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I Want Out

11/21/2023

We all have to do something to earn a living in this world. My present vocational situation is as ideal as I could hope for. I susupect it would even instill envy in some. All the same, I want out.

I'm not saying that I am in the process of getting out, but I find it difficult to ignore the strong desire to get out and do something else. Once again, I have no idea what that could be or what it might involve; it just has to be something else.

And that's where the fun starts. What else could I possibly do? What else would I be willing to do? What else would I actually like to do? Would anything else be meaningfully different from what I am doing now? Probably not. Then why bother with wanting out?

Cope. Carry on. Make the best of it. Keep your attention focused on more important matters.

For the first time, I wish I were of retirement age. Things would be a bit simpler if that were the case. But I'm not, which means I either make good on wanting out or on stifling wanting out and focusing that pent-up energy elsewhere.

Which is what I will probably do.

For now.

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Mednyánszky Sunset Season Has Arrived

11/19/2023

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Some find the late autumn/early winter to be a gloomy time. I suppose it is in many respects, but over the past four or five years, I have begun looking forward to mid-November because it marks the start of what I refer to as "Mednyánszky Sunset Season."

When visible, the sunsets in this part of the world are exceptionally captivating and enchanting from the middle of November until about the end of January -- something László Mednyánszky not only recognized but also effectively conveyed in his many autumn/winter sunset paintings.

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Stalin Was Too Moral; The Anatomy of a Zizek Thought-Horror

11/18/2023

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Slavoj Zizek – the perpetually slobbering, lisping, nose-wiping, uber-leftist thinker and supposedly aspiring communist revolutionary – is often described as the most dangerous philosopher in the West. I don’t think Zizek poses any real danger to anyone. Though his talk is dangerous, he has never seemed inclined to take any risky, revolutionary walks. Cushy professor jobs, lucrative book contracts, fawning media, and profitable speaking engagements tend to hinder one’s motivation to go for a stroll in that direction.

If Zizek is dangerous in any way, it is the slim possibility that some radicals may take his ideas and run with them. That’s what Zizek appears to pine for. Thankfully, no serious takers have emerged . . . yet.

In any case, no leftist/communist ideologue in the world today is as future-fixated and utopia-obsessed as old Slavoj. He takes nothing off the table when it comes to “the times to come” and enthusiastically justifies practically anything and everything that could help foment and usher in a new communist revolution, as this little thought-horror from his In Defense of Lost Causes demonstrates:

There is, however, a limit to Stalinism: not that it is too immoral, but that it is secretly too moral, still relying on a figure of the big Other. As we have seen, in what is arguably the most intelligent legitimization of Stalinist terror, Merleu-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror from 1946, the terror is justified as a kind of wager on the future, almost in the mode of the theology of Pascal who enjoins us to make a bet on God: if the final result of today’s horror will be the bright Communist future, then this outcome will retroactively redeem the terrible things a revolutionary has to do today.

Pascal and communism? A false analogy par excellence. Comparing two mutually exclusive sets of metaphysical assumptions to justify the mode of only one of these sets represents a level of mental gymnastics to which only people like Zizek and Merleu-Ponty can rise. It barely warrants mentioning that the metaphysical assumptions of communism are entirely this-worldly, while Pascal’s wager focuses on the other-worldly. Comparing these two visions of the future is as deceptive as it is absurd.

Stephen Vizinczey warned his readers that people who obsess about the future do not care about you. I will flesh out this saying by adding this-worldly before future. Anyone who insists you obsess about some this-worldly future instantly reveals that he doesn’t care about you. At all.

Zizek spends the rest of the Stalinism Revisited chapter of In Defense of Lost Causes detailing how Stalin’s biggest problem was the burden of the big Other. Stalin, Zizek claims, was troubled by things like ensuring that brutal actions, purges, and liquidations would remain redeemable in the eyes of the big Other.

Put more simply, Zizek argues that Stalin was too hung up on the end justifying the means. Zizek’s solution? The means don’t need justifying if the end is truly good.

I suppose the Nazis could employ the same line of thinking to justify their own particular set of horrors. Not so fast, Zizek lisps while pointing to what he describes as the thin but crucial difference between Nazis and communism:

Let us take Stalinism at its most brutal: the dekulakization of the early 1930s. Stalin’s slogan was that “kulaks as a class should be liquidated” – what does this mean? It can mean many things – from taking away their property (land), to forcibly removing them to other areas (say, from Ukraine to Siberia), or simply going into a gulag – but it did not mean simply kill them all. The goal was to liquidate them as a class, not as individuals.

