it’s the 2nd or the 3rd of April by the time I finish writing this. This is not a diary, this is probably not a good idea either. But I’ve been programmed by the internet to always broadcast my ideas as if they have any merit, a sense of urgency to vocalize inner monologues better kept inside. Self deprecation is another practice imposed by the nature of internets discourse, for nothing is holy online, & woe to he who takes himself seriously purely on internet grounds without a real life achievement as a backbone. Well maybe not anymore, times are getting blurrier whenever I type about the internet as such.
ma 3alena, the idea of writing this post coupled with the intention of extending it at no prior specified schedule occurred to me almost two weeks ago. Back then I wanted to castigate the unwarranted premature circle jerk in the country, there was no point in over doing it on the bird app so I figured I’d put it somewhere else, only accessible to people adventurous enough to click on a blog link in 2k20. But what stopped me was a feeling of being overwhelmed by many reasons that have no place in this post except one.
So what changed now? the one reason I just mentioned, for starters I feel better, I’m no longer sick. yeah, I had a respiratory disease, dry coughs, difficulty breathing, pain in chest. One could almost say C*r*na, almost but can’t bet anything on it because I didn’t get tested. I did call the hot line, on the 19th. Doctor wasn’t impressed with my symptoms, his manners were as lowly as what you’d expect from any arrogant retard with a medical degree in this shit hole. I was cooperative & nice for some stupid reason. He was interested mostly in the fact that I haven’t been in contact with anyone coming from abroad. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, unless the person is on the verge of dying gasping for air, boiling feverishly then there was no need to test him. The beneficial doubt grants him this excuse because the other possible explanation is that he unironically believes the virus only jumps from one person to another but doesn’t hop any further. Someone coming from abroad might infect the people he comes in contact with, but they won’t infect anyone, so if I was lucky enough not to directly get in touch with the c*r*na holder then I won’t get it…
That’s not what I’m here to write about today, it’s just a quick recap, okay it is a bit related because recently I’m hearing people urging each other to get tested, now. I wonder how many of them understand how much they’re missing from the picture. did I mention calling 911 days later but not getting through? This at least was a known fact publicly. maybe later I will talk about how people viewed this & how naive the understanding was.
Okay so what is it about the urging to get tested, the cries to stay home, get locked, a collective lifestyle switch that’s unprecedented & unprepared yet expected to go smooth af for some fucking reason. There seems to be this narrative of complete agency & ability to control the spread. Both the laid back optimistically & the tensed professional & worriers will tell you that it could be under control -something must be said about the nature of this control but let’s not clog up the first & possible last post- if we all play along. The whole crisis is taken as a numbers game, if we reach a target things will be okay. Corporate jargon, you can even sense the manager tone in all these proclamations.
The numbers are still abstract entities in our minds. The issue with this is at least twofold, first there is the sense that we are bracing ourselves for impact, once the impact hits we will look at the digits, then score our performance, you can visually see this on the count site. The gravity of the situation is not felt on a personal level. Here is where I subvert expectations I presume, I’m not about to say when people start dying it will become more real. that’s kind of a given, but what’s not considered is the fact that even when people start dying, life is still the same as before on the personal level of perception. Even if thousands die around you, if none of them happens to be a family member or a loved one then it’s still not that bad. If a person close to you passes away, the numbers would stop making sense. You won’t be looking at statistics, it would become a personal tragedy.
Far too soon to predict how this will end, despite the eagerness of people wanting to nail a prophetic shot in the dark. What doesn’t require clairvoyance is the knowledge that it will end badly for us, without a clear picture of how badly, quantitatively or qualitatively. Maybe later generations could gain something, maybe it will make their lives worse. Anyway it’s not like we behave as if there will be future generations.
The reaction will depend on the ending, so let’s imagine a scenario to better understand that we blind ourselves with numbers to avoid the cold gaze of death. imagine if C*r*na gets contained & not that many people die, but from the few were your loved one(s). You will live to see everyone celebrating containment, the test was passed. oh your beloved parent, sibling, significant other, close friend died gasping for air? touch luck but hey look at the bright side, we have better numbers, we can rub it in the face of other countries. Some people might get medals, some will make fortunes, a whole set of novels will take a swing at this crisis in retrospect, 3toom probably finished his already. I will struggle to convince people that what I already wrote has nothing to do with C*r*na, wallah!
Everyone will go on considering this to be just a game of numbers, in a scenario I’ll call scenario A. I’ll add scenarios later but for now let’s conclude with the obvious fact that this is not a soulless college test or a business deal, it’s a matter of life And death. I understand that someone might retort by saying if the numbers are less then less people will have to live through that type of solitude while everyone celebrates in scenario A. But that’s still a game of stats, it’s a thing I had a long argument with an old friend once, how people don’t understand that statistics collapse once the existential touches it. 2% is not much for a cold calculating computer counter, but for those 2% it’s everything, it’s a 100%. That statistical bird view is something for planners, not for those on the ground.
Maybe less obvious is the fact that people die, people tend to die at some point in their lives, shocking right? this is not sarcasm, I genuinely feel like this needed a reminder. Humans always treated death with reverence, yet only recently, & by recently I mean almost a century give or take ago did humans start to have a mythology of surpassing physical death. Lewis Mumford iirc would set it further back to when the Sun God was being resurrected by the likes of Francis Bacon. Sure before that there were theories of reincarnation, of afterlife. Many believed in immortality & sought out immortality pills or life elixirs, but it was never elevated to a level of popular belief, of policy. It remained in the realm of the occult.
However the promise of cheating death is scarier than death itself once taken from the ramblings of a certain Nikolai Fyodorov (I haven’t read the book yet ftr) & pumped into becoming an underlying popular belief. It is not stated openly because no one is crazy enough to talk about it, well let’s exclude transhumanists & snake oil Musk types with the neuro-elixirs that uploads consciousness on clouds. interesting use of the word, clouds are fluffy, basically a cup of glass strewn across the sky, but some people want us to believe our minds can be sprinkled on top of such fragile fickle electrical storage glasses without first defining what it is that makes us alive, that makes up our consciousness, what makes us who we are. the Who is not the question, it’s a question of What for the death cheaters, peal away the human body & mind until nothing is left, then upload the nothing on a nothing server, without accounting for the energy required to keep the servers running, how a mere flick of a switch will be far more detrimental to our e-existences than beasts & pandemics.
The clergy of death-cheating can afford sounding this crazy, the lay believer doesn’t have the luxury & only sounds like a dreamy child when parrot-preaching the latest scriptural version of death-cheating. Then you’ll have the rest that don’t even realize they’re the cult card carrying members. Those are the ones wailing from the minute C*r*na stepped foot in their country, they inverted the burial rituals, instead of weeping over the dead they weep over death itself. They cry before any person died, to what purpose? To the point of this post, this is the second-fold, the pseudo sense of agency, of being able to control the elements. Not Fire Water Earth, the elements they think they can control are Death, Nature & Their fellow humans. The crazy death-cheating cult cheats itself before cheating death, this manifests in different ways. One of the manifestations is the false need of control over other humans.
What’s scary to me, scarier than the virus & the pandemic, & I don’t pretend to take it lightly or to be stoic about it, I love my parents way too much to take this lightly. With that in mind, the scarier than that which might rob me of whomstve I hold dear, is the belief that we have control over death manifested by tight control of each others’ lives. The frenzied mob that cheers police brutality because the stakes are too high, they don’t question the several questionable premises they constructed their instaview upon. The rules are simple, if we all listen to other people, no matter how corrupt or incompetent we used to think they were, then we can defeat death itself.
I want to end on this note, I know this technique of ending a post or an article with an “oh no” attitude leaves a mark & is a cool essayist closure, but it might give the reader the wrong impression that I’m one of those that bitch about something called humanity, maybe I’ll say what I think of such a term in due time but for now I would like to bring to the reader’s attention that there are many scary things in nature, & indeed some of those things could be fought back. Among them are nature denying cultists.
The false sense of agency is a self fulfilling prophecy of making it a war of pathological man against man instead of a war of man against pathogen. For if you believe people could be held accountable for spreading death, delivering them to death is the next logical step. & this absurd notion is what I’m trying to counter before SHTF.
with that, I wish you a good night. Till next time.
2nd Entry:
It’s still the 3rd. It’s tempting to postpone this to get the nice 4/4 date but the ideas are tangled in my mind like a bunch of wires & I have to untangle them to lay them out neatly & see what goes where. While I think the death-cheaters must be chastised & since I’ll probably spend most of the time speaking against them, I think it must be cleared that other parties are not innocent or faultless. It must also be cleared that although this is not the one-dimensional mind melting bird app, it is obvious that my addiction to it will lead the initial & possibly only traffic to this page. So I must ease the reader into the larger than 280 character concept by easing his mind & to allay the fear that the rant is a verbose yet basic opposition stance, I’m not one of those accounts that created an entire persona on opposition but for some reason cucked at the exact moment where groupthink is the most dangerous. More on those later, as they’re at the lowest rung of blame. Between them & the death-cheaters (assuming they don’t belong to the same group for the time being) lays a group of death-embracers.
Some of the many amusing things to witness were paralleled clips & positions that wouldn’t be connected in almost any other scenario, a group of old men at a mosque upset that the jama3a prayers would be cancelled, expressing the will to face the virus head on juxtaposed with a group of youthful westerners prioritizing partying over panicking.
