Francis Berger

Not Talking About Movies

23/3/2019

The other day I realized I have not talked about movies to anyone for well over a year. In fact, the number of times film has been a topic of conversation during my four years in Hungary easily fits on the fingers of one of my hands. This is rather new for me because when I lived in the United States and Canada movies were always a topic of conversation regardless of whom I spoke with, be they classmates, colleagues, friends, family, or even strangers.

Hey, have you seen . . . ? What did you think of . . . ? Did you like . . . ? I can't wait to see the new . . . ? Are you going to see . . . ? Are you a fan of . . . ?

No matter what the original conversation topic had been, my discussions with other North Americans ultimately included one or several of the questions above, which often lead to lengthy digressions into movies, celebrities, Hollywood, and all the rest of it. In North America people relish describing movie scenes, mimicking dialogue, retelling jokes and punchlines, and describing the emotions they experienced as they watched the latest blockbuster. Of course, I barely noticed this when I lived in North America where talking about movies forms an enormous part of everyday small talk, chitchat, and serious conversation. As a discussion topic, I surmise it is second only to weather.

In Hungary, films are rarely a topic of discussion. Sure, Hungarians watch and enjoy movies as much as anyone else in the West, but they seldom bring films up when you talk to them and, I have noticed, often find it somewhat strange when you do. If you ask the average Hungarian if he or she has seen this or that, they will usually just say yes or no and perhaps mention whether or not they liked the film in question, but they hardly ever delve any deeper into the topic than that.

Naturally, this must have something to do with culture. I imagine movies are a popular topic in North American because they form such a large part of North American culture. Movies are also probably considered a somewhat neutral domain; in other words, they are something everyone in the United States and Canada can talk about regardless of their background. I'm speculating here, but perhaps the movies are the only real unifying culture an otherwise polarized North America has left.

Whatever the case, the same does not hold true here in Hungary. People like watching films, but rarely feel impelled to talk much about what they have seen. At first this struck me as odd, but after four years I have come to appreciate not talking about or hearing about movies all the time and, to be honest, I don't miss it all that much either.

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Hungary - The EUmpire Strikes Back

22/3/2019

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Viktor Orbán has invested a considerable amount of time and energy into provoking the EU and the European People's Party into an attack. It appears his efforts have paid out handsomely. The only question that remains is, What happens next?

While the British people have had to endure the nauseating rollercoaster nightmare Brexit has become, Hungarians are currently bracing themselves for the possibility of turbulence in the near future.

A few days ago, the European People’s Party suspended Fidesz, the Hungarian ruling party, from its ranks as retaliation for Orbán’s alleged illiberalism, flagrant flouting of “European values”, and staunch anti-mass migration stance. This latest rebuke of Orbán specifically and Hungary in general follows hard on the heels of the EU’s triggering of Article 7 proceedings against the country in September, 2018.

Hungary’s appearance of conflict has now met the European Union’s appearance of force. Anyone who understands the secret rules of engagement knows compromise under such circumstances is impossible, as the following quotes demonstrate,

“We cannot compromise on democracy, rule of law, freedom of press, academic freedom or minorities rights. And anti-EU rhetoric is unacceptable. The divergences between EPP and Fidesz must cease,” Joseph Daul, the president of that coalition (the European People’s Party) said Wednesday.

A Hungarian official offered the following prior to the EPP vote,

A Hungarian government official stressed before the vote to suspend the party that they would “under no circumstances be able to compromise on fundamental issues such as the defense of Christian culture or the rejection of immigration.”

With compromise seemingly out of the question, something must give. In my opinion, whatever “gives” will determine not only Hungary’s fate, but the long-term feasibility of the European Union as whole.

What are the stakes? Well, as the quote above demonstrates, on the one side you have the EU’s Babylonian vision of Europe - the establishment of a homogenized, bureaucratic, totalitarian state controlled under the banners of my favorite value delusions: freedom, democracy, and human rights. On the other side you have the struggle for the re-establishment of a Europe of sovereign nations.

What the forces of democracy, freedom, and human rights ultimately want is a continuation of the migrant crisis of 2015; the establishment of “safe and orderly” migration of millions of non-European people into Europe until the European people themselves drown within the borders of their own countries. Anyone who still has the audacity to claim the social-engineering war the EU, in cooperation with the UN, has waged against its own people is nothing more than a sinister conspiracy theory can, at this point, be neither trusted nor endorsed.

That the center-right European People’s Party, made up of so-called conservatives and Christian democrats, takes umbrage with Orbán’s rejection of immigration or defense of Christian culture should make us all pause for a moment. That this same European People’s Party adamantly encourages and supports the continued effort of importing millions of non-European people into Europe bleeds out past the oxymoronic into the realm of evil.

So which side will give? The coming months should provide the answer. Be prepared for both possibilities. In the meantime, get ready for the fireworks. It will likely be quite a show.

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Equinox and After

21/3/2019

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My winter night walks have become spring sunset walks. The change happened as most changes do – gradually then suddenly. One evening I am out walking next to the river, the diaphanous mist of my exhalations suspended and illuminated in the darkness by my headlamp; the next evening I am bathed in the warm orange glow of the setting spring sun inhaling the faint scent of wild plum blossoms. Though I have enjoyed my winter night walks, it is good to feel the sun’s rays again and see the verdant world that has laid dormant for so long energetically awaken from its slumber.

The spring equinox was glorious. Untarnished blue skies marred only by the vapor trails of occasional jets passing overhead. Warm spring air still haunted by the last frosty ghosts of fading winter. And after sunset, the appearance of yet another super moon, full alabaster white this time, bathing everything in silvery tones.

