extraordinary popular delusions

I’ll Be Your Savior, Steadfast and True. I’ll Come to Your Emotional Rescue

By in animals, extraordinary popular delusions No Comments

I saw this in the new arrivals section at the library tonight. I know we live in a therapeutic age which makes a virtue of emotional incontinence, but I’m afraid this particular manifestation is even worse than I thought. But if people no longer feel embarrassed by the indignity of presenting themselves as fundamentally broken, then let’s try a different approach: pets are noble creatures who simply don’t deserve to bear the burden of your psychological weakness. They are not furry Kleenex for absorbing all your pain and despair. You owe it to them to get your act together before bringing them into your care and expecting them to work some sort of healing miracle on you in exchange. I’m pretty sure it’s a truism even in the self-help world that a healthy human relationship can’t be formed around a sense of being damaged and fragile; why should it be significantly different in the case of an animal? Neurotic people just create neurotic pets, and then nobody’s happy.

Cultivated Philistines

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, nietzsche, spiritual-not-religious, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit 2 Comments

There were a number of representational talents who, with a gentle brush, depicted the happiness, the cosiness, the prosaicness, the bucolic health, the ease and contentment to be found in the nursery, the scholar’s study and the farmhouse. With such picture-books of reality in their hands, these self-satisfied people then sought to come to terms once and for all with the classics they found unsettling and with the demand for further seeking which proceeded from them…

— Nietzsche, “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” Untimely Meditations

As Daniel Breazeale explains in the editor’s introduction, this essay, written in 1873, was an attack on the philistine arrogance of the German bourgeoisie, those who took the military victory over France in 1871 as proof of the superiority of their culture and received ideas. David Strauss just happened to be whom Nietzsche chose as the symbolic representation of that class, probably as a concession to Wagner. Untimely Meditations was Nietzsche’s second book, written while he was still somewhat in the intellectual shadow of Wagner and Schopenhauer, before his break with their influence and his turn toward more interesting, aphoristic thoughts. Some parts of it don’t translate well — there are references to contemporary names and disputes which mean nothing to us now, and some of the arguments seem completely abstract from our vantage point a century and a half later. Nietzsche’s aristocratic disdain for the small world of shopkeepers, farmers and other laborers is almost shocking to a modern American. As he would later write in Thus Spake Zarathustra, describing the “last men,” an enfeebled human race devoted to nothing but entertainment, painless comfort, and security, “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the Last Men, and they blink.” I myself am undoubtedly bourgeois, both by circumstance and temperament. America itself is a bourgeois nation, a point Eric Hoffer pridefully made many times — proof of what the common man could do when freed from the yoke of the aristocracy. It’s difficult not to read passages like these and think indignantly, Hey, wait a minute, I resemble that remark!

But then he also jabs at “the cultural philistine who also loves arabesque flourishes but above all conceives himself alone to be real and treats his reality as the standard of reason in the world,” which strikes me as a succinct way to describe two prominent aspects of our culture today — spiritual-not-religiousness and the multiculti mania for “diversity.” As with Nietzsche’s philistines and their response to the classics, the spiritual-not-religious types curate a Whitman’s sampler of what they like about the world’s varied religious traditions while ignoring or disposing of the rest; whatever “arabesque flourishes” their spirituality happens to display is still only a cosmetic decoration for the “moralistic therapeutic Deism” underneath. The multiculturalists, of course, love superficial differences between people as long as there’s a shared bedrock of ideological uniformity. (In the cultural status game of rock-paper-scissors, privileged white progressives will still always assert themselves over conservative Catholic Latinos, homophobic black Baptists, or patriarchal Asians, who will suddenly find that they are no longer covered under intersectionality insurance once they dare deviate from their benefactors.) A modern-day polemicist looking for an avatar to symbolize this strange phenomenon of religion and politics as a form of self-aggrandizing therapy probably couldn’t do better than Oprah.

