Modernity

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

In the new property and money economy, this is a type which has learned that damage makes people wise, but debts make them wiser. The key figure of the new age is the ‘debtor-producer’ – better known as the entrepreneur – who constantly flexibilizes their business methods, their opinions and themselves in order to access by all lawful and unlawful, tried and untried means the profits that enable them to pay off their loans on time.
These debtor producers give the idea of owed debt it’s radically renewing, modern meaning: a moral fault becomes an economically logical relationship of incentive.
Without the positivization of debt, there can be no capitalism. It was the debtor-producers who began to turn the wheel of permanent monetary circulation in the ‘age of the bourgeoisie’.
The primary fact of the Modern Age was not that the earth goes around the sun, but that money goes around the earth.

Progress as debt production.
We see it today with a globalization of debt to ensure debt-paying enslavement.

Debt as "positive promise".
This "debt" can be translated metaphysically as lack, experienced as need/suffering.
Need is manipulated, promising a greater satiation, a higher return in pleasure investment, by forfeiting the short-term for a hypothetical long-term outcome.
The path-of-more-resistance became an economic blueprint, entailment heightened speculative risks by projecting a heightened future gratification.
The projected idea(l), in the beyondness of time.
Competition makes this path-of-more-resistance a strategic pricing out of the other, which results in a lifetime of chains of debt.
Overt force, authority, is not required, outside of the "moral" imperative to pay back your accumulated debt, or face the higher costs.
The translational of lack, into code, a numerical symbol, represented by money, opens up the possibility for creating artificial lack, by accentuating, inflating the one already present as existence.
This artificially produced lack is an accumulation of time. The more willingly taking no a debt is taking on a temporal accumulation of lack, seduced by the promises of its future alleviation, and the pleasure of that moment.

Debt, as a monetary translation of existential lack, now inflates need (the experience of this lack), and the risk of greater suffering.
Need being the “mother of invention” becomes the indebted one's economic virility, his rat-race hustle and bustle, his stress and anxiety, and his creativity in fulfilling this debt.
He is now defined by this monetary debt.
He sells off his time, his life, (life being temporal), seduced by the promise of a final satisfaction, which never comes.
His existential anxieties/fear manipulated to purchase more and more products which hint at this finality, but only offer a temporary high, a momentary pleasure.
He is a slave to his own passions.
No longer reined in by his reason, but controlled by an external reason, an alien will.

Value judgments are always juxtapositions.

When one values self he does so in relation to an otherness. When one values one over another one Compares one to the other, and evaluates according to the level of his own need.

The past/nature, and the present/nurture, the environment the organism is raised in and survives within determines the degree of this need, and so it also determines the evaluation.

Risk taking in nature must take into consideration other factors than those risk taking must consider within manmade environments.
Self evaluation, in human systems is shaped by the artifices man constructs to deal with the more dire, permanent costs in nature. the individual raised in a sheltered environment will asses his own value according to his experiences.
If these experiences never faced any damage, if he has been protected from his own ignorance, then his sense of self, his self value, will be warped.
He will mistake the protective system's effect for his own value and will overestimate self.

But, as usual, one can postpone need/suffering, but not escape it.
Sheltering simply accumulates the pain that will be paid, for existing.
What can be paid incrementally will, most definitely be paid, in one lump sum; what could lead to a gradual increase in strength, might result in excruciating final curtain call.

The idea that one has value before there is a judgment to evaluate, to assess, to judge, is a way of escaping the pain of discovering your value within the environment you can only escape with death.
the alternative is a living-dead existence. Alive but brain-dead, numb, oblivious to anything hurtful; full of the untested confidence of a mind that has never faced its own pain.

The modern mistakes knowledge for understanding...as I've noted many times before.

From this mistake all others follow.
He assumes that because he knows things, he has herd the words used to refer to them, that he understands them.
He remains cynical and aloof, protected from his own simplicity, because he associated knowing with understanding, and because in this information inundated world, we've heard it all, the conclusion is made that all know it all and so all understand it all...or, at least, that all can understand it all.  

Here's the thing, though...understanding is about patterns (re)cognition.
I can know, be taught, parrot, that 1+1=2, and that 3+3=6, but if I do not see the pattern then I do not understand what I am saying.
Then, when someone says one, or two, the words correspond to what I've recited, regurgitated, learned verbatim, and so I think I understand, that it's nothing new to me, but if I cannot use this knowledge to figure out what 2+2= then I do not understand, I simply know.

Can someone learn to understand?
Up to a degree.
Some pattern (re)cognition remain beyond the capacity of the average individual.
He can know, and repeat, but he will never understand because the pattern in the knowledge, the data being presented to him, is beyond him.
The best he can do is imitate, and fool the average, like him, that he understands, by repeating the understanding provided to him by another.  

And so, equality continues to be a comforting myth, and no matter what you tell a simpleton, he will always tell you that it's "old news", dismissing it as if he's reasoned it away, settling for the exciting, trendy, flashy new shiny thing, to be mesmerized by, calling it, in the end, superficial, before he runs towards the next "new" thing.

The Modern, having been raised on word manipulations and conjuring magic tricks, assumes that when revealing the world to him that you are conjuring it out of thin air, or words with no reference to the apparent.
All is trickery, leading to cynical leveling of all opinions as equally being "head-games", or all is absolute, so if it is not absolutely so, then it is absolutely not so.

The Modern believes, in his naive worship of his own subjectivity, that all perspectives are governed by escapism and transparent word-play.
The possibility that a word, symbolizing a noumenon (abstraction), might gain superiority by being attached to a phenomenon, alludes it, or it flees from the possibility, because it prefers this detached, creativity where the deciding factor becomes seduction based no pretenses, and probabilities vanish in sensationalism.
Not erotic in the honest sense, but in the romantic sense - the idealized world of Modern superficiality that declares one thing and then acts in contradiction to it.
The Modern ascribes this to its own complexity, that mystifies itself, no less than it does the other.
In this way it avoids being seen as what it is, rather than as what it wishes it were - which changes form month to month, to accommodate fashion trends, and popularity contests.

