Bronze Age Mindset Read online

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  It would be interesting to know what the “extinction” event or path is in each previous human cycle of civilization. If it is something completely random and external, like asteroids or volcanoes, or if it is something inherent to civilization as such…some circumstance or behavior that leads to virulent disease, or some kind of great weapon or maybe even something more uncanny. I wonder if the peoples and religions that exist now also existed in past cycles under different names with slightly different superficial circumstances and appearances, but in all fundamental ways otherwise the same. And if one or a set of these, or some new belief that hasn’t even appeared yet, is the cause of the end of civilization in every cycle. A frog once suggested to me that the explosion of African populations in our time is the event that the movie Alien describes, a population bred under the most extreme pathogenic load, and that, despite its weaknesses in cold weather, can nevertheless wreak so much damage on the rest of the world that societies collapse under the march of the zombi …I personally doubt this. Asia will shut them out without glancing twice or hearing of their suffering. I think instead the end in previous cycles has varied but that very often, and most interesting, one cause has been the emergence of brotherhoods of savage men who have decided to purify the earth and rid it of the infestation of the human-cockroach. Because unfortunately in the long run the development of civilization and comfort leads to the proliferation of damaged life, the innovation of mankind leads to unspeakable abortions of life, and men on the periphery who want to preserve the natural order begin to plot the end of everything. I also wonder if some ancient civilization has managed to escape all these cycles of destruction and has hidden underground somewhere. Maybe they are really eternal and live life as an experiment, detached, seeing it as a playful dream they can observe at a distance…maybe an emissary surfaces from time to time so they can amuse themselves. I shudder to think, though, that by this same reasoning the aborted robot life to which the mass of mankind inevitably degenerates in each cycle of civilization also survived, maybe in small communities of “moles,” inside dry hills of limestone, or not far underground in old networks of caves and tunnels. No doubt stories of vampires, kobold, cryptid humanoids and many others might refer to these degenerated stragglers that prey on us and terrorize us….no doubt many among the ranks of deities have come from both types, and stranger things still exist under the earth. Please see DEROs if interested. There are more things….

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  There can be no “artificial intelligence” in the way that people really mean it. If they mean some machine that approximates the intellect of man, this may be possible, and even very useful, although they’re very far from their goals at the moment. Success at chess is their one great achievement, but they fail still at kicking a ball, pouring ketchup, recognizing simple objects …could one hunt, or survive being hunted? But they never mean just the intellect in this way, or a crude approximation of it: when people speak of “artificial intelligence” what they always mean is artificial life, a robot of some kind, or an artificial consciousness indistinguishable from human consciousness. There is an apparently different but in fact similar speculation that nerds love: that the universe is “logic” or information. That what constitutes matter can in fact be recorded as “information,” as relations of logic, and that therefore the universe must be precisely this—this is behind also the belief that you can “upload” your intelligence to a computer and attain immortality, and many related forms of imbecility. The motivation for this is nerdishness and also somewhat the Jewish way of thinking, or the Judaizing tendency that promotes facility with words and number, but approaches mental deficiency and even retardation when it comes to anything visual. The Jewish hatred of matter, an ancient prejudice that precedes the Bible, and the hatred also for beauty that they share with other Semitic peoples—and many others besides—all of this comes together to promote this kind of aggressive nerdishness. This is the origin of many of these claims, though it shouldn’t be imagined that here or elsewhere I am referring to all Jews, or that this absolves non-Jews. Because the “Judaizing” tendency I talk about is inherent to human nature, and is very common also among non-Jews, and in some degree it exists within everyone, together with the counter-acting love of vibrant matter, image, and beauty. It just exists in different degrees in different people, and peoples. In any case, all of these delusions, that you can be “uploaded” because your “brain” can be uploaded, that “the universe is information” or that something like “artificial intelligence” actually can exist, are all at bottom the same delusion and the same power fantasy of the nerd. The nerd can be described as a person of inelegant and pedantic intelligence, often middling intelligence, who takes excessive pride in the intellect, even in the memorization of facts, the design of clumsy concepts to which reality is then expected to fit like to bed of Procrustes…. And he identifies with it. There are very rare people in history, even a few saints and martyrs, who were ashamed of their evil character and will, and sought salvation in contemplation, sought some escape in this. These are sometimes noble people, but this doesn’t describe the nerd. The nerd doesn’t hate himself, his nature, his tendencies or spirit, nor is his intellect powerful enough to over-awe his needling will and consider things without the pressure of interest or the gravity of petty desires. He never sees things like the true genius or the artist does, when the perceiving part of the intellect becomes so powerful that it really overpowers everything else…so that the fullness of the object occupies all of consciousness and an idea, or some new insight into the world, is actually grasped. No, the nerd is a creature of will, under the direction of a petty will in the everyday sense, and all of his thoughts, concepts, and designs have a forced quality because they refer always to need and desire for some kind of gain. This very often is just material gain, but the desire for prestige is even worse. In men of intellect the desire for prestige is often the most disgusting, especially when there’s no native manliness, because this leads to cowardice and lies, to others and oneself. For this reason Nietzsche said manliness is the first requirement of the philosopher, but there’s no one farther from the philosopher than the unmanly nerd, and there’s no enemy more implacable of the human race and of the genius of the species, than just this nerd and everything he represents. The attempt to “mimic” life through algorithms, through the brute-force of trial-and-error, will never create either life or “consciousness”—just what would such a machine be “conscious” of?