Is - Ought
Old - New
Endure - Innovate
Acceptance - Achievement
Non-resistance - Aggressiveness
Mercy - Justice
Populist - Hierarchist
Centre - Periphery
Real - Ideal
Unconscious - Conscious
Maternal - Paternal
Communal - Individual
Communism - Capitalism
Saturn - Apollo
Communal - Individual
Communism - Capitalism
Saturn - Apollo
King - Prince
Senex - Puer
The aggressive, masculine youth longs to be free - or to put it another way, "context independent."
The Gossip Village is context. It situates the individual in a web of relatedness. The Gossip Village stands in direct contrast to "greatness"
Seated at the high table of civilisation, modern man sees himself as the inheritor of history, with all preceding cultures forming a more or less linear trajectory that leads inexorably to himself.
Within his progressive teleology, whatever helps development is good, and whatever hinders it is bad. The story of history is one of gradual 'levelling up.'
Hoel’s gossip trap is an analogue of BAP’s longhouse/gossip village - all are what we could call ‘scaling traps’ - cultural prophylactics that work to prevent maximisation of select variables at the expense of others i.e. ‘scaling up’. The progressive sees scaling traps as obstacles to be overcome, but from the viewpoint of tradition they are necessary safeguards against runaway growth and the destruction of tradition.
Your view of the trap is conditioned by your view of progress. Modern man assumes that progress is good because it leads to the boons of civilisation. Primitive man guards against it so as to safeguard his tradition.
In the eyes of primitive man, civilisation is a state of sickness, brought about by detachment from environment and denial of reality. Primitive man does not live in denial. Modern man represses negative feedback and assumes that his sick state is healthy and normal - the default, in fact - whereas to most preceding cultures he is an aberration.
Clearly the story of progress can be framed in opposite ways. Because the traditional view rejects the core assumptions of progressive teleology it cannot be ‘included’ within it on its own terms.
Primitive man didn’t ‘hinder progress’ with his scaling traps or his sluggish rate of innovation. Such interpretations fail to understand tradition on its own terms and so present little more than a simple picture book history.
The world for Nietzsche is full of people who are incapable of accomplishing what they hope to accomplish, people who want in vain to be brave, generous, strong, perhaps even cruel, or at least notorious in some way - people who want to, but cannot, leave a mark on history.
These are “the suffering,” those who […] have finally convinced themselves that their weaknesses are actually their virtues, the results of their choice rather than the shortcomings of their nature; they even take their weaknesses to be reasons why they will someday be rewarded “in another life.”
Unable to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world, they come to consider uniformity a virtue and impose it on everyone: this is how “the herd” is created.
The values of the weak, which Nietzsche considers moral at least in part because they are intended to be virtues that all must exhibit, aim to ease suffering caused by impotence by construing such impotence as an achievement.
The weak actually suffer from envy, from ressentiment, of the few “fortunate accidents of great success” who are not like them and who are unaffected by the morality of the herd.
[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 120-1
When you explain the way in which we behave on a genetic level there’s something that is missed, which is why I’m much more fond of explaining it in historical terms; [accepting that] ‘these are the things that have always been with us,’ and then to an extent making your peace with that. It means that you have a reasonable approach to things that you can’t do anything about.
You’ll never get rid of the hucksters, the liars; you’ll never get the world without hate. So have reasonable aspirations.
[Douglas Murray]
'Trust, truth and media in the pandemic, Douglas Murray' (53:00)
"I can't ever lose control with you"
The beloved compels us to be on our best behaviour, to be the best we can be at this moment in time.
And, inasmuch as this best behaviour runs contrary to our default patterns, it may sometimes seem like an act; as if we are playing the part of being good, whilst deep down maybe it isn't who we really are.
But the act needn't seem false; it is necessarily put on, and in putting it on we are able to craft ourselves, mould ourselves into the shape we want to be.
"Enough. Remember who you are"
Maintaining the act involves a frequent remembering. To stay on course may require constant minor adjustments, because we all forget the way from time to time.
Abstinence becomes a sign of inner strength, the hardest act to maintain. In conquering of one the strongest instincts (one of the strongest defaults), we light the road that leads to other victories.
