#post-christian society

[blackswaneuroparedux]

For 200 years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake…The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed wire. ... It appears that amputation of the soul isn't just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.

- George Orwell, Notes on the Way

Orwell on post-Christian societies.

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

two questions to ask yourself when you start looking for pre-christian material in medieval literature:

1. when are these texts from

2. when did christianity come to this area

i can guarantee you in the vast majority of celtic-language sources (and others) the answer to 2. is several centuries before 1. and at that point you gotta ask yourself... how likely is it that these people would be writing about something that has not been a thing for them or anyone they know for, like, four hundred years (or, in many cases, eight or nine hundred years), especially given that most of the people doing that writing are not merely passively existing in a christian society but are, yunno, monks

there are exceptions! but there are way fewer exceptions than you think there are gonna be! and the exceptions are almost always extremely nebulous sub layers that can't be disentangled from the other layers (which are christian) with any certainty so are always somewhat speculative!

and most importantly those other layers are interesting too, but if you only ever treat them like dirt to dig through to get to something "real" underneath you're sure gonna be disappointed a lot of the time (and you're gonna miss a lot of cool shit that would be really exciting if this was an actual archaeological dig and not a metaphor)!!

[if-not-now-tell-me-when]

Today, October 13th, marks 52 years since the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 on its way from Mendoza, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile.

17 of the 29 victims of the accident passed away during or shortly after the crash, or during the first night on the mountain. Below, you can find their photos and a short bio for each. May they rest in peace, and may their families find peace on this day and every day.

Eugenia Dolgay de Parrado, age 50. Eugenia was the mother of Susana and Nando Parrado, and had come on the trip at the invitation of her son. Eugenia is described by her son as a quiet but strong woman, “full of encouragement and sage advice, with deep reserves of resourcefulness and good judgment that won her the respect of everyone who knew her.” While waiting to take off from the airport in Mendoza, she handed out candy from her purse to the boys around her. Eugenia died instantly during the crash, and is buried on the mountain with her daughter, Susana. 

Graziela Gumila de Mariani, age 43. Graziela bought her ticket aboard Flight 571 at the last minute, as she was flying to Chile for her daughter’s wedding. She was sitting in the front of the plane, and suffered two broken legs during the crash. The boys tried to free her afterwards, but she was inextricably pinned by the mass of seats that were crushed together in the impact. Two boys, Rafael Echaverran and Moncho Sabella, took turns holding her hand throughout the night in an attempt to comfort her. She passed away from her injuries early the following morning.

Colonel Dante Lagurara, age 41. Lagurara was a lieutenant colonel in the Uruguayan Air Force, and the co-pilot of the Fairchild. According to Alive by Piers Paul Read, one of his last acts before the crash was to tell Ramirez to, “make sure that the unruly passengers did as they were told” and took their seats. He survived the initial crash, but was pinned to his seat by the instrument panel. The boys tried in vain to free him, but were only able to feed him some snow and remove the cushion from his seat before returning to the fuselage. He passed away from his injuries during the first night.

Esther Horta Pérez de Nicola, age 40. Esther was the wife of Francisco Nicola, the Old Christians’ team doctor, and the mother of four young sons. Both were avid supporters of the team, and were excited to see them play in Chile. Esther died on impact when she and her husband were thrown forward into the wall separating the luggage compartment from the main cabin.

Dr. Francisco “Pancho”  Nicola, age 40. Dr. Nicola was the Old Christians’ team doctor, and an avid supporter of both the team and the Stella Maris College. While onboard the plane, he joined in the playful energy of the boys, catching a rugby ball thrown across the cabin by Roberto Canessa. He left behind four young sons. He and his wife both died immediately on impact.

Colonel Julio César Ferradás, age 39. Ferradás was an experienced pilot, having served in the Uruguayan Air Force for nearly 20 years, and completed 29 flights over the Andes. Ferradás died on impact.

Lieutenant Ramón Martínez, age 30. Martínez was serving as the steward aboard Flight 571. He spent his last moments playing cards with several of the boys in the back of the plane. He was one of the passengers sucked out of the back of the aircraft when the tail was cut off. 