He, then, concludes that any description of the world, which reveals it to him, where it is disclosed, uncovered, must be another magic trick.
He has been trained to dismiss his own senses as trickery, so that even what he sees becomes a fake.
He is seduced by the possibility that nothing peprcieves is real, because then it all becomes a game of words and pretenses - magic conjuring, where everything, and anything is possible.

The Modern must blame someone for its condition.
He cannot hold himself accountable, that is for sure.
So, why not the one who exposes him to what he is?
It's all his fault, this other, because perspectives, after all, are all equally subjective....so what evil motive he must have to think as he does.

He cannot bring himself to admit how deeply he despises himself and the world that made him possible, so why not hate the one who lifts a mirror to make him see for himself?
Why not despise the one who reveals the world to him, and makes him look at his place within it?  
Then he can project his hatred outwards, and remain convinced that he "loves" himself.
Only, he loves an idealized, fake self, which he cultivated daily to remain hidden from sight.
Cultivation, for him, is not lifting himself, in relation to the world, but hiding from it, lying about it, pretending to be what he is not, and may never be able to become.
His rage focuses upon the one who made him aware of this probability.

This is the cleansing process words are good for.
The cleansing of words in the baptismal pool.
He is, then, reborn a pristine nobody just waiting to be given a name, an identity, a reason for being.
They, these priestly types, sanctify the concept, absolve it of all wrong-doing, and clean it for mass consumption, detaching it from the world as it is, to reconnect it to a world as it should have been.
For the modern all who speak of reality are priests and shamans, out to trick them, and use them.
Having known no father they think all masculine energy is an antagonist, a competitor, out to dominate them.
They've been told that they must compete with their own fathers for their mother's affections.

Do you see, now, why the Modern is so quick to accuse the other of hatred and of projecting?
It's all he can do to escape being discovered.

Having reached the end of dualism the lines between the subjective/objective, the good/bad, the one/nil, the noumenon/phenomenon, are demarcated along ideological lines.
These are dependent upon motives, object/objectives, creating projected idea(l)s, which are, in turn, determines by particular psychosomatic balances, manifesting as emotions, reactions to stimuli, along a fight/flight fault line.

All else are translation, interpretation using a different medium, an alternative code, of the same concepts using different symbols = words, numbers, icons, images.

If one is distressed by his state of becoming to a degree where he wants to correct it, escape it, and feels inadequate to this task, then a particular way of seeing the world develops.
It may describe itself using different terms, but the "medium is the message" and if the medium is taken as that which it refers to then its logic is taken literally - this being the easiest method of dealing with what appears, is apparent, without having to deal with it, cope with it, directly.

Cybernetic man is man with no past, no nature.
He is defined by his purchased prosthetics.
Man, woman, animal...he can choose any accessory, any gadget, to improve his inheritance.
He is not defined, because he wishes to remain flexible in his options.


He is mechanical zombie - robot with interchangeable parts.
His strength multiplied, with intelligence compensated, his life inflated.

Sloterdijk's coming up to speed with The Feminization of Man, and Modern Nihilism in his book The World Interior of Capital...

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

The key terms ‘boredom’, ‘hothouse existence’ and ‘psychopolitical rearrangement’ of the part of humanity possessing spending power require additional explanations.

They must begin from the observation that among the populations of the comfort sphere, a far reaching shift is currently taking place from conventional thinking in terms of need and
lack to a largely unaccustomed thinking in options.
The significance of this transition goes far beyond what can be expressed by a phrase such as ‘change of mentality’.
These collectives have experienced such a deep caesura that one could be tempted to articulate their meaning with recourse to an exuberant philosophical concept: the realm of necessity, it would seem, has given way to the realm of freedom, however numerous the partisans of necessity who doggedly resist the altered conditions from an underground of old and new conservatism.

These include romantic and religious temperaments who react with outrage to the discovery that banality and freedom are converging – which is not how the goal of human endeavour had been envisaged. Indeed, after the shift, weak reasons such as mere moods and personal taste must take over the role of strong reasons, previously embodied by commanding need and its translation into figures of the fundamental, the dominant, the glorious and the inescapable. In a world defined by
means of relief, the old imperatives are losing their justifications.
Where there was necessity, there can now be mood.

Mood, taste, attitude, a sunny disposition, a can-do attitude.
A change of "perspective", becoming infective if it promises and soothes, alters the endosphere of the simulated world of man; now replacing the real with the hyper-real, the surreal.
A thoroughly world-denouncing meme, producing an internal space/time, geometries and mathematics used to map-it-out and set it apart from the chaos "outside".
An alternative, projected, exosphere, to cover the world up and to express the endospher's deepest desires.

A purely noetic construct, unbound by natural restrictions, and like all abstraction it simplifies/generalizes unwanted dimensions away so as to focus on the thingness of the object/objective.

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

Reference to pampering does not, of course, imply any concessions to conservative pedagogy, which clings stubbornly to the view that humans always depend on being led by a firm hand.

Pampering, as a term from historical anthropology, denotes the psychophysical and semantic reflexes of the relieving process that was inherent in the civilizatory process from the start, but could only become fully visible in the age of a radical de-scarcification of goods.  

Sloterdijk goes on to describe the internal structure of hierarchies, this endospheric psychological, noetic, memetic, geometry, created by this sheltering system.  

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

An architectural image can assist in grasping the new conditions: the interior of the postmodern crystal palace contains an elevator that transports residents to the five expansively constructed floors of relief.
Naturally, one should not assume that all passengers are able to alight on whatever floor they like and make use of its specific offers.
As significant numbers of beneficiaries are currently present on each level, however, knowledge of the pampering that is possible elsewhere affects all other palace dwellers.

In time, most palace-dwellers walk through all the floors, though they do not all have the same experiences.

The first floor is for those who have succeeded in partially or completely fulfilling the dream of income without performance; the second is frequented by an audience of relaxed citizens who profit from political security without themselves having any readiness to fight; the third is where those meet who participate in general provisions of immunity without having their own history of suffering; on the fourth, consumers of a knowledge whose acquisition requires no experience spread themselves out; and on the fifth one finds those who, through direct publication of their own person, have succeeded in becoming famous without presenting any achievement or publishing any work.

