Showing posts with label Woodman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woodman. Show all posts
Growth
Malthus suggested that while technological advances could increase a society's supply of resources, such as food, and thereby improve the standard of living, the abundance of resources would enable population growth, which would eventually bring the supply of resources for each person back to its level prior to its original level.
Some economists contend that since the industrial revolution in the early 19th century, mankind has broken out of the trap.
Others argue that the continuation of extreme poverty indicates that the Malthusian trap continues to operate. Others further argue that due to lack of food availability coupled with excessive pollution, developing countries show more evidence of the trap as compared to developed countries.
‘Malthusianism’, Wikipedia
[...] creatures and plants live together in a combination of competition and mutual dependency, and it is that combination that is the important thing to consider.
Every species has a primary Malthusian capacity. Any species that does not, potentially, produce more young than the number of the population of the parental generation is out. They’re doomed. It is absolutely necessary for every species and for every such system that its components have a potential positive gain in the population curve.
But, if every species has potential gain, it is then quite a trick to achieve equilibrium. All sorts of interactive balances and dependencies come into play, and it is these processes that have the sort of circuit structure that I have mentioned.
The Malthusian curve is exponential. It is the curve of population growth and it is not inappropriate to call this the population explosion.
You may regret that organisms have this explosive characteristic, but you may as well settle for it. The creatures that don’t are out.
[Gregory Bateson]
'Conscious Purpose versus Nature', Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.436
Given a source of variation and a selection procedure, systems always evolve in a manner that is easy to describe in general and impossible to predict in detail. The overview is that they take up every opportunity available to them: that’s the part that’s easy to describe.
What’s impossible to predict is how and in what order they’ll do it. That’s true of cellular automata, and it’s also true of living things over time. Follow the evolutionary trajectory of any group of living things, from club moss to crocodiles to Galapagos finches to human beings, and you’ll see that same process at work.
Metaphorically, it’s as though you were inflating a big balloon inside a space too small to contain it: the balloon pushes outwards in all directions, now here, now there, until it runs up against the hard limits of walls and floor and ceiling.
Do evolutionary breakthroughs take place? Of course, and the process just outlined explains how and why those happen. Imagine for a moment that you’ve got a balloon made of some absurdly flexible substance, so that it can just keep stretching no matter how big it gets. You start inflating it inside your bedroom. The door’s closed, the windows are closed, pretty soon the balloon’s outer surface is pushing hard against the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the furniture—but there’s an inch-wide gap under the door you forgot about. Once the pressure gets high enough, the balloon pushes out through that gap, and all of a sudden it’s in the hallway and there’s a vast amount of previously inaccessible space for it to expand into.
Whoosh! Before long it’s filling up the living room and pushing against half a dozen other doors and windows. If one of those happens to be open a little, another evolutionary breakthrough follows. It’s not a linear process, and many different lines of evolutionary development can—and did—unfold at the same time.
That’s the story of life on Earth. The walls, floor, and ceiling are the laws of nature and the limits of environment, and the balloon represents the range of niches occupied by living things.
[John Michael Greer]
‘Against Enchantment I: Ken Wilber’, Ecosophia
For the first long, long period, human population growth was held in check by negative feedback because we were part of ecosystems. And disease, famines, resource shortages, those sorts of things kept human populations in check, just like every other species.
Humans are no different from other species in our population dynamics. We have a natural propensity to expand exponentially, but we're held in check by the natural negative feedbacks of the human ecosystem.
Along comes fossil fuel, particularly in the early part of the 19th century when we began to use it in great quantity, as well as an advance of public health measures. Fossil fuel provided the means by which humans could acquire all the food and other resources needed to grow the human enterprise, and public health improvements increased the longevity and health of the population.
So for the first time in human history in the last, about one tenth of 1% of human history, humans were able to realize our full potential for exponential population growth. Until then, it had been suppressed […] We have found ways to relieve the negative feedback, allowing the positive feedback to take off.
We took the cork off the bottle and we've had this enormous population and boom of the whole human enterprise in just the past 200 years. So what we take to be the norm […] is the single most abnormal period in human history. We are like any other species exposed to an abundance of resources that goes through a population boom - there will be a bust, there has to be a bust because the boom can't continue.
Any system that is primarily driven by positive feedback is self-destructive because it means that it will grow forever in a situation, in a context which is clearly not going to grow forever. And we're no different […] I'll put it bluntly, we are in the plague phase of a one-off human population boom bust cycle. We're nearing the top and we will come down because of the onset of negative feedback. Nature will restore balance between that positive and negative feedback and who knows what will come of that.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
[…] K-selected species tend to always to press up against the available carrying capacity of their environments […] using whatever resources are available […] Our evolutionary success depends on high survival rates of infants and this constant pushing up against that carrying capacity.
By the way, that was Malthus's great insight. He realized that if more food was made available, human beings being K strategists would in effect always rise to the level of food availability.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
[…] there's no inherent conflict between technology and ecological thinking. The conflict comes from assuming you can use the technology to overcome the biophysical reality within which we are embedded.
So if we decided as a species 200 years ago, that the carrying capacity of planet Earth indefinitely was say 2 billion people, we could have used technology at an appropriate scale to ensure the continued wellbeing of some 2 billion people ad infinitum.
But we didn't do that. The assumption was that technology can increase carrying capacity indefinitely […]
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
In many cases the relationships, the stable relationships that indigenous peoples have developed with their natural environments occur after they've obliterated the natural environment. They occur after they've hunted out all of the megafauna, the large easily caught species.
If you just think of New Zealand, which has been settled since 800 years ago or so, 12 species of gigantic birds went extinct as a result of the deprivations of the indigenous people that now occupy New Zealand. The decimation of populations of large mammals […] in Australia just follows the progression of the occupation of that subcontinent by aboriginals in the last 50,000 years.
So yes, we can develop a harmonious relationship with our ecosystems, but often only after we've inserted ourselves into those ecosystems and appropriated the habitats and food chains of many of the mammals […]
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Any species capable of exponential growth will respond to a period of resource abundance. And many species in nature go through cycles. It's a boom bust cycle: things get good, we expand, then negative feedback kicks in, we crash, then we get good and expand.
Humans have never done that, not globally. We've done it locally.
But now for the first time we've managed to, in effect, colonize the entire planet. We've grown by liquidating our capital [but] you cannot continue to grow by liquidating the natural capital basis of your own existence. And so we get to the point where we become so large, there's simply insufficiency there to maintain even the maintenance activities, let alone further growth.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
We can't avoid the reality that humans are biophysical entities, that we are ecological species that have evolved as components of nature and that we require a certain energy flow just to breathe.
Historically, that energy flow has always been solar energy through our food supply. We broke from that, oh, just about 200 years ago. And with this exosomatic or outside the body source of energy called fossil fuel, we vastly increased our capacity to exploit and destroy the planet.
And so we see everywhere measurements of the decline in forest fertility. North America has lost 50% to 70% of the organic nutrients that took 11,000 or 12,000 years in the Postglacial period to accumulate. So in less than 200 years of deep tillage agriculture, half of that's gone or 70% is gone. And the only way we maintain the productivity of the Great Plains is through the massive applications of fertilizers and pesticides and increasing irrigation.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
William Rees: The biophysical reality is that human beings in the growth of the human system have displaced other species from their eco-niches. It's a concept I call competitive displacement.
Human unsustainability is a natural phenomenon. We are unsustainable by nature because all we're doing is following our natural propensity to expand and to fill all available habitat, but we do it better than any other species.
So if you go back 10,000 years, humans were fewer than, or less than 1% of the biomass of mammals on planet Earth. Then with agriculture and just more recently in the last couple of 100 years with fossil energy and the massive expansion of the human enterprise, humans have become 36% or 34% of the biomass of mammals.
And by the way, the biomass itself has gone up. But our domestic animals are another 62-63%. So that when you add all of that together, it means that wild mammals on planet Earth today are about 3%-4% of the total biomass of mammals. So all those great herds you see in Africa are a trivial appendage on the biomass of mammals, which has absolutely been commandeered by both humans and our domestic animals.
So there's been an enormous displacement of non-human species, and the remaining populations in the last 50 years have been reduced by 65-70%.
Nate Hagens: It's actually worse than that because it’s all mammals, including ocean mammals. So if it's only land mammals, it's 98%.
