Modernity

We live in an age where being masculine has been reduced to a feminine standard: association (I am strong because I know someone, or I am part of some group, or I am supported by another entity), references (I am smart because I know of something, I have heard of the words repeating them religiously, I have been trained), image (I am valuable because I adhere to an image, I look like I am so, I have cultivated an appearance).

The essence is lost in image.
The appearance buried in pretense.

Spoiled brats never having worked a day in their lives, never having faced the world, cultivating, buying, referencing, an image.

We live in an age where a slut, with no pride, and no standards worth anything to her/him, can reproduce, and those above remain child-less.
A bovine can have six kids, with four different men, but Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer never father a single child.

A whore, able to compromise her ideals, or lacking any altogether, can pass on her genes, but Kierkegaard, Evola, Socrates?, Heisman, Weininger, and so on, do not.

I've explored the reasons for it in my positions about feminization, and the Nihilism that is now called Modernity...but, please, come up with your own explanations.
Do not neglect to consider where this is heading towards, and why the degradation of masculinity is more than simply a loss of a sex, and a dangling appendage.

I told my friend what he had to do to pass on his genes, in a Modern world such as this.
I did it, and it involved lowering myself to the level of a (ma)animal.
He did it, and is in the midst of paying the price of doing so.

But I can stand up and return to being a human.

Baudrilalrd, Jean wrote:

All societies end up wearing masks.

Social unity is the product of weakness: the insecurity of an individual driving it to congregate with others of its kind to raise its survivability potential.
It involves a compromise, because it is a symptom of weakness.
The compromise is that of freedom, of self.
The “compromise” is this mask being worn to hide the origins.

Evola, Julius wrote:

Such is the primary meaning of any democracy, in the original sense of the term, and of every kind of ‘socialism’: in their essence they are both anti-State, and represent the degradation and contamination of the political principle.
Both democracy and socialism ratify the shift from the masculine to the feminine and from the spiritual to the material and the promiscuous.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

The ‘advanced democratic’ systems are stabilized on the formula of bipartite alternation.
The monopoly in fact remains that of a homogenous political class, from left to right, but it must be exercised as such.
The one-party totalitarian regime is an unstable form–it defuses the political scene, it no longer assures the feed-back of public opinion, the minimal flux in the integrated circuit which constitutes the transitory political machine.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

We live by the mode of referendum precisely because there is no longer any referential. Every sign, every message (objects of ‘functional’ use as well as any item of fashion or televised news, poll or electoral consultation) is presented to us as a question/answer.
The entire system of communication has passed from that of a syntactically complex language structure to a binary sign system of question/answer – of perpetual test.
Now tests and referenda are, we know, perfect forms of simulation: the answer is called forth by the question, it is design-ated in advance.
The referendum is always an ultimatum: the unilateral nature of the question, that is no longer exactly an interrogation, but the immediate imposition of a sense whereby the cycle is suddenly completed.
Every message is a verdict, just like the one that comes from polling statistics.

Democracy, emerging as a compromise in a disintegrating hierarchy has, ever since, never attained its original spirit, and intent.
The structures of democratic rule remained but the methods used to manipulate, and to re-establish hierarchies which would exclude the unwanted ones, shifted from overt to covert.

Given the dumbing-down process, necessary to maintain internal harmony, what sane elite would place its faith on the judgment of the masses?   
Dumbing-Down essentially means reducing the sophistication of the mind.
The individual becomes more primal, in its reasoning, more animalistic, more easily manipulated using need/desire/want.
Human nature is denied so as to make the manipulation of it more effective.
It's a way of reducing self-awareness - the opposition to Know Thyself.  

Harvie, Ferguson wrote:

The perpetual incompleteness of the self, which is the hidden motive of bourgeois psychology, is best described as desire.
If pleasure is the pursuit of the ego, desire is the endless quest for the self in its ‘finished’ form.
The transcendental infinite in which the subjectivity of happiness rested is transformed into the perpetual torment of the self s search for concrete ‘authenticity’.
The discovery of our own personality, its emergence as a wholly determinate and necessary structure, becomes the ‘religious’ duty of the bourgeois individual.
This is a discovery of ‘inwardness’ and inevitably so as the ‘double freedom’ of capitalism extends to each individual an identical legal and political identity. The act of distinguishing one person from another, in a condition of ideal equality, must therefore be the work of an interior personality.
The endless variety of such personalities is the corollary of the complete inner freedom of subjectivity. In reaching beyond itself, hopelessly, to complete itself, the incipient ‘self progressively discounts all the personalities which it is not.

The self as a relation of desire, a segment of the infinite interior freedom of the subject, is an assumption of bourgeois psychology unexamined by the majority of its conventional practitioners. It is hinted at in Hume’s scepticism and agonized over by Rousseau. Perhaps only in Hegel does it become the foundation for a systematic reconstruction of reality.

In a famous passage in the Phenomenology, Hegel analyses the growth of self-consciousness as a dialectic of desire. Simple undifferentiated consciousness, the ‘I’, which is ‘absolute mediation,’ conscious of itself only as the immediacy of the given world, as the ‘dizziness of a perpetually self-engendered disorder’, postulates itself as a coherent structure by desire.
The more it desires, the more concrete and specific it becomes. Desire is the specific mode of existence of the self.

In desiring commodities the self seeks to confirm itself as distinct from any other self, but what it seeks in any object is the spiritual reality which lies at its core. The original disordered state of subjectivity ‘alienates’ itself into such material forms in order that, in recognizing and reincorporating itself within its own personality, it can define its uniqueness. In seeking commodities, that is to say, it seeks itself. It seeks itself with even greater urgency in the ‘purest’ of its alienated forms, as another person.
To become a self the ‘I’ must engage itself in a relationship of mutual recognition.

It desires the desire of another, and becomes itself only by transcending all other, animal, needs.
In spite of the groundless freedom of subjectivity, the personality ‘emerges’ by an immanent and absolutely necessary process of unfolding.
Hegel’s phenomenology is a philosophical description of this process. The self, in its completed, rational form (which in becoming philosophically possible becomes also, for Hegel, a practical reality) is after all a kind of duplicate of the ‘world system’.
It is, first of all, a system: in Hegel’s terminology, pure mediation. The self is ‘all of a piece’, its various differ entiations so many aspects of a totality recoverable from any starting point. It is therefore ‘rational’. Its development through a series of dialectical steps or ‘negations’, its progressive ‘otherness’ is an inevitable, self-moving sequence of forms.

It is a system understood in terms of a simple underlying principle, desire, rather than a fixed empirical arrangement of parts. Desire, we might say, is the gravity of the self; it is what lends weight to the personality and fills it with content.
This is not to suggest of course that there is no difference between a Hegelian and a utilitarian approach to the nature of individuated subjectivity. Such a contention would be absurd. Yet they are linked as two of the logically and existentially possible versions of bourgeois selfhood. Neither is comprehensible within the cosmology of fun or happiness. What the traditions of bourgeois psychology seek above all is confirmation of conscious selfhood.
And the route to conscious selfhood is through completion of the ‘psychic’ system. This system can be viewed in a number of different ways: as the complex interrelations of ‘irritable’ matter, the network of utilitarian calculations, the reflexive judgements of ‘approbation’, or the dialectics of ‘otherness’. Each tends, in its own way, to progressively higher levels of internal organization that
culminate in self-consciousness.

In my system of understanding I use "need", "desire" and "want" to differentiate between different kinds of dependencies.

Need: A spontaneous sensation produced by the totality of cellular (inter)activities transmitted to the brain, through the nervous system,and interpreted there as this sense.
The (inter)activity is amongst cells, and groupings of specialized cells we call organs, but also between the totality organizing itself, and the external, to it, world, which is contradicting it and tending towards chaos.

Desire: The accumulated energies, due to the (re)action to need begin to pressure the organism to be released.
The organism has a limit in how much energy it can store.
The leftover energies once self-maintenance is dealt with, is stored as fat, or as libidinal energy.
Libidinal energy being the evolutionary result of sexual methods of reproduction, resulting in a seasonal frenzy, that overwhelms the brain, or, as with humans, in a consistent, but less frenzied, preoccupation.  
This accumulated store can be directed towards growth, procreation, and in more sophisticated lifeforms towards creation.

