War And Climbing Are Tales Of All Passions

We Climb Therefore We Are?

Climbing is the tale of all passions. Where the essence is reached. The top of the world is littered with corpses. Littered with ambition and selfishness too, not just selfless heroism. Mountains bring out the extremes. The extremes of humanity: life, death, what human beings consider reasonable behavior… which, in many cases, turns out to not be reasonable at all. Climbing teaches life, and how human values can dominate it.

So a question mountains always bring is how come reason vanishes up there, and how come do human beings persist in taking enormous risks, just because they can and it brings fame. Mountains bring new Achilles ready to kill to achieve fame, and the one they kill is not named Hector, nor for exacting revenge, but it is themselves they kill, and for flimsier reasons.

Nevado Chacraraju at sunrise from Chopicalqui camp. Cordillera Blanca, Peru. America del Sur.

It has always been true that climbing mountains is a great way to find out about human nature. Nature does not care about humanity. Humanity is here to give nature a soul. That soul, that human soul, is the most astounding object in the universe. It is the very fact that lives are at stake, that life is in the balance, for no good reason, which makes climbing irresistible. Gods used to live among the mountains. By entering the peaks, though, and rolling the dice with life itself, human beings make themselves into gods, telling the universe that life and death, and all human passions are just what they play with, and roll around like dice.

This doomsplay makes climbing divine. In one day, one hour, one second, entire lives are lived and universes born and created.

The dirty and not so little secret about humanity is that it is all about creating and destroying. And sometimes, having life in the way is the best way to be alive.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum“, the Romans used to say. If you want peace, prepare for war. But preparing for war does not mean just having bigger and better weaponry. It also means to have bigger and better psychology, it means to understand the enemy. It means to understand that the enemy’s psychology is no less than the climbing psychology: it is not because the odds of surviving are low that the feat shall not be attempted. Actually, it is the other way around. It may well be, with some characters (say Xi, China’s dictator) that, the lower the odds of surviving, the more tempting the adventure.

It is important to understand that war, like climbing, is attractive for reasons pertaining to the very inconveniences it fosters, discomfort, pain, fear, and death. When Japan and Nazi Germany went to war, the odds that they would win were extremely low (they both got very lucky initially). But the very fact that the odds were low made the wars they started, more attractive, as, the more deadly and frightening the mountain, the more tempting it is to scale it.

War is not just entertained as politics by other means, but, just like mountain climbing, is as the very root of what it means for human beings to be alive in full… even if that means disdain for life itself… precisely because it means disdain for life.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S 1: An implicit background to all this philosophy is that our ancestors were climbers, and carnivores, at least for 100 million years. Climbing… and fighting… come to us more naturally than walking on two legs. They are more part of our creation-given logic.

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P/S 2: Some of the (mildest) core of this essay was sent to the New York Times as a comment on an article of Mallory and Irvine (who came very close to Everest’s summit in 1924). My comment was blocked. I mention this, because it shows how much the plutocratic newspaper worries about molding its readership’s mind. The same day another comment of mine on “Cancel Culture” was also blocked. Ezra Klein, from Vox and now the NYT, argued that “Cancel Culture” was just legal maneuvering by corporate America. I added that “Cancel Culture” was the oldest thing in English American culture: after all, the Native Americans were “cancelled”. Well, the NYT cancelled that comment… Climbing may not be everywhere, but fighting is…

Why To Kill God: Because Deicide Will Help Limit Wealth Absolutely

Humanity, the genus Homo, did well for 5 million years without God. Finding food, water, and surviving were good enough deities to get the genus Homo’s psychology by.

But now we have individuals going around, proclaiming the absurdity of life (Camus and his ilk)… To find meaning, they need lions to show up, so they can think upright, and they don’t know it. They have become like sheep, as Christian propaganda insisted their were… whereas lions ran away from their distant ancestors. Running after lions was all the religion our ancestors needed, when they showed up.

If humanity is so ferocious, and self reliant, why would humanity have ever needed gods? Men were the gods.

Who needs gods? The difference is civilization, and, more precisely, its military aspect and the cancerous growth known as plutocracy.

