280 thoughts on “The Quest For Meaning”

1. I’m 3 days late to the party, so I’ll write this to myself.
   I suppose I don’t disagree with Z about psychology in general being of dubious value, as 99.9% of the people, including me decades ago, were looking for a magical fix to one’s character flaws. Church is better for that if they aren’t accidentally worshiping Satan, as many are these days. And I’m not a believer, in the way a religious person thinks of it.

   I think most people can’t find the words to describe much of their daily interaction with reality. That is because we don’t actually know what we are doing all day. We all are in love with our intellect, thinking that we are thinking our way through the day. That’s just bullshit. We don’t run the show, whatever it is keeping our heart pumping is running the show. The whole show, or damn near it. We are barely more aware than the average golden retriever.

   It’s so funny to me now, listening to everyone spout the same crap I believed for 55+ years. I am new myself to this idea, so I’m not ragging on anyone, but it is funny.

   The revelation I find so amusing is that it looks like the bible tracks exactly to instinctual awareness becoming self-aware. “In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
   “…and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters…”

   The world didn’t “exist” until the first man named it. Every baby goes through the same process, the world is a morass of chaos until they speak their first word. The bible continues to track this way, the more I look at it. It’s a damned psychology manual. If I am shocking any Christians, I’m not intending to be a jerk here. It’s the rationalists that ruined it and made God into a guy-in-the-sky. But they keep saying that the Holy Spirit is within you. Well, duh!

   Both Rational-ism, as well as rational thought, involve limiting context in order to contain a subject to specific criteria. Useful in science. But often destructive to the core in real life.

   I always tried to read the bible rationally, and was baffled, in the same way that a modern universal rationalist can’t understand humor, or metaphor, or colloquial speech.

   Both loving and being loved by God become compelling mysteries again, instead of feeling like a cheap cheat at life.

   BTW, I learned all of this from a psychologist 3 years ago. Heh.

   Back to worshiping Satan, if I understand it correctly Lucifer was always a metaphor for intellect. Lucifer was the most powerful in heaven, and our intellect is the most powerful force in our mind’s eye. When worshiped, it becomes evil.

   I think all of this tracks with Z’s general premise that biology creates culture. Why not, it creates the world!

2. This piece by Codevilla is about right.
   Cometh the hour, whence cometh the man?

   https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/the-silence-of-the-shepherds/

3. https://youtu.be/6fVE8kSM43I

   Filler for spam filter.

4. All societies seek and sustain irrational explanations for the big questions. But it is only in abundantly affluent societies that counter-productive, self-harming narratives are allowed to flurish. If subsistence level societies did this they would soon be history. Maasai warriors fighting lions with spears cannot afford the illusion that ‘women are just as good warriors’, the lions would very swiftly correct this delusion. But in a warm, comfortable Vienna apartment or Manhattan office, why not? Lions, Chinese soldiers or Taliban terrorists and others who would punish your mistake, are far away in exotic lands so anything goes. Until you’ve burned through your ancestors’ societal capital.

   ‘Nature’ is closely related to ‘reality’; it seems likely that isolation from nature in this sense for too long, makes people psychotic in the official psychiatic sense.

   • Good comment. Obviously women need to be seen and not heard. This goes to the deeper issue that men cannot rely on themselves to have a sane culture. We need help from a higher sourse!

5. Z Man’s getting psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy mixed up in places. Psychiatrists are physicians mainly prescribe drugs these days and don’t act like therapists. Most practitioners of the many types of psychotherapy, of which psychoanalysis is but one, if the main progenitor, are Ph.D’s, perhaps Psy.D.’s, and maybe the majority with master’s level degrees in counseling that vary by state, not MD’s. Here in California we have the MFT, which stands for Marriage and Family Therapist, not the most accurate title when mostly individual therapy is what’s practiced.

   We’re talking 50 years and more in the past when most talk therapists were psychiatrists and vice versa.

   • You are right. Psychiatrists became drug pushers back in the 60’s-70’s as a reaction to a plethora of less qualified, but probably more competent competitors in “counseling”. The Docs can drug you, the others not.

6. Nietzsche wrote at the end of the 19th century that there would be two centuries of nihilism ahead.

   By that estimation we are only half way through…

   • So, woke-ism and nihilism are mutually compatible? Consistent? Both are Godless.

7. What you call Panpsychism and characterize as primitive thought is pat of Western Philosophical thought.

   Liebnitz basically said that wee can “see” (apprehend) that we are physical objects made of flesh and blood existing in a world of other physical objects.

   Because the physical object is us, we can also “see” the inside of the object, consciousness, thought, aesthetic sense, morality.

   The other physical objects around us, the tree, the dog, the gravel in the road; we cannot see the inside of the objects, the consciousness. But would it not be consistent with Occums Razor to assume that absent other evidence those objects are just like us and have an “inside”?

   • interesting, but can’t we tell what’s on their inside by seeing how they behave on the outside?

8. I am sure I am not the first one to ask this, but I do not have the patience to scroll through a couple of hundred comments . . . but why do you want somebody to buy you a bear?

   • Hope that’s a typo, or it’s a bruin that’ll bring him to ruin 🙂

9. It’s official Z had gone black pill. So Z where do you intend to build your off grid compound? I’m going with Appalachia, however up North doesn’t look bad either.

10. my comment didn’t pass ? First time it happen. Did I wrote something forbidden ?

    • 2 questions, 1 for the Zman, 1 for the crowd.

      1-Dear Zman, I’m astonished by your capacity to write 1 paper every day (+ the podcast -which I can’t enjoy because there’s no subtitles, but that’s not the today’s point.
      I seem to have read that in addition to your writing efforts you had an IRL job. If it is true, where do you find the high energy needed to do so much work ?

      2-Dear Zmanreaders, wich are your favorite columnists, outside of Z ? And those you have give up with ?

      For my part (in alphabetical order) :

      Favorites :

      -@ndrew@nglin
      -David C@le
      -Ann C@ulter
      -James H@ward Kunstler
      -Kevin McD@n@ld
      -Curtis Y@rvin

      give up :

      -@ndrew@nglin (when he talk about women and sun care cream)
      -J@hn Derbyshire
      -Greg J@hnson (and every CC crew)
      -Steve S@iler
      -Jared Tayl@r (and most of VD crew, Brimel@w, Kirkpa@trick
      -V@xday

      thank you by advance for your eventual answers, and please, forgive my bad english 🙂

      • Hmm… think maybe your ungood English has anything to do with why you enjoy reading Y-Arvinator (same as my weakness for dubbed kung-fu flicks from the 70s)?The dude’s oeuvre is an impeccable parody of Medium/Substack avant la lettre.

        Dave Cole is quite funny despite obvious sociopathy

      • I don’t like any of those people except Greg Johnson, even if he sounds like Napoleon Dynamite’s brother, Kip

        Also I like Jared Taylor. Of the older guys, he seems the only one with a mind still fresh and able to change with the times.

        • Kip was a helluva quarterback tho..
          Spilt my G20 and Sobieski

      • Vox Day was my only other required daily reading, but it looks like he was canceled a couple of days ago.

        • New site for Teddy Beale
          Milobookclub.something….🙂

11. “Marxism” appears 15 times in the comments.

    Don’t try to shoehorn every conflict into a Cold War paradigm.

    Don’t say that everything you dislike is Marxism. Marxism is confusing enough. The term “Cultural Marxism” is conceals far more than it reveals.

    Our elites are not Marxists. They are anti-white.

    • But they are also Marxist. No, not in the cartoon sense used by conservatives, but in the technical way in which we can understand why they do what they do.

      You can have more than one club in the bag.

      • In what ways are they Marxist? In the Cultural Marxist sense, in that they have transformed the class struggle into a racial in gender struggle?

        If so, isn’t it clearer to say that they are anti-white male? Explanations that refer back to Marxism only lessens the impact of our current problems.

        I see dissident right explanations that rely on Marxism like the intractable epicycles of astronomers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle#Epicycles) who tried to retain the idea that the earth was the center of the universe.

        Our problems are only tangentially related to Marxism. The most direct explanation of our problems is that the elites want to dispossess traditional white males.

        Any other explanation only detracts from the harshness of this truth.

        • I think Marxism is their tool of anti-white bigotry

          You are right, it could be anything really, but Marxism is the set of tools they’ve decided on

        • Based on the fact that Karl komplained about the “reserve army of labor,” i.e. scabs, illegals, and technocratically cultivated un-/underemployment, and karped about the Industrial Revolution in general, I’d say our elites don’t seem too kommitted to the old man’s thoughts on some salient points. Call ’em “Cafeteria Marxists”

          • “Marxism” has been adapting into a self-serving elite ideology since…Marx.

            “The last Christian died on the cross,” Nietzsche said. There is no last Marxist; there’s never been a first one.

            Leninism, in contrast, did and does exist. It’s dominated human life for a century, I’d say.

        • Rigged elections are anti citizen, not just white citizens.

          A tyrannical government is tyrannical to all citizens, not just white citizens.

          Criminal income inequality. Economic policies that advantage the rich disadvantage the middle class of all color. We have a govt. that allows renters to stop paying rent.

          Our schools brainwash our kids with CRT, BLM, transgenderism and Marxism.

          Censorship applies to all dissenters.

          The pervasiveness of Marxist and anti-white propaganda. An American Pravda, the NYT.

          We live in a one party state, supported by the media, headed by a senile Marxist and advised by an American Politburo.

          Crime in our cities that will lead to greater and greater civil unrest and the Nationalism of policing.

          We live in a surveillance state where no one of any color has any privacy.

          You are right about the disparate impact, but remember the end game – totalitarianism, tyranny, Marxism. The focus is on whites because they are the biggest – the only? – obstacle in the way of achieving their Marxist dream.

          • Why I like what’s being called barstool conservatism

            Not that I’m on board with it, but I like it’s potential to throw a big wrench into the gears

            It unites American men of all races. The last thing they need.

            Interesting is that the other day a friend of mine was speaking openly about how letting women get the vote was the cause of so much of our dysfunction. It’s catching on

            Being critical of womyns , openly stating why you’d never vote for one because of x, y, and z, I would not be surprised in the least if this becomes mainstream in the not so distant future

          • Other than that, everything’s pretty awesome.

          • From Falcone: “Interesting is that the other day a friend of mine was speaking openly about how letting women get the vote was the cause of so much of our dysfunction. It’s catching on”
            I’ve been saying this at my new job, a place where it has never been said before… It seems like it was never even thought before. It is getting traction. It has been much easier to get them to reject the rainbow coalition, the ridicule now travels in both directions.

        • Funny you should ask. The next two podcasts are on this topic. Cultural Marxism is a real thing that cannot be discounted. Sure, the mouth breathers of Conservative Inc. have soiled the term, but it is an important thing for our side to grasp.

        • When all you have is a hammer….

          But yeah, the Marxism obsession with the American right in general is grating. And foolish.

        • I think you have a point. Even if the oppressor/oppressed idea comes form Marxism, does it advance our cause? Maybe not.

          However, the earth IS the center of the universe.

    • They are authoritarians, whether fascist, Marxist, or globalist. Why dwell on a single term when the meaning boils down to revolutionaries who wish to destroy your history history? Obviously they are anti-white. You act as if Z hasn’t said so. Your quibble reminds me of Z’s essay this week on conservative “allies” picking fights over little things. Get over it and focus on the enemy.

      • BUT the Left conquered America with verbal warfare. SO we would do well to copy them.

    • Marxism, during the Cold War, had to do with economics – “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The Marxism we experience now is a cultural Marxism adapted from the 20th century’s economic Marxism – “If you have ability, it doesn’t matter. To each according to whether he or she is not a white male.” I mean, did you ever read of Lenin or Marx advocating the subjugation or obliteration of the white race? It would be interesting to know what either of them would think about how their philosophy has been hijacked.

      Z, as usual, a piece with insights not found anywhere else (I wish I had the time to be here every day). But I do disagree with this sentence:

      “They fell for it because they wanted to believe the glorious future free of conflict was an inevitable outcome of history.”

      Perhaps some of the more foolish ones felt that on a surface level. But I think most, if not all, were thinking in the dim subterranean caves in which their primal desires reside and call the shots, “And then I will, for the first time in my life, be part of the power structure that ushers this in, and able to tell others, yea verily those superior to me in intellect and talent, what to do. And they will get what’s coming to them, good and hard.”

      • Get it good and hard, that is, as per H. L Mencken.

12. When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

    G.K. Chesterton, one century ago

    • He may have been chubby, but he was very frequently correct!

13. “Psychiatry has fallen out of fashion as it has become obvious that you cannot talk someone out of mental illness.”

    Psychiatry has fallen out of fashion, because its a scam. The DSM is useless at detecting and labeling discrete mental disorders (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190708131152.htm#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20has%20concluded,identify%20discrete%20mental%20health%20disorders.&text=A%20new%20study%2C%20published%20in,identify%20discrete%20mental%20health%20disorders.) Psychiatrists only know their medical model. They always ignore other peoples behavior in a situation, and only seek to treat a persons reaction brought on by environmental, social, or legal variables. They are primed to view everything as a symptom of a mental disorder. It is a literal Satanic Pseudoscience used as a tool of social control.

