[hoping the compulsion to write these fades by tomorrow]
[this was my first full day without twitter in ~9 months and a smartphone in 4 years and already I felt my language-muscle relaxing when moving alone in space]
got creeped out by how perfectly all couple’s faces paired in degree of symmetry and ‘refinement’ of bone structure, wanted to ask every one if they ‘met’ online
laughed out loud, covered mouth, looked down at my chancletas and mesh shorts no underwear
regretted not telling set of ~12 year-old boys who passed me twice doing a bike race on an earlier walk how much more power they’d get if they raised their seats up
smelled cocaine, thought about breaking up with a girlfriend on a semisecret coke  binge, writing her a gay pity-party email about the unified heritability of addiction, willpower and capacity for evil on another several months later, listening to all of realniggatumblr’s dipset compilation getting lost walking home from chinatown to park slope on another several months after that
[ever doubting the wisdom of talking about drugs knowing there’s no documentation without promotion, also those are literally all of my coke binges so chill out]
saw a guy who looked like a ramapo mountainman (dreads, blue eyes, square stocky german head), felt strange feeling guilt making this racial call in the city while i felt ecstatic making it in stony point
imagined asian girls inventing some bike-related video valorization of their calves over the false white feminine form the way black girls booty clap, etc.
felt a holy fire descend from my lips through my shoulders to my fingertips listening to cam’ron rap
I donât get the Yudkowsky thing at all, and I generally ignore that section of the internet, but from what I know of Thiel, he seems to fall in the Kuehnelt-Leddihn tradition⌠and heâs connected to Mencius Moldbug, so I doubt I could have much of a problem with him.
same, I’m snarking at a decent distance (of course)
all I know about him is from the New Yorker profile and I would describe my feelings as “intrigued” with a dim element of respect: like I think a semi-closeted gay man may make the best christian, and I’d be enthusiastic about the impulse behind his fellowships if they weren’t overwhelmingly likely to produce stupid web gimmicks »*
seems meet to own up to you and atone to my other followers that it was through your reference that I bought Julius Evola, who I quit after ~15 pages as the writing and/or translation were shitty
and more generally because neofascist intellectual tendencies need to be treated with kid gloves, only secondarily for the obvious »social stigma resulting from a repugnant indifference to mass murder
primarily because they ought (for reasons I someday hope to prove ‘immanent’) to begin and end by grafting the veins of self-empowerment, group camaraderie and mass-cultural restoration
at which point the alienation it addressed will seem to have been a kind of collective-action problem, a low-wattage social equilibrium we accidentally settled into wending our way towards the eradication of the very values fascists went down most infamously championing (of which eugenics and the indifference to individual life remain with us in peculiar, mutated forms only more resilient for drawing the less upon the now-rarefied foolhardy courage fascists had in spades)Â
every darkness and violence is self-defeating »**
there comes a point daily where u log off and get some sun, son
»* like I literally came back to my apt from slogging through the last of habermas outside to post something about an adorable little fantasy where i start working again once the heat settles down, save every penny and do something like him on a much smaller scale
»** my thoughts on violence are a bit more unsettled than decorum allows me to let on, but I can say with confidence (as if this is going to earn me any props) that extermination and conquest ought to be unthinkable
» like to the extent I toy around with the virtues of violence at my extreme distance it’s as a kind of ineradicable, inarticulable ‘universal grammar’ latent in masculinity, necessarily adressed more than we allow at present, best refined into a mutually intelligible discourse (on which spectrum “fighting fair” stands as the vaguest ideal, and a timid skinnyboy pumping waka flocka the worst absurdity)
» “mourningwars” are the only murders that should ever stir up something like awed wonder in you
quoting from Youth and Dissent, Habermas in Legitimation Crisis (god bless him bear with him):
“William James long ago contrasted the once-born and the twice-born; the once-born are those who unreflectively and “innocently” accept the convictions of their childhoods; the twice-born are those who may adhere to exactly the same convictions, but who do so in a different way after a protracted period of doubt, criticism, and examination of those beliefs. Viewed as attitudes, the beliefs of the twice-born may be identical, but the mind-set, cognitive framework, or developmental level of the once- and twice-born are extremely different. In other words, we need to examine not only the beliefs men hold, but the way they hold them—the complexity, richness, and structure of their views of the world. Politically and socially, it may be more important that members of a given subculture possess a relativistic view of truth than that they are conservatives or liberals.”
