Monthly Archives: January 2015

Why Sex Work is Hated

Cracked asked a question, saying they’re asking honestly, so I’ll answer. First the question:

See, we’ve done a few articles on sex workers and porn stars (including a woman who has sex with a ventriloquist dummy on camera) and we keep coming to the same conclusion:

A) The demand for these people’s services is enormous;

B) The vast majority of us partake in some form or another (by consuming porn, if nothing else);

C) They thus fulfill a basic need in a way that the world would sorely miss if they stopped; and

D) We fucking hate them for it. Like, to the point of violence.

Why? We’re honestly asking. Someone let us know.

A & B are both easy to explain: the sex drive of a healthy man is a ravenous beast. Men need sexual release and need it constantly. The fire burns in the loins and the mind and never really stops burning except for those precious few hours after release.

To make matters worse, in today’s liberated society, the male is constantly assaulted with sexual imagery. One can not walk down the street without seeing a girl in a tight and/or low-cut top or ass-accentuating jeans. It’s a constant war for most men between their base urges and societal propriety. They’re constantly seeing on display what they can not have, what they could take but won’t; the whole of society enforcing the cruelty of placing a hamburger in front of a starving man. And man is always starving.

Sex work offers release. A temporary reprieve from the incessant burning and deprivation.

A third aggravating factor can be found in the article:

In other words, a key skill is learning how to simply hang out with clients and make them feel comfortable. Despite what you hear about how men primarily are all about looks, a lot of guys go to strip clubs for more than ogling boobies — they miss (or have never known) having a woman in their life, and for whatever reason this is the only place they can get something a little like that.

Men not only want sex, they want female companionship, a soft place to land, where they can comfortably offload their struggles. Traditionally, a wife would supply this role, but with today’s independent women who value traditionally masculine values over traditionally feminine ones, a soft place to land is not always as easy to obtain.

So there is a demand and this demand is aggravated by modern mores.

Now C is where their observation is not fully accurate as they do not distinguish between the personal and the societal. While sex workers fulfill individuals’ needs, it fails society’s needs. Society needs men to be fathers and to produce. Fatherhood is civilization, but unlike motherhood, fatherhood is not natural, it is a social construct. Like all social constructs it must be maintained and reinforced throughout society or it breaks down.

Sex work tears at fatherhood, it tears at civilization. That is where the seeming contradiction of D comes in, although disapproval or disgust would be a better word than hate. Here are a few of the ways it tears at away at fatherhood:

1) Sex work creates bastards. Children without fathers suffer and generally are less likely to become productive members of society. Before “reliable” birth control was common, bastards were inevitable, but even modern birth control is not as reliable as people claim, and bastards still occur. Fatherless children are societal problems.

2) A man partaking in paid sexual services (or is successful as a cad) is expending effort outside of being a father. He is not spending those same time and resources creating, providing for, and raising his own children.  His own family suffers.

3) In many cases, sexual services (or fornication) may even replace marriage and fatherhood entirely. In this case, the man has no family, he raises no children to carry society forward, women are deprived of a potential husband, and he produces less for society as he produces only for himself, not for his family.

4) A woman turning to sex work is a woman not being a wife and mother. Instead of creating and raising children in a stable family environment she is providing sex for profit. Each sex worker is one less young woman in the marriage pool for men, reducing the incentives for men to work towards marriage. Even after a sex worker retires, she is still not a good prospect for marriage.

If you think this is all no problem, just look at our current society as it has relaxed its mores against fornication and paid sexual services. About 40% of children are born out of wedlock, a third of children live without fathers, a fifth of children live in poverty, our birth rates are well below replacement levels, and young men are dropping out of marriage and the workplace.

On a more personal level: women dislike sex workers because they are in direct competition against them for men, even their own husbands. Men dislike sex workers because it is degrading having to pay for what you wish you could achieve naturally and they’ll externalize this self-hatred.

This is why sex workers are disdained. They tear at the fabric of civilization.

****

Another point, what they think of as hate is not always hate, but rather desire and perverted forms of love, particularly when it comes to violence or individual actions. Just looking through the examples of “hate” Cracked provide illustrates this clearly.

Yeah, there’s something about women who are willing to show off their bodies without shame that enrages a very specific sort of terrible person. It’s like they can’t stand the idea of the performer retaining any kind of power at all. “If I’m paying to see her body, I should get total access, regardless of what she says.” Every customer service job requires dealing with entitled dicks, but we’re guessing you’ve never had to deal with that.

