Oeaohoo

Some of his earlier music is less strange. If you are having a Nietzschean phase you ought to love his Fifth Sonata and his symphony, “The Poem of Ecstasy”.

Of course. One of the main weapons of progressivism is the “cult of normalcy”.

If that’s what you want to tell yourself, so be it! Whether it is Eros or Thanatos, it is nevertheless a regression to the subconscious mud of life. For what it’s worth, the two concepts became increasingly blurred in later Freudianism. My favourite composer Scriabin - inspired by the Russian mystic Solovyov, as well as the more questionable philosophies of Theosophy, Schopenhauerian idealism and Nietzschean vitalism - captures the consumption of our decadent world in the Heraclitean fires of divine purgation perfectly in his ode to scintillating devastation, Towards the Flame!

I agree. Though I think the world we currently inhabit is changing very radically and so this might not apply for much longer! To be frank, I think that the true and generally unconscious purpose of evolutionary progressivism is to terminate our decadence as quickly as possible. It represents a sort of “race to the finish line” and a political expression of Thanatos (Todestrieb or the “Death Drive”). In its own way, then, it is a beneficent phenomenon: destroying all of that which is no longer worth conserving. Maybe not in such a rigorously formulated manner, but still: variations on the same theme.

…until it doesn’t… You’re right, though I don’t see this as contradicting anything that I said above. Evolutionary progressivism is a myth which suits a certain mentality and attitude towards life. It will last for as long as this mentality and attitude last. Of course, however, from the traditional perspective it is evolutionary progressivism which is obscure and topsy-turvy! I don’t agree with this. There is only an element of deconstruction in what I am saying because I think that this forum is extremely biased towards a certain worldview. It has nothing to do with being a postmodernist and certainly not a nihilist.

“Comrades, have you noticed that we are ruled by a malicious and tyrannical elite?” “You don’t understand! They are simply better than us! As the vanguard of the future, the super-developed minority, they deserve to rule over us. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature!” “That’s not a bug, it’s a small creature!”

I’ve always despised the term straw-manning anyway. It reduces everything to an abstract logical debate, divorced from practical realities. It also fails to distinguish between the irrational and the super-rational. I imagine being in some Communist hell-realm and pointing out the ugliness that surrounds us. My devoted comrades would immediately respond: “But that’s just a straw-man! You have failed to understand the deep intelligence of Communism! You need to read Marx’s Capital 10-15 more times!” Even if a belief system is logically coherent, its practical consequences might not be.

You are playing a game here, holding all conservatives to the standards of the most mediocre brand of contemporary “conservatism” whilst selecting the best examples of liberalism. It is you who is straw-manning, I am just returning the favour. If you were really interested in steel-manning conservatism, you would contrast someone like René Guénon with Wilber, the cultural relativism of Vico and Spengler with postmodern relativism, something like the Dark Enlightenment to Daniel Schmachtenberger and “Game B”… All you are really interested in, however, is desperately clinging to your personal progressive biases whilst posing as some deep “Tier 2 systems thinker”. This isn’t Fox News versus Daniel Schmachtenberger. That is the straw-man!

I would very much like to wrap this up here as this forum gives me a headache! Will you at least admit this basic fact? If you were born in another time, you would almost certainly view history differently. The way that we conceive of history is inevitably shaped by where we find ourselves in history. To offer a very brief and inevitably simplified overview, this is how the view of history has changed over time: Hinduism offers the most advanced system which has survived into the modern day: the fractal process that you are describing is laid out in terms of a complex system of Manvantaras and Yuga Cycles, which each have an ascent (kalpa) and a descent (pralaya). Given the many shared aspects of Indo-European culture, it is safe to assume that other traditional civilisations had similar models, which were lost through the very process that I am describing here. This view was reappropriated and narrowed down by the great Empires of historical antiquity (Ancient Persia, Greece, Rome) so that only the present Yuga cycle remained, in the form of the myth of the “Four Ages of Man”: Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. This was then further reduced by the so-called Abrahamic religions into a linear view of history, as a personalised doctrine of fallenness and salvation: a fall from Divine Grace culminating in the eventual redemption of the world in the Revelatory Apocalypse. The final stage of this process is the modern, progressive and evolutionary view, which is a systematic inversion of all of its predecessors. The radical revolutionaries and ideologues who formulated the ideology of “progress” were well aware that they were engaged in an inversion of traditional doctrine. This has been described in an academic setting as “inverted exegesis”: the turning of a doctrine on its head, so as to subvert and ultimately destroy it. Each view of history is a reflection of the material and spiritual dispositions of those who created it. The earliest view reveals a universalism which is the complete antithesis of modern uniformity: a view of history relatively untainted by personal biases. The second view reveals a decadence in comparison to the first, providing a framework for statecraft and Empire-building as well as a mythic-religious creed. The third view, that of the Abrahamic religions, justified a life of penitence and prostration before the theistic God. We decadent moderns, on the other hand, are obsessed with change, the future, endless innovation, the flux of becoming, the wheel of samsara... To this end, we have invented a whole historiographical framework (“evolutionary progressivism”) to justify this obsession. The whole thing is a post-hoc rationalisation for an irrational attachment to progress and all of its synonyms. That is what I mean when I say that: evolution is just an alibi for people who have regressed to the level of apes.

