Breakroom chat

Moraline:

What’s interesting is how the early catholic church embraced the pagan gods and rituals. The saints replaced the pagan gods, the virgin, the festivals of easter and christmas, all grafted upon older pagan rituals. Even the churches were constructed upon pagan holy sites. This leads me to believe in a strange continuity of the gods. Even the great santuario de las lajas in southern colombia, its massive bridge built across the gorge upon which the virgin was sighted, i believe was probably a holy site before the spanish arrived. No doubt buga was always holy too. Call the spiritual power of these places whatever you want. 

But men have blemished the gods. Luther was the start of the great blemishing in the west. The rejection of trabsubstantiation was the rejection of god on earth. The protestants sent the gods away. No wonder it was protestants who made up 99% of scientists. 

Maximin:

Our gods are here, below. They are with us in the

Bureau, in the kitchen, in the shops, in the rest rooms. The

gods have become like us, ergo we have become like gods.

And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on another

planet, we shall come to you to make your life as

godlike, as rational, and as correct as our own ...” (Zamiatin, We)

I really can't say what it is. I know nearly nothing about gods or the history of Christianity. I had always hoped that I myself was a god, which would explain why I have never been able to fit in Western society. Yet then again Tim Feriss is a god. If you pay him a few hundred dollars a month, he will send you a package of what he is buying these days, really cool things that will make you happy for a few days. Western gods have very short shelf lives. The gods of Moraline are eternal--a great blender, or an eternal cupcake or steak. I am reaching for metaphors. A man from Northbrook, Illinois must search for consumer metaphors. That is all I was put on earth to do. Every boy's dream in Northbrook was to have his own infomerical. My parents would be beyond themselves with joy if I were Tim Feriss, because Tim Feriss is a god. He mails gods to other men who pay him. The selling of Church indulgences, that sort of thing. Tim Feriss maintains his sanity and sells indulgences, is a god and sells smaller gods with curt shelf lives. This happiness is godly, although these gods, these consumer products, are fragile, and soon die.  There are no standardized tests to make certain of godhood so man will always be uncertain of gods and godhood. I also remember the last farmland in Northbrook. It later was paved. McMansions were built upon the farmland to make the farmland holy. Each home is a god. Inside there are gods who live in groups and they are called families. The family itself is not worshipped but there are strange fetish cults. Families report to larger gods. But even farmland isn't godly. If anyone had even read the first few chapters of moraline free a kid from Northbrook would realize how fucked he really is--his childhood feeling of nature and spirituality was a pathetic plot of land not even farmed, one fucking horse, some old rusting farm equipment, a few old 'farm houses' that backed to the land that, if you even read the fist chapter of Moraline free, it’s clearly the cemetery of a murdered tribe. Try sleeping at night now. A litte kid from northbrook would have to dig very deep in the field to find the gods. It would be shocking for him to find corpses.

You are more like Fritz in this respect--he knew Christianity inside out. My family didn't even have a chance to reject the gods--they weren't aware of them. I only knew one kid in high school, Manos, a Greek, who ever mentioned gods and I almost thought he was joking. My parents also never took seriously what they called 'religion.' My mother was a catholic and she only described Catholicism as a strange system from which she escaped. Perhaps this is where I get my concept of matrix and the constant feeling of escape. The catholics think many things as dirty but I always thought catholics were dirty and protestants clean.  My father was very deft, raised in a time of great expectations for high modernism. The gods had been swiftly defeated all over the world and a huge vacuum needed to be filled by law, finance, real estate--it was a very gratifying and exciting time for the empire. I greatly enjoy terms such as 'liberty' and 'freedom' as I tackle ancient hunter-gatherers. I am confident these libertarian concepts would be deeply relevant to the Eskimo, more relevant than even excel.  I also am ignorant about Greek gods, although from time to time I read a description of Greek Gods or read Roman mention of the dead gods.  As a product of high modernist upper middle class law and finance, I find all the mention of the gods very curious. Given my upbringing I should, if I were a correct product of my specific matrix, seek to illegalize or otherwise discourage the gods you speak of. That I do not partly explains my bad conscience while in the west. Lawyers, accountants, and men of high finance and legal systems believe that their systems are the holy or the magic--power, it is to them. I am working on a retracement of this power. Yet in the mean time I feel powerless in a matrix I have rejected and powerless among gods who do not love me. Yet today was R's birthday and I bought her a baby tiger stuffed animal and flowers.

