There Is No Enlightenment Without Violence

Violence, like folly, has been unfairly criticized by ingrate thinkers. Both methods are central to proper mental creativity. Any serious change of mind is a form of crazy violence, this is why great thinkers have been so thoroughly hated throughout history.

The list of the martyrs of thought is long. Socrates, condemned to death, Plato and Aristotle barely escaping execution, Demosthenes suicided by Aristotle’s BFF, the Gracchi and thousands of their collaborators assassinated for fighting the “Optimates”,  Caesar treacherously and stupidly assassinated, Christ crucified, Domitians killing all philosophy, except supine Stoicism, Julian mysteriously stabbed, Hypatia flayed alive (and her torturer in chief made into a Christian saint!), Boethius executed by having his bones broken (because the Ostrogoth in chief heard some rumors which he recognized later were erroneous)… 

… and then when one gets to medieval times, many of the most important western thinkers were involved in life and death struggles, for trying to reconcile the Christian madness with reason, the most famous being Abelard’s fighting the genocidal upper society maniac Saint Bernard… but Hus, Dolet and Bruno were among the many top teachers burned alive by the Vatican… Descartes had to run for his life… But the guillotine caught up with Lavoisier, the world’s top chemist… Of course, under the Nazis many intellectuals died the hard way. The situation was worse on the Muslim side, and got actually so bad that, when the west got finally thoroughly islamized (that took centuries), so did intellectual life (which thus died).

Why we need lions (as Nietzsche, last of a long line, pointed out). Wisdom needs claws. I prefer to master the lion, as the lady above… then feed him my enemies. I made it so that I have enough of those, my lion will not go hungry…

Why so much violence against thinkers? Because violence is force and it requires enormous force to change minds. This all arises from the fact it takes enormous amounts of energy to make up a brain: baby brains consume up to 25% of a body’s energy. Thus, when a mind is made up, they are nearly impossible to change… before rebuilding a brain one would need to demolish it, and it’s not clear how to do this: thoughts and emotions are literally physical objects, highly nonlinear neural networks of axons, dendrites perfused by emotional topoi from various organ, organelles, and even neurons. Let me quote one of my frenemies, celebrated by Critical Race theorists, Frantz Fanon, a very smart Martiniquais psychiatrist FLN-Soviet-CIA agent who exerted violence for the liberation-destruction of Algeria: “Violence is man recreating himself.” I explained that neurologically.

Socrates and Machiavelli are generally held to hold vastly different views on violence and violent actions, the former advocates strongly that it is always better to be harmed rather than to harm while the latter argues that violence is essential, when used correctly, in order to gain and maintain power. The former was a real warrior, killing and saving people in combat. Machiavel was just a paper-pusher with boyish admiration for Cesare Biorgia. 

However, Socrates was put on trial for injuring the Athenian democracy, corrupting the youth: several of his followers and lovers, decades younger than him, engaged in high treason against Athens. So Socrates was basically accused of exerting violence against democracy. And that’s pretty much what some of his philosophy does. (As with anything Socratic, much of this may have been “fiction”, as indicated by Aristotle…) Thus Socrates, bathing as he was in violence, demonstrates, by his own life, that violence is everywhere. His own attempt at showing showy non-violence is itself a violence: Socrates insisted to punish Athens by making her sin… As a fleeing Aristotle himself pointed out, as he chuckled, fleeing, that he would not let Athens sin against philosophy again….

So I say: sometimes the ends justify the means. For proof I direct you to contemplation of aerial Allied bombings in World War Two. Including the nuclear bombings and deaths by irradiation, those bombings on Germany and Japan killed less than 1.5 million people, most of them sort-of innocent, or even completely innocent (children). However their effects on the war were so great that those two fascist powers were unable to pursue the war. Without prior aerial bombing for years, which weakened it considerably, Nazi Germany would have had, ironically enough, to be atom bombed into submission… 

Plato claims that often it is better to get injured, that’s how to be more open, and submit to others and other things. But, although the view has merits, within bounds, it cannot be absolute. As an absolute, it only reflects Plato’s inclination to dictators (namely the tyrant of Syracuse) and dictatorship (“philosopher-kings”). So Plato makes Socrates mouth this sort of opinion, focusing on rape (“eros”)… As if normal people had to make a philosophy of rape… to guide daily life… Levinas was more subtle: on the first page of Totality and Infinity,he writes: “being reveals itself as war—even more, war is “the very patency, or the truth of the real.” (TI, 21/9)

As I said, neurological war, if nothing else. Socrates recognizes things around us are tumbling in and out of being. In spite of his dissemblance on violence, Socrates was more real on folly. He considered it 2440 years ago that:”the greatest blessing granted to mankind comes by way of madness, which is a divine gift.” Erasmus followed, 19 centuries later.  