Let’s talk about the 7ajjis first, there is no need to see my criticism as that of a hysterical death-cheater who looks down on the old men because they are not as scared as he is of death. Let us first credit the men for their faith & their willingness to consider some powers to be higher than that of the state. Unlike the younger generation that glorifies men & techniques, the older one has enough wisdom to avoid completely surrendering to authority at the drop of a hat. One can almost sense that if they were younger, they’d risk a shoot out just to preserve their rituals. The interpretations given by them on the religious plane are also discredited by the younger generation as too naïve, for the materialist millennial or zoomer it’s laughable that something has layers of meaning & symbolism, the furthest they can get is how a movie refers to another movie, coincidentally a reference they would not have the attention to notice but would only see as a post online to upvote & share in glee. They take things too materialistically to feel the full weight of the religious symbolisms in destitute mosques & churches. It sounds like am generalizing over the younger generation here, so I’ll single out the younger death-cheaters just to be clear. With that in mind, plus the respect due to older men. It’s time to go after the younger death-embracers, the schizoids that mix the spiritualist & the materialist worldviews to concoct an abomination of secularized Islam. This group also has a spectrum so it’s important to not generalize here either, the nature & scales of mixtures vary.
People with a religious upbringing & those of a spiritual temperament consider that most if not all bad things in the modern world stem from the materialistic worldview. They talk a lot of shit about it that you’d think they are preparing to fight it. Yet judging from the actions taken by the religious in the past couple of decades it seems that they still have their eyesight pinned on old grudges not on current enemies. Unable to comprehend the world as it is they seek the warm embrace of answered questions & the familiar trodden paths, to fight in the same battlefields, too afraid to explore new terrain, too weak to do such a thing. Instead of wondering why an ottoman caliphate fell they would rather carry on its wars against whom they consider the Safavids. Or perhaps they are so arrogant that they think they have spiritually conquered the materialistic worldview; the argument is won & thus they only need to drag the win in the battle of ideas to a win in physical battles. What they miss is that the act of dragging that win is the entire struggle.
It is becoming clearer to me that, for long if not forever, the intellectual questions were not detached enough from materialistic structures of powers. The finest of men were eager to uphold what they consider the accurate interpretation of some passages or the logical procession of some ideas, & in order to do so they didn’t mind being subjects to a materialistic worldly master, to cut down their intellectual adversaries not ultimately in words but through decrees. I understand that this might have happened elsewhere with the other main Abrahamic religion but that’s not a good enough excuse, for many reasons I’ll enumerate two of. Even if that was the case elsewhere that doesn’t mean it’s an excuse since Christianity in the West eventually declined & it was torn asunder by the growth of the death-cheating cult roots, the major question in this regard is asking if the roots were seeds in Christianity itself or maybe in its mix with the European stock. Second it is not wise to carry comparisons longer than needed, the more detailed you get & the bigger context you consider the more like the analogy will crumble, not because it is a bad analogy, but it’s in the nature of analogies to be a bridge & nothing more. Those that rest on it for too long are doomed to fall. A proper essential understanding of any subject is one that doesn’t require analogies, he may only use it to let others cross over & get his point of view.
I know what you’re thinking, or I can guess at least. I’m going astray too quickly, maybe, or maybe it’s the damn nature of the wire entanglement that causes me to go down routes I would rather not rush through but I apologize if my ideas are designed like a Dark Souls game, this is not sophistication it’s chaos. So, let’s pull this wire to the side & state succinctly that what’s required is not secularization of thought but rather the decoupling of understanding & of divine judgement. It’s not a divorce between the worldly & the heavenly, it’s firstly a separation of the intellectual & the spiritual. The humans should be treated as humans, the conditions must be taken as worldly conditions, otherwise nothing is gained from the glorified understanding of history. Rigidness is a mark of death, not to downplay any of the major fetan, but we must elevate the modern fetna to its proper place. Not to be arrogant to think it can be resolved easily because it’s clear something is extremely off with how we see things. Certainly understanding it requires revisiting older fetan without seeing it as a fight between good & evil, but as a history of ideas & dialectic. I won’t go into details because I haven’t worked them out but to deny its existence is another bluff masked with spiritual holier than thous, the religious man today is not even an apologist. The apologist has the dignity of standing firm in action & words, the modern religious man is stripped down to the most basic rituals, allowed only by the goodness of the state, & when finally the secular state forces him out of his last abode, the mosque or the church, he will not be backed by fine young men, he will be mocked by his countrymen that don’t take his symbolism seriously & merely consider it misplaced fetishism, they fetishize other constructions so they will assume that’s what the religious man is doing in holding on to his shrine.
The young men ideally standing on his side will in reality, depending on their mixtures, Either tell him how this time he should go home for the better of the state, not thinking twice about questioning the state, or the state of affairs, or any materialistic context that could be overridden in current or future events. Or they will not be standing anywhere close because they have been shipped off to fight some battle that is so puzzling that foot soldiers directly involved in it aren’t quite sure what’s happening. They are the second mixture, let’s call them the literalists, for they forsake symbolism & proper materialistic understanding & substitute it with literal belief in legends & golden historical accounts as real life events, without any regard to the entire sequence of events that got them in extremely questionable militias with weapons they don’t manufacture, & orders from governments they’re not part of or a citizen of which. By the way these types will go on rants against the state, professing words more rebellious than the secularist that mocks them, the double paradox is that the sons of the second mixture will mock the notion of states in a typical khawarij fashion minus the khawarij dignity of being their own masters, we find them herded by intelligence agencies belonging to the very states they claim to hate so much. They don’t see the world as it is because the spiritual veil reshapes what they’re doing & the policies to be somehow in their favor, their God tricked those fools into giving them weapons, never entertaining the alt explanation, that they were tricked by those that studied them & how they see their God. A better way of seeing how out of touch they are, they blasphemously used God as a tool that punished the Chinese for Uighurs for their sake. The joy didn’t last long & it shouldn’t, once C*r*na reached their shores & forced them through the proxy of state & the death-cheating tentacles to close their mosques, we saw how No7 Qudah rewrote the script again, God is using C*r*na to punish them, they who just months ago were cheering. Much to be said about this without the snarky mockery of the materialists, but for now let’s speak like them & ask on behalf of C*r*na, where is your God now?
The other side of the paradox lies with death-cheaters that mock them only insofar as they want to break down the whole ideology, while cheering them in actual battles. United against enemies that could be discussed in the future.
Moving back to the first mixture, those will not travel that far, not just because C*r*na grounded the airplanes, but also because they are tempered with a better understanding of the world than the second mixture, yet their arrogance leads them to ignore their material conditions, they assume that men can continue to behave as they always did even when the world is drastically different. As things change, they will lament the lack of good men without looking around those supposed bad men that are simply living in a different world of inputs & tools. Different than them & than their salaf. The first mixture is more realistic but that’s not saying much, they also engage in golden legendary narratives instead of stepping down & viewing the world as it is, as it was. To them everything is reconstructed in retrospect to fit modern sentiments. Instead of digging their heels & countering postmodernism they celebrate being ackshually the first ones to walk the path of whatever is thrown at them as an accusation. The first mixture type will also share with everyone the sense that something went wrong, but instead of having the fortitude of covering the ground of over a thousand years, neigh, not even a hundred year, you’ll find them worried, holed up on the few centimeters of the last decade.
What went wrong in their books is simply that they veered off the course of the death-cheaters, the Spring that promised instant enlightenment for some reason didn’t work play out like the movie they watched in Tunisia, they must know why it didn’t, without going anywhere before that in terms of argument, even if they push a few years back it’s all just to realign things in retrospect to ask why the death-cheating utopia wasn’t achieved, never questioning the utopia itself, for their utopia itself is a first mixture, equally contradictory to all utopias, plus more contradiction of its own ideological mixing. The sleight of hand is done so quickly that the trickster has tricked himself.
To sum up, the death-embracers’ two mixtures are as follows, the literalists that embrace death literally by strapping themselves with bombs & even miss the symbolic & origin of such an extreme action, an action that strikes terror in the heart of the death-cheater for it negates the core of the death-cheating & by extension blows all levels. The first mixture, the unwittingly secularized, will not go to those lengths but will go on with the state’s will, they will let what they hold dear decay because they’re too sure of themselves that they never consider the humiliating defeats in real life to have any bearing on their ideology. That this too shall pass in their minds, not knowing that nothing before passed & afterwards conditions reverted to an original pure ideal golden Rashidun form, not even the Rashidun form itself lives up to how it’s perceived. Both mixtures will fail the older death-embracer, those are too old to strap themselves with bombs & it is unjust to accuse them of being anywhere near the minority of literalists (is it too late to point out that I will consider them the second mixture because of how few they are & that the first mixture is much more common?) but the old ones, they will embrace the virus. & if you ask me, I think they should be given the proper information, if afterwards they wish to carry on then they could be allowed in a way that doesn’t harm others. As an ex second mixturist death embracer, I’ll argue that if the state is the granter of freedoms, then it should grant the freedom of death.
I don’t know which next wire to remove from the cluster but an important note to end on is to point another flip by C*r*na, while the older generation display healthy amounts of skepticism the younger generation mocks conspiracy theories, they sheepishly unquestioningly agree with anything official, beseeching each other to listen only to the lab coats & the army fatigues. To atone for the snarky materialistic question I asked before, I’ll use the No7 misunderstanding to assume C*r*na is a tool of punishment indeed, it’s not just through death but also through flipping the roles, the young that are supposed to be rebellious & anarchistic are turned into model statists, while the old that should be too naive are going full truther mode. It is easy to make fun of the WhatsApp explanations, what’s hard is escaping the technological epistemological trap of the false sense of omniscience.
3rd Entry
It’s the fif of April, I’m not gonna strike through because I know I’ll post this before tomorrow. This entry is the shortest so far but that’s only because it’s more of a buildup to an overarching argument.
