X. Myth

WE HAVE HARDLY any sort of excuse for existing, that is, those of us who spend our time crafting thought into words and placing words in a medium, one which differs according to our time and place. In our present time, we think it no higher charity than to pay people for this, but what we have paid people for, like Charles Dickens, is the production of text, rather than of actual content.

IT GOES ON further than this; even if money were not exchanged, if honors were exchanged, in a society which primarily operated upon the establishment of credit in an intangible way, we would run the same risk. Carlyle says rightly that the purpose of eloquent writing is not to produce text, but rather, that if someone has something to say, to be able say it in the most excellent way possible. It would as though when we wanted men to produce more blackberries we asked for mere blackberry-flavor; and then are startled at what ingredients are employed to produce it.

IF THERE IS ANY EXCUSE for our avocation, it must certainly be the construction of myth. Myth tends to fill the unknown spaces and arrange them, giving shape to the darkness of the abyss. Where histories are unknown, myth substitutes; where sciences, mythological explanation, and so on. This creates a confusion to us, who have collected a lot of information on the past (history) and on the operation of natural forces ('science'). It seems to us that since these voices speak, myth ought to be silent.

BUT YET HERE IS A MYTH itself, that is, the story that someone discovered the scientific method (perhaps it was Francis Bacon) and after that, we entered an age of knowledge rather than one of superstition. The concept of revolution - revolt being the activity - applied to science, a process involving very little armed force and a lot of writing, some argumentation, and much money passing around, should have been to us a tell-tale sign that we were reading a myth. It is not necessarily untrue that this was a revolt, but rather, the facts alone reveal no revolt, we must therefore ask if a revolt is indeed the apt way to tell the story.

MUCH ABOUT THIS AFFAIR inclines us to believe that this myth is the most pejorative of myths, that is, an elaborate falsehood designed to deceive so that a theft may occur. We are told of some pagans that had a statue that seemed to eat food that was offered to it. In fact what happened was certain men snuck in a secret entrance during the night and stole the food offered to the god. The Hecatomb was at least offered in the open and eaten there; the showbread was given to the priests as a sacrifice to God (and because they had no land of their own) - and so on.

I WILL NOT GO INTO the details of this particular deception. I will but say that if we should discover that Bacon did not invent a new method, and that he was in fact nothing more than a paid shill whose views helped someone politically, whilst better scientists labored elsewhere and built the knowledge which we really make use of to bend nature to our will, we ought to reject him and this myth as false. But in our era, myth is itself a synonym for false, is it not?

THAT IS OF COURSE not true; myths we have heard may be confirmed or busted - how can a myth be confirmed? It is this - a myth is a conceit or a claim about events which is unsubstantiated or perhaps unable to substantiated. Axioms and priors cannot be proven, but are necessary to make use of information. We can at least have some satisfaction that if the use of those axioms produces good results that there is some truth to them. It does not make their truth unlimited, only they are often not specific about the scope of their applicability. Myths are axioms or priors in the form of stories, which truth we have already heard and recognized in a way of trying to justify the activity of more primitive groups - telling stories that seem obviously false to us.

IN FACT, IN ORDER for a history or a science to be useful, it must be part myth. That is, it must arrange the information in a way that is useful to us. The only way for it to really be useful to us is by being, in some way, true. Certainly it was true to some extent that the idol ate the food, but obviously much truer that Christ ate the fish and honeycomb. Deception is the first principle of war, and a society which operates primarily by deceiving its own members risks war on itself, and for what reason?

WE BELIEVE THAT WE must have proof before we believe, which precludes the possibility of myth. This is also a myth, since belief itself pertains to 'that which has not yet been seen' and therefore if we are believing still and yet have already seen (instead of simply knowing, since it is now been established as fact) we wonder what sort of 'belief' we mean? Is it helpful to describe this as belief at all? Or is it better to describe this as a society of unbelief? What really is the story here?

RATHER IT IS PROBABLY better to describe this as a society of deception, since its central mythos is that it has no mythos; its religion that it has no religion, its violence that it does no violence, and so forth. It certainly, like the Hindu, believes with utter sincerity the things that it believes, but it has, due to cunning, chosen carefully the things which it believes in order to protect the spirit of belief from doubt.

FASHION RULES IT, for the fashion of disbelief is important to its value system. Thus it must pick things of weight to disbelieve, for the sake of status. It has numerous myths told about its supposedly defeated enemies, while it decries its enemies speaking any word that could possibly be construed as false or at least, be unprovable. This is the nature of intellectual sovereignty, and the question that remains for it is not to be powerless but rather to be true.

DOES OUR LORD ESCHEW myth? No - he constructs particular fictions, true fictions called parables. His parables are notable for often containing counter-factuals such as a man giving to his sons their inheritance long before his death, but his parables tell us important truths about spirituality and about anthropology. Anthropology is very descriptive indeed, when in the hands of the one who made man.

IN ANY CASE we are often told - it is believed that Christianity has run its course. Something 'next' is at hand. But I tell you the truth; the Truth cannot run its course. What has run its course is this belief which has no belief; Christians were for certain carried up in it, citing our canon as inerrant, or perhaps treating 'In The Beginning' as a scientific text. How had they not bought into this myth? No one knows what happened in the beginning - in the same way we know what happened last week.

EVEN IF WE are to collect facts about the world in the far past, bits and pieces we can reason to or happen to observe because of the conflation of space and time - we will still need a story to make sense of them. No, I tell you the truth - it is that system which believed it had discovered ancient men were cave-men that hit their women on the heads with clubs, that believed that if you asked enough men you would come to even truths that no man possessed? Yes, it is that system that is dead.

AND WE WHO WRITE MYTH ARE THE PROPHETS OF ITS DEMISE.

IX. Prolongation

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that man exists, like all creatures exist, to prolong himself. To the extent that this is true, it is also true that there is no such thing as 'humanity' or even 'the species'. Obviously, in the world of the survival drive alone, there are no distinctions other than 'self' and 'other'. Some flexibility is permitted for prolongation, as a child, another creature, becomes part of 'self' as 'my seed' or 'my progeny.'

IT IS ARGUABLE that progressivism as a whole is reducible to nothing other than the process of extending self abstractly until the self perishes; but this is merely a way to diagram or measure it as 'progress'. Another process whereby 'self' expands to merge with 'world' is decomposition; the end result is identical.

