Stoics were thoroughgoing materialists. Even the soul, the life-force, whatever you want to call it (their term was pneuma), was conceived of as a physical thing: Elemental fire. (This is another reason I wanted to start with Stoicism. You can build a fine life, and a strong community of men, with, say, Ignatius of Loyola, but since this is the Postmodern world anything overtly religious will turn off the very people who need it most. Stoicism is tailor-made for modern “atheists” (just don’t tell Marcus himself that)).
Like all materialists, then, Stoics had a real problem with things like beauty. If you’re a materialist, Beauty is either a refutation of your theory, or a tautology (“certain arrangements of atoms produce chemical reactions that our brains interpret as pleasant” is just a fancy way of saying “beautiful things are beautiful because they’re beautiful”). Back in grad school, in one of the deepest, darkest, most dungeon-like corners of the university’s book morgue, I discovered Ayn Rand’s attempt at an Objectivist aesthetics. Her conclusion, stripped of her inimitable self-congratulatory prose, is here:
At the base of her argument, Rand asserts that one cannot create art without infusing a given work with one’s own value judgments and personal philosophy. Even if the artist attempts to withhold moral overtones, the work becomes tinged with a deterministic or naturalistic message. The next logical step of Rand’s argument is that the audience of any particular work cannot help but come away with some sense of a philosophical message, colored by his or her own personal values, ingrained into their psyche by whatever degree of emotional impact the work holds for them.
Rand goes on to divide artistic endeavors into “valid” and “invalid” forms …
In other words, there’s no art, only propaganda. Looks like ol’ Marcus really missed a trick, statecraft-wise, doesn’t it?
Severian, “On Fine Writing Etc.”, Everyday Stoicism, 2020-05-04.
March 7, 2023
QotD: The Stoic view of beauty
March 3, 2023
QotD: What’s the opposite of university? “Diversity”
Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.
February 27, 2023
QotD: Sigmund Freud’s insights
That’s what happened with Anna O., history’s most famous psychiatric patient. She had a very turbulent love/hate relationship with her father, as tightly wound girls do. When he became deathly ill on a family vacation, the unresolvable tension caused a whole host of physical symptoms, including hysterical paralysis. Pioneering psychologist Josef Breuer “talked her through” it, finally resolving the emotional conflict and “curing” the patient.
All this would’ve been interesting, but largely irrelevant, were it not for World War I. The world at large didn’t care about the problems of overprivileged Jewish girls, but they did care about their soldiers suddenly going crazy in the trenches. Once military doctors finally ruled out a physical cause, they were left with Freudian explanations: A soldier can’t stop fighting, because he’s an honorable, dutiful soldier. Yet that soldier must stop fighting. The only honorable way out is a wound. If the enemy doesn’t wound him, then, his subconscious will. Hence the bizarre “conversion disorders” — hysterical blindness, paralysis, mutism, etc. — characteristic of “shell shock.”
But a funny thing happened. While everyone now acknowledged the real power of the subconscious mind, we sort of … forgot … about it. Psychology, particularly psychotherapy, went back to being a ghetto Jewish preoccupation. Bored, over-privileged housewives might go to a shrink to talk through their “issues”, but as for the rest of us, well, if we weren’t going into combat anytime soon, why bother? Outside of a few crusty old reactionaries (like yours truly) making fun of SJWs, when was the last time you heard the word “neurotic”?
But that’s the thing: either the subconscious is real, or it isn’t. When we say “neurotic” (the few of us who still do), we usually mean people like Anna O. — rich, cosseted, politically active human toothaches who try to force the entire world into the all-encompassing drama of their Daddy Issues (see also: Virginia Woolf). But that’s not how Freud meant it. According to him, we’re all neurotic to some degree or another, because that’s just how anxiety works.
