The main title for our talk tonight is: the PROMETHEAN CREDO:
And the descriptive subtitle would be: THE FUNDAMENTALS OF COUNTER-MODERN METAPHYSICS
In the next 2 hours, I will attempt to give a comprehensive critique of modernity, and then in the final segment, I will also offer an alternative.
In total, there are 6 segments, which are partitioned into 2, one hour talks.
In the First hour I will talk about what modernity offers, then about the phenomenon known as Entropy,
and I will close up by a brief overview of various Religious attitudes.
After a short break I will go into a more in-depth analysis of the values of modernity with the main focus on Equality.
Then I will move onto the closely related concepts of ‘Otherness’ and ‘Conflict’,
and finally I will conclude our session tonight by describing particular state of mind, which I’ve termed the 'Falling Star’.
First segment: The Dialectic of Modernity.
So why are you here?
I am hoping that you are here because you are searching for answers and looking for alternatives to modernity and modern attitudes to life.
A couple of years ago when I was just still finding my way, I’ve came across this article in a newspaper.
This picture depicts the Enthroning ceremony of the head of the Church at Canterbury Cathedral.
You see, the highlight of the event were these African dancers who led a colourful procession through the cathedral, accompanying the ceremony.
Then I’ve seen this image. And this one really got to me. I just kept wondering about what was going through Charles’ mind?
Just look at his facial expression. What was he thinking? What's the meaning of this?
Or this?! You've probably have seen this sort of cultural material around campus.
These are clearly part of modernity, but what does this really mean? How do these form part of our narrative?
Another expression of modernity: Conchita Wurst. The infamous bearded ‘woman’ who won the recent Eurovision festival
Change? What does this mean? Change you can Believe in? Believe in what Change ? Change To where?
Just where are we supposed to be going?
So What is Modernity?
Modernity is a worldview...
and since this club is about challenges to modernity, we must first summarise what the current world is about now.
What is it that modernity offers. What is the Narrative of modernity?
So if Modernity was a person, then fictional dialogue between modernity and You would go something like this:
You would say: I am mistreated despite I am the centre of the world.
Modernity would say: your worth is equal to everyone else’s.
You again: I am oppressed and exploited.
Modernity would respond by: you will be liberated.
And you would say: I just want to be happy and enjoy myself.
and Modernity conclude by: the whole world was created for your leisure.
This dialogue plays out in many different formats but it all comes down to this:
I am entitled! The world owes me a living for just having existed!
And from this dialogue, a Story develops.
In order to expose this narrative of modernity, we must extract it, and state it in explicit terms. So that we can later contrast it with the alternative.
I’ve found this comment on youtube somewhere, and I am going to read it out at length, as I feel it captures the essence of modernity surprisingly well:
So what are the selling points of modernity? What are it’s key values. I have actually highlighted them:
And these would be: Freedom, Equality and Happyness.
I am going to systematically deconstruct these values in the second hour, but for now, let’s just accept them at face value.
I’ve used the term ‘narrative’ before, but what I’ve really mean is a Religion.
We will talk more about religions at the end of this hour, but for now let’s just say that a religion is just a story.
It has nothing to do with dogmas or worshipping the holy father.
It's simply a story to the world.
How the world came to be. How humans popped into existence and ultimately what are we supposed to do.
It gives people a role to act out in this cosmic play.
So that is a very broad definition of Religion. I think everything that is a comprehensive view of the world is a religion,
which includes not only 'narrow sense' religions such as Christianity, but also Marxism,
Liberalism and of course all forms of counter-modern ideologies as well, including the talk you are hearing right now.
So every time I use the word RELIGION, don’t confuse it with the ‘theistic’ definition, I never mean people in robes, what I mean is simply a worldview.
So we have seen the primary values of modernity, but every good story needs a conflict. So what are the supposed challenges for modernity?
What are the elements of the story?
Tyrants!
Rebelling against an empire, against tyrants that want to take our freedom away. Like those seen in the Hunger Games or Star Wars.
We must rebel against their authority and this usually also represents a sort of rebellion against fate or destiny at the same time.
And then there are these evil rich people.
Hedonistic and decadent… who seem to serve no useful purpose at all,
all they seem to do is selfishly keep their ill gotten wealth to themselves and hold the poor back...
And ONLY because of that, for no other reason there is still inequality in society.
Because of course, as you all know we are all born equal. So that really must be the only reason!
And then finally the worst crime of all: oppression.
Oppression of the Other. Which is a crime twice over,
because we are all supposed to be the same, so there is not supposed to be a room left for an ‘Us and Them’
So once we overcame these obstacles, what does modernity promise?
Well, you will be equal to everyone else. But actually not even equal. Special, equally special.
You will be free to do anything, you can pick your gender, your sexuality, your class or even your race.
even if you are completely incapable of looking after yourself, you will never be alone, you will be looked after.
And to pay for all of that, there will have to be infinite growth and economic expansion to foot the bill.
And to top it all off, there will of course will be an end to all human conflict and poverty.
All you have to do is to wish it so! To Believe! To close your eyes and believe in Change.
So Its all about me. My Rights, My Entitlements, Compensations for having to endure this oppressive reality.
The crazy bit is that Modernity promises this to every single one of us, that we will ALL be made equal, free and happy.
At the expense of everyone else of course, because resources, including money, love and happiness are finite.
And as such, they are a zero sum game. Giving something to someone, means taking it away from another. So it doesn’t quite add up.
So then you have to ask how is this possible, how is modernity promising to deliver this?
It all comes back to Modernity's approach to Reality. That reality will be whatever you wish it to be.
That is specifically, that there is no Objective Reality, no truths prior to man. Everything is relative.
Everything can be understood in terms of rationale, processes of the human mind.
This is not actually scientific 'Reason' as it is frequently misunderstood, but rather 'the reasoning of the human mind',
that is: what is INSIDE our minds rather than what is outside. Reasons outside of man, prior to his consciousness.
Modernity says that everything originates in our consciousness.
All of our motivations naturally, but maybe even reality itself?
If you don't look at the moon, then the moon doesn't exist. We will return to this point a bit later.
So what are the implications. This of course means: There is no higher purpose,
that everything is arbitrary, and most likely to be joke. Nothing should be taken too seriously.
And since reality is all subjective an plastic, we can ultimately reshape reality into this fantasy land, where all of those things CAN become true.
So whats the problem then?
Well of course the only problem is that none of this not possible, you cant achieve that, you can only Lie about it.
And that is pretty much the message of modernity. To be dishonest. Is to Lie. To replace the real world with world of lies, deceit and falsehood.
The best way to illustrate modernity's approach to reality is through the metaphor of cosmetic surgery.
Cosmetic surgery is supposed to make you more beautiful.
But what is the true nature of beauty? What makes beautiful beautiful?
Actually we know from experimental evidence that female beauty results from collection physical traits that indicate fertility,
the likelihood that you will be able to bear healthy children.
Hip to Waist ratio, symmetricity of the face, clean skin without wrinkles, these are just cues indicating your value as a mate.
So if you are implanting silicone into your breast, undergo liposuction, reshape your nose and face. You will not really become more fertile at all.
In effect you will be simply lying and pretending. Just like modernity lying and pretending about it’s promises.
So modernity is essentially an escape from Reality.
Of course in order to prove our successful escape from reality, we must create an absurd culture, as a living proof that we have defied nature, and reality is arbitrary.
This is the purpose of all modern art and culture, to degrade and ridicule, to demonstrate that everything is a joke,
so we might all as well have a good time and pretend that we are equal, free and happy.
Irrespective of what the individual modern artist says about what they are doing,
the overarching goal is always to destroy perceived systems of oppression by undermining prior symbolic structures of Western discourse.
This includes traditional symbolism and structure and even skill.
Let’s look at a few select modern art pieces.
What does this mean?
There is actually an unspoken taboo in modern art towards the so called ‘representational art’. And you may have wondered why that is.
You see, art that requires no skill and no talent will equalise everyone and with that, you have appeared to have achieved your prime goal: Equality.
Deconstructivism, post structuralism, automatic drawing, drawing while your eyes are closed, or just simply throwing paint onto the canvas randomly.
These are all designed to create a sort of freedom in disorder and chaos. Another goal achieved.
Freedom in Chaos is a point we will revisit during the second hour.
