Accounts to settle

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Most people in this madly overcrowded world live simply obeying the biological imperatives they have stored in their brain circuitry. They feed, fight for some space where to mate properly and feed their offsprings (in Orwell'1984 they were called proles) . They cooperate with others as regular social animals, avoid, in general, harming their likes especially in bloody ways, defend their breed, some of ther relatives and, for some time at least, the mate they choose (or that was assigned to them, like in most of the far East).They are equipped to do this businesses with skills, acquired genetically or learned subsequently. Eden being lost, they are often forced to fight bloodily in some army, or less bloodily in some corporation. And then, being the game too complicated for their equipment, inherited or learned, many become misfits. They may fight for space in improper ways, or get sick, or become addicted to alcool or drugs. There are mixtures in this destinies. Alcool, which is widespread anyway, is associated, in a moderate way, with working for a corporation, in a less moderate way with destitution. In some cases (World War one) alcool in assigned by the commanding hyerarchy in order to convince soldiers to fight in an attack on the trenches. Finally there are the revolutionary geniuses, not particularly Guevara, yes Guevara also, but I am not interested in Guevara here. Rather in thinkers, philosophers, idealist leaders. Marx, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Tom Paine, Freud. These have accounts to settle. They were apportioned a space in the world where they didn’t fit in according to their wishes. So they took refuge in imaginary worlds constructed by themselves and made all they could to involve other people in their constructions. These people had or have accounts to settle.

What. The. Hell.

Yes hell for somes, heaven for others.

Are you high? I didn't know what frack your saying.

You said "frack"....

What the heck?

explanation behind that?

So what? I like my Battlestar Galatica.

Okay I follow you to here this is the evolutionary reality of the world.



Sounds like this basically means mental illness.



I guess your talking about philosphers here.

So you need to tie your three points together better so we can understand what your trying to really get across.

I think the gist is about Quacks and charlatans.

I read this as being the 'group' (the proles) is the collective unconscious, the norm, when we function in an unconscious way, just following our instincts/drives. The thinkers and philosophers have emerged from the 'group-think' because they have been hurt by life or are different in a way that precludes them from membership of the group. In Jungian terms, they have started to individuate. That's how I see it, but maybe this is not what you meant?

Yes it's what I meant.

There are a lot of quack and charlatans. But many are third order charlatans. Even some who have made historic disasters were third order. Hitler, Pol pot, were intellectually failures. Stalin too. But then there are the first class: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, with some qualification. What moved them? Sometimes they live squalid lives like Marx, who was always moneyless and spent all his time al the British Museum and having some sex with his maid. Kierkegaard living alone and writing a prodigious quantity of books non to be taken lightly, dying when his money was finished. My idea is they all, in their particular ways, fought for space (in an evolutionary sense). They could not find a satisfactory allottment in normal life and they constructed imaginary worlds where they succeded in involving people; they founded marxism, existentialism and nihilism, they moved legions.What prevented this people from having a peaceful and good life? On one side they were inept for normal careers in this world, on the other side they could draw on an extraordinary intelligence and knowledge. So they found compensation, they found space circling themselves of followers, and finding recognition.

I don’t believe that this social world can be reformed. All attempts have failed and will fail. After all, our task is to live and reproduce, and here we do this very badly. This is an aside.

Last edited by paolo on 16 Jan 2007, 8:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

Fascinating. Do go on...

I think Paolo has a point.

I will confine myself to Hitler if I may, for the sake of the discussion, as someone who had great power for a time but who was completely morally corrupt. This is my own view and I should say that I have no evidence to back it up, but I see Hitler as someone who acted completely unconsciously. He was spoiled by his mother after his natural father died, he was a very unhappy boy. He had no positive male role models and developed a negative mother complex. Because of his strangeness he was rejected by the collective, and I would think that this is what caused him to be unable to have a peaceful and good life. He spent his adult life fuelled by anger and by his negative mother complex, in an unconscious drive for power over the society which had rejected him. Once he had power, posessed as he was by his own shadow, his dark side (which had colluded with the mother complex in his drive towards power in the first place). His shadow then directed the evil of the collective shadow of a whole nation towards the dreadful atrocities of the second world war.

Maybe...because the characters you have mentioned (both positive and negative) have been forced out of the collective, they are no longer bound by the collective rules, the rules of behaviour towards their fellow human beings, the collective rule that says 'this is how things are' and it freed them to write their own rules, either for evil, as in the case of Hitler, Pol Pot et al, or positive, like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, who you mentioned, who made ground-breaking leaps forward in philosophy and psychology. Perhaps it is a matter of choice whether to work for 'good' or 'evil'. Maybe it is directed by the Self. It is a very interesting question indeed.





Well, to bang on about Jung again, (I know I probably do this far too much ) Jung said that there is hope for humanity so long as enough people do their inner work. It was a hopeful message but Jung himself was very wary indeed of the collective. He said 'Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as welll organized in his individuality as the mass itself'.

l dlsagree with you paolo. The revolutionaries, extraordinary thinkers, and so had their reasons. They saw problems with the world and made a big difference, be it good or bad. The world can be reformed, it can be changed, and those are people that have achieved such a thing on a great scale.

I disagree with this GREATLY.
Our task is not just to live and reproduce, but better ourselves, achieve. We are human because we forge our lives, and think.
We are not just animals. The world we have today would not even exist without the extraordinary thinkers. Some people just think differently. They are rare, and not just mediocre lowlives. Your beliefs seem to be that of an Anarcho-primitivist.

I say smeg. (From Red Dwarf)