal). Status determines who eats and who mates. The woke are tormented by two things: the erasure of individuality in a homogenised world where identities are plastic (and transparently derived from the infotainment industry) resulting in chronic uncertainty and feelings of inauthenticity and the experience of material frustration/downward social mobility (or the fear of it) hence the desperation to claw a position in an uncertain world.
The attraction of woke for the BIPOCs is simply collecting the rent from whitey one way or another and the thrill of seeing rivals degraded and humiliated. With the white wokes it is status or perceptions of a delusionary status as a prop to the ego.
You're not wrong in any of this, but you might also be overthinking it a bit. The intent of the term isn't academic precision so much as linguistic ego damage, and the primary context I have in mind is American since, frankly, America is the heart of this beast. So it's not so much a matter of what political historians or clinical psychiatrists will make of the word - it's the impact it has on Jane Normie, whose relationship to Marxist and narcissist is much more connotative than it is denotative.
I've taken the term out for a test drive with normies out in the real world, and so far it seems to work. Last night I ran it by the friendly lesbian bartender at the local tavern, and she immediately laughed and said it instantly brought to mind a person she knows.
I agree, it stings. And it does so because Lord knows there are plenty of Marxcissists around, and not just since Wokeness!
You are right. What works works. This is not a seminar. The right expression is a self-piloting ballistic heading where it needs to go.
The servitors of the regime are desperate for reassurance that they are the real thing. Deny them that and they visibly weaken.
Exactly.
"Your real ideology is mental illness" hurts because, for so many of them, it's true. Highlighting that immediately deflates their self-importance.
As a European, me too I'm less inclined to use Marxism as a sort of blanket word for "evil", as seems customary for many Americans.
It is important to connect with the actual meaning people are trying to convey when they use words. For example, there are people in the US who use the term "Marxists" almost precisely as some Marxists use the word "Capitalists" - describing a corrupt and greedy clique of globalist oligarchs. And yet, they are at each others' throats! Some who call themselves Marxists are really more like American populists, while others are full-blown Neo-Marxist Theory-Believing Wokeies. And still others are influenced by the Neo-Marxists, but only took some good ideas from them and are pretty spot-on... Etc. pp.
I mean, Michael Parenti self-identified as a Marxist, and he was brilliant! His son is also a hardcore leftie but he's spot-on in many ways. Bottom line: at some point, labels can stand in the way, and people just need to talk.
The trouble is that with repeated use of labels, people become lazy. They prioritise assumed similarities and neglect direct observation, thus missing what is singular.
The trouble with the b.s. about Marxism in America is that you need to read books to understand any theory and most self-described Marxists barely read, let alone read in order to undertake any disciplined thought. Hence the absurdity of people who champion racial resentment and the lumpen proletariat over skilled workers and entrepreneurs.
What I find ludicrous about the US right is that many discuss books that they have not read. Imagine dismissing the Frankfurt School without understanding how much they had in common with Heidegger!
In my experience truly serious people read what their opponents actually write and they read it carefully.
Unfortunately, we are living though an era of escalating neurocognitive impairment from poor education, widespread use of psychoactives (above all cannabis) and infantilised infotainment. A zombie herd is being formed.
"The trouble with the b.s. about Marxism in America is that you need to read books to understand any theory and most self-described Marxists barely read, let alone read in order to undertake any disciplined thought. Hence the absurdity of people who champion racial resentment and the lumpen proletariat over skilled workers and entrepreneurs."
Indeed. Meaning they aren't really Marxists; it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption.
Exactly. Most politics is larping. The central feature of Western society is maximum immersion in infotainment. Monkey see, monkey do. Television explains more about the cultural and social psychologies than anything else. The self-understanding of people who brand themselves by their political beliefs is almost always next to non-existent. And the numbers radicalised by books are probably equivalent to the numbers taking up falconry as a hobby.