Today was a virtual repeat of yesterday. I arrived home a little earlier than usual and cajoled my son into joining me on my walk. The plum tree perfume was a little heavier than it had been the day before, or perhaps it just seemed so because of the perfectly still air. As we walked along the riverbank, my son prattled on about the various characters in Sonic the Hedgehog. When he had exhausted the topic, we talked for a while about equinoxes and solstices and the eternal war between light and darkness. Out in the fields, the deer were grazing in full force, and we stopped for a moment and counted them.

At the line of poplar trees near the levee, my son paused to rest and noticed the carcass of a rabbit next to the narrow drainage ditch that flows into the river. We looked at the bundle of fur and bone wordlessly for half-a-minute, and then turned away and made our way back to the house. After a few minutes, my little boy was talking about Sonic again, and I listened with all the interest I could muster. As the sun sank behind a stand of black locust trees in the distance, I noted that the light had hung on a little longer than it had the day before. As imperceptible as it had been, it somehow made all the difference in the world.

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Increasingly Meaningless Words and Phrases

21/3/2019

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As far as I can tell, the words contained in the list below no longer define what they are meant to define.

moral authority
freedom
human rights
democracy
values
justice
philanthropist

I hear these words repeated ad nauseam every day, yet I rarely perceive the things they are meant to delineate.

What a truly confusing time to be alive.

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Metaphysical Confusion and Value Delusion

20/3/2019

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Max Scheler (1874-1928) was a well-known and respected German philosopher during his time, but has since slipped into relative obscurity. He was a Catholic convert who later turned his back on the Church because of its rigidity and dogma. He was also a rather controversial figure and was involved in an adultery scandal that cost him a professorship among other things. Nevertheless, Scheler is a fascinating thinker. Although I do not agree with everything he expounds, much of what he argues in his book Ressentiment not only makes sense, but is, in my humble opinion, also extremely topical given the circumstances of our contemporary, resentment-fueled leftist/liberal dominated world.

In Ressentiment, Max Scheler agrees with Friedrich Nietzsche's claim that Ressentiment values result in a descent and deterioration of the individual and society away from higher-positive values to lower-negative values, but Scheler disagrees with Nietzsche regarding the source of Ressentiment. Unlike Nietzsche, who believes Ressentiment stems from slave morality embedded within Christianity, Scheler expertly argues that the actual source of Ressentiment values is bourgeois morality. Scheler essentially attests that the roots of liberalism and leftism are to be found there and not, as Nietzsche presumed, in Christianity. Nevertheless, though Ressentiment originated in bourgeois morality, Scheler admits it did gradually seep into Christianity, tainting and eventually usurping original Christian values through the centuries until it found its ultimate expression in the French Revolution in 1789.

In the following, I present a brief outline of Scheler’s views concerning the corrupting influence of Ressentiment values which, in their purest form, results in Metaphysical Confusion and, ultimately, Value Delusion. I am firmly convinced, as are many others, that our contemporary world suffers from an acute case of both. The following may help shed light on at least some aspects of our current societal malaise. Though much of the following information is not new or groundbreaking, it is my hope that exploring Scheler's ideas here might help clarify some of the confusion concerning the dominant Metaphysical Confusion of our own times.

In order to understand Nietzsche's concept of Ressentiment properly, it must be shown in relation to the apriori hierarchy of value modalities, which Scheler regards as emotively experienced and universal, objective, and constant. From lowest to highest these modalities (with their respective positive and corresponding negative forms) are as follows: sensual values of the agreeable and the disagreeable; vital values of the noble and vulgar; mental (psychic) values of the beautiful and ugly, right and wrong and truth and falsehood; and finally spiritual values of the Holy and unholy of the Divine and idols.

Scheler argues that this apriori hierarchy of value modalities best represents Christian ethics and morality (at least in the ideal, traditional form) as it is modeled upon a belief in Divine creation and the existence of a personal, loving God. For individuals or societies living life within such a framework, the ethical, psychological, and spiritual issue becomes how the energy from these feeling states will be channeled so as to better benefit the individual person and society. Hence, an adulterated Christian hierarchy of ethics and values cannot, as Nietzsche argues, be the source of resentment values. Thus, it is a framework built upon what Scheler describes as Positive Value.

On the other hand, Ressentiment represents the dark underside, or inversion, of Scheler's vision of a personal and transformational non-formal ethics of values. Scheler notes that the state of Ressentiment, as a personal disposition, begins primarily in negative psychic and emotional states; chief among these are envy, jealousy, anger, hatred, spite, malice, joy over another's misfortune, mean spirited competition, etc. Scheler also states that the sources of what he terms feeling states responses might be motivated by almost any negative experience ranging from personal criticism, ridicule, and mockery, to rejection, abandonment, and so forth.

According to Scheler, Ressentiment is highly situational in character because it always involves "mental comparisons" (value-judgments) with other people who allegedly possess no such Ressentiment feelings and who simultaneously exhibit authentic positive values. Although Ressentiment might begin with admiration and respect, it ends in a coveting of those personal qualities and goods possessed by another. In other words, what Scheler defines here is classic resentment, the kind we encounter on a daily basis in the everyday world - the kind we ourselves have felt or perhaps still feel on occasion when confronted by people who inspire feelings of inferiority or longing within us.

Further refining Ressentiment, Scheler writes:

"Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion—and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious – or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by "embittering" and "poisoning" the personality."

A person mind-poisoned by resentment would have flows in the direction of unethical action, away from the positive and toward negative and lower values on the apriori hierarchy of value modalities. No longer respecting any sense of Divine Creation and unable to view the world through the lens of Christian love, the resentful shift their values in direct opposition to the original value modalities. This is initially a reverse horizontal movement from positive to negative that leads to a descending movement from higher to lower.