[William Rees & Nate Hagens]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Archaic societies do not make a sharp distinction between life and death. Death is an aspect of life, and life is only possible in symbolic exchange with death.
Rituals of initiation and sacrifice are symbolic acts which regulate numerous transitions from life to death. Initiation is a second birth, following upon death, that is, the end of a phase of life.
The relationship between life and death is characterized by reciprocity. Festivals as expenditure imply a symbolic exchange with death: 'Symbolic death, which has not undergone the imaginary disjunction of life and death which is at the origin of the reality of death, is exchanged in a social ritual of feasting."
The age of production is accordingly a time without festival. It is dominated by an irreversibility, that of endless growth.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.51
The price we pay for our enslavement to matter, to the negative devouring Becky, is great.
Gathering food for a devouring mother who cannot get enough becomes a metaphor for a fully automated society in which human efficiency must aspire to the performance of an automaton.
Psychic automatons are addicted personalities, governed by mysterious, irrational fetishes. To wean them from their addictions - to food, to alcohol, to sex, to drugs, to work - is to wean Becko from Becky. It is not easy. To wean Becko from Becky it is also necessary to wean Becky from herself. She is literally eating herself to death. Like her, our society grows on what it devours. It is destroying itself on what it manufactures. Economists call that self-destructive phenomenon "economic growth," and economic growth has become the chief measure of society's health.
Anyone who weighs 300 pounds and is gaining 10 "pounds" a month on the stock market must sense that society's way of measuring its health is both perverse and crazy.
A society that is devouring its natural resources is not becoming more healthy and more realistic. It is dying as surely as a patient who has gone from 300 to 400 pounds is dying. America at the moment is 200 billion dollars overweight. Many economists predict it will be 300 billion by the end of the century.
The Becky I have in mind, i.e. our global negative mother, weighs in the neighbourhood of £300 trillion - roughly the price we are now budgeting worldwide for armaments. The Beckos of the world are feeding a ravenously destructive appetite and it is bound to explode unless Becko can be stopped, which is to say, unless Becky can be stopped.
Becky's compulsive behavior must be redeemed if we are to survive. She not only controls with machine-like efficiency our waking "conscious" hours, but our sleeping, unconscious hours as well. She works both above ground and underground. Underground, she is worshipped, served, propitiated in fetishes, addictions, ravaging diseases, marital break- downs, premature deaths.
Nothing can satisfy her hunger, which is unconscious, insatiable and autonomous. Her appetite feeds on its own power, endlessly giving birth to more and more and more, endlessly feeding on what is feeding on her.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.204-5
The modern industrial system has a built-in tendency to grow; it cannot really work unless it is growing. The word ‘stability’ has been struck from its dictionary and replaced by ‘stagnation’.
Its continuous growth pursues no particular aims or objectives, it is growth for the sake of growing. No one, even inquires after its final shape. There is none, there is no ‘saturation point’.
Who, it may be asked, calls the tune? Fundamentally, the technologist. Whatever becomes technologically possible - within certain economic limits - must be done. Society must adapt itself to it. The question whether or not it does any good is ruled out on the specious argument that no one knows anyhow what is good or evil, wholesome or unwholesome, worthy of man or unworthy.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 30
Once agriculture-generated surplus created private ownership and a system of differential and competitive advantage, the game theory shoot was greased and the continual evolution of power dynamics was set.
No, we could not go back to a previous stage in the system. No, it couldn’t have stayed at a previous phase. No, we can’t prevent continued exponential growth within this framework. No, we can’t bind the dynamics with law, given that economics is more fundamental to the power stack than law is.
[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'New Economics Series: Part 4', Explorations on the Future of Civilisation
An economic system does not have to be expansive—that is, constantly increasing its production of wealth—and it might well be possible for people to be completely happy in a non-expansive economic system if they were accustomed to it.
In the twentieth century, however, the people of our culture have been living under expansive conditions for generations. Their minds are psychologically adjusted to expansion, and they feel deeply frustrated unless they are better off each year than they were the preceding year.
The economic system itself has become organized for expansion, and if it does not expand it tends to collapse.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.313
The past history of weapons over thousands of years shows that the reason political units have grown larger in certain periods has been because of the increased power of the offensive in the dominant weapons systems, and that periods in which defensive weapons became dominant have been those in which political units remained small in area or even became smaller.
The growing power of castles in the period about 1100 B.C. or about A.D. 900 made political power so decentralized and made power units so small that all power became private power, and the state disappeared as a common form of political organization. Thus arose the so-called “Dark Ages” about 1000 B.C. or A.D. 1000.
We do not expect any such extreme growth of defensive power in the future, but any increase in defensive weapon power would stop the growth in size of power areas and would, in time, reverse this tendency.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.765-6
Related posts:
Shallow Feminism / Deep Feminism
Shallow - Deep
I’ve recently been trying to tease out a fundamental division within the broad church of feminism, between what I’ll call ‘deep feminism’ and ‘shallow feminism.’ Both appear to be in conflict with what they call ‘patriarchy’ (or ‘the Patriarchy’), but upon closer examination it seems to me that only deep feminism wishes to ‘smash the patriarchy’, whereas shallow feminism wishes only to change its internal structure.
To deep feminism, ‘patriarchy’ can be broadly understood as an overemphasis on structure. Deep feminism is influenced by thinkers like Derrida and Lacan, who point out that while certain structures might seem ‘real’, every structure is in fact lacking, and so ‘unreal’. In Lacan’s work, femininity can be understood as that which works against structures and masculinity, conversely, as faith in structures - or as Lacan would put it, a belief in ‘presence’ (i.e. a belief that objects really are solid). ‘Patriarchy’ occurs when we take structures too seriously and deny their inherent inconsistency. It is a denial/retreat from absence, into presence; from weakness, into strength.
Shallow feminism takes for granted the necessity and ‘reality’ of structures, and concerns itself instead with their internal ordering. To shallow feminism, ‘patriarchy’ is apparent not so much in our epistemological understanding of ‘structures’, rather, in the way in which structures are ordered so that certain groups are favoured over others.
Beneath our structures lies what Lacan calls ‘the Real’ (and what I’ve referred to in the past as ‘the Sea', which is, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy admits, "tricky to encapsulate and evades being pinned down through succinct definitions.” The Real can be understood as the negative space between our categories and definitions, and is analogous to the waveform of quantum physics - a state of possibility that precedes, or undergirds a ‘collapse’ into form. To Lacan, the Real is akin the state of nature, and it is our use of language - the tool with which we conceptualise and compartmentalise experience - that separates us from this primordial domain. ‘Real’ is how we could describe our ‘animal’ existence in the Garden of Eden, with our use of language (i.e. symbolism/structures) precipitating our fall from the Real.
I like to envisage the Real as a sea - as something liquid, in motion - upon which we float, safe within our various vessels. Within the bowels of something as substantial as a cruise liner we may even forget that we’re at sea at all, but those paying close attention can still feel the slight motion of the waves beneath (a stray iceberg helps to provide a more vivid reminder). The sea is a constant threat to our safely anchored structures.
We can distinguish our two forms of feminism by their attitude towards the Real. Deep feminism seeks an exposure to the Real, whereas shallow feminism wants to be protected from it; and it is in this sense that we can say that shallow feminism wants to preserve the shell of ‘patriarchy’, which acts as a protection from the anxiety-provoking complexity of the Real. A confrontation with the Real - a plunge into cold, dark water - is, after all, more than most people can take. It’s a niche activity, and most aren't well suited to it. Those that seek the real tend to have a relatively unique constitution, and proclivities - artists, philosophers, poets, mystics. For the uninitiated, exposure to the Real can result in nihilism - in fact, ‘over-exposure to the Real’ (or ‘over-exposure to complexity’) could serve as a good definition for nihilism.
Todd McGowan suggests that ‘feminism is the recognition that nothing lies beneath, and the subsequent embrace of the nothing-beneath.’ But embracing the nothing-beneath is a tall order, and a risky one at that. An artist may eschew rules, boundaries, order, and convention, but most people can’t afford to.
And perhaps this is what our deep/shallow division comes down to: deep feminism is the preserve of the esoteric, the initiated; and shallow feminism the preserve of the exoteric and profane.