Want: A combination of needs/desires abstracted into an object/objective.
The object/objective is projected as a destination, an idea(l), a direction which guides the will towards it.
Because a want is a mental construct it can take any form possible, if this promises a relief, from need, and a release of desire.
It is a complex structure which, because of its nature, can be manufactures and transmitted socially/culturally as a shared principle.
It's only restriction is that it must refer to an organic need and/or a libidinal desire.
Other than that it can be projected as anything, because it is always a promise of fulfillment.
The promise is exemplified in capitalistic systems by the commodity, which is always something that promises a gratification but never does so completely.
When the commodity is purchased it quickly fades and/or disappoints, and another purchase must take its place in the endless cycle of consumerism.

To deal with this endless cycle some minds focus on the superficial, the immediate, finding in that ephemeral state of excited gratification, or in that momentary pleasure of feeding a need or of discharging accumulated libidinal energies, an existential purpose.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von wrote:

The more imperfect the living being, the more the parts resemble each other and reproduce the image of the whole.
The more the living being becomes perfect, the more the parts are dissimilar.
When the parts look like each other, they are decreasingly subordinated to each other; the subordination of the organs characterizes a creature of superior order.

Specialization creates dissimilarity as it increases its synergy, and its efficiency.

The SuperOrganism, we call a Nation, a State, a System, a Civilization, subordinates its genetic parts, using memetic assimilation.
The organism is the inferior order, in relation to the SuperOrganism.
A quantitative superiority.
Specialization is the end product of codependency, and dependency is the negation of freedom, the restriction of free-will.  

Love, as an emotion now detached from phenomena, and made into a pure noumenon, becomes the binding social lubricant.
All genetic distinction must be made superficial for its power to bond, to create dependencies, to work effectively.
Genetics are reduced down to a superficial appearance, a trickery the mind must "overcome" for it to find bliss in the communal feeling of love.
The emotion ceases to be an organic tool, and becomes a SuperOrganic one.
Hate is projected outwards, towards otherness, while internally all cellular walls must be made porous, opaque, all-inlcusive; walls torn down, to increase (inter)active efficiency (synergy).
The naturally produced distances required for an organism to emerge are now contradicted on a noetic level.
The organism, the cell, can remain distinct, but only apparently...only superficially.
Appearances ARE superficial, but only for internal consumption (politics).
Noetically all walls, all distinctions, are non-existent; remnants of a "primitive" and now overcome past/nature.

The SuperOrganism thinks as one, or thinking is passed on, through the mediums which replace organic nervous systems, from the central hub, the SuperOrganic BRAIN (institution), through the SuperOrganic whole as data, as knowledge/understanding.
Just as the cell has only a indirect relationship to the world beyond the organism's "boundaries" (skin), so does the Modern refer to nature as a standard of judging the world.
It's primary and dominant reference point is the data, the equivalent of a bio-energy pulse that gets to it through the SuperOrganic nervous system - the system of disseminating data.

Need/Desire/Want distinctions, as stated above, apply to the SuperOrganism as well.

Values are no longer based on the relationship of the organism with its mostly unknown, unpredictable, world, but adjust to SuperOrganic predictable, known, relationships...they become Super-Real (hyperreal).

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.
Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – PRECESSION OF SIMULACRUM–it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.
The desert of the real itself.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality – a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity.

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

The obscenity of our culture resides in the confusion of desire and its equivalent materialized in the image; not only for sexual desire, but the desire for knowledge and its equivalent materialized in ”information,” the desire for fantasy and its equivalent materialized in the Disneylands of the world, the desire for space and its equivalent programmed into vacation itineraries, the desire for play and its equivalent programmed into private telematics.
It is this promiscuity the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of things by images, which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.
And this knows no bounds, because unlike sexed animal species protected by a kind of internal regulatory system, images cannot be prevented from proliferating indefinitely, since they do not breed organically and know neither sex nor death.

The image substitutes the appearance, and the two are confused as similes.
Equalization becomes possible.
The malleability of the image, using techniques/technologies, purchased as commodity, and put on as an identifier, creates the illusion that appearance is also malleable - the past has been overcome in the present, or in some projected future.
The past's immutable determining indifference to our presence is "corrected" with a bit of human cosmetic intervention, and training, to bury essence in hyperbole.

Modernistic obsession with perspectivism and subjectivity is another form of trying to escape, to erase, the objective world.
The individual is convinced that he is free to will any self he wants [see want above].
Trained in any social utility available, which requires an average potential, the conviction deepens.
The individual is now his SuperOrganic specialization.
Every other organic identifier is insignificant, a childish game, a hedonistic plaything - severity reduced, using techniques/technologies, to the level of entertainment, and/or another consumer good.

From a simple primitive sensation, evolved amongst plants, we proceed towards clusters of sensations in (re)action to sensual data.
Sensation is how the organism (inter)acts with otherness, or how self-ordering comes into contact with the fluctuations of (inter)activity, tending towards chaos (complexity, and then randomness).
 
Emotions being automatic (re)actions to stimuli.
Stimuli are gathered by using an intervening medium, if they are at a distance.
The medium is atmosphere, later to become the sophisticated form of language, evolving words as its symbolic code of exchange.
The word stimulates an image, a sensation, an emotional (re)action, thusly transmitting a state of mind.
Language create a shared atmosphere within which the exchange of data takes place.  

Internal organ hierarchies (personality) coming into contact, via the nervous system, with external hierarchies; in the brain both converging: the noumenon and the phenomenon, the idea(l) and the real.
Both obscure, incomplete, uncertain.
These (re)actions become established as survival enhancing traits.

The fight/flight mechanism prepares the organism for a sudden burst of energy.
Anxiety, stress, is this psychosomatic preparatory stage.
Fear is the emotion of anticipation.
The more you are aware of the more there is to fear, to feel anxious about, to care about.
Anxiety is an admission of ignorance before the unpredictable, uncertain (inter)activity of the phenomenal world.
The more patterns are perceived in the phenomena (inter)acting, all the more predictable the phenomenon becomes - anxiety decreases proportionally to understanding; to pattern recognition.
But is the interpretation of pattern reliable?
Uncertainty, doubt, skepticism is never absent.    

But to have heterosexual methods of reproduction evolve, as efficient, this fight/flight stage had to be placated, numbed, soothed down to a level where coitus could take place.
The male/female roles placing each individual in different levels of vulnerability.
Now, other types of emotions evolve to deal with the already established automated (re)actions to otherness.
Autoimmune defensive strategies had to be overcome with trickery and/or repression.
The sperm are given a time period to fertilize the ovum in the female's body before they are attacked as alien intruders.
Same process applies to the female's tolerance of a male's penetrating intrusions.
The female/male psyche evolves from there - specialization.  

Social (inter)action, in general, begins with a tenuous trust.
The other must be like us, or be made like us, for the anxiety to decrease to a degree where cooperation can proceed effectively and efficiently.
A mutual fear can be bonding.
A mutual motive, governed by a shared weakness, can be bonding.

To make the other more like us social engineering, and memetic castration, and intellectual blindness, compartmentalization, indoctrination, domestication (training, education) and schizophrenia, and dumbing-down...and so on, intervene to numb, trick, sooth, tolerate otherness, accept intrusion.

Probability is a limitation of possibility.
Order it is called.
Order is consistent, predictable, reliable, repeating...
Absolute order would be the implosion of possibility into a singular probability.
Space being a projection of possibility, and all the patterns perceived in it the different types of matter/energy.

(Inter)activity erodes order, gradually, by reducing its repetitions, degrading its consistency, reliability, predictability.

Increasing possibility, space/time, is a tendency towards the infinite possible, which means the absence of all restricting probability (order) to (inter)acting.
The attainment of absolute possibility would be the attainment of infinite space/time...absolute randomness, approached through a period of increasing fragmentation, (complexity).

Both absolutes are unattainable, resulting in a movement towards and in cycles.
These cycles may be regional.

The liberal obsession with freedom is a cry for chaos - a liberation from the restricting, determining, unchangeable, past/nature, so as to attain infinite possibilities.
The self unrestricted by probabilities, order...but free to be anything - the godly state.

God, as a personification of the absolute becomes this paradoxical singularity of One probability (order), and of infinite possibilities (chaos), exposing its human source, and the conflict between the idea(l) (noumenon) and real (phenomenon) within man.
The paradox is linguistically based, ergo this singular god could only begin as "word".
The word here refers to a noumenon that has no reference to the phenomenon, except as a simplification/generalization, or a contradiction of it.
The form this noumenon/phenomenon relationship takes determines its nihilistic degree.

To make it infective the apparent had to be degraded to an illusion, a perspective, a subjectivity where no objectivity ever applies.