For Christians, these movement from the positive to the negative and from the higher to the lower at the individual level epitomize sin and transgression. They represent shifts away from the Divine - movements away from the knowledge of being made in God's image through love. The recognition of these shifts from the positive to the negative requires repentance in order to be absolved, but through repentance, Christianity does offer the mechanisms through which such psychic and spiritual transgressions can indeed be absolved. According to Scheler, once a Christian has repented a shift inspired by Ressentiment, he or she has the opportunity to once again realign with Positive Value and continue pursuing the proper flow of spiritual, psychological, and physical energy.

But what of individuals who refuse or reject repentance or disregard the very concept of being made in God's image through love as embodied within the hierarchy depicted above?

Scheler classifies the inability or refusal to align oneself with the apriori hierarchy of values as Pathological Ressentiment. At the individual level, Pathological Ressentiment leads to a deadening or numbing of common sympathetic feeling states and the higher psychic or spiritual feeling states. Put another way, individuals plagued by Pathological Ressentiment not only have disordered emotions and emotional states, but are essentially cut off from the higher, ascendant spiritual states. Since they reject the very concept of being made in God's image and the love of a personal God, the Ressentiment-imbued essentially cast themselves into a state of Metaphysical Confusion eventually leading to what Scheler calls Value Delusion. The ethical, psychological, and spiritual issue of how the energy from these feeling states will be channeled so as to better benefit the individual person and society are perverted and take on an inverse form.

Metaphysical Confusion at the level of the individual is bad enough on its own, but if Pathological Ressentiment infects a large number of individuals in a given community or society, it can have profound societal repercussions as well.

Metaphysical Confusion at the societal/cultural level results first in a complete inversion of the apriori hierarchy of values, which is then complemented by the vertical assent of this inverted hierarchy. What once occupied the top of the hierarchy is now perverted and placed squarely at the bottom; hence, the vertical no longer represents an assent from the lower to the higher, but rather the vertical assent away from a misunderstood higher toward a falsely exalted lower.

In the inverted Metaphysical Confusion hierarchy, Divine Creation and Divine Love are placed firmly at the bottom of the stack and are afforded the smallest amount of territory possible. In fact, the values of the Holy and unholy are completely stripped of any reference to the authentic Divine and are instead presented as nothing more than hypocrisy and superstition.

As bad as that is, what makes the predominant flow in the hierarchy of Metaphysical Confusion even worse is the perversion and elevation of the other lower levels of the hierarchy. This, in essence, is the crux of Value Delusion - that is, a flow away from the misrepresented Divine up into the "higher" values. Thus, the mental values level, which was once one rank below the top, is now one rank above the bottom. In addition, rather than being the domain of truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, and so forth, the level of mental values becomes the home of political ideology and nothing more. Furthermore the vital values, which focused on nobility and vulgarity are replaced by the negative values of fear and security. The values of utility occupy the summit of the inverted hierarchy of Metaphysical Confusion where they serve as the new idols of worship within the Value Delusion world.

Moreover, unlike the apriori hierarchy, the inverted hierarchy offers no corresponding positive values towards which an individual could shift, thereby making any sort of shifting virtually impossible. Seen in this light, the hierarchy of Metaphysical Confusion and Value Delusion offers no freedom within its structure. It is a totalitarian system par excellence. There is only one possible way the flow can go and no absolution is offered to any who refuses to follow the one possible direction the structure offers within its framework.

The Metaphysical Confusion / Value Delusion hierarchy diagram above well illustrates current circumstances in the contemporary West. The hierarchy can be applied to nearly all leftist/liberal societies in the modern West and historical leftist/liberal societies such as those found in revolutionary France and Bolshevik Russia.

The contemporary West is utterly steeped in Value Delusion, so much so that the vast majority of its people can no longer envision any other form of ascent than the one presented by the hierarchy of Value Delusion. A cursory glance at most media sources in any Western country is enough to confirm this. Of course, this state of Value Delusion is hardly surprising considering the Establishment's intentional and skillful instilling and harnessing of Ressentiment over the past two centuries or more. There should be no confusion about this whatsoever. Whatever benefit the Enlightenment offered has been thoroughly sabotaged by the Establishment's utilization of resentment as a means of consciousness distraction and manipulation.

Value Delusion represents but a portion of what modern people are up against. What can or should be done in the face of this world of Metaphysical Confusion and Value Delusion will, for the time being, remain the subject of future posts. In the meantime, I believe Scheler's concepts of Metaphysical Confusion and Value Delusion offer clear insights into the nature and the scope of the many challenges modern people face, namely spiritual alienation and a disordered metaphysical conception of Reality at the level of consciousness.

Note added: The diagrams and some of the information included in this post were extracted from the following source.

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The Religion of Self-Hatred

19/3/2019

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I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian, but I regard self-hatred as among the gravest of sins. Self-hatred is a poisoning of the mind and soul – a rejection of the divine spark within all individuals and the denial of a loving, personal God. At its core, self-hatred opens a vast chasm between the individual and the Divine, which inspires metaphysical confusion.

Unable to recognize themselves as creations of a loving and personal Creator, individuals consumed by self-loathing wander through nihilistic deserts devoid of inherent morality, intrinsic values, and objective meaning. Finding oases of pleasure amongst the dunes is the only chance the self-loathing have at survival. The pleasure oases provide the self-loathing with the only meaning left available to them, and it is in these places the self-hating congregate.

Satiating base instincts and desires dulls the pain but fills not the void. To alleviate this, the self-hating have turned their energies to alchemy. They have transmuted their lead-hatred into golden-love and have drawn up magnificently misguided desert reclamation plans. Their ultimate goal is the creation of an expansive and unified oasis of pleasure in which no one will ever again suffer the outrage of the harsh desert wind.

The establishment of this utopia has become the new religion, one demanding sacrosanct selflessness and sacrifice to the altar of Mankind. The indoctrinated masses worship the new idol with altruistic devotion, lulled by the promise that it will make angels and love-hating, impersonal gods of them all.