Mystics like Lacan may seek an exposure to the Real, and a radical reevaluation of the notion of ‘structure’ itself, but most feminists take for granted the necessity of some form of ‘patriarchy’ and seek rather an equal footing within it, or a shake-up of the established order.
While Lacan is criticized for constituting sexual difference on the basis of the phallic function and subjectivity on the basis of paternal authority, what the Lacanian project does provide for feminism is not the idea of a malleable culture, susceptible to human mastery, as distinct from a fixed nature that escapes it, but the more disconcerting idea that human mastery, of ourselves, of others, of nature and culture, is itself illusory.
Rather than the promise of a rational progress toward greater and greater equality, respect for individual difference, and universality, Lacan's insights, like Freud's, point toward the precariousness of identity and social bonds and to the instability of the drives that attach us to one another.
In addition to the distinctiveness of his method, focus, and insight, this willingness to grapple with the limits of self-mastery is one reason why Lacan has been taken as an innovative and amenable resource for some feminist theorists. In exposing the inadequacies of social or empirical accounts of sexual difference, identity, and the power relations built upon them, Lacan confronts the fundamental structures at the root of empirical socio-historical circumstances.
[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[…] for Irigaray, both Beauvoir and Freud fail to address sexual difference insofar as they retain a singular notion of masculine subjectivity, Freud because he presumes the libido is always masculine, and Beauvoir because she reckons the aim of women's emancipation as equality with men (for instance by concluding the Second Sex with a call to brotherhood and seeming, arguably, to be calling for women to assimilate to masculine norms of selfhood).
Irigaray rejects the project of equality, since ‘equality’ can only ever mean equality to men, and proposes instead doubling the notion of subjectivity in line with the subject's own self-division.
Irigaray also challenges the Lacanian idea of the law of the father and the phallic signifier, pillorying the way in which natural birth has been assigned to maternity while cultural birth is assigned to paternity, equating the woman-mother with body and the man-father with language and law, and relegating the bodily process of parturition (maternity) to mute nature while valorizing the symbolic process of legitimation (paternity) as constitutive of civilization.
Irigaray's affirmation of sexual difference does not mean affirming the feminine traits that have been ascribed to women, since these are actually, in her view, the traits of sexual indifference, defined only with reference to men. Sexual difference has yet to appear and it is her task to bring it into being.
Unlike Irigaray, who wants to retrieve the pre-Oedipal period in order to reclaim feminine genealogies, Kristeva wants only to redescribe it in order to reassess its import for individuation and creative self-transformation. She takes infantile matricide (separation from the mother) to be a necessary condition of subjectivity and not a remnant of patriarchal violence.
Where Irigaray aims to introduce sexual difference into the social contract and the domain of law and rights, Kristeva proposes that we introduce self-discord.
[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
--
Irigaray also challenges the Lacanian idea of the law of the father and the phallic signifier, pillorying the way in which natural birth has been assigned to maternity while cultural birth is assigned to paternity, equating the woman-mother with body and the man-father with language and law, and relegating the bodily process of parturition (maternity) to mute nature while valorizing the symbolic process of legitimation (paternity) as constitutive of civilization.
Irigaray's affirmation of sexual difference does not mean affirming the feminine traits that have been ascribed to women, since these are actually, in her view, the traits of sexual indifference, defined only with reference to men. Sexual difference has yet to appear and it is her task to bring it into being.
Unlike Irigaray, who wants to retrieve the pre-Oedipal period in order to reclaim feminine genealogies, Kristeva wants only to redescribe it in order to reassess its import for individuation and creative self-transformation. She takes infantile matricide (separation from the mother) to be a necessary condition of subjectivity and not a remnant of patriarchal violence.
Where Irigaray aims to introduce sexual difference into the social contract and the domain of law and rights, Kristeva proposes that we introduce self-discord.
[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
--
Irigaray wants a stake in civilisation, but a deeper critique would question the inherent 'patriarchal' assumptions that give rise to civilisation in the first place.
In wanting to introduce 'sexual difference', which has yet to appear in history, Irigaray seems to chase the impossible, an ill-formed fantasy.
Many women who now demand equality with men in the professions are not struggling to overcome the tyranny of the patriarchal order. On the contrary, they are, in their long, regressive, unredeemed identification with matter, struggling to compete with men in the largely unconscious service of the dark side of the Great Mother.
In this crucial respect, their behavior is far more regressive than their active rebellion would suggest. They are becoming the victims of the Great Maw in ways that release her particular fury.
While men are as unconsciously victimized as women, this chapter is directed specifically to women who are now finding themselves enslaved to the Great Mother and are coming to realize that the way out offered by the more radical elements of the feminist movement only leads them deeper into her clutches.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.204
Contemporary feminists, recognising the trap into which they might fall, i.e. becoming the enemy they sought to overthrow, have taken a positive approach […] For such women the matriarchy that exists at the core of our technological culture is yet another demonic parody of femininity. The unconscious mother is, for them, no role mode.
They take no satisfaction in the state of nervous collapse to which Yves St. Laurent is annually reduced in his round-the-clock struggle to keep them clothed. It gives them no satisfaction that men willingly sacrifice their manhood to them even as they sacrificed their testicles to Great Mother Astarte. They are not gratified to see themselves in Vogue parading like so many queens.
These women recognize that it is the negative mother who rules in Becky, that her son Becko is probably gay, and that it is not only his manhood that is being destroyed but their womanhood as well.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.206
Mothers who have no time for Being themselves need to hear the whisper of an inner voice that erupts as they drop off the children, run to the supermarket, and dash to their exercise class: "If this is life, it's not worth it."
However beautiful these woman may be, if they are obsessed by achieving and excelling, their center will become an empty hole and their instinctual femininity may unconsciously fall into despair. Worse yet, they may pass this despair onto their children, who may unconsciously pick up their mother's emptiness and sense of death.
Any analyst working with an addicted patient is working within a shamanistic initiation rite, attempting to bring new life out of the bones, smashing the rigid stereotype in order to release the individual woman who can say Yes to life and herself as a feminine being.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.210-11
The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse, and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture. It is a lightning-quick Apollonian circuit of male bonding.
One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book.
Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men. Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature.
It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Even Thoreau’s Walden was just a two-year experiment. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.37-8
A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.
The feminists' response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men — a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her "equality." She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy.
The righteously indignant person genuinely wants to come to a settlement. By contrast, if the envied party grants what the envier demands, it merely further demonstrates his superiority and provokes more envy.
But it is a metaphysical impossibility to "grant" what a feminist envies: the successful performance of the male role including risk overcome, obstacles surmounted, and objectively verifiable achievement.
Indeed, concessions are perceived as signs of weakness, and whet the appetite for more concessions, a cycle that could only end with the complete self-destruction of the envied party. In other words, feminists' claim to be motivated by love of justice or fairness is flapdoodle. Feminism is a species not of righteous indignation but of hatred.
[F. Roger Devlin]
'Home Economics', Sexual Utopia in Power, p.105-7
Related posts:
Many women who now demand equality with men in the professions are not struggling to overcome the tyranny of the patriarchal order. On the contrary, they are, in their long, regressive, unredeemed identification with matter, struggling to compete with men in the largely unconscious service of the dark side of the Great Mother.
In this crucial respect, their behavior is far more regressive than their active rebellion would suggest. They are becoming the victims of the Great Maw in ways that release her particular fury.
While men are as unconsciously victimized as women, this chapter is directed specifically to women who are now finding themselves enslaved to the Great Mother and are coming to realize that the way out offered by the more radical elements of the feminist movement only leads them deeper into her clutches.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.204
Contemporary feminists, recognising the trap into which they might fall, i.e. becoming the enemy they sought to overthrow, have taken a positive approach […] For such women the matriarchy that exists at the core of our technological culture is yet another demonic parody of femininity. The unconscious mother is, for them, no role mode.
They take no satisfaction in the state of nervous collapse to which Yves St. Laurent is annually reduced in his round-the-clock struggle to keep them clothed. It gives them no satisfaction that men willingly sacrifice their manhood to them even as they sacrificed their testicles to Great Mother Astarte. They are not gratified to see themselves in Vogue parading like so many queens.