Even when the rural population was deliberately starved (millions of dead in Ukraine, again), the goal was not to kill them all, but to break their backbone, to brutally crush their resistance, to show them who was master. The difference – minimal, but crucial – persists here with regard to the Nazi de-Judaization, where the ultimate goal effectively was to annihilate them as individuals, to make them disappear as a race.

Zizek cites Marcuse, who claimed that the difference between the Stalinist-gulag and the Nazi annihilation camp was, at that historical moment, the difference between civilization and barbarism, with the former being civilized and the latter being barbaric.

I’m sure the kids who starved to death in the Ukraine in the 1930s would have been relieved to know they had been targeted as a class and not as individuals. They also would have been grateful to discover that their annihilation qualified as civilized rather than barbaric.

What can you do with Zizek's thought-horrors?

Seriously? Anyone?

Absolutely nothing. Be grateful for his cushy prof jobs, speaking tours, and all the rest of it.

And let the dead bury the dead with their this-worldly-future obsessions.

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Dali's Demonic Honesty

11/17/2023

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Dali was not a demon, but he could be demonically honest, as demonstrated in the short interview clip below.

When asked what it felt like to be the most famous painter in the world, Dali states that lots of people who ask for his autograph don’t know him as a painter. He claims most don’t know what he is – a singer, a madman, a film star. All they know is that Dali is famous and that alone justifies an autograph.

This speaks to the modern cult of celebrity – a cult Dali devoted most of his effort and energy to creating and cultivating, not only for himself but as a prototype for all who would follow. I guess you could say Dali was a pioneer in the art of being famous for being famous.

A shameless self-promoter and master manipulator, Dali mastered the art of getting noticed and staying noticed. He shrewdly utilized the ever-expanding media of the twentieth century to entice people toward his endless spectacle and performance parade. He understood Oscar Wilde’s famous “not being talked about quip” and energetically focused on always being talked about.

Dali’s claim that he had contributed absolutely nothing to art is what Dr. Charlton describes as “demonic honesty.” At first, the admission almost comes across as the humility and modesty of a great master who refuses to allow his ego to dominate his creations, but things take a sudden, somewhat unexpected turn when Dali refers to himself as a “very bad painter.”

Anyone familiar with Dali’s paintings knows he was anything but a bad painter, at least technically. Some may disagree, but I believe Dali was a far better painter than his contemporary fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso, at least technically. I will add that he was a far better painter than most twentieth-century painters.

How could Dali possibly consider himself a “very bad painter?”

Dali offers the following explanation – he is too intelligent to be a good painter. He then adds that one must be a little stupid to be a good painter.

The big question here is what Dali means by intelligence. I sense that the intelligence he refers to is the slick, devious, cunning, scheming, artful, and wily variety. Dali acknowledges that he is too crafty and guileful to be a great painter. Stupid artists reject the temptation to guile or knavery and approach art and creation with honest and pure motivations. Dali admits he is too intelligent to do so, which speaks volumes about his motivations.

Dali then goes on to praise the greatness and genius of Velazquez, Vermeer, and Raphael; however, he juxtaposes these geniuses with his “I’m a very bad painter” claim by declaring that he would die within a week were ever to produce a masterpiece that reached the height of a Velazquez. To avoid such a dreadful fate, he chooses to “paint bad pictures and live a little longer.”

I found this last bit intriguing on many levels. For starters, Dali seems perfectly aware of Creation. He also seems very aware of what he should be doing with his creativity. Yet he appears to reject what he should be doing in favor of what keeps Dali living, revealing that he never considered his art as anything more than a means to the shallowest of ends – fame, wealth, success, ego.

Dali acknowledges that if he pursued art and creativity more sincerely, it would be the end of him — more specifically, the end of famous, wealthy, successful, egomaniacal, celebrity Dali.

A different, perhaps truer Dali would take the very bad painter’s place – and very bad painter Dali wants none of that.

I sincerely hope Dali was able to let go of "living a little longer" when his life ended. I really do.

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A "Better Than Nothing" Understanding Is A Start But Hardly Adequate

11/15/2023

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Some traditional/conventional/mainstream Christians appear to be waking up to the reality that external forms of Christianity are collapsing or have collapsed entirely.

Thankfully, many maintain their faith despite this cratering and are beginning to acknowledge that Christianity will inevitably be simpler, more individualistic, and more other-worldly-focused going forward.

Such acknowledgment is no small feat, especially considering how most traditional/conventional/mainstream Christians understand, define, and view Christianity. Understandably, the acknowledgment is a bitter one. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they have resigned themselves to the consolation that it is "better than nothing."