The topic of propaganda is extremely crucial in this day & age, I tried to represent one side of it fictionally in Sa7ra’ elWa8e3. Another side will be briefly examined in Fo8 elWa3i. I’d like to add another bit that’s been on my mind, but I haven’t written it down anywhere yet.
But first let’s take a detour & look at the concept of culture. A concept that is not that easy to explain either but at least it’s clearer in people’s minds even if defined properly. cultures can’t be detached from material conditions & political structure. All cultures in the world are now forced into a globalized melting pot.
Another hop before things come full circle in future entries. The secular split between church & state comes at the expense of the church, the religious will recede with time, it won’t vanish instantly. To use an analogy, secularization is keelhauling the religion, if religion doesn’t die in the process then it will come back from the other side maimed & critically injured. It is understandable that religious people might not be very welcoming of such a treatment even if they were assured that religion will make it alive to the other side by the end of it all.
Religion, like almost everything else, was a grouping of several parts that got disconnected & treated separately later -Perhaps an example of Empedocles’ strife- Possibly without any chance of coming back to form a single unit. Generally speaking it contained mythology, a code of ethics, laws, a worldview, a social contract. Secularization started tearing the Laws from it initially, the worldview was transmuted into political ideologies, the social contract & the ethics change accordingly. All of this was gradual.
Let’s take a quick look at how mythologies might interact, here as in everywhere else in this post, I could be mistaken of course:
- A mythology might exist under a different yet dominant mythology, consider how Muslims allowed Christians & Jews to keep their mythology, they debated them, had special laws for them, encouraged conversions, in some cases forced it, sometimes discouraging them. but ultimately, religious communities under pressure survived with their mythology intact.
- Mythologies might openly fuse, I am not aware of total fusion but what I have in mind is the association of deities across different mythologies, Serapis is an example. Another way to look at it is the association of different deities, I just looked up the term to explain this: Interpretatio graeca which is “a discourse used to interpret or attempt to understand the mythology and religion of other cultures; a comparative methodology using ancient Greek religious concepts and practices, deities, and myths, equivalencies, and shared characteristics.” Comparative religion as a study is not a fusion of religions but scouting the equivalencies & the attitude seems to be more relaxed on the Pagan-Pagan axis. monotheists might feel a level affinity in agreeing on the oneness of God but they wouldn’t fuse openly. They would not accept such an attempt from the Polytheist because it defeats the purpose of Monotheism.
- The last type of interaction is the direct confrontation of mythologies, slightly like the first type but different in that there is an active conflict on the mythological plane as well as other planes. Christianity in Rome for example was a mono mythology under a dominant poly one, although it was suppressed but it had the last say. History has favored these two monotheistic mythologies over the pagan ones in some parts of the world, Muslims destroying idols in Mecca or Christians chopping down sacred trees. (Side note, I noticed that previously I used to think in an Abrahamic centric way disregarding the far eastern religions & philosophies, it wasn’t C*r*na that made me realize that was a wrong approach, it happened during a humble peak at Daoism for fictional writing purposes. Just wanted to point this out to the reader to avoid falling in the same narrowing misconception.) Later, through colonization Christianity would knock down other pagan cultures around the world, by the time Western countries manage to take down the Islamic empire, it coincides with the fall of Christendom in Tsarist Russia, signaling not the victory of Christianity over Islam but the victory of Secularism over both religions.
With such interactions in mind the monotheist should refrain from believing that his religion subdued paganism as a historical march of truth against falsity unless he defines his place with respect to the secular worldview, if Truth wins with history then history favored the secular. To reject that, the monotheist should place himself in place of the underdog in one of the two examples mentioned or conjure better historical examples. Either he is like the Christian living under the mercy of the Muslims, that is, he is a Muslim living under the mercy of the Secular. Or he is as the Christian living under the mercy of the Pagan, which means a period of sacrifice & martyrdom followed by turning the table & taking the lead. The second analogy would explain what was brought up in the previous entry, the death-embracing attitude. It is not nihilistic fatalism, unless the future turns out to be like the first example, y3ne, if the religious is to be indefinitely subordinated to the secular then sacrifices of such nature are moot. This is not a deterministic claim, the actions of the death embracers might bring up that end if they were not mindful, careful & visionary.
I just mentioned Secularism as if it’s a competing religion, which is wrong if we were to take the religion as the compound mentioned earlier (mythology, ethics, laws, worldview, social contract). Secularization doesn’t have an official mythology, or such is the claim. In the next entry I will hopefully attempt to examine this. For now, it suffices to say that even without the mythology, if we assume it to hold a negative mythology mathalan then we can without a question see how materialistically speaking the religious is completely subjugated. The international laws, the dominant secular nations, the social contracts everywhere, the financial world order, all of this point out the secular nature of our times.
Before I finish, I would like to add that mythologies might not directly mix but as a whole the religions could be easily influenced by the conditions & competing religions/parts of the religions. What we see of Muslims ackshuallying is a symptom of their worldview being reshaped without touching the mythology.
“bro you started with propaganda” I know, & I shall return to it as I close the circle, otherwise it would have been basics which I covered elsewhere. Spoiler alert, I’ll attempt to descend from mythology to worldview/culture & from that to reach “propaganda”
“aight bro but I thought this is about C*r*na” I know! I’m just laying out the definitions & relations to explain more of what’s happening nowadays. & while not a diary, this is mostly me thinking out loud. I hope I was clear about that fam.
4th Entry
7th of April.
Could there be a secular mythology? The main argument in this entry is not to prove that it is a mythology in the strictest sense of the word, but that there is something akin to it, & even if a different word has to be used it won’t be any of the other components of religion. To do so we must have a quick look at mythology itself then draw distinctions between it & other components.
As for mythology we are speaking about the stories of Gods in pagan religions, cosmogony, eschatology, afterlife & tales of ancient heroes plus mythical creatures. In monotheistic ones there are no tales of Gods by definition, however there are tales of prophets & an angelology. The term mythology might not be accepted by the mono believers & I have to point out that I’m only using it here to be objectively descriptive. The first distinction should be between myth & legend in that the myth is on the metaphysical/belief level while legends are on the historical/fictional plane. Euhemerism is the idea that the historical grew into the mythological. A concept worthy of consideration for itself but for now let’s consider it to distinguish between history & myths.
The other distinction should be made between myth & worldview, a worldview is contingent upon the myth & upon other things. Picture a Norse pagan in modern times, when scientists explain the natural phenomena like the sun as a star & the moon as a satellite, they’re not Sol & Mani on their chariots. Our friend the pagan will either ignore the claim, or try to render both accounts compatible, this could happen through reinterpretation of the myth without removing Sol & Mani, in other words his worldview would change but for him Sol & Mani will exist on some level, even if symbolic. The two other options once met with such claims is to be agnostic, strong agnosticism in being skeptical about which is true or weak agnosticism where both hold true without favoring one over the other or explaining how. Or finally it might result in rejecting this specific myth or the entire mythical corpus. His worldview changes because the myth changed through reinterpretation or was negated. & so, we can see that the worldview is not only carried on the myth but on other cognitive faculties & rationalizations. The myth is not directly dependent on such things, because no myth is individually made after the fact, there is no personal myth that each man creates as they see fit. The myth is eternal unlike the worldview that is subject to change & in many cases quite subjective. It goes without saying that I’m describing a religious myth here, a secular myth, if such a thing exists, might not share this detail.
Before moving on to the secular system, let’s talk about what I’d like to call the interpretive sectarian sub-myth, term is subject to change. The sects of the same religion have the same main myth, yet they might disagree to the point of battling each other. There are at least two ways in which sects differ. First is the interpretation of the myth, the interpretation of the myth informs the worldview which also derives notions from other sources. Sects will not question the authority of scripture but will interpret certain parts differently. This fact might be held against them from the atheistic, but what the atheist misses by trying to exaggerate the number of sects & interpretations, claiming that it expands as if the text & words have absolutely no meaning. Without going deep into any linguistic & literary theory, we can see that although interpretations are subject to alteration, the whole of scripture & the systematic nature of religion limits the number of possible rational interpretations.
The interpretive disagreement happens on different levels, some sects might have major disagreements, but it will not touch the core of the mythology, if it does then the sect could be considered, either objectively or by other sects, to have strayed into forming a different religion. On less significant disagreements we are dealing with crucial passages that may be serious but would still not touch the mythology itself, this could touch upon other components like the law or ethics of the religion. Then there are miniscule details or philosophical disagreements that don’t matter except to the illuminated minds that are discussing them. Such details are important to be considered & debated but it is far from the main points of a religion, the myth.
The other way sects form is more important & common, it won’t even start off with a theoretical theological disagreement but a disagreement on another component, could even be a secular disagreement that is seen through religious lens. An issue with governance or succession is settled with combat not with debates then the scholars will attempt to mend things in retrospect & in their zeal to prove each other wrong they will elevate events & persons from the historical to the legendary. Thus the interpretive sectarian sub-myth starts to form, its formation doesn’t happen instantaneously, with time there will be a dialectic between the secular & the religious, the two causes of sectarianism will reinforce each other, different heroes mean different worldviews, means different sources of understanding.
Let’s move on to the secular, everything stated so far will help us (me) in two ways. We shall see how a secular mythology would look like, & later we may see how the concept of sub-myth is also existent in the secular plane.