When one is a tyrant, the last thing one needs is to have as subjects, men who believe they are gods… And this is true for bankers, today’s real gods, and they hide their malevolence behind their arrogant deluded little boys: Clinton, Major, Bliar Blair, Bush, Obama, Trump, Macron… And they half demented girls: Thatcher, Merkel, May…

Catholicism was invented and imposed by emperor (“Saint”) Constantine, and his tyrannical successors (in Arabic: caliphs). In turn, Catholicism was the proximal cause of the military collapse of the Roman state, without any question. Islam was a bellicose ideology of Muhammad which enabled him to seize Arabia. Muhammad’s two immediate successors, companions and accomplices, Abu Bakr and Umar were immediately capable of building a gigantic empire, thanks to that immensely ferocious religion. They crushed the Persian and Roman empires, in a few years. Believers in Islam believe they sit with god after death, if they fight for Islam, or Muhammad.

Don’t think it’s over: watch Indonesia, where Islam is creeping back everyday some more (the president there suggested recently to release the mastermind of Islamist terror there…)

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Our ancestors at work: no need for Gods to chase cats. The story there is that the cheetahs were hunting impalas next to a dam. Jackals gave the alert, and baboons decided to encircle and then suddenly charge the cheetahs, to remove them from the premises…Baboons will act that way, even against lions. Our ancestors were expert at that, even 20 million years ago. I have met chimpanzees in lion territory with very few very small trees around, and they tried to frighten me (differently from the lions, who just went away).

Catholicism profited Roman Catholic plutocracy:

Those who think Catholicism didn’t bring the collapse of the Roman state should know the major facts (they don’t). It did, 100% (although the cause of Roman Catholicism itself was Roman military fascism, itself a consequence of plain old Roman financial fascism… for contemporary banks, see below).

In particular Roman Catholicism was proximally causal in the fall of the empire, when the Occidental part of the empire was led by Frankish generalissimo Arbogast. Arbogast had long been emperor in all but name. His Frankish nature prevented him (at the time) to be elected to the Purple. The emperor Theodosius had established terror decrees against “heretics” since 380 CE. Those led to the devastation of the empire’s intelligence, culture, libraries, books, spirits, and intellectuals… Let alone the Jews and whoever Theodosius wanted killed.

Arbogast tried to reestablish religious plurality, and civilizational sanity. So the Catholic fanatic, emperor Theodosius of the Oriental part, went to war. The mostly Frankish Roman army of the West got, barely, killed by Theodosius, thanks to a hurricane and the Goths, at the battle of the Frigidus river, September 5-6, 394 CE.

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No More Western Roman Army… So Back to More Savage Franks:

Result? After Arbogast’s soldiers got killed at Frigidus, so was the Roman army in the West (although Germans were constantly attacking the Roman Germanias). Theodosius, sole emperor, died in 395 CE. Within six years, the government of bishops which by then led Rome, called onto (much less Romanized) Franks to protect the provinces of Gallia and the two Germanias; but in 406 CE, 12 years after the disaster at the Frigidus, Germanic nations broke through the Frankish curtain, and invaded the Western empire. In particular, the Vandals invaded all the way to Africa, et present day Tunisia. There they established a maritime empire, and blocked grain supplies to the gigantic city of Rome, and most of Italy. Rome fell to the Goths in 410 CE. Actually the king of the Goths, Aleric, had commanded the Gothic forces fighting the Romanized Franks at Frigidus. Small world: the eternal return of the same, just as bankers nowadays.

The government of bishops viewed those who were not fanatically Catholic, and obedient as heretics to be destroyed. They didn’t just destroy independent individuals, but the entire Republican organization, by destroying culture, libraries, books full of (non-Catholic) wisdom. The destruction, by torture, of individuals such as Hypatia and major libraries, such as the one in Alexandria are examples of this situation.

Less well known, is that the bishops forbade the death penalty. Thus highways were thereafter paralyzed by bandits: incarceration, besides slavery, was not possible in antiquity. Also plutocratic families (which often had a bishop) couldn’t be forced to pay taxes.

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Catholicism and Islam were most profitable to the leaders claiming to “believe” in them during the Middle Ages:

Catholicism brought the collapse of the Roman empire in the West. The Franks, in the late Fifth Century, took over completely, and  reestablished the situation by reimposing a modicum of tolerance, and then a lot of innovations. And, first of all, mandatory secular education between the Sixth and Eighth centuries (generally uniquely attributed to Charlemagne, erroneously, as the fighting against the Papacy was during the Sixth Century). This Frankish spirit of overture and advancing civilization was weaponized to conquer Europe. Main events: elimination of the Goths, 507 CE, final colonization and domestication of the Saxons by Charlemagne in a 30 year war, 800 CE; reconquest of Britain and Southern Italy, Sicily, late Eleventh Century.

