"You Can’t Do That!"

While perusing Steve Pavlina's blog, I found this little snippet of observational wisdom:

Apparently if you try anything that goes against the mainstream, it means you’re being fanatical, crazy, and deluded. Supposedly common sense dictates that we all get regular corporate jobs, eat factory-produced “foods” from cardboard boxes, and live our lives just like we imagine everyone else does. Then quietly die.

I feel sorry for the people who genuinely think this way… and live their lives accordingly.

[link]

He's dead on. There is an invisible social power which holds sway over the herds of sheeple who swarm our industrial landscapes; it pulls them into line, ideologically, and pushes hard on any who deviate.

Many never express the descension they feel for fear of breaking taboo; and slowly, because the discriminating impulse is never made behavioral habit, people altogether loose their senses. Ergo, the mad culture we see today.

Luckily the sheeple aren't too bright. Their institutions can be exploited by a cleaver and disciplined mind. Advantage can be made: excel within the failing systems and with the acquired leverage inject subtle memetic and genetic legacies which chip away at the prevailing infrastructures and bloodlines. This cuts down that which is already dying whilst propping up symbols everywhere for disenchanted allies.

They'll say you can't do that, but you actually can.

Shayne

Richard Dawkins on Eugenics

IN THE 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though of course they would not have used that phrase. Today, I suspect that the idea is too dangerous for comfortable discussion, and my conjecture is that Adolf Hitler is responsible for the change.

Nobody wants to be caught agreeing with that monster, even in a single particular. The spectre of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from "ought" to "is" and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice.

I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?

- Richard Dawkins

Shayne

Art and Civilization as Rasa

To hear it told by today's bourgeoisie pseudo-intellectual "consumer of art" or liberal arts school graduate whose "career" consists of producing material for museums and galleries (art for arts sake--dead art--as opposed to art for the sake of culture, race, religion or even man--living art), one would come to think that the highest form of art is the most earnest exhibition of expression of oneself.

This near unanimous cultural meme is entirely modern. It disregards elements which represent and reflect primordial truths, formulaic comprehension through iconographic and symbological communication, or anything founded on or supported by tradition. As such it is entirely alien to meaningful or empowering connections to the natural and cosmic cycles which make up the physical and metaphysical worlds and is thus limited to novelty and commerce.

In such an environment the artist must posses the sort of prophetic genius which births religions, foresees the creation and perseverance of new races of humanity, perpetually sees Nature as theophany, etc. in order to produce anything of real or lasting value. Therefore this modern impulse towards the exhibition of individualism ultimately alienates and divorces one from the very qualities which formulated the substance and principals of their very being, the qualities the artist wishes to express, and leaves them trapped in an inferior world of eternal becoming, unto death.

Ananda Coomaraswamy puts it thus:

It has been well said that civilization is style. An immanent culture in this sense endows every individual with an outward grace, a typological perfection, such as only the rarest beings can achieve by their own effort, a kind of perfection which dose not belong to genius; whereas a democracy, which requires of every man to save his own "face" and soul, actually condemns each to an exhibition of his own irregularity and imperfection, and this implicit acceptance of formal imperfection only too easily passes over in to an exhibitionism which makes a virtue of vanity and is complacently described as self-expression.

An ethno-culture or race, in this point of view, honed and sculpted by generations of cultural and genetic aesthetic ascendency towards "typological perfection" through the traditional teachings descendant from the Fathers of ethnicity and founding prophets of religion, includes all individuals involved from the lowest to the highest caste in the most powerful and profound example of archetypical expression. This far transcends the "vain exhibitionism" of modern dead art, and in the light of such comparison reveals modern "art" as a truncated, spasmodic and schizophrenic parody of true art and, in fact, no art at all.

According to Coomaraswamy's rendition of the Sahitya Darpana:

Pure aesthetic experience is theirs in whom the knowledge of ideal beauty is innate; it is known intuitively, in the intelectual ecstasy without accompaniment of ideation, at the highest level of conscious being; born of one mother with the vision of God, its life is as it were a flash of blinding light of transmundane origin, impossible to analyze, and yet in the image of our very being.

(Quote: Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, Dover Publications pp 36-37)

Shayne