The current political fevers are strongest with those parts of the population who are either desperate for personal distraction or a career in misdirection. Those who are economically surplus or at risk of becoming so. The redundant or soon to be redundant. So they dream up a role and play it...usually very badly. And the roles are invariably taken directly from TV. HOUSE OF CARDS (US version generallly, but the UK one as well for the dedicated) has had a bigger influence on the formation of political staffers in the Anglophone world in the last decade or so than any book. Just ask any of them what they watch and you'll see...and then compare it to the pitch those shits put on for their employers.
Exactly, yes. And ideologies are merely decorative costumes for the staged mummery. They can be taken on or off, switched out, combined without regard to logical consistency. Ideology in this world is faek and ghey, which is why the dissident faction increasingly doesn't bother with it.
One fights the entropic pull of clown world not by adopting beliefs, or by critiquing them, but by cultivating physical and spiritual virtue. I suppose one could argue that vitalism is an ideology itself, which it is in part ... but it's an ideology that demands results from self work, and is resistant to fakery for this reason. One cannot merely PROFESS vitalism, one must by its very nature live it. Same with stoicism etc. They are praxis first and foremost.
"One fights the entropic pull of clown world not by adopting beliefs, or by critiquing them, but by cultivating physical and spiritual virtue"
Loading this one into the affirmation server.
Living well is the best revenge. Not in the consumerist sense, but in the sense of achieving a degree of self-realisation through purposeful actions.
The success of infotainment (which is all about vicarious experience and parasocial relationships and the falsification of everything) in taking the place of real experience creates a need for authenticity and activities that provide a sense of being present and alive.
One point about reading. Here is a passage from an interview with Bret Easton Ellis:
"I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel."
That sums it up. Reading of any kind is a minority thing and getting rarer by the day. The claims people make about themselves (above all in politics) need to be tested against the evidence.
In case anyone is interested, here is a link to the interview.
https://unherd.com/?p=459992?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=a2e0147de5&mc_eid=b388f3aa5d
"Political battle requires destabilising the enemy. Identifying their raw nerves for target practice is essential (and fun)." I'm stealing this one.
⚠️ Scam alert! 📢 SOS!!
🗨 I bring you good tidings / Let’s converse ㈩𝟏𝟕𝟖𝟔𝟔𝟑𝟐𝟑𝟓𝟐𝟕
↑↑ goes in many a stack comments, purportedly from authors but *no*! Avatar pics & names hard to differentiate at first glance (though of course without author's mark and orange tick where applicable) 🤦
Care to announce loud to Deimos publisher crowd? I wonder how long until Barsoom's top-form
enfant terrible falls prey 😉
--
(*) ei gato maio [sic] --> https://substack.com/profile/126928624-ei-gato-maio
(*) Good Citizen’s [sic] --> https://substack.com/profile/127084970-good-citizens
Yep, saw that on TGC's blog. I'll spread the word, and will certainly be keeping my eye out for any pollution of my own comments section by these vermin.
So the bad cat's stylistic refusal to use CAPS finally bit him in the tail?
I propose the refusal runs deeper than stylistic, to subcutaneous fascia at least. Anywhoo, caps a lousy saviour make, as the curious case of GC readily demonstrates.
Still can't figure out what a secret sauce this s/fucker rustled up to bold zer number string 🤔
>substack power users can't figure out how to format comment text
>some random scammer does it effortlessly
Damnit, substack.
“SJW has largely fallen out of use…” Leftists always reject the names that they apply to themselves. “Liberal, socialist, progressive…” at some point leftists renounced them all and demanded that they be called something else. Maybe it’s because their labels for themselves become associated with their Marxcissist ideas, which are nonsense and untruths (as I discuss in “Leftist Untruths”).
Progressive is one they've stuck with for a long time, actually - they still wear it quite proudly, as despite conservatism's best efforts it's very difficult to make 'prog' into a hurtful slur. Like, who hates progress? Similarly with liberal, albeit the meaning of this is fuzzy since it's changed so much; but you still get plenty of conservatives saying "I'm a CLASSICAL liberal!", which is basically accusing the left of heretical deviance from the true faith. Finally, socialist is something that doesn't hurt them, either; they're proud to be socialists, and talk about it all the time.
