America is crumbling and many blame its president
@georgia
But as a democracy shouldn't the fault lie with the people?
But as a democracy shouldn't the fault lie with the people?
@georgia @Jack @orekix What universal metaethics? Show me these universal ethics. "It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity"-Maurice Barrès. Everything still moves by force, as it did in the days of old. The only differences here now is that liberalism doesn't want to touch the body, and so, when it does it will cry about it (which is kinda pathetic). I do not call for to remove morality from society, because morality is a useful tool. All is will to power and the battle for domination.
I quoted from the book Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Now, Redbeard himself (Arthur Desmond) was best described by the occultist Stephen E. Flowers as a "Social Darwinist street-philosopher". I disagree with may parts of Redbeard's Social Darwinism and many other parts of Redbeard, I would even say it is de-evolutionary a loy of ways. However, it is still really well composed, and my favorite book, mostly for its aesthetics and writing. I view Might is Right as the bastard love child of Max Stirner and Nietzsche. However, it's really just a book of poetic blasphemy, not a lot of intellectual merit.
I still hold the metapoint of the text to be true. You may hold the metapoint is "might is right" but it's better to call it "law is force". "Law is force" gets at the metapoint better then "might is right", however it doesn't as well fit in with its vulgar and blasphemic nature. This view of breaking into power is seen in Nihilism, Fascism and even in a lot of Post-Modernism (the last however typically has an unfavorable view of power, and Fascism being Neo-Hegelian puts mind at the geist at the center). If I say "might is right", "might makes right" or "law is force" this is truth and you must adapt yourself to its parameters.
The book is full of is/ought fallacys. To give an example that comes from the end of the book "The strong must ever rule the weak, is grim Primordial Law". Why must the strong rule the weak? It's Primordial Law? This is almost like a strange and perverted form of natural law (weird coming from someone inspired so much by Nihilist like Nietzsche and Stirner), and so, I could use the same attacks I use against natural law here. The strong may rule the weak, but that doesn't mean they ought to rule the weak. It would be better to say "The strong rule the weak, deal with it" but even then the creative, clever and cunning are likely to dominate the strong (something Redbread never seems to talk about). In sort the strong dominate the weak, and the smart dominate the strong.
One huge problem with Redbeard is his Egoism. I may not be a fan of Egoism but I still think Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own is a must read, mostly for his high level of iconoclasm. For Hegel there are two ways to look at the individual, first is shown in René Descartes's "Cogito, ergo sum". Descartes found that he can't doubt his existence as a thinking subject. For Hegel the problem with Descartes is he assumes the individual can exist isolated from the world, that is like saying there can be a subjective without an object. This makes sense of the wold through the individuals making groups, for them society is the sum of separate atomized individuals. This view can be found in everyone from Søren Kierkegaard to Locke and most extremely in the Egoism of Max Stirner. For both Kierkegaard and Stirner society and collectives are something abstract and unreal. In truth, it is as Maurice Barrès put it "The individual is nothing, society is everything". It is only society that matters. Whether or not you are a live, dead, beaten or killed has no importance beyond that which it has you, which is little because you are irrelevant.
Sticking with Maurice Barrès when a bunch of Jewish French citizens had been illegally assassinated, the night of the massacre he had a dream. He was confronted with a giant ocean with rippling tides and a blue sky above his head a voice spoke to him, it was his nation telling him that his existence and the existence of any single French subject was but in almost meaningless mere grain of sand in a vast beach of history.
The first problem for any thinking subject (and Egoism) is the other. However, the fact of the other does not disprove Individualism or Egoism, but it does start to put it in to question. Which come first? The ego or society? Any one ego can be removed and you will still have society. So, society in this sense is greater then any individual.