We all have strong emotional impulses that run counter our self-image. Hence the entire panoply of pop-Freudianism: The preacher who constantly rails against homosexuality from the pulpit is secretly gay (“projection”). The strict, controlling, everything-in-its-place type is a sadist (“anal-retentive”). The player who can’t settle down with any woman is actually trying to find a Mommy figure (“Oedipus complex”). And, of course, the — ahem — daddy of them all, the crippling Daddy Issues that make feminists such fun.
But that’s just the thing: Either anxiety works that way or it doesn’t. Just because we don’t see a specific syndrome in ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole bunch of anxiety we need to discharge. Just because it’s subclinical, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s not real, or unimportant. See for example the legions of keyboard commandos who show up in the comments of any blog with more than fourteen readers. Yeah, sure, it’s possible that those guys all got kicked out of SEAL Team 6 for being too badass … but it’s probably classic identification. They’re deeply uneasy about the world and their place in it, so they construct themselves an identity as the Rambo of Evergreen Terrace.
Severian, “High Anxiety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-16.
February 23, 2023
QotD: Academic types
You do acknowledge, of course, that it’s in the nature of math that 50% of the population are below average?
Our default “solution” for university shooters […] is psychiatry. More access to better “mental health care”, we say, would’ve prevented this. Maybe, maybe not, but at least it’s something. The problem, though, is that the only diagnostic criterion you can realistically use is “So-and-So is a twitchy, weird loner”, which — trust me — exactly describes 99% of grad students and 100% of professors. Do we force feed all of them powerful prescription psychotropics on the off-chance?
Before you jump to agree — and yes, I fully acknowledge how awesome that would be, if you put it on Pay-per-View I’d be the first to sign up […] I’d ask you to consider two things:
First, it’s the government doing this. The same stupid motherfuckers who can’t manage to rig a poll where only a handful of addled old farmers vote. Do you really want to bet America’s future social stability on them loading the right drug into the sprayers? Given the federal bureaucracy’s sterling reputation for basic competence, they’d probably crop-dust the ‘hood with meth.
Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-15.
February 19, 2023
QotD: “… doesn’t play well with others”
Even purpose-built groups of highly trained specialists fall victim to it, once a certain critical mass is reached. Sports teams call that kind of guy “the locker room cancer”, but it applies to any group. Get a team of five aeronautical engineers together and you’ll get a cool plane. Get a group of fifty together, and you’ll get nothing but a giant nerd slap fight.
There are three plausible explanations for this:
- Social
- Biological
- or some combo of the two.
The Left (by which I also mean the Right) will, of course, go all in on {1}. It’s an article of faith for them, but it’s not necessarily wrong because of that. See above: Every one of those aeronautical engineers engaged in the giant 50-nerd slap fight is, on his lonesome and in every other context, the definition of a solid citizen. Certainly nobody groans “There goes the neighborhood!” when someone from Lockheed Martin buys a house down the block. There must be something to the idea that social conditions cause knuckleheadery.
Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-15.
February 15, 2023
QotD: The divine right of kings
England’s James I, for instance, was a deeply weird dude. Though he wrote a whole book about his divine right to rule, he kept his weirdness sufficiently in check so as not to alienate his court. Alas, his heir didn’t bother, and we know how that turned out. And so it went with just about any divine right monarch — the more people who actually saw him, the flimsier the theory seemed. History is full of examples of kingdoms “ruled” by insane kings, but not too many of kingdoms thriving when the people knew the king was a lunatic. Feebleminded monarchs are generally kept under lock and key by their courtiers, or they end up Epsteined.
Even democracies once understood this. Pick any 19th century American legislator, for example. As P.J. O’Rourke once said about rock stars, to call one of these guys a drunken, borderline-illiterate pervert just means you’ve read his autobiography. But they knew enough to keep it sufficiently in check around the voters, so that so long as they didn’t actually Chappaquiddick someone, they’d face no repercussions.
