Rant on: Ideology

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Shroom Man 777
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Rant on: Ideology

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

This is terrible. Everything I'm reading and watching, from Jodorowsky to loopy comics by Moore and Morrison to William Gibson to Zizek to McCloud’s comic drawing manuals are telling me all about cognomemetics, ideology, shamanism, all the same stuff. It’s frightening, how human perception works and shit, the volition of ideas, memes, concepts, which exist as extensions of human neural tissues and organs, intangible, but permeating all over the place, the combination of thoughts from within and the various mediums and tools used to convey it, from vocal languages and facial expressions and shit to HD multi-terabyte bullshit smellovision ocular grifts... instruments of thought-transmission.

Guh. So the flaw of Hitchens and Dawkins is not merely addressing whether or not a religulon is right or wrong, whether or not there was a Jeebus. Or a Muhammad. This is too shallow and right/wrong is two dimensional, they think it’s a coin when this issue is a multi-dimensional 10-sided Dungeons and Dinobonoids dice.

Free market economics, socialism, nationalism, fascism, patriotism, whatever, none of these are exactly "right" in a factual empirical sense. You can’t test American libertarianism, Reaganism, or Scandinavian Social Welfare in a laboratory. Yet these ideologies and beliefs and concepts and philosophies... it’s HOW they are utilized, as metaphorical instruments. The humans using them are the ones who imbue in them their correctness, their wrongness, their volition and definition and also how the humans themselves are shaped by these abstract things. Its alchemy, transubstantiation, memetic evolution, except the difference is that the transformations can occur within a generation as well as across multiple generations, forward into time or backward, and also in a Lamarckian sense. These communicative thought-pattern-tissue-organs we use, these mediums, can transcend distance and even time, at least forward into time.

blah blah blah I am not yet going into how these things, like religion and spirituality, which people convey to each other, are utterly magical and are like the human arts individual and cooperative arts, in a symbiotic, communal, interactive way, because these abstract beliefs are based on the inputs humans receive from the environment, yet reinterpreted and digested by the human brain, from that same region where artistic inspiration comes from. The transmutation of external sensory input with internal dream logics and wherever the arts come from.


Pawel: Not just a single brain, either, those ideas are continually processed by all the minds in parallel and what comes it is thus then re-processed by other minds, etc.


Yes. so the human meme-sphere is actually like a multi-cellular multi-organism ecosystem. That is the alchemy, the shamanism, the collective unconscious. The tangible evidence is left behind by physical mediums (books, films, cassette tapes, pyramids, statues, radio waves echoing in space, etc.) akin to solid fossils, they are the skeletons but there are other tissue forms that compose them, the intangible things in our brains and between people’s brains, and when we look back in a paleo-archaeological sense, we just see a percentage, a fraction, or what these things are.

This is what angry atheist fatty nerds don't get. Sadly, even Dawkins, and he's the one who popularized memetics. This, as building blocks for the organisms and tissues and memetic-metabolismic processes, is what should be the concern, not merely whether this or that actually happened or not. Divine Right of Kings wasn't quantificatorily true with gigajoules and shit, but fuck, it existed and was implemented for... forever.

If you want to be oooh and aaahh about it, I have an alternative take on Christianity. Is it true or false? How do you define this. Was there a Jesus guy who did cool shit in ancient times? Who knows. But the stuff he supposedly did, help the poor, the sick, the whores, stand up for what's right against authority figures, use compassion, emancipation, egalitarianism, this has been written down for like... forever.

Yet for two thousand years people have been screwing this up despite its being written down right there. It’s like people never figuring out how to program a VCR for eons, despite the manual being right there.

So the thing is. I am thinking its truthiness or falseness of an idea might actually be determined by the actions of adherents. They are the ones who imbue it. So... all over history, you've had good people everywhere step up and do the right thing to help the others, feed the hungry, shelter and clothe the needy. These have happened time and time again. And so these... they are Christ, and with each and every example, yes. Christ is true. They are Christ! Christ is there and there and there. Those who die to help others. That is the sacrifice of Christ happening again and and again, crucifiction. Crucifixion.

And then, those who have received the written instructions of Christ and yet continue to be shits, who hurt and harm, who build walls, who amass wealth at the expense of others. Whenever this happens, then Christ was never real. And this applies to any other form of ideological belief.


Pawel: There's more. Our typical story structure and motives are hugely influenced by biblical stories and motifs. So in a way every thought we have since childhood is within this framework

Oh yes, that is another thing. Ah, well, I have another rant about that.I will treat you to it. Sans the unusualness of Christ's sacrifice (we still find other examples of this in other contexts, emancipatory counter-culture concepts, Christ/ianity to Judaism Pharisees is similar to, example, Buddhism to Hinduism), Christianity and the Abrahamic religions are using meat and potato, vanilla authoritarianism formula.
A lot of monotheistic faiths are. And I am thinking of how this came to be.
First there was polytheism, and even before that, there was animism. Animism is the most "primitive." I'll try to make this concise and not too rambling. This realization came to me when I was watching beautiful anime movies of Miyazaki. My Neighbor Totoro.

I saw how he depicted the children and even the parents as so used to the inexplicable magical existence of mystical mythical beings. They didn't even treat it with the usual novelty of WOW WOAH as in other Western films. The mythical beings were just like family members. Yes, they were special and magical, yet the narrative depicted them so organically.

