Let's begin with some questions about ideologues, whether they subscribe to positivism, scientism, existentialism, psychologism, evolutionism, leftism, whatever. Let's just call it the modern and postmodern plague of ismism:
why do they expressly prohibit anybody to ask questions concerning the sectors of reality they have excluded from their personal horizon? why do they want to imprison themselves in their restricted horizon and dogmatize their prison reality as the universal truth? and why do they want to lock up all mankind in the prison of their own making?
Why do these narrow-minded assouls want to "engulf Western civilization in their political prison culture"?
Not only would answering this question require a lifetime, but we could say that this is what a "lifetime" is, precisely. I wish I could.... well, not literally, but for the purposes of this essay, I wish I could go through college again, knowing what I know (and unKnow) now, and thereby observe the whole pathological process from an objective standpoint. As it was, I internalized the pathology and then spent the second half of my life undoing it. Or with luck, the latter three fifths.
In this meditative essay on his own intellectual development, called Remembrance of Things Past, Voegelin says that he too was subject to the same pressures to conform to ideology:
A school [i.e., a school of thought] is a formidable force indeed. Considerable time had to elapse before I understood the situation and its implications.
For my part, it wasn't until well into graduate school that I began to realize that the relevant issue isn't so much the philosophy as the philosopher, by which I mean that "philosophy" is just the means for a great (or not so great) intelligence to grapple with existence.
In my specific case -- in the discipline of psychoanalysis -- I noticed that it was full of intellectual mediocrities who had simply internalized the catechism, sprinkled with a few great intellects who used the tools and concepts of psychoanalysis to express a much deeper and wider apprehension of things. You might say that they deployed psychoanalytic concepts to transcend the limits of the discipline from within.
The analogy to music, or religion, or painting is exact. Anyone can learn music. But how many can use it express great artistry? Anyone can learn theology. But how many great theologians are there? Isn't there an informal law governing all disciplines regarding the excellence-to-crap ratio? Some people say rock music is crap. Which is true, except for 1%. Same with TV, movies, books, blogs, whatever.
Here it is: Sturgeon's Law, "an adage stating that 'ninety percent of everything is crap.'" Clearly, Sturgeon had low standards.
Come to think of it, Sturgeon's Law must intersect with the Dunning-Kruger effect, such that the lower one's ability or expertise, the lower the perceived ratio of excellence-to-crap. In other words, a person with no musical discernment thinks all music is pleasant. He enjoys Harry Connick as much as Frank Sinatra, or Bruno Mars as much as James Brown. A person with no journalistic standards is satisfied with CNN or the NY Times. A wife with low standards is content with me.
Back to Voegelin: an analysis of the phenomenon of consciousness
has no instrument other than the concrete consciousness of the analyst. The quality of this instrument, then, and consequently the quality of the results, will depend on what I have called the horizon of consciousness; and the quality of the horizon will depend on the analyst's willingness to reach out into all the dimensions of the reality in which his conscious existence is an event; it will depend on his desire to know.
This is what you call a Key Principle. It is irreducible to anything else, although we hasten to add that it is necessarily complemented by the Divine Energies, so to speak.
In other words, our openness is either open to the transcendent object or it is actually enclosed within its own genetic, neurological, cultural, ideological, and/or philodoxical horizons. There are only two possibilities, but if you keep thinking through your limited horizon you'll realize there is only one. Break through that glass ceiling!
The resultant consciousness
is a ceaseless action of expanding, ordering, articulating, and correcting itself; it is an event in the reality of which as a part it partakes. It is a permanent effort at responsive openness to the appeal of reality, at bewaring of premature satisfaction, and above all at avoiding the self-destructive phantasy of believing the reality of which it is a part to be an object external to itself that can be mastered by bringing it into the form of a system.
Oh well. Didn't finish the book, and now playtime is over. I have to get some work done.
40 comments:
I wish I could go through college again, knowing what I know (and unKnow) now, and thereby observe the whole pathological process from an objective standpoint.
We have young family members going through college right now. Sometimes, we pick their brains to get a sense of what things are like (gross generalization follows): the boys are generally tech and business minded, and know that they have to put up with a lot of indoctrinating BS in order to learn what they are actually there for. One defected from the state university system and found a good Christian college instead. The girls tend to be a little (or a lot) more bleeding-heart, and so don't see it as indoctrination, which is unfortunate because (as we see in the protests) one of the West's biggest problems as far as useful idiots goes is woke white college girls who believe their job is to save poor brown people from evil whites.
It is amazing how much evil can be generated by twisting a person's natural desire to do good, whether for show or - much more dangerously - in genuine earnest.
