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Weep for us moderns! We are richer than avarice itself and because of this we are blind to our poverty! You will not learn this truth until you have FELT this truth, my friendsâ
What is our poverty, how are we poor? Our smartphones are made of the finest rare earth metals, and they can wirelessly control dildos attached to whores halfway across the world in realtime. Are we not rich?
Our minds are filled with stories and those stories are the psychic fundament of the self. The topology of the mental landscape is genetically determined but the castles that we build there are cultural and the materials we use are narratives and your house is a grass hut
Our poverty is a spiritual poverty. We have lost the past, we have lost the future, we have lost god, and we have lost the ability to believe in happy endings. Most troubling of all is the last, which is the key to all the others
In the Argonautica we know from the beginning that Jason will acquire the golden fleece. We know he can find the treasure, and that he will find happiness, which is not hedonistic pleasure but a deep fulfillment situated in eternity
In Kafka's the Castle we know equally from the beginning that K. will never gain entry to the Castle. The happy ending is not even conceivable. The nu-sincerity of Franzen and Wallace is cynicism in drag, it is makeup contouring of the face, instagram falsies, evil geometry
In Joyce we learn a thousand circumstances of Leopold Bloom and yet we know nothing about him, nothing at all! We learn more about a character in Dante from three sentences of Inferno than from a three hundred pages of Ulysses
The novel relates to the epic as the written word relates to the spoken word. The phenomenology of literate society is different to that of oral society in that the former creates a "rational" and schizotypal man, disconnected from his emotions by sentimentality
Literate man is incapable of truly believing in god because of the chasm that literacy creates between inner and outer life. Perhaps if we burned every book forever, we could find happiness again https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1063561795485323264
You may think you have not lost god, but you are in denial. You believe without believing, but you no longer feel His aura, only the aura of the ravenous maw, steel and glass, oil and capital, electronic media and pharmaceuticals https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1053456829567496192
Would you die for your God? Dumb question. Would you kill for your God? A god you would not kill for is a god you would not die for is a god you donât believe in. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1034801320958386177
We have internalized the "fully automatic" model of the universe. Whether we trouble deaf heaven about it or not, every modern feels it in his balls that the world is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
If you were raised in the church then you know it was not always thus. When I was young I believed sincerely; I was taught Godâs word, and I had not yet beheld modernity. Everyone should be raised religious, if only so they can mourn for God when they see what we have wrought!
It's easy for a child to believe, but belief is not childlike. God is dead, and if he is ever to be revived, we must understand where our sanctity has gone, which means must first understand where it came from
It started with taboo. We have to imagine that the earliest taboos were strictly practical; social prohibitions against eating certain mushrooms, for example, or as a way of transmitting hygienic practices through culture
Superstition is the tendency of the mind to overfit from experience. The capacity for superstition must have been adaptive to our ancestors, but it yielded behavioral artifacts in the form of superfluous taboos
Pointless taboos are maladaptive, hence the negative connotation of superstition. The progressive impulse is in part a desire to break out of superstitious overfit, a behavioral garbage collector
If taboos persist they become traditions, but traditions on their own arenât sacred. The alchemy that makes holiness works by BREAKING tradition, VIOLATING taboo. In this white hot moment it isnât the broken tradition that becomes holy, but its inversion https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1027980897033674752
Bataille: Sacred objects are consistently transmuted from left to right; the object of religious practices consists in this essential transformation; the left sacred is transformed into right sacred, the object of repulsion to object of attraction, depression to stimulation
Often the benefits of a tradition are not immediately obvious; they are selected for by second- and third-order effects. When you break a taboo you are not immediately zapped by god. This can make all traditions seem meaningless, the modality of the atomized world
Nietzsche was the last holy man of the West. Will there be another? And how can it be that he got it so wrong and so right? Nietzsche as prophet: he thought the transvaluation of all values would result in a man of great power, instead we have found an inversion of man and woman
It's fitting that Nietzsche died after embracing a horse; one thinks of Caligula, making his horse a senator, or the classic Chinese Proverb "point deer make horse" (æéčżçș銏), in which the emperor parades a deer into his court and demands his advisors acknowledge its horsehood
Indeed, what better metaphor for the world where decentralized power anarcho-tyranistically demands the mutability of biological sex? This deer is a horse, won't you go for a ride?
The inability to believe in happiness is the reason that we now experience insatiable hunger for the sacred, insatiable because we are incapable of finding rest in the sanctity we generate each time we blow up a taboo, insatiable because we have no faith in faith
Driven by god-lust we increasingly see each facet of life infiltrated and inverted by progressives; they violate each and every taboo that they find, chasing with diminishing returns the feeling of that first high, the first time they found rapture in profanity
Most people are conservative in their temperament if not in their beliefs. The true left, the transgressive left, is small, and once they establish a sanctity by violating a taboo, the rest of the "left" adopts it.
"Left" and "Right" form a gradient of willingness to adopt new sanctities. In the sense that the right wing wishes to destroy and invert progressive holiness around sex and gender, we are becoming the transgressive ones
Taboo violation releases sacred energy, but to capture it there is one more ingredient needed, a topic for a future thread... Once a taboo is violated, a spectacular, sacrificial death is required to ratify it.
