Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism

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Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:45 am

.

Adding this as a new thread, even if it doesn't garner many replies, as I feel the below Substack piece covers a broad range of current issues, and as such, doesn't fit in any single thread (but can be placed in almost all of the top 10 in General Discussion today).

I understand, from whatever social media content I peruse on a weekly basis, that Tolkien, in some circles, is being labeled 'Far Right'. See this example, naturally coming from Canada (since Canada has now essentially become an extension of whatever Reset plans are underway):
The Lord of the Rings and its far right fans
28 days ago
cbc.ca

Why is Lord of the Rings and fantasy novels so intriguing to conservatives and the far right? Journalist John Last has been researching the links between The Lord of the Rings and Italian fascist movements. He talks about how the Italian prime minister’s love for Tolkien is interwoven with her politics.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2173610051518

And this snippet from Reddit:
Tolkien & The Far-Right : r/tolkienfans - Reddit

Reddit
https://www.reddit.com › tolkienfans › comments › rvfcz2

Jan 3, 2022 — A guy who detested Nazism and antisemitism as much as J. R. R. Tolkien did is not far-right. He was definitely conservative, but not far-right.


The above 'musings' are fitting commentary for the Thought-Framing of our times.

In any event, I'm not a subscriber to this Substack so unfortunately have not read this in its entirety. Agree or not with this author's comments, it's a far more engaging output/summary of observations than anything in most mainstream press right now.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/a-pr ... kien-lewis
A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism

Our most farsighted seers knew the war for humanity had begun

Which dystopian writer saw it all coming? Of all the famous authors of the 20th century who crafted worlds meant as warnings, who has proved most prophetic about the afflictions of the 21st? George Orwell? Aldous Huxley? Kurt Vonnegut? Ray Bradbury? Each of these, among others, have proved far too disturbingly prescient about many aspects of our present, as far as I’m concerned. But it could be that none of them were quite as far-sighted as the fairytale spinners.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, fast friends and fellow members of the Inklings – the famous club of pioneering fantasy writers at Oxford in the 1930s and 40s – are not typically thought of as “dystopian” authors. They certainly never claimed the title. After all, they wrote tales of fantastical adventure, heroism, and mythology that have delighted children and adults ever since, not prophecies of boots stamping on human faces forever. And yet, their stories and non-fiction essays contain warnings that might have struck more surely to the heart of our emerging 21st century dystopia than any other.

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Lewis and Tolkien.

The disenchantment and demoralization of a world produced by the foolishly blinkered “debunkers” of the intelligentsia; the catastrophic corruption of genuine education; the inevitable collapse of dominating ideologies of pure materialist rationalism and progress into pure subjectivity and nihilism; the inherent connection between the loss of any objective value and the emergence of a perverse techno-state obsessively seeking first total control over humanity and then in the end the final abolition of humanity itself… Tolkien and Lewis foresaw all of the darkest winds that now gather in growing intensity today.

But ultimately the shared strength of both authors may have also been something even more straightforward: a willingness to speak plainly and openly about the existence and nature of evil. Mankind, they saw, could not resist opening the door to the dark, even with the best of intentions. And so they offered up a way to resist it.

Subjectivism’s Insidious Seeds

“The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.”


When Lewis delivered this line in a series of February 1943 lectures that would later be published as his short book The Abolition of Man, it must have sounded rather ridiculous. Britain was literally in a war for its survival, its cities being bombed and its soldiers killed in a great struggle with Hitler’s Germany, and Lewis was trying to sound the air-raid siren over an education textbook.

But Lewis was urgent about the danger coming down the road, a menace he saw as just as threatening as Nazism, and in fact deeply intertwined with it, give that:
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientists in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut into some fresh shape at will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people…

Unfortunately, as Lewis would later lament, Abolition was “almost totally ignored by the public” at the time. But now that our society seems to be truly well along in the process of self-destruction kicked off by “education in the spirit of The Green Book,” it might be about time we all grasped what he was trying to warn us about.