Sloterdijk maps up, geometrically and mathematically, the five major types of Modern populating its interior, sheltered, levels.
Different types, representing different organ hierarchies, producing different personalities, psychologies; each gravitating to the floor of its convenience; the hospital ward to deal with its particular ailment.

Then he proceeds to explain feminization to those way ahead of the game...
{note the date the book was published}

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

The most visible trace of the change in mentality is the rapid disintegration of historical masculinity.

The reason is clear enough: during the last fifty years, the social design of the ‘man’ became subject to overall relief from war. Specifically, it was liberated from the categorical prohibition on cowardice that applied in traditional cultures. As a result, the ‘new man’ established himself as a socio-psychological success figure in postpolemogenic culture – with the sole exception of the zone influenced by a military romanticism that continues to enjoy political support and mass media celebration in the imperial front nation on duty, the USA.
The new man is the civilly relaxed man, that is to say the consumer in the genus masculinum.
Where unease in relaxation appears, it is compensated for with symbolic gestures that provide suggestions for the production of designer masculinity.

Once detached from its natural place the concept man,  like the concept woman, represented by the words, and guided by the principle that all appearances are superficial and manufactured, or easily correctable - but only when it comes to human beings or those within the "crystal palace", where everything is product to be consumed.
Within this magical realm of abundance and safety, where all can be manufactured and pretended, nothing can resist the market forces that make resources accessible to those who do the "job" well.

"Designer masculinity" like "designer femininity"...a fashionable trendy look; up-to-date, and relevant - useful, pleasing, popular, marketable.

He goes on to say more...but let us jump forward to his tackling of the largest and brightest of all crystal palaces, now becoming a world of its own, swallowing the earth bit by bit, with only a brief stop on his comment about nihilism...

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

At this point we can only vaguely predict how post-fossility will remould the present concepts of entrepreneurship and freedom of expression.
It seems probable that from the vantage point of future ‘soft’ solar technologies, the romanticism of explosion – or, more generally speaking, the psychological, aesthetic and political derivatives of the sudden release of energy – will be judged in retrospect as the expressive world of a massculturally globalized energy fascism.

This is a reflex of the helpless vitalism that springs from the poverty of perspectives in the fossil energy-based world system. Against this background, one understands why the culture scene in the crystal palace betrays a profound disorientation – beyond the aforementioned convergence of boredom and entertainment.

The cheerful mass-cultural nihilism of the consumer scene is no less clueless and without future than the high-cultural nihilism of affluent private persons who assemble art collections to attain personal significance.
For the time being, ‘high’ and ‘low’ will follow the maxim ‘Après nous le solaire.’

Energy management where in Matrix-like simulation a human is no less than a battery processing solar winds.
How funny is this to Apollo?

The "clueless cheerfulness" of consumerism, and the "upscale" pretentiousness of the "well to do" who immerse themselves in hedonism and art, to find relief from their over-stimulated ennui now desperate to find some revamped, hyperbole, to stimulate the pleasure parts into life.

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

The United States of America is undoubtedly one of its preferred regions, not to say its main residence.
It is the country in the modern that, more than any other, has given itself the constitution of a comfort sphere.
One could almost say that in the case of the USA, the crystal palace presents itself as an immigration country.
In keeping with this, most of its inhabitants have developed an inclination to view themselves not merely as agents of an economic system, but as carriers of a motivation that has long borne an irresistible name: the American Dream.
Its basic definition includes the postulation that the number of its definitions is virtually as high as the number of the country's inhabitants.
If one reduces all the dreams dreamt on American soil about the meaning of existence in that country to their essentials, however, one will probably be left with no more than three irreducible
motifs.

Amongst those identifying with the idealized "dreamer" remaining asleep is the first priority.
By any means necessary: drugs, entertainment, food, sex, the somnambulist must remain in a stater where dreaming can happen.
 
And what is dreaming other than a state of solipsistic detachment from reality; a realm of infinite possibilities, willfully directed, but not consciously - the intuitive, unconsciousness, lending credence to its fantastic landscapes.
Sleep, the intermediating state between living and dying, where the world fades and reemerges as an internally bubbling-up, overflowing, stream of internal processes.

What can thwart the imagination of a mind disconnected from anything that would inhibit its dreaming?

The "American Dream" where "everything is possible", being the overoptimistic, naive, seductive expression of this sleeping detachment from the world that, still, cares not.
Ergo, multiplicity characterizes the sleeper's options.
There's no world of probability, no determining immutable past/nature, to limit the chaotic spaces of expanding possibilities.
Everything is forth, forward, immanent, towards infinite possibility = chaos.

Agents of chaos, then.
The Nihilist finds his own, and congregates with them.
It's instinctive....an organism finds the herd he smells himself in....
Lepers used to form communities of their own.

No matter how different he wants to be the nihilist (re)cognizes a fellow Nihilist...whether the other calls himself by that name or sues any fashionable variant: Marxist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Liberal, Secular-Humanist, Altruist...Bob, Harry, Paul, Mary.

What's in a name?
Another word.

The Nihilist uses words to hide, not to expose...and so what he says is infinitely recyclable, re-definable....it is never attached to a phenomenon to stabilize it, preventing him from claiming to mean something else, at a future date.
This is, particularity, useful to a nihilist who hides and wants to presence an idealistic conception of self.
No matter how stupid he is, how duplicitous, how fake, he can always claim to mean whatever implies that he is not.
Using artistic, ambiguous, prose, is a perfect way to allude being exposed.
He never clarifies, never makes a stand...he is forever twisting and turning, using words, to hide.
One moment he implies 'this' boldly, then, when 'this' proves to be wanting, he claims to have meant 'that'.
He simply changes the words around to mean anything, to anyone, at any time.

Another method of evasion, of escape exposure, is deferring to "experts", and letting them speak on his behalf.
Then he can distance himself from them, if they prove to be less than idea(l).
He didn't "really" believe what this other said...he simply mentioned that 'so-and-so, said it, when he was desperately trying to imply something that flattered him.
He alludes to, and so he can never be caught 'saying anything'.

