-
Content count
666 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Everything posted by Oeaohoo
-
-
You want to lure her in with sweet talk without being too direct. Try something like this: “Hey baby! I don’t mean to be rude but that dress makes you look a little fat. Have you been eating too much recently?” She’ll pretend to be angry with you, saying things like “What the hell, jerk! What kind of creep would say something like that?!” (If she starts crying, then you know she’s really into you!) Keep on smooth-talking: “Also, your face looks a bit like a pig. Do you snore? I can’t stand snoring. Well, you probably want to know a little more about me… All you need to know is that my previous girlfriends have never been disappointed, if you know what I mean!” At this point, she will physically escalate on you with a violent slap or maybe a kick between the legs. This is what he call her coming onto you. Now that you’ve hooked her, pull out the big guns: “Feminism has been a complete disaster for the human race. Birth rates are below replacement, the family has been devastated, women are a tyrannical force in the workplace and the cost of living has been raised drastically by two-salary households, making life more difficult for everyone. Not only that, but giving woman the vote has rapidly escalated social decadence, leading to the dominance of feminine values like compassion over wisdom, love over truth, freedom over responsibility, and a general emasculation of culture. That is why I want to bring back the Islamic harem, in which my women would never talk to me unless spoken to.” By this point, her underwear is fully saturated. Time to get each other naked. I’ll leave the rest to you…
-
Oeaohoo replied to Rasheed's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
No. You are just comparing Wilber with the wrong people. Wilber’s real predecessors are not Carl Junk and Sigmund Fraud, but people like Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon. Frankly, he is a pale mediocrity in comparison. Wilber just took the Perennial Philosophy and mixed it with the the inconsequential “discoveries” of the profane and degenerate world. I have been reading him recently and I never realised how blatant this was. The reason he is little known is because his theory is pointless, an irrelevant attempt to “integrate” the essential and the inconsequential. -
Well, I would say that even if truth doesn’t correlate to any one of these quadrants, it also doesn’t lie at the centre of them. My point is that some truths are more significant than others. I remember reading a funny description of modern knowledge as “knowledge of that which is not worth the trouble of knowing”… It really wasn’t. In a book that is worth reading the pages subtly emanate a mysterious transcendent light, glimmers of intellectual intuition… This book just radiates a spiritualised form of evolutionary progressivism. So many better books to read, so little time!
-
Indeed. It seems to me that the emergence of “Stage Green” is not at all a positive development, either. It is something closer to putting out fire with gasoline… Woop-Dee-Doo!
-
This actually came to mind because I decided to re-read one of Wilber’s mediocre books, “Integral Psychology”. Aside from rolling around laughing whenever Wilber was naive enough to claim that modernity is justified by the innovations of “liberal democracy” and “feminism”, I was struck by a particular chapter: “To Integrate Premodern and Modern”. In this chapter, he provides a graph of the four quadrants which, like you said, are literally just four versions of a line going up… However, I thought that his criticism of the “premodern” (which should really be called Tradition) reveals one of the main flaws in the whole Integral project. He claims that “pre-modernity” was “all-level but not all-quadrant”, whereas modernity was “all-quadrant but not all level”. What he means by this is that Tradition emphasised the Upper-Left Quadrant (intentional-subjective) over the other three, whereas, whilst modernity has mapped the other quadrants more thoroughly, it has only done so at the lower “levels” which scientific materialism accepts as real. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that modernity has conducted a more rigorous examination of external phenomena, there is a perfectly valid reason why Tradition prioritised the “quadrant” of internal subjectivity, for this is the domain of the spiritual realisation: everything else in life is downstream of and therefore subordinate to the divine Essence and the metaphysical Principles which are its emanations. Any normal society is ordered around a transcendent Principle, embodied by an elite class; it is only modernity which prefers a disorganised chaos, which is completely anathema to spiritual realisation except in isolated cases, in the name of “liberal democracy” and “feminism”. Traditional civilisations did concern themselves with the other quadrants of knowledge; always recognising, however, the superiority of metaphysics above all other sciences. For brevity, let us take the single example of psychology: it is obvious that a psychology whose sole purpose is to create a “healthy ego”, which is the highest aim of modern psychology, is drastically inferior to one which maps the psychological states right up to the ultimate annihilation of the psyche in God. The latter is precisely what the psychological sciences of ”premodern” civilisations provide; even if they may lack the exacting rigour of modern science, this rigour is comparatively unimportant.