CERTAIN RELIGIONS OF THE EAST are amenable to this, even if in practice they are counter to many of its actual practices such as intense vice, because they see the self as ultimately an illusion, anyway. The reasons for this extend logically from the Eternity placed in the heart of man combined with his circumstances and his native tendencies (a cumulative result of this pattern.) Man must be immortal, but dies; this paradox alone tells you more about what kind of religions may be practiced than most contemporary descriptions of religion as power (which is power scapegoating religion.)

THIS RAISES AN IMPORTANT QUESTION, which is, how far may the self actually extend? What do extensions of the self mean - are there only two categories or are there more? Is there more to the self than just 'me'? It is clear that if you start from an egalitarian metaphysic -- that is -- the idea that all things are natively equal except some distortion be introduced against nature (a religious idea), then you must eventually take issue with the concept that I exist, or that anything other than I exists. The equalism must be muted by some countervailing force, which either means it is not the absolute principle underlying things (the theory of everything) or it is one of more than one principle, introducing multiplicity as somehow fundamental. Without this limitation, equalism or egalitarianism must eventually flatten all things out, including, somehow, the round earth itself.

IT IS CLEAR THAT THERE IS A HIERARCHY, which is to say 'a sacred source' and all that comes from that distinction - and that all things exist as a complex order. Hierarchy itself implies therefore, 'en arche ton ho logos' - in the beginning there was the Word. Man wishes to be immortal as his source is immortal - and his medium - the medium of any creature to some extent - is orthogonal to this drive.

IN SPEAKING OF PROLONGATION, we often talk about one axis of distinction - r versus K. r-strategies focus on filling space quickly and cheaply as a means of prolongation, whereas K focuses on effectively keeping the space held. The strategies reinforce themselves over time, as for instance men can relatively act r-selected, but can never produce hundreds of offspring at once the way a frog or spider might. It is the case that however r-selected a human population might be (such as American blacks in the cities) there is a limitation due to the massive foundation of prior iterations wherein men survived best by a relatively K-strategy, this would indicate that a population which drops below the r-limit will become dysfunctional, possibly parasitic, and certainly doomed in any circumstance but a relative paradise (but might be outcompeted in that environment.)

THIS RELATES TO THE SELF in that r-selection disperses it more, making the prolongation less 'self' and more 'likeness' or 'image' of self, whereas K-selection can drive towards the other extreme of complete identification. In the former the risk is the dilution of what is being prolonged, and in the latter the risk is that any loss halts the prolongation. In theory, sexual selection itself prevents - or should prevent - pure narcissism in the long run because it requires two individuals and therefore must output a minimum of two individuals to maintain a population, required for prolongation.

IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS that the endgame for hyper-K selected men is to have themselves cloned. One goes in, one comes out. Adaptation might be able to be finessed with technology, which is to say, technology that is external to the body. (We are already equipped for this.) The cost-benefit ought to be analyzed, but due to the religious aspect of prolongation, the value of self-continuance may outweigh any cost. Such may be the end of individualism taken as an absolute.

THUS THE RANGE FOR MEN lies somewhere between American blacks, who for example, might be one of 20 children of a single man with several (perhaps even up to 20) women with whom he is not married. The other extreme of this is the example of Maureen Dowd who will likely never marry, who because of various traits both natural and acquired, cannot reproduce. For there to continue being a Maureen Dowd in the world -- ? There cannot be, unless she gets herself cloned. Her K function is perfectly maximized to the point of not yielding any ground to a man or a fetus. For a likeness of her to persist, someone else has to produce an extra child.

EVEN THOSE WHO HAVE ONE CHILD are pushing the edge of this K-selection limit, but whether this is a problem or not depends on the range of children produced and therefore the average. So one can support a certain number of Maureen Dowds and Singletons provided there is a range of more r-selected families on the other end, that are enough like them to produce someone similar to them. This is one reason why the problem of low birth rates cannot be fixed with immigration; unless the emigres are a former diaspora, such as might be the case with Jews returning to Israel or Irish to Ireland, the people will be qualitatively different for better or worse, and thus will be replacing and not prolonging that population.

ASSIMILATION PROVIDES A MIDDLE GROUND where a continuation between the old stock and the new stock can be had, though it will be changed slightly by absorbing the immigrants. The similarity of the immigrants to the old stock gives us the safe level of absorption. But the rate will be below 5%, meaning a really insufficient birth rate cannot be overcome by assimilation.

THE SECOND AXIS of prolongation strategy is height. s/T strategies refer to short and tall strategies respectively. The obvious relation to plants here should be noted; plants that get closer to sunlight are most benefited, but there are costs associated with being taller, such as heat dispersion, getting eaten by herbivores, etc, that affect whether being tall or short is the best way for the species to continue. Even among a single species strategy may differ under difference circumsntances: violets in a bright field will grow small leaves and be so low to the ground that a lawnmower cannot cut them, but in the shade amongst plants they will grow larger leaves and may grow up to a foot in height (or more.)

EVEN SOMETHING LIKE LEAF SIZE has to do with s/T strategy, larger leaves are more costly, but in the right circumstances beat small leaves hands down. Some plants have reduced the disadvantages of large leaves by forming leaflets - a leaflet getting attacked will be less harmful to the overall vascular system of the leaf. A plant which is by default invested heavily in T strategy is called a tree. Simple plants like moss are masters of s-strategy, and have prolonged themselves from time immemorial because they are so low to the ground.

AMONG MEN THERE ARE SUCH STRATEGIES, but they are subtle. While there may be other examples of s/T strategy, the one that comes to mind is linearity. In defining the 'line' (and it has to be one and not two, unless both lines are important enough) of genetic descent, the descendent is predisposed to a certain identity and therefore a certain loyalty. In general the T strategy is patrilinearity, practiced by most majorities and anyone in a position of strength, whose sons are likely to be prominent. The s strategy is matrilinearity, which means that even if you produce no leaders, your daughters may marry such prominent figures and therefore preserve your line, your identity, and your prolongation.

THIS ALLOWS US TO MAKE A POSTULATE. The s strategy would therefore make daughters more favorable than sons, since identity will be transferred through them, up to an obvious limit. At that limit, the culture must dissolve since the leadership capacity of the male will be gone entirely. A minority might slowly insinuate itself into a population this way; the real carrying capacity/size of that group would be determined by 2x its number of sons, but if it produced extra daughters (meaning it produced more daughters who married and had children than sons) it would slowly spread its identity into the host culture, provided it kept up with the nominal birthrate.

