However, certain human behaviours’ (such as starting wars, resisting diversity, or fostering political confrontation) interfere with these trends, hindering their consolidation and putting humanity's peaceful progress at risk. — Seeker25

How often in history was the motivation for war to acquire resources on one side and to defend those resources on the other. If we go back to the cod eating capelin predatory event, it is a conflict driven by the instinct to eat. Why isn't this tantamount to a kind of war in nature?

Our consumption, the effects of a vast amount of free energy exploitation, is a trade-off we don't easily control as a species anyway.

Folks in my locality are pursuing a solution to slow down another great predatory event of Oryctes rhinoceros, an epidemic of massive horned beetle. The beetle eats the hearts of large palms. I have to inject palm trees with imidicloprid (neonicatinoid) to try and save them. Funnily enough, palm damage almost looks like the palms have been shot up by a gun (burrow holes everywhere). My intuition is that insecticide is bad idea because all pollinators that visit palms (principally honey bees) will be negatively impacted, leading to a further loss in bio diversity. Or we could see this as a kind of new selection pressure which these pollinators will have to overcome. Many insects can successfully gain resistance to insecticides via natural selection, but an empirical picture of what is going on is not gathered by anyone who is fighting to save their palms.

The anthropocene is an age of extinction caused by the human need to conserve and expand itself (in all dimensions we desire to conserve and expand). For nature to even picture itself, as if we could be a steward of control, perhaps required a tremendous level of energy exploitation. The trade-offs and fall out of that event are ongoing.



I've been dragged into war by these magnificent bastards. They are discussing where to find the best palms (anywhere they find them). Luckily our family members do not include species of palms. Are you team palm, or team beetle, or is this a parochial problem which you have no solutions for? How does your GETs help guide my decision and how will it convince my boss to incur a financial loss for a moral cause? If you had an optimal solution, I wouldn't have the power or incentive to implement it anyway.

That anyone has any hesitation to fully condemn the shooter and to refuse to use his actions to promote any outstanding agenda reveals someone just terribly misguided without any moral compass. — Hanover

Trump is the president elect. A wonderful magnetic pole for the calibration of our moral compasses.

that 'believing' in a principle is absolutely not sufficient to make it exist — Clearbury

And thus on grounds of simplicity, we should conclude that though humans are disposed to believe in the reality of moral principles, in reality there are none. — Clearbury

Isn't an alternative perspective permissible also, that belief is sufficient to bring all kinds of social constructions/facts/actions into existence? The degree to which belief has power as an established norm is relative to the number of people who hold that belief. We don't need necessarily hold to whether moral principles "exist" but whether they have any power to justify/guide action/inaction as codes of convention.

Believing that you and everyone else should stop at a traffic intersection permits a kind of organized reality that wouldn't happen without a consensus.

Your philosophical position is the attempt to either represent a convention/standard or establish one in the way Seeker is trying argue for the adoption of vague principles cherry picked from a picture of evolution.

Individuals have the right to choose what they want to know and not. Revealing the truth without their consent would be an infringement on their autonomy. Ignorance, in many cases, can be a blessing. — Alonsoaceves

We will be withholding information about the upcoming coronavirus epidemic so that business can happen as usual. Oops! Cat is out of the bag.

The passage of information, whether true or false, is always then infringing on your autonomy then, unless you are always implicitly consenting.

When I choose to read a topic on the basis of a headline, I don't have the power to erase/negate its possible influence on me. I can't unwatch film and unread books.

You have no idea what anyone is going to say to you in the next moment. You can't make them unsay it.

It's the idea that truth is somehow objective, neutral, and completely independent from the person who utters it that is problematic. — baker

Well maybe we could shift to the notion to international human rights. This is something you may not agree with but if all human beings ought to have universal rights, do we not owe every one the education to understand what those rights are. Or do we withhold that information on the basis of avoiding potential harm, interfering or destroying cultural forms, processes, identities.

Is this just more idealistic naivete, bolstered by some futile Western minority consensus.

Liberated from what? Liberated into what? — baker

The Western, and specifically, American, savior complex ... — baker

Point taken. It is naively idealistic for sure and the realistic political motivation is never just about improving the lives of anyone. I've heard there are North Korean defectors who find life in South Korea very hard, as they can't really integrate into its highly competitive capitalist society for many reasons. Some express the desire to return to North Korea.

