As this goes on
Man bows and prays to the Neon God he made
Bird flu comes in and Covid continues and war drums beat louder and louder and this insanity can be dated to 2020 “anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi", which translates to "in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ. Nietzsche says, "the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable", everything that was "built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it", including "the whole [...] European morality is bound to "collapse". Yes, he was correct.
I find horrifying what Anders finds horrifying in Kafka-this crazy NORMAL is day to day life. What Anders finds horrifying in Kafka is that the protagonists of his novels find themselves in absurd and distressing situations, but experience them as if they were normal. When Gregor Samsa wakes up as a cockroach, he does not express shock, pain or anger, but accepts that condition without dismay. The dominant feature of Kafka's narrative is not the irruption of evil but the absence of any reaction, resistance, rebellion or refusal on the part of the victims, who adapt to the condition into which they fall. An absolute, grotesque, inhuman realism, immediately with transcendental obtuseness. Kafka sacrifices intelligence and reason, but also every civic and political sense. And this, for Anders, is to be deplored. I translate: he is a bad teacher. The victims of his stories collaborate with the executioners, accept torture: they feel excluded from the world, deprived of rights and duties, in the wrong. https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/kafka-un-grande-ma-cattivo-maestro/
Miguel de Unamuno "There are people who appear to think only with the brain, while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life."
I am afraid that our era has replaced the human only by a head. A head more over befitting Gregor Samsa. A head that is almost insane. Dr. Iain McGilchrist argues that many of the problems our society faces stem from the fact that the left hemisphere of our brains has come to dominate our minds and lives. McGilchrist argues from his research "The left hemisphere's goal is to enable us to manipulate things, whereas the goal of the right hemisphere is to relate to things and understand them as a whole. Two ways of thinking that are both needed, but are fundamentally at the same time incompatible." "A way of thinking which is reductive, mechanistic has taken us over," said McGilchrist in The Divided Brain. "We behave like people who have right hemisphere damage. "[Left Hemisphere] treats the world as a simple resource to be exploited. It's made us enormously powerful. It's enabled us to become wealthy, but it's also meant that we've lost the means to understand the world, to make sense of it, to feel satisfaction and fulfilment through our place in the world."
Berel Lang wrote an essay titled “Genocide and Kant’s Enlightenment,” which appeared in his Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. In this essay Lang uncovers certain lines of affinity between some classical aspects of Enlightenment thought, and the Nazi genocide. His conclusion is that there are two important aspects of the Enlightenment that formed the intellectual heritage, which needed to be in place, for genocide to occur in the heart of civilized Europe: namely, the universalization of rational ideals, and the redefinition of the individual human being in terms of its possessing or not such a universal rationality. The genocide, Lang argues, was aimed at those groups who stuck to their own ancient pre-Enlightenment sources of particularistic identity, considered “irrational.” Hence the racial laws and racial exclusion were expression of ingrained Enlightenment prejudices. Which is to say, the Enlightenment sheds light on everything except itself; it remains to be enlightened. Sound familiar? Lockdowns. Vaccinations. Masks. Social distance. And now of course WHO tyranny.
This then which, in the final analysis, is more obscurantist than religious fanaticism and fundamentalism. Here we have an “enlightened” era throwing out the window the baby with t1he bathwater and arrogantly refusing any suggestion that it ought to enlighten itself, and not with its own light?
This conjures up that terrible face to face encounter of Dante with the poet Bertrand Del Bornio in a cave in hell doing “light to himself” with its own decapitated head. There we have reason eating its own tail; internal logical thinking and assuming the grammar of lunacy.
Marcello Veneziani writes-Marxism has been the culture of the transition from the Christian-bourgeois society—of which we find the insuperable example in the work of Benedetto Croce—to the bourgeois society in its pure state. We could even say that Marxism represented the “transition to the worst” in the sense that, through Marxism, bourgeois society has shed every residual moral and religious sense, unburdening itself of all “impurities” that still tied it to traditional society, thus presenting itself as full materialism and full secularism. The West has realized everything of Marxism, except its messianic hope. “Socialism” Veneziani writes “has not inherited capitalist society, but has become included, entangled in capitalism itself; in many respects, it has been the intermediate stop on the journey from capitalism to neo-capitalism.” Veneziani notices that Western society realizes the essence of Marxism: “radical atheism and materialism, internationalism and universal non-belonging, the primacy of praxis and the death of philosophy, the domination of production and the universal manipulation of nature, technological Faustianism and equality that realizes itself as homogenization.” The new globalist liberalism, Veneziani observes, absorbs the lesson of Marxism, purifying it of all prophetic, gnostic and anti-modern slag, and of solidaristic suggestions.
Therefore we can say that the West is Marxism’s full secularization, as well as its perfect realization. It is Capitalism that absorbs Communism, using it to erase religious sacredness and national sacredness, a goal it could not have reached in any other way.
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Touches on what I have been thinking just latterly.
People are fashionably alienated from their bodies. They forget that their bodies are intrinsically part of themselves.
For many, mention of a *soul* is forbidden talk as too religious.
So I must phrase such conversations as the body is part of one's identity, or being, or personality or individual nature.
For them I liken it to a dog. A dog tends to be in touch with its body. A poodle doesn't think that it is a rottweiler.
This also leads me to declare that people who clip their dogs and dress them in clothes and ribbons are messing with the dog.
Other dogs can spot these transdogs and such transdogs will sense the response that they get from other dogs as hurtful to their sense of self confidence. It confuses the dog that has been toyed with.
"A way of thinking which is reductive, mechanistic has taken us over..."
Yes. Physicalist reductionism is a philosophical doctrine, i.e. materialism, not the 'consumerism' kind but the idea that only physical matter is real and exists. The average person does not know what physicalist reductionism is or that it exists, let alone that it is accepted as "the truth" by almost all philosophers and theoretical physicists. But it is the basis of leftism from Hobbes to Marx to the present. And it permeates all thought now.