But then, why use different code, different words, numbers, to say exactly what another has already said?
Why use words that complicate when other words can be used to simplify?
Because in the desired uniformity, the Nihilists still wishes to stand apart.
Because he does not really know what he is talking about, but it shaping it as he goes along; adapting it to whatever new data comes up, pretending that he 'originally' meant exactly that.
Like a duplicitous coward, he sells what he does not buy into, or he buys into what he so desperately needs to be sold.

His faked humility, expressed as arrogance, quickly turns to humility, trying to 'save face'.
His message is "positive", after all...so why attack him when he is trying to help?

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

The second characteristic is tied to the term ‘chosenness’ – a word that moves through a multi-coloured spectrum of meanings, starting with the notion that it is the most natural thing in the world to be at the top in all respects and extending to the rarely voiced, but widely palpable idea that the deep purpose of this country is to be the venue for the Protestant outdoing of the Jewish exception.

Now, we are entering into this escapist psychology of nihilism.
Heisman commented on the connection between Anglo-Saxon, later Yankee, resentiment, finding its feminine mate in the Jewish cult of victimhood.
What a pair they've been?
Giving birth to the American infant, that declares itself king of the world.

The sense of entitlement, on a mass scale, as byproduct of the previously mentioned dream-spaces, made possible under the protective umbrella, that let's the beast slumber; that child-like charm of the optimist, and the "positive" nihilistic messenger.
"I offer you salvation! Reject me at your peril."

The Anglo-Saxons dealt with their historical emasculation by the Normans, like the Jews dealt their emasculation by the Egyptians: they changed their minds, altered their attitude, and inverted the world to where bottom was up, and up became bottom.

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

The third and final attribute is connected to the psychodynamic social contract of the USA, which ensures the everlasting precedence of manias over depressions.
One manifestation of this is the code of optimism that visitors from Europe find so cheering, albeit often baffling, and which constitutes the true national language (although selfcritical idioms, even an indigenous version of negativism, can also be found).
This gives rise to the zestful habit among ordinary Americans of formulating problems as challenges.

This mania can also be witnessed in the arena of "philosophizing" where nothing is permitted to be spoken of unless a "solution", to it, is also provided, reducing philosophy to a self-help manual, rather than a description of what is.
no longer philosophy, as love of wisdom, but political philosophy, as in Strauss, and Plato, and love of virtue.
Virtue decides what wisdom is to be permitted airing.
No memetic culling acceptable here, unless practices by the State, through the women.

Anything less is "whining".
Why speak of what is negative if you cannot turn it into a positive?
Shaming into silence.
If you are going to say something bad, unsettling, make sure you follow it with a protective measure for those who may go mad.
If not, your motives, and character, will be slandered, until you can speak no more.

Intellectualism desperate to provide a "correction" to the objective, using subjective schizophrenia.
And if the world does not bend, then reduce it to words, and then to numbers, to recalculate it, and to sell it and use it as a pparticle to construct whatever lie you like...change your attitude, your perspective.

All this only possible within this "crystal palace" of entitled sheltering...or "pampering" as Sloterdijk calls it.  

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

If one brings together these three primary characteristics, one reaches the following assessment: in its psychopolitical design, the United States of America is the country of actually existing escapism.

The home of every kind of escapee, it primarily harbours people who, faced with the hopelessness of their previous home situation, migrated to a wide space of second chances. An asylum for countless desperate and shipwrecked individuals, it took up many of the refugees who managed to save themselves from the floods of world history.

How does one escape reality?
If one is weak and cowardly then one numbs one's self, one forgets, denies, rejects...falls asleep.
Zombies are the walking dead - "Eyes Wide Shut"...hunger with minimal consciousness.

One does not change self (asceticism) one changes his attitude, thinking the world has changed to accommodate him.
Then, like a good hypocrite, he sells this easy, self-help, manual to morons, weaker and more cowardly than himself.
He becomes a usurer, charging a fee for his good graces and his kindliness.

Heisman and Weininger chose suicide as their escape, remaining true to the orthodoxy of their own meme.
The Orthodox Jews dream of annihilation, as do some infected "anarchists".
More adapted versions developing Zionistic escape through others...the leveling away of all past so as to forget it and escape in uniformity - a uniformity of the market place.  

The dis-ease now encroaching into the heart of European man - weakened after two major wars and decades of indoctrination (infection): race mixing, shaming, education etc.
The escapist immigrants, the wandering in the deserts of the real, are to be imported, now, spreading the psychology of desperation and surrender.
America exporting its "choseness", builds empires on escapees, and asylum seekers.  

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

As the Shining City on the Hill, it shows an endless crowd of emissaries from the gloomy yonder a plain wide enough to provide all enthusiasms with the right to settle and promulgate at a safe distance from one another.
If one had to articulate the radiance and the paradox of the United States in a single sentence, it would be this: it allowed the forces of ‘history’ to withdraw from ‘history’.
A further sentence then explains the current temptation: the forces that have escaped ‘history’ are now in the process of rediscovering ‘history’ for themselves.

All nihilism inevitably faces its own paradoxes.
The idea(l) can push away the real only for so long, and only to a degree, before it forces itself back into consciousness.
The dreamer realizes he is sleeping when things stop making sense in his dream-world.
The Zombies experience a deja vu, a slight disconcerting, splinter in their mind's eye.
The liar cannot evade exposing his duplicity, no matter how talented he might be.  
If he convinces himself of his own lie he is as surprised by being exposed as a lair as the ones he's seduced.

The paradox is covered using pseudo-intellectual rhetoric, complexity to hide the simplicity of the farce; makeup, extravagant garments to divert attentions, shares morals that protect each other's pretenses, and manufactured identities - called civility, kindness, politeness.

The paradox manifesting in a cult of victims, identifying with their choseness, gaining power that victimizes, and using uniformity to hide their sense of exclusivity.
The "benevolent" douchebag of Modernity.

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

The only liberation movement that still has meaning for Americans is that in which one attempts to break free from the personal relics of historical life, one's origins in one's own family: every individual can repeat the secession from history in private by liberating the inner child from the dominance of the parental world.