With the help of this distinction, I can express my thesis as follows: [to the extent] the components of the cultural tradition that are today dominant (and dysfunctional in their working) are more likely to be reflected at the level of the personality system, the more frequently the form of development of the adolescent crisis forces a “second birth” and prevents a conventional outcome of adolescence. For logical reasons, universalistic value systems and countercultural experiential complexes most readily withstand the explicit testing of tradition. That the probability of a conventional form of development of the adolescent crisis is decreasing, can be supported by the following indicators:
—expansion of the educational system is lengthening training periods and making possible for increasing proportions of the population a psycho-social moratorium in early adolescence (from the thirteenth to the sixteenth year) and an extension of this phase (in extreme cases, to the age of 30);
—improved formal schooling of cognitive capacities increases the probability that dissonances between proffered patterns of interpretation and perceived social reality will arise and intensify the problem of identity;
—development of egalitarian family structures and spread of childrearing techniques typical of the middle classes promote processes of socialization that tend to burden youth with adolescent problems;
—loosening of sexual prohibitions made possible by pharmaceutics works itself out (as does the temporary liberation—differentiated according to strata—from directly economic pressures) in such a way that socialization processes free of anxiety, with an expanded scope for experimentation, become more probable for adolescents.
Furthermore, it can be inferred from the presently attained degree of complexity of the role system that in advanced-capitalist societies more and more members have at their disposal basic universalistic qualifications for actions within roles. Since a morality based on principle can be credibly offered by tradition only in the form of communicative ethics, which cannot function without conflict in the political-economic system, two outcomes are to be expected from a non-conventional form of development of the adolescent crisis: (1) withdrawal as a reaction to an overloading of personality resources (a behavior syndrome that Keniston has observed and examined in the “alienated”) and (2) protest as a result of an autonomous ego organization that cannot be stabilized under the given conditions (a behavior syndrome that Keniston has described in his “young radicals”).
That’s written in 1973—way before your trend piece. Witness how exhausted 1 has grown since in the recesses of the web, 2 in the hot and crowded public squares dissent still cannot manage to fill. The only third way I hear in the grindstone at present is a quietist, “prosumerist”, wholly pathetic injunction to grow up, save up, settle down, look around, plan ahead, find your niche, read a thousand fucking listicles about “how to be” and not a single article, chapter, verse or book. Cut this out unless you’re consciously on some slacker shit, which is only justifiable on the day shift. To do this otherwise and knowingly isn’t to achieve a second birth, it’s to die the coward’s infinite deaths, treat by treat.*
And you know what else? It’s not even going to work, doggie. Hit 30 at 35 and you’re just shifting that other time-honored postwar archetype, the midlife crisis, to the newly belated, medicated center of your lifespan. Better hope you’re enough of a cocksucker to do it in a sports car; it’s much uglier how they “pretend” (ctrl-F that here)in Japan.
* And no, no one cares that you’re cohabitating without marriage or marrying without kids. That’s the ultimate hedonistic privatism and u know it…
** O and reading H. in a park today (criminally alone according to not the Puritans but NYC Parks Regulation §1-05.s.1), I heard a mother chastise her toddler who’d just opened the gate thus: “I’m very proud of how strong you are, Magnus, but I want you to make a better choice. Kids might run out of there. Go close it. Make a better choice.” I mean, I guess… but to MAGNUS…?
went for a walk tonight, angel’in heavy syrup and dipset masculine feminine rhyme got me feeling powerful
saw a middle-aged white guy in the brunch spot no one ever goes standing over a table without food or a menu holding book THE MIRACLE OF FASTING smdh
thought MADDDDD GREEK DINER OWNERS CONFUSED ABOUT THE NATURE OF BRUNCH TRAFFIC RIGHT NOW
saw a black guy riding a horse up fulton smdh
saw a black guy biking and rapping without headphones
felt overwhelmed by the number of children with nowhere better to be than atlantic center
felt physically threatened by traffic due to nets stadium construction
went to random pizzeria to avoid recognition, felt shocked by their mural, lines were thick and colors chirpy like a cartoon, hideous, almost a photoshop
saw an energy spray smdhÂ
brown-bagged two beers [due to being in park slope]
saw someone closing up a coffee shop at ~10 p.m., thought MADDDD COFFEE SHOP OWNERS RESEARCHING GABATROL RIGHT NOW SMDH
then PROBABLY NONE ACTUALLY AND THAT’S A LEGIT BUSINESS IDEA
felt unsure but confident that a handful of brownstone businesses in park slope have vanished, guessing literally every property there is an investment at this point
[realized my old alternate avoid-recognition pizzeria is a real estate office, just like the alternate deli, the primary bakery…]
felt momentarily uncertain whether i was experiencing high blood pressure [due to four hits off a one-hitter ~1 hour prior]Â or the mildest rain smdh
thought LITERALLY THE ATMOSPHERE IS BOILING, then SORTA… MAYBE… IN REVERSE…?