The source of the madness is simple: when genuinely new neural circuitry is erected, old erroneous circuitry has to be destroyed. This violent act requires so much, one may feel it makes no sense, hence the appearance, at the very least, of folly. 

Incitation and redemption comes from humans being, instinctively, truth machines. For this we have to enjoy changing our minds, hard, painful and energetically expensive. So we have to enjoy pain, at least that way. 

So here you have it:

Sometimes the ends justify the means. Those who claim otherwise are just posing without knowledge of the most eminent facts.

There is something such as new and better thinking, and that is defined as thinking that is closer to reality, and feed the beholder better. Ultimately superior thinking will be all proven by destroying the enemy. Same old same old. (That does not mean I am advocating to go out kill people 24/7: Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, destroyed their enemies pretty well… by marching.)

Energetic violence inside one’s mind implements new and better thinking, starting with oneself, but it’s more fun when imposed upon others. 

Folly, or the appearance, and the appreciation thereof, is an indispensable method to implement the systematic and systemic doubt Descartes advocated. Even Socrates/Plato got that one right. 

It’s a complicated world out there, best dealt with subtlety greater than what has been previously described in the classical imagination… Descartes, a man of the sword, a captain, had forgotten, or did not dare, to make explicit a few methods indispensable to thinkers. He knew those methods all too well, and the accusations they led to, thus why he had to flee France for his life.

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: It may, and will be argued that, in truth, the “violence” and “folly” I am talking about is not really either, since they are fully legitimate as part of creativity. Was Van Gogh violent and mad? We don’t know, as we don’t know how he really died (OK, a gunshot, but who fired it and how?). But whatever his mental status, thank you. However, I was reflecting on various bans I received over the years on the Internet, several of them permanent and forever (“we have the means to know who you are, etc.”). The most recent ban for “hate” being in May 2021, for alleged “hate” on Facebook, the punishment being for 30 days. The reason for the alleged “hate” was a case of shooting the messenger because Facebook didn’t like the message. Facebook recognized it was in error and suspended its own suspension. Meanwhile I sent a few comments to the New York Times, including to some famous pseudo-intellectuals, and they got banned, and I was wondering what goes through the minds of such people, pretending to think publicly while enabling trite comments and banning important and intelligent ones.

So the verdict was that, in any case, mental creativity will often show up as violent madness to some. Authentic tolerance is, then, to tolerate the appearance of intellectual violence and madness… As long as it doesn’t really hurt those who can’t defend themselves.

Preaching Total Obedience By Submission To Supreme Irrationality

IF YOU OBEY FOLLY, YOU WILL ACCEPT ANYTHING, INCLUDING INFAMY

Politicians and policies are often insane. This is not accidental, but a method of control: accept to be ruled by folly, tyranny will be sweet, relatively speaking.

Pelosi, Speaker of the House, was standing next to Harris, Vice President of the world’s mightiest country. Both temples of reason were wearing masks. They have been vaccinated for four months with mRNA COVID vaccines of 95% efficiency. Even if one of the two had the virus and gave it to the other, nothing would happen. Of millions who got a vaccine authorized in the USA, nobody died of COVID passed the first ten days following inoculation. 

What are those two mighty potentates preaching then?

Are Pelosi and Harris preaching that the mRNA vaccines they received do not work? That would contradict the science they claim to follow (although neither of these mighty women did any scientific studies beyond what was mandatory in high school, they defeated Trump and his vaccines financing by claiming they and their obsessive masking had science on their side [1]). 

One has to understand that both are professional politicians and extremely wealthy and powerful creatures. They stand at the very top of the world’s pyramid of inequity, injustice and unequal distributions of powers. They don’t just stand at the top, they are the symbol of unequal power, and that the fate of humanity depends upon a few. 