    They also ignore that people have different chronotypes. Morning Larks are more apt to adapt to our industrial society. Whereas night owls are not, and are discriminated against for that. If the latter group protests they are accused of complaining and having a mental disorder. One of the most dangerous things someone can do is see a psychiatrists whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

    The issue is that Gen-Pop views them as real professionals because they have MD in front of their names, but they are not. If all someone does is read down made up checklist (The DSM doesnt link to studies, or even biological data) there are going to be massive false positives. It is a cult plain and simple.

    Now before someone tries to disqualify and call me scientologist, well did you know L. Ron Hubbard creating scientology in reaction to his abuse at the hands of Psychiatrists. All the evidence of it Psychiatry needing to be abolished is staring every doctor, clinician, lawyer, judge, and legislature right in the face, but none of them can see it, because they do not think multidisciplinary. Mental Illness does not exist.

    “It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.”
    ― Thomas Stephen Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

    “The primary problem with modern psychiatry is its reduction of mental illness to bodily dysfunction. Objectification of those identified as mentally ill, by insisting on the somatic nature of their illness, may apparently simplify matters and help protect those trying to provide care from the pain experienced by those needing support. But psychiatric assessment too often fails to appreciate personal and social precursors of mental illness by avoiding or not taking account of such psychosocial considerations. Mainstream psychiatry acts on the somatic hypothesis of mental illness to the detriment of understanding people’s problems.”
    ― Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

    “It is conceivable, of course, that significant physicochemical disturbances will be found in some “mental patients” and in some “conditions” now labeled “mental illnesses.” But this does not mean that all so-called mental diseases have biological “causes,” for the simple reason that it has become customary to use the term “mental illness” to stigmatize, and thus control, those persons whose behavior offends society—or the psychiatrist making the “diagnosis.”
    ― Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

    Huge swaths of the population are having their lives ruined by the lies these losers pedal. And then theres the fact that they think everyone needs psychiatric treatment. To them anyone whose never been diagnosed is just an undiagnosed paycheck. They literally think everything is a symptom of a mental illness. They have even started going back through the historical record and diagnosing historical figures. Who if those Great Men of yesteryear were alive today would be labeled Mentally Ill and there gifts would never be allowed to flourish.

    http://www.cchrstl.org/artists.shtml
    https://www.pubfacts.com/detail/16462555/Mental-illness-in-US-Presidents-between-1776-and-1974-a-review-of-biographical-sources

    And please don’t even get me started on the effects of the Nerve Agents they prescribe, the therapies they use (CBT and EMDR), and the diagnostic tools they use to detect mental disorders.

    • “Morning Larks are more apt to adapt to our industrial society. Whereas night owls are not, and are discriminated against for that.”

      Night Owl Nationalism!

      My body wants to go to bed at 2 AM and get up at 9 AM. I joke that I am descended from night raiders.

      I had a job for 9 years where I had to be at work at 6:30 AM but as soon as I was off the chain I was back to my night owl ways.

    • Thomas Szasz greatly overstates his case. If you don’t think mental illness exists, take a quick trip to any downtown. (They’re particularly thick on the ground in Seattle.)

      • No he doesn’t. Being homeless isn’t a mental illness. Its a sign someone doesn’t have the resources necessary to raise their station in life. In some instances they have been the victims of severe abuse. In some instances smear campaigns, by low IQ idiots. In some cases, external variables converge to force them into homelessness. Doesn’t mean they are mentally ill. Something Americans refuse to acknowledge exist.

        People like you are primed to see mental illness everywhere. Doesn’t surprise me as psychiatric language has dehumanized the human condition. You are no longer high energy, you just have Bipolar. You are no longer smarter and following a deeper chain of logic than the clinician, nope you have Delusional Disorder. You are no longer having seasonal changes in behavior, you have Bipolar 1, Bipolar 2, or Cyclothymia. You are no longer extremely smart and expressing Neanderthal genes, nope you have Autism Spectrum Disorder. And in the case of Bipolar 1, many patients labeled that way have been found having low thyroid hormones. Which would mean the patient has an endocrinological problem, not a mental disorder. You are also no longer having a perfectly normal and healthy reaction to bullshit, nope you have an Adjustment Disorder. I can go on and on for hours, at the blatant holes, including the fact that a lot of Catholic Saints would be diagnosed mentally ill if they were living under the DSM Tyranny. Did you know if you drink a single cup of coffee every day, and then stop you can be labeled as having a mental disorder? Caffeine Withdrawal Disorder.

        There is also the Unspecified Mental Disorder diagnoses. Essentially, “We don’t know what’s wrong with you, and there is nothing wrong with you, but we are trained Medical Doctors primed to see mental illness everywhere so we have to label you as having one. Its unspecified, but we don’t know what it is.”. Combined with the Sub-Syndromal Classification one can see how all of Psychiatry is all bullshit.

        Yet hardly anyone in a position of command can bring themselves to admit that Psychiatry is a scam. That’s why they refer to patients falsely labeled Mentally Ill as pseudo-patients. That means they are literally ignoring prior diagnoses that in many cases have ruined someone’s life irreparably. Not only that there is the notion of the catch all diagnoses. A lot of psychiatrists are only trained in a couple of disorders. Therefore they diagnose everyone they see with that disorder( https://www.hcplive.com/view/patients-misdiagnosed-schizophrenia).

        Its a scam pure and simple. Their entire profession is founded around The Make Shit Up Logical Fallacy.

        • And in the case of Bipolar 1, many patients labeled that way have been found having low thyroid hormones. Which would mean the patient has an endocrinological problem, not a mental disorder.

          A thyroid panel is one of the very first things a SERIOUS neuro-psychiatrist would order for you.

          A sober serious moral ethical [God-forbid CARING] medical professional would order an entire battery of tests before even starting to consider anything in the DSM*.

          The problem is that the Frankfurt School & its dutiful army of shabbos goyische ghey-ped0-faced hemlock-society sadistically-psychopathic nihilists have intentionally purposefully mindfully with-malice-aforethought infiltrated & seized control of the field of psychiatry for the express purpose of sowing the seeds of as much hopelessness, despair, misery, anger, vengefulness & murderous rage in their patients as is humanly possible [and then some].

          Until you are honest with yourself as to the existence of MONSTERS in the medical profession, you will woefully misunderestimate the pure rank EVIL you are confronting therein.

          Q: Why do s0d0mite paedophiles become scout masters & youth choir directors & high skrewl wrassling coaches?

          A: Because that’s where the boys are.

          Q: Why do monsters become psychiatrists in hospitals?

          A: Because that’s where the patients with the weakest, most vulnerable & most helpless personalities are to be found, just ready & waiting to be psychologically & pharmacologically tortured to death [else reprogrammed to be Deep State ki11ing machines].

          *Although, truth be told, some of y’all are so dadgum obviously nuts that a serious neuropsychiatrist with several decades of experience under his belt could simply glance at your physiognomies and know with about a 95% to 99% certainty WTF is wrong with y’all. But being a SERIOUS neuropsychiatrist, he’s still gonna order a battery of tests on you, to be dadgum certain, so that his conscience won’t be bothering the hell outta him that he just MIGHT have gotten the diagnosis wrong.

          But of course sadistic psychopaths don’t have consciences.

        • No doubt there’s much abuse in the field. Still, mental illness is a real thing.

          And you’re wrong about the homeless. A large fraction of them are mentally ill. To be sure, their setting and history don’t help matters, nor does drug and alcohol abuse.

          Public service announcement: never, ever, if you have any choice in the matter (i.e. they ain’t family), get involved emotionally (indeed, in any way) with a person with a chronic, serious mental illness. I learned this the hard way, and getting out of such a relationship was very painful. In fact, if you’re not in too deep, get the hell out as quickly as you can. They are pure poison. It’s not their fault, but you don’t have to go down with the ship. 🙁

          • “And you’re wrong about the homeless. A large fraction of them are mentally ill. To be sure, their setting and history don’t help matters, nor does drug and alcohol abuse.”

            I guess all those Van Lifers, RVers, and People Like Me, who are all homeless are mentally ill. All the 20,000 odd people in LA County who live in their vehicles are homeless right?

            INB4 “There homeless by choice.” The massive parts of reality that statement avoids is obvious to anyone who has deconstructed it. We live in an age where the Abusers are allowed to run free, and their victims are forced to suffer, all because of the cultural myth in Mental Illness.

            I’m actually sitting in a strip mall parking lot right now typing this response. Must be my mental illness keeping me from getting a dwelling. Was forced into it after horrific abuse, which I have proof of. I even had to tell a State Trooper Supervisor to his face in the command center “I dont care.” and provide video evidence of the abuse before they went after the legit crazy person in the situation. Mental Illness doesn’t exist. Its a worthless lie sold to the population to control them. Do you realize the original Architects of the Holocaust were the Psychiatristsa? Do you realize Thomas Jefferson admonished Benjamin Rush (the Founding father of Psychiatry) for killing George Washington? Are you aware of the human rights and color of law violations it commits daily, weekly, yearly, and eternally? Its fake made up bafflegarble, spouted off by worthless people hiding behind MDs.

            The only reason nobody will come out and destroy it is because well questioning Psychiatry means you have a Mental Illness (ODD). Especially no Alpha.

            Oh and here is the final piece of Obective Scientific Evidence. Seeing as Medical Records are Objective Evidence, and Psychiatric Labels are viewed as Objective Medical Diagnoses. I was taken to an Emergency room once by police officers for Owning a copy of The Anti-Federalist Papers and The Constitutional Convention debates. The doctors thought it was an Anti-Government Book. They also called me a Nazi for owning a book from the US Army War College, amongst others. If that’s not proof Psychiatry is a scam, than I don’t know what is. They had to admit and I quote them “You seem like a sane and rational person.”, but still Diagnosed me. So apparently Sanity, Owning Historical WW2 Books, and Owning Founding Documents of the US Government are symptoms of a severe mental illness.

            Its the biggest scam every sold to the American People.

      • To Nunya: >95% of homeless in Seattle are drug addicts.

        Some of symptoms of addiction mimic the symptoms of mental illness. But the drugs in this case are the cause not the cure. The cure to homelessness, at least in Seattle, requires addressing drug abuse. Nothing that does not address this issue will solve this problem.

        Everyone deserves blame for this problem: drug dealers, drug users, city leaders, politicians, prosecutors, defense attorneys, public health workers, voters etc. All have blood on hands.

    • Gotta admit, after years ago of reading Bill Bennett/Pete Wehner style neocons sniping over the baleful influence of that particular liberteriun nerd icon, I never actually read anything by Szasz. This is funny because when I saw the frequent GOPe think piece last year about the “intellectual foundation,” lol, of Defund The Po-po, I immediately dismissed not just the target but the writer of said piece; it is a risky, lazy habit of the Internet age to first encounter “foundational” writings of some villain/hero du jour through a grifter’s 50-cent-per-word blog post and believe you know something about the topic.

      FWIW I am not saying Szasz wasn’t a bastard or anything. I’m sure also blameworthy was a 1960s critical mass of corrupt insolvent bureaucrats receiving his suggestion of closing down the mental hospitals in the vein of, “Yeah — that’s the ticket!” Every store the street over from me that has a drive-throughs — and some that don’t even have one, and presumably need customers to enter in order to sell things — have closed their lobbies since March 2020 and not re-opened, even though my county along with most in my state gave up on the mandates basically half a year ago…

      • America’s problems with mental illness and homelessness can be traced to one of the first truly bipartisan efforts by the ruling class to fuck the rest of us in the ass. Back in the 1980s the Left-elite wanted to turn the whole society into an experiment to try out their pet theories (like those of Szasz) about there being no such thing as mental illness. They knew this would probably result in ordinary folks wading through human waste on their way to work but hey, fuck those guys right, I went to Harvard! The right-Elite realized at the same time that they could get a phat tax cut by shutting down all the mental hospitals dropping the patients off at the town square. They knew this would probably result in ordinary folks wading through human waste on their way to work but hey, fuck those guys right, I went to Yale!

        Come to think of it, this may have been the way our glorious new age of Uniparty consensus on things like immigration got rolling.

        As to your point about the store lobbies, I’ve seen this too even in the suburbs. This is probably the elite’s new paradigm for everything – wait for some crisis (or manufacture one with media help) and then do some really nasty, crass, and evil thing you’ve been wanting to do but were afraid to do unless all the other evil cowards went in on it with you.

        • “Back in the 1980s the Left-elite wanted to turn the whole society into an experiment to try out their pet theories (like those of Szasz) about there being no such thing as mental illness.”

          Its no pet theory. There’s no blood work or diagnostic test you an give to prove mental illness. Its quackery. Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Therapists all use the DSM. Even though the pseudopatient study was proven flawed, there’s still merit to it.

    • In an era of cargo cults, quackery, and superstition, it’s interesting that superstition like the Virgin of Guadeloupe, has proven by far the least harmful, and even beneficial…The Virgin encourages a violent people to be less violent and better behaved, with some success….The cargo cult of vaccination, aimed at a largely harmless disease, has caused trillions of dollars of damage to the world economy and western peoples…The quackery of Freudian psychiatry, parts of which were created to shield Freud’s mentor, who had sex with children in Vienna, from scrutiny, caused immense damage to the culture, but not much short term economic damage…The cult of egalitarianism, known to be false for millennia, threatens to destroy western civilization…

      • Investigate the miracle. Its real.

    • And aren’t they endorsing all these little children to disfigure themselves via “gender transitioning”?

      These people are dangerous quacks.

    • Elron created Scientology for one reason- $$$$. HIs hatred of psychiatry promoted his own version of the same thing. Scientology is 100% verbal therapy, i.e., talking folks out of not only their mental illness, but the contents of their wallet as well. Ascribing a nobler version of Hubtard’s motivations is pure fallacy.