—but just that, a mimicry or parody of the middling human intellect. A mirror and exaltation of the false intellect of the nerd, that never leaves the stream of words, syllogisms, motives and desire, that is always forced and contrived, because it’s under pressure of some petty need. And it’s really grotesque. It’s as if you have a girl you desire, she dies but using Big Magic you reanimate her corpse, put makeup on her, re-teach this zombi to speak, force her to copy all of her old habits, condition her like you would a pigeon to act in ways you remember and that you liked. But in the end she’s just a reanimated live-action doll, and this is grotesque. This is just what “AI” is. It is a fantasy of power of the conspiracy of biological interests that unites the nerds, the intellect of “reason”—the party that believes in empty words—the middling, and the Jews of the human spirit into hoping for their golem. “AI” is the golem of those who hate life…. It is their true Messiah and their vengeance.

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  Youth and beauty are universally hated in almost all human societies in history. These societies are run by decrepit, sclerotic old men. Sometimes they use image of fat woman “Earth Mother” to beat the young men over the head with and make them submit. Other times they promote ugliness in all ways: ugliness and perversity in custom, scarification, circumcision, self-mutilation. Customs and religious authorities that concern themselves with how you should wipe your ass, brush teeth, how many fingers to insert in anus to achieve such and such “magical-medical” goal, petty legalisms of a
ll kinds—the Shiite sect among Muslims and rabbinical Judaism are most like this. All of this smothers genuine religious enthusiasm and the true oracular science, from which can evolve arts of great beauty. Often their food is unappetizing and looks like boiled rocks. Their languages—most human languages are so hard to listen to! Tagalog is almost torture to hear, though I don’t mean to single out this culture, it’s hardly the worst in terms of love of ugliness (actually the Filipinos can be a pleasant people with an impish sense of humor inherited from the long-lost negritos now absorbed in their population). Their people are ugly: millennia of arranged marriages, for financial gain, among the Indians—originally a noble people—led to a nation now, of one billion, that almost never wins any athletic contests, that has won fewer gold medals since its inception than tiny Croatia has since 1992, where both the men and the women are inbred, ugly, unsexy, and almost deformed. I don’t mean to pick on them, because they’re hardly the only ones, and this ugliness, physical ugliness, is almost universal in the human race. Beauty is the very rare and precious preserve of tribes that have striven to promote child-making for something other than financial, social and political gain. No, the promotion of ugliness is nearly universal and the love of beauty is so rare: among the great civilizations, only the ancient Greeks, the French, the Japanese, and somewhat the Italians are true lovers of beauty and refinement, and have based their existence exclusively on the promotion of beauty. How many times in history have cultures become ugly and petty because financial interest overrode eugenics in marriage—and free love, though not perfect, is somewhat more eugenic than letting fathers trade daughters for personal gain. In their hatred and distrust of beauty one feels such societies live under a tremendous pressure of needs. Their true ruler is the god of gravity and they are dominated by fears of the future, unspeakable anxieties about money and matter, and importune, brutish behaviors all motivated by need, by the desire to grasp, by the feeling they all nourish that they’re being taken advantage of. They always feel they’re being disrespected. The desire for respect is the true mark of the forever-slighted. The distrust of beauty is sometimes sold as the high-minded rejection of material desire by the saintly or the kind or the contemplative. But that’s just nonsense, and you can see it in this way. Beauty-hating cultures have one other peculiarity they all share, which is very revealing. They hate also privacy and personal space, they hate also beauty in good and refined manners. These societies are based on such popular solidarity that it’s considered normal to barge in on other people, absurd to demand to knock; they make animal sounds when eating—or, the way such people are often said to smell in history whenever such societies are encountered—all of this tells you what the hatred of beauty is really about. Freud refers to the inner pain many of his clients experienced trying to shift from this kind of medieval, collective, smothering culture of ugliness to one where personal space and distance, refinement and beauty, were instead valued. It’s about the hatred of distinction or superiority, hatred of the principle of difference and distance between individuals, that is by contrast so prized in those very few beauty-loving cultures. And the hatred of superiority comes from the suspicion the many in such beauty-hating societies feel, that, in not being subject to the horrible pressures of need and anxiety under which they themselves live, that the beautiful and carefree make a mockery of what they take most seriously. The beautiful threaten to unravel the regimentation under which they must subject their constant crude need for things. This is why such societies descend to the lowest types of faggotry whenever their native laws are even slightly relaxed. Islam is most like this. Jews, when devoid of their religion, as well as Persians who live under the tyranny of Shiite law, and most of all the people of the Gulf States, all revert to a crude animal condition without their rigid laws and become completely dissolute, as the Arabs were said to have been before Islam. And they will soon return to this. I don’t need to add notes for spergs and pedants: men like John Milius are excepted from such judgments, but their existence has nothing to do one way or another with my point here, which is about general types and the ways these generate. I am speaking of two opposing views of life that are based in two very different needs of two very different biological orientations. There can be no compromise between those who live under the pressure of need and of material increase, who are the walking shadows of the dead, and on the other side, those who are carefree, joyous, pleasure-loving and worship beauty. One seeks the preservation and expansion of mere life, the other seeks the exaltation of life.

