Let’s hope so but sooner rather than later. There is a bit of a difference perhaps between the elements of individual grief you posit and the elements of the societal angst you anticipate.
Grief is immediate and is the person left behind wanting to say yes. The person who leaves either through death or other has little interest in the grief, they have moved on.
The societal angst however comes almost too late for action and is based on each of us saying no to an unwanted upheaval rather than yes to something we desire.
So the angst will almost by definition be by the skin of our teeth if it is indeed in time, and the later we leave it to say no the more infrastructure is in place to enslave us. So the No needs to be a really serious no which destroys the infrastructure being placed around us. Leaving the infrastructure in place for the next clown who wants to control us is not an option. So the revolution you anticipate needs to be a complete rejection, not just a simper and a turned cheek.
Fascinating that you take this position, even before reading it properly I just today tweeted this out, which I think goes to the heart of what you're saying..? Maybe...
"When God is telling us to walk through the fire 🔥 the sooner we do it, the less it hurts. The longer we wait, the more the fire spreads, the longer the walk, and the deeper the burns. No point waiting for someone to put it out. There are no firefighters 🚒 for spiritual pain."
Pretty much so I think. The saying is that no one gets out of life alive, but neither do we get out without a measure of pain. How could we?
The technocrat’s counterfeit offering is numbness. The offering of life is the place where our consciousness rubs raw against reality. Which more or less puts the technocratic ideal as a bankruptcy at the bottom of the pile.
After fifty-two odd years, I'm reading 1984 again (for the Orwell, which will take YEARS). You should too. Everyone thinks they know what's in it, so they don't bother. Okay, here's one (p. 66, orig. ed.): "facecrime". Think of anything with "face" at the start, and you'll be able to trace it back to GO. Also (I don't think I did read this 52 years ago, but it's startling): the Appendix, on Newspeak.
Meantime (I got this going this morning):
I used to be a liberal. I used to think, in other words, that “informed consent” was the way to go, and individual action was the place to start. I still am in favour of individual action as the root of ethical behaviour, but no longer of political behaviour. In political terms, a liberal is a Lamarckian, a person who believes, to use the language of Donne’s Third Satire,
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe,
And what the hill's suddennes resists, winne so.
Well, that’s all very fine from the ethical point of view, but fifty or sixty years later Thomas Hobbes came along with his Leviathan, and told us that politics isn’t about what we do, but about how we are constrained to do anything, and therefore introduced us to what might be called a Darwinist model of political life. (There is always going to be a conflict between Donne’s view and Hobbes’, because there is always going to be conflict between ethics and politics, between intellectual life and social life, etc. Neither, in each case, is ever going to supersede the other, because the human is a dialectic of the animal and the propositional -- our addressiveness is more than purely addressive.)
What does “Darwinian” politics look like? Darwinism is mainly the theory that when you look at evolution (or an organism’s development from one form to another) you don’t look at the organism changing itself (although organisms change FIRST, before any evolution of the species occurs) so much as the way certain traits are selected, in terms of the nature of the environment they are selected into, to be dominant. Hobbes’ theory of politics isn’t, of course, a theory of how certain traits in a ruler are selected to be dominant, but it is a theory of why dominance transcends the interests of individuals, and by what process (“personation”) individuals surrender their interests, and how necessary this is. (Nietzsche once said that Darwinism was true, BUT DEADLY, because the products of the social-evolutionary process were the second-guessed results of the “weak will to power”, and that no “great individuality” necessarily evolved. This is hardly a surprise, if the product of politics is simply the “personated” product of a “sorting out” of dominant forces. Nietzsche’s conception of a “great individuality” is necessarily an ETHICAL one, and the false alignment of politics with ethics is really what he seems to be complaining about.)
What is to become of the mass of people who are prepared to bow to the dominant force in their political lives, without appreciating how little it cares for them, and how consumed it is by its own dominance? What is to become of society in general? How are “individual resisters” to be accommodated by society in general? First, there is the notion of “virtue” in society in general—not virtue as a quality of “society in general”, but the mere fact that in “holding together” it shows more strength and resilience (as Nietzsche also says) than “the integrity of the individual” (how actual individuals so disappointed him!). But, second, society in general is not immutable. That is, it changes, it “evolves”, it re-encounters its environment and certain traits that had once been recessive now become dominant. To take a metaphor from moralism: It learns from its mistakes. Or not. This may be, as in the case of the Roman Empire recorded over more than a millennium by Edward Gibbon, an extremely complex and tortuous affair, but then perhaps Gibbon had learnt from Hobbes more than we are told, and was more or less refining, as ambitious history does to any theory of politics, the terms of his simplifications.
