@Foz89107323
Something about the burning of Notre Dame in 2019 was different.
This event, like 9/11, had eschatological signifiance.
The actions taken to repair it since reflect the dispossession—the replacism—we are seeing everywhere now.
First of all, what is 'replacism'?
According to Renaud Camus, replacism is "the substitution of something else to everything and the replacement of everything by something else."
It is pure dehumanization, the replacement of everything unique and human with what is man-made.
In @GraduatedBen's interview, Camus reminds us "of how writers are replaced by intellectuals, intellectuals by journalists, journalists by TV-show hosts, marble by chipstone, stone by concrete or plaster, wood by plaster, or plastic the signature material of global replacism…
…which spoils even the depths of the oceans."
This gradual (visible) degeneration goes against the western idea of 'progress'
Man's knowledge of himself does not increase the more power he has over nature.
History is starting to look like involution towards entropy/sameness
In a fully replaced world, role models/heroes degenerate into celebrities, imagination and vision into advertisements, music into a carpet of sound, speech into an exchange of pleasantries, the breeze wooshing through the tree's into noise pollution.
Think of Evola's Kali Yuga.
In the words of Byung Chul Han:
“One travels everywhere, yet does not experience anything. One accumulates information and data, yet does not attain knowledge. One lusts after adventures and stimulation, but always remains the same.
In a replaced world, everything must be looked at in terms of utility/material gain.
This hyperfixation on utility has actually made the world useless, inverting all noble values, like Beauty, into nihilistic mediocrity.
Roger Scruton on The Replacement of Beauty:
[video clip at link]
This facelessness, or lack of uniqueness, we feel experientially is reflected in our environment.
With skyscrapers, for example, there is no unique character; the face of windows simply mirrors their surroundings, expressing a obsequious anonymity.
In a city that is devoid of face, we move from thought-to-thought, relationship-to -relationship, room-to-room, escaping the world's voice, never listening.
Thrown out of orbit, the self can never develop a connection with the other, so it develops an unstable self-image.
The selfie phenomenon stems from this psychological instability.
Faced with one’s inner emptiness from narcissistic isolation, one vainly attempts to produce oneself, in the form of an image that reflects who we are.
This only further traps oneself in a hall of mirrors.
"The narcissist", as Christopher Lasch said, "does not acknowledge the separate existence of the self, as distinguished from the bodily ego. He drowns in his own reflection, never understanding that it is reflection."
Uploading this selfie into the galactic uproar that is the internet, you surrender to a limitless gaze with no depth.
In this digital ocean, you 'surf' the web, but you are the opposite of a sea-farer, who feels the ocean's terrifying vastness.
The digital world is neither black or white, night or day, self nor other, it is devoid of all opposites, of all tension.
The translucent apple store in NYC reflects this. It is a transparent cube meant to represent freedom.
It symbolizes limitless communication with no boundary.
But it is impossible to live in a world devoid of limits—it would cease to be human, to be a world with us in it.
Dugin said that this new era of technology displaces being and crowns nothing.
Why?
What is so pernicious about replacism is it seeks to turn all that is solid into air, all that is human into a formless reflection of ourselves.
The Greek's intuited that there was an aspect of man that tries to overcome himself until he is nothing.
Prometheus, for example, was punished by the God's for stealing the fire of consciousness from the heavens.
By giving man consciousness, he was eternally punished by zeus.
For being conscious, we have been eternally punished with a knowledge of death
https://bluelabyrinths.com/2015/03/02/m ... t-essence/
Tragedies like these are so old because they reflect a fundamental aspect of the human experience from childhood.
German psychologist Karl Groos observed that children come to understand that they exist as discrete entitites by recognizing that "they" caused something to happen.
Our sense of self is grounded in action.
The child takes immense "pleasure at being the cause."
When this desire for control is denied to a child, experiments have shown that they experience rage, a refusal to engage, and a withdrawing from the world entirely.
From childhood onwards, man has a 'will-to-appropriate'. The intellect "wants equality", as Nietzsche said "to subsume a sense impression into an existing series: in the same way the body assimilates inorganic matter."