61 percent of strippers report experiencing someone trying to penetrate them via finger, 82 percent have been punched, and a balls-out terrifying 56 percent reported having a customer freaking follow them home at least once.

That’s not hate, that’s textbook frustrated desire. A man getting handsy or attempting to have sex is not hating, he’s desiring. A man following a woman home is not hate, it is very strong desire.

Where hate might come in is after the fact (ex: the punching): its not all that particularly surprising someone would be hated for rejecting someone by the person being rejected, however irrational that hatred might be.

Lightning Round – 2015/01/28

How to build a better red pill blogosphere.

Three fundamental truths.

A career is not a vocation.

9/10 businesses fail.

A intro guide to practical economics.
Related: The US is strangling entrepreneurs.

Over a 10-year period most forms of non-permanent birth control are almost guaranteed to fail.

Kill the kulaks.
Related: The leftist mind virus.

What makes NRx unique. NRx Principles.
Related: The necessity of boundaries.
Related: Entryism.

The responses to Mike’s Frankfurt School post continue.
Related: The protestant ancestry of progressivism.
Related: The Frankfurt School is not the cause of progressivism.
Related: Forget cultural Marxism.
Related: Culture Marxism exists.
Related: Not all reaction is equal.
Related: Democracy and revolt.

The insanity of student loans.
Related: Scattered graduates.
Related: Making universities irrelevant.
Related: Millenials: childless and indentured for nothing.

A response to Yuray’s claims on education.

Women’s liberation is women’s prostitution.
Related: Feminism, university, and prostitutes.

Spanish fertility and patriarchy.

Can the state supplant the family?

Alimony and child support: Time to shrug.
Related: Man going to jail for refusing to pay for child that isn’t his.

On nerds and women.

The blowback of liberal schemes.

The government paper bubble.

Freedom of speech and government weakness.

A solution to the holiness problem.

The problem of role models.

An experience at Chipotle.

On the fluidity of race.

Le Pen’s lessons for the Anglosphere.

Anti-Europeanists.

Idiocracy, democracy, and the SotU.

Institutions, Rome, and Carthage.

Usury and chattel slavery.

When Christians turn on Christians and atheists know the Bible better.
Related: Not all “Christians” are Christian.

The Anglican church has signed its death warrant.

650k march on Washington in pro-life rally.

A reversal: Bakery accused of religious discrimination for refusing to put anti-gay message on cake.
Related: More reversals.

Delaying sex leads to better relationships.

Sexual abuse is not egalitarian.

Abortion aborts itself.

Duck writes for a guest post for Roissy: “Who bitch this is?”

Women aren’t in STEM because they are not as good at math.

Feminists complain that Wikipedia is banning anti-GG feminists from making the GG page biased.

Tumblr feminism in Time.

Women outnumber men 2:1 in public service disability claims in Canada.

The ratchet goes on: What it’s like to date your dad. Related.

Free speech killed on Canadian campuses.

America’s new aristocracy.

Commies win in Greece.

Libertarian Brad Spangler turning himself in for molesting his daughter.
Related: Libertarian responses.

Pink SF is destroying SF.

Designing Twilight Struggle, an excellent board game.

Metal Moment – Epica

Haven’t had one of these in a while, so here’s an introduction to Epica, a operatic metal band from the Netherlands. The main vocalist, Simone Simons has probably the most beautiful voice I have heard and she is definitely my favourite female singer. Here’s Mother of Light from their 2005 album Consign to Oblivion:

Here’s Cry for the Moon from their first CD:

Their general sound hasn’t changed much over the years: a beautiful operatic soprano mixed with rough growls over a excellent metal with heavy symphonic elements, but they’ve always managed to keep it fresh and interesting. Here’s Quantum Enigma from their most recent CD:

Here’s something a bit slower and softer, Feint, also from Phantom Agony:

Finally, from their live album, a metal version of Dies Irae. It’s one of the very few live albums I’ve ever felt worth purchasing:

 

 

 

 

Creationism: The Modernist Frame

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while and have been observant, you may have noticed that I use created and evolved more-or-less interchangeably. At one time I was a strong creationist, but that was years ago. Now I tend use whichever one is more convenient. Evolution makes logical sense, the evidence I’ve reviewed seems to support it, and seems to be supported by those who know more than me about the science involved, so I accept it as fact. On the other hand, I would not be overly surprised if liberals and their pet scientists have constructed a false scientific narrative on this issue. Whatever the case, I accept evolution as fact but do not discount the possibility of creationism, and tend to use whichever happens to be most convenient at the time.

