I would hazard an opinion that the opening ceremonies of the latest Olympic games were a "Stalingradification" of what was once the noble endeavour to determine the best athletes of this world. It is a perfect word and deserves to go viral.
The part about suicide really grabbed me. Someone once said (I forget attribution but it was a modern psychiatrist; it's not made up) that mass murder is suicide turned outward. At some point I plan to write about the narcisissm required for either (both) of these life extinguishing events. Until then, suffice to say that the pathology of destruction-without-rebuilding is something we should all question strongly, if not oppose entirely.
I am not the biggest fan of St. John Paul II, if he had done a better job of rooting out the predators and heretics we wouldn’t have Pope Francis the Silly today, but you said a lot here that echoes his warnings about the culture of death in the West. They proudly wear their emblems of death, the sterilization( in quite horrific ways) of children, the euthanasia of the old and inconvenient, and the murder of millions of innocents denied a chance to live. The abortion and vasectomy van at the democratic national convention was a bad look and I’m glad she paid the price for such an overt acknowledgement that her party had helped to make a world in which raising children is inconvenient at best and impossible at worst.
Their message is clear, if you aren’t having all the fun there is right this minute, life is pointless. Not something you build up, develop skills that you can take pride in, raise a family that two generations from now you can look back on with pleasure and a sense of accomplishment.
Your essays are well done and cut to the heart of the matter, you get out what you put in, and whatever the culture is urging you towards, run the other way.
Alas I fear your take on things is considered old fashioned. But it is of course the truth. Nothing comes easy. And the easy virtues they now sell are being exposed as dopamine traps destroying attention spans and lives.
Perhaps it is all just a big test. Some fail and some pass.
Thank you for reading. We must all do our bit to preserve what we can while the demons aim to destroy it all.
It is old fashioned, and I was very fortunate to have had a traditional life as a stay at home wife and mother. It was such a good life, and open to everyone, whatever their class or education, throughout history up until the past 50 years, it makes me sad to realize that it has all but disappeared. Perhaps the coming hard times will make men and women realize that they need each other to make a home and protect themselves and their children from the buffeting of modern life. Women especially, suffering from a mind altering cloud of antidepressants, birth control pills, and left wing politics will hopefully return to reality some day soon.
For me, the closest-to-home example of this establishment-sanctioned historical and cultural erasure/profanity was the Scottish government website which announced guidance to all gov and local gov buildings as to which flags to fly on specific days of the year following. As I recall, the third Sunday in November was to be marked by flying the "transgender" flag. To mark International Transgender Remembrance Day, of course. Despicable.
There's a great attraction in the occidental mind for false pairs (or "Dick'O'Tommies" as the modern academics like to call it). Here, the pairing of destruction and creation comes to mind as it is often stated in post-1950s pop-culture and other media - explicit or implicit - that in order to create, you must first destroy.
It is also often argued, in a clandestine and subtle manner (intertextual, some might say) that destruction is creation, and vice versa, turning the opposing concepts (falsely opposed) into an Ouroboros.
While it may be true, sometimes, and can be made to be true if one wishes it so, there's nothing that forces creation to be destruction or vice versa, or them being opposed. Not even the relativistic fall-back position of destruction-creation simply being change is wholly true.
To make firewood, you fell a tree. The process is creation, destruction and change. I mention this to show how deceptively easy it is to think that way, and how conditioned we are - have been made, even - to do so instinctively.
But is it true? Only language-wise. Only in semantics. In reality, I make out of a tree firewood. Not destroy, not create, not change. To use the create-destroy-change model is done because it shatters the links of causality and meaning and purpose, akin to taking a pair of scissors to a paper with a text written on it and cutting out the words one by one. Which is also the purpose: establish control of language and by language thought and by thought perception and by perception reality.
The counter to this is to speak true and think true.
How it pertains to history is rather obvious: what is said to have happened becomes what happened, the one doing the telling is the arbiter of reality.
(Incidentally, in my native tongue, the word for history the subject and story as in fairy-tale and legend is the same: historia. Makes it a lot easier to remember that history is the stories we tell about the past.)
As Frank Herbert said in the Dune novels, "Once you have a marketplace soul, the souk becomes the totality of existence".