In the U.S., folks leaving a long stint in prison, or the social structure of the armed services, cannot easily integrate as a civilian. Not to mention many Americans are frustrated with their own way of life (which is seldom as anyone might wish it to be).

My hypothetical is likely too far afield from Benj's pattern: 'is truth owed if it diminishes free will'.

What is permissible under the banner of postmodern monkey business?

Whatever you can get away with. :snicker:

Jokes on you!

Western society is no longer an example worthy of emulating. It provides nothing in the way of spiritual fulfillment, no role models, no worthy causes, etc. — Tzeentch

We could get weirder in America. I propose a permanent flash theater mob of folk dressed up as Trump doing Trump like things. We will bath in the energy of universal narcissism as we dance in orange wigs and oversized cheap suits, have mock Trump sex with mock Trump prostitutes in the public square. We will take shits on the graves of men and women who have given their lives in service to the country while selling bibles. We'll sing the country's greatest hits: "Grab them by the Pussy" and "Love Me, I'm a Strong man with Large hands".

If we get shot and lose our jobs while doing it, oh well. It's hard to have fun adventure without taking a risk. We can just pretend we've got presidential resources.

When the malaise of senselessness has reaches its last tipping point, many of us will have died in service to the great Trump dance.

It will be a dancing plague for strong bastards to become weak bitches, to exhaust and draw down the devils of our desires, in a communion of becoming One with Trump. Once our bodies are used up and broken, we can lie down on the side walk and stay there until we perish from lack of purpose.

:fire:
:death:

• Equilibrium, the propensity for life, and freedom are three evolutionary trends which, according to my thesis, shed light on how we should act. — Seeker25

Stable relationships between species over time may include warfare/conflict or large acts of predation . Eusocial species, like ants, may develop means to distinguish between in-group out-group individuals of their own species and have conflicts on that basis. Sometimes it may be purely down to dietary source creating a pheromone signature.

Chat GPT says that evolutionary equilibrium is compatible with an arms race, such that perennial pattern of territory dispute between species could continually evolve together in a kind of reciprocating balance of adaptations.

The development of the human cognitive capacity probably emerged in part from endless conspecific war, resource/territory conflict. Such resource competitions are ongoing under the rules of a national/global Capitalist paradigm. We sink our savings into the stock market because we want to preserve the 'freedom' it gives us despite ridiculous, excessive and destructive aspect of a lot of consumption, which is about individuals collaborating/competing to acquire resources (economic warfare/game). One might question the ethics of a lot of economic relationships which serve us insofar as one would rather remain ignorant of their unwholesome reality.

Is it ethical to own stock in Coca Cola? Why aren't they just a culturally sanctioned version of harmful drug dealers? Shouldn't we be free to sell coca cola? One person's benefit is another person's harm but such a trade-off is acceptable if we value the freedom at the cost of such consequences.

However, neither aggression nor genocide are responses aligned with evolutionary trends. — Seeker25

There are probably plenty of occasions in evolutionary history where the overgrowth of a species occurs due to some kind of environmental accident, or new adaptation via the mechanism of selection. Entire species, as an energy source for another, become reduced in population, some go extinct.

Oceanographers record the largest predation event ever observed in the ocean

Here 2.5 million cod ate 10.5 million capelin, 4.2 capelin eaten per cod.

Are predatory events acts of "aggression." If capelin populations can recover, does that excuse the fact that 10.5 million individuals were killed?

In value neutral terms, maybe capelin are just transforming into cod here.

You are just cherry picking "trends" that align with some sense of life/diversity conservation. Nature's means of limiting growth may not be fun. They may appear to us as cruel accidents, if we as a unique species have a sense/duty/forsight for limiting gratuitous harm, while maintaining biodiversity.

Really? If you were to tell the North Koreans about, say, the homeless in the US or the suicide rates in Switzerland, the government there would punish them?

What would be that "truth" you would tell them, and how complete would it be? — baker

If we were to believe that the North Korean peoples ought to be liberated and nations endeavored to do so, information of all kinds about the outside world might be helpful. Flash drives, if they have the ability to view contents, could contain a lot of miscellaneous content, including documentaries on suicide and homelessness in other countries. Flash drives are probably taboo, no matter what content is on them but I don't know.