    • I once got wrapped around the finger for a year by a woman with, in hindsight, very special talents.

      Years later I came around a book about “histrionic personality disorder”. She checked literally ALL the boxes.

      So I am not so sure about the DSM being worthless…

      • Eh, human types have been around forever (the drama queen, the stoic man, the life of the party, etc.). The problem with the DSM is that while it is good at listing cohesive descriptive criteria for a “disorder,” it doesn’t ever really say what a a normal, healthy personality would look like, nor does it say how much variance (or what sort of variance) would be normal, expect or tolerable. In essence, the flaw in psychiatry is that it views the human condition, in total, as a disease that needs to be drugged into oblivion.

14. Hard to see how you can talk about Freud without talking about his Jewishness. It may not be important to you, but it was important to Freud. And then there’s Marx. He may have not been Jew in a religious sense, but he was racially Jewish and you can be damn sure he viewed the world through that lens. Marx’s Father was a Rabbi and his parents didn’t convert till after he died. And there’s zero evidence either of Marx’s parents were believing Chistians – it was all for show.

    • Freud on his way to America in 1909:

      “We are bringing them the plague. And they don’t even know it.”

      https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124959127425412215

      • And then there are the “contributions” of his nephew, one Edward Bernays. One of his chief books was entitled, Propaganda. He pointed the way to how to undermine a white, gentile, high trust culture.

      • Why were our defense so weak? protestantism

    • Nietzsche quote today:

      “Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy;”

      (From “The Antichrist”)

      Busted! Even a professed Atheist, Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, so I guess he too was a ruined (or at least, ruinous) philosopher. 😀

15. Off topic: Any thoughts on the ultra fast collapse of the Afghanistan regime to the Taliban? I think US military pulled out of Bagram less than 5 weeks ago. Now Herat, third largest city in country, has fallen to Taliban (see link). This is fast!

    https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-taliban-take-control-of-herat-in-major-victory-reports/a-58836723

    • Just not said is that the Taliban taking back over if we left Afghanistan has been known for at least the last 15 years.

      The pundits and retired generals on CNN that kept repeating the mantra of the US bringing democracy and freedom knew as well what the logical conclusion would be when the US forces pulled out.

      Western Civilization and the ideals contained cannot be simply exported to other cultures. It is not just ideas. If that were the case, we could send them the Constitution with the USA part omitted with White-out.

      Afghanistan will level back to its intended spot in the World according to their cultures abilities.

      • Correct in all points. The pity of this is that neither Right nor Left is talking about what you so succinctly stated. The people of Afghanistan–and a dozen other regions I can name–don’t give a whit about democracy. It’s not in their genes. No lasting lesson will be learned from this debacle. It took the Russians 10 years to smarten up. 20 for the Americans. Sigh…

        • Just so, Compsci. And although some of you may get sick of my banging on about the pomos, I must say that they are right about one very important thing: they believed that human rights and democracy were Western constructs. According to the pomos–and for largely linguistic reasons–every culture, i.e. nation, was distinct from every other, and it was impossible for people from one nation to truly understand those from another. And more to the point, it was utter folly for the West to impose alien democracy and so-called “human rights” on other nations.

          • Based pomo! Seriously I notice this in a lot of the lefty thinking: they start with the ‘ultra-right’ premise and torture the hell out of it until it’s unrecognizable. I strongly suspect they see the truth more clearly than righty does but have a primitive fear of it.

      • The Afghans retain their original culture, have no interest in democracy, and will never allow the disease of feminism to enter their villages…When the West collapses, Afghanistan will be unaffected…

      • It helps to understand the role that evolution plays in this example. The peoples that inhabit that region (Afghanistan is an artificial man-made boundary and the more correct differentiation is an environmental consistency boundary) are the end-product of many millennia of natural selection pressures. This has resulted in a unique physiology and associated traits that are endemic to that area. In addition, the local customs & culture is also an end-product of evolutionary forces that ultimately “worked” to enhance survive & thrive success in that particular environment. IOW, the Taliban is attempting to restore the ancient traditions that were necessary for their people’s long term survival. Asking them to change is tantamount to asking them to commit suicide. How arrogant & stupid is that? If an invading army came into your town and attempted to force you into suicidal changes, would you calmly acquiesce? Why would anyone expect them to behave differently?

      • Hashish and Opium.

    • And now Kandahar falls. Afghan government isn’t fighting for sh!t. Where did my $850B in weapons and training go? Everyone in US military over O-6 paygrade resign now!

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/taliban-claim-capture-kandahar-grip-on-afghanistan-grows

    • Afghanistan has always been in the hands of the Taliban.

      I once saw a report about a supply convoy that paid off several Taliban checkpoints on its way to a US outpost from Pakistan.

      The reporters said that this was the case throughout the occupation.

      Someone explain to me what the point of all this was….

16. Mr. Zman, do you think the English language is fit for philosophy and metaphysics?

    I state this because when I compare English with other languages (Arabic, Persian, and Urdu) that I am familiar with, I find English vocabulary wanting in philosophical precision and clarity.

    I find great Western philosophical works like Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ more comprehensible in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu than in English.

    • Funny you should say that because many Germans prefer to read Kant in English.

      • Because English Kant is Not Kant, and that’s better. He’s translated extremely poorly (or was, back when I had to read him). The similarities of English and German are a translator trap, especially in European philosophy, where every word might be idiomatic.

        I own about thirty shelves of 20th century avant garde literature, but Thomas Common’s translation of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is the weirdest book I’ve ever read. It’s…goth kid Conan as zen Shakespeare? If that was the dumbest thing in the world. It’s why American Nietzscheanism was sissy fascism, Leopold & Loeb, and the Church of Satan, and why boomers call Nietzsche—an anti-German semitophile—a “proto-Nazi.” The hyperbolically evil Germans in war movies are a translation error.

    • It’s a poetic language

      Things that can be said with precision in one language need layers of color and suggestion and momentary diversion in English, different roads leading to the same place

      But in the end, the picture painted in English is usually the more full. Getting straight to the point doesn’t always make a lasting impression. I’d say the beauty of English is that it’s a language of romance for a bucolic and seafaring people

17. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Quest for Meaning

18. And let’s not forget the ass- burger on the Autism bun every child who comes in at below the 49% of the first grade class is diagnosed with. Literally every one I work with has one of those in their family. I’ve got two in mine. I won’t even look at them. “ they wanted it, now their going to get, I don’t like this anymore than you do”. Oh and by the way , staring at a phone 18 hrs a day has nothing to do with it. Said the pipe smoking man in the turtleneck. Same crap in the 80’s with drug treatment via Hazelton scam. I was 2 blocks away from a shooting/ murder yesterday sitting in traffic. Reasons for the flying led, sneaker raffle in melrose . Low impulse control, low empathy, low low low IQ.

    • That’s not really new: ADHD. Additionally, public school teachers have been batshit crazy a long time, too.

      • Really, when the “professional” credentialed class is ranked according to productivity and overall net “benefit” to society. Or in this example, the societal anchors bringing the vessel below waterline, I would say the worst and the dreadfully the most influential are:

        Government teachers
        Journalists
        Helping Profession: Social Workers, psychologists, etc

        They all just want to help so, so much. Or, cover for I have no marketable skills whatsoever.

        • Public school teachers do a disproportionate amount of evil for their numbers and are typically found near the front of any column of advancing Leftist idiots.

          • I date one once..she was a really hot elementary school teacher. She was dumber than a doornail with the state’s flagship U masters credential. She was also really, really funny, and 2nd graders could really relate to her. Fortunately, she was not political. Unfortunately, she was going to teach whatever she was told to teach. She probably wasn’t even aware of Randi W and its agenda (we can use “it” as an identifying is a pronoun right?) One only need to glance at this naturally childless Teachers Union President to understand that she hates you and your children

          • And that’s because of the anti-white indoctrination they received in Colleges of “Education.” Education profs are the stupidest on any college campus, and also the most virulently anti-white.

          • Hopefully this comment will appear right under Ostei’s comment.

            About 50% of Negro PhD’s in the USA are awarded in Education* 🙂

            *I could not easily confirm this, but did find articles about how under-represented they are in STEM. Wonder why 😀

    • Would suggest reading Yang today on “Emotional Support Peacocks.” (I thought he was being literary there, but it turns out, some freaks were actually bringing live peacocks into the DMV with them)

      Autistic Kid is, while not the most glittery, just another contrived status symbol in this debased society.

      It has no fixed meaning, it’s like “racism” or “fascism” or “diversity” or “progress.” Was Adolf H autistic? I want to see many BuzzFeed and Vox explainers on that urgent question

      • Eventually I’m sure I’m going to need a “therapy rhino”. The therapy of course being watching the rhino destroy, maim, and kill while the snowflakes around me are afraid to say a word for fear of being insensitive and hateful. I’m starting to understand Caligula and the horse a bit.

19. As I’ve said before, all I ask is that you delay the West’s final solution until I shuffle off. Won’t be long I promise.

    • Don’t you want to see the thrilling climax?

    • Probably not going to happen.

      The controllers smell blood in the water, which is why they are doubling down on the anti-YT blood libel media campaign and the calls for forced jabs to stay employed, which disproportionately affects YT.

      The opeds and other pieces about low jab uptake among the blegh and Hispanic communities are red herrings. That is a secondary or tertiary concern for the controllers.

    • Tito Perdue, an elderly dissident novelist, proposed a battalion of older men who were willing to die for their people.

      They have lived full lives and want to sacrifice for their people.

      • That is not irrational. A person who has a terminal disease, but can still get around could decide to go out as a suicide bomber if they believed in their cause.

        • Contact me in about ten years. Don’t make it too complicated.

          • I might consider a role as an elderly pedestrian who an assailant didn’t know had a a powerful handgun. Think of me as, perhaps, a decrepit version of Charles Bronson in the 1970s movie “Death Wish.” 😀

20. Speaking of quackery, https://quackwatch.org/ is (surprisingly) still alive!

21. As I read the article a lyric from that old R Stones tune ran through my mind: “she goes running for the shelter of her mothers little helper”…
    It seems highly likely that the legal – and…mmm…not so legal – pharmaceutical business would have had some serious and permanent mind bending effects over the last +/- 100 yrs. The legal stuff alone generating revenue north of an estimated USD$750 B annually. The not so legal stuff no doubt more…much more.

    • Consumers of hard drugs and alcohol making fun of some poor, White housewife on prescription drugs. Yeah, got it…..

      • I stated it reminded me.
        I did not state I endorsed or approved.

        • Wasn’t aimed at you, meant to say that the Stone’s(ersatz “Black” Blues Men/Street Fighting Men – yeah, right)ridiculing a Middle Class mom was just another Leftist jab at White culture. All that crap that began Post War and really got rockin’ in the Sixties.

          • If you listen to the song, it can also be considered a social commentary, very timely I’d say, of the rather vapid lifestyle already widespread by the mid 1960s. About the only thing traditional in the song (implied) is a stay-at-home wife and mother. Nowadays, she wouldn’t even cook instant food, she’d just order GrubHub, Uber Eats or similar.

            Here’s the lyrics if you’d like to parse them:
            https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rollingstones/motherslittlehelper.html

22. The Joe Rogan listeners have been going in this direction for a long time. It usually involves mushrooms and some overrated place like Joshua Tree.

23. Another outstanding topic not found anywhere else on the internet. Allow me to add my 2 cents.

    First, mental disease is metastasizing in our modern highly affluent culture because our environment no longer culls these mutations at birth or in early life.

    Second, feminism has literally manufactured an epidemic of mental disease in modern women by coercing them into shirking their ancestral biological role as mother & primary nurturer of children. A woman who has failed in this essential biological role is going to feel bad about herself (its in the DNA), but that feeling will be in conflict with absorbed feminist doctrine, and the cognitive dissonance will drive her crazy.

    Third, psychiatrists are no different that illicit drug pushers. 99% of what they do is prescribe mind-altering drugs with little more insight than by-guess-and-by-golly. Most mental illness can be “cured” by a month alone in a remote Siberian forest with nothing but your wits to sustain you. And yes, sometimes cure means die of starvation.

    Last, I sometimes describe the coming collapse & chaos as the “Great Crazy” because most people will be seriously unprepared for the rapid & extreme nature of the change, and they will panic (because that is in our nature, think stampede). When viewed from a distance, this mass panic will look like hysterical insanity on steroids. And it is best viewed from a great distance.

    Get out of the city now.

    • I love how effortlessly based some of the comments are here. I really could learn a thing or three from some of you.

    • Outstanding comment.

      Let me add my two cents to your first observation: our environment encourages and enhances mental diseases.

    • It’s amazing how many bad mothers become depressed.

    • I took your advice…25 years ago.

24. The panoply of anti-rational nonsense in our age is indeed extensive, and Z has touched upon some of it. However, it’s most absurd and prevalent forms are the denial of biological sex and race. Denial is a river leftists perpetually seek for ablutions, much as Hindus wallow in the feculent Ganges. They cannot tolerate the physical limitations our world imposes upon their mad utopian fantasies, so they deny things such as the scientific reality of sex and race, all the while cloaking the denial in science. The smug, pseudoscientific conceit of the Leftist conceals their complete lack of awareness of their own irrationality. It is only the postmodern theorists who are aware of this irrationality and embrace it. They, at least, are consistent.