In God Emperor, the Museum Fremen are degenerate LARPers, pale shadows of their warrior ancestors. There's a scene in which one of them sells a duplicate crysknife, which the earlier novels make clear was not merely a weapon, but a sacred artifact of their culture & religion. Making a copy for sale would've been unthinkable sacrilege to the original Fremen, who would've considered such an act worthy of the death tripod (FH doesn't elaborate on this execution method, but one can imagine). It also mentions the Museum Fremen imitating the religious rituals as entertainment for tourists, and so on.
Point being, Frank Herbert, via Dune, basically predicted this degeneration via commodification.
The Spartans did this too. As a Briton it is my great fear we will become some kind of Harry Potter themepark, LARPing around with union jacks and statues of Churchill. They certainly are not teaching proper history to the kids, so they will have no idea what they are losing.
Herbert was a great observer in my view. He has inspired a few pieces on here if you are interested.
Looks like I've read 2/3, just need to catch up with "fear is the mind-killer".
And yes, that's another good example. I recall reading that Roman senators would take trips to Sparta to wrestle with youths and watch/participate in reenacted rites. That was the final indignity heaped upon the mightiest land power of Hellas after its fall -- to be turned into an amusement park, a hollow mockery of its former self.
Humankind has been reduced to rubble. Collectively we are treating Creation or The Divine Gift as it were mud.
The leading edge of this now everywhere mud-ification or enshittification project is of course Trumpty Dumpty or the Tangerine Tyrant.
He is a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian, a pathological liar and a life long professional grifter.
Every time he opens his potty-mouth he makes a mockery of the normative traditions and wisdom upon which a truly civilized culture is based.
He comes out of the sucker-is-born-every-minute showbiz tradition of P T Barnum. Barnum was of course wrong - there are now thousands of suckers born every minute.
Look at the kind of bull-shit religiosity that he promotes via his American Bible.
I would hazard an opinion that the opening ceremonies of the latest Olympic games were a "Stalingradification" of what was once the noble endeavour to determine the best athletes of this world. It is a perfect word and deserves to go viral.
The part about suicide really grabbed me. Someone once said (I forget attribution but it was a modern psychiatrist; it's not made up) that mass murder is suicide turned outward. At some point I plan to write about the narcisissm required for either (both) of these life extinguishing events. Until then, suffice to say that the pathology of destruction-without-rebuilding is something we should all question strongly, if not oppose entirely.
Yes I agree. There is a lot of outright destruction, not the creative destruction we expect. The new replacing the old.
This is old fashioned intolerance by and large.
As for the narcissism. The narcissist must control their world lest their real self be revealed. So a lot of the rage is this.
I suspect much of what drives the destruction is envy. Our ancestors were confident and capable. That is enough for many to trigger them.
I am not the biggest fan of St. John Paul II, if he had done a better job of rooting out the predators and heretics we wouldn’t have Pope Francis the Silly today, but you said a lot here that echoes his warnings about the culture of death in the West. They proudly wear their emblems of death, the sterilization( in quite horrific ways) of children, the euthanasia of the old and inconvenient, and the murder of millions of innocents denied a chance to live. The abortion and vasectomy van at the democratic national convention was a bad look and I’m glad she paid the price for such an overt acknowledgement that her party had helped to make a world in which raising children is inconvenient at best and impossible at worst.
Their message is clear, if you aren’t having all the fun there is right this minute, life is pointless. Not something you build up, develop skills that you can take pride in, raise a family that two generations from now you can look back on with pleasure and a sense of accomplishment.
Your essays are well done and cut to the heart of the matter, you get out what you put in, and whatever the culture is urging you towards, run the other way.
Alas I fear your take on things is considered old fashioned. But it is of course the truth. Nothing comes easy. And the easy virtues they now sell are being exposed as dopamine traps destroying attention spans and lives.
Perhaps it is all just a big test. Some fail and some pass.
Thank you for reading. We must all do our bit to preserve what we can while the demons aim to destroy it all.
It is old fashioned, and I was very fortunate to have had a traditional life as a stay at home wife and mother. It was such a good life, and open to everyone, whatever their class or education, throughout history up until the past 50 years, it makes me sad to realize that it has all but disappeared. Perhaps the coming hard times will make men and women realize that they need each other to make a home and protect themselves and their children from the buffeting of modern life. Women especially, suffering from a mind altering cloud of antidepressants, birth control pills, and left wing politics will hopefully return to reality some day soon.
I do hope women can be cured of their ills. I sense the younger ones are lost though.