Am not saying that we should, but we are not being hard pressed to convey "truth" (truth bearing information) to North Koreans for the sake of potentially expanding or eroding their free will. The problem is the consequences of reorganizing a state, waging war, fomenting coups, changing social identity, are likely always worse than leaving it be.

Is the truth still owed even if it erodes free will?

That the "truth is owed" becomes a pressing consideration for whoever can tell or withhold it, as a dilemma or trade-off, brings up the concern as to whether whoever is deciding has much free will in the matter.

We could use is a long list of interesting real world dilemmas or hypotheticals which could give us something to work with.

If there was a collaborative effort to drop informational goods, flash drives and pamphlets over North Korea to inform North Koreans about how life is elsewhere as "truth owed", that effort might come with considerable state backlash (harm to its citizens).

Why shouldn't we meet and educate the isolated tribal peoples of the Sentinel Islands? Would educating them about what lies beyond their own way of life increase or erode their free will? We need a lot more information for a harm-benefit analysis. Maybe life is awful there from our perspective.

Is it ok to be an invisible voyeur for data collection, like in Star Trek when they observed technologically limited cultures.

Evolution generates diversity. Silencing, re-educating, or imprisoning those who express a different opinion goes against evolution. We must facilitate the integration of diversity, not reject it. — Seeker25

Consider any organized structure, whether machine or organism, and its functions. In order to conserve that complex function/structure you have to protect is from forces that undermine/degrade/destroy it.

The body is pretty good at keeping out all that diversity which would get in the way of its self-preservation.

The global capitalist paradigm, preceded by state conquest, has done much to eliminate cultural and biological diversity. Why isn't this just another trend of evolution? Any form of complex life that collapses leaves behind space for new diversity. Nature is indifferent to what comes next, even if the long term universal evolutionary trend is increased complexity.

In Hawaii we've constant waves of types of biological epidemics, since new organisms are being introduced all the time. Displacement of species occurs all the time. Right now the Coconut Rhino beetle is pretty much destroying a range of large palms. If we're impartial to species, we could analogize this as a plague which may end up killing a majority of individuals.

The introductions of new molecules (PFAs/PFOs/plastics) to the evolutionary playing field is the generation of new kind of diversity but it comes at the trade-off of current biological function (human health). If we poison ourselves too much, we're forced to evolve by either artificial or natural selection.

So, the taboo against eating people may have become widespread because holding that taboo makes social cohesion easier. — Brendan Golledge

Eating people could also form a collectively sanctioned rite, permissible under strict adherence to the cultural form.The Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea are noted for suffering from prion disease (Kuru) from eating brains of their dead. It would be interesting to know whether the Fore would ever perform the ritual alone, outside of the social form, and whether that would be collectively deemed permissible. Or maybe we'd see it as comparable to not sharing a kind of rare meat, being excluded from a rare chance of honoring the dead, in egalitarian societies. Did everybody get a bit?

Human sacrifice was also ubiquitous practice which one might consider as a universal taboo due its implications for 'tit for tat' social instability. However we may find many culturally permissible forms. This is just to draw up the distinction between publicly sanctioned acts which are performed as part of a social function which might otherwise be considered taboo outside of that.

The Eucharist is a form of cannibalism, if the body and the blood of Christ is as an intelligible (trans)substance still classifiable as 'human'.

Christians believe we can’t save ourselves. Whereas Hinduism and Buddhism place it all in our hands (or place the task of removing our hands from the picture, losing one’s self as up to us alone) and don’t speak of grace from God. — Fire Ologist

Meister Eckhart, German Catholic (1260-1328), might as well compare to the Yogi or a Buddhist given the strangeness of his poetic mysticism around 'birth of the Son' in the soul. Emptying oneself of everything, that the grace/Word of God may manifest, sounds eerily similar in practice to these other meditative traditions.