“Upon these self-satisfied newspaper readers and consumers of culture Nietzsche bestowed the fitting name Bildungsphilister or ‘cultivated philistines’,” Breazeale tells us. Nietzsche bemoans “the slime of this newspaper language,” the platitudes and feeble ideas that pass for current events, the sort that “informed” citizens pride themselves on being conversant with (“engaged with their newspapers and commonplace chatter about politics”). He scorns the type of writer who tries to provoke thought in uninformative ways — “but to the poor writer’s brain new and modern are the same thing, and it now torments itself to draw metaphors from the railway, the telegraph, the steam-engine, the stock exchange, and feels proud of the fact that these similes must be new because they are modern.” I can only imagine the perverse delight he would derive from reading most articles on neuroscience today.

The Lady of the House was telling me about a podcast she heard with an author named Kim Scott, a CEO coach in Silicon Valley, promoting her new book, in which “constructive criticism” has been replaced by the shiny, new, up-to-date term “radical candor.” Apparently, her marketable idea involves placing “radical candor” on an Eisenhower matrix along with “ruinous empathy,” “manipulative sincerity,” and “obnoxious aggression.” You see, there are ways to balance honesty with empathy without becoming either overly empathetic (safe-space coddling, etc.) or abrasive (brutally honest). You can tell people hard truths without crushing their spirit. “But…we used to just call that common sense!” I said. “Aristotle and the golden mean! Who doesn’t know this? Why is this a new idea just because someone uses new terminology?”

It reminded me that so much of what we hear from social science is little more than old truths run through a jargonizer — “writing that wears a white coat,” as one friend of mine put it. And yet, that kind of stilted jargon is the default among the cultural clerisy. Speak their dialect or be unheard. “A study has shown…” Maybe I can take heart after all — I might be as ordinary as can be, but I think I know who the modern-day equivalent of Nietzsche’s cultivated philistines are. “We have invented knowledge,” say the Voxplainers and the TedTalkers, and they blink.

Everybody’s Anxious for the Coming of the Crisis

By in alan watts, environment, extraordinary popular delusions, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Alf Hornborg:

Doomsday scenarios are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate. Scientists from all over the world tell us that emissions in 10 years must be half of what they were 10 years ago, or we face apocalypse. School children like Greta Thunberg and activist movements like Extinction Rebellion are demanding that we panic. And rightly so. But what should we do to avoid disaster?

Alan Watts once suggested that no one really believes in the reality of hell. It’s evident in their actions, he said, or, rather, in the lack thereof. If you saw your mother’s name on a list of people scheduled to be rounded up by the Gestapo, the immediacy of the threat would occupy your entire attention. You wouldn’t rest, you wouldn’t take no for an answer, you would do whatever it took to get her to safety, even over her objections. And yet, when it comes to the possibility or the likelihood of your unsaved mother facing an eternity of torment, you’re content to shrug if your tepid efforts at persuasion fail. If hell truly exists and promises to devour many if not most of your friends and loved ones, how could you simply go on about your business, complacent and unruffled?

Likewise, I doubt that many of our devout climatarians genuinely believe in the likelihood of an environmental “apocalypse,” let alone that “panic” would be a wise response; it’s just that the rising cost of positional goods requires higher rhetorical outlays. They seem to love the emotional/spiritual tension of the apocalyptic mindset, true, but Gaian retribution still seems like an abstract fantasy to them. They’re not going to retreat to the primitive living conditions of survivalist hermits, or to the impoverished economies of rural, medieval villages. They’re not going to sacrifice any of their modern conveniences. None of them honestly expect floods and tornadoes and wildfires to increasingly threaten their homes. To judge purely by their actions, it seems that climate change is of interest to them primarily as a means to “win” petty arguments online. An added bonus is that, as with thoughts of hellfire, it allows people of sour, curdled character to revenge themselves upon their enemies through imagination. “I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen, and now you’ll be sorry!” If some chemist ever finds a way to put that sentiment in pill form, the results will dwarf the opioid epidemic.

All the Words We Say to Be Believed

By in extraordinary popular delusions, fresh hell, political philosophy No Comments

Eric Levitz:

By now, you are probably aware that the millennial and “Gen-Z” generations are far more supportive of “socialism” and redistributive economic policies than any of their elders. And yet, according to Pew’s new survey, Americans under 30 are also way more distrustful of their fellow citizens and government than any other age group.

…Historically, socialism has been a utopian creed marked by its faith in humankind’s capacity for altruism. But Pew’s research suggests that America’s most socialistic age bracket is also its most misanthropic.