-
A capitalist system is one in which everybody does what they want. The trouble with this is that most people don’t know what they want. As a result of this, they end up defaulting and falling back on what other people are doing. This creates an increasingly collectivistic form of capitalism. A communist system is one in which everybody does what the state wants. The trouble with this is that most people don’t want to do what the state wants. As a result of this, they end up desiring individual liberty and the right to do what they want. This creates an increasingly individualistic form of communism. The ideology of the global system is one in which these two ideologies converge: this could be called, for lack of a better term, communist capitalism. Fukuyama was wrong that “liberal democracy” is the ideology of “the end of history”: the end-state ideology is really a hellish fusion of subservience to a state with no real sovereignty and the illusion of individual liberty. The sense of alienation and de-individualisation that come from surviving within a communist system can be compensated by the distractions and entertainments of capitalism. The sense of moral vacuity and atomisation that come from surviving within a neoliberal capitalist system can be compensated by progressive communitarianism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and post-Communist China really represent the “capitalisation” of communism, whereas the “Woke” progressive values which have come to predominate in the West are really just the “communisation” of capitalism, hence the endless appeals to “community” made by this movement. This is my view of the ideology which animates the system that we live under. It explains many of the complaints which the so-called Left and the so-called Right make against each other. For example, the “Woke” issue: from the point of view of the Right, this issue obviously represents a questionable divergence of the West from the individualistic values of “Classic Liberalism” and the “free-market”; from the point of view of the Left, it is nonetheless valid to point out that “Woke” is little more than a defence mechanism of “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism”. It also allows us to transcend the mediocre dialectic between capitalism and communism, a favourite topic for debate amongst the global community of political mid-wits. It is clear from my analysis that both systems converge upon the same ends. This shouldn’t be surprising given that both systems start from the same materialistic premises and the reduction of all life to the “socioeconomic factor”. What do you think of this? My impression from reading some of the threads on this forum is that some of you are in denial as to the extent to which the present-day “capitalist” system has morphed into something quite different, in exactly the same way that it would be silly to claim that modern-day China is still communist. If so, what I have said will probably annoy you!
-
What am I doing here?!
-
What makes one fiction more convenient than another?
-
What is the relationship between truth and Truth? If there isn’t one, why do you use the same word?
-
Planet Earth, about to be recycled!
-
I completely agree with this as the major flaw in the way that models like Spiral Progress are applied around here.
-
@Nilsi This is what a postmodernist sounds like! Proof that I am not one! @axiom Do you believe there is such a thing as truth? Do you believe that human concepts and truth are completely orthogonal to one another, or can we at least approach truth conceptually? To me it seems that - even if, yes, truth can never be reduced to a conceptual system - truth can nevertheless be approximated by conceptuality. You could think of it like the “lock-on” system in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, slowly aligning the computer’s model of things with reality. I also think that, because of the analogy between microcosm and macrocosm, even attaining to a perfect understanding of the truth of a relatively “low-resolution” situation can naturally scale to the big picture.
-
Me neither, nor has there even been a completely Stage Orange society. These are hypothetical ideals which never map perfectly onto reality. I would say that the post-Renaissance European mercantile empires were the nearest embodiment of “pure capitalism”. In the 20th century, we moved away from this towards managerial capitalism, in which the element of pure profit has slowly been substituted for various managerial agendas. This “managerial capitalism” is a precursor to the “communist capitalism” that I am describing! You’re being very pedantic! I was taking for granted that, given that the subject of this thread is the relationship between capitalism and communism (the latter being an ideology of the 20th century), you would recognise that I was talking about the values of these territories within the 20th century. Whilst there were certainly appeals to community on both sides, it is undeniable that the Anglo-American ideal was the “sovereign individual” and the “self-made man” whilst the Russo-Chinese Communist ideal was the “upholder of the community” and the “worker”. Just look at the art and propaganda of the two regimes.
-
Very true… In this context, however, I am talking about the “progress” which has taken place within the modern capitalist system. In Spiral Progress terms, we could say that you are describing “Stage Blue” religious communities whereas here we are discussing “Stage Green” communitarianism, in between these being the pure capitalist system of “Stage Orange”. I will admit that there is a slight issue with the wording of this whole thing. By capitalism and communism, it may be better to read the ideologies of Anglo-America and Russo-China, though I don’t think this is ideal either.