"The second point is, what must a man contribute by his own
actions, in order to procure and deserve the occurrence and the con
summation of this birth in himself? Is it better to do something toward
this, to imagine and think about God ? - or should he keep still and
silent in peace and quiet and let God speak and work in him, merely
waiting for God to act? Now I say, as I said before, that these words
and this act are only for the good and perfected people, who have so
absorbed and assimilated the essence of all virtues that these virtues
emanate from them naturally, without their seeking; and above all
there must dwell in them the worthy life and lofty teachings of our
Lord Jesus Christ. They must know that the very best and noblest
attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak
within. When the powers have been completely withdrawn from all
their works and images, then the Word is spoken. Therefore he said,
'In the midst of the silence the secret word was spoken unto me.'
And so, the more completely you are able to draw in your powers
to a unity and forget all those things and their images which you
have absorbed, and the further you can get from creatures and their
images, the nearer you are to this and the readier to receive it. If only
you could suddenly be unaware of all things,10 then you could pass
into an oblivion of your own body as St. Paul did, when he said,
"Whether in the body I cannot tell, or out of the body I cannot tell;
God knows it" (2 Cor. 1 2 :2). In this case the spirit had so entirely ab
sorbed the powers that it had forgotten the body: memory no longer
functioned, nor understanding, nor the senses, nor the powers that
should function so as to govern and grace the body; vital warmth
and body-heat were suspended, so that the body did not waste dur
ing the three days when he neither ate nor drank. Thus too Moses
fared, when he fasted for forty days on the mountain and was none
the worse for it, for on the last day he was as strong as on the first.
In this way a man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward and
sink into an oblivion of all things and himself. Concerning this a
master1 1 addressed the soul thus: 'Withdraw from the unrest of ex
ternal activities, then flee away and hide from the turmoil of inward
thoughts, for they but create discord.' And so, if God is to speak
His Word in the soul, she must be at rest and at peace, and then
He will speak His Word, and Himself, in the soul - no image, but
Himself!" — Meister Eckhart, Sermon One

As I said, I can't really discuss things with someone like you. — Clearbury

Sounds like the final nail in the coffin that is this thread.

Sorry to have to burst your bubble, shatter your illusion, but reality just is not like this. — Metaphysician Undercover

This has been said maybe a dozen times in this thread already. The heart wants what the heart wants: justice without the tyrannies of justice, free market solutions for every problem, infinite resources, zero pollution, the perpetual health of the commons, a future of biological/social evolution without violence, a Jinn that grants 14 wishes in good faith...

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. — Brenner T

There could be a mystic interpretation of this quote which shatters the otherwise dull Christian rote literalist dogma.

Meister Eckhart might've referred to the virgin birth as something that happens inside of us. When
"Christ resurrects", it might happen somewhere other than just a literal tomb and a historical body 2000+ years ago.

In Eckhart's vision, God is primarily fecund. Out of overabundance of love the fertile God gives birth to the Son, the Word in all of us. Clearly,[d] this is rooted in the Neoplatonic notion of "ebullience; boiling over" of the One that cannot hold back its abundance of Being. Eckhart had imagined the creation not as a "compulsory" overflowing (a metaphor based on a common hydrodynamic picture), but as the free act of will of the triune nature of Deity (refer Trinitarianism). — Wikipedia: Meister Eckhart

92 ‘Spanish practices’

Wonder if Amazon (corporation) workers in anywhere in the world could get away with this, or is the labor monitoring so fine-tuned that it makes the potential for 'Spanish practices' pretty much impossible. Amazon seems to benefit greatly from the prospect of infinite worker turn-over but I'm not so sure its sustainable.

If we are on the side of exploited and under paid labor, it's not so much a pejorative term. There is always a limit beyond which exploited labor becomes exploitative labor though. When the entire workforce has a stake in ownership and gains from productivity, co-workers might share in the bosses' concerns.

Have heard of the mythical Mondrogon corporation. Americans would do well to learn about work cooperatives in school if wasn't always considered anti-American socialist propaganda.

But, surprisingly, there is another interpretation around on behalf of trade unions or workers. Doing unauthorised working methods with the aim of being listened by the bosses and changing the labour conditions. — javi2541997

If only labor collaboration could be so unified in good faith and by fellowship. These practices are like the softest/benign version of a strike, which I'm sure happens now and again in various forms where it is tolerated.

Am sure there are very interesting examples of it written down somewhere.

There is no doubt that a lot of time spent waffling at the TPF is just another example of these "Spanish practices".

Until the boss is allowed corporate-level productivity monitoring, we will all keep getting away with acting like Spaniards, drinking wine at all hours, taking naps on the company's time, and mistaking giants for windmills.