Sergeant Ovidio Joaquín Ramírez, age 26. Ramírez was an Air Force sergeant who served as purser and navigator aboard Flight 571. Ramírez was sucked from the back of the aircraft and died upon impact with the mountain.

Julio Martinez Lamas, age 24. Julio was an avid supporter of the Old Christians’ team, and a friend and soccer teammate of Numa Turcatti and Coche Inciarte. Julio survived the initial crash, but passed away during the first night from his injuries.

Daniel Shaw Urioste, age 24. Daniel was an alum of the Stella Maris College, a substitute player for the Old Christians, and a cousin of Fito and Eduardo Strauch. He was also a close friend of Marcelo Pérez and a former full time player on the team. Moments before the crash, he begged his cousin Fito to switch seats with him, but Fito refused, inadvertently saving the latter’s life. Daniel was sucked from the back of the plane when the tail was cut off by impact with the mountain.

Gastón Costemalle, age 24. Gastón was a former player and captain of the Old Christians team, a law student, and a close friend of Numa Turcatti, Pancho Delgado, Coche Inciarte, Marcelo Pérez and Eduardo Strauch. Gastón was instrumental in convincing many non-players to join the trip, including Coche, Pancho and Numa. He perished along with several others when he was sucked from the rear of the plane.

Guido Jose Magri, age 23. Guido was an agronomy student, an active Old Christian’s player, and a longtime friend of Nando Parrado. He was engaged to be married at the time of the crash, and was very excited to spend his time in Chile planning the wedding with his fiancee, who was the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. Guido perished with several others after being sucked from the rear of the plane.

Felipe Maquirriain, age 22. Felipe was an economics student, a Stella Maris alum, and a friend of Arturo Nogueira, Pedro Algorta and Enrique Platero. Felipe suffered blunt force trauma during the crash, and passed away during the first night due to his injuries.

Francisco “Panchito” Abal, age 21. Panchito was a Stella Maris alum and a talented rugby player who held the winger position for the Old Christian's First 15. Panchito was also Nando Parrado's closest friend, and was considered to be a second son by Nando's parents, Seler and Eugenia, as well as a surrogate brother by his sister, Susy. Moments before the crash, Panchito convinced Nando to switch seats so that he could have a better view of the mountains, a split-second decision that would save Nando's life but cost Panchito his own. Panchito suffered severe head trauma during the crash, and passed away during the first night on the mountain from his injuries.

Jorge Alexis Hounie, age 20. Alexis, known as “Alejo” by his friends, was a Stella Maris alum, a scrum-half on the Old Christian’s First 15, and a veterinary student. Alexis was sucked from the back of the plane along with several of his friends and teammates, and perished upon impact with the mountain.

Fernando “Flaco” Vasquez, age 20. Flaco was a friend and classmate of Roberto Canessa, and a medical student. Roberto and Flaco were seatmates on the plane. Flaco suffered an amputation of his lower leg during the crash, and passed away before Canessa or Zerbino could attend to his wounds.

Carlos Valeta, age 18. Carlos was a Stella Maris alum, a medical student, and a friend of Gustavo Zerbino and Carlitos Paez. He was not a player on the Old Christian’s team, but he was an avid team supporter. Carlos was sucked from the rear of the plane, miraculously surviving the impact, but falling down the mountain to his death as he tried in his shock to reach the other survivors.

[dailyanarchistposts]

...so sore mennes eyes were blinded Where covetousnesse of filthie gaine is more than reason minded. — Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Golding translation)

A friend of mine told me a story recently that makes a good introduction to a column about economics. It seems that my friend was in the men’s room at his place of business, voiding his bladder energetically, when the President of his firm walked in and took a stance at the next urinal. A strange thing thereupon happened to my friend: his urine ceased spurting, even though he could still feel the pressure of an incompletely emptied bladder.

