ETHOS&LUDOS:

Three Tenets of Morality:

1. To form convictions.

a.  Observing behavior in others.

b. Learning from one’s own experiences.

c.  Weighing choices against a stable tradition or goal.

2. To stand by convictions.

a.  Resisting temptation.

b. Prioritizing with consistency.

c.  Practicing habits.

d.Taking calculated risks.

3. To reform/update convictions.

a.  Understanding Deeper Principles, the player is then able to suspend short-term values for deeper, more enduring ones.

b. Adhering to a righteous habit, one travels through several iterations of the same enterprise while never drifting too far from the central course.

c.  Contradictions between opposing values are resolved internally and then carried out externally.

d.Emotional responses are understood clearly.

                                                           i.      Righteous indignation becomes informed self-interest.

                                                       ii.      The ability to comprehend intelligence in others as akin to one’s own produces win-win outcomes.

                                                   iii.      The sabotage of win-win outcomes produces longing for justice and redemption.

                                                    iv.      The synthesis of informed self-interest and selfless idealism combine to create an autonomous individual who is himself a Source of Moral Authority, no longer dependent upon external forces, whether those forces act as moral, immoral, or amoral agents.

Weaker characters:

-        Know the Right Thing to Do but still do not do it.

-        Do not concern themselves with Ethics.

-        Falsely believe themselves to be justified in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

-        Engage in unethical and/or deliberately misleading communications.

-        Take righteous words out of context, such as when the fight for liberty becomes a narcissistic expression of the will. (A.k.a. “stolen valour”.)

-        Get so absorbed in the theoretical aspect of moral discourse that they never develop conviction.

-        Become so involved in the execution of a principle that they never question conviction.

-        Allow public opinion to govern them.

-        Become cynical when injured.

-        Envy righteousness.

Permissible exceptions:

-        Avoiding situations wherein one is likely to become demoralized.

-        Using morality to get ahead (informed self-interest; passion.)

-        Doing the Right Things for the Wrong Reasons.

o  Right Things are ordinarily objective and physical, whereas

o  Reasons are nebulous and abstract, prone to manipulation and obscurity.

-        Defying conventional expectations in order to adhere to an internal conviction. This represents CONSTANCY over a LIFETIME. (Personal Growth.)

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

PROFESS!ON&PASS!ON:

Most people sense emotional distress and they become more attentive. Then they read what you have to say and they find it credible, informed, and well-put. But some degenerate sees the emotional impact of either his involvement or his noninvolvement and, instead of attending to the details, he reacts to the emotion in a thoroughly unsympathetic (and, consequently, unprofessional) manner. I will not work with guys like that, and neither should you. They need to learn emotional maturity by taking responsibility for their teams and the sort of work environment which they contribute to by remaining ignorant of the facts. There will never in your adult life be a legitimate situation wherein you are either expected or rewarded for suppressing half the facts of a situation, and neither can anyone gain status in an organization by suppressing them in others.

[({DM.A.A.)}]

CULTZA:

A cult is an organization whose constituents are adherents to both a code of conduct and a frame of reference which is self-contained, forbidding departure without excommunication, reinforcing psychological damage via conformism. Of all contemporary cults, the most common and despicable appears to be that of “postmodernism”: a slightly overused term for an EXTREMELY overused mode of thinking.

Postmodernism was a conclusion which philosophers arrived at as a sort of surrender or concession to defeat. It is a term that is used aptly to describe not only the “groundlessness” of morality, tradition, and metaphysical inquiry, but also the willful-yet-inevitable ACCEPTANCE by ordinary people of this perceived futility.

If the term itself appears pretentious, it is only because the one who perceives it to be such takes this condition for granted, calling it “life”. Yet it ought to be transparent how this is a cultish dogma. Postmodernism offers no escape from the constantly changing stream of information; it blocks off all paths to either a meaningful future or an authoritative past. Not only does the past matter less now than it did when it was present, but that which WAS past IN the past mattered more when the latter past was present than either past matters now in our current present. The greatest danger in postmodernism is its narcissistic refusal to change permanently. Narcissism is not to be confused with unyielding rigidity; narcissists often adapt to their circumstances when they cannot adapt their circumstances to themselves, yet what characterizes narcissism in particular is the seeming inability to change in the long term, to adopt a new paradigm of consistency which is more inclusive, perceptive, or conscientious.

So it is with postmodernism: its condition is ever-shifting, yet its fundamental character remains infantile, self-referential, and egocentric. Everything becomes a function of the individual subject, devoid of transcendence into the ancient ideals of Solidarity, Heroism, Virtue, Beauty or Truth.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

In this world, nihilism prospers under the GUISE of meaning, as terms such as “identity”, “freedom”, “pride”, and even “right” or “wrong” are torn from their roots and left to be constantly redefined by an illiterate Public.