This “Green Book” that Lewis viewed as such a symbol of menace was his polite pseudonym for a fashionable contemporary English textbook actually titled The Control of Language. This textbook was itself a popularization for children of the trendy new post-modern philosophy of Logical Positivism, as advanced in another book, I.A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism. Logical Positivism saw itself as championing purely objective scientific knowledge, and was determined to prove that all metaphysical priors were not only false but wholly meaningless. In truth, however, it was as Lewis quickly realized actually a philosophy of pure subjectivism – and thus, as we shall see, a sure path straight out into “the complete void.”

In Abolition, Lewis zeros in on one seemingly innocuous passage in The Control of Language to begin illustrating this point. It relates a story told by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which two tourists visit a majestic waterfall. Gazing upon it, one calls it “sublime.” The other says, “Yes, it is pretty.” Coleridge is disgusted by the latter. But, as Lewis recounts, of this story the authors of the textbook merely conclude:
When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall… Actually… he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word ‘sublime’, or shortly, I have sublime feelings… This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.


For Lewis, this “momentous little paragraph” contains all the seeds necessary for the destruction of humanity.

“No schoolboy,” Lewis writes, “will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only…” He “thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology and politics are all at stake.” For while the authors may “hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him,” in fact, they have put into his mind “an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”

That controversy is the reality of any objective value independent of the self.

As Lewis argues, the assertion that the waterfall only produces subjective and arbitrary feelings in the viewer is a revolutionary one, because, “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it – believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” That is, feelings were a response (a fitting or ill-fitting response) to an objective or transcendent reality. To feel awe at something is to recognize the independent existence of a magnificence beyond the subjective interpretation of one’s own head:
The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings… To say that the cataract is sublime means saying that our emotion of humility is appropriate or ordinate to the reality, and thus to speak of something else besides the emotion; just as to say that a shoe fits is to speak not only of shoes but of feet.


This “something else” that exists as a reality independent from and prior to the subjective is what Lewis – drawing deliberately on a non-Christian tradition to point to its universality – labels as the Tao (or “the Way”). The Tao represents an independent reality of values just as concrete as the independent reality of objects.

Much as Alexander Hamilton argued in 1775 that “the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records,” but “are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power,” Lewis is adamant that at least the outlines of the Tao are observable by all those capable of paying attention.

Marshalling an extensive appendix of common traditional moral injunctions from religions and cultures across the world, he argues that it is this reality to which all human morality and ethics, with greater or lesser success, conform. For while the value systems of human societies – or at least, those inherited from before our modern age – might have many outward differences, “what is common to them all is… the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is, and the kind of things we are.”

To rebel against the doctrine of objective value and suggest – as Nietzsche had – that man could piece together or devise his own values from nothing was not only pure arrogance, but in the end impossible:
This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world.

Rather:
What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess… The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour…


Yet Lewis was indeed concerned that the rebels were in fact near to succeeding, that an idea “swollen to madness” in isolation from the Tao was on the verge of destroying not only itself but the whole of mankind.

When Lewis made a second go at explaining this evil, however, this time in his powerful science fiction novel That Hideous Strength – which he described as “a ‘tall tale’ about devilry” with “a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man” – he chose a different approach. The plot, which involves the inhuman schemes of a shadowy global organization of scientists and bureaucrats called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), pointedly focuses on the dangers not of radical subjectivism, but of its seeming opposite: the thirst for “pure objectivity” and orderliness. Why? What does this have to do with post-modern subjectivism?

The answer to that reflects Lewis’ true genius. And Tolkien’s.

The Conditioners: Total Objectivity and the Dream of Perfect Order

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The character of Sauron, the great villain of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, can seem rather simplistic to the insufficiently nerdy uninitiated, or at least those who only watch the movies[1]: he’s big and bad, seems to like the color black, and is determined to conquer and do evil stuff for reasons unclear. But in fact Sauron’s motives were deeply thought through by Tolkien (like every aspect of his cosmology), and are significantly more complex than might commonly be assumed.