When they went for meat, that just proved how utterly useless as propagandists for anything at all they truly were. (Softly softly catchee monkey? Who put Xi Jinping in charge of anything?)
If people go for this shite, they can blame themselves. The "interpreters of the world" couldn't even change their shoelaces.
We've always lived under the tyranny of the majority, and this is all just a less reversible version of the same old thing.
Yes, they'll keep going for it until it starts to hurt. Then the pain and the grief will begin. Perhaps when I said it will happen to us all 'simultaneously' I exaggerated. There will be stages of realisation as it slowly works its way up the ranks of the middle class. I can already see it in my colleague though. Those hovering around the 100k mark are becoming disillusioned. Those on 150+ still believe they're part of a blessed elite. Wait a while, is all I say to those folks.
Slightly more complicated than that mate - although I'll be the first to admit, as I always have, that many of my problems would disappear if I never had another drink again. Your comment appears to presuppose that she does not drink herself, but here lies half (or more) of the problem.
I "presuppose" no such thing. Experience from almost 40 years of psychiatric nursing tells me that difficulties in marriages (or in temporary "partnerships" as are more common these days) only arise when one of the drinking partners begins to regularly binge-drink or becomes a straight-out alcoholic. Did the partner who left you binge-drink?
To me, you seem to suffer from the delusion that you are still in full control of your drinking. But are you?
I would say she is a "functioning" alcoholic rather than a binge drinker, however, alcohol effects her mood to such an extent that she is a different person from one moment to another. To answer your question, no I am not in full control of my drinking. While my life was stable I would have claimed I could effectively control it, but with certain foundations removed it has once again become a crutch that I have little control over, although I have been steadily reducing for the past week.
The chief psychiatrist at the hospital where I worked before I retired 25 years ago was in no doubt : only Alcoholics Anonymous could possibly help advanced alcoholics like you - simply because you cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We supplied transport in a hospital car for suitable patients to join the nearest AA meeting for a few weeks.
A "suitable patient" is one who (like you) have a concept of God - and who genuinely does not wish to die. You cannot do it on your own - reducing your intake simply won't work. You need help from God - "as you perceive Him".
I value your input Andy. I'm curious as to how you would define 'advanced alcoholic'. I find labels problematic for a number of reasons, not least because I've been told by clinicians in the past that I don't fit the definition of an alcoholic - simply because I can control it at will for extended periods, and this always struck me as odd because I personally saw my drinking, when it was happening, of deserving of SOME form of clinical acknowledgement. But at the same time, and as I've written in the past, I do not see the issue as black and white. I do not believe there are simply those who are alcoholics and those who are not. As such, how would you define 'alcoholic' and what makes one an 'advanced alcoholic'?
Dear J. J. Dawson – No, the issue is most certainly not “black or white”, as you yourself point out above. You have “been told by clinicians that [you] don’t fit the definition of an alcoholic - simply because [you] can control [your intake] at will for extended periods”. In my experience, this very much depends on your personal, economic circumstances : if you can afford to take any amount of time off your work (if you are even "working") to satisfy your desire to drink things are honky-dory - but that is not the case for ordinary folks working ordinary jobs. These will without a doubt soon lose their jobs, lose their income, not be able to make enough money to survive – and so inevitably end up on skid-row as obvious “advanced alcoholics”.
I assume (correct me if I am wrong) that your money situation puts you in my first-mentioned group of alcoholic sufferers. And there you may remain quite happily for years as a heavy drinker with regular (but probably ever increasingly frequent) binge-periods. Clinically, I would still classify you as an advanced alcoholic. I have no idea how old you are, J. J. - but assuming you are 50 years old I would suggest (based on my clinical experience) that if you carry on drinking and smoking as you do now, within a decade you will be dead from lung-cancer or cirrhosis of the liver - or you will be a quite happy resident in a dementia ward suffering incurable, alcoholic brain-damage.
It's good to be back mate. You are an interesting case then - and, I would argue, at a serious advantage therefore: You've already encountered the big existential grief and now you're just waiting for the others to catch up. You are prepped and, as you say, you're already identifying your crew. I know what you mean when you say "My sadness is rooted in a fear that things have changed and cannot ever go back to the way they were" - I too have felt this, which is part of the reason I formed the connection with the loss of my relationship. It's not the saddest I've ever felt though; I suspect there is a part of me that still clings to the hope things might go back to the way they used to be; and in this respect, perhaps I'm a step or two behind you. But again, my consolation is in the fact that when it does happen, I will certainly not be alone, as I am in this current loss.
Let’s hope so but sooner rather than later. There is a bit of a difference perhaps between the elements of individual grief you posit and the elements of the societal angst you anticipate.