Most traditional/conventional/mainstream Christians yearn for a Christianity that resembles past Christianity, with all of its inherent social, political, and intellectual dominance intact. Such Christians see little "upside" in a form of Christianity that lacks some or all of these attributes.

To such Christians, I offer the following -- I know where you are coming from and sympathize to a certain degree; however, I think the implications of a "better than nothing" attitude require deeper contemplation.

To suggest that current circumstances might be "the best thing ever" would be too much for most to accept.

Yet, a simpler, more individualistic, more other-worldly focused Christianity is incontestably "the best thing given current conditions" and undeniably better than the baser, collective, this-worldly "faith communities" parading around under the guise of Christianity today.

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Why Do You Call Them Citadels of Darkness?

11/11/2023

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“Why do you call Oxford and Columbia citadels of darkness?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Never in the history of the world has the planet been flooded with many so-called educated and enlightened individuals clutching their precious little degrees, yet what has this expansion of education and enlightenment brought us?”

Verge paused for a moment and waited for an answer to his question; when none was forthcoming, he continued, “Why, a perishing society, of course!”

He swirled his cognac again. A bemused expression spread across his face.

“The absolute triumph of mediocrity under the flag of humanism. They have drowned us all in an infinite sea of vulgarity during their relentless assault against Western civilization with their atheism, their reductionism, their positivism, their materialism – that, my dear friends, is the lasting testament of the citadels of darkness. Bless them in their effort to enlighten us!”

Note: I wrote that fictionalized assessment of higher education institutions over a decade ago. Since then the citadels have only grown darker. Makes one wonder where universities will be in a decade's time. Suffice to say, the prognosis looks grim.

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The System Can "Turn on a Dime" When Instructed to Do So

11/10/2023

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The following is an excerpt from a substack written by a German blogger who goes by the pseudonym Eugyppius:

Some valued readers objected to my remark in yesterday’s post that the political establishment appear “completely powerless” to stop migration. They point out that the importation of foreign political clients furthers elite interests and suggest that the present wave of mass migration is desired, perhaps even deliberately engineered. Now that my internet is functioning again, I will risk repeating some old plague chronicle themes, in order to explain my thinking more fully.

First of all, I agree that our rulers have eagerly sponsored mass migration for a long time. They also collaborated in constructing the massive tapestry of NGOs, philanthropic organisations and human smuggling bands that continue funnelling the third world into Europe today. In theory, the political establishment could stop this nonsense tomorrow by any number of measures. Italy could stop fishing migrants out of the ocean, Germany could stop paying them money and EU member states could bin the egregiously dumb legal construct of asylum. Alas, the managerial state simply can’t turn on a dime like this. All policies are subject to powerful inertial forces, because of the sheer complexity of the institutional apparatus and the vast numbers of people involved. It takes years for the system to even recognise that what it is doing is stupid, and still longer for it to stop acting stupidly. The present influx, which reflects forces set in motion more than a decade ago, is a catastrophe of the regime’s own making, and one it is very ill-equipped to address.

I’m not sure if Eugyppius is religious or not. His choice of pseudonym seems to imply that he is, but it could be that he just thinks the name sounds cool because it is difficult to pronounce. Whatever the case, I do read his blog every now and then and have found some of his material enlightening. All the same, I’d like to say a few words concerning the bold-added sentence above.

Eugyppius’s premise here is that the System – as a lumbering, complex bureaucratic behemoth involving vast numbers of people and mechanisms – cannot “turn on a dime”, hence, its unavoidable propensity to implement its policies and decisions in a plodding and slow-moving manner.

This is only partially true. Yes, most of the System’s machinations are plodding and protracted, but this does not entail that the System is incapable of turning on a dime whenever it is instructed to do so.

Case in point, the birdemic and its subsequent peck campaign, during which the System proved – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that it was impressively capable of turning on a dime.

The System did not let “the sheer complexity of the institutional apparatus” obstruct anything there. The vast amounts of people involved proved to be an asset, not a liability. Inertia and passivity gave way to energy and activity. Put simply, the System proved extremely competent in getting everyone and everything to “get with the program” with breathtaking quickness and efficiency.

Eugyppius calls his blog “A Plague Chronicle” and has dedicated much effort and energy to covering the birdemic, yet he seems to have trouble remembering just how quick and efficient “the sheer complexity of the institutional apparatus” can be.

It all comes down to the System’s goals and motivations. Some things are purposefully slow and drawn out and others hit like lightning.

Now, Eugyppius may have a bad memory, but I suspect his take on how the System operates has more to do with appearing “fair and balanced.”