felt stupid, weak
saw a couple with their excuse to be outside (dog) hesitating on the threshold, deciding whether the mildest rain was a better excuse to stay inside smdh
got cut off on the sidewalk by a woman entering mcdonald’s in a minivan, knocked on her window as she passed and literally smdh, vainly hoped australian tourists behind me would pick up behavior
saw a white guy biking with a helmet, headlight, yellow neon reflective scarf and red neon reflective vest torn into the form of a cape smdh
engaged in mild recognition with a bearded guy, thought “brotherhood of white dudes growing hair with no good reason [smdh]”
spoke to no one, overthought eye contact with everyone
thought about going blurry next time so i can’t notice body type or clothing in advance
decided exercise euphoria is triggered by time, only amplified by intensity, would encourage everyone to go on at least an hourlong walk if sweating’s not their bag
THIS THE SAME SHIT THAT SCULPTED MY LIFE AW FUCK IT MAN THIS CULTURE AIN’T RIGHT
reminder that as long as you live in a world that keys prosperity to consumption growth aging will entail a continual, unnecessarily rapid alienation from other people’s fabricated desires
Adolf stood outside my house in his black overcoat, his dark hat pulled down over his face. It was a cold, unpleasant November evening. He waved to me impatiently. I was just cleaning myself up from the workshop and getting ready to go to the theatre. Rienzi was being given that night. We had never seen this Wagner opera and looked forward to it with great excitement. In order to secure the pillars in the Promenade we had to be early. Adolf whistled, to hurry me up.
Now we were in the theatre, burning with enthusiasm, and living breathlessly through Rienzi’s rise to be the Tribune of the people of Rome and his subsequent downfall. When at last it was over, it was past midnight. My friend, his hands thrust into his coat pockets, silent and withdrawn, strode through the streets and out of the city. Usually, after an artistic experience that had moved him, he would start talking straight away, sharply criticizing the performance, but after Rienzi he remained quiet a long while. This surprised me, and I asked him what he thought of it. He threw me a strange, almost hostile glance. “Shut up!” he said brusquely.
The cold, damp mist lay oppressively over the narrow streets. Our solitary steps resounded on the pavement. Adolf took the road that led up to the Freinberg. Without speaking a word, he strode forward. He looked almost sinister, and paler than ever. His turned-up coat collar increased this impression.
I wanted to ask him, “Where are you going?” But his pallid face looked so forbidding that I suppressed the question.
As if propelled by an invisible force, Adolf climbed up to the top of the Freinberg. And only now did I realize that we were no longer in solitude and darkness, for the stars shone brilliantly above us.
Adolf stood in front of me; and now he gripped both my hands and held them tight. He had never made such a gesture before. I felt from the grasp of his hands how deeply moved he was. His eyes were feverish with excitement. The words did not come smoothly from his mouth as they usually did, but rather erupted, hoarse and raucous. From his voice I could tell even more how much this experience had shaken him.
Gradually his speech loosened, and the words flowed more freely. Never before and never again have I heard Adolf Hitler speak as he did in that hour, as we stood there alone under the stars, as though we were the only creatures in the world.
I cannot repeat every word that my friend uttered. I was struck by something strange, which I had never noticed before, even when he had talked to me in moments of the greatest excitement. It was as if another being spoke out of his body, and moved him as much as it did me. It wasn’t at all a case of a speaker being carried away by his own words. On the contrary; I rather felt as though he himself listened with astonishment and emotion to what burst forth from him with elementary force. I will not attempt to interpret this phenomenon, but it was a state of complete ecstasy and rapture, in which he transferred the character of Rienzi, without even mentioning him as a model or example, with visionary power to the plane of his own ambitions. But it was more than a cheap adaptation. Indeed, the impact of the opera was rather a sheer external impulse which compelled him to speak. Like flood waters breaking their dikes, his words burst forth from him. He conjured up in grandiose, inspiring pictures his own future and that of his people.
Hitherto I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or perhaps an architect. Now this was no longer the case. Now he aspired to something higher, which I could not yet fully grasp. It rather surprised me, as I thought that the vocation of the artist was for him the highest, most desirable goal. But now he was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.
