Gnosticism, Staying Sane, Evil Endnotes & More
Short Notes IV
A selection of musings from my Notes Stream on Substack. See my previous Short Notes I, Short Notes II and Short Notes III for more.
Short Notes IV
Calling the left “Gnostic” worked because it is seen as a swear word both by materialist atheists and Christian fundies. It's ironic though because today's right-wing thought is full of Gnostic motives. Besides, the idea of mystical union with something higher to transcend the endless running in circles in our reality is something important and present in any real religiosity that isn't merely subscribing to some authoritarian belief system.
(In response to Harrison’s ponerology roundup)
Everybody criticizes genetic/biological blank slatism, but it’s soul-level blank slatism that stands in the way of understanding so many aspects of our world.
Perhaps we just haven’t (re-)found a language to talk about these things yet, although the NPC meme has done much to bring such heresy back into the modern world.
Hot take: Nietzsche's whole railing against protestant priests and the Apostle Paul was all part of a Freudian murder fantasy against Übervater Martin Luther.
(See also my essay, Nietzsche's "Antichrist" and Pauline Theology)
Everyone using the words "morality" and "payoff" in the same piece of writing should be thrown into a dungeon and turned into a math slave for those with actual souls.
As the old narratives degenerate into absurdities and lose their hold on us, new narratives inevitably start emerging and competing. But reactionary ideas always had a hard time. You can’t simply go back, and most people know and feel this truth, no matter how much they hate the status quo and how much nostalgia they have for better, saner times.
This is the niche that Right-Wing Progressives fill: they offer a narrative of technological advancement, utopia, and conquest. Alas, this is just another reactionary move in disguise: this kind of techno-optimism has powered us for a long time, until Woke took over. But here, too, we can’t go back.
We can no longer pretend we don’t understand how truly f*cked up our world, our civilization is, and how deep it all goes. Slave labour, exploitation, theft of ideas, planned obsolescence, outsourcing of everything ugly and hands-on, top-down push of tech that enslaves us and that nobody would have opted for etc. are what technology is based on. Not to mention the silliest forms of philosophical materialism. No utopia can be built on such a rotten foundation.
What we need, and what will emerge, are very different narratives, very different energies. What it will be I can’t tell, except that it will be very new and surprising indeed. Lame techno optimism, be it based on 19th century dreams or 1990s fantasies, won’t do. Neither will a reactionary return to some agrarian past, or any return for that matter.
Instead, we’re in for a ride.
(Replying to
’s piece The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives)People love to argue about just when everything turned to crap. 60s? 80s? 2015? Enlightenment? Reformation? WWI? Augustus?
Truth is, causality is a problematic concept here. Pick any point in history and you'll find reasons for why it went downhill from there, and seeds for much later catastrophes.
The human condition is fractal, multidimensional, nonlinear.
The rare meme-making:
People love to hate the concept of "lived experience".
But the truth is: often insights based on lived experience are far superior to any results based on obsessive quantitative research. It's just that some people have a very poor, low-level "lived experience".
Others, however, are full of wisdom, of enlightened perception. They are in tune with something Greater, based on a life of deep love for truth, reflection, and observation of the subtleties of the world around them and their inner life. Listen to them.
So-called "qualitative research" is the worst of both worlds. If you are a prophet, just thunder away The Truth without permission and without asking anybody, much less in the form of silly questionnaires.
You don't need pRooF. Just rip it. You are in touch with something far beyond mEtHoDolOgy.
OR, if you wanna do the quantitative stats thing, do that, and do it right: mindful of the many traps and limitations of diving into the world of abstractions.
In fact, even then you must bring your lived experience to the table. Work on it.
Intuition has gotten a bad name. "Forget everything your intuition tells you”, science-priests say, “this is how it really all works.” Stuff like that sells well in university press releases and on book covers.
The truth is that intuition only tends to break down when dealing with hyper-abstract, isolated questions. Lucky for us, life is neither hyper-abstract nor isolated.
Get rid of indoctrination, and your intuition shall flower and guide you again.
The measure of someone’s mental-spiritual development: pain tolerance for truth and uncertainty. And what the person decides to do with it.
When everything’s being questioned, and everything “opens up”, one of your main tasks is to simply stay sane.
Don’t stare too long into one of the myriad schizoid obsessions being peddled by the Sperg Brigade who are so attracted to online discourse that their spasms seem far more common and persuasive than they actually are.
Look at those theories, but don’t get hypnotized by them. The key is to keep moving (on).
Never lose touch with that part of the soul that connects you with the deep, the subtle, the thing-as-such, the world beyond words.
Rooted in that connected place, orient yourself beyond the appearances, towards past and future, and when the going gets rough, hold tight to that steering wheel.
Such is the spiral of true progress.
Painting: William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder
Chat GPT is to writing what personality is to character, what ideology is to discernment, and what sadomasochistic entanglement is to love.
To be fair, the same goes for a lot of manual writing if it isn’t based on a wider, deeper, honest perception and just shuffles info bits around.
Endnotes are a crime against humanity.
Writers, editors, publishers: stop butchering marginalized marginalia, and stop treating readers like imbeciles who need to be shielded from sources, glorious snark, and deep-dives into your pet peeves.
For extra glory, unapologetically write mini-essays in your footnotes spanning two to four pages.
And while we’re at it, please shit on modern citation styles. Only complete retards could have come up with nonsense like this (Kant, 1992). For God’s sake, just give me the author, title and where needed page number in a footnote so that I know what the hell you’re talking about, not more, not less. And be shamelessly inconsistent where it makes sense. Do the full reference thing in the bibliography if you must.
Seriously, how did we ever get to this point.
Next time some neocon bastard screams “but Chamberlain Churchill Hitler!” at you if you oppose joining/starting yet another foreign war, tell him this:
If Britain had NOT entered WWI, not only would that war have ended much sooner with much less bloodshed, but neither Nazis nor Bolsheviks would ever have existed in the first place.
(Ironically, some claim Churchill himself might have been part of the faction scheming and pushing for Britain to enter the war.)
Nice post again . Lots of fresh air here. 👍🏻
On gnosticism, i currently see a kernel of truth in it that matter is evil *when* we worship it, but not inherently. What do you think?
Good stuff, brother
One caveat. The difference between ChatGPT and human info-shufflers is still qualitative at the bottom, if only in this regard: the human versions still need to eat and sleep. Thanks to these frailties, they can still be persuaded to do better (or even to give up entirely, and spend their limited time on something better suited to their myriad gifts and flaws). The Machine can just puke nonsense forever.