Secularism as we know it today is more or less founded on renaissance & enlightenment ideals. The focus is the human not the divine, the reference is human rationality not the religious. I claimed that the worldview was contingent on mythology & on other factors like cognitive faculties & rationalizations, so if we take out the mythology the worldview would not evaporate along with it because it has other sources to draw from. However, those faculties were used to interpret the world while factoring mythology, not only as another variable but as the very basis. Without it the human will rely on his direct experiences & rationality, the religious always calls into question how reliable those things are. & between those that value them, great lengths were reached to elevate one or the other, either completely rejecting the senses or postulating a state of infant tabula rasa to be filled by senses. Even though the prominent pioneers of these philosophical schools were themselves believers in religion, what they set out to do by relying on the human was disconnecting the mythological component from the rest of the components. Once the wedge has been lodged in, it was a matter of time before the religion is done away with & is replaced with a mutated lesser form of it. lesser as in with a less component, & dare I say the most significant one.
If Man became the purveyor of Laws instead of God or Gods, then would it be a stretch to say that Man assumed the position of God(s)? The belief in pristine human rationality could do without an all-knowing divine entity. This move could give the first indication towards the identity of secular mythology, stories of Gods in pagan religions is then replaced with the story of Men. The reversal is even clearer in the turn from the idea that God created Man to the idea that the idea of God was created by Man. It is no wonder the crazy mustached man announced the death of God also prophesied the rise of the Over-Man.
If Man is appointed to succeed God then it’s no wonder that everything will start centering on him, at least in the minds of men. Just as God is never meant to die then Man in the secularized version of mythology would be immortal as well. With this move we can see with the negation of eschatology & a reinvention of the after life & the attitude towards & by reflection towards life itself. The passage of time would not be cyclical as in an Eastern fashion or limited as in an Abrahamic fashion but will become secularly infinite. I recall observing this from another general perspective, the timelines of humanity would be proportional to the number of Gods or immortals, cycles for religions with several deities, endless ends. A single line for monotheistic religions for a single God. & if the God count was zero then the end count is zero as well. But with the secular mythology concept we can come to the same general conclusion from a different premise, it’s not that God count is zero, it’s that Man himself started to see himself as a God & so started denying the notion of him perishing. In other words, Man must cheat death, must become a death cheater!
Immortality was not the single attribute of God, in fact, in some mythologies Gods are destined to die, & in other worldviews the universe shares eternity with God. What makes a God involves other attributes. Pagan pantheons had different attributes. There are gods for natural phenomena. For thunder & rain, for crops & fertility. There are gods for human works like poetry, for feelings like love & for concepts like judgment. The degree of secular substitutions then varies, all things human are already in their place. For everything else we can see the major shifts in conception as the heavenly kingdom rots for its new fleshy inhabitants. The arts will no longer appeal to what’s higher but for what’s inwards. The artist could assume the role of God by assigning the parameters of beauty, & as long as he can have a cult that shares his parameters then they will have their own standards that could be horrendous for others. But it will not be contested since the objective is no longer there. The focus is on the inward expression not on the imitation of nature or the elevation of the senses.
Even though arts & how they’re affected with the deification of Man as artist & subsequently of Man as a receiver. To keep the rant more focused on C*r*na we need to shift our gaze & look upon another attribute of God which is being usurped by Man. The control over nature. Even though in Islam control over nature was considered a duty of the Man but that was still a duty assigned from above, in no way would the Muslim consider himself able to subdue earth, he was a governor not a god. In secular mythology it is Man as God who controls nature. Since it directly goes against reason to consider the weak human to be a controller of the mighty nature, we need technology. Man believes that nature is there to be used at his will, this arrogant assumption doesn’t stop at the planet, the delusion manifests itself in space-colonizing fantasies. If the religious eschatological events speak of an end, the subverted secular eschatology speaks of an infinite quest of hopping from one planet to another. Or a trans humanist afterlife. The best indication of delusional Godlike power that Man considers to be within his grasp is what Michio Kaku calls type 1, 2 & 3 civilization, planetary, stellar & galactic. I will link the video & I invite the reader to listen to it with what he just read about in mind. it’s worth examining closely, the promise of immortality & the toying of nature, the threat identified as passions & terrorism. I remember watching this video several years back, way before reconsidering the effects of technology & the limits of man. I vaguely remember being impressed with the concept.
I will stop the entry here because after watching the video to link it I found more & more to say & this entry is already long as it is. I would like point out one of the contradictions in the video though, notice how he warned of the terrorist rejection of multiculturalism, this smart man did so in the midst of praising a mono civilization that nullified all cultures across the world. I am reminded of this part from Ellul’s Technological Society.
Till next time.
5th Entry
10th 12th of April
Any direct criticism of scientists and technology is met with dismissive ridicule & aggression. It is understandable for some reasons of course; scientists are the sharpest tools in the shed & technology grants us all the shiny stuff. I believe there are more underlying reasons that are not considered usually & instead of directly discussing them I want to take a step down & discuss another aspect of the secular mythology, hoping not to shock the reader with the conclusions aka prematurely spilling the beans.
The past century was the most brutal throughout history, we are comforted by false progress platitudes, despite having the best documented worst conflicts, we are meant to believe that humans have it better than ever before. The trick is to omit the horrible events in some of the worst arguments you will ever encounter. Humans, we are told, are now less embroiled in violence & wars If we discount a whole fucking world war or two & if we deny the possibility of a nuclear war & ignore its unprecedented potential.
Let us have a quick overview of how the secular & the religious interacted in that century leading up to our current day.
20th century major wars progress on an increasingly secular parameters as religious claims declined gradually then reemerged as an abomination, check the 2nd entry for some thoughts on that. It started with WW1 where there were religious & nonreligious factions, the secular didn’t just strike from without, it also came from within the religious, the communism in Russia & the racial nationalism in the Ottoman empire which helped fuel an Arabian nationalism. Thus, the religious social contract was breaking inside. WW2 had some appeals to the religiosity of here or there but the main umbrellas, motivation & promises were all ideologically secular. You won’t find much talk about heavens & Gods, instead you’ll find talk about worldly ideals, freedom, nation, proletariat. With was a tacit agreement between everyone that this has nothing to do with the afterlife. In some factions the distinction between the religious & the secular is less clear, imperial Japan merged nationalist sentiment with religion. Another exceptional example is zionism, many try to attach it to nationalism but the lines are always blurry with Jews since Bolshevism was in the minds of many contemporaries also tied with Judaism. I will not discuss jews in this entry, but they must always be singled out, after all they prefer to be dealt with uniquely.
Towards the end of the century, the fall of the Soviet Union coincided with the rise of Islamic militias, in Afghanistan it wasn’t a correlation, it was causation to some arguable degree, it is there that the Islamic thinkers & fighters agreed to bow to God not by facing Mecca but by facing the white house, rewarded with weaponry & propaganda in movies like Rambo dedicated to the brave mujahedin. I must look more into the rationalization of this move but judging by the contemporary events, it was done unwittingly, not realpolitikaly.
On the middle eastern theatre, there was a conflict between nationalist countries & monarchies, another manifestation of the struggle between the secular & the religious, but there were no neatly divided ideologies, the religious as I mentioned elsewhere is thoroughly mixed with the secular in a way that puts the secular above the religious, & not any secular, the western secular to be exact. Whereas the nationalist never went full atheistic so we can’t say it is purely secular, but it too places the religious beneath the secular. The victorious monarchist religious faction had the last say closing in the century, but it was a victory on the axle of the Secular chariot not one of the dominantly religious. One last important addition before we close the century, 20 years before Y2K a religious revolution in Iran reshaped the region & the alliances, quickly at war by the nationalist Iraq, while at the same time on good terms with the nationalist Syria. Ten years later the same Iraq invaded Kuwait, then punished by the US. In the center of many conflicts or at the side of it were the zionists, again, signaling them out is crucial but they deserve their own entry because they hop between distinctions as they see fit.
So, it is hard to speak of ideological purity in the ME; I believe that the local ideologies & factions hold a distinct mixture that couldn’t be laid down on any western political compass. It deserves examination but you will be hard pressed to find such a thing, the western thinker will view it through his local lens & the Arab thinkers are busy with outdated or biased paradigms or were too westernized to view it with local eyes. Recently locally grown ideas are diminishing in themselves; it is becoming easier to view things in western lenses by younger thinkers & intellectuals. This is an ominous sign of the erosion of any real diversity & sovereignty in the world. But a positive sign for the likes of Kaku.
The next century/millennium started with the infamous September attacks, the specter of Islamic terrorism instantly became the focus of the Western world. The brave mujahiden that were backed by the US suddenly became the next villain in the American mythological structure. What’s noteworthy about such groups is that you will find a lot of analysts & commentators completely decoupling them from their political/economical/technological contexts. This is done both by supporters & enemies. For the supporter as I mentioned before, God works in mysterious ways & the possibility that there is a cynical mobilization of the religious by the secular is never considered because of the implications. Enemies want to deny any direct support because the clash of civilization thesis will collapse. So both sides benefit from presenting this as a direct conflict between the religious & the secular, you might think that since I’m focused on this particular issue I would gladly welcome this as a proof of the struggle but on the contrary, the muddled definition is what I’m setting out to clear up, some of these religious militias get their weaponry from secular powers, others might have a higher degree of religious autonomy by creating their own weaponry or getting them from religious countries but these militias are quite nationalistic in nature.
& so in the first decade of the 21st century, on the surface propagandist level, on both sides, it looked as if a fight broke out again between the religious & the secular. However, it was asymmetrical & the casualties were incomparable. Sacrifices of all kinds & on all levels are understandable, justifiable & heroic when you are forced to fight, all anti colonial sacrifices were last measures, none of those struggles were inviting of the colonial powers.
