Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Nature is Supernatural

Men and women are faced with different Temptations. One difference is that men typically use power to obtain sex (e.g., Bill), while women use sex to obtain power (e.g., Hillary, riding the coattails of a powerful man). This truism is apparently rooted in different evolutionary strategies, but if this is the case, it doesn't negate free will. Rather, it's more like astrology: the stars incline but do not compel.

For the vast majority of human existence we have been hunter-gatherers -- 99% of that existence, according to Tucker. Therefore, if we want to know something about the ground floor of the psyche -- why man is the way he is -- it might be worthwhile to take a look at the ways and whys of our most venerable furbears.

More generally, if the evolutionary psychologists are correct, then we are definitely in the Wrong Place -- this is not my beautiful cave! -- and there's not much we can do about it. We have made our procrustean bed and now we have to live a lie in it. It is very much as if we have a nature designed for certain specific conditions, but those conditions are nowhere to be found -- like the old zoos that simply tossed the animals in cages without trying to replicate their environment.

But our environment is changing all the time, and since we adapt to it so quickly, it might lead one to believe that man has no nature. This is discussed in the excellent Making Gay Okay, which, based on the reviews, is making gays insane.

What is interesting is that traditionalists believe in an enduring human nature, and that this belief is in conformity with evolutionary science. So it is ironic in the extreme for leftists to call anyone else "anti-science," being that these scientifically correct mythtics are the worst offenders. They don't just deny the science, but try to block the scientific paths. One is not permitted to even think in certain directions, for fear of stumbling upon a Forbidden Truth.

Leftists believe in nature but not in NATURE, the latter of which transcends nature. NATURE is what the Founders were referring to with the crack about our rights being rooted in "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." They surely didn't mean lowercase nature -- as if our natural rights are founded upon physics or biology or natural selection. If they were, then politics would be founded on the principle of kill or be killed, which is what nature teaches us.

By NATURE, the founders mean "in the nature of things," or just the way things ARE and reality IS. No rational person says "realities are," which is one more reason why leftists are intrinsically irrational, for to say that there are realities is to deny Reality, precisely.

Our "point of departure," writes Reilly, "must be that Nature is what is, regardless of what anyone desires or abhors." Thus, this places reality outside the domains of will and desire. As we've Schuonsplained on many occasions, the human being is composed of intellect, sentiment, and will, and if the latter two are detached from the former, we are soon enough in leftist Hell, where there is lots of hysteria and bullying but no truth.

Speaking of modern science, one thing we know conclusively about man is that Aristotle was correct: man is the political animal, which does not refer to vulgar politics, but rather, to the fact that man's nature is to be involved with others in order to create a society in which it is possible to pursue the Good.

We cannot do this if we are fundamentally atomistic monads, in which case community would just interfere with our nature. It would mean that any community is a kind of falsehood, and astonishingly, this is precisely what the uber-leftist Rousseau argued:

"The Rousseauian anthropology claims that man is not a rational, political animal and that society in any form is fundamentally alien, and alienating to individuals. In his origins, man was isolated and essentially complete on his own and in himself" (Reilly).

We can see how this primordial craziness is present in both leftism and libertarianism. In fact, it is the reason why leftism is confused with liberalism, because it posits a kind of radical freedom that is equivalent to nihilism.

But in reality, there can be no such thing as radical or pure freedom. Rather, as with all ultimate ontological categories, freedom only exists in a complementary relationship, in this case, to responsibility. And although the two necessarily coarise, responsibility must be ontologically prior, otherwise it would have no explanation. In other words, you cannot get from freedom to responsibility, whereas responsibility automatically implies freedom.

Also, freedom is purely abstract, with no positive meaning, whereas responsibility is concrete. It's like a woman's so-called "freedom to choose." Choose what? Anything? No, of course not. That kind of purely abstract freedom refers to nothing.

Rather, let's be honest: it is the freedom to kill her baby. Such freedom is of course completely divorced from responsibility, but also cannot possibly be rooted in nature. If it is in nature, then it is obviously present in female babies, so only male babies could be aborted in "good" conscience.

Thus, this so-called freedom can only be a positive freedom, but is there such a thing? I don't see how, without freedom becoming something it is not.

That is, natural freedom does not impinge on anyone else's freedom, and everyone is equally free (and responsible). But the positive right to abortion obviously impinges on the rights of others, including the father, the baby, and society in general.

Now, among other things, nature is objective, for which reason we are "subject" to it. It took a very long time for man to recognize this, apparently not until the ancient Greeks: "Before this discovery, ancient man was immersed in mythological portrayals of the world, the gods, and himself" (Tucker).