These women recognize that it is the negative mother who rules in Becky, that her son Becko is probably gay, and that it is not only his manhood that is being destroyed but their womanhood as well.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.206
Mothers who have no time for Being themselves need to hear the whisper of an inner voice that erupts as they drop off the children, run to the supermarket, and dash to their exercise class: "If this is life, it's not worth it."
However beautiful these woman may be, if they are obsessed by achieving and excelling, their center will become an empty hole and their instinctual femininity may unconsciously fall into despair. Worse yet, they may pass this despair onto their children, who may unconsciously pick up their mother's emptiness and sense of death.
Any analyst working with an addicted patient is working within a shamanistic initiation rite, attempting to bring new life out of the bones, smashing the rigid stereotype in order to release the individual woman who can say Yes to life and herself as a feminine being.
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.210-11
The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse, and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture. It is a lightning-quick Apollonian circuit of male bonding.
One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book.
Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men. Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature.
It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Even Thoreau’s Walden was just a two-year experiment. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.37-8
A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.
The feminists' response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men — a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her "equality." She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy.
The righteously indignant person genuinely wants to come to a settlement. By contrast, if the envied party grants what the envier demands, it merely further demonstrates his superiority and provokes more envy.
But it is a metaphysical impossibility to "grant" what a feminist envies: the successful performance of the male role including risk overcome, obstacles surmounted, and objectively verifiable achievement.
Indeed, concessions are perceived as signs of weakness, and whet the appetite for more concessions, a cycle that could only end with the complete self-destruction of the envied party. In other words, feminists' claim to be motivated by love of justice or fairness is flapdoodle. Feminism is a species not of righteous indignation but of hatred.
[F. Roger Devlin]
'Home Economics', Sexual Utopia in Power, p.105-7
Related posts:
The Coming of Nihilism
Civilisation - Culture
Mechanism - Organism
Part - Whole
Barren - Fertile
Data - Narrative
Quantity - Quality
Dead - Alive
Modernity - by which we mean the liberal worldview - can be characterised as the negation of traditional bonds and boundaries. In this sense, Modernity does not offer a positive programme - it only works to dissolve, rather than create. Its only borders are those that preserve the liberal status-quo, which is another way of saying that it prohibits bonds, boundaries and groupings.
Each of the three [Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism] buried a millennium of spiritual depth [...] In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the centuries, are undone.
Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose "pure" (i.e., soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested.
The Culture was annihilated by discussion.
If we pass in review the great 19th-Century names with which we associate the march of this great drama - Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg - we comprehend in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism.
Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese de-souling of the human being, just as there is a Western.
This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full.
Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs, but deepest and last things are question here - the inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the provincial as well. For the Classical world this condition sets in with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.
For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 - on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect.
Culture and Civilization - the living body of a soul and the mummy of it […] Culture and Civilization - the organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts."
That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist - in the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization – whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.
The feeling of strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire.
Only the sick man feels his limbs.
Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident - hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice - or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian” or “rational” criteria.
The brain rules because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, civilisation-men consciously. The megalopolis - sceptical, practical, artificial - alone represents Civilisation to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The "People" means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is not democratic - this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban existence - and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old "estates" - gentry and priesthood - he is the only organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture.
[Faust] is Civilization in the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of internal organism, intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p.352-4, 357
A current of thought and a “historiography” exist that represent this process of rebellion and dissolution, or at least its first phases, as having been something positive and as a victory. It is another aspect of contemporary nihilism, whose undeclared basis is a sort of “shipwreck euphoria.”
It is well known that the phases of dissolution, beginning with illuminism and liberalism and proceeding gradually to immanentist historicism (first “idealistic,” then materialist and Marxist), have been interpreted and celebrated as those of the emancipation and reaffirmation of man, of progress of the spirit, and of true "humanism.”
Man, at a given moment, wanted to "be free.” He was allowed to be so, and he was allowed to throw off the chains that did not bind him so much as sustain him. Thereupon he was allowed to suffer all the consequences of his liberation, following ineluctably up to his present state in which “God is dead” […] and existence becomes the field of absurdity where everything is possible and everything is allowed.
[...] boomer truth or the boomer truth regime refers to the episteme under which we have been suffering since 1945.
Turning to a particular point, one can only maintain an attitude of detachment when facing the confrontation of the two factions contending for world domination today: the democratic, capitalist West and the communist East.
In fact, this struggle is devoid of any meaning from a spiritual point of view. The “West” is not an exponent of any higher ideal. Its very civilization, based on an essential negation of traditional values, presents the same destructions and nihilistic background that is evident in the Marxist and communist sphere, however different in form and degree.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p.175-6
What is called the course of history is more or less the same thing as what is called ‘progressivism’ in Left-wing circles, and it aims at only one thing today: to foment passivity in the face of the current that is getting stronger and carries us continually lower.
As to the charge of ‘reactionary’, ask them the following question: while you are acting, destroying, and profaning, do you then want us not to ‘react’, but to stand by passively watching, or maybe even shouting, ‘Good work, keep it up!’
[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, V
Although it announces that it is taking leave of all ideology, dataism itself is an ideology. It is leading to digital totalitarianism.
Big Data is supposed to be freeing knowledge from subjective arbitrariness. By this logic, intuition does not represent a higher form of knowing; instead, it represents something merely subjective - a stopgap compensating for the shortage of objective data. In complex situations, the argument goes, intuition is blind.
The mistrust even extends to theory, which is suspected of being an ideology: if enough data are available, it should prove superfluous as well.
The second Enlightenment is the age of purely data-driven knowledge. Anderson's visionary rhetoric goes: 'Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."
Adorno would say that the 'transparency' of today is another name for myth too - that dataism likewise heralds false clarity. The dialectic of old is also making the second Enlightenment, which seeks to counter ideology, into an ideology in its own right - more still, it is leading to the barbarism of data.
Dataism, it turns out, is amounting to digital Dadaism. Dadaism also takes leave of meaningful contexts of every kind. It empties language itself of sense: 'The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada."
Dataism is nihilism. It gives up on any and all meaning. Data and numbers are not narrative; they are additive. Meaning, on the other hand, is based on narration. Data simply fills up the senseless void.
[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.58-9
Today, a further paradigm shift is silently taking place. The Copernican anthropological turn which made man an autonomous producer of knowledge is being superseded by the dataistic turn.
The human being now has to comply with data. No longer the producer of knowledge, the human being cedes its sovereignty to data. Dataism puts an end to the idealism and humanism of the Enlightenment. The human being is no longer the sovereign subject of knowledge, the originator of knowledge. Knowledge is now produced mechanically.
The data-driven production of knowledge takes place without the involvement of the human subject or consciousness. Enormous volumes of data displace the human being from its central position as producer of knowledge, and the human being itself is reduced to a data set, a variable that can be calculated and manipulated.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.81-2
Modernity was distinguished by the gradual rise of the Logos of Cybele.
Galileo and Gassendi revived atomism, and nominalism became the basis of the scientific method. Materialism thus gradually became the criterion of scienticity. Eternity was rejected and replaced by the absolutization of time, historicism and, finally, the idea of progress. As in Epicurus’ philosophy, god first becomes “idle” (Deism) and “logical” (the “god of the philosophers”), and then yields to pure atheism (Nietzsche’s “God is dead”). The human soul is thought to be mortal and then comes to be regarded as the “psyche”, that is the sublimated continuation of the physical organism.
The doctrine of the atomic structure of matter came to be laid at the foundation of the physical map of the world of Modernity, and the opening of this vacuum brings us back to the Great Void of Democritus. Space becomes isotropic and Democritus’ principle of isonymy thereby becomes dogma.
If we take into account the materialism and heightened and clearly unhealthy fixation of modern people on things and atomic (and ever more microscopic) phenomenon, the reign of quantity over quality, earthly over heavenly, and mechanical over organic, the preponderance of individualist fragmentation, including the aesthetic norms of contemporary art, then the notion that we find ourselves under the rule of the Black Logos seems to be a wholly probable supposition.
Modernity, thus, is the onset of the philosophical winter, marked by the domination of the Great Mother of Matter. The Titans storm the abode of the gods. Night triumphs over day. The mystical nocturne subjugates the ranks of the heroic diurne. Thus arises the era of the masses, of gravity (Isaac Newton’s universal gravitation) and – in René Guénon words – the “reign of quantity.”