Frozen in timelessness! The Ubermensch is the immature and unrefined version of Zarathustra’s doctrine. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the gradual refinement of this idea: from the Ubermensch, through the Will to Power, culminating in the Great Midday and the revelation of the Eternal Recurrence. Do you recall what the Goddess of Life says to Zarathustra towards the end of the Third Part of Zarathustra? “Thereupon Life looked pensively behind her and about her and said softly: 'O Zarathustra, you are not true enough to me! 'You have long not loved me as much as you say you do; I know you are thinking that you want to leave me soon. 'There is an ancient heavy heavy booming-bell: at night its booming comes all the way up to your cave: and when you hear this bell at midnight strike the hour, between the strokes of one and twelve you think—you think then, O Zarathustra, well I know, of how you want to leave me soon!' 'Yes; I answered hesitantly, 'but you also know that—' And I said something into her ear, right through her tangled yellow crazy locks of hair. ‘You know that, O Zarathustra? No one knows that.—‘“ Zarathustra here realises something more profound than the Superman who stays true to life and to the earth. There is some validity to his assault on the “preachers of death” and “other-worldliness”, in the sense that embracing the earth can be a means of transcending it, whilst denying it can keep you stuck upon it. The ultimate form of his teaching, however, is transcendence of life; it is just not a transcendence which defines itself in opposition to “life” and “the earth.”

Unity and uniformity are antithetical. You are conflating Esoteric Unity with exoteric diversity.

Because it is what Frithjof Schuon, one of the truest embodiments of the “utopian conservatism” that I am describing, called The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Recognising the inherent oneness which underlies all humans shouldn’t translate to a fanatical (and truly utopian!) “humanitarian” program of annihilating all distinctions in the name of a bland and homogenising uniformity. You just don’t want anyone bursting the bubble of your degenerate little project, annihilating all distinctions in the name of “actualizing” bug-man style liberal cosmopolitanism on a global scale.

There are two simultaneous aspects to the phenomenon of cyclical manifestation: a linear descent and a cyclical ascent and descent. Let us take the historical example of Christianity. Of course, the Christian religion was most potent when Christ was still alive. It has become increasingly impotent in the times following. This is the linear descent. However, the culture of Christendom as an embodied phenomenon was quite weak when Christ was alive. It took a millennia of cultural development (the ascent) for Christendom to become a dominant material power. It has also taken hundreds of years of cultural development (the descent) for Christianity to be deconstructed: the so-called “Renaissance”, the so-called “Enlightenment”, the secular ideologies of the twentieth century, all culminating in contemporary Clown World (in which, heresy is orthodoxy and orthodoxy is heresy, or as the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth say “Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair”). There is a hierarchy, it’s just not a hierarchy of “evolution”. To use Mircea Eliade’s phrase, it is a hierarchical descent, from the Sacred to the profane. Isn’t it strange that, amongst all of these cultures, we do not find a single claim to animal origins or “evolution”, but to noble and divine origins? One of the first things I said when I came back to this forum is: evolution is just an alibi for people who have regressed to the level of apes. I love this phrase and it is completely true. Nice quote, though I prefer his saying: “Progress is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea!”

The fundamental problem with this whole model is conflating the difference between esoterism and exoterism with that between historicised stages of development.

Not necessarily! He or she could just as well become the esoteric heart of the tribe: someone who is able to radiate transcendence within the plane of relativity, like you are trying to do with people around here. Even in the major historical case of this happening, Jesus Christ, the tribe has been engaging in ritual penance for this mistake for two thousand years…

Both are closed. The conservative is closed to chaos whereas the liberal is closed to order. Wherever you are starting from, understanding God is going to involve transcending your human limitations. A conservative can reconcile themselves with every permutation of relative existence by recognising the shared forms which animate them; in other words, recognising the stability which underlies change.

This reminds me of a significant statement from T.S. Eliot regarding the Christian Church: “But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.“

Ah, Actualized… When it isn’t obscurantist oneupmanship, it’s a tenuous appeal to logic culminating in the inevitable: “TA-DAAA!” God is also Truth, Order, Law, the Good, Necessity, the Absolute. Even the Infinite Freedom of God is one which contains every permutation of unfreedom, otherwise it wouldn’t be infinite! Therefore, and I find it amazing that I even have to say this, God is beyond both liberalism and conservatism.

