Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios

Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios, three hack philosophers from ancient Greece, find themselves in the year 2019. After catching up with the following millennia of philosophy, they find themselves in a state of deep confusion...

Emfýlios: The answer seems clear in this accursed age: Believe nothing, believe not even the seemingly obvious truth.

Kítrinos: Then are we not following the metanarrative of skepticism?

Emfýlios: Perhaps... but we will be the least metanarrative followers among men, and thus as wise as one can be.

Kítrinos: Can we even have ethics beyond the pleasure principle? Utilitarianism is flawed because it just projects what you thinks is good onto everyone we can cover basic needs, but desire is complex... so all we can do is let people do what they want...equally.

Ton: Well if you choose a different set of ethics you are projecting that set  onto people, based on you thinking that those ethics is correct.Utilitarianism, in practice, will never be 100% correct, but I think it's already by far the most useful and accurate ethical theory that the modern man has come up with.

Kítrinos: But how would you apply utilitarianism to a masochist?

Ton: I don't know, this question is, perhaps, unanswerable.

Emfýlios: Negative Utilitarianism, however, can answer this question just fine: You should probably not torture the masochist if he no longer wants to be tortured.

Kítrinos: We need to deconstruct the pleasure/pain dichotomy...

Ton: At this point, we don't know what ethics really are. Or if it's anything at all!

Emfýlios: ETHICS ARE A METANARRATIVE.

Kítrinos: Your mother is a metanarrative! And she sodomizes goats.

Ton: Well, that's the one thing we know that ethics are...

Kítrinos: Can there be unknown unknowns if I know I don't know everything?

Everyone:...

Ton: Perhaps... You don't know the scope and significance of the unknown unknowns? Having read Thomas Ligotti, I must say I agree completely that human psychology directly and contradicts any sort of completely accurate self-awareness or perception.
Emfýlios: Why, of course! We specifically evolved to not be accurately self-aware. The same we evolved to breed and nothing else, which is to say, you did not evolve to be happy after you procreate, only to think that the act of procreation will bring you happiness.
Kítrinos: Nature is our stepping stone. Well, that and the language that precedes us.
Emfýlios: Nature itself must be destroyed if we are to solve this problem. Someone grab a torch, I'm going to do it!
Kítrinos: Nature is... an anchoring? In the Zapffian sense? From which you can later detach and reattach to something else. But you won't get anywhere without taking the first step.
Ton: Nicely put about evolution Emfýlios, but I must ask, what is being "accurately self-aware". Would being accurately self-aware just be not being aware at all?
Emfýlios: Good question, bad answer... What would it be?
Ton: I mean, evolution constructed all meaning for us, or so say many people, but I see this as pure delusion, perhaps even a deliberate fabrication. I don't think there's any awareness, or that hypothetical awareness would be completely empty, motionless and unchanging, nihilistic, for anything else would be fabricated meaning.
Kítrinos: And those meanings are anchorings.
Emfýlios: Perhaps accurately self-awareness is nothing but an acute awareness of oneself without the four remedies for life [Zapffe] that give "meaning" to our lives.
Ton: I guess that's an accurate, but certainly it entails severe despair?
Kítrinos: Rather, it's a point from where you anchor everything else, like an axiom.

The three philosophers are stuck in a state of aporia.

Rhetoric and Crucifixation (Tragic Pyrrhonism Pt.1)

Let us imagine a narrative, any narrative, whether that be communism, Nazism, nationalism of any kind, any political stance, any narrative whatsoever, regardless of its truth and falsifiability.
Let us imagine a cross, it's bloody timber and the holes caused by the nailing...

I know an individual, who goes by ze/zir pronouns. Ze is a communist (a Marxist-Leninist, if I am not mistaken), anti-family, anti-childhood, anti-age of consent, anti-gender and so on. While this person is real, it is hard to not think of zir as being sort of emblematic of the so-called "internet leftist".

Let's call this narrative, or this amalgamation of narratives, cross #1.

Before this, ze was a white nationalist.

Let's call this second narrative cross #2.

We do not control our own beliefs. Because of the way time works, we never "are", rather, we are always becoming. So we are always crushed between who we were (a white nationalist) and who we are becoming (a communist). When we reflect upon who we have become, we will see a multitude of people (a multitude of crosses...): Our "younger self" as effectively died, as will our "young adult self" and our "adult self", until our "old self" suffers a more literal death.