It was an unknown youth who spoke to me in that strange hour. He spoke of a special mission which one day would be entrusted to him, and I, his only listener, could hardly understand what he meant. Many years had to pass before I realized the significance of this enraptured hour for my friend.
…
I was also present when Adolf Hitler retold this sequel to the performance of Rienzi in Linz to Frau Wagner, at whose home we were both guests. Thus my own memory was doubly confirmed. The words with which Hitler concluded his story to Frau Wagner are also unforgettable for me. He said solemnly, “In that hour it began.”
The fascination exerted upon our imaginations by the romantic features of St. George’s Guild does not spring from the novelty of the idea of such an institution (there have been many other organizations for the testing of socialistic crotchets and hobbies), but from the bizarre and poetical nature of the founder [John Ruskin], the astonishingly visionary character of many of his schemes, and the large financial sacrifices he has made for their realization. …
The prime object of the Guild is “the general medicining, enriching, and preserving in political strength of the population of Great Britain.” …
The first maxim of the Guildsmen is “to do good work, whether they live or die.” Marriages are to be regulated by the Guild. As to courtship, the sum and substance of Mr. Ruskin’s ideas is this: No girl should reject a lover at once nor accept him at once. A girl worth anything ought to have half a dozen suitors; and she is to put them all on probation, requiring of them as many lions’ skins and giants’ heads as she thinks she is worth. If a lover is absolutely disliked by her, “she may send him away for seven years or so, he vowing to live on cresses and wear sackcloth meanwhile,” or do something of the kind to show his worthiness. When we read such funny things as this in Mr. Ruskin’s books, we begin to understand the meaning of that quizzing, mischievous look in the eyes which he is reported occasionally to show. âŚ
At this point I make no doubt my readers are rubbing their eyes, and asking themselves just where about in time they really are [May 13th, 1886], and if they are in possession of their senses. Don’t tremble or get alarmed, dear friends. Our liberties are still safe: there is no danger of Prof. Ruskin being intrusted with autocratic power. He is only dreaming, after all. Will you examine a specimen law of our ideal government? It is only six hundred years old, and comes from Florence. The law away back there was that no citizen should buy fish to sell again to middlemen. In this way, you get fresh fish, do you see? Now, we must have this law in St. George’s Guild. But how to get our fish to their proper market and sold? Why, what else have the sons of fishermen to do, and what else have idle clergymen to do, better than to peddle good fish? The day must come (says Ruskin, in all seriousness) when gentlemen will turn fish-mongers, and, hiring themselves out to the fishermen, take dripping basket on back, and cry their funny wares through the cities!
“They may stagger on, perhaps, a year or two more in their vain ways; but the day must come when your poor, little, honest puppy, whom his people have been wanting to dress up in a surplice, and call ‘The to be Feared,’ that he might have pay enough, by tithe or tax, to marry a pretty girl, and live in a parsonage,—some poor, little, honest wretch of a puppy, I say, will eventually get it into his glossy head that he would be incomparably more reverend to mortals, and acceptable to St. Peter and all saints, as a true monger of sweet fish than a false fisher for rotten souls; and that his wife would be incomparably more ‘ladylike’, not to say madonna-like, marching beside him in purple stockings and sabots, or even frankly barefoot, with her creel full of caller herring on her back, than in administering any quantity of ecclesiastical scholarship to her Sunday-schools.
“‘How dreadful, how atrocious!’ thinks the tender clerical lover. ‘My wife walk with a fishbasket on her back!’ »
“‘Yes, you, young scamp, you. You were going to lie to the Holy Ghost, then, were you, only that she might wear satin slippers, and be called ‘a lady’?’”