Insanity rules. President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, as Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., look on. (Chip Somodevilla/Pool via AP)

And what do those two potentates show, and want us to learn? That they are completely insane. Yes, they want us to know of, and learn to respect their complete folly. Folly is the message and the new religion.

When the USA preferred to invade Iraq, kill a few million there, foster the Islamist State and prop up the price of oil to make fracking profitable, the US propaganda outfit known as the New York Times, especially its multiple prize winning Tom Friedman, rolled out the insanity argument, as something very serious.

The argument went this way: it made no sense to invade Iraq, and that is why this folly precisely made (meta) sense [2]. 

Why did it make no sense? That was conceded in the end, thanks to critique like yours truly, or the French government. All the arguments rolled by Biden or Bush were lies: there were no weapons of mass destruction, and the fiercely secular Saddam Hussein was Al Qaeda’s most determined enemy. 

That is why the New York Times seriously rolled out that meta-argument: once all countries realize that the US leadership was completely insane, and could engage in total war, just because it did not like a particular country, everybody will be so scared, they would obey the USA. That was an even more grotesque and war criminality ladden discourse that the one Athens made to the Mellians.

Athens: “…since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must…”.

USA under Bush-Biden-Tom Friedman-New York Times: “the strong has a duty to be insane, so the weak can be persuaded to quake in fear and do as they must…”

The praise of folly has long been a method of governance. Ancient religions are deliberately mad, to teach terror and submission by the very madness we are supposed to worship. If you revere maximal irrationality, you can’t think. If you can’t think, you can’t complain.

That was the whole idea of Christianism, and why Roman emperors imposed Catholicism carrying, if one objected to it, the penalty of a torturous death (edicts of Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian I, Roman emperors, circa 381 CE).

Christianism is full of irrationalities: God is almighty, but His Son dies on a cross; God tortures sinners, but He makes sin possible; Christianism is a religion of love, so it brandishes somebody being tortured to death to instill respect for love; God loves humanity so its preachers will burn you alive if you don’t obey them; and so on… 

The usual explanation for those irrationalities is that the ways of God are mysterious. 

That is itself a mystification. 

In truth, the message of Fourth Century imperial Roman Catholicism was the same as that of the leaders of the US attacking Iraq: we have the prerogative of irrationality, even on something as important as terrorizing humanity. Actually, you should be terrorized, because we are irrational… and lethally so.

There is plenty of evidence that elites have always used that trick of looking completely insane.

Once, as a child, I met a large male chimpanzee in the wild. He could have torn m to pieces in seconds. Instead, screaming as one thousand furies he ran to a rather small tree, and that already made no sense. He climbed to the top, howling bloody murder, moved its limbs in all sorts of ways, got the poor tree to oscillate in all directions close to the breaking point. That chimp looked like the most crazed creature in the universe. And that was exactly the message it wanted to convey. It was inhabited by a force out of any intelligibility. No sane predator would come in the general vicinity. I discovered later that this was a systemic method with chimps, one could call it a method of government of the jungle according to chimp. It explained why predators avoided them. Baboons tried the same method, of instilling respect by projecting obvious madness, even charging lions on the ground, when they could go up in the trees.

Exhibiting madness as a method of governance is how elites stay in place. When the Maya elites failed Mayan civilization, by proving unable to manage a megadrought, it no doubt used similar methods, by waging the logic of war instead of the logic of the environment. The vengeance of We The People was in the end terrible, and the elites were terminated in the most gory fashion (something similar happened during the Jacqueries of the Fourteenth Century, when plutocrats got roasted… and the mood of the balance of terror would extent through the French Revolution of 1789, four centuries later).

By wearing their masks, Harris and Pelosi say: yes our message is self-contradictory, the vaccines work, thus we wear masks; but it is the message of power; folly is what we call the truth, and if you are good, you will obey our irrationality by not even daring to observe it.

Meanwhile, Biden, unmasked in front of the two masked furies, was rewriting US history grotesquely.

Will they get away with it? The lurid power turgid insanity brings is a very bad example to give to the thermonuclear armed fascists around the world. We saw this in the 1930s. Be it in imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, the meta understanding the dictators made of the “democracies” was the same: they are weak, and they are afraid of our irrationality, they will submit if we act irrational enough.

