Fragments & Miscellanea, Vol. 3
Transcriptions from the Notebook...
I began typing some of the things in my notebooks into Substack, less for my subscribers than to preserve them and make them available to me wherever and whenever I had an internet connection. A Long List of Things I Haven't Written Yet... was one, and so was ANOTHER Long List of Unwritten Things. Instead of continuing this naming trend (Yet Another Long List!) I’m going to name this series ‘Fragments & Miscellanea’. Technically this is Volume 3.
The Proto-States of Afghanistan
To understand Afghanistan as it was before the Taliban and after the fall of the monarchy (a period of some 40 years) one must return to a state of civilization long-forgotten in the Western world. Max Weber, the German sociologist, defined a state as ‘a human community that successfully claims the use of legitimate violence within a given territory’. In Europe, before the spread of the Roman Empire and other advanced states the land not controlled by large tribal groupings was exploited by bands of armed men. While the relationship may have begun as simple pillage, with low-level warriors taking the food, shelter, and women of undefended agricultural laborers, it probably evolved into a kind of symbiosis (albeit one between decidedly unequal parties). The farmers built the community and the warriors defended it from robbers and the more brutal depredations of other tribes. The long-term nature of this arrangement ensured sustainability. The warriors needed a healthy base of production to tax and were therefore incentivized to guarantee the health of the community. Out of these rude beginnings arose agricultural civilization.
In the absence of large territorial governing units, Afghanistan’s countryside patchwork network of small subsistence villages [Dunbar’s Number] was ripe for such…
Medicine: Applied Science
The study of the human body is a principal subject of science. The interventions necessary to heal wounds and sickness are slipshod and determined by what works. Understanding why is of secondary importance and often sacrificed entirely to the exigency…
References:
→Leper King/Baldwin IV speech about morality: A King may move a man, a father may claim a son, but remember that even when those who move you be Kings, or men of power, your soul is in your keeping alone. When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus." Or that, "Virtue was not convenient at the time." This will not suffice. Remember that.
→Hannah Arendt: “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world.”
Natural Aristocracies:
(?) Aristos
→ Nietzsche quotes
The democratic impetus for egalitarianism
political
economic
cultural - the inversion of elite aspiration
moral
The Bell Curve and the oddly recurrent nature of the Pareto distribution
Jerusalem Temple
Moonlight, Streetlights, and Darkened Parking Lots
The Humid Mystery of Florida Nights
Moonlight is a great film: tightly written, moody, evocative, and with layered explorations of American ghetto life, and masculinity, and sexuality, and motherhood, and role modelling. It’s the kind of movie that wealthy and well-educated people love to see and be seen seeing, and to be heard discussing. It peels off the scabs of subjects which they fetishize and like to believe they’re concerned with: homosexuality and urban dysfunction and dug addiction and poverty and violence. They are not actually concerned about any of these things (if they were the attendant issues would be quickly resolved). If they were concerned with these things they wouldn’t limit their engagement with these issues to their film diet, Any one of them could drive 5 miles and see these things for themselves… but it’s easier and safer to watch movies about them.
They could proactively share their wealth and privilege with the people touched by these issues. They never do that.
This is not about the endless hypocrisy of American progressives, though…
The Quirks of Womankind:
Reluctance to judge/weigh/rank
exhibit: Hinge conversation 4/1/24
‘all of my friends are pretty’
getting emotional about being called emotional
sexual generalizations = ALWAYS inaccurate… unless they’re empowering!
If women were as capable as men, in every respect… we would still expect to see less women represented in every role and at every level in society. Women must bear children, whereas men cannot. This means that women cannot devote as much aggregate time and energy to other things as men
supportive, never dismissive
communicative, not competitive
exhibit - message boards about body image
exhibit - message boards about sexism and sexual harassment
‘I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.’ - Henry David Thoreau
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NOBLE SAVAGES
Bernard Latour - separation from nature
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The modern drive to appear and be (and stay) BUSY… (spiritual, psychological implications…)
Diagram: establishing stable, long-term relationships used to be easier, because peopel’s lives were simpler…
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Self-absorption:
the narcissism of self-improvement - yoga, wealth creation, diet… all feed into natural impulses and personal desires and all are based upon the desire to experience/enjoy more happiness/comfort/serenity/power… (no emphasis on virtue or self-improving one’s morality or sense of responsibility)… “I’m working on myself”
(Title ?) ‘The Ethic of Personal Responsibility… and the Slippery Slope’
Delusion, Magical Thinking, and Pathological Identity Disorders
Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID)
Gender Dysphoria
Body Dysmorphia (Anorexia)
Borderline Personality Disorders (BPD; borderline traits) & Histrionic Personality Disorders (HPD)
Narcissistic Personality Disorders (NPD; self absorption, entitlement)
(?) Intuitive, Emotional, & Magical Thinking
‘a revolt against reality and the real’
an urge to break the tether: the gnostic realm of the pleroma and the feminine principle of divine unity
Teachers and mental health professionals as enthusiastic co-authors of fantasy
exhibit: Donovan Nicholas case (Dr. Grande)
The Society of the Smothering Mother
The effects of misplaced maternal urges, unleashed upon an entire society
exhibit: article about ‘right-wing sons’
“The appeal of a grievance-based identity makes it hard to convince straight white boys that they in fact have plenty going for them, and that they have no reason to feel aggrieved. Doing this convincing, whether it’s in the classroom or at the dinner table, requires a light touch. It’s very easy, and very satisfying, to be doctrinaire — social media encourages and rewards it. I think many of us adults are so entrenched in social-media political discourse that it feels dangerously transgressive to allow a teen to articulate beliefs we disagree with at our dinner tables. When you spend your days reading infographics reminding you that being silent means being on the side of the oppressor, having a flesh-and-blood oppressor-in-training eating your spaghetti and meatballs can feel like a waking nightmare. But coming down too hard risks playing right into the paranoid hands of masculinist discourses of male disempowerment.”