As soon as one refrains from interpreting Tradition and religion from the standpoint of the “contemporal moment”, and instead strives to determine the “contemporal moment” from the position of Tradition and religion, then everything immediately falls into place, and the anomalousness of our epoch is revealed in all of its volume. We live in the center of winter, at the bottom point of the Untergang, of descent.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[…] in the spirit of the Logos of Dionysus we have drawn substantially nearer to the zone of matter and the Mother […] Yet still the form, the eidos, remains the fundamental pole of the phenomenon and, as follows, therefore cannot claim the role of being the philosophy of Cybele.
In Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius Carus, we have a developed panorama of the philosophy of the Titans which shaped the Logos of the Great Mother and systematized its procedures and basic concepts.
The blind rampage of sputtered particles turns into vortices which constitute organizational ensembles, but order itself, including the eidoi, figures, bodies, and processes, is shaped by the aleatoric laws of random combinations.
There is no harmony or immanent logic in the world, everything is utterly meaningless. Seeing the world as an insignificant accident, Democritus laughed at anyone who treated being seriously and solemnly, thus earning himself the epithet “the laughing philosopher.”
In the spirit of his general system, Democritus did not believe in eternity, the soul, or immortality, but solely in accident and the Great Void of the dead and alienated Universe.
Here we can see a vivid example of the mystical nocturne, the shift of consciousness towards the opposite side, towards identification with the blind, unseen, or ghostly forces of matter, disorder, and chaos, i.e., the philosophy of Night. Plato was completely right to see in Democritus and his atomists existential enemies, the bearers of the chthonic, titanic element.
Similar ideas were developed in Epicurus’ philosophy, which reduced all of reality to the sensual world and recognized the doctrine of atoms, thereby rejecting not only the being of Platonic ideas, but also the forms/eidoi of Aristotle.
In this case, man’s soul is as mortal as his body. Epicurus believed in the evolution of species, postulating that material forces develop from the simplest forms towards the emergence of more organized beings.
The Neoplatonists saw the castrate philosophy of materialism to be a gross violation of healthy sense and related its main principles to the final four hypotheses of Plato’s Parmenides pertaining to the denial of the existence of the One. Thus, we are dealing here with a philosophy of the universe which, from an Apollonian point of view, simply cannot exist – cannot and should not.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
Although it has long been believed that capitalist society is a patriarchal arrangement because of the inferior roles and limited rewards granted to women, it is important to realise that Becky, not Becko is in charge.
The so-called patriarchy serves the dark side of the Magna Mater - what Phillip Wylie in Generation of Vipers (1955) called “Momism.” This dark side is embodied in a materialism so pervasive that matter itself, in all its infinite variety, is the divinity we serve. Mater or matter (“the stuff of which a thing is made” [Oxford English Dictionary]) has become Western society’s dark goddess.
Looked at from the inside, our culture functions in the service of a Great Mother Machine, a devouring Kali.
The question is not how can we get out of matter, out of the womb of the Great Mother, but how can we redeem her - that is, how can we contact and release the light that is at the heart of her darkness?
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.203-4
We modern people, who reject traditional wisdom and deny the existence of the vertical dimension of the spirit, like our forefathers desire nothing more than somehow to be able to rise above the humdrum state of our present life.
We hope to do so by growing rich, moving around at ever-increasing speed, traveling to the moon and into space; but whatever we do in these respects, we cannot rise above our own humdrum, petty, egotistical selves.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 114
At the base of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world […], the acknowledgment of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art and in thought […] Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics, and spiritual values, but religion also […]
Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for the stripping of oneself of all the trappings of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the setting free of the natural man […]
The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin […] Not to be a materialist was to be taken as a moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then you were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically.
[Nikolai Berdyaev]
Related posts:
'Modernity' is synonymous with 'anti-tradition.'
Dugin and Woodman see modernity as being in thrall to the dark side of the Great Mother - the Black Logos - which manifests in a pervasive, debased materialism. The emblem of debased matter (dead matter) is the machine. Total efficiency means total death - the end of error.
Schumacher points out that modern man still desires to 'rise above' his humdrum existence - still yearns for something beyond the everyday - but having denied himself access to the 'vertical dimension of the spirit', his yearnings are confined to mundane outlets, which ultimately prove to be unsatisfying.
We can see 'new materialism' as an attempt to revive matter, undermining a Newtonian vision that has radically underestimated its true nature.
Each of the three [Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism] buried a millennium of spiritual depth [...] In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the centuries, are undone.
Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late Culture, and whose "pure" (i.e., soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their hardness, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested.
The Culture was annihilated by discussion.
If we pass in review the great 19th-Century names with which we associate the march of this great drama - Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg - we comprehend in a glance that which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism.
Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese de-souling of the human being, just as there is a Western.
This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full.
Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs, but deepest and last things are question here - the inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the provincial as well. For the Classical world this condition sets in with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.
For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 - on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect.
Culture and Civilization - the living body of a soul and the mummy of it […] Culture and Civilization - the organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts."
That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist - in the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization – whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.
The feeling of strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire.
Only the sick man feels his limbs.
Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident - hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice - or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian” or “rational” criteria.
The brain rules because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, civilisation-men consciously. The megalopolis - sceptical, practical, artificial - alone represents Civilisation to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The "People" means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is not democratic - this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban existence - and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old "estates" - gentry and priesthood - he is the only organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture.
[Faust] is Civilization in the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of internal organism, intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p.352-4, 357
A current of thought and a “historiography” exist that represent this process of rebellion and dissolution, or at least its first phases, as having been something positive and as a victory. It is another aspect of contemporary nihilism, whose undeclared basis is a sort of “shipwreck euphoria.”
It is well known that the phases of dissolution, beginning with illuminism and liberalism and proceeding gradually to immanentist historicism (first “idealistic,” then materialist and Marxist), have been interpreted and celebrated as those of the emancipation and reaffirmation of man, of progress of the spirit, and of true "humanism.”
Man, at a given moment, wanted to "be free.” He was allowed to be so, and he was allowed to throw off the chains that did not bind him so much as sustain him. Thereupon he was allowed to suffer all the consequences of his liberation, following ineluctably up to his present state in which “God is dead” […] and existence becomes the field of absurdity where everything is possible and everything is allowed.
This is what Nietzsche called the “tragic phase” of nihilism. It is the beginning of the “misery of man without God.” Existence seems devoid of any meaning, any goal. While all imperatives, moral values, and restraints have fallen away, so have all supports […] Existence is reduced to itself in its naked reality, without any reference point outside itself that could give it a real meaning for man.
For some time, a good part of Western humanity has considered it a natural thing for existence to lack any real meaning, and for it not to be ordered by any higher principle, arranging their lives in the most bearable and least disagreeable way they can. Of course this has its counterpart and inevitable consequence in an inner life that is more and more reduced, formless, feeble, and elusive, and in a growing dissolution of any uprightness and character.
One also notices that the sporadic experiences of intellectuals and artists of the past become modes of behavior occurring in the natural course of things for certain groups of the younger generation [...] Only yesterday it was a matter of writers, painters, and “damned poets” living on the edge, often alcoholics, mingling their talents with the climate of existential dissolution and with irrational rebellion against established values.
Already after World War I, processes of this type had begun to spread, announcing the final phases of nihilism. At first such harbingers remained at the margins of life, on the frontier-zone of art. The most significant and radical of them all was perhaps Dadaism, the end result of the deepest impulses that had nourished the various movements of avant-garde art.
But Dadaism negated the very categories of art, showing the transition to the chaotic forms of a life deprived of any rationality, any restraint, any coherence; it was not just the acceptance but the exaltation of the absurd and the contradictory, of nonsense and pointlessness taken just as they are.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 19-22
For some time, a good part of Western humanity has considered it a natural thing for existence to lack any real meaning, and for it not to be ordered by any higher principle, arranging their lives in the most bearable and least disagreeable way they can. Of course this has its counterpart and inevitable consequence in an inner life that is more and more reduced, formless, feeble, and elusive, and in a growing dissolution of any uprightness and character.
