‘Nothing is written’...Your ‘bearded lady’ reference made me think of Norah Vincent, the libertarian US journalist whose 2006 book ‘Self Made Man’ retells her experience of living as a man for 18 months. Disguised as a man, she pursued male activities including dating women. Vincent was a lesbian, so this may not have been too challenging; however, living as a man ultimately was. The mental strain of maintaining a false identity eventually caused a depressive breakdown. She ended her life by assisted suicide at a clinic in Switzerland. From living as a man, she had concluded that women were privileged, and that men ‘were suffering’ and ‘needed each other more than anything else.’ She also refused to believe in transgenderism, calling it ‘the death of the self and the soul’. Be careful how you handle fate.
This is quite sad I think. I know these people are insufferable however I don't want them to die. Not suggesting you do either. Just wanted to highlight that they are still human no matter how broken and mislead they may be.
Your compassion is not misplaced. It's insanely difficult to detach yourself from the Matrix. Many of these people have had this shit drilled into their heads as kids. If not specifically the transgenderism stuff at least the liberal "SCIENCE!' stuff. It's not entirely their fault, and once they start down the road to complete madness it's difficult to get out, just as any other cult.
I fear so. When the youngsters under the spell of this cult finally awaken from the trance they’ve been in, and realise the cost of their own Faustian pact, there will be a dreadful reckoning. There are already growing numbers of detransitioners coming out of this nightmare and speaking of their experiences,
I've heard life as a man described as "Living life on hard mode," which will make sense to anyone who's played video games. We have to accomplish all the same things - childhood, puberty, education, jobs, running a home, etc - it's just that for men there are almost no support systems whatsoever.
Years’ ago I realised how hard men have it, on a school trip to France - we visited the WW1 war cemeteries. Row upon row of white crosses, all of them men, all some mother’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s sweetheart, someone’s father. Tears are welling in my eyes even thinking about that place. It affected all of us kids so deeply.
That’s a true perception. We as men just have to get on with it. Especially now when the traditional home roles have gone. Women are no longer there to manage the house.
I often look at youngsters now and wonder how they survive. When I was growing up you learned not to be a dick because you’d get a kicking... you were not effeminate.... you had to be tough or you’d have the piss taken out of you. Now the kids just seem soft to me. Lost with no references for their behaviour.
Thanks Morgoth. Your article just reinforces my belief that we have to return to our spiritual roots to survive. That there are some things intangible that can't be put on a spreadsheet; like your first kiss, looking at a beautiful church, painting, watching a thunderstorm pass overhead at night, with the window open and a cup of tea. These things can't be sorted alphabetically in column A on an excel spreadsheet to work out how to sell a product to a certain demographic; they're intangible.
I was thinking of something, the cycle of things (stick with me on this). As a Scotsman, I play a bit of golf. Golf started in Scotland, a shepherd decided it would be a good idea to bring a stick and ball with him whilst he was with his sheep.
This idea grew, and became the game we know.
It started off as an "art", something you had a knack of doing. Then some of the fundamentals and basic laws of the game were discovered and developed. The technology of the sticks and balls developed.
The game became about 50% "knack/natural gift" and 50% "technology". The "Golden Years" of golf were the '60s and '70s when, my favourite golfer, Jack Nicklaus dominated the game. His swing wasn't "conventional" but he is regarded as the best player of all time as his strength of will (Faustian Spirit) got him through.
As the technology developed and mobile phones and golf apps became available to the masses, we are now at a point where the ideal angles of the body and club have been worked out, so that, an average player with a mobile phone and the latest golf clubs, can develop his swing to wherw he can now hit the ball as far as, or further, than Jack Nicklaus at his peak.
Now, the "great copiers" the Asians, have factory lines of children with mobile phones at driving ranges developing their cut-and-paste swings. Where the individuality and magic has been condensed down to angles, torque and clubhead speed.
What I'm trying to say is that Western Man invents something, it goes through a magical, "Golden Age" period, the subjects mystique is turned into centimetres, metres, kilograms, degrees etc. the magic goes, and it descends into corporate materialism with a substandard, plastic version developed in the Far East, stripped of all secrets and magic.
Anyone else have similar thoughts? Or do I just have too much time on my hands lol.
Excellent comment. Funny enough I've noticed the exact same thing happening with push bikes. My mountain bike in the 90s had 15 gears and handled everything I threw at it across Northumberland. I even threw it over a bridge once then climbed down for a shortcut. It cost £150.
I recently went to a shop to see what's going on with bikes these days and considered shelling out for a tourer. The brands were the same but they were unbelievably expensive and many of them elecrtric with internet connection. They were also absurdly complicated.