Moraline:

I was raised with my parents during their cult period where demons and witches and warlocks ravaged green bay wi and lansing, mi. I was told of a neighborhood witch who could levitate small objects such as pencils. I saw other witches myself and was visited at various moments by spirits. Halloween was a devils day and i was not allowed to celebrate it. My mother told me of the cat sacrifices done but the witches of green bay as tribute to satan. There were plans to procure a baby for an ultimate halloween sacrifice. This was my childhood and early youth. I stopped seeing the spirits when i came to northbrook, il and my mother stopped mentioning them. 

I should also mention it was through prayer that i was even born alive at all due to my mothers sickness in pregnancy. My feet were also very pigeontoed and this was corrected through the administration of holy water. 

Maximin:

You arrived in the center of godlessness incarnate when you arrived in Northbrook. If you study the history of the Northshore of Chicago--I haven't--you will learn of the settling along this Northshore of the super-rich industrialists in Glencoe, Winnetka, Kennilworth, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff. Northbrook was built after these lakefront settlements in the late 50s and early 60s as a chance for a farm town to play catch up in just few years from developers (I speak of the real suburb, not the old village in the center). It was an old farmtown and Mr. Landweir who you certainly didn't know was involved in the transformation from Shermerville to Northbrook. It would attract the insecure and confused to become secure and productive members of society--my parents, your parents. I wonder how many ran from witches in Wisconsin. Your mother didn't see any witches in Northbrook. I find this impossible because you must recall "Nursey," the old lady who lived in one of the turn-of-the-century homes. She died when I was 8 and they found rooms completely filled with junk. It was once a beautiful house because I saw the restoration after they took away her body and things and sold the house to a rich couple. My parents never understood why anyone would restore an old house. My mother hated old homes and she loved her suburban home in Northbrook and loved carpet. There was a small bubonic rat which lived in this carpet infested house and it bit children on the face.  When I was a child I saw, huge, rambling abandoned mansions in Lake Bluff. I would throw rocks at the abandoned greenhouse of the Armor mansion because my father bought a 'lot' out there. It was totally undeveloped save these abandoned mansions and my father would go there to be alone and think about why he had entered into law and accounting. He was happy in that forest. However, past age 11, something either happened to he or I and there has been a strange mutual suspicion. However, I believe he was at once like us, I am certain. You must remember that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father; never forget this.

Moraline: 

But i have much more sympathy for the WE guy than orwell or rand paul or the libertarians or any of the western complainers. In the ussr you had difficulty leaving. Any man with a us passport can go to a lot of good places. Why stick around and whine? Answer: because whining is their hobby. Because they have no skills to live in freedom. Its all silly to demand freedom from a state. The presence of any state is an infringement on freedom. The choices are simple: gain the skills to live freely within the cracks of that state system (as in scotts mountain people of asia) OR leave for some other place. But to have no skills to live otherwise, no courage to leave, and to complain that the state is acting too much like a state is ridiculous. 

Only a russian of that time could write such a book. Orwell had not experienced enough or in depth, none of the great russian suffering. For this reason orwell is read today. Its imaginative and specilative. WE is probably straight history.

Maximin:

The purpose of philosophy is as an escape route, to fortify his mind to retrace and deconstruct lies and allow him to find his way back. You mention courage--I have just finished writing a piece that speaks on that--courage is more rare than diamonds, it leads man back to the hunt. If philosophy is not used as anything other than an escape route, it grows cancerous. But so goes matrices:

“The sins the angel promised to punish were, most particularly, the crushing exactions of grain and labor by the nobility, the tithes of the high clergy, and the failure of avaricious, licentious, and vain elites to observe God’s commands.” (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance)

It is. And like your writing of Patagonia, there is something different about it, striking. So striking no one knows what to do. Men are shocked to encounter bravery. Bravery and courage are rare things and highly valued and remembered. But why is this? Why is bravery and courage so precious? It shows man a path and brings him back to his original freedom. What no one realized about Patagonia is that no matter how much mystery anyone tries to remove beforehand, man loses himself there. It is a force of mountainous and enormous wonder. This is the god experience.

There is another experience in western matrices but it is a very negative electrical energy, akin to standing near an electric power station transformer. Far, far too much surplus, as you say. Surplus is the orginary concept of when and how things got off kilter (or just perhaps slightly different, and then off kilter). I say slightly different because surplus as surplus (I prefer the beautiful Latin, surplus qua surplus, and in fact contemplate writing in Latin but am concerned of limited audience) did exist temporarily even in hunter gatherer tribes--or at least from my limited anecdotal knowledge from what I read in Brody and Carpenter. Canetti describes the force of how surplus seems to be shipped in high pressure pipes--the onerous pressure of the financial systems. He describes how men of great wealth have the overwhelming force and burden of the lives this money represents. You then have a very strange counter-product--money guys talking just about the money, totally detached from the lives. It's as if people have forgotten the human factor. Isn't it strange that in a totally mechanized product, it is as if a computer is almost the producer of the product? As if the human buys from computer? At that point the money represents a computer's labor. This is where it gets very strange and man becomes one with computer, perhaps a convergence to computer--I'm not certain yet but I believe Zamiatin was getting at this.