The chaste brain has tremendous energy and gigantic will power. Without chastity there can be no spiritual strength. Continence gives wonderful control over mankind.The spiritual leaders of men have been very continent and this is what gave them power.
Chastity in thought, word and deed always and in all conditions is what is called Brahmacharya. Unchaste imagination is as bad as unchaste action. The Brahmacharin must be pure in thought, word and deed.
[Swami Vivekananda]
It is hardly worth dwelling on the neorealism that surfaced after World War II. It was characterized by the tendency in the artistic field to present as human reality only the most trivial and wretched sides of existence, mostly relating to the lowest and most vulnerable social strata.
The whole pose exhausted itself in a single phase; it appeared wanting in any dimension of depth, even virtual depth, and served as a sophisticated formula for certain intellectuals disguised as common folk.
When it was not reiterating banalities about the pathos of wretched people, it often took pleasure in ugliness and in masochism, in the complacent depiction of everything most abject, corrupt, and defeated in man. There is a whole genre of novels, unnecessary to name by title, in which this tendency appears undisguised, sometimes in combination with the most irrational and dark side of existentialism.
That which in actual life is only a sector of a complex reality is here characterized as reality itself: a misrepresentation too obvious to require further comment.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p.117
The foundations of liberalism were laid by a series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.
Three main efforts undergirded this revolution in thought and practice. First, politics would be based upon reliability of “the low” rather than aspiration to “the high.” The classical and Christian effort to foster virtue was rejected as both paternalistic and ineffectual, prone to abuse and unreliability.
It was Machiavelli who broke with the classical and Christian eduction in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies of “imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.”
[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.24-5
Everything [infants] do has to be regarded as above moral reproach and one hundred percent right. If you have an infant who is crying your job is not to judge, punish, or discipline the infant. The infant has a problem and all of your attention is to be focused on solving that problem.
And that’s great for people who are under six months, but it’s increasingly deadly as the child matures. An all-encompassing, ‘I will do everything for you’ is the enemy of development. That’s the Freudian nightmare, that’s what Freud put his finger on - he knew that was the pathology of the age: the Oedipal Mother. And that’s certainly what we see now.
If you put compassion in the highest place, that’s what you have - a state of being where everything is an infant, and the only hallmark of an ethic is pity.
The strong man glorified by Nietzsche could “see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint’s gentleness and self-severity.”
The debate between the two ideals - and the debate was “serious,” James insisted - came down to the choice between “aggressiveness” and “non-resistance.” Which provided the better “means of adaptation” to a world in which human projects and expectations so often came to nothing?
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p. 283
What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing (one wonders if they’ve ever seen social pressure applied). Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place.
And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats, i.e., gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that prevents individuals from accruing too much power.
According to the Davids, in the Hazda
“talented hunters are systematically mocked and belittled. . .”
And the evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm came to a similar conclusion:
“Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggats and bullies down to earth—ridicule, shaming, shunning. . .”
Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all.
So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip.
[Erik Hoel]
‘The gossip trap’, The Intrinsic Perspective, Substack
--
"Lockean individualism" is too painful and "alienating" for so many you see...the Blade Runner world will never come because these very many will use technology to reestablish the warmth and community (snooping) of the gossip village where moralistic matron peeks from the window.
[Bronze Age Pervert]
Twitter
Something essential will have been achieved when we revive the love for a style of active impersonality, through which what counts is the work and not the individual.
Through this, we become capable of not seeing ourselves as something important, since what is important is the function, the responsibility, the task accepted, and the end pursued.
[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, IV
Chaucer’s humanism is predicated on the common man, on our shared foibles and frailties, our daily muddle. He absolves his admirers of guilt. There is no fear and trembling in his theology. Chaucer’s conviviality is full of winks, chuckles, and nudges. The hearty warmth of it all makes my skin crawl.
Chaucer is a populist, while Spenser is a hierarchist. The Faerie Queene, like Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, is aristocratic in form and content. Chaucer, and here is his continuing appeal, accepts the flesh. But the Apollonian resists nature by its hostile eye-drawn line.