The reader may want to accuse me of surrealist symbolism, a dirty mind or a perverted sense of humor, but I can think of no better place to begin an examination of Capitalism than the lavatory. We are all aware by now, or should be aware, that Protestantism has played a large part in creating and maintaining the Capitalist ideology, and Protestantism itself began in a privy.

This little-known fact is worth stressing, in the light of psychoanalytical theory. Luther’s own words are: “But once when in this tower I was meditating on those words, ‘the just lives by faith,’ ‘justice of God.’ I soon had the thought whether we ought to live justified by faith [the central doctrine of Protestantism — R.A.W.]. This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower” (quoted in Luther by H. Grisar).

All Protestant theology begins from, and pays tribute to. this “experience in the tower” — Thurmerlehnis, as it is called. That this experience could hardly have happened anywhere else but in a toilet is well documented by the anal and excremental style of Luther’s fantasy: at least twice he had visions of the devil in which that Evil Spirit assaulted him by the time-honored gesture of contempt — “showing him his posterior,” in Grisar’s words.

More: this anal preoccupation colors Luther’s entire sensibility. The Pope and his Bishops are, Luther says, “urine, excrement and filth... the filth of squiredom, dung splattered on the sleeve,” etc. The devil wants to “stink us and stab us with his dung.” As for mankind, “we are but worms in ordure and filth.” Such quotes could be multiplied almost ad infinitum, certainly ad nauseam. Alfred North Whitehead was being accurate, not polemical, when he compared Luther’s rhetoric to Hitler’s, and said that Luther was “more foul-mouthed.” Even facing death Luther could think in no other imagery: “I am the ripe shard,” he said, “and the world is the gaping anus.”

It was, I believe, Erich Fromm who first explained the connection between the Protestant ethic and the rise of Capitalism — a connection long noted and well documented by such sociologists as Tawney and Weber — by pointing out that both Protestantism and Capitalism are creations of what Freud called “anal personalites.” Fromm, of course, has to dilute and obfuscate the basic Freudian insight in order to get it in line with his sociologicalization of psychology.

This dilution and obfuscation is what Fromm and other neo-Freudians celebrate as their “advance” over Freud’s “biological orientation.” What is primary to Fromm is not body-sensations but “attitudes toward the world” occasionally expressed “in the language of the body.” (I am paraphrasing and condensing from his Escape from Freedom.) Thus Freud’s clear and eminently scientific conception of the “anal personality” becomes vulgarized into the foggy and uselessly vague notion of the “authoritarian personality.”

I leave this de-materialized psychology to those professors who, finding it useful in mixed classrooms and inoffensive to the public at large, have embraced it. I take it that I have a body, and my reader has a body, and that we both had them long before we began developing “attitudes toward the world,” and that any psychology worth elbow-room at the counter of scientific consideration will have to be centered on these facts and on the pulsating rhythms of the living flesh.

Freud, like Marx — and, in a different way, like Cezanne — was gifted with a special kind of stupidity; a kind of stupidity which (I flatter myself) often appears in this column to the irritation of its readers. I mean the kind of stupidity that the little boy had in Anderson’s legend when he refused to see the Emperor’s new clothes. Marx was just dumb enough to ignore, or disbelieve, all the cultural prejudices of his infamous century and see with his own eyes that the relation of boss and worker is chiefly a physical relationship, an energy relationship, in which part of the worker’s energy is drained off much in the manner that a vampire’s victim has his blood sucked.

All ideological super-structure is built upon this simple energy process, and Marx was right in refusing to let any other fact or set of facts distract him from his unblinking examination of this central circumstance of our economic system. When the “natural sciences” and the “social sciences” are finally synthesized, this basic energy process will be their chief link, and will be formulated. I am convinced, in a Third Law of Thermodynamics.

Freud’s stupidity was of an equally brilliant kind: he was the first psychologist really to understand the implications for psychology of the simple fact that people have bodies. (Cezanne’s stupidity, similarly, was to look at the world as a child does and not as an art teacher tells one to.)

“...refresh my bowels in The Lord.” St. Paul, Philemon 1:20

But to return to my friend, standing there at the urinal in the grip of an unusual variety of impotence.