When I think about everyone I’ve ever met, and pick the individuals who I believe might run amok if government disappeared tomorrow, the number is very close to zero. And just dealing with people in my day-to-day leads me to believe that people aren’t as anti-social as statists make them out to be. — NOS4A2

Consider whether or not you, or the average person, is capable of vengeance. Can a single violent crime (ex. the rape of a loved one) initiate a feedback cycle of violence in a community due to the natural need/impulse for retributive justice (tit for tat). If violence is by some measure socially contagious, or escalates new conflicts, then it may only take one bad apple to ruin the batch.

Blood feuds were common in societies with a weak rule of law (or where the state did not consider itself responsible for mediating this kind of dispute), where family and kinship ties were the main source of authority. — Wikipedia:Feud

Feud

The irony, though, is that your cartel government acts just like your enlightened one, with slight variation. — NOS4A2

Yes and you continue to desire what you'll never have. You're stuck with the government your stuck with.

Anarchists/libertarians want to eat their cake and have it too. They always want justice in the absence of a formal system of justice. If everything were perfect, well life would just be peaches and cream until the end of days.

Imagine you're a Mexican avocado farmer and all of a sudden one day a gang of armed men show up and blackmail you to pay protectionist tax. This cartel "government" will always inevitably appear and you'll wish you'd had recourse to be protected by the services of a more enlightened/fair system. Of course there is the option of collaborative defense but that might take a commitment to share resources, to risk defending others so they will risk defending you.

Or, as T Clark mentioned, you have a nice piece of land with a river you rely on for subsistence, and one day it turns a mineral red and stinks to high heaven. You can't drink or fish anymore. Maybe you can't even stomach the smell. Too bad for you, if whoever is contaminating the river has a self-determined right to do so. Better break out the guns again and take back the purity of your river, if you can. Maybe your family is large enough and subservient enough to want to help you go to war.

The oneupmanship is more or less an idea that could have also had a wider effect on theological and ethical discussions. — I like sushi

Javra's distinction of "power over" versus "power with" in terms of competition and collaboration is appropriate. There is just as much room for the evolution of gods/God within mundane collaborative activities, like in the simple retelling of a story which the audience curates through feedback. I suppose you could say wanting to appeal to an audience is a kind of one upmanship of the self, even when there is no direct competitor involved. If everyone has heard the same old story a hundred times before, acceptable novelty might be encouraged.

The capacity to dream up supernormal stimuli and automatic conceptual fusions also may furnish the first abstract ontological dualism (spirit versus matter). The gods may just as well fall out of the dream world, if it is taken as evidence of a whole hidden world-in-itself.

For this reason I think the heart of the matter of the God concept is due to a break in the means of passing on knowledge and/or uninitiated people misconstruing the stories - basically mistaking the map for the landscape. — I like sushi

Still seems like a reductive conclusion, in light of the cool responses in this thread. Are you just saying the God concept is just another meme, like everything else that might replicate through a game of telephone? It's very Dawkinish/Dennetish. The misconstrual is at times intentional, the flourish of a will to subordinate, teach or delight others, like telling your kids a fat man in a red suit delivers gifts globally to deserving children on Christmas Eve (because your parents did it to you).

Suppose we look into the heavens and see our cultural constellations as gods, with narrative exploits attached to them. We've connected the dots of known stars in familiar patterns as a shared mnemonic/coordinating device for potential navigation. Imbuing those patterns with a godly/sacred significance, story, might serve useful functions from an evolutionary point of view.

We are still sharing consensus dreams (myths) insofar as our maps can never fully close in upon the landscape.

Circles don't exist either, just like the gods. They are just another mathematical meme or organizing principle in a game of telephone. Ok...

It's not part of a grand scientific narrative but you should see the blue carousel bird's courtship ritual.



The social aspect of this collaborative dance troop in training is remarkable (as it reminds me of us). Does kinship explain the cooperation of the junior males? Can more genetically distant birds join a troop? How much variation in the style of dance between populations is there? If we could award a species for the most interesting/complex courtship ritual, who are the contenders?

...

A possible metaphor at the root of this post is closed and open structures in the universe and what that means in relationship to growth, adaptation on all levels.

Here we extend the view to any structure which you could draw a circle around: the individual, couple, family, neighborhood, community, town, city, state, nation...

