Aesthetic Materialism

  The Church of Satan is a bit of a paradox -  on the one hand, it stressed extreme individualism; on the other, it was a community, an institution, a church.  The founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, was always going on about how he was seeking "superior" people - an "elite" - a community of the most extraordinary and successful members of a generation.  And yet contemporary Satanists tend not to be members of any elite, but rather losers, resentful misfits, nerds, and incels.  Ah, well.  Back to the drawing board.  If I were a Satanist - I'm not, but if I were - and I were seeking an elite of superior, successful people, I wouldn't look for them among the followers of Ayn Rand, who are the most resentful, nerdliest nerdlings of them all, but rather among the communists. What makes communism such a hotbed of elites?  First and foremost, I love communists for their clothing.  Communists are, on average, far better dressed than other p...

Playing fast and loose with the truth Let's get faster! Let's get looser! Fast! Loose! Fast! Loose! Let's get faster! Let's get looser! Fast! Loose! Fast! Loose!

  "I am whatever you say I am" -Eminem, "The Way I Am"   The above quote outlines a kind of feint, which I call the Eminem strategy.  It goes like this: "You have insulted me, called me a name.  You expect me to defend myself, and prove that I'm not that thing.  But the joke's on you - I am that thing.  And I'm proud of it!" The Eminem strategy is a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu.  With it, not only can one render your opponent's attacks useless, but one can use the force of their own blow to topple them over. I think primarily of the old anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.  Before him, the term "anarchist" was used almost exclusively as an insult.  People attacked William Godwin and Percy Shelley, calling them anarchists.  Shelley threw the term back in their faces - in his famous poem "The Masque of Anarchy," written in response to the Peterloo Massacre, he said that the government of England were the true anarchists.  In ...

      Marx's most serious theoretical error - his moment of real utopianism - was when he said that "Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."  (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)  This bizarre claim, which reminds me of Wittgenstein's idiotic notion that "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.  The riddle does not exist.  If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6:5), is more of a religious belief than it is a scientific observation.  But it is simply false, which is easy to see.  Humanity has all kinds of problems, both theoretical and practical, that it is unable to solve, and has been unable...

  Kafka is almost the opposite of an existentialist, at least the way Sartre defines the term. Sartre thought that there was no given meaning for experience (such as religion might provide) and was therefore for boldly giving meaning to one's own experience, creatively. Kafka's metier was all about the lingering doubt, or fear, that this is not enough... that, in fact, there IS a given meaning to one's experience, completely out of one's own control, and that it is a dark and terrifying and inscrutable meaning.