-
You should be able to read this book here. I haven’t read it for quite a while but I was just reading the opening again and it made me roll around with laughter. It’s always refreshing how aloof Guénon is from all of the banal mediocrity of our times. This passage particularly: ‘Many no longer doubt the possibility of a world crisis, using the latter word in its most usual acceptation, and this in itself marks a very noticeable change of outlook: by sheer force of circumstance certain illusions are beginning to vanish, and for our part we cannot but rejoice that this is so, for it is at any rate a favourable symptom and a sign that a readjustment of the contemporary mentality is still possible - a glimmer of light, as it were - in the midst of the present chaos. In keeping with this, the belief in an endless “progress,” which was held until recently as a sort of intangible, indisputable dogma, is no longer so general, there are those who perceive, though in a vague and confused manner, that the civilization of the West may not always go on developing in the same direction, but may some day reach a point where it will stop, or even be plunged in its entirety into some cataclysm. It is possible that such persons do not see clearly where the danger lies; the fantastic or puerile fears they sometimes express are proof enough that their minds still harbour many errors, but it is at any rate something that they realize there is a danger, even if it is felt rather than really understood, it is something too that they can conceive that this civilization with which the moderns are so infatuated holds no privileged position in the history of the world, and that it may meet the same fate which has befallen so many others that have already disappeared at more or less distant epochs, and some of which have left traces so slight as to be hardly noticeable, let alone recognizable.’ Yeah! Preach it!
-
As conservatives, we are the undeveloped and physiologically retarded. We inhabit the Third World, not of geopolitics, but of stages of psycho-spiritual development. In the interests of transcending the self-bias that our survival imposes, we must recognise that in the contemporary progressive climate there are only two options for us: submit or die. That is why I have decided to openly and willingly acknowledge our genetic inferiority to liberals. Sure, we can try to rationalise it this way and that… but deep down we know that they are simply better than us in every way. Science has shown that this inferiority is hardwired into the structures of our brains. We can never hope to match the cosmopolitans in their open-mindedness, their love of team sports and pop music, their superficiality and sentimentality… I’ll never be able to admire postmodern art, all of those squiggles of paint chaotically thrown onto the canvas in a childish frenzy… Nor will I ever have the joy of penetrating the depths of the relativistic thinkers: neither Derrida, Adorno, nor even the greatest genius of all history, Albert Einstein, will ever mean anything to me; I will forever be stuck in a world of absolutes. How will I even survive? A life without deconstruction is like a world without oxygen! Some of us conservatives will learn our lesson. We’ll learn to humbly prostrate ourselves before the liberal elite, and the cosmopolitan world that they must succeed in bringing about. Unfortunately, however, some of us won’t… Who knows what horrors we might bring about in our resistance to progress. It chills me to even think about it. The good news is that… soon all of us conservatives will be dead! Then there’ll be nothing more to worry about.
-
By the way, what I am suggesting here is much weirder than simply suggesting that we are heading towards the terminal phase of “late capitalism” or that progressivism is going to lead us to a “new communism”. Extrapolating our situation to its conclusion, I see a situation where “capital” is completely subservient to the “community” at the same time that the “community” is completely subservient to “capital”! A paradoxical situation: neither will be dominant whilst both are. If this system comes to pass, it will be the ultimate parody of the primordial social order, organised around a sort of inverted non-duality.
-
*grabs popcorn* What do you mean by this? Why is it arbitrary? I agree that it is nonsense but it is worse than just being arbitrary. Like all of the models from which it inherits - evolutionary progressivism, psychoanalytic developmental studies, and various other vain attempts to fuse modern science (which is not to say the empirical approach itself) and religion - it is a systematic inversion of the truth.
