A word of praise

I was reading The Middle Class Quiet Riot and came across one of the most insightful quotes I’ve encountered recently:

“God may be dead, but his copybook headings hold illimitable dominion over all.”

Another way to put it, is to re-avow my assertion that it is madness to deny the primacy of human nature in human beings.

Hi ho Sliver! Away!

I’m going to explain why what could be called “female morality” is generally inferior.

Okay, some background: women possess more active “mirroring neurons” than men — studies don’t indicate a mismatch in number of such neurons, but they’re far more active in female brains. These neurons are a kind of hardwired empathetic system; they make the possessor literally feel what they see other people feeling. Because of this, feminists and such like to assert that women are morally superior, because they are “more empathetic” and thus more inclined to reduce suffering, or something like that.

However, if you think about it, this is the worst kind of lie — the kind which sounds quite convincing, and is actually dangerously wrong.

Mirroring neurons work by basically guessing what someone must be feeling based on what you observe them to be experiencing; they essentially give you the sensation you would feel if what was happening to the other person happened to you. What is wrong with this picture? It shouldn’t take a rocket surgeon to work it out.

This mirroring system works great in small and intimate environments — say, a mother raising her kids, and interacting with her family; she knows these people well, they’re all from a similar context, and they will have enough common ground that they’ll probably respond similarly to a given stimulus.

However, in the isolated, mixed-up, and economically disparate culture we have now … it completely breaks down; a woman can’t easily imagine what something will feel like to other people, unless they’re exactly like her. Because of this whole obsession with “diversity” and “racial mixing” (which are, incidentally, mutually exclusive) and other such concepts, this entire framework lies in shambles.

And that’s a mess, but it is actually far worse in application than that description implies, because of the real problem: any system of ethics which relies on this kind of empathy is inherently selfish.

Let’s take a situation which might have been common-place in America 100 years ago, or is still common-place in other areas of the world today: living with no (or limited) power or running water.

Children raised in these areas of the world are acclimated to these conditions; they thinks it’s normal to heat water in a kettle to bathe, or to wash clothes by hand.

But your average first-world, middle-class, female-oriented moral being will basically put themselves into this situation, imagine suffering beyond description (because they’re weak and would just die without hot running water, etc.), and would immediately call it abuse or suffering.

Even though nobody is unhappy and the child is thriving.

The quintessence of female morality is, “I can’t bear to watch.”

They don’t end suffering because the other person suffers, they end it because they don’t want discomfort — “it’s hard to watch, so I must make it stop.” Nowhere in this construct is latitude for individual variation, or self determination.

And because we gave women the vote (and men are more loyal than women), our entire legal structure is now centred around female morality — which is why things like political correctness and nanny-state child protection laws are enshrined in our legal structure. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why this is a bad thing.

Rockface Rumble

Every few weeks, I come across some new headline: “NEWSFLASH: SCIENTISTS CONFIRM OLD WIVES’ TALE” and the irony compels me to giggle: Every generation we think our wisdom surpasses that of our elders, and every generation mocks their predecessors for their hubris. Every time we discover some evidence that “the ancients” had some understanding of engineering, or physics, or medicine, we’re amazed — as if it were unthinkable that anyone without our advances and knowledge could possibly stumble across any kind of lasting truth — you know, the kind which lasts until the next study comes out to prove it wrong.

Modern scientists have the delusion that they can a priori determine the relevant factors in a system. They also believe they can a priori determine the stabilisation period for systems they don’t understand. We claim to know the secrets, the answers have been found, but how can one fool make another wise?

This is why we keep getting cancer from new drugs: scientists dream up some new alchemy they believe will help some condition, but their study is invariably limited to a very short duration, and if few enough people show obvious problems during that eye-blink of a study, they call the drug “safe” and it’s only a decade later, when half the users of the drug suddenly have bladder cancer, that everyone goes, “Huh, those studies weren’t thorough enough — oh well, come take the next drug! Don’t worry, it’s safe — we did a study!”

