Humanism Versus Buddhism

The very fact that there is a distinction to be made between, “Humanism” and “Buddhism” tells volumes. No ideology with pretensions to goodness should stand distinct from humanism. Because that means, contradicting human ethology. And Buddhism contradicts human ethology, big time. Arguably, it’s way worse than Abrahamism: even the disguised cannibalism of Abrahamism is more naturally anchored in human nature.

What’s the problem in not been occurred in human nature? Well, the more so, arguably, the more of a superstition: standing (“stare”) above (“super”) reality.

Another problem with Buddhism is that it was instigated by a Prince, Gautama Buddha. I am not a Prince, nor do I know any, but I suspect that any Prince would be partial to making the Commons into sheep. So that they can be directed where the shepherds of men when men to be led (to slaughter, or, at the very least, to be shorn and milked, as needed). The fact is, Buddhism instills passivity: passivity is perfect for Princes. Passivity is not a good propellant for evolution. Individuals are created as children, it’s very hard for them to quit their mental geometry later.

The next problem with Buddhism, as with Islamism and Christianism, is that there are many variants of this superstition. In particular, they are more or less superstitious. Tibetan Buddhism, which is extremely superstitious, is pretty far from Zen Buddhism, which is pretty secular. 

Tibetan Buddhists believe that if they rotate around unclimbed Mount Kailash, good things will happen. The PRC gave famed alpinist Reinhold Messner the authorization to climb it, but he declined… Good boy.

Variants of Buddhism are just as far from each other as Wahhabism/Salafism is far from Sufism (the latter having itself drastically different variants). The Mahāyāna (“Great Vehicle) Buddhism is the largest major tradition of Buddhism existing today, with 53.2% of practitioners, compared to 35.8% for Theravada and 5.7% for Vajrayana. The Great Vehicle is more altruistic: it may have been Christianized (personal opinion), as Christian missions reached Sri Lanka as early as the Third Century, and India by the 100s, Common era (just when Mahāyāna surfaced). (I have lots of idiosyncratic opinions…)

Just to give an example, Tibetan Buddhism comprises four lineages. Temperaments can run high: top associates of the Dalai Lama killed each other for reasons of great theological import, in the obscure spiritual caves they roam.  (Interestingly, I made a Google Search of this fact I know to be true; however, Google informed me that, under European Privacy Law, this search was omitted:I’m now in Europe…It took me a huge amount of time to find the link above, and I had to be crafty. This shows European law to be friendly to the Elite, AKA plutocracy…)  

The fundamental problem with Buddhism is its very secular foundation. The deepest intuition of Buddhism, that pain has to be avoided, at the cost of perception. It is as inhuman as it gets.

Some may object to this description. And the objection may be valid, depending upon the variant of Buddhism considered. Some Buddhists will say:”Pain has to be avoided, at the cost of most human emotion”. That’s still inhuman.

Why? The brain thinks, not just with strict implications, but also with emotions. This is even true at the level of pure logic. Emotions can’t be avoided, even if one restricts oneself to logic itself.

Even the parodic character in Star Trek, Mr. Spock, depends very heavily on emotions: after all, one has to have FAITH in the axioms of logic. Besides logics can be anything, by changing the axioms. One choses axioms of logic from emotion, not logic. Logic does not select logic. Logic is; volition, volition from emotion, does the rest.

Emotional computers are coming, make no mistake. Serious Quantum Computers will be emotional… (Yes, I know, that could be a problem…)

By then, when it becomes obvious that, for achieving true Artificial Intelligence, one needs emotions, Buddhism will suffer an irretrievable blow.

Many Buddhists say:”Wait, meditation is good, it changes the brain”. Right. No need to be a Buddhist to meditate, though. I meditate several hours a day, I am a meditation machine, but I usually never mention it, it’s a s natural to me as breathing, and I know the of the impudence of telling other people to “meditate”, as if they were such fools that they never meditate. Basically, if one never meditates, one is just a mechanical parrot. Because one has no indigenous thinking.

Moreover, to deflate further the Buddhist bandwagon, Buddhist meditation is only one type of meditation. However admirable. There are other types of meditation, fully incompatible with Buddhist meditation, and which give excellent results Buddhism can’t get at. An example is Taoist meditation.

