Do you believe that there is a hedonically ideal set of propensities for aesthetic pleasure to which all should aspire, and that this sets the standard for resolving disputes about taste?

In other words, do you believe in ‘true judges’ whose sensibilities are perfectly calibrated for the maximization of aesthetic pleasure, such that their hypothetical joint verdict on matters of aesthetic value fixes the aesthetic facts?

Today’s humanity, that is me and you, are living dead — sharing the unhealable inner wound of disillusionment that cannot be healed. The basic reason for this is not to be found in the injustice of social order, the worsening of life conditions, or particular tragic events, although all these cause great suffering. As we mature collectively and personally, as our power to think, communicate, learn and feel grows, as our abilities allow us to penetrate more deeply into the ambiguity and uncertainty of reality, we become less susceptible to illusions. The rise of consciousness and disillusionment comes at the cost of unbearable emotional suffering. For those who are not guided by illusions, the reality is painful in its every aspect: life hurts, thinking hurts, love hurts, and there is no cure for this (well, except for lobotomy).

The modern existential analyst Alice Holzhey-Kunz rightly claims one should not consider those who are particularly susceptible to depression as having a specific psychological disorder. In her view, a predisposition to depression rather suggests a hypersensitivity to reality (which leads to the incapacity to generate illusions that would mediate reality to make it acceptable). We are facing an epidemic of depression because we are becoming more sensitive to reality.
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We are living dead, for whom committing suicide is less painful than to go on as the heroes, the survivors of our lives. But all the most unbearable suffering is worth it, because of what we are at the end of this deadly path: a collection of scars that our lives left us with, beautiful revolutionary monsters. Only those who are not detached from reality, who don’t escape the great pain of facing it, retain the power to change it.
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By trying to deprive a person of emotional suffering and fostering happiness, popular types of psychotherapy ultimately support detachment from reality, the reduction of consciousness, the neutralization of thinking, and limitations on profound layers of interhuman intimacy.

Within the perspective of popular psychology, we are weak sick creatures who need to be numbed with antidepressants, so we can be happy or at least feel no emotional pain. In fact, what popular types of psychotherapy are trying to heal us from is our greatness and power that comes with the cost of unbearable suffering.
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Those who promise eternal happiness and an absence of suffering are manipulating you or are themselves frightened and seeking escape in illusions. Happiness is unattainable in the context of a raised consciousness, where the only possible form of joy is the masochistic pleasure of suffering from interaction with reality.
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Necropsychoanalysis is a practice of the commons, a custodian of a space where we are “allowed not to enjoy” (Slavoj Žižek), a space of universal human pain, through which we are all connected. A negative psychoanalyst is a medium connecting common survival experiences, communicating the message that each of us is not alone in our struggle and inner pain.

A useful counterweight to all our talk about the return of history, the new age of great-power conflict, etc:

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Russia is dying. In just the first week of Putin’s war, the country lost somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 men, according to western sources, an immense and needless tragedy for the poor families left behind to grieve.

Whether those in the Kremlin will weep for them, they must shudder at the thought that in the average week the country loses another 2,000 through population decline, a rate that rose to 20,000 during Covid. But even in normal periods, Russia is now shrinking by more than 100,000 people a year and with no prospect of raising fertility above the 2.1 total fertility rate (children-per-woman) replacement threshold.

The incomprehensible thing about this war is that Russia is not a belligerent young nation in need of expansion; it is not filled with frustrated young men hoping to assert themselves in conflict, as with Syria, Afghanistan or the world’s other conflict zones; it is already elderly, ageing quickly and in some parts heading for oblivion. Some 20,000 Russian villages have been completely abandoned in recent years, and 36,000 others have fewer than ten inhabitants left and will follow them soon. A third of land once farmed in the former USSR has now been abandoned.

If the Russians turn out to have no stomach for this fight, it will probably be for the simple fact that the country does not have enough men to spare. The majority of those poor young men killed for Russia’s honour will be their mother’s only son, in many cases their only child; this will make the impact of Putin’s crimes even more devastating for its victims.

https://edwest.substack.com/p/children-of-men-is-really-happening?s=w

On Friday the wholesale price of domestic energy was nine times what it was a year ago. But the cost of production of energy hasn’t changed. The entire excess is due to profit taking that exploits shortages.

Are we really just going to stand by and watch this exploitation happen?

We only import 4% of our gas from Russia. A third comes from Norway. Nearly half is from our own North Sea supply.

Why then are we being stuck with obscene price rises?