The veracity of evolution has no impact on my faith either way. Did God create man through natural evolutionary processes, did He create man through guided evolutionary processes, did He create man from ashes in a literal 168-hour period? It doesn’t matter. Maybe God was being literal when having man dictate His Word, maybe He was being figurative and poetic, maybe He wanted the focus to be on the more important underlying points, or maybe explaining 20th century biological science to iron age nomadic shepherds was not the point of the Biblical narrative.

This has been my position for many years. It doesn’t matter, but recently, I’ve begun to think that it dose matter but in a completely different way.

The problem with the creation/evolution debate is not whether one or the other is fact, but the entire frame of the debate itself. The whole creation/evolution debate is an example of both creationists and atheists being pwned by modernity. Any Christian jumping into that debate has already lost himself to modernism and its secular worldview.

Creationists have lost completely their conception of primal/mythic truth. They can not conceive of Truth apart from fact, so their faith rests on a literal interpretation of what is fairly obviously poetical and has a high chance of not being meant to be understood literally. They believe that if creation as written isn’t fact then it can’t be true and therefore the Bible is false and the faith is false.

This is false. Whether the literal creation is fact or not does not impact whether it is true. It is the myth, the Truth, of man’s relationship to God, man’s relation to nature, man’s purpose, man’s blessing, man’s relation to woman, and man’s sins. This is all true, whether or not the literal creation is fact. To rest the basis of the mythic truth of these claims on the fact truth of a poetic narrative of creation is to allow their greater humanity to be pwned by the modern’s soulless materialism.

As I said recently, “Modernism, in its essence, is the destruction of myth in the human experience and its replacement by fact, often false. Modernism is the entirety of truth being conquered by fact. Buying into the naturalist, materialist world-view is to swallow modernity whole.” To debate creationism as a science is to accept the modern frame. If you do so, you are already a materialist. You have accepted Nietzsche cry of “God is dead” and have embraced the death of metaphysics. You have embraced positivism as the only way.

By accepting the modern frame, creationism has made positivism their god.

Positivism has it’s place, the realm of fact. Science discovers fact, mundane truth, but it doesn’t discover Truth and it cannot create Truth, it cannot even create truth. To elevate science above its place is to destroy reason and Truth.

The creation myth is not a mundane truth under the yoke of positivism; to treat it as such is to degrade it. To look for Truth in science is to degrade yourself, to kill your own soul.

We can see soul-killing of the positivist approach to creation through the vulgar atheists. We can see them degrade themselves. They accept positivism in theory, but it kills their soul. So, to save their soul, they deify science and create a nonsense modernist morality based on rehashed puritanism. Simply read this from the statement of Aims and Principles of the American Atheists:

Materialism restores dignity and intellectual integrity to humanity. It teaches that we must prize our life on earth and strive always to improve it. It holds that human beings are capable of creating a social system based on reason and justice. Materialism’s “faith” is in humankind and their ability to transform the world culture by their own efforts.

Their positivism has so mutilated their mind and soul that they look at nothing and create a religious faith of it while decrying religion and faith. They need myth, they need Truth, but have none, so they have to make up blatantly self-refuting falsehoods to succor themselves. How could any mind not raped by modernism possibly “think” ‘I am nothing but an accident of material laws, therefore my life is to be prized’?

They deify themselves, they deify science, they deify ‘reason’, they deify humanity, because they have are broken creatures needing Truth, searching for Truth, in a system that denies the existence of Truth. It’s inhuman.

Don’t let yourself be pwned by modernity and positivism. Reject creationism; reject vulgar atheism; reject positivism; reject modernism.

Lightning Round – 2015/01/21

Create your own monomyth.

Stop complaining about your job and go to church.

Science may not be as good a career path as it seems.
Related: Almost half of college grads in jobs that don’t require a degree.

An RP round-up of marriage.

10 women Christian men should not marry. Vice versa.
Related: Your spouse is not your friend.

What to do when she turns on you.

 Wisdom from St. Louis.

Why monarchy?

The Frankfurt School caused progressivism.
Related: Land disagrees, as does Hurlock.

