Moderners are conditioned just to dig their own graves

Biologism part 2: Science can't give you your religious instruction - YouTube

Spinster Aunt1 day ago

It's so interesting. I have never encountered another person speaking of Nietzshe in this way. At the time I was trying cobble some sort of education together, it was fashionable, (and still may be,) in North America, to use Nietzsche's work as an example of the impulse to fascism. I didn't really see that. Because of my own life experience, I was seeing him as someone who was struggling with physical and mental illness, and who was struggling mightily to seek and to know excellence as he defined it, in his own body, mind, imagination and life. I was told that I was as wrong as wrong could be, and furthermore, if I continued in my delusions about the meaning of his writing to me, it would translate into a failing grade in the course. So, I regurgitated what I was supposed to, and went on with life.

Later, I encountered groups of people who must have been some of the foundational people in what is now called the "alt right" in the US. They all read books by Julius Evola, Fracis Parker Yockey, Jack London, Ezra Pound,
and so on. They of course, also quoted and read Nietzsche constantly, and
wore his name like a badge of membership in their group.

I've always thought it odd how my own experience of Nietzshe's writings
was so "off", from what I was being told he "really meant" and what he
"really believed". And so, it is quite interesting for me, to hear you using his work as you navigate your own personal thoughts and experiences. It makes me think that I would like to begin re-reading him again, with an
eye toward my original experience of his writings.

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Jennifer Armstrong2 minutes ago

I really do not see much evidence of fascism in Nietzsche. Perhaps there is some authoritarianism in Beyond Good and Evil, especially with regard to gender roles, but Nietzsche was opposed to brute force, whereas fascism is nothing but brute force. It's the reason why Nietzsche saw value in the Catholic church as a system of SPIRITUAL organisation, which he compared favorably to the state, the latter being a system of force. In all Nietzsche was looking to reinstate a spiritual hierarchy that would be based on his principles of psychology, which he was discovering. Fascism is anti-psychological to the core, and down on the intellect. Fascism is emotion. But fascism also kills the emotions, through its exertion of extreme force. Those who embrace fascism end up dead inside and long to die to seal the internal fact with external evidence. Nietzsche struggled to stay alive.

Tragedy or chaff?

It is very difficult to see tragedy if you have the moralistic idea that anything bad that happens to a group of people is because they "had it coming". These are two opposing world views. I tend to write in a tragic vein, because I think that if anyone is deserving of annihilation, and even seeking it, it is the current crop of narcissists, who have become like chaff, without a core, and which the winds need to blow away. They condemned me and my people and my origins in a very pompous manner, but one can surely not replace a real seed, even if it is a bad seed, producing wildness and overgrowths, with a harvest of chaff. I just deny that this is permissible or that it makes any sense. Yes, I read Alice Miller ages ago, and you summarize her views well. As for the issue of Christianity, yes, I was brought up with strict Christian discipline, sometimes arbitrarily getting the hell beaten out of me, quite literally -- getting a real thumping from my father. There is also some nobility (also in the Nietzschean sense) in the kind of Christianity I was brought up with, which was paternalistic in a good way, not just violent in a bad way. Taking the responsibility to oversee nature, and to become caretakers of it was part of my upbringing. Wild and tame nature was our preserve; it was what we had to occupy ourselves with. The very difficult side of the Christianity I was brought up with was that it was also warlike and militarized (also quite literally). The government of the day had declared war against all other values, though its choice of words in the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (1965), which spoke of having struck a blow on behalf of Christianity and Western civilization. The point was to dig in one's heels against the global changes leading to modernity, globalism and liberalism. Once Rhodesia had made its proclamation, I guess war was inevitable, so a civil war that had been starting to take off and became increasingly intensified, with the communist countries of China and Russia funding and training the guerrilla fighters. This was tragic. My father lost a brother to that war, who had barely entered adulthood. Anyway, if was probably for reasons of the intensity of the emotions that the war had stirred up that my parents refused to allow me to leave Christianity. They really wanted to beat it back into me, after I renounced it, as their whole lives would have been in vain if the Christianity they had fought and sacrificed for was not true. As you now might be able to imagine, this put me in an extremely painful position indeed, because I was made to feel that I was killing myself and my parents by not complying with the Christian belief system. At least, I think, and I feel that I was killing a lot of emotional lifeforms that were begging me not to do that. That was my background so far as Christianity goes.

Africa is the core of human reality, and of the human psyche - YouTube

Africa is the core of human reality, and of the human psyche - YouTube

 

MadebyReuben5 hours ago

the idea that, Id = African, is something I've struggled with.
But I'm much more believing of psychoanalysis than you are.