All thought categorizes the unique aspects of reality into systems for the sake of usefulness.
As Nietzcshe said "only when we see things coarsley and made equal do they become calculable and usable to us."
The tragic aspect of this—and this is where the Greeks were right—is that lust for control is doomed to failure because our conceptual structures are much simpler than the complex phenomenon they are attempting to account for.
Nature always wins out in the end.
As Pagilia wrote: “Action is the route of escape from nature, but all action circles back to origins, the womb-tomb of nature. Oedipus, trying to escape his mother, runs straight into her arms."
Man is the promethean being who, fearful of death and chaos—the consummate coldness of the universe—must “create an alternate reality, a heterocosm of control to give himself the illusion of freedom.
Narcissism is losing oneself in this heterocosm, in this world of abstraction.
Since the industrial revolution, we have become trapped in abstraction.
The exchange of commodities in the market implies there's something equal and equivelent about them.
1 kg of caviar is “the same as” 1000 different people clicking on the same internet advert
"We treat quantities of fish eggs, human attention, clowning performances, bullets, computing time, potatoes, and a bewildering array of other things, as “the same” — because, in the marketplace they all may be exchanged for one another, via the “alien mediator” we call money."
All labor is treated equally; the egalitarianism inherent in the notion of market exchange refuses to distinguish between one consumer’s dollar and another, one worker from another.
That is why jobs are outsourced over seas, and why domestic workers are replaced with immigrants.
This "calculative thinking" that Heidegger warned about, has seeped into our common language.
The word "life", for example, designates at times a view from nowhere; an anonymous view of nature that looks at a person, a bee, a cell, a bear, and embryo—as being all the same thing.
C.S. Lewis:
"When we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of ‘Nature’ in the sense that we suspend our
judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity."
In modernity, our objective reality is treated as a subjective creation, an 'illusion', while our social constructs—like money—are fetishized as real entities.
Our moral obligations to each other are looked down upon, while our selfish (fake) rights are put on a pedastol.
France has become the locus of this Economic rationality that attempts to depoliticize the public sphere, reducing all public questions to managerial, cost-benefit calculations.
Something occured in France during the French Revolution that fundamentally changed history forever.
Divine providence was replaced with purposeless nature, governed by blind chance.
The "taming of chance" is moral statistics. It stems from the view, as Maistre observed, that historical development can be attributed to an accident—the creation of private property.
If all inequality stems from private property, as Rousseau believed it did, then that implies individuals can be administered by experts who are knowledgable enough of the 'science' to correct what went wrong.
This is the origin of modern technocracy.
Maistre writes: "We say in everyday conversation: ‘‘This man was made for such a profession; what a pity he did not take it up!’’ Rousseau appropriates this expression and transports it into philosophical language...
..."So that here we have an intelligent being which was made (apparently by God) for the life of savages and which a dreadful chance precipitated into civilization (apparently in spite of God)."
This gnostic transformation literally changed man after the Revolution of 1789.
Our disenchanted view of the world has become so total, so commonplace, that we accept the 'metaphysically neutral' view of liberalism that denies the existence of purpose in nature or man.
This spiritual subterfuge is invisible to us, despite all the signs it is evil.
We are told a higher GDP is better, that more jobs is better, that numbers and statistics are all that matter.
Liberalism pushes consequences without ever discussing its premises.
'Why' should our economy adopt the logic of the cancer cell—growth for growth's sake?
What is it, A Priori, that constitutes human flourishing? Why reference any study if you can't answer that?
We talk endlessly about mental health, about public policy—but there is always that unspoken rejection of transcendence, of the sacred.
In my thread on Yuval Noah Harari, I talk about how this rejection of free will has very real consequences for the human race. If man desires only pleasure, if he is only a biological being without soul, then others in power can administer his future, can make 'him' happy.
Yuval Noah Harari, like Rousseau, views history through the lens of blind chance.
Life is a zero-sum-struggle, where violence, competition, lovelessness, and atomization are not real choices that we may or may not make, but the nature of reality itself.
We expect these people to make us free with a view of history like that?