I also wonder if Argentina (maybe parts of Chile) were as close as a man could get to hunter-gatherer society. I am aware of the enormous surplus of the sheep. I am aware of the huge estancias and some of the outright horrid oppression of the workers in Rio Gallegos in the 20s. Yet clearly some of these estancias were far less surplus driven. And then this incredible phenomenon of the failed state--the estancia at which I stayed was huge but there was an enormous feeling of freedom there, meaning, not the taint of high-modernism, or traces of it so small that compared to western matrices it is barely detectable.

A smaller estancia may have fluctuations in sheep or other food supplies that could bring it close to hunter-gatherer balances. The difference would be that the hunter-gatherer seemed to roam to other areas to cycle hunting areas. This may well be the modern man's sense of freedom--following the natural contours of the earth in his pursuit of something to eat--a perfect correlation. It is basically man as animal or what man now calls animal. Perhaps then in that context man never thought of himself as special. Later on there would be other cultures that would be far bolder, perhaps driven by their building surpluses--bold enough to say they were god's chosen people, or codifying the names and stories of the gods and mixing it with institutionalized slavery and servitude such as with Egypt and Greece et al..

The paradox of this freedom is it really cannot happen now with the world's current population. It almost certainly cannot exist given the current state of man. The nature of the hunter gather 'society' (societies did not exist pre-surplus) kept populations in check as there was only a finite amount of animals and plants the earth can produce in any one region. Man's body was one with everything--physically as he made his way through the land (he did not 'conquer' anything, which is a very, very arrogant and emblematic way of looking at getting up a mountain or getting across a plain, etc.).

But the paradox gets even more perplexing. On the one hand you have Zamiatin who specifically calls out this thing with the Gods. This is why I bang my fist on the table because you guys would be shutting down ale houses (I say ale house in the context of protected social spaces in which subordinate classes could express their hidden transcripts, not dens of vice in which inebriation or licentiousness are the main focus) night after night in discussion. You cannot fault me also for using terms such as "hidden transcripts" or "subordinate classes" as they are from Scott and you are the one who told me to read Scott. It is permissible to use academic language so long as it is used for good and not evil.

Zamiatin claims that the world population will shrink considerably but be highly regulated like a computer, and the remaining people will be a fraction of the world's population but live like a computer (maybe people actually go away and only computer is left--the ultimate convergence) somehow serving a computer, but I need to get through the book.

What is very strange about this proposal is that it would mimic in an evil way what would have to happen for man to return to freedom--a huge reduction in the population. If men lived again, all of them, as hunter-gatheres, there would have to be enough space for each man (or each band) to roam and hunt and gather freely.

Surplus paradoxically leads to "more" yet then drastically leads to a lot less as it all falls apart. In man's attempt to be god or make freedom, he fails. God for man is the authentic feel of his planet each day as he moves about the earth following its contours and being affected by it in pursuit of food. Man wanders, not aimlessly as Western man would say, but that free spontaneous wander mimics the free spontaneous wander of the animals. Nothing in the world is like the grid of a suburb--clearly not even stock market or commodity prices. Which is the mental sickness of geometry, for example--whose fucking sick visions are those? Certainly not mine, and what megalomaniac arrogance for anyone to imply that geometry is a very good example of truth, e.g. a priori truth. Plato tried to say that such forms were windows into some god-like forces but they would have no relevance whatsoever to hunter-gatherer man.

Based on the nature of human matrices--how they grow, control, and dominate men, how they expand populations, harvest energy, and continue to grow-- the growth represents sickness--it is a mimicking of wandering that has been lost, of lost wandering and lost freedom. As you had written early, the hunt was the greatest thing for man (although balanced by the joy and return to woman and family), or so essentially a part of him and a part of his happiness that once he has lost it he will always try to find something to take its place. Yet matrices do two things: they hold men back socially (really the most important point in describing a matrix), and dominate land physically, significantly lessening his chances of ever getting away.

There is the tragic prospect that the reason that this is so suddenly and rapidly clear (as it was so suddenly and rapidly for Zamiatin) is that matrices are forcing man's hand by the dooming vision which means servitude for all, total loss of freedom without any respite, a world in which only autistics are happy with their green trains or images thereof.