And the lost-children, the feminists, the "independent" ones, having "broken free" from nature/past, their own family, find pleasure in reinventing themselves in accordance with the immediate, institutionalized idea(l) sold to them.  
They tune-out, to tune-up.
Not really free, but even more dependent upon the sheltering, "pampering" marketing they put themselves asleep within; the bedrooms of the "crystal palace".

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

Naturally the concept of work also lost its Old European meaning in the USA: it refers not simply to the participation in transforming material into a higher-value product through invested energy – until, at the vanishing point of value creation, workers emancipate themselves from work as such.

American work is a performance whose meaning is to show how the subject can proceed from the abundance of opportunities to the superabundance of success.

Where else would it be conceivable for people to move to the South and slave away even more than in their previous homes?
And where else could people in an officially egalitarian culture look upon the increasingly gaping chasm between rich and poor with such equanimity?
The relaxed shamelessness of the American oligarchy proves how far the coronas that surround every success in that country are perceived by the great majority of Americans as emanations of their own faith. In the meritocratic climate, even the exaggeratedly remunerated achievements of others serve to prove the validity of the shared dream.
Hence the absence, so enviable for Europeans, of ressentiments towards those who have made it.

This American attitude is now imported into Europe to make it into another version, an extension of the same Nihilistic Meme.
It is American "soft power".
Not much aggression required...only passive aggression, and hot flashes in between long stretches of cold force.

All values internally determined...
You too can construct your own reality and live within it, if you behave and adopt this mindset...if you are "healthy" enough to make yourself ill - so ill as to live in that limbo state between life and death, that dream-space, that Zombie world of the walking-dead, where almost anything is possible and nothing outside of its paradigm matters - a cynical detachment from your senses, by making your sensations the object/objective.

Now read how Sloterdijk describes this inversion of values and value-judgments, now adopted by some as Value Ontology....

Sloterdijk, Peter wrote:

In the light of all this, one can understand why the figures are always deceptive when dealing with the United States of America. According to its deep economy, the land needs no balances. It lives in a world above numbers, for it never moves from a given value to a higher one, as in trivial growth, but rather from perfection to over-perfection.
It is only when viewed superficially that the United States, like every nation in the capitalist system, depends on constant economic and demographic growth.
It is not the economic figures that prove its greatness; on the contrary, its greatness radiates the figures.

It's not the word that describes the world, but the world that adjusts to the word, the number.
It's not reality that determines value, but value that directs judgment, shaping reality.
No action, no imposition of will....simple, easy, perspective adjustment.
Change your mind, love yourself, value yourself, and the world magically changes before your eyes.

Man as self-referential, free from the nastiness of existence, now entirely self-sufficient...but only within this sheltering world that protects him from his own vulnerability as a sleeper.
Value as innate, not as determined by environment, world, reality.
And so is identity.
The preeminence of subjectivity, rejecting the objective as too inhibiting, too authoritarian....too distressful...too terrifying.
Even beauty, taste, appreciation, is a choice.
It is whatever, at any time, for whomever.
Let's vote on it.
Anything goes...the laws of nature suspended in your dreams.  

Who would be so cruel as to wake a sleeping child?
The shock, alone, might harm it.
And who is this one who dares disturb our rest...each in his own world?
Now we are understanding the imagery of the Baudrillarean inspired movie.
Some resent being woken up.
They want to fall right back to sleep: Cypher.
His name alone speaks of code.

The binary code reduced to its most abstract form as 1/0, or one multiplied with itself, with the nil added later as a rejection of it within the nihilistic paradigm of absolutes.
Balance because absolute one implies an absolute negation of it...both within the dualistic paradigm of the "logic" in the medium of the code.
The message comes with its own encryption codes.

From word...to number.
"First there was the word, and the number was GOD".
Translated to...
"First there was the number, and the word was ONE".

Same absolute, translated using a different code.

The artistic representation in the image above is the essence of Alexandrianism, the idea that all is rational, all is knowable, ordered, and all is governed by a unifying principle, a one.
And because the brain is a seeker of patterns, order, the idea implies that the world reflects the mind, rather than the mind reflecting the world; the world it emerges as a (re)action to.  
Essentially it is the Judeo-Christian dogma, minus a God...offering the same escapes, relieving mythologies, De-stressing implications.
THIS is progress, folks.
From word, to number.
From name to value.

Having faith, accepting "Jesus into your heart", surrendering reason to necessity, to anxiety, morphs into "change your perspective", "alter your attitude", "surrender to the literal, the absolute".
Then, all is reborn.
All is positive.
And by positive we mean all is 1...the rest are multiples of the same one.
Same...but seemingly different, because appearances are illusions.
Well, at least that's what the priestly, hypocrites, snake-oil salesmen tell the crowds.
 
0 becomes a place in space/time, where we've failed to find the 1...but we will, because we've assumed it there - projected it there, after we created it in our mind.
Nil, is the unbeliever, the one who has no faith...the infidel, living in the "hell" of absence.
What is absent?
The absolute; the one.
God.
The world, minus absolute morals, justice, unity, sameness, in all but appearance, is the new "negative"...the 0.
How hard is it to wake-up to that world, huh?
Best you fall back to sleep.
Take a pill.

Notice how the seekers surrender to the projected sought, the (s)ought.

They are the wanderers, in the desert, looking for escape, for God.
The 'burning bush' is the geometric shape; the scripture on the tablet of stone, is the mathematical formula - it is pi.
Every-time they find a pattern in the geometry, which is a neurological pattern, they rejoice...as if they are close to the divine, the God that alludes them.
They feel as if they are peering into God's mind, who is waiting for them to come to Him.

Here the same practice as that used by hedonists is applied.
The sensation, the pleasure, is the object/objective; the final destination, the end, the idea(l).
They stop there, and go no further, in fear that they may lose the magic of the moment.

For the numerically inclined nihilists the number one is the end.  
They've revealed a code, and they stop there.
The word/number is the fabric, the mysterious, the end of the intellectual road - the absolute is near.
Salvation is near!!!
Now, all can be healed....the Golden Ratio not indicating an internal, apriori, neurological structure projected outward, but the sacred revealing itself to them.
God, a reflection of man, as idea(l) Being, and now the Golden Ratio as the geometry of mind, and its self-referential "logic" reflected back, as if it were Other - the figurative taken literally.