Speaking of Chappaquiddick, the Media has always been complicit in the great game of Fool-the-Rubes. They only do it for Democrats now, of course, but that’s the real problem these days: the Media has been doing all this for so long, and so successfully, that they no longer feel the need to bother. Just as Charles I decided to let his freak flag fly because hey, why not, I’m the king, so the Democrat-Media complex went all-in in 2008. You watch these guys — Don Lemon, say, mocking Trump voters as illiterate hicks — and the expression on their face is one of relief. It feels good to finally let it all out, and the more you do it, the better it feels.
Severian, “Rule by Lunatic”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-29.
February 11, 2023
QotD: “The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are”
And Plato’s actually pretty clear, as philosophers go. You’d really get into trouble with a muddled writer … or a much clearer one. A thinker like Nietzsche, for example, who’s such a lapidary stylist that you get lost in his prose, not realizing that he’s often saying the exact opposite of what he seems to be saying. To briefly mention the most famous example: “God is dead” isn’t the barbaric yawp of atheism triumphant. The rest of the paragraph is important, too, especially the next few words: “and we have killed him.” Nietzsche, supposedly the greatest nihilist, is raging against nihilism.
[…]
So here’s what I’d do, if I were designing a from-scratch college reading list. I’d go to the “for Dummies” versions, but only after clearly articulating the why of my reading list. I’d assign Plato, for example, as one of the earliest and best examples of one of mankind’s most pernicious traits: Utopianism. The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are. The most famous of these being Marxism, of course, and you’d get much further into the Marxist mindset by studying The Republic than you would by actually reading all 50-odd volumes of Marx. “What is Justice?” Plato famously asks in this work; the answer, as it turns out, is pretty much straight Stalinism.
How does he arrive at this extraordinary, counter-intuitive(-seeming) conclusion? The Cliff’s Notes will walk you through it. Check them out, then go back and read the real thing if the spirit moves you.
Articulating the “why” saves you all kinds of other headaches, too. Why should you read Hegel, for example? Because you can’t understand Marx without him … but trust me, if you can read The Republic for Dummies, you sure as hell don’t have to wade through Das Kapital. Marxism was a militantly proselytizing faith; they churned out umpteen thousand catechisms spelling it all out … and because they did, there are equally umpteen many anti-Marxist catechisms. Pick one; you’ll get all the Hegel you’ll ever need just from the context.
Severian, “How to Read ‘The Classics'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-13.
February 7, 2023
QotD: The misery of certainty
So why are they always so fucking miserable?
Let’s stipulate, for instance, that gender really is just a social construction. Even if it’s not, you’re dogmatically certain of this. Crucially, everyone else in your world is equally dogmatically certain, so even if it’s not, it is. Shouldn’t you be much, much, much happier? So you’re really a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin. Cool. Everyone else is 100% on board with this. You should be the happiest wingless golden-skinned dragonkin on earth … but you’re not. You’re miserable, and you do your damnedest to make every single other person you come in contact with miserable, too.
As a wise man once put it, if you run into an asshole in the morning, well, you just ran into an asshole. If you run into nothing but assholes all day, then you’re the asshole.
Same question to atheists. I can understand nonbelievers being tormented by their uncertainty, but an atheist is dogmatically certain there’s no god … so why aren’t y’all happier? Why, exactly, does the kid with cancer make you mad? The universe, you’re sure, is nothing but the random collision of atoms. It sucks for the kid that those atoms collided in that particular way, but why are you mad? More to the point, why are you mad? It’s like getting mad at gravity for that apple bonking you on the head. There’s no cosmic injustice without cosmic justice. I’d expect a zenlike calm, but instead, every time I write something about atheism (which I really don’t very often), I get a whole bunch of sour, bitter, angry atheists dropping in to tell me that I’m the asshole.
Severian, “The Emotion is the Tell”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-24.
February 3, 2023
QotD: Democracy
Democracy always devolves into ochlocracy, as some Dead White Male said, but since the last Dead White Male died centuries before Twitter, he didn’t realize that ochlocracy was just a pit stop on the way to kakistocracy.