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Sorry, I didn't read what you wrote properly earlier, as I must have read "id" as identity, rather than as Freud's "id". In any case, I do not think Freud's id really exists, except as a concept. It is also a concept that is more closely aligned with circumstances of extreme moral repression, which lead to an unhealthy internal reaction and bottling up of primal energies. In other words, "id" is European.

 

Africa is the core of human reality, and of the human psyche - YouTube

Africa is the core of human reality, and of the human psyche - YouTube

 

MadebyReuben5 hours ago

the idea that, Id = African, is something I've struggled with.
But I'm much more believing of psychoanalysis than you are.

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Sorry, I didn't read what you wrote properly earlier, as I must have read "id" as identity, rather than as Freud's "id". In any case, I do not think Freud's id really exists, except as a concept. It is also a concept that is more closely aligned with circumstances of extreme moral repression, which lead to an unhealthy internal reaction and bottling up of primal energies. In other words, "id" is European.

 

Africa is the core of human reality, and of the human psyche

Biologism part 2: Science can't give you your religious instruction

Biologism = the worship of biology

Recognizing North American rhetoric and the sleight of hand

Costs of trying to just push the "RESET HISTORY" button

Please will you support this channel & my work

The logic behind why the narcissist laughs at you

Exposing the psychological ramifications of psychoanalysis

The absurdity of political idealism

The folly and anti-historicism of identity politics

What is pretentiousness? - YouTube

What is pretentiousness? - YouTube:



'via Blog this'

 

Jade Haj13 hours agoHIGHLIGHTED COMMENT

Wonderful! such an underestimated topic, difficult and slim, but very important in age where people get away with too much pretending. Maturity is a beautiful concept. thank you

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Jennifer Armstrong26 seconds ago

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think we can all be accused of being "pretentious" in our youth, but whether we have something to say or not had to do with whether we press forward into maturity. Sad to say, maturity is either undervalued or does not seem to have a place at all in modern society. Imagine! If it were possible to point out that some people had matured whereas others had not, those who had not would have hurt feelings and feel discriminated against. That is why almost everywhere people are treated like irreponsible children, and you can't bring up any objection against that form of treatment.

Who creates society?

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Jennifer Armstrong (Philosophy) 3 seconds ago

I noticed Western narcissism pretty early on, not long after I migrated, but I thought the problem might have been with me, rather than with other people. I was so wrong about that. Society is the sum of its parts and I came from a society that was anything but narcissistic. Unfortunately I was soon tarnished with the same brush of narcissism, or even worse, since I did not know the game that was being played against me or how to defend myself against it. In a society that had had some actual moral training, like the one I had been brought up in, I would have been able to appeal to those around me, particularly my peers or the authorities in society to see the problems I was pointing out and to step in to do something. Unfortunately, to my great despair, I found that there were no responsible adults in this society, just people catering to their inner child. Now, it seems that finally after all these decades, the Westerners themselves are cottoning on to the fact that there is a problem within their society. Alas, too many of them are still catering to their inner children, even as they point the problem out. At best, it will take another century before children start to take the role of adults, which means taking responsibility for what happens around them and taking a risk to speak out or to act effectively when things go wrong. My view is that the reason this doesn't happen is largely due to Christianity and its notion of inner sinfulness and depravity. Nobody can expect a depraved baby to do something for itself, never mind on behalf of other people.

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Philosophy lecture: Recovery of the Western mind?