This trend towards ever more complexity (forgive me but I can't think of a word for it) is happening in nearly every hobby or activity. Essentially everything I enjoyed as a kid was something whose basics could be picked up in an afternoon. Mastering it might take years or even decades. But to just "get into" most hobbies was relatively cheap when I was young. You could join your school's Little League baseball team for next to nothing. Used bikes could be had for $20 and they were very simple. My parents found an old archery set at a garage sale and my brothers and I spent days in the woods at Target practice- now these same bows have weights and sights and other exorbitantly expensive add ons. This trend to complexity seems universal in our modern age and if I'm brutally honest it scares the hell out of me, because I see no end in sight.
In the 70's us kids in our area used to build our own bikes out of parts "borrowed" from scrapyards. Great days spent covered in oil, trying out different combinations of wheels, chains, handlebars, hammering bent parts into shape. All those boys (and a few Tomboys) all sharing knowledge and skills. Your bike back then was your bike because you knew every part, nut and bolt intimately, and you rode it like it was a slightly unreliable and prone to bucking horse.
Mine finally died at Keilder Forest when the ball bearings sprung loose and totalled the threads inside the crank. It was as if it's core had ruptured.
I have very similar thoughts. We humans are tool makers who bend nature to our will with those tools to survive. Without our "technology" we are prey. Anyone that wants to argue that point can go into bear country without tools and discuss the matter with Smokey.
As with your golf example, I think that there is a balancing point where there is just enough technology to make the activity possible and just enough art or spirit required to make the activity remain human, and this point (as you describe) is the Golden Age.
Commercial pressure to win seems to be the driver that forces the art or spirit out in favour of pragmatic data driven perfection and error free tools. Maybe there are other pressures; I don't know.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say: There's a happy-medium where the spirit and the physical universe are balanced, where our technolgy's passed by the point of chopping down trees with a rock, but we're not quite the technology-subservient, overweight, useless eaters in Wall-E. The perfect balance of a Quality (the spirit) and a Quantity (Mph, Kg, cm., Volts, Amps, etc)
(In Scotland there are some "hickory" competitions where one is only allowed to play with the old hickory clubs to keep the old traditions alive, so to add to my previous comment, maybe you have a subgroup in each field which reverts to the "old ways").
On the Faustian question. I think the right needs more people to exert their will to steer us in the right direction. I don't like the idea of "fate" as it's a perfect slave philosophy. The difference with Western Man is that he has an idea and stops at nothing until he's conquered Mt. Everest, the Atlantic Ocean or put a man into space.
The "genius" of the left is that it presents its agenda with a humanitariun mask which covers the satanic agenda, which dupes the useful idiots, until it's too late. Right-wing philosophy is based on real-life observations on human nature, power and meritocracy, which a technogy-dependant population can close their eyes to due to the relevant luxury that society creates.
I think most civilizations collapse because psychos and criminals get in positions of power and subvert it from the inside (using their Faustian spirit), thus the two biggest problems a civilization face are:
1. How to detect and stop pyschos getting into power.
2. How to remove them if they get into positions of power.
Nothing is free - which can be read a few different ways, including that absolute freedom, the liberation from all constraints and bonds, is the same as nothingness.
There's always a tension between determinism and free will. Too far in the former direction and you get complacent fatalism. Too far in the other and you get ... This. The sweet spot is to see life as poetry. The form imposed by the structure of the poem is what makes it a poem, but into this can be poured whatever one wishes. The constraints determine the options, but the options are open to the author's choice, and it's in the tension between the two that creation happens.
Our civilization needs to learn to appreciate the creative role played by the constraints imposed by nature. Although the irony is that, the more we pretend those constraints don't exist, the more constrained our lives become in a practical sense, thanks to the tyranny imposed by late-stage liberalism itself.
A concrete identity can here be viewed as the boundaries set. I'm a middle aged bloke from the North East of England from a socially conservative background. This is what I have to work with and I accept it.
Exactly. And for that boundary set to be at all meaningful, it must be exclusive - a middle-aged English bloke is not a Hindu bank manager. For the boundary to say what something is, it must also say what it is not.
Which isn't to say that identities are wholly impermeable or static. Who we are evolves over time. But they're profoundly historical. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday, but who we were yesterday is an inseparable aspect of who we are today. The Airport Lounge State seeks to ignore this historicity, to pretend that the past simply didn't exist, or that it can be changed. Which is how you end up with sad bearded ladies become alienated parodies of men,
This reminds me of a video AA did a while ago in which he compared the lifestyles of a medieval blacksmith to a modern worker. It was a great argument that the blacksmith's life, though lacking in "choice" (his father was a blacksmith and his father's father was a blacksmith, etc), "social mobility", or material wealth, the blacksmith could be secure in filling this role that he was fated to. He also believed in God and had his family to protect him. He had a Lord but distance did not make the State an imposing figure.
Was a great video and I think echoes some of the things discussed here.
Morgoth, don't forget that Anglo-Saxon culture once had a concept of fate as well, called wyrd. Much like the eastern cultures, this was something you could not escape, although you had "free will" in the sense that you could decide how you would meet your fate.