Grief is immediate and is the person left behind wanting to say yes. The person who leaves either through death or other has little interest in the grief, they have moved on.
The societal angst however comes almost too late for action and is based on each of us saying no to an unwanted upheaval rather than yes to something we desire.
So the angst will almost by definition be by the skin of our teeth if it is indeed in time, and the later we leave it to say no the more infrastructure is in place to enslave us. So the No needs to be a really serious no which destroys the infrastructure being placed around us. Leaving the infrastructure in place for the next clown who wants to control us is not an option. So the revolution you anticipate needs to be a complete rejection, not just a simper and a turned cheek.
Fascinating that you take this position, even before reading it properly I just today tweeted this out, which I think goes to the heart of what you're saying..? Maybe...
https://x.com/realJJDawson/status/1709762074224869480?s=20
"When God is telling us to walk through the fire 🔥 the sooner we do it, the less it hurts. The longer we wait, the more the fire spreads, the longer the walk, and the deeper the burns. No point waiting for someone to put it out. There are no firefighters 🚒 for spiritual pain."
Pretty much so I think. The saying is that no one gets out of life alive, but neither do we get out without a measure of pain. How could we?
The technocrat’s counterfeit offering is numbness. The offering of life is the place where our consciousness rubs raw against reality. Which more or less puts the technocratic ideal as a bankruptcy at the bottom of the pile.
After fifty-two odd years, I'm reading 1984 again (for the Orwell, which will take YEARS). You should too. Everyone thinks they know what's in it, so they don't bother. Okay, here's one (p. 66, orig. ed.): "facecrime". Think of anything with "face" at the start, and you'll be able to trace it back to GO. Also (I don't think I did read this 52 years ago, but it's startling): the Appendix, on Newspeak.
Meantime (I got this going this morning):
I used to be a liberal. I used to think, in other words, that “informed consent” was the way to go, and individual action was the place to start. I still am in favour of individual action as the root of ethical behaviour, but no longer of political behaviour. In political terms, a liberal is a Lamarckian, a person who believes, to use the language of Donne’s Third Satire,
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe,
And what the hill's suddennes resists, winne so.
Well, that’s all very fine from the ethical point of view, but fifty or sixty years later Thomas Hobbes came along with his Leviathan, and told us that politics isn’t about what we do, but about how we are constrained to do anything, and therefore introduced us to what might be called a Darwinist model of political life. (There is always going to be a conflict between Donne’s view and Hobbes’, because there is always going to be conflict between ethics and politics, between intellectual life and social life, etc. Neither, in each case, is ever going to supersede the other, because the human is a dialectic of the animal and the propositional -- our addressiveness is more than purely addressive.)
What does “Darwinian” politics look like? Darwinism is mainly the theory that when you look at evolution (or an organism’s development from one form to another) you don’t look at the organism changing itself (although organisms change FIRST, before any evolution of the species occurs) so much as the way certain traits are selected, in terms of the nature of the environment they are selected into, to be dominant. Hobbes’ theory of politics isn’t, of course, a theory of how certain traits in a ruler are selected to be dominant, but it is a theory of why dominance transcends the interests of individuals, and by what process (“personation”) individuals surrender their interests, and how necessary this is. (Nietzsche once said that Darwinism was true, BUT DEADLY, because the products of the social-evolutionary process were the second-guessed results of the “weak will to power”, and that no “great individuality” necessarily evolved. This is hardly a surprise, if the product of politics is simply the “personated” product of a “sorting out” of dominant forces. Nietzsche’s conception of a “great individuality” is necessarily an ETHICAL one, and the false alignment of politics with ethics is really what he seems to be complaining about.)
What is to become of the mass of people who are prepared to bow to the dominant force in their political lives, without appreciating how little it cares for them, and how consumed it is by its own dominance? What is to become of society in general? How are “individual resisters” to be accommodated by society in general? First, there is the notion of “virtue” in society in general—not virtue as a quality of “society in general”, but the mere fact that in “holding together” it shows more strength and resilience (as Nietzsche also says) than “the integrity of the individual” (how actual individuals so disappointed him!). But, second, society in general is not immutable. That is, it changes, it “evolves”, it re-encounters its environment and certain traits that had once been recessive now become dominant. To take a metaphor from moralism: It learns from its mistakes. Or not. This may be, as in the case of the Roman Empire recorded over more than a millennium by Edward Gibbon, an extremely complex and tortuous affair, but then perhaps Gibbon had learnt from Hobbes more than we are told, and was more or less refining, as ambitious history does to any theory of politics, the terms of his simplifications.