In the beginning, Sauron was one of the Maiar (angels), and a servant of Aulë, the Valar (demigod or arch-angel) of craftsmanship (similar to the Greek god Hephaestus). Sauron was also a craftsman, whose specialty was knowledge and technics, and for this won great honor and acclaim. But, above all, Tolkien recorded in his notes, “he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”

It’s this that drew him to the great Enemy of heaven, the fallen arch-angel Melkor (or Morgoth), whose “will and power… to effect his designs quickly and masterfully” proved irresistible to Sauron. This led to his fall, and his service as Melkor’s greatest lieutenant, assisting his master with all the “deceits of his cunning.”

But even once his master was defeated (captured by the Valar and “cast into the void” beyond the world), leaving Sauron to his own designs, his motives for conquest and domination were, as far as he was concerned, wholly rational. Indeed, he still desired order above all things. “His original desire for order had really envisaged the good estate (especially physical well-being) of his subjects,” and all his “ordering and planning and organization was [intended for] the good of all.” Thus, “He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of Earth.” Inevitably, however, in time “his plans, the idea coming from his own isolated mind, became the sole object of his will, and an end, the End, in itself.”

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In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.”

For Sauron, the “confusion” and “friction” he could not tolerate was the product of the unpredictability of the free will of other living beings, and so it was all “the creatures of earth, in their minds and wills, that he desired to dominate.” This led him to forge his own technological devices of total control: the rings of power and the “One Ring to rule them all.” His single-minded need for order – “swollen to madness” in its isolation – had cut him off from humanity, and from the Tao.

Sauron is of course hardly the only one, including in our own world, tempted by the Faustian dream of perfect order and control. Lewis had a name for these would-be Saurons: “The Conditioners.”

To Lewis, the Conditioners are the inevitable product of the ideology of “pure objectivity” promoted by the likes of the authors of the Green Book: the belief – absent the existence of the true objective value of the Tao – that any moral feelings or pangs of conscience are merely subjective experiences and what would today be called “social constructs,” while the real world is purely material, and therefore purely mechanistic. To be “purely objective” is therefore, in this view, to focus only on the material, and dismiss the rest as non-existent.

“For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue,” Lewis writes. “For magic and [today’s] applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious…”

But because in this “objective” view there is nothing whatsoever to separate man from the material of the natural world – nothing that man permanently is – man himself becomes material available to be manipulated and reshaped at will, just as the natural world can be manipulated and reshaped. And while it “is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will,” Lewis warns that indeed, “if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be…”

In such a world, in which techniques of technological control must come to be applied to man just as they are applied to tree or iron, it is not “Mankind” as a whole that will gain such power. Rather, inevitably, “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases” means in truth “the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

And if, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument,” then ultimately:
Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundred men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.


How these “few hundred men” might behave is the subject at the heart of Lewis’ vastly underrated novel That Hideous Strength, which revolves around the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments – essentially a huge NGO of scientists, sociologists, and other assorted “expert planners” that has managed to secure near total freedom of operations in Britain by arguing that the advancement of national and human progress and wellbeing require it be granted complete license to conduct “efficient” scientific research and experiments in social engineering and technocratic governance.

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The novel follows the story’s protagonist, Mark, as he is drawn deeper and deeper into the N.I.C.E. after it arrives to take over his little English college town and build a giant modernist headquarters on top of it. (Simultaneously his wife Jane more wisely embarks on a path in the opposite direction.) Mark is recruited into the N.I.C.E. in part because, as a sociologist, he – unlike the rest of his fellow progressive academics who have campaigned to bring the scientific institution to town – is able to quickly begin to grasp the real implications of the N.I.C.E. Asked what he thinks the organization’s purpose is, he replies that the important thing is not the big research grants or fancy new equipment, but the fact that “it would have its own legal staff and its own police… The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state.”

His recruiter, one Lord Feverstone, excitably explains that this is quite right.

“It is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on – obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. IF Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal.”