You manage a beautiful and incisive discussion of the current madness that has struck our culture. I don't know where it will end and things are changing so fast that I find myself in an almost constant reactionary state. Everywhere I look I see drag queens presenting themselves in such a bizarre and frankly demonic manner and yet most of society seems to have accepted it as normal. I refuse to believe that I'm the mad one. I feel like Charlton Heston's character Taylor in The Planet of the Apes, who finally gives in to despair and the insanity of his environment and just shouts out, "It's a madhouse!"
The Faustian leftists live so far from the time when legal fictions, like citizenship, were created to reflect an underlying phenomenon, that they have forgotten which came first. They assume that because the English, let's say, had English citizenship, ordaining anyone in the world with the same legal fiction of citizenship makes them English. They literally believe that the law is a transformation spell.
Yes, it's exactly like that. You'll notice that the freedom to pick categories doesn't extend to others, however, who in some countries can go to jail for expressing a different choice of categorisation.
This is... Essentially the point of all the French philosophers that I hate. It's postmodernism in a nutshell. Nothing is outside of linguistics and linguistics is a servant to power.
Free will is something I've cherished and thought a lot about through my years. Part of my rejection of strict Calvinism was over the abrogation of free will in that theology. My parents told me constantly when I was young that 'God has a plan for our lives'. I think that's true. I also think we DO have free will, and the ability to forge our own path in life. However one of the great tragedies is to get what you want without a full understanding of what you're asking for. I can think of many examples from my own life, I was and probably still am, quite willful.
When you said that tranny was trapped 'in a play written by herself with herself as the main star', it reminded me of my own self-willed path.
I do think we can fight fate or destiny or God's plan for our life. But you have to pay the price for it and rarely do we have the wisdom to truly understand the decisions we are making, often in the heat of emotion or youth or passion.
Hence the importance of (rubs hands with glee and whips out violin) Tradition!
But seriously. We only live once.. and each decision we make prunes the tree of our future choices forever. One simply cannot expect to live well by total free choice and learning from one's errors.
Traditions are evolved heuristics for surviving and thriving in a given group adapted to a given environment. They may not be globally optimal, but at least we know they work. Don't have to be the obnoxious Nassim Taleb to grasp that precautionary principle should apply and that stepping away from one's native Tradtions is the equivalent of playing hopscotch in a minefield.
PS: How the Guardianistas would gnash their teeth with rage were they to have your insightful prose rubbed in their faces. I mean the very idea of a guy with your accent having anything worthwhile to say! The humanity!
Interesting and frustrating. Choice of job, career, girlfriends etc all quite random or based on something insubstantial which shape your life for decades to come.
Well, Christ seemed to imply there is indeed a path, or at least two of them: the broad one and the narrow one. The "left hand path" of "do what thou wilt" is of course the broad one that Jesus speaks.
But, of course, as Led Zeppelin says "there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change the road you're on"
Finding the right path is arguably the big secret. Krishna, similarly echoed this, and basically said a lot of people simply aren't gonna make it- they're going to have to go through rebirth to figure this out.
This kind of reminds me of the gnostic idea of Hylics. I think the NPCs are obstacles on the path to enlightenment.
I view the NPCs as lost creatures. They aren't obstacles, usually. If anything they serve as negative examples of what not to do or what not to be. I can pity them. But I also know how dangerous a mob can be.
Agreed. Well, I think of them as obstacles in the way that their demand for consensus means that they're a useful tool for the elites to gaslight you with
Part of the "redpilling process" is going through a trial where you have people continually tell you that you're "crazy", not caving to consensus and sticking by your guns.
They are Sirens luring you back into the deep. They are the simulation of steak offered by agents of the Matrix.
This is really timely and well done. Free will is a gift from God, and is real, insofar as man can accept or reject God, specifically Jesus Christ God made man, but it does not mean reality is mutable and bends to man’s will. It is only free in a metaphysical sense. Materialistic man does not have free will as we are seeing in the wreckage we have made.
Many of your points have just come up in a book I am reading, it is the biography of Fr. Seraphim Rose, his life and works, by hieromonk Damascene. Seraphim Rose was an orthodox monk who started out as a brilliant student of philosophy and Eastern languages. His critique of the modern world in the 1960’s, before he entered the church, makes many of the same points as you have here, although Spengler doesn’t appear as one of his sources. He saw the modern world as moving into a post nihilistic age.
It is both frightening and reassuring that so much of the madness we are seeing was predicted by those who were not caught up in the intoxicating idea of the spiritual evolution of man. This idea has poisoned religion, politics, philosophy, infected the church and the academy, leaving the reality of man’s condition far behind. How after the bloodiest century in history people could believe that humanity had somehow progressed beyond the need for God or limits of any kind is hard to fathom.
You are more than free to ignore the Law (God's law), and many have elected to do so out of a disdain for God. They reject him because they are uncomfortable with the notion that a higher being may judge them.
What they don't realize is that the Law is there for our own protection. It is the consequence of reality. Like the law of Gravity, you can choose to ignore it at your peril.