That rational interpretation of irrationality was the explicit computation of the Japanese High Command: irrationally attack the USA at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, and the USA will be terrified into submission. The commander of the Japanese Navy, Marshall Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Harvard educated, thought that argument was crazy, and said so (!)… But when talking to people who think insanity is a method of government, calling an argument crazy is not enough to make them think, they believe it’s a compliment. So Yamamoto went along, until he was shot down by long range P38s in a deliberate execution, crashing into a steamy jungle (the US had cracked the Japanese codes).

The apparently insane attack, and rule, the US and the world, with their irrationality, and they believe the world will be terrified into submission, and their class will stay on top. Well, what happens if their irrationality is not enough of an example?

Worshipping flagrant insanity is the ultimate submission.. and the ultimate trap.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] In truth obsessive masking masquerade caused megadeath as it persuaded people that masks were protective in close quarters, although they are not. Masks are micrometric, SARS-CoV2 is nanometric; a net made for tuna can’t catch plankton. Don’t ask Harris and Pelosi what a nanometer is… And do not even ask Fauci, who financed the virus lab in Wuhan to enhance ACE2 receptor function on Yunan bat coronaviruses…    

***

[2] Any logic makes sense only if it comes with a meta-logic. To make sense of sense, one needs meta-sense. This is the hard core (meta) conclusion of Twentieth Century (meta) logic, from famous theorems of Godel, Tarski, etc.

Mania Form Mafia

As Nietzsche said, folly is rare in the individual, but the rule in the collective. Why it is so is very instructive. I have  explained this: mania cement tribes together, and collective crime unifies best. That doesn’t mean the collective is always wrong. All learning is cultural, thus from a mass of people, thus massive. When an element of culture is erroneous enough, it will bring nefarious consequences… which unite those who believe and participate in that mania. Indeed nothing unites better than common criminality.

It is a fundamental chimp instinct. Then an entire group of chimps get together to go on the warpath, hunt, hurt or, and, kill other chimps, as a matter of territory, hence ecology.

Examples of commonly practiced mania are scapegoatism, another the religion of Abraham, religions with human sacrifices, all sorts of racisms and tribalisms, etc. The crime is not accidental, but unifying. Crimes against truth and common sense are most… common as they present the further advantage of reducing brain work..

Follies are not necessarily useless, far from it. Paradoxically, folly helps reason, by exploring all possibilities, and instills strife, thus it is adaptive to the species which rules the world. Folly suggests and cleanses, by creating the very excesses which identify all the possibilities and diminish the human ecological load. In particular insanity expands the logics to the max. (Yes, this is Erasmus stood on his head…)

The advantage of mass delusions is partly why insanity is rare in the individual but the rule in cultural sets (epochs, nations, religions, etc. Another reason, besides the extremely sophisticated one evoked above is the fact that criminal follies bind tribes best… And plutocracies can exploit these and unite the people that way. See:  “Delusions That Bind”

Belinda Smith

Patrice Ayme

 -I like it, except if you could maybe rephrase the part about the religion of Abraham (singling out Judaism would be anti-Semitic.) For example: most atheists single out no belief. There are also three separate religious groups that come from the Family of Abraham.

Answer to Belinda Smith:

Judeo-Xto-Islamism is just the “religion of Abraham”. Calling them “monotheism” is abusive to other religions which also believed in a supreme being… The religionS of Abraham all emanate from Judaism. It is not anti-Semitic to observe this, because it’s a fact. which can be verified by reading the Bible or the Qur’an (something I do all the time, for fun). As happens with sects, they tend to hate each other. Sunni religious texts (Hadith) enjoin that all jews have to be killed before the Final Judgment can happen. This is not being anti-Jewish or being anti-Sunni to notice this. It is just describing faithfully some related ideologies.

Wisdom cannot listen to the complaints of idiots.

Many view Jesus as a “Rabi”… and Jesus was certainly a Jew… That he was a Jew prevented Christians to exterminate Jews (although they came close many times)… Christians, or more exactly Catholics, exterminated everybody else (99.99% of Samaritans, 100% Cathars, etc.).

Muhammad took refuge in Yattrib, a Jewish city, but later eradicated a Jewish tribe there. And elements of Islam are very clear that Jews are a serious problem with a lethal solution (once again, not an interpretation singling out a religion groundlessly, it’s literally there, in writing).