Readers are beginning to write in accusing me of being a Reichian. and I don’t want to lend support to so terrible an accusation, but I also don’t see, and can’t see, how we can account for what happened here except by saying, in Reich’s terms, that the presence of the President of the firm created an anxiety — and anxiety, to Dr. Reich, meant simply, physically, the withdrawal of life-energy from the periphery of the body to its core: a contraction. My friend’s genital-urinary apparatus went dead as the energy flowed back into his center.

(For some interesting data tending to indicate the increasing prevalence of this anxious energy-contraction in American culture, see Lawrence Barth’s column in the October 1960 Realist.)

An experience of my own comes to mind here. Recently, a guy I know got so damned mad at me that he refused to speak to me anymore. Readers of this column may figure he had good justification — and I would be the last one in the world to deny that, intent as I am on becoming known as the meanest literary bastard since Brann the Iconoclast — but the point is that my offense, in this case, was merely speaking against the Capitalist system. Being sent to Coventry for this, by a cat who has been only mildly peeved by my sexual and religious heresies, is what prompted the question asked in the title of this column: “Is Capitalism a Revealed Religion?” Has it now become so sacred that questioning it is more dangerous than, let us say, asking if Jesus ever pulled his pudding as a boy?

I am going to come on so strong as to say that, in a Freudian sense, Capitalism always has been a revealed religion. (“Religion,” old Papa Sigmund once succinctly said, “is a public neurosis; neurosis is a private religion.”) Capitalism, I would in all seriousness suggest, can best be understood as a public neurosis characteristic of societies in which the life energy has been driven out of the genital area into the anal area. Being a public neurosis, it is institutionalized, ritualized and mystificated with all the pomp and folderol of any other religion.

Let us look into the age that gave birth to Capitalism. The Late Middle Ages were a time of hysteria (always a result of prolonged anxiety states) and of witch-hunting (a symptom of hysteria) — and, finally, of impotence. The whole style of the age, as Spengler would call it, is well illustrated by Rull Summa desiderantes issued by Pope Innocent VIII:

“It has indeed lately come to Our ears,” wrote His Holiness, “that in some parts of Northern Germany... many persons of both sexes... have abandoned themselves to devils... and by their incantations, spells and conjurations... have slain infants yet in their mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle... These wretches further afflict and torment men and women... with terrible piteous pains and sore diseases; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives, or wives receive their husbands...”

It seems evident that, as G. Rattray Taylor notes in his brilliant Sex in History, Innocent was concerned “solely with certain pathological sexual phenomena... particularly psychic impotence and frigidity.” Taylor produces considerable evidence that such Papal fears were well-grounded because the dictatorship of the Medieval Church was indeed so thoroughly destroying the normal sexual functioning of men and women as to create widespread impotence and infertility.

The witch-hunts of the period were almost all, Taylor demonstrates, brought on by people who, finding themselves impotent, accused some neighbor of “bewitching” them. The infamous Malleus Malificarum, the handbook used for centuries by witch-hunters and Inquisitors, reads like nothing so much as a modern textbook of sexual pathology.

It was out of the maelstrom that Protestantism and Capitalism emerged. As the genitals of the Western World died, its anus, so to speak, came to be its central living preoccupation — inspired and guided by the hysterical vision of one neurotic monk sitting on a john.

The psychoanalytical insight that money represents to the anal personality — the feces which it covets — is not really new or novel. Have we not always spoken of “filthy lucre?” Doesn’t Dante put the usurers and the buggers in one pocket of hell because both are “against natural increase?” Five hundred years after Dante, didn’t another great poet, who is markedly hostile to Freudian theory, intuitively make the same discovery:

Usury kills the child in the womb And breaks short the young man’s courting Usury brings age into youth; it lies between the bride and the bridegroom Usury is against Nature’s increase.