This will no doubt come as a shock to those of us blessed enough to have woke acquaintances on social media, where their cheerful equanimity, thoughtful consideration, and effusive delight in the motley variety of opinions belonging to their fellow citizens are on constant display. But yes, it seems that many people in these Yoo Ess of Ay are firmly in favor of spending vast amounts of other people’s money, especially when saying so raises one’s own status among peers with no cost to oneself. That’s a real head-scratcher, all right. Blinking in bewilderment, bereft of answers from the social-science literature, our correspondent concludes, “A definitive explanation of this paradox in public opinion will probably require a more credentialed authority.”

Well, I’m fairly sure Ivan Karamazov wouldn’t count as a credentialed authority, being a fictional creation and all, but he did note that it’s much easier to love one’s neighbors “at a distance,” where we can avoid being inconvenienced by their body odor, their clumsiness, and their stupid faces. Likewise, James Fitzjames Stephen probably doesn’t have any relevant citations to his name, but he recognized that the utopian socialist was precisely the sort of man “who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.” Christopher Lasch, though — I know he wandered off the reservation in his later years, but perhaps his credentials might earn him a perfunctory hearing? He traced the makings of misanthropic progressivism to a full century ago, when it started to become fashionable to demonstrate one’s political idealism by expressing contempt and disgust for one’s benighted neighbors. Too bad these men chose to express their observations in the vague, wispy form of novels and artful rhetoric rather than the data and studies of social science.

As to Levitz’s befuddlement over why the U.S. doesn’t seem inclined to replicate the welfare states of northern Europe, well, greater minds than his have found the question difficult and left it unaddressed.

The Circle Has Been Broken, It’s Always Been This Way

By in extraordinary popular delusions, political philosophy No Comments

Adrian Kreutz:

But can’t we be both tyrannical and interconnected? Buddhist practice could help us overcome the evil aspects of our nature and promote the compassionate side within us. The socioeconomic system of Compassionate Marxism could be the breeding ground for compassion, and compassion the motor of a socioeconomic system with low duḥkha. Working on the inner Tyrannosaurus would benefit those suffering from Capitalism, which, according to Marx and Buddha, is everyone. The problem with Left-activists is that they see the evil as being exclusively caused by the socioeconomic system (this was Marx’s problem too), without understanding how these factors operate within us. ‘Social change requires inner change – becoming less selfish,’ says the Dalai Lama. The question is not who we are – we are malevolent creatures, as far as I can tell. The question is who we want to be.

I know, I know, that’s a strange excerpt to present without further context. Don’t worry, I’ll elaborate a bit. According to his author bio, Mr. Kreutz is a graduate student in philosophy. (This seems like a relevant time to mention that philosophers are renowned for demonstrating the lack of any necessary connection between theoretical smarts and common sense; see also the guy behind the Existential Comics website.) And so, as philosophers are wont to do, Kreutz wonders: what if we could combine Buddhist ethics with Marxist socioeconomics to create a better world? Hence, Compassionate Marxism, an oxymoron to rule them all.

There are, as you’d expect, several thousand words of theoretical plumage obscuring the scrawny meat of the matter, but that’s what hyperlinks are for, in case you’re into that sort of thing. As for me, like Samuel Johnson, I prefer to refute idealist fancies by kicking the rock of historical experience: you can’t reform the nature of Marxism through good intentions. The totalitarian conclusion follows neatly from the theoretical premises, a fact that should be of interest to philosophers. Most interestingly, though, Kreutz professes a belief in the truth of original sin, if not by that particular name. “Humanity is not evil because the economic system is; the economic system is evil because humanity is.” “All signs indicate that we don’t have the capacities for universal benevolent compassion, uncontaminated by a proclivity to evil, hatred and competition.” And yet he wants to believe in the possibility of species-wide harmony of desire and action, conducted by the guiding hand of philosophy. It’s fascinating to watch someone straining every muscle to square this circle. If he should manage to retain his intellectual integrity, I suspect he’ll discover what so many others have — we have a lifetime’s work to do in trying to be consistently virtuous individuals without the added delusion that any of us are fit to arrange society’s affairs for the greater good.