Think about the suffering this can cause. Any look at the average white nationalist will notice that these people are unhappy, constantly complaining about this and that, of the degeneracy of the world, of the multitude of imaginary conspiracies that they need to anchor themselves to in order to not fall in the black hole of despair.

Likewise, changing ("dying") from a white nationalist to a communist can cause quite a lot of suffering as well: One has to completely reinvent oneself, to admit their wrongness completely, to see what they thought of as truth as being repulsive. Perhaps this would be nothing if we were completely rational creatures, but we are not: We associate what we think is the truth (narratives) with our own identities. To change this radically is to effectively commit metaphysical suicide.

And now communism causes them the same sufferings.

I hope the message is clear: We do not carry our cross. Instead we are crucified on our own narratives, and when we think we have "figured it out", when we change narratives radically, we merely change crosses, we go from Cross #1 to Cross #2, but we are crucified on our own rhetoric all the same and thus suffer all the same.

We are either this way, or we are not at all...

Reflections on God and religion

Jesus Christ must have been a psychopath -Peter Wessel Zapffe

Why should God continue to care for us? Is it not with the utmost hubris that the so called "humble" Christians continue to think that God would even want to care for us for this long? If history repeats, it only follows that God would soon tire of us.

The idea that an omnipotent, sentient being could spend millennia doing nothing without committing suicide breaks one from any religion. Either God is so alien to us as to be irrelevant, or we are arrogant to assume we are special to him in any way and not just one of his countless creations, no different than a pebble.

Mankind is born into the sufferings of the world, and is then cast into the fiery pits of Hell for eternal suffering as it cannot reach redemption in this world. Why then, do the Christians continue the cycle of endless suffering, even as they claim to reject all the things of this world?

Satan would have never have casted anyone into the pits if everyone's father and mother didn't hand the sufferers from their mothers' womb straight into the claws of the Devil.

What God likes is that not of this world, his own kingdom rests in another world. What Satan adores, however, is present in every facet of human nature and behavior. How arrogant are the Christians then, in thinking that God would want anything to do with a species like us! God would be far fonder of oysters, those harmless, quiet, unmoving beings, than he would ever be of us!

If humans are a reflection of their Creator, it only follows that God was in immense suffering... or inflicting immense suffering on another entity.

Julius Bahnsen and I Have A Special Plan For This World: No Escape.

When everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
When everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
When all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
As by a shining brainless beacon
Or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world
When you are calm and joyful
And finally entirely alone
Then in a great new darkness
You will finally execute your special plan

I have recently finished reading two of the shorter works by one Julius Bahnsen, one of the three main representatives of German Idealist Pessimism during the 19th century, the other two being Edward Von Hartmann and Philipp Mainlander, Bahnsen being by far the most obscure of these three thinkers. In these readings, I have found several similarities to Thomas Ligotti's disturbing poem I Have A Special Plan For This World.

In Bahsen's thought, which could be accurately described as absolute, unrelenting pessimism, there is no possible redemption or salvation from this world (as opposed to Schopenhauer, who advised either asceticism or a calm contemplation of art, or Mainlander, who thought universal redemption was inevitable because of entropy through some very clever readings of his contemporary physicians, namely Boltzmann). Likewise, he thought that any attempts at reaching redemption from existence are doomed and delusional from the beginning. "Redemption from existence" is exactly the "plan" of the narrator:

Imagine he said all the flesh that is eaten

Man is a self-conscious nothing.

The teeth tearing into it
The tongue tasting it's flavor
And the hunger for that taste
Now take away that flesh he said
Take away the teeth and the tongue
The taste and the hunger
Take away everything as it is
That was my plan
My own special plan for this world
I listened to these words and yet I did not wonder
If this creature whom I had thought sleeping or dead would ever approach his vision
Even in his deepest dreams
Or his most lasting death
Because I had heard of such plans such visions
And I knew they did not see far enough
But what was demanded in a way of a plan
Needed to go beyond tongue and teeth and hunger and flesh
Beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away
And so I began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night
And a strangely shining light
That owed nothing to the light of day

The narrator seems to think that all existence is a grind, from the line: "Once more we are mangled by a great grinding fear". The wording here, grinding, is particularly reminiscent of Bahnsen's epitaph "Vita mea irritus labor", latin for "My life was pointless work". 

