r8 / h8

The following is an essay i wrote for class. I took some risks in order to make sure i didn't leave out any good expressions, since he said that this essay wouldn't really be graded on strict technical points.

We live amongst a surfeit of information, from which we feel we can know little and of which we can say with certainty even less. Vast quantities of data are collected and processed by massive arrays of networked computers, collected through the smallest and largest of methods. We herald ourselves as the paragons of rationality, with our secular world view, and we place no credit in that which is without the rubber stamp of the scientific or political body of authority. Reductionist materialism, the idea that we must believe and act on nothing which cannot be comprehensively explained to the satisfaction of collective social assent, is the popular default. Consequent of peoples varying abilities to understand orders of complexity, we achieve by our domesticated egalitarianism only the lowest common denominator. Where one is shamed into admitting, ‘what can I know? What can I say?’, authority – the ultimate and most expensive luxury item - steps in to arbitrate. Society finds itself in a pitiful state between abject confusion and groveling capitulation. The conclusion we’ve arrived at is that nothing is ultimately true, reality is ultimately unknowable, we are just complex chemical automata without volition. And in this bleak cacophony, in this ‘post-truth’ age as it is called, we must rediscover the tools by which we can navigate reality with wisdom and purpose.

Through long centuries, mankind has sought to achieve liberation from the cruel constraints of nature. From plague, famine, warfare, and general suffering we have fled since the beginning of recorded history, first (and often attempting once more) to create a better world through strength, suppressing those who have caused us to suffer. As we grew more sophisticated, the Greeks began to envision philosophy and virtue as the means to a good life, which was attainable by some, but not all. Greek society operated through citizens, which owned slaves, and by application of ones capacity for thought, we could achieve an Olympian state of exaltedness. The romans forged empire with simplified precepts of morality and overcame the Greeks through mechanical might. They built structures and walls which have not to this day finished crumbling, testifying to their efforts to fly from suffering though lurid excess of wine, women, and slaughter. They too, as the Greeks before them, were stultified through the flaws of their civilization, as they grew too large for the binds of the Fasces to hold and dissipated into history. The catholic church grew upon the corpse of the roman empire, ordering society by divine enlightenment, and teaching Europe to accept order abstracted from the tribal modes.

>>9338432

The time came eventually that we began to pursue the arts of scientific investigation, and we have accomplished miracles of medicine and technology. Gross labor has been largely done away with, as hydraulics and motors render our muscular capacity unlimited. Meanwhile computers automate repetitive mental process, and do for the brain what a backhoe does for the body. We’ve invented a form of progress, a gradual glorification of egalitarianism above all else, kindness above all else. From this movement, we’ve arranged government to accomplish the goal of extricating individuals from the unfairness of life, unequal circumstance, and the hierarchy natural to human relationships. The cruel mother at whose teat we have starved and died is dead to us, and the faculties of our body and mind which grew hard and strong in her embrace have withered from neglect.

Let us define some terms in preparation for the theorem. Domestication is the process of taming and subjugating the wildness of a creature, in order to accomplish civilization. Hallucination is the experience of an imaginary reality resulting from an absence of understandable stimulation. Radicalism is the extremes of behavior that result from hallucination and lack of experience. Savagery is amoral accuracy of action which aims to achieve simple goals. Savagery requires a clear awareness of reality as it really is, but lacks sophistication in its brutality. Clarity is a perception of reality that is substantial enough to act accurately and temperately on.

>>9338437

The extremes of virtue are the most grotesque of vices, being the unrestrained action against which appeals to moderation can be deemed immoral. Unrestrained action will achieve an arbitrary state of affairs tending towards the horrific, as the range of desirable states of affairs is limited, and the range of undesirable states of affairs is unlimited. Through our moral domestication, we have become incapable of self-serving faith and broken the link between truth and life, life being virtuously granted without condition in our domesticated civilization. No longer does violence stand at the gates of the city; violence stands at the whim of ideology. In the absence of visceral qualities to our judgements and theories, we have begun to hallucinate. There is no stimulation which strikes us as unquestionable. We may selectively look at things and hallucinate that they do not exist, and we may look into the dark and hallucinate whatever we wish. Free to wander along the path of delusion without reprimand, our soft civilization gives birth to radicals who can cry for blood not because blood cries for blood, but because they have never seen blood except in their hallucinations. Like children playing with dangerously powerful tools, they turn on a machine they cannot understand. The savagery they precipitate, the horrific whirling of the dreadful machinery they have set in motion, is now become their teacher. Their classroom will be drenched in gore and despair, and they will learn what truth looks like, and the color of its fangs. Those that survive through luck or brutality will have paid a high price for their new clarity.

>>9338441

We have been domesticated by the march of progress and modernity, and lost touch with the animal. We no longer have to struggle, and our muscles waste away with our souls. Truth serves a purpose. Truth is a weapon, which we barely remember how to use anymore. Cut off from that which is unquestionably real, we hallucinate out of sheer desperation to see or know anything, anything at all. And from these delusions and intensifying depression is spawned radicals. Mostly the pampered children of the affluent, they adopt ideologies which give them a sense of purpose. They engage in simulated conflict, but draw ever closer to serious consequences, which in their ignorance and inexperience, they are not wise enough to fear. But they come constantly closer to the edge of an irrevocable stupidity, as they require higher and higher doses of radicalism to get the same high. And when they tumble from the precipice, society explodes into savagery and chaos, collapsing under the weight of our delusions and radicalism. In the horrors that follow, we can no longer afford the luxury of hallucination. Many will not open their eyes fast enough, and perish. As the winnowing runs out of momentum, and the culling begins to slow, those who remain will see with wide open eyes. They will have known truth once more- and at a terrible price. Eventually, they will become masters of their world. They will create a glorious society of strength and virtue. But their children will have not known the horrors which educated their parents, and although they will be taught of it, the process of domestication will begin again, and history starts to repeat itself. So it is that the cycles of history are driven by the consequences of our own folly.

that's all folks.

it was titled 'The Truth about Post-Truth'. i didn't like the title but couldn't think of a better one.

Hallucination as the result of domestication
Radicalism as the result of hallucination
Savagery as the result of radicalism
Clarity as the result of Savagery

Savagery is the natural and bitter antidote to hallucination.

The cycles of history are driven by the consequences of our own folly.


Domestication: The process of taming and subjugating a creature in order to accomplish civilization.

Hallucination: An imaginary reality that is vivid and substantial enough to act on.

Radicalism: The extremes of aberration in action through hallucinatory reality.

Savagery: Accurate but amoral action towards simple goals based on simple but accurate perception of reality.

Clarity: A perception of reality that is substantial enough to act accurately and temperately on.