In total, all of modern art serves the purpose to prove that reality can be deconstructed and nothing is objective.
When looking at it from that angle, this sort of thing makes perfect sense.
This piece is titled the Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili.
In case you can't see, these are basically cutouts of pornographic images, with Mary painted with elephant excrement.
'My Bed' is a work by the British artist Tracey Emin. No further comments needed I think.
And now you know the true meaning behind this timeless master piece.
So modernity has this need to prove that this is indeed happening. This is ‘Change’.
That we are making ‘Progress’. We are progressing towards escaping the shackles of reality.
Cultural expressions are simply a manifestation of this.
So returning to this picture, we have our answer now:
This is so absurd, so unnatural, that it really proves that we have actually 'Progressed' to this stage:
we have successfully defied nature.
Charles is probably not consciously aware of this, but subconsciously, he must know that this is the next stage of progress.
So we have established that modernity is primarily about an aversion from reality.
But this just brings up more questions: Why is it so? Why are we running away from reality?
The short answer is that: because reality is NOT arranged the way we would want it to be. (It is not consistent with Freedom, Equality and Happiness.
But why is that so?
Why cant we be all Free, Equal and Happy? What is the ultimate nature of reality that makes it so unpleasant?
This next segment will be about Entropy and the meaning of life, which will hopefully answer some of these questions.
So about Entropy. Let's have a quick look at the history of the Universe, our place in it and also discover the meaning of life in the process.
The promise of modernity in one sentence, is to make each of every one of our little fragment views of reality, to be as if it was the real thing.
To replace objective reality with our subjective perception of reality.
How come? To find out, we would actually have to go back quite far.
This picture was taken by the WMAP probe and this is the infant Universe. And what you can see that while it is remarkably homogenous for what it is, it is not quite so.
There are signs of asymmetry and chaos appearing. And why is that?
All things break down. But people don't like this and tend to regard these as unfortunate accidents.
Just like this wine glass falling onto the floor.
Like if it was avoidable. Maybe you could do better next time.
You see, when slowed down, this certainly looks avoidable. You may think it didn’t need to be that way!
If you could have just paid more attention and didn’t  make that one bad move, you would still have your Iphone or pen or glass of wine.
However consider this:
The truth of the cosmos that it is in a constant state of entropy, everything progresses from a state of relative organisation and structure,
to a less organised state with a lower energy level. The end result of this process must be a Universe of complete and perfect Equality,
where all that remains will be null and void, dead and cold.
But why is that?
Consider this sand castle. There are only a few ways in which you could organise sand particles to make up a sand castle.
But there is an almost infinite combination of ways in which those very same particles would be just total chaos.
Due to the arrow of time, a sequence of events can only go forwards and never backwards.
And since any change is overwhelmingly more likely to result in a less organised state, this constant flux isn’t just simply permanent change, but permanent decay.
In other words: as time goes on entropy increases.
Time is the product of entropy.
Scientifically expressed: it's called SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS:
And this law applies to everything, there are no exceptions.
So what is the meaning of life? It's a hard question.
But just like in a mathematical problem, when you cannot solve it outright, very often you just have to rearrange the equation.
So if you rearrange it, then this is what you get: Meaning of life is what is Life? What does life do?
You take in energy and stuff which is more organised, use it to maintain your body. And then release that in forms of excrement and heat.
Thereby also increasing entropy in your surroundings.
But you maintain your organised state just a little longer.
We are remarkably good at this but eventually, there is no escape from entropy.
This is the source of Tragedy. Greek Tragedy. That everything is temporal.
That things don't last. The beauty of the most attractive woman will be destroyed by time.
This is because we are not external to reality, but part of it. We are no exception to the rule
This timelapse was taken over a period of 25 years.
You can just see just the effects of gravity as it drags down your skin.
Your bones get more pronounced. Your eyelids drop. You loose hair.
You are just very slowly consumed by entropy.
And of course this process doesn’t stop at a ripe old age.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of this concept.
And then the bunny is no more. He has returned into nothingness.
The source of suffering is the inevitable death and decay of ourselves. Our minds and bodies.
That our existence, a unique event in time will never be repeated and will be lost in this infinite decay.
This source of sorrow is that the world is not the way we wish it was so.
Whether it be something perfect we wanted to achieve, or the unreturned love of the other. The problem is always be the same.
The real problem is that we wished that the world was as if we ideally imagined it. Rather than how it actually is.
Now lets introduce you to my main original contribution to this talk tonight.
And these are the concepts of Awakening vs Counter-Awakening.
These may be quite difficult to grasp at first, but it boils down to this: Am I part of the whole? Or is the whole is part of me?
They sound similar but they are NOT the same. They are actually opposites.
Another term I will use for this is Schopenhauer's fallacy and we will return to that during the second hour.
So what is the state of mind of an ‘Awakened’ person?
That is basically to realise that there is an external objective reality and you are only part of it.
 This is what scientists would call empirical truth: data discovered through experimental evidence.
It's as simple as that!
What about the other one? The Counter-Awakened. t's a bit more tricky.
It just says to “reduce reality to your perception of reality”. And we have actually heard that before!
I am a visual person, so perhaps a diagram will explain these better. Red means your individual self.
So in other words: Counter-Awakening states that the Universe doesn’t exist, where as with Awakening: You dont' exist, or at least as a separate entity.
To illustrate the Counter-Awakened state further, I think the Camera-Obscura metaphor explains it quite well.
The Camera obscura was a primitive camera, which works like this:
You are in this darkened box and there is a small hole in a wall there, the light goes through there,
and a blurry inverted image of the outside world is projected onto the opposite wall.
This is actually even how modern cameras work in principle.
And someone in the Counter-Awakened state, would mistake this distorted little image, for Reality itself.
Even though, he is just inside this dark box. Which represents his mind.
It is to deny the extraneous origin of this image.
What is VERY deceptive is that you do feel and would describe this experience like that you are part of the entirety.
But actually what you are feeling is that the entirety exists only inside you and there is nothing outside. Which is a perfect inversion of the truth.
It is so close, that I would argue that originally legit religions were simply mistranslated and got lost in the translation.
This position is stated explicitly in Solipsist or Existentialist philosophy.
This philosophy states, that Man is an existence that precedes ihis essence. And that man must invent himself (and the world) as he goes along.
The ultimate truth in existentialism is that the only thing that we can be sure of is what we THINK. That is absolute truth for them.
External things are always suspect and likely to be false.
And since of course we are experiencing everything through senses, you may argue there is no way to prove this either way. But of course, you would be wrong.
There is actually one way, in which an honest existentialist could prove that he really believes this.
What method might that be? Any guesses? It’s actually quite simple: all you have to do is to jump in front of a train or to shoot yourself.
If you are right, nothing will happen to you. You will just simply be able to reinvent yourself or imagine yourself out of that situation.
But of course these noble philosophers (like Sarte) never put this theory to the test themselves.
Because of course existentialism doesn’t really believe in itself. It's actually about something else entirely.
This argument could be had on many different levels: political, legal and even on the level of quantum physics.
Because if there was a physicist here today, he could say: that hold on. you are wrong:
since science has shown us that on the Quantum level, due to quantum uncertainty, reality is random.
A subatomic particle can be at 2 places at the same time. And what's worse, its position appears to be determined by the fact that you are looking at it.
That is, the moon only exists if you are looking at it.
And that since everything is built from subatomic particles, that must be the ultimate nature of reality.
I was quite worried about quantum mysticism for a while, as it appeared to give these sorts of ideas a certain scientific credibility.
This view actually exists explicitly and it is called Biocentrism, by a Scientist named Robert Lanza, an early pioneer of cloning.
What he said was that Reality ends and begins with the observer.
He believed that the Universe is just a figment of our imagination and he justified his views via quantum uncertainty.
Which is a more or less a scientifically based solipsism.
There are many different variations of this same theme, but they all basically come back to the idea that reality somehow breaks down on the quantum level.
And that provides us with an escape route.
So why can't Quantum mysticism save us from Reality?
Now there are of course competing theories, which state that even quantum particles follow specific rules, we just dont understand them yet.
And on an even smaller scale than the quantum scale, things go back to discrete zeros and ones.
But that doesn’t matter. They don't need to.
Individual particles may really be ALMOST entirely random.
Because all of these theories and experiments deal with either individual particles or just a very small number of them.