As kierkegaard said:
"Only a wretched and mundane conception of the dialectic of power holds that it increases in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent."
Every Baconian Conquest over nature only “increases her domain.” Gain-of-function research, the attempt to master viruses, creates a pandemic that ravages earth.
When we reject the intrinsic value of each individual, we reap the consequences, like this:
As Houellebecq observed, there is this sense in France that modernity is suicidal, that the country is reaping the consequences of its own sins against God & the Ancient Regime.
Politicians like Eric Zemmour have also shed light on this.
https://unherd.com/2021/06/the-narcissi ... of-france/
France, a Catholic nation at heart, has rejected it's roots in God.
Is it any surprise that the Notre Dame fire occured during holy week?
The fire came from within.
The conceit of France's elite is thinking that can ignore Zemmour, and the people's love of God & Country.
This just proves that the elites can never master us, they will never know what we want.
They will never control us so long as they cease to control themselves.
The art of power lies precisely in making oneself free.
Nobody else can command you to be free except yourself.
“Architects", Nietzsche says, ‘have always been under the spell of power”
A power that is freedom in space.
By shaping space, the architect creates a continuum of form in which he is with himself.
Only the architect can create this continuum of form, because it's part of him.
This is how work was understood by the Greeks.
In Greece, "Productive activities were not conceived in relation to the unitary referent that the market is for us, but with respect to the use value of the object produced."
You defined that use-value, nobody else.
"Every task is defined as a function of the product that it proposes to fabricate: the cobbler with respect to the shoe, the potter with respect to the pot. Labor is not considered in the perspective of the producer, as some social value."
We have all internalized the concept of work, of selling our labor, which Cicero understood as a "pledge for slavery".
Paradoxically, the working man feels like he has more control over the world, even as he gives up more of himself to work and consumption.
Our sense of 'sovereignty' over the world is an illusion that increases in direct proportion to one's arrogance & narcissism.
If we were to step outside of ourselves, see the world from God's view, we would recognize this truth.
Nothing in this world is the same.
To treat the present as a reptition of the past, or another human being as if they were just a member of a species, is to reject what is so obvious to experience—the world is unpredictable until we freely choose what to do with it.
That choice is always yours.
The point of Narcissus's story is NOT that he fell in love with himself, but, since he fails to recognize his own reflection, he lacks any conception of difference between himself and his surroundings."
In other words, he drowns in his own reflections.
We acquire our sense of difference from our surroundings, that feeling of autonomy, when we are able to effect change as a child.
As we get older, though, we become conscious of forces beyond our control, and we withdraw into our own abstractions to escape responsibility.
As we've outsourced all of our responsibilities to technology, in an attempt to run from God, reality has reasserted itself, often times violently.
We have treated all of nature—every country and culture—as if it they were the same.
9/11 was an attack on this.
The violence of the globalism sweeps through all cultures that do not submit to its laws of universal exchange.
The violence of the global as the violence of the Same destroys the negativity of the Other, of the singular, of the incomparable.
The leveling of all cultures creates a destructive counterforce—terrorism.
Jean Baudrillard refers to the architectural particularity of the Twin Towers, these symbols of trade:
“Whereas the high-rise buildings of the Rockefeller Center reflect the city and the sky...
...in their glass and steel fronts, the Twin Towers have no connection to the outside. The two twin buildings, which resemble each other and reflect each other, form a closed system. Thus the Same established itself in a total exclusion of the Other."
The culture of death, the free movement of goods and peoples, led to a destructive counterforce—reinforcing the cycle of violence, of rebellion against God.
This cycle continued in 2019, as the pillars of Notre Dame felt down in flames.
In Icarus Fallen, French philosopher Chantol Delsol suggests that the condition of modern European man was the condition that Icarus would have been in had he survived the fall.
With out technology, we have flown too close to the sun.
When this became too much for God, we fell back down to earth, and that angel—with wax wings on fire—landed on a symbol of western greatness, in a country falling downwards, like Icarus, torn apart by immigration, materialism, and corruption.
https://twitter.com/Foz89107323/status/ ... 3JP6QXi-MQ
