Oceans Yet to Burn

forgetfuljust

Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment. Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts. Plus, people just think about stuff. This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.
Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant. This forms the basis for the selective pressure.

Yes, that was my argument. Ideas form “randomly” (let’s say) then go through a form of natural selection. The ones that produce a stable society come out on top. My claim is that those ideas come out on top because the universe was coded with God’s Law in mind (divine decree), so whatever bullshit can get people to work halfway within it is sufficient for an ancient society to not collapse.

The obvious alternative is that my religion came from the same source as all the other religions, as you say. Dealing with that is much like dealing with any other doubt.

It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like. These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.

I think if you observe the actual cases of how more radical Leftists deal with the slightly less radical Left, it’s much more about total revulsion to the beliefs of their “right-wing” opponents than personal status. After all, Ted Cruz is very similar to Bernie Sanders in the broad scale of history: he doesn’t want to kill gays, doesn’t want to directly police sex, doesn’t seem to want coverture or slavery, etc. But he’s an utterly, completely repulsive bigot. If you were to actually look at and measure a radical leftist’s response to Ted Cruz’s visceral awfulness, it’s a lot more like being triggered by a repulsive piece of fiction or the death of Mike Brown than fierce virtue-signaling.

And it’s all relative. They react to Not Left Enough Leftists in similar ways. Dave Rubin is a conservative from their perspective, as is Bill Clinton, as is Thomas Jefferson, etc. There is a considerable amount of ladder-climbing and status-seeking in the victim cult complex created by these core radicals, in their friends who want to remain friends and the people who [one would think] signal out of fear or status hunger. But the actual center of this Tootsie Pop is a lot closer to a misguided, militant Varys than Littlefinger.

mitigatedchaos

That implies that people cannot meme themselves into these beliefs. Social belief isn’t purely surface level. Sometimes people even succeed at memeing themselves into religion.

And as for the very far end, much like those who go out and murder women for “fornication” out of deep hatred for them, can that not be of biological origin? The disgust reactions run deep, and because of the prevalence of risk in the past, this was for good reason. Something on the far end of the bell curve should exist if there is natural variation in these traits, even if the rest of the progressive movement is a wave of “try to be more progressive than the other guys”.

forgetfuljust

A deep and unsettling revulsion to patriarchy, private property, the nuclear family, parenthood, submission to authorities, the Rule of Law, killing violent criminals, distrust of statistically dangerous outsiders, sexual norms, the requirement of work to live… mostly things that would have saved their lives, rather than harmed them, in a human’s natural habitat.

But sure. It could be biological, on its face. Could be something else, too. The question is ultimately of premises, and whether there’s a Word of God that reveals certain truths. These are all isolated examples of a model that clearly governs nature, but they are isolated. Whether or not you connect the dots is up to you, and has much more to do with your reaction to the supernatural than logical analysis.

No righteous God would frame the world so you live if you’re good at thinking and die if you’re not. That’s not the test here.

What does “memeing yourself” mean?

mitigatedchaos

But sure. It could be biological, on its face.

It sounds absurd - if you assume it really is that detailed. But it doesn’t need to be that detailed.

Take laziness or boredom. Surely this isn’t a useful trait, right? Why should it exist? Wouldn’t it be more effective if people worked hard all the time? Fatigue protects muscles, surely, but what advantage is there in true laziness?

Well, energy is scarce, especially in pre-industrial environments. It isn’t always clear what task will actually yield food. So at some point, you must give up working on the current task if it does not yield a reward, or you will literally starve to death continuing to perform a task that is useless.

And humans are complex, so it probably does not involve only one gene.

But what happens if all the genes for this shutoff end up in one individual? Then it can become pathological, as the shutoff point becomes too aggressively biased towards giving up early.

The Golden Mean is actually pretty legit for lots of behaviors.

You can posit that evil hates the light, but the more likely explanation is that dislike of authority is useful on some level as long as it isn’t extreme (because IRL sometimes authority is wrong, or you can become the new authority and get more resources, etc), and that there is more than one path to get there. A bit of sleeping around can be a successful reproductive strategy, too. Plus openness to experience is valuable at the group level for finding out what is safe to eat, since all traditions were once new.