Likewise, the following verse has several Bahnsean elements in it:

There are no means for escaping this world

It penetrates even into your sleep

And is his substance

You are caught in your own dreaming

Where there is no space

And a hell forever where there is no time

You can't do nothing you aren't told to do

There is no hope for escape from this dream

"There are no means to escaping this world / It penetrates into your sleep" Is a very Bahnsean notion. There is no means to escape the horrible suffering of existence because of the principle of contradiction, which is to say, Bahnsen says that there was not one single, "cosmic" Will like Schopenhauer thought, but rather, every individual had several Wills in himself, the Will to do something, and these Wills contradicted each other, thus making the individual forever miserable since his desires are always contradicting each other. Thus, even in sleep, there is no escape from existence. Likewise, it's interesting that Bahsen thought that there would never be a sort of escape from existence, and it would just continue on forever. Life is just a nightmare for him, and this imagery seems quite like his ideas. One would be remiss to not mention Alfred Kubin's novel The Other Side, which took influence from Bahnsen as well as Mainlander.

The entire verse about "designs upon this world" applies as well: Just like Mainlander, Bahnsen disagreed with the leftists who thought that existence was fundamentally good, it was just made into suffering by this or that entity. For Bahnsen, no revolution, no utopia would relieve us from suffering, not because revolutions or utopias are impossible, but because the problem relies on existence itself. Reality itself is ontologically painful, and thus, neither right-wing nor left-wing "solutions" would fix Humanity's suffering.

he verse about "the funny man" might as well be about Bahnsen too, thought it is likely a reference to John Doe from Ligotti's story The Frolic: Bahnsen believed that it was humor that it was "in possession of the correct ethical metric" because it was only humor that could simultaneously relieve tension and suffering and acknowledge existence (which is to say, the "being" of whatever grotesque thing is the subject of the comedy) as being nightmarish. Referring to the man, his walk and his plan seems to coincide with this. 

Finally, at the very end, the first verse is repeated, only broken, somewhat depressed, melancholically... This repetition, for me, always indicated that the "special plan" would never come to fruition, it's just a fantasy that the narrator holds to endure the constant grinding, and at the end, perhaps he realizes this, somewhat like how the narrator from The Bungalow House knows his maxim in a way he never did before. All hopes of fixing this universe are ultimately doomed, for the narrator dreams of an utopia of non-being, but he dreams of an utopia all the same, a place where there are no more contradictions, and like Bahnsen said: "The world is an inextricable tangle of contradictions of the most tragic negativity."

No More Philosophers.

No more Plato, he's in the world of forms now.
No more Epicurus, no more pain or pleasure now.
No more Seneca, at least he didn't cry though.
No more Mainlander, dead as his God, hanging from the noose.
No more Bahnsen, at least there's no more suffering that way.
No more Michelstaedter, crucified on rhetoric no more.
No more Zapffe, no Last Messiah being buried in the fingernails of midwives and pacifier makers.
No more Spengler, oh well, at least he won't have to see no decline.
No more Cioran, didn't even remember who he was.
No more Schopenhauer, but I guess it's better that way.
No more Leopardi, as sick of life as he was of health.
No more Kierkegaard, together with his God at last, what a laugh.
No more Jean Amery, so sick of life he wrote a whole book about it.
No more Caraco, he missed his mommy too much, went straight after her.

My life is pointless work.

How Stephen King misunderstands horror.

"Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station."
-Thomas Ligotti

“[It’s] cold, I’m not a cold guy,” King told BBC arts editor Will Gompertz. “I think one of the things people relate to in my books is this warmth, there’s a reaching out and saying to the reader, ‘I want you to be a part of this.’ With Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ I felt that it was very cold, very ‘We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an anthill, aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects.’ ”

This, quite simply, is a microcosm of how Stephen King fails utterly to understand horror. Horror, for Mr. King, seems to be something warm. Well! Excuse my hubris, but I would argue that, yes, horror, proper horror, is very much a cold thing. That's why we call it chilling! Who has heard of horror that is warm? Warm is associated with good health, with a good disposition, with softness and tenderness, with a cozy fireplace. Do any of these things speak of horror? Of the uncanniness of being, of something pernicious that lies behind our reality, or even of cheap thrills?