-
I thank you for your sincere words of encouragement, but I’m not so sure that he would be. He very much believes in the dialectic between communism and capitalism and always used to talk about how “the West got it right”. By the way, when someone as small-minded as “DrugsBunny” criticises you, it is a good sign that you are onto something! Of course I am talking about more than just vaccines. The vaccines were a decent example of the public-private partnership and a good demonstration of just how far we have already come but there are many others. Do you believe that “progress” has taken place in the capitalistic West over the last 70 years? I think it is safe to assume that the answer is “yes.” Now, it is obvious that you are someone who would consider “progress” to be “protecting people from dangerous misinformation” by enforcing the modern love of safety, sensitising majority groups to minority struggles, enhancing the welfare state, and on the most tautological level, imposing “progressive” values. How is this all done but by state intervention in people’s lives? It is highly suspect to deny that something has happened whilst simultaneously celebrating it: that is what you people would call “gaslighting”. I’m trying not to talk so much here about whether any of this stuff is good or bad. This is a model of why things have changed in the way that they have and what these changes converge upon. It is also worth pointing out that this convergence is not complete yet, so that the West is obviously still more capitalist than communist. I see what you were saying here. Whilst it is true that a lot of what belonged to the earlier form of progressivism could be considered under the headings of “liberalism” and “capitalism”, it is still the case that the older progressivism heavily influences the new one. This is particularly true with respect to technological innovation and the modern obsession with the uses of technology for the enforcement of progressivism: AI, what Foucault called “bio-politics”, eco-technology, surveillance states, transhumanism and so on.
-
All of that being said, the term “Woke” is relevant even to the earlier form of progressivism, given the way that it framed itself: the “Renaissance”, the “Enlightenment”, “Illuminism”… These are all inverted adaptations of religious terminology in the same way that “Woke” is a complete parody of spiritual awakening. Sure. I suppose in relation to the theme here, it is two things: on the one hand, everything which emphasises left-wing forms of communitarianism, and on the other, the increasing intervention of the state in people’s lives. As well as what I mentioned in a comment above, the increasing intervention of the non-governmental capitalist elite in people’s lives! That’s not what I meant. Renaissance Humanism and, even more so, Enlightenment Rationalism explicitly promoted progressivism. They even gave it a capital letter: Progress! A god worthy of such decadent times… Ok, sorry to assume the worst.
-
As far as something short, read The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guénon! The follow-up to this book, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Time, is better but also much more intensive. Maybe I could be more specific if something interested you? If you want something easier than a book, there is a lot of overlap between my interests and the YouTube guru Shunyamurti.
-
…and these are the people who accuse others of gaslighting… I have no idea where to start with that. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “Woke”, given how bound up it is with banal political commentary, but still… Not to mention that it is obvious that, just like in the other thread, you are pretending to be genuinely posing a reasonable and harmless question, when in reality you already think you know the answer to your question. It might be useful to distinguish between two different kinds of progressivism. There is the earlier progressivism which originated around the time of the Renaissance, which emphasises liberalism, free thought, technological innovation, emancipation from the strictures of organised religion, and so on. Then there is the form of progressivism which has been predominant since World War 2, which views all of Western history through the distortion filter of Nazi Germany (even the nations which fought against them!) and creates a pseudo-religious parody of Christianity out of “marginalised communities” and the way that they have “suffered for our sins”. Both forms of progressivism are extremely dominant in contemporary discourse, on the left and the right; the so-called “conservative” parties of European nations constantly appeal to them both. Progressivism is just the cultural water that we swim in. Maybe you are like the fish in the joke from David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
-
I see this as being part of the same thing because “power” in this context is essentially the ability to manipulate and exploit what people want, which is only possible because they don’t really know what they want. This is also part of the phenomenon that I am describing because the accumulation of power by a capitalist elite creates a kind of surrogate state within each state. This financial surrogate state can then demand obedience in the same way that a communist state would. The governmental state and the financial state also collaborate with each other through things like public-private partnerships. Also, this contributes to the global ideology of “communist capitalism” because, unlike the governmental elite, the financial elite is relatively borderless. @lisindel Your criticism seems pedantic to me. For example, will you admit that a State with very high taxation is more communistic than one with very low taxation? If so, I don’t see why there should be any issue with the loose idea of a “capitalisation” of communism and vice versa. Neither of these things are absolutes, except in hypothetical terms. As to your other criticisms, whilst both ideologies do reduce life to socioeconomic factors, there is undeniably an overarching “communitarian” sentiment to communism and an “individualistic” one to capitalism.
-
This reminds me a lot of Leonard Cohen’s funny song Death of a Ladies Man. Wonderful closing lyrics: ‘So the great affair is over, but whoever would have guessed / It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed! It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star / I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far!’ Exactly how I feel about all the great strides made in the name of “progress”…