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The Ideal of a Unified, Altruistic Society

11/10/2023

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Ask modern people to describe the indispensable components of an ideal society or civilization. I guarantee you that most would check off unity and altruism as essential characteristics, regardless of what part of the political spectrum they identify with.

The self-identified leftist liberal types would employ words like diversity and inclusivity to describe their idea of unity and terms like social justice and equality/equity to outline their vision of people living for the sake of others.

Those on the right would portray unity as culture, class, nation, or race and altruism as the duty to self-sacrifice to conserve and preserve cultural, class-based, national, or racial unity.

It doesn’t take more than a cursory glance to understand that both conceptualizations and the countless others along the political spectrum are variations of the same theme. Both fail to properly or fully address the spiritual foundation underpinning the material reality of societies and civilizations.

From 2020 to 2022, the world got a little taste of what a so-called ideal society or civilization founded on unity and altruism would look like and be like. The dreaded birdemic plague provided the world unity and altruism – the two components nearly all modern people yearn for.

The severe measures implemented in the name of keeping everyone safe from everyone else integrated everyone into an unprecedented display of unity while the peck campaign granted people the opportunity to do something selfless for the benefit of others and the world. Freedom, agency, and rights were trampled and cast aside to answer the call for unity and altruism.

People who envision ideal societies and civilizations through the prism of unity and altruism unavoidably favor establishing societal or civilizational despotism over the individual. Put another way, people who allow political/social spectrums to dominate their thinking inescapably aspire to some form of totalitarianism because their thinking is ineluctably mired in positivism, which considers theism and metaphysics null and void.

A conceptualization of reality that renounces theism and metaphysics has no use for individuals, motivation, choice, agency, rights, or freedom. The individual exists only to serve the collective, and the focal point of the collective is society, something Auguste Comte makes explicitly clear in his The Catechism of Positivist Religion. (I know; the irony, right? Reject all religion and then write a catechism.) Anyway,

Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such a notion always rests on individuality.

We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, and to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. … Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral.

Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions.

Comte’s last point about the much-vaunted final state, where only duties based on functions exist, is disturbing and revealing. We certainly got a sample of what that might look like during the birdemic, didn’t we?

Comte is also famous for uttering the following: “But now, I, August Comte, have discovered the truth. Therefore, there is no longer any need for freedom of thought or freedom of the press. I want to rule and to organize the whole country.”

In the end, all positivism comes down to the desire to rule. Mandate unity and altruism for all and use that as the foundation of truth through which one accesses power. Once power has been secured, banish all freedom of thought, and focus entirely on ruling the unified, selfless masses in the name of truth.

Thankfully, theism and metaphysics are not null and void. God exists. Creation exists. You and I exist, which means we still have freedom, agency, and choice, but we must want and exercise these to enjoy them.

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Of All the Golden Calves in the World, None is More Golden Than Altruism

11/9/2023

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I was perusing a site called Global Research this morning, when I stumbled upon an article called Financial Dictatorship Changes Human Consciousness by Jaras Valiukėnas. I was tempted to keep scrolling at first because the premise struck me as too obvious, but the mention of human consciousness piqued my interest, so I waded in.

The following summarizes the writer’s ideas:

Human consciousness took a wrong turn somewhere and has been hijacked by the same market mechanisms the Establishment employs to enslave and destroy people.
This market form of consciousness has turned the masses into selfish predators who view the world and everything in it as “food” to satiate vulgar, self-centered appetites.
Human consciousness shapes reality creatively but in its current form, it has been harnessed for destruction.
Human consciousness should be developing to the realization that the world’s people must unite, that we are all in this together and that we are also unified with the natural world.
“It is necessary to completely abandon the instinctive path of development, taking the path of intelligent construction of one’s future. Free the economy from mandatory growth and maximum profit. Bank interest should be prohibited, and the entire financial sector should become a single organism of the state.”
“The most important issue is the rejection of false material values and a return to the true ones, which are land and water; people should again feel one with the nature around them.”
“As for spiritual values, their return will be inevitable in conditions of unity; we are all a society of a common destiny. I cannot say how to implement all this in practice, but it will have to be done, otherwise, the wheel of history will do it, but with more tragic consequences.”

If you are somewhat confused by the seemingly conflicting metaphysical assumptions, you are not alone. Valiukėnas strikes me as the sort of person who has made some real breakthroughs in discernment, but his metaphysical assumptions are plagued by an abundance of what Owen Barfield referred to as Residual Unresolved Positivism, as his conclusion amply demonstrates:

Man and the nature surrounding him are a single whole, our ancestors knew this very well, living with it in complete harmony. The fact that everything in our world is interconnected is confirmed by quantum science. It is not at all necessary to be a scientist to see the obvious, just look at a map of the planet, which, plus or minus, is 70% covered with water, the rest 30% is earth, the human body consists of 70% water and 30% earth elements. Perhaps this is a coincidence, many will think, but for some reason, I don’t think so.