WM. SLOANE KENNEDY
better not even spoken of so long as its politics are sexual
It is the function of the legislator to impose the form of politeia—the constitution—upon the matter of politeuma, the citizen body; and it is the function of virtÚ [meaning ‘power’ but also ‘virtue’ in the modern sense] to impose form upon fortuna [chance, uncertainty, almost our ‘entropy’]. But when the subject is innovation, there is a pressing danger that virtÚ may deliver itself into fortuna’s power, and therefore the ideal type of innovator is he who depends as little as possible on circumstances beyond his control. The more the innovator is thought of as subverting and replacing a previously existing structure of custom and legitimacy, the more he will have to cope with the contingencies of suddenly disoriented behavior and the greater will be his exposure to fortuna. To attain the ideal type, therefore, we must suppose a situation in which the matter has no form, and above all no previously existing form, but what the innovator gives it; and the innovator must be a legislator. It was therefore a logical necessity that each hero should find his people in a condition of total anomie; since if the matter had had any vestige of form, that would have detracted from his virtĂš’s total independence of fortuna. (J.G.A. Pocock)
This is leader as lawgiver, unto whom the people are delivered over so abjectly as to be returned to subhuman clay. That the archetype is Moses, a demigenocidal thief who stole property he couldn’t feed and felt more comfortable speaking to god than men, tells you just how unpleasant this condition can get. Take heart, at least, that this means the darkest hour will come right before dawn; and therefore every extra decibel of truth with which this passage rings brings us closer to our own renewal:
What will never again be built any more, cannot be built any more, isâa society, in the old sense of that word; to build such, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society; this is a truth for which the time has come! (Nietzsche, quoted in below)
And so as trenchant and despondent as this critique seems, try as you move through it to witness the next isotope our continual decay is just one radiant alpha particle away from:
âModernityâ means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected futureâof goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, new worlds of information. The process was accompanied by a terrible emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. For without the anchorage of tradition, without the imagined and vivid intricacies of kinship, without the past living on (most often monstrously) in the detail of everyday life, meaning became a scarce social commodityâif by âmeaningâ we have in mind agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding, orders implicit in things, stories and images in which a culture is able to crystallize its sense of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the realities of pain and death. The phrase Max Weber borrowed from Schiller, âthe disenchantment of the worldââgloomy yet in my view exultant, with its promise of a disabused dwelling in the world as it isâstill sums up this side of modernity best …
âSecularizationâ is a nice technical word for this blankness. It means specialization and abstraction, as part of the texture of ordinary doings; social life driven by a calculus of large-scale statistical chances, with everyone accepting or resenting a high level of risk; time and space turned into variables in that same calculus, both of them saturated by âinformationâ and played with endlessly, monotonously, on nets and screens; the de-skilling of everyday life (deference to experts and technicians in more and more of the microstructure of the self); available, invasive, haunting expertise; the chronic revision of everything in the light of âstudiesâ.
This does no more than block in the outlines: descriptively, there would be many things to add. But from the present point of view only two motifs need developing. First, that the essence of modernity, from the scripture-reading spice-merchant to the Harvard iPod banker sweating in the gym, is a new kind of isolate obedient âindividualâ with technical support to match. The printed book, the spiritual exercise, coffee and Le Figaro, Time Out, Twitter, tobacco (or its renunciation), the heaven of infinite apps. Second, that all this apparatus is a kind or extension of clockwork. Individuality is held together by a fiction of full existence to come. Time Out is always just round the corner. And while the deepest function of this new chronology is to do work on what used to be called âsubject positionsââkeeping the citizen-subject in a state of perpetual anticipation (and thus accepting the pittance of subjectivity actually on offer)âit is at the level of politics that the Great Look Forward is most a given. (P.J. Clark)
Among those most secure in their modernity, furthest advanced by the forces of capitalist extraction, the awareness of self as component and freedom as a form of control is already beyond an inkling, into its beginnings as a passion. Today I delivered an envelope to a jacked Italian guy (not the faddiest type, is the point) who refused his coworker’s offer of a bite because on Mondays he doesn’t allow himself to eat until 2 in the afternoon. “Intermittent fasting,” he said by way of explanation. It’s supposed to smooth out the appetite that devours our will from within.Â
The hope, I guess, is that as ‘clockwork all the way down’ becomes our ethos, retuning our activity, harmony more than mastery our lives’ pursuit, we approach the anomic openness, the truly atomic reduction to the elemental most available to reconfiguration, the humblest confusion that will be necessary to end this society committed to the false infinity of candy-store liberty. We’ve already got as many lawgivers as quack doctors; now it’s time to pick one, for good, or at least a longer now. What will be next necessary but harder still is to accept the tragedy Clark talks about, the inevitability of violent suffering~~embrace it, even, in order to redistribute it evenly, as the only frame bold enough to give life meaning. Depends on whether you’re chicken, or worse~~one of those chickens bred for cages who only gets as far as breaking a leg given free range.
Anyway this post is dedicated to the courier I met today who’s been homeless a third of his nine years because he preferred to give his sister a decent burial than keep his savings account. All day it felt like I’d caught death from his eyes but now that it’s night I’m choosing to see it as just how brutal the will to live sometimes gets. If you can’t match that courage with insistence get the fuck out the game.
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