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Persistent conflation error:
individual value versus social norm
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Solution to the Fermi Paradox
civilization/technology provokes a reaction in nature: the rate of biological adaptation slows and dysgenic effects begin to proliferate within the population, weakening the gene pool. This causes collapse. This cycle continues until happenstance (asteroid, climate shift, etc.) causes species extinction
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Earthseed
the wisdom of seeding other worlds with hardy microbes, to encourage biology and diversification. What might these ‘seeds’ include? What species/chemicals/kingdoms/goals/target planet types/surface areas/biomes?
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If modern sociology was a proper science they would pose questions and try to overthrow and improve their vision of reality…
example: the nature and generation of sex disparities are not interesting to such people (gender theorists). They already know everything they believe on that score… the entire enterprise is a search for data and support to buttress and already-determined conclusion (sex differences are socially constructed). Ideology gives you the axioms, study works to support them…
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310
Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern. We present an archeological discovery and meta-analysis that challenge the man-the-hunter hypothesis. Excavations at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa reveal a 9000-year-old human burial (WMP6) associated with a hunting toolkit of stone projectile points and animal processing tools. Osteological, proteomic, and isotopic analyses indicate that this early hunter was a young adult female who subsisted on terrestrial plants and animals. Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate WMP6 as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with nongendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.
In reality the article above provides no clear evidence of their counter-hypothetical implied claims… merely some ambiguous remains and speculative data points which cannot even be said to support their ideas. This is science?!
Why stop at fat positivity? (Ugly, old, infirm…)
If beauty is purely an arbitrary (oppressive) social standard why is their not cry for inclusion of UGLY people?
Recently I’ve seen what feels like an increasing number of fat people in advertisements…
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Some Notes on Epistemology
Nature of reality
…objectivity
social v. biological influences
…scientific knowledge
the shortcomings of ‘scientism’ and technocracy
Anchoring knowledge in reality (allegory of the blind men and the elephant)…
…trying to feel our way about in a surreal and phantasmagorical landscape
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Why the ‘Strong Female Character’ Will Never Work
What does ‘work’ mean? Not (only) make money, but to condition and manipulate modern perceptions and tastes
“The best propaganda is entertainment” - The Movie Cynic
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The Hollow Men (excerpt) by T. S. Eliot
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Nietzsche
Works:
Human, All Too Human
I.) Of First & Last Things
II.) On the History of Moral Feelings
III.) Religious Life - veganism: ‘ascetism… high degree of vanity…’
IV.) From the Souls of Artists and Writers
V.) Signs of Higher and Lower Culture - ‘free spirit’s points out society’s vulnerability
VI.) Man in Society
VII.) Woman and Child - ‘will free spirits live with women?’
VIII.) A Look at the State
IX.) Man Alone w/ Himself
The Gay Science (383 aphorisms, 5 books)
A.) Morality - warnings against preachers…
B.) “I do not want to wage war against that which is ugly… Looking away shall be my only negation”
C.) Book III, IV, V, (VI - Sanctus Januarius); Book 5 - the death of God, the crisis in existing moral values…
The Will to Power
Preface - “history of the next two centuries” “advent of nihilism… catastrophe”
A.) Central focus of his philosophy -
ontological -
organic -
psychological -
social -
The Antichrist (62 sections)
Foreward: ‘one must be accustomed… not yet living…’ ‘These alone are my readers’
A.) Decadent values of Christianity: weakness, nihilism, equality, ‘religion of pity’
B.) ‘Hatred of the natural’ - God… nature… ‘against life itself’
C.) Buddhism = more realistic, against suffering rather than sin
D.) Jewish decadence & resentment
E.) 5 Stages of denaturalizing ethics: epoch of decay / priests use concept of sin to gain and use power / sin becomes everywhere
Morality is no longer a reflection of the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people; it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and in opposition to life—a fundamental perversion of the fancy, an “evil eye” on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of “sin”; well-being represented as a danger, as a “temptation”
From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the “sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it—in his own phrase, to “sanctify” it.... For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the “moral order of the world”)
Nitezsche’s ‘Eternal Recurrence’
"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'
"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?"
The Cure For Anxiety - The Wisdom of the Stoa
The Cure for Insecurity - The Wisdom of the Cynics
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The prophecy of the summer night
As I sat alone on the evening of May 2, 2024, I was struck by a powerful intuition/premonition. The pleasantly cool breeze layered over the warm and fading day struck me as similar to the summer evenings of my childhood, as we played around the neighborhood of our family home in Ft. Leavenworth, KS as the daults sat and talked, late into the night. I was seized by the feeling that within 2-3 years my life will have assumed a much different shape. I will be sitting outside and enjoying the pleasant murmur of a summer evening… outside my house with my
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‘Song of the Cell’ (Pg. 328-329) story about a boy who goes into a cave to kill a bear
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God of Nature > God of Abraham > Christian God
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Kazuo Ishiguro:
Never Let Me Go
The Buried Giant
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An Islamic Reformation
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The Myth of Patriarchy
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Cosmology
Abiogenesis - filtering RNA though volcanic glass
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Social Justice as a Christian Millenarian Heresy
Social Justice as Make-Work for the Intelligentsia
Social Justice as a Flawed Historical Narrative
Social Justice as Personality Pathology
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