Any living biological matter by its nature is a continuation of the earth, and the earth is a continuation of the sky. The physical body of each of us will in due time become part of the earth, the water, having changed its properties, will rise into the sky, purify itself, and again pour onto the earth with rain, filling the surrounding nature with life.

This is the same eternal process of “sowing and reaping” that Christ spoke about in his time. How can we break out of this closed cycle of our physical nature and realize the meaning of our life in this world?

Well, I humbly suggest prioritizing life that is not in this world, but Valiukėnas is not ready to make that leap yet. He’s entirely focused on meaning in this world:

The Soviet period, despite its many mistakes, gave us an important lesson that we need to deeply comprehend and draw conclusions for ourselves. For me personally, this period opened my eyes to all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature, it looked like the beginning of awakening from a dream, just before the dawn began.

As for the power of money and humanity’s dependence on it, the head of the Rothschild clan answered this question very directly: “People just need to stop worshiping the Golden Calf, and this dependence will disappear.”

True as that may be, what people like Valiukėnas fail to notice is that are essentially replacing the worshipping of one Golden Calf with another. In the specific case of Valiukėnas, this new Golden Calf is the vision of a unified global society in complete harmony with nature, a sort of Green Marxism, if you will.

Nowhere is this Golden Calf more clearly displayed than in Valiukėnas’s lament concerning the absence of altruism in the modern world:

At the heart of market thinking, a reflex has been developed that encourages the consumer to consider the whole world, including the people around him, as potential food for himself.

In this thinking, the concept of altruism is completely absent, which does not correspond to the nature of the world around us and man himself; this fact is directly related to the fall in the birth rate, the loss of a sense of unity, and much more.

First, the concept of altruism does not in any way correspond to the nature of the world around us and to man himself because the concept of altruism is the brainchild of Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, who vehemently denied the reality of religion and the spiritual.

Second, altruism cannot correspond to the nature of the world and to man himself precisely because it is and has always been a deeply anti-religious and anti-spiritual principle that has nothing at all to do with Christ or Christianity.

Last, Jesus did not promote altruism.

At its core, Valiukėnas’s ultimate vision concerning the development of human consciousness is the establishment of Comte’s social positivism, with society sitting atop the hierarchy of values, or as Comte called it, the hierarchy of sciences. Within this vision rests Comte’s dictum, “The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.”

Valiukėnas’s metaphysical assumptions include some fairly juicy self-delusions; however, my primary aim in this post is to draw attention to the larger issue of putting first things first.

If your discernment leads you to believe that society and culture are atop the hierarchy of values or science or whatever, or that an individual should dedicate his life energies solely to the furtherment or preservation of society and culture, then your discernment remains entangled in the sticky pit of altruism and its inevitable social positivism.

The same applies to those who liberally throw around the “demography is destiny” line (also one of Comte’s ideas, by the way).

If you think that’s no big deal, remember that Comte was the man who claimed that “Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.”

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How to Bungle Bollix in One Easy Step

11/9/2023

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Bollocks.

I was sixteen when I first heard this word. I was visiting a friend who had moved to England, and one evening in a Chester pub, I overheard a man utter the word after his mate had meticulously described some social initiative the Thatcher government was tabling. I discreetly asked my friend for a definition, to which he replied,

“Bullshit. Nonsense. Rubbish. But the word means balls.”

“Between-the-legs balls?”

My friend grinned and nodded.

“What a great word!” I exclaimed.

As I finished my pint, I made a solemn teenage vow that I would incorporate the word bollocks into my active vocabulary from that moment forward; however, like most of the solemn vows I made back then, nothing ever came of it -- not even after I discovered the word featured in the title of a Sex Pistols album.

Etymology Online offers the following on this vulgar British term:

bollocks (n.)
"testicles," 1744, variant of ballocks, from Old English beallucas "testicles," from Proto-Germanic *ball-, from PIE root *bhel- (2) "to blow, swell." In British slang, as an ejaculation, "nonsense!" from 1919.

The word bollocks also led to the more recent verb bollix, coined in an apparent euphemistic respelling in the US in 1937 to describe botching, bungling, ruining, or messing up something.

Though the noun and verb have different spellings, their pronunciation is the same, which could be confusing if one is a bit hazy on the context.

Imagine bollixing bollocks!

Note added: Apparently, bollock (singular, not bollocks) is a vulgar verb in British usage meaning the act of reprimanding someone severely.

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