The individual had to be disconnected from his own sensuality; his awareness ridiculed and distrusted as no more than trickery.
Some settled for the sensation the phenomenon produced in them, no wanting to proceed further towards it.
In both cases the mind was contained within the space/time immediacy of what is called "present" - it was reduced to the perceptions of a simpler organism existing in a contained perceptual-event-horizon, and a simplified world of pain/pleasure, good/bad...friend/foe.

The perceptual-even-horizon being the organism's sensual limit; a noetic box where dimensions are cut-away - shallow perception of past/nature, resulting in a shallow, and delusional, projection of probability (object/objective), in the coming future - the desirable object/objective being the projection of an idea(l).

When the idea(l) is based on a shallow perception of past/nature it is freed from the limitations patterns (order) places upon it - the improbable becomes more probable, or more possible.
The mind is detaching from reality, and becoming imprisoned in ideality (noetic self-references - solipsism).
Sharing in the same ideality gives the impression of awareness, when it is merely a communal solipsism, just as a communal schizophrenia and narcissism is possible within controlled, restricted, sheltering environments.
The commonality is in the shared need to live in your own reality.
The social contract.
Protection from reality is a prerequisite.

Modernity is the application of Nihilistic principles to achieve internal harmony, by reducing the individual, or the idea of individuality, to the stage of cellular awareness, or utility - value, identity in relation to the communal otherness.

Manipulating natural anxieties concerning the phenomenon, the uncertain, threatening, real, this process is easily communicated as a shared principle, using language (words).
The words become the encasing code, as in the all-encompassing, protective, matrix, within which each mind can cocoon himsef/herself in his own self-referential world, only being obliged to pay for the privilege ...now called a "right".

America is a nation built by "rebels".
Those who protest against the Pope, reject Kings; Anglo-Saxons defying the Norse yoke, and then Jews rebelling against their worldly fate.
It gathers into its bosom the entire world’s impoverished, its desperate, as any Idea(l) detached from the past/nature would; those dreaming of escaping their lot in life, dreaming American dreams.

Who populated its uncharted frontiers early-on but Europe’s frantic rabble, undesirables, and its criminals and disillusioned?

America is the New World offering new beginnings, freedom from the past, from nature, from fate, from all earthly order.
It begins as a frontier waiting for brutal men to claim it from the savages, inviting all the impoverished, and those looking for a way out of their own, personal, Old World predicaments, to it.
The voyage there is a rebirthing step, a baptism in the ocean's abyss.
Those undertaking the trip have already reached their wits end, and have no other option left.
They agree to kill their past, to run from it towards a new self.
Hope the antidote to despair.
Thanksgiving, the rite of a successful reincarnation.    
All is forgiven; all is forgotten… emancipation from one’s reputation.  

Today it offers a New World Order: some coming emancipation through leveling unity where the idea of “individuality” becomes another way of saying "consumer choices," liberated from self through other.

But when frontiers full of possibilities became parceled the rebels faced the same conundrum the Jews did when they gained power, as those chosen to be meek and the world’s powerless: how does one preserve this rebellious spirit when it has become an authority?
Outer frontiers fenced and owned by the few, turn to inner frontiers of escape.
The “American dream” offering infinite possibilities becomes increasingly less probable.
Imagination pick-up the slack.  
Natural selection selectively reaffirmed turns to an internal alienation.
Judeo-Christianity provided this rebelliousness against nature; an annulment of the world's determination; its vicious, unfair, indifference.
No earthly emissary would survive American insurrection.
No government, no laws, no institutions… no authority – a nation of “anarchists” incarcerated so that they have nowhere to escape, but inwards, nothing to destroy, but themselves, running towards that coming tomorrow-land, that Disneyland world.  
The American is forever escaping into internal frontiers of possibility, projected outwards as hyperbolic wonderlands.
With no past/nature to hold him back he is a perpetual projection forward, where anything goes.
He is living in the coming, immanent, future, and is never present, never completely apparent.
He is there, but not really.
He is empty, hungry, needy with no source to draw sustenance from, other than the immediate, and the imagined.
He must agitate his neurotic rebelliousness to get that needed adrenaline rush to run on – wearing an outer shell he is constructing as he goes along, gathering symbols, words, products, artifices to build himself up: a self-made man.
He creates himself out of the throw-away goods he finds in the urban worlds he can only exist within.
Here where nature is a park that does not challenge his fantasies.    

No sex, no race, no culture, no regrets – he is pure image with very little content.
The American is an eternal prepubescent child at play, reinventing himself every morning, after he's forgotten last night’s game.
He is never man, woman, race, self; he is only pretending to be this, and then that, as the circumstances demand.
He still does not know who he is, or what he wants to be.
He is open to options.
He has no past to define him, to guide him, to discipline him.
He has no problem being disloyal to his heritage, because he’s has given it up.
He is an orphaned boy who ran away from home only to get lost in the multitudes.
He has already mingled and mixed himself into diluted detachment – his past is a, embarrassing movie script he can rewrite with a happy ending; it is lost through his abandonment to his primal cravings; chewed down into bits and pieces, until the fragments puzzle him – each one a little mirror reflecting a different angle, a slightly off perspective.

If he cares to reincorporate the fragments into cohesion he tries by using artifices, makeups, garments, surgical interventions, accessories, words: symbols of the most popular phantasmagorias.
Any technique or technology will do.
He is not apparent; he strives to be impressive because there’s nothing more to him than the immediate.        
He is up-and-coming, updated, and forever cutting-edge; living the lifestyle of the most current pop-cultural icons.
History bores him. He is a man of the future.
Everything lies ahead.

The present, the immediate, is his only shallow contact with what was; rebelling against it as it fades away, to be replaced, repackaged, recycled; falling back into the past which is continuously overcome, denied, forgotten, re-narrated to harmonize it with the newest version of the coming future.
He recycles himself because he forgets who he was before; recycling is his only sense of what has come before.
Every new packaging is a promise of novelty.
Design confusing the sameness of the material; diverting from the same product within.  
He is addicted to the purchasable product's impending promise.  
Fashion, trends, gadgetry, new releases, new products, new possibilities, new money; he lives in a whirlwind of sensationalism, and excitement is his fix.

He must be constantly stimulated, pleasured, given a prospect to excite his nervous system, making him feel alive.
Because he feels dead inside. He feels non-existent.
 
He is fun-loving, cynical, and mockingly funny; a party animal, always having a good time, never taking anything, including himself, seriously.
He can ridicule everything, and anything, as part of his eternal rebelliousness, because he throws everything in the recycling-bin of history, as if it were garbage, and moves on, not caring what happens to it.
The moment he throws it away his mind is already fixed on his next purchase; that next thing that will add to his image.
No baggage, no walls, no limits.
He leaves scorched earth in his passing, and then builds a shopping mall and parking lot there.
He is as light as a helium balloon.  
He is moving forward, upward, progressing, with no regard for the past/nature. The earth vanishes below, and he is floating in limbo.
Scared of being blown away he grasps at anything promising mass.
He purchases gravity to settle down his flighty spirit.
Consumer goods are his anchoring to a well-crafted self – only the best ingredients will do.
He buys on credit.
He thinks he's well-grounded because he's tied himself to things that prevent him from floating into oblivion; from being swept away by any passing breeze.  

He is clueless in that he no longer knows what he is rebelling against, when he has become part of the world’s authority system… its idealized state.
All want to emulate its youthful mischievousness.
He has forgotten his original protests, having replaced them with newer more fashionable ones.
He retains this sexy adolescent image of being a rebel rejecting everything that is, by finding remnants of the past to turn into his foe.
He identifies himself as the world’s unruly fun-loving, teenager.  
Carefree in his toying ways.

Behind him rush all infantile psychologies, unable to find the causes for their own dissatisfaction and disillusionment; fighting against anything that presents itself as a reminder of their unfortunate condition. And like all adolescents, when the adults are dealt with, they can indulge in their fun-loving innocence; carelessly experimenting, and numbing themselves into a stupor before they fall asleep, to awaken the next day rejuvenated, having already rebelled against the night before.
Like a dream, before a hangover, it slowly fades from memory as if it never happened.  
The world returns to being new, again, full of infinite possibilities; a youthful, hopeful, world, seductive to all who want to find relief in naiveté, and/or romantic idealism.

He, this New World, New Age, Modern man, this American, is constantly recyclable.
Nothing sticks on him, to him, because he is born-again at will; he changes skins on a whim.
If he has money he has alternatives.
Nothing matters.
Indifference is the gift.
Why would he care?
What would such a mind care about, when, for him, tomorrow hope is returned, and the past is already gone?