    • Great comment. The Left is at war with reality.

      • Roger Kimball published a book called Experiments against Reality: the Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age. I have not read it, but the title is wonderful.

      • Unfortunately so is the Right in many aspects. Currently harping on the Afghanistan bailout are the Neocon talking heads complaining bitterly about how we are leaving the Afghanistan government to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Guess we should have spent another $1T and a few more thousand American lives for folk who partake in child pedophilia with their “dancing boys”. Within months of leaving, Afghanistan will be right back where we found it–in the hands of the Taliban with all that entails.

        • Months? That seems overly optimistic. Although the ol’ Joe is sending the cavalry.

    • And which is why it’s virtually pointless to even try to have a discussion with them.

    • It’s an ancient disease:

      The theological instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just what had become possible again…. A backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the “true world,” [Plato’s “reality”, the Ideal] …Out of reality there had been made “appearance”; an absolutely false world, that of being, had been
      turned into reality….

      — said a certain 19th century syphilitic who Must Not be Named 🙂

      The idea goes back at least to Plato, c. 4 century BC, in his “Real” (I call it a mental reality) as opposed to his “apparent” (I call it the real world). This ties in closely with his famous parable of the cave. I think he describes it poorly, but I get the gist of his argument. Personally, I’m a realist, empiricist, not even sure the correct term. We both agree there are two world, but the basic disagreement is in which one is “real.” 😀

25. The closest the quacks came to actual science was when the Victorian era phrenologists started measuring African skulls and estimating brain size as compared to other races.

    • Phrenology made outlandish claims about what could be known from examining peoples’ skulls, and lost credibility as a result.

      But cranial capacity/brain size is indeed correlated to intelligence. Asians on average have bigger brains than Whites, and Blacks have the smallest of all, which correlates with average IQ differences:

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016028960200137X

      • Interestingly, still done today by archeologists on extinct humans/proto-humans, but not on existent humans—least they be cast into the void! 😉

        • Exactly! When they find an ancient skull, and use it to determine what type of human it belonged to, that’s A-OK. But suggest that there are group racial differences in skull size which correspond with group differences in intelligence: ‘Off with your head!’

          • Yep, funny how brain sizes of all these extinct humanoids could vary in size and be correlated to how these humanoids created tools, hunted, and survived natural harsh conditions, like the Ice Age–yet, magically, homo sapien sapien, converged on a one size fits all brain.

      • I always liked Terry Pratchett’s description of a reverse phrenologist.

        You told him what personality traits you wanted and he made them come true with a large mallet.

26. The quest for meaning in the present sense is really just wondering why you have all the stuff you have. It’s one of those modern luxuries made possible by material abundance. There’s a conceit to it, because spiritual meaning is essentially embracing mystery and suffering, and that has to be jettisoned to believe you can find meaning in yourself alone. Your material self, which is all of your possessions.

    Like the great philosopher Sting said, we’re spirits in a material world— both at the same time. Seems impossible to keep the middle. We’re always swinging back and forth until the extreme exhausts itself and we’re pulled back the other way. It makes sense, though. Struggle is creative, and if we were all Buddhas, we’d sit at peace doing nothing, waiting to die, and that would be boring.

    • I’ve often thought that when it comes to our material stuff, we all have a version of “survivor syndrome.” Those who survive plane crashes, battles, etc., I’m told, are almost always beset by a serious existential crisis: Why me? Why did I live, but the guy next to me get vaporized? I’m no better or worse than he was…

      Since there’s no answer that doesn’t involve a) divine intervention or b) the cold, merciless logic of randomness, and since we’re biologically incapable of handling b), inability or unwillingness to embrace a) really screws you up. Without constant reminders of the enormous debt we owe our forefathers for things like aspirin and antibiotics, “survivor syndrome” kicks in. What did I do to deserve all this? Nothing? No, that can’t be right… therefore, I must’ve stolen it! I must atone!!

      It’s the only culturally acceptable outlet through which to discharge the massive intra-psychic conflict (since we’re talking about Freud in the OP).

      • I went through that. Didn’t feel like a thief, only undeserving. So I made stupid choices and suffered until I realized there was no spiritual value in self-caused suffering.

        That’s where I get my understanding of the bourgeois, btw. The self-hating squish, the LARPing revolutionary.

        Fwiw my best answer at this point is to accept one’s fate. Strangely enough, there seems to be a lot of overcoming in that acceptance.

        As I often say, Nietzsche was a genius!

        • Also (apologies for obnoxiously touting my beliefs) imo Nietzsche was a deeply Christian writer in spite of his best efforts to the contrary. Where he erred, as many do imo, was in getting hung up on the cross and missing the empty tomb. Or maybe it was the syphilis 🙂

          • He was of Polish extraction, which created some cognitive dissonance within his Protestant family. He must have wondered how in the hell he ended up where he did.

          • You indeed are correct. As I noted in another post, he was the son of at least two generations of Lutheran pastors. Part of his education would have been in the church. He studied enough at University to become a philologist and briefly taught as a professor. Clearly he was a brilliant mind and from the Christian point of view, was a turncoat. Naturally, his formation informed his very insightful writing, which often cites scripture to make his points. Definitely not recommended reading for anyone wishing to become (or remain) a Christian 😀

          • He understood as well as anyone I’ve read that Christianity had been subverted. Back in the 19th century no less! He was very anti-subversion. Why he also became anti-Christian puzzles me. Seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

    • You’ll pardon me, but it appears that based on your statement, you know litttle about Buddhism. If there is one thing life is not if you practice Zen, say, that would be “boring”.

      • Buddhism inspired a man to feed himself to a tiger. Can’t say if he was bored, but clearly he didn’t think there was anything better to do with his life 🙂

27. My FIL was a Psychologist who spent most of his time in the talk therapy sessions you describe. One interesting part of his strategy was that he would pore down into their family tree to ascertain possible genetic or upbringing issues in the family. Say dad was an alcoholic, mom was a hypochondriac, or an uncle was schizophrenic, he would ascertain if the same mental ticks were affecting his abilities to live a decent life. He was not licensed to dispense meds, but it did allow creating coping mechanisms and strategies to be able to navigate life.

    He also worked with soldiers with PTSD and let them develop mantras to disassociate the horrible things they saw with their value as a person. One simple one was along the lines of “The war was a waste of life, but that doesn’t make me a waste of life”.

    Honestly, the best he could do is interact with broken people and give them the tools to be less broken. Even he understood this. There is no magical cure or revelation that will make them whole. The people who oversold their practice to talk about curing people did it for money, power, and prestige, and made people worse off in the process.

    • Chet Rollins,

      Alcoholism and schizophrenia— along with a host of other psychological conditions— are indeed genetically influenced (though not determined): a person with a history of schizophrenia in their family is indeed more likely to become schizophrenic, compared to someone with no family history of it. Most human traits— in fact, every trait they’ve studied— has been similarly shown to have a genetic component.

      And of course, genetics and experience— ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’— usually go hand-in-hand: a person with a violent impulsive parent is not only going to inherit their genes for violence and impulsivity, they’re going to be raised in a household where violence and impulsivity are the norm.

      So helping your counselee see where they came from is a useful and valid way of helping them understand how they got where they are.

      As I understand it, the most helpful thing for military PTSD survivors is to get together with other vets who are suffering from it, and share their stories.

28. And the biggest meaning people found was conspicuous consumption (not the TB kind). Purchase a new phone or gender id and show it to the world. The marxist materialist world view led to the layman sense of materialism. One of the biggest accomplices was Freud’s nephew – Edward Bernays. His ability to capitalize on the world of 20th century western excess through marketing is possibly the most influential social engineering device of the past 100 years.

    • Lolz, at one point Duke U offered a generous mental health benefit.
      Soon, every Tom, Dick and Tracy had a psychiatrist/ therapist. They had to retreat because I started to eat into even their deep pockets.

29. Panpsychism is straight out of Marx, too. Obviously someone in The Hive busted out its copy of “The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy.” Mine is the 4th edition, I think, published in the early 70s for the instruction of fraternal socialist comrades worldwide, but you can find similar online. It says “consciousness is merely a property of highly organized matter.” It *must* be, comrade, because all is material and thus there is nothing more to this world than shoes, shit, and bread (I’m paraphrasing).

    These clowns have never had an original idea in their lives. At least the OG clowns found a newer way to express the same old junk. These fools not only don’t know what they don’t know, they assume that anything they don’t know by definition doesn’t exist.

    • ” they assume that anything they don’t know by definition doesn’t exist”

      They also think things beyond their ken are intrinsically evil or otherwise they would know them. Today’s leftists are too moronic to live.

30. Panpsychism is a technical philosophical solution to a technical philosophical problem, the mind-body problem. The problem is becoming more acute as we’re now, perhaps, close to the time when heaps of semiconductors might actually be said to be thinking. People have been beavering away at this problem for centuries, without apparent success. Panpsychism is a way of saying that, hey, there is no problem, and simply walking away. Some philosophers are pretty adept at declaring a problem a non-problem.

    • Where there is no solution, there is no problem.

31. Pet rocks…….

32. as I was telling my dad the other day – it’s not so much HR as such. It’s that HR used to have a specific goal with the assumption that the other people in the corporation had differing goals. Now it’s like HR and the C-suite are converging.

    Likewise, it’s one thing if there’s bs pseudoscience festering in therapeutic circles. But again the assumption was that if you wanted more serious research – that’s what medicine and the hard sciences were for. But what if there’s an increasing convergence between therapeutic culture and medicine? Z wrote about it here: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=21333

    • I know psychiatrists — not psychologists; these are the ones with MDs — who claim to believe the grossest psuedo-Lamarckism, regarding the “trauma of slavery” etc. Apparently that gets in your DNA (as opposed to The Vaxx, which totally doesn’t).

      MDs. Contemplate that on the tree of woe.

      • I think part of it is that psychologists are more pragmatic than psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are more the dreamers. They wanted the whole enchilada: Mercedes, trophy wife, tweed jackets with leather patches on elbows, etc. Psychologists just wanted a job. They are the ones that work for the county, running rehab programs for substance abusers. But, the scary thing about psychiatrists is that they have a license to prescribe drugs. And psychiatric drugs not only rarely work, but the side effect profile is unbelievable. For every Lithium prescription that sort of works, you have 20 prescriptions of antipsychotics and antidepressants, which often just create zombies. And interestingly enough, the Pharmacologists for the drug companies don’t really know how they work! They have theories, though. I know that there will probably be someone reading this blog that will swear that Zoloft worked for their depression, but you will also have someone that swears that vitamin, mineral, or herbal supplements cured their fill-in-the-blank. Even though there is absolutely no statistical evidence that they work. They are immensely profitable for supplement makers, though! I am convinced that there is a faith component to healing. Your body has the ability to believe that something will happen to it and then, miraculously, it does. That is why CBD oil works for some people but is just overpriced BS to others.

        • Part of the problem with these psychoactive drugs is that they are misprescribed. They work best—if at all—in a short term basis while one attempts to change the underlying conditions in the patients life. As with pain med’s, they often become a crutch of diminishing effectiveness. In there lies the rub. We all want instant results and a pill for all that ails us. Getting truly better is a hard effort and we are lazy/weak.

          • Oh god, the happy pills. In my teaching days, which ended several years ago, every third college girl was on SSRIs. Student health handed out benzos like candy. Ambien and Ritalin everywhere, to “treat” all the BS “learning disabilities” they all claimed they had. Half a given classroom was on enough shit to boggle a horse. I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.

          • I was a Pharmacist in my pre-retirement days. The last 15 years of my career was spent doing Nursing Home consulting. You wouldn’t believe the number of residents that were on antipsychotics, like Quetiapine or Risperidone. The detail reps (sales people for the drug companies) assured everyone how safe and effective they were, and how grandma would benefit by them. After awhile, everyone noticed that grandma was a vegetable. The nursing homes didn’t mind because she was no longer a problem and required no staff intervention. Eventually the State and Federal governments started to require a specific psychiatric diagnosis to prescribe them to grandma, not just “behavior”. So, the doctors went with antidepressants to “calm” grandma down. Eventually, antidepressants, in fact, any psychoactive med had to have a specific clinical psychiatric diagnosis to be used. But, the priority was not to make grandma comfortable. It was to make nursing home personnel comfortable. After all, grandma’s just there to die, while the employees have more important things to worry about. Like when their next smoke break is.

          • Severian, it might be better today. Really. The Fed’s are up everyone’s ass in the medical field these days. I’m not for that either, but as I’ve noted here before, during some recent hospital events, the institutions were pretty up front with me as to how and why and for how long they’d prescribe opioids. Indeed, one hospital said I’d need to visit their pharmacy for a pain pill–whether hospitalized or at home. No take home and never for more than 10 days.

            My doctor does not treat mental patients/problems, nor chronic pain patients. Fed oversight just ain’t worth it.

        • How long until medications are prescribed to cure racism?

          • You’d best pray to every god you’ve ever heard of that it’s only pills. Google up “sluggish schizophrenia,” then learn that they’re already trying out “Patriot syndrome,” and behold your future.

            On the upside, I’d like to meet some of you in person, and we’ll all have plenty of time to get acquainted in the labor camps.

          • More likely, whites will be forced to endure an anti-racism inoculation along with the interminable anti-Kovid boosters. And I’m not joking.

          • I don’t know how familiar you are with the controversy around the latest DSM, Severian, but basically every crime was an identified mental illness: “shoplifter syndrome” and so forth. Many left the APA over it.

