America, historical destiny

This place has abandoned all sure footing and is plunging head-long into an abyss of self. All ideas have become shallow and responsive only to fantasy, what little reality remains has been ceded to the lawyers, or to the powers of capital. There is a widespread belief and ethos here that all problems can be solved by simply talking about them, via an appeal to pleasing images that offer hard rapes under their surfaces- taking so long as a consensus can be reached or coerced. The wolves of our nature. I mean think about what this all means, this modern ethos. A lot of this looks like apathy, and is, but this apathy represents the weight of a huge burden this culture bears.

Not since Rome have we seen such a massive undertaking to assume so much error and madness as value. Such a will as this, and since all detrimental and lowly things must be worked through to ultimately be overcome by beneficial and high things, by the good, I have hope for this place. After all, Rome sacrificed itself on the alter of philosophy, and birthed a far nobler and more human reality in the process... Europe. What will the sacrifice of Europe and America yield 500 or 1000 years from now?

The bigger problem is technology and its ability to erase history. History is the only justice of philosophy. Not what we think of history, but history itself. It doesn't matter that technology erases our encounter with history, or our ideas of it; what matters is tha technology actually erases history itself. Or at least that is the danger I see as a possibility.

It seems that way and I will agree that this is the greatness of the USofA: the absolute ruthlesness in its pursuit of all the most currently powerful means.

But technology is seen through with the nose, and people then appear so silly that one's admiration for the US increases a millionfold. They will NOT be held back by silliness in this pursuit, and the concecuence is this seeming erasal, so essencially important. We cannot ask the US to give this up, all we can do is sart helping it feel the calm and the ground they have permitted. Eventually their empire too will collapse, and its is such a great empire that I feel compelled to help it do so in the outmost dignity.

Perhaps these empires have been showerings for the fields of Europe from the start. This, by the way, is why I refuse to give up my European identity.

Pezer wrote:

It seems that way and I will agree that this is the greatness of the USofA: the absolute ruthlesness in its pursuit of all the most currently powerful means.

But technology is seen through with the nose, and people then appear so silly that one's admiration for the US increases a millionfold. They will NOT be held back by silliness in this pursuit, and the concecuence is this seeming erasal, so essencially important. We cannot ask the US to give this up, all we can do is sart helping it feel the calm and the ground they have permitted.

Excellent conclusions!

Quote :

Eventually their empire too will collapse, and its is such a great empire that I feel compelled to help it do so in the outmost dignity.

Perhaps these empires have been showerings for the fields of Europe from the start. This, by the way, is why I refuse to give up my European identity.

I think the American empire is destined to be the symbol of any emerging global order, one way or another. In the worst case as its antithesis, like capital is to the revolution; the actual substance to the negative order. In a good case, as its persisting agency of a balance of power which requires the superiority of technology for a grounding of Earthly processes in the largely metaphysical world that humans inhabit.

"American empire is destined to be the symbol of any emerging global order":

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The word derives from the Greek symbolon (σύμβολον) meaning token or watchword. It is an amalgam of syn- "together" + bole "a throwing, a casting, the stroke of a missile, bolt, beam." The sense evolution in Greek is from "throwing things together" to "contrasting" to "comparing" to "token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine." Hence, "outward sign" of something. The meaning "something which stands for something else" was first recorded in 1590, in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene.

The Faerie Queene is awesome.

I read somewhere that the word Europe has no traceable origins. That it is thought to derive from what the sound evokes, "eur", a wide-ness-ning. Europe. Almost like a verb. But still. Evidently it must have sprung up as the word for known world, the one beyond the limits between Romans or Greeks or Celts or Christians and barbarians.

I don't know about the deep origins of that name but the Eur sound reminds of the rune Ur_uz.

runesecrets wrote:

Uruz – “Oo – Ruse” – Literally: “Aurochs” – Esoteric: Endurance, Formation, Manifestation

Key Concepts: life force, physical health, courage, organic structure, manifestation, formation, healing, vigor, endurance


Psi: determination, persistence, freedom, courage, will, territoriality, independence

Energy: Vital formative force, archetypal patterning, raw primal power, survival, healing, endurance, manifestation, organic structuring

Mundane: physical health, stamina

Divinations: Strength, constancy, vitality, tenacity, pattern, luck, health, pragmatic knowledge, understanding; or weakness, obsession, misdirected force, inconstancy, sickness, ignorance, uncontrolled rage, insensitivity, brutality

Governs:
Shaping and forcing fortunate circumstances creatively through will and inspiration
Self-healing and maintenance of good mental and physical health
Assertion of home ground, personal space, independence and freedom
Strength and tenacity, courage, persistence against all odds
Ability to control aggression and take responsibility
Rites of passage, especially into adulthood

My notes:

While FEHU is the symbol of a domesticated cattle, and Uruz is a symbol of the wild bovine, a reminder that cattle were once wild creatures. If Fehu represents young lovers, Uruz represents young warriors.