Wise Chaucer, putting roses in the cheeks of medieval asceticism, opposes absolutism and extremism in all things. But the idealizing Apollonian mode is absolutist and extremist from the first architectural overstatements of Old Kingdom Egypt. Western greatness is unwise, mad, inhuman.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.171-2
Related posts:-
A Higher Power
Budo
Walk a Straight Line
Stand Tall
Sailing the Turbulent Seas
The Middle Path
The aggressive, masculine youth longs to be free - or to put it another way, "context independent."
The Gossip Village is context. It situates the individual in a web of relatedness. The Gossip Village stands in direct contrast to "greatness"
Seated at the high table of civilisation, modern man sees himself as the inheritor of history, with all preceding cultures forming a more or less linear trajectory that leads inexorably to himself.
Within his progressive teleology, whatever helps development is good, and whatever hinders it is bad. The story of history is one of gradual 'levelling up.'
Hoel’s gossip trap is an analogue of BAP’s longhouse/gossip village - all are what we could call ‘scaling traps’ - cultural prophylactics that work to prevent maximisation of select variables at the expense of others i.e. ‘scaling up’. The progressive sees scaling traps as obstacles to be overcome, but from the viewpoint of tradition they are necessary safeguards against runaway growth and the destruction of tradition.
Your view of the trap is conditioned by your view of progress. Modern man assumes that progress is good because it leads to the boons of civilisation. Primitive man guards against it so as to safeguard his tradition.
In the eyes of primitive man, civilisation is a state of sickness, brought about by detachment from environment and denial of reality. Primitive man does not live in denial. Modern man represses negative feedback and assumes that his sick state is healthy and normal - the default, in fact - whereas to most preceding cultures he is an aberration.
Clearly the story of progress can be framed in opposite ways. Because the traditional view rejects the core assumptions of progressive teleology it cannot be ‘included’ within it on its own terms.
Primitive man didn’t ‘hinder progress’ with his scaling traps or his sluggish rate of innovation. Such interpretations fail to understand tradition on its own terms and so present little more than a simple picture book history.
The world for Nietzsche is full of people who are incapable of accomplishing what they hope to accomplish, people who want in vain to be brave, generous, strong, perhaps even cruel, or at least notorious in some way - people who want to, but cannot, leave a mark on history.
These are “the suffering,” those who […] have finally convinced themselves that their weaknesses are actually their virtues, the results of their choice rather than the shortcomings of their nature; they even take their weaknesses to be reasons why they will someday be rewarded “in another life.”
Unable to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world, they come to consider uniformity a virtue and impose it on everyone: this is how “the herd” is created.
The values of the weak, which Nietzsche considers moral at least in part because they are intended to be virtues that all must exhibit, aim to ease suffering caused by impotence by construing such impotence as an achievement.
The weak actually suffer from envy, from ressentiment, of the few “fortunate accidents of great success” who are not like them and who are unaffected by the morality of the herd.
[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 120-1
Morality is in Europe today herd-animal morality - that is to say, as we understand the thing, only one kind of human morality beside which, before which, after which many other, above all higher, moralities are possible or ought to be possible.
[…] with the aid of a religion which has gratified and flattered the sublimest herd-animal desires, it has got to the point where we discover even in political and social institutions an increasingly evident expression of this morality: the democratic movement inherits the Christian.
[…] at one in their tenacious opposition to every special claim, every special right and privilege (that is to say, in the last resort to every right: for when everyone is equal no one will need any rights? -); at one in their mistrust of punitive justice (as if it were an assault on the weaker, an injustice against the necessary consequence of all previous society - ); but equally at one in the religion of pity, in sympathy with whatever feels, lives, suffers (down as far as the animals, up as far as 'God' - the extravagance of ‘pity for God' belongs in a democratic era - ); at one, one and all, in the cry and impatience of pity, in mortal hatred for suffering in general, in their almost feminine incapacity to remain spectators of suffering, to let suffer; at one in their involuntary gloom and sensitivity, under whose spell Europe seems threatened with a new Buddhism; at one in their faith in the morality of mutual pity, as if it were morality in itself and the pinnacle, the attained pinnacle of man, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of the present and the great redemption from all the guilt of the past - at one, one and all, in their faith in the community as the saviour, that is to say in the herd, in 'themselves'...