Make no mistake: I welcome individuals with dubious behavior to engage in so-called secular Buddhism, if they didn’t gather such a level of wisdom yet, that they still insist to engage in road rage, drug abuse, drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco or THC, insulting their friends thoughtlessly, betraying their loving ones, clutching guns, potentially lethal behaviors, abusing the innocent, in being self-destructive, or in total incapacity to meditate in any way, etc.

I will just say that philosophy, full force, is vastly superior to Buddhism and other isms. Philosophy itself has its own isms, many of them. To quote a few: Stoicism, Cynicism, Existentialism, Marxism, Nominalism, Epicureanism, Positivism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Hedonism, Realism, Pragmatism, Materialism, etc.

Allright, the Politically Correct pseudo-left which rules, or, more exactly, ruins the West loves the Dalai Lama certainly the most famous incarnation of Buddhism known worldwide. I am cool with some of what Dalai says, but I have been known to agree even with Lamas in the high Andes. However, my harsh criticism of Buddhism, and other eastern religions (I barely got started here) was pleased to see that, last time my friend Obama received the DL at the White House, His Holiness had to skirt the garbage of the backside…

However interesting the debate, “Secular Buddhism” is pretty much an oxymoron. The mood of passivity Buddhism and its derivatives generated made East Asia fall behind West Asia (Europe). Now, of course, Buddhism and its derivatives or antecedents (Confucianism) has been wiped out as a leading mood, in places such as Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. It has been replaced by the mood which enabled Western Europe to forcefully industrialize in the Nineteenth Century (If Czar Peter The Great read this, he would be outraged and point out that, three centuries ago, he did exactly what Mao, Chou En Lai and Deng Tsiao Ping did, in the last few decades… Right, I present my excuses…) The point is that PROGRESSIVISM is not compatible with Buddhism. All leaders in the East have concluded it’s not, and they have chosen the philosophical path forged by Europe (and now idiotically second-guessed there!)

Too many superstitious religions around, for this small planet. Respecting them, amounts to procreating them. We need hard-core secularism, and the religion of the planetary Republic.

Patrice Ayme’

Golden Rule Reassessed

The so-called “Golden Rule” is never to do to others what one would not like others to do to oneself. Or variation thereof. It implicitly, and naively, assumes people don’t like to suffer, or to inflict pain and extermination onto everybody. It also assumes that right and wrong are sharply defined, like night and day (that is literally the root of the religion known as Manichaeism) Thus the Golden Rule is inapplicable: history, Christianism, Islamism are full of people, or even a “God” who is a glutton for pain, punishment, suffering, even when applied to oneself, not just others.

Buddhism is different that way. It just as naively assumes that people want to avoid suffering at all cost. But if we did this, it’s not clear we could exist. Life is full of pains, and that’s alright, because that’s how we pay for it. Actually the best way would be to absorb a deadly dose of barbiturates, and be done, Marilyn Monroe style.

Thus, fundamentally, Buddhism is so irrelevant, as to be inhuman (whereas Christianism and Islamism are all too human!) Pain and suffering are intrinsically human. Pain and suffering are regulators of the human species. Regulation by pain and suffering is not a necessary consequence of the animal condition. Pain and suffering do not necessarily regulate all species. They do not regulate marmots. When marmots come out of hibernation, the head marmot considers her folk, and how many have died over winter. She wants a group of between 15 and 21 individuals. Say three have died: she asks her consort to make her three little ones. Then she turns on a pheromone to turn him off. 

Humans Are Not Marmots. Agent Of Evolution Such as Human Beings Are Made For Deception, And Destruction, Not Contraception

The dominant female cannot bear more than two to four babies. If she is unable to replenish the colony, all by herself, she makes it so that her consort impregnates another female. Thus marmots are made for the Golden Rule: they regulate their population in a very gentle, specific way. Humans do not regulate their population through fancy birth control, but through mayhem, pain, suffering, deprivation, famine.

Reciprocal perversity, not just reciprocal altruism, is then intrinsic to the human species: this . Higher wisdom consists not in denying reality,  but in circumnavigating it, for the best. We have so much technology, nowadays, the fanciest moral principles can be brought to bear.     