Second, King himself says he is not a cold person. Perhaps for the best regarding his personal life, but... does this not speak volumes about how inadequate King is to write horror? The greatest literary horror masters were all as far as warm as one could get. Edgar Allan Poe's writings are cold, depressive and personal, while the man himself had a deeply troubled personal life which granted him insight on a variety of psychological disorders, and this reflects on his stories. Likewise, Lovecraft was a depressive, a borderline agoraphobic, scared of everything... Nick Land, hopped up on amphetamines, Ligotti suffering from anhedonia and severe depression, Kafka, while not always considered a horror writer, was a bunch of neuroses shambling about in a bipedal approximation of a man, Bataille and his grotesque obsessions with sex... Let us not be shy and say it: Good horror writers were, at large, what the neurotypical world would consider disturbed individuals.

King sees horror as an optimistic reactionary: Life is great, it's an amazing thing, until some horror, always traditionally scary and always highly defeatable comes along. There is nothing uncanny for Stephen King other than wholly fictional monsters. Ultimately, it's fictional nonsense to help us escape from the far more terrifying real nonsense, in which the writers I mentioned before helped elucidate upon.

His prose is slipshod, perhaps because Stephen King is hardly a writer's writer, and I doubt any Stephen King fan cares about prose.

His characters are cartoons: An homophobe will always be going on about how much he hates the gays, a racist will always be out shouting the N-word. No characters develop any amount of psychological depth or insight.

His plots always disappoint and at times go into some really stupid territory, such as the Turtle from It, just for an example off the top of my head.

His novels are absolutely bloated with useless queens: picking up any of his tomes is like picking up some veiny, throbbing insect queen about to ejaculate her brood into the world. This is not as noticeable in his earlier works, but in his later works, as he has likely long since stopped needing an editor to sell books anyway, so the bloating is horrendous.

He repeats his story elements nonstop: His characters are often times just him (writer, famous writer, smoker, had a car accident, alcoholic or drug abuser, and so on), Small towns in Maine, gratuitous sex, religious Christian fundamentalism, disproportionate retributions, teens being tossers, adults being useless, completely tasteless and cartoonish depictions of abusive parents... one could go on.

He admits he writes "the literary equivalent of McDonalds," but he also acts shitty when academia doesn't take him seriously, which results in one of the cringiest scenes in all of fiction when the poor, oppressed Stephen King self insert stands up to the big bad intellectuals for not taking his pulp crap as being a valid work of literary fiction. 

He's likely one of the best pop authors out there (if only because other mainstream horror writers are even worse) but when he dies, he will be largely remembered because of the movie adaptations of his works, which are nearly always superior to the source material (massively so in the case of The Shining.)

Spengler, Zapffe, Ligotti and the "Nerd Fandom".

Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism also has a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition.

-Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

According to philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, in his essay The Last Messiah, human beings have naturally evolved an intrinsic need for meaning and purpose in their lives while the environment where they evolved in lacks both.

We have gotten a surplus of consciousness, says Zapffe, for we are the only animals in nature that can realize the tragic meaningless of our existence in which we are brutally thrust without a choice. To cope with this, Zapffe notes, we have come up with four remedies for life, which Thomas Ligotti, in his Conspiracy Against The Human Race cites as being the following:

(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.

(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.

(3)DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets, their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etc.

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them.

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

In his philosophical masterpiece of pessimism The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, Thomas Ligotti comments on these four strategies as they evolve over time: 

[...] with the passing of generations the more profligate will become humanity’s means of hiding its disillusionments from itself: the more brainless and delusive its isolation from the actualities of existence; the more stupefying and uncouth its distractions from the startling and dreadful; the more heavy-handed and madcap its anchorings in unreality; and the more callous, self-mocking, and detached from life its sublimations in art. These developments will not make us any more paradoxical in our being, but they could make all manifestations of our paradoxical nature less effective and more aberrant.