To put it another way, nature had been subject to man, not in reality -- as if rain dances or human sacrifice were successful in influencing nature -- but in the imagination, where man lived. Like Marx, man tried to change nature before understanding nature. But only by bowing to nature's laws are we able to use them as the boundary conditions for further exploration and evolution.

Once man "discovered" the objective world, it permitted us to inquire into its rational structure. Thus, interestingly, the discovery of objective reality proved that NATURE is supernatural, i.e., infused with a transcendent truth intelligible to man's intelligence. As such, you might say that the world became objective on one level, but subjective on a higher level, i.e., the divine plane (in that it had to be grounded in a deeper, wider, and higher intelligence, ultimately a Person).

Oh my. Way out of time. Why didn't someone tell me? As always, to be continued...

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

TOTAL CLARITY and PERFECT NONSENSE

Yesterday I had insufficient time to express what I was trying to say with TOTAL CLARITY. For me, the achievement of TOTAL CLARITY means that no honest, intellectually adequate, and sincere person could possibly disagree with me.

I am always trying to paint the reader -- beginning with myself -- into an airtight corner from which there is no escape but inscape. Or there is no way out but up. This we call UPWORLD MOBILITY.

There is a lucid mechanical determinism that inspires futility and an organic entelechial deiterminism that nourishes HOPE.

Or in other words, one must know what IS in order to know what CAN BE. It is how ultimate reality can be always THE SAME and yet EVER NEW, instead of an ABSURCULAR repetitititititititition populated by a bunch of UNCLE AUTOMOTONS.

Revelation is both CLOSED and OPEN, or an open and shut case, because it is composed of TRUTH and FREEDOM, so it is dyna-static or olden pneumagain. This is the cosmic edge where all the RAZORACTION occurs.

I am always aiming for TOTAL CLARITY except for when TOTAL CLARITY only obscures the issue, for example, in defining God. To achieve TOTAL CLARITY in that arena would result in a total lack of clarity, i.e., absurdity. Any discussion of God requires the judicious use of orthoparadox, which cannot attain TOTAL CLARITY, but rather, transclarity, or PERFECT NONSENSE.

This is how and why O can be "incomprehensible and yet the meaning of everything," and why knowledge of it "does no more than render the mystery immediate and inescapable" (Ware).

This does not mean we should get an apophathead or veer off into irrationalism. Rather, there is an irreducible and endless play of apophatic and cataphatic, or knowledge and mystery, (n) and O.

This yeoman's work -- or play rather -- is NEVER DONE. The best we can do is to never stop aiming at that which transcends and defines us, the goal we can perceive but never see. Or we see through things toward that to which they point or converge upon.

And how do we perceive it? Two ways. We can look back and see its unmistakable fruit tracks, or turn forward and feel its attraction and its nourishment: it simultaneously PULLS on our emptiness and GIVES of its riches.

This dynamic force "attracts creation into the eschatological condition," which means that history is the interval or gap during which progress towards its own fillfullment occurs. For the AWAKE or even ALERT, time itself is the KNOWA's ARK of salvation.

"To the extent that one ascends in the knowledge of God, he ascends at the same time in the understanding of the mystery of God as that which is not to be understood. 'This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness'" (Staniloae). We are always rising above meanings toward MEANING itself via the DARKLIGHT of faith.

God is like any other name. Just because I know your name, or have a name for you, it does not mean that I fully know you, much less contain you.

You could say that being born again from above is the EIGHTH DAY of creation, i.e., VERTICAL LIFTOFF. Since the liftoff never ends, we could symbolize it [8∞] GUFFAW-HA! If it ever ends, it will mean that time has become eternal, or finally caught up with itsoph. History will have healed the wounds it inflicted, and hopefully JUDGMENT will wound the heels history inflicted upon the restavus.

So there will be a final endless COMM-UNION of orthoparadoxes such as flesh and spirit. Or not, because the other direction ends "in isolation within one's own emptiness" (ibid). In between is the exodus in the bewilderness of time, Israel on one side, Egypt on the other, Life or Death. Endless novelty or endless monotony.

Once upon a time we spoke of A influences and B influences, as described by Mouravieff. You could say that these are horizontal and vertical -- or terrestrial and celestial -- influences, respectively. No real happiness can result from A influences only. These bring transient pleasures, to be sure, but no quantity of horizontal pleasure adds up to one qualitative vertical bealtitude.