Take an example. The cases of Mr. Assange (an Australian citizen) and Mr. Snowden (an US citizen). Assange and Snowden are the two most prominent whistle-blowers in the world (lanceurs d’alerte, alarm launchers, literally, in French).

Julian Assange revealed that US military forces, using an attack helicopter, had killed journalists, and then fired again and again, on would-be rescuers. One would think that US authorities, were they compatible with the Golden Rule as traditionally interpreted, and the Jesus god Obama talks about all the time, would have tanked Assange for this revelation. After all, a democracy should have armed forces beyond any suspicion. (The military forces of the UK, the US and France went through the Second World War without extremely blatant, shocking war crimes committed, although the Americans were ruthless, the French somewhat vengeful, and both the French and British suffered striking war crimes from Nazi forces in May-June 1940). 

Instead of lauding Assange, the Washington government has gone all out to capture Assange, and had an ex-CIA agent accusing him of unclear activities. The same violent treatment was extended to Edward Snowden, who had the presence of mind to escape to Russia (making Putin a force for the good!) Snowden’s crime was to reveal that the so-called “social networks” and “search engines” of the USA were actually spy networks searching for miscreants. That, in turn, brought many questions, including how much of world public opinion is fabricated deliberately by the US “Deep State”.

Philosophically, it means the Obama administration had it all wrong. At least all wrong, if, and only if, democracy is what it wants to preserve. In democracy, or justice, and democracy is about justice for all, as all, information is the prime ingredient. A really democratic state will never, ever pursue information providers. Whistle-blowers are among the saints of democracy. 

Assange and Snowden made precious gifts to US democracy. In answer, Obama offered We The People a poisoned dish: serving rabid nationalism the frantic fever of blind vengeance, forgetting that revealing crimes against democracy should be rewarded, not punished.

None of this is an accident, it’s a system, white as the driven snow, same as a polar bear on a rampage, and for the same reason. Ask the average democratic voters: they will telly you Hillary Clinton is more “Golden Rule” than her friend and rival, Donald Trump. As Bill Moyers put it, in his essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State“:

“Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.”

Take another example: tolerance. Many feel, rightly, that the Golden Rule should include tolerance. Tolerance is necessary to be nice to others. Tolerance goes beyond just being nice to others. It’s about being nice to oneself, be it only by becoming smarter.

Tolerance is, fundamentally, a neurobiological problem. Any brain is a set of neuroglial networks. Any seriously new idea, or new emotion, is a threat against one, or several elements of that set. To welcome the threat requires a deliberate effort. One needs to train oneself to such mental gymnastics, deconstructing, fusioning and rebuilding. Mind. Tolerance is necessary for adopting superior ideas, and feelings, discarding inferior ones.

How does one train for tolerance? One should not be proud of being a citizen of some predigested, mass mental system. Instead one should be ashamed. Instead of following the herd, bleating altogether, one should shout from rooftops: “I am a citizen of the mind“.

The Golden Rule is thus, in part, necessarily, just from the inclusion of tolerance, about building a better mind. And tolerance is not easy to foster (as shown by the local interdiction of “burkini” on some beaches in France. See #tolerance). Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance, but, potentially, its exact opposite:collaborating with mental fascism. We can see that the traditional Golden Rule is not easy to apply.

The real Golden Rule of humanity is that deeper thinking always works best, in the long run. For all that is the most worth it.  

Patrice Ayme’

Could Veganism Cause Extinctions?

For millions of years, hominids evolved as ever more efficient killer apes. This allowed entire human races or subspecies to live off meat. Such as the Homo Sapiens Sapiens variant Cro-Magnon, or Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis. Meat was a hyper concentrated energy source. just ask seals, dolphins, killer whales, humpback whales, polar bears and walruses.

East Africans, tall and lean, evolved to run down exhausted preys in the mid-day sun, they became ancestral to many people today (most of all of them, according to the “Out of Africa” theory). Cro-Magnon looked like ancestral Scandinavians, tall and strong, ready to fight the fiercest lions, wolves and bears. They are ancestral to many people today. They long lived in present day France, when France was landlocked by enormous glaciers on towering mountains, all around, or the giant ice sheets form the north, and the icy seas, west and south. Then non-glaciated Europe was a land of tundra, and enormous herds of often gigantic beasts.