Some European history.

A reactionary is a conservative who has ceased to believe liberals engage in good faith.
Related: Ross Douthat supports reading Moldbug.

Teleofunction not tradition.

Anthropologist: We’re on the brink of collapse.
Related: Apocalypse when?
Related: 3 graphs.
Related: The boomer legacy.
Related: 2084. Heh.

Sound money and societal morality.
Related: Zippy has an e-book out on usury.
Related: Gold, Bitcoin, and reaction.

Women in the workplace.
Related: On fertility and pregnancy.

House of Cards and society.

Government failure.

Nazis were of the left.

The TRS troll guide.
Related: Troll-hunting tips.

Voting is a charade.

Left-liberalism: the diabetes of politics. Heh.

British poll on Jews.

Will reality sink into leftists following Charlie Hebdo?

Candlelight vigils and cavity searches.

Amish Coordination and how the Amish are different.

Rote learning rocks.

On egalitarian art.

On free speech.

Communist rabbits.

Pedophilia and post-modernism.
Related:The promotion of consensual incest.

Was homosexual “marriage” a bridge too far for leftists.
Related: Reality vs. marriage.

John C Wright’s collected apology.

Christian church exploding in China.
Related: Possible revival in Europe.

4 terrible lessons taught at church.

Feminism is for ugly women.

Confessions of a serial rapist.

Feminist loudmouth Shanley  was a racist who dated white nationalist troll Weev.
Related: She’s been melting down on Twitter after being doxed. Amusement to be had.

Marine LePen in the NYT.

Canada enjoys socialist medicine.

Free speech for some in Canada.
Related: Private speech should not be publicly policed.

Socialism: Coming soon to a country near you.

Serial rapist requests euthanasia instead of prison.

Depression, suicide, and social dysfunction.

Immigration math in the US.

White Americans are very white.

MLK birthday party flyers.

Soros bankrolled Ferguson protests.

More journalistic integrity on display.

Getting women warriors wrong.

The pendulum swing in SF.

More on TrackingPoint.

H/T: Isegoria, SSC, DS, SDA, Land

World War P Beckons

Someone on Twitter shared an Upworthy article on a 19-year-old pedophile who has never gone near a child (not giving Upworthy clicks). The Upworthy article was wasteful clickbait saying to listen to this This American life podcast (I didn’t listen to it). It also link to this sob story of 16-year-old pedophile.* It’s looking more likely that World War P may be on the horizon.

I’ve written on pedophilia recently and you can tell I am not unsympathetic to those struggling with this issue.

That being said, these poor-me articles are just the first step to the normalization of pedophilia. A quick follow-up to World War G and World War T. These pro-pedophilia articles have become relatively common over the past year or so. Over the next decade, expect to see these articles slowly and subtly shift from ‘we have to help these people’ to ‘we should tolerate these people’ to ‘we should accept these people’ to ‘there’s nothing wrong with these people’ to ‘this is an alternative lifestyle’. I don’t think there will be a follow-up to ‘the right to pedophilic marriage’, that seems a bridge too far, but then again, the left is often more audacious then I think they could possibly be.

This is the first blitz of a long war. Be prepared.

To those struggling with pedophilic temptations, the best advice is to suck it up. I know it sucks, but life sucks, get used to it. Don’t make it suck worse for other people. Don’t try to normalize your perversions, don’t try to be accepted, don’t try to have others tolerate your sickness. Recognize there’s something fundamentally wrong with you and do the best you can with it. Maybe talk to a close friend or a helpful online community about it, but otherwise keep to it yourself. Don’t try to force your brokenness on the rest of the world.

But even though you are broken, don’t give into the brokenness; you are a man, not a beast. You can choose whether to be a slave to your passions or not. Don’t abuse children, avoid other tie alone with other people’s children, and avoid illegal porn. If you must to keep temptation away, masturbate to your fantasies or some lolicon. Better a sin against yourself and your own soul than against a child. I would also say, pray to God and accept the Lord’s salvation; he’ll forgive you and love you even if you are fundamentally broken. But whatever you do realize you are not your perversion. You are moral agent, an autonomous being with a will. Exercise it. Do not let your perversion become your identity.

Dear non-practicing pedophile, you are broken at the most fundamental level. Accept it. Fuck your self-esteem. But just because you are broken does not mean you damned. Don’t let your brokenness define you. Define yourself by what you can contribute to the world, not by your brokenness. It will always be there, but you can rise above it. Choose to do so.