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  Among the Greeks the man of power was called aner, who was different from the other word used, anthropos, which referred just to some shadow-being, indistinct, some kind of humanoid shape. The real man was rare, and most males were not and are not real men! The word in beginning was used only for demigods and superhumans like Achilles or Diomedes or Odysseus. In the Iliad Diomedes in his moment of glory is compared to lion whose spirit has been aroused by anger at wound, and scatters the shepherds and dogs before him. Athena kindled a fire on his head and shoulders and marked him as one possessed by the true inner force inside all things. This burst out of him now and made itself light up above all others. The real man was a man filled by courage and daring that all came from an excess of being. This idea was shared also by other Aryan cultures; the Roman vir, the Sanskrit and Avestan nar, the Welsh ner, the Proto-Indo-European Hner all ultimately refer to a kind of vital life-force capable of superhuman strength. There is other word, related, having to do with manly youth: ayu; ayu refers to the youthful life-force that renews itself in each generation, that moves from life to life without end, forever persisting. It is behind all the Indo-European words for youth, and youthful strength and power. It appears in Latin iuuenis, in Sanskrit, and all the Germanic and English forms. But most of all it is this same word, this same idea that is behind the Latin aetas and aeternus, behind the vision of an age, a cyclical age, of eternity. How pregnant in meaning that youth and eternity are the same word and idea in these languages! The Gothic and Germanic words are the same. This idea very vivid in Greek! In this the words aiei, meaning forever, and the word aion, both contain at their root this meaning: of life-span, life-force, youthful strength. These peoples saw the vigor of youth as the true driving force behind life and behind all things, forever renewing itself, reincarnating itself anew in each generation in full force, though the memories of men and of societies may disappear. If you want the most beautiful poetic expression of this view, you must see in the Iliad when Homer describes the death of Euphorbus. His death is compared to young tree in its prime blown down by strong wind. Pythagoras, looking on Euphorbus’ shield in Sicily, broke into tears, remembering that he had been this man. He knew of what was hidden on the other side of the shield. This view persists: and this is why someone like D.H. Lawrence could look on the sarcophagi of the ancient Tuscans and see in this pleasure- and beauty-loving people a celebration of something very similar. They put on their funerary objects images of reveling, and feasting, and abundant flourishing life and great joy, wine parties, leaping dolphins, to remind themselves that this irrepressible force, nature, youth continues anew in each generation and is never defeated by death. In same way when I poast physiques of beautiful and handsome youths I do so because in contemplating them I am filled with a deep calm and joy—I see in them the persistent rejuvenation of this same eternal force, that is inside all things. I see in this force the hidden design and intention of nature, its reaching beyond itself. Its designs are unspeakable and what it reaches and wants is mysterious to us, can only be understood imperfectly and through metaphor. Its “plan” and design is beyond human comprehension, but it is without doubt that it is striving, against numerous other “factions” and centrifugal forces, for the production and creation of a superior creature of some kind, a specimen of terrible beauty and power. I have no doubt that the gods, if they exist, would look only like perfected and improved versions of beautiful physiques of you
ng men, just like they showed themselves to the Greek oracles in dreams. They were the first to discover the true biological and physical form of the man, the correct form, the true proportions. I have no doubt also that this force, in being inside us together with others, has made human history, life, and our own minds the battleground and stage of its action, and that passivity in the face of its power is therefore absurd: it calls on us to allow ourselves to be possessed by it, and to wage war on its behalf against its enemies. If you want to understand the true power of aion, of the eternal youthful energy that is the universe, you must study what remains from Heraclitus when he uses this word, and how he connects it to the idea of fire that is the essence of all things and all action. And he is very right when he says, “The best desire one thing above all, ever-flowing eternal fame among mortals; but the many glut themselves like cattle.” This is what I believe in!