            So no doubt the inverse will happen and CRT criticism will be a committable illness. See you in the padded room.

      • If the trauma of slavery–or some other form of trauma–gets into your DNA, then we’re all equally afflicted because, if you go far enough back into your genealogy, you will find profound woe and victimhood.

        At any rate, however, African in general were better off as slaves in America than they were as free men in Africa, so the point is moot.

33. “There are people still clinging to things like Freudian psychoanalysis, but people with some knowledge of the human science know it is quackery. In fact, the entire enterprise of talk therapy is just pseudoscience, like astrology or tarot card reading.”

    What I always found funny about idiots embracing Freud and his ilk was their cataloging of what dreams “mean”. Apparently, images in dreams have specific meanings for everybody. There may be more than one possibility of the meaning of a cigar and other things, but I always wanted to know who gave Sigmund the “The Complete and Fully Documented Encyclopedia of Dream Interpretation”. I guess jewish psychiatrists have a direct line to the Creator. Or, maybe Satan.

    • Interpreting dreams is as old as the Bible itself. Freud was just the latest in a long line of interpreters starting with Joseph.

      • Joseph, and Daniel too, were just much better at it

        • Yeah, but God had a hand in that. Fraud just made the shit up as he went along.

    • I find Carl Jung to be more annoying in this regard (dream interpretation).

34. Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex. That means gravel in your driveway has a consciousness, just less complex than your consciousness.

    It’s a distortion of the truth that all creation was brought into being through God’s Fiat, his Divine Will, and that everything that exists, from hadrons, bosons and gluons to galaxies, planets and you are simply forms of the Divine Will. DNA is the unique 4-letter language the Divine Will employ s to allow morphogenetic expression of life on Earth.

    Atheists should wonder more at how it is that something operates their cardiac conductive pathway 70 times/minute for their entire lives. When was the last time they kept themselves breathing while asleep, or made new hepatocytes, or troubled to repair their broken bones. Who designed those systems? Who created a world where all particles, all matter is understood to simply be surface representations of the various known forces, electromagnetic, bosonic, etc. It wasn’t “evolution.”

    The Divine Will teaches also that the sun we see in the sky is but a pale shadow of the True Sun of the Divine Will. Rabbis speak of Tzim Tzum, the “slowing of the Divine energy to allow the universe to come into existence. It makes sense in the quantum universe: the super-high energy “quantum foam” that is the background substrate of “empty space” is “slowed down” or “frozen” to allow particles, even photons, to come into existence. The sun, the brightest thing in our world, is merely the Divine Will slowed down enough to be “a star.”

    Louisa Piccarreta, an Italian woman of the early 20th c, bedridden for 50 years, surviving only on the eucharist, on her way to Sainthood, wrote 30 volumes on the Divine Will. It is amazing, and the Church continues to explore its riches.

    One thing that stuck with me was the idea that God transforms the earth every 2000 years (in recent human history). The flood was the purification of the Father, Christ’s crucifixion 2000 years afterwards was the Redemption, and now, in our time, we will see the Sanctification by the Holy Spirit, who is, by my understanding, the operator of the Divine Will.

    Sorry for the long post. Some might consider this important.

35. Freudianism and Marxism are still the dominant ideologies of faculty in the humanities. Although nowadays, it is cultural marxism, which is more race oriented, than orthodox marxism, which is class oriented.

36. “Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex. That means gravel in your driveway has a consciousness, just less complex than your consciousness.”

    Panpsychism is madness. Consciousness is not in trees, and rocks, and I’m afraid it’s even worse than that.- Consciousness is not even in you.

    The last 40 years of quantum mechanics , double slit, entanglement, quantum eraser, ++ experiments are suggests s type of idealism is coming to smash the materialists. The universe looks more like the mind of God, and matter is the illusory. Everything is an appearance in Consciousness, even you.

    In that model, “God Is”, and the world is an appearance in God, the Inexpressible Mystery creates by simply thinking it.

    Have you ever experienced anything outside of awareness? Has anyone ever experienced anything outside of wareness(Conciousness)? Go ahead, try to experience something outside of awareness. You can never get past awareness (Consciousness).

    So how do we know if there is a world outside Conciousness? We don’t. Bohr and Hisenberg were probably right. Everything we think of as real is made of “non-suff”. And that , beyond name and form, is in religious terms, Gods Infinite Being.

    If you think it’s impossible, just look how we once thought the earth was a flat dinner plate. This is the central mystery now in quantum mechanics.

    And it’s the confirm that God Is.

    • It’s all a mirage, huh?

      This is a very old idea, as I’m sure you know

      There is enough evidence and everyday things to suggest it’s not all a mirage.

      Let me ask you, even if speaking rhetorically, if you are sitting next to your cat and you die all of a sudden, does he disappear and his existence erased? What about your children?

    • Maybe we old lib arts students can be of a little help to the STEM guys

      For my senior thesis I wrote about John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version. It was about a computer geek, highly intelligent, trying to prove Gods existence through a massive university computer. It’s a sympathetic portrait of this guy, but also about a Roger, a believer. Very good book as I remember and was thought provoking to my younger mind. I’m sure it still holds up. You may find it a good read. But it’s Updike, so you have to like artful literature and not very basic writing.

      There is also stuff in there about when the college town that’s the setting (Cambridge, Harvard) starts seeing an influx of foreign students, Africans and the like, and Updike is pretty fair about providing commentary on it. It might give younger guys a taste of what America was like just before the immigration madness was notched up to 11.

    • All the empirical data in the world does not resolve the mind-body problem, because the mind-body problem is not an empirical problem. And as far as quantum mechanics goes, there are multiple, mutually inconsistent, “interpretations” of quantum mechanics. The physicists are no more able to agree than are the philosophers.

      • Descartes solved the mind body problem, remember? It’s the pineal gland! 🙂

        • As my Early Modern Phil professor said, “to the inflamed imagination, the pineal gland does look like a little man.”

    • Are you familiar with Bernardo Kastrup? This sounds much in line with his works. Which is a good thing.

      • Very much aligned with Kastrup. The test of reality must be your experience of yourself, not what you have been taught.

        No one has ever experienced anything outside of awareness (just another word for consciousness).

        Your entire experience, is a little bundle of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions (hearing seeing tasting smelling touching). Most people think they are a collection of thoughts. But thought doesn’t know anything. Take the thought “the sky is blue”. Does that thought have any ability to understand this conversation we are having?

        No, thoughts, like sensations and perceptions know nothing, they have to be known, and what they are known by is you, awareness, consciousness.

        Consciousness is present before thought, a thought rises in awareness and consciousness knows it, the thought dissolves and Conciousness, Awareness, this Knowing remains.

        The reason you can say, beyond any doubt, “I Am”, is because consciousness is reality. There is nothing you can be more certain of than consciousness, because that is your experience of yourself. I believe it’s God’s signature on every heart.

        • This is the fundamental insight in the Hindu Vedanta non-dualist philosophy traced out in the Upanishads, the unity of Atman-Brahman, the direct experience of which is attainable through meditation or spontaneous mystical experience.

          The Upanishads, once translated from the Sanskrit, made quite an impression in the West. Schopenhauer was certainly familiar with them, as were many others subsequently.

          They are worthy of serious study, along with such other works as the Bhagavad Gita, in which the pathways, or yogas, to experience of the Divine may be pursued by people of different natures and capabilities.

          • capabilities… are described.

        • Ah, if only it were that simple 😀 It’s a fascinating question, for meditation or reflection, something like “What is the self? What, precisely, is this thing, the ‘I’?” I don’t offer you any answers, but it’s a question that is not easily answered. In fact, it seems to resist any easy answers. Try it and see!

          Even Nietzsche treats it, but doesn’t reach conclusions. He’s just sowing the seeds of philosophical doubt.

          During my readings about Buddhism, I hoped to find out what the “self” really is. I learnt enough that Buddha has a very clever answer. His purpose is to teach the path out of suffering, not to explain stuff. One teaching DOES teach what he thought the self is NOT. Called the Skandras or five attributes of “The Conceit ‘I am’ ” as they call it. Look it up if you like. In a few sentences, whatever “you” is, it is NOT: your body, your emotions, your perceptions, your choices (“mental formations”), nor consciousness.

          I’m not familiar with Hinduism, but understand that Buddhism is influenced by it.

    • It may be of interest that David Skrbina, whose book “The Jesus Hoax” (tldr: the dirty Jews made it all up) has been bouncing around the Dissident Right (you can read my review at Counter-Currents and his response), is a proponent of panpsychism (he has a book tracing the idea through history, so it’s not a “new” idea in any sense). Panpsychism is an attempt to solve “the hard problem of consciousness” (there is no way, even in principle, to construct consciousness out of pure materialism). It’s wrong, but only because it’s a form of materialism as well. The real solution is analytical idealism, Schopenhauer re-expressed in the language of modern analytic philosophy and compatible with neuroscience and quantum physics. See the work of Bernardo Kastrup.

      That said, his book on panpsychism is far better than The Jesus Hoax; of course, the manly men of the Dissident Right will prove their manhood by sneering at panpsychism and loudly proclaiming his “the Jews did it!” thesis.

    • IS is. Awareness and consciousness are not synonymous. Consciousness depends upon the reflexive inner dialogue, awareness simply IS.

      Quantum physics (or any other field of study) will never confirm the mystery, because our dual/simultaneous being of matter and energy cannot reduce IS to a cognitive or verbal construct that simply IS, bey9nd space and time. For my money, the best book on this is “Wholeness and the Implacate (that’s the correct spelling) Order”, by the late David Bohm, an eminent physicist indeed.

      • Implicate Order. Bohm’s book was one of the keys to my understanding of the Divine Will. How reality that we can perceive is constantly unfolding (explicate) from a hidden implicate (hidden) order.

37. Panpsychism is one of the challenges to the reigning secular religion of reductive materialism (i.e. the notion that “everything” can be explained by the actions and interactions of physical matter, down to and beyond subatomic particles). Botanical scientist Rupert Sheldrake rejects panpsychism but puts forth a theory of “morphic fields” as a possible foundation for understanding observations (e.g. how the Tarantula Hawk wasp does what it does) that cannot be adequately explained (at least not at this point) by reductive materialism. (The fact that Sheldrake’s TEDx talk was suppressed by the TED organization is a point in his favor.)

38. Say what you will about The Enlightenment, but darn it, our civilization had men wiping out disease, breaking the speed of sound, cracking atoms and walking on the moon.

    We are all called to respect our ancestors, but my father and grandfather’s generation were like unto gods.

    • Enlightenment was 90% good but the 10% bad, namely the idea that everyone could become an Englishman, is going to wipe out civilization

      • Its certainly going to wipe out England.

        • ………………………………You first.

      • Projection on your part,American.

        The English have never believed that everyone is secretly English and just need a good dose of bombs to nudge them in the right direction.

        Maybe it’s a republic trait as the French seem to share your optimism.

        • You can’t tell that it’s an expression and not to be taken literally?

          A way of saying that the Enlightenment held that universally all men were essentially the same, that Enlightenment principles were universal

          Not exactly rocket science, mate

39. A good book on this, now on Kindle, is John Murray Cuddihy’s “he Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity”

    • Jack: Yes, Cuddihy’s work is excellent. Believe it or not, got it thru inter-library loan a number of years ago. I’m sure they’ve since removed it from whatever collection and burned it.

40. “Covid is mutating because it is offended by our vaccines.”

    Well, yes, it is—in a sense. One theory I tend to subscribe to is that our massive and indiscriminate vaccination program is pressuring the virus to mutate, or at least provide an environment that supports and spreads mutation. The test of this is what we seem to be seeing now: mutation, after mutation, all more resistant to the current “vaccines”, to be followed by “booster” shots, which are in reality updated mRNA concoctions derived from the latest mutation(s).

    As with the flu vaccine, this race can never be won.

    • Its not theoretical its known as Marek’s.

41. Freud was a coke head quack with an Oedipus complex.
    Got thrown out of a head shrink session many years ago after I told Karen that the before Prozac (Pamelor?) pills were some of the worst things ever.
    It turned out to be a turning point or fork in the road for good.
    The medical field was conquered as part of the Long March as well and avoid it if you can.
    Cue cutesy Tik Tok videos of “heroic” nurses dancing during the dastardly Black Death redux in a hospital so quiet you can hear a pin drop.

42. People are getting dumber and pet dogs and cats becoming smarter

    My dog has a superior outlook on how to live and thrive than anyone in authority. Plants, the same. Want to see what it takes to never give up on life? Look to your plants in the garden. Or driveway. You can suffocate grass with a foot of concrete and it never gives up reaching for the sun.

    But note there was always some resistance to the quackery. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, called Freud the Viennese Witch Doctor. Nabokov born in 1899 for reference.

    • Indeed.

      Many years ago walking through the streets of Dubrovnik, I noticed how savvy the street/alley cats were. They scared the hell out of any dog that got close. Saw one bulldog go in for an investigation, got swiped across it’s nose, and backed off. Saw it a number of times.

      I suppose in hindsight a comparison between gangs of alley cats sucker-punching more docile and innocent creatures could apply to a particular group with whom we see the same behaviours…

      • I am routinely outwitted by my dog. I spend more time coming up with ever more elaborate “agility” stuff to play with him, than actually playing with him. Now it’s possible I’m dumb for a human, but that’s still pretty smart for a dog.