That’s all on this for now. Be prepared for the long war. WWP beckons and your children’s innocence is the cost of defeat. For pedophiles, WWP will be an inner war, the cost of defeat your soul and your humanity.

****

* Tangential side-note: From the article:

Another study found that being knocked unconscious before the age of 13 might be a factor. This may sound like quackery, but it points toward biological causation. In other words, it’s likely that pedophiles are born this way.

I didn’t know being knocked unconscious was something you were born with. I think left-wing slogans may have poisoned Luke Malone’s mind.

Abolish Prison

Count Nothingface made a crack at libertarians wanting to abolish prison on Twitter. I happen agree with the libertarians on this one, prison should be abolished. On the other hand, I think it should be replaced with things those same libertarians might not agree with: public whippings, executions, and restitution, depending on the crime. Prison should be abolished for a few reasons: it’s cruel, it’s costly, it’s actively harmful, and the alternatives are more useful.

1) It’s cruel:

Prison is unnecessarily cruel, yet everybody seems to accept it as normal, while thinking its alternative as cruel. Why is locking someone in a hole with the scum of society somehow less cruel than a few moments of pain. If you were given the choice between 20 lashes spread over 5 days or 3 years in prison, which would you choose?

Obviously, the former. Everybody I’ve asked would choose the former. I’m sure if you even gave just criminals the option, the vast majority of them would choose whipping.

If everbody would choose whipping then that then why is whipping considered cruel while prison is not? It makes no logical sense.

(It does make societal sense though. We do it for the same reason we send old people to die in old folks homes and hospitals: decadence. We have become so soft we hate to see pain and death in the open, so rather than accept that, we inflict greater cruelty on criminals [and old folks] by locking them away where we don’t have to see them.)

2)  It’s costly:

It costs $20-50k per year to house a criminal in a prison. A bullet costs a buck or less. A bullwhip costs a few hundred dollars. A person to execute the punishment will probably cost under $50/hour. We could save a lot of money by eliminating prison. Restitution pays for itself.

Now, the standard argument is that death row inmates cost a lot to execute, but that is only because of the insane legal process involved in executing someone and holding them in prison until they are executed. If we streamline the process, the cost would not be so insanely high.

3) It’s actively harmful:

Prison is actively harmful in three main ways. First, it separates children from their fathers and destroys families. A man in prison is not raising his children; his kids are being supported the state and single moms. This is not good for children, it’s not good for families, and it’s not good for the state.

Second, it separates a man from his community. Instead of being able to get a job, learn a skill, or otherwise doing something that would help him become a productive member of society, he is forced into prison where he becomes a parasite for years. Then, when he gets free form prison, he has become so used to the prison lifestyle that he can no longer function productively in the real world.

Third, it turns minor criminals into major criminals. Prison takes minor criminals and/or misguided youths, who with a bit of guidance or stern correction could be set right, and forces them into spending months or years interacting with nobody other than other criminals. This turns minor problems into major ones.

4) The alternatives are better:

The immediate objection to eliminating prisons is ‘how do we keep criminals from law-abiding citizens?’ The answer is execute them.

If an individual is so anti-social that society can find no better use for him than to store him in a warehouse to keep him from being around other people, he should be executed. It is of no benefit to society to keep a useless criminal alive in prison for years and I don’t see how keeping someone hopelessly caged for his whole life in conditions worse than we treat zoo animals is less cruel than a quick death after a good meal and an opportunity for repentance to save his immortal soul.

So, for perpetual criminals and the fully evil, execution is the superior alternative to a life of caged parasitism.

For those criminals who commit lesser violent crimes whipping is the preferable alternative (possibly castration for sexual crimes). It is at once less cruel and less destructive, yet also more of a deterrent. While everybody knows abstractly prison is bad, the full scope of imprisonment is somewhat abstract and not all that easy to grok. On the other hand, a whipping is real and visceral, it is easy to picture and the pain of it is easy to imagine. The sight of a public whipping would be a much stronger deterrent than knowing bad guys are locked up somewhere away from here.

As for the petty criminals and property criminals restitution is easily a better alternative. Make criminals pay monetary damages for monetary and petty crimes. In the case where they cannot afford to, garnish wages over time until the debt is paid. If they are unwilling to find productive work, put them into forced labour until their debt is paid.