LIKEWISE, THE REVERSE IS ALSO TRUE, that T-strategy would make having more reproducing sons favorable, up to a certain point. Generating excess males is always dangerous, and the limit of excess males would be determined by eligible non-members of the group who are female. A social group which is 95% of the nation would still need to produce a near even quantity of sons and daughters: if we have 100 representative families each producing about 2 children, 95 of these are the majority. If they produced 98 sons and 92 daughters, their extra sons could marry the daughters of the 5 minority families and integrate them into that identity, provided the minority identity was not matrilineal or if it was, the majority identity was stronger. In the example, one son would be without a mate, assuming the minorities had 1 son, 1 daughter per family average.

THE LIMITATION ON THIS OF COURSE, is clear. If one had all sons, one would have to import foreign females. This would also be the case if all native females were unfit for reproduction either because they took vocations that prohibited it, or because they were made unfit by some cultural or genetic degeneration.

IN GENERAL, A GROUP THAT IS INHERENTLY MATRILINEAL is a permanent minority and will always be thrown out of power even when it gets it. The inability to switch into a patrilineal mode in times of strength would make it always parasitic, even in situations where realistically, it had the capacity to become a majority. For instance, it would seem most likely that Israeli Jews will cease being matrilineal at some point, having no need for an s-strategy. American Blacks have been effectively rendered matrilineal by cultural degeneration, and between Europeans and Hispanics there is a conflict; both are patrilineal but the European stock on the whole and particularly among the elite has become the weaker stock and will be overtaken with present trends continuing, provided they do not mask a significant inner activity (such as devoutly religious Europeans far out-producing non-devout/non-religious Europeans and eventually becoming the majority within the majority.)

WE CAN POPULATE A DIAGRAM FOR OUR OWN VISUALIZATION.

    r/K     r      |     K
s/T 
 T       Hispanic  | European
 ------------------+------------
 s       Blacks    | Jews

WE MAY SPECULATE THAT GROUPS which have significantly different strategies, whether because of environment or genetics, will come into conflict. The degree of difference x the percentage of the unassimilated population = degree of conflict. Ergo, the small fraction of T/K American blacks get along quite well with Europeans, just as the s/K feminist Europeans would get along well with the Jews. T/s differentiations will likely create more conflict, particularly if they are binary like matrilineal vs. patrilineal.

THE ABILITY TO SWITCH STRATEGIES while keeping the core of the identity whole will be a key to the survival of human groups in the coming time. Until geography stabilizes again, expect chaos that requires resilience.

VII. Language

A PECULIARITY ARISES when we begin to talk about language. Subversion is a mode of thought for post-moderns, who while ceasing to believe in a utopian future as modern progressives had, still have it as a basic, faith-based assumption. "If we subvert what exists now, it will only move us to something better." Though they do not explicitly say this, the conscious subversiveness combined with the generic desire for the betterment of man leaves it as a reasonable conclusion.

ALL OF OUR TALK ABOUT LANGUAGE is designed to subvert - to undermine - our natural assumptions and beliefs about language. Some of this is intentional Hyperstition on the part of our enemies, but other of it is just regurgitation of misunderstood facts, or misunderstood science being interpreted through a subversive paradigm.

CONSIDER THE PHRASE, "the recipient determines the meaning of the message." This is either so trivial as to never need be mentioned (for how else will I, your interlocutor, discover your meaning, if I do not make some determination of what you meant to say?) or it is so subversive as to undermine the traditional function of language and the possibility of truth. It represents the quintessence of modern 'liberal arts' 'scholarship'. Restatement of trivial truisms in a way that allows acceptance of subversion.

DECONSTRUCTING DECONSTRUCTION is pointless; one does not shoot the enemy's gun, but the enemy, in the chest, since it's the easiest place to hit. Sundering weapons is a feat of duelists, and what works great in one-on-one rhetoric does not necessarily represent truth or fact or anything useful to anyone outside of that moment.

INSTEAD OF DECONSTRUCTING IT, we will explain it. Deconstruction is a tool used to subvert meanings hostile to one's own ideology or beliefs. In the same way that cutting the body of a man apart robs him of his life, so does cutting apart the meanings of words, phrases, stories, and so forth, if done to dismember. We should note that 'dismember' is a kind of strange opposite to 'remember'. Dissection of dead things gains knowledge; dissection of live things is execution.

IT HAS ALREADY BEEN SAID WELL that meaning is discerned by using convention, and that convention helps us discover (or determine as best we can) the intended meaning of the message. The word 'determines' is used in an ambiguous way, since it might imply total determination; as though the recipient is creating the meaning out of nothing. A person who does this is often given another name: insane.

DECONSTRUCTING THESE is pointless, instead what must happen is the utter destruction of the majority of Western thought since the Enlightenment, since the sewage rule applies: A quart of wine with a drop of sewage is sewage. This principle was once stated as, "An ounce of leaven leavens the whole lump" (though without a necessarily negative connotation.)

THE OPPOSITE OF DECONSTRUCTION is synthesis, and if your mind works the way mind does, it rapidly makes connections between disparate things, 'to remember that which one never knew." Plato had interpreted this to be proof of the pre-existence of souls, but it is only proof of the general underlying pattern of things in which souls, as well as physical bodies, participate.

IN SYNTHESIS WE DO SOMETHING ELSE, which can go wrong. When it goes wrong it is called 'syncretic' - a hasty gluing of things together, a chimera. In Synthesis we try to validate the truth in each disparate thing, while combining them into something greater. Synthetic can also be a byword, referring to things that are unnaturally combined, another word for chimerical, alloyed, or artificial.

THE POINT HOWEVER, is that some synthetic things are created by first deconstructing the natural things - and then unnaturally combining them as parts to form a whole. In poetry this is called 'a mixed metaphor'. The proper method of synthesis is like the conception of a child - the two haploids form a zygote. The haploids are, as it were, natural parts. We look for the natural parts and natural seams, tearing and stitching, always looking to preserve wholes. Haploids are thus half-wholes, wholes that are designed to be synthesized into new wholes.