Probably a lame reference but it seems akin to the Oblivion and Skyrim game. Go ahead, put on the skin you want, the gender, and go around on your "free will." The choices don't really matter and there's always a boundary there. You'll never stop the pressure to do what the game is pushing you to do. The faceless programmers and architects rule.
In my opinion Skyrim is not a lame reference at all. If art is an expression of culture, and if video games can in any way be considered a form of art, then surely using them as examples in cultural discussions is valid. As a typical gen x person I've been playing video games for most of my life. I think Skyrim was a monumental achievement for all involved, possibly the single greatest "free roaming" game ever made.
The irony of the left’s rejection of the notion of Fate and all its implications is that Fate can be construed as simply cause and effect, action and reaction, the observability and measurability of which is the backbone of their beloved Science, the thing they think will help escape their Fate, but as we are seeing now, only seals it.
If the rejection of Fate is an essential part of the Faustian civilization and if Fate reasserts itself, doesn´t that mean that Faustian civilization was "wrong" from the very beginning? Its greatest achievement being its own utter refutation. The Aztecs were "refuted" by being conquered and thereby perhaps spared their particular and inevitable "self-own".
I wish there was something more positive to draw from it all. It´s almost like saying "Sorry, we just recognized our fundamental mistake (which nobody else made) after a mere 1000 years. Hope you have no hard feelings about it."
I've long held the view, expressed in various ways, that what we shall see is a split. I touched on it in my recent Turning Away monologue. In more Spenglerian terms this would be the Fellaheen.
In the context of this article, and my content generally, I find myself in the role of the Fellaheen. The moral position to take is one of arguing against further harm and undue misery. Maybe some political moderation can be brokered. It is pragmatism essentially.
I suppose our only hope is that the horrendous mistakes of this civilisation can serve as a lesson for some future civilisation. Maybe that's our fate, to show the next lot how not to do things lol
By this broad logic, every civilization which dies - as all do - was wrong from the start. As is perhaps the case, civilizations being just as mortal as humans, therefore flawed, therefore never fully in possession of absolute truth.
This seems an unfair way of framing it, however. Rather, each civilization is working through the implications of a certain core idea, and when those implications have been exhausted, its work is done, and it expires. Usually badly. Death is often messy and painful. But none of this refutes the lessons learned by that civilization in its spring and summer, or the beauty it produced in its autumn.
"That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—–civilizations are built up—–excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few years, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us"
Is there a Faustian right though? I am not sure what that would be. I think you get to the essence of Faustian man here and it is precisely the tragic delusion that he can overcome nature, and even God. His accomplices in this are intellectual knowledge, machines and rationalism. Faustian man and the left are one and the same, and the 'right' in the Faustian world is nothing but inertia in the progress towards the fated Faustian destruction. Those who think Spengler was talking about climbing mountains and conquering outer space when he talked of Faustian man have only the weakest grasp of his intention. There is something of the devil in Faust and Spengler explicitly says so.
I think the Faustian Right dominates the earlier cultural phase and the left takes over gradually upon the civilization era when the forms are calcified.
"The YouTuber claimed Spengler simply invoked ‘‘magic’’ when explaining the inevitability of Destiny and cyclical history. In other words, Spengler did not think or share the views of a sociology professor from Harvard or wherever."
Possibly one of the most important "noticings" of mine when transitioning out of atheistic materialism was just how much truth about the human condition was written in story, allegory, the Bible and the Gita.
There's a meme I love which has a woman asking "What is a good person anyway lol" and the man replying "You've replaced 10,000 years of philosophy, tradition and religion with 'just do what feels good' and you wonder why you're depressed? Take another Zoloft Sharon and fuck off"
It's, by all accounts, a perfect meme
Morgoth, I can't say I'm surprised, but I am indeed impressed that you took this bit of social media and turned it into a discussion on the Fates and Faust. Brilliant, my dude.
It is all written.. the Faustian bargain is the pre determined end of western civilization , the devil always comes to take the payment due.. the system is gnostic luciferian creation worship.. the actual complete flip of orthodox Christianity. The answers lie in Byzantine theology
‘Nothing is written’...Your ‘bearded lady’ reference made me think of Norah Vincent, the libertarian US journalist whose 2006 book ‘Self Made Man’ retells her experience of living as a man for 18 months. Disguised as a man, she pursued male activities including dating women. Vincent was a lesbian, so this may not have been too challenging; however, living as a man ultimately was. The mental strain of maintaining a false identity eventually caused a depressive breakdown. She ended her life by assisted suicide at a clinic in Switzerland. From living as a man, she had concluded that women were privileged, and that men ‘were suffering’ and ‘needed each other more than anything else.’ She also refused to believe in transgenderism, calling it ‘the death of the self and the soul’. Be careful how you handle fate.
I think we're going to be seeing a lot of suicides ahead...
This is quite sad I think. I know these people are insufferable however I don't want them to die. Not suggesting you do either. Just wanted to highlight that they are still human no matter how broken and mislead they may be.