And this means that, as he points out to Mark in a particularly telling exchange:
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”

“What sort of thing have you in mind?”

“Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backwards races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…”

“But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”

“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”


This passage hints at Lewis’ greatest fear. So far human nature had proved itself impervious to change, no matter how strenuous the attempts at new “education,” thus making complete conditioning impossible (and so eventually bringing down every totalitarian scheme attempted). But as he writes in Abolition, in the future, with sufficient force and cunning, the power of technological control might conquer even this last fortress of humanity:
Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted… But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.

If the Conditioners can succeed in this, there is no doubt they would then seek to “optimize” not only the physical nature of man, but his values – to craft a simulacrum of “better,” artificial ones for the new man, beyond the Tao. At this point, why shouldn’t they attempt to do so?

Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They have surrendered – like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. For we are assuming the last stage of Man’s struggle with Nature...


But one great question yet remains: from what source will these new values come? The Conditioners will have freed themselves from the confines of the Tao; but, unconstrained and untethered from any lodestar of fixed value, what then will be their purpose? What will motivate them? Will they even know? “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man,” Lewis predicted. “The battle will then be won… But who, precisely, will have won it?”

Man and God at the N.I.C.E.

One powerful literary device of That Hideous Strength is that Mark’s journey takes him, a bit like Dante, through circle after circle of what he falsely believes, each time, to be the true inner circle of the N.I.C.E., each time moving one layer closer to the horrible truth (or anti-truth) of its real motives.
...


...generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk."
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:42 pm

Tolkein and Lewis were conservative middle class Englishmen from the first half of the 20th century. They were religious, catholics iirc. Tolkein was for sure and LoTR is a very Catholic book.

They saw industrialisation poison their beautiful country and a mechanical war destroy the youth of their time. They both fought in ww1 in the trenches on the Western front where it was basically the mechanised slaughter of a generation of young men. "Where a whole generation were butchered and damned" to quote Eric Bogle.

They were respected authors from Oxford. So very conservative institutions and from a class system that was fucked. It produced the likes of Mosley.

I have friends from inner London and other, proper working class British cities. Its amazing hearing some of the stuff they say.

One of them from the East End of London in the Kray era (tells me him and his mates used to go watch Led Zep in the pub as young guys.) Told me about the way the working class in inner London were often massacred by the establishment, even during the late 1800s with the full support of middle class people like lewis and Tolkein (or their mentors as the case would have been.) There were multiple working class socialist movements during that time and whole boroughs would be barricaded and the populations massacred if they got too militant.

None of this is recorded in history books except as as minor references.

Tolkein is racist as. All of the bad guys are Mediterranean or African racially. The best place is little England (the Shire) but even that is a stereotype free of the same people if they'd grown up in bigger cities (Sam Gamgee would be a inner city CHAV these days if he grew up on an estate.)

They both write stories about the return of monarchies to their true place in power.

There is plenty of dodgy stuff in the subtext of both writers.

jesus, Lewis' characters - the boys - bash people at the drop of a hat. they're always getting into fights (but i'll bet they can;'t actually fight, like to save their arses in a street fight.)

Their stories are very conservative and reinforce everything about the society that brought about Mosley and the BUF. Alot of the support the BUF got came from their peers.

But at the same time their stories are great and celebrate some real beautiful things about being human.
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby Grizzly » Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:27 pm

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby drstrangelove » Sat Mar 18, 2023 9:44 am

Belligerent Savant » Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:45 am wrote:In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.”

good post bel sav. think you've cut through to the underlying truth of the centuries old philosophical battle being waged here. objective reality vs subjective reality. people who believe their beliefs are objective facts have a need to FORCE reality to reflect that. people who understand their beliefs are subjective do not have this need.

religion or spirituality should be to provide certitude or security for things, in people's minds, that people cannot know, and with any humility will admit they do not know. atheists are some of the most insecure, unstable and dangerous people that have ever lived because they have been convinced that this basic human need is in conflict with science(just look at the disgusting human being sam harris). but ohhhh noooo, this hasn't led to them rejecting the concept of god. just opened up a vacancy for the position.
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby Grizzly » Sat Mar 18, 2023 11:52 am

atheists are some of the most insecure, unstable and dangerous people


Ha! I'm atheist on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. :thumbsup :eeyaa agnostic the rest of it.