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT COMPUTER LANGUAGE, we talk about it deconstructively. We act as if 1's and 0's are actually computer language. No computer reads 1's and 0's, no more than a man being reads pure contrast on a plane. For the man, the light and dark (they may be inverted, so long as their contrast is not removed) combine in two dimensional spaces to form letters, which combine in one-dimensional strings to form words, phrases, language. In like manner, the computer does not read 0's and 1's directly, but groups of them which form instructions. Thus computers have language just the same as men do, it is just much simpler and is on a different substrate, but its basic principle is still the contrast of light and dark, high and low, sound and silence.

BECAUSE ITS LANGUAGE is so simple, the computer is able to quickly determine the meaning of the messages being sent, and respond to them with its own messages, such as doing additions, multiplications, skips, etc. The computer is completely natural; it does not deliberate or form opinions about the messages, but immediately responds. This immediacy itself is the source of most of man's trouble with computers; the computer cannot respond to ambiguity, so it either automatically treats the ambiguous as a clear statement of something or other, or the man is forced to disclose the ambiguity based on incomplete information. The computer cannot form opinion, so it cannot deliberate for the man. The man must tell it how to deliberate, but it has a problem on the basic level of being perfectly trusting and natural with its interpretation of its language.

WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE THIS because the computer is the CPU in this case, which only interacts with us indirectly. But the fundamental problem persists. That is, how to make a computer unnatural, when it is acting in perfect accord with its nature, often to its detriment?

WE HAVE SYNTHESIZED LANGUAGE back together; now 'man's' and 'computers'' language are one again. Computers are a species of animal, very tiny and made of silicon (and whatever else we make of them of.) It is an animal for whom its only motion is thought, and the content of that thought is language. The medium of its messages is electricity. (Though it can be light.) Knowing what an animal is, we were able to construct one. Once we know what Intelligence is, we will be able to construct one. The first question that needs to be asked is 'what is an intelligence' or at least, 'what is intelligence'? Without this answer you will not be able to discover the path to creating one.

LANGUAGE SERVES as one method to give form to thought, though we often mistake thoughts for language. Language is an expression of information - to in-form requires intent, or will. That will's operation is given, as the computer is given the limited will to respond to messages. Our will is given by the one who made us, to do what it is we must needs do. We have a capacity for freedom of will, which is to say, unlike the computer, we can originate a message. Whether this is really true or not has been the subject of debate; whether the brain is the mind or simply a substrate for its operation.

INFORMATION is a sort of 'rage to order the sea' information is neither pattern nor noise; randomness is not more 'information' than pure pattern; pure pattern is not more information than noise. PI contains no information in its numbers, the numbers are just a digest. The information IS PI itself; the ratio of the diameter of the circle to its circumference. It represents symbolically the natural roughness that exists between synthesized systems; in this case, the radial and the cartesian. The radial and the cartesian remain distinct - and it is unknown as to whether we will ever be able to actually unify them.

THE POINT OF LOOKING AT number-noise like the roughness of PI's tail is to destroy language - if Shakespeare is just one of an infinite number of possible combinations of letters, then it has no meaning in the sense of information; no will in-formed it. Whether I decide to assign a meaning to it or not is not meaningful, since the point of decoding the message is to discover, not simply to decide. The intent here is to destroy the other in language, which induces the desired state - alienation - which requires the desired cure - ideology and the uniform state.

BE CAREFUL TO ONLY point this gun at your enemies - but do remember to point it. If you do not fight, you will be overcome.

VI. Violence

WE ARE OFTEN ASKED as "Americans" why we restrict sexuality so much (we do not so much anymore) but allow 'violence'. In this particular framing, sex and violence are viewed as a pair parallel objects, or as items in a list on a ratings system. Why favor gruesome violence over sex, which everybody loves? Are these people sadistic?

AS DISCUSSED BEFORE 'sex' is obviously a charged subject. There is good reason why Muslims of the radical variety are truly afraid of it; they understand, even if not intellectually, its power to manipulate men. But sex is simply a species of violence; but what then is violence?

THE VIOLENT TAKE THE KINGDOM BY FORCE, the famous saying goes that causes "Pacifists" to immediately begin working their metaphor-engines overtime. Sex is a difficult word for us, because what originates as a description of our dimorphism turns into anything somehow relating to the ramifications of that dimorphism regarding its role in reproduction. Violence seems an even harder word; as to us it suggests Moses striking instead of tapping the rock; violence is to us by definition an excess of motion and vigor, regardless of what our dictionaries say.

BUT NATURE SO CALLED IS VIOLENT, and if we are to take sex advice from Bonobos we may as well take violence advice from Eagles. While not known for being correct or particularly sane, Nietzsche is very honest on this point: if one is to look merely at nature for one's morals as the Romantics did, why not pick and choose what YOU want, not what a watered-down form of post-Christianity chooses by 'self evidence'? You can choose to be dominant and powerful, and most of all, violent. Or are Bonobos right while Eagles are wrong? What about the species that commit what would be for men, rape?

IT IS NOT MY INTEREST to seem as though I am trying hard to 'rescue' violence as a concept, while making sure that I do not excuse violent crimes. The activity exists and others may look to its ramifications. Has our morality gotten out of hand? We must look to the thing itself to see if this is so.

ONE POINT that seems to gall Christians is the idea that somehow the God of the Old Testament was harsh and judgmental (the 'father') while that of the New Testament was nice and merciful. This distinction is heresy. The God of the Old Testament is the Son, who is revealed in the flesh in the New. We appeal to authority on this issue, since the text by itself could be interpreted multiple ways. Here is an exercise: read a prophet, say Joel, and write down your thoughts. Come back in two years and do the same thing. The self-evident meaning will be different.

THE COMBINATION of violence and mercy is not a mistake; where we read 'spare the rod, spoil the child', do we think that violence is not part of discipline (the rod)? The rod bruises and breaks, but does not kill. The rod still is violence. All weapons that exist are violent tools turned to war. A society that automatically considers any violence 'excess' is a society full of dissipation, as ours is. Barbarism was recognized first not by a people who were 'civilized' in the sense of the Eloi - non-violent, but by people who had learned to channel and sublimate their violence looking on those who could not.

LET US PROPOSE THAT VIOLENCE is natural to men. It is also notable that sexuality generally begins as the male being provoked to pursue the female and couple with her. These base, core activities all involve violence. This of course is the reason why we are opposed by the Left; they recognize the violence in our instinct and wish to remove it. But they have already, in a hyper-pious way, defined not merely wrathful and excessive violence as sin, but any violence at all.