Hunting is our past, how we evolve, and so was war. Vegans want to change all this. They claim that the future is not to touch adversely the smallest hair or feather. Thus they suggest to not use any animal product whatsoever. Instead, one should go fully agricultural. Agri-cultural means to cultivate the ager, the field. Hence the question: Vegans say they are friendly to beasts, they want to live off fields they cultivate, but are fields friendly to beasts?   

Pure Veganism Would Lead To The Extermination Of This Species

This is the paradox: is one friendly with others, when one exclude others? (The question is not just for Brexiters) When vegans exclude all animal species, are they friendly to animals?

Nature is good and evil. Gods stand above nature (supernatural), they don’t exclude it. Could it be that, when vegan want to exclude evil, they want to exclude nature?

How so? Very simple. Contemplate the world we have. Look at the Auroch. The last auroch died in a royal preserve in Poland in the Seventeenth Century. Europeans domesticated aurochs perhaps 25,000 years ago. Through a careful mix of natural and artificial selection, over 10,000 generations, Europeans created the European domestic cattle (meanwhile Indians and Africans were doing the same with their own breeds; the African zebu was probably evolved in India first; it resists well to African diseases such as sleeping sickness, malaria…)

Or consider sheep and goats: millions live today. They are descendants of their wild ancestors.

What do vegans want to do with all those animals? Through these millions of these domesticated animals survive the ancient species which graced the Earth for tens of millions of years.

This is not an idle question. Take chicken. The rooster was made by the Romans into the symbol of Celtic lands (which they called “Gallia”, the land of chicks…) In the wild, chickens, initially from South East Asia, are basically extinct. By refusing the presence of chicken inside plates, and in the fields, vegans condemn the species to terminal extinction.

Does hard core veganism allows to ride on horses and run dogs?

Conclusion: hard core veganism would lead to the terminal extinction of the most megafauna. They claim to be friendly to the individuals, but they will kill the species.

Solution: keep on using animal species, but do it in what is, ironically enough, called a “humane” way. If a rooster has a beautiful, easy, comfortable life, and then loses by surprise its head in a laser explosion, is it so bad? Would this sudden death be worse than enjoying life prior to this impromptu, sudden, unforeseen and painless demise?

Is veganism, pushed to extreme, the psychological equivalent of a brat who declares to his mom that he will refuse to breathe, rather than to eat its vegetables? Mummy here, being nature herself?

There is an extremely powerful metapsychological objection to veganism: we have seen that story, the story of renouncing life, many times before. Periodically, a slave religion arises, and recommends to us to lay prone, refuse life, reject even self-defense, accept to live small, barely eating, afraid to bother others in all and any way. This apparently bizarre cult is only natural, and is an evolutionary selected mode of operation: that of the prey which surrenders to those red in fang and claw.

When an animal of one of these species which get preyed upon, is surrounded, and death is unavoidable, it is often seen surrendering to its fate: this is part of the co-evolution of ecological systems (something not well-known, but still a fact). Not the evolution of the fittest individual as the naive evolutionists of the 19 C had it, but the evolution of entire ecological systems, as individuals made of multitudes. Is the vegan is a beast which wants to die and disguises this as a lofty language, while dragging hundreds of large species in its hateful discourse? Hateful of what? Hateful of life itself. Life is about living, thus suffering and dying. Not that the latter activities are necessarily something to look for, just the opposite. But mitigating and escaping them, is the spice of life.

Thus it is not excluded that the rise of veganism corresponds to surrender to mighty plutocrats: instead of tearing and shredding plutocratic substance, vegans decide that broccoli is all the protein they need. ‘They are starving? Let them eat grass!’ Say these new Marie-Antoinettes of the abysmal age.