The transgressive self-aware role play of the artist tries to tinker with aspects of a closed structure to change it for the sake of... novelty, amusement, compassion, beauty, justice, catharsis, uility... The reconfiguration of the world can be pushed to all limits but there is inevitably a threshold of destruction, where the potentially adaptive structure falls apart, crumbles, dies. A human dies and so does a nation.

Jesus thinks himself the Jewish Messiah, the young lamb, while the conservatives sigh and shake their fists "this is not the way, you are messing with the way we do things". Such an innocent play by a young man becomes etched into history as a play of the Passion. They nailed this Jew to a cross and it flowered into the rite of atonement. Now we can do it in the school play.

Jesus, the existentialist role player, is condemned for being inclusive. The act of inclusion is the act of compassion, but this warrants the pious moralizers to expel him. It was just a happy accident, if we must look on it that way.

The critical difference between morality and art is that the former prioritizes exclusion, whereas the latter prioritizes inclusion. — ucarr

The dogmatic face of morality prioritizes exclusion for greater or lesser freedoms. The free flying artist prioritizes inclusion at risk but you can just as well envision such work as a great act of exclusion, being set in opposition to the collective "morality" of life's tiresome busybody bullshit. Life is just maintenance of structures until death and in that we must tweak, convulse and dance to make the boredom bearable.

The hunger artist, tired of the morality of eating, says, "not today, not tomorrow, maybe the next day". Perhaps there no food on this Earth that isn't tinged with weariness of living. The Jains have an ancient rite of ritual starvation, Sallekhana, in the name of compassion for all living things, to expunge all karmas. It might be reserved for older folks but as a statement I think it is very beautiful. Should the state make that ritual illegal?

How strange and transgressive it would be to consider suicide an art form.

your dream has a bit of coherence — javi2541997

It has full coherence in the context of my personal experience. It is just an exaggeration of my worries in the mundane realm.

According to your dreams, wouldn't you accept that there could be two realities? — javi2541997

One reality, two reality, three reality... I'll defer to whatever the consensus is on this as ultimately I don't think it makes much of a difference.

Yet I wouldn't say that all dreams lead me to illusional notions. — javi2541997

Often and recently what occurs in my dreams are supernormal stimului which refer directly to the normal everyday world, and just emerge out of interior worries.

In the real world I am a custodian of a meditation center and a Japanese inspired garden.

In the dream world:

I am the sole custodian of a miniature city (think of the Vatican) with endless water terraces. The subterranean pumping network is endless and so are the levers and buttons. It is altogether too much for a single person to take care of (I get lost). As a lone individual I cannot contain or control the pilgrims who come to the city and treat it as if it were a tourist attraction, who transgress every rule that they were blind to from eagerness to see. The crowd is too big and chaotic to learn how to approach the place.

At other times:

The miniature city/state is completely empty and I go in search of company I cannot find, getting lost.

I believe the two worlds (dreamlike and real) exist. — javi2541997

But this is not true with respect to consensus reality. Also the physical world, which everybody would agree "exists" because it is self-evident, has a relative (illusory/dreamlike) appearance to whatever organism is conscious of it.

We're always inevitably going to hit our heads against the old wall of the "world-in-itself", as if it could/should exist without the perspective of the local observer. As a networking species of consensus making, we will always fall back on the common sense notions for knowing the difference between what is meant by an illusion and the thing that the illusion references in a third-party verifiable world.

To scare children on Halloween!? — RussellA

You might be scaring the "adults" too.

Well, Shawn, pack your bags. We're going to Hollywood.

No one is reading the what is in the Lounge, let alone the forum to make that a concern, unless you want to fall into a conspiracy trap. Maybe it could involve the cyber intelligence wing of Scientology. What services would they be using? Cruise has higher aspirations than to be paranoid about critics and fan boys.

Baden is just being a jerk at the jerkfest, to mock the fools as a fool worth mocking, which is different from being a pious philosopher at the forum (I think?). Mysteries of mysteries, who knows WTFIGO.

Baden wrote that story about the Captain needing his sack flipped. That must've been Cruise.

I have a notion that religion and politics are either nearly or even exactly the same thing. There's a Gordian knot linking religion, politics and morality. — ucarr

There is politics in the conservation/construction of any way of being, wherever there are priests and parishioners (politicians and the public) who are "relating to the citizens", promoting the rules and regulation of that way of being in dialectical good will. It's complicated for sure.

