LUDE:

It would appear that my initial apprehensions surrounding sexuality were purely derivative of the Collective Unconscious. May this weblog serve as a continued source of sexual liberation for men and women alike.

[({R.G.)}]

WHALE:

I’m talking about a monolithic, centralized media, overlooking a veritable wasteland of self-referential social networking, which cannibalizes its deeply forgetful culture memetically. I’m talking about the latest version of Microsoft Word, which I am using even at this moment to convey this to you, though it does not recognize the name Mirandola, and I speak also on behalf of those who seem to think that if I use the medium I owe some debt to it, rather than holding the entitlement for it to yield to MY intelligence. And I speak about a generation of students whose very school masters deny them access to true literature, who replace a library with computers, as though those kids didn’t already carry computers, of surpassing capability, within their pockets. Yes: I use the Internet. It’s how I publish nowadays. But what I have to say holds value, since I don’t confine myself to the mere mouthpiece of it. I take my cues from books, of course. The paper which a book is printed on contains the history of human culture; all the greats wrote their ideas on paper, to be READ on paper, rather than pored over as the blue light of a monitor burns holes into your brain like L.S.D. Heidegger is worth more than just a migraine; he is to be savoured in a dingy, dusty library among the sorts of tomes where his phenomenology found its conception. It is a tradition, and you cannot argue with tradition, not without appeal to yet another strain of that same common history. And you know what’s great about these books? They last. A single server goes down and you lose some terabytes of data. Maybe someday you will find a book upon the shelves. Maybe that book finds YOU. You do not Google it; you never knew about it. Yes: no algorithm but the Will of God provided it to you. And it was never forced upon you by a troll or radical. It was not sold to you; you simply FOUND it. And you read it; with that choice, you took responsibility for all its contents. It became you. It transformed you. And you broke out of yourself and your own echo chamber. Thus you saw to it that you were more than just the product of your social groups, a mere statistic to the advertising agencies which would manipulate your will. You accrued no viruses, no malware, and no hatred from its acquisition. You stayed with it; it stayed with you. All that changed was your Soul as you read it, over and over again, as Life transformed the both of you. Yet it was not some shady moderator censoring the pages, shadow-banning the author for his indecorous honesty about matters of deeply personal import. The publishers made sure of that. And in its constancy you found your own; and in its constancy you found YOURSELF.

I still recall Howard Beale raging about how so few Americans read books. Back in the seventies, the Internet was not a problem for us yet. You’d have to be daft as a fish to say he had the right to rage only because the Internet had not yet saved us. Even then, the radio had been a threat. Yes: even then, we were the fodder of the television set. You think I speak regressively? The men who knew the most of science in those times predicted that humanity would suffer, for they also knew of the humanities as well. Humanity, I tell you, hasn’t changed, except that it’s lost its own motivation to persist. The radio does little now; the Internet is our greatest danger. But since I am told it ate the World, consider this my broadcast from within the whale. At least I’ve salvaged that which the Great Beast has yet to have digested. And at least I might make palatable to the modern tongue the language of a distant decency. Do you know even where your indignation comes from? All the greats were those who wrote our ethics. How then do you dare to call them products of their time and place? No: in their books, we find the timeless. It is WE who, with each passing day, become far more generic and mechanical, confined to just the desert of the present moment, having lost our roots within the past, uncertain even what the future OUGHT to be, except that we might crave the novelty of it. WE are products of our time and place, but THEY had seen the future and the past. Their books accomplished what our Internet could not. It was because they took the time to write it down. I had a friend – an actor – who once said to me, deep in a late-night phone-call, that I spoke as if I wrote on paper. This was true. How did he know? He knew quite many things intuitively. He was an old Soul. He probably remembered his past lives. And once you’ve been around a few times on this circus wheel of Life, you scoff at modern “novelty”. And you return then to your novels, knowing they inform all that you do within the End Times we inhabit.

(Dm.A.A.)

ANT!PETERSON ONE:

Peterson argues that agreeable men tend to strive for win-win situations, whereas unagreeable men tend to produce win-lose situations wherein they are themselves the winners. It follows logically and cynically that human life is predominated, as in the works of Nietzsche and Steinbeck, by the unagreeable men who exploit the effeminate agreeableness of “beta men”. Yet, as per usual, Peterson focuses so intensely upon one angle that he misses the bigger picture. Consider, for instance, the role that Conscientiousness plays in win-win situations. Peterson panders to his neoconservative market (another part of his anti-Marxist pitfall) by defining conscientiousness within the extremely narrow (lacking in Openness) confines of “work ethic”. Yet by so doing he casts a curtain over the entire history of ethics. Traditionally, win-win situations promote the Greater Good, including Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, and deontologically speaking the pursuit of Good for the Other as Well as the Self remains consistent with the ideals of Social Justice, both inside and outside of the courtroom. Conscientious individuals might easily qualify their agreeableness by standing by their convictions, yet only to the extent that this does not risk substantial harm to the Other Party; in such a negotiation, they assume the Moral High Ground at the moment that their interlocutor attempts to overstep a boundary they hold sacred, and against the leverage provided by their values they manage to force the unagreeable egoist into a win-win situation, even if it means mitigating the winnings for the consequently compromised egoist. The only manner in which this enterprise fails is if the conscientious, agreeable person is somehow fooled into surrendering his (or her, though Peterson conveniently ignores the success of such women) stance. One method by which a manipulator might bypass the conscientious person is by accusing him of lacking Openness. (May the record show that this is a falsehood, since the conscientious person has the entire history of morality to avail himself of, whereas I have provided ample warrant to prove that Peterson lacks openness by ignoring the bulk of this history.) So long as the manipulator can PRETEND to understanding moral principles on a high context, he or she can challenge the authority of the conscientious man. Yet another attempt at manipulation comes about if the manipulator manages to pit conscientious against agreeableness. If the manipulator can somehow convince either his interlocutor or an “authoritative” third party that the conscientious man’s values (and largely unyielding insistence upon those values) in fact HARMS the manipulator, then in an attempt to PREVENT a win-lose situation in his own favour our hero will unwittingly produce a win-lose situation in the villain’s favour. We must only hope that most conscientious, open, and agreeable men are also discerning when it comes to con artistry, even if this renders them more jaded than they’d like to be or they deserve.