Well, tribalism is a fairly real and highly damaging ism. It’s okay because the other side is always worse.
Just one tiny example. Kamala Harris fooled around with Willie Brown to launch her political career, and as an added bonus, he was married, old enough to be her father, and it was all done public-obvious. Nobody will say anything about any of that because Trump.
Coming soon to our near-American future: a POTUS who travels everywhere with his entourage of blonde bimbo bitches while FLOTUS stays at home. And nobody cares because "the other side is worse".
I'm reading a biography of L. Ron Hubbard, which has inspired me to create a Raccoon Celebrity Centre at the bottom of the side bar. New members will be added as they occur to me.
I like that Goethe quote; what does it say, though, when one simultaneously finds everything both ridiculous and serious?
It's a mad, mad, mad, yadda yadda world...
It says
"With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored."
:D
Oh right - I really should have remembered that!
Yes you should have Julie. My predictions are thus:
Trump won't be able to overcome all the adversity and will not be reelected.
Two years into his term Biden will get pulled off the speaking stage with a big hook when he calls for girls of all ages to come up and sit on his lap and pull his finger. And this at a NATO summit no less. Harris becomes president.
Now if you like that Trump was a bit too into using our federal forces to quell dissent, then you’ll love Kamala. Will white lives even matter than? Probably. As long as they’ve got the money.
Que sera, sera
I like trying out my new material here because instead of the usual “YOU SUCK!” with a hurled glass of beer from the back, I'll get a pithy Davila aphorism or polite shrug.
You know the saying that if you are at a poker table, and can't spot the sucker, then it's probably you?
By a very loose analogy, if you are talking about ideologies and think everybody but you has one, then you probably have the worst of the lot.
Then there are the people who refer to Dunning-Kreuger and think its only talking about other people, couldn't possibly apply to themselves.
It's about time you showed up. I was beginning to wonder if Bob had gotten something wrong.
Gagdad: Is the Hubbard bio Russell Miller's BARE-FACED MESSIAH? That's an excellent book. And read Lawrence Wright's GOING CLEAR for the best history of $cientology itself.
I'm reading Wright's book at the moment -- it is absolutely insane, much, much crazier than I had ever realized! Highly recommended, albeit for entertainment value only. I'm not sure if we can draw any general conclusions from a person who seems to qualify for every serious mental disorder known to man. There's also a strong demonic element in the mix.
I had just thought he was a conman and drug addict, but he was a delusional paranoid narcissistic manic-depressive sadistic obsessive hysterical grandiose pathological liar too.
Huh. I didn't realize he was all that, but can't say I'm too surprised. Makes you wonder about the people behind similar cults like the Nxivm guy.
Schuon has an essay about this kind of person -- the man with no center or multiple centers. Extracted from an old post:
This is "the man who lacks a center... because he has two or even three centers at once.... This new type -- who is unhinged -- is capable of 'everything and nothing'.... The pariah has neither center nor continuity; he is a void eager for sensations; his life is a disconnected series of arbitrary experiences."
"The danger this type represents for society is evident..."
Dupree @8/12/2020 06:45:00 PM,
Speaking of highly rationalized ad hominem nuttiness, I've learned that most Qanon followers are Christians and that their "deep state" enemies are Satan worshipping pedophiliac Democrat party operatives trying to take down Trump in his glorious quest to a patriotic military dictatorship utopia.
QAnon is a conspiracy to troll leftwing conspiracy theorists regarding QAnon. It's working.
Sounds fun, where do I sign up?
I'd never heard of it. I googled it, and the left's hair is on fire about it. As usual. It sounds worse than the OK sign, the Russia conspiracy, and the two scoops of ice cream put together.
Yes, much worse. They ask questions and notice things.
Since the left only attacks what it fears, it makes me wonder if there's a kernel of truth to it.
At Trump rallies there are many Qanon tee shirts and signs showing up. When interviewed, none of these people even remotely states that it's all just in good fun, a great way to prank paranoid liberals. They appear pretty serious.
Here's a reasonable opinion I found online from one of the saner opinionists which does ring of truth:
When Christianity is set up as a cultural battle instead of an opportunity to serve, others are seen not as people in need of love but enemies who need to be feared and mistrusted.
And then there's this from the satanist Christopher Hyatt:
Rumors about ones enemies are doubly believed.
I know people who dabble in such witchcraft. And I know even more who are susceptible to it. But in this world, sins and sinning are always for the other guy. Get back Satan. Get back to where you once belonged. Wow. That was easy. Vote Trump everybody!
Shrug.