And like Christians cannot define God without exposing their childishness beneath all the hocus-pokus mythological ranting, the modern cannot define 'one', the very center of his belief, without exposing how simple and infantile he has been, obfuscating, complicating, using words, algorithms, statistics, to cloud rather than clarify.

Then, like those Judeo-Chritians, with that same childish excitement, they declare themselves saved, genius - Eureka!!!
"I have cured cancer!!!"
"I am not human!!! I am like a god."
"I have seen the mind of God!!"
"Worship Him, through me!!! I am his most perfect representation!"

The humble arrogance of the deluded, desperate to be noticed from amongst the throng they choose to identify with - another schizophrenic paradox, reliant on pretenses.  

The awakened one, finding himself amongst cocoons of sleepers - each in his own little, solipsistic, world (subjectivity), connected, via the machine (technology/technique) to the singularity of the oneness (the source provider of the service, of protection and programming) - the unifying contradiction; the antithesis to the presumed individuality.

One = internal, God,
Nil = external, world

The buffoons discover the code of their own narcotic.

The inversion.

Within this communal mechanism multiplicity is but an illusion of uniformity; divergence an illusion of sameness.
There, each has value...his own value.
Do not disturb it.

The one who dares must be sleepless; suffering from some kind of stress related insomnia.
He sees with eyes open.
Why does he not relax, it isn't that bad...calm down, keep quiet and drift off?
Why must he disrupt the other's dream just because he is unable to surrender to hypnos(ism)?
How envious he must be of their restfulness.

Approach Feminism and MRA declarations of liberation and of "turning away" from this vantage point.
feminists want equal rewards for equal servitude to the system. they no longer serve self, as sex, as nature/past, but they service the machine...and feel wronged when they are not compensated for their services.  

Only the sick are kept awake...and in this matrix of artifices 'all is good', if you just enjoy.
The wakeful world is the negative one - Plato's cave metaphor.
The Hellenes were ahead of their time.
To look back towards them is to look far beyond this modern, "progressive", retardation.

Is not life a sickness?
Who shall heal himself by dying?
Not the hypocrite.
He prefers this alternative, intermediating condition of living-death.  

But that the strength of nihilism.

It is restricted by nothing but social paradigms.

Every decade you can rename what worked before, and then sell it as the new thing, the wodner-drug, the new product.

Look at art these days.

Sampling, repackaging, remaking, of the same concepts...over and over again.
Proud to progress!!!

Liberalism is, at its heart, conservative.
It conserves subjective reinterpretation of the same concepts....unique only in appearances which are, superficial.
Movies remade...songs remade....art remade...philosophy remade.

Use different words to make it seem fresh, accusing the other of oldness.
Marketing schemes.
You must change to remain trendy.
You must make fantastic claims to get noticed.  

The sick ones prefer the placebo rather than nothing at all.
take orange juice, mix in some food coloring and extra sugar, some carbonated fizz to sparkle and pop, call it something funky and exciting and sell, Sell, SELL!!!

Pure genius!

From Brown's book Life Against Death - The Psychoanalytic meaning of History:

Brown, Norman wrote:

The Disease Called Man

There is one word which, if we only understand it, is the key to Freud's thought.
That word is "repression."
The whole edifice of psychoanalysis, Freud said, is based upon the theory of repression.
Freud's entire life was devoted to the study of the phenomenon he called repression.
The Freudian revolution is that radical revision of traditional theories of human nature and human society which becomes necessary if repression is recognized as a fact.
In the new Freudian perspective, the essence of society is repression of the individual, and the essence of the individual is repression of himself.

We can understand social repression as an adaptation of self to otherness...and self-repression, beginning at birth and then culminating in the adolescent ages where it becomes problematic, the awakening to the necessity fo hiding self from other soa s to be accepted, tolerated, allowed to participate.
Moderns call this process "maturing".
Males and females experience it as a curbing of sexual desires to accommodate social integration.
Females call ti Paternalism when it moves from the biological to the theoretical, abstracted, realm - from gene to meme - and when it is de-institutionalized, liberating of her sexual choices.
Male sexual oppression is maintained, as he is the expendable sex and easier to handle once females have been integrated into the social norms.
Male is, also, the eternally resistant, the challenging.
Feminization is the application of male sexual repression, first to make civilization possible and then to make Globalization: the integration of heterogeneous bloodlines, into a cohesive, uniforming, whole.
Nihilism takes on the role of internal leveler - an mental steamroller.

Brown, Norman wrote:

The crux of Freud's discovery is that neurotic symptoms, as well as the dreams and errors of everyday life, do have meaning, and that the meaning of "meaning" has to be radically revised because they have meaning.
Since the purport of these purposive expressions is generally unknown to the person whose purpose they express, Freud is driven to embrace the paradox that there are in a human being purposes of which he knows nothing, involuntary purposes,  or, in more technical Freudian language, "unconscious ideas."
From this point of view a new world of psychic reality is opened up, of whose inner nature we are every bit as ignorant as we are of the reality of the external world, and of which our ordinary conscious observation tells us no more than our sense organs are able to report to us of the external world.
Freud can thus define psychoanalysis as "nothing more than the discovery of the unconscious in mental life.

The idea that an other can know you more than you know yourself gains support, and the Know Thyself axiom becomes a pressing challenge of self-maintenance.

The exploration of this "inner universe" is the path of discovering self...never to be completed.
This "noetic" universe is the universe of abstractions, expressed using symbols like letters and numbers, formed into words and mathematical equations...and art.

Within the binary paradigm of Modern Nihilism they replace the world of phenomenon by first detaching the abstraction from its sensual referent.
The creative possibility words/numbers offer are released from reality. They can now become abstracted to where they bear no resemblance to anything experienced.
Reversal begins the nihilistic process of reinventing itself as a "positive".
The phenomenon does not trigger the noumenon.
Now the noumenon triggers other noumenon, with the final destination being the sensation, the emotion.
It need not go further towards an indifferent world that may contradict its needs, and stress it further.    