    • The “IQ guy” in me is demanding I point out that in living memory there were people like Nabokov—great elite minds, celebrity geniuses—and now there aren’t. Something hit us in the head and brain-damaged us. We’re good at math, still, but there have always been autistic dorks. Maladjusted goofballs like Yarvin and Houellebecq are the only “public intellectuals” who even slightly resemble the real ones of just fifty years ago. A Nabokov-like being existing today is *unimaginable.* Whatever happened to us, it was so big (and now we’re so dumb) we can’t see it.

      • Part of it, I think, is that it just isnt in our cultural repertoire anymore. There are no Medici anymore, either, though even middle class people theoretically have the money to make it happen. I couldn’t have my living room ceiling frescoed even if I wanted to. Who would do the work, or even know how to start figuring it out? I could “afford” to hire an artist (let’s stipulate), but who? And where? And how to make sure that if I did find one, they wouldn’t gender-swap Adam and give the Hand of God long painted tranny nails?

      • Houellebecq’s latest book – “Serotonin” – addresses the medication/shrink racket pretty well (morbidly and mordantly). In the end, the age-old benefits of family/God/community shine through the fog of medication.

      • Very true, Hemid

        We do seem to have hit a wall

    • While pet-sitting a neighbor’s dog recently, I noticed a perfect anthill cone atop an otherwise flawless concrete driveway. 😀

43. Aristocratic Victorians, including the royals, actually got the surgery and carried colostomy bags under those fine clothes. That’s how batsh*t the elite quackery can get.

    Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candles don’t, er, hold a candle to ’em.
    Not to be sniffed at, you cheeky lads.

    • Let’s never forget Rasputin

      And today with have black girl magic

44. We human beings evolved to be pattern-seeking primates: noticing patterns in the world around us definitely added to our chances of survival, and thus was selected-for by the forces of evolution.

    Starting around a couple hundred thousand years ago, our human ancestors had brains roughly as big as ours; so they weren’t dummies by any means.

    But way back when, they had no accumulation of facts to build on, as we do today; so their pattern-seeking brains were forced to work with what they had, and came up with a variety of explanations, basically concocted out of the blue: religions.

    Today we do have a wealth of actual data— human history, genetics and DNA, bone trails, archaeological evidence— demonstrable facts which we can use to understand who we are and where we came from.

    But in today’s woke world, we’re arguably making ourselves dumber, as people force themselves to believe in unbelievable concepts like radical egalitarianism, and ignore the science and everyday experience of racial differences.

    And today’s modern welfare States are arguably reversing the positive effects of evolution, as for the first time in history they’re enabling the least-capable among us to not just survive, but to thrive, and to reproduce faster than anyone else. We have yet to see how that plays out, as automation removes the few jobs which that ever-growing underclass is capable of doing.

    And yeah: Freud was a quack in many ways— and a serious coke-head, back when cocaine was legal and readily available, which probably explains how he got so carried away— and it’s now known that, contrary to the basic assumption of psychoanalysis, understanding what your psychological problems are doesn’t make them magically go away.

    But Freud did come up with some concepts which have stood the test of time: the fact that much of our cognitive activity is unconscious, and the fact that our psyches are made up of competing drives, many of which are in conflict with each other. So the old boy did get some things right, and did make a lasting contribution; while also confusing things with his many misconceptions about what people are like.

    We humans evolved with a need to belong to a group, and a need to come up with a belief system that purports to explain it all. The new religion of “anti-racism” and woke radical egalitarianism is the latest in a long line of magical beliefs which— while they sound nice, and make one feel good to believe them— simply aren’t in accord with the facts.

    Our ‘elite’ rulers are pushing them partly as part of their ongoing effort to pander to Blacks, and partly to get people used to believing what they’re told to believe, while condemning and canceling all those who dare to believe otherwise.

    Like masking, espousing woke ideology separates the compliant from the non-compliant.

    • “the fact that much of our cognitive activity is unconscious, and the fact that our psyches are made up of competing drives, many of which are in conflict with each other.”

      Strong grounds alone for the layman to reason as to why we’ve not created a true AI yet. And never will.

      • Yes, but as with chess playing computers, you might overcome the complexity of thought through brute force.

        • On an 8×8 matrix though.

          Only so many possible combinations.

          I’ve noticed that when I play the jukebox and it comes up with suggestions, it’s always wrong

          Because there are simply too many variables. Example, one day I wanted to hear men singing with deep voices. Then I wanted to hear men with tenor voices. One day I wanted to hear saxophones. This spanned all kinds of musical genres and eras, but because my first play was Waylon it went where you know it would.

          I know this is not the best example because the AI on a jukebox is not the Ferrari of AI, but I think one gets my larger point. Our minds are simply way more complex than computers are able to compute for.

          There will come a day when people begin to realize that computers have their limitations, like everything else. But right now the feeling among the tech nerds is that computers will be able to do it all. Itself a form of quackery.

        • Compsci:

          I do not think this true. One can get a Grandmaster level chess machine from brute force. In fact, this is the only way that it can be done. But an actual human consciousness via brute force? Never. I simply cannot see how it could be done.

          Claude Shannon was the first black man who thought deeply about how to build a chess computer and machine intelligence. He discussed to categories: Type ‘A’, which was brute force and Type ‘B’, which required ‘intelligence’ (whatever that meant). With the advent of cheaper hardware, all the bodies involved in chess computation went all in with Type ‘A’. And it worked.

          But this approach cannot ever work for a full model of the human mind. In fact, I’d rank reasoning about the ‘mechanics’ of the mind (and consciousness) as much of a mystery as what came before the alleged Big Bang. Possibly almost futile.

          I don’t know the current state of the art of AI. But I do know that anything so impressive as to routinely convince a human it is a human would be an explosive revolution. It does not appear to have happened. And I doubt it will.

          How does one brute force hate? Or love? Or anger? Or pride? I just cannot see how it can be done.

          • What you say is the same said of the chess playing computer—until the world champion chess player was defeated.

            I like to imagine the same thing, that I’m unique—of infinite possibilities wrt thought and action. But perhaps we are not?

          • CompSci:

            Can’t reply directly, so have replied to myself.

            Anyway:

            “What you say is the same said of the chess playing computer—until the world champion chess player was defeated.”

            You’re right, of course. But even then, the brute force version of the problem was tangible. Your average science guy could reason about how it ought to be done. The same could not be said then for a true AI, and it cannot be said now. How, where, would one start?

            Oddly enough it was the success of this approach which convinced many researchers to follow brute force and machine learning algorithm improvement, as a means to ‘intelligence’. Stop trying to actually think about what makes a conscious entity. There’s obviously the money angle as well, IBM pretty much shelved Deep Blue after it’s second game with the famous Gambian chess player Kasparov.

            “I like to imagine the same thing, that I’m unique—of infinite possibilities wrt thought and action. But perhaps we are not?”

            You are unique. And not in a snowflake type of way. Can it be said that your thoughts and the processes behind them, even in the last ten minutes, have an exact duplicate in any mind on Earth?

            That said, your final question has given something to think about. What are your thoughts on this uniqueness?

          • OrangeFrog, I have no thoughts on my uniqueness. I’m really a sham philosopher with only a few formal courses under my belt and really not smart enough to be a philosopher, hence my moniker, Compsci.

            Let me just admit that the “Turing Test” has not been met yet. So that’s a point in your favor.

          • I don’t know the formal philosophy terms, but I’ll give it a try. For all its seeming miraculous powers, the human brain is simply a complex pattern recognition device, an analog computer if you like.

            No, we can’t build one now, maybe never. But we can model one. Reductionism has its place. Fact is, the brain is composed of billions of neurons, each of which has more or less predictable qualities, linked together by more-or-less understood means.

            Point: all the above could, in theory, be modeled in 1:1 detail in hardware or software.

            Yes, we are just machines. Very sophisticated machines. I still leave open the question: “Built by whom or what?”

            The materialist, God-free ontology says, more or less, that everything is an accident, and that we (complex life forms) are “merely” the latest (not to say final) product of an endless sequence of chance recombination, building from simple to the complex. Dennet in his “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” uses the concept of a slightly simpler machine that builds a slightly more complex machine…

            I’m not claiming these views are correct, but they are, apparently, supported by some science.

      • The panpsychos would like a word with you. If consciousness arises out of organized matter we simply need the right kind of computer to bring out a conscious machine. Perhaps the current method of sending digital data through tiny switches can’t harness the phenomenon.

        But I don’t really think this way anymore since I stopped taking drugs.

        • I can tell you how desperate some of the theories about an AI are. A while back I read a book by some fancy-pants professor in this field, maybe a neuroscientist. One of his lines of reasoning was that consciousness ‘just happens’.

          That’s right. He suggested that at a certain point, complex systems (The Internet was his example) just ‘get conscious’. What a cop out. It just happens! Marvellous! Well, let us assemble all the widgets and just wait and see…

          Gonna be waiting a long time, lads. A long time.

      • Orange Frog,

        Yeah, as you probably know, whether or not AI duplicating human consciousness is possible is a hot topic in the field, about which the best minds differ.

        I tend to agree with you: our human consciousness is grounded in experiences and emotions, and value judgements; so it’s hard to see how it could ever be duplicated by strictly logical reasoning.

        • If AI is to ever reach a certain potential, using only binary code will not suffice, no matter how much raw power is employed. A visual illustration is a screen with pixels, no matter how many pixels there are you still cannot replicate a true curve or non 45-degree diagnoal, it will always have a set of squares at its core. It’s the gap between the digital and the analog where the latter can get into the in-between spaces that digital can only approximate

          Needed is a computing system that is more organic and replicative of nature itself. If that’s even possible, but I know people are trying. Somehow grafting computing power with a natural organism.

          • Frank Herbert’s mentats, along with other peoples found in his Dune books are of interest. Under the conditions imposed by the Butlerian Jihad, the attempt to shut out quality- based mentation in preference to quantity-based “mentation” resulted in humans embracing quality-based mentation. Machine-based counterfeit mentation was tossed, and humans tose to the occasion. I found this interesting in the ways in which it played out with cultures drawing upon spiritual traditions, and consciously rejecting materialism as their basis.

    • Why I don’t buy evolution in total

      If we already had the brainpower to invent a wheel, just that it was untapped, then why did we evolve to have the brainpower to begin with? How were we selecting for intelligence leading up to our inventiveness if there was nothing to invent for thousands of years?

      Doesn’t add up.

      I also notice people like Steve sailer are a lot like followers of Freud. He will try to explain everything through the prism of natural selection. Natural selection is his Freudian psychoanalysis and answer to everything. It gets old, but everything he comes up with is him trying to reverse engineer something to make sense from the standpoint and logic of natural selection. He’s your STEM guy with no imagination, and they can be just as harmful as your blue haired lezbo.

      Hey Sailer, why does it feel good for the wind blowing through my hair? What is the evolutionary reason for that? Or when my wife whispers in my ear I get the warm and fuzzies. And btw, dogs feel the same. They feel the pleasures of wind in their faces, why you them happy as can be when sticking their heads out the car window. What’s the evolutionary reason for it?

      His answer would be just as asinine as explaining it through Oedipal complex.

      • No, no, no Falcone.

        Your understanding of the world and reasoning is wrong! You simply need to reduce everything to more charts, graphs, tables and averages… then it’ll all be good!

        • Dogs rightfully see a piece of paper with a graph on it and piss all over it

          There’s your natural selection, Steve

      • Falcone,

        There’s no doubt that over the long term, ancestral human brains have gotten bigger over time: the fossil record shows it. Evolutionary theory claims that brainpower evolved in the course of meeting specific challenges.

        How would you explain the increasing size of human (homo sapien) brains over time?

        The DNA and bone trail shows humans leaving out of Africa and populating the rest of the world. Would you deny that?

        Evolutionary theory/natural selection claims that it was the constant challenges of encountering and mastering new environments which propelled human evolution. It’s why people up north tend to be smarter: greater challenges to surviving cold winters. And why those who remained in Africa are a lot less smart: no challenges to meet.

        Evolutionary theory/natural selection posits that every human trait we see in people today must confer an adaptive advantage; must enable those possessing it to reproduce more than those without it.

        Looked-at in that light, the feelings you get when your wife whispers in your ear are easily explained: couples who have those feelings are more successful than those who don’t. Same with your dog having them: it makes him a more successful dog.

        Similarly with the wind whistling through your hair: it’s not hard to see how humans with that kind of positive response to nature would be more successful than those who lacked it.

        If you’re believing a religious explanation— that God created everything— and contrasting it with the evolutionary explanation of natural selection, then we likely won’t see eye to eye: nothing I’m going to say is going to convince you.

        But what do you do with the fossil record, which seems to show a succession of proto-humans gradually evolving into modern man? How do you explain it?

        • How would I explain it?

          Who the hell knows? But looking to evolutionary theory to explain everything is like using a car mechanic’s tools to rough frame a house. It has utility value in a specific set of circumstances but proves inadequate and has limitations in others. The problem is that people think this particular tool set can fix everything, then you get a house that falls down because no one had a hammer.

    • But way back when, they had no accumulation of facts to build on, as we do today

      On an individual basis so-called primitives probably had more facts available to them than any modern bozo. In addition to an awareness and knowledge of their immediate surroundings, primitive man had the time and inclination to reflect on his place in the universe, something that moderns seldom engage in. Pre-literates are famous for having prodigious memories and their survivors are amazed at the forgetfulness of the moderns with whom they are associated.