You realize yourself as an individual with the help of and in relation to other individuals, other thinking subjects. Existentialist may say that an individual can only come to some things on his own, like meaning of death and goal in life. They are wrong the individual's ideas of life and death come from other individuals, many of his ideas come language which he gets from the people around him. With out the collectives the individual would never be able to take a look in to this, the fact that Existentialist exist proves this. Individuals develop collectively in preexisting communities. To ignore the other one would give themselves to false knowledge, and with out the other they could not exist. The subject can only develop his consciousness by engaging with civil-society, and then the state (which exist inside the subject). The subject must engage in something like the master-slave dialectic because to opt out is not an option, and it is how consciousness develops it self (note I disagree partly with the role Hegel places on the slave).
The last main problem I have with the text is its view of Social Darwinism. Redbeard views Darwinism is just pure domination over the weak. As the Anarchist Peter Kropotkin pointed out mutual aid plays a role in evolution. The only credit Redbeard this is in a line like "Blessed is the man whose foot is swift to serve a friend, he is a friend indeed", which is followed up by "Cursed are the organizers of Charities, they are propagators of plagues". Redbread even attacks Kropotkin by name in the book. Kropotkin may over assume the role of mutual aid. Redbeard may over assume the role of domination. For evolution to have its proper character, the golden mean must be found.
Now, moving back to you. Violence is a human need, and must be expressed. Nietzsche has shown the problem with trying to remove just things from society in Beyond Good and Evil;
"To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIETY, it would immediately disclose what it really is—namely, a Will to the DENIAL of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;—but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal—it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy—not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it LIVES, and because life IS precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter, people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which 'the exploiting character' is to be absent—that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. 'Exploitation' does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life—Granting that as a theory this is a novelty—as a reality it is the FUNDAMENTAL FACT of all history let us be so far honest towards ourselves!"
The other problem that Nietzsche doesn't get into is that of emotion. Here we may turn to Ernst Jünger. That is an emotion should not be viewed by what emotion it is, but rather by its intensity. Joy isn't any better the sorrow, and pleasure isn't better then pain. Liberalism lacks this understanding of emotion.
One may understand Schmitt with what we may call this "will-to-power logic", and I have yet to read Schmitt so I will not say anything about that. However, Spengler does a great job putting the will to power in a historical and political context. Spengler explains how everything from the idea of Fatherland to Socialism comes out of the will to power. Here I think he does a better job then Nietzsche ever could, however if talk about the will to power in the ontological or all most any other context Nietzsche is far better. It is not "universal metaethics" that has separated us from savagery, but it was the will to power.
I am 100% against liberal morality. However, ethics formed man's behavior even when he was in the jungle and can't be removed from his mind. So the question is what ethics are best to instill in the people? This question is relative to your goal.
I quoted from the book Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Now, Redbeard himself (Arthur Desmond) was best described by the occultist Stephen E. Flowers as a "Social Darwinist street-philosopher". I disagree with may parts of Redbeard's Social Darwinism and many other parts of Redbeard, I would even say it is de-evolutionary a loy of ways. However, it is still really well composed, and my favorite book, mostly for its aesthetics and writing. I view Might is Right as the bastard love child of Max Stirner and Nietzsche. However, it's really just a book of poetic blasphemy, not a lot of intellectual merit.
I still hold the metapoint of the text to be true. You may hold the metapoint is "might is right" but it's better to call it "law is force". "Law is force" gets at the metapoint better then "might is right", however it doesn't as well fit in with its vulgar and blasphemic nature. This view of breaking into power is seen in Nihilism, Fascism and even in a lot of Post-Modernism (the last however typically has an unfavorable view of power, and Fascism being Neo-Hegelian puts mind at the geist at the center). If I say "might is right", "might makes right" or "law is force" this is truth and you must adapt yourself to its parameters.
The book is full of is/ought fallacys. To give an example that comes from the end of the book "The strong must ever rule the weak, is grim Primordial Law". Why must the strong rule the weak? It's Primordial Law? This is almost like a strange and perverted form of natural law (weird coming from someone inspired so much by Nihilist like Nietzsche and Stirner), and so, I could use the same attacks I use against natural law here. The strong may rule the weak, but that doesn't mean they ought to rule the weak. It would be better to say "The strong rule the weak, deal with it" but even then the creative, clever and cunning are likely to dominate the strong (something Redbread never seems to talk about). In sort the strong dominate the weak, and the smart dominate the strong.