But the lines got blurry to many, the jihadist groups that would provoke the West were working another angle, their provocations & civilian targets were not a logical extension of a fight against any existent occupation, Afghanistan wasn’t occupied anymore & when it was occupied it was the Soviets not the West. Some countries like Saudi which produces famous mujahedin was never occupied by Western powers. But the notion of one Ummah, of one Arab struggle blurred the borders. The only country directly occupied is Palestine, yet those mujahedin didn’t work against israeli forces, didn’t strike Israeli targets abroad. That 00s decade started with a confusing event, had two wars that cemented that supremacy of the secular over the religious. But since the rifles of the mujahedin were pointed outwards it was easy to group them all & consider them to be the same freedom fighters, easy to confuse the ones directly fighting an occupation like in Palestine or Lebanon with ones carrying out attacks that aren’t aimed at any particular occupational force. The word terrorism didn’t really terrorize people in the ME because the sight of US bombings dwarfed any action taken out by any militia.
I didn’t intend this to be an entry about terrorism or the religious sphere, so let us focus on the purely political. Moving on with our claims from the previous entry, the secular mythology will gradually substitute elements of former religious mythologies. We traced some parts of how the secular minded, in his worship of Man instead of God will believe in his absolute control over nature, the examples are clear from two previous entries based on the reactions to C*r*na. The sense of agency (a sort of collective omnipotence) & the sense of omniscience (the government/world agency respecters, conspiracy theory ridiculers).
But the mythology also has an afterlife, & transhumanism is relatively recent, before the rise of Musks & Kakus there was the political afterlife where we got all kinds of utopias or semi utopias. The classless world, the anarchic one with all the self-organized small communities, the one were the a race enjoys a thousand years of victory, & one which wasn’t as well formulated as any of those but the one we actually almost ended up with, a democracy with which history itself ended. The utopias on the mythological level substitute heavens. Hell, on the other hand is completely discarded as a future possibility, to all secular political myths, hell is what’s already happening elsewhere (even if the elsewhere is ideological not geographical).
I’ll end this entry here so it won’t drag longer, but I invite the reader to reconsider the conflicts in the past century up to 2010, to check them on the secular mythological scale. Were they different mythologies at war or were they sub mythologies? My claim is that they are sub mythologies, what we saw was secular sectarian war. I am not claiming that the religious disappeared, it lives on but as a subservient Mythology not another sub mythology. Another claim I’ll make is that the mixing between the secular & the religious, if it keeps going unconsciously without this model in mind, will annihilate the religious either completely or transform it as to make it another religiously influenced Secular sub mythology. My end game is to make it a secularly influenced Religious mythology. Or at least a sub mythology for the main religious one not for a secular one.
Till next time I hope.
6th Entry
16th 24th of April
In History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russel has this interesting comparison, he says that “To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary: Yahweh=Dialectical Materialism. The Messiah= Marx. The Elect=The Proletariat. The Church=The Communist Party. The Second Coming=The Revolution. Hell=Punishment of the Capitalists. The Millennium=The Communist Commonwealth”
Despite being mentioned in passing, this insight branches to many directions in my mind, the direct path is to follow the secular mythological hypothesis & try establishing it in other secular ideologies. Including the one Mr. Bertrand himself believed in. another branch would be an examination of psychology itself or rather what position do psychologists really hold in societies with secular mythologies. I will go onwards for this entry, but I ask you to keep the psychologists in mind for future discussion.
What I believe Bertrand got wrong about Yahweh was equating him with dialectical materialism. The secular worships Man & with man being so tiny the worship is done through the mass of men & through the tools that makes men gods. Unless dialectical materialism is taken to be a primordial force or the first generation of Gods. The right way to place it would be to consider it part of scripture, the way Qada’ wa Qadar is central to Quran, dialectical materialism is central to Das Kapital. Not that I have read it but I’m assuming it’s the backbone of his philosophy. The Messiah being Marx is more obvious, even in the layman inventory of historical figures you will see Marx, a common memetic reference. The term Marxist in relation to Marx is like Christian in relation to Christ. Marx disciples are the sub mythological figure that sects fight over; Tankies & Trotskyites could be likened to Sunnis & Shias.
A religious society would put so much effort into pleasing the God it worships, following in the path of the sub mythological figures. Likewise, all secular societies will attempt to please Man. In order to worship Man, all men must be crushed in the process, combined in a giant made up of the tiny men. The following is just symbolic not factual, you can see the failure of the different political ideologies because they diverge from the pure secular self-worship. The collectivist nature of both Communism & Nationalism falls short from the ideal of men worshiping themselves, only the Democratic Capitalist ideology properly puts every man as God.
This happens on various levels, for example the cult of personality around leaders in totalitarian states breaks the rule of worshiping All men. On another level Commies & Naties are out-proselytized by Democratic Capitalists, not just defeated by them in wars. The communist will never appeal to the bourgeoisie. The supremacist racial nationalism cannot convince all races, the belief of supremacy eliminates that possibility. Again this is just symbolic, & It is not in praise of DemCaps, on the contrary we might argue that it wins because it appeals to the vanity & the most base of human’s desires.
It is important to note that a toned-down version of nationalism functions since we already are organized along state lines. Thus Democratic Capitalism can & did have the last say among the secular sects but as with religious sects it is not easy to handle them as discrete blocks, the nation state & workers’ rights are prominent in today’s efforts, they just don’t play the central role & they fluctuate in importance in the minds of many. A capitalist purist might disagree with the idea that business dealings in our world are capitalist. Governments are too involved for his taste. On the other hand, you’ll hear much clamoring against capitalism & the possibility of having a functioning democracy with capitalism. Both terms not probably defined by most people uttering them, including me. But whatever it is I can assert it’s not a nationalist or a communist or any strictly religious system that is running western countries, & that those things are all in the backseat.
C*r*na shows the globalizing vector that is diminishing notions of nations in the minds of men, while countries compete to get masks & equipment, the people clutch their pearls & sigh about the state of humanity. It seems to be a given that humans across the globe should cooperate, what is missing from this superficial noble belief is a formalized founding basis (according to this entire post, the basis is the unspoken presupposed secular mythology). Also lacking is the evidence of its possibility or existence & the actual conceptualization of how it works, without arguing we are told it is the “humane” thing to think…
To entertain this idea I’ll say a couple of things, first let’s imagine a globalized government, if the amount of medical equipment available was the same then wouldn’t the global government move it according to what IT sees fit? Sure, there won’t be borders but that doesn’t mean infinite equipment, even if we assume more productivity & larger amounts of equipment, we are still not told how that would make the equipment instantly available everywhere in the world. Just because we no longer call a country by the country’s name that does not deny the fact that the equipment delivered to that country’s location according to a global government changes.
One might argue that equipment will not be hogged by countries & that a globalized government will distribute it according to where it matters the most. I think it is a nice fantasy, it might even in the extremely distant future become possible, but for now I have to wonder about the functionality of such a bloated government. We are witnessing shortcomings in way smaller governments, to put humanity’s fate in the hands of a centralized government & risk such shortcoming on a global scale is a recipe for disaster. The shortcoming could be coming from the lack of certainty & the lethargy of bureaucracy, it also could come from the malice of those in power. But isn’t this particular argument (globo gov) based on trying to avoid malicious competing smaller governments? it must be proven that the people that form the globalized government aren’t as malicious as the politicians making up all the little governments.
The next counter argument is that even if they were malicious, they wouldn’t have other governments to be malicious against. This is a good point, the only downside of this is the complete equalization that it assumes in a unified world, there are always disparities within any nation state, you don’t need competing governments to fight over resources, capitals are usually the most pampered & there is no reason to assume a globalized government won’t have one or a few central hubs of powers that are preferentially treated. And many civilizations, to a varying degrees, siphoned resources from all over to feed its center of power, if I’m not mistaken the only counter is as I mentioned, an assumption of complete equalization. The reality of this is questionable but for our current purpose we can see the next attribute of Man as God, Gods after all are equal in Godhood. Secular mythology will have the equality of Men not as something grounded in nature, since that is clearly not the case, it is an unfounded belief based on faith not on anything tangible.
What we are living through is a DemCap experiment that is still on going, its material & military victory (& retrospectively symbolic one as well) over the rest of the sects could be temporary, but regardless of what happens next, it’s not a surprise people assume without much argumentation that democracy is the way, the popularity of socialist or even Marxist sentiments represents the natural rejection of men being crushed, but instead of reconsidering the main myth, that they’re all somehow gods that each deserve an instant happy life, & a heaven on earth state of existence, what is attacked is mostly the material conditions of their lives because gods can’t be broke or work 9 to 5 to sustain themselves.
A quick example of the automatic belief in democracy as the way is the so-called Arab Spring, the instantaneous belief in democracy had no democratic philosophical build up. secondly, we have secularly initial outbursts. The religious façade of the militias does not stop the apolitical average atheist from supporting them, such contradiction is never acknowledged directly. It is always brushed aside with false equivalencies.
Well, that is, all the way from the start of the Spring till the emergence of C*r*na, where suddenly the same people that talked about nothing else other than the rights of the people suddenly cheered for the instant grab of powers, the stripping of rights, & engaged in the statist boot licking they claim to be vehemently opposed to. Now we can move the timeline from the previous entry, without much discussion of what went on from 2010 to 2020, not because it’s not important, it is without a doubt extremely important, but in 2020 we have the vantage point of seeing results & enough examples to properly judge what happened instead of sticking to the dreamy state of 2010, which many Arabs can’t seem to snap out of.