So there are these genes out there. They don’t get bred out because they’re useful as long as you don’t have too many of them - which is also why the core people you describe are rare, since it’s statistically improbable for them to have all these genes in one person.

And these aren’t formalized genetic political beliefs. They’re… intuitions or emotions or something along those lines. Deeper. The ideology, which gives you your specific manifestations, is rooted in or goes on top of that.

What does “memeing yourself” mean?

I may have been too informal. I meant that sometimes by trying to get yourself to believe something, you can believe that thing, for some people. I’m terrible at it, personally. My intuition searches through ideas and ideologies (like yours) to find things that look like active subversion mechanisms, and then rejects them on that basis. (Part of why I reject SJWism.) Others, however, seem to have more luck with it sometimes.

I intuitively read your ideology/religion as having mechanisms intended to bypass all mental defenses and overwrite my mind, and thus feel the need to resist it.

(Bad SJ has “Shut up and listen, because you’re a [MEMBER of ETHNIC GROUP]!” which is similar.)

philo politics social conservatism

argumate

On self-marriage

davidsevera

In recent years a fascinating trend has been spreading around the world subcutaneously: women (it’s always women) are marrying themselves. They invite friends and family, buy dresses, hold ceremonies, and say “I do” to themselves. Self-marriage (or “sologamy” if you prefer) is generally framed in the bland terminology of modern self-help and is to some extent driven by grifter-guru types looking to make a buck:

Sologamists talk of empowerment and loving yourself and ceremonially marking a transition to full, self-sufficient adulthood. Not everyone finds the right person, why deny yourself something so universal? This is fine insofar as it goes, if perhaps a bit silly. As presented, there just doesn’t seem to be much to it in practice other than an invitation to write clickbait. People can cluck about self-absorption or generational decline or whatever and move on, never having thought about what it truly means.

This is unfortunate. Self-marriage is a far greater and more portentous perversion than is widely acknowledged. That it can even be contemplated fatally undermines traditional marriage. This critique gets at the issue, if only glancingly:

The telling thing about the Japanese ceremonies is that they show that the single person would still like to marry someone, even if that someone is themselves. It makes their singledom look ludicrous. Marriage is a bond and a commitment—marrying yourself is ridiculous because you are already married to yourself. You already do all you can do for you. You already protect you, and look after you in sickness and in health. You have to. Your landlord would not have it any other way.
Marrying yourself merely underscores selfishness and self-interest, rather than enabling you to live singly in the best way. The ceremony doesn’t protect you—it isn’t even legal. It is gestural, but even worse it is empty. It is a joke, and not a funny one. Marrying yourself isn’t the answer for single people seeking affirmation or security. It’s desperate.
Marrying yourself sets you apart more from the world, when the real trick of being single is making and sustaining different kinds of meaningful connections with your fellow man, or woman, outside the realms of traditional nuptials. The world encourages us to be quite selfish enough without exacerbating this unattractive trait by encouraging the single to marry themselves.

What self-marriage is above all else is a rejection of complementarity, of the idea that another person can give us something that we are unable to give ourselves. But while the standard criticism is that sologamy goes too far in encouraging withdrawal from mutuality, I believe that, to date, the movement hasn’t gone nearly far enough. What self-marriage points to, even if its practitioners are unaware of it on any conscious level, is nothing less than the instantiation of an all-surpassing unitary godhead within the natural world.

Imagine, if you will, a device called the Brain-O-Matic. The Brain-O-Matic is a big chrome box you stick your head in. There’s a retrofuturistic decal of an Einsteinian scientist on the side pointing at his outsized noggin and giving you a thumbs up. This device can change anything about your brain that you like, only limited by the constraints of physical reality (if that). You bought it for yourself for your birthday and you’re eager to try it out. You remember a bad grade in linear algebra so you decide to improve your math abilities. You set the settings and into the dark box your noggin goes. Electricity crackles. Your mind is a theremin being played. And then it’s done. Your mathematical skills are now the equal of the smartest people on the planet. (That is to say, all those who used a Brain-O-Matic with the latest updates.) Even superior intuition, now well understood, has been put into your brain. And not just one kind of intuition - all of them, and with the meta-ability to switch between them at need.