Yes, that is Ezra Pound, in his Canto 51. Elsewhere, Pound has indicated the same awareness of the pro- anal, anti-genital direction of the Capitalist (or, as he calls it, Usurocratic) temperament:

his condom full of black beetles, tattoo marks round the anus, and a circle of lady golfers about him. the courageous violent slashing themselves with knives the cowardly inciters to violence... the beast with a hundred legs, USURIA and the swill full of respectors bowing to the lords of the place, explaining its advantages, and the laudatores temporis acti claiming that the shit used to be blacker and richer (Canto 15)

At the end of Arthur Miller’s novel. The Misfits, the hero curses, not “money,” but, significantly, “shit, and money.” Another artistic expression of the anal orientation of the modern world occurs in Norman Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time,” in which the protagonist, trying to cure his girl of frigidity, finds he can bring her to orgasm by entering per anum.

Actually, the psychoanalytical theory of money as a symbolic turd is already implicit in the Judeo-Christian myth of work as Adam’s Curse. Dr. Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind recounts a case-history of a millionaire who was compulsively busy to escape anxieties connected with infantile anal guilts. Similar cases appear in the works of Freud, Ferenczi and Jones, among others. Abraham describes in his Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis a patient whose anxieties centered around the idea of being forced to eat excrement as a punishment for sin: the theme of two or three of the most popular jokes in capitalist society.

“Work,” says Durkheim briefly, “is still for most men a punishment and a scourge.” Freud, perhaps, put it even more simply, in his study of Dosteovski, saying that Dosteovski was under a compulsion to make his burden of guilt take tangible form as a burden of debt. Norman Brown’s brilliant Life Against Death (to which I am greatly indebted) sums it all up thusly: “Money is human guilt with the dross refined away till it is a pure crystal of self-punishment, but it remains filthy because it remains guilt.”

It may seem almost too pat if we now remind ourselves that the congenital problem of Capitalism, never yet solved, is the problem of dumping the surplus.

The psycho-dynamics of Capitalism, in short, seem to consist of what cyberneticists call a circular-causal process. Born of neurotic anxiety and desensitization (contraction of the life energies), it constantly generates more anxiety through its unpredictable boom-and-bust cycles and the wars incident upon its imperialistic necessity to dump the surplus. But this second-order anxiety (which afflicts the boss as well as the worker, for he, too, is the victim of the cycle) breeds that “busy-busy-busy” compensating activity which drives the whole system ever onward into contradictions, crashes and further anxieties.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich’s theory was that cancer is caused, partially, by the contraction of life energies, i.e., anxiety. (And anybody who doubts Reich’s theory of anxiety only needs to observe himself in a moment of stress to be convinced that Reich was absolutely right. Improper breathing and what A. S. Neill calls “the stiff stomach danger” make up the feeling we call “anxiety” or “tension,” and both are symptomatic of muscular contraction, such as we see on a very gross level in an infant cringing with fear.)

Consider, in the context of Reich’s idea, the following words of one of the most enthusiastic defenders of modern American Capitalism, Dr. Ernest Dichter, President of The Institute of Motivational Research: “Possibly more than half of all human diseases are psychogenic.” says Dr. Dichter in The Strategy of Desire; “worry, maladjustment and other emotional disturbances can be responsible for almost anything from heart attack to cancer.” Dr. Dichter’s job. as high-priest of Motivational Research, is using this “worry, maladjustment and other emotional disturbances” to influence people to allow themselves to be exploited still further by the Power Elite of Capitalism.

According to the University of California’s recent symposium on psychological factors in cancer, all the women with cancer of the breast examined by Dr. Franz Alexander in one study showed severe psychiatric disturbances, generally with some degree of sexual malfunctioning; another study, of women with cancer of the uterus, showed even more conspicuous sexual disturbances, especially of the sort called “frigidity” (Psychological Variables in Human Cancer, University of California Press).

Vihjalmur Stefansson’s Cancer: Disease of Civilization points out that this pathology is rare, or non-existent, among primitive tribes. Need we add to this that the physical bearing of primitive peoples is so different from that of our so-called “civilization” that almost every explorer on record comes back with bemused comments on the subject? Primitive man, free of the anxieties and armors-against-anxiety characteristic of our culture, stands and walks and sits as a human being should, gracefully and naturally. Look around you and notice how much visible tension you can see in people’s postures; and you will know why Dr. Reich called cancer a shrinking biopathy.