In the distance beyond the desert, the chasm grows ever wider all the while.

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Hot Dog Haydn

17/3/2019

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Esterháza Palace, a sprawling Rococo edifice loosely modeled upon the Palace of Versailles, was built by Miklós Esterházy in the 1760s. The palace is located in the town of Fertőd, which is a mere four kilometers from my village of Fertőendréd. My family and I discovered Esterháza Palace three years ago after we moved to Fertőendréd from Sopron. Since then, we make a point of visiting the palace at least once a month to marvel at the ornate architecture and enjoy the tranquility of the sprawling French garden. My son was a little more than four years old the first time we visited, and he loved the vast landscaped garden, which he was free to explore as he saw fit.

Esterháza Palace - Fertőd, Hungary

During our initial walk through the gardens at Esterháza Palace, we came upon a life-sized bronze statue of a man carrying a violin. My son paused before the statue and asked me who the figure was. I read the short inscription on the statue’s base and informed him it was Joseph Haydn. I then went on to explain who Joseph Haydn had been and why there was a statue of him in the gardens of Esterháza Palace. My son listened intently, but kept his eyes focused on the looming statue before him the whole time. When I had finished telling him about Haydn and his patron Miklós Esterhazy, my son pointed up at the statue’s right hand and asked,

“Why is Haydn carrying a hot dog?”

The question caught me off-guard, and I turned my attention to the statue’s left hand. This is what we were looking at:

As you can see, the statue carries a violin tucked under its left arm and what is meant to be a curled batch of completed sheet music in its right, but in my son’s eyes, the completed compositions Haydn holds aloft in his right hand are a hot dog.

I started chuckling immediately. It didn’t take too much imagination at all to see the curled sheet music could indeed be mistaken for a hot dog.

“He’s probably going back the palace because he forgot to put ketchup on it,” I said jokingly.

“Maybe he forgot the mustard, too!” my son chimed in.

My son and I named the statue “Hot Dog Haydn” that day, and we stop before it every time we go to the gardens of Esterháza Palace. No matter how many times I see the statue, I cannot “unsee” my son’s original “hot dog” interpretation.

Though I know the object in Haydn’s right hand is sheet music, my eyes acknowledge only a hot dog, and my mind playfully conjures up an impossible scene from 1765 – one of the esteemed composer scurrying back toward the magnificent palace in order to put some ketchup on the hot dog he had been given.

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The Current Target of Resentment "Love"

17/3/2019

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Max Scheler published Ressentiment just before the First World War. At that time, he was acutely aware of the communist menace bubbling under the surface of society because he had been a Marxist himself. The war had not even officially ended when the Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing the Czar in Russia. Other communist revolutions were attempted in other European countries as well. During this time, Scheler’s observations concerning ressentiment hatred being directed at the strong, the powerful, and the wealthy certainly were true, but does the same hold true today?

As mentioned in my previous blog post, resentment-based love continues its faux concern with the oppressed, but the oppressed are no longer the working class proletariat. In our contemporary world, the working class have lost their official victimhood status, which has been transferred to other groups, namely women, people with non-traditional sexual orientations, various ethnicities within the West’s mostly pluralistic societies, and so forth. Unlike the communists of the past whose love of the proletariat actually served as means to cover their intense hatred for the rich and powerful, today’s Global Establishment – which holds nearly all the wealth and power in the West today – works diligently to ensure the ressentiment-based "love” they inspire will not be aimed at them and is deflected elsewhere. Hence, they have created new classes of oppressors.

Who are the oppressors today? The working and middle class native populations of Western nations. The very same groups who essentially maintain and uphold society through their work and taxes. The Establishment’s hatred of these two groups is so profound it can barely be concealed – even under a thick layer of ressentiment-love.

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Resentment - The Hate Fueling Contemporary Conceptions of 'Love'

16/3/2019

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In Ressentiment, Max Scheler argues against Friedrich Nietzche’s claim that Christian morality and values stem from a slave morality rooted in resentment. Nevertheless, Scheler agrees with Nietzsche’s disparagement of ressentiment as a perverting force, and he steadfastly concurs with Nietzsche’s recognition of the inherent falsifying activity of resentment:

“Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.”

Scheler’s main disagreement with Nietszsche is the source of this ressentiment – the latter places it squarely within Christian morality and values, while the former regards bourgeois morality, which gradually but effectively replaced true Christian morality from the thirteenth century onward, as the true source of ressentiment. Both thinkers understand the falsifying nature of resentment – that of perverting and inverting authentic values and morality.

Scheler’s main bone of contention is Nietzsche’s mistaken conflation of Christianity with bourgeois morality and values. The latter, Scheler argues is utterly steeped in resentment thinking, while the former, in its authentic and unadulterated form, is simply incapable descending into resentment. Scheler concurs with Nietzsche’s criticism of resentment-based slave morality as the source of descending values, but rejects the claim that Christianity provided the catalyst for this descent.

According to Scheler, the error in Nietzsche’s premise becomes readily apparent in the concept of love. This is an important issue for us today as well because no concept has been as thoroughly falsified and perverted as much as love has. Scheler emphasizes that true Christian love is entirely free of ressentiment, but acknowledges “that ressentiment can very easily use it for its own purposes by simulating an emotion which corresponds to this idea. This simulation is often so perfect that even the sharpest observer can no longer distinguish real love from ressentiment which poses as love.”

Scheler concludes this to be the major flaw in Nietzsche’s attitudes regarding Christian love. When Nietzsche disparages Christian love, he is not criticizing actual, authentic Christian love, but ressentiment-based love that masquerades as Christian love. In other words, Scheler agrees with Nietzsche’s overall diagnosis of the sickness in modern man and society, but points out Nietzsche’s mistaken identification of the pathogen behind the illness.