One huge problem with Redbeard is his Egoism. I may not be a fan of Egoism but I still think Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own is a must read, mostly for his high level of iconoclasm. For Hegel there are two ways to look at the individual, first is shown in René Descartes's "Cogito, ergo sum". Descartes found that he can't doubt his existence as a thinking subject. For Hegel the problem with Descartes is he assumes the individual can exist isolated from the world, that is like saying there can be a subjective without an object. This makes sense of the wold through the individuals making groups, for them society is the sum of separate atomized individuals. This view can be found in everyone from Søren Kierkegaard to Locke and most extremely in the Egoism of Max Stirner. For both Kierkegaard and Stirner society and collectives are something abstract and unreal. In truth, it is as Maurice Barrès put it "The individual is nothing, society is everything". It is only society that matters. Whether or not you are a live, dead, beaten or killed has no importance beyond that which it has you, which is little because you are irrelevant.
Sticking with Maurice Barrès when a bunch of Jewish French citizens had been illegally assassinated, the night of the massacre he had a dream. He was confronted with a giant ocean with rippling tides and a blue sky above his head a voice spoke to him, it was his nation telling him that his existence and the existence of any single French subject was but in almost meaningless mere grain of sand in a vast beach of history.
The first problem for any thinking subject (and Egoism) is the other. However, the fact of the other does not disprove Individualism or Egoism, but it does start to put it in to question. Which come first? The ego or society? Any one ego can be removed and you will still have society. So, society in this sense is greater then any individual.
You realize yourself as an individual with the help of and in relation to other individuals, other thinking subjects. Existentialist may say that an individual can only come to some things on his own, like meaning of death and goal in life. They are wrong the individual's ideas of life and death come from other individuals, many of his ideas come language which he gets from the people around him. With out the collectives the individual would never be able to take a look in to this, the fact that Existentialist exist proves this. Individuals develop collectively in preexisting communities. To ignore the other one would give themselves to false knowledge, and with out the other they could not exist. The subject can only develop his consciousness by engaging with civil-society, and then the state (which exist inside the subject). The subject must engage in something like the master-slave dialectic because to opt out is not an option, and it is how consciousness develops it self (note I disagree partly with the role Hegel places on the slave).
The last main problem I have with the text is its view of Social Darwinism. Redbeard views Darwinism is just pure domination over the weak. As the Anarchist Peter Kropotkin pointed out mutual aid plays a role in evolution. The only credit Redbeard this is in a line like "Blessed is the man whose foot is swift to serve a friend, he is a friend indeed", which is followed up by "Cursed are the organizers of Charities, they are propagators of plagues". Redbread even attacks Kropotkin by name in the book. Kropotkin may over assume the role of mutual aid. Redbeard may over assume the role of domination. For evolution to have its proper character, the golden mean must be found.
Now, moving back to you. Violence is a human need, and must be expressed. Nietzsche has shown the problem with trying to remove just things from society in Beyond Good and Evil;
"To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIETY, it would immediately disclose what it really is—namely, a Will to the DENIAL of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;—but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal—it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy—not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it LIVES, and because life IS precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter, people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which 'the exploiting character' is to be absent—that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. 'Exploitation' does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life—Granting that as a theory this is a novelty—as a reality it is the FUNDAMENTAL FACT of all history let us be so far honest towards ourselves!"
The other problem that Nietzsche doesn't get into is that of emotion. Here we may turn to Ernst Jünger. That is an emotion should not be viewed by what emotion it is, but rather by its intensity. Joy isn't any better the sorrow, and pleasure isn't better then pain. Liberalism lacks this understanding of emotion.
One may understand Schmitt with what we may call this "will-to-power logic", and I have yet to read Schmitt so I will not say anything about that. However, Spengler does a great job putting the will to power in a historical and political context. Spengler explains how everything from the idea of Fatherland to Socialism comes out of the will to power. Here I think he does a better job then Nietzsche ever could, however if talk about the will to power in the ontological or all most any other context Nietzsche is far better. It is not "universal metaethics" that has separated us from savagery, but it was the will to power.