Our kindly editor has asked me to stop using the example of the guy walking into the park with a radio in his hand every time I want to say that people are dead in modern America. Okay. I will use another example. I once said to a young lady (who happened to be the wife of the guy who stopped talking to me when he found out I’m a socialist), “Dig that tree there — wow!” She replied, icily, “I dug it,” putting me down for being so corny as to talk that way. The point was that she hadn’t dug it; she had hardly glanced at it. Basho could flip over a sight as simple as a tom cat with the Yen, and write a poem about it:

Yawning. Then, fully awake, the cat goes out to a night of poontang.

This is not just “the poet’s eye”; Cezanne had it. Nor is it the “artist’s eye”; Darwin had it when he looked at the iguana and intuited the law of evolution. It is the special kind of stupidity I was talking about earlier in this column. It is the innocent childish eye of a man who is not completely blinded by the organized bullshit and desensitization of an unjust social system. It is obvious, or should be, that the prejudiced white never “sees” a Negro; he sees the social lies, stereotypes, in his own mind. (This is the point of the best novel ever written about the Negro in America, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.)

It should be equally obvious that, in a social system motivated by anxiety and a deadening of life energy, nobody even sees the street on which he lives anymore. We are walking dead men, as Lawrence tried so hard to show us in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that great and mostly unread novel in which average readers hop around looking for symbolic sexual gratification and skipping the passages which give the book half its meaning — the passages about how Clifford’s impotence and paralysis drove him to becoming a successful businessman.

The whole world has been stunned for 17 years now by the opening, in 1944, of the Nazi annihilation camps. We still don’t know how to explain such things, how they could be possible. Let me bring this column toward a conclusion with a set of facts that may throw some light on what happened in Germany — and is happening here — facts which are all explained by my hypothesis that Capitalism derives from deadening of the genitals and centering of the interest in the anus, but which cannot be explained, so far as I know, by any other hypothesis.

The English of Shakespeare’s day were a bawdy, sexy, uninhibited bunch of hipsters. As Capitalism grew in England, this national character changed markedly, so much so that it is difficult for us to imagine Falstaff and his friends as truly English. The modern post-Capitalist Englishman is the epitome of the armored individual, rigid, compulsively “moral,” utterly lacking in spontaneity. Simultaneously, England was the first nation consciously to idealize the completely frigid woman.

Capitalism was born in Germany, chiefly, and chiefly in the age of Luther.

Calvin’s fanatically anti-sexual regime in Geneva was also one of the primary creators of the Capitalist spirit. Raleigh, observing the deadness of the Genevese, remarked that they had “nothing left but their usury.”

As Capitalism came to dominance in Germany, the German national character became more and more rigid, armored, “closed” and secretive, lacking in play and spontaneity, etc. Out of this came the automaton who is a living caricature of humanity, the goose-stepping tin soldier known as the Nazi.

America, the only surviving 100% Capitalist nation, is the most Puritanical nation in the world. It is the only nation, indeed, which has executed a man in the 20th Century, not for murder, but (in effect) for a Sexual offense.

Desensitization in America is growing more appalling all the time. Lawrence Barth recounted in the Realist a few months ago an incident at a racetrack in Illinois where a section of the grandstand collapsed, killing and injuring a great number of people; the people in the uncollapsed part of the grandstand were completely unmoved, according to reports — even those sitting only a few feet from the groaning bodies of the victims. It is this country also which twice dropped atomic bombs on two cities full of men, women and children, and which poured burning napalm on its enemies in Korea.

Recently, in Harmony, North Carolina, the American Legion staged a little rabbit hunt — for charitable purposes, of course. The rabbits were beaten to death with baseball bats.