A Modern, having been given the privilege of existence, awakens to the reality of his own existence, and the particularities that this entails.
Wanting to deal with their embarrassing parts he, unfortunately, finds the past/nature closed to his willful whims.
He cannot change what is out of reach in the space/time continuum of past/nature.
Then, he becomes distressed, anxious, and he turns to what he can, possibly, willfully intrude upon: the present, as the immediate past manifest within his own lifespan.
He changes his immediacy, his image, to deal with an appearance he is not totally aware of, nor able to completely alter.
If this proves to be beyond his power to cope with, in a satisfactory and/or convincing manner, he becomes desperate, angry, accusing the other of what ails him; projecting upon the otherness what he most despises about himself, and his past/nature, wanting to assault in otherness what he wishes were not so, about him.
He avenges himself upon this other, only realizing later, if ever, that it was himself, or the negative parts of this self, he was trying to eliminate to no avail, because the past/nature can be buried, denied, and forgotten, but it cannot be escaped.

In the end, the other can only make us hurt, using words, if what this other says is something we fear might be true.  
If it is not, in any way, even remotely true, then we do not give a shit; but if we secretly worry that this other might have discovered something about us, may have seen something in us, that we’ve tried to deny, and to forget, then we despise him, rather than admitting that he might be telling us something we already know intuitively.

For an American, born in the U.S. the language that he speaks is “American” and not English.
It’s how he asserts his detachment form his own history.
He is beginning and end – a self-referential becoming enclosed within a bubble, a cocoon of space/time.

Appearances are superficial and irrelevant, to him, because his perception of appearances is dominated by contrived, fabricated, false images.
He, already, exists in fantasy, believing in it when it is presented on a screen is not a big leap of faith to take.

For the American, the dominating version of the Modern, identifying with the spirit of anti-authoritarianism, to be a rebel, is all that matters; to resist otherness is all that is required.
It does not matter what the context is, what principles are involved, or what idea(l)s underlie an issue, what matters is the position of rejection, antithesis, which preserves the image of contrarian, of distinction, which is what he understands individuality to be.

Che Guevara can be sold in Capitalist markets because the ideas are not important, but only the symbol of the rebel, his impressing image sold to teenagers to represent their individuating anti-authoritarianism.
What the symbols refer to is irrelevant for the Modern. The only thing that matters is the symbol itself, the metaphor, as a vague feeling, a general sensation.
Capitalism sells image, not idea(l)s, and the masses, desperate for an absent identifier that is more substantial than superficial imagery, buy into it in their desperate search for substance, for appearance, for self.

With no past/nature to draw from, all they have are symbols, images, words, numbers.
Image is but another commodity to be worn, for a time, and then replaced with another; another recyclable mask.
Funny, because they really do mean nothing, to him: underwear, the flavor of the year, a fashion trend he participates in and remains aloof to.
If cultivated enough, he remains cynical to all of it.
He is above it all, and only indulges to reinstate his own separateness.
All that matters is how it makes him feel, and what utility it serves in the here and now.

The modern feels pride in his shamelessness.
His only understanding of shame is through Judeo-Christian nihilism and cannot fathom a sense of self-criticism based on an idea(l) he has placed himself accountable to.

For the secular version of Judeo-Christian nihilism, either/or means to feel ashamed of being a degenerate shameless turd, accountable to nobody but accountable back to himself - who is always forgiving.
Self is now a reflection fo some communal judgment.
"I am valuable in relation to a common, popular, judgment".

God replaced by self, as in the abstracted Self.

Persectivism, for the modern means...
"I am accountable to nothing and to nobody, but myself; I judge myself, conveniently, by my own standards" which are not really my own but only a blanket forgiveness, a "right" to be as obtuse and vulgar as I please, if, and when, this remains within the acceptable parameters of social values.
If the vulgarity assaults one, it is permissible (particularly if this 'one' is threatening to this majority), but if it assaults many, immediately or as a projected hypothetical possibility, then it is not permissible.
Therefore, to be stupid, simple, and primitive, is acceptable if it remains within the childish, shallow, limits that, theoretically, threaten nobody but a few.
Any action, including a thought, that insults, or assaults (potentially) more than one, is immediately unacceptable.
If the simpleton remains within that line of "acceptability" flexing and posturing, as a primal would, within these social rules he can continue to do so.  

How is this limit determined?
The quantity of individuals not hurt by the idea(l)s, and behavior presented.
The threat must have a temporal value.
The more primitive, base, simplistic, stupid, childish the behavior, all the more acceptable it is to the majority.
The more ridiculous the posturing is, all the more tolerable, to the many, it becomes...entertaining even.
sometimes used to create a caricature so as to dismiss all similar idea(l)s, using the method of association.
Shamelessness for the shameless.  

Honor reduced to the level of an infant.
To not feel ashamed is to feel no honor; shame determined by the idea(l) being used as an object/objective.
So, to be shameless, in the modern sense, is to only hold one's self accountable to the majority judgment, when the self is used as a reflection of the many.
If the behavior is permissible, in that it does not threaten the majority's principles, it is not something to feel ashamed of.

With no shame there is no possibility for dignity.
Dignity is a refusal to fall beneath a level of conduct, of existence, in relation to an idea(l).

An aristocrat will hold himself accountable to his aristocratic standards, and find identity there.
A manimal will find dignity in being a base animal, and hold himself accountable to simple ideas concerning power and strength.
A nihilist will avoid both, by negating both, finding dignity in being a non-person, a non-distinctive individual, where "individuality" takes the form of a shallow shell he can wear, one day, and then take off to wear another the next.

Judeo-Christianity took shame and extended it towards an object/objective, an idea(l), that could never be realized.
By doing so they condemned all those who fell into its spell to a lifetime of shame, that could only be absolved through death, or this perpetual, ascetic, self-punishment, turning all followers into life-long servants burdened by a shame that they were not accountable for and one that was a fabrication, based on a fairytale; turning all its followers into eternal victims of nature that could only be cleared away by a lifetime of self-rejection.
Its followers became infected by the guilt associated with this inability to attain an idea(l) that was beyond the boundaries of the existent, and so could never be approached - turning all of them into sinners, or the victims of being born mere mortals, damned to exist where the idea(l) was entirely absent - unrealistic within reality.
It made being human into something shameful, something to be ignored, forgotten, rejected, repressed, or reducing it into a primal caricature that exposed all the elements the Judeo-Christian creed wanted to paint as shameful.
Man as the perpetual guilty one, forever to make recompense for being born.  

Shame is not a Christian monopoly.
Judeo-Christianity simply manipulated it to create docile, dependent, automatons, unable to resist, or to question.
 
Only a base, simple manimal feels no remorse, no shame, before an act (s)he regrets because it comes in conflict with an idea(l) (s)he identifies with and wants to live in accordance with.
A simple animal feels no shame because it is forever acting on impulse, and in accordance with its nature.
It justifies a behavior after-the-fact, because it is unable to know itself, and so it cannot control and direct itself effectively.
It, also, cannot project beyond a certain limit, and so it has no ability to feel embarrassed and/or ashamed by an act with a future outcome, or a consequence outside its immediate environment; it is unable to see itself through an others eyes, because it always sees itself as a reflection upon otherness.  
Only a creature that can project an object/objective in time/space can hold itself accountable beyond the immediacy of its circumstances, and the pressing needs it feels in relation to its primal nature.

It's not "freedom" to be shameless, no more than it is freedom to denounce one's past/nature.
It is a prison within your own shallow solipsism - a shallow perceptual-even-horizon cage.
It is a self-referential escape in delusion, finding validation in others.
It is to live as an animal, destined to remain no more than an animal; condemned to be approached, judged and valued as one does an animal.
To validate yourself in otherness is to remain eternally dependent upon them for your self-esteem.
It, eventually, becomes obvious, turning you into a caricature, a charlatan, a needy creature with no internal sense of dignity, and no personal idea(l)s, beyond the superficial, to remain loyal to, and to feel humbled before.  

Only difference, between such a "human" and an animal, being that belonging to the human species you can be, in theory, more than an animal, and if you cannot be more it is even more shameful and demeaning, because the animal has no such potential, nor could it ever have such a possibility.
Still, how many animals exhibit more dignity and decency, more shame, than some who call themselves human?

Some ask repeatedly, because the answer is not in them:
What is nobility?

I answer...
To live not rejecting your past/nature, but controlling it, aligning yourself with it, and then projecting an object/objective, an idea(l) you refuse to divert from; it is to feel ashamed, not before others, but before your own criteria; to feel ashamed before yourself, your ancestors, your future progeny, guided by a standard outside of yourself, beyond your immediacy.

