Bronze Age Mindset Read online

  22

  Do you imagine that men of genius or, let’s say, men of science in history walked around clear-headed, “disenchanted,” reasonable, with the tight-assed attitude of the science cultist and materialist? No great discovery has ever been made by the power of reason. Reason is a means of communicating, imperfectly, some discoveries to others, and in the case of the sciences, a method of trying to render this communication certain and precise. But no one ever made a discovery through syllogisms, through reason, through this makeshift form of transmission. Great mathematicians saw spatial relations, as great physicists saw and to some extent felt physical relations. In contemplation of mathematical forms, there is almost a physical feel of geometric relations, and all mathematics at bottom is about geometric relations even when it doesn’t seem so. Compare the Euclidian proof of the Pythagorean theorem, based on syllogism, which helps you understand nothing that’s actually going on, with the imagistic proof of the three squares, that makes you perceive, physically perceive even in your body, why this theorem is true. Gauss, so beloved even by the tedious scientistic goblins that even Google gave him a cartoon, is famous to have said something like, “I got it…now I have to get it.” Meaning, he had seen and felt the fundamental spatial relation he was searching, but now he had to translate it into the imperfect language of mathematics for others. Thus all mathematics and all science in general—mathematics is only the prototype and most precise of the sciences—is about the definitions, not about the proof, not about the process or—absurd!—the “algorithm.” All great scientific discoveries, supposedly the great works of “reason,” are in fact the result of intuitions and sudden grasp of ideas. And all such sudden grasp and reaching is based on what, in other circumstances, would be called a kind of religious intoxication: it depends on a state of the mind where the perceiving part of the intellect is absolutely focused, limpid, yet driven by the most relentless energy, an energy to penetrate. Direct perception is already “intellectualized” and in fact much closer to the innate “intelligence” of things than cerebral syllogisms. No scientist worth anything has ever felt pride at using algorithms or trial-and-error to solve a problem. Yes, feminists are right that “science” is patriarchal in this sense, that it is a “rape” of nature. Real scientists like Galois are monsters of will, and the preponderance of men in the hard sciences is explained by this orientation of character, as also by the fact that the minds of men more than of women are capable of sustained focus on one thing (women are better at multitasking). There are women who were great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians.

  23

  The modern peasant just replaces the artificial prejudices of superstitions and village old wives’ tales with the superstitions of science, which he receives ready-made from authorities among the popularizers of science. He loves them because of the creature comforts he believes they provide through technology. He is a cargo cultist—he knows nothing of what goes into the discoveries of science, nor the way the substance is transmitted among scientists, he just has a propagandized image of some of the results. This is no different from belief in Big Magic, which is how many primitives think of science—the Big Magic of the white man. It’s not even the substance of science that is the problem because it could be of great use, as much as any other popular religion has been: the problem is the frame of spirit that it puts the acolyte in. It makes him think he has power over the processes of nature which are at present actually very poorly understood. By removing primal fear—the only kind of awe that drives the many—it injects a toxic mix of complacency, arrogance, brutality, fanaticism that is all just under the surface only so long as times are good. Science as popular religion brings no true consolation but instead feeds a kind of false pride, pride in spiting oneself—does this sound familiar? It should sound familiar to women most of all. It actually makes the many more servile to the authorities who are presumed to understand and manipulate the technology. That is its purpose, to make the many submit, which wouldn’t be bad, if they weren’t submitting to the lords of lies. You can see from all this anyway why Enlightenment can never happen but also why those critics of Enlightenment like most of the followers of Heidegger go the wrong way. They are right when they say, in so many words, that the inborn character of every man is in some way unique, the biology too particular, much more so than the more uniform character of animals. For animals the worker ant, or two fruitflies, will have exactly the same inborn, but humans are all slightly different. From this they draw the conclusion that no common “way” can suffice for all, but that the only authentic way for you can come from the needs of your inner self. Every adherence to an external code, religion, or ideology is “inauthentic” and represents essentially a form of mind control, your adopting the thoughts of another, inappropriate for your own metabolism, biology, peculiar conditions for growth or flourishing. Yes, it is true, Nietzsche went so far as to avoid reading anything written by others, so as not to infect his mind! And he was a mutant with a very particular biology—such types often are, and he was right that for them, physiology, diet, may be the most pressing research necessary. But he never forgot that the fundamental fact of nature is inequality, and this is something these people, the followers of Heidegger, and Heidegger himself to a great degree, all forget. It is madness to ask the common prefab run of man to fashion his own way, his own “religion”—the many find solace and meaning only in submission. It is good that this is so, and they shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for it. So much of the modern idiocy is based on shaming those who would find true pleasure in submission! The long chain of being is held together by command and obedience. The many are not so different from one another, nor their conditions of life so different. In the end you too, no matter how special or a genius you may be, are held together to the average man through many ties of biology, so that you would both do well to pay attention to what is common, especially insofar as the body is concerned. The body is not a private thing: the “individual” body is likely diseased. The universal body, the correct type discovered by ancient Greek science and art, is not something you will develop by nurturing your own “individual” quirks, doxies and faggotries. Biology works according to types and grades of manifestation, not according to the development of “unique” personal eccentricities. Science rightly understood helps us understand the types, the species, the true cleavages of nature. Science is not in and of itself the cause of our problems, of your “alienation,” nor does it have any content beyond who uses it and for what. Science is a great tool because it can uncover for us the biological conditions of all life and the relationships between types of life. It can, as Nietzsche predicted, settle the question of the true hierarchy of values, or more precisely, the real ladder of life, the true hierarchy of biological types. What prevents this from happening is not inherent to science or technology as such. It is a political and sociological problem—one way or another, in time, the right force will take hold of the power of science and reveal its true potential. Science was never meant to be for comfort!