You make this way to complicated.
Narcissists maintain the perfect self image to compensate for their total lack of self-esteem. That is, the don't feel any sense of self worth. Therefore they try to create a persona which will have worth, and victim Olympics works very well. It's just perfect for them so they can immediately and on the cheap become double plus good persons, by attributes although not in essentia.
This lack of essence, ie dasein, or väsen, is the same thing as lacking spirit and ultimately capacity for love. Which means, they hate.
If you don't love yourself, you hate the world, so they are haters, and self haters.
This is also why they hate Christians with such venom, because they are in total rejection of truth, beauty and love. But I digress in my Platonic underpinnings...
Just ask them "why don't you love yourself? Why treat yourself with such little respect? It's undignified.
If you want to go for the kill, kill them with kindness and aim for the heart.
"If so much of the 20th century's destruction was rooted in 19th-century German thought, so much of our 21st-century stupidity, self-absorption, and Personality Disorder Politics are rooted in 20th-century California."
Bernardo Kastrup, in his Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, mentions what a disaster it was that Hegel rather than Schop triumphed in German philosophy. He means that Schop's idealism would have provided a better metaphysics, compatible with quantum mechanics, than scientific materialism, and I suspect he is a total shitlib himself (he's written an "open letter" to Putin demanding he resign and let Biden bring muh democracy to Russia, literally) but I would adopt that idea and adapt it along your lines. Without Hegel, pompous bullshit would not pass for super-knowledge in Germany; no Marx, no Nietzsche (a clear writer but simply obsessed with reversing all of Schop's ideas); thus no Communism or Fascism to duke it out in the 20th century. Also no Heidegger, although he's a bit sui generis anyway (and on record as "loathing" Schopenhauer). Heidegger is a classic narcissist, btw, writing 100 volumes to bring "the message of Beying" (sic) to a fallen world, etc. Carl Jung privately said he was clearly a schizo and a graphomaniac.
Anyway, before California there was Frankfurt. If you read Grand Hotel Abyss, you can see that the Frankfurters were the original Marxcissists. They were from rich Jewish families, whose money enabled their fine classical German educations, but they were ashamed of their uncool, merchant parents and became "Marxists" to piss them off. Hence the need to "reimagine" Marxism as having nothing to do with revolution or workers, but a dreamy state of mind where you imagine Utopia (but never try to actually do anything about it). Horkheimer, the head of the school, spend his whole career caging grants etc. to keep things afloat, which required him to spend his time stamping out any hints of revolutionary action, which would scare off the rich donors. Towards the end of his life he abandoned the whole thing and just wrote about his real hero: Schopenhauer.
Kastrup also strikes me as a shitlib. My introduction to him was a dialogue between him and Christopher Langan. The contrast between the two couldn't have been stronger. Kastrup is a powerful argument that the world, or at least his corner of it, doesn't need more metaphysics - it needs hormone therapy.
Which was one of Nietzsche's core insights really. Much philosophy isn't really philosophy, it's indigestion and a lack of healthy exercise.
I think I know what you mean. At the same time, if that's the same YT vid I saw, I thought Langan was a bit too high-T, inclined to try to make points by talking over and louder, like an academically trained Bill O'Reilly. I find this all the time on "dissident right" podcasts, like TDS and especially Myth of the 20th Century, where one of the podcasters seems drunk at times.
Nietzsche has a point, but the problem is that very different people can, in fact, assert the same views. My only interest in Kastrup's work is that he seems to have unknowingly stumbled into putting forward a metaphysics that would provide a nice, academically respectable background for what I'm really interested in, positive thinking or New Thought movement, especially Neville Goddard. Neville is basically the anti-Kastrup: tall, matinee idol handsome, smooth talking, married and raising children: all the things the "dissident right" talks about but never gets around to doing.
