FORCE IS A HUMANISM

FORCEFULLY CONTEXTUALIZING MAN.

Force Is Strong, It Beats Weakness Anytime.

***

 Abstract: Homo Sapiens, fundamentally, is all about force. And thus, so is humanism. So is wisdom.

 The name of the species is “Homo Sapiens Sapiens”. In English: “Man Wise Wise”. And in which sense is Man Wise Wise  wise about? Wise in the usage of force.

 And how did all this wisdom arise? Through genetic mutations that force facilitated, and implemented. The force of the most domineering species, those even lions feared, the human species. Force protected our fragile, growing brains. And the usage of force has become much more extensive since man has become super brainy. Brains are all about mustering, and mastering, forces.

 So how come conventional humanism ignores this powerful evidence? Simply because conventional humanism tends to be the humanism masters prefer their slaves to have. Even Nietzsche’s ‘Amor Fati’ is so affected. So is Existentialism. Real man does not just exist out there. 

 A human being in full creates worlds, using force, inside out.

***

 FORCE ME UP:

 It’s not even sad, and certainly true that man is about force. Molded by forces, creating new ones. It should be forcefully celebrated. Celebrations are often about force: contemplate fireworks. Those who disagree with this evidence live in denial. OK, living in denial can be best: so does the resigned sheep, when eaten by the wolf. Force is good, when well directed. Just ask bacteria. And good does not happen without force. Such is the theme of this essay: NO FORCE, NO LIFE, NO INTELLIGENCE, NO MORALITY.

 Force.

 A word conventional humanism has been avoiding as if it had the plague. Thus the ostrich’s head is deep in the sand, and its juicy rump, up in the air, ready for clawing by lions. “Why can’t wolves eat grass, as we do?” bleat the sheep. Some questions, like the moon, have no moral answer.

 Here you have an animal (man) driving the entire biosphere to extinction. And some ecologists observing this deplore the usage of force? But it is force that destroys the biosphere, force applied by man, and only other forces applied by man can stop those destroying forces.

 An American acquaintance reading a tweet about force as an essential part of humanism, denounced me as “too far off”, adding he was “off”, “unfriending” me right away. That brutality was fully coherent with yesterday’s humanism’s hysteria on the subject of force. 

 That got me to think: why does conventional humanism hate force so much? Why does it want to be weak so much? How can one hate force so much, in a world, a civilization, that rests on force, so much?

 My irascible (ex)correspondent confused “force” and “abuse”. Those who have studied physics know that force (or, even better, potential) is fundamental to (all of) physics. What is fundamental to physics is fundamental to man.

 Anything can be abused. Anything.

 Those who forcefully deny force as an overwhelming concept, are, at best, hypocrites. And, at worst, severely retarded. How come so much common philosophy got so retarded, then, that so much of the folks also are, and does this explain the civilizational crisis we are experiencing?

***

 LOGIC IS STRONG, BUT CONTEXT, STRONGER; Context Overwhelms Deduction Forcefully:

 The irascible clown was prisoner of a deeper flaw than faulty logic: simplistic semantics, too meager a context to support reality. In his context, force is abuse, a manifestation of evil. However, in its physical sense and more frequent occurrence, force is just what brings change. In particular what turns oppressive infamy into delicious salami.

 This, neglecting the importance of context, was Socrates’ main strategic character flaw. Socrates set-up for himself little logical games he then won (easily, as he had rigged the context). But, as Alexander showed when he cut the Gordian Knot, logic is nothing if one uses force, and more of a context often gives greater force.

 Nietzsche too neglected context when he embraced fate. The Franks he alluded to, calling them “noble” were not just free of other men, they were free of fate as much as they could get the better of it, in a good fight they always welcomed. They welcomed hatred and resentment as calls to violent, forceful action. That, in turn was directed towards many hostile forces, including intolerable Christianism and invasive Islamism.

***

 LIFE IS FORCE. INTELLIGENCE EVEN MORE SO:

 At first sight, life is an orderly organization, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy, that is, disorder, keeps on increasing. So life contradicts the Second Law, on the face of it. That law can be contradicted only by the application of force. That is the first obvious way in which force enters what defines us. Even an urchin’s symmetry is the expression of force.

 That leads to a number of philosophico-physical questions: what is force? Where does the organizing force that defines life come from? Those questions are very deep, and involve the deepest philosophy of mathematics too; we will eschew them here (however, see the note).

 What is force? A deviation from routine, an inflection of inertia, a change of geodesics. Short of changing the trajectory of the planet itself, certainly extinguishing the biosphere qualifies as a considerable change of trajectory. A considerable usage of force.