  24

  I don’t talk about if God exists, I don’t know this. I’ve never had any feeling for this one way or another. I’ve sat in houses of religions, but I always felt nothing, it put me to sleep. Even the novelty of a Buddhist or Hindu temple wore off very fast: I enjoyed the spectacle but could tell…these priests are just more piledrivers. I was always so bored. How can the secret and hidden and precious things be about doctrine and just more talking? But—and I don’t know why people put these things together, because for me they never had anything to do with each other—even as a small boy I felt every object was inhabited by an uncanny shadow or spirit. I paid honor to certain toys and certain objects I found outside and hid carefully. No one ever taught me to do this. I found dead animal and buried it with ceremony. I always felt I could talk to animal and that they were my brothers and sisters. This “animism” is the natural reli
gion of man, and shows itself even to small child left alone to play. I remember fondly a small white dog under thickets of wisteria bushes growing on corrugated steel, and I believe this dog has followed me in different forms my whole life. But I’m almost sure that gods exist, and in any case, the argument against the one God isn’t the same as against the other gods. In all the fulminations of Sam Harris, and Hitchens, and the “new atheists,” there’s nothing really new—they want to banish not just religion from public life, but to enter your own mind and replace whatever vestiges of old organized religions are there with their own very stupid organized religion. If they have an easy time of it, this is because monotheism overreached. It made such grand claims… and when these claims were abandoned it left people with the impression that there really is nothing besides “science,” which of course, nobody really understands, because it’s nothing but a method. It would have been far more honest to embrace skepticism but of course they would never let you take the logical conclusion. But still, forget for a moment all the claims made about God, about the creation of matter out of nothing—which runs against all intuition and all observation that you can make yourself…you don’t even need science for that. Paglia said once that the real novelty of the one God was that he spoke the world into existence. How different this was from all other creation myths! All pagans knew the world was eternal, and that its present condition was a result of cycles of birth, rebirth, regeneration, copulation: the Japanese even have myths about gods shitting on fields to make them fertile! How proper, it makes many other things about Japanese culture easier to understand. Monotheism, even of the intellectual or deist variety, and especially that variety, makes all kinds of claims too about the lawfulness of matter or of nature, about intelligent design and the like. It’s actually much closer to the science that claims to disprove it, than to the original paganism of all mankind. So much of this story makes time a line and makes matter conditional on a deity or creator that lives outside it: the creation of matter out of nothing, the creation of your soul out of nothing. Matter is dead, in some ways homogenous, and its meaning is “divine” only in the sense that it reveals the creation of the external deity, or even better, just the laws he made to govern it. It seems and feels wrong, or runs against the immediate perception of the world, so it requires faith, a concept unknown to ancient pagans of all kinds. For this reason the Romans considered Christians and Jews to be no different from atheists. That view is very different. As such, there is no “scientific” reason why you would have to rule out the existence of beings stronger, superior, more intelligent, more magnificent than us, equipped with powers that appear magical to our understanding. The only reason I can think to dismiss this is Schopenhauer’s, his amusing refutation of God—that any being of intelligence higher than man’s would have already abolished itself long ago. But if you don’t believe that, what reason can there be? Please no say “there no proof,” “I didn’t see it.” Scientific proof would be totally forbidden here: in fact there are many strange occurrences that have been recorded by many, as much as any event can be recorded, but this lacks any scientific meaning, it’s a case of “not applicable.” If an impish deity of the lower kind, with which the world is full, some purple goblin with a wicked face showed itself to a pedant in a white coat, the scientist would convince himself he was hallucinating—and in any case, without being available for study, for testing, for experiments that can be seen by others (this standard has been abandoned for many fields lately), its existence would not fall within the power of “science” at all. No, and what do you say to ancient accounts that such creatures showed themselves to men before, and maybe still do? Why would they show themselves to you? The weakness and spinelessness of modern man—no god would show himself to such creatures, to be jeered at! Why? Remember why the young men in Mishima’s story of the League of the Divine Wind were so inflamed with passion and anger on behalf of the immortal gods. They knew that, without them, without the breed of warriors, the many would forget the gods. They would become powerless spirits hiding among the reeds, the subject of superstition, ridicule. The true gods have a kind of power, but not the kind the many imagine. Why should they care for mankind? They are rare and precious, and it is for man to find, acknowledge, and honor them. This, at least, was the ancient view: and the foundation and preservation of oracles was the first question of life and also of statecraft. Gods could not control nature or fate, but could reveal its workings at key times. If a god showed himself today to you, in a dream, would you have the inner energy and power to honor him and do his bidding in the world? Or would you, neutered by the modern pervasive hivemind of the slave, dismiss it, and yourself as unreal or unworthy, when it is the modern bugman and his blabbering that lacks reality. But I want you to be intoxicated with the highest enthusiasm and ready to receive these greatest blessings with great confidence!

  25

  Nerds, so prized by the middlebrow clothmos who rule the cities and want to think that, well, at least they’re smart and deserve RESPECT, are people who possess a kind of self-destructive parody of intelligence. Their facility with pointless concepts and abstractions make them think they have an understanding of real things when all they have is a misunderstanding of words and grammar, overgeneralized to the point of meaninglessness. Simple people confuse a facility with words for real intellect. It would be very easy to speculate, for example, on the two forms of life I mentioned above and to say, as some do, that there is a progress in the universe from the simple to the more complex. This is similar to those who believe in historical progress, and that there is a motion in history to greater reasonableness, or peace, or prosperity, or freedom, whatever. All of this way of thinking is wrong. While I believe the two physiological processes I mentioned do describe two different kinds of life, and their differing conditions and aims, there is no evidence for any motion in time in favor of one or the other, either when we consider the universe or just human history. If anything, the evidence is motion toward the lower forms of life. I have no doubt anyway that beings of magnificent beauty and complexity existed before, but disappeared because the conditions for their preservation were that much more difficult. No doubt also that human civilization came and went in many cycles, over many hundreds of thousands of years. Civilizations far more advanced than ours are buried under miles of ash and rock, or under the ice of Antarctica, or were entirely pulverized. The memory of such things comes to very sensitive youths with a nervous system so strong that, as a parasite, it takes over the organism: in moments of limpid calm, a small perturbation in the will brings a faint feeling of a memory from long ago…they suddenly remember, like a revelation…