I see very little here that is worth responding to. On the other hand, the recent Liberalism video literally implies that God-realisation is liberalism turned up to 11… This is such a childish worldview! It is always valuable to take things to their conclusion. Like holes in a balloon, you can see the absurdity of something much more easily when it has been inflated. This place and others like it are useful because they take “Spiral Dynamics” and Wilberism, and indeed all unconstrained visions of endless “growth”, to their absurd conclusion: “We’re just gonna get more and more liberal forever, dude! It’s gonna be awesome, totally rad, bro! And at the end of the road of liberalism - there lies God!” Ridiculous. ‘Inversion’ really is the key to understanding all modern deviations... “The Great Parody: Spirituality Inverted”!

The conservative equivalent of Ken Wilber would be the Perennial Traditionalist school of René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, Titus Burckhardt and various others. This school is represented today by people like Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Charles Upton. Wilber basically took the perennial metaphysics and mixed it with Darwinian Evolutionism, progressive leftism and his inane predecessors like Teilhard de Chardin. The conservative equivalent of Noam Chomsky would be Jewish libertarian theorists like Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. They are represented in the present-day by the Mises Institute. Some Paleo-Conservatives like, for example, Paul Gottfried, who has written very importantly on the uses and abuses of so-called “Anti-Fascism”, could also he considered here. The conservative equivalent of Schmachtenberger would be the so-called Neo-Reactionary Right: Spandrell, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), Nick Land and many others. See, for example, Spandrell’s blog and it’s articles: We Need a New Religion, The Game Theory of Leftism, Bioleninism, IQ Shredders… The guy who used to run Rebel Wisdom did an interview with someone from this sphere, demonstrating the affinities and differences between them. I appreciate that you are quoting Mr. Gura, but the idea that Jordan Peterson and PragerU are serious conservative thinkers is laughable. Jordan Peterson’s recent “Conservative Manifesto” is the absolute quintessence of mediocrity, revealing a complete lack of engagement with the actual conservative tradition in the name of the most vacuous pseudo-libertarianism. No wonder people around here have such a low opinion of conservatives if they are the reference point.

There are many beautiful expressions in the Schuon essay which I linked above. An example: ‘Relativism engenders a spirit of rebellion and is at the same time its fruit. The spirit of rebellion, unlike holy anger, is not a passing state, nor is it directed against some worldly abuse; on the contrary it is a chronic malady directed against Heaven and against everything that represents Heaven or is a reminder of it. When Lao Tzu said that “in the latter days the man of virtue appears vile”, he had in mind the rebellious spirit that characterizes our time; but for psychological and existentialist relativism, which by definition always seeks to justify the crude ego, this spiritual state is normal, and it is its absence that amounts to disease, whence the abolition of the sense of sin. The sense of sin is the consciousness of an equilibrium surpassing our personal will and operating ultimately for the benefit of our integral personality and that of the human collectivity, even though occasionally wounding us; this sense of sin goes hand in hand with a sense of the sacred, which is an instinct for what surpasses us—for what should therefore not be touched by ignorant and iconoclastic hands. As limited and degraded as man undeniably is, he yet remains “the proof by contraries” of the divine Prototype and of all that this Prototype implies and determines in relation to man. Not to acknowledge what surpasses us and not to wish to surpass ourselves: this in fact is the whole program of psychologism, and it is the very definition of Lucifer. The opposite, or rather the primordial and normative, attitude is this: to think only in reference to what surpasses us and to live for the sake of surpassing ourselves; to seek greatness where this is to be found and not on the plane of the individual and his rebellious pettiness. In order to return to true greatness, man must first of all agree to pay the debt of his pettiness and to remain small on the plane where he cannot help being small; the sense of what is objective on the one hand and of the absolute on the other does not go without a certain abnegation, and it is this abnegation precisely that allows us to be completely faithful to our human vocation.’ Wonderful.

Whereas every other cosmopolitan liberal is an enlightened sage… Ridiculous. Tradition provided a much better framework for transcendent realisations than the organised chaos under which we live. The exoteric expression of a religion is obviously going to be more limited. However, this is the only way that most of humanity can relate to transcendent reality: a passive participation in a hierarchical order. This is much better than just leaving the masses to themselves, to mindlessly eat, drink and dissipate in their shopping malls and their nightclubs. I am not denying that, given the decadence of our times, most of the religions have been reduced to an empty shell of themselves, a mere exoterism without an animating nucleus. Of course, this is only exaggerated by the urgent push for global democracy, egalitarianism, and all the rest of it. I’m just denying the idea that your relativised world is any better… It isn’t. We live in the most materialistic, fear-based and pettily egotistical society known to history. There’s your “development” for you!

Story of my life.

Anyway, I don’t see this going anywhere productive. This place is such a hive mind.

My idea of hell. Don’t you see how attached you people are to this one stupid system of thought? How do you know that this system is the truth? You appeal to it as though it is some sacred dogma. Again, I could just as well say: you need to read René Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times 10-15 times. But, again, if relativism and absolutism are both aspects of what is ultimately true, why is it more “developed” to prioritise one over the other on a societal level? Of course any earthly representation of the Absolute is ultimately relative; as if every traditional society didn’t acknowledge that. It is not a matter of a false Absolute; it is a matter of an earthly and therefore relative symbol of what is beyond relativity.