This "passing of generations" is, of course, nothing more than the evolution of a civilization. Which is where Spengler comes in. If we are to believe Spengler, major civilizations go through a series of steps: Creation - Myth - Stories - Art - Realization - Rationalization - Technologization - Destruction.
A culture declines over time, after it has gotten all of its myths, all of its realizations out of the way, whereas the "age of enlightenment" arrives and, in proper Socratic fashion, everything is questioned, every God overthrown, every authority figure scrutinized, every status quo analyzed. After this, there follows a quick technologization, and the society, eventually, after getting all of its own essence out, dies, whereas the cycle begins again (Such as Western Medieval society arriving out of the ashes of Classical society.)

Well, what's new about this? Nothing at all. And to further degrade the borderline nonexistent structure of this post, I want to argue about a comic. This comic, to be specific:

Looking at the man in the comic and how he represents it's author, as well as the culture, the society he represents, one can see two things:

1): A man who is trying to escape our ghosts, who cannot anchor himself to his ghosts, as I explained in my last post.
2): Because the anchors associated with the Ghosts of our past, he has instead preferred to enter the world of distractions, to such an extent that, indeed, they become anchorings, and in the case of our artist and many others, inspiration for sublimation, to "let it out".

One look at Twitter or any such website will show you that these people are frustrated, bewildered, anxious. Despite being catered to more than ever, they are extremely unhappy and always getting worse. They're always protesting, boycotting, screaming into the void (a scream borne of a nightmare that no one hears) because Superman did the wrong thing in a movie or Wonder Woman's clothes were too suggestive or anything of that kind. Life has become a living nightmare for these people (as most of them are veterans of this kind of shlock), and when the novelty wears off, it threatens to encroach on the core of their distraction itself, so they will borough themselves deeper in it in hopes of escaping this metaphysical dread, and thus they refuse life as life presents itself.

Going back to Spengler and Zapffe, this is an example of post-rationalization anchoring. After the realization and Enlightenment age has killed God by snuffing out any rational belief in God or Gods, we are only left with secular anchors, secular religions. Like a fandom.

Look at what the comic is saying: what he depicts as insufferable horror is simply living. He imagines himself leaving this horror (the horror of existence) behind, transitioning instead into a pleasant world of children's cartoons (a distortion of the world-in-itself and of life-in-itself). The thing to understand here, above all else, is that this escape never actually happens, it's a marketing trick, a capitalist hoot, just like car companies marketing themselves to men during a middle-life crisis, and just like buying a sports car won't make a middle-aged man more virile, consuming nerd entertainment won't free you of the hardships of life and existence, so that comic strip has never happened, is not happening and will never happen. You don't escape life just because you're watching a cartoon. Life's horror is much life a horde of ants, they can stop biting you momentarily, and you feel relieved for a while, but no matter how hard you deny these horrors, they will still be there, crawling over you, tingling and making sure you never completely forget about them.

So, just like Ligotti wrote about our remedies for life becoming increasingly more absurd, so did Spengler predict this. By losing God, we have resorted to all sorts of religious anchors, in which we worship "the brand", in a glorious declaration of our decline as a civilization. As more and more generations become disillusioned with their previous anchors, so will the next generations scramble for more and more absurd ones.

Do not think I am religious for a moment because of my statements: All of these historical steps develop dialectically and are... basically inevitable. When I talk of "decline", I do not speak of it as a reactionary who wishes for a "better" previous age, but of it as simple stages in our history.

This bizarre and "madcap", as Ligotti writes, anchors are nowhere better exemplified in nerd culture. Nerd culture is a bizarre form of crypto-capitalist religion. It's an entire class of adults who take their pop culture consumer brands more seriously than anything in real life, regardless of practical on non-practical usage. 'Fandoms' are pagan sects worshipping the One True Commodity in its many different forms.

"Nerds" (not in the sense of people who enjoy traditionally "nerdy" things, rather, people who subscribe to fandoms inside nerd culture) are really easy to manipulate for political ends, with the military recruiting gamers being the latest and most blatant example. Idpol liberals, as well as nerd reactionaries, live in the make believe bullshit world of the Brand.

Absurd anchors in the age of decline. With age, they get more and more ridiculous. One can only wonder how much more nonsense is there left for us to endure until the planet is finally quiet and there is no more nonsense ever again. And I have no doubt that end of nonsense will itself be a form of nonsense.