It's less rooting the philosophy in the lifestyle, more along the lines of "good optics." Use Kastrup but keep him in the back office, while Neville attracts the ladies at his lectures. (This is where I came up with the title of my first book on the topic, Magick for Housewives, although it turned out that people thought it was about "kitchen magick" which apparently is a thing, so the 2nd ed. was given a boring title that hits all the Amazon key words. Live and learn).
The postmodernists might call this "intellectual bricolage," appropriate the arguments for ones own purposes, whatever the other guy is or thinks. What could be more manly than such intellectual swashbuckling?
Langan's problem, or one of them, is precisely that he's too high-t. The man is a mountain, and risks crushing others merely by shifting his weight. That said, I actually found his performance in that debate to be highly restrained, given that Kastrup started off by admitting that he hadn't even bothered to familiarize himself with even the rudiments of Langan's thought, which was massively disrespectful. Kastrup's breakdown afterwards was rather typical of emotionally insecure, easily intimidated males.
That isn't to say that Kastrup's own ideas are entirely without value. Frankly, the dialogue with Langan wasn't a good platform for either of them to do much more than posture. Goddard I'm not aware of (any relation to the rocket scientist?), but he sounds interesting.
It occurs to me K is rather like Jordan Peterson. I think K is vastly more intelligent, and into more interesting things, but JP is another PhD, also an actual professor (for now...), obsessed with Carl Jung (as is K, who has a book on "decoding" his metaphysics), prone to hysteria (much more so), and now thinks, like some Hollywood celebrity, he should be giving out political advice (eg. "The West should get its act together" and attack Iran. Note the "clean up your room" language) like some geopolitical expert.
I don't think the two Goddards are connected, but Neville has a slight connection to A. Crowley (Crowley's ex-secretary met Neville and wrote the first book discussing him, back in 1947, while Crowley is connected to Jack Parsons, another rocket guy, through L. Ron Hubbard).
The first of many essays on Neville:
https://www.academia.edu/42163086/Magick_for_Housewives_The_Not_So_New_and_Rather_Traditional_Thought_of_Neville_Goddard
"Examines New Thought teacher Neville Goddard's sources in the Western esoteric traditions. Special mention is made of Julius Evola, Alistair Crowley and Colin Wilson."
Someone put together a page:
https://coolwisdombooks.com/james-omearas-china-box-articles-on-neville-goddard/
However, there is a strong tendency on the right to dismiss Schopenhauer and everything Romantic as New Age mumbo jumbo that supposedly led to Wokeism. They tend to dismiss much of the German tradition as pure evil, either from an atheist-scientistic perspective or from a mainstream Christian perspective. Funny, that!
As for Wokeism, that's a perfect example. Schopenhauer abhorred slavery in "the United States of North America" as he calls it, as an example how evil men are (his famous "pessimism"). At the same time, when arguing that the more intelligent you are, the more you crave solitude, he casually notes that Negroes like to live together in one big house, "and cannot get enough of the company of their snub-nosed kind," while "everyone agrees" they are the least intelligent of all races. So he would be abhorred by both the Confederacy-loving Right and the Woke. Of course, his infamous essay "On Women" would be enough to be cancelled today; not a likely source for Wokeism. More abstractly, he denied the very idea that we could substantially "improve" the world, much less that such improvement was "inevitable" ; those Woke assumptions are from that airy-fairy head in the clouds Hegel (Obama's "the arc of history bends toward justice" is straight out of Hegel; of course so is the neocon's "end of history" -- see how complicated this is!),
True. Schop doesn't fit into their neat categories.
As for the "atheist-scientistic perspective," he's actually cited as "the first prominent atheist" in the Western tradition. (You could lose your academic job for that, like doxing today, but he had his own money and never "worked" as a philosopher). And he studied medicine, and kept up to date in the sciences, especially biology, as he found confirmation of his metaphysics of the Will there. He was, in short, pro-science and considered Hegel and the others as ignoramuses who were just juggling concepts. OTOH, said metaphysics was anything but "materialist" which is where Kastrup links it with QM; hence my original claim that philosophy took a wrong turn back then.