This distinction is of vital importance today. Our world suffers from total metaphysical confusion, and I submit that the bulk of this metaphysical confusion has its foundation in falsified love. People are confused about love. It has become challenging to define and difficult to recognize in its authentic form. The source of this confusion is Scheler’s notion that “even the sharpest observer can no longer distinguish real love from ressentiment which poses as love.” I think this represents the foundation for much of our confused thinking today. It also reveals the Establishment’s use of ressentiment to “for its own purposes by simulating an emotion which corresponds to this idea.”

Regardless of who we are, I firmly believe most people possess, at the bare minimum, a vague intimation of what true love comprises, and I believe the source of this vague intimation is the divine spark each of us carries within ourselves. At some level, most people believe their motivations are driven and directed by goodness rather than evil, that is, by love rather than hatred. Yet, very few are able to truly comprehend the authentic source of this intimation of love or develop this vague intimation in the proper direction. Without this comprehension and development, the divine spark of love innate in all individuals becomes diluted by their own resentment-induced attitudes toward themselves and the world.

In addition to this, our ressentiment-based authorities thoroughly understand the significance and power of authentic love and work adamantly toward falsifying, inverting, and supplanting genuine, resentment-free love with fake, resentment-filled “love.” This fake, resentment-filled love simulates authentic love in such a manner that, “even the sharpest observer can no longer distinguish real love from ressentiment which poses as love.” Thus, people are lulled into the belief they are doing good when in fact they are engaging in its exact opposite.

Our inability to distinguish real love from ressentiment love is at the core of many of our contemporary problems, both at the individual and the societal level. The trick very few of us recognize (and it took me a long time to even begin to become aware of this myself, so I am not pointing fingers at anyone else per se) is that contemporary concepts of love are not grounded in real love at all, but in its opposite – in hatred. According to Scheler, the two pillars of hatred masquerading as love are the hatred of God and the hatred of self.

Ressentiment love does not recognize the reality of a personal and loving God. If it recognizes God at all, it can only regard God in the negative, as either indifferent and uncaring, or cruel and authoritarian. Either way, resentment-fueled love feels nothing but hatred and revulsion for God. Nevertheless, most ressentiment-motivated love is based in atheism, that is, the denial of God. Since God is either indifferent, cruel, or non-existent, resentment-based love regards the act of worship or any expressed love for God as either foolishly misguided or intrinsically evil. In the former, it is filled with spite and detraction against anyone with the audacity to love a divine entity that creates a world full of meaningless suffering, while in the latter it maliciously condemns those who dare to invest their love into something imaginary at the expense of something more concrete like altruism and love for mankind. On the topic, Scheller states:

“In the first place this love of mankind is an expression of suppressed hatred, a revulsion against God. It is the expression of a suppressed hatred of God! It keeps coming back to the strange idea that ‘there isn't enough love in the world’ for one to expend any on other than human beings - a real distortion dictated by ressentiment!”

Thus, the moral imperative in resentment-based love is to channel one’s energies away from God and toward humanity – not individuals made in the likeness of the Divine, but humanity as a whole. Resentment-based love removes God as the focal point and source of love and replaces this with the love of Man. It urges us toward selflessness and charity and persuades us that our highest virtue is to love everyone regardless of who they are. This altruistic urge becomes the only meaningful imperative. The ultimate goal is to make the world a better place for humanity by eliminating all inequalities stemming from Christian or even classical morality, both of which are regarded both as oppressive and authoritarian in nature. Put simply, the highest possible virtue in resentment-based love is materialistically-inspired altruism.

Resentment-based love rejects virtues such as loving your neighbor as yourself or treating people as you would like to be treated and demands we love our neighbor more than ourselves and treat other people far better than we believe we ourselves deserve to be treated. This unselfish “love” is then valued as the highest virtue to which an individual can aspire.

This errant belief in altruistic unselfishness through the unconditional love of the “other” not only inverts the original Christian conception of loving others but also mask altruism’s true source – hatred. Our modern obsession with the disadvantaged and the marginalized has less to do with love for people who are categorized as such and more to do with the hatred of those who occupy positions on the opposite side of the spectrum, as Scheler makes clear in the following passage from Ressentiment:

“Thus the ‘altruistic’ urge is really a form of hatred, of self-hatred, posing as its opposite (love) in the false perspective of consciousness. In the same way, in ressentiment morality, love for the ‘small,’ the ‘poor,’ the ‘weak,’ and the ‘oppressed’ is really disguised hatred, repressed envy, an impulse to detract, etc., directed against the opposite phenomena: ‘wealth,’ ‘strength,’ ‘power,’ ‘largesse.’ When hatred does not dare to come out into the open, it can be easily expressed in the form of ostensible love—love for something which has features that are the opposite of those of the hated object. This can happen in such a way that the hatred remains secret.”

I believe a great deal of our contemporary confusion about love, even among Christians, is located primarily within these two overarching misconceptions. True and sincere Christian love has been completely inverted and falsified by resentment-inspired love which, at its core, actually finds its source in hatred. The inability to differentiate true love from false love leads people to error and is ultimately harmful for both the individual and society. Yet even those who recognize and understand the marked difference between resentment-love and true love are sometimes held hostage by the dictums of ressentiment.

Recognizing this metaphysical confusion surrounding love must surely be the first step toward metaphysical realignment. We must come to terms with the way love has been manipulated by the forces of resentment. As Scheler states, we must realize that “All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations.” Resentment has convinced the world that the positive value inherent in Christian love is actually a negative value. According to Scheler, our task is to reject this false devaluation and negation, to challenge this poisoning of the mind, and re-establish the value and positivity contained within Christian love.