C*r*na showed us that many think it is okay for governments to force any measure, the weak retort to this criticism of them is that this is a pandemic & such measures are necessary for safety misses the mark. This retort doesn’t understand that what is criticized & puzzling here isn’t just the strict measures, it’s the out of the blue blind trust for starters, & the brutality of men against their countrymen for mild transgressions, is breaking a curfew really that dangerous that one would cheer the humiliation & call for harsher measures? All of this, as reprehensible as it may sound, could at least be redeemed by consistency, but even that is absent. Most of the people that get seizures if asked to reconsider the Arabic Spring’s legitimacy prove with every test that they are no different than those they claim to oppose. Supporting prison torture, innocent murder, police brutality at the drop of a hat. The same ones that think mocking nationalism is a personality trait turned nationalists overnight. I’m not complaining about this burst of nationalism as much as I’m confused, is this double standard a proof of the secular mythological hypothesis or the result of propagandized brains (assuming they’re different things)?
Cynical support of revolution is always on the menu of explanations, it was the first sign for me that something is off, none of it seemed genuine. What I say here is not about the revolutions as much as about the support from abroad, many people get engrossed in discussing the revolutions & try to pass the impression that they are directly involved in them. Without factoring the factual disconnect in geography & activities, an intellectual blunder in my opinion. The stench of hypocrisy was never absent, the immoral positions kept worsening over time, but the situation is so decadent & the double standards are so severely imbalanced that it just might wake people to attempt deeper analysis of the revolutionary mistakes, but if it doesn’t then I don’t know what will.
The mob mentality witnessed in the past weeks could raise from two possible sources, first we can consider it as an indication that people here have no concept of individual dignity & no understanding of what a secular government really is. Or it could be another sign of the secular mythology that considers Man to be the be all end all. For if Man should never die, then anyone endangering man is not only transgressing against his fellow man but against Man as God. If there is no afterlife, then surely anyone putting us at risk in this life is blasphemous! To repeat myself, yes man always feared death & centered many of his activities if not all of them around the anxiety fueled by death, what’s different with the secular mythology is that immortality is no longer confined to the heavens.
Even if I were to fold the whole hypothesis of the previous entries, I could still point to an exceptional status of the country we live in. There is a generation or two that are raised with the highest ideal being “amin wo aman”. What kind of populace do you think such a glorification of safety would breed? A “warrior like caste” would emerge, beneath it will be the large swathes of scared men that shun any notion of mass conflict. They are tough using the warrior like caste as a bludgeon against each other, but they would never consider going against the warrior like caste.
This cowardly strain of thinking will burst in an indirect way, the need to act & the inability to do so will lead to resolving the psychological dissonance by proxy. Safety is paramount in our country, negligible elsewhere.
Now let’s roll out the hypothesis again & note that the secular sub myth of Democracy causes dissonance within the minds of people living in non-democratic countries, in a country that doubles down on the sacredness of human life, a life of the barest existence mind you, the only way out of the dissonance is to support revolutions elsewhere. & it must be a revolution, not any kind of conflict, in fact conflicts that aren’t directly based on secular mythology are downplayed if not sneakily questioned or outright betrayed by words or deeds.
The secular sectarianism is also visible between the nationalist first & the democratic first, you will see many young Arabs mocking the previous generation for support of dictators or even nationalism. The young man or woman might even be bright enough to understand the role of propaganda in shaping the opinion of his or her parents, but they will never consider that the new generation is submerged in an equal, if not worst, levels of propaganda. The same mockery of conspiracy theories regarding C*r*na has been the norm for a decade for any anti Arabic Spring theory. Let’s consider on what grounds the younger generation mocks the older one: nationalist leaders ruined their countries, lost battles, didn’t achieve what they claimed to have set out to do. Let’s not contest any of those claims but simply ask, how are the mass movements of the Arab Spring & all the subsequent disasters any different? Whatever answer is given it must not be valid with the nationalist leaders.
For example, any appeal to the existence of a counter revolution is not different than the nationalist appeal to the imperialist powers. In fact it is worse, since any revolution should expect a counter revolution if it was clear sighted & had clear goals with clear enemies. Whereas the nationalist isn’t dealing with the imperialist as an after effect but as a danger to face. The 3rd world nationalist, unlike the 1st world counterpart, emerged from the brutal conflict with colonization. Nationalism was the counterattack not the initiation. The revolution on the other hand doesn’t emerge from the counter revolution, & if it attempts to claim that it is the nationalist in its fight against its own government (imperialist), then it might be better to either learn from the nationalist, or at least be wise enough not to mock it, without argument, by sole appeals to the sub secular democratic capitalist mythos.
Now if we were to agree with the rearrangement of events, let’s say a revolution is a counter not an initiation of violence (which is evidently false unless the definition of violence is bent until it loses meaning, especially in bloody revolutions) & if 3rd world nationalism is a counter for imperialism, would it be too much to ask this kind of revolutionary to stop the pretenses in his brave efforts in countering counter imperialists & to be committed to follow up with all the arguments necessary to shake off the fact that he is on the side of the imperialist? I don’t expect a sincere response of course, because none of this was philosophically built up, the laymen & intellectuals see all the death & suffering without a shred of self-doubt, without considering that perhaps they share the blame with the evil tyrants they claim to oppose on ethical grounds. I believe it is too much for them to consider because the ideological roof will be blown off exposing the imperial sky above, the religious man that thinks God is helping him cannot be very open about being a proxy, the secular one that supports him also cannot give grounds to the attacks mounted by the nationalist because as an adherent of the globo democratic sect he disagrees with nationalism. What I expect from them is shrieks & mischaracterization of these questions. I sincerely hope for honest answers though, or someone that can concede some points.
In anticipation of possible screeching I would like to be clear that I am clearly against any form of tyranny but that doesn’t automatically makes me side with any revolution unless it promises to really end the tyranny not just replace it. I have been consistent with this right from the start of C*r*na & all through the last decade, unlike many that fall instantly at every test of their so called revolutionary stances. I would add that unlike the humanitarian sub secularist, I do not steal from the suffering of others, I do not abstract suffering to numbers & pour all types of suffering in one big pot, then mix it with my tears to show people how much of a “humanist” I am. My people suffered & are suffering more than enough & that is my main concern, this heightens my sensitivity to the suffering of others, which makes me want to act properly to help not by being agreeable & offering hollow aid which would be more to ease my dissonance than to help those who directly suffer. I do not offer empty slogans, they do more harm than good. My sympathy is deeper than a tweet & is more persistent than a hashtag. I do believe in the power of words & ideas which is why I am writing all this, this is my revolt, seeking the best analysis & understanding how different groups think, grasping for a model that might truly help. I believe that this is what we Arabs lacked in the past decade if not the entire past century as well. At no point was there a lack of men or zeal, what we missed was vision & proper philosophical foundations. It is not my fault that my analysis goes against the main narratives. considering how fucked we are, it is safer to assume we got more things wrong than right. I do not do it to join a propagandized circle jerk, perhaps I have been more consistent in being against the consensus than in being an ideologue of any kind as my ideas crystallized & changed through the years. It is not a fun place to be, it leaves me on the periphery. But a man does not hold ideals for fun or for any reward. The company he seeks is of the few idealists not the manipulated masses. Even true believers of different mythologies are better mental companions to me than those that misunderstand the mythology we share. Despite having to be with the later on the ground, unless they throw me on a pyre for not offering tokens of blind agreement.
Sectarian secularism doesn’t exclude the death embracers of the first mixture. The religious people that are trying to akshually their way through. In fact, they have the weirdest claims since their mythology is a fusion of the secular & the religious, trying to balance the worship of God & Man. Inadvertently in many ways reducing god & religion to a tool for the benefit of Man. There is no doubt that religious practices are beneficial, the secular trick by this specific group is to make that benefit the real goal. Considering Man to be the end. Do you not hear how much they talk about humanity, & how they are da real humanists? How da real feminism was a religious one, one that you needed to squint hard enough to understand? how da historical dialectical abolishment of slavery took centuries, happened elsewhere, but was all part of the plan? How psychologically it is beneficial to do such & such ritual? How in reality the prophets were the first secularists? I’ll end sarcasm here, but I’ll say that a self-aware first mixer could argue his way to secularism without betraying what he conceives to be da real religion. Fuck it I might be that man eventually. I only ask that he cuts down the lip service to the religious mythology if there is no full commitment to it. As it might confuse many if not all who listen.
Anyway, that would be all for now. I think I have gone on a tangent lol, perhaps the entries are just a sequence of tangents. The last paragraph is a way to tie the ends, the more we progress the closer we will be back to explaining what is happening here & now. I am not any presenting entry as conclusive but I’m not downplaying it in any way by saying it’s just thinking out loud. I mention that fact just as an excuse of how messy it is.
Till next time…
7th Entry
24th of April
I wanted to make this a separate entry because it revolves around a certain book, but this entry is not out of the entire rant scope, on the contrary it fits so neatly in a way that surprised me. My mind tells me to calm down since my new ideas will obviously conform with old ideas because they are both mine. But this is where my mind got it wrong, because I claim that there is direct display of one of the concepts here in the book in question not by me & found where I wasn’t even looking, The Plague by Camus.
Disclaimer: I’m not going to write a review, I recommend the book if you are into Camus or want something related to C*r*na. Spoilers ahead.
The concept is the dichotomy of Embracers/Cheaters of death mentioned in earlier entries, in the novel there is a character called Father Paneloux, two sermons are delivered by this character, one on the outset of the plague where he considers it to be a punishment. This type of rationalizing is an accurate description of how religious figures approach calamities in general, it is a punishment for sinners & if people were to act right then things will not be this bad. The father then works with a doctor & on one occasion they witness the death of a child, they watch it minute by minute because they were hoping that a cure will save him. The child dies & it leaves a mark on all characters involved, Father Paneloux was hit the hardest. The story tells of some changes in his words & mannerisms, then he delivers the second sermon where he is not as certain as in the first one. He changes his view of the plague, instead of it being a punishment he now considers it a test. an All or Nothing test of faith. You either take your faith that includes all the suffering it entails without rationalizing it or you reject the faith. His view is formulated as such “It is illogical for a priest to call in a doctor.”