I know, I know, I'm a ghey soft arse.
Your compassion is not misplaced. It's insanely difficult to detach yourself from the Matrix. Many of these people have had this shit drilled into their heads as kids. If not specifically the transgenderism stuff at least the liberal "SCIENCE!' stuff. It's not entirely their fault, and once they start down the road to complete madness it's difficult to get out, just as any other cult.
I fear so. When the youngsters under the spell of this cult finally awaken from the trance they’ve been in, and realise the cost of their own Faustian pact, there will be a dreadful reckoning. There are already growing numbers of detransitioners coming out of this nightmare and speaking of their experiences,
I've heard life as a man described as "Living life on hard mode," which will make sense to anyone who's played video games. We have to accomplish all the same things - childhood, puberty, education, jobs, running a home, etc - it's just that for men there are almost no support systems whatsoever.
Years’ ago I realised how hard men have it, on a school trip to France - we visited the WW1 war cemeteries. Row upon row of white crosses, all of them men, all some mother’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s sweetheart, someone’s father. Tears are welling in my eyes even thinking about that place. It affected all of us kids so deeply.
That’s a true perception. We as men just have to get on with it. Especially now when the traditional home roles have gone. Women are no longer there to manage the house.
I often look at youngsters now and wonder how they survive. When I was growing up you learned not to be a dick because you’d get a kicking... you were not effeminate.... you had to be tough or you’d have the piss taken out of you. Now the kids just seem soft to me. Lost with no references for their behaviour.
The campaign against "bullying" seems to have set the stage for this. It's just a microcosm of the domineering den mother in the long house
Thanks Morgoth. Your article just reinforces my belief that we have to return to our spiritual roots to survive. That there are some things intangible that can't be put on a spreadsheet; like your first kiss, looking at a beautiful church, painting, watching a thunderstorm pass overhead at night, with the window open and a cup of tea. These things can't be sorted alphabetically in column A on an excel spreadsheet to work out how to sell a product to a certain demographic; they're intangible.
I was thinking of something, the cycle of things (stick with me on this). As a Scotsman, I play a bit of golf. Golf started in Scotland, a shepherd decided it would be a good idea to bring a stick and ball with him whilst he was with his sheep.
This idea grew, and became the game we know.
It started off as an "art", something you had a knack of doing. Then some of the fundamentals and basic laws of the game were discovered and developed. The technology of the sticks and balls developed.
The game became about 50% "knack/natural gift" and 50% "technology". The "Golden Years" of golf were the '60s and '70s when, my favourite golfer, Jack Nicklaus dominated the game. His swing wasn't "conventional" but he is regarded as the best player of all time as his strength of will (Faustian Spirit) got him through.
As the technology developed and mobile phones and golf apps became available to the masses, we are now at a point where the ideal angles of the body and club have been worked out, so that, an average player with a mobile phone and the latest golf clubs, can develop his swing to wherw he can now hit the ball as far as, or further, than Jack Nicklaus at his peak.
Now, the "great copiers" the Asians, have factory lines of children with mobile phones at driving ranges developing their cut-and-paste swings. Where the individuality and magic has been condensed down to angles, torque and clubhead speed.
What I'm trying to say is that Western Man invents something, it goes through a magical, "Golden Age" period, the subjects mystique is turned into centimetres, metres, kilograms, degrees etc. the magic goes, and it descends into corporate materialism with a substandard, plastic version developed in the Far East, stripped of all secrets and magic.
Anyone else have similar thoughts? Or do I just have too much time on my hands lol.
Excellent comment. Funny enough I've noticed the exact same thing happening with push bikes. My mountain bike in the 90s had 15 gears and handled everything I threw at it across Northumberland. I even threw it over a bridge once then climbed down for a shortcut. It cost £150.
I recently went to a shop to see what's going on with bikes these days and considered shelling out for a tourer. The brands were the same but they were unbelievably expensive and many of them elecrtric with internet connection. They were also absurdly complicated.
This trend towards ever more complexity (forgive me but I can't think of a word for it) is happening in nearly every hobby or activity. Essentially everything I enjoyed as a kid was something whose basics could be picked up in an afternoon. Mastering it might take years or even decades. But to just "get into" most hobbies was relatively cheap when I was young. You could join your school's Little League baseball team for next to nothing. Used bikes could be had for $20 and they were very simple. My parents found an old archery set at a garage sale and my brothers and I spent days in the woods at Target practice- now these same bows have weights and sights and other exorbitantly expensive add ons. This trend to complexity seems universal in our modern age and if I'm brutally honest it scares the hell out of me, because I see no end in sight.
You might enjoy Bryan Appleyard's The Brain is Wider Than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don't Work in a Complex World.
In the 70's us kids in our area used to build our own bikes out of parts "borrowed" from scrapyards. Great days spent covered in oil, trying out different combinations of wheels, chains, handlebars, hammering bent parts into shape. All those boys (and a few Tomboys) all sharing knowledge and skills. Your bike back then was your bike because you knew every part, nut and bolt intimately, and you rode it like it was a slightly unreliable and prone to bucking horse.