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Ressentiment is at the Core of the Problem

15/3/2019

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"We believe that the Christian values can very easily be perverted into ressentiment values and have often been thus conceived. But the core of Christian ethics has not grown on the soil of ressentiment. On the other hand, we believe that the core of bourgeois morality, which gradually replaced Christian morality ever since the 13th century and culminated in the French Revolution, is rooted in ressentiment. In the modern social movement, ressentiment has become an important determinant and has increasingly modified established morality."

This text appears in at the beginning of Max Scheler's Ressentiment, a slim volume of philosophy of phenomenology in which the author challenges Nietzsche’s assertion that Christianity stems from resentment and slave morality. Scheler argues Nietzsche’s error lies in equating contemporary Christian values as actual and original Christian values. According to Scheler, the Christianity Nietzsche criticizes is not truly Christianity at all, but rather a Christianity perverted by ressentiment values, which Scheler equates with bourgeois morality and its inherent grounding in resentment.

I believe Scheler explores a crucial problem, one that has plagued Christianity since the end of the Middle Ages. Not only have resentment morality and values utterly eclipsed Christianity in society, but they have acted as a kind of poison in which Christianity has been marinating for centuries. The problem for contemporary Christians is twofold in this regard. On the one hand, the distinction between resentment values and Christian values has been completely blurred. On the other hand, authentic Christian values appear flawed and weak when set against the ruling resentment values system.

So much of what I have been encountering online lately can be boiled down the problems Scheler identified in his little book. It’s been a few years since I read Ressentiment, but I think I will revisit it in the very near future and write some observations about the book on this blog. I have a feeling Scheler’s insights would be timely and helpful and add a valuable perspective to many of the topics I have seen fellow bloggers exploring and addressing over the past few weeks.

Stay tuned.

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A Place in Which I am Happy to Die (No, This is a Happy Post . . . Really!)

14/3/2019

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Yesterday marked the fourth year anniversary of my move to western Hungary. I normally do not keep track of such things since I have a tough enough time remembering more important dates like my wedding anniversary, yet for some reason, yesterday I recalled I had arrived to Sopron, Hungary on March 13, 2015. Last year, March 13 slipped by unacknowledged, but this year I became acutely aware of the date. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was just a gentle reminder to take a moment to reflect on the time I have spent here.

I certainly do not wish to bore anyone with the details of the four years I have spent in the northwestern part of Hungary, but I will say this – after more than a decade of wandering the globe, I have once again found a place I can call home. I cannot imagine leaving the place I am now or moving anywhere else. I say this not because my circumstances here are perfect or ideal, but they are perfect and ideal enough – at least for me and my family. For the first time in nearly twenty years, I can honestly say I am content. A sense of balance and harmony I haven’t experienced in decades has slowly returned. I am confident I am in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. My family is happy. I live in Reality. What more could a man possibly want?

I once jokingly told a friend I would settle down if ever I found a place in which I would be happy to die. Though it sounds rather morbid, I have found that place, and there is no place else I want to be.

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The Women of Eger - Modern Feminists Would Disapprove

13/3/2019

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Women of Eger - 1867 - Bertalan Székely

I usually avoid feminism as a topic, but I’m feeling mischievous today, so here goes nothing . . .

During the Siege of Eger in 1552, a defending force of approximately 2,200 individuals comprising professional soldiers, peasants, and a few dozen women successfully repelled an attacking Ottoman army of approximately 35,000 to 40,000 men. Though the women numbered only in the dozens and had no real military training of any kind, they helped defend Eger Fortress against the assaulting forces and played a significant role in repeatedly repelling the Ottoman onslaught. The siege lasted 39 days before Turkish commanders finally gave up and withdrew.

The painting above is Bertalan Székely’s depiction of the female defenders at Eger. I have always admired this painting. In my mind, it captures the tougher, more aggressive side of femininity in a positive light. The image contains all the values and virtues modern feminists promulgate – resistance, courage, agency, determination, bravery, competence, ability, and equality with men. At first glance, this painting contains everything a feminist should find admirable.

Of course, most contemporary feminists would not interpret the painting in this way. Oh no, that would be too simple. Most feminists would not regard women putting their lives on the line to defend their nation and their faith from a dangerous force as a good thing. That would be too obvious. Instead, modern feminists would see only layers of oppression in the colors Székely had painted on the canvas.

Firstly, modern feminists would point out the painting depicts the patriarchy’s exploitation of Eger's oppressed women. Feminists would explain that patriarchy had indoctrinated these women into believing they were defending themselves when, in fact, they were doing little more than defending the systems of their own oppression, namely the patriarchy, the nation, Christianity, family, and white supremacy.

Secondly, our modern feminists would also likely eye the painting and emphasize the the poor working conditions, gender stereotypes, glass ceilings, obvious sexual objectification, and violence against women the work of art contains.

Lastly, our modern feminists would argue the evil patriarchy had also indoctrinated the women of Eger into a racist ideology. The men of Eger, these feminists would claim, had taught their women to hate the Other and to reject the vibrant, enriching cultural possibilities Ottoman conquest clearly offered. By being brainwashed into believing the Ottomans were an evil force striving to enslave them, the women of Eger had become oblivious to the true source of their oppression - Hungarian men and the hideous patriarchy these Hungarian men had erected. As a result, Eger's women were incapable of seeing the conquering army as a liberating force, which is what it actually was.

If you think my assessment of modern feminism is unfair or exaggerated, I encourage you to watch the brief snippet below. Something tells me the Hungarians would have lost the fortress in a single day if the women of Eger had been anything like the enlightened feminist thinker in this short video.