That Lawrence book is great! I also recommend the HBO documentary that came out in 2015.
I remember encounter a Scientologist when I was a freshman in college. She approached me on the street and insisted I go to this center and take a test to find out how screwed up I am. While doing this, she was holding on to my arm and had the most sinister eyes as she spoke. I didn't myself well at the time, but I knew enough to know that I needed to stay away from this.
It's so stupid and so crazy, that it could only attract the stupid and crazy. And yet, Chick Corea has been a member for decades, and he's one of my favorite musicians. He also seems like a nice guy. Celebrities are given very special attention, so maybe that's part of the explanation.
Re Wright: If you can read only one book about the subject, that's the tome to pick. Check out the Miller bio if you want to get deeper into Hubbard's craziness; thanks to the "Church's" myopia about him, they indirectly gave the biographer access to a vast trove LRH's personal papers going back to his childhood, and virtually every page has some fascinating and/or appalling revelation about him.
Someone once said that Hubbard demonized psychiatrists, and the psychology profession in general, because deep down inside he KNEW he was a walking smorgasbord of psychopathology, and would be in immediate and serious risk of commitment if he got within hailing distance of a shrink. I really wonder why the Navy didn't lock him up after his misadventures there, but then Naval Intel was up to some strange things in the Cold War era, and may very well have used his weirdness as a cover to get him in JPL-cofounder/rocket-scientist/political-radical Jack Parsons's occultist circle.
And another wit said something to the effect of, "Every religion and philosophy out there has at least a *grain* of truth in its teachings -- EXCEPT $cientology, which is *100% bullshit*!" I think that's a bit harsh -- DIANETICS, the cheese in the Hubbardite trap, does contains some useful self-help techniques -- but the whole hokey, spiteful, bad-space-opera mythos and culture of the "Clears" really has no parallel in any other faith.
His psychopathology is so protean it's difficult to describe, plus there's the element of vivid imagination bordering psychosis (and often crossing that border). Seems to share features with other cult leaders, though. In his book Denial of Death, Becker talks about the infectiousness of the morally unrepressed, and there's something to that. When I was 19 or 20, there was a guy I admired who would do anything for a laugh, on a dare, or just for the hell of it. Such people can appear larger than life, and Hubbard obviously appeared that way to his admirers. There's a kind of charisma that comes with an absence of repression, and one often sees this in great actors such as Brando. And cult leaders are always actors.
John Lennon was that way. The other Beatles called it a gloriously rebellious "fuck-all" attitude.
Come to think of it, there are certain fields wherein craziness is a competitive advantage, in part because the non-crazy have so many other options. Thus, it isn't surprising that so many rock musicians, actors and now athletes are crazy.
That, and it seems craziness and a willingness to engage in/ be subjected to horrible things are pretty much a requirement if you really want to be a star. Or, a willingness to let those things happen to your kids. There's a reason so many child actors have tragic lives, and it isn't only the effect of fame on developing minds.
Gagdad: Another entertaining book about a cult leader is self-help author Peter McWilliams' Life 102: What To Do When Your Guru Sues You. McWilliams was a ranking member of the late John-Roger Hinkins' MSIA sect for many years, and has all sorts of fascinating and hilarious tales about John-Roger's utter looniness and amorality, as well as anecdotes about co-member Arianna Huffington, who learned a lot of cult-honcho tricks at his feet. The MSIA head sued McWilliams -- hence the title -- and eventually had the book taken out of print, but you can still pick up used copies on Amazon for $20 or so.
Sounds enticing -- I just snagged a cheap copy on ebay.
looks like Trump's guys are going to start applying the civil rights act to everyone, for the first time ever. I imagine the dems didn't think it worked that way.
It's great news for blacks as well. Imagine the stigma of knowing you were accepted to Yale just because some privileged white libs want to feel good about themselves.
A first step toward cultural sanity is restoring meaning to words, as in discrimination means discrimination.
It seems like surreptitious guru cults are a thing of the past. They were prominent in the 70's through the 90's. But the internet has exposed most things. But that's not to say the cult of personality of the charismatic crazy has gone away. Maybe it's so exposed now through the politics of the left, that it undermines the cult label making people believe it's all part of the cultural milieu. AOC anyone?
Self improvement gurus have been replaced by self interested pundits. It's a cultural thing.
Mine tells me to always blame the Democrats. And please stay tuned for another episode.
"Let's begin with some questions about ideologues, whether they subscribe to positivism, scientism, existentialism, psychologism, evolutionism, leftism, whatever. Let's just call it the modern and postmodern plague of ismism"
Ismism - note that's a great word.
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