The Past is reduced to that which we are anxious to escape, whereas the Future is feared as that which cannot be prevented but which we seek to avoid. The Present, in turn, loses all its meaning in the overlying Course of History; so long as “progress” is still a meme in circulation among the masses, Our Society must surely be the best of all possible worlds to DATE, but each new day will render it obsolete, meaning that at no point can one look back and say, “how great the Past was!!” And yet we feel a constant nostalgia, s though we had not only “lost something” but were in a constant process of losing it, and this wistful melancholy is warranted, for this process of loss has in fact been carefully scrutinized by authorities whose insights too are in the process of being lost.

In Truth, any one of us can work to stop this process of dissolution. Yet I don’t believe that ever before in the course of history has the temptation been greater to surrender responsibility for Mankind’s Future and to simply use the March of Progress as a sublimation for the individual ego and will.

[({DM.A.A.)}]

TAYLOR: 05062020.

TAYLOR: 05062020.

Do not bewail me that I have been so unrelenting in your denunciation. You had so many opportunities to remedy the worst crisis in my Life (as well as the Lives of Others) that it is maddening to consider. At every juncture, I did my due diligence by instructing you, and almost to spite me you resisted like a maniac, electing to aggravate matters past the point of reparation. Tell me now: when once has anyone followed my advice into despair? When have my plans failed by design? How many times did they not succeed, once sold to YOUR peculiar liking?

[({Dm.A.A.||R.G.)}]

Z!ZEK: 05062020.

Zizek is a product of his Zeitgeist: a narcissistic entertainer who willfully collects a bounty for a once-noble and now-marginalized enterprise which he himself deems to be “useless”, against the admonition of his predecessors and contemporaries, even the dull and conventional ones, but to the tremendous benefit of his celebrity, his own ego, and his indirect pandering to an audience. He echoes the modern prejudice that philosophy does not solve problems, whereas science does. Yet all problems essentially begin and end in the mind, and their solution is only substantial once it is registered consciously. Science does not solve problems; even technology does not. They merely supply man with tools and weapons. As Zizek himself points out, it is extremely problematic to disembody the weapon, as Suzuki does, giving the tool all the credit and denying the one who wields it. Herein, I criticize Suzuki even as a former Buddhist, whose insistence upon the subjectivity of objective problems (as well as the objectivity of subjective problems) is a Buddhistic vestige.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

REVENGE of the 5TH:

When we develop a science, we create a Truth, which helps us to understand our World intersubjectively. Yet it is a long and steep road from scientific “discovery” and its consequent technological “development”; effectively, technology is “infused” with a science, (e.g. a Physics Engine) and even after the product has been mass-produced and distributed there is a hierarchy of understanding the technology itself. Modern technology develops in a manner that even its host organisms cannot claim to understand absolutely; it is essentially a lifeform, engaged in a symbiotic relationship with us, and at times it threatens to consume us entirely.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

While Orwell made a legitimate claim in insisting that idiomatic language tends towards propaganda whereas honest communication is far more literal and considerate of each individual word, one must not lose sight of the fact that many of our idioms in fact retain a specific function which is implied by the words themselves. While “it goes without saying” might be considered “redundant”, one must wonder what exactly it redounds, and while it may be called “unconcise”, one might wonder why it OUGHT to be concise. The simple fact that something is “needless to say” does not preclude its saying it, nor does it rob us of the potential fruits of the luxurious conceit. It may be needless in the sense that the speaker already knows it to be true, but the speaker will nonetheless say it in the possibility that others need to HEAR it, out of consideration for them, all the while reminding them that it SHOULD be obvious.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

MAYDAY:

If I focus on my shortcomings, I will inevitably come upon a situation which is absurd and which predisposes me to failure. Yet when I play to my strengths, I prosper, and those problems have a way of resolving themselves. This is such a situation.

You are nothing but a con artist. You learned all the excuses long ago. If you are in the company of those who do not make them, then you make them FOR them, by creating a situation so irredeemably dysfunctional that we have no sensible recourse but to blame you.

If you don’t wish to accrue hatred, learn to handle criticism. A truth which does not need to be constantly reconstructed is nothing more than dogma: a quagmire devoid of currency.

I could think of innumerable arguments for and against gender fluidity, and not only will most of them tend to be against it, but all of them will tend to apply to all people, deriving their relevance from their universality, barring as a consequence any purely anecdotal appeals to a unique predisposition set against a “privileged” backdrop. That the evidence I produce on behalf of “conformity” is so overwhelming says less about my position and more about the facts themselves, as well as my capacity to fathom these facts.

For many of you, Trump is the President you Deserve. When have you ever seen the Land that was stolen from you? How would you identify it? What would you call it? By what archaic name? Face it: you are a product of this nation, not its predecessors. Your escapist hatred of the country which produced you is itself a product of that country’s social engineering. Who are you to tell me I should leave? Who are you to make your tribal territory great again?

[({Dm.A.A.)}]