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Jim Morrison and the Spiritual Backfire

12/3/2019

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I turned my back on the Catholic Church and Catholicism when I was sixteen. The drift had started a couple of years earlier when I refused the sacrament of Confirmation. My rejection of the Church and the Catholic faith had nothing to do with creeping atheism, but rather my growing discomfort with the increasingly visible hypocrisies I was seeing all around me. Put succinctly, by failing to live up to its own tenets and dogma, I felt the Church had let me down, and I had no desire to be confirmed into the folds of what I considered a corrupt institution.

Though I had rejected my Catholic faith, I still believed in God and still possessed some form of spiritual yearning. I began seeking alternative approaches to the divine, and because I was sixteen, popular music was one of the first places I looked. The Doors was the first band to pique my interest in this regard. In one respect, the rock band was simply one of dozens that had exploded onto the scene at the height of the flower-power/hippie/sexual revolution era of the late-sixties. What set The Doors apart for me was the dark charisma of the band's lead singer, Jim Morrison.

Though I liked the band’s music, I felt a greater attraction to Morrison’s shamanistic persona and mystical lyrics. I immediately investigated the origin of the band’s name and discovered it had its source in a line from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Aldous Huxley took the title for his book The Doors of Perception, which details his attempt at psychedelic consciousness expansion via mescaline, from this line. In turn, Jim Morrison reduced the phrase even further by naming his rock-and-roll band The Doors after Huxley's book. At the age of sixteen, I considered all of this to be profound, and thus began my nearly three-year obsession with the life and work of James Douglas Morrison.

Looking back at it now, I realize what had fascinated me about Morrison was the dark spirituality he seemed to epitomize. Having turned my back on Catholicism, I was searching for another route toward the spiritual and, as silly as it sounds now, I was hopeful Jim Morrison could provide such a route.

In Morrison, I saw a kindred spirit who had an innate interest in consciousness. Like me, he had been a shy, sensitive youth drawn to poetry and literature. Like me, he sensed there was more to life than the material and had a keen interest in peak experiences and creative transcendence within which he believed the secret to life could be discovered. While other bands and singers of the era sang of incense and peppermints, Morrison crooned about breaking through the other side. His persona represented a raw, intense form of unbridled yearning for greater consciousness and experience that found no solace within conventional spiritual frameworks.

After reading No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, I regarded Morrison as an incarnated version of one of The Doors’ own songs - a wild child, full of grace, who offered the potential to be the savior of the human race. According to the biography, Morrison detested his lionization as a rock star and regarded his rocket ride to fame as a trap, one that kept him from pursuing his true calling as a poet and visionary. I took Morrison’s lack of interest in his eventual fame and material success as proof of the man’s dedication to higher things.

While the rest of his bandmates simply wanted to put on a show, Morrison aspired to elevate the crowd into a mass trance of transcendence with himself at the helm as the grand shaman. He began to mock his own celebrity altering the charismatic appearance that had made him a star. He grew a beard, gained weight, and began performing lewd and unpredictable antics on stage. Caught in a monster of his own making, he sought escape through alcohol and drugs, and his overindulgence eventually resulted in his premature death at the tender age of twenty-seven.

Convinced Morrison had been on to something, I spent a little over two years researching his life and work. I analyzed the lyrics to every Doors song, read every poem Morrison had written, and scoured countless secondary sources written by people ranging from his family members and associates to hardcore fans and academics. In 1990, I even made a pilgrimage to Mr. Mojo Risin’s grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in France.

What did I discover after my exhaustive research?

Well, nothing good.

The more I waded in Jim Morrison’s life, the more I realized he had been, at best, a minor mystic, but even that may a generous overestimation. In the end, I concluded Jim Morrison had been merely an intelligent and sensitive young man – an unexceptional poetic talent bolstered by exceptional charisma and stage presence who, rather tragically, happened to be in the right place doing the right thing when the tumultuous wave that was the 1960s deluged the world.

It did not take me long to realize that Morrison’s inherent spirituality was, at its core, quite base and material. Though he shared some brilliant observations during interviews and in some snippets of his poems and songs, Morrison’s spiritual insights rarely rose above the physical plane. Excess paved the road to wisdom, mystical experiences were the result of sex or drugs, and doors stood between the known and the unknown, but Morrison himself could offer no explicit revelation about what the unknown encompassed. Morrison obsessed with breaking through to the other side, but had been utterly indifferent to what the other side might actually contain.

Having written the above, I do believe Morrison possessed some level of spiritual intuition and occasional, non-drug induced moments of heightened awareness or consciousness, but I surmise he had no proper channels into which to funnel these. Rejecting Christianity, and every other religious tradition for that matter, Morrison directed his inherent, malformed spiritual energies in the only direction available to him – the tempestuous, chaotic, hedonistic 1960s counterculture he ironically professed to loathe.

The meeting of these two forces proved to be short-lived and fatal. When his divine spark encountered the noxious, combustible fumes of 1960s, it resulted in a horrendous and tragic spiritual backfire. Embracing the sexual revolution and drug culture with open arms, Morrison embarked on a truly spectacular and pointless five-year journey of self-destruction that culminated in his mysterious death in a Paris hotel room in 1971.

My interest in Jim Morrison waned after I turned nineteen. I continued my wayward spiritual quest in the works of Colin Wilson and P.D. Ouspensky and let Jim Morrison fade into the background. Though I still enjoy some of The Doors’ music whenever it comes on, I rarely think about the band or their tragic lead singer these days. I am certain my exposure to The Doors and Morrison was harmful to some degree, but with the exception of a few youthful drinking binges, I knew better than to follow Morrison down the paved road of excess in the hope of finding wisdom. Even as a teenager, I was averse to the idea of consciousness expansion through chemical means, and though I had turned away from the Catholic Church, it did not take me long to understand that the rock-and-roll, Lizard King shamanism Morrison offered was spiritual dead end that offered nothing more than an excuse for destructive, hedonistic indulgence.