In order to be happy, man must have a goal "that transcends the domain of 'A' influences," or is "beyond the mental horizon" of mere horizontaloids. In the world of pure A, "nothing lasts, everything breaks, and everything tires." So you end up OLD, BORED, and JADED, or full to the brim with emptiness.

Will you knock it off with the capitalizing already?

Besides, what was it you were unclear about yesterday?

Well, it had to do with that penultimate crack to the effect that "homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality."

Reilly expresses it more clearly, writing of how nature "is teleologically ordered to ends that inhere in their essence and make them what they are." In short, there is a truth and a reality that we do not invent and to which we graciously defer.

Conversely, the first principle of the homosexual activists is that "things are nothing in themselves, but are only what we make them to be according to our wills and desires" (emphasis mine). Here we see how one man's metaphysical trash is another man's libidinous pleasure, the pleasure of dominating reality with the will to POWER.

Monday, May 05, 2014

Marriage Equality and World Destruction

Barely no time today, and so much to fill it with. Maybe you should just read the book, because there are important ideas on every page.

And when I say important, I only mean like "world saving" (or world-shattering, depending on where you stand). Dennis Prager is the only other person I know of -- although I'm sure there are others -- who realizes that the attack on marriage is an attack on the very foundation of our humanness and therefore of civilization itself.

But when you affirm this, you of course sound crazy. It reminds me of the left's thus far successful attempt to controversialize Benghazi.

That is, the first step in turning the world upside down is to make right side-up "controversial," as if there is some legitimate doubt about it.

It's amazing how rapidly the left has been able to accomplish this with regard to the redefinition of marriage. The Obama who assumed the presidency in 2009 would now be unqualified due to his then hateful support of traditional marriage. He would have to be mozilla'ed.

It's not just marriage and homosexuality. Consider all the other things the left has successfully controversialized: the military, school prayer, sexual identity, motherhood, fatherhood, bastardy, the english language, illegal voting, illegal immigration, free speech, the Constitution...

Just the fact that we have to argue over these things makes us a little crazy too, because it's crazy to argue with a crazy person. Normally I would have no interest in doing so, but in this case we have no choice, because these crazys want to control our lives.

The very idea that the left, of all things, suddenly cares about monogamy and sexual commitment is absurd on its face. On what basis? In other words, on what principle of leftism is marriage founded?

Whatever it is, it is not the same as ours, so we're necessarily talking about apples and oranges -- or rather, the compulsory belief, backed by state violence, that apples and oranges are identical.

To believe otherwise is a thoughtcrime. It is to place oneself outside the margins of civilized society, which is again ironic in the extreme, since monogamous marriage and civilization are two sides of the same coin, as compellingly demonstrated by Tucker.

Thus, anyone who cares about civilization should be on our side, but these fools and tools have no earthly idea what is at stake. For upon what principle do they found their deviant notion of marriage? As far as I can tell, it is either "equality" or "freedom," as in "marriage equality" or "the freedom to love who we want."

Now, to be sure, equality and freedom are genuine principles. However each refers to the other; not only do they oppose one another, but each has its own irreducible complement. The complement of freedom is responsibility, while the complement of equality is hierarchy.

Freedom can have absolutely no meaning in the absence of responsibility, while equality in the absence of hierarchy is just nihilism. (I might add that in these complementarities, responsibility is prior to freedom, just as hierarchy must be posterior to equality.)

And bringing about the monstrous equality of the left always requires great violence and coercion, while its version of freedom simply equates to irresponsibility. Or rather, there is no personal responsibility, only collective responsibility.

Thus, individuals are incentivized to be more personally irresponsible, which results in the need for a larger and more intrusive state to be responsible for all these irresponsible losers.

But beneath the left's misunderstanding freedom and equality is an even deeper principle: pleasure. To put it inversely, real marriage is not based upon pleasure. Rather, it is based upon reality, specifically, the reality of sexual polarity and the recognition that monogamous marriage channels this in prosocial ways, in the direction of civilization.

As Tucker emphasizes, there is nothing wholly "natural" about monogamy. Rather, although rooted in nature -- the nature of things -- it is an institution that transcends nature.

But homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality. Conversely, marriage is rooted in the abstract cosmic principle of sexual polarity, which is concretized in the form of marriage.

But I'm out of time. To be contined....

Friday, May 02, 2014

How Liberal Policies Promote Cosmic Inequality

Think about that the implications of that one: monogamy made us human. If that is the case, then what the excuse me fuck are we doing? Trying to undo civilization and progress?