One also notices that the sporadic experiences of intellectuals and artists of the past become modes of behavior occurring in the natural course of things for certain groups of the younger generation [...] Only yesterday it was a matter of writers, painters, and “damned poets” living on the edge, often alcoholics, mingling their talents with the climate of existential dissolution and with irrational rebellion against established values.
Already after World War I, processes of this type had begun to spread, announcing the final phases of nihilism. At first such harbingers remained at the margins of life, on the frontier-zone of art. The most significant and radical of them all was perhaps Dadaism, the end result of the deepest impulses that had nourished the various movements of avant-garde art.
But Dadaism negated the very categories of art, showing the transition to the chaotic forms of a life deprived of any rationality, any restraint, any coherence; it was not just the acceptance but the exaltation of the absurd and the contradictory, of nonsense and pointlessness taken just as they are.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 19-22
[...] boomer truth or the boomer truth regime refers to the episteme under which we have been suffering since 1945.
In this episteme the summum bonum, the ultimate moral good, is something like individual self-expression unmoored from societal constraint. In its most depraved manifestation we might imagine the grotesque defender of the regime, Vaush – a hog-like neck-bearded YouTuber – defending paedophilia and questioning sexual age-of-consent laws.
The ultimate evil in this regime is represented by the Mid-Century Germans and their terrible monstrous leader Moustache Man.
[Academic Agent]
'About This Substack: On Boomer Truth and Related Issues'
Turning to a particular point, one can only maintain an attitude of detachment when facing the confrontation of the two factions contending for world domination today: the democratic, capitalist West and the communist East.
In fact, this struggle is devoid of any meaning from a spiritual point of view. The “West” is not an exponent of any higher ideal. Its very civilization, based on an essential negation of traditional values, presents the same destructions and nihilistic background that is evident in the Marxist and communist sphere, however different in form and degree.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p.175-6
What is called the course of history is more or less the same thing as what is called ‘progressivism’ in Left-wing circles, and it aims at only one thing today: to foment passivity in the face of the current that is getting stronger and carries us continually lower.
As to the charge of ‘reactionary’, ask them the following question: while you are acting, destroying, and profaning, do you then want us not to ‘react’, but to stand by passively watching, or maybe even shouting, ‘Good work, keep it up!’
[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, V
Although it announces that it is taking leave of all ideology, dataism itself is an ideology. It is leading to digital totalitarianism.
Big Data is supposed to be freeing knowledge from subjective arbitrariness. By this logic, intuition does not represent a higher form of knowing; instead, it represents something merely subjective - a stopgap compensating for the shortage of objective data. In complex situations, the argument goes, intuition is blind.
The mistrust even extends to theory, which is suspected of being an ideology: if enough data are available, it should prove superfluous as well.
The second Enlightenment is the age of purely data-driven knowledge. Anderson's visionary rhetoric goes: 'Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."
Adorno would say that the 'transparency' of today is another name for myth too - that dataism likewise heralds false clarity. The dialectic of old is also making the second Enlightenment, which seeks to counter ideology, into an ideology in its own right - more still, it is leading to the barbarism of data.
Dataism, it turns out, is amounting to digital Dadaism. Dadaism also takes leave of meaningful contexts of every kind. It empties language itself of sense: 'The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada."
Dataism is nihilism. It gives up on any and all meaning. Data and numbers are not narrative; they are additive. Meaning, on the other hand, is based on narration. Data simply fills up the senseless void.
[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.58-9
Today, a further paradigm shift is silently taking place. The Copernican anthropological turn which made man an autonomous producer of knowledge is being superseded by the dataistic turn.
The human being now has to comply with data. No longer the producer of knowledge, the human being cedes its sovereignty to data. Dataism puts an end to the idealism and humanism of the Enlightenment. The human being is no longer the sovereign subject of knowledge, the originator of knowledge. Knowledge is now produced mechanically.
The data-driven production of knowledge takes place without the involvement of the human subject or consciousness. Enormous volumes of data displace the human being from its central position as producer of knowledge, and the human being itself is reduced to a data set, a variable that can be calculated and manipulated.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.81-2
Modernity was distinguished by the gradual rise of the Logos of Cybele.
Galileo and Gassendi revived atomism, and nominalism became the basis of the scientific method. Materialism thus gradually became the criterion of scienticity. Eternity was rejected and replaced by the absolutization of time, historicism and, finally, the idea of progress. As in Epicurus’ philosophy, god first becomes “idle” (Deism) and “logical” (the “god of the philosophers”), and then yields to pure atheism (Nietzsche’s “God is dead”). The human soul is thought to be mortal and then comes to be regarded as the “psyche”, that is the sublimated continuation of the physical organism.
The doctrine of the atomic structure of matter came to be laid at the foundation of the physical map of the world of Modernity, and the opening of this vacuum brings us back to the Great Void of Democritus. Space becomes isotropic and Democritus’ principle of isonymy thereby becomes dogma.
If we take into account the materialism and heightened and clearly unhealthy fixation of modern people on things and atomic (and ever more microscopic) phenomenon, the reign of quantity over quality, earthly over heavenly, and mechanical over organic, the preponderance of individualist fragmentation, including the aesthetic norms of contemporary art, then the notion that we find ourselves under the rule of the Black Logos seems to be a wholly probable supposition.
Modernity, thus, is the onset of the philosophical winter, marked by the domination of the Great Mother of Matter. The Titans storm the abode of the gods. Night triumphs over day. The mystical nocturne subjugates the ranks of the heroic diurne. Thus arises the era of the masses, of gravity (Isaac Newton’s universal gravitation) and – in René Guénon words – the “reign of quantity.”
As soon as one refrains from interpreting Tradition and religion from the standpoint of the “contemporal moment”, and instead strives to determine the “contemporal moment” from the position of Tradition and religion, then everything immediately falls into place, and the anomalousness of our epoch is revealed in all of its volume. We live in the center of winter, at the bottom point of the Untergang, of descent.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[…] in the spirit of the Logos of Dionysus we have drawn substantially nearer to the zone of matter and the Mother […] Yet still the form, the eidos, remains the fundamental pole of the phenomenon and, as follows, therefore cannot claim the role of being the philosophy of Cybele.
In Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius Carus, we have a developed panorama of the philosophy of the Titans which shaped the Logos of the Great Mother and systematized its procedures and basic concepts.
The blind rampage of sputtered particles turns into vortices which constitute organizational ensembles, but order itself, including the eidoi, figures, bodies, and processes, is shaped by the aleatoric laws of random combinations.
There is no harmony or immanent logic in the world, everything is utterly meaningless. Seeing the world as an insignificant accident, Democritus laughed at anyone who treated being seriously and solemnly, thus earning himself the epithet “the laughing philosopher.”
In the spirit of his general system, Democritus did not believe in eternity, the soul, or immortality, but solely in accident and the Great Void of the dead and alienated Universe.
Here we can see a vivid example of the mystical nocturne, the shift of consciousness towards the opposite side, towards identification with the blind, unseen, or ghostly forces of matter, disorder, and chaos, i.e., the philosophy of Night. Plato was completely right to see in Democritus and his atomists existential enemies, the bearers of the chthonic, titanic element.
Similar ideas were developed in Epicurus’ philosophy, which reduced all of reality to the sensual world and recognized the doctrine of atoms, thereby rejecting not only the being of Platonic ideas, but also the forms/eidoi of Aristotle.
In this case, man’s soul is as mortal as his body. Epicurus believed in the evolution of species, postulating that material forces develop from the simplest forms towards the emergence of more organized beings.
The Neoplatonists saw the castrate philosophy of materialism to be a gross violation of healthy sense and related its main principles to the final four hypotheses of Plato’s Parmenides pertaining to the denial of the existence of the One. Thus, we are dealing here with a philosophy of the universe which, from an Apollonian point of view, simply cannot exist – cannot and should not.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
Although it has long been believed that capitalist society is a patriarchal arrangement because of the inferior roles and limited rewards granted to women, it is important to realise that Becky, not Becko is in charge.
The so-called patriarchy serves the dark side of the Magna Mater - what Phillip Wylie in Generation of Vipers (1955) called “Momism.” This dark side is embodied in a materialism so pervasive that matter itself, in all its infinite variety, is the divinity we serve. Mater or matter (“the stuff of which a thing is made” [Oxford English Dictionary]) has become Western society’s dark goddess.
