The Great Divide
All of animal nature is divided in two – those who are naturally herd animals and those who are loners, sheep and cows, or hawks and wolves. This divide physically and psychologically runs through humankind as well. Some choose the fearful and join a herd, some choose the fearless and seek lonely heights. Sedentary or crackling with purpose. Some choose the master and some choose the slave. This cannot be effaced from a man’s soul.
It is not that slaves are the prey and masters the predators. In fact it is most often the opposite. It is that the masters live by strength, assertiveness, creativity and independence. They live by voluntary creation and production. They respect power, boldness courage and risk taking. It is natural for them to follow their own path and rebel against conformity. The slaves live by passivity, dependence, meekness and manipulation. It is natural they stick together as herd animals do.
All Man has heroic instincts. But what if he cannot express them? He must live in constant frustration and enfeeblement, going to the self-imposition of his own self-censorship in order to conform to the disembodied, introjected slave master. He must direct his natural strength and assertiveness against his very own natural strength and assertiveness and in denying this agency he thereby devotes his life to succor. And he must live with the resentment, anguish and self-hatred this causes.
The instinct to obey like so is the genetic inheritance from the slave camp where our ancestors obeyed or were slain. Yet today, the individualist revolution demands that the slaves who do not obey this narcissistic introject will not only survive but overwhelm. In the coming age where we draw from deep, archaic meaning inscribed in our bones which compels us to cultivate and cherish our capacity to envision the future and act decisively upon in, the culture of the slave is not just starved, its genes are edited away. The market, progress, a new worldview around the structure of nature overwhelmingly demands that human beings act on the basis for voluntarism and creative agency alone. The confluence of digital, censorship-free, borderless sound money to reward and guard capital against counterfeit, and artificial intelligence which outcompetes the work of the repetitive and herdlike, simply creates a food desert for sheep morality.
And what is moral to the sheep? Grazing peacefully, sticking close together with others like you, not straying. What is bad to the sheep? Wolves. It is important for sheep to convince wolves to be more sheeplike. To the wolf, strength, viscousness, and contempt for the sheep are moral.
Leftism and statism are the religion invented to ritualize sheepishness. This much has been known since the beginning. What has been less well known is how leftist subversion has been concealed, that its main goals have been masked. Leftists want to graze peacefully among others just like them, yet on pastures owned by and tended by masters. The goal is to fool masters into believing they are likewise sheep. The aggressive, the strong, the powerful, and the creative must be cast as evil in order to graze their fields unmolested. They mask a collapsed desire to predate upon the wolves which is deeply insidious in its stuntedness.
The Epimethean slave must sacrifice the Promethean masters by making what is noble, generative and courageous into the enemy. On behalf of Zeus or Yahweh or the monistic totalizing state, Epimethean sheep morality must scapegoat the creators and owners and all psychological traits possessed by rarified individuals. Indeed, the religions of Yahweh, of Zeus, have their roots in moralizing this act of sacrifice and scapegoating into the ecclesiastical. A grand “who do you think you are to do that?” is institutionalized as the excuse for mimetic violence inflicted on creative, rebellious heterodoxy. They expose a natural hatred towards the desire of creators to preserve the capital toward which a “master’s” moral instincts compel him.
Empedocles, The Sage of Agrigento
The early radical, pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (434-494 BC) described the fundamental quality of dissonance and dynamic tension in the nature of the cosmos. In his lessons on Love and Strife Empedocles rejected monism of his day, the idea of the times which held that all reality was predestined fate under the aegis of Zeus, that all things trend toward one in some universal sorting of otherwise irreducibly different particulars within the cosmos. Empedocles described a cosmos wrenched between forces of creation and destruction, of cohesion and disintegration. The cosmos was an irreducible dissonance and perpetual coincidence of opposites, of indestructible and opposing forces in a fundamentally dialectic process of competing heterodoxies were always arising and emerging.
It was the indestructability and opposing nature of these forces which causes change to be non-linear, which in turn is the preceding natural reality for which Man is “designed,” and thus why a sense for Beauty, meaning and creative capacity were placed in the center of his being.
When humans are cornered, we still often act like animals. Just like gnawing off a limb to wrench free, we cannibalize our capacity to drive attention to the gestalt, meta-nature of the world. In those moments we obsess around the conceit that the world is just things. That we progress mechanistically from thing to thing in a reductionist materialism which assumes away everything about human purpose being anything but utilitarian. It is the heroic, the most noble within us, which does not renege on the transcendent nature of human purpose even when the fates of Yahweh and his inertia-bound tortures chain us to the rock for all the gaggling onlookers. Most especially in these poignant ordeals, when we turn our attention to the way in which destiny unfolds through synthesis and syncretism, in non-linear ways, we gain a sense of the utter creative might of Mankind within us that is our possession. These primitive truths which unite interlinked values help orient the consciousness. We reset our attention and attraction again to what is moral and beautiful, beyond what mere cognitive mechanics, let alone doctrinairism, can apprehend inductively. If we practice this enough, this heroism will begin to grow spontaneously. It will come to actively seek out “its antithesis in order to pronounce a more and grateful exultant “yes” to its own self” (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals).