For the modern everything has been reduced to a sensation, the feeling, the emotion.
It suffices that it feels good or that you "feel it in your bones", you "sense it in your gut".

The animal (re)actions become the end; the reference point.
A self-referential, looping.

Why am I noble?
Because I feel it in my bones.
Which is how Christians justify their belief in God, by the way.

Why are they valuable?
Because they choose to think of themselves that way.
Why?
Because it feels good.

Reality reduced to the sense of gratification an idea, a hypothesis offers.
No independent source of validation; no external to them, reference point. the noumenon looping back upon itself, and connecting to the sensation it produces back in the brain where the noumenon remains: detached, abstracted, simplified and superficial...full of pleasing insinuations and flattering implications.

Reality reduced to the understanding of a basic animal.

For the Modern the either/or dichotomy enters the scene in all his deliberations.

Either pain, or pleasure. Man is "free" to make a choice.

The christian dilemma:
Either accept God, or suffer an eternity in hell. A madman would "choose" hell.
The choice is really one, for a rational man, in this scenario, once the presuppositions have been applied in the question asked.
Emotion become reason.

Given this either/or choice the "reasonable" man can only choose one way, if he is not suffering from some kind of psychosis.
Modern emotive childishness raised to the level of a reasoned option.

One defining characteristic of capitalist Modernity is the phobia towards any metaphysical conception of "Need"; Sloterdijk comments on how the conception of the Real has come to be affected by Optimistic ontologies...

Sloterdijk wrote:

"The image of the eruptive oil well, known among experts as a ‘gusher’, has been one of the archetypes not only of the American Dream, but of the modern way of life as such, which was opened up by easily accessible energies. The petroleum bath is the baptism of the contemporary human being – and Hollywood would not be the central issuing facility of our valid myths had it not shown one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, James Dean, bathing in his own oil well as the star of Giant (1955). The continuously growing influx of energy from so far unexhausted fossil stores not only enabled constant ‘growth’ – positive feedbacks between work, science, technology and consumption over more than a quarter of a century – together with the implications I have described as the psychosemantic modification of populations through prolonged relieving and pampering effects; it also included such venerable categories of Old European ontology as being, reality and freedom in an abrupt change of meaning.

Thus the concept of the real has now come to include the activist connotation that things could always be different (of which only artists, as guardians of the sense of possibility, have so far had any intimation), in contrast to the view held by tradition, where references to reality were always infused with the pathos of not possibly being any other way. As a result, the concept demanded submission to the power of finitude, harshness and lack. For an entire age, for example, a phrase like ‘crop failure’ was loaded with the admonitory severity of the classical doctrine of the real. In its way, it reminds us that the ruler of this world can only be death – supported by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, his seasoned entourage. In a world situation like that of today, characterized by the fundamental experience of surplus energy, the ancient and medieval dogma of resignation has lost its validity; now there are new degrees of freedom whose effects extend to the level of existential moods. Small wonder, then, that Catholic theology, which essentially thinks in premodern and miserablist terms, has completely forfeited its connection to the facts of the present – even more than the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines, which at least take a semi-modern approach. Accordingly, the concept of freedom also had to break away from its conventional meanings over the last hundred years. It makes new dimensions of meaning sound on its current overtone rows, especially the definition of freedom as the right to unlimited mobility and festive squandering of energy.3 Thus two former lord's prerogatives, namely gratuitous freedom of movement and whimsical spending, are democratically generalized at the expense of a subservient nature – only, of course, where the climatic conditions of the great hothouse are already in force. Because modernity as a whole constitutes a figure on a background of the primary colour abundance, its denizens are challenged by the feeling of constant dissolutions of boundaries. They can and must acknowledge that their lives fall into a time without normality. They pay for their thrownness into the world of excess with the feeling that the horizon is drifting.

The sensitive zone in the reprogramming of existential moods in modernity thus concerns the experience of de-scarcification encountered early on by the inhabitants of the crystal palace – and which they barely ever acknowledge sufficiently. The sense of reality among people in the agro-imperial age was attuned to the scarcity of goods and resources, being based on the experience that their labour, embodied in arduous farming, was just enough to place precarious islands of human artificiality in nature. This was already addressed in the ancient theories of ages, which bear resigned witness to the fact that even the great empires crumble, and the most arrogant towers are levelled by inexorable nature within a few generations. Agrarian conservatism expressed its ecological-moral conclusions in a categorical ban on wastefulness. Because the product of labour could not usually be increased, only augmented by looting at best, people in the ancient world were aware at all times that produced value was a limited, relatively constant factor that had to be protected at all costs. Under these conditions, the squanderer must have been considered insane. The narcissistic profligacies of noble lords could thus only be taken as acts of hubris – and their later reinterpretation as ‘culture’ could not yet be predicted.

These views were invalidated when, with the breakthrough to the fossil-fuelled style of culture a little more than two centuries ago, a sinister liberalism appeared on the scene and resolutely began to overturn all the criteria. While wastefulness had traditionally been the ultimate sin against subsistence, as it jeopardized the constantly scarce supply of survival means, the age of fossil energy saw a thoroughgoing change in the meaning of wastefulness: we can now calmly term it the first civic duty. Not that supplies of goods and energies have grown into the infinite overnight; but the fact that the limits of the possible are constantly pushed further away gives the ‘meaning of being’ a fundamentally altered complexion. Now only Stoics still count the stocks; for the ordinary Epicureans in the great comfort hothouse, the ‘stocks’ are the very things that one can assume are infinitely duplicable. Within a few generations, the collective willingness to consume more was able to ascend to the level of a system premise: mass frivolity is the psychosemantic agent of consumerism. Its blossoming indicates how recklessness is now in the position of the fundamental. The ban on wastefulness has been replaced by the ban on frugality, expressed in the perpetual appeals to encourage domestic demand. Modern civilization is based less on ‘humanity's exit from its self-inflicted unproductiveness’ than on the constant influx of an undeserved wealth of energy into the space of entrepreneurship and experience." [In the World Interior of Capital]

From the simple on/off neural switches we get the binary system, or dualism.

The temporal direction being dictated by experience, and the towards chaos.

When the dualism are detached from the experienced, from nature/past, the direction can be inverted.
Now all is perspective, which is disconnected from reality or sensuality. On a purely theoretical,a abstracted, noetic, level all is arbitrary and reversible.  
Pleasure can be a decrease in need/suffering, but it can also be that need/suffering is a decrease in pleasure.
Every concept disconnected from the world can be inverted, and because the inversion is pleasing, it is comforting, because it contradicts the indifferent, determining, agon of existing, Nihilism becomes seductive and the preferred perspective.

Nihilism can only be rationalized when the words being used have no reference outside the human mind.


To think outside this noetic box, this intuited dualism where both ends can be reversed, or, when taken literally, both can be divergent variations of the same Nihilistic end, one must be able to think artistically, metaphorically, symbolically.
The static symbols of binary logic can only represent a fluid, fluctuating, reality, if they are used as a painter uses shades and colors.

The inverse also produces the subjective towards objective dynamic.
The subjective no longed bound by an indifferent objective reality but the agency creating the objective.
The mind creator of the world, rather than the interpreter of it.
Nihilism constructs the illusion of freedom from the world by negating the objective world, the nature/past determining immutable factor, and tuning it all into a subjective construct.
This, of course, is only viable within human realities, because the world, the objective, remains indifferent to human artifices.

Artificial reality becomes a matter of shared subjectivity, or a shared delusion, based on the schism of subject from object, or the noumenon from the phenomenon.
This simulated reality is dependent on conviction, and so popularity and convincing the other becomes crucial for the construction of identity.
The more others you convince with your performance, your acting, the more you live-out the identity you've chosen for yourself.

Acting and actors become the modern's idea(l) type, the idol.
The actor by pretending, in a convincing way embodies the identity he wishes to embody.
Pretense is now the new social value.
To pretend but not to over-act nor to under-act.
The performance must remain convincing to the many for it to have the desirable effect.

There is no objective world to shatter the illusion being played out.
All is subjective and so all a matter of convincing the subjective to participate in the performance - reinforcing it with its own conviction.

Once the mind is contained within Modern nihilistic dualism of either/or where both ends are nullification of the real, and detachment of the noumenon from the phenomenon has reached a certain level, the inversion of all concepts becomes feasible.  

The world is increasing in chaos, but also decreasing.... sex is natural specialization or it does not mean a thing, appearances matter, exposing the essence of the other, or the essence of the other determines its appearance.
Man escapes the determinations of otherness by creating an artificial space within which all is reversible, correctable; all can be healed and inverted.