High culture has just demonstrated that it has its own version of more plebeian jingoistic pursuits like "liberty cabbage," "freedom fries" or, today, dumping Russian vodka in the streets. This is not only a crime against art -- though it certainly is that -- but a demonstration of fundamental unseriousness in approaching the actual issues at stake. Russians of all kinds, whether sinful (Valery Gergiev), blameless (the Bolshoi, where the director actually came out against the war), or somewhere in between (Anna Netrebko), are probably well advised to steer clear of Western countries at the moment anyway. In the US, our racism has evolved to the point that Russians are probably not in danger the way Sikhs and Muslims were after 9/11, or Japanese after Pearl Harbor -- but that could well change if things get worse. If I were a praying man, I'd be praying they won't.

Unsurprisingly, most of the types who whine about so called "cancel culture" will say nothing about this, or even approve of it. They will also continue to hold the so-called "liberal democracies" (including Poland? ha!) blameless if the crisis escalates, and all of Europe -- and potentially the world -- once again splits into armed camps.

I promise all of you that this never ends well. Some of us know it, others don't, but all of us will pay the price.

https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2022/03/03/1084177539/anna-netrebko-metropolitan-opera-russia-putin-ukraine

I keep thinking about Julia Ioffe’s on-target criticism of the US media narrative of this war:

—the underdog Ukrainians,

—the hear-throb president,

—the plucky citizens.

No.... This is a tragedy, an attack on human rights, a war crime of fascism & attempted genocide.

Solemnity, please.

This absurd debacle over whether Novak Djokovic can enter Australia and play in the Australian Open despite being unvaccinated illustrates so much of the theater and bullshit embedded in COVID policy.

There's not an iota of science or public health driving any of this madness:

The distorted logic that suicide is a personal, even selfish, whim based on some kind of external happiness quotient remains pervasive, despite efforts over decades to destigmatize this most confounding manner of death. Even a change in language — the widespread push toward stating a person “died by suicide” rather than “committed suicide” to underscore that this is not a criminal act, or sin, but an illness, like a fatal cancer or a massive stroke — has done little to reframe the debate.

But it’s not anyone’s choice. It’s outside the realm of choice, like a fatal heart attack. There are behaviors that look like choices that don't take into account how biologically determined they are. We’re talking about a kind of suffering that is, for the most part, outside the realm of anyone else’s experience.

Adorno was a pretentious windbag with a censorious attitude to the human heart.

And...... there is a right to suicide, for whatever reason, and access to information and the means.

It's in your head: Why reducing all problems to 'mental health issues' hurts humanity

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/540331-mental-health-hurts-humanity/

The existence of faultless aesthetic disagreements, even given the arguments that often accompany such disputes, supports a subjectivist and relativist position in regard to aesthetic value, one that recognizes ultimate differences in taste. But if the existence of differences in taste at every level of critical sophistication implies a subjectivist and relativist position in regard to aesthetic value and the lack of aesthetic principles of the most important kind, how can we claim that the taste of some people is better than that of others? Must the relativist say that it is all a matter of what particular individuals prefer, of what subjective value they find in response to various works? If so, there would be an air of paradox, if not a genuine paradox. For, as noted, our very concept of taste includes the idea that there is both good and bad taste, that some people have better taste than others. How, then, can the appeal to taste show this to be false?

Empirical psychological aesthetics is confronted with an initial logical difficulty analogous to that which confronts empirical objective aesthetics. The latter is unable to decide, among conflicting beauty judgments, what particular things are ‘really’ beautiful, and empirical psychology is unable to decide empirically what are instances of ‘real’ appreciation.

One man gazes with wonder and delight upon the pottery figures offered as prizes of marksmanship at the village fair and is bored in the National Gallery. Another is thrilled by a Titian and revolted by the pottery prizes.

Are the delight of one man in the pottery figure and the other man in the Titian both instances of appreciation of the beautiful? Or is one genuine appreciation and the other spurious? And if so, why?

Does anyone owe anyone else his or her life?

Does anyone have a duty to suffer for anyone else's benefit (or to forestall anyone else's prospective suffering)?

Does the mere fact (i.e. imposition) of being born render each one of us a slave -- to family, to community, to the species?

It seems to me that, in the absence of answering any of the above in the affirmative, there's nothing more selfish, and therefore more hypocritical, than stigmatizing suicide as "a selfish act." Even if it is, so what? Unless the 'collateral damage' of killing oneself is premeditated & also irreparable (which it very rarely is), so what? 'The world', after all, could stand to be relieved -- freely by self-selection -- of as many desperately (i.e. pathologically) miserable people as possible; gratitude rather than scorn (or taboo-fear) being the more appropriate, more civilized (i.e. pre-modern, pre-JCI), response.