The Republican Romans outlawed all religions which practiced human sacrifices (so the Celtic religion was 100% eradicated, and the Carthaginian religion went underground). I will review the essay for possible anti-Semitic misrepresentation, though. I am agnostic (I do not pretend to be god by claiming there is no god).

Graduating from the human sacrifice mood as a unifier advanced civilization. One point I make is that the religions celebrating Abraham as founder (Islam, Xtianism, Judaism) celebrate the willingness to commit infanticide to please the boss as a community building criminal mood… In a way that was just not so blatant as to fall under Roman interdiction. So, basically, Abrahamism fosters the mood to do anything to please the boss.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

Listening to Christian preachers of US Protestantism (“Reform”) one basically listen, under the para ble of the Jewish people seizing land “given by God”, to the praising, as a religion, of the seizure of land, making war to, and killing the original inhabitants (who were, I think, Semites, nota bene…)

Collective madness is a complicated subject, with pros and cons. One may want to keep that in mind as Internet censorship is ever more practiced all over (not just Xi’s dictatorship).

Patrice Ayme

Why Obama Failed, Intimate Version

Obama is very smart, world-educated, so how come most of what he did will quickly evaporate, and how come his “signature achievement”, Obamacare, mostly failed? (Some premiums of health insurance are up to an incredible $39,000, a year, for a couple; Obamacare “deductibles” of $6,000 are common.)

I said right from the start, that Obamacare would fail, and how. It did. Obama says that, whoever he asked at the time among politicians, including Republicans, nobody could come up with anything better than Obamacare (he himself proposed what I proposed, Medicare For All, unanimously rejected by the powers that be).

Ask the lost fools out there, and they will tell you that Obama failed because of the Republicans. This is an anti-idea Obama himself contributed to launch when he had a supermajority, to deflect the observation that he was doing exactly what Bush had been doing just prior. It is an answer as genuine as saying the antibiotics failed, because of the germs.

Poignantly, all the more as it was unknowingly, the president himself pointed out the reason in his last press conference: Obama said any president is guided by his advisors. Obama’s team of advisors, though, was not chosen by him, and came short in one way: there was nobody there he could trust to “speak truth to power” (except for his wife, but she was part of the system, being part of the Chicago machine). 

All Of Obama’s Allowed Friends Clang Way Too Much To Plutocracy, The Establishment, And The Criminal Past. All Of Obama’s Advisors Arguably Belonged To The Corrupt, Self-Fulfilling, Self-Referential Establishment.

Here is an example: the US Patent System is broken (to the point US companies use China or Europe for patent protection!) All advisors around Obama advised him to make it worse, because, making it worse advantaged the giant tech monopolies. Obama went along, not knowing any better than the fact millions of dollars of his checks came from said monopolies and the dissembling faces and lying lips of the multi-billionaires who were always around. Small, but crucial inventors, and US innovation are among the victims.

Of course, Obama was not told he was making the Patent System worse, to advantage antitrust violators. Instead, Obama went around, claiming he wanted to protect from “non-practicing entities”. In his stupidity, he did not realize that this meant any inventor. The guy was that dumb, because his advisors were that perverse (not knowing it either, as they just focus on the dollar signs coming their way).

“It will be granted that folly is a mental disease, and of folly there are two kinds, madness and stupidity.” Plato, “Timaeus”.

Stupidity often arises from ignorance. Ignorance of facts, or ignorance of possible logics, including of the emotional kind.

Many frenzied maniacs say Trump is an idiot. By this, they may simply mean that they are too ignorant to understand that Trump has a different personality, with different experiences, all very idiosyncratic. Trump did not destroy 18 other presidential candidates without being smart, in some important sense. (Some will observe that means that, by the same token, I consider Hitler smart in some ways. Sure. The military defeat of France and Britain in May 1940 is pretty much attributable to Hitler outsmarting the top general of the French High Command: Hitler laid a trap, in the Netherland, and the stupid French fell in it!)

How do we know Obama failed? Listen to him, or his obsequious, crazed sycophants: they celebrate the fact that Obama “saved the economy”. They forget that Obama had not run to “save the economy”. They don’t tell you how he did it: he followed the plan of Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs CEO, Secretary of Treasury of Bush had ordered him to follow. Nor what it consisted of (transferring asset from taxpayers to the wealthiest people in the world, so that they will be as wealthy again, as they were before).