***

 FORCE, ESPECIALLY THE FORCE OF TRUTH, ALLOWED MAN TO BE:

 What is intelligence? Using force to one’s advantage. Picture a bacteria going up stream towards a food source the smell of which it detected. It is using the force of its propelling system to its (future) advantage. If the bacteria had no possibility of using force, it could not deflect its existence closer to its (future) subsistence.

 Chimps were never far from trees. Not so with the ancestors of man, thanks to their usage of force. The very principle of man was to evolve into an all conquering ape who uses so much force, the lions themselves contend in vain. Thus the apeman could settle the savannah park, and also the rest of the planet. And force was not just about protection, but energy procurement. Eating energy and protein rich meat allowed more time and energy for thinking (and first of all, about projecting more force, such as about how best to hunt, make war, and grab lots of females)

 Of course, there is no civilization without force: civilization means cities, and one needs force to build houses, let alone operate a city, and keep it alive, by forcefully bringing goods and water to it, while evacuating waste. The Greco-Roman empire existed because of long distance trade, rendered possible by 10,000 ships, all using force. Force could be used passively: see aqueducts and other hydraulics.

 What is intelligence? Doing the right thing. “Doing”: how does one do anything without force? No doing, nor even ding, without force.

***

 WHY ARE SO MANY MENTAL SYSTEMS ADVERSE TO FORCE? ALTHOUGH CIVILIZATION RESTS ON FORCE?

 Naturally civilization has to be civil, and so the usage of illegal force within society has to be discouraged. Oppressive mental systems hide behind that to implement their oppression of the full, but innocent nature of man.

 The cruel masters, the plutocrats, fear that force will be used against them. So they instill the People with the fear of force. Not only the fear that this terrible thing could be used against the innocent, but also the fear of wielding it against abuse. 

 That is why Christianity was a slave religion: so that there would be masters, who reigned with their minds, rather than tiring themselves beating up their subjects as much as they otherwise would have to. The occasional execution helped: the last person assassinated by the church for heresy was in the Nineteenth Century. This violence of Christianity by mental means unfolded until the Twentieth Century: the papacy, namely Pie XII, was an active collaborator of Nazism, the religion of the Master Race, and was so effective that nobody think of it to this day.

 Although Nietzsche posed as the re-evaluator of all values, and an adversary of “slave religion”, Nietzsche was all about having the force to accept the force of one’s fate. That alleviated subjects from extraneous baggage such as resentment, he opined. But what is wrong about resentment? If I resent Obama and Krugman for having set-up too small of a real stimulus to the economy of the USA, there is nothing wrong with me. It reminds me there is something wrong with them.

 Nietzsche, following a lot of top thinkers of the enlightenment, spent a lot of time heaping scorn on Christianity. However, he was the son of a pastor, and his belief in fate is immediately recognizable as the old Christian quandary of the problem of Grace and the Christo-Muslim attitude symbolized by the slogan “Inch Allah!”

 And what of many of the French intellectuals of the mid Twentieth Century, those who embraced decolonization, Mao, after embracing Vichy and Stalin? Well, they embraced all these mighty forces, because they were weak. Weakness was their religion. They produced an obscure philosophy, Existentialism, whose shadowy existence denied context. It had no more impact on infamy and plutocracy than Heidegger putting on his Nazi uniform had on civilization. Heidegger, too, was weak, and thus their hero.

 Nietzsche was clear, strong in his elocution, and said many good little truths. However Nietzsche embraced the oldest message of the leaders of empire: learn to love your fate. Many French philosophers (Sartre, Foucault, etc.) were neither clear nor strong enough to embrace anything, but themselves, and the sycophants who licked their bottoms clean.

 As Sartre puts it in his ‘Existentialism is a Humanism‘: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.” That is silly. Man does not just exist, and “surge”. Humans are molded by forces, including some mental ones from caregivers. There is a debate of forces at work, and that debate is called man.

***

 WHEN MAN IS SO STRONG AS TO BE A MAKER:

 Nietzsche could not escape his own fate. Nobody can. For this travel that we cannot escape, Nietzsche enjoins to carry as little baggage as possible. No resentment. So be it. But so what?

 Nietzsche was just scratching the surface of the nature of man, when he proclaimed again the religion of accepting one’s fate, a religion very well known, indeed, as it is the one the masters prefer, ever since plutocracy appeared, and it has ruled. Nietzsche’s message was without any originality.

 Verily, Nietzsche and the slave religions missed the big picture completely. Man is strong. Although man has to embrace fate, man is also a creator of worlds, and a maker of fate itself. For those who doubt that, have a look at the tortured planet. Fate is elaborated there, poisoned river, after polluted sea, extinguished species, after mercury sprinkled Arctic, melting icecap, after dying plankton, and burned out forest.