Compare this to the model of “traditional science” — or the science of house-wives: women are keen observers and meticulous recorders of factual data; anyone who’s dated one will know how terribly long and accurate their memories can be. The tight-knit circles that women traditionally tend to clump into, combined with their endless gossiping, means that no observation goes undiscussed; no ailment or failure or illness goes unnoticed. These women are not stupid. If they notice that women tend to have miscarriages after having contact with a certain herb, or that certain foods appeared to speed recovery of illness, that information eventually becomes encoded into one of those “old wives’ tales” which modern fashion derides with such abandon.

This slow, meticulous, and plodding accrual of knowledge is amazingly effective, and it applies as much to psychology or sociology as it does medicine: there is a reason every successful religion promotes rapid reproduction, cohesive family units, and structured interaction between family members, along with imposing an external existential framework upon its members and governing the basis of interaction between different families — because religions have twenty thousand years of refinement to their model of successful family dynamics, and the model of how families cohere together into societies. Let me put this more explicitly: healthy families, not healthy individuals, are the basic building blocks of a successful society.

The practice of “science” in this modern culture has led to some great advances, but it carries yet-invisible gangrenous rot within; the reason it has not destabilised as quickly as our culture, is because people are more perverse than facts.

And Little Lambs Eat Ivy

Mother nature is better than the human race.

Drag your beady eyes away from the shiny lights and whirring mechanisms and look outside. The world is bigger than you; it is a social and biological experiment which has been running for billions of years.

A forest can last for thousands, perhaps millions, of years comparitively unchanged, given the proper climate; there are trees which took root as the pyramids were being raised; the oceans are eternal, bounded only by the sun’s lifespan.

Against this aeon-spanning majesty, measure our achievements: cities which require endless slavery to support, vehicles which poison and destroy, and societies which invariably decay into despotism and crumble into nothing.

Mother nature is a dust mote on a finger of the infinitely long hand of the universe; in the face of everything that is, we are beyond insignificant — our greatest triumphs and our highest wisdom are incalculably irrelevant.

And it is the height of hubris to think that we know better than either; it is beyond insanity to claim that we can gainsay the world.

Pacifists are the most pretentious of cowards, because they are afraid to acknowledge their own place in the world, however insignificant: they make pretence of advances they do not possess, and perspective they do not hold.

Every Spring, the new year is inducted with destruction, and death, and violence; every Autumn comes the winnowing of the frost, where the weak perish and the strong prey upon them, the stronger upon the strong. And thus continues the way of the world, a way which has persisted for time beyond imagining (do not delude yourself by pretending you can really comprehend “two billion years”), and we are a part of it whether we like it or not.

Change occurs by violence. Upheaval causes destruction; it is inevitable, and yet these insufferably pretentious children think they know a better way! They hem and haw and make uncomfortable noises when one asks them for a single example of true change accomplished by peace — they claim, like any religion, that the rapture true power of peace will make itself apparent in the sixties in the seventies in the nineties any day now.

“Occupy” will accomplish nothing, except perhaps to annoy people; childish posturing and ineffectual bickering are a poor substitute for fire and sword.

HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE

People hate food.

I don’t really know when it started: maybe with TV dinners; maybe with the microwave; there’s no way to know for sure.

Eating is one of the most primal and intimate acts we can engage in; to break bread together has been seen as a deeply and symbolic act for time beyond reckoning; in doing so we literally accept into our bodies that which sustains us: without food we are nothing.

So what does it say, when we begin to attack food itself?

I can safely guess that most of you have never eaten fruit off the vine (and no, visiting a farm somewhere once doesn’t count); there is something unimaginably potent in living close enough to the world that one can touch the very source of one’s sustenance. I do not own the tree, and yet it serves me; in turn I serve it, if I obey the ancient ways and perform my body in the capacity for which it was designed.

In plainer terms: apples taste good so I’ll eat them and shit out the seeds somewhere else — or at least discard the core further from the tree than it might have fallen itself (ever wondered at the near-compulsive urge to throw apple cores after eating?).

This is called an exchange, and it is one of innumerably many which hold this world together.