Hawkes, David wrote:

An actor’s appearance is different from his essence, and it is impossible to interpret his lines as expressions of his thoughts. The body of the actor itself becomes a performative sign, and the theater depends for its effect on the audience’s willingness to treat this sign as if it were constitutive of reality for the duration of the play. An actor, in short, is alien to his real self, and this leads critics like William Worthen to refer to acting’s “Satanic duplicity.”--The Faust Myth

The willingness found in the audience's need to suspend reason, and to surrender to the image with no substance - the pretense.
No wonder Moderns worship actors and all dream of becoming famous performers.
To perform before others, and to convince, to seduce them into suspending disbelief, is magical.  
The simulation of simulacrum permits the actor to play any part.
This is his "freedom" and the audience, the other actors, are to play into this act, if their own performance is to remain believable.
Power is to make of them your supporting cast.

An actor's appeal is the product of his ability to stir-up emotions in the audience, to stand-in, for them, in situations they will never experience, and offer an idea(l) worth emulating - emotional seduction using crafted appearance, and fake situations.
When it comes to emotion reason disintegrates in the psyche of the Modern.

Hawkes, David wrote:

Heywood is happy to describe acting’s effect as “bewitching,” and he applauds the self-fashioning it can produce in the audience. Many of his contemporaries pointed to the link between the theatrical and the economic variants of magical thinking.
Like acting, the process of commodification requires the animation of images.
Even the simplest act of barter assumes the ability to see the image, the “value,” of one thing in the physical body of another.
Over the course of history, this value takes on an independent form as money, and it grows progressively more powerful and more abstract as time goes on. It also enters into a hostile relationship with what it represents: subjective human activity, or “labor power.”
With the transition from a barter to a money economy, value must be expressed in the form of a common denominator.
The things to be exchanged are either the products of human labor or the objects of human desire; most frequently they are both. In either case, what the things share in common is the value brought to them by human subjective agency.
Value is a way of expressing human subjective agency—which is to say human life—in objective form.
Money is simultaneously an animate image and the objectified form of the subject.

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is an antitheatrical tract apres la lettre, and the most cogent exposition of the development of the commodity form into the autonomous image. Beginning from the proposition that “All that was once directly lived has become representation,” it describes the way in which animate images expand their power beyond the money form, mutating into what Debord calls the “spectacle.”
Although he defines the spectacle in Marxist terms as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”, and as “the concrete manifestation of alienation” , Debord is acutely sensitive to the theological heritage of the concept. He calls the spectacle “a specious form of the sacred”  and “a visible negation of life . . .--The Faust Myth

The iconography of money, its performative value is the result of a subjective agreement.
Money, on its own, has zero value, or value equal to the material it is printed upon.
The symbol is the value giver, and the symbol is magical.
It can make others perform, heal natural injustices, convince the most skeptical mind, correct the determinations of centuries.

When the value of the referent to the referred can be confused, value can be manufactured. It can have no real application and only matter within the paradigm within which the symbols are given value.
Within the context of performative value, within artificial environments, the value of anything can be manufactured through marketing.

Alienation from self through the icon, the symbol, the word, a welcomed relief for the common man who is the byproduct of sheltering and human interventions upon natural processes.
To escape the reality of one's own self, ones nature/past, so as to them reinvent self according to popular idea(l)s in the immediate present: this is what liberty and individuality is in Modern contexts.
Money purchases the means by which this escape can become plausible, as a performance, because nothing is ever escaped.
There is only the pretense, the act, the performance of what is necessary for there to be an escape.
The individual dies, to be reborn in this new guise. Through symbolic death he is liberated from his past, from nature, reborn as a new character.

Hawkes, David wrote:

Laura Levine observes that the people of Tudor and Stuart England instinctively associated the theatre with magic. She points out that in Daemonologie, James VI’s “vision of the witches destroying their victims by image magic is animated by the same fear at the heart of attacks against the stage, the fear that representations can actually alter the things they are only supposed to represent.”
Opposition to witchcraft and to the theatre reflect a wider fear of the generalized power of the performative sign:
“Though [Daemonologie] claims that magic is mere theatre, like the antitheatrical tracts, its real fear is that theater itself is constitutive” .

Similarly, Levine finds in the anonymous witch-tract Newes from Scotland “the fear that, rather than representing the things they are supposed to stand for, signs can actually alter them.
What Newes from Scotland shares with the antitheatrical tracts of the period is the frightening vision that representations can actually make the things they stand for mimic them—a vision of a kind of mimesis in reverse”
--The Faust Myth

The confusion between the signified and the signifier is this confusion between the noumenon and the phenomenon.
The confused, the magically mesmerized, hypnotized, have mistaken the word for the deed, the idea(l), abstracted, for the real, the objective for the subjective.  

Hawkes, David wrote:

Faustus’s basic sin is semiotic. As William Blackburn notes, his ignorance of magic “is really an ignorance of the proper way to use language.”
The magician “has difficulty in distinguishing between things and his verbal descriptions of those things”, and is damned as a result of his “attempt to substitute a world of words for the real
world” .
He is captivated by the verbal and figural iconography of ritual magic: “Lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters— / Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires”.
Faust “desires” the outward sign as an end in itself, and his magical ambitions are described in emotional, rather than rational terms: “Tis Magic, Magic

--The Faust Myth

The mysterious, indifferent, coldness of the objective is substituted, magically, by the symbol, the word, the abstraction.
Quality reduced to quantity.  

Hawkes, David wrote:

Faustus’s opening monologue gives a precise and exhaustive location of magic within sixteenth-century academic discourse. It begins with the scholar determining to look beneath the surface of the subjects he studies, seeking after their underlying significance: “Settle thy studies Faustus, and begin / To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess”.

His declared intention is to pursue the natural teleology of each discipline, or “level at the end of every Art, / And live and die in Aristotle’s works” .

Faustus is proposing to discover the Aristotelian telos, the “end” or “final cause,” of every art.
Doubt has already been thrown on his ability to discern this, however, by the previous line’s injunction to himself:
“Having commenced, be a Divine in show.”
The phrase “in show” equates the reputation, or image, of a “divine” with the reality, and this confusion is evident in Faustus’s subsequent reasoning:

Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravisht me,
Bene disserere est finis logicis,
Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?

--The Faust Myth

The pursuit of the projected nullification of the dynamic real with an idealized presupposition.
It is, itself, a symbol to direct the mind and focus the will.
it's attainment would mean a finality - in this case the end of thinking.

Hawkes, David wrote:

Affords this art no greater miracle:
Then read no more, thou hast attained the end.

Of course, to dispute well is not the “chiefest end”—the telos or finis—of logic, but of rhetoric.
Faust has already committed the error, which is common to magicians and sophists, of valuing the manipulation of signs over the pursuit of truth. He makes a similar mistake when he turns to medicine:
“Be a physician Faustus, heap up gold”.

This is a wry reference to medicinal alchemy, which sought the philosopher’s stone, not in order to realize the financial value of gold, but as a catalyst which would bring the fallen universe of matter
back to its spiritual perfection or telos.
Faustus’s ambition, on the other hand, is basely acquisitive. He views gold in quantitative rather than qualitative terms: as money, rather than as the perfect form of metal. His worldly avarice harmonizes with his ambition for the sweet fruition of earthly fame, which he confuses with spiritual salvation in his hope to be “eternized for some wondrous cure”.

There follows another misreading of teleology:

Summum bonum medicinæ sanitas,
The end of physic is our body’s health:
Why Faustus, hast thou not attained that end?

Faustus understands “physic” in a purely material sense, mistranslating sanitas as “our body’s health,” when in fact the term refers equally to mental health—sanity—and to the ability to reason logically. This is one end he has certainly not achieved, as we find from his instrumental,
performative understanding of his words’ effect:
Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,
Whereby whole cities have escaped the plague,
And thousand desperate maladies been eased?

There is no reference to any clinical or philosophical advance to which Faustus has contributed. Rather, as he describes it, his medical proclamations have been fetishized, set up as efficacious “monuments,” and treated in the same way as Catholic relics.
At this stage in the soliloquy, Faustus’s fatal aspiration is revealed: he hopes to become equal to God.

This is the Satanic, the Manichean, and the magical error, which believes in the possibility of an artificial life—etymologically we could call it a technological life—beyond and apart from the Creator:
Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
Wouldst thou make men to live eternally
Or, being dead, raise them to life again,
Then this profession were to be esteemed.