Brown, Norman wrote:

But the Freudian revolution is not limited to the hypothesis of an unconscious psychic life in the human being in addition to his conscious life.
The other crucial hypothesis is that some unconscious ideas in a human being are incapable of becoming conscious to him in the ordinary way, because they are strenuously disowned and resisted by the conscious self.
From this point of view Freud can say that "the whole of psychoanalytic theory is in fact built up on the perception of the resistance exerted by the patient when we try to make him conscious of his unconscious.

This "resistance" is anxiety/fear imposing a limit, a survival necessity, to self-preserve.
Added to this individual resistance we have the communal, social, cultural, resistance to self-awareness.

Overestimation, and less often, underestimation, being expressions of this resistance.
Within my contexts this resistance is the rejection of the phenomenon, by the noesis, or its replacement by the noumenon (abstraction) = truth.
Truth = Absolute, the final truth - absolute subjectivity; objective/subjective harmony, ideal/real convergence.
The intuitive resisting the counter-intuitive, which is forever mysterious and only sensed...as in a psychic, neurotic, sensation, expressed through dreams and schizophrenic behavior.
Another way to express the same idea is as the discrepancy between real and idea(l); the mind settling for the most flattering, easy, soothing middle-ground: God who loves but demands discipline, or the idea(l) requiring a leap of faith, a sacrifice of reason, a submission to the symbol.  

Brown, Norman wrote:

The realm of the unconscious is established in the individual when he refuses to admit into his conscious life a purpose or desire which he has, and in doing so establishes in himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea.
This rejection by the individual of a purpose or idea, which nevertheless remains his, is repression.
"The essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of consciousness."

The desire to see the world, as it is, can also be repressed in this manner.

Brown, Norman wrote:

Stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the refusal of the human being to recognize the realities of his human nature.
The fact that the repressed purposes nevertheless remain his is shown by dreams and neurotic symptoms, which represent an irruption of the unconscious into consciousness, producing not indeed a pure image of the unconscious, but a compromise between the two conflicting systems, and thus exhibiting the reality of the conflict.
Thus the notion of the unconscious remains an enigma without the theory of repression; or, as Freud says, ''We obtain our theory of the unconscious from the theory of repression."  
To put it another way, the unconscious is "the dynamically unconscious repressed."
Repression is the key word in the whole system; the word is chosen to indicate a structure dynamically based on psychic conflict. Freud illustrates the nature of psychic repression by a series of metaphors and analogies drawn from the social phenomena of war, civil war, and police action.

The psychic conflict is between the real and the ideal...the noumenon and the phenomenon....manifesting in a neurological state - on/off.
Repression is the unconscious, yet willful, shutting "off".  

Nothing of the world is permitted to register, consciously, if it troubles the mind.
A beginning of solipsism and the self-referential method of Nihilism.

The senses troubled by what they are exposed to, the apparent contradicting the desirable idea(l), close themselves-off from it.
They are blinded, forgetful, they ignore, dismiss, deny - Zombies.
They can now exist in their "truth", or in a shared "truth" - mass repression.

Brown, Norman wrote:

Even more theoretically important are dreams. For dreams, also "normal" phenomena, exhibit in detail not only the existence of the unconscious but also the dynamics of its repression (the dream-censorship).
But since the same dynamics of repression explained neurotic symptoms, and since the dreams of neurotics, which are a clue to the meaning of their symptoms, differ neither in structure nor in content from the dreams of normal people, the conclusion is that a
dream is itself a neurotic symptom.
We are all therefore neurotic.
At least dreams show that the difference between neurosis and health prevails only by day; and since the psychopathology of everyday life exhibits the same dynamics, even the waking life of the "healthy" man is pervaded by innumerable symptom-formations.
Between "normality" and "abnormality" there is no qualitative but only a quantitative difference, based largely on the practical question of whether our neurosis is serious enough to incapacitate us for work.

A utilitarian definition of "health".
Degrees, again.
Not either/or absolutes; no "truths" but more or less...higher/lower, better/worse, superior/inferior.

The neurotic who denies fear in himself is doubly afraid that it may overwhelm him.
He not only fears what stimulates the anxiety, but he fears fear itself.
The narcotic? Love.
Absolute intimacy of uniform sameness.
Different only in style, in detail, in taste....in appearance...but not really so.  
Senses are turned into sources of trickery.
He must close himself off to retain his "truth" which is contradicted by the world.

Brown, Norman wrote:

Or perhaps we are closer to the Freudian point of view if we give a more paradoxical formulation; the difference between "neurotic" and "healthy" is only that the "healthy" have a socially usual form of neurosis.
At any rate, to quote a more technical and cautious formulation of the same theorem, Freud says that from the study of dreams we learn that the neuroses make use of a mechanism already in existence as a normal part of our psychic structure, not of one that is newly created by some morbid disturbance or other.

The "healthy" ones are the neurotics who remain useful....find value in otherness.  

Brown, Norman wrote:

Thus Freud's first paradox, the existence of a repressed unconscious, necessarily implies the second and even more significant paradox, the universal neurosis of mankind.
Here is the pons asinorum of psychoanalysis. Neurosis is not an occasional aberration; it is not just in other people; it is in us, and in us all the time.
It is in the psychoanalyst: Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, which he regarded as the root of all neurosis, by self-analysis.
The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the great applications and extensions of the Socratic maxim, "Know thyself." Or, to put it another way, the doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind is the psychoanalytical analogue of the theological doctrine of original sin.

"Original sin" being a metaphor for man's self-awakening....awakening to his own nakedness, and the comparisons, resulting in insecurity, before others and existence.
Nietzsche called it resentiment, choosing man's awakening to his own temporality, his own mortality.
What makes man possibler also makes him experience his own mortality - the paradox of the real versus the idea(l), the desired noumenon versus the phenomenon...the 1/0 versus the Flux that denies both.
This is where self-valuation begins and ends.
An old medication adapted for the Modern generations by repackaging it - Nihilistic ointment to cope, supported by pseudo-scientific numerology.
Synchronicity = word/number associations, coincidentally, and/or incidentally produced.
A mapping out of human noesis, through the application of it in geometry and all human artifices geometry and math is used to construct.