I am 100% against liberal morality. However, ethics formed man's behavior even when he was in the jungle and can't be removed from his mind. So the question is what ethics are best to instill in the people? This question is relative to your goal.
@lain_os @Jack @orekix now im unlettered in philosophy but ill take a crack at this. jungers logic sounds like casuistry. emotions aren’t essential things manifested with varying intensity. they exist as discrete nuerochemical phenomena for the purpose of (excuse the teleological language) fulfilling a function, whether vestigial or salubrious contemporaneously. “sorrow isnt any better than joy”, better how? certainly not subjectively. I agree with the assessment that one cannot exist without the other though. as for “will to power”, what even is that? thats not a rhetorical question. but one cannot on the one hand say the individual is nothing while appraising such an egoistic principle as the foundation of civilization. or are you talking about the will to power as a system and a hierarchy? as for universal metaethics. now I want to believe in the liberal morality of natural rights but thats not what im referring to. im not referring to any particular ethical theory, just prosocial ethics in general, and the belief that it should be applied universally. im not saying axiomatic morality (or even inductively derived morality) exists but it is humans regarding it as such that separates us from beasts. morality based on the caprices of selfish utility is, in my consideration, no morality at all.
@georgia @Jack @orekix Will to power is simple. First, a organism will seek life, then increase it's power. Will to power is the drive to increase power. To give an example a tree seeks to grow and expand, taking resources away from other plants. This can be and often is used in an egoistic way, but it doesn't have to be. In fact the you have an egoistic argument to not behave egoistically, and it's as simple as "strength in numbers".
The individual is irrelevant, and this is easy to demonstrate even without getting Hegelian context I like to work with. You can kill anyone and assuming he isn't someone of power society will work fine.
The Roman Empire may be seen as an almost embodiment of will to power in a political context. In Rome such an egoistic understanding was next to impossible to hold.
A morality built off selfish utility is a morality. When we talk about morality we are talking about values, and why in which we come to prescriptions. "Rape is good", "AIDs is good" and "Murder is good" can be perfectly logical in a moral context. To show you we can start with the idea that humans harm the environment and the planet. If humans harm the environment that's bad then anything that lowers them that is good: race increases the suicide rate and so is good, then AIDs and murder increases death and so is good. Not only that here it isn't a selfish utility, but a selfless love for the planet. It is a selfless love for the planet that bring out the Linkolaian Humanocidal Earth Police. Here I can point to Linkola's justification for the Holocaust;
"We even have to be able to re-evaluate Fascism and recognize the service that philosophy made 30 years ago when it freed the Earth from the weight of tens of millions of overeating Europeans, six million of them by an almost ideally environment-preserving means."
Jünger makes perfect sense. Will is what creates reality, and will in affected by emotions.
The individual is irrelevant, and this is easy to demonstrate even without getting Hegelian context I like to work with. You can kill anyone and assuming he isn't someone of power society will work fine.
The Roman Empire may be seen as an almost embodiment of will to power in a political context. In Rome such an egoistic understanding was next to impossible to hold.
A morality built off selfish utility is a morality. When we talk about morality we are talking about values, and why in which we come to prescriptions. "Rape is good", "AIDs is good" and "Murder is good" can be perfectly logical in a moral context. To show you we can start with the idea that humans harm the environment and the planet. If humans harm the environment that's bad then anything that lowers them that is good: race increases the suicide rate and so is good, then AIDs and murder increases death and so is good. Not only that here it isn't a selfish utility, but a selfless love for the planet. It is a selfless love for the planet that bring out the Linkolaian Humanocidal Earth Police. Here I can point to Linkola's justification for the Holocaust;
"We even have to be able to re-evaluate Fascism and recognize the service that philosophy made 30 years ago when it freed the Earth from the weight of tens of millions of overeating Europeans, six million of them by an almost ideally environment-preserving means."
Jünger makes perfect sense. Will is what creates reality, and will in affected by emotions.
@namark @orekix @georgia @Jack What ever you say my dude