Socrates, the founding father of a type of novel dialectic, was condemned by the state.

I heard some notable Rabbi make the comment that Judaism is "portable civilization". You can carry the art of being Jewish from one place to another and endure or enjoy life through it. But one Rabbi might say you have to cut off the skin of your wiener to be a member of the tribe, while another might say that is unnecessary.

And don't forget about Jesus who broke the walls of Judaism wide open to invite the peoples of all nations... if that is what he did. He was the seed of the Christian tree, with all of its ever growing and flowering branches.

In Church the service is sometimes spiritless, rote, depressing, restrictive. You skip out and go to the movies to watch Euripedes', The Bacchae, to watch in indignant horror, Pentheus, get ripped apart by his own deluded mother, who is possessed by the madness of a cruel god. All for what, the poor guy (though he was a king) didn't believe in a foreign deity of some pantheon. So turns the wheel of Samsara.

Pentheus, as they guy who transgresses good taste or law, by impiety, is here to be considered in the guise of an evil artist as a sacrificial victim, much like Jesus (perceived to be impious by whatever transgression got him killed). Oh the virtue of piety! What impious artist makes a Christian run back to church?

If ucarr is transgressing the bounds of implicit/explicit virtue/etiquette as an artist contra the philosopher, maybe he is the evil artist.

He must run back to church to give what that unanimous crowd demands, in an alignment of the sensible wills of such a peer group: good, clear, hygienic, rigorous and rational sense in selfless service.

Chatgpt may give us a lecture on piety:

"Piety" refers to a deep respect for and devotion to religious practices, beliefs, or duties. It often involves a reverence for the divine, as well as a commitment to moral and ethical principles associated with one’s faith. People who exhibit piety typically demonstrate their religious devotion through regular worship, prayer, rituals, and adherence to religious teachings.

In a broader sense, piety can also encompass loyalty, respect, and duty toward one’s family, community, or country, reflecting a sense of duty and honor in relationships and responsibilities. The concept is commonly associated with virtues such as humility, reverence, and obedience to higher moral or spiritual authority. — ChatGPT on Piety

We're not supposed to talk about Cum Cruise.

In fact, not the least bit evil and in no ways like a writing-desk. — Vera Mont

Thanks for humoring me a bit. :pray: It maybe healthy to leave the desk behind now and again to watch the birds.

Makes me feel rather guilty. I should just STFU and become a nun. :death:

Though there is a perceived lack of humility and good will in the elites, which trickles down the line.

It is another one of my central points of focus: the artist wants to threaten the beautiful woman with something of interest menacing her composure. — ucarr

Am looking forward to Robert Eggers Nosferatu, and the premise is related, pushed to the limit. A young bride is being possessed to the horror of everyone around her, by a really awful demon that wants to copulate with her and she with it (my assumption based on trailer).

But that demon represents what is in us, both men and women, turned up to a degree which threatens an entire community. It is the Id overgrown into a deity, our shadow grown titanic (before which we awe and tremble), the frightful nightmare of human desire gone awry. The transgressions which threaten the status quo in concentric circles from family to nation is a vision of the monster. What is monsterous (akin to all that is deified) is the breakdown of the boundaries of the sacred order, as all kinds of terrible fusions/transgressions occur (like in the transitions of H. Bosch's paintings).

The whole drama is just a meditation on those sinful desires, which can serve a moral function, in so far as we can become aware that they represent the forces within us.

Your thesis sounds in someway evocative or at least relevant to Rene Girard's work (a very weird but interesting kind of Christian). He draws a line between unanimous expulsion of the scapegoat, to the sacrificial rites as what imbues archaic culture with its powers to keep order. It's all very mysterious, archetypal and mythic but it resonates with me.

We are within the ring of the cult/community which may expel us at any time. It just a never ending set of taboos that forms the thresholds of our social structure.

Art makes us aware of those parts of our human nature that, for one reason or another, we are blind to, so the evil-mongering artist who speaks to your soul should not be foregone because s/he drives you home to yourself, and without your homecoming to yourself, you can make no authentic approach to virtue. — ucarr

I think you are right. Artists are another kind of God's priests. They form the other pole of the oscillation you speak of that keeps us on the middle path between two kinds of hell.

Moralizers often carry a lot of filth in their own shadows. The evil-mongering artist can do a lot with that.