Thus we have seen that story before. Whenever great plutocrats rise, We The People tends to roll on its back, presents its belly, and waits for horror, persuading themselves that horror is all what they ever wanted. Buddhism preaches that it is better to give up on life in full, rather than indulge into giving and receiving suffering. After its creation by a Princeling (not a coincidence), Buddhism took over most of India. But the predators laid in wait. They re-took all of India.

Vegans can preach. The only way what they preach can not lead to mass extinction, is by reserving around half of the land mass to total wilderness, in all and any ecological zone. That could, even should, be done. However, refusing the essence of life, preferring non-existence to death, is another matter entirely.

Patrice Ayme’

Against Emotional Shrinkage

Is Rejecting The Human Condition Wise? Or Simply Inhuman?

In “Against Invulnerability”, philosophy professor Todd May has walked some of my way, and I will help him with some of the rest (empathy in action!). Here is Todd, in the New York Times, for “The Stone”, a succession of rather stony essays in philosophy:

“Like many of us, I am often troubled. I am distressed by my failure to be more than I am: a better philosopher, a better family member, a better person. And I know that if I could take a little more distance on the daily goings-on in my world that trouble me, I would probably be better in many if not all of these ways. This knowledge leads me to think of those philosophies that counsel rising above the things that disturb me so that I may arrive at a tranquil state of mind. Philosophies like Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and possibly Epicureanism (the ancient philosophy, not its modern association with pleasures of the flesh) offer different ways of achieving such a tranquil state, and so they are tempting. I believe, however, that for most of us they are a false if beguiling path.”

Chameleons Are Not Stoic, They Anticipate The World

[Chameleons are found in the Namibian desert, not just tropical rain forest; there they have to cover huge distances in search of prey… while avoiding to become dinner, so they change colors just as fast as they run across. The chameleonic way of life is not Buddhist, just begging inertly for crumbs from the rich, dressed in bright orange.]

Let me applaud Todd May. There was some predictable screaming on the Internet from Stoics and Buddhists, claiming for both that they do not shun emotions, but bears them.

However, that’s somewhat besides the point. Indeed, not enough is, in crucial situations, the equivalent of not at all: if a plane tries to fly, and it does not have enough speed, it crashes.

Stoicism and Buddhism, and the sort of Fatalism connected to Christianism (Dieu le veut!) or Islam (Inch Allah) have crashed civilization repeatedly (at some point, before a crash, Buddhism controlled most of India).

Here is more of what the heroic (by academic standards) Todd says:

“Buddhism, at least in its official doctrine, argues that if we abandon our desires by coming to understand the true nature of the cosmos and follow the Noble Eightfold Path, the end of suffering will follow. Stoicism similarly (but distinctly) counsels that we rid ourselves of emotion, and similarly (but again distinctly) offers a path of recognition of our place in the universe to help us get there. I do not wish to claim that either or both of these or related doctrines are mistaken. Instead, I want to say that most of us, when we really reflect upon our lives, would not want what is officially on offer, but instead something else.”

But the author is right on target on his main point, the excellent notion of “invulnerability“:

“In their official guise, these doctrines are examples of what I am going to label “invulnerabilism.” They say that we can, and we should, make ourselves immune to the world’s vicissitudes. What is central to invulnerabilist views is the belief that we can extricate ourselves from the world’s contingencies so that they do not affect us. We are capable of making ourselves immune to the fortunes of our bodies, our thoughts, and our environment, and we will live better or happier or more pure lives if we do so. Whether the task involves the abolition of desire, the elimination of emotion or the recognition of the ultimate oneness of all things, the guiding idea is that we can and ought to make ourselves invulnerable to the world’s vagaries.”

Todd makes implicitly the point that, fundamentally, the invulnerabilists deny the human condition:

“For invulnerabilist views, what matters is only the present. After all, as they argue, the present is all there is, and therefore the only thing we can have an effect upon. Moreover, we can only be assured of having an effect upon ourselves in the present. Our effects upon the world are always uncertain. The task of invulnerabilism, then, is for us to inhabit the present fully and without reserve, letting go of the grip of our past and our desires for the future. Only if we do this can we render ourselves immune to the predations of our psychological tendencies, tendencies tied up with hope, regret, expectation and mourning.

Invulnerabilism recommends that we secrete a distance between ourselves and the world so that ultimately it cannot touch us.”