Perhaps killing oneself is simply an act of self-defense against 'involuntary self-torment'. If so, reparable collateral damage is a reasonable trade-off (risk), no?

While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the old and the young. The failure to properly exploit this fact has led to many unnecessary deaths and the biggest public health fiasco in history.

Requiring healthy citizens to get vaccinated against a virus that is not particularly deadly — whilst using a vaccine not particularly efficacious — neatly enables the claim that the virus' ongoing non-virulence results from the vaccine.

The reasoning is circular but familiar.

The indication to (mass) test was Bullshit.

The rapid test was Bullshit.

The diagnostic criteria are Bullshit.

Antisocial distancing, quarantine, isolation, contact tracing, masks, school closures & curfews aka lockdowns for asymptomatic persons, formerly called healthy people, are Bullshit.

End this Bullshit.

We no longer understand melancholy. Today we lump all forms of melancholy together into one indiscriminate bundle and call it “depression”. While a lot of good is being done by psychiatrists, psychologists, and the medical profession in terms of treating depression, something important is being lost at the same time. Melancholy is much more than what we call “depression”. For better and for worse, the ancients saw melancholy as a gift from God. Prior to modern psychology and psychiatry, melancholy was seen precisely as a gift from the divine. In Greek mythology, it even had its own god, Saturn, and it was seen as a rich but mixed gift. On one hand, it could bring soul-crushing emotions such as unbearable loneliness, paralyzing obsessions, inconsolable grief, cosmic sadness, and suicidal despair; on the other hand, it could also bring depth, genius, creativity, poetic inspiration, compassion, mystical insight, and wisdom.

No more. Today melancholy has even lost its name and has become, in the words of Lyn Cowan, a Jungian analyst, “clinicalized, pathologized, and medicalized” so that what poets, philosophers, blues singers, artists, and mystics have forever drawn on for depth is now seen as a “treatable illness” rather than as a painful part of the soul that doesn’t want treatment but wants instead to be listened to because it intuits the unbearable heaviness of things, namely, the torment of human finitude, inadequacy and mortality. For Cowan, modern psychology’s preoccupation with symptoms of depression and its reliance on drugs in treating depression show an “appalling superficiality in the face of real human suffering.” For her, apart from whatever else this might mean, refusing to recognize the depth and meaning of melancholy is demeaning to the sufferer and perpetrates a violence against a soul that is already in torment.

And that is the issue when dealing with suicide. Suicide is normally the result of a soul in torment and in most cases that torment is not the result of a moral failure but of a melancholy which overwhelms a person at a time when he or she is too tender, too weak, too wounded, too stressed, or too biochemically impaired to withstand its pressure.

There’s still a lot we don’t understand about suicide and that misunderstanding isn’t just psychological, it’s also moral. In short, we generally blame the victim: “If your soul is sick, it’s your fault”.

For the most part that is how people who die by suicide are judged. Even though publicly we have come a long way in recent times in understanding suicide and now claim to be more open and less judgmental morally, the stigma remains. We still have not made the same peace with breakdowns in mental health as we have made with breakdowns in physical health. We don’t have the same psychological and moral anxieties when someone dies of cancer, stroke, or heart attack as we do when someone dies by suicide. Those who die by suicide are, in effect, our new “lepers”. In former times when there was no solution for leprosy other than isolating the person from everyone else, the victim suffered doubly, once from the disease and then (perhaps even more painfully) from the social isolation and debilitating stigma. He or she was declared “unclean” and had to own that stigma. But the person suffering from leprosy still had the consolation of not being judged psychologically or morally. They were not judged to be “unclean” in those areas. They were pitied. However, we only feel pity for those whom we haven’t ostracized, psychologically and morally. That’s why we judge rather than pity someone who dies by suicide. For us, death by suicide still renders persons “unclean” in that it puts them outside of what we deem as morally and psychologically acceptable. Their deaths are not spoken of in the same way as other deaths. They are doubly judged, psychologically (If your soul is sick, it’s your own fault) and morally (Your death is a betrayal). To die by suicide is worse than dying of leprosy.

I’m not sure how we can move past this. As Pascal says, the heart has its reasons. So too does the powerful taboo inside us that militates against suicide.

There are good reasons why we spontaneously feel the way we do about suicide. But, perhaps a deeper understanding of the complexity of forces that lie inside of what we naively label “depression” might help us understand that, in most cases, suicide may not be judged as a moral or psychological failure, but as a melancholy that has overpowered a suffering soul.