You see the orderliness of the world as you see it, arises through the increase of scale. It's like a vector sum.
These particles on the screen look pretty random. But if you were to analyse them and draw vectors onto these particles, then the result is not entirely random.
They do point to somewhere.
It’s the same as saying that in a dream the words in a book change every time you turn the page. But when you are awake, reality is perfectly and beautifully consistent.
Of course another evidence that proves that these theories are false, is the obvious: That we as we exist, we have defined shapes.
The atoms and subatomic particles from my hand don’t just fly in all directions. I don’t just evaporate.
Because as a total sum, my hand remains quite precisely the same shape, from one moment to the next.
Because both Quantum Physics and Newtonian Physics exist in the same world, therefore they must be continuous.
Quantum Physics turns into Newtonian Physics through the increase of scale.
This unity through continuity is a concept that we will revisit during the second hour.
This same rule applies to all systems, they get more orderly and more predictable as you increase the scale and the sample size.
This ignorance of statistics also explains the fallacies of most modern beliefs, which only focus on individuals and exceptions, instead looking at the big picture.
Now, I’ve focused on the most extreme versions of this, such as Biocentrism and Existentialism.
But of course most people who are like this, would not actually say that they believe that they are just imagining the world.
But they do act like it! To give you some concrete examples:
For instance, how our societies make decisions. Because in modernity we tend to conflate these two following items:
(1) Stuff that you like, that is, the things that are nice and pleasant, with (2) Stuff that is objectively True, as discovered through the scientific method.
And these two are not the same!
But today, we live in a social system where we make decisions based on consensus: that is voting.
The act of voting is us asserting that these two are in fact the same.
And the reasoning behind that is that what the majority of people like must also be true right?
But is that really true? Can you really hold a vote to decide if the earth is flat? Or how many hours are in a day?
What about human equality? Do we really have the authority to change reality on that level?
The vast majority of people would actually agree that we are or should be equal.
But of course that doesn’t matter at all, because no matter how many people believe in something, the facts will not change. As objective reality doesn’t care what we want.
What is really happening is we are trying to force our subjective perceptions of reality, our desires or prejudices, onto actual reality.
Another general example is when people focus on the exception rather than the rule.
For example when you tell someone that intelligence has a strong genetic component.
If they don’t deny this outright, then they usually respond with something along the lines of that they have known an individual case where this wasn’t true.
That someone from an average family was really really smart!
And of course there are some. But that doesn’t matter, when that is not true for the majority of the cases.
Or I could cite countless Hollywood movies with happy endings.
It’s always the same. It's always the same intention, elevating the part above the whole, or the exception above the rule.
This Inversion of order and hierarchy, which is the true meaning behind Counter-awakening.
People don’t actually have to believe that the world isn’t real, it’s enough if they act like it.
So we've talked a great deal about the relationship between the part and the whole, which is actually at root of all religious ideas.
And this will lead us into the next segment: Religions and their meaning.
As we understand modernity and the true nature of reality better now, let's explore the purpose of religions.
The purpose of both ‘classical’ (theistic) as well as secular religions (worldviews) is to respond and deal with the problems of existence in time and entropy.
Let's have a quick overview at how various Religions handled this question throughout human history.
So I believe, that the fundamental principle behind all genuine religious feelings is well illustrated by this picture.
These are actually distant galaxies. Which means that of course there are billions of solar systems in each and every one of them and zillions of worlds like ours.
And you are on one of them. You are this tiny little speck in the cosmos.
You are part of the greater whole.
That your individual being is just a temporary fold in the fabric of the Universe, which will eventually unfold and disappear... like the bunny.
And there is only one legitimate way to overcome this existential crisis:
the solution is to attach yourself to something greater than yourself, to a worthy cause that will survive you,
 therefore you would not be 'lost' when you die. Because the world will go on. That there is something after death,
it's just your individual ‘fold’ is no longer part of it, but your actions still may be.
But of course, as we will see later on, not everyone is capable of this. We will return to this during the second hour.
It is quite easy to see that our ancestors would have believed this.
After all early man spent most nights staring up the starry sky and seeing something this.
You get the sense, that we are on ball hurling through space.
This view is manifest in primitive nature religions, as well as the Vedantic, Indo-Eurpean world views.
So let's return to our overview of religions: The first one we need to look at is early Hinduism, such as described in the Vedas: 4000 years ago.
Their spirituality was characterised by a sense of unity with the Universe and mankind's cosmic role was to be at balance with this unity by performing sacrifices.
The many gods of the Hindu World are simply representations of the multiple facets of one objective reality: which was termed Bhraman.
You, the person experiencing this reality is Atman. That is the Self or the subjective.
In Hinduism, it is said that Atman and Bhraman are equivalent. You can already see how this realisation will later on be abused.
Then the next period that followed, was called the Axial Age.
Religions originating in this era were characterised by turning away from this unified view.
Not a complete break yet, that will happen later. But religions did become more anthropocentric or man centred.
Buddhism is a representative example of this.
It is characterised by sense of introversion. Where individuals mattered more than before.
That Your pain and Your suffering somehow became supremely important
and an escape from the samsara (cycle of continuous rebirth) became the ultimate purpose of existence.
Buddhism is still an honest religion though, as it doesn't deny reality as it is. It accepts that the nature of being is one of suffering
and that is due to a sense of Loss which is a function of temporality.
Only the goals became corrupted.
The ancient Greek gods and even the Roman ones were the linear descendents of our Hindu gods, albeit a little bit corrupted and anthropomorphised along the way.
But they have retained much of their original essence
and even their anthropomorphic characteristics could be interpreted as allegories of the behaviour of the planets and powers which they have represented.
They were still our original deities. Which were taken from us by Christianity. And the tragedy of this cannot be overstated.
So enter Christianity: 2000 years ago. But of course much of Europe wasn’t forced into Christianity up until much later, only after 1000AD.
The dominance of Christianity signifies the start of the modern era and represents a sharp downhill trend in terms of spirituality, where things were finally broken apart.
Christianity, actually started as a cult of slaves and other rejects of the classical civilisation.
And their spirituality, that is one of resentment, inferiority and hatred towards anything masculine and noble, still forms the basis of Christian morality today.
Its really quite important to spend some time analysing the Christian view of the world,
as basically all modern ideologies are just simply secularist derivatives of the same idea.
So let's expose some of the core ethics and morality of Christianity.
The most important one is the idea of the Creator: that the Universe was created by something that you could relate to:
an anthropomorphic god, who of course has nothing better to do than to care about You and if you You him.
This anthropomorphic god is someone who 'stands in', as a kindof Freudian super-ego for You, You the creator of your own reality.
So you could say that Man worships himself in a man loving god that Man has created to his image.
Christianity is also responsible for the dualistic world view: Good vs Evil, Mind vs Body, this life and the next...
One part is the comfortable fantasy land: the spirit and the happy afterlife in heaven and the other is cruel harsh world of reality: the Shadow World.
Where as the earlier religions realised that such divisions didn't exist. But now the Universe was finally broken and fractured into two.
The ancient greeks believed that we had a destiny, that our fate was pre-ordained. Christians came up with the idea of free will.
And actually modern science is confirming the Greeks and disproving Christianity.
And there is this sense of self denial: early Christian heroes have castrated themselves: which pretty much sums up the core message of Christianity quite well.
Then there is linear concept of time, where everything progresses from a definite start to a defined end.
In Christianity this was still an ambiguous event: the judgment day. In later iterations such as in Liberalism, the negative ambiguity of this was removed.
The Christian Ideal of 'one god' is not an improvement over pagan polytheism, but rather a degeneration.
As instead of worshipping one ultimate reality, Christians worship their own projected super egos.
Where as the multiplicity of pagan gods represented the multiplicity of reality.
The motif of burial instead of cremation is also an expression of an aversion from reality,
as it is motivated by a hope of resurrection into a fantasy land and also by an ignorance and hypocrisy of what happens to a body after death.
The preparation work and the process of decay.
Christian Miracles or prophets who can perform miracles:
the meaning of this is that somebody who can defy and break the rules of reality and annihilate it with their personal desires.
And finally, Christianity also has this pathological worshipping of human life. That is saving human lives at all costs.
We will uncover the true meaning behind this in the next hour.
On the left, this is a diagram of the Geocentric world view. Which I will use as a metaphor for Christianity and Counter-Awakening.