Jesus, though, the million dollar question was what the hell got this surplus shit going? If this question can be answered, can man be saved? Or is the idea of saving man always going to involve some high modernist scheme that makes things worse, further entangling man in some idiotic scheme? At least your solution of the hunter-gatherer isn't some idiotic high modernist scheme.

Perhaps this is also the origin of evil. Perhaps this is the original sin. But the original sin was not Cain killing Abel. It seems original sin is deception. Ah, I see it now, the Garden of Eden. This Side of Eden, Hugh Brody. Was it woman that started the matrix? Jesus, is that a possibility?

That then begs the question--if deception is the original sin (coercion of other men, one could say, not unlike law, not unlike all systems of domination), it could be argued that all this got bad for man with the first matrix. Abundance was always around. There always was surplus. Indeed there is nothing more today than there was a million years ago. Hence it isn't surplus qua surplus as the evil force which has changed man. Man chose to abuse the world. But the question is why. The question is whether surplus is a symptom or a cause. If it is true the earth has always been there for man, why did he suddenly strike at earth? Why did man strike at earth? Or why did man strike at man? Was it cowardice? Did men no longer have the courage to fight and slay one another? It has to be asked why man didn't hunt other men but hunted other 'animals.' Yet nearly no animals hunt each other--lions don't hunt lions. No animals do this (fish, perhaps?) So for man to hunt man represents sickness. Taking away a man's freedom (taking away his roaming, his hunt) is equivalent to killing a man. A matrix is by definition then a system of killing other men. The whole enterprise is built on the enslavement of other men--the killing of man's liberty or freedom, which began with preventing other men to hunt and roam through coercion.

I had a sketch of an idea that showed the balance of how a guy could make things useful for his hunt--carry enough food and water for example to get across a plain to get at more animals. Maybe he creates a wineskin or some sack for berries or dried meat. But just enough to get him to the next hunt. What if something bad happened though--although it seems unpopular or offensive to speak of anything bad in Eden. The man breaks his leg and suddenly has to survive in a cave to get through a winter, for example. He is alone and maybe no one will help him. No longer is his life of the wander and the hunt. Now it is to stay in the cave, limp around for berries or small animals, and try to make it. Maybe such a man survives and suddenly a whole different kind of man is born--the planner, the saver. He has to lure women to him to live with him in his cave (I am reaching here) and convince the woman that his stationary life is preferable. Perhaps he encounters other men. Who knows what happens when other men approach him, if they are friendly or not. I do not know what contexts men fought and killed one another (always?).

The point is that perhaps the scheming to survive in contrast to the spontaneous joy of the wander and hunt is what led to man's first attack on earth. Something went wrong with the hunt. Man lost his ability to hunt due to a natural accident. If he then survived and had a son or daughter, he would have to teach his children the only way he could teach them--for as a cripple he could not teach his son how to hunt. The original sin may well have been an original perversion--not some insanity of a man driven organically but due to a bad fall and a leg break. Man was hurt but never got better. He passed on his hurt or sick spirit. This then led to a degenerate attack on earth--a loss of faith in the hunt. Degeneracy bread degeneracy, until man was so unfit all he knew--his only and entire way--was an attack on the earth. He perfected and strengthened his perversion into what is now called *science* and his system to protect his perversion was called *government*. Remember when you told the man in the bar that you come from a culture of science and government? Western man is a man wandering in sickness--the blue pill men tell themselves each day they are well to continue on. The red pill men realize their sickness but some can never quite conduct the pathology.

I do not here see why it would be necessary to blame woman for the original sin. It makes no sense to pin it on her, especially if it can be demonstrated that man can fuck himself alone and on the hunt. Loss of freedom can be man's own doing--but the evil, if you want to call it that, or the original sin, is when man spreads his misfortune. Can he spread his misfortune to other healthy, hunting men, or must it be from father to son?

Man, alone with his broken leg in the cave--one hopes that he summons the great force of the gods, that he is always happy, that, as you say, he is never alone. Did the bad gods gang up on man and drive the lone injured man crazy in his cave? Why weren't the helping gods helping him? Maybe a man would have just come to rest in the cave and died in peace. He was always at peace. Perhaps this theory of the sick man was never even possible in a world of helping gods and man was always at peace and there was no torment, anxiety, or suffering.

"While traveling with Ohnainewk, I remarked, as best I could in Eskimo, "The wind is cold." He laughed. "How," he asked, "can the wind be cold? You're cold; you're unhappy. But the wind isn't cold or unhappy."" (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me)