Looked at from the inside, our culture functions in the service of a Great Mother Machine, a devouring Kali.
The question is not how can we get out of matter, out of the womb of the Great Mother, but how can we redeem her - that is, how can we contact and release the light that is at the heart of her darkness?
[Marion Woodman]
‘The Emergence of the Feminine’, Betwixt and Between, p.203-4
We modern people, who reject traditional wisdom and deny the existence of the vertical dimension of the spirit, like our forefathers desire nothing more than somehow to be able to rise above the humdrum state of our present life.
We hope to do so by growing rich, moving around at ever-increasing speed, traveling to the moon and into space; but whatever we do in these respects, we cannot rise above our own humdrum, petty, egotistical selves.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 114
At the base of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world […], the acknowledgment of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art and in thought […] Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics, and spiritual values, but religion also […]
Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for the stripping of oneself of all the trappings of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the setting free of the natural man […]
The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin […] Not to be a materialist was to be taken as a moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then you were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically.
[Nikolai Berdyaev]
Related posts:
Storytelling
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We’re all constantly telling stories; from personal mythology, to collective folklore. They are the way in which we breathe meaning into things. They bring sense, and direction. They guide us, tell us which steps to take, and when. Sometimes we update them, or rewrite them. Sometimes we scrap them and start anew.
A story is akin to a constellation, something that brings together what was separate; from atoms, to planets, to human beings. Stories are what bind us; they get us moving in the same direction; promote cohesion, and harmony. ‘Tribe’ is another way of saying ‘a shared story.’ When a story is shared it becomes a truth, at least among those who share it. But what was yesterday considered a truth, may today be considered a delusion.
In times gone by a collective story - a story of the people - would be commonplace. The stronger this story - the greater its reach and influence - the stronger was the collective. A shared story is a place in which to live, offering shelter from the whirling confusion and maddening incoherence of the outside world. Of course, in erecting walls it also places limits; and those societies with the strongest stories also have the firmest boundaries.
Society is, then, a collection of stories; from personal fiction to collective folklore. Whilst our modern societies are increasingly individualistic, the individual story has not gained total precedent. As long as we wish to be more than isolated units, then we will always need stories to bind us.
However, the kind of overarching fiction that defined traditional collectives doesn’t seem to be so common today, due perhaps in part to the scale and diversity of our societies. Whereas once an entire society would have been bound by a single fiction, this unity has since fractured. Yet, whilst ‘grand narratives’ may not be fashionable, we still have our various tribes: from those that believe in the stories of holy books, to those that believe in the stories of science books.
We may, then, have our short stories; but we’re certainly no longer all on the same page. This lack of a common story has created a vacuum in which new stories compete for dominion. One tribe claims it has the story, whilst another rubbishes its claims and offers its gospel. There is also a growing chorus of individual voices, each offering their own interpretation on how things are, and what we should believe. This blog is one example among many. From scientific theorists, to religious theorists; from pulpit to blog post; from expert to amateur: stories abound. Our age faces us with a confusion of tales to choose from. How, then, do we do our choosing?
In the diagram opposite I’ve pictured a society as a series of concentric circles, the largest of which define its boundaries. To transcend this boundary is to step outside of the society.
The inner circles represent the differing voices within the society, or the differing stories advocated by these voices. I’ve offered real life examples of the kind of voices that you could be exposed to within my own society, here in England. I offer these examples based on the kind of things these voices generally say, which isn’t to say that they are forever anchored at certain points on the spectrum. David Icke’s trajectory attests to this.
At the centre we have voices that seem to be widely accepted. They espouse ‘mainstream’ stories and are exemplified by the Prime Minister who, being the focal point of officialdom, is an arbiter of official truths. If, for instance, the Prime Minister were to suddenly veer off-piste and start spouting ‘conspiracy theories’ then this could lead to one of two things: either the Prime Minister would be ousted from their role, or; the conspiracy theories would be accepted as mainstream truths. Because the role itself does not allow a condoning of fringe fiction, either the stories must move inwards, or the person move outwards.
As we move further out the voices become less mainstream and more contentious; bringing us to the niche stories of the ‘lunatic fringe,’ as exemplified by the likes of David Icke. One of the many reasons that David Icke could not be Prime Minister is because he holds beliefs that are entirely incompatible with the current set of accepted core truths.
In all things there is a pull towards dissolution, and an opposite pull towards unification. This tug of war is everywhere, at all scales; from a society, to the bodies that make up that society, to the cells that make up those bodies. It is the interchange between life and death.
We can describe a society, much like the nucleus of an atom, as a centre of attraction; which is another way of saying a centre of life. To be part of a society is to be within its field of attraction. So whilst those near the outside may appear to be opposed to many of the central truths of the society, it still exerts a pull upon them, albeit a comparatively weak one. They have not left the society, and are still a part of it, if only minimally.
The further we move from the core, the weaker its pull becomes. Those voices at its centre are less diverse because its core truths - those fundamental stories that bind it - are exerting more of an influence. As with our example of the Prime Minister, voices must align with these truths or move further out. You cannot, generally speaking, be a mainstream voice whilst rejecting mainstream truths; or at least, not insofar as you pose a threat to the status quo.
Like any centre of life, be it a galaxy, a planet, or a human being, a society exists by preserving its core fictions. For instance, an important part of the story of ‘liberal democracies’ is that every person within that society ought to be granted free speech. Another is the belief that democracy is the best system of governance. If these fictions were ousted by counter-fictions, then the society would cease to exist (in its current form at least) morphing into something else instead. It is fictions such as these that separate liberal democracies from, say, illiberal autocracies.
Consider your own personal fictions, those strands that thread together to make you who you are. Which of these, and how many, would have to change before you became someone you no longer recognised?
Those that reside nearest the centre will, then, tend to be more interested in preserving and defending its core truths. As I’ve mentioned, these voices tend to be more homogenous because they ‘tow the company line’ and are less interested in questioning collective assumptions or exploring alternatives. It is, after all, not in their job description. Every collective - every structure - needs those individuals that guard its premises and work to keep it structurally sound, and these people fulfil that role. They are its antibodies, working to conserve the status quo.
Icke himself refers to this area as the ‘postage stamp consensus’ alluding to its narrow range of voices. However, having polarised himself at the fringes - having cast his anchor at a certain location - he views things in a rather one-sided way. In choosing a side he is unable to transcend the binary itself and see the value of both sides. When he talks of his opposite, of the central area of society, he uses embattled language. He does not talk of its value, or even seem to recognise that it has a value. In this he mirrors the way that the centre tends to talk about people like him, on the fringes.
The further we move from the centre of attraction the weaker its pull becomes, and the less influence its core truths have upon people. This leads to a greater diversity of voices, especially around the fringes. This is the place that entertains heretics and blasphemers, iconoclasts and dissenters. Core truths are handled roughly, without reverence; are tested to the point of failure. Once their shells are cracked their fictional nature is exposed. What was once objective and beyond question, becomes subjective and questionable.
In my diagram I’ve marked out five concentric circles, illustrating a relatively diverse range of voices; from the very conservative to the very dissentious; a diversity that seems to show a large degree of permissiveness - when it comes to speech at least. Indeed, I think that my society, as with other Western democracies, can be characterised by its lack of boundaries; it does not erect the kind of towering perimeter walls that we see when we look at other, less permissive, cultures.
Its worth bearing in mind that we’re talking about freedom of speech, not freedom of action. When it comes to action, we are certainly much more limited. As Gene Ray reminds us, “one may question the bourgeois paradigm, only not in any way that is effective or has results; one may play with the symbols of radical politics, but one must not act on them; anyone can say the emperor has no clothes or even scream it within the closed walls of a gallery, but no one may cut off his head.”
So more freedom means more diversity. If there are no walls to stop them, frontiersman will always be tempted to explore new territory. It is in their nature to pull away; to look for alternatives. In this they are analogous to the process of genetic mutation, allowing an organism to change and evolve in response to environmental demands. They maintain a critical amount of diversity, offering fresh insights when they are needed (and when they aren’t). They are the hand that stirs the sediments; the oil that prevents parts from seizing. If evolution is important to a society then it must allow its fringes to flourish; it must allow an area in which alternatives can be proposed. The fact that voices such as David Icke’s are permitted could be seen as a sign that our society currently allows this area, to some extent at least.