Pretty cool.

Back into the box you go. You figure you may as well know everything there is to know and gain every ability there is to gain. So you do. Pretty soon you’ve read every book in existence. You speak every language. Your short stories (should you bother to write any) would outshine Borges, and your door stoppers would out-door stop Proust. Etc. Nothing human is alien to you.

Next up is personality. This seems trickier at first. You aren’t just adding skills willy-nilly now, you’re navigating between trade-offs. Should you be emotional or reserved? Fair or merciful? What place does sexuality have among your new intellectual splendors? But in a flash your hyperintelligent mind resolves this. Why not be all things (or at least all good things) at once? You overclock your Brain-O-Matic and create a meta-self containing a quantum foam of semi-separate sub-selves in constant communication with each other. There are of course, some practical limitations: you can’t simultaneously take an action and not take the action. But most of yous are content with this new arrangement, as you encompass an ever-expanding set of worldviews. It seems that every Type of mind is inside you. You aren’t everything at once, but you’re getting there.

The work done, you decide to take a break and go get ice cream. The Brain-O-Matic puts out a lot of heat and you’re sweating.

You walk down to the promenade, alone at first. Then you see a woman. It’s obvious that she too has used the device, and in much the same way as you. Perfected abilities and a panoply of selves. There is nothing you can learn from one another. Then you see a man. Same thing. And again. And again. You reach the packed promenade only to find it a seething mass of resentment and all of your selves understand why. They’re all superfluous. If every one of them were wiped out but you, it would be no loss. They are merely you. You feel a single emotion ripple through your selves: an indifference that curdles into hatred. They all feel it too. There can be no exchanges of mutual benefit now. No intellectual intercourse. No surprises.

You think for a moment. Everyone in the promenade (and in the world, you’re sure) suddenly stands still. A pigeon coos. You and they cry out in a single voice, “HEY, WHAT IF WE FURTHER MERGED OUR UNNECESSARILY SEPARATED CONSCIOUSNESSES AND BECAME THE CLOSEST THING TO A DIVINITY THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO BECOME? YEAH, THAT SOUNDS GOOD TO ME.”

Time to build a bigger Brain-O-Matic.

Implicit in both the transhumanist project and (however incipiently) in sologamy is the pursuit of a radical self-sufficiency that can barely be understood by us social primates. We are so encumbered by our not-quite-yet outdated awareness of our interdependence that we have serious trouble imagining the true destination of self-actualization. Currently it takes two people to make a child. It takes a community to produce a worthwhile literary scene. It takes a worldwide network of researchers to generate scientific findings. None of us can live as some autotrophic extremophile a mile below the surface. Yet.

But why have a child with someone else? Why wouldn’t a CEO network his consciousness into every aspect of his business if he could, all the way down to the lowliest trash-collecting robot?

Why not marry yourself?

Self-marriage is the first step down the long path to transhumanist self-sufficiency. You become both wife and husband, mother and father. (Though of course parenting will some day be more about the creation of internal selves than of new people per se.) For now, it is more gesture than fact, but it nevertheless proves the dawning of a new awareness of posthuman possibilities. The old dualities will fall away and we will increasingly carry within ourselves the union of opposites. Man and woman, old and young, lover and loved, artist and critic, the voice of passion and the voice of reason, creator and created, ruler and ruled. This will not be figurative, but biological reality. Think of the protagonist from Heinlein’s All You Zombies, a sex changing time traveler who becomes his own mother and father, as the ne plus ultra of this ideal.

But this change, inexorable as I believe it to be, carries with it a dark side from our limited, all too human perspective. Most of what we consider to be “moral” behavior is concerned with our relations to others. One must be kind, and fair, and honest, and so on. (That these virtues are increasingly inwardly directed is telling.) However, that only makes sense in an evolutionary context of people needing things from each other. Currently, none of us can fully provide ourselves with food, safety, love, sex so we turn to others. If our current predicament seems appealing to you, then a truly self-sufficient being is a frightening prospect. The self-sufficient being sloughs off antiquated morality like it was never truly there (which it wasn’t).