So the Geocentric model symbolises this 'inverted world-view'. Where everything revolves around the Earth which represents your head or your mind.
The parallels don’t end there:
take the famous ‘geocentric fixes’ where the apparent motion of solar bodies didn’t quite match the ones predicted by the flawed geocentric model.
You could extrapolate from this to how modernity deals with the apparent problems of persistent inequality in society for instance.
All sorts of ‘fixes’ are invoked to explain why inequality persists, instead of just accepting that the underlying model is flawed.
If you have got this sort of reverse reasoning, you see everything inverted. That everything revolves around you and was created for your pleasure.
This sort of thinking leads you to believe that the ridges of the Banana were put there by a benevolent creator to make it easier for You to peel it.
This is the famous video of the creationist Kirk Cameron demonstrating this.
This image is from the book of Kells.
And you can see how Christianity slowly corrupted the authentic soul of Europe through the artwork of the era.
Just look at all these struggling animals and the little solar swirls that represented the Indo-European spirit, which were eventually tamed and destroyed by Christianity.
Solar swirls represent the cycle of life. Infinity. That we are part of the whole.
Where as the cross, represents something like STOP sign:
we DON’T want to be part of the whole. That we want to stop the train and get off!
But of course you cant get off. As time will progress forward in an endless downward spiral.
Because Christianity itself is but a step on a trajectory on a path towards greater entropy and decay.
In the 19th Century Christianity has split into its secular derivatives: Liberalism and Marxism.
It is important to emphasise this connection, as many would-be reactionaries believe that Christianity is somehow viable and good
and a return to it would restore everything to their proper order.
But that would only be temporary you see, as Christianity will always evolve into Marxism/Liberalism,
precisely because they are really just the same thing sans even a god.
This may seem odd first, as Marxists have treated Christians quite poorly. Like turning Temples into barns, sending priests into death camps etc.
But that is to me just sibling rivalry.
There are countless parallels and analogies between them but here are the most important three:
The main subject of history was changed from the poor oppressed roman slave to the poor oppressed revolutionary proletariat.
The starting point: the Garden of Eden was replaced by a type of Rousseauian proto-communism with noble savages that didn’t own private property
and allegedly they were so peaceful that they didn't even have words for violence.
The expulsion from Eden is transposed as a loss of innocence due to civilisation and the advent of private property.
And the final stop: Heaven, where everyone will be equal, will have to be created here on earth. Right now!
What you will notice that is that the goals are exactly the same, except that you have removed the last layer of transcendence.
All abstractions and complexities have been stripped away.
At this stage we don’t want to have to understand such abstract concepts such as afterlife. We want things here and now.
So Marxism is really just a simplified and dumbed down version of Christianity.
An interesting side story: there was actually the inspiration for a 19th Chinese movement, the Taiping, which could be translated as 'Heavenly Kingdom‘.
This was basically a transitory stage between Marxism and Christianity.
This movement sought to overthrow the current emperor and establish an earthly heaven where everyone was equal and was living in a type of commune.
Of course at the end, the guy who believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus, made himself emperor and then he was disposed of shortly afterwards.
So about Liberalism:
The historical rivalry between liberal Capitalists vs marxist Soviets, was actually a false dichotomy.
They were in perfect agreement on just where are we supposed to be going, they were only squabbling over the details: how we are going to get there.
Instead of the masses of the proleteriat, the subject of history has been further reduced, to the individual this time.
Where as the marxist proletaire was at least able to believe in something greater than himself, if not a nation, then at least an international class,
where in liberalism the individual is completely isolated and warped into his own mind.
Even though classical Liberalism preceded Marxism, the later neoliberal ideas, in many respects represent an even lower form of spiritual development.
As now the individual wants to get rid of not only collective class distinctions, but everything outside or prior to his own individual being.
The main difference, where Liberalism appears to deviate significantly from Marxism: is the concept of Freedom or Liberation.
But that is actually not a true difference. It's actually is just description of Equality from another angle as we will see in the second hour.
After the failure of Soviet Marxism, these two ideologies merged back into one product once again.
The failure of orthodox Marxism in Russia was just too obvious, so they've have dropped economic aspect.
Additionally, the old revolutionary class was replaced by a new people, whom they believed to be actual noble savages.
This final hybrid product of Marxism and Liberalism was then translated into cultural terms, hence they are usually referred to as 'Cultural-Marxists' today.
This could be a whole talk on it’s own and I don’t have the time to get into it, but it’s enough for you to know, that they are exactly the same as before, only worse.
So this concludes our brief overview of religions
and from now on I willl be using the terms Christianity, Liberalism and Marxism interchangeably, because I think they are really the same thing.
So bear that in mind, whenever I use one of those terms, I could just as well have used any of them.
We will take a short break now, but In the next hour, I will talk more about the core values of modernity with the primary focus on Equality.
After that we will explore the closely linked concepts of ‘Otherness’ and Conflict
and finally conclude our discussion with the description of the Titanic spirit or the way I’ve termed it: The Falling Star.
So in the previous hour we have spent some time thinking about Entropy and how the various religions responded to the challenges that it imposed on us.
But before that I’ve started my talk tonight by exposing modernity and it’s primary values.
But we haven’t really delved into the true meaning of these values. What does Happiness, Freedom and Equality truly mean in Reality?
The first of these concepts I am going to tackle is Happiness, as it is the least important.
So we have seen that one of the ultimate goals of existence according to modernity, is the ideal of happiness and pleasure.
So what about the value or the worth of Happiness. Surprisingly, the refutation comes from modernity itself.
There is a thoroughly twisted modernist movement, which is called Anti-Natalism.
What their argument boils down to is that since the ultimate purpose of life is happiness, it would have been better for all of us to not to have lived at all.
And that is because the total sum of our experiences, will by definition have a negative balance. And that is because in addition to all of the negative events,
the pain and suffering that we will endure in our lifetimes, at the end we will all die. And with that, all our positive experiences will be null and void.
Which means that the best that you can hope for is a zero, that is to not to have lived at all.
And they would be completely right, except of course that their starting assumption is completely invalid.
As Happiness is completely irrelevant, as there are much more important things, as we will find out at the end of this hour.
But at least they are consistent and they have helped us to demonstrate the futility of happiness as the goal of existence.
I am not trying to discourage you here. What I mean is not that you shouldn't feel satisfied with something that you have worked hard for and be happy with your results.
What I really mean is that the goal of existence should not be about enjoying yourself as an end in itself.
But instead, feeling good about yourself, should be a side-effect of realising a higher ideal.
Freedom is up next. So what is Freedom?
I think that there are two types of freedoms: One is the Freedom as an Ideal of Liberation.
And the other is freedom as it is actually realised.
The first one is arguably the more important: That is Freedom as an Ideal of Liberation.
This I would argue amounts to a freedom FROM reality. That is an escape from Reality. And we have seen that before.
A practical expression of this usually means heredity. This is why genes scare liberals,
as they know that we will never be truly free from this reality, as our DNA binds us here.
That we will never be able to become truly spiritual or cultural beings disconnected from our biology.
So this type of freedom is as we have seen it already, it's actually impossible.
And what about the second type: Freedom that we did actually achieve? Freedom as realised. To be able free to do what you enjoy.
Well, I think that is just simply not that valuable. It is actually nothing to be proud of.
Because as you have seen with the Sand Castle: free actions are overwhelmingly more likely to result in the creation of disorder, than that of order.
Just think about the average timeline of a Facebook profile. Or the Twitter feed of an average person. That is freedom realised.
It is just junk data: noise that drowns out any signal that may still be out there. Creation of noise like that, is just a plain manifestation of entropy.
Now we have to deal with the question of Equality. What is the true meaning of Equality?
It should be obvious at this point but let’s state it explicitly:
It means, that the world is not real. Because you exist inside your mind, and there is Nothing real outside.
And of course if there is nothing outside and that everything is YOU, then by definition that also means you are ‘equal’ to everything in a sort of singularity.
This is the true meaning of Equality. That there is no external reality.
And in this sense, actually you can see why freedom and equality are just the two sides of the same coin.
Because they both amount to the same thing: they are both about an escape from reality.
The ideal of Liberation says that we could just reshape reality into a fantasy land.
Where as the idea of Equality, proposes that reality could be reduced into a singularity with the observer.