“Democracy” only works — if, in fact, it does work, which is a very fucking open question — in a stakeholder society. When Madison and the boys pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other, they meant all of that literally — Washington could well have died a pauper, Alexander Hamilton ordered his cannon to fire on his own house, and so on. They had skin in the game, which is why they were so public-spirited — if they screwed up, they personally would have to live with the consequences. These days, of course, getting “elected” — or even selected to run for “election” — is a free pass to Easy Street. The rules apply only to the plebs, and only so long — and, insh’allah, the day is soon coming — as we have to pretend to let them “vote” on stuff.
Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.
January 30, 2023
QotD: Teaching … back in the day
Of course, this was so long ago that students used to be unsure how to address me. Most professors had gone “hip” and had students call them by first name, but there were enough crusty old codgers around who insisted on “Dr. So-and-So” that they didn’t assume. After which I started telling them “you can call me whatever you want, but as a general rule life runs smoother if we respect each other’s station. If you know someone has a title, it’s best to use it unless they specifically tell you otherwise, and it’s always good to respect the social distance between yourself and someone who has something you want. So, choose accordingly.” 20 years ago, most of them got it, and addressed me by my title. 15 years ago, I started getting lots of puzzled puppy dog looks (“what’s a ‘social station’?”). 10 years ago, they all just assumed first names were fine, and before I retired I counted myself lucky if I got so much as a “hey dude”.
Meanwhile, as far as the students were concerned, my job went from “trying to teach them something” to “the annoying meat puppet whose presence we have to tolerate until he puts the A+ in the gradebook for record-keeping purposes”.
Severian, responding to a comment on “Movies Made On Mars”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-04.
January 26, 2023
QotD: Non-commissioned officers
Your ideal “delta” is something like a lifer noncom in a non-pozzed military. Back in the days, I’m told, new recruits and civilians used to call crusty old gunny sergeants “sir”, to which the gunny would reply “Don’t call me ‘sir’, I work for a living!” That’s the attitude. Those guys with all the stripes on their sleeves aren’t officers because they lack “command presence”; they’re not officers because they don’t want to be officers. They know themselves, and, crucially, they know where they best fit into the organization’s overall mission. “Get in where you fit in” is, in a very real sense, their identity.
Examples of that kind of guy are tougher to find in the historical literature, which is why we need to develop, and pump up, the archetype. […] the ideal is the centurion, the backbone of Marcus Aurelius’ army. A soldier, a Stoic, a leader … but one who knows, and values, his place in the organization above all things.
Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.
January 22, 2023
QotD: Evolution of the nation-state
It took the rest of Europe another 150 years, but the Thirty Years’ War did the trick. What started as another of the endless doctrinal conflicts kicked off by the Reformation ended with the creation of the modern nation-state. Cardinal Richelieu really was a Cardinal — a prince of the Roman Catholic Church, a guy with a legitimate chance of being elected Pope. This man brought Catholic France into the war on the Protestant side for “reasons of state”. This made sense in 1631 … and the war still had another 17 years to run.
Speaking of, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War, the famous Peace of Westphalia, is credited with creating the modern nation-state. Which it did, but since we decided back in 1946 that nationalism was the worst possible sin, we Postmoderns forgot what everyone around the treaty table knew: That “nation” and “state” are inseparable. The nation-state, which for clarity’s sake will henceforth be known as the ethno-state, is the biggest stable form of human organization.
Severian, “The Libertarian Moment?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-19.
January 14, 2023
QotD: What would it be like to always believe you’re right?
This is not because I’m such a humble guy. If anything, it’s the reverse — it’s because “being right” is such an important part of my self-concept that if I’m going to put my reputation on the line, I need to really BE right. And as we all know, 99% of being right comes from acknowledging all the times you were wrong. Admitting I don’t know when I really don’t know is painless. Admitting I was wrong when I thought I was right stings, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as my own inner self-knowledge of being wrong. That really stings, and so I’d rather take the pain of admitting I was wrong any number of times to the much greater pain of actually being wrong on something fundamental.