 For those who doubt that, have a look at the grander work of man.

***

 WHEN FORCE IS USED TOO LATE:

 During their reign, the Nazis assassinated one million and a half Jewish children. With the best of intentions, of course.

 The Nazis killed even more innocent children, and people, than that. However, by 1935, it was clear, considering the Nuremberg racial hatred laws, that the Nazis had they set the framework for such a holocaust.

 Yet, they were not opposed, and the United Kingdom and the USA (among other vermin, such as Sweden) kept on collaborating with the would be mass murderers, transferring ever more power to them. (Even thoroughly hostile the French republic, led by a Jew, sent her athletes to Berlin in 1936.)

 Why? Lack of force. Lack of desire to use force. Lack of relish for the usage of force. Force was not used. Neither intellectual force, nor physical force. Force was nowhere to be seen. Yet, what greater delight than to crush a terrible infamy such as Nazism? If that pleasure does not exist enough, it ought to be taught.

 When finally France and Britain decided to use force, September 1, 1939, it was all too late, and the alliance between Hitler, Stalin and American plutocrats had become nearly unstoppable. 70 million dead were what it took. OK, better late than never. Millions of assassinated children were part of the price paid for having not enough intellectual and moral force in a timely manner.

 Now one can see something similar with the spectrum of Merkler rising. Fortunately, she is in the process of being stopped in her tracks by the force of the (mostly French) electorate. The others have been there, and seen that, this time they have the force.

***

 WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO REALIZE FORCE IS THE ESSENCE OF INTELLIGENCE? THUS MAN?

 Because only force allows to do what is necessary.

 Just look at the austerity programs implemented around the West, from Greece to the USA. Austerity is characterized by a renunciation of force. It’s something monks do (thanks to others, in the background, who are working and fighting for them).

 When Obama came to power, instead of being forceful like the wheelchair bound Roosevelt, who closed all the banks, and enforced a giant WPA, Obama put in place a tiny real stimulus program (not any larger than that of Sarkozy in France). OK, Obama played basketball a lot, so he felt very active. The activity of the spinal cord, not that of the higher mental functions FDR displayed.

 Merkel has been much more devious. Whereas she embarked on heavy stimulus inside Germany (10% GDP!) plus massive Kurtzarbeit and other socialist, central planning tricks, all of which bore excellent fruit, she has been pushing deliriously on murderous austerity on the rest of Europe, earning herself full Nazi garb in caricature, and theperfidic nickname of ‘Merkler‘ from yours truly. (That theme will be developped in the next essay.) 

 Europe is equipped with the most plutocracy friendly banking system in the world. Unbelievable, but true. All the screaming from wall Street about Europe being a ‘welfare state” masks that fact. And all banking systems in existence are plutocracy friendly, as the Chinese Prime Minister admitted recently about big Chinese banks (adding that was intolerable). To break that institutional state of affairs, force has to be used. Mental force, physical force (white nights of debates among politicians, economists, and philosophers, studying of the situation by the common citizenry, demonstrations…)

 Similarly, to build a world sustainable economy, massive force has to be used.

 The root of the financial-economic-social-civilizational crisis is that plutocracy has envenomed democracy with torpor and a paralysis of the mind. As the People got persuaded that force was anathema, the forces of evil were left unopposed. So, out of the lofty, thoroughly idiotic perspective that humanism had nothing to with force was born, naturally enough, a humanism without force. And now a civilization without force, something that does not grow anymore, but implodes onto itself.

 Time for some vigor. Voltaire’s recommendation to crush infamy requires some force. Let’s gather it. It starts with observation, analysis, resolve. It’s not as bad as when our ancestors had to face real lions.

 Context is made of bits and pieces of semantics, and all connect to the emotional. To be a human in full, it’s important to feel good about force. Otherwise one will end up without dignity, as the dinner of hyenas, or banksters. A weak, degenerated version of humanism is bringing us, and our biosphere, to an ominous doom. Time for some glory.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

 Note on life’s vital principle. How come life grow within an ever more chaotic world? How does life overwhelms the second law of Thermodynamics? This is related to a thought experiment called Maxwell’s Daemon. The Daemon separates gas molecules, fabricating a cold compartment in a tank. Maxwell did not present a mechanism to do this. Nor does life.

 My hunch though is that a so far unrevealed force, tied to low energy Quantum Mechanics, the collapse force, is what presides to the rise of this order. Big particle accelerators cannot study that force. (But research towards the Quantum Computer will.)

*

Note on: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/humanism-is-force-no-fly-over-libya/

The present essay offers an abstract framework for the older one, which urged to intervene in Libya to throw out the bloody dictatorship.

Tags: Force, Humanism