Mine finally died at Keilder Forest when the ball bearings sprung loose and totalled the threads inside the crank. It was as if it's core had ruptured.
I have very similar thoughts. We humans are tool makers who bend nature to our will with those tools to survive. Without our "technology" we are prey. Anyone that wants to argue that point can go into bear country without tools and discuss the matter with Smokey.
As with your golf example, I think that there is a balancing point where there is just enough technology to make the activity possible and just enough art or spirit required to make the activity remain human, and this point (as you describe) is the Golden Age.
Commercial pressure to win seems to be the driver that forces the art or spirit out in favour of pragmatic data driven perfection and error free tools. Maybe there are other pressures; I don't know.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say: There's a happy-medium where the spirit and the physical universe are balanced, where our technolgy's passed by the point of chopping down trees with a rock, but we're not quite the technology-subservient, overweight, useless eaters in Wall-E. The perfect balance of a Quality (the spirit) and a Quantity (Mph, Kg, cm., Volts, Amps, etc)
(In Scotland there are some "hickory" competitions where one is only allowed to play with the old hickory clubs to keep the old traditions alive, so to add to my previous comment, maybe you have a subgroup in each field which reverts to the "old ways").
On the Faustian question. I think the right needs more people to exert their will to steer us in the right direction. I don't like the idea of "fate" as it's a perfect slave philosophy. The difference with Western Man is that he has an idea and stops at nothing until he's conquered Mt. Everest, the Atlantic Ocean or put a man into space.
The "genius" of the left is that it presents its agenda with a humanitariun mask which covers the satanic agenda, which dupes the useful idiots, until it's too late. Right-wing philosophy is based on real-life observations on human nature, power and meritocracy, which a technogy-dependant population can close their eyes to due to the relevant luxury that society creates.
I think most civilizations collapse because psychos and criminals get in positions of power and subvert it from the inside (using their Faustian spirit), thus the two biggest problems a civilization face are:
1. How to detect and stop pyschos getting into power.
2. How to remove them if they get into positions of power.
Excellent insight. We haven't even reached peak automation yet.
All these idiots think we are going to get Star Trek. In reality I see our future resembling some awful mix of WALL-E, Idiocracy and Blade Runner
Nothing is free - which can be read a few different ways, including that absolute freedom, the liberation from all constraints and bonds, is the same as nothingness.
There's always a tension between determinism and free will. Too far in the former direction and you get complacent fatalism. Too far in the other and you get ... This. The sweet spot is to see life as poetry. The form imposed by the structure of the poem is what makes it a poem, but into this can be poured whatever one wishes. The constraints determine the options, but the options are open to the author's choice, and it's in the tension between the two that creation happens.
Our civilization needs to learn to appreciate the creative role played by the constraints imposed by nature. Although the irony is that, the more we pretend those constraints don't exist, the more constrained our lives become in a practical sense, thanks to the tyranny imposed by late-stage liberalism itself.
A concrete identity can here be viewed as the boundaries set. I'm a middle aged bloke from the North East of England from a socially conservative background. This is what I have to work with and I accept it.
Exactly. And for that boundary set to be at all meaningful, it must be exclusive - a middle-aged English bloke is not a Hindu bank manager. For the boundary to say what something is, it must also say what it is not.
Which isn't to say that identities are wholly impermeable or static. Who we are evolves over time. But they're profoundly historical. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday, but who we were yesterday is an inseparable aspect of who we are today. The Airport Lounge State seeks to ignore this historicity, to pretend that the past simply didn't exist, or that it can be changed. Which is how you end up with sad bearded ladies become alienated parodies of men,
This reminds me of a video AA did a while ago in which he compared the lifestyles of a medieval blacksmith to a modern worker. It was a great argument that the blacksmith's life, though lacking in "choice" (his father was a blacksmith and his father's father was a blacksmith, etc), "social mobility", or material wealth, the blacksmith could be secure in filling this role that he was fated to. He also believed in God and had his family to protect him. He had a Lord but distance did not make the State an imposing figure.
Was a great video and I think echoes some of the things discussed here.
Morgoth, don't forget that Anglo-Saxon culture once had a concept of fate as well, called wyrd. Much like the eastern cultures, this was something you could not escape, although you had "free will" in the sense that you could decide how you would meet your fate.
You manage a beautiful and incisive discussion of the current madness that has struck our culture. I don't know where it will end and things are changing so fast that I find myself in an almost constant reactionary state. Everywhere I look I see drag queens presenting themselves in such a bizarre and frankly demonic manner and yet most of society seems to have accepted it as normal. I refuse to believe that I'm the mad one. I feel like Charlton Heston's character Taylor in The Planet of the Apes, who finally gives in to despair and the insanity of his environment and just shouts out, "It's a madhouse!"
The wyrd is very interesting and I might one of the Pagans onto a Morgcast to discuss it properly.