Brown, Norman wrote:

All psychic forces are significant only through their aptitude to arouse emotions.
Ideas are repressed only because they are bound up with releases of emotions, which are not to come about; it would be more correct to say that repression deals with the emotions, but these are comprehensible to us only in their tie-up with ideas."
Freud is never tired of insisting that dreams are in essence wish-fulfillments, expressions of repressed unconscious wishes, and neurotic symptoms likewise.

The, so called, modern, progressives, are using the most primal of all methods to escape.
Not progressing, but conserving on a entirely different level.  

Brown, Norman wrote:

With this notion of desire as the essence of man is joined a definition of desire as energy directed toward the procurement of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Hence Freud can say, "Our entire psychical activity is bent upon procuring pleasure and avoiding pain, is automatically regulated by the pleasure-principle."
Or, "It is simply the pleasure-principle which draws up the programme of life's purpose."
At this level of analysis, the pleasure-principle implies no complicated hedonistic theory nor any particular theory as to the sources of pleasure. It is an assumption taken from common sense, and means much the same as Aristotle's dictum that all men seek happiness: Freud says that the goal of the pleasure-principle is happiness.

But man's desire for happiness is in conflict with the whole world.
Reality imposes on human beings the necessity of renunciation of pleasures; reality frustrates desire.
The pleasure-principle is in conflict with the reality-principle, and this conflict is the cause of repression.
Under the conditions of repression the essence of our being lies in the unconscious, and only in the unconscious does the pleasure-principle reign supreme.
Dreams and neurotic symptoms show that the frustrations of reality cannot destroy the desires which are the essence of our being: the unconscious is the unsubdued and indestructible element in the human soul.
The whole world may be against it, but still man holds fast to the deep-rooted, passionate striving for a positive fulfillment of happiness.

Philosophy, intellectualism, has become obsessed with this pleasure-principle, at the cost of objectively exploring the reality-principle, whether it leads to pleasure or not.
This is why subjectivity is so crucial to the modern mind...and it uses emotional words like "love" or absolute worlds like "truth" to avoid (bury, replace, forget) the real.    
A theory is judged on emotional grounds - on pleasure-principle standards.
Sophistication determined by the promise of a long-term or short-term pleasure return...or by the "truths" ability to include as many others into the love, intimacy, as possible.
Thinking contained by politics, and emotional needs.  

Brown, Norman wrote:

The conscious self, on the other hand, which by refusing to admit a desire into consciousness institutes the process of repression, is, so to speak, the surface of ourselves mediating between our inner real being and external reality.
The nucleus of the conscious self is that part of the mind or system in the mind which receives perceptions from the external world. This nucleus acquires a new dimension through the power of speech, which makes it accessible to the process of education and acculturation.
The conscious self is the organ of adaptation to the environment and to the culture.
The conscious self, therefore, is governed not by the pleasure-principle but by the principle of adjustment to reality, the reality principle.

Reality determines what pleasure is. focusing on the symptom is to ignore the dis-ease, the sense of sickness it is produced by: need/suffering.
But is need a sickness, objectively speaking, when it is an interpretation of existing?
No...but for the infantile, still maturing psychologically, human mind it feels insufferably evil.
That reality is indifferent is enough to stress an infantile psychology...then add to it the world's incomprehensibility, only understood by approximation, and you have the very source of human neurosis.    

Brown, Norman wrote:

From this point of view dreams and neurotic symptoms, which we previously analyzed as produced by the conflict between the conscious and unconscious systems, can also be analyzed as produced by the conflict between the pleasure-principle and the reality-principle.
On the one hand, dreams, neurotic symptoms, and all other manifestations of the unconscious, such as fantasy, represent in some degree or other a flight or alienation from a reality which is found unbearable.
On the other hand, they represent a return to the pleasure-principle; they are substitutes for pleasures denied by reality.
In this compromise between the two conflicting systems, the pleasure desired is reduced or distorted or even transformed to pain. Under the conditions of repression, under the domination of the reality-principle, the pursuit of pleasure is degraded to the status of a symptom.

As is need/pain.
Repression is also self-preservation. the closing-off of self so as to self-order - life.
this only becomes problematic when under the effects of sheltering the organism can close itself off to such a degree that it can then live in its own reality.  
The antagonism of self-organizing life and entropic, fluctuating world is evident here.
all life is nihilistic, to a degree, because ti imposes a self-order, within a disordering - a pattern of consistency within Flux.
This is the paradox being exploited by modernity and Nihilism.  

Quote :

But to say that reality or the reality-principle causes repression defines the problem rather than solves it.
Freud sometimes identifies the reality-principle with the "struggle for existence," as if repression could be ultimately explained
by some objective economic necessity to work.
But man makes his own reality and various kinds of reality (and various compulsions to work) through the medium of culture or society.
It is therefore more adequate to say that society imposes repression, though even this formula in Freud's early writings is
connected with the inadequate idea that society, in imposing repression, is simply legislating the demands of objective economic necessity. This naive and rationalistic sociology stands, or rather falls, with Freud's earlier version of psychoanalysis.
The later Freud, as we shall see, in his doctrine of anxiety is moving toward the position that man is the animal which represses himself and which creates culture or society in order to repress himself.
Even the formula that society imposes repression poses a problem rather than solves it; but the problem it poses is large.
For if society imposes repression, and repression causes the universal neurosis of mankind, it follows that there is an intrinsic connection between social organization and neurosis.
Man the social animal is by the same token the neurotic animal. Or, as Freud puts it, man's superiority over the other animals is his capacity for neurosis, and his capacity for neurosis is merely the obverse of his capacity for cultural development.

Freud therefore arrives at the same conclusion as Nietzsche ("the disease called man"), but by a scientific route, by a study of the neuroses. Neurosis is an essential consequence of civilization or culture. Here again is a harsh lesson in humility, which tender minded critics and apostles of Freud evade or suppress.
We must be prepared to analyze clinically as a neurosis not only the foreign culture we dislike, but also our own.

It is the fact that social behavior is a product of weakness, insecurity, rather than strength which causes the problem.
A fact ignored and denied by moderns and "positive" Nihilists, in the same way they deny what "love" is, and what all emotions are.