As it happens, I’m currently reading George Will’s new book, The Conservative Sensibility, where he writes something coincidentally relevant to our discussion:

In its attempt to equalize “well-being,” progressivism came to exalt one virtue: compassion. Which is a passion. And compassion is a capacious concept. It can mean the prevention or amelioration of pain, of discomfort, of insecurity, or even of sadness. However, the frustration of desires is uncomfortable and can make people sad. So compassionate government must toil for the satisfaction of all desires. If a desire unfulfilled is painful, or even discomforting, fulfilling that desire is a duty of compassionate government. Such government believes that the pain of unfulfilled desires makes fulfilling the desires necessary. So the desires are upgraded to necessities. People suffering disappointed desires are therefore necessitous people, and, according to Franklin Roosevelt, they are not free. What moderation, what temperance, what restraint can there be in government animated by the idea that freedom, understood as emancipation from necessity, is the gift of comprehensively compassionate government?

It seems to me to be essential to the nature of Buddhism to recognize the futility of trying to satisfy all desires (as well as the futility of desiring to stop desiring), which separates it profoundly from a materialist philosophy which sees the satisfaction of all desire as both possible and necessary. But then again, I only took a few semesters of philosophy.

All of Your Struggles Beneath Your Disguise

By in extraordinary popular delusions, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit No Comments

A cause-creating drive is powerful within him; someone must be to blame for his feeling vile. His “righteous indignation” itself already does him good; every poor devil finds pleasure in scolding – it gives him a little of the intoxication of power. Even complaining and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a small dose of revenge in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different for one’s feeling vile, sometimes even with one’s being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege. “If I am canaille, you ought to be so, too”: on the basis of this logic, one makes revolutions. Complaining is never of any use, it comes from weakness. Whether one attributes one’s feeling vile to others or to oneself – the socialist does the former, the Christian for example does the latter – makes no essential difference. What is common to both, and unworthy in both, is that someone has to be to blame for the fact that one suffers – in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering.

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Brad Warner:

The Buddha said, “All life is suffering.” This doesn’t mean that your entire life is always spent in pain. Obviously not. We all have times in our lives when we’re happy. Our entire lives are not constant misery.

No. What the Buddha meant was that all of us are suffering. Every single person you see is having a tough time just getting through life. No matter how rich they are or how much supposed “privilege” they have. The Buddha was a wealthy man from one of the most privileged races and classes of his time. He gave up his wealth and privilege because it didn’t do anything to relieve his suffering.

There is a poisonous notion gripping much of the United States these days that there are people in our midst who never suffer. Holding such ideas is a way of dehumanizing others; it’s a way of allowing ourselves an excuse for hate and providing an easy target to take out our frustrations on. It’s a bad idea. And the saddest thing of all is to see so many Buddhist centers in our country embracing this awful idea and promoting it.

We are all suffering. There is no measurement for suffering. There are no ranks for suffering. It affects every single one of us.

…Women suffer. Men suffer. The poor suffer. The rich suffer. This disabled suffer. The able-bodied suffer. Gay people suffer. Trans people suffer. Straight cis-gendered people suffer. Homeless people suffer. People in beautiful homes suffer. Black people suffer. Latinos suffer. Middle Eastern people, Native Americans, and Asians suffer. White people suffer.

We are all lonely and sad and confused and frustrated. We are all afraid to die. No one is exempt.

The idea that some suffer while others don’t is false and damaging. The idea that some forms of suffering are important while other forms of suffering don’t really matter is ugly and wrong. It gives those in the supposedly “privileged” classes the notion that they are not suffering — which is at odds with their real, lived experience. It often makes the supposedly “privileged” more likely to cause suffering. And it gives others the notion that if only they had the supposed privileges accorded to those other people that they too would no longer suffer. It makes for needless jealousy and envy and greed. It’s a rotten idea that stands in the way of getting at the real root of suffering. It is a lie.

This is probably the best articulation one could ask for in response to the incessant, pernicious cant about “privilege” we’ve been hearing for years. I suppose it’s an idle question to ask why, at this particular point in time, so many people have become possessed by the idea that there is such a thing as a life free of suffering, that it’s being unfairly hoarded by this or that group of people, and that we deserve to take it from them by means fair if possible, or foul if necessary. As Warner said in the previous post, the Buddha called such things “questions tending not to edification.” Regardless of the particular origin, the response is always the same. Envy has spontaneously combusted throughout history and always will; the point is to see it for the lie it is and to stop indulging in the behavior. The simplest things are often incredibly difficult.