Well, yes. But only for the undesirables. Doing so maintains the power of the powerful because it preemptively diminishes the competition.

It is similar to how racial preferences shrink the pool of qualified or gifted Asians, Jews, and white males. It's a fantastic scam for white elites. If excellence is your competitor, well, just make it more difficult for the excellent to compete. Better yet, make it against the law, as per the Wise Latina.

Likewise, why else would black elites -- i.e., poverty pimps, race hustlers, liberal house negroes, and tenured bullshit artists with PhDs in Historical Fantasy -- so adamantly oppose school choice? Because it is a direct threat to their gig. If more blacks do well, then the parasites who feed on failure and resentment would have to do something productive. But not one of them is qualified to sharpen Thomas Sowell's pencil.

In Charles Murray's Coming Apart, he points out how liberal elites preach one thing but practice quite another. That is, in the lower classes, "welfare dependence and single motherhood are rapidly becoming the norm."

To illustrate the point, in 1960, 85% of the adults ages 30 to 49 in his apocryphal Fishtown "were living as married couples. Now the figure is 48 percent. In 1960, 81 percent of households had someone working full time in the workforce. Today it is only 53 percent." And most disastrously, "Divorce rates have climbed from 5 percent to 35 percent, and children living in broken homes or with single mothers rose from 2 percent to 23 percent" (in Tucker).

Or in other words, mission accomplished. We don't have to worry about these children becoming our competitors. Predators, yes. But so long as we confine them to certain areas, or the predators mostly prey on each another, then it's cool. Liberal polices promote and celebrate nothing less than psycho-cultural genocide.

Again, what is most striking about this is the hypocrisy of the anointed, who insist that these underclass boobs should not imitate what they do, but rather, do as they say. That is, "although many of the attitudes that denigrate the importance of marriage originate among the intelligentsia and the upper middle class, that stratum of society has so far managed to keep its families intact" (ibid).

The result is that we are truly facing a crisis of inequality, but income is an effect, a marker, a measure, of something more fundamental.

That is, the vast majority of people living in poverty are single mothers and fatherless children. Factor out these two categories and poverty almost disappears. But this material analysis does not and cannot measure the soul damage, nor does it even recognize such a thing. Rather, the left starts by materializing man, so it is a case of animal in/infrahuman beast out.

So, the gap in marriage equality results in "a yawning gulf of economic inequality," so much so that marriage is "the fault line dividing the American classes" (Murray, in Tucker). No one can deny that "those who form traditional families succeed; those who don't fail" (Tucker). Nor would any leftist ever acknowledge that monogamous marriage is the telos of human sexuality, i.e., its proper end. Which is just one more reason why leftism is the quintessential doctrine of failure, a recipe for cultural decline.

To zoom out to the Cosmic perspective, one thing which which I failed to entirely think through in the Coonifesto is why, if human beings evolved or are created to be monogamous, there is so much polygamy? All human cultures regulate sexuality and recognize marriage, but, as Tucker notes, "the practice of polygamy was almost universal outside the Christian West."

Long story short, if you want to look at it in a purely scientific way, human beings were definitely selected for monogamy, in that hunter-gatherer (HG) tribes practice monogamy, and something like 99% of our evolution occurred within, and was shaped by, this cultural matrix.

It seems that polygamy doesn't appear until the emergence of agriculture and herding. The HG lifestyle can only support a group of limited size, and it is vital that everyone in the group -- especially the males -- get along and cooperate. Therefore, the one-to-a-customer rule prevents a war of Each against All for access to Feminine Charms.

The transition to monogamy happened so early in our development that it is completely entangled with what it means to be human: "In other words, we never would have become human if we hadn't adopted monogamy." One thing to which Tucker fails, in my opinion, to give sufficient emphasis, is the role of the Helpless Baby in all this. After all, it is the baby, not the adult, who will carry the genes, the evolutionary memo, into the future. Thus, the baby becomes the hinge of civilizational advance and of Cosmic Evolution. Be as children is no joke.

Tucker does briefly touch on this, noting that upright walking was accompanied by a narrowing of the pelvis, just when our brains were getting so oversized. Ouch!

Note that in Genesis, our exodus into time and history is accompanied by the "in pain you shall bring forth children" business. No pain, no brain. Or Cane.

At any rate, only one thing makes this possible, and it is a very weird solution, the real key to our humanness: all of us "are born prematurely.... This means we arrive in a more helpless state, requiring constant care and attention" (Tucker) for a lengthy period of time. It is in this period of development that we forge the intersubjective foundation of our psyche, and "only a pair-bonded couple could offer" the protection needed to nurture this space.