The error here is the belief that to raise the dead, as in necromancy, would be equivalent to granting eternal life: Faustus has misunderstood the nature of the soul.
He next turns from medicine to law, and reads from Justinian:

“Si una eademque, res legatus duobus, / Alter
rem alter valorem rei” [“If one and the same thing is bequeathed to
two heirs, one receives the thing, the other the value of the thing”]

The Biblical resonances of different legacies being inherited by different sons would have been hard for Marlowe’s contemporaries to miss. They would have thought of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, all of whom were typological figures for the reprobate and the redeemed.

Here, one heir receives the thing itself, and the other receives the financial value of the thing.
One receives the reality, the other the image; one the referent and the other the sign.

Faustus, already in the grip of magical thinking, misses the metaphorical significance of this, dismissing it as “[a] pretty case of paltry legacies”, but the following text he examines gives
the lie to his nonchalance: “Ex hæreditari filium non potest pater nisi . . .” [“A father may not disinherit his son unless . . .”].
His literalist, legalist interpretation obscures the text’s figurative relevance to his own situation, where he is indeed to be “disinherited” by his “Father.”




--The Faust Myth

What a sad state of affairs it is when women take the current state of men, which they idolize as being more modern, as a starting point to then claim superiority in relation to them, and because they cannot declare themselves physically superior, without sounding ridiculous, they settle for claiming to be more "clever" because they can outwit these degenerates, and because they can manipulate them using sex; a possibility afforded to them by institution set-up by men, to produce the docile sort they then decide is both beneath them and also preferable to the "other" type, which they call primal.

No, not sad...but pathetic.

Women, and effete men, prefer to make the side-effect of satiating a need, the end in itself, because if they do not they would have to accept that they are a means to an end, or insignificant when it comes to control, and establishing order...or in projecting an object/objective, idea(l) to direct humanity's will.

Paternalism morphs from a masculine authority to a monetary pragmatism.
The female begrudgingly submits to its might though, in the latter case, she preserves the illusion of choice, and tells herself she was free.

She marries one for social reasons and fucks other(s) for emotional/physical reasons. 
Confused by how she can manage both she splits herself in two, unable to explain herself - schizophrenia.
Later she feels lost, wanting to discover her "real" self in her own confusing self-contradictions.

A modern's obsession with age is partly the result of his schizophrenic existence. 
Wanting to preserve his/her innocence towards the choices (s)he was forced to make, and the compromises these choices entailed, (s)he wishes to preserve the illusion that (s)he can make amends for them at a later date. 
Remaining young means you can (re)cover from your previous mistakes in judgment, and then make a new start - reinventing yourself in the process.

Having been disillusioned by what (s)he was told was the "valuable", and the "good" life, the healthy and normal way to go, (s)he dreams of living a second life...this time with the benefit of hindsight.
The Modern idea(l) having proven void of substance, mainly because it contradicts the real is rejected, and the mind wishes to live in accordance to his/her genetic predispositions, with no social or memetic concerns - pure animal hedonism.
The pragmatic giving way to a desire to have the repressed instinctual, the innate, the intuitive, have its try. 

The schism Modernity produces creates this duality in the psyche.
When one part lives out its life (usually the memetic part) the other wants to have a try (the genetic part). 
The two are rarely in agreement.

A hedonist, and a materialist, considers the symptom, the side-effect, of his (inter)actions the reason, the purpose, the end of them.  
An animal having little understanding of the world and of the self considers the orgasm the reason why he struggles to copulate - it puts itself at the center of reality and understands the world through its motives, its drives, its automatic (re)actions.

Anthropocentric world-views develop into egocentric ones, particularly when the individual has been stripped of all identifiers from the past/nature.
It is an implosion of self-consciousnesses, an anxious pulling back at the merest touch of otherness, consolidating its awareness so as to then construct a shallow foundation in the immediate from where to build forth.  
With the deep roots of self cut off, the plant grips upon the surfaces wanting to crawl upon them rather than immerse itself in the soil's depth.

When the organism's own evolved methods of simplifying/generalizing and symbolizing the mystifying, dynamic world, and its internal logic, becomes apparent to the self-conscious mind, this discovery becomes a universal law, and the voyage towards self-discovery becomes a trip towards the eternal.
It is true that as a manifestation of the real man can look inward to explore the outer, but finding only order there, is to ignore the chaos that accompanies it, because life, in the end, has an antagonistic relationship with the world, as it is ordaining in the disordering, and so its internal structures and the methods and symbols it developed to make sense of them are most often contradicted by the world.

To discover that language, whether using words or numbers, has a self-referential logic, and to understand pleasure as the simplest form of evaluating otherness, is part of self-understanding.

What do we consider beautiful, or pleasing to our senses?
What displays symmetry, and promises a higher degree of it in relation to our own.
Whether it be the proportions of the body, or a color scheme, or a tonal succession, or the accentuating harmony of flavors, or a panorama what the mind finds pleasing is the order present, and the possibilities this order offers to its own ordering.

And why is this so appealing, so seductive; and why did life evolve this attraction to order?
Because order is declining towards chaos (complexity and then randomness); because the organism lacks it in itself in an absolute state, and must replenish it, and preserve it, and increase it as much as it can.

It is understandable, from a psychological perspective, that a mind finding itself in an indifferent, to its interests, environment would be pleased by the idea that this mysterious world hides an underlying logic which is, coincidentally, in agreement with organic processes, and that the fabric of reality is not only accessible but also eternally consistent.
Anxiety and fear, along with the stresses of need existence exposes the mind to, are strong motivators.
When the authority and order of God has ceased to apply then some other form, replacing it, must take its place; if not the "word of God" then mathematics speaking the language of the divine, and if not a universal purpose and morality then some logic, some hidden truth to make the uncertain less threatening.


Need-Suffering/Pain is the sensation of Flux (dynamic interactivity - temporal attrition upon the organism), and so any willful act, any act directing the life-forms aggregate energies towards an object/objective (idea(l)) which strives to contradict this Flux will result in pleasure, ergo because life is an ordering in the disordering, or a self-maintaining, self-correcting, self-organizing emergent unity, increasing its order, as much as possible, (re)acting to this Flux, automatically, intuitively, as a struggle, an agon, all its activities will result in pleasure, if they are successful.
Pleasure being the sensation that it is acting in agreement with its primary drives, as these have evolved through its most fundamental needs.

This anthropocentric attitude where man, and by extension life, is placed at the center of the universe, is linked to the psychology of Nihilism and its Modern expression currently in the west.
The world becomes a hedonistic playground, existing to provide pleasure to the organism.
The struggle, the antagonism, is inverted into a benevolent, caring, existence... and God is resurrected in a secular form.

Nihilistic religions with their promise of salvation from the negativity of existence, if gnosis (knowledge of God's love, God's reason, God's purpose), and trust (faith) enter a man's heart, are replaced by the conviction that existence is really a pleasing state, and that underlying its uncertainty and its suffering, lies a universal code, a divine word, which offers salvation anew.
The requirement is the same: the compensating arrogance of a humbled soul; the belief that all is reversible (perspectivism) and all that is needed is a change in attitude (faith in the power of human perspective.

The "negativity" of existence, is now inverted into a secret positivity awaiting discovery to the one with a pure heart, and a strong conviction.
God gives way to a universal pattern - the ultimate unifying theory, the ONE in mathematical/linguistic form.
The "word of god" is now the numerical sequences (1-9), the (0) negating it (Satan), as 1 through 9 are really multipliers of ONE, of itself (god multiplied infinitely is the universal code, the hidden fabric).
The mathematics, the linguistic tools rooted in internal systolic/diastolic rates, and neurological on/off methods, the symbols, become the underlying "positivity" of the world, where their discovery saves man from their absence, symbolized by another absolute human contrivance, the zero.

Hawkes, David wrote:

In the eighteenth century, the Faustian attitude to autonomous representation and the objectification of the subject moves decisively into the realm of the erotic. Even in Spies and Marlowe, the erotic power exerted by the animate image of Helen of Troy marks the stage at which the distinction between illusion and reality breaks down.

This condition is known to postmodern philosophers as “hyper-reality,” and thinkers like Jean Baudrillard have argued convincingly that the displacement of the referent by the sign is the definitive characteristic of contemporary consciousness.

In Baudrillard’s work, however, hyper-reality loses some of the ethical stigma that his former Situationist colleague Guy Debord attached to the “spectacle.”
While both Debord and Baudrillard trace a direct link between the spectacle and the imposition of imaginary exchange-value on an object, Debord emphasizes the fact that exchange-value is objectified labor-power, and this give his critique a moralistic tone that has largely disappeared from postmodernist accounts of the hyper-real.