      • nailheadtom,

        All true: early humans had an understanding and intimate connection with the natural world that we moderns lack. There’s no doubt they knew plenty that we don’t. And that their memories were phenomenal compared to ours.

        What I was referring to was the cultural inheritance of facts that every schoolkid learns. Human knowledge is cumulative, especially after the invention of the printing press.

        In that sense, even moderately-intelligent modern humans know true facts about the Universe that Plato and Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci didn’t.

    • Competing drives. … the spirit is wiling but the flesh is weak. St. Paul said it 1900 years earlier

      • c matt,

        Indeed: radically-different (and mutually-opposing) contexts, but both expressing the same truth about human experience.

        What’s true is true

45. Those over the age of forty or so will remember when people regularly went to see a psychiatrist to discuss their troubles.

    Depiction of neurotics on a psychiatrist’s couch on black and white television sit-coms had nothing to do with popular culture. It was comedy, a specialty of Woody Allen at it’s height, and a satire on east coast life, particularly Manhattan. There’s never been a time when a significant portion of any population anywhere regularly went to see a shrink.

    • Perhaps not, I suspect a majority of the population don’t see MD’s either. However, after WWII the popularity of psychoanalysis grew and became part of the popular culture. As pointed out, aided by the popular media. To support this assertion, look up and watch the old 50’s sci-fi movie, “Forbidden Planet”. It completely depends on a general layman’s understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis for the plot.

      • It completely depends on a general layman’s understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis for the plot.

        Let me see if I can find a 75 year-old general layman and have him explain Freudian psychoanalysis to me.

        • In the 50’s Hollywood bet a movie budget upon the underlying plot understanding (perhaps flawed) of the movie going public’s knowledge of psychoanalysis. It would seem strange to do so if the concept was unknown/alien to the general audience and relegated solely to a few academics in the university.

          But yes, the concepts of Id and Ego were generally known as was the concept of the mind not being completely and directly under our control. Freud was a famous personality prior to WWII, and perhaps second only to Einstein as a renown “scientist”. It also didn’t hurt that much of his theory dwelled upon repressed sexuality—the public always loving a bit of titillation.

          One doesn’t need to dig up a layman. When I was an undergrad, a goodly portion of our intro psych class was centered on Freudian theory and practice. Even at that late date, Freud’s monograph, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” was required reading. Still a good read today should one want to understand why Freud was so popular, yet so wrong.

        • Other than that, everything’s pretty awesome.

        • You want to fuck your mother and kill your father. it’s a jew thing..

          • Er, “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles? Last I checked, the ancient Greeks weren’t Jewish. Although it is true that via a philosophical miscegenation, one of his fellow Hellenes (Plato) and Judaism (St. Paul) was born a new, popular religion 😀

    • Yes, seeing a shrink seemed to be a habit of Jews and single women based on my experience. The women wanted to complain and a shrink had to listen. Shrinks were looked down on in the working class world of my youth.

      There are a lot of misconceptions about the 60s and 70s among the right such as all the boomers were hippies when most were working class and Nixon won the youth vote

      • My Comment: In high school (mid ’70s) many of us used sessions with the “resource counselor” as an easy way to get out of class and to shoot the shit. I don’t believe anyone ever took it seriously.

46. Things that will help males cure depression/other psychological ailments:

    – working out
    – having a goal
    – being part of a community with similar goals/values
    – connection with God
    – strong friend/family connections
    – sunlight and healthy eating

    Basically everything our “primitive” ancestors did – although the physical workout was usually on the job, rather than at the gym.

    Taking SSRIs won’t help. In cases of severe suicidal depression, they’re useful, but that’s about it. SSRIs mask the problem. Depression is your brain telling you that your lifestyle sucks, basically. Talking to leftist quacks doesn’t help either. I was talking to a psychologist at some point and she made it worse. She was just an idiot, giving out feminine, pseudo solutions.

    • You basically explained why elites of 19th century & current ones bought into crazy ideas such as marxism & critical race theory.
      The moment the european elites stopped being real men they immediately adopted j*uwish behaviour & started acting like merchant oligarchs.They basically lost their connection to nature/God & they’re FAGGOTS, no martial spirit whatsoever.

      Imagine a j*uw explaining psychoanalysis to Charlemagne, he’d probably lose his head. Vlad’s grandson fought off 6 assassins by himself, killed off 2 of them, those men didn’t play around or cared to listen to progressive mumbo jumbo.

      • President Andrew attacking his wannabe assassin is also a good one.

    • Let me add a caveat to your list, which otherwise I am in total agreement with

      Working out is not good if you’re doing heavy weightlifting.

      It will eventually aggravate your joints to the point where you have a lifetime of joint pains and problems

      Do things more natural and if you are going to jog don’t do it on paved streets but on dirt trails or the beach. If lifting weights, stick with barbell exercises.

      Best exercise is swimming. Talk about feeling good?! After a good romp in the pool or ocean and swimming around getting very little crevice some exercise, just being in the water, you will come out feeling brand new. And girls can see it from a mile away, if one needs any extra motivation.

      • Swimming’s great. Used to do it all the time. Then the shamdemic meant I had to book times to go and all that crap.

        Now? Light calisthenics/stretching and James LaFond’s shadow boxing drills. Can do that at home. And in a prison cell, for that matter.

    • 100% Exercise, relationships, diet, and sunlight are magic.

      In RE: Alcohol

      When I was a kid, I thought coffee was the “adult” beverage.

      When I was a teen, I thought alcohol was the “adult” beverage.

      Now I’m an adult, and I’ve learned that WATER is the “adult” beverage.

      • No you were right the first time with coffee/tea 😉

    • Martin had more sense and fewer neurosis’s than Frasier n Nels combined.

47. “The unhappy wife spending more time at church did more for her wellbeing than hours with a quack and an eventual divorce. The peace of knowing that after this life, there is a next life of eternal bliss did more for the psyche of regular people than handfuls of anxiety drugs”

    Completely true, seen with my own eyes multiple times.
    I do believe there is a romantic side to humans which needs to be fed constantly otherwise they become miserable goblins, i guess a religion of love like christianity soothes the souls of many people.

    • My grandfather used to tell my grandma to get that picture of a Jesus out of the hallway, it was the one we’ve all seen where Jesus is this gorgeous guy with long brown hair. Romantic indeed. I wonder how many Christian women kept the faith because Jesus was their dream guy.

48. The Covid hoax has neatly brought together all the quackery and organizational corruption in modern society especially SCIENCE! The idea that we will all die if we don’t wear masks that were invented for bacteria not viruses alone is enough to make me wonder if Africans who believe in Voodoo are more advanced than high IQ Asians and Whites. The idea that we must appease the Gods by forcing kids to wear masks and social distance all day, thus hindering their mental and emotional development, is enough to make me feel we would be better off worshiping tree Gods and tossing virgins into volcanos.

    I have a very high IQ but find that I can have more coherent conversations about what is going on with mid IQ working class and military types than I can with other highly educated and high IQ men. The working class has a much better BS detector.

    Highly intelligent people want status for being smart like what they got in school. Unfortunately many were nerds and are still seeking to be the big man on campus. Where things go off the rail quickly is that to get that status they have to follow the dictates of the upper members of the tribe as disclosed in the NYT and a few other organs. To use their highly developed brains to think through what is going on poses the risk that they will lose all status as a smart man.

    Smart people who have achieved success in one field become convinced that they are insightful in all other areas not by original thought but through repeating what they are told by the NYT (and they are convinced everyone who disagrees with them watches Fox News) . They very easily con themselves and are conned by the tribe. To make matters worse, the dumber the idea, the more it will be rejected by normal people which in turn provides confirmation to high IQ people that they are right because they are superior.

    So we are in a world that requires a shrewd and intelligent managerial class and leadership yet they are mainly fools and getting more delusional and superstitious all the time.

    • I have a very high IQ but find that I can have more coherent conversations about what is going on with mid IQ working class and military types than I can with other highly educated and high IQ men.
      Gee, you’re a great guy!

      • Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I liked the thought mostly, but the aspect of discussing/mentioning one’s “superior” IQ is old and I consider a “tell” of exactly what the commenter was decrying, i.e., if you have to talk about your “high” IQ it probably is not that high.

    • I have a very high IQ but find that I can have more coherent conversations about what is going on with mid IQ working class and military types than I can with other highly educated and high IQ men.

      Schooling has become little more than operant conditioning in deference to authority.

      Repeat what the authority wants get a gold star. Do it for an extended period of time get an “A” on your report card. Challenge the authority and get slap down. Continue doing so and get shamed in front of your peers. Or punished with detention. Fail to repeat what they want and get a D or C on your report cars. Maybe held back to repeat the “class”.

      Do all of that over and over for 16+ years (Grade 1 through college) and you will acquire some factoids along the way. And be trained to think like the authorities, to anticipate what why expect. But what you really learn is to repeat what they want to hear, to always defer to their position. To accept that something is true because they say so.

      So it’s hardly surprising that the people that have gone the furthest in the process are also the most likely to accept and internalize the official narrative, whatever it is.

      • The length of time the highly educated have spent in school has given them far more indoctrination but I think it goes farther than that. Once they come out of school many work in fields that are part of globohomo. To prosper they need to think a certain way. As smart, highly educated people they don’t want to think that they are saying stupid things so they rely on places like the NYT to give them the guidelines. If it is in the NYT, it must be smart so I can think it.

        To make matters worse they want to be seen as smart people in their personal life too. Since we lost the cultural war, we can’t convey status, only the tribe can. You must have thoughts approved by them to be smart

        • Yes. The missing word here is ‘sissy’. Smart people tend to be sissies. Even if they have an inquisitive mind that resists marination in leftism through their ‘education’; they still like their friends. Their job. Their material goods. Their FaceBerg account.

          If they know ‘X’ to be true, and that the statement of ‘X’ would actually help (gotta be cruel to be kind) but would get them uninvited to their neighbour’s dinner parties, they ain’t gonna say ‘X’.

          Because they are sissies. And they don’t even need to have the screws put to them. You can get these hollow men to cave by just cancelling them from Twitter.

          Bloody sissies, I tell you. It is simply all so tiresome.

    • Haha yeah, I know what you mean. My IQ is 130+, and I also prefer talking to middle/lower IQ over the midwits.

      The problems are the midwits, the people with a college degree, IQ of 105-115, who think they’re smart. They’re very dull, arrogant, and lack introspection (thinking they’re super duper smart). They’re usually insufferable liberals who think they’re too smart for Sky God, or things like borders.

      People with lower IQ have a more concrete understanding of humanity. They’ve also accepted that they’re not Einstein, so they lack the arrogance.

      People with legitimately high IQ, 125+, also tend to have more sense, but also have a nihilistic perspective. Sort of like they understand that we live in clown world; always have; always will. There are a surprising number of racists in this category too. I get along fine with the far right tip of the IQ curve. William Pierce is a good example, professor and senior engineering researcher at an airplane company… And a “white supremacist”.

      Obviously these are large generalizations but it’s been true to a degree for me, you get alot of the liberal midwits in the big city.

      • The midwits with a college degree who want status as a smart person are indeed some of the worst and most vicious people out there. You run into them a lot in corporations and social media.

        • go to the lawyersgunsmoneyblog. It’s all full of that kind of stuff. It’s three college professors who run the site.

      • Another good example was William Shockley.

        • Yes, I recently read the SPLC page on Shockley. I haven’t checked it against outside sources, but it actually seemed fairly objective and I thought it presented Shockley’s beliefs “positively” (in a way he’d have liked them.)

          One can almost pity the poor SPLC for the quandry they must find themself in: They’re in the difficult position of wanting to vilify such opponents, yet they must explain in detail some of the intended victim’s philosophy. You can easily see how problematic this would be, for example, if he’s some racist white supremacist spreading evil lies like the Negro is a stupid, violent race that has never built a scrap of civilization, or that Eugenics is evil because it encourages the breeding of desirable traits, but seeks to reduce undesirable traits. Maybe it’s a good idea for plants and animals, but humans are magically exempt from the laws of genetics, for reasons. 😀

          I plan to look up their bio’s of other famous writers in the field. 😀

      • I was in a local association that had an organizer who couldn’t wait to tell people that A) He belonged to Mensa and B) Hillary was going to blow Trump out of the water. It kind of met my expectations though as, no offense to the commentors here, generally when someone talks about how smart they are it means they’re about to use it as cover to say something really stupid.

        • A lot of it comes down to embarrassment

          One of th biggest reasons people choose not to get into a fight is not the physical pain but the embarrassment of losing or looking foolish throwing a silly punch, etc. They don’t want to be found out. They don’t want people laughing at them. Needless to say, it’s quite liberating when you simply don’t give a shit, as with most blue collar guys, so you just go with what you’ve got and let the chips fall where they may.

          Smart people are much the same. Instead of just saying what they think, they feel they need back up, so they quote studies, or research papers. To show they’re smart. Being found out that they may be stupid is an embarrassment they could never accept.

          Everyone wears a mask, but for smart people the mask is also their security blanket

    • Highly intelligent people want status for being smart like what they got in school. Unfortunately many were nerds and are still seeking to be the big man on campus.

      That’s been observed before. Yeah, a libertarian. And Jewish. But he still hits the mark.

      https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/policy-report/1998/1/cpr-20n1-1.pdf

    • I’ll have to disagree with most of your claims. Highly intelligent people can have disorders, of course, but your stereotypes are closer to a dumb fuck than a brain.