This is better for a number of reasons: First, it avoids the problem of prison making petty criminals into greater criminals. Second, it keeps a man with his family and his community. Third, it helps, or forces, a man to become a productive member of the community. Through forced labour, he’s forced to contribute to society and forced to learn a useful skill of some sort.

For the above reasons, I think that any wise society would end the wasteful, inhuman, and cruel prison system and institute a humane, human system of execution, public whippings, and restitution.

Abolish prisons now.

Lightning Round – 2015/01/14

Some remedial red pill.

Passion and work.

If people didn’t have debt.

Phatic speech. If only I had read this 20 years ago. Maybe it will help younger mes.

Taki’s guide to good girls.

A warning: Jack Nicholson: “single and lonely and likely to die alone”.

Whores, daughters, and the patriarchy.
Related: Broken hearts, broken windows.
Related: Sex and natural law.

Parental involvement and civilization.
Related: The WP notices that there are a lot of single mothers and that’s not good.
Related: Children of single parents more likely to see domestic violence.

The three laws of behavioural genetics.

The culling of young entrepreneurs.

Modern monarchy.
Related: Beneficial effects of the Hapsburg Empire.

Smash the Overton Window.

Democratic loss aversion.

The break-down of moderation.

The emptiness of the 68ers.

The winners are those who are serious.

12 people killed in Paris by peaceful Muslims.
Related: The world is a dangerous place; the French have let that danger in.
Related: Free speech comes from the barrel of a gun.
Related: Malcolm thinks this may be big.
Related: Charlie was not us.
Related: This is what diversity looks like.
Related: Choose who you serve.
Related: Leftists love Islam.
Related: Je Suis Charlie won’t save free speech.
Related: Did Charlie Hebdo have it coming?
Related: Charlie Hebdo conspiracy theorizing.
Related: On Muslims and Jews.
Related: Tyranny of the minority.
Related: Multiculturalism’s last gasp.
Related: Moral retardation and Islamophobia. More.
Related: Why the left supports Islam.
Related: What will we do?
Related: European views of the nation.
Related: Anti-semitic Israelis and diversity.
Related: Netanyahu vs. Hollande.

NYT covering for Islam.
Related: Media hypocrisy.

FN in France.
Related: Le Pen denounced for calling for peace and democracy.

Deportation is not war.
Related: That’s what separate countries are for.

The coming annihilation of European progressivism.

Supporting #blackbrunch.
Related: On #blackbrunch.

Authoritarianism and adaptive complexity.

Islands of security.

The credibility trap.

The importance of mythology.

Nywracu’s thoughts on religion.

New NRx aggregator: Neoreactive, a competitor to Reaction Times.

NRx at the Catalyst Club.

A bit on the Great Filter.

Just a reminder, there are no consequences for lying journalists.

Singapore works.

More on Japan’s demographic time bomb.
Related: How Japan’s sexual apathy is threatening the world’s economy.

The success of Egypt’s junta.

On Nigeria.

Liberalism is a sin.

RP hope in the RC church.

The wake-up call view of marriage.
Related: An analysis of Stanton: Part 1, 2, & 3.
Related: How Christian counseling destroys marriage.

Churches unleashing the feral woman.

The downside of the soul mate myth.

We might not have so much divorce if people put as much effort into marriage as revenge.

Women playing for sympathy not truth.

13 examples of why women lie about rape.

The sex ratio is getting worse for men.

Thought crime at Dalhousie University.

Heh, spoiled girls.Related.

Marissa Mayers struggling at Yahoo.

A little story of women in STEM.

The tolerance of homosexuals.

Putin: 10th most admired man in America.

What gamergate taught us about social justice.

Horrifying civil liberties predictions for 2015.

Thoughts from Thomas Sowell.

The prohibitionist’s dilemma.

Bad policies based on fragile science.

The decline of science fiction.

Cracked discovers the wonder of government programs.

5 uncomfortable truths about Cracked.

H/T: Bayne, SDA, MR, RPR, SCC

Myth, Truth, and Modernity

Nyan wrote on creating a religion. The basis of his post is this bit of materialist nonsense:

The immediate and obvious solution is that we must believe in a mythology that is not true. Not necessarily false, mind you; our spiritual myths may be nonsense from a truth perspective. For example, we might claim to believe that “It is the destiny of mankind to conquer the stars”. This can’t really be true or false in a positivist sense because constructions involving “destiny” and “mankind” are not really meaningful empirically. How does the statement constrain your expectations? It does not; it is purely mythological.