How I survived multiple setbacks

The imaginary Left / False progressives

Part Two: Recovery from an extreme authoritarian upbringing

Important historical perspective: AUTOBIOGRAPHY: part 1

Surviving the war

It's a long story, but thank you for the question. A bit of background first: I grew up in Rhodesia during a time of war. My father fought in the army for the ideals of white, Christian civilization -- a very masculine ideal. When the war was lost, he began bashing me, taking out his rage and disappointment about how things had turned out on me. He also swore to bring me up in the Rhodesian way, with really a military standard of discipline, no mistakes allowed. He expressed his hatred of women and emotion, and took revenge against the new world values by sticking to the old ways in relation to me. That is how I became emotionally repressed in the first place. I had no idea how much rage I had against my father, as well as with how I had been treated as a newcomer to a new culture. I had not been permitted to express emotion growing up (the change of regime in Rhodesia happened when I was about 12), with the consequent upping the ante of rage attacks from my father). Whilst I remained in Africa, I was still more or less adapted to that situation, though, as it was not common for anybody to express strong emotion or to act in their individual self-interest. That is the background. When I came to Australia, aged 15, I found that people here already had predetermined ideas about me. I was very shy, but they thought I was arrogant. I had no idea how to conduct myself in modernity, and asked questions, but people presumed that I was seeking attention in an unwarranted way. Also they had been told that I was racist and egoistic and superior, none of which I was aware of being, as these attributes did not belong to me, or to the culture I had been brought up in, which was a Rhodesian, feminine culture (think of the women as lieutenants in a civil system, operating the structures of civil life in war time. ) Anyway, I really didn't fit in and had no way of relating to anything about me. That was when the stress of not being able to adapt, or to understand the new situation I was in took its toll. My father felt I had let him down, and began bashing me, trying to install Christian values into me at this point and thereafter. Every time somebody was angry at me, for reasons I could not fathom, he began bashing me. I struggled a great deal with an increasingly weaker constitution, basically because I needed a great deal of assistance, but when I tried to ask for it, I only got reprimanded. During this time I developed a lot of rage, but because I was unused to expressing emotion, and found it distasteful in the extreme, as well as dangerous if I felt a negative emotion against my father welling up, I did not understand that this internalized rage was creating an auto-immune disorder. Every time I got angry, I got sick. I could not allow myself to get upset in any way, as I would immediately come down with a virus. I only started to turn the situation around after I hit rock bottom. That was a deeply shameful place to be. i was the victim of a dysfunctional workplace and was the scapegoat. I had been trying to prove that I could survive Western culture, by building my energy and my knowledge, but all my efforts had fallen into a heap. My health disintegrated significantly with this crisis of workplace bullying. My digestive system broke down and I could hardly eat solid food after that (indeed for quite a few years). I had to build myself up again. Part of how I learned to see my own anger was when I felt that I had lost everything ain terms of any social standing or belief system I could salvage. When I realized suddenly that I had lost everything, I began to sense my own rage, as though I had moved into the eye of the storm where everything was peaceful. Everything around me slowed down and I could feel my rage for the very first time. This gave me the inner strength to start looking for a new perspective, which I found in Nietzsche. Since I had to start again from scratch, I had bought some books by Nietzsche and tried to use them to understand psychology. I had to return to live at home whilst my health recovered, and during this time I kept getting bashed by my father, but it seemed to matter less than before, since I now had a goal and an agenda for my recovery. I still didn't understand about psychology or about the new world I was in, but I was learning about emotion from Nietzsche, and I was finding a basis to reorient myself. My goal more recently has been to reintegrate my emotions into my general state of being, so that I make myself as whole as possible.

Diversionary impact! The deployment of a rhetorical style

Living different realities, at different levels of the mind

Steal my ideas & steal my "identity" - YouTube

Steal my ideas & steal my "identity" - YouTube:



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Spinster Aunt 11 hours ago

Yes, I hope the idea of commodified identity NEVER makes sense to you! =) You are looking at identity as a candle-flame, which can share its properties with another candle wick, create a new, unique and individual light, and the original flame is not diminished. That to me, is the way of a true teacher--
to simply burn by the light of their own flame, yet fully willing to share their own enlightenment with others, for the pure joy of the transfer of light; not for profit, not for some strange aggrandizement of the idea of self, but just pure delight in learning, in asking, in investigating, and in the contentment that comes from accomplishing the ascent and descent through the peaks and valleys of philosophical thought!

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Jennifer Armstrong (Philosophy) 5 hours ago

When I was studying my PhD and focusing on an African writer, I heard some people proclaim that the reason he was angry at the world was because he was not being awarded enough royalities for his book. I found that quite unbelievable. Actually he didn't like being given a narrow and restricted identity, even if the identity was lauded and compensated for by white liberals. He wanted to throw objects at their heads for being hypocritical (overly saccharine, etc.)

Overcoming life as a stuck record

Steal my ideas & steal my "identity" - YouTube

Steal my ideas & steal my "identity" - YouTube: "s

 

inquisitivemind4 minutes agoHIGHLIGHTED COMMENT

I think this is brilliant commentary and will share it on my google page :) I was just juggling some of your thoughts a couple of weeks ago, I could not wrap my mind about the number of people suffering with malignant narcissism as well as cognitive dissonance, and then I thought it must be because of the flip flop they have to do not just from abuse but from the flip flop individualistic mentality to the collectivist mentality, back and forth in many contexts, but they seem to do it unconciously, as soon as they can grasp a belief system based on or lack of morals, they are switching again, the wires become mangled. In pop culture, movies, celebrity, we hardly look at the makings, more at the results, that is intended I think for us as a consumer to indentify with goals only and not journey....empathy is found in a journey, goals are just objective....All this is very hard to catch and a person (like me, or you or anybody else that gets it) would have to have been completely ostracized, outcast or foreign to it to and then submerged in it to understand. Great video cant wait to have time to watch more of yours.

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Jennifer Armstrong (Philosophy)1 second ago

Haha. You got it! You also raise another interesting point, which is that process is not understood in current materialist culture. The value of process is ostracized, which really is as bizarre as it gets, since we are all creatures in progess, working through different processes. If you deny process, then all you have is the illusion of the result, which convention demands has to be perfect. But that is emptiness itself -- the perfect end result without any meaning and without any real content.