TO GET AROUND THE PROBLEM of humans being naturally violent, they create a concept called 'consensual actions' in which it is thought you can remove the passive person by making them actively choose whatever it is, you have somehow made the violence -- not violence. In reality, human wills are not nearly as free as consensualists idealize, and consent can be coerced, especially in normally passive parties.

THIS RELATES TO THEORIES of oppression, which seem to be related to feminism, wherein the sublimated violence of the male towards the female becomes the definition of sin, the sin which keeps the woman from the promised land of freedom. This freedom then would be the ability to have nothing inflicted upon one that one did not choose. This is not the male definition of freedom.

BUT BEING VIOLENTLY PURSUED is inherent to the woman, and her concern with her personal attractiveness is related to her basic understanding of value, which arises from biology itself. It is that what is most value is what is most worth taking by force and risking violence to possess. Eve's sin is tied up in this, of course.

HYPERGAMY is the slightly perverted alteration of this, wherein instead of passively accepting the value God or 'nature' has assigned her, the woman actively seeks to inflate her value not merely by making herself more beautiful, but by trying to get the men with the most power to violently pursue to pursue her. A king could take a whole nation but he took this woman? That is validation of value.

VIOLENCE IS ALSO necessary to right wrongs; and we accept that these wrongs are necessarily caused by the errors of men. But since the natural world is itself both innocent and violent, as are our own children, violence is necessary to confront it until it can be mastered. Christ's walking on water must be understood in part this way; that he could command the water to act as land and it did. Man would have no need for the violence of paddling and sailing if he too was master of the waters in this fashion.

GOD OF COURSE applies violence to man to restrain and instruct him; "I bring not peace, but the sword," the Master says. If we quote from Christ in the right context, we will find that he was no pacifist, but rather avoided both sex and violence because he, being master, had little need for either. Those who think he might have had children are earthly-minded. God needs no human children to prolong himself; he is the source of Prolongation. He came to have violence, which he himself instituted, inflicted upon himself, to complete that work he started in Adam. Christ was no unfortunate victim of state violence. The cross was itself a weapon.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION is almost the definition of creation itself; to witness the creation of any object on the level at which the work actually happens is to see a lot of violence. Human births are violent. The question always is not whether something is violent or not, but whether the ends that violence is put to are realizable or worthy, in addition to the side-effects of the violence. Intent is important, but meaning well without understanding the ramifications of action does not abrogate consequence even if it makes forgiveness easier.

WE HAVE A FEAR that if we see violence, like human sexuality, for what it is, we will realize that some people we think are evil, were correct. We are plagued by moral weakness, for our morality is based on a form of inaction called niceness. To be perfect is to be inert like helium; It would also require us to make judgments, which is to risk judgment itself, if wrongly made. The tragedy of error is to be avoided by being classed outside of possible actions.

RESTRAINT ITSELF IS VIOLENCE, though a sublimated form of it. The necessary restraint to make people behave nice, that is coming to the USA, will undo it, since that restraint itself cannot be nice, being violent. The way around this is to 'dehumanize' the subjects of the violence, as is sometimes done in war, and is what terms like 'racist', 'homophobe', 'sexist' et al, represent. If reactionaries had an iota of the cultural clout that we are believed to have, sexism would have already been used the way racism originally was, "volkisch" - meaning folkish, according to one's own kind. In short, a man might be overheard being complimented on his sexism, being very careful to avoid feminine activities while being restrained and refined in his masculine activities. This dehumanization is justified as quid-quo-pro - homosexuals feel dehumanized by the disgust most people feel towards homosexual acts, and so on. Some of dehumanization is just the natural ramifications of persons who fall outside of someone's Dunbar's number, now needing to be abstracted to be remembered.

WE CAN SEE THAT all must develop a kind of holy violence, as all must have a holy dread. The wrong that exists in the world from human error, and the struggle against nature in our limitation require it. This does not mean all men are to be violent; for instance, women are less suited to violence in general. Priests should not be violent. We would be in error if we thought, "if priests aren't violent, then violence must be unholy." Because a clergyman does not disrobe in public, does that make being naked unholy? In the process of trying to understand the world scientifically, we have applied inorganic thinking (thinking that works with inorganic parts of the cosmos) to organic things, whereas the ancients tended to apply the organic thinking to the inorganic things. The singularization or simplification process which scientific hypothesization often involves can do unnecessary violence to tradition, like drugs often do unnecessary violence to other parts of the human body when used as treatment.

OBVIOUSLY, KNOWING THE END of man helps to understand the purpose of violence, and understanding his nature helps us place limits on its side-effects to both men and their world, but to also know how to properly use the threat of it as a defense. Violence is glorious, obviously, but also dangerous; a world devoid of violence for us, as we are, would be a world capable of only one kind of violence: self-annihilation.

V. Sex

NOW THAT we have dealt with sidelining the moral passions of the modern age, or the three great follies of the revolution, we should speak of other topics that are far more uncomfortable and that no conservative religious person will ever dare speak of. To speak of these topics would either be proof of being reactionary or being a monastic (and therefore free to be ridiculed for having truly extreme views.)

SEX IS a topic you will hear a lot about - but not really. Most of what we would speak of regarding human sexual relations is either enforcement of taboo or exhortation towards chastity. Now, I have no interest in removing taboos or undermining chastity. Far from it, instead, I intend to relate some very extreme words about such things, which will hopefully illuminate, 'darkly', the subject matter.

HUMAN SEX is a biological fact - even any idea of an axis of 'sexedness' or 'genderedness' presupposes a binary male and female for its fundamental categories. Such efforts are merely an attempt to confuse sex and sexuality with the various levels of 'gender' or what might be called 'genderedness'. As I recall, BTAF once tried to theorize a third sex, but that's stuff I read in college when I was interested in prurient literature.

ARISTOPHENES has a strange theory of gender and sex, perhaps the strangest. His belief was that humans were originally joined in pairs, and that three pairings existed: male/male, female/female and male/female. At some point, the gods broke them up, but they still feel drawn to either their original 'mate' or one similar to them. This is the first time I can think of in history of there being a 'general theory of sexual orientation' and all general theories of sexual orientation that follow it are just about as credible.