When they went for meat, that just proved how utterly useless as propagandists for anything at all they truly were. (Softly softly catchee monkey? Who put Xi Jinping in charge of anything?)
If people go for this shite, they can blame themselves. The "interpreters of the world" couldn't even change their shoelaces.
We've always lived under the tyranny of the majority, and this is all just a less reversible version of the same old thing.
Yes, they'll keep going for it until it starts to hurt. Then the pain and the grief will begin. Perhaps when I said it will happen to us all 'simultaneously' I exaggerated. There will be stages of realisation as it slowly works its way up the ranks of the middle class. I can already see it in my colleague though. Those hovering around the 100k mark are becoming disillusioned. Those on 150+ still believe they're part of a blessed elite. Wait a while, is all I say to those folks.
She just may come back - if you stop your binge drinking.
Slightly more complicated than that mate - although I'll be the first to admit, as I always have, that many of my problems would disappear if I never had another drink again. Your comment appears to presuppose that she does not drink herself, but here lies half (or more) of the problem.
I "presuppose" no such thing. Experience from almost 40 years of psychiatric nursing tells me that difficulties in marriages (or in temporary "partnerships" as are more common these days) only arise when one of the drinking partners begins to regularly binge-drink or becomes a straight-out alcoholic. Did the partner who left you binge-drink?
To me, you seem to suffer from the delusion that you are still in full control of your drinking. But are you?
I would say she is a "functioning" alcoholic rather than a binge drinker, however, alcohol effects her mood to such an extent that she is a different person from one moment to another. To answer your question, no I am not in full control of my drinking. While my life was stable I would have claimed I could effectively control it, but with certain foundations removed it has once again become a crutch that I have little control over, although I have been steadily reducing for the past week.
The chief psychiatrist at the hospital where I worked before I retired 25 years ago was in no doubt : only Alcoholics Anonymous could possibly help advanced alcoholics like you - simply because you cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We supplied transport in a hospital car for suitable patients to join the nearest AA meeting for a few weeks.
A "suitable patient" is one who (like you) have a concept of God - and who genuinely does not wish to die. You cannot do it on your own - reducing your intake simply won't work. You need help from God - "as you perceive Him".
But your sinful pride will try to stop you.
I value your input Andy. I'm curious as to how you would define 'advanced alcoholic'. I find labels problematic for a number of reasons, not least because I've been told by clinicians in the past that I don't fit the definition of an alcoholic - simply because I can control it at will for extended periods, and this always struck me as odd because I personally saw my drinking, when it was happening, of deserving of SOME form of clinical acknowledgement. But at the same time, and as I've written in the past, I do not see the issue as black and white. I do not believe there are simply those who are alcoholics and those who are not. As such, how would you define 'alcoholic' and what makes one an 'advanced alcoholic'?
Dear J. J. Dawson – No, the issue is most certainly not “black or white”, as you yourself point out above. You have “been told by clinicians that [you] don’t fit the definition of an alcoholic - simply because [you] can control [your intake] at will for extended periods”. In my experience, this very much depends on your personal, economic circumstances : if you can afford to take any amount of time off your work (if you are even "working") to satisfy your desire to drink things are honky-dory - but that is not the case for ordinary folks working ordinary jobs. These will without a doubt soon lose their jobs, lose their income, not be able to make enough money to survive – and so inevitably end up on skid-row as obvious “advanced alcoholics”.
I assume (correct me if I am wrong) that your money situation puts you in my first-mentioned group of alcoholic sufferers. And there you may remain quite happily for years as a heavy drinker with regular (but probably ever increasingly frequent) binge-periods. Clinically, I would still classify you as an advanced alcoholic. I have no idea how old you are, J. J. - but assuming you are 50 years old I would suggest (based on my clinical experience) that if you carry on drinking and smoking as you do now, within a decade you will be dead from lung-cancer or cirrhosis of the liver - or you will be a quite happy resident in a dementia ward suffering incurable, alcoholic brain-damage.
It's good to be back mate. You are an interesting case then - and, I would argue, at a serious advantage therefore: You've already encountered the big existential grief and now you're just waiting for the others to catch up. You are prepped and, as you say, you're already identifying your crew. I know what you mean when you say "My sadness is rooted in a fear that things have changed and cannot ever go back to the way they were" - I too have felt this, which is part of the reason I formed the connection with the loss of my relationship. It's not the saddest I've ever felt though; I suspect there is a part of me that still clings to the hope things might go back to the way they used to be; and in this respect, perhaps I'm a step or two behind you. But again, my consolation is in the fact that when it does happen, I will certainly not be alone, as I am in this current loss.