Santiago Odo wrote:But more: it feeds into certain near-apocalyptic fears. A profound disquiet. I think it fair to say that you show how this functions, how it can capture. You blend a group of apprehensions together and charge them with reactive energy. Lots and lots of people are involved in this. It is a mental and psychological contagion. [italics added]
David Quinn wrote:I am the last person to fall victim to “near-apocalyptic fears”, but it is impossible to ignore the science, which is very solid.
Talking with you is, I am afraid to say, like talking with a machine. I mean this in a very specific sense and will try to explain. But first: You declare that you are 'the last person to fall victim to "near-apocalyptic" fears' but I suggest to you that you are, in truth, the first person. I have struggled to understand the inner dimensions of why this is so, and in fact it has been an extraordinarily valuable process. It goes to the heart of everything that I think, do and write.
You are a person with a strange and bizarre 'mental structure'. It is what you mean when you refer to your 'reason' and to 'rationality'. It is a steel-like carapace [a protective, shell-like covering likened to that of a turtle or crustacean] in which an aspect of your self has 'holed up'. Your 'enlightenment' is located there with you. It is (my impression) an entirely contrived and willed state. In that limited space where you *exist*, or through the manoeuvre of holing-up there, you effectively cut yourself off from the intelligible world. I do mean 'intelligible' in a special sense. You have created for yourself a hyper-rational protective fortress. You, Dan and to a certain extent Kevin are men who are, shall I say, 'structured' naturally to be like this. However, in my view, that structure and that state of being has a pathological aspect. Or, 'modernity' in specific senses augments the primary orientation and distorts it greatly. This shows up most obviously in you with your open Delusions of Grandeur in respect to your declared/non-declared 'enlightenment' and your bizarre relationship to your contrived 'God' that is a neurotic extension of your will and self-image.
The reason it is important -- fruitful I will say -- to consider you as a problem is because you are, in many ways, an example of a contagion that infects people, not the answer to an infection as you seem to think. As you
pretend. When I realized this, and in the process of coming to better understanding of why GF was such a monumental gift for me personally, I came to understand that everything that you reject in that hyper-rationalistic dismissive and absolutely certain manner, would likely be areas and zones where things of great value, relevance and importance are located. This points to the act of *discarding*, though to dis-card does not quite hold the proper sense. More like jettisoning but in the sense of abandonment. Why is this important? Because it is this mind-frame -- arrogant, certain, steel-hard -- which destroys the possibility of subtle perception. And subtle perception is needed, very needed, in a radical time of dramatic shift between one metaphysic and another, encroaching one. There is, as you might be able to imagine (or perhaps not!) a great deal more that can and should be said here.
What I notice right now, in your relationship to the climate change issue, is not some rational argument or a rational/logical concern, but rather a psychological dark-spot within which you become blinded. I use the term 'obstinacy' for you (and numerous others here structured similarly to you):
for obstinacy makes one unable to hear for all that one has ears! You do not see, to all appearances, the degree that you are
in fact captured by psychological hysteria (of a peculiar 'leftist' sort). And in your intense denial (this is what *carapace* refers to and what its psychic function is) you tie yourself down into it evermore. In this sense, according to my understanding, you provide an example of just how a wide-ranging social conflagration operates.
But what is its source? Why is it happening? Well, this is (in my view) the more important question to ask. It is more than just *a question*, it is in fact a
PROJECT. It is an intellectual project, a social project, an historical project. It has to do with the history of ideas and, yes, it certainly has to do with *philosophy* but at another level. It is, it really is, a spiritual and metaphysical issue, that is if considered in the widest sense. And I must say that to have been given the opportunity to have been exposed to the
SICK here at GF (I use the general term 'nihilism') I have been given an extraordinary opportunity to delve into the inner dimensions of these problems and to grapple with them. Obviously within myself since these are not abstract questions relevant to an exterior. It all has very deeply to do with us as persons, in this temporal modality, dealing with life.
It is true, right now, that you are *captured* in a psychological current. But it is so real for you, so immediate, so 'undeniable' to your reason, that you cannot see how deep you are in it. And this, right here, describes how masses of people are captured in the same current! The Trump-Hysteria is a symptom. But it connects to feminism issues; to sexual and gender issues; to the structure (if I can call it that) of the operation of Cultural Marxism (and I do see this as a useful, though a flawed, term). Now, I did not say and I do not say that CC does not have a human factor. But it is really not my area of interest taken on the whole. And my post on the topic made this clear. You misunderstood (a little intentionally I think!) my statement about 'experts'. I said that other interests and groups shall I say take possession of the material, place it into narrative structures, politicize it, and use it in various ways. It is in this sense that 'I do not trust experts'. Not, certainly, that I do not trust or value expertise.
In order to understand Our Present -- in my excruciatingly humble opinion -- one has to take a wide detour away from any immediate problem or conflict, and turn back into metaphysical questions. This means turning back to study the former metaphysical means of grasping 'reality' and explaining being'.
Those metaphysical questions have to do with the structure of perception about what this world is and what we are here doing in it. These are in the ultimate and most important sense metaphysical and ontological questions of the most profound order. In order to understand what is going on, psychologically, in our present, it is necessary to understand *our situation* which occurs within a tension between two competing (perhaps I could say) metaphysics and
an entire relationship to being. I have made efforts to bring this question out onto the foreground but with limited success. Still, I have written a good deal about this (well or badly) and, still, it is an area of vital concern.
Be all that as it may, I find you
not the revealer of important truths (and thus, Dear Avolith! of Wisdom) but the subject of an analysis of what operates against it, and what destroys the possibility of gaining it. This does
not mean that the science in Climate Science is fraudulent, because climate change is not, not really, the important topic here.
But what is then the *important topic*? Well, hysteria obviously, of the sort that you are deeply enmeshed in. But in a larger sense the hysterical dysfunction that has led you to your
desperate manoeuvre which describes, basically, your entire neurotic set of choices; that which you call 'spirituality' and 'reason'. You are not alone in any sense in this. It is a mass-phenomenon. It is a cultural one and an historical one.
When I said to Diebert that I would *rewrite Genius Forum* this is really what I meant. The whole thing -- the whole thing! -- must be rewritten. But what this really means is that we are in a deviating cycle within intellectual history, and certainly culturally and civilizationally (pardon the neologism). The task before us of
RECOVERY is huge and demanding. We will either carry it out or we will fail extraordinarily.
You have not yet even begun. You have been stopped by your own neurosis.
I can help you.