The hyper-real is the space where words, symbols, numbers, replace the real, rather than represent it.
Value is imaginary, contrived, a matter of shared delusion, or a secret agreement, a lie:
"I will buy what you sell as valuable, if you accept what I sell as equally valuable".  

Money is the abstraction where this agreement congeals into the hyper-real.
The symbol represents the elimination of the phenomenon, placing in its place the noumenon, where all is equated in code.
Men are women, races are all born with the same potentials (economically speaking).
The hyper-real utility is the new value system of exchange. Within its spaces new identities, new relationships, are forged - qualities become quantities of market exchange value.

Sex a new uniform, a life-style option.
Appearance a fashion trend.

Hawkes, David wrote:

The theoretical foundation of Debord’s work is Georg Lukacs’s extrapolation of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism into the allencompassing notion of “reification,” a phenomenon that is simultaneously psychological and economic.  

 

The symbols utility, the word, the code, has value within this exchange space where the participants have agreed, or been indoctrinated, upon the shared value standards.
The subjective is the agreement to support the other's perspective if it does not contradict the principles of the exchange.  
The objective world is not a factor, especially when it does contradict these principles.

Hawkes, David wrote:

Every version of the Faust story includes a critique of sexual idolatry, and as a result, treatments of the Faust legend frequently overlap with another primal modern myth: the story of Don Juan. It is often said that Don Juan is to the body what Faust is to the mind, but just as Faust exhibits sexual as well as intellectual ambition, Don Juan always displays a Faustian free-thinking skepticism.....

Like Faust, Don Juan is interested only in the efficacy of words, not their truth: “Saying, for him, is in no case tantamount to knowing, but rather to doing: acting on the interlocutor, modifying the situation and the play of forces within it.”

The word is judged by its seductive power. how does it makes us feel, how does it comfort and offer us hope.
It loses its reference to reality, which remains indifferent, and becomes another commodity of exchange...of selling and buying.
And like with most capitalistic market systems expansion means globalizing this comodification of values. All must be included for the system to experience growth.

The symbol becomes a magical talisman, binding one to another, by a promise.
Words can be used to bind all in promises.
The promise is that I will not disturb your delusion if you do not disturb mine - the Democratic idea(l).

Words can be declarative, hyperbolic, the claims expressed using them absurd, yet the promise is binding, and the more money you have the more binding they become.

The action reduced to a symbol a word - money being the abstraction of effort in time.
This is what Hawkes calls "magic".
The symbol is magical.

Phenomenon is noumenon.
Object is subject.

Objective reality is subjective interpretation.
The Nihilistic inversion.
The subjective need not adapt to the indifferent fluctuating objective world, but the world can now be transformed into a symbol and manipulated, divided into smaller parts, codes that can be exchanged, at will.

Within this artificial realm of human artifice, this hyper-real realm, everything can be reduced to a monetary value, a quantity.
Within it natural inequalities, the superior/inferior, the past, changes meaning.

The Modern Nihilist confuses the means for the end (object/objective) because he's not really interested in reality or, at least, not the reality which makes him feel uncertain and vulnerable.
For him discussing how to maintain a stable system to make comfort and safety possible is the same as discussing how the world works, outside of this human safety net and its contrivances, and, for him, discussion suffering/pleasure sensations is about the sensation itself, and not the reason this sensation evolves, or what it refers to.
The side-effect becomes the end itself, because he does not want to go further.

As such, sex, for the Modern is about orgasm, the feeling of being pleasured, justice is about lies that will accommodate as many as possible, and philosophy, in general, is about finding ways to cope, about finding solutions, and correcting how things are.
But he has no clue how things are because he never goes beyond this desperate need to correct this nefarious, world of indifference which he understands only as evil.
He stops where he feels the most at ease.
He begins to think from himself, and from the position of his own interests.
He does not explore the world objectively and then proceed to figure out if he can or cannot correct it, or how to cope with it, as well, and as much as he can.
He begins with the subjective and works backwards, which for him seems a forward looking method; a progressive, positive way attitude.  
And this backwards method is exactly where Nihilism seduces him, and not without his own consent, if he is aware of what is occurring at all.

The con-artist does not trick his "victim" no more than a hypnotist has the power to make someone do something he is unwilling to do; he manipulates a desire already present in the other.
This is the seductive power of signs, that many have commented upon.
Words being signs, and words are how both con-artist and hypnotist pull out of the other what desperately wants to come out.

Just witness the seductive power of numbers, and of mathematics. They offer the individual, interested in them, the comforting illusion that these manmade symbols, based on human neurological processes, are an insight into something universal, something sacred, something absolute, something powerful.  
It does not matter if everything man builds using these symbols is ephemeral, incomplete, unable to incorporate the totality into a singular symbol, reflecting, in this way, the species that constructed them.  
What matters is the temporary solutions, the salves, the illusion they provide that man can be a master of his own destiny - the Alexandrian Age's masculine nihilism.

On the one hand we have feminine nihilism that seeks solutions, power, through association, and surrenders will and reason to the absurd so as to gain the fantasy of his/her life being worthy of eternity and his suffering having a meaning, a purpose, and on the other we have the masculine nihilism that begins with the premise of omnipotence and omniscience, believing that he can and will, one day, become God.
And this dualism, this binary psychological paradigm is the matrix within which Modernity functions.
It designated right from left politics, good from evil, and right from wrong.
It is intuitive, instinctual, and this is why it is so powerful.
Its foundation is internal, reptilian, genetic; ingrained in the methods used in thinking that go back to the beginning of life.

To fully understand the multiplicity modernity produces one must first understand the idea(l) of Nihilism which it is based upon, or that it uses to create an artificial internal harmony.
Eliminating internal frictions is what nihilism is used for, and to do so it must invert human understanding and then replace it with an emotionally gratifying field of action that defuses energies and directs them towards useful, to the system, object/objectives.

For the modern the world is his construct.  
There is no objective world which forces a subjective interpretation of it to adapt or die.
It isn't that sexual roles are naturally produced, but that man invents them.
It isn't that races are an indication of how species are created within Evolution Theory, but that man invents this distinction.
It's not that beauty is order and that man evolves to perceive it, to discover it, but that man decides, on his own, what it is.
It isn't that appearances matter but that that they matter, how much they matter, or which one do or do not matter, is decided by man.

This detachment from probability opens up possibilities, where the only rule is systemic: the only limit being that one's projected beliefs do not interfere with those of another.
The world which restricts the healthy rational mind is what they consider cultist, because the world limits what interpretations of it are useful and which ones perish, creating a convergence of perspectives where belonging to the same species is the deciding factor.
With moderns there is no such limiting factor, other than the systemic one, previously mentioned. This opens up possibilities to almost anything, from the reasonable to the absurd, from the demented to the noble.
Modern multiplicity is really a byproduct of systematic protection; the natural, indifferent, world kept outside its premises.  
This increases permissibility, within the confines of social rules. the individual grows up to believe that only the system, or other people, is what limits his activities, his beliefs, his tastes and preferences.

Modern obsession with subjectivity preaches that the world can be manufactured through a collective agreement, because there is no objective reality to resist human artifices.
Essentially a social eugenics program dependent on education, training, brainwashing, manipulating weakness, and needs, already present but denied a natural cause - nature can be redefined and past reinterpreted.
Hypocritically denying 'human nature' and rejecting eugenics.

When you propose to them that the world is present, that the past/nature manifests as presence, that the objective dynamic world cannot be escaped with tricks and words, they can only comprehend this uncovering of reality, which is present, as another subjective trick.
They need to retain this obsession...otherwise they might be forced to face a world that will be indifferent to their delusions.

When the modern uses the term "objective" he usually has some version of the absolute in mind.
In his either/or duality, the subjective represents the creative, adaptive, fluid, and the objective the static, immutable, absolute.

The idea that the objective can be both dynamic, fluid, and still remain objective in relation to the mind that must adapt to it, cannot be comprehended.

It is because the objective exists that the subjective must evolve, as a (re)action to it, to deal with it.
It is because the world is dynamic and yet displaying, still, patterns of order, of consistency, that life emerges and must remain engaged and adaptive to this ever-changing universe.

But we are talking about two different degrees of change, and dynamism here.
The world is dynamic but not to the degree where life would be impossible within it.
The world changes but in relation to the evolved, organic, brain, evolved to survive within it, it appears static in its processes.
And so man comes up with laws to describe these patterns of consistency, assuming that they remain eternal.

The world exists before there is a consciousness present to perceive it and interpret it, and it remains unaffected if this consciousness perishes because it failed to perceive accurately.