And I thought about how ancient shrines to nature spirits still exist in Japan today. And how my girlfriend said that when she was in Japan, the family she was assigned to wouldn't even kill a centipede in the bathroom because it was "god". I realized that the depiction of such familiarity with mythical mystical deities and mundane creatures of nature such as bugs... might have something to do with each other.
Is it a coincidence that more urbanized folks are estranged from both their mythologies and the natural world? So when they encounter both, either as a fantasy fairy tale or a zoo or a goat in a petting zoo, their fascination has elements of novelty born from their detachment? Whereas a person raised around nature and mythology would react to both in a more organic, familiar yet nonetheless reverent manner? Environment, historical context, plays an important role.

If these abstract beliefs are formulated from environmental exposure and re-interpreted by the subconscious dream logic into the spiritual concepts and ideas. Then consider the ancient humans in pre-agricultural societies, in the jungles or what have you. To survive, they rely on nature, for hunting and gathering, it brings blessings and bounties. Yet it can also bring calamities, famines, bad hunts and harvests and deaths.

These phenomenon they interpret into their animistic faiths, the nature beings and whatnot, they are to be placated, revered, respected, but their worship is different from modern worship. Because these beings are unknowable, fickle, inhuman even. You can see traces of it in later polytheistic faiths that have become more anthropomorphic. How their deities, which embody elements of nature, do not answer to human will. They are untamed. Their spirituality was a reflection of their unknowable environment. You realize this when you are walking in particularly serene mountain, forest environments far removed from the vestiges of human constructions.

So how did this evolve into the more familiar forms of faith we see today? Man's gradual (limited) control of nature, the domestication of animals, the agriculture of crops. Now these forces vital for life, the food to hunt and harvest, have been made predictable, they can be interacted with and manipulated through human will. Nature is now no longer as unknowable as it was before. Yes, flocks still die of plague, famines and droughts still ruin crops, so of course nature is still not fully tamed. But still, the increasing relevance of the human element, the empowerment of humanity in its interactions with the environment... this is why the animistic spirits become more humanized, become the anthropomorphic polytheistic deities.

Agriculture also enables larger populations. Now it’s not just small tribes and families in the wilderness, their environment is no longer that of the nature-wilderness, their environment is composed of and formed by other human beings. The arrangement of the environment, the working order of it, human society has coagulated, has congealed, and so the jungle man navigates now is a human jungle.
Pawel: also: agriculture requires organization, careful planning, law and order

Yes. Organized religion is not just a religion that is organized. It is also a religion OF organization, a reflection of how the world and environment became human-organized. Thus the divine reflections thus reflect all these human things, these known things. So the mechanisms of the divine are more man-like.

Pawel: but but but
Plenty of organized civilizations existed that used religions where this human influence was not evident. I think it appears more in the priesthood than in the gods themselves

Like what civilizations?

Pawel: babylon, sumer, the greek city states, nordic kingdoms cartghage, phoenicia

The Greek Gods were very anthropomorphic. Heck, the Greek and Nordic divinities were heavily reliant on the Strong Man Hero narrative. Which is also reflected in their governance.

Pawel: aaah, yeah, I misunderstood you. go on

Okay, the next stage is... these are generally polytheistic. How did monotheism, now exemplified and dominated in the present by Abrahamic monotheism, come to be. Well, even in the Old Testament, it was still polytheistic. The concept of different tribes with different gods, man's wars would also be reflected in warring pantheons. Mamon, Moloch, Baal, whatever.

Pawel: It kinda still is, sorta. God and his angels, cults of the saints, God's three personas

The older weirder Judaism mythologies expounds on this more, I think. Other polytheistic systems had one highest ranking god, but still,he was one of many. This may be due to the fact that once upon a time, these tribes were related, and their polytheism reflects their very diverse nature, as numerous city-states, tribes, clans, federalized entities, that have attained a certain degree of development.

Still, what happened in ancient Israel? To the polytheistic warring tribes? Their defeat, the emergence of a ruling hegemony. So the defeat and absorption of multiple systems into one centralized government, authoritarian, is reflected by the emergence of a monotheism.

Pawel: Christianity's big break was when their faith was made into the official one by the roman empire. So maybe yeah, it actually reflects growing centralization of the human civilization like some sort of, I don't know, shadow thoughtspace zeitgeist reflected in our brain. I don't have the vocabulary to express it.

I am trying to cop out Rome due to its federalization, which enables multiple faiths to exist just as how it didn't do the whole conversion of other cultures to make them all Romany too. The term you are looking for: Reflections?

Pawel: Well, see - the world is organized in a certain way, people growing up in it get used to it. And their beliefs/ideologies (incl. religion) would tend to reflect that. There's an emperor? King? Well, our god is like that, it's the natural order.

But with the Abrahamic faiths, there was so much more centralization than in Rome. And as we see later on, Rome's polytheism also gets slain and the monotheism is perpetuated... just like the dead tribes of Canaan. And so after Rome, the Abrahamic monotheism became super charged. The great hegemons of Europe and the Middle East. Eventually the Europeans would rule the world. It’s a reflection of that.

Zizek just calls the thoughtspace pattern reflection things... "ideology"

Of course, its weird, since the monotheism that overran the world wasn't the monotheistic Judaism. It was Christianity, which began as an emancipatory counter-culture by an activist. Of course, he died, if he ever existed, and the belief was co-opted and whatever the specifics of the belief is, it’s obvious that the guys who spread Christianity around the world and conquered the world weren't really adherents to Christ's "true" teachings. So it's not the particular religion or ideology or political belief or concept that causes this world orders, it’s also the socioeconomics and geopolitics of the time. The factual circumstances of whatever's happening between peoples and nations is what causes the reflection, in the spiritual or religious area. Reflections of physical realities that have already occurred.

Phew.
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"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
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