Addendum:


How do you tell an angel, that you don't believe in God.
I highly recommend the entire album...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Mar 18, 2023 8:31 pm

drstrangelove » 18 Mar 2023 23:44 wrote:
Belligerent Savant » Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:45 am wrote:In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.”

good post bel sav. think you've cut through to the underlying truth of the centuries old philosophical battle being waged here. objective reality vs subjective reality. people who believe their beliefs are objective facts have a need to FORCE reality to reflect that. people who understand their beliefs are subjective do not have this need.

religion or spirituality should be to provide certitude or security for things, in people's minds, that people cannot know, and with any humility will admit they do not know. atheists are some of the most insecure, unstable and dangerous people that have ever lived because they have been convinced that this basic human need is in conflict with science(just look at the disgusting human being sam harris). but ohhhh noooo, this hasn't led to them rejecting the concept of god. just opened up a vacancy for the position.


Have you read The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Reich?

Goes well with this argument you're making about insecurity and objective vs subjective reality.

Reich talks about sex and sexual energy tho which doesn't get brought up alot in most modern discussions about how society works.

When you think that most religions and social hierarchies have control of sexuality, sexual expression and sexual behaviour as a fundamental part of their schtick.

Reich also talks about football (soccer) and its role in fascism. Coincidentally footy started this weekend down your way (go Roos!!). I think soccer is a particular type of sport in this case. It uses austerity and the economics of scarcity on field - ie scoring is rare and as a result so is the peak experience that other, higher scoring sports provide.

Neil Stephenson wrote a book called the diamond age where he suggested that societies like Imperial UK (1800s) and Imperial Japan in the middle of tlast century succeeded because they used emotional repression to drive their success on battlefields and in general.

Anyway...
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby drstrangelove » Sat Mar 18, 2023 9:16 pm

I haven't actually read very much on psychology in general and it's something i look forward to diving into soon.

but objective reality vs subjective reality has been the underlying philosophical theme of western civilization since its roots in classical civ. that the underlying philosophical belief in totalitarianism(intolerance for a diversity of views) is the belief in objective reality and that the underlying philosophical belief in democracy(tolerance for a diversity of views) is the belief in subjective reality.

is reality objective or subjective? the framing of this as an either/or binary is fraudulent as it's obviously useful to view some elements of reality, such as gravity, as objective, and others, such as culture, as subjective.

i feel most newage stuff is just a rehashing of this with new nomenclature and conceptualisation. but if you strip that all away the fundamentals are still the same. there are some important 20th century developments to this dichotomy(false but useful to view in this way so far as understanding political movements) i don't completely understand and need to read up on however.

i actually think the transgender debate is being weaponised as a psyop in favor of objective reality. a lot of the LGBTQ movement seems to be designed to make diversity as intolerable as possible to justify an outright rejection of it by society. people are now starting to crave an order to reality because semantics has gone too far and destroyed a lot of the elements of reality it is useful to view as "objective", such as biological differences between males and females.

all this could be solved if people were taught epistemology. but then the plebs would stop arguing with each other and turn their attention to who rules them.
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby kelley » Mon Mar 20, 2023 7:31 am

disturbingly anti-modern

why these two when there are Pound and Eliot to be read?

far better writers and more virulent in their hatred

:lol: :lol: :lol:

The Lord of The Rings trilogy (especially in the filmed version) was obviously designed to brainwash entire generations of gullible followers into accepting the "romance" of decrepit hierarchies and magical thinking

not a stretch to say it was Tolkien's influence upon the popular imagination which reasserted the viability of Empire in its post-'68 guise
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby DrEvil » Mon Mar 20, 2023 5:29 pm

drstrangelove » Sat Mar 18, 2023 3:44 pm wrote:
Belligerent Savant » Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:45 am wrote:In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.”