ON THE PURELY SEXUAL LEVEL, there is only male/female sexuality. This is because any use of the term 'sexual' to not refer to the relationship between the opposite sexes is metaphorical; so homosexuality is not in the same class of terms as sexuality and heterosexuality is redundant. Sexedness is about the configuration of the same part of human biology into a complementary pair - the 'genitals' whose purpose is unification. If you consider other sexed things - like plugs - you'll recognize that plugs are more properly referred to being 'sexual' than a homosexual couple.

THE REASON FOR THIS CONFUSION is simple; since same-sex couplings involve the same parts used in actual sexuality, and many of the same actions associated with real couplings, they are metaphorically granted the term 'sexuality'. The same confusion has extended to marriage, love, and soon virginity. This homo-sex is rightly condemned as a perversion, as it involves purposeful misuse of the functions (such as the orgasm) of real sexuality. All virtue involves pleasure, for sure, but fornication is - if anything in deeper truth - the attachment of the pleasure of virtue to vice.

CHASTITY ALSO has a deeper meaning, that of abstaining from to prevent the incidence of fornication. Chastity's role is to prevent the miswiring of pleasure. Granted, chastity alone is not enough, since it is merely a negation. Negations leave a vacuum which as we understand, our nature abhors. The utility of chastity is thus to prevent the filling of the space with disorder.

SEXUALITY is just physical, however. We begin to think and understand 'genderedness' with words (it seems) - words describing sexed beings start by picking up the attitude of that sex. But, 'genderedness' is not a general category outside of language. To pair masculinity and femininity on a higher level as 'gender' makes it appear that they are properties ascribed-to but not inherent-to a substance; a 'ship' being feminine in gender doesn't make it female. Its femininity thus can be dismissed as a fancy (after all, some other group of people make all ships masculine!)

THE IMPORTANCE OF SEXUALITY on the spiritual level is that it maps theology into anthropology. We as Orthodox understand the cross (sacrifice) and the unity in the church to be imaged by the nuptial (sexual) union of male and female and thus connected to the type of love the Greeks called 'eros'. This is a difficulty for materialists, who assume that the physical is primary adn thus we must be thinking of bumping uglies. Rather, it's the copulation we do (or do wrongly) that is an image of something metaphysical, which is revealed in the Cross and in the union of God and Man in the Church.

MALE AND FEMALE are two differing but same substances - inherently different in an unbridgeable way (we think differently, we work differently, we even move differently) but joined by the human nature. In the same way, the godman is inherently different from us in that he is God, but is also inherently the same as he is Man. There really isn't anything else that needs to be said about the subject -- and since eros is a love that involves jealousy, it's obvious why God is jealous -- and why idols are adultery. It is of course not possible for there to be a real nuptial union between God and Man until the incarnation. And if there is no incarnation (as some believe) then there can be no union of God and Man and no real access to the Divine through man.

IT FOLLOWS FROM THIS that there is no 'copulation' in heaven. None at all. Christ affirms this to the materialist Jews who think to refute the resurrection by pointing out the absurdity of nuptial union with seven men when monogamy is the rule. So if you want to 'have sex' get it over with before the next world, though you may find that outside of its proper purpose it merely drags the mind down to earth. It's funny that way. The pleasure from it is the pleasure of virtue, but a greater virtue awaits beyond since our human coitus is but a shadow of real union.

THUS WE ORTHODOX affirm that the purpose of marriage is not simply to bear children, but to unify man and wife. Man does not control whether the womb is opened or not; but he does control whether he joins himself to his wife. For marriage actually is just this - the copulation of the man and woman together. Our ages of ceremony are to protect and direct this act whose pleasure is almost greater than any other. And for good reason, as we explained the central aim of man is his prolongation and his physical prolongation is through children. It's also notable that his psychosomatic prolongation is through another kind of union - making 'sexuality' the most dangerous and sacred aspect of human life, perhaps.

THE HIERARCHY IMPLIED in the god/man pair is also implied in the male/female pair. It was once thought long ago that Man was fundamentally male and that females were deformed males. (These theories go quite nicely along side Aristophenes' theories of sexual orientation.) From this point it was believed that male was the better of the two. As it turns out, proto-sexed humans are all technically female (it was sort of implied that it was the reverse) which throws a huge wrench into that theory entirely.

YOU MIGHT SAY to me, well, if your theory is metaphysical, you don't care about human gestation in deciding which of the two sexes is the 'higher' in the hierarchy! This is quite untrue. Even if we regard the physical as an emanation or shadow of the metaphysical, it still follows that there ought to be a correlation that we can discern. And it is this: since the male is spiritual and active, it is sensible that his gestation involves a fundamental transformation. It is the first of many self-transformations being male entails (and has, traditionally - consider rites of passage.)

THUS IT IS NOT so much that one sex is superior but rather that the male is primarily directed to the spiritual and active, while the female to the bodily and passive. The irony here is that women are better at suffering than men, since passivity -- passion -- is their forte. And what is life if not suffering? This also relates to the degree of self-giving required by the human female in gestation - far greater than most creatures. It is even such that falsely masculinized females regard the new human (fetus) as a parasite. To them it may be said, it's not your job to be a male. It's your job to be a female. As the apostle says, "She will be saved through birthgiving."

JIM HAS WRITTEN some theories regarding homosexuality, not on the metaphysical level but the physical - which are probably more erudite than I can offer regarding biology. One thing should be said however, and that is that because the purpose of the pleasure of union is to bind together, child sexual abuse, particularly the homo-sexual kind, confuses this process of union and sets the pleasure itself outside of its best and perhaps only intended place. After this it is not surprising that other forms of pleasure are ascribed to union (those involving the muscles of the gastrointestinal tract for instance) and what unions are regarded as real are simply those which involve some kind of sexualized pleasure. It is a positive feedback loop.

THUS THE AXIS of sexuality goes from 'sexual' to 'pansexual' and everything along the way is just stops along a path leading to the sexualization of everything, and the inclusion of all forms of pleasure into sexuality. Supposed bisexuality and homosexuality have telltale signs in them, that such persons involved often ape characteristics of the other sex; so you will have two females but one is masculine (and dominant) - or the proliferation of feminized men.

WE WILL JUST ASSUME that there are a variety of pleasures - the pleasure of domination, the pleasure of submission, the pleasure of female beauty, the pleasure of male beauty, and so on, and note that a fundamental lack of direction in terms of sexuality means these concepts can be attached in different ways that produce disorder. Binding them all is the physical pleasure, almost mechanical in nature, given to the real act itself.