      If you do some reading about common personality traits of the below-average intelligence, one of their most debilitating traits is the “fixed idea,” basically the inability to realize when they’re incorrect. Parallel to this is they resist correction, sometimes stubbornly. Stupid people suffer from the infamous Dunning-Kruger syndrome: they think themselves more talented/smarter than they actually are, and they underestimate the competence of more intelligent people.

      In direct contradiction of one of your claims, smart people actually tend to UNDER-estimate their abilities and overall competence.

      I will agree with you that the highly intelligent, like anyone, is liable to become an unquestioning follower of a belief system or a peer group with whom he identifies. People of average and better IQ can also believe, or at least claim to believe, in some rather ridiculous ideas.

      I don’t have any data one way or the other, but I suspect this probably applies equally to all levels of cognitive power. Being gullible/innocent does not preclude a strong intellect; the problem may just be failure to use the smarts. You can find plenty of cases where very smart people do very stupid things. A good IQ is a blessing, but it is not a guarantee that you’ll stay out of trouble.

      • IQ measures the brain’s speed in processing patterns and abstractions. It is useful in predicting overall success in the world we now live in, but of course, “the world we live in” did not exist for 99% of human experience. Yet that IQ must have existed for millennia; unused, undervalued, unnoticed, advancing in spite of no known adaptive value for humanity.

        Humanity somehow crawled through the mud of 100,000 years and here we are, the inheritors, with our high IQ people.

        Can it be that high IQ, like having a 13″ love muscle – is maladaptive? Does anyone think we have another 100,000 years in us?

    • “So we are in a world that requires a shrewd and intelligent managerial class and leadership yet they are mainly fools and getting more delusional and superstitious all the time.”

      So, you are saying that what the world requires are delusional, superstitious fools.

49. Oh no. Ohhh no, no way Jose’.

    Umm, is my gravel driveway… going to call me racist?

    • Maybe…let me go dig through my gravel to divine some answers from the special pieces.

    • Depends: is the driveway pure, crushed limestone (white), sand & gravel (greyish/brown) or asphalt?

50. Marxism is not complete nonsense. His analysis of the problems of 19th century industrialization were spot on. His monomania wrt economics driving history was wrong because he universalized phenomenon that were relevant to Western Europe in the preceding half millennia. His predictions were wrong because they were projecting trends of his lifetime forward to some i determinant future. Which is an error that is all to common among people. Many DR do the same.

51. If you compare the speed of advancements made in the core sciences (including engineering) over the last century, Psychology has advanced to the stage comparable to barbers practicing medicine.

52. The psychologist practicing talk therapy is no different than a prostitute. Just like guys will get so horny that they’ll pay a woman for her services, people get so lonely that they’ll pay big bucks just to have someone shut up, and *listen to them* (or pretend to listen) for an hour. Nobody leaves a single problem behind them when they leave the shrink’s office. It’s more like getting yer ashes hauled, or taking a psychic enema.

    JWM

    • Better analogy is a secular priest or rabbi.

      They can help people with some problems, but not those with organic illnesses.

      The big difference is the priest or rabbi is working with a traditional community driven body of knowledge and doing so as charity to genuinely help people. The shrink is using contemporary fads and doing so for profit, which changes the counseling dynamic even if the participant don’t realize it.

    • jwm,

      Indeed!

      In fact, some years ago the head of the American Psychological Association pointed out how the various types of therapy— based on very different notions of what made people sick and how to cure them— had almost identical rates of success. Pointing to the fact that what’s curative is just having someone to talk to who you know is listening with a sympathetic ear.

      • I’ll buy that—and say what you will, women beat men in that department.

    • Haha! Yes, I call them “ear whores”!

53. Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex.

    Sounds like a fancy justification of animism.

    Lefty has situationally been animist for a long time. Specifically wrt to guns. They’re phobia of them incorporates the idea that the gun has a spirit which possesses those who encounter it. They wouldn’t admit such a belief. But it is revealed by their always blaming “the gun” for violence and crime, and in referring to hunk of metal as evil.

54. I don’t have a quick link but it is pretty well agreed IQ has dropped precipitously. It would be little shock to learn the American elite gas experienced the sharpest decline.

    It is true that ridiculous quackery such as Freudianism and superstitious nonsense like Marxism always impacted the upper classes hardest. What is new is the proliferation of particularly ignorant beliefs such as White privilege and Critical Race Theory. While some in the upper classes of yore embraced fantasies such as fairy rings, their peers still regarded them as kooks. No longer.

    Trotsky famously observed the upper class was easier to propagandize because all one had to do was attach authority no matter how spurious to a ridiculous claim and they would take it hook, line and sinker while workers would not. God he would enjoy this.

    • I would argue that things like critical theory, cultural Marxism and post-modernism are more complex than industrial age ideologies like communism and fascism. Those old ideas dwelled exclusively in the tangible, while the new religion is spiritual and cultural. That is what is happening in America. A new religion is spreading among the Cloud People. What used to be contained in the academy has gotten loose into the rest of the managerial elite. It bleeding down into the managerial class as a whole. That HR person really believes that adding a trans BIPOC to the accounting team will cause something magical to happen.

      • Thanks for clarifying a point that’s been brewing in my head for awhile. It’s similar to my point to that the Bolsheviks and Fascists were willing to get their hands dirty.

        Communism and Fascism and the people who implemented them were concerned about changing things on the ground. They had (as you say) tangible plans and hard men to make those plans happen.

        It was very masculine.

        Our new ideology is very feminine. Its goals – such as they are – are amorphous, often focused on feelings. They have no real plan outside of equity and whites apologizing forever. And the way that implement their vague plan is not through hard men doing hard things; it’s soy boys in tech and finance cutting you off from the world with a button.

        It’s the ideology of a middle-aged book club hosted by a woman who decorates her house with Native American dream catchers.

        • CRT and White privilege are indeed feminine problems. Women have to be socially shamed as they are complete conformists. Ridicule and marginalization are good responses to feminine hysteria.

        • It would be more accurate to say that the new ideology is very primitive, or very pagan. Or, even more accurately, very unchristian. The ideological revolution, like all the enlightenment revolutions before it, is a rejection of Christianity, particularly orthodox Christianity. The key dichotomy is “being” versus “feeling.” In Christianity, it is important to be good, but with paganism it’s important to feel good. Christianity holds that there is an objective moral standard to which all humans are eternally subject and an order to the universe. Pagans hold that the gods are fickle and the universe is random. It turns out, the post-Christian world looks a lot like the pre-Christian world.

      • No doubt true about the religious aspect, Z, but I think you are off about the complexity. It is faith without evidence. Marxism and fascism were based on observable problems and were reactions to them. CRT is more akin to spiritualism. I may be misreading your use of “complex” here.

        Marxism and to a lesser extent fascism also had religious overtones, but they could point to factual circumstances and claim these were prescriptions to them. CRT really is demonology and not an attempt to address or correct a problem.

      • I think it’s fair to say that one magical thing that would happen is that more office supplies would “disappear”…and no one would want to figure out the trick.

55. So “all is vanity and a striving after wind,” eh?

    You sound like a weary intellectual-manqué this morning.

    If your idea of culture or the nation or the people is the cumulative experience of the race, it’s not so easy to dismiss what, to current sensibilities, appears to be quackery.

    Empires rise and fall — we’re in our fall — but the search for transcendent meaning will go on past any stein-raising glees of “gaudeamus igitur.”

56. Reminds me of (Orwell’s ?)) quote that there are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual can believe them.

    As far as psychoanalysis, psychiatry and such waning, well it has. Now it’s just a trip to your doctor for a prescription for ssri,s and such. Wouldn’t call that progress though.

57. Its hard not to see Marxism as the inevitable result of middle class childhood. Marx, Engels and all subsequent Marxist share the same thing. Their middle class parents made just enough to give them a good material existance, but didn’t have access to the upper elite.

    Marxism is thus the natural result of middle class childhood. Hence why it exploded just as kids left the labor of the farm, but more and more of them could escape being child labor in factories.

    After all what is Marxism if not the desire to escape into the bliss of childhood. Free from responsibility to work and justify their existence, they can return to simply “doing their art” like they fantasize about doing post-revolution.

    Combine this with class envy of those with true power. The second necessary ingredient of Marxism is burning resentment of those that managed to preserve their idyllic existence. After all, post-revolution EVERYONE will have a shiny new car and etc, etc, etc.

    • Calling Marxism a firm of middle class escapism is a bit trite. Industrial factory labor at the beginning of the industrial revolution was not exactly a cakewalk. In fact, it was a pretty miserable experience for the workers, who also wished they could afford to escape it. Marx was hardly the only one to notice the misery, or to have qualms about industrialization (Chesterton, for example, shared many of the same critiques, but didn’t advocate the same social reforms). It wasn’t a fun time for anyone except maybe factory owners, and people were right to be appalled by the treatment of the proles.

      • Marx was hardly the only one to notice the misery, or to have qualms about industrialization

        Marx never set foot in a factory or associated with factory workers.

        • So, what, were the workers shuttled from home to factory in enclosed underground tubes so that no one else would see them? Were they banned from public space? Did Engels not know how to describe the conditions of his family’s factory to Marx? Was there no common commentary and understanding of the proles to draw from? Honestly, do you really think anyone could live in that era and be completely lacking in knowledge of how the proles lived?

          • Factory hands almost always lived within walking distance of their employment. Segregation in England existed then just as it does now. The proles don’t live in Mayfair or Wimbledon. There are many areas of large English cities that some people can’t safely frequent today and couldn’t then.

      • It was so miserable millions of people left the countryside and migrated to cities for Industrial work?

        • All sort of relative. Working a subsistence farm was back breaking as well. And if you really didn’t own your own farm, probably worse than taking your chances in the city, or in some form of industrialized employment. Until the industrial revolution cities were sump’s where the excess peasants went to die. After IR things got better, but slowly. Took a while before workers were thought of as fellow human beings rather than cog’s in a machine.

          • The supply of workers for the industrial revolution came from the enclosure movement of the 18th century:

            “Another important feature of the Agricultural Revolution was the Enclosure Movement. In the decades and centuries before the 1700s, British farmers planted their crops on small strips of land while allowing their animals to graze on common fields shared collectively. However, in the 1700s, the British parliament passed legislation, referred to as the Enclosure Acts, which allowed the common areas to become privately owned. This led to wealthy farmers buying up large sections of land in order to create larger and more complex farms. Ultimately, this forced smaller farmers off of their land. Having lost their way of life, many of these farmers went to local towns and cities in search of work. This was important to the overall Industrial Revolution, because it helped create a system that created a large workforce for the factories and mines.”https://www.historycrunch.com/enclosure-movement.html#/

      • This insight may apply more early in the industrial revolution:

        Nobody denies that a 19th century factory was a pleasant place to work. Twelve hour days, few if any breaks, and dangerous working conditions. But that image the socialist taught you in high school is missing a few key pieces of data.

        Except perhaps in the case of minor children forced to work by desperate parents, those factory workers were free men and women. Poor yes, but free. Nobody forced them to go to that dirty factory. The only possible conclusion is they left left a wretched existence as a farm laborer or similar, in exchange for a better (to them) opportunity.

        Modern society’s idea of the bucolic country farm existence is mostly just a pleasant fantasy very poorly informed by the harsh realities of living off the land. It’s as ludicrous as the Enlightenment’s “noble savage,” or modern ideas that all people are equal, etc. In the middle ages the Germans had a saying, “City air makes one free.” This captured the idea that life in town was better than on the farm.

        Now, of course, much of the world has, in so many words, overplayed the hand of urban life. Too much of a good thing, perhaps. A day may come when that country life — even an arduous one — will be better than a dehumanized or collapsing city.

        • Voluntary? Some.

          Overall they were forced into the factories by government policy destroying the foundations of the agrarian economy as noted by nailheadtom.

          The ultimate result of that was constant labor strife basically. Eventually labor won enough with the 40 Hour Work Week (give us back what we had was one cry) and better conditions for things to calm down somewhat.

          As a side note.

          Its telling that the US fertility rate dropped below replacement or nearly so in the 30’s and was like that for nearly 10 years.

          You can blame say 42-45 or so on World War 2 but the rest was entirely economic.

          The sudden prosperity plus health improvements gave us the baby boom which than promptly ended in 1972.

          27 years isn’t bad but its been followed by 49 of fertility and as soon as immigrants get moved in, they drop too. Now its everywhere,

          I think and I’m far from sure that we may have reached a critical point where there aren’t enough rural people to keep cities from causing population decline.

          China is looking at its population halving in 50 years, maybe another halving in 75-100putting it back to 1799 level or so if I did the numbers right . This note without famine losses .

          Everywhere else save Africa and the Middle East are getting there at various speeds and even MENA et all are slowly moving in that direction.

          This suggest that industrial and post industrial civilization will auto-destruct and thereafter population will go into freefall . Apparently materialism as ethos and urbanization while they produce stuff do not produce humans.

          It would not surprise me not at all if the US , well it won’t exists to a successor state drops to maybe 60 million mostly Amish and ultra religious in a couple of centuries, moments in historical time.

          Upside they’ll have much better mental health and be fertile. They’ll just live more physically difficult lives. More importantly, any notions of “scientific progress” or ad astra bull-bleep will be gone gone gone

          Whether you think that is good or bad is up to you I guess. I won’t be around for it so I don’t have to care.

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