The mysteries of Capitalist economics are held to be as sacred as those of any other religion — i.e., every other organized social neurosis. Only the “experts” are supposed to be able to understand “the rate of interest,” “the price of money,” the “dangers” of “inflation,” etc. The whole system — “the black magic of money,” as Pound once called it — simply rests upon breeding money as if it were alive. (“Is your gold ewes and rams?” — Shakespeare.) Or, as Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, put it, “the bank hath interest on all moneys it creates out of nothing.” This creation out of nothing is just what the infant wants to do with its feces, according to Freud, Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Menninger and other psychoanalysts. (Rexroth once paraphrased Dante’s analysis of this system by saying that, to Dante, the usurer is a pederast who wants to make his turds his heirs.)

I could go on, but what’s the use? Those who have had a little experience in psychiatry will know what I’m getting at: others will just laugh, as they’ve been laughing since Freud published his first case histories. I ask only one thing of skeptics: don’t bring up Soviet Russia, please. That horrible example of State Capitalism has nothing to do with what I, and other libertarian socialists, would offer as an alternative to the present system.

Dante said of the damned in hell that they were persons who had lost il ben del’ intelletto, which I don’t think it’s at all extravagant to translate as: their ability to dig things. This is not a Marxist kind of social criticism I have been presenting in this column, but just a way of saying that there’s something pathological, literally so, about a system which increasingly blinds people to the joys of the senses and ties them down to a narrow groove of profit-seeking.

[dovesndecay]

As someone who was not raised in any flavor of Christianity, I don't personally have a horse in this Culturally Christian or not debate.

What I will say is that some people sure are sounding a whole helluva lot like the white folks that wanna say because they are X marginalization, they don't benefit from white supremacy.

[hybbat]

I do think a good chunk of the 'cringey atheist' stereotype did come from the fact that, especially americans, regardless of their actual religious status are just casually christian and refer to things through a religious filter and that isn't seen for how overwhelming/obnoxious/frustrating it is. Its absense, such as when writing a story and things like "oh god" or other casual references are remove or replaced, is seen as notable the same way people find the cast being all women or queer being 'abnormal'.

And I think more people, especially here on tumblr, should take a moment from ragging on some kid being "cringey" saying god doesn't exist or making atheist jump around like dancing monkeys to establish they're one of the good respectful ones before they ever even begin to talk about their own thoughts, and examine why so much content just inserts god into a conversation that had nothing to do with religion like it's the expected norm, the same way they examine the invasiveness of casual heteronormativity.

[soup-mother]

anyone else remember the "not believing in young earth creationism is cultural christianity" post? i think it was "because you're deciding what is and isn't true for other people"

[reflection-s-of-stars]

Hey. Hey what if one of the OG lyctors was Jewish pre-resurrection. Wouldn’t that be so fucked up

[eremosjournal]

The Tortured Catholic’s Department

by @aud.ball

[lord-here-i-am]

Months Dedications Christianity VS Society I'd always choose Christ.

[inkedwingss]

For the ones joining my new writing-only blog, my baby Substack: I will upload one poem every day for the next 15 days, so expect some e-mails in your inbox! :)

If you have been here for a while, you must know I was in desperate need of a writing-only platform — in fact, if you remember, I even tried a side blog, but that didn't work for me (and the novel is cooking atm). So, for the sake of my peace of mind and my writing, I will upload all the poetry in here to this sparkling, brand-new Substack.

After a few days on that platform, though, I can already tell I'm not going to follow what I perceived to be the pattern. Do I feel like a fish out of the water? Yes. Do I plan to change? No. Is it good for ''marketing''? Nope! But I literally can't force myself into a non-authentic space. It gives me anxiety.

I believe in using the platform instead of letting the platform use me. I'm free. That is unnegotiable. So, I will do my best on my own terms, as many things annoy me about the writing culture of these times we live in and I refuse to wear the halter. Oh, I promise I'll never try to coach you, start mothering you, or try to sell you a "how to write poetry in 5 steps" guide. No hooking titles. I won't join the experts-on-shit FOMO cult to prey on other people's triggers or to feel ''good'' about myself at the expense of others. This type of thing actually creeps me out.