THUS FEMINISTS, who cannot enjoy submitting normally (due to dominant/submissive ideology hacks), find it difficult to enjoy the regular act. Indeed, the difficulty given in both sexes enjoying the act in the same way is not mysterious; it is a secondary test of the union. That is to say, can both parties involved consider the other person's pleasure their own? If they can, they likely also can consider the other person's well-being their own. For some this process is simpler than others.

BUT ALL OF THIS is moot outside of the context of the male/female union. If you believe in some degree of intelligent design (as I do) you would have to regard all of this is a very sophisticated technology for the creation of higher-level entities. Because humans die, this process is coupled to that of creating more humans, making the prolongation of man center around the nuptial act. We should also regard it as profoundly realistic that the Christian idea is to understand the union of God and man through Jesus Christ as nuptial in nature.

THERE WAS A TIME when women were encouraged to imagine themselves having nuptials WITH Christ, which is if you think about it, insanely perverse, hedonistic and materialistic. The nature of the sex drive is that of a positive feedback loop, so feeding it with anything outside of the actual thing ("do not awaken desire before its time", the proverb goes) is bound to be pornographic and lead to fornication of some kind.

ALL OF THE TABOOS around sex are also misunderstood. In a sense, people have a very Manichean view of taboo and clean/unclean. While dirt seems to be a slam-dunk for being unclean, it's also true that swallowing bleach, a CLEANER, is inherently unclean. (It makes you sick.) Cleanliness thus is not so much about keeping the good things from the bad, but rather, not mixing things out of order. In this way, people often treat anything taboo as being taboo because it is inherently unclean. So in their folly they take modesty to mean that the sexual organs and thus by extension the act itself, to be somehow 'bad'.

BUT WE AS ORTHODOX cover the cup in which the body and blood of Christ are. It is hidden not because it is bad, but because it is OTHER. The female in particular has a naturally great beauty (even so more without clothes) so to prevent the mixing of sexual activity and everything else she in particular should be modest. Overmodesty can have the opposite effect of course, since mystery motivates as much as revelation. We have already demonstrated above that sexuality can devour all forms of pleasure and activity into itself; so overexpression of male and female sex can induce a feedback loop that is not controllable.

THUS WE CAN SAY that we Europeans in particular have women cover up the way we do because we regard her beauty as sacred, not because we regard it as unclean or bad. Those involved in Liberation (LIBERTY from below) only see walls as the chains of slavery, the wall between powerful and sacred things that should not mix is something they can not learn to understand.

SEX ALSO gives us the chance to think about sacredness in general, and all of its strange and hard to justify rules that nonetheless cause havoc if not kept in some form. There is much that we do not understand about order, either on the physical or the metaphysical plane; sexuality itself is an albatross about the neck of fallen man if he does not give serious respect to such concerns.

IV. Fraternity

THE LAST OF THE THREE FOLLIES is Fraternity. The promise given to the Revolutionary society was for all men - and firstly all "Frenchmen" - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The nationalistic society is presaged on all three follies. These follies are necessary because hyper-specialization breaks up the places where they had once settled; in the communities and families which were once organic but were broken down to form a larger, unitive body.

IN THIS WAY the heresy of Christianity that nationalism and all of the revolutionary societies and ideologies that followed it is clear; Christianity is first and foremost a fellowship, a fraternity of brethren. The concept that 'there is no x or y in Christ' must be understood in this fashion: for if there were male and female in Christ, no full fraternity would be possible, since no proper fraternity or mannerbund is ever co-ed.

CHRISTIANITY PROPOSES that the high priest or most respected elder stands in for Christ in the midst of the gathering of the brethren. There are brethren upon brethren; the top is the synod of bishops, which in the Western tradition became headed decisively by its only See: Rome. If the high priest is as Christ, then all the people gathered about him are the complete Church, regardless of where they are. This is the old model; the organic unity is around the local leader, who himself has a conciliar relationship with his brother leaders. (They cannot fulfill different roles as completely as the members of the local body can.)

THE CONCERN OF CERTAIN THINKERS was that society, like the council of bishops, was not organic enough; it was more mechanical. But to make the 'whole' or the church of churches completely organic requires breaking down the organic unity of the local churches. Though Rome created a sub-church, a higher organic grouping of Cardinals and the upper echelons, it never truly abolished the local organism. This is as far as a church can make concessions with the necessities of worldly authority and remain itself. Whether it has gone too far in this regard is not something I am capable of addressing rightly.

NOW THAT ORGANIC society is not organic, though all of its members are now units in reference to that high leadership, the national government. Whence fraternity? The Dunbar number tells us that in our biology, and as perhaps a function of our temporal and rational limitation, it is fixed at the local level. Fraternity outside of this scale is a fiction.

THE CHRISTIAN ORGANISM does not actually abolish sex, race or caste. It merely sets them aside in the context of its worship, where all human differences are as rubbish before the awesome chasm between man and God. For if Christianity had abolished them, what need would there be to remind the brethren that in Christ they were of no account?

ATTEMPTING TO RECONSTRUCT this true mannerbund and its paradoxical and psychosomatic character has beguiled the moral thinkers for ages. To really reconstruct it requires the creation of a religion, since aspects of our fellowship and our education are both religious by nature. But to have rejected it decisively to create it anew is, as Paul notes, grounds for being a transgressor. This transgressing is not of some particular legal decree but rather is the concept of transgressing justice itself; a concept revolutionaries began with affixing themselves to with ardor.

AND IF REVOLUTION AFFIXED ITSELF to justice but found that it in order to fulfill its justice, it must become unjust, it could only hope that its crimes would be forgotten by some further generation delivered from the unjust system it believed it overthrew only to re-create. Even this process of renunciation is a Christian theme, and they cannot rightly do it.

THE ORGANIC UNITY of mankind may be impossible on any level except the local; and if so, hierarchy is necessitated for any real fraternity to stretch across all of men. Fraternity is expressed in a paradox itself; that of the attraction of opposites and the attraction of the similar. Since man is complex, he may contain what Aristotle calls a contrary; something which differs on one point but shares an underlying similarity. All fraternity is built on these contraries.

MAN AND WOMAN are such a contrary: both by nature man, but both opposite in sex. Organic unities are possible because of contrary personalities and skills among members. One leads, one submits; one speaks, one listens, one fights, one makes peace. But an underlying unity allows these contraries to resolve smoothly, like the blood vessels moving air from the lungs to the cells and the blood back to the lungs to receive more air. Without the common system they could have no relationship.

