Ontological Shocks, Total Pyrrhonean Semioclasis and a Soul Set for Liberty [continuation]
So, off the board went, without qualms or regret, things which framed everything I strove for my entire life and on account of which I entertained vague fantasies of 'posterity'. It felt like truth and it felt like freedom and, more, it felt clean and healthy...
What will be the following ontological shock, is impossible to say, for no sane person can anticipate the content of the next episode of psychotics...
For a mind in the habit of thinking, used to the discipline of reasoning, conclusions are not hard to accept, you go where the facts and the logic lead you: a new tyranny is rising and is moving at cruising speed. More difficult is the problem what to _do with the conclusion_...
I can tell this much to the reader who will happen across these lines.
I had spent my entire life until my mid 20s in an Eastern European communist totalitarian regime. _They will not succeed_, this tyrannical version on steroids, aiming globally, with its 'scientific' justifications and its high tech armament of repression. Large-scale 'control' is the pipe dream of the Machiavellians, and such control _is not possible_.
Machiavellians of all persuasions are sociopaths at their core. They believe in the infinite malleability and manipulability of the human mind. They believe that humans are born 'tabula rasa' and they can inscribe on their minds whatever designs of anthropogenesis and social engineering they hallucinate. These basic beliefs _are false_.
Following Dr. Malone's soul searching, and equally from personal experience, the experience of a young professional cast long ago in a compulsory work place away from home, feverishly digging for understanding in the permitted but mostly irrelevant books, experience which framed the rest of my life (call it my formative existential crisis) --- I know these _other_ basic beliefs, namely: that people distinguish innately between good and evil; that as a consequence the drive for liberty has precedence; that people _independently_ come to find again and again the language of liberty - words, concepts, arguments; that they can summon the grit to withstand tyranny within, and that, sooner or later, they will find the courage and the means to oppose it. Whether you believe in natural instinct, in God or in the soul, _this_ is the ineradicable truth about human nature. And, if you cannot believe any of the above but still resist Machiavelianism, then at least tell yourself that these are the beliefs _worth having_: at least you will not feel despondent, dejected, forlorn _and powerless_. Heck, even mathematics is founded on basic beliefs (axioms), so you _must_ believe in something, isn't it?
And here is another rationale, this time, learned 'cold': control congeals life, energy, creativity. Control makes things brittle and brittle things break easily (see also Taleb on antifragility). Tyranny is _self_ destructive. It originates in malice, in spite, it grows by negative-sum games, and these all are eating away and finally take down the agents. Tyranny is the cancer of social life.
Even though the new tyranny will not succeed, it can produce a lot of damage - suffering, destruction, death, it may take a long time to meet its appointed time with Ananke, and it may become full blown before we, the older generation, are dead. But, heck, nobody leaves this place alive so, how we live, what we think, say and do, makes all the difference. The difference which may be the only big thing at stake.
Note. Comment submitted to Principia-Scientific, to the Australian League of Rights and to Mike Zimmer's epheptikoi substack.
So, off the board went, without qualms or regret, things which framed everything I strove for my entire life and on account of which I entertained vague fantasies of 'posterity'. It felt like truth and it felt like freedom and, more, it felt clean and healthy...
What will be the following ontological shock, is impossible to say, for no sane person can anticipate the content of the next episode of psychotics...
For a mind in the habit of thinking, used to the discipline of reasoning, conclusions are not hard to accept, you go where the facts and the logic lead you: a new tyranny is rising and is moving at cruising speed. More difficult is the problem what to _do with the conclusion_...
I can tell this much to the reader who will happen across these lines.
I had spent my entire life until my mid 20s in an Eastern European communist totalitarian regime. _They will not succeed_, this tyrannical version on steroids, aiming globally, with its 'scientific' justifications and its high tech armament of repression. Large-scale 'control' is the pipe dream of the Machiavellians, and such control _is not possible_.
Machiavellians of all persuasions are sociopaths at their core. They believe in the infinite malleability and manipulability of the human mind. They believe that humans are born 'tabula rasa' and they can inscribe on their minds whatever designs of anthropogenesis and social engineering they hallucinate. These basic beliefs _are false_.
Following Dr. Malone's soul searching, and equally from personal experience, the experience of a young professional cast long ago in a compulsory work place away from home, feverishly digging for understanding in the permitted but mostly irrelevant books, experience which framed the rest of my life (call it my formative existential crisis) --- I know these _other_ basic beliefs, namely: that people distinguish innately between good and evil; that as a consequence the drive for liberty has precedence; that people _independently_ come to find again and again the language of liberty - words, concepts, arguments; that they can summon the grit to withstand tyranny within, and that, sooner or later, they will find the courage and the means to oppose it. Whether you believe in natural instinct, in God or in the soul, _this_ is the ineradicable truth about human nature. And, if you cannot believe any of the above but still resist Machiavelianism, then at least tell yourself that these are the beliefs _worth having_: at least you will not feel despondent, dejected, forlorn _and powerless_. Heck, even mathematics is founded on basic beliefs (axioms), so you _must_ believe in something, isn't it?
And here is another rationale, this time, learned 'cold': control congeals life, energy, creativity. Control makes things brittle and brittle things break easily (see also Taleb on antifragility). Tyranny is _self_ destructive. It originates in malice, in spite, it grows by negative-sum games, and these all are eating away and finally take down the agents. Tyranny is the cancer of social life.
Even though the new tyranny will not succeed, it can produce a lot of damage - suffering, destruction, death, it may take a long time to meet its appointed time with Ananke, and it may become full blown before we, the older generation, are dead. But, heck, nobody leaves this place alive so, how we live, what we think, say and do, makes all the difference. The difference which may be the only big thing at stake.
Note. Comment submitted to Principia-Scientific, to the Australian League of Rights and to Mike Zimmer's epheptikoi substack.