This is why it's the greatest violation of modernity to deny human equality or freedom.
Because you are violating this most sacred principle: saying that there are external things to you. Things that are prior to man and to his consciousness.
So what is the Goal of Equality?
I’ve actually heard this during an undergrad Biochemistry lecture: we were told that A living organism's metabolism is only at equilibrium when it is dead.
That is when a living thing, no longer feeds on negative entropy.
You see, so the goal of Equality must be death, because it is a will into nothingness. And this actually manifests itself in most egalitarian societies eventually.
Just think about the 100 million killed in the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Cambodia.
But the best case study for egalitarian projects, which is also the most relevant for us today, is I think the Jones Town and the People’s Temple project.
This was Jim Jones. He was a religious leader in the 1970’s who combined the teachings of Marxism and Christianity,
to create a utopian egalitarian community for European and African-Americans.
They've moved to a commune in South America, where they tried to realise the utopian-Rousseauian society where everyone was equal, free and happy.
But because they were in fact trying to create a fantasy, which cannot exist in this reality. When this realisation sank in,
they basically committed mass suicide by drinking a soft drink called Kool-Aid, which was laced with cyanide.
Here are some excerpts from the suicide tape transcripts, which describe the moments just before the suicide.
A Mother protested against the proposed suicide by saying:
And here they are at peace finally and in perfect equality! Because you can only be equal in death.
And this is OK by me. They've made their choice.
But the problem is of course is that not everyone was willing to become equal. Some were forced to.
See that little girl there, she is being led into Equality. That nice lady on her left is encouraging her to become Equal.
She probably murdered her later that day.
I would like to think that if she was given the choice she probably wouldn’t want to be 'equalised'.
But the children were simply led onto their deaths and the adults that changed their minds were forced to die by other men with guns.
And here are some clips from the full documentary: “Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple”.
They've actually went and lived the Rousseauian dream.
Everyone loves everyone.
All the children are really happy.
Look it's Paradise.
The fist in the air... The fist in the air...
And of course the wonderful multicultural ideal.
And here they are marching off into their deaths. The scary bit is that a large number of survivors are in a complete denial.
The only thing that they are sorry for is that it actually has ended, but they've described it as heaven on earth.
And presumably, would give it another try if they could.
But this is terrible! Why would anyone want this? And who are these People anyway?
Who are these ‘Others’? We haven’t dealt with the concept of ‘Otherness’.
But before we would delve into the concept of 'Otherness' and the closely linked process of human conflict we would need to get a bit more honest about human nature.
So at this point, it is appropriate to talk about human variation.
You were probably told countless times that we are all born equal and that genes play no role in our behaviour.
But of course that is not true. I think today this is actually more accepted than just a few years ago,
but just in case you've been living under a stone here is the basic 101:
So.
Personality traits are influenced by the genotype:
Your personality is not (only) the result of your rational decision making process, but also evolution.
This is where the field of evolutionary psychology can help us.
Gene frequencies change over time and due to the environment. So humans that live great distances apart, either spatially or temporally, are not necessarily the same.
Why is this important? Remember Entropy? Remember how things decay over time?
The human genome is no exception. Mutations are the expression of entropy at the molecular level.
Mutations didn't stop when our species first evolved 200K YA, they just keep piling up in our genome.
And unless, they are actively selected AGAINST and only the good kept, it is inevitable that most functional mutations would be harmful.
This is a graph of the human brain size. And As you can see it is decreasing over time.
Actually it has been decreasing for the past 10 thousand years!
And this is actually not controversial at all, this is from the journal of Human Biology and Discover magazine. The links where the data is from is there at the bottom.
What is controversial is my theory though. But it will make perfect sense if you are starting to see things from a new perspective.
You see today, it is believed that Ideas, exist on their own? And then these Ideas take on a life of their own? And then transform society and people, even against their will.
Like if ideas fell from the sky, into your heads? And if you got lucky, then you would have good ideas falling into your head. And if less lucky, then bad ones.
Which I think is again, an inversion of the truth.
Evolutionary psychology tells us that people have natural tendencies and propensities. So ideologies would then naturally arise as a vector sum of their constituents.
This is the same principle that underlies neural networks. That complex behaviours arise as an emergent property from simpler components.
So my hypothesis, is that the quality of culture is determined by the mean average human quality of the time.
So if I’ve added in the various religions onto this graph and an obvious pattern emerges.
The spiritual quality as I’ve described in the previous hour, declines in tandem with human brain sizes.
Now I have to make a disclaimer here,
this is only correlation and not proven causation and there are a thousand other variables involved, so this will probably never be proven.
Yet it is a very compelling hypothesis, as if you think about it,
abstract concepts such as a reality existing independent of our perception of it,
or even a sense of transcendence or afterlife, would require cognitively expensive calculations.
And if you lack the processing power to do so, and if the critical majority of the people are unable to perform these, then the religion of the era,
 is bound to be replaced by less cognitively demanding ideology that the general population is still able to entertain.
The scary bit is that according to the authors of the article:
brain size decrease has been the most severe at the most densely populated areas. As if civilisation itself would be causing it.
There are many arguments against this and one of them is that our bodies have also been shrinking through a process known as gracilisation.
But that isn’t entirely a valid point, EQ ratios have been decreasing and our brains have been shrinking faster than our bodies.
The strongest counter argument is of course is that hold on, if we got so stupid over the past few thousand years,
then how come we are sending people into outer space now and not 10 thousand years ago?
The answer to that is simple: while Culture by definition must reflect the average of a human type, science will always express the elite, as it is not democratic.
That is because science is not created ‘by the people’. It is created by the elite. The rest of us are just consumers.
You don’t need to be intelligent to Use an Iphone or to Use a remote control. A Chimpanzee can do that.
Most people can drive a car or watch TV, but very few people can invent cars or invent TVs.
So the take-home message of Human Variation: is that religions characterise the current human average of the time & place of their genesis
and they are replaced when the human type of whom they represented is no longer dominant.
Which leads us to the conclusion that spirituality, is limited to the maximum capacity of the average human’s processing power.
This also means that spiritual changes, are more driven by changes to human biology, rather than by abstract “ideas”.
 So in effect, if Marx didn’t exist. History wouldn’t have changed.
It wouldn’t have been that people just didn’t think of "hey equality is such a great idea", rather Marx himself was just a product of a much larger historical process.
As was Christianity. Indeed if we look at the succession of Christianity to Marxism and to what we have today,
we see a pattern emerging. Which seem to support the idea that it is all caused by Entropy.
Now, I’ve just made some very bold assertions about how genes determine culture.
And whatever the scientific merits of that argument may be, it sounds awfully a lot like Materialism?
So at this point it is also appropriate to talk about the problem of materialism.
This goes back to the age old argument of Mind versus Matter. Because of course Genes vs Culture is exactly same dichotomy,
except that you have squared the problem to the population level.
And of course as we have seen it, this had it’s origin Christianity again: in the form of the Spirit and the Body dualism.
So superficially, it would appear that what I am advocating is a type of scientific materialism.
That I am trying to reduce our incredibly complex art, culture and spirituality even our religions, to something as shallow and empty such as a DNA sequence.
And the scientific method is indeed inherently reductionistic. As you can only understand reality by breaking it down into simpler components.
But this of course appears to leave scientists stranded on a materialistic worldview and they are liable to be accused of being narrow minded, and lacking a holistic vision
The scientific method does attempt to reduce everything into numbers, molecules and cells.
And for this reason, when they ask the question: is there more to life than just pure matter? Most scientists don’t know what to say!
And if scienctists have no soul, then they can only help the body and cannot offer society any useful guidence, when it comes to the matters of culture and the spirit.
And for this reason, scientists are only allowed to exercise their power over reality to provide for our bodies, by creating consumer technology and medicine.
Which will unfortunately leave all the spiritual authority with the charlatans.
Who of course since they have no connection to reality, they are liable to drift away into a fantasy land.
I’ve called them spiritual charlatans, because that is what they are.
But if that is true, then where does that leave us?
Do we have to choose between the mind and the body? Can’t we have both?
But these are actually all false dichotomies. We don’t need to choose either or.
Because Mind vs Body, Good vs Evil, Quantum vs Newtonian physics, these are all false dichotomies.
I am not saying that spirituality can be reduced to biology. But instead, that biology and spirituality from a continuum and cannot exist separately.
