B.P. Bollocksworth commented on Archetypology Dec-29-2018 5:44 PM UTC
James,
Saw this link and thought it said something interesting about different ways of managing human livestock:
You could argue the overtly authoritarian way is more humane than soft-authoritarian. In China today, or the old USSR &c., it was pretty clear what was off limits as their system allowed for explicitly outlawing activities counter to the perceived interests of the owner class.
But the choice isn't between "freedom" and "tyranny", it's between overt and covert red lines. In America, we have an owner class too, who allow themselves to be constrained by 18th c. liberal institutions. They're constrained, but they're still operation under the same incentives as the ChiComs, and seek to maximally exploit their sentient, free-willed livestock. They can't/won't quite outlaw speech or private organization, so instead of simply telling us what we can't do, they work behind the scenes to thwart would-be competitors, while pretending we have broad freedoms.
I'm thinking specifically of the case of Kwanzaa. I learned a few days ago that Kwanzaa was essentially an FBI creation. The FBI were concerned about black nationalism back in the 70s, so they backed the most extreme, loony black nationalists they could find. Sound familiar? Long story short, a side effect of pushing the extreme black nationalists, who were inevitably irrelevant, was getting the Kwanzaa meme fixed into the culture. This is almost as good as the CIA promoting modern art.
I for one promise I will never try to agitate the other slaves, but still find observing the scene fascinating, which is why I read you. I do wish they'd just tell us what our social credit score is (guaranteed every American has one) and what we can and can't say. I suppose they have their reasons for keeping things as they are.
_________________________________________________
B.P., I find myself agreeing with every line of your thesis, and since you touch on inculcated myth as an imposition upon the minds of the daft achieved by craft rather than force, I would like to attach some mythological notes.
Livestock management of people feels like a modern notion, or at least it did to me at age 11 when listening to a sermon at Sunday mass and developing distrust of the Good Shepherd and his human flock. I have since discovered the following associated with this concept.
In ancient Sumer, the supposed place of the Garden of Eden, the word Satan first emerges and has been translated by a Russian linguist as "administrator."
The ancient Greek term which has been translated to "garden" in English more correctly translates into "walled animal pen," closer to Orwell's "animal farm" than to King James' "Garden."
While managers of horse and cattle herds and even pig pens harbor some respect for their livestock, shepherds generally despise sheep and this lack of respect often extends to some sheep dogs who go on murdering sprees and have to be put down by the shepherd. This brings one to wonder at the choice of sheep as the metaphor for humanity in sacrifice-based religions, particularly in light of the fact that sheep were regarded across many ancient civilizations as the standard sacrificial animal.
Civilizations, established on every continent which hosted them, have followed the same dietary symbiosis: the ruling elite have dined on a mixed diet, featuring meat as the main course and the servile classes have dined almost exclusively on grains—animal feed—to the extent that in the 1870s in Great Britain, the median height differential between offices and men in the British Army, recruited from their respective classes, was 4 inches.
Whether imposed via the will of the shepherd or his sheep dogs, mythologies [narratives in postmodern parlance] seem to be imbibed by the servile classes which bring the slave into a passive, if not peaceful, coexistence with his masters. For instance, since about 1985, the most broadly expressed metaphor for the human condition, presented in story form, is that of the Vampire—a parasitic manager of free range human livestock—as the invisible, sympathetic, god-like elite. This mythology persists as the dominant fantasy theme in literature and TV aimed at the impressionable female mind.
On the parallel track of the involuntarily feminized human male, the dominant fantasy theme is the zombie, the mindless predator incapable of empathy, a body hijacked by an irrational hunger from among one's fellows—life as ravenous betrayal.
Both of these strong myths are often intertwined, also with the werewolf theme—which is the counter-culture myth of rejecting domestication—and seems to serve as some kind of salve against rational questioning of the human condition. It is axiomatic amongst the wrongthinkers I know that no human who is an avid consumer of vampire or zombie media can be red-pilled until they develop a distaste for or boredom with said myth. Also, let us not forget that when werewolf myth is intertwined with vampire myth the werewolves are the lesser and that lone werewolf stories depict them as exclusively predators or sympathetic yet doomed.
Under the God of Things
GD...............do I love this blog and my friends here! This is one of the most genius convos I've heard/seen all year. Up here in the thin air where I live (nor cali mtns) I am not exactly surrounded by a brain trust and were I, the gene pool still isn't this deep. Cocktails to all!!!
Thanks, Ruben!
Enjoy the thin air.
Thanks James. Paleo diet/lifestyle guru John durant went through The Garden/Enclosure of Eden story in his excellent “The Paleo Manifesto” a few years ago. He saw in it a very ancient memory of the transition to farming, and that this amounted to a Faustian Bargain. In this way we could see the Fall as partly reflecting the loss of our true nature as wild, free-willed humans. The Gilgamesh story is the only other example of a memory from before agriculture which I am aware of, though perhaps the Chinese have some stories.