Whenever I do think about Jim Morrison these days, it is from a speculative perspective. I imagine Jim Morrison would have made a formidable Christian had he chosen the path, and I wonder why he had seen no appeal in Christianity. Christ’s gift – the one and only true way to the other side - offers exactly what Morrison had longed for during life. All the right ingredients had been in place. Yet Morrison adhered to a hedonistic and rebellious worldview instead, which led to him a true Roman wilderness of pain, suffering, and early death. Though he had annagramatized his name to Mr Mojo Risin in the song L.A. Woman, Morrison had shown no real interest at the prospect of rising after death.

Sadly, his desire to break on through to the other side ended with a spiritual thud. I say this not from a position of judgmental scorn, but rather with a saddened heart. Say what you will about the man (and this despite the ample conspiracy theories about his being an agent of the establishment), I consider Jim Morrison to have been misguided rather than evil, and I cannot help but wonder what might have been had he seen the light in his own lifetime.

In 1990, his father had a flat stone placed on Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise. The bronze plaque on the stone contains the following inscription in Greek: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ.

This translates as "true to his own spirit" or "according to his own daemon.”

The second translation is more fitting in my opinion. It captures the tragedy of Jim Morrison and the lost spiritual potential he epitomized, a potential to which he himself was utterly oblivious as this short interview snippet, recorded less than a year before his death, clearly demonstrates.

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Cucky Stuff and Categorizing Males Via the Greek Alphabet Leave Me Cold

10/3/2019

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I don't know. Maybe I'm too old to care, but I come across a lot of material online that focuses on calling turncoat conservatives "cucks" and ordering males into a heirarchies defined by letters from the Greek alphabet and, well, most of it just leaves me cold.

Don't misunderstand, I am not criticizing those who write about these things because it obviously seems important to them, and perhaps it is important at some level. The observations these writers make do contain some truth here and there, but the constant rants about 'cuckservatives' and the endless fixation on men as alphas, betas, or gammas just does not interest me all that much.

Once again, I am not claiming that writing about these subjects is necessarily bad; it's just I don't find either topic all that engaging. This obviously places me in the minority as it seems many blog readers derive perennial satisfaction from reading about the latest Cucky McFluffmuffin, or gamma soyboy, or whatever.

Well, to each his own, I suppose.

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A Few More Rambling Thoughts About Foul Language

10/3/2019

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In a previous post I acknowledged foul language as a suboptimal and fundamentally bad thing, but also made a case for the acceptability of foul language within certain contexts. I suppose this comes down to my general view of profanity versus my approach to the topic as a fiction writer. To be clear, arguing for the acceptability of profanity from a contextual perspective does not imply that I am giving foul language a free pass, so to speak. Regardless of where or how it is employed, profanity remains corrosive to the Good, but its use within certain contexts seems necessary if for no other reason than to emphasize this point.

I will begin with my general views. As redundant as the following statement may sound, my big concern with foul language is the fact that it is language – in other words, one of the primary ways we interpret and comprehend the world and ourselves. It is also one of the elemental ways we communicate these interpretations and comprehensions to others. At the most basic epistemological level this is serious business because the language we use to comprehend and define the world and ourselves also has tremendous power at the ontological level where we judge and infer the nature and relations of being.

Seen from this perspective, profanity has the potential to distort our thinking and deaden and desecrate the outside world. I surmise that delineating everything in both the outer world and inner world as an effin this or effin that cheapens being and renders it less vigorous and intense. Debasing the world and our existence through the habitual use of execration could prevent us from perceiving the world and ourselves as they truly are. We may become desensitized to some of the truth, beauty, and goodness the world contains.

A second concern with obscene language is its sources. Commenter Epimetheus noted that profanity tends to “encourage a basic attitude of contempt, pride, and wrath.” I believe this is correct and would be quick to other negative emotions such as scorn, mockery, and hatred. Even good natured or seemingly innocent cursing seems to spring from rather dark places. Regardless of where it emerges from, profanity has the tendency to denature and dehumanize. Though anger may be justified at times, verbally reducing people to the level of reproductive organs or animals or sexual objects or other unseemly things serves as a dangerous first step to permanently objectifying some individuals as such things in our minds.

Finally, foul language often desacralizes and falls into the realm of blasphemy. The sole purpose of certain words and phrases is to disrespect and divest the spiritual of sacred and religious significance. Applying the profane to that which is unprofane is the ultimate expression of irreverence.

How then could I possibly argue for the acceptability of profanity within certain contexts given what I have noted above? In my first post on the subject I argued the existence of foul language within certain works of art might be acceptable and used the example of the gangster film Goodfellas to back up my point.

On the one hand, allowing the characters in the film to curse lends them a quality of realism. On the other hand, depicting these characters as realistically as possible with their foul language intact allows us to see the close connection between their language, motivations, and actions. Goodfellas is populated by mostly vile, vulgar, and violent individuals whose vileness, violence, and vulgarity are perfectly projected through the language they use. These characters are essentially predators motivated by ruthless materialistic desires. Removing the foul language from Goodfellas may have rendered the film unbelievable; it also may have made the characters appear less evil and ruthless. Anyone who admires or even emulates the foul language the film contains misses the larger point the inclusion of the profanity might be trying to make.

When I write fiction, I allow certain characters to use foul language within the context of the narrative not because I wish to glorify profanity itself, but rather to provide insights into a character’s personality and motivations. As in real life, cursing does not immediately render a character evil and beyond redemption, but characters that use foul language consistently reveal much about themselves and their attitude toward the world.

Of course, an argument could be made that all of this can be accomplished without the inclusion of cursing and swear words. I would be quick to agree, but writers who choose to include profanity in fiction should not be callously dismissed as profane, which puritanical types often tend to do.

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