The devolution of the drag queen into what looks like a hellborn demon is, I think, completely intentional.
They're slowly starting to tell the truth about themselves.
The agenda numbers are anchor numbers, a sales technique. The ludicrous concept of an average temperature for the planet is another example.
The Faustian leftists live so far from the time when legal fictions, like citizenship, were created to reflect an underlying phenomenon, that they have forgotten which came first. They assume that because the English, let's say, had English citizenship, ordaining anyone in the world with the same legal fiction of citizenship makes them English. They literally believe that the law is a transformation spell.
This is a really astute point. Don't they also make the same philosophical argument when it comes to gender / sex? Consider:
1. There is this thing in nature, that we call woman
2. I was not born as that thing, but I wish to be one
3. Therefore, I will call myself "woman", and force society to do so as well
4. And thus, I have become woman.
Yes, it's exactly like that. You'll notice that the freedom to pick categories doesn't extend to others, however, who in some countries can go to jail for expressing a different choice of categorisation.
This is... Essentially the point of all the French philosophers that I hate. It's postmodernism in a nutshell. Nothing is outside of linguistics and linguistics is a servant to power.
It's the weaponization of overrationalization.
Free will is something I've cherished and thought a lot about through my years. Part of my rejection of strict Calvinism was over the abrogation of free will in that theology. My parents told me constantly when I was young that 'God has a plan for our lives'. I think that's true. I also think we DO have free will, and the ability to forge our own path in life. However one of the great tragedies is to get what you want without a full understanding of what you're asking for. I can think of many examples from my own life, I was and probably still am, quite willful.
When you said that tranny was trapped 'in a play written by herself with herself as the main star', it reminded me of my own self-willed path.
I do think we can fight fate or destiny or God's plan for our life. But you have to pay the price for it and rarely do we have the wisdom to truly understand the decisions we are making, often in the heat of emotion or youth or passion.
Good, sad essay today.
It's interesting to consider how much our fates are determined by random choices made in our youth.
Hence the importance of (rubs hands with glee and whips out violin) Tradition!
But seriously. We only live once.. and each decision we make prunes the tree of our future choices forever. One simply cannot expect to live well by total free choice and learning from one's errors.
Traditions are evolved heuristics for surviving and thriving in a given group adapted to a given environment. They may not be globally optimal, but at least we know they work. Don't have to be the obnoxious Nassim Taleb to grasp that precautionary principle should apply and that stepping away from one's native Tradtions is the equivalent of playing hopscotch in a minefield.
PS: How the Guardianistas would gnash their teeth with rage were they to have your insightful prose rubbed in their faces. I mean the very idea of a guy with your accent having anything worthwhile to say! The humanity!
Interesting and frustrating. Choice of job, career, girlfriends etc all quite random or based on something insubstantial which shape your life for decades to come.
Well, Christ seemed to imply there is indeed a path, or at least two of them: the broad one and the narrow one. The "left hand path" of "do what thou wilt" is of course the broad one that Jesus speaks.
But, of course, as Led Zeppelin says "there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change the road you're on"
Finding the right path is arguably the big secret. Krishna, similarly echoed this, and basically said a lot of people simply aren't gonna make it- they're going to have to go through rebirth to figure this out.
This kind of reminds me of the gnostic idea of Hylics. I think the NPCs are obstacles on the path to enlightenment.
I view the NPCs as lost creatures. They aren't obstacles, usually. If anything they serve as negative examples of what not to do or what not to be. I can pity them. But I also know how dangerous a mob can be.
Props for the Zep reference too :)
Agreed. Well, I think of them as obstacles in the way that their demand for consensus means that they're a useful tool for the elites to gaslight you with
Part of the "redpilling process" is going through a trial where you have people continually tell you that you're "crazy", not caving to consensus and sticking by your guns.
They are Sirens luring you back into the deep. They are the simulation of steak offered by agents of the Matrix.
This is really timely and well done. Free will is a gift from God, and is real, insofar as man can accept or reject God, specifically Jesus Christ God made man, but it does not mean reality is mutable and bends to man’s will. It is only free in a metaphysical sense. Materialistic man does not have free will as we are seeing in the wreckage we have made.
Many of your points have just come up in a book I am reading, it is the biography of Fr. Seraphim Rose, his life and works, by hieromonk Damascene. Seraphim Rose was an orthodox monk who started out as a brilliant student of philosophy and Eastern languages. His critique of the modern world in the 1960’s, before he entered the church, makes many of the same points as you have here, although Spengler doesn’t appear as one of his sources. He saw the modern world as moving into a post nihilistic age.
It is both frightening and reassuring that so much of the madness we are seeing was predicted by those who were not caught up in the intoxicating idea of the spiritual evolution of man. This idea has poisoned religion, politics, philosophy, infected the church and the academy, leaving the reality of man’s condition far behind. How after the bloodiest century in history people could believe that humanity had somehow progressed beyond the need for God or limits of any kind is hard to fathom.