And as for the "mainstream Christian perspective," he despises Christianity and even more Judaism; actually he despises Christianity BECAUSE it promotes Jewish ideas, so he'd fit in with the anti-Christian side of the dissident Right. BUT another but: his metaphysical goal of overcoming the Will and his ethics based in compassion are aligned with some elements of mystical Christianity, and like his reading in science he's happy to quote lots of mystics in support thereof. That distinguishes him from the Nietzschean Right, since N largely just reversed both ideas to "discover" the Will to Power; obviously a more popular idea!
There's the official version of all these guys, which supports various ideologies, but then there's the reality. For example, everyone hates Nietzsche or loves Nietzsche as some kind of proto-Nazi; yet he loved Jews and hated German nationalist. OTOH, Hitler himself carried Schop's main works with him in the WWI trenches, and later said to Leni Riefenstahl "I can do nothing with Nietzsche; it's all in Schopenhauer." It seems like people just take whatever bits they already agree with and create their own version, and claim to "followers of X" or Y.
> as for the "mainstream Christian perspective," he despises Christianity and even more Judaism; actually he despises Christianity BECAUSE it promotes Jewish ideas
Can you recommend the appropriate work to read about this?
Well, that rather depends on which faction of the right we're discussing. The Christnats, especially, do tend to be Teutonophobes. Other factions are big fans of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Goethe, Spengler.
Interesting pattern: "to dismiss much of the German tradition as pure evil".
"Filth-bloods".
Or, "shit-bloods".
You need to go Germanic in your wording, Latin is too polysyllabic and lacks the brutality required.
This is generally good advice.
Also, WWBAPS(D)
(What Would Bronze-Age Pervert Say (Do))
I like mash potato?
(clears throat, adopts exaggerated non-specific Slavic accent) WITH THE KIDNEY GRAVY it is how you say, fortifying for the spirit and satisfying for the palate
This is NOT FOOD, you understand, you fucking American gourmands, mash potato with kidney gravy is not there so you can stuff your fat bellies with it, it is MEDICINE for the BODY, you must RESPECT *coughs* you see how they attaq me!
OK, all this talk of foods has caused me to feel hunger, I have not time for thisnow but now must take quick smoke break to quell gnawing rodent in my gut, enjoy beautiful vital Slavic orchestral music in meantime.
Hell yeah! "Marxcissists." Now if they were Groucho Marxcissists and at least had a sense of humor about things, that would be one thing, but it's "communist manifesto" except that the pampered bourgeoise have swapped places with the proletariat. "Geez, this communism thing hasn't worked out too well -- in fact, it's even been one of the leading causes of death during the last century . . . Hey, I know, let's just get rid of all this 'concern for the working class' nonsense and make it all about my pronouns and my sex life and forcing everyone to pay attention to ME and celebrate MY self-identity on pain of CANCELLATION!!!"
Wrt no-editing experiment. Disclaimer: just for laughs!
💬 I’ve been looking for an Atomic Word with which to nuke this hateful egregore from orbit for years now.
Cf: 🗨 One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. (*)
To be fair, it’s more of a weak garden-path sentence (the final now ruins the illusion), but the association sprang to mind, and feels too funny not to share 🤸
--
(*) How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
Says more about your pajamas than the elephant, perhaps 😏
Oh yes! 😁 Elephants gonna do elephants, who we are to judge. Though a danger-haired marxcissist won't allow you to question zer belly size either.
Indeed, but when elephants insist they are healthy and beautiful at their given size, they are at least not making a species-level category error.
Although that does raise the question. Are body-positive dangerhairs in the process of speciating?
They're prob already past this point of no return 🤷
The Time Machine, only it's the evolved descendents of right wing bodybuilders hunting and eating the descendents of dangerhairs.
Thinking about narcissism inevitably leads me to thinking about the story of narcissus in the prologue of the alchemist. Shoe still fits.