Instead of the nebulous “change you can believe in”, Obama’s “rule” consisted in an extension of Bush. And that’s his proudest achievement: Bush cleaning boy. Obama persisted in 2010, by signing a further extension of the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest.

How did we get a presidency that brain-washed? By isolating the president from common sense. Obama was told to drop his close friends he had for decades, and have no contacts with them whatsoever. Immensely rich “Democratic” operators  told Obama that. As they had dropped the presidency into his lap, he knew better than to confront them.

Bowles, Podesta told Obama:”Friends only cause problems”.  Obama was allowed to keep just three of the “Chum Gang” who had no serious brain of their own, and were extremely scared to disobey the authorities. They went around like human dogs, following their master everywhere (the wives promptly divorced).

Podesta, a lawyer who believes in UFO, big time, got launched under Clinton, and then sold his influence in the “Podesta Group”, making hundreds of millions.  

Actually, here is an anecdote, to give you an idea of the level of dangerous lunacy evolved in the so-called “Deep State”. Two of the preceding are siblings, and two other siblings, having incomparably more brains, and scientific educations, were excluded (lest they told Barack what was up and down). One of the sibling worked for a company we will call B (the other sibling worked for a while as a PhD at NASA). At B, sibling IV worked on an aircraft. He was told to sign plenty of papers consigning him to secrecy, under the threat of terrible punishments. He signed. Then he was told:”That was just the legal stuff. In truth, we will just kill you.” After a safe period, he quit B and became a lawyer… This is the Deep State, US style.

So no wonder the environment of Obama was strictly controlled, by the Deep State, under the orders of the Deepest State, namely the plutocracy of the .01%

Obama submitted to this humiliating treatment, because he was promised ever better things (remember the Nobel Prize? Or was that an obedience prize?). The religion of Obama is “navigation” (his word and concept). “Navigation” consists in doing what he is being told by the powers that be. Said another way: “leading from behind”. Leading from behind the Deepest State. This propensity is why Obama was selected.

Obama is “worth” 24 million dollars now, and projected to be ten times that very soon.

The idea of Obama being unable to talk to his friends was that he would be left with the servants of the plutocracy to interact with, and them exclusively. So he socialized extensively with, say, Sheryl Sandberg (ex-paramour of Harvard and Clinton’s Larry Summers, now COO of the spy operation Facebook; never being elected, a young Sandberg was in a huge office at Treasury with a big US flag behind her)

Anywhere, there you have it. Obama loves to say that one should not “do stupid stuff”. Well, how does he know about the countless stupidities of his presidency? From reading the fawning plutocratic “Main Stream Media” press? From all the sycophants around, and greedsters delirious with the desire of being employed by the giant monopolies Obama favored so much?

Obama needed true friends, all-knowing, and completely independent, around him, to chew the fat (Charlemagne and Philippe IV Le Bel of France had them, and Pericles).

Trump has a much stronger personality. He has pulled all around him a number of trusted advisors and family, all of them with the ability to talk truth to power.

You don’t want stupid? Have a debate with serious contradictors. Obama did not, and thus did stupid. So stupid, that it is only now dawning on his subconscious, in the last few months, how stupid it all was. And that’s one of the reason why Obama’s subconscious did not want Clinton to be elected. The continuation of the masquerade, somehow offended the last shreds of decency that his ominous career left him with. 

Yes, Obama should have backed up Senator Sanders. Too late now. Another stupid indecency. Fate marches on, as in Greek tragedies of times past.

Pericles did not even accept an invitation to share a meal with his friends. For 30 years. He did not want to get corrupted that way. But then he was spending much of his time with the top philosophers in the world: Protagoras, Zeno of Elea, Anaxagoras, and Aspasia (Pericles had a son with his partner, the stunning Aspasia, from Miletus; Aspasia wrote the most famous discourse “of” Pericles).

And now it is all over. What sort of thermonuclear puppet was that, who was not even allowed by his minders to talk to his real friends? History will want to know, and will be relentless.

In other, but related news, it turns out that 450 million years of paleoclimate reveal a sinister possibility: that scientists dreadfully underestimated considerably the sensitivity of the climate to the CO2 density. This means that the potential rise of temperature facing us by 2100 is 4.5 degree Centigrade (the old maximal was 3 C). An unfathomable catastrophe.