You are more than free to ignore the Law (God's law), and many have elected to do so out of a disdain for God. They reject him because they are uncomfortable with the notion that a higher being may judge them.
What they don't realize is that the Law is there for our own protection. It is the consequence of reality. Like the law of Gravity, you can choose to ignore it at your peril.
Probably a lame reference but it seems akin to the Oblivion and Skyrim game. Go ahead, put on the skin you want, the gender, and go around on your "free will." The choices don't really matter and there's always a boundary there. You'll never stop the pressure to do what the game is pushing you to do. The faceless programmers and architects rule.
Fascinating that Skyrim is so open while the Japanese RPGs are set garden paths.
Skyrim is long overdue a deep dive. Problem is, where to even begin with an analysis.
In my opinion Skyrim is not a lame reference at all. If art is an expression of culture, and if video games can in any way be considered a form of art, then surely using them as examples in cultural discussions is valid. As a typical gen x person I've been playing video games for most of my life. I think Skyrim was a monumental achievement for all involved, possibly the single greatest "free roaming" game ever made.
Enter ye in at the strait gate:
for wide is the gate, and broad is the way,
that leadeth to destruction,
and many there be which go in thereat:
Mathew 7:13
Not overly pious Morgoth but the above has a ring of truth to it.
Beautifully written Morgoth. Take a bow while I applaud.
Thank you
The irony of the left’s rejection of the notion of Fate and all its implications is that Fate can be construed as simply cause and effect, action and reaction, the observability and measurability of which is the backbone of their beloved Science, the thing they think will help escape their Fate, but as we are seeing now, only seals it.
If the rejection of Fate is an essential part of the Faustian civilization and if Fate reasserts itself, doesn´t that mean that Faustian civilization was "wrong" from the very beginning? Its greatest achievement being its own utter refutation. The Aztecs were "refuted" by being conquered and thereby perhaps spared their particular and inevitable "self-own".
The Faust myth is exactly that.
I wish there was something more positive to draw from it all. It´s almost like saying "Sorry, we just recognized our fundamental mistake (which nobody else made) after a mere 1000 years. Hope you have no hard feelings about it."
I've long held the view, expressed in various ways, that what we shall see is a split. I touched on it in my recent Turning Away monologue. In more Spenglerian terms this would be the Fellaheen.
In the context of this article, and my content generally, I find myself in the role of the Fellaheen. The moral position to take is one of arguing against further harm and undue misery. Maybe some political moderation can be brokered. It is pragmatism essentially.
I suppose our only hope is that the horrendous mistakes of this civilisation can serve as a lesson for some future civilisation. Maybe that's our fate, to show the next lot how not to do things lol
By this broad logic, every civilization which dies - as all do - was wrong from the start. As is perhaps the case, civilizations being just as mortal as humans, therefore flawed, therefore never fully in possession of absolute truth.
This seems an unfair way of framing it, however. Rather, each civilization is working through the implications of a certain core idea, and when those implications have been exhausted, its work is done, and it expires. Usually badly. Death is often messy and painful. But none of this refutes the lessons learned by that civilization in its spring and summer, or the beauty it produced in its autumn.
Very well put.
Yep. Here's CS Lewis on the matter:
"That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—–civilizations are built up—–excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few years, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us"
Is there a Faustian right though? I am not sure what that would be. I think you get to the essence of Faustian man here and it is precisely the tragic delusion that he can overcome nature, and even God. His accomplices in this are intellectual knowledge, machines and rationalism. Faustian man and the left are one and the same, and the 'right' in the Faustian world is nothing but inertia in the progress towards the fated Faustian destruction. Those who think Spengler was talking about climbing mountains and conquering outer space when he talked of Faustian man have only the weakest grasp of his intention. There is something of the devil in Faust and Spengler explicitly says so.
I think the Faustian Right dominates the earlier cultural phase and the left takes over gradually upon the civilization era when the forms are calcified.
"The YouTuber claimed Spengler simply invoked ‘‘magic’’ when explaining the inevitability of Destiny and cyclical history. In other words, Spengler did not think or share the views of a sociology professor from Harvard or wherever."
Possibly one of the most important "noticings" of mine when transitioning out of atheistic materialism was just how much truth about the human condition was written in story, allegory, the Bible and the Gita.
There's a meme I love which has a woman asking "What is a good person anyway lol" and the man replying "You've replaced 10,000 years of philosophy, tradition and religion with 'just do what feels good' and you wonder why you're depressed? Take another Zoloft Sharon and fuck off"
It's, by all accounts, a perfect meme
Morgoth, I can't say I'm surprised, but I am indeed impressed that you took this bit of social media and turned it into a discussion on the Fates and Faust. Brilliant, my dude.
It is all written.. the Faustian bargain is the pre determined end of western civilization , the devil always comes to take the payment due.. the system is gnostic luciferian creation worship.. the actual complete flip of orthodox Christianity. The answers lie in Byzantine theology