  26

  Reincarnation is the original belief of every society or tribe that drew its conclusions from observation of life and nature. The new religions, the faith of Israel and those that have come from it, and many others that came about at that time, or have arisen since—I believe Zoroastrianism is likely the root also of the faith in the Bible—have some divine inspiration at their beginnings, but I believe at least the way they are interpreted now is a design of the human mind, and calculated. They are abstract, utilitarian, and crudely political. Before this nearly every society had a belief in reincarnation. This still has remained in some places, although the moral meaning imposed on reincarnation by Buddhism and Hinduism is, like Plato’s, for reasons of social utility and is political. But there is much significance in the primitive belief in reincarnation, which is more like a primal and perennial belief. It is universal and naïve, and I believe therefore it must have some truth. It’s not possible to dismiss it as wish-fulfillment, and a false desire for immortality: first, because as we see, the later religions achieve this in a much better way with the teaching of the afterlife, but most of all because to many people, reincarnation is a kind of hell. You’ve all had very comfortable lives and maybe wouldn’t mind reliving something like this again, but try to visit a burn ward. Life is so painful for so many t
hat suicide, an escape from this infernal prison, is very common at all times. But, unfortunately for the suicides, that death is not the end of the story. I believe reincarnation is fundamentally true, even though most of these religions taught it in a metaphorical and popular form called metempsychosis. This is the belief that the soul, the supposed (but false) unity of will and intellect, is fully reborn. This is false. The intellect is a merely physical quality like muscular strength and can’t be “reborn” any more than your muscles are literally reborn. You are not at bottom your intellect, this is impossible, although this is the assumption of almost all modern people even when they claim otherwise. They pay lip service to “supremacy of the desires,” or to biological determinism, but they still believe they are their intellects, just imprisoned by flesh and matter and genes and a biological “programming.” This is wrong! And it’s not the intellect that is reborn, I will tell you what is. Take a fruitfly, or a worker ant. This type of being is very close to plant-life in some ways. It has very primitive intellect, very primitive nervous system. There are inborn ways of behaving, of reacting to certain stimuli, inborn desires and orientations “in the blood,” and when you kill one ant, the next one over will be identical in this regard. Its rebirth is “instantaneous” because the ant has a will that is shared uniformly across its type in the hive, and is therefore persistent and enduring. Once the queen dies, the next queen is indistinguishable from it in that thing that Schopenhauer calls the will, what he says is inborn way of wanting, and is in a very literal sense a “reincarnation” of this same thing. If you don’t see this it’s because you keep confusing yourself for your intellect. But that part of you that is really you persists even when your intellect is asleep, and would persist even if you experienced total amnesia. If you doubt, just ask yourself… someone you love, if you had to choose—would you rather they forgot everything but still behaved the way you always knew they did, or would you rather that they kept all their memories and knowledge but had a radical change in personality? This question is easy to answer…if you love someone only for what they know or remember…everyone knows this is a betrayal because that’s not who you are. And in fact there’s no such thing as a radical change in personality. The lower forms of life are nearly uniform in their wills or inborn ways of acting, and also very simple: in the case of amoeba, yeast, and such they are not far removed from the behavior of the natural forces, like gravity, which is completely uniform and persistent. Once dead, they are immediately reborn, and indeed live simultaneously in numerous bodies. For higher and more differentiated animals, the Will appears more particularly defined for each type, species, and finally each specimen when it comes to the human. But this biological reality, independent of what is known, remembered, or consciously decided, is a matter of the blood and body, and this same being, thing, or Will, call it what you will, will be reborn in just the same way. In a different time, but this same particular way of desiring and behaving that is inside you will come again: this is the real meaning of reincarnation. And with the glut of humans in our time, we have to wonder if the same being also lives now in multiple bodies sometimes. Where do these beings come from? Some have said that these new billions of hue-mans, that in a previous life they must have been yeast, amoeba, locusts and other insects that are born in multitudes in each season. I’d like this to be true, but I think rather that in previous ages mankind also swelled to many billions or even more …and also I have no doubt the entire universe is teeming with life of all kinds.