What is happening is that all of these form smooth gradient: a Continuum. Just the same way as quantum physics must turn into newtonian phyiscs on a larger scale.
And our consciousness is an emergent property generated by the sum of a 100 billion neurones in our brain.
You cannot reduce reality to the behaviuour of a single electron. The same way you cannot reduce your mind to the action potentials of a single neurone,
But at the same time you also cannot think of them as separate that can be broken apart.
This is really quite problematic. And again it all goes back to the issue of the relationship between the part and the whole.
During the first hour, when we talked about counter-awakening or solipsism. I’ve said that modernists try to reduce reality into the perception of reality of the observer.
But there is more to this. As of course we are all sentient beings, so even if we believe that its all about Me,
we are still aware of all the negativity, the unpleasantness and the pain that we experience during our lifetimes. It looms over our horizon like rain clouds.
The modernist solution to this, is to while ultimately hoping to reduce everything into a singularity with the observer,
in the meanwhile all the negative things are banished and externalised in the most extreme dualistic fashion.
All the negative aspects of life are said to be of external origin. Individual responsibility is completely removed,
as all problems of human society are said to be due to oppressive patriarchs, exploitation by capitalists or just general social alienation.
All negative human behaviour is said to be learned, never intrinsic. Which of course removes all agency and therefore blame from everyone.
So it is like a Singularity in Dualism.
Where the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of the world are completely separate from one another, but at the same time in a complete singularity in their own category.
Everything that is Good, is reduced into a singularity with the observer,
and Everything that is Bad is reduced into a singularity with the external world, which of course we hope to do away with at the end eventually.
Which is a very infantile view of the world.
This is really the key, because Modernists, assert either duality or singularity.
Where as our side, we assert neither, instead we believe in a Continuum.
Which is a concept that we will explore shortly.
So we have established that there is a biological basis for human variation,
which will help us the accept that at least from a scientific perspective, we aren’t all the same.
We've said a few words about false dichotomies in an abstract sense, but we really need to tie these two together,
to be able to deal with the question of ‘otherness’, when it applies to other humans.
We have talked about this in the very first segment. Remember the ‘oppression’ of the other?
Which was the worst crime according to modernity, especially since according to modern thinking the ‘Other’ is not even a valid category.
So the question is: are there ‘Others’ who are external to us? Or are we all part of the same 'Unity'?
Now this is a question that is very difficult to untangle.
As I’ve just said in the previous segment that since we are all part of the same objective reality, surely there must be some continuity between us.
So a modernist may argue that there may not be any room left for the concept of the ‘Other’ right?
To illustrate this problem, I am going to use Schopenhauer. He was a 19th century German philosopher.
Basically, amongst other things, this is what Schopenhauer said:
“Since we are all part of the same reality, we are made up of the same energy force,
therefore harming or killing others is like harming yourself. Like a snake biting on its own tail.”
He got this from Buddhism.
But I've read translations of the Hindu religious book, the Bhagavad Gita which also purport to make this same point.
Buddhism is dodgier, but the Bhagavad Gita is actually a legit piece of religion. And it is simply a mistranslation, as you will see later.
So this killing others is like killing yourself argument?
Is basically identical to ALL non-violence arguments made by Marxists, Liberals and Christians.
This is where the idea of 'sacred life' comes from. This is why Christians are so upset at the thought of loosing any human life.
As they are selfish and feel that they are loosing themselves. The end to the world,
as Liberals believe that We are the cosmos, so when you close your eyes for the last time, then that's like turning off the lights in the Universe.
The Bhagavad Gita is basically a war story, between two factions of a clan and it deals with the problems of existence
and our role and duties when it comes to war and conflict with others.
This illustration presumably depicts the moment when the protagonist, Arjuna, realises the true identity of his friend as one of being Krishna.
Schopenhauer's fallacy from a mistranslation of the Bhagavad Gita goes like this:
Remember, Brahman being the entirety.
Property translated however, it actually says:
This means nothing of the sort right? Which makes sense, as the book is a story about a fratricidal war,
reassuring the protagonist that killing is OK.
But it just illustrates how easy it is to mistake one for the other.
But then what about the Liberal argument:
If we are all One, then there is no distinction between us and the 'Other'? All we need to do to awaken and realise that we are all brothers.
And Modernists would argue that if You deny our common brotherhood and the equality of all men, then it would You who denies the unity of existence.
This is actually a really confusing Ying-Yang effect. On one hand I’ve said that we are ALL part of the same reality.
But then now, I seem to argue against myself? Saying that we are still somehow separate? How can that be ?
Aren’t we all ONE? Like this little girl suggests?
This onion skin pattern is actually quite common to the difference between the Counter-Awakened and Awakened states.
On one layer of the onion I say what they say on the other layer. But they are misaligned.
So how do we untangle this?
This is actually identical to the common misinterpretation of the equivalence between Atman and Brahman.
Because we are not ‘ONE’. We are not ‘Identical’. We are not ‘Equal’. But rather we inhabit the same reality, but have unique features which differentiates us.
This actually defines Reality with any specific shape. Without this reality would be featureless.
Reality could only be ‘One’ if it was completely indistinct singularity.
The Sun and the Earth are both parts of the same Universe, yet they are not identical, but instead they are different parts of the same Entirety.
So the allegation that by asserting difference instead of sameness would amount to deny the unity of reality, that is in fact the reversal of the truth.
This goes back to the Camera-Obscura view of the world that I’ve talked about during the previous hour.
this is why its possible to 'Discriminate', which is just another word for ‘Differentiation’.
That is saying that you see the world as differentiated…
Which is the philosophical basis for the ‘crime’ of discrimination, that is asserting, that someone is an ‘Other'.
This is why it is considered immoral to call out someone and say "your kind did this" or "people like you".
Because with this, you would be violating this most sacred principle of ‘non-otherness’.
So since we have established, that in true reality, there are 'Others', it becomes possible to hurt them.
So there is an ‘Other’ and it is possible to tell who they are, to 'discriminate'.
And this leads us to the problem of violence and death And how it involves us and those ‘Others’.
So what is violence?
Violence, I would define as rapid change.
That is, an object undergoes violence when it undergoes a rapid transformation.
Today, we live in a culture where the ‘glorification of violence’ is considered a crime and we are meant to aspire to a live a life devoid of violence, of world peace.
But of course the problem is, that Life and existence are a series of rapid changes.
You come into this world violently, you undergo a series of rapid changes. And then more likely than not, you end your life the same way.
Wanting to live a life without violence is a desire to live life without life or to not to live at all. A will into non-existence and nothingness.
A goal of World Peace is like equality, non achievable and at fundamental odds with life itself.
People will only be peaceful in death. Here the 'Kool-Aid drinker' example is relevant again.
Some may argue that what I am saying is dangerous. They say that we should avoid dangerous things.
Because dangerous things can cause pain and suffering. And may even result in... death.
But of course these are the very things that are destined for all of us and in fact none of the above can ever be avoided.
As these things are like life itself: running from them, amounts to running from life which is of course futile, as there is no escape.
So it is OK to accept violence then. But what about death?
It is as we have seen is completely and utterly inevitable.
But what about the meaning of death? Can death have a positive value?
According to Liberal thinking it cannot. Death, is always experienced as a tragedy.
But according to counter-modern thinking death may be meaningful. And the non-existence of something or someone may be a positive thing.
So death, is Okay also.
Now we have arrived at the most difficult and sensitive of all topics: that is the act of taking the life of an ‘Other’.
According to liberal morality this is almost always a bad thing. The ultimate crime.
Because in the counter-awakened, inverted world view, every time a Liberal is forced to kill someone he is destroying the Universe.
The cult of Human Rights takes this argument to the next level, by saying that not only we don’t have the right to kill anyone,
but that actually we have a duty to keep everyone alive
and that they are entitled to a whole host of rights and privileges. Just for having existed.
But of course the problem is that in order to survive we have to actually kill.
We use our money to finance the killing of animals, either to eat them or to use their bodies for various products we use for day to day life.
Christianity attempts to address this issue by saying that animals don’t have a soul.
Where as modern liberals say that they have simpler nervous system and therefore have a reduced level of consciousness...
...so we aren't really turning the lights off.
But of course the greatest difficulty is when it comes to the taking the life of another human.
Here also, we are all killers.