If I were to draw my circular diagram for an Amish society, then it would likely consist of only one or two circles, as opposed to five. Theirs is a restrictive environment, in which certain things must not be said, as well as done. Yet, whilst I, peering in from a distance, may characterise it as restrictive, those on the inside will no doubt feel differently. Walls may confine, but they also protect. The Amish have managed to maintain a strong cultural identity in the face of powerful outside influences; due, in no small part, to their strong boundaries.
A chief concern of communities like these - and that faces any organism with a relatively narrow range of voices - is how to prevent stagnation. So whilst permissive societies must always guard against dissolution, restrictive societies must likewise guard against petrifaction.
I think that there are ‘truths’ at all levels, from the core to the fringes, and that whilst they may seem contradictory, each is vital to the other as part of a larger balance. Inasmuch as both central and fringe voices are crucial to this balance, then neither ought to be dismissed out of hand. Truths contradict; fictions do not.
I recognise that most of the things that I am talking about are very simple, and perhaps very obvious. I think that this conversation is important, not because it is original or revelatory, rather that it brings to mind a simple truth; one that, in an age of partisan polemic, of mass projection and scapegoating, we are apt to forget: that there is no ‘other’ out there, only parts of ourselves that we don’t yet know.
Carl Jung proposed that a whole and balanced individual is someone who is able to transcend a one-sided perspective and to see value in both sides of an opposition. In order to do this we must become multilingual, gaining an understanding of languages other than our own.
Jung described this enlargement as ‘individuation,’ a process of making the unconscious conscious. It is like fishing in a vast dark sea and dragging strange and sometimes horrible things to the surface. Instead of casting them back into the depths - away! be gone! - our task is to bring them closer, and accept that these things are our things. It is making the foreign, familiar; the blind spot a seen spot.
The more things we bring to the surface, the less repulsed we will be when we see them in others. If we can, for instance, find that part of ourselves that is open to outlandish theories then we will be more amenable to the likes of David Icke. We needn’t believe in his theories, but we also needn’t reject them out of hand, or condemn him for holding them.
Jung once went as far as to propose that the way to world peace was through this process of finding the other within the self. However, he also inferred that individuation isn’t for everyone; that for some it may be neither possible, nor appropriate. It may be that some of us must believe that the world is ‘real’ and not ‘fictional’; that stories are stories and truths are truths; that the game is a matter of life and death, and not just a game. It may be important that there are those of us who believe in the superiority of red, and ignore the virtues of blue; or vice versa.
But if this is the case, then it is equally important that there are those of us who can mediate this divide, by seeing through things to their relative, fictional nature. It is important that there are those who can listen to a wide range of voices within a society; who can fish their stories from the narrow banks of the mainstream, or the wide expanse of the lunatic sea. Lines of communication between opposing parties must always remain open, and emissaries must carry messages between them; lest they get it into their heads that the opposition really is evil and must, therefore, be wiped out. Inasmuch as we live in an age of bitter antithesis, of diversity and fracturing, in which the stories that bind us are breaking down, or are already long gone, and in which new fault-lines appear daily; then the ability to see-through, and synergize, is vital.
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Psychologically speaking, so long as conscious and unconscious are enemies, the ego experiences itself in constant danger of death.
Once they are in harmony the ego experiences itself open and supported by the maternal matrix of love.
[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 42
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Part of what’s happening in the United States is an increasing conflict between people of different temperaments and we don’t really understand how to mediate between that anymore.
Those that are on the tolerant end of the political distribution tend to think of those who are their opposites as intolerant. But they’re not necessarily intolerant, they’re also justice seeking; and justice is one of the hands, according to Jung, that God uses to keep the world in balance.
Its a very rough situation in the political realm when either side of a temperamental distribution make the a priori proposition that their particular temperament stands for the only virtues that are dominant and ceases to talk to the other side.
One way across that divide is for each of us, depending on our particular political stance and perhaps our inbuilt biological temperament, to note very carefully that just because we think that the way we view the world is virtuous doesn’t mean it isn’t with its attendant vice, and it also doesn’t mean that all the vice that we don’t have stacks up on the other side of the political distribution.
Even in those moments where you think that you’re at your best and proclaiming virtues that you think are universal you may have a blind spot that makes it impossible to talk to people who don’t think the same way you do, and then you might frighten yourself after that realisation by coming to understand that people that you can’t talk to you can only fight with. And thats a bad outcome.
[Jordan B. Peterson]
'Tolerance as a vice'
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Related posts:-
Centre / Periphery
The Colour Wheel
Casting a Shadow
From Separation to Connection
Constellating
Repressed
Conscious - Unconscious
Light - Shadow
Simple - Complex
Mono - Poly
One - Many
Spotlight - Floodlight
Left out - repressed - held under - denied - silenced
As in the individual, the neglected, unheard, repressed, and denied assert their viewpoint and feeling through symptom and pathology.
Thus an archetypal psychologist attuned to psyche in the world would listen for the multiplicity of viewpoints that comprise situations and events.
She would be attentive to the dynamics that prevent certain voices from speaking or from being heard, and work to create situations in which the silenced can come to voice and the silencers can learn the value of listening.
[Mary Watkins]
On Returning to the Soul of the World: Archetypal Psychology and Cultural/Ecological Work, p. 8
The archetype of the Wise Old Man [...] denotes an aspect of wholeness, but striving single-mindedly for wisdom at the expense of, for example, irrational human foolishness, is to miss many of the joys in living.
[The] idealized Madonna is a certain perfect image of the feminine, but the real woman must also accept the whore in herself for the sake of her completeness.
It is in seeking perfection by isolating and exaggerating parts of ourselves that we become neurotic.
[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 52
Awareness of the issue as a polarity to manage rather than as a problem to be solved opens the door to the possibility of resolution. Resolution begins with looking honestly and with genuine curiosity at the entire polarity.
As Polster and Polster point out, this awareness allows warring parties to “become allies in the common search for a [positive outcome], rather than uneasy opponents maintaining the split.”
This requires clients to be willing to suspend their deep-seated conviction that anyone who holds a point of view different from their own is the enemy, or that one position is absolutely right and the other is absolutely wrong.
The implication of this theory is that, if the client is to be able to truly stand outside the situation [...] the individual, group or organization must risk identifying with the opposing point of view or views. In other words - and here lies the paradox - to be able to change, a person (or organization) has to want to change badly enough that he, she, it is willing to approach problems in a radically different way: by identifying with the opposing perspective.
[...] true polarities are never really resolved; they can only be managed or balanced. That’s because each pole and its apparent opposite actually depend on one another. "The pairs are involved in an ongoing, balancing process over an extended period of time. They are interdependent. They need each other.” [Herb Stevenson]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'
To take a position implies discrimination and exclusion, and so no position is unassailable because every position is missing something.
Criticism can serve to remind us of what we are missing.
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz (1963) used a microcomputer to simulate weather patterns in 1960.
While inputting initial starting conditions to the computer, he inadvertently rounded one the numbers to three, instead of six decimal places. The small difference .506 (instead of .506127) produced rapidly divergent simulations of weather patterns. Small differences in initial conditions produced widely different results.
Some meteorologists believed that Lorenz's discovery meant that weather control was just around the corner. Small nonnatural changes could be used to manipulate large weather patterns. Lorenz, however, believed that this was the reason for the failure of long term forecasts.
Any uncontrolled system variable could thwart efforts to control the overall state of the system.
[David S. Walonick]
'General Systems Theory'
Rejected parts of the personality are like children clamouring to be let into a room: they will continue to cause a disturbance until they are admitted.
It is as if even the most infantile aspects of the personality, the aspects of which we should most like to rid ourselves, were endowed with a dynamic energy which demanded that they too should seek expression.
Personality ultimately seeks realization as a whole, and, however much the ego may seek to reject that which it finds hard to tolerate, the rejected parts will make their appearance somewhere, whether as symptoms or as projections upon other people.
The final aim is the realization of the total personality.
[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.92
Related posts:-
The Colour Wheel
Mono / Poly
This, Not That
Control
Rational / Irrational
Projecting a Shadow
Full Spectrum
Step Toward Madness
Infinite Doorways
Still Waters
Walk a Straight Line
Assuming a position
Do Not Disturb
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