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Beyond Good and Evil, 202
When you explain the way in which we behave on a genetic level there’s something that is missed, which is why I’m much more fond of explaining it in historical terms; [accepting that] ‘these are the things that have always been with us,’ and then to an extent making your peace with that. It means that you have a reasonable approach to things that you can’t do anything about.
You’ll never get rid of the hucksters, the liars; you’ll never get the world without hate. So have reasonable aspirations.
[Douglas Murray]
'Trust, truth and media in the pandemic, Douglas Murray' (53:00)
The beloved compels us to be on our best behaviour, to be the best we can be at this moment in time.
And, inasmuch as this best behaviour runs contrary to our default patterns, it may sometimes seem like an act; as if we are playing the part of being good, whilst deep down maybe it isn't who we really are.
But the act needn't seem false; it is necessarily put on, and in putting it on we are able to craft ourselves, mould ourselves into the shape we want to be.
"Enough. Remember who you are"
Maintaining the act involves a frequent remembering. To stay on course may require constant minor adjustments, because we all forget the way from time to time.
Abstinence becomes a sign of inner strength, the hardest act to maintain. In conquering of one the strongest instincts (one of the strongest defaults), we light the road that leads to other victories.
The chaste brain has tremendous energy and gigantic will power. Without chastity there can be no spiritual strength. Continence gives wonderful control over mankind.The spiritual leaders of men have been very continent and this is what gave them power.
Chastity in thought, word and deed always and in all conditions is what is called Brahmacharya. Unchaste imagination is as bad as unchaste action. The Brahmacharin must be pure in thought, word and deed.
[Swami Vivekananda]
It is hardly worth dwelling on the neorealism that surfaced after World War II. It was characterized by the tendency in the artistic field to present as human reality only the most trivial and wretched sides of existence, mostly relating to the lowest and most vulnerable social strata.
The whole pose exhausted itself in a single phase; it appeared wanting in any dimension of depth, even virtual depth, and served as a sophisticated formula for certain intellectuals disguised as common folk.
When it was not reiterating banalities about the pathos of wretched people, it often took pleasure in ugliness and in masochism, in the complacent depiction of everything most abject, corrupt, and defeated in man. There is a whole genre of novels, unnecessary to name by title, in which this tendency appears undisguised, sometimes in combination with the most irrational and dark side of existentialism.
That which in actual life is only a sector of a complex reality is here characterized as reality itself: a misrepresentation too obvious to require further comment.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p.117
The foundations of liberalism were laid by a series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.
Three main efforts undergirded this revolution in thought and practice. First, politics would be based upon reliability of “the low” rather than aspiration to “the high.” The classical and Christian effort to foster virtue was rejected as both paternalistic and ineffectual, prone to abuse and unreliability.
It was Machiavelli who broke with the classical and Christian eduction in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies of “imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.”
[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.24-5
Everything [infants] do has to be regarded as above moral reproach and one hundred percent right. If you have an infant who is crying your job is not to judge, punish, or discipline the infant. The infant has a problem and all of your attention is to be focused on solving that problem.
And that’s great for people who are under six months, but it’s increasingly deadly as the child matures. An all-encompassing, ‘I will do everything for you’ is the enemy of development. That’s the Freudian nightmare, that’s what Freud put his finger on - he knew that was the pathology of the age: the Oedipal Mother. And that’s certainly what we see now.
If you put compassion in the highest place, that’s what you have - a state of being where everything is an infant, and the only hallmark of an ethic is pity.
Jung said God rules with two hands - mercy and justice. And [justice] is discrimination, differentiation, judgement, putting things in their proper place, setting the highest above the lowest, formulating a pathway for further development.
A mother might say, 'You’re just fine the way you are', but what’s that to say to someone who is ten? You’re not fine the way you are! You’re ten! You’ve got a lot of growing up to do - and you’re probably not fine the way you are when you’re twenty. You’re just a fraction of what you could be. And if it’s all maternal compassion, and I mean that in the symbolic sense, then where’s the impetus for development?