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

WELLG:

Well: gee. Where do I begin? You worked deliberately to undermine me at the moment when I was closest to actualizing my goals of five years, the moment when I trusted you most. You tried to justify this by analogy to what happened five years prior, even though you were just as evasive and duplicitous back then. You accused ME of being evasive when you KNEW what you were doing to me. Not even five years had past since the injury, and you pretended that that time had rendered your affront irrelevant. Given the opportunity to square with me, you refused, though it would have served your client. You demonstrated that my one mistake was trusting you. And what had been your warrant? You appealed only to the basest and most treacherous, self-entitled instincts in human nature. You proved that anyone who had ever chosen to buy what you were selling was mistaken. Ultimately, you were loyal neither to our mutual associate nor to me. It was all an ego trip, a ruthless one at that. Neither your goods nor services were ever superior, and your marketing was sheerly underhanded. Tragedy followed in your wake. And you now judge ME?!

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

PREFERENCE:

ADM!TTANCE:

A great many women do not wish to admit that they find agreeableness in men unattractive, though of course they have an odd way of expressing this disbelief. Instead of encouraging us to adhere to what is most sacred in our Souls, to shelter it against a World that not only turns its nose up at kindness but which rewards barbarity, even treating kindness with suspicion, these women extrapolate from their own experiences to excess. They have no way of knowing what it is that drives any ONE woman to reject any ONE man, but they tend to presume, inexplicably, that that woman will have the same reasons as ANY woman. This is not only absolutist and authoritarian, but it is irrational as well. By making this presumption, a woman presumes that any man who is alone DESERVES to be that way. However, in my own experience, I must say that MOST women do not supply reasons at ALL, and for you to universalize your own reasons would be to lend them an excuse. Even if the principles which you appeal to could be more precious than Kindness, enough so that they might validate the AUTHENTICITY of Kindness and its rewards, it would be impossible for you to prove, as well as preposterous for you to presume, that in every instance wherein a man is rejected in SPITE of his kindness, (if not TO spite his kindness,) that it was HE who was at fault, for the sheer number of women who do not even CITE your universal reasons abstain from that entire discussion, so the generalization cannot even be proven true, nor to be applicable, on a case-by-case basis.

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

Unsent Public Letter:

It’s high time I came clean with you. I should have realized that you would never have inferred that there had been a sentimental weakness underlying my attempts to keep this conversation going. You were unpresumptuous and analytical enough to dismiss our correspondence as an irreconcilable intellectual feud, and it was only natural for you to defend your own position against what you had presumed to be an ignorant viewpoint. Might I instead suggest that it was a more open but less disciplined one? I do not truly believe that, but it is nice to think that.

The truth is that I was among your many aesthetic admirers. Naturally, I avoided making this known so as not to fall into the trap of logocentrism, thereby yielding to your reductionistic, positivistic viewpoint. On a more fundamental level, I avoid making overt, conventional expressions of erotic affection so as not to be made an object of knowledge, hence probably causing confusion for an aspiring naturalist.

What it was that kept me coming back I cannot say for certain. Perhaps I couldn’t bring myself to think that you had been the selfish, narcissistic sort of person whom I first imagined myself to encounter. Eastern European women seldom appeal to me, (though the obverse tends to be true, inexplicably,) probably because I am myself of Eastern European birth. I must have suspected that I was addicted to the abuse with which I perceived you to treat me, though over time I forgave you for that. Peculiarly enough, even my attempts to disguise my identity quickly came unfurled. My only comfort was in knowing that you had bothered to remember me. That tipped me off that there was more to you than met the eye. Perhaps your inquisitive nature was motivated by a transcendental aim.

This aim I sought to unriddle. Multiple times I contacted you, in many guises, trying to present you as I saw you, in an attempt to make peace with you and with how you see yourself. Yet repeatedly you distanced yourself from me. I knew not why. Yet it is clear to me now: you still regard me as a rival of some sort. Instead of confessing to the emotional impact that your words had upon me, I continued to fight with you. It was not that I did not understand you. I just had not made this understanding understood.

Recently I saw you commend one of your followers for confessing to what he called a “crush”. I was taken aback not by his childish honesty but your equally childlike appreciation of it. It became apparent to me that you see the world in very simple, even naïve terms, and had I fit more neatly into your taxonomy of personality then I would have won your favour. This I cannot do. I’m not whatever you might think I am, at least not exclusively, nor will I be. Yet in exposing a more vulnerable side to myself I hope to reconcile.

P.S.: It’s funny, too. I look at pictures of you and I find myself thinking, “She is so gorgeous. How does she get around?” That might appear ironic to you; the conventional response is rather “how does she NOT get around?” But I acknowledge that in calling you “gorgeous” I only make a radically subjective claim which does not live up to your Science. I feel a desire which I know that even I cannot fulfill, and if even so strong a longing cannot be fulfilled, then how can yours, when you seem so serene and free of physical attachments?

It is good that I’ve had time to find my path over the last two years. My envy has abated, and my confidence directs me now. I hope that you will receive these words in the Spirit in which they were intended. Keep doing what you do, and keep smiling. I know not to accuse you of any further ignorance or evil. You are not a fearful person, unlike many.