Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

(FB 1544195129 Timestamp) FROM THE THEOLOGICAL TO THE LITERARY – ANSWERING A COMPETENT CRITIC. (useful) —“Certain kinds of allegorical story try to teach a moral but most of what we consider great literature instead dramatizes a question like what does it mean to be a hero, or is it possible to find meaning in the world that we haven’t placed there ourselves? These questions don’t have univocal answers which is why we find the dramatizations more interesting than anybody’s opinion about such matters. We hate poetry that has palpable designs on us, as Keats said. Also, the dramatizing of ambiguous questions creates the beauty that “tease[s] us out of thought” and is the real payload of these stories, rather than some socially utilitarian archetype that you install in people like software, even if it’s open-source software. Beauty can be found in a postmodern novel like The Crying of Lot 49 as readily as in a heroic story like the Odyssey, or indeed in the wisdom books of the old testament, or the writings of medieval mystics. I think Norman Mailer was right that if the universe is a lock then the key is a metaphor, not a measure, but then he belonged to the class of intellectuals who haven’t given up on the question of why there’s something rather than nothing and therefore placed more importance on the inner life as a source of sovereignty than on being a member of a pack, the inner life being that by virtue of which we are incommensurable. I’m new here, but initial signs are that planet Doolittle is a place for people who have prematurely closed their accounts with reality.”— John Tangney

John, Intelligent, Articulate, Traditional, Conventional, but just another take on secular theology, closing with self service, contradiction, and error – and entirely missing the point of the challenges of the present, the purpose of my work, what I’m doing here with followers and lurkers, and the post. 1 – What faculties are you advocating exercising – and why? What faculties are those following me seeking to exercise? 2 – You use experiential terms for entertainment, or mindfulness, or escapism, as if they are moral goods, when they are simply forms of consumption, avoidance, and escape – self medication. Yet people who follow me are seeking the capacity to understand, improve, and act – particularly to act to change the current conflict. 3 – You ‘appear’ to assume that knowledge of right action, morality, and the virtues is complicated. It isn’t. it’s actually trivial, and can be taught by allegory, analogy, history, and rule. The difference is that what is objectively moral (what we do here) and what is subjectively open to interpretation as moral, are the difference between truth and preference. 4 – There is a very good reason Women, Mailer, and someone like you prefer the ‘undecidable’ metaphor, and Men, Aristotle, and someone like me, prefers the ‘decidable’ rule. The first conveys meaning while preserving the ability to cheat, the second conveys rule and eliminates the ability to cheat.(See my post earlier today to Eric Weinstein). 5 – The warrior prefers the conflict, the judge the law, the merchant the ability to weasel and negotiate, the women the ability to bait and not deliver, and the thief the ability to predate. We know your moral pretense by which degree of moral intolerance/intolerance you advocate (demand). 6 – Where you assume people are programmed or resistant to programming (a) they ARE programmed, and (b) they ARE resistant to programming, because they search for confirmation of their personal survival, consumptive, and reproductive strategies. In other words, people seek programming that they want. And norm encourages, and the law enforces rules that they must obey even if they contradict with the programming that they have sought. 7 – So as a specialist in the ‘Grammars’ (paradigms of programming and decidability) it’s quite obvious that you’re invested in a form of escapism (and perhaps denialism) that is indifferent from Mysticism, Theology, Idealism, Utopianism, Fictionalism, Self Medication, or drug use. Where most here are looking for non-escapism. For the opposite. FOR AGENCY. So it is not that I or we escape reality – it is that we seek to understand it, and take advantage of it. It is those who seek sedation that seek to escape reality. QUESTIONS/PROBLEMS I SEEK TO ANSWER/SOLVE How do we end lying in economics, politics, and law? How do we solve the conflict of our current attempts at speciation by moral intuition (left-feminine, right-masculine)? How do we end the systematic destruction of western civilization which is the only one to produce a high trust labor, working, middle, and professional class? How do we prevent another abrahamic dark age of ignorance, superstition, and dysgenia? I am one of the most innovative thinkers working today. That is not a compliment to myself. It is a criticism of the current state of thought – and the near loss of the 20th century – and the second fall of Europa. Affections. Curt