good post bel sav. think you've cut through to the underlying truth of the centuries old philosophical battle being waged here. objective reality vs subjective reality. people who believe their beliefs are objective facts have a need to FORCE reality to reflect that. people who understand their beliefs are subjective do not have this need.

religion or spirituality should be to provide certitude or security for things, in people's minds, that people cannot know, and with any humility will admit they do not know. atheists are some of the most insecure, unstable and dangerous people that have ever lived because they have been convinced that this basic human need is in conflict with science(just look at the disgusting human being sam harris). but ohhhh noooo, this hasn't led to them rejecting the concept of god. just opened up a vacancy for the position.


I think it's the other way around. It's the religious folks who think their beliefs are objective facts who are the dangerous ones, constantly running around trying to force their "facts" on others. Religion is just a tool used by the ruling class to control the peasants and promote unquestioning obedience to authority.

Up until quite recently being an atheist would land you in serious trouble for denying the "facts" of the establishment. It still carries the death penalty some places and serious stigma many more. Just look up how many atheist there are in the US congress.

And I do think most atheists reject the concept of God, that's the whole point. You're conflating them with transhumanists/singularitarians, which is a tiny subset. It's like saying Westboro Baptist Church is representative of Christians.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby Harvey » Mon Mar 20, 2023 7:02 pm

On the contrary. The dangerous ones do exactly as they are expected to do on behalf of power, whatever their understanding of reality, whomever is in power. Isn't that what power is? Making up the minds of the biddable?
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby drstrangelove » Mon Mar 20, 2023 7:17 pm

you are absolutely correct when it comes to belief in an omnipotence(all-powerful) god. this is what catholics believe and why catholicism is totalitarian/fascist. it does not believe people have free will. which is why catholics aren't held accountable for their actions. raped a bunch of kids? not your fault - god's will. it's entirely void of ethics as its teaching are ultimately meaningless.

but this is not true of the christian transcendent god, which is omniscient but does not meddle in the affairs of humans(not all-powerful), leaving them free will to be either good or bad and most importantly, accountable for their actions. raped a bunch of kids? your fault - free will. it has ethics which are meaningfully applied. redemption for bad behavior is found through good behavior, not just saying ten hail marys.

basically free-will religion is tolerant of subjective reality whereas god's-will religion is intolerant of subjective reality. granted, what i've just laid out seems to be lost on many self-identifying as christian these days.

problem with atheism is that it rejects the belief that some things cannot be known, or rather, shouldn't be known. many of the atrocities committed in the name of science have occurred because of an inability not to know things. there is a basic human need for certitude and security towards the unknown. this can either be dealt with, as it currently stands, by discovering it through science or not worrying about it because that's something only god should know.

what kind of knowledge can humans learn from vivisection? perhaps that should be left for god to know and not find out.

what happens when we mass vaccinate a population with gene therapy technology during a pandemic? perhaps that should be left for god to know and not find out.

atheism is what has turned science into a religion to fill the void of the unknown. free-will religion is not in conflict with science, provides an ethical basis for scientific experimentation, and prevents science from becoming religion by drawing a clear distinction between the purpose of the two.

now i have read books that deal with this issue through basically what is called ethical humanism(i think). which just takes free-will religion and literally replaces the word god with nature - not pagan though. which is more or less what i believe.

i believe god nature is good. and because humans come from god nature i believe humans are good. people have the free will to go against their good nature. the basis of people's good nature though is the need to work collaboratively/cooperatively with each other to survive.

yes religion is a control mechanism. ethics is a control mechanism. people controlling their own behavior based on set of beliefs, as opposed to say being beaten with a stick, is a good thing. everything to do with philosophy is about controlling behavior. except for literally the worst philosophies which have no ethics . . . "nothing is true, everything permitted".