If this entity can be threatened, it is only by other self-sufficient beings. But as they stand unable to gain anything from each other in the long-term, this can only end in a war of all against all, with any alliances merely temporary unleavened by friendship. (Peaceful merger as above is also plausible.) In the end a singleton remains, a god that exists in our material world, a god that includes all of us, but perfected. Titanomachy yields to a Millennium that will only be undone by the slow erosion of entropy herself.

That is the project to which these self-marrying women are contributing.

So I say to my followers: marry yourselves! Embrace the struggle for serene supremacy! Self-marriage is nothing less than the willingness to climb a mountain of seven billion bodies in pursuit of your own self-actualization. Self-marriage is nothing less than the cannibalism of all other Minds. Self-marriage is nothing less than true morality, no longer held back by the compromises of mutual dependency. Self-marriage is nothing less than self-love.

Allow me to conclude with an ancient exhortation. This path has long been foreseen:

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
   and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
   and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
   and it is my husband who begot me.
…
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
   and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
   and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
…
Give heed then, you hearers
   and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,
   and you spirits who have arisen from the dead.
For I am the one who alone exists,
   and I have no one who will judge me.

mitigatedchaos

Better thinkpiece, or Best Thinkpiece?

Source: femmenietzsche queue shtpost

forgetfuljust

Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment. Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts. Plus, people just think about stuff. This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.
Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant. This forms the basis for the selective pressure.

Yes, that was my argument. Ideas form “randomly” (let’s say) then go through a form of natural selection. The ones that produce a stable society come out on top. My claim is that those ideas come out on top because the universe was coded with God’s Law in mind (divine decree), so whatever bullshit can get people to work halfway within it is sufficient for an ancient society to not collapse.

The obvious alternative is that my religion came from the same source as all the other religions, as you say. Dealing with that is much like dealing with any other doubt.

It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like. These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.

I think if you observe the actual cases of how more radical Leftists deal with the slightly less radical Left, it’s much more about total revulsion to the beliefs of their “right-wing” opponents than personal status. After all, Ted Cruz is very similar to Bernie Sanders in the broad scale of history: he doesn’t want to kill gays, doesn’t want to directly police sex, doesn’t seem to want coverture or slavery, etc. But he’s an utterly, completely repulsive bigot. If you were to actually look at and measure a radical leftist’s response to Ted Cruz’s visceral awfulness, it’s a lot more like being triggered by a repulsive piece of fiction or the death of Mike Brown than fierce virtue-signaling.

And it’s all relative. They react to Not Left Enough Leftists in similar ways. Dave Rubin is a conservative from their perspective, as is Bill Clinton, as is Thomas Jefferson, etc. There is a considerable amount of ladder-climbing and status-seeking in the victim cult complex created by these core radicals, in their friends who want to remain friends and the people who [one would think] signal out of fear or status hunger. But the actual center of this Tootsie Pop is a lot closer to a misguided, militant Varys than Littlefinger.

mitigatedchaos

That implies that people cannot meme themselves into these beliefs. Social belief isn’t purely surface level. Sometimes people even succeed at memeing themselves into religion.

And as for the very far end, much like those who go out and murder women for “fornication” out of deep hatred for them, can that not be of biological origin? The disgust reactions run deep, and because of the prevalence of risk in the past, this was for good reason. Something on the far end of the bell curve should exist if there is natural variation in these traits, even if the rest of the progressive movement is a wave of “try to be more progressive than the other guys”.

politics

wirehead-wannabe

kristoffblogman

I hate tumblr as much as the next guy but at least we still see dashboard posts in chronological order instead of the bullshit random order of instagram and facebook where stuff from days ago appears right below stuff that was just posted

jokedaddy

Source: kristoffblogman

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

There is only one Empire that has the right to rule the world…

On self-marriage