One of the “authorized” idiots, a guy without moral or epistemological compass, one of boyfriends of Obama, from way back, told me grandly this week that I was “inappropriate”. Well, F you.

Those who did nothing in these times of the greatest perils, for humanity, are not just fools. They are criminals. You did not just fail, you did not just fail civilization, you failed intelligence in the galaxy. Off with your minds! Requiem for Obama. Warning for his successor!

Patrice Ayme’  

Mass DELUSIONS: FOLLIES BIND MINDS. Example: Will To Infanticide: ABRAHAMISM.

Commonly Accepted DELUSIONS BIND MINDS TOGETHER. And The Crazier The Bond, The Stronger It is: Collective Madness is Both A Crowd Creator And Crowd Control (and Often Crowd Weaponization!)

Why is madness so popular with crowds? It is common to condemn the madness of the crowds, while being mystified by all sorts of follies, conflicts, moods and ideas inciting to mayhem, which crowds engage in with relish… just observe any sport stadium crowd getting hysterical about their team.

The deity Jews, Muslims and Christians share, orders Abraham to kill his own child, and the devout Abraham agrees to do so. Although Abraham’s child is saved, in some other cases in the Bible, children are killed by the Bible God to punish parents.  This obedience to gore is the divine image the respected believers revere: what could be more horrible? Why are the consequences (murderous believers) surprising?

But why such an inclination to collective madness? Of what problem is collective madness the solution? Why so little wisdom in so many moods and thoughts systems? Why so much allure to collective sentiment? Is it an accident, a coincidence, an happenstance… Or is the mayhem not a consequence of the crowd, but, instead, what creates the crowd? Is the call to mayhem a method, a system, a deep, and perverse, logic at work, hidden from a first glance? This is what we will show here: the madness of crowds does not arise from the crowd as much as the crowd from the will to madness.
There is a fascist psychology underlying the madness of crowds, to make out of many minds one. Common crime, or common thought crime, helps to make one mind out of many, and the worse the crime, the better the bond. There is no worse crime than killing children, thus no better bond. Thus Carthage practiced it.

A contrario, by rejecting human sacrifice, Rome placed the Republican values above anything.

Because, quite often, there is a higher sort of wisdom, a secret plot, a perverse mechanism, a nonlinear feedback, attached to the apparent blatant lack of wisdom. An apparent lack of wisdom can hide a deeper logic. The logic often has to stay hidden, because, if revealed, it would look rather perverse, and the opposite of what the mechanism it claims to achieve appears to be. 

For millions of years, the greatest enemy of man has been other men, the men of the alienated tribe, next door. Proper ecology serving the survival of all, required to find them repulsive, to reject them, to kill them. Such is the basic reason for the evil men commit: ecology. But there is even worse: there can be too many children, and the most atrocious crimes, are the most binding:

The atrocious delusion that the boSS is more important than the life of a child is the faith which Binds Judaism, and Its Ilk: Christianism, & Islamism. Should we use the neologism “pedocidal”?

Crime binding innocence to extinguish it. Should we call Abrahamism, the “Would-be Child Killer religion“? That would distinguish it from Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism, etc.

DELUSION IS A SIGN THAT WE BELONG:

How does one recognize friend from foe? By a signal. It could be the color of a skin, the color of a badge, a flag, and other visual or auditory signal (an accent, say). However, the ultimate structure is a brain structure. They fall in two classes: ideas, and moods.

So, to recognize the friend, the one who has the signal, and the foe, the one who does not, it’s best to entertain a particularly strong signal.

One not seen in nature. That will be best, because no doubt very special.

But are not the most clever, and wisest ideas and moods, faithful reproductions of nature?

Yes.

So the best way to identify a friend, and thus foe, are most stupid and most unwise ideas, and moods.

This is why Judaism, Christianism and Islamism celebrate the would-be child killer, Abraham his name, as their founder. The idea of killing one’s child is assuredly unnatural, unwise, most cruel, and grotesquely inhuman. It’s the ultimate dumb atrocity: destroying the species, starting with one’s flesh and blood.

It’s abominable. Thus it’s best to identify friend (the one who expresses intense admiration for the same despicable madness) and foe (the one who has kept common decency, readily distinguishable as alien, therefore).

What do we see here?

The madness, the insanity which binds.