Dream of Better Lives, The Kind Which Never Hate

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, religion No Comments

In fact, for many misotheists, love is precisely the centerpiece of their moral philosophy. One could go so far as to argue that misotheists are more likely to foster love for humanity because they have already channeled and contained whatever capacity of hatred they possessed when they direct their hostility against an intangible antagonist—God. There is nothing (or much less) of the bitterness, destructiveness, and violence in the misotheist that marks the determined racist, misogynist, or religious bigot.

— Bernard Schweizer, Hating God : The Untold Story of Misotheism

I’m not sure how to spell the sound of surprised, muffled laughter, so I’ll just say yes, one could go so far as to argue that point — if one didn’t mind looking ridiculous. Who knew that the human capacity for hatred and violence was a finite resource, subject to hydraulic limitations?

On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love for the human race — that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind — is an unaccountable person with whom it is difficult to deal upon any well-known and recognized principles, and who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.

— James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

A Mass of Scribes

By in eric hoffer, extraordinary popular delusions, the geist of the zeit No Comments

While reading this article about the trendy socialism among New York City’s “creative underclass,” I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. Then I realized it wasn’t that I’d read the article before; it was that Eric Hoffer had already summed it up much more succinctly in his book The Ordeal of Change: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”

Obiter Scripta, no. 63

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, obiter scripta No Comments

I would think it obvious that it is essential to human equilibrium and a true engagement with reality to acknowledge that tragedy is the defining part of human life and to accept the limits (and opportunities) this imposes, both individual and political. The effort to deny tragedy was among the fundamental factors responsible for what happened in the twentieth century. Utopianism defies tragedy—and fails.

Two of the individuals most important to my discussion, T. E. Lawrence and Vladimir Peniakoff, found a kind of serenity in resolute acceptance of and engagement with the violence in our nature, deriving from it what I would call the only true solution, the classical one, identified by Aristotle as the pursuit of virtue, the only proper pursuit for a human being.

Such is an uncomfortable route toward a solution since it demands individual self-examination and renounces the consoling ideologies and utopian illusions of a collective resolution of the human problem. Virtue is an all but totally ignored conception today, when narcissism and the (futile) pursuit of self-esteem are the prevailing counterfeits of individual worth and achievement, with death denied in the search for the therapy of immortality.

— William Pfaff, The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

Pfaff identifies the First World War as the cataclysmic event in which the old certainties were shattered. Since then, we’ve been frantically pawing through the shards, trying to piece them back together, creating various grotesqueries in the process. He also notes the role simple boredom, a frivolous longing for “something interesting,” played in the destruction. A century later, in the midst of unprecedented affluence, other bored people, needing something stronger than video games, prefer to live-action-role-play as Nazis and Communists to make their lives seem significant. As George Santayana said, that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to: strutting and roaring. The alternative, humility, is more painful than battle.

Sowing the Seeds of Love

By in extraordinary popular delusions, nietzsche, philosophy, psychology No Comments

Rob Henderson:

It can be hard, though, to accept that morality motivates violence. Maybe there’s something wrong with thinking of violence as moral. Isn’t the point of morality to care for people, or at least not hurt them?

We are told that a “surprising new scientific theory explains why morality leads to violence.” It turns out that people are willing to be violent over the things they care most deeply about, especially if those things are considered rare and irreplaceable. I suppose this is “surprising” to anyone raised in a Skinner box, unacquainted with the great philosopher-poets who already addressed this inherent shapeshifting, transitory, mysterious nature of life long ago:

“How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless action out of self-interest? Or the pure sunlike gaze of the sage out of covetousness? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, even worse; the things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this turmoil of delusion and desire! Rather from the lap of being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the ‘thing-in-itself ‘—there must be their basis, and nowhere else!”— This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudice by which the metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this “belief” that they trouble themselves about “knowledge,” about something that is finally christened solemnly as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of the metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them to raise doubts right here at the threshold where it is surely most necessary: even if they vowed to themselves, “de omnibus dubitandum.” For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and second, whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use? For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to appearance, the will to deception, self-interest, and desire. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence. Perhaps! — But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous Perhapses!

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