Our tax money is actively spent on financing wars that go on in the world right at this very moment
and therefore we are actively participating in the murder of a large number of people.
Liberalism tries to get around this by saying that: Killing is only ever permissible as an act of self defence.
And this is of course is a very difficult proposition, as wars are very rarely truly self-defensive,
especially when we are ‘defending’ ourselves with pre-emptive strikes abroad.
Here, the attempted explanation really breaks down:
usually wars are justified as ‘righteous wars’, ‘humanitarian intervention’,
wars to fight for 'human rights', or against 'oppression' and of course the best excuse is a ‘fight against evil’ or a ‘war to end all wars’.
These excuses look increasingly less and less convincing.
So let's return to the Bhagavad Gita, to see what it says about the matter:
So in plain English:
The cosmos does not hurt itself by killing someone, it simply just feeds on itself.
Think about galactic collisions, supernovas or the Big Bang.
The Universe does not end itself just because two planets crash into each other.
The same way animals kill and feed on each other since time immemorial.
As we have seen from the classical text of the Bhagavad Gita, our position in contrast with the Christians would be very different, as we start from different origins.
We are okay with this, as we realise that creation and destruction aren’t a dichotomy either, but rather they also form a continuum.
We view humans as part of a larger external reality and we are part of that reality. And that reality is filled with violence and death.
The Universe can be a violent place. Stars are all very violent beings.
When they explode in meganovas, the scale and the magnitude of that violence is incomprehensible by the human mind.
And it is actually from these very events that the creative forces were released. As all planets are made from star stuff.
As they say: creation and destruction always go together.
Black holes consume whole stars. As I’ve said the Universe feeds on itself.
And this is OK. This is how it was meant to be.
Consciousness is not a value in itself, as it is an illusion. It is only ever useful if you use your individuality to achieve great things.
You are not the center of the Universe and therefore should your story end the Universe will still go on.
Therefore killing and removing someone’s consciousness, is on principle not more of a moral failing than a bear eating a salmon in an Alaskan river.
So we have established that in Reality people are not all the same and the concept of the 'Other' is in fact legitimate one.
The most useful practical tip I will share with you tonight, is that ideas are not independent entities.
They cannot originate, or even exist in a Vacuum.
Ideas simply represent the vector sum of a characteristic of a people, or just their author if it's an individual philosophical work.
You should always evaluate the Person and the Idea, at the same time and look for overlaps of interest.
People do not argue with Ideas. People argue with their Identities.
When someone says "I agree with you". It is literally meant like that and not "I agree with your ideas", but literally with the person.
It is in fact impossible to hold ideas that do not serve your identity.
People aren’t rational agents, we use our intellect for post-hoc rationalisation of self-justification.
Morals are nothing more than the expression of an identity.
You will believe to be good and moral whatever serves your interests.
And the same way, whatever is contrary to your interest, will be considered immoral and evil.
The fact that modern morals are what they are, doesn’t mean that they are intrinsically valid,
it only means that a critical majority's interests are served by them.
So there was some fighting in the past... and even some killing...
But that was the past right?
Maybe we have 'moved on‘? Maybe we have progressed to a more 'enlightened age'?
And in the future at some point all this fighting and killing should just stop right?
Can’t we just all get along? Live side by side and aspire for world peace?!
Surely, all this fighting must be just some cosmic mistake or a misunderstanding between us?
Can’t we end human conflict, once and for all?
So why can't we just get along? What's the source of all of this hostility?
We are hostile to those whose interests conflict with ours.
But why would our interest be in conflict?
Perhaps it’s better to approach this question from the other end.
Who are our allies? What makes our friends our friends?
Our friends are generally speaking, are those that we share our goals with and that is a result of shared ideas.
But where do ideas come from? Well, we’ve just talked about it!
Ideas come from your identity. The more identity we share, the more our interests will be aligned.
The more similar we are, the more likely we will have common interests.
People from the same in-group, will be natural allies.
So returning to the source of conflict and hostility, we have our answer now:
A difference in identity, creates a difference in interests.
So if we are different and there is a specific issue where our interests are opposing each other, then we are in a state of active conflict.
If there is no current issue that we disagree on, then we are still in a passive state of conflict,
even though we may still cooperate on unrelated issues.
 What is important to realise that even when there is no current disagreement, we are still in a passive state of conflict,
it is just simply not expressed. It lies dormant, but all that is needed is a catalyst or a spark.
Because conflict itself is just when difference is given expression.
Let's look at an example.
In a post-apocalyptic world, like after zombie outbreak, I scavenge a ration of food somewhere.
And I will have to decide if it is in my interest to share this precious resource with someone.
The most commonality that I can have with someone, is of course with myself.
It is impossible for me to have a conflict of interests with this person then, because we are in a singularity. I share everything in common with him.
But let’s say there is two of us. Me and another person.
An-Other.
Now, what considerations would enter my mind, in deciding if it's in my best interest to share something with this Other?
The question is, what is the degree of difference between us.
How different is he from me?
The more we are alike, the more it's in my interest to share.
Because in effect I would be sharing it with myself, to the degree that this person is similar to me.
But should he be from an out-group, that is sufficiently different from mine, then it will simply be no longer in my interest to share anything with him.
Therefore, we will be in a natural state of competition, which is of course the true nature of conflict.
So how does modernity deal with the question of Conflict?
The same way as it does with all the other problems we have seen so far: that is to pretend that it is actually not there.
Modernity says that all our differences are not real, or that they don’t really mean anything.
And any differences that are just too obvious, are said to be only skin deep or socially constructed.
Which presumes, that they could be reconstructed in more compatible ways.
Which means that if you and I are ‘One’, then of course I cannot have a conflict with you,
the same way as I cannot have a conflict of interest with myself.
And since we are all the same, any conflict must be due to some kind of terrible misunderstanding, between fundamentally good and well meaning people,
or due to the scheming of evil tyrants who want to set the common people against each other for their own selfish personal benefit.
According to modernists all conflicts are due to some sort of miscommunication and we just simply have to get together,
and we can work out any problem just by talking to each other, since we are all the same!
As you can see, the one thing that is beautifully consistent in modernity, is how it lies about everything that is important to the human condition.
But if you are honest, you will have to accept that since there are Others
and these others can also be different to us, therefore conflict seems like an inevitable part of life.
'Hate' is not the cause of conflict therefore, it is simply a realisation that you are in conflict with someone different.
Therefore getting rid of ‘hate’ will not stop conflicts, just the same way treating the symptoms will not cure disease.
But is conflict really an illness? Is it bad thing?
I think not, because conflict is just another word for competition,
which is a process by which the competitors improve themselves.
Which is how evolution works.
And this of course means, that stopping conflict would also stop improvement at the same time.
The entire recorded history of mankind,
is just a long list of dates of the various wars, revolutions and all the other conflicts we’ve been through.
Can you honestly believe that all of those were just accidents?
Events contrary to our nature, due to a misunderstanding or miscommunication between peace-loving peoples?
So the argument that we should somehow ‘learn’ from past mistakes,
or that humanity would be somehow be ‘destroying itself’ due to conflicts, is just the wrong way of looking at it.
Could humanity really destroy itself through wars? Like this flag suggests?
There are over 7 billion of us now,
it seems that no matter what we do, there is no real danger that we would run out of people any time soon.
It’s the same argument,
as if someone suggested that nature is destroying itself, just because lions hunt gazelles
and that somehow lions should learn from their past mistakes and stop being carnivores.
So the conclusion is to view conflict as a process of self improvement through competition.
We’ve spent a great deal of time discussing the ideas and ideologies of these people.
But we have also learned that all ideas are ultimately just an expression of an identity.
So its time to reveal the identity of these Others, which will allow us to understand them and us better.
So who are these others then?
This painting is titled ‘Internationale’ by Otto Griebel, an artist of the last century.
There is no irony here.
This is actually a sincere self portrait of these ‘Others’.
Nietzsche would have called them the last men.
Jessie Jackson, when Obama was elected.
A well known girl band. You’ve probably have seen them around in the news.
These are people who are damaged and weak.
Their existential dishonesty comes from the fact, that their existence itself is based on a lie.
The feeling of guilt characterising Christianity or Liberalism,
is rooted in the existential dishonesty of these people, that they know that they couldn’t exist in a real world.
This is why they are afraid of competition or 'struggle' because they know that they would loose.