To the Leftist, none of that computes. They’re always right. About everything. They literally can’t be wrong. And if what they were right about yesterday is 180 degrees from what they’re right about today, well, that’s just Reality reconfiguring itself. The Earth is stable; it’s the sun and stars that are moving around it. And if that leaves you with deferents and epicycles and retrograde motion and all that, well, so be it. See above, re: the physical impossibility of them being wrong …
… at least as individuals. But get them in a group, and all of a sudden a whole roomful of sort-of-Gods turns into a persecuted minority, even when everyone in the group agrees with everyone else. Even when the group, collectively, controls everything. If you think it’s bad in politics, y’all, go to a faculty meeting at the nearest college. To hear them tell it, the wolf is always at the door. Donald Trump and his jackbooted stormtroopers really are lurking behind every bush, waiting to jump out and pour bleach on them while yelling “This is MAGA country, bitch!” They’re afraid of their own students, because they just know those kids are out there thinking Unapproved Thoughts, and somehow those Unapproved Thoughts can physically harm them … even though they control the grade book, and can — and of course do — punish Unapproved Thought with extreme prejudice.
[…]
If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the answer might be as simple as: They can’t abstract, so they’re literally physically incapable of Reality-testing their heuristics. The Experts have given them the TORAH (that’s The One Right Answer, H8rz!), and since they can only evaluate individual cases as they come into view — they can only micro-focus on each parked car in the lot, to return to the earlier metaphor — they can’t draw the really-obvious-to-non-autists conclusion that they are not a persecuted minority, but in fact control everything.
Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.
January 10, 2023
QotD: A useful life lesson
Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.
January 6, 2023
QotD: The weird economics of “Onlyfans”
Given that I am not in the target audience for OnlyFans, then, perhaps all my speculations are hilariously wrong. And obviously there’s a robust market for porn, so it stands to reason that a la carte porn would have, if anything, an even bigger market …
… but do we trust those numbers? Everything in Clown World is fake and gay, and everything to do with the Internet has always been … how shall we put this? Factually dubious. This was true even when the Internet was a Libertarian paradise (for the young guys out there: Back in the build-your-own-modem days, I’m told, the Internet was hardcore Libertarian. By the time I got there, it was still very, very Right. Which stands to reason — you needed patience, discipline, and a little savvy to be online back then, and those are not Leftist qualities). OnlyFans claims a subscriber base of X, with revenues of Y. Do we have any reason to believe those are even within shouting distance of reality?
Money laundering seems like a live option.
My other guess was kompromat. I understand that Chinese Intelligence has all but openly admitted that TikTok is part of a targeted program to spread deviance, and if it has some intel benefit that’s a bonus. I figure OnlyFans had some sort of similar function. We all know that the classic “honey pot” is alive and well — Eric Swalwell and of course Hunter Biden say hi — but why bother running a real agent at somebody when he’s perfectly willing to put all his deviant desires in writing, backed by his credit card number?
I checked out OnlyFans — on Wikipedia; for research — and hey, whaddaya know, they got in on The Current Thing in Ukraine. Given what we know about Vladimir Putin, I’m sure he’s real broken up about that. It probably works pretty well as “open source” domestic intelligence, too — just as your enemies are busy uploading their own blackmail photos, so your domestic deviants are busy outing themselves on the other side of the transaction. Indeed, the only thing that surprises me is that the usual (((retards))) aren’t blaming it on the Mossad …
… actually I’m sure they are, and I do NOT want to know about it, but the point is, the whole thing seems really sketchy. So what are your thoughts? Money laundering scheme? PsyOp? Really obvious intelligence ploy? Or is it exactly what it seems like, desperately horny betas doing their thing?
(Based on what I saw on Facebook etc., I’m almost willing to believe the latter. All a recognizably human female has to do is post a cleavage shot on Facebook and she’ll get a hundred thirsty simps complimenting her. It’s the money thing that gets me, though. Being a simp in the Facebook comments is free).
Severian, “The E-Thot Economy”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-05.