But I do promise we can just resonate and inspire each other by being honest and raw, by having a brave heart so we can keep being kind, and by pursuing truth, beauty and art... How about that? We can enjoy the vibe and cultivate this appreciation of words! We can even chat as writer friends, as reader friends or just as friends friends — and encourage each other through real, second-intention-free presence.

If my writing doesn't touch you, it's fine. If yours doesn't touch me, it's fine. It's not personal, it's not a bad thing. We are all finding our voice. The day you think you know everything, you're dead, so we have to keep searching, moving and growing together! How many times have I needed the words from @cssnder @goodluckclove @hersurvival or @remnantofabrokensoul, and so many others around here (iykyk)? And I'm very grateful for every word and idea you all shared here in this amazing space, helping me to keep going, to break from my shell and lay another brick in the foundations of what I want to create.

That is the beauty of it. Creation demands connection. That is respect and human experience. And I repeat it: sometimes what I create won't touch anyone but me.

Oh, but what if it does!

Well, that being said: I actually do have some crazy ideas for the Substack. At first, the focus was on creating some substantial and self-indulgent content about literature (I like to study). Although I still think that's important, exciting and valid, Poetry is making its way through my inked fingers more and more, demanding space, attention, and voice; so I will not neglect this calling.

What about the future? I don’t know. Paid subscriptions for specific academic literature content? Prophetic, devotional newsletters?Generating debates on books for the community? Just poetry that you can read for free and not engage at all because I can be quite antisocial at times? Digging around some old ancient advice on writing? None of the above? Anything is possible, really. For now, I will slow down and avoid contributing to the hamster wheel of modern despair for the speed of light living and likes.

For now, poetry, please.

And tea. Lots of tea, because it's raining.

The grass looks so green!

[rahabs]

It's just amazing to me that all the people who were having complete meltdowns in February over a video game are now on this website spitting some of the most vile, heinous, antisemitic rhetoric, is all.

[shiredwarf]

this whole trad life thing is so fascinating to me but also sometimes just deeply hilarious because some of them really looked at some adverts from the 50s and went: wow life back then was perfect, I want this! Imagine if in 2090 people watched 2020 ads and went like: wow, peak civilisation, let's all lose our rights to recreate this utopia!

[dailyanarchistposts]

For Chris Marquis, a gifted writer, a courageous reporter and a generous friend whose loss has left a hole in my heart.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. —Blaise Pascal

Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

By Umberto Eco

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice;” such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.</strong> Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.</strong> Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering’s fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play (“When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “egg-heads,” “effete snobs,” and “universities are nests of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.</strong> When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such “final solutions” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.</strong> Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.</strong> In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte (“Long Live Death!”). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.</strong> This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.</strong> In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

analyzing hermes, emet-selch, the ancients and ascians, how they're written, and the fandom's reaction to them be like hm. emet-selch's role in this fuckery is compounded by the fact that his backstory as a genocide survivor is incongruous with his ruling a huge genocidal colonialist world power in the present da [ANTISEMITISM BLAST]

[memento-mariii]

As a queer christian I know full well how conservative evangelical christianity, and western imperialist christianity in general, has been used and *is* still used as a tool of oppression, and I'm all for criticizing that, hell I'm one of its biggest critics,

But it's very disheartening to see takes like "christianity, as in the religion as a whole, is inherently oppressive and fascist and shouldn't be welcome in leftist spaces" on my dash. (<-this is not a strawman this is literally a paraphrased version of a post I saw)

I know these posts are coming as a reaction to the rise of christofascism in the fall of Roe and things like florida's Don't Say Gay bill,

And also for a lot of people from a place of personal hurt too, from their experiences of religious trauma or religious oppression,

And I'm not saying something like "the christians are the REAL oppressed class" or "the queers are oppressing christianity!" or anything ridiculous like that,

But idk. I guess it's emotionally draining to be told "you don't belong here" from conservative evangelicals all day and then. when you turn to secular queer/leftist spaces. you get told the same thing all over again.