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A man goes every day to the same teachers
They teach him the same lesson
He hears, but does not listen
Is it the lessons of these teachers that you need?
You already know how to get girls
You already know how to be a man
They teach him the same lesson
He hears, but does not listen
Is it the lessons of these teachers that you need?
You already know how to get girls
You already know how to be a man
You keep taking the same medicine but you still feel sick: masculinity is under attack. Masculinity is fragile but you must be anti-fragile. A man needs a mannerbund. Manhood is mastery. Manhood is discipline. A woman is a human being and a man is a human doing
Be strong, have conviction, be a protector, donât get caught up, donât let her use you. Lift weights, looksmax, get some better clothes, make more money, tease her, troll her, a woman is a lock and man is a key, control the frame, own your desires
There is nothing new under the sun. All the good wisdom of the present is reheated wisdom of the past. Everything there is to know about suffering, contentment, our place in the world, and the inevitability of death was written down thousands of years ago https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1095571919489748994
Some of the good advice, like going to the gym, requires a lot of work. Some advice seems like something you could change immediately, but how, exactly, does one own oneâs desires? How do you root out the weakness in your own soul?
For a man, the distinction between doing and being is false. There is no "human" condition, only a male and a female condition. A man IS the sum of his actions, his essence is not separate from his existence https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1042761997337554944
To change your condition you must change what you are. This is often painful. You create your circumstances and your circumstances create you in a feedback loop. It's cybernetics all the way down https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1057382617618599936
You cope with the pain of your failures by grasping them tightly, making them part of your identity: "It's OK that I am bad in this way, it's who I am." Then later you think: "The world should be made more hospitable to people like me."
Changing actions changes identity and vice versa. The reason you canât weaponize wisdom is that you have received wisdom in the world of the mind, but to be useful it must pass into the world of the body.
Consider an athlete at the top of his game: when you hear him speak, you feel he has only half a brain, but in his body there knowledge and mind unspeakable. He has no knowledge, but he embodies knowledge; unto the athlete is an epistemology of action
To the ancient truths that you have heard already, modern man has added: âthe world has no center.â This is not new, either, but modern man has come to understand this truth like never before.
The belief that the world has no center is the key conceit of the modern age, and in modernity we have come to embody this belief. The decentering of god from our collective consciousness was also the decentering of man.
A sign consists of a signifier and a signified. This is related to Peter Thiel's notion of "the world of atoms" vs. "the world of bits". The bit-world is a dream of the atom-world, and the soul is a dream of the body.
Prior to modernity, our signifiers were mediated by the signified; the world of the body was experientially primary to the world of the mind. In modernity, this relation is inverted.
The printing press, the era of industrial replication of art, radio, television, and the internet have all given signifiers a mobility and a vitality that was unimaginable in the past, and we experience this as a kind of flux, a plasticity of all referents https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1053456944898301952
Nowhere is this clearer than on instagram and youtube, where people eat ridiculous simulations of food, multicolor monstrosities that tickle the mind and poison the body, and where women use facetune and photoshop to stretch their bodies into bizarre caricatures of femininity.
The experiential primacy of signifiers alienates us from our bodies, and has profound consequences for art, literature, sexuality, and religion. We feel this alienation because we necessarily experience our bodies as secondary to our mediated perceptions.
You may say it was always thus, but now we have the philsophical tools to understand it. Wrong. The ubiquitization and above all the SPEED of electronic media have brought about genuine phenomenological change. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1063560871585042432
In one of my favorite stories by Borges, The House of Asterion, we find a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the premodern world, man is at the center; the hero is Theseus. In the modern world, the minotaur is the sympathetic character, a head mismatched to a body.
The Minotaur says: "Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?" The labyrinth does not constrain his body, but he is mesmerized by it. The world of signifiers traps him
Asterion is caught in the labyrinth, and he rationalizes it to himself: "Not for nothing was my mother a queen; I cannot be confused with the populace, though my modesty might so desire." He lines his cage with delusions of grandeur.
In the end we learn that the minotaur is miserable. Like so many in the modern world, he longs for death. The morning sun was reflected in the bronze sword. "Would you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus "The Minotaur scarcely defended himself."
We feel modernity as a psychic wound, and it is words (signifiers) that have wounded us. Wise words brought us here, but still we thirst after wise words, as if they could get us out. Every wise utterance becomes another stone in your labyrinth walls https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1034163573772017664
To escape his labyrinth, Asterion had to die. Bad identities have gravity, they hold you to bad patterns of behavior. To change your behaviors you must change your identity, a change we metaphorize as self-death
Religion is one way of changing identity: in Christianity, The narrative of self-death underwrites the transformation of the self. "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live"
The disciplines of the bodyâathleticism, physical labor, and martial trainingâdraw us into the world of the signified, the world of bodies. To a man who has spent his life lost in the labyrinth of signifiers, a newfound awareness of the body feels like a superpower
The cultivation of the body becomes a new identity, and in this place, will flows thoughtlessly into actuality. Such a man finds success with women, not because they desire his body, but because he has embodied his desires
He thinks to himself: this is enlightenment! The ancients were right about everything, and modernity is only a pit. But we have found many fine treasures in the labyrinth, many wonders and many horrors. Like Asterion we should not complain of life; the door to the prison is open