Thus many delusions are the cement that does not just unite the group, but even defines it.

No doubt delusions will also help to unite those scatterbrains (schizophrenic) minds some of us suffer from.

Delusion can be the crucible of the many, and the cement of the one.

Madness in crowds and madness of the one, thus spring from a common logic of human ethology.

Are all groups defined by delusions? No, the Directly Democratic Republic can define itself without a common madness (this is why Switzerland holds together, in spite of its four official languages and several religions). By insisting on the basic ideas and moods of our common humanity.

This is why the Republic can be enough of a religion, the one that works, without delusion.

Human nature is made to make one out of many (mental fascism). That’s how lions and hyenas were fought (just as baboons still do it: by making the troop into one giant superorganism). Making one of many was also what was necessary to stay competitive on the (human meat) market: if one did not want to become dinner for the other guys, one had to stay united.

Thus humans sharing a group have a strong instinct to think all the same. In two ways: to define the group, even if it means through a delusion, and to make the group fight as one.

(The more crowded the human population, the more delusions will have to define groups; this is why nationalism grows with the crowding… the latter being relative: considering its technology then, in 1900, Germany was relatively more crowded than now; hence the rise of German fascism, which went in parallel with the explosion of the German population, 1850-1914…)

Yet, human beings are truth machines. That’s an instinct going the other way. Because herd animals think all the same, they cannot think anew. Except to stampede, somewhere., or search for the simplest things: new grass, water.

Those who search for truth will avoid the group (all the more as it is all too often defined by a delusion).

Searching for truth is more human, and a way to reach for greater survivability.

Hence the one, the philosopher, will, by necessity, fight the group. Between the delusion which define the groups and the truths, which define the philosopher, it’s a fight to death. The spirit of philosophers always won over the madness of the crowds.

Yes, delusionists, and illusionists are fit for attack, especially when they engage in mass delusion. It’s a matter of collective safety, for the world community. The reason for this is that delusions feed aggression. Delusion is entertained to create the group, the troop, with aggressive purpose in mind.

In particular, theists. Especially of the would-be child sacrifice type (Abraham his name).

As I explained, the main reason for collective delusion, just as for individual delusion is to create a system of mind (moods plus thoughts) that binds.

Thus, the fundamental reason for the collective to bind through delusion is aggression. Either real, or potential. Exclusion and alienation are aggressions. Mass delusions enable them.

Mass delusions such as various sects of Abraham (the word ‘sect’ comes from cutting: chopping heads is what sects do best).

Mass delusions are obsessive about aggression. Be it supposedly for resisting aggression (real or imagined), or committing it, in any case, making it as the big thing in life, worth deluding one’s mind, just to identify as a group, and enjoy the pleasures thereof.

Delusion such as: ’I am the Elected People, not that’s me; I prove it, by exterminating you, etc.’

When a religious group goes around, exhibiting its religious appurtenance, it exhibits its delusion. Thus, implicitly, its aggression.

And size matters. Because the size of a threat matters: when groups of predators fight each other, say lions versus hyenas, generally the side with the greatest total mass wins.

This is why French public schools forbid religious symbols of more than such and such a size, or why schools in Britain impose uniforms (and that’s even better).

WE ARE ALL SCIENTISTS; “BELIEVERS” KNOW THEY ARE DELUDED:

Believers know they are deluded, deep down inside. That’s why they are so aggressive, when confronted to their incoherence.

In Copenhagen last week, an Islamist assassin shot at a Freedom of Expression meeting, killing and wounding, and then repeated the performance at a Synagogue, killing and wounding. In a freezing rain, 500 deluded fanatics came to the killer’s burial. Let’s hope the police and secret services took a lot of pictures.

Experience shows fanaticism makes a universe most pleasant to those who dominate it.

Experience is what gives us a ground for all our propositions. This is important, because it means, whether they know it, or not, all human beings are scientists.

This is why the notion of “believer” has been introduced. It, all by itself, is a delusion. A deliberate, collective delusion, to create the group (and then proceed with some crusade, jihad, ghetto).

“Believers” are precisely those who believe in NOT applying science, for the most important metaprinciples.

However, what they have to apply every day to function as animals, and full human beings, is based on what is called “the scientific method”, but which is simply common sense, systematized industrially.

Thus “believers” fundamentally, do not believe!

Patrice Ayme’