You may have noticed the relationship of this problem to Hume’s impenetrable Is-Ought barrier. I propose a similarly impenetrable but transparent Truth-Myth barrier to replace it. On one side we have the beliefs one adopts as part of an unsubordinated quest to understand the world, the beliefs that an idealized engineer might have, the Truth. On the other side we have those beliefs that provide meaning and spiritual context, and motivate us, the Myth. I call the barrier transparent because the Myth tends to be constructed in terms of the Truth. For example where on the truth side we notice fleshy ape-things that are related in a certain way to most of what we have to deal with, on the Myth side we call them “people”, give them individual names, and speculate about their destiny. On the Truth side of the barrier, I think Logical Positivism is the correct approach; we construct our beliefs about Truth to constrain our expectations and direct our purposeful actions, and we cut out the non-contributing parts. On the Myth side, I don’t really know how or even whether we ought to constrain our techniques of reasoning. I will be relatively permissive here and take the position that you adopt whatever mythology speaks to your soul, with the only restriction being that don’t let this pollute our understanding of Truth.

Something can be True without being Fact, and you will never have a human system until you come to terms with this. I’ve written on the three types of truth before.

Fact truth – Fact truth is mundane reality. A fact truth is empirical, it explains or describes a natural phenomenon but goes no deeper than that. “The sky is blue” would be a fact truth. Science is the best developed way of establishing this type of truth.

Social truth – A social truth is something socially accepted as being true. A social truth is something true in relating to and within a society. Social truths can be both mundane and transcendental. “It is rude to spit on the sidewalk” would be a mundane social truth; “the American Dream” would be a transcendental social truth.

Primal truth – Primal truth is transcendental truth. It is Truth. Truth speaks to the core of our human essence; to who and what we are. It is never mundane.

Another name for the third is mythic truth. Myths are True, in fact they are often more True than fact.

If you don’t understand, think of Plato’s forms as an analog. The forms don’t technically exist, they are not fact, but the form is more True than any particular factual instantiation of the form. The non-factual concept of tree is more true of trees as a whole than that particular existent oak at the neighbourhood park.

In the same way, the primal truths are more true of humanity than any particular existing human, any organization, or any of the facts of humanity. Myth is the distilled Truth of humanity.

Nyan is trying to replace Truth with fact and wondering how to create a human religion out of this. It’s impossible, you can not even make human out of fact alone. If you try you will only have a broken, soulless wretch animated only until the empty sleeve of flesh can destroy itself. Man does not live on fact alone. Man needs myth; man is myth; myth is truth.

Modernism, in its essence, is the destruction of myth in the human experience and its replacement by fact, often false. Modernism is the entirety of truth being conquered by fact. Buying into the naturalist, materialist world-view is to swallow modernity whole. By holding to his Truth-Myth framework Nyan is only showing that he is still pwned by modernity.

None of this is to say that fact is wrong, untrue, or unimportant. Fact is an essential part of truth, but it is not the entirely truth. Fact has its place, but that place is not myth’s place.

Nyan needs to abandon his false materialism. He sees ‘internal contradictions’ and replaces God with Darwin. Darwin may be fact, he may be true, but he can never be Truth. The internal contradictions he sees which he thinks deny God are Truth. The glory of fox’s hunt and the desperation of the rabbit’s run are not internal contradictions, but are instead mutually necessary; without the glory there is no desperation, without the desperation there is no glory. It is both the glory and the desperation that make the race real, that make the hunt matter, that create Truth. The glory and the desperation are Truth whatever Darwinian facts may be used to explain them. Nyan’s materialism would destroy both leaving only biology and game theory in its place.

Nyan knows, even if he does not actively realize it, that his materialism is false for he can’t even hold to his materialism for the single post in which he purports to do just that. He reifies a non-material, atheist natural law, then anthropomorphizes this immaterial form as Gnon and erects himself a new god. He states he remains agnostic to Gnon’s metaphysical nature while at the same time he posits Gnon as metaphysical Truth itself. He set out to make a materialistic, positivist religion and creates himself a immaterial, metaphysical god. As with all materialists, he denies God only to create his own god.