Readers might view this character as an example of the failure of the religion to account for suffering. A religious reader might take this as an attack, a less religious one might consider it a valid criticism. The death left Father Paneloux in doubt some might say, a crude atheistic look would even say he lost his faith or that his faith is at fault. Shortly as the story progresses, Father Paneloux gets sick & refuses the help of the doctor which naturally shocks the death cheater. What is peculiar about his death is that we are not certain it was caused by the plague. The doctor writes “doubtful case” as the cause. This implies in my opinion that the cause of his death was the child’s suffering that he witnessed. Others might say it is doubt itself. But how could it be doubt if he answered his question, he chose not to get the help of the doctor & stayed true to his faith. He faced death looking at the crucifix. Another character puts it directly, he mentions a priest that lost his faith during a war after seeing a young man’s face with both eyes destroyed, he then continues: When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose his faith. And he will go through with it to the end.”
Father Paneloux chose to embrace death, the absurdist might use this to mock religion but that’s only because he couldn’t understand that choice. As much as I want to go on a tangent to talk about existentialism & absurdism I will refrain because I want this entry to be short & to the point.
The dichotomy of embracing/cheating death is not an everyday choice, only in the depths of depression does it become so. But for the ordinary & even troubled person, the choices faced are different & with much less at stake. But it is a question that stares us straight in the eyes in times of calamities, whether collective or personal. Father Paneloux chosing to embrace death as his answer is consistent with his paradigm, his mythology, his worldview, all the way down to his choices of rejecting the secular medicine should not be viewed with a tipped fedora. This is a personal existential choice, unlike the first sermon when he threw the responsibility on the believers, the second sermon was him announcing his own doubts & choices to the audience, then living up to his words.
I would add Father Paneloux as an example of a pure death embracer, he does not fit in the two mixtures I mentioned previously. He didn’t mix his faith in God with his faith in the doctor, in Man. He embraced death but did not ask others to do so, & certainly did not endanger others or directly attack them in his embrace. His sensitivity is what I would expect from a true believer, Father Panloux that delivered the first mixture was the detached theoretician, he was not a believer as much as an academic of a belief system. That’s the type of religious figures that we despise, but by the time of the second sermon we found the proper example of the faithful man. The one that is willing to carry the Cross.
Other characters are worthy of discussing but it is a different kind of discussion. 3ala seeret el discussion I would like to mention another thing. I joined a group discussion about this book & last week we discussed another book with a plague-ish event. Blindness by Saramago. Some people mentioned that although Blindness had grotesque surface level events, there was an air of optimism that snuck between the events, while in The Plague the opposite seems to have happened; despite humanitarian characters, despite the lack of evil characters, The Plague had a dreadful feeling to it. I was asked why that might be. I said that perhaps the overall philosophy of the writer peers through the surface textual level. I wanted to oppose Camus French Absurdism with a Latin Christian background of Saramago, however Saramago is an atheist not a Christian. This point also fits with this long rant in two ways, one is Particular. It is up for question & frankly I am not fully committed to. But the second way is more consistent in a universal sense.
The Particular is Saramago’s Christianity, not personally since he is not a Christian. I found out that he had issues with Christians due to other writings. In order to further examine this theme I need to see what he wrote elsewhere & dive in a bigger pool of evidence from other writers. The main idea is that the cultural & spiritual essence of a people will pierce through their works of art, rising from the deepest of levels. But regardless of that, the universal idea I had in mind is that there are different kinds of atheisms, which is the point I’m trying to drive here. The sub mythology of different atheistic sects might diverge as much as religious sects do. What I failed to do by jumping directly to the religious is a failure many people do which I’m trying to undo with this thesis, trying to strip the opposing views from enough credit & portray to be less nuanced than our own. I have yet got to break down the secular sub mythologies but for now let’s lay the hypothesis that the Political atheism of Saramago is more hopeful than the Absurdist atheism of Camus. This is the second point which fits with what I’m saying. as for the first I might have been mistaken unless we consider the inertia of beliefs of a group. The French are secularists through & through. & even though Latin America is communistic or at least socialist, its roots in the Spanish & Portuguese religiosity might give its secularity a different flavor. Saramago being a Portuguese communist does not negate his roots, or does it?
Any way that difference didn’t appear to me personally, what I stated crossed my mind as an answer to explain that feeling during the discussion. for me personally I did find the works dissimilar, I found The Plague a lot more insightful & it clicked on many occasions, whereas Blindness had a direct disgusting feel to it. Others noted that Blindness did have a hopeful ending, just because he threw a pessimistic sentence without showing it through the story doesn’t mean it was a dark story, even the blindness was white in nature. I think The Plague had a proper struggle, the characters were more fleshed & their ideas more proper, not just blind people scurrying around stepping in shit scavenging for food. But The Plague ended with an indifferent tone. Since this isn’t a literary rant I won’t delve in details but I’ll say this, Blindness has an interesting fictional concept but it goes nowhere with it, The Plague is realistic & aims for a higher conception of Man but it reaches a conclusion that is unsatisfactory. Might this be the proper answer? The Communism peered through Blindness in its fictional premise that goes nowhere. The Plague is logically concluded but the conclusion is lifeless as the universe is from an Absurdist pov? without invoking deeper Christian roots or studying Saramago this answer is better. Also I wonder where AlMawta fits in this catastrophic scheme.
Before we finish the entry, I would like to bring up more quotes from Camus that are relevant to our tl;dr
This quote from The Plague matches the death cheaters: In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore, we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
This one is funny & brings a good point about an idea that was memed with C*r*na: They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality.
These two bit showcase the discrepancy between the humanist victory & the author’s absurdism that sneaks beneath it in the following exchange: “and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
The conversation: “Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that’s all”
Rieux’s face darkened: “Yes. I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”
“No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.”
“Yes. A never-ending defeat.”
Finally, a quote from the Rebel which brings us back to our theme about the secular mythology (I don’t know if Camus wrote it or quoted it as I haven’t read the Rebel):
Criticism of religion leads to this doctrine that man is for man the supreme being. From this angle, socialism is therefore an enterprise for the deification of man and has assumed some of the characteristics of traditional religion.
Till Next time, & Ramadan Kareem.
8th Entry
3rd of May
The lockdown is being phased out slowly even though there is no vaccine as far as I know. We will see how it goes but since this rant is just a documentation of some passing thoughts during the lockdown, I will try to make this entry the last or the second to last in case life goes back to semi normality. But I gotta wonder if the panic was warranted doe.
First a quick summary (plus extra comments not mentioned lol) to save your time from reading the previous entries. The main idea is that humans did not reject religion they just replaced it. The various mythologies in history placed an entity at the top, Gods or a God or a certain primordial power/way that dictates nature. Secularism started taking steps to kill those Gods by rendering them noninterventional (deism, mechanical determinism on a mythological plane) then by basing morality on rationality instead of scripture (I don’t think it’s a conspiracy it’s just the flow of philosophy, western philosophy to be exact). Then with the Western exploration & dominion over other races & lands it was not enough to downplay God’s role but to grasp it themselves, before that, people always claimed to be instruments of Gods, the difference here was that they viewed themselves as replacements of Gods.
This shows in breaking down other parts of mythology like the afterlife, it is no longer what happens after you die, it is presented as the end game of a civilization, a state of heaven on earth, a utopia if we follow a certain political ideology. This was the 20th in a nutshell, the main two questions were of economy & nationhood.
But things were not going on as anyone planned or philosophized, instead of enlightenment’s rational humans the ideas started to point to irrationality & animal herding overview, humans must subordinated with various techniques. Economical delusions of complete equality also didn’t fit with reality so reality was forced to fit with it. Then the psychologists stepped in, with the help of medical achievements & lack of regard to the wellbeing of human subjects, experiments were made. Societies were no longer questioned in reference to a scriptural model of morality, now it came down to just feeling happy, the question is no longer “is this society just or moral” it is now “is this society giving me what I want!”. All negative feelings should be eliminated, self help religion was on the rise & so was the individual faux dreams of success, negating any meaning to having a group or loved ones. everyone is on their own pursuing happiness. The American dream was outsourced, the Islamic notion of people freaking out on judgement day & thinking only about themselves “nafsi nafsi!” was ahead of schedule.
Other manifestations of this replacement, mentioned in previous entries, include the belief of human omnipotence (we can crush C*r*na if we freeze in our homes!) or delusions of omniscience (ha ha conspiracy theorists got it wrong, governments & news are godlike entities that instantly understand everything & communicate Truth). The dilusion of globalized equality (waa why are evil countries hogging equipment, we should all have access to everything everywhere instantly) & the belief in immortality as I will briefly discuss in the following paragraphs.
With the start of 21st century something else started gaining hold of people’s minds, the political was answered militarily & economically, so instead of thinking of other political systems it is taken for granted that democracy is the way. The attributes-replacement of Gods started taking another route, immortality. Instead of building a utopian society why not cut to the chase & find a way to be immortal.