What Tucker fails to emphasize is that -- well, I suppose this is just my opinion -- the kind of uniquely intense intimacy characterized by human pair-bonding rests on that foundation of infantile attachment. In other words, the helpless baby brings about the familial circumstances necessary for its own survival. Only because we were neurologically incomplete infants intensely attached to the mother can we form the later intense attachment with an opposite adult of the complementary sex.

Another key development was the loss of estrus, thus making the human female sexually available all year 'round. This prompted men to buzz close to the hive instead of polynoodling with all the other honeys in the annual whambam and scram.

But then the Agricultural Revolution occurred, changing everything.

To be continued...

Thursday, May 01, 2014

How Homosexual Marriage and Other Deviant and Dysfunctional Attitudes Rendered Us Less Than Human and Destroyed Civilization

What's the most important subject in the world? It is possible that it is human monogamy.

In his Things That Matter, Krauthammer makes a persuasive case that it is politics, since, if you get that one wrong, everything else goes south with it:

"Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything -- high and low and, most especially, high -- lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away."

Ah, but what is a humane and successful political system built upon? What is its foundation? Intelligence? No, because all human groups have that. Supposedly. Genes? In fact, Nicholas Wade's new book suggests that we can no longer rule that out a priori, as do liberal creationists.

But genes are not what make us human. First of all, they are necessary but not sufficient to account for our humanness. But also, they are simply an encoded memory of, and plan for, genetic fitness, AKA reproductive success: a memoir of the future.

Besides, there is no such thing as an individual human being, or at least our individuality can only be understood in the context of an irreducible intersubjectivity. Since the I-Thou relation is "built into" our genes, it means that human beings are literally programmed for transcendence (if you want to look at it from a strictly scientific standpoint; obviously there are deeper and higher perspectives).

Consider this highly coonworthy book, Marriage and Civilization. Note in particular the subtitle: How Monogamy Made Us Human. It doesn't get any more Cosmic than that, because we are talking about the conditions that permit humanness to emerge from mere biology.

One could also express it inversely, say, How Homosexual Marriage and Other Deviant and Dysfunctional Attitudes Rendered Us Less Than Human and Destroyed Civilization. That book is yet to be written, nor does Tucker put it that way. Nobody wants to replace Donald Sterling as the sap du jour in the roiling cannibal pot of the proglodyte left.

It is always gratifying when a respectable person confirms some of the multi-undisciplinary speculation of the Coonifesto, in this case the intimate connection between humanness and monogamy. Just the other day I read how this deliriously self-satisfifed idiot thinks it's Time to Ditch Monogamy. Why? Because it's time to jettison civilization, as have the subcultures that have already successfully eliminated the norm of marriage and reverted to barbarism.

Interestingly, this downward-cutting edge view goes back to the cultural Marxism of Marx and Engels, who -- once again turning reality on its head -- suggested that marriage and monogamy are the origins of that curse word property, in that woman becomes the first possession of man: when man "took command in the home," "the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children" (in Tucker).

Yeah, it's just like that around here.

When we talk about civilization, what are we really talking about? For starters, we are talking about the domestication of man. Not woman, mind you. Women are already domesticates, and quite literally so, since the female body is the domicile of the baby, which is to say, the human future. In short, mother-baby is built into nature. The category of Father -- in distinction to sperm donor -- isn't. Father is the first purely cultural category, the one that makes all the others -- politics included -- possible.

How the hell do you civilize a man, of all things? Well, since it happened, we need to examine the circumstances under which it happened, but also the circumstances under which it failed to do so -- at least up to my standards.

Tucker notes that "the adoption of social monogamy by early hominids created something unique in nature -- a society where males cooperate at common tasks with a minimum of sexual competition."

In most other species it is a violent free-for-all to determine Who Gets the Chicks. Males spend the majority of their time competing with other males for access to the holiest of holies. (Recall what Chagnon discovered about those ignoble savages of the Amazon basin, constantly at war over the ladies.)

What we're really looking for is a kind of gap in nature, or a "place" where prehistory verticalizes and becomes transnatural, i.e., jumps into civilization and history. In my opinion, it ultimately -- which is to say, ontologically -- takes place in the infant (I saw it happen with my own eyes!) -- but there are existential conditions that have to prevail in order to give birth to premature and neurologically incomplete babies.

I just noticed that I'm way outta' time here. To be continued....

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