However, the conjugation of grievous Frankish civil war (Battle/massacre of Fontenoy) contemporaneous with multiple simultaneous deep invasions by Viking, Avars and Muslims, brought a disintegration of the empire. It’s not that the empire collapsed like the Assyrians in 614 BCE, or Nazi Germany in 1945. Instead, West Francia, exasperated by the military inefficiency of the empire, broke away from the rest, and then exploded in turn into around 60 states of diverse natures, through militaristic localization, also known as the Feudal Order.

Great lords of the Eleventh Century were plutocrats who would have been without justification for except the violence of their military feats… if not for the heavenly justification of violence by the Bible. Hence Bible god came back: a resurgence of terroristic, mysogynistic and pedophiliac Catholicism, starting around 1026 CE (when an entire religious establishment of a French city was burned alive by the Papacy… Crusades followed, two generations later…).  

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So “god” provided the metaphysical backup for degenerating Roman plutocracy and the Feudal Order. What about more modern times? Why were Americans so Christian “god” obsessed?

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God provided solace after giving reasons to eliminate the Natives:

The Bible is full of holocausts ordered by god, and king David is punished most horribly for refusing to destroy a nation: his son is tortured to death by god, over a week.

Hence, when the “Pilgrims” got to the New World, they extolled the riches of America (relative to Europe) to their kind left in Europe, urging them to come… And space the Pilgrims made by killing, enslaving and scalping the Natives: it was the Bible all over again: grabbing the “Promised Land”, by extermination of the preceding inhabitants…  

God enabled to do what Constantine or Muhammad, and their successors did with it; kill one’s opponents, because god ordered it. Falling asleep while the bankers make deals with Hitler, Franco, and their ilk? Indeed! Once one has eliminated the Natives (as was done in the Americas and Australia), what is left of the need for god? Acquiring the mentalities of lambs!

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God as Daddy or Mummy for baby lambs:

For modern Americans God became just a guarantee of perpetual infancy. The god-thing obsession? If we please a superior being, we will do better, s/he will take care of us. In other words, babyhood, all over again.

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Attali to the Rescue:

Before the US Revolution, many Americans believed in a much more natural form of divinity. It turns out that, when a deity dictate what is right and wrong, it’s actually “The Man” who decides what is right or wrong.

Now we have a more serious situation than pleasing The Man.

In particular, bankers are in command of the planet: Clinton, and then Obama made sure of it. Their rewards were colossal, and much appreciated by their tiny mind.

However, the times for gravitas has come. Jacques Attali, who is in very good position to know about bankers (he headed a totally major European bank, among many high level positions he had), warns us that a financial calamity, just like the preceding one, is around the corner.

See:

Democratic Illusion and Capitalist Cynicism

(I will write an essay on it, if I find the time…)

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Attali says the bankers are back to industrial sized evil, worse than 2008. Why are the bankers back to their nefarious ways?

In part because Obama would finish all his discourses, certifying, like G. W. Bush, or Clinton, that “God bless America”. So the US lambs were satisfied, and have been bleating contently ever since. Their bankers’ boy, Obama, was excellent, as the color of his skin testified, they said, with characteristic, we-believe-in-bible-god psychology.

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LIMIT WEALTH ABSOLUTELY: Elizabeth WARREN To The rescue:

(Ex-Harvard law professor) Senator Elizabeth Warren is running for president. To my surprised amazement, she rolled out her financial program last week: she proposes enormous taxes on the super wealthy. 2% of wealth above 50 millions, and even more, higher up.

Senator Warren’s wealth tax would be the way I would implement limiting wealth absolutely.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/limit-wealth-absolutely/

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/12/28/limit-wealth-absolutely-ii-great-wealth-steers-elite-leadership-referendums-to-fix-it-all/

Let’s keep our cynical fingers crossed that Warren’s wealth tax is not just a trick to keep Sanders from running again…  (She used to be way milder, nearly timid…)

In France, Rothschild merger and acquisition banker Macron, another boy president, ignorant of all, but for manipulating the lambs, removed the wealth tax (the yellow jackets want it reinstated). That particular wealth tax was too restrictive, I say. But Macron said the wealthy French would then flee to other countries… like the USA. Well, with Warren as president that would be easily fixed…

The USA taxes worldwide already: so wealthy US citizens won’t be able to escape (all the more as the French Republic is also learning from US ways and means…)

And for that change of taxation, what do we need? We need for US citizens to realize they have been kept in infancy by their increasing plutocracy (“In God We Trust”, borrowed from the Nazi army, was installed in US minds by the US Congress only in 1954…)

For Americans to graduate from infancy, they need to reject “god” and go back to their revolutionary roots… which were decidedly secular, we have that secularism in writing, from the most official documents by the US Founding Fathers… Philosophical infancy was nice, but it’s all over, the lions of fate are onto us now.