The dream of immortality is as old as humanity itself, usually it was answered with an afterlife or cycles while cults tried to take a shot at it with elixirs of life & immortality pills. The difference now is that it’s a wide held belief & a hiveminded pursuit of humanity. We are told that we can upload ourselves on a some cloud & if we science hard enough this will come to be. Instead of worshiping God to let us in heaven we can worship science & technology, after all even if it does not get us to heaven it will at least ease our suffering in this world. Gotta get those drugs to make us feel happy & Netflix to distract us from the hellish industrial life & what it forces us to forsake. Any traditional notion of having a group to identify with or a loved one is laughable for many reasons in the mind of the thoroughly secularized. Not only because the meme of infinite progress automatically rejects any yearning to the past, but also because of the nafsi nafsi mentality & what it entails, ultimately sacrificing yourself for a higher cause is slowly becoming a thing of the past, & with it we see the fading of the smaller sacrifices expected in human relations, & if people are not willing to compromise & sacrifice something for each other then the very notion of a community is laughable, down to the basic unit of family or the pure ideal of love.
Now in order to see the four concepts of Godlike Men in secular thought & to further prove that it breaks into the religious mind as well, check out this video by Shuqeiri specifically the point that starts around 8:58. See how instead of questioning what got C*r*na to spread & instead of questioning what we take for granted, he wants more of the same. More globalization, more delusions about defeating death & so on.
Humans are philosophically chasing their tails at this point in history. It is easy to fall for the trap of a golden past, which is just as confusing as a utopian future. The people that fall for this trap are many, I focused on the religious ones that fail to admit the momentary defeat (that will become permanent if they keep clowning). I also tried to show that they do not fully grasp how affected they are by the dark spirit of this age. Religion is reverse engineered & painted as a postmodern liberal world with some caveats. Or worse, it is considered a corpse & so terroristic necromancy is attempted to revive it.
I like to believe that I barely escaped this trap so I cannot talk much about the way forward, but I can see some signposts. First obstacle is the idea that time can be turned back in any way. Instead we should accept the cyclical nature of history. Things go up & down; we should always attempt to make the best with what we have not with what we wish we have. The secondary obstacle is the assurance of the cyclical ebb & flow, the idea that just because things happened before & will happen again we should chill. That when this empire collapses we’ll have another shot with our own empire. This should be avoided at all costs, because the symbolic cycles are materially different, an overarching cycle is also taking place, & on smaller scale we have smaller personal cycles. We should not repeat mistakes even if we find ourselves in the seemingly same position as we found ourselves before. A fall of globalized empire spells doom for everyone, this could be truly the end of history.
To cut a long story short, for the religiously minded it’s time to consider the real implications of a dominant secular mythology. Without wet dreams about the past. To give a direct practical guide I will say this, the 20th century had two main questions that religious people never answered, the question of economy & of nationhood. The 21st century has another two questions, one of technology & of environment. Muslim scholars either cheating & stealing secular answers or giving unsatisfactory wishful ones. Unless an honest school of thought tackles them head on then religion will have no place in the future. Instead of painting Islamic history with brushes of liberalism we should be critical in retrospect with all these questions in mind & grade the tests accordingly. We shouldn’t fall for a complete self-loathing leftist defeatism. There is a residual question that wasn’t answered, the sectarian one, the effort being put in this one might be one of the reasons Muslims can’t think clearly, they’re busy with pointless squabbles & are therefor nothing more than pawns on the chess board. I hope none of this is interpreted as an attack on religion itself, it is a criticism & a call for intellectual action. The secular religion is dragging humanity down to hell on earth, or worse, is dragging earth to a catastrophe & possible extinction by playing God with nature.
At this point you are free to go, you can go up & read how I was exploring those ideas, or you can keep reading & check some bonus ideas I want to squeeze in.
First an allegory to explain the ideas developed in this rant, picture a tower that pierces the sky. This tower is your model of the world, at the top is the religious mythology, there is a power that rules over. If we take a step down you’ll find a worldview, from that we can see the twin of politics & economy. Another dimension is there but we cannot see it, that’s time, or we should say history. At the first floor of the tower you & I stand. We can leave this tower but only to move to another tower. That is the choice that we make. The collective choices shape the tower(s). We make choices but we are not in complete control of our conditions, the conditions make some choices for us or limit our choices.
Let us go down deeper, into the human psyche, where we find that our actions are not fully in informed by rationality, the passions have a say in how we behave. We should strike a balance between the two forces. The tower is held together with the group ethics which takes from all levels of the tower.
The combination of our collective choices (recent & ancestral) the politics, the economical conditions give us Culture. Culture is a collection of informed choices that either still work or worked at one point. Rejecting it is rejecting a rich supply of hints & guides, blindly following it only works if nothing changed. But the moment the tower is shook, or the collective choices are altered we must restructure it as not to collapse.
This tower is a model not bound by physical laws. Its center of gravity is not earth but the sky. This is how it all went down, the highest floor was taken out because it was distant, the next step was to hold the second highest floor & hold the structure (worldview & ethics) when that failed it was reduced to a matter of organization (political ideologies & economical systems became the roof of consideration with no metaphysics beyond it). When a bloody frenzy ensued & none of the utopias were achieved it fell down, history is denied (which is why we are told progress is infinite) cultures are reduced to superficial symbols devoid of meaning, a mono culture is out to wipe real cultural diversity, which is one of the reasons racism is the cardinal sin of secular societies, the other reason being the mythological status of the hol*caust. At this point it all collapsed on the individual, but he is not left alone, the psychologists want to dissect him & split his brains & personality. It doesn’t stop there, he wants to black out the mythological sky by claiming it was all in our minds, reinterpreting mythologies as projection & nothing more. the economists want to substitute his organic means of sustenance with artificial products. Our personal choices are conditioned since birth, we are not told of heaven or hell after we die, but we need a narrative, we can’t live without the tower, so we get short timed narratives that go nowhere, those narratives are TV shows & movies & commercial novels. They are not just distractions, they inform our view of reality, tell us how to behave. We know the people behind them are greedy hedonists, yet for some reason many of us dream of lives according to what is seen in those shows. So, it is not a surprise that we act like greedy hedonists ourselves. Only to face reality & realize it is not a show. Any attempt to fix the mundane cruel reality shouldn’t start with what self-help gurus trick you into, it should start right at the top, by reconfiguring the entire tower. This philosophical task is not for everyone, it never was. But we, the ones not assigned to do it, as individuals we should be aware of the collapsing tower & take cover. Our only means to fight it is through the only tool we have, not to succumb to the collapsing tower. Even if we can’t formulate a philosophy & can’t find prophets to guide us, we should dodge the debris hurrying towards us by choosing to connect with those on the ground around us, with the closest people, to live authentically & fight the urge to immitate what is presented to us as normal lifestyles. We need to hold the ground with our will so subsequently we will have the ability to structure a different tower, mentally by the few that are visionary first, then we can help build it materially afterwards.
Second, I would like to quickly invite the reader to relocate the religious functions with the concept of God replacement not rejection in mind. Are psychologists & propagandists the clerics of the secular age? The conceptual trick is believing that the roles of clerics is gone with religion, we should look for what it morphed into. It is easy to bash the dying role of the religious man but the real challenge, if we considered the clergy to be corrupt, is to look out for the Secular clergy.
As for the scientists, smart as they are in their relative fields, are they smart enough to comprehend the tower or are they happy with the high positions they now hold in it? can we really turn to them for anything other than technical details? blinded by the narrowed tunnel of a microscope they might not understand that the whole tower is breaking.
It might be entertaining for the atheistic to mock the religious structures, but can he be taken seriously if he is blinded to the religious structure that even he doesn’t understand he is entombed in? Aren’t all his criticisms undercut by his zeal & dogmatism? Just because it was relocated doesn’t make it any less dangerous or blameless. In reference to a point in a previous entry, the naive new generation that prides itself in not following nationalist leaders or nationalism can’t even begin to understand their own positions & how propagandized they are to believe what they believe. The same goes for the atheist that thinks he is too woke for religion but can’t understand how much of an acolyte he is.
Third a quote from Camus discussing rebellion & talking about Ivan from Brothers Karamazov because why not
Fourth, on the topic of Camus & to finish this entry, in a previous entry I talked about his book The Plague & a thought that crossed my mind in the discussion. That there is an internal or subconscious philosophy that permeates the text of the author. This does not take away from the text but helps us better understand it. With the example of the metaphysical tower in mind, I want to add that its collapse affects us in all personal choices & influences interpersonal relationships, the fact that we live in this consumerist vain age will be internalized. The ethics of our towers are built by those shows.
Just as the tower pierces the sky, its collapse will surely pierce to the deeper recesses of our minds. I wish to ask the reader to fight the urge to live for a fleeting dream that will never be satisfied with products & an endless Netflix binge watch. We might not acknowledge it or state it openly in the texts that we write for our lives, but it shows through our actions & aspirations.
Just as humans failed at all their attempts to play Gods as a collective, it is wise not to attempt to act like little Gods with dreams of hollow material successes. It sounds like madness in this day & age to ask this but I also believe we must accept the suffering that comes with life, we shouldn’t celebrate it but we shouldn’t run away frantically from it. If we find ourselves bored in the C*r*na lockdown we should try to get in our inner worlds & be more introspective, this is the opposite of self-help, this is not about feeling better, constant happiness is a meme propagated by this falling tower, don’t fall for that meme, instead try to understand our finitude as humans & accept the true nature of suffering.
This was the case in most of Human history, the higher ideals were all in place for a reason, seeking family, friendship & love were the ways you could deal with the harshness of reality. But now in our artificial hell we reject those things & scurry around like insects in a colony, the billboards show us ideals of individualism & self actualization, such things were not articulated openly before because people had genuine lives. Now that we have completely lost autonomy & authenticity we pray in their names while never fully having them, never connecting the dots, never understanding that being selfish & empty inside are byproducts of chasing after ideals like individualism & constant happiness. Instead of accepting that we might not be constantly happy & that our lives were meant to be shared not selfishly lived. If we don’t understand this we will lose the very things we pursue.
Sameer.rameeS 