This is all very true. Its major defect is that it denies what the brain is made for. The brain is made for predicting the future. Even a chameleon’s brain anticipates the future, as it focuses, and prepares its tongue. Stoics, Buddhism and the like, want to have no tongue, and no focus on anticipation. They want to amputate us, please help! Are they why there is so much plutocracy, and nobody is doing anything about it?

As I have argued for years, that, by reducing emotions, one reduces the human condition, and, thus, the very ability to reduce pain. Invulnerabilists are self-defeating. Todd touches upon that:

“Most of us want to feel caught up in the world. We want to feel gripped by what we do and those we care about, involved with them, taken up by them. The price of this involvement is our vulnerability. We must stand prepared to feel the loss of what we care about, because that is part of what it means to care. Caring requires desiring for the sake of others, which in an uncertain world entails that that desiring can be frustrated.”

Stoicism, as defined by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius is centered on trying to achieve emotional detachment from what one cannot change.

Of course the problem is that one finds out what one cannot change from thinking, and thinking arises from emoting. So, if you don’t emote right, or not enough, you won’t think right.

By insisting that acceptance and tranquility are the most important, somehow most noble moods, invulnerability theories shrink the imagination, and mental reach.

Thus making acceptance and tranquility into a religion dwarves the human spirit into a shadow of its former self..

Are we going to accept infamy, too, because we cannot change it?

Marcus Aurelius is exhibit number one. Somehow he decided that he could not change the old way to select an emperor, and it had to be simply the son of himself. Thus he named his own son Commodus on a whole succession of honors by the age of 12, then made that boy a Consul, and finally co-emperor by the age of sixteen (16).

The son was Commodus, one of the most atrocious Roman emperors, and certainly the worst one (he gave up huge chunks of the empire, next to its core).

Marcus Aurelius, and the four emperors before him had been selected on merit. But merit and performance, selecting the best, were apparently antagonistic to Marcus Aurelius’ acceptance and tranquility.

Marcus Aurelius ought to have cracked down on plutocrats who did not pay enough taxes to sustain the army, then engaged in desperate defense. There, again, Marcus opted for acceptance (of infamy) and tranquility.

Stoicism is comfort, but duty is not always comfortable.

Moods and emotions are at the root of thinking. Cancelling the former would cancel the later, and turn us into beasts. That would be counterproductive to the oftentimes loudly advocated aim, reducing human suffering (people behaving like beasts do not live optimal lives in the complicated civilization we have).

MOODS RULE THOUGHTS

Trying to reduce pain through invulnerability theories is a bit hypocritical, because one could swallow a great quantity of sleeping pills, or take other drastic measures, to achieve a pain-free coma… Or death, surely an end to suffering in this allegedly terrible world.

So why are these theories arise so popular? Two viewpoints, as usual: those of the masters, and those of the slaves.

A meta question ponders who pushed, and pushes these theories on the masses? The mechanism is obvious: it is easier to domesticate the emotion-deprived, and thus thought-deprived ones, than fully intelligent human beings.

Thus invulnerability theories and religions are actually optimal for great masters who want to have many emotion-less, inhuman little slaves, with reduced intelligence.

That’s why the masters love Buddhism and company. But then why do the small people love this mood which serves to oppress them too?

Acceptance and tranquility should not be the end-all, be-all. Except, of course, for people with frayed nerves living in denial. Or then people who wants to live gloriously.

Anger is crucial to crush infamy. Absolutely excluding anger is absolutely accepting infamy as a matter of principle. Instead one should follow Voltaire’s advice: “Il faut ecraser l’infame!”. One ought to crush infamy.

Some specialists of Asian sociology believe that a lot of the problems in Asia (for example the holocaust in Cambodia) originated with too much tranquility and acceptance for the intolerable.

Obsessively focusing on acceptance and tranquility is self-serving, as it persuades the beholders, and those who look at them, that they are good, elevated people. And yes, it gets hot and passionate, where civilization is progressing. Yes, as with a kitchen, it gets hot there. But those who stay out ought not to get the respect they crave for.

Get angry, expand thinking, crush infamy!

Patrice Ayme’