This is because materialism and positivism are useful for finding fact, but near useless for finding Truth, but Nyan can’t see this because he makes a modern false distinction between Truth and Myth. He needs to reconcile himself to Truth and deny this inhuman materialism.

Nyan, spurn this modernism and embrace the truth of myth.

****

From here, I’ll let Chesterton take over (read the entire chapter to see modernity eviscerated):

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment was here: that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales rounded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.

First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been DONE. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure.

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were WILFUL. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.

But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken. But the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them. The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet. This modern universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast, but it is not free. One went into larger and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with Babylonian perspective; but one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air.

Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance; but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance. So finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions I began to argue about it a little; and I soon found that the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected. According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only (they would say) while it is one thing it is also the only thing there is. Why, then, should one worry particularly to call it large? There is nothing to compare it with. It would be just as sensible to call it small. A man may say, “I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures.” But if it comes to that why should not a man say, “I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see”? One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments. It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth; it is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. A man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness of the world; why should he not choose to have an emotion about its smallness?

It happened that I had that emotion. When one is fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a life-guardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. If military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable. But the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman. The moment you really see an elephant you can call it “Tiny.” If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it. These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie

As of my writing this the Google news search of Charlie Hebdo shooting nets “About 21,700,000 results“. Rotherham abuse nets “About 27,800 results“. Rotherham rapeAbout 9,520 results“. The latter story has had four months for stories to be written, the former a couple days.

Here we can see the West’s priorities: a dozen left-wing journalists get killed by the same people they fought so hard to import and it is an international crisis that everyone must care about. 1400 innocent children get raped by those same imports and nobody gives a shit.

You should have been angry months ago.

Anyway, here’s my opinion on Charlie Hebdo: they got what they deserved  the natural consequences of their pro-immigration beliefs (Ed: Ill-phrased and added a clarification) and I’m not going to shed a tear. May God grant them mercy in the next life.

Charlie Hebdo was a vile left-wing rag that regularly engaged in anti-Christian blasphemy. They are not ‘us‘. The Muslims aren’t us, but neither are Charlie Hebdo. If our enemies want to start killing each other, why should we involve ourselves? Let them take each other out.

I do have some sympathy for free speech and I might be sympathetic if Charlie Hebdo was staunch ideological pro-free speech organization but like most left-wingers Charlie are very selective in their desire for free speech. From Charlie Hebdo’s wiki:

In 2008, controversy broke over a column by veteran cartoonist Siné which led to accusations of antisemitism and Siné’s sacking by Val. Siné sued the newspaper for unfair dismissal and Charlie Hebdo was sentenced to pay him €90,000 in damages. Siné launched a rival paper called Siné Hebdo which later became Siné Mensuel. Charlie Hebdo launched its Internet site, after years of reluctance from Val.

Charlie gutlessly sacked a cartoonist for violating a more-untouchable taboo. I guess they fear Jews more than Muslims. They are not pro-free speech, they are simply anti-religion. Why should I, or any religious person, support them in this?

To add is this:

On 26 April 1996 François Cavanna, Stéphane Charbonnier and Philippe Val filed 173,704 signatures, obtained in 8 months, with the aim of banning the political party Front National, since it would have contravened the articles 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The people at Charlie loved free speech and free assembly so much, they literally tried to ban a political party* and silence 15% of the population. (I wonder if they would/will reconsider their dislike of FN now?)

There is no reason to support Charlie. All this is is a left-wing organization, a supporter of diversity, receiving the natural consequences of diversity. If you invite savages into your country, do not be surprised when savagery results. Mourn not for those who helped engineer the invasion, but for those innocents who suffer due to it.

****

* Mike Anissimov indicated on Twitter that it may have been a joke (as did another rude person), but I haven’t been able to find a source for that. Wikipedia and the article wikipedia sources seem to be playing it straight (‘pilon’, translated ‘drumstick’ at the end, also means to pulp a book). Other sources than wiki seem to take it seriously as well. The translations of a random set of these forum members seem to take the attempted ban seriously. Now, I can’t read French very well, so I would miss any subtleties to these stories that would indicate humour and this story is from two decades ago, before the internet went mainstream, so I am having a hard time finding much. It’s possible that this is a joke, but 173k signatures is a long way to go for a joke, and there was an official inquiry into banning FN that followed soon after. I’m accepting it as legitimate until such someone shows otherwise.