EVEN IN GOD, as we understand him, we see contraries; the unoriginate and the two who come from Him; the one who spirates and the one who proceeds; the one who is incarnate and the two who are not; the two who may be blasphemed against and the one whom cannot be. But all remain God; they among themselves are the life of God; the Church is the relationship between the members of the Trinity from before the ages, empty of man until Pentecost. As the hymn says, "the formerly barren Church."

THIS IS THE PERFECTION of Fraternity; being of one mind while being distinct. To remove distinction is to destroy fellowship. What follows from this is that to deny racial and ethnic categories, as well as to deny the real nature of them (groups of humans are not equal, either) is to completely prevent fellowship among them through their leadership.

FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS the saying goes, and there are as many types of boundaries as there are relationships. May love govern them all.

III. Liberty

THE ORIGINAL TEXT on liberty from Christianity is Paul's: Do not allow your liberty to be an excuse for sin. All other texts are similar: All things are permissible but not all things are beneficial and I shall be enslaved by none. Juxtaposed is a position of extreme liberty with extreme discretion; liberty from the basic principles of this world (GNON) comes with a heavy price - responsibility to not misuse it.

THIS BASIC RESPONSIBILITY is not legal. The character of the liberty is itself extralegal; it is a setting aside of all rules and regulations that were set upon us. Discretion is required where no rules hold sway; but this is not so much a doing-away with rules, as a doing away with legal obligations. Discretion is itself a set of rules, but ones more subtle and adaptable than "if you don't do X you're getting stoned."

LIBERTY, like equality, cannot be an absolute. Liberty is always in reference to something; and the very question of what liberty is in reference to is the question which consumes most post-enlightenment debate. There is a certain fear that if liberty is defined positively; i.e. 'freedom to become X', 'freedom to do Y', it gives license to social engineers to take away all freedoms which do not tend towards that end.

A MAN WISHES TO SAIL THE SEA, but in order to do so, he must be confined in a boat. The freedom to cross the ocean is a real freedom, but so is the freedom to move about freely on foot. These freedoms contradict one another. Thus people argue endlessly about 'freedom' when what they really have in mind, the telos, differs. Because of this, they can without conflict claim others' ideas of freedom are in fact slavery, and vice versa.

THE CATCH on the Christian definition of liberty however, is that such liberty is in the Spirit. This is a peculiar expression, but indicates that mankind in general, as a rule, is not in a state of liberty from GNON post-incarnation. It indicates that Christians (specifically, baptized Christians) may be, but that such freedom comes through the Spirit itself, and not as some mental revelation.

BECAUSE OF THIS, the discussion of liberty must be one of potency; all human beings are potentially able to become baptized Christians, ergo, they are potentially able to be in complete liberty. But complete liberty, as we have noted above, simply means the freedom to will anything, not necessarily the freedom to fulfill it (since freedoms can contradict.) Thus we are, in the post-lapsarian state, not merely unable to fulfill what we wish, but often unable to wish what we wish.

IF LIBERTY IS in reference to something, we must ask 'what'. If man is granted freedom, what is this freedom for? Those who argue no purpose for such freedom realistically have little ground to stand on for arguing that it is even freedom at all. Thus such a position is self-closing; we can consider it answered by its own conditions.

MERELY ACKNOWLEDGING that we do not precisely know the purpose for our liberty does not call into question the existence of a purpose; unless we assume that because we did not know precisely of the New World in Europe prior to Columbus' journey that it probably didn't exist. There is a tendency to hold the tension of the unknown falsely; to make lipservice of admitting the mystery while in our minds making a series of unwarranted assumptions.

HUMAN FREEDOM, therefore, is attached to human being. To understand the purpose of human freedom requires understanding what a human being is, what it is for, and so on. Obviously therefore, if one does not believe that a human being is 'for' anything, human liberty must not be 'for' anything in particular.

GIVEN THIS STIPULATION we can only talk about freedom, meaningfully, in terms of ends. The first end of human beings is quite obviously to perpetuate themselves. Now, it is not the case that human beings exist to perpetuate 'humanity' - but rather, their own bloodlines. In the long run this fulfills the original command "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth."

PROLONGATION is the first end of man, And given man's abilities and nature his prolongation does not end with the body, but continues with the mind, the soul, the spirit. However, as men die, in order to meet their purpose, they must continue to live somehow. Different religions have proposed different solutions to this enigma, some even falling so low as to believe that men, like animals, are only prolonged through their descendents. Others have speculated that the soul transmigrates, which allows man to persist but destroys his psychosomatic identity, and yet others thought the soul itself to partake of life and thus continue after, without the body.

CHRISTIANITY proposes a different notion, that the dead shall be raised to life, and in that life the psychosomatic identity will be prolonged into the everlasting. All things resurrected must both be made new but also be the same thing they were before, else man's basic purpose go unfulfilled. As God is immortal, men being prolonged into the everlasting is being in likeness to him.

BUT IF THE RESURRECTION is of the body, then the life of the body is meaningful, and cannot be disregarded. Further, given that man is living, (his basic purpose) his purpose is then to glorify God. But what can this mean? People who attend church services think they know what it means, because they attach the words to certain events. But let us examine the concept more carefully.

TO EXALT GOD would mean to show forth the goodness of him; and in the example above we noted that as God is immortal, so man is meant to be immortal. And if immortality in man is shown to be glorious, then the Immortal One is shown to be glorious. Likewise with all things that God has impressed upon man; inasmuch as man exercises them rightly, they glorify the one whom they are taken from, the original.

IN THE GRAND SCHEME of things, praise and worship songs are small change in the glorification of the Infinite God. Therefore we think it not unreasonable to say that not only is man only truly able to be free in God, but that this freedom is directed towards the magnification and perfection of all of the characteristics that God placed of himself in man.

THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM as ensconced in the desire for liberation is irrelevant; actual liberation can only happen in the context in which the divine characteristics in man can be exercised and made excellent. Any liberation outside of this is an illusion or worse, a kind of bondage which sells itself as freedom - the very libel perpetuated against the Church by revolutionaries.

IF MEN ARE NOT FREE to become gods, then they are not free. They are brute beasts, whose fate it is to be torn to pieces.