The most abysmal thing you can tell eighteen year old boys, especially is they’re miserable, is ‘well you’re just okay the way you are.’ You can say, with the proper admixture of justice and mercy, ‘You’re not so bad for eighteen, and you can be way more.’ And that’s the spirit of justice, which is a patriarchal spirit fundamentally - the encouragement and calling forth of further development.
There has to be allowance for imperfection and error, while also an orientation towards a goal. And getting that balance right is part of what consciousness does. It constantly adjudicates between those two higher order principles. And there’s no final solution - you can’t just say, well we’re all compassionate and we’re done with it.
[Jordan Peterson]
‘Beyond Order Jordan B. Peterson Montreal | Host: Jonathan Pageau’
A mother might say, 'You’re just fine the way you are', but what’s that to say to someone who is ten? You’re not fine the way you are! You’re ten! You’ve got a lot of growing up to do - and you’re probably not fine the way you are when you’re twenty. You’re just a fraction of what you could be. And if it’s all maternal compassion, and I mean that in the symbolic sense, then where’s the impetus for development?
The most abysmal thing you can tell eighteen year old boys, especially is they’re miserable, is ‘well you’re just okay the way you are.’ You can say, with the proper admixture of justice and mercy, ‘You’re not so bad for eighteen, and you can be way more.’ And that’s the spirit of justice, which is a patriarchal spirit fundamentally - the encouragement and calling forth of further development.
There has to be allowance for imperfection and error, while also an orientation towards a goal. And getting that balance right is part of what consciousness does. It constantly adjudicates between those two higher order principles. And there’s no final solution - you can’t just say, well we’re all compassionate and we’re done with it.
[Jordan Peterson]
‘Beyond Order Jordan B. Peterson Montreal | Host: Jonathan Pageau’
The strong man glorified by Nietzsche could “see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint’s gentleness and self-severity.”
The debate between the two ideals - and the debate was “serious,” James insisted - came down to the choice between “aggressiveness” and “non-resistance.” Which provided the better “means of adaptation” to a world in which human projects and expectations so often came to nothing?
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p. 283
What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing (one wonders if they’ve ever seen social pressure applied). Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place.
And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats, i.e., gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that prevents individuals from accruing too much power.
According to the Davids, in the Hazda
“talented hunters are systematically mocked and belittled. . .”
And the evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm came to a similar conclusion:
“Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggats and bullies down to earth—ridicule, shaming, shunning. . .”
Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all.
So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip.
[Erik Hoel]
‘The gossip trap’, The Intrinsic Perspective, Substack
--
"Lockean individualism" is too painful and "alienating" for so many you see...the Blade Runner world will never come because these very many will use technology to reestablish the warmth and community (snooping) of the gossip village where moralistic matron peeks from the window.
[Bronze Age Pervert]
Something essential will have been achieved when we revive the love for a style of active impersonality, through which what counts is the work and not the individual.
Through this, we become capable of not seeing ourselves as something important, since what is important is the function, the responsibility, the task accepted, and the end pursued.
[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, IV
Chaucer’s humanism is predicated on the common man, on our shared foibles and frailties, our daily muddle. He absolves his admirers of guilt. There is no fear and trembling in his theology. Chaucer’s conviviality is full of winks, chuckles, and nudges. The hearty warmth of it all makes my skin crawl.
Chaucer is a populist, while Spenser is a hierarchist. The Faerie Queene, like Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, is aristocratic in form and content. Chaucer, and here is his continuing appeal, accepts the flesh. But the Apollonian resists nature by its hostile eye-drawn line.
Wise Chaucer, putting roses in the cheeks of medieval asceticism, opposes absolutism and extremism in all things. But the idealizing Apollonian mode is absolutist and extremist from the first architectural overstatements of Old Kingdom Egypt. Western greatness is unwise, mad, inhuman.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.171-2
Related posts:-
A Higher Power
Budo
Walk a Straight Line
Stand Tall
Sailing the Turbulent Seas
The Middle Path