When they say that life is a joke, what they truly mean is that Their life is a joke.
They serve no higher purpose because they cannot, because they are not capable of it.
They see the Universe as broken, but it is actually them, who are broken.
They see the world as an oppressive exploitation by tyrants, patriarchs or capitalists:
But what they are really oppressed by is not anything unfair, but by reality itself.
Reality is cruel and unpleasant, and they are just simply to weak to cope with it.
Their attitude to life is well captured by the act of protest.
You see the act of protest is equivalent to the act of begging. They never act. They never really do anything but beg others to help them.
Their goal is avoiding suffering, which will lead them to avoiding life as life is suffering.
So where do all these lies come from? What is their source?
The falseness of the modern world originates from lies.
But lies originate from weakness.
People are usually dishonest and lie if they have to. To justify their existence.
The source of falsehood of modernity is due the wretchedness of mankind,
as inferior people need to pretend that they are not inferior, in order to justify their continued existence.
To pretend that they should exist.
A good metaphor is a game of cards.
People usually only have to bluff, that is to act dishonest, if they have something to hide.
If you are dealt a winning hand of cards, then there is little reason to not to declare what you've got.
This means that people who are most honest and upfront, are people who are strong. They have no reason to hide what they’ve got.
You know the saying “put best foot forward”? It also implies that you should try to hide your weaknesses.
It’s just that for some people, there is nothing to show and everything to hide.
If you are like this, then you have to realise that you simply have very limited options as far as an identity and therefore an ideology goes.
If you are like this, you must believe in ‘This’, otherwise your whole existence looses it’s legitimacy.
This is why the goal of the last man is centering his goals around himself and reducing the reality to his individual perception of the reality,
where they are literally in the fantasy land of their own creation.
As that is the only place where they can actually survive.
This is also the problem.
I mean now I've have exposed the meaning of life, the right way to do everything,
it should be pretty easy to use this a winning formula to win an election or to change the world right?
Unfortunately no.
It is futile to argue with these last men:
because you are not arguing with a logical idea, that can be defeated on the grounds of reason.
You are arguing against a person.
They are just wretched and miserable people, who find their identity through an ideology that makes the burden of reality go away.
And there is no defeating that. As you cannot refute an identity that serves the self-justification for a person,
because that would amount to telling a person to go and kill himself. And noone is going to do that.
So I have taken away everything. All the good things that modernity offers.
I’ve shown that Happiness is an impossible goal, as is Freedom.
 Equality is possible, but only in death.
So you may ask, what is left then? What's the point of existence?
To complete this talk, in the place all of the those false values, I have to propose an alternative identity.
It's time to talk about us.
I am going to conclude this session tonight,
with the concept of the ‘Falling Star’, which is a metaphor I will use for this other type of identity.
We are honest because we are strong.
This is a marble statue of the Greek god Apollo.
And generally our old gods, especially the Titans will serve as a good metaphor for our side.
This difference between ‘Awakened’ and ‘Counter-Awakened’ states, could also be described as the difference between adults and children.
The infantile, non-adult views the world as himself. He wants to save himself and primarily seeks others as ‘saviors’ to free him from his suffering.
He wants to be 'cured' or 'treated'.
Where as an Adult, or Awakened person does not seek liberation or 'freedom'. He seeks truth. And transcendence.
He wants to surpass himself with every challenge that life throws his way.
The goal of the overman is self-overcoming towards a higher ideal, that is centering your goals outside of your person.
According to modernity, all you need to do to be a good person is to be nice to others and be happy.
Or at least pretend that you are.
But we have higher standards.
For us, one of the defining traits of nobility, is how honest you are.
How true. That’s what really matters, not fake smiles.
So what do we want?
Freedom can only appeal to those are not free, to the slaves.
But a master does seek freedom, he seeks the truth.
So Truth instead of freedom should take the place of the meaning of life.
Surpassing and overcoming ourselves and obstacles in our way, should be prized as a social good instead of equality.
The ultimate goal of existence, should be about achieving a higher state: to be more noble.
It is a state of mind where you are no longer rebelling against fate. But you are becoming fate itself.
You should aspire to become one with Destiny instead of rebelling against it.
Overcoming yourself. Not by denying your nature, but by becoming one with it.
Overcome your petty problems, your individuality, your self centered goals,
to be able to sacrifice yourself for a purpose greater than yourself.
For a brief moment in time, both of these animals are perfect manifestations of the archetype of their species.
Then the gazelle falls.
But that is OK, his death also had a value, as he did his best,
and there is no shame in a death like that.
So who is us then? What makes us Human?
What differentiates us from these ‘Others’?
So what is our archetype then?
The defining trait for the Overman,
is NOT its compassion or sentimentality, but rather the Promethean spirit.
A restless drive to better ourselves and surpass ourselves, to conquer new peaks,
to discover, to be greater and higher than what we were before.
To resist cosmic entropy and disintegration.
Our goal is Overcome. To overcome our humanity.
To be more than what we were before.
For us, analysing our emotional life or contemplating problems of 'existence', is just navel gazing.
These are unimportant and are considered to be obstacles to true transcendence.
What's the point in looking inside?
There is nothing there. Nothing that is of interest.
Our outlook differs even from the ideal proposed by the Bhagavad Gita’s,
as that advocated a type of detached action.
It may be possible for a soldier to perform his 'duty' with a sense of detachment, out of obedience to their destiny or assigned cast role.
But this approach still seems to me to be designed to 'shield' or protect someone weaker from 'feeling bad'.
There is still in a sense 'escaping' from the harshness of reality.
It is just our 'minds' are escaping, but we let our bodies stay in the shadow world and be engaged with it.
But I think it impossible for an artist to create great works of art with a sense of disinterest or detachment as those are not conducive to be your best.
If you want to win a race, you will have to want to win. Even if you know that the odds are against you.
Just like Prometheus, even if you end up having to suffer for your ideals, it's worth it,
as without pain, suffering and sacrifice there can be no overcoming.
It's like falling in love.
It's impossible to fall in love with a sense of 'pious detachment'.
It's just barely better than to simply avoid love altogether out of the fear of rejection and pain.
Detached action applied to love would be like falling in love without falling in love.
The ideal of the highest nobility, is not an emotional detachment from our actions to escape pain,
but rather, the acceptance of the inevitable pain resulting from those actions,
as well as the acceptance of unquenchable thirst for more.
I believe that the Titan Atlas also captures the essence of our being.
He bears the weight of the entire world on his shoulders, yet he does not yield.
He bears it as he is strong.
Instead of trying to escape from suffering via either self-deception or distancing our emotions from the world,
the more noble approach is to endure suffering for a higher ideal.
You should not personally wish to become god, nor should you even wish to see the world which we would want to create.
We would be far too inferior for such a perfection and would only be blinded by it’s brightness.
We would not belong to such a world, since we are just a step along the way to the overman.
It is not possible to go through life as a Titan from birth to death.
Even if you are the perfect overman right now.
When you are younger,
you are naturally inclined towards Counter-Awakened ideas, as those are essentially infantile.
But as you grow older, become stronger and more accomplished, if you are our type, then you will turn towards Awakening.
However as you get older, you will decline back into Counter-Awakening again, as your mind and body will get slowly consumed by entropy.
This is why our ancestors prayed that they will meet a glorious end on a battlefield, rather than die as a frail old man.
That is the hope that death will take us long before that, and will return into nothingness.
To burn up instead of burning out.
To those that want to take it easy and relax, this may same harsh.
But look at it this way, you only have a few short decades, a very limited window to achieve anything.
And after that, you will have a whole eternity to rest.
The ideal is to manifest the perfect essence of our archetype, push it further while we are still here and then go out with a bang.
This is where the metaphor of the Falling Star comes in.
While we are here, we should aspire for an existence at our peak, like a falling star.
Because when you realise that with each day, we are hurled towards non-existence and that we are given a limited time,
you will do your utmost best to surpass yourself while you are still here.
Our goal is Overcome. To overcome our humanity. To become more than what we were before.
Our existence is but a fleeting moment in time,
less than a blink of an eye and we ought to be like a falling star,
burning through the sky while we are here.
You see that?
You should aspire for an existence like that in time.
Instead of burning out, burning up in our existence, to be true to ourselves,
to fulfill our being and then to go out into nothingness,
before our falling star would hit the earth.
