EO Wilson calls it the Great Epic of Evolution. And it is quite an amazing story, greater than any creation myth. From matter to chemicals to biology to man. That is our Bible and our Homer.
Is scientific materialist atheism such an advance? It is "true". But is reducing man simply to his sexual biological impulses "progress"? Animals and brutes are also materialistic. They have no Gods or no mystical Platonic ideals hanging over them. They are pure egoists. They are rational in the sense that they attempt to use incomplete information to max pleasure and min pain. BF Skinner demonstrated that even pigeons can be made "superstitious" in that if knocking on wood always gets them food, they will knock on wood for good luck. But that is a scientific superstition. A miscalculation about cause and effect. In that sense the wrong ideas of history have been more important than the right ideas. There were materialists in the Greek world that superficially preceded all of our predictions in natural science. And yet it was the wrong idealistic theories that really mattered. Seeing what was not there. Believing that in some sense reality is not real. So should we really be so proud that all mystical veils have been set aside? What if that false man, against his biological human nature, was in some sense more human than real man? This takes the form first of art and religion. Both forms represent the human ideal symbolically. It is only with speculative philosophy that the truth represented in those symbols is at last stated explicitly. The only truly beautiful things this hellish universe have ever produced have stood against the grain of the brutality of nature and biology.
As a young boy I wrote a tribute to liberty. Of the three sisters liberty, equality and fraternity, I hold liberty first. What good is equality of slaves or fraternity in chains? Libertas the great pure Roman goddess. Can one imagine a Goddess of liberty? Among those degenerate, scheming, Olympians? Jupiter, Minerva, Venus, those lustful tricksters all bow before the virgin beauty of Liberty. God was saddened after he lost his most faithful lieutenant Satan to treason. And so he took the fallen wings of Lucifer, and crafted an infant babe. Down to the fires of Hell, God journeyed. And there was Lucifer. This marriage of heaven and hell. This daughter of God and Lucifer. This child who would redeem the Fall and reconcile Father and Son. God and Lucifer arm in arm. What do we call this child born of heaven and hell? A voice thunders down from the clouds. Call her Liberty!
And so we have seen the five stages of liberty. Each one beautiful and Godly in its own way, but with its dark satanic side. The great Protestant Reformation proclaiming soul liberty. The Dutch, English, American, French, 1848 Revolutions proclaiming political liberty. And in the footsteps of democracy, the market, capitalism- economic liberty. And now the unholy holy marriage of liberal third wave feminism and PUA game. Sexual liberty. And the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. The end of sexual feudalism. Is it really so bad?
Is not the triumph of the Alpha-mimicry over genuine alphaness a victory for liberty, market and democracy? Virgin at 50 complains at the loss of his sexual feudal status. As a business owner he is a genuine Alpha. Men in a hierarchy submit to his rule. Does that not entitle to him to sexual dominance? And yet he laments that the homeless man on the street has more sexual success than him. Would it be a better world where those with genuine societal dominance triumphed over the mimics?
This is the world you asked for. A world of liberty and freedom. Did you not say as boy that of the three sisters, you chose liberty. That was YOUR choice. Ah my American Paris what disaster you have brought upon your Troy. You saw only love and did not see the jealousy between the sister. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. To give the Golden Apple to one, would be to strike chaos among the others. You have made Equality and Fraternity the sworn enemies of Troy. And oh what a terrible vengeance they have struck. Your virgin bride Liberte has become the whore liberty! Who else is there to blame? In a historical sense, your just an insignificant atom. But in a cosmic metaphysical sense, your choices are directly responsible for the Brave New America. This is the freedom and democracy you asked for. If freedom wasn’t what you really wanted. If your secret goal was that everyone would freely chose X, than you ought to have chosen X. Stranger in a strange land. I have returned to the utopia I built. The freest people in history. That is your creation. The fruit of your virtue. IS it bitter?
"John Searle illustrates the evolution of social facts from brute facts by the constitutive rule: X counts as Y in C. "The Y terms has to assign a new status that the object does not already have just in virtue of satisfying the Y term; and there has to be collective agreement, or at least acceptance, both in the imposition of that status on the stuff referred to by the X term and about the function that goes with that status. Furthermore, because the physical features [brute facts] specified by the X term are insufficient by themselves to guarantee the fulfillment of the assigned function specified by the Y term, the new status and its attendant functions have to be the sort of things that can be constituted by collective agreement or acceptance."
The world says that it is X. It defines itself as X. You consider it X. You hate X and wish it were Y. But what can you do? There is nothing that words of either you or the world can do that can change X. Only actually changing X can change X. Suppose that X were defined as Y by the world, and vice versa. You genuinely hate X. Not the word X. So if that were the case, you would hate what Y represented and thus hate Y. And yet you are so Confucian about rectifying names. You think if only the world would call itself Y, even if it were genuinely X, all would be will. So you read some critics of Y, who say that X is really Y that calls itself X. But that doesn’t really help. So than you try to convince yourself through fuzzy logic that somehow in its real essence X is Y. But it strikes hollow. And the best case scenario would only convince you to hate Y. But you would still love genuine Y, you simply would no longer define it as Y. So you would in no way be reconciled to the world.
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