atheists have also come to base ethics on greater good logic a.k.a the trolley dilemma. which is purely quantitative and usually purely hypothetical(if you pull the lever and kill one person maybe you save four). they reject qualitative factors because those aren't "objective". there it is again. the belief in objective reality. as if qualitative factors such as age aren't real. as if you couldn't ask four grandparents if perhaps they would be happy for you to pull the lever to save their one grandchild. nope too complex. too much noise. 1 person = 1 person. everyone is the same as everyone else. "don't you believe in equality? don't you believe people should be equal?"

if(lives saved > lives lost) then: act=justified

^ that right there sums up the last three years of pandemic policy. it's ends based thinking with little consideration for means. ends are hypothetical. means are very much real and in people's direct control. you CAN control your own actions, you CANNOT control the reactions to your actions.

and when this greater good logic turns out to have been purely hypothetical, they say "at the time we didn't know" "what we didn't know then" "now we know".

atheism, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to an objective reality based on all-knowing scientists, that unlike god, do very much interfere with the world.
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Wed Mar 22, 2023 6:05 pm

drstrangelove » 21 Mar 2023 09:17 wrote:you are absolutely correct when it comes to belief in an omnipotence(all-powerful) god. this is what catholics believe and why catholicism is totalitarian/fascist. it does not believe people have free will. which is why catholics aren't held accountable for their actions. raped a bunch of kids? not your fault - god's will. it's entirely void of ethics as its teaching are ultimately meaningless.

but this is not true of the christian transcendent god, which is omniscient but does not meddle in the affairs of humans(not all-powerful), leaving them free will to be either good or bad and most importantly, accountable for their actions. raped a bunch of kids? your fault - free will. it has ethics which are meaningfully applied. redemption for bad behavior is found through good behavior, not just saying ten hail marys.

basically free-will religion is tolerant of subjective reality whereas god's-will religion is intolerant of subjective reality. granted, what i've just laid out seems to be lost on many self-identifying as christian these days.

problem with atheism is that it rejects the belief that some things cannot be known, or rather, shouldn't be known. many of the atrocities committed in the name of science have occurred because of an inability not to know things. there is a basic human need for certitude and security towards the unknown. this can either be dealt with, as it currently stands, by discovering it through science or not worrying about it because that's something only god should know.

what kind of knowledge can humans learn from vivisection? perhaps that should be left for god to know and not find out.

what happens when we mass vaccinate a population with gene therapy technology during a pandemic? perhaps that should be left for god to know and not find out.

atheism is what has turned science into a religion to fill the void of the unknown. free-will religion is not in conflict with science, provides an ethical basis for scientific experimentation, and prevents science from becoming religion by drawing a clear distinction between the purpose of the two.

now i have read books that deal with this issue through basically what is called ethical humanism(i think). which just takes free-will religion and literally replaces the word god with nature - not pagan though. which is more or less what i believe.

i believe god nature is good. and because humans come from god nature i believe humans are good. people have the free will to go against their good nature. the basis of people's good nature though is the need to work collaboratively/cooperatively with each other to survive.

yes religion is a control mechanism. ethics is a control mechanism. people controlling their own behavior based on set of beliefs, as opposed to say being beaten with a stick, is a good thing. everything to do with philosophy is about controlling behavior. except for literally the worst philosophies which have no ethics . . . "nothing is true, everything permitted".

atheists have also come to base ethics on greater good logic a.k.a the trolley dilemma. which is purely quantitative and usually purely hypothetical(if you pull the lever and kill one person maybe you save four). they reject qualitative factors because those aren't "objective". there it is again. the belief in objective reality. as if qualitative factors such as age aren't real. as if you couldn't ask four grandparents if perhaps they would be happy for you to pull the lever to save their one grandchild. nope too complex. too much noise. 1 person = 1 person. everyone is the same as everyone else. "don't you believe in equality? don't you believe people should be equal?"

if(lives saved > lives lost) then: act=justified

^ that right there sums up the last three years of pandemic policy. it's ends based thinking with little consideration for means. ends are hypothetical. means are very much real and in people's direct control. you CAN control your own actions, you CANNOT control the reactions to your actions.

and when this greater good logic turns out to have been purely hypothetical, they say "at the time we didn't know" "what we didn't know then" "now we know".

atheism, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to an objective reality based on all-knowing scientists, that unlike god, do very much interfere with the world.