For me, the closest-to-home example of this establishment-sanctioned historical and cultural erasure/profanity was the Scottish government website which announced guidance to all gov and local gov buildings as to which flags to fly on specific days of the year following. As I recall, the third Sunday in November was to be marked by flying the "transgender" flag. To mark International Transgender Remembrance Day, of course. Despicable.
Completely lost.
Damnatio memoriae: Damnation of memory. The deliberate erasure of any evidence of the past. That Latin high school was of some good after all.
Brilliant article. I will do my bit.
We must all do our bit lest we lose it all to the crazy.
You’re very right, we must. And I will.
There's a great attraction in the occidental mind for false pairs (or "Dick'O'Tommies" as the modern academics like to call it). Here, the pairing of destruction and creation comes to mind as it is often stated in post-1950s pop-culture and other media - explicit or implicit - that in order to create, you must first destroy.
It is also often argued, in a clandestine and subtle manner (intertextual, some might say) that destruction is creation, and vice versa, turning the opposing concepts (falsely opposed) into an Ouroboros.
While it may be true, sometimes, and can be made to be true if one wishes it so, there's nothing that forces creation to be destruction or vice versa, or them being opposed. Not even the relativistic fall-back position of destruction-creation simply being change is wholly true.
To make firewood, you fell a tree. The process is creation, destruction and change. I mention this to show how deceptively easy it is to think that way, and how conditioned we are - have been made, even - to do so instinctively.
But is it true? Only language-wise. Only in semantics. In reality, I make out of a tree firewood. Not destroy, not create, not change. To use the create-destroy-change model is done because it shatters the links of causality and meaning and purpose, akin to taking a pair of scissors to a paper with a text written on it and cutting out the words one by one. Which is also the purpose: establish control of language and by language thought and by thought perception and by perception reality.
The counter to this is to speak true and think true.
How it pertains to history is rather obvious: what is said to have happened becomes what happened, the one doing the telling is the arbiter of reality.
(Incidentally, in my native tongue, the word for history the subject and story as in fairy-tale and legend is the same: historia. Makes it a lot easier to remember that history is the stories we tell about the past.)
As Frank Herbert said in the Dune novels, "Once you have a marketplace soul, the souk becomes the totality of existence".
In God Emperor, the Museum Fremen are degenerate LARPers, pale shadows of their warrior ancestors. There's a scene in which one of them sells a duplicate crysknife, which the earlier novels make clear was not merely a weapon, but a sacred artifact of their culture & religion. Making a copy for sale would've been unthinkable sacrilege to the original Fremen, who would've considered such an act worthy of the death tripod (FH doesn't elaborate on this execution method, but one can imagine). It also mentions the Museum Fremen imitating the religious rituals as entertainment for tourists, and so on.
Point being, Frank Herbert, via Dune, basically predicted this degeneration via commodification.
The Spartans did this too. As a Briton it is my great fear we will become some kind of Harry Potter themepark, LARPing around with union jacks and statues of Churchill. They certainly are not teaching proper history to the kids, so they will have no idea what they are losing.
Herbert was a great observer in my view. He has inspired a few pieces on here if you are interested.
https://abysspostcard.substack.com/t/frank-herbert
Looks like I've read 2/3, just need to catch up with "fear is the mind-killer".
And yes, that's another good example. I recall reading that Roman senators would take trips to Sparta to wrestle with youths and watch/participate in reenacted rites. That was the final indignity heaped upon the mightiest land power of Hellas after its fall -- to be turned into an amusement park, a hollow mockery of its former self.
Exactly that. They would even whip actors in a mockery of Spartan stoicism. All a spectacle for wealthy Romans.
Humankind has been reduced to rubble. Collectively we are treating Creation or The Divine Gift as it were mud.
The leading edge of this now everywhere mud-ification or enshittification project is of course Trumpty Dumpty or the Tangerine Tyrant.
He is a religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian, a pathological liar and a life long professional grifter.
Every time he opens his potty-mouth he makes a mockery of the normative traditions and wisdom upon which a truly civilized culture is based.
He comes out of the sucker-is-born-every-minute showbiz tradition of P T Barnum. Barnum was of course wrong - there are now thousands of suckers born every minute.
Look at the kind of bull-shit religiosity that he promotes via his American Bible.
"Every time he opens his potty-mouth..."
You nailed it. Every time I see Trump's funny-shaped oval mouth (does he do it on purpose?) I will think of the opening of a toilet bowl.