Amen.

Patrice Ayme

 

Of Gods, Mice and Laws: Just Pretend, Knowing You Pretend!

Western Europe has (finally) turned pretty secular, but not so the rest of the world. One should remember that, thanks to secular Greco-Roman law which ruled the most civilized parts of Europe for 26 centuries, Europe was never as completely god-crazy as the rest of the world. Neither was China, and this fundamental secularism explains probably the superiority of China and Europe in civilizational matters.

Eugen R finds “that the Universe is governed according the law of mathematics an oddity, and not a necessity of existence. How came these laws to existence?”Einstein, even more basically, couldn’t believe the universe was comprehensible. But it is com-prehensible because the universe has laws and thus can be apprehended. Eugen ruminations in “God. Programmer?” are more bleak than I think is wise. So here is my take on it:

If we lived in a universe which had no laws, such as plutocracy (which is intrinsically lawless), we would not be able to get a handle on the universe. And this is exactly what is happening, and why.

The Gods are the jokes the higher-ups have always played, and pretend to believe they mean everything that matters, so they could not just live better, but feel, and even act, better!

Laws of nature are given: this is a fact, the baby becomes cognizant of within minutes of coming to the world: close the eyes, and rest, comfort is given.

If truly in denial of the laws, one couldn’t live accordingly, because one would die right away. Even the craziest religious fanatics, know enough true physics not to die quickly: they don’t jump off windows, and don’t crash headfirst to get into the bus!

To be part of this world, this natural world, is to be law-abiding, to a very great extent, because otherwise we won’t be: to be lawful, or not to be. There is no alternative to natural laws, but death, prompt and definitive. All human beings learn this, starting as infants. When our great leaders, political, commercial or spiritual, act otherwise, as if they could make the laws, they lie to us.

“God” is just a concept claiming we still have a well-meaning parent teaching us the laws, and if we just please the deity, everything will be OK in all ways. Whereas we truly have no one, and especially nothing to guide us… Except for the laws of nature. But this claimed assumption, that the maker of laws can be befriended, self-hypnotize us, and those we want to rule.

Whether a “programmer”made the laws of nature or not, is irrelevant to the world of facts: the laws are in evidence, the “programmer”is not (notwithstanding that Aztecs could point at hummingbirds everywhere, and their main deity was a hummingbird, of sorts). There are enough laws to learn and search for, that we don’t need to spend time searching for something outside of the universe.

The evidence, instead, is that the laws of nature are here alone, they are primary actors. Why would there be a need to suppose that some agent made it so that jumping in a lava lake is deadly? All we know, is that trying to swim in lava would be deadly. And that’s enough to survive that one.

Those who claim natural laws are from the actions of a supernatural agent, generally are themselves easily found out to benefit from such claims. Thus their alleged supernaturalism turns out to be all too human for their comfort… and against that of those who trust them.

Ultimately, laws of mathematics are just laws of the neurology, thus laws of physics. Physics is all the god we have, but it is a mighty one and it doesn’t forgive.

All we can do, is to humanize the universe, and make our own god(s), knowing full well we did. Just as my daughter told me to do when she was two, and she wanted to learn from some role play, while I eyed the whole thing skeptically: “Just pretend!”

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: EugenR:”As in most of the cases I fully agree with you. The question is how to influence those who don’t make the effort to use their human capacity to comprehend reality based on evidence and not imaginary reality based on wishful thinking and flattery.”

PA: Happy we agree, as usual… As I said, many individuals have large base material interest to foster superstition (what stands above [nature]). The vast masses also have interest to just pretend that there are human deities up there, as it makes the world less inhuman, a place where baby thinking works, a return to very comfortable infantilism, the thing closest to the deepest, most comfortable slumber.
The solution, then, is to explain what is going on, and why pretend is OK, as long as it does not have too much of a deleterious impact on nature, human and not.