Though Uruz energy is also heavily invested in the hamingja, it is not suited for easy, conscious control as Fehu is. It is the rune of powerful unconscious shaping energies that need to be guided wisely as they manifest. It is an early reminder within the series that the untamed powers of creativity are not without danger – a reality quite clear in our modern technological civilization. It is the user’s skill and practiced techniques that will control the energy unleashed by this rune. It is the rune of independence, asserting oneself and one’s territory.

Life’s persistence and its endless resourcefulness in the task of survival are all implicit within the rune meaning of Uruz, thus it is a rune of manifestation, regeneration and endurance. The organic patterning energy of Uruz laces up the skin, sustains the ego and can be used to protect the psyche from trauma. Self-healing is the energy which pulls a diseased or ill form back toward its ‘primal blueprint’: the original, invisible shape intended by nature’s design.

Uruz is the rune of the inner-King and inner-Queen. We can assert our right to exist and be free in the very same primal authority that the aurochs did theirs. It is the will to live passionate and free.

There are deep ideational transformations as the impetus for thought shifts over time and generations. These can be understood only by looking at larger changes, for example in how modern liberalism has changes over just the last 30 years. Each minor change is seated in larger changes. Individual person's ideas are reflections of the current time plus some mediating at the hands of left-over vestiges of former changes that live on in society in different ways. Upon such an understanding only, a historical one, can we understand how thought is changing and thus get a sense of America today. Becaus beneath the ideas are the psychological grounds of ideation, which are more primary, primitive, and real. The ideas live out of the grounds of emotion, motive, sensation, habit, cognitive expectation capacity and the ranges of perception, mostly a utilitarian expediency. Philosophy is a struggle to extirpate thought from that expediency as much as possible, but the challenge then is how to do so without unduly cutting off thought from the grounds of thought. Because those grounds themselves are far more than the simple "utility" that is manifesting positive contents in a given moment.

America has become a means of dissolving things together. Postmodern means the lack of sure footing and an acceptance of everything plastic, hesitant, and unsure of itself. America is overtly postmodern in an almost absolute sense but only covertly retains its old hard substances, which cannot be converted. The system is simply waiting for those older substances to die off, and is doing everything it can to make that process hurry along. Technological rationality is only an excuse needed to maintain a process of deforestation of the old lands.

So much self-questioning can't undo its own ground, this is even more true of the psyche than it is of thought/reason. Modern society is hugely daemonic in this way. Rather than try to resolve oppositions they are maintained through active irresolution. The ethos is one of refusal to find a truly common ground, thus the over-emphasis on superficial agreements and thus also the forced conformity-pressure to anything that might serve as such a superficial quasi-grounding, "political correctness".

What is also interesting is how capital figures here. Capital is like the higher regions of the psyche, emotions and reason, it cannot truly self-divide along grounding lines, it must remain "anchored". Psychological late capitalism became so many little tricks and manipulation a of every kind in order to keep a process of capital expansion open and push competition into narrower and narrower channels, culminating in things like facebook and twitter, only the crudest form of this visible in why Zizek points to with how companies like Starbucks play on guilt and shame by trying to convince you that your purchase of a latte is saying a rainforest somewhere in the third world. Old ideas of capitalism are more focused on property rights and resolving conflicts along the lines of consistency in fiscal and refulatory domains, hence the individual right to produce and consume is implicit, but more recently this view has lost favor for an emphasis on copyright protection and the securing of mass accumulations of capital power at the expense of mediating resolutions in terms of any more individual pure right, which must act like a hopelessly intractable principle within capitalistic machines. Thus also according to this shift we have entire societies seemingly threatened with collapse over the insolvency of a single corporation or a small handful of them. Therefore also the need to expend excessive resources and psychological capital to shelter the largest capital holders from market consequences.

I think postmodernism is a phase that will be overtaken by a return to a far more ruthless ethos of concrete, hard edges and demands that will be possible only by a continued shift of capital markets and production toward the third world; the ideas are reaching a maximum fluidity and lack of substance now, and despite popular science fiction that envisions a utopian world where all certain edges are blurred and everything is called into permanent stasis of questioning I don't think there's much further to go. Need and pain are going to continue to maintain and slowly expand the present conditions but they are already marginalizing- after all what else are such things as mass hyper-focus on traumatizing the mind in terms of its gender or religions alignments other than an intensification at the margins? Such overt, crude moves aren't even possible if the impetus for such things had anything like a real hold and ground in a society and people. The repressed truth comes more into focus, more out in the open, we have Trump and all the rest of the clowns finally able to take off their masks and be who they are. Hitler was voted into power and named man of the year in 1938 by Time magazine; despite everything, the human depths run far beyond capital's power, that being rooted in truth may only ever be truly over-coded in the image of truth.