Apples bought in supermarkets are sterile; even if you plant every seed with the greatest of care, the likelihood of one sprouting is virtually zero. You have enslaved the tree, for you no longer serve it, although it continues to serve you — and this is the most cold and cruel of servitude, for you lay hands never upon your slaves, not in care, not in harvest, and not to lay it down when its use to you ends.

As you chain yourselves together tighter and tighter, you squeeze out the essence of life; among this essence is found the love of food (not gluttony, or the desire to gorge, but a love of food for its own sake; the art, the sustenance, and the bonding it represents), which is so utterly essential to loving one’s self — how can you love something composed of things you hate?

You do not love yourselves, for you know that your lives are empty and your spirits have crumbled to dust — and dust is all you eat: dust brought to the golem’s semblance of life by the concoctions of those modern alchemists who have transformed figurative lead into literal fools’ gold which brings the promise of good fare to the palate, while distracting the tongue and betraying the belly of those who eat them — and all of you do:

The phrases “natural flavours” and “artificial flavours” are functionally identical in meaning, and both are found in virtually everything you can buy at any store. Without them, without the dyes and additives which lend colour and texture, and without the artificially re-introduced nutrients, what you eat every day would be similar to shredded card board — actually, it is card board:

Little things like actually using “food” in items sold to be eaten is going out of fashion; a towering majority of commercial food products use cellulose — wood pulp — instead of, oh, flour.

It pains me, and shames me on behalf of the human race, that I must remind you that wood is not food, and neither is gold; it is bizarre and horrific that you have retained your gluttony while apprehending a hatred of that which you eat.

No wonder you are fat: no amount of food can ever fill the hole where your soul might have been.

“And that is the story, kids, of how I met your mother.”

Whither left our dreams, I asked, some months ago; I suppose now is as good a time as any to begin formulating the answer.

If you are reading this, it is overwhelmingly likely you live in a city; where in the world is irrelevant.

Most of you hole-dwellers have never known freedom. America, Europe, Australia, it doesn’t matter — you are not free, and even as you lie every day to yourself to the contrary, you know that this is true.

Freedom is a lack of restriction; can you recall even once in your life when you could have done anything — ANYTHING — without fear of the consequences?

No, you do not remember this; all you know is fear. Every moment of every day, you live in fear.

I don’t really care if you believe otherwise; you are lying, and I know it, and you know it, even if you fear to admit it.

Freedom is being able to lie down and sleep when you are tired, or eat when you are hungry; freedom is being able to build a house without a permit. Freedom is knowing you could dance naked in a field, painted bright blue, and be mocked only by the wind, who dances as no human ever could. Freedom is knowing that if you reject the rules of your society, that you could leave it behind — without simply trading one set of shackles for another.

There is not one sliver of land on this planet which is not claimed by some country or other. I want you to think about this — about the implications. There is the long-held and oft-stated belief that laws are “social contracts” — in essence, that in exchange for living in a given society, that one gives up certain “freedoms” in exchange for structure, protection, and the companionship of other human beings. What exchange, however, is an offer one cannot refuse?

If you believe that child slavery is wrong; that parents should not be able to sell their children into bondage, how can you say that a man should be inexorably bound by laws he has no choice but to accept? What kind of a “contract” is an agreement made simply by being conceived?

The bubbles of light we call cities are a place of human structure; to live in a city is to conform to the social norms of that city, and this is necessary for the structure to survive — but you city dwellers believe that the bondage you have accepted in exchange for protection and sustenance should apply to everyone, willing or not.

To come into a city is to accept that one is entering a place of order and agreeing to bide thereby, but when every living man, woman, and child is chained to the light, no matter where they go, they are not free, and they live in fear of the chains they can never escape, and the chains can tighten, inexorably, forever constraining more tightly, until the breath of life — of living, as opposed to simple existence — is choked entirely from them.

And they are you.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

So I came across this today, and among the many other avenues of comment I can devise, one stands out:

If this situation were reversed — that is, if it were two men and one woman — both men would be facing charges of assault, kidnapping, rape, and probably attempted murder.

The threat this kind of inequity represents cannot be over-stated . . . but an explanation of the precise mechanism must wait for another day.