I was raised as a Catholic, my mum still is one even tho she is very rational, was a plant geneticist in the 60s when women didn't do science (I think the first one in Australia) etc etc.

Anyway free will is a fundamental concept to Catholics. It means you are responsible for your actions, not someone else, not God - you. The idea of forgiveness and redemption via confession is sposed to mean that you reflect on your behaviour understand what you've done wrong and make peace with God. (Now this works fine without God if you just do it and try to be honest with yourself and listen to your own personal conscience as well. Its a useful process for self development without believing that religion.)

There is fuck all difference between Catholics and other Christians. The differences are trivial and as a result they are made out to be huge so people in power in those heirarchies can manipulate their congregations.

I knew two Seventh day Adventists for years, still know one - more Christians tho they are usually vegatarian which is a significant from between other Christian religions. They were more focused on what was wrong with each others belief systems than anything I said and I flat out told them both I was a pagan. Their trivial differences in how they interpreted some obscure line in the bible were more important to them than trying to convince me that what I thought about the world was influenced by satan.
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby drstrangelove » Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:40 am

Joe Hillshoist » Wed Mar 22, 2023 6:05 pm wrote: The idea of forgiveness and redemption via confession is sposed to mean that you reflect on your behaviour understand what you've done wrong and make peace with God. (Now this works fine without God if you just do it and try to be honest with yourself and listen to your own personal conscience as well. Its a useful process for self development without believing that religion.)

but conscience is shaped by a philosophical outlook on reality that provides one with an underlying reasoning for why they should have a conscience.

rejecting the outlook of a religion is fine in this specific regard so long as a person understands what they are replacing it with.

the problem with atheists is they don't really think philosophically at all. they replace god with nature because god isn't 'real'(yeah no shit fuckwits, well done!!!!) but then go on to equate the evolution of human culture to human nature. which results in the belief human nature is a cruel unforgiving thing in which only the strongest survive because of darwinism. and this is what ends up replacing the underlying logic to their ethical behavior, probably without them even realising it. they know some things are good and some things are bad, but don't understand why they should believe these things are either good or bad. so when their beliefs in good and bad are put to the test there's nothing backing it. this can be easily dealt with by teaching atheists that long before humans were competitive they were collaborative and that darwinism doesn't mean human nature is cruel or unkind, only that human behavior has the potential to be this. thus human nature is collaborative and its good to help each other.

the real issue for atheists is dealing with what can't be known. atheists have no way of dealing with the unknowable, so adopt the belief the unknowable can be known through science. since science is only useful for things that can be known, science then becomes their religion. and they start superstitiously baptizing their babies with mRNA gene therapies.
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby semper occultus » Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:32 am

I knew two Seventh day Adventists for years, still know one - more Christians tho they are usually vegatarian which is a significant from between other Christian religions.


you mean they don't eat Jesus at Communion ?
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Re: Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihil

Postby Harvey » Fri Mar 24, 2023 6:02 am

semper occultus » Thu Mar 23, 2023 10:32 am wrote:
I knew two Seventh day Adventists for years, still know one - more Christians tho they are usually vegatarian which is a significant from between other Christian religions.


you mean they don't eat Jesus at Communion ?


If Jesus is an avatar of Bachus/Dionysus/Osiris and the common element of both bread and wine is the yeast mold, could be there's no getting away from Jesus... It's the natural yeast, that dusty covering on skin of grapes, which perfoms the miracle of water into wine. If you make your own wine or visit vineyards then you already know the difference between living wine and the dead wine you get from supermarkets. Did you know that by adding a proportion of wine to still water, then leaving the mixture to stand for the required number of hours, the water is cleared of otherwise dangerous organisms? This is why the Greeks added wine to their potions and sacrements. Holy water indeed.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
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"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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