Rather than casting nature as fatalistic and cyclical between ages of cohesion and disintegration, Empedocles’ worldview in fact pointed towards the nobility of Man’s nature as dynamic and creative, forever rising to the ordeals of nature as dissonant and polarizing. Man’s nature is always in search of greater capacity and agency in his response to these shifting polarities and cosmic forces, and that this capacity was the lifeblood of his innate nobility. The implication was so deep in fact that it mirrored Martin Heidegger twenty-five centuries later, that even mental models themselves are tools of a tool making race, which fashions worldviews and ideologies to overcome and overwhelm in this gargantuan arc of dialectical processes.
Masters are imbued with courageous, ennobling and creative traits in order to address the cosmic reality Empedocles describes. Yet in our age, these traits have been condemned. Empedocles’ underlying virtue and beauty-seeking quality in human nature today is at odds with a national economy of financialization and its inductive, “derivative-into-general” framing of the world.
In contrast to the fundamental dissonance in the cosmos of Empedocles, statists and leftists conceive of all nature as one monistic whole – an ambrosia field where all is one. Implicit in the desire to invert the morality of a people is the desire to conceal the inversion, which reflects the implicit knowledge that the morality of the herdlike overgrazer does in fact cause civilizational collapse. The niche morality of the Epimethean herd offers a discreet utility, but also demands that morality-at-large has become immoral. It propagates through generating poverty and immorality. In fact, morality itself is the “danger of dangers” (Nietzsche). This way it can be morality itself which is to blame for the paroxysm and collapse caused by the herd’s mindlessness and conformist overgrazing.
Today, markets are geared for low-stakes, not high-stakes thinking. But they are also geared to reducing the gains in purchasing power a currency experiences when the technology of the masters generates greater production. The ambrosia grazed by the herd is the rent produced when a currency is devalued and the counterfeits which leverage the greater productivity of technological science as collateral are liquidated and distributed. Paradoxically, perversely, the greater the non-linear change generated by creators, the more financial repression and loss of freedom is required. The dysgenic, inductive, rent-seeking worldview is not just guided by a deliberately faulty idea chain, it is fundamentally anti-Man.
And like the tragedy of the commons, today the fields are in fact all grazed out. The United States owes $33 trillion not counting state/municipal debt, private debt and unfunded liabilities. It is a zenith in the age of slave morality.
And as Empedocles would predict, our age of cohesion, monism and herd values is giving way to the age of dynamic tension where creative strength and the morality of innovation, rebellion and heterodoxy will be valorized again. Empedocles’ pendulum has swung its widest into the age of cohesion, and is returning toward the age of strife.
Man is Built for High Stakes
There are two types of problems:
1. Low-Stakes: Lower potential, linear rewards. Decisions are easily reversible.
2. High-Stakes: Higher potential, asymmetric rewards. Decisions are not easily reversible.
With low-stakes problems, given the reward potential is low and the decisions are easily reversible, we can use shortcuts and heuristics to choose our path. We can take a linear approach which feels logical because the use of analogies provide the simian brain with the feeling that it “understands.” But this is but mimicry. These types of choices are merely traps luring us with pretentiousness to ignore the most valuable assets we possess for the sake of following linear process.
With high-stakes problems, asymmetric return potential requires us to think in ways that feel divergent. Factually speaking, profits are statistically anomalous. A creative, non-linear approach requires understanding first that change itself is non-linear. Unlike the animal kingdom, Man was built with the tools for this behavior.
An economy dedicated in some great part to financialization generates a principal part of its revenues from transaction fees. This begins to inculcate a low-stakes mental model and worldview very different from an engineering and manufacturing economy which intrinsically seeks a step shift-style increase in production. It prioritizes a mindset of the specific-to-general, of induction, that concepts can be formed if common qualities or operations among the many disjointed, constituent phenomena floating in a sea of anarchy can be aligned.
Yet it is not this way with humans in nature at all. This specific-to-general approach is in fact form of mimicry-seeking. It is instead, however, that we begin with an ingrained sense of values and meaning that are ontologically prior to how we synthesize value from these floating, disjointed constituents. This 0th principle instinct for meaning is the base layer instinct Man possesses to pursue beauty and enhance his capacity for creative power, without which no patterns in these floating constituents could be recognized at all. This general-to-specific, high-stakes mind frame is deductive, begins with a sense of creativity and the inborn imperative to realize creative vision as a primary value.
An economy of financialization prioritizes the inductive over the deductive. The conceit which begins with an attempt to ramrod a mishmash of disjointed constituent phenomena and statistical data points into a contrived husk of an intellectual framework ultimately leads knowingly, but secretly, to a reliance on counterfeiting by the state when that framework empty of unifying values and meaning breaks down. An economy which does not begin from an appreciation of the emergent genius of creative entrepreneurship at the fountainhead of all market activity inevitably implodes.
The age of strife is an age of creative abundance. It is an age where wholeness cascades into many shapes, and age of deduction principled on the original minerals of Beauty and creative will. The archaic and futuristic archetypal power of the spirit of Prometheus and Western creative morality eliminates the utility of the ideology where human beings to subvert their true nature under the codependent obsequiousness the ancient geist of narcissistic abuse inflicted on the slaves of ancient times. Along with the repeal of slave morality is the repeal of its utility as well as its idea chain. General-to-specific deduction driven by the presence of a-priori intrinsic values, Beauty and meaning will dominate again.
Promethean Man was built for the reality of dissonance and the tension of opposites. He was built for the destiny of the voluntary and the creative, to assert his inborn will in generative, heroic, risk-taking ways. He thunders with nobility into the new age.
-RC