Animalism Is Not A Humanism

More Is Different. Similarly, Humanism Is More Than Animalism. Identifying Humanism To Animalism Is Incorrect, And No Way To Progress.
All advanced animals, including squirrels, have consciousness (by definition of “advanced”). But animals have more or less consciousness, and much more, or much less, can be very different. Studies on worms have shown that as little as three neurons can endow a worm with apparent free will: three neurons, free will. But of course worms do not have consciousness and free will as we do.

An analogy will help the wise: an isolated ensemble of very few particles is endowed with, and controlled by, quantum properties; however an ensemble of many particles, with few exceptions (Bose-Einstein condensates) is a classical object: more is completely different. The quantum description vanishes, the classical description replaces it. Similarly and for the same reason, from quantum to classical, or a variant thereof, the animal description disappears and the human description appears.

In the end, we are completely different from squirrels.

Now, of course, should one be a Nazi one may want to consider people to be no more than animals, so the Nazis elevated animals to the level of humans, to better exterminate the latter. After all, one exterminated insects with Zyklon B, and, having identified people to insects, the Nazis could then exterminate the former like the latter… with the same insecticide!

Our ancestors 60 millions years ago, resembled squirrels, but they ate insects. Our descendants became ever more brainy, in great part because of their carnivorous diet and habits: running after potentially dangerous prey while clinging to branches requires much intelligence… while squirrels, content to much on nuts, a less demanding task neurologically, stagnated neurologically. A quick look at evolution tells us that squirrels are probably 100 millions years away from civilization (should all of their deadly competition, namely primates, magically disappear; with primates to eat them, squirrels would never get there, to civilization, because predators tend to stay smarter, and primates are dozens of millions of years of intellectual superiority over squirrels).

To claim ever more intelligence makes no difference in grounding morality should be a well-known pitfall.

Civilization’s progress ever since there are animals and they think, is called humanism.

Animalism is not a humanism. Sentient mussels are not conscious chimps. Much more mind is completely different.

Patrice Ayme

Magnolia (named after French botanist Magnol), Monterey cypress, Luna… Berkeley CA, 2/23/2021 Do other animals appreciate beauty? Some apparently do. But surely not as much as humans do.

***

P/S: this is the second essay on the “Animalism Is Not A Humanism” theme in a few days. What is going on? There is obviously a deep propaganda campaign launched suddenly by the plutocracy promoting the opposite, namely that animalism is humanism. Plutocrats are animals, but we should think of them, all of a sudden, as human (that seems to be the secret message supposed to imprint our subconscious: you are just an animals, thus we are all equal, rich or poor, commander of the world, or not). This time the spark to my reaction above, a comment which I sent to the New York Times, was an article in the New York Times 2/23/2021, today… in the NYT’s philosophical series called “THE STONE“. My comment was blocked, as it put the plutocratic newspaper to shame. Here are extracts of the NYT’s article, with comments I add now (those were not sent to the plutocratic propaganda paper, naturlich!):

Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.
It’s astonishing how relentlessly Western philosophy has strained to prove we are not squirrels. By Crispin Sartwell; Mr. Sartwell is a professor of philosophy.

If one were to read through the prefaces and first paragraphs of the canonical works of Western philosophy, one might assume the discipline’s primary question to be this: What makes us humans so much better than all the other animals? Really, it’s astonishing how relentless this theme is in the whole history of philosophy. The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to, members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.

[Patrice Ayme: As I explained, more is different; that’s a well known idea. One snowflake doesn’t make an avalanche, and cannot behave as one; many snowflakes make an avalanche, a completely different agent; one neuron does not make a civilization, dozens of billions of trillions of them, entangled, over the fullness of time, do. The transition from quantum to classical mechanics is the best example; that analogy is a hard data point great philosophers did not have before: Quantum Physics, in full, dates from 1924…

The so-called “philosophy professor” Sartwell pursues: The Great Philosopher will, before addressing himself to the deep ethical and metaphysical questions, pause for the conventional, ground-clearing declaration: “I am definitely not a squirrel.” This is evidently something that needs continual emphasizing.

Rationality and self-control, as philosophers underline again and again, give humans a value that squirrels lack (let’s just stick with this species for the time being), a moral status unique to us. We are conscious, and squirrels, allegedly, are not; we are rational, and squirrels are not; we are free, and squirrels are not.

We can congratulate ourselves on the threat averted. But if we truly believed we were so much better than squirrels, why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?

[It is of course not just “Great Philosophers who make that point. People eat squirrels casually; when they eat Mr. Sartwell and his ilk, they thank the gods, at least so I have been told…]

Sartwell: One difficult thing to face about our animality is that it entails our deaths; being an animal is associated throughout philosophy with dying purposelessly, and so with living meaninglessly. It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.

[Here Sartwell mixes up things. Mortality is one thing, morality, another. We may all die tomorrow, it does not mean our morality dies with us. That rationality gives us some of our dignity is one thing; love, or even hatred, gives us dignity too. That advanced animals are rational cannot be denied: reason is what the brain produces. That reason endows an eagle with dignity cannot be denied either. If an eagle behaved like a rabbit, it would have less dignity… Now Sartwell speaks of Kant, professor to slave traders, a philosopher extolling the slave trade, and who is to reason what the slave trader is to commerce… Kant was deeply immoral, and his law most noticeable, is slave trading. kant is to the western intellectual tradition was lung cancer is to breathing…]

Sartwell: “The connection of such ideas to the way we treat animals — for example, in our food chain — is too obvious to need repeating. And the devaluation of animals and disconnection of us from them reflect a deeper devaluation of the material universe in general. In this scheme of things, we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything. This is the ideology of species annihilation and environmental destruction, and also of technological development.“

PA: Humans became humans because they ate meat. Otherwise we would have big bellies like chimps, gorialls and all too many Americans have. Meat gave superb nutrition, allowing to shorten the gut. Gorillas and chimps know this, and try to kill preys as much as they can. But they are not superb killers as the evolving members of the genus Homo became. Pure veganism is NOT healthy. This being said I look forward lab meat… But then why should there be cows around? Is not a world without cows poorer? Supposed I was on a lonely planet, and god would lend me Sartwell for 20 years as company, until She made Sartwell disappear in a cloud of smoke. Should there be Sartwell, or no Sartwell? Is it moral to have Sartwell? Did he suffer?

A paradox is that the animalists tell us to stop eating animals to be like animals. But animals eat animals. Even cows do. So if we would be animals like animals, we would eat animals like the animals do.

Sartwell: Further trouble is caused when the distinctions between humans and animals are then used to draw distinctions among human beings. Some humans, according to this line of thinking, are self-conscious, rational and free, and some are driven by beastly desires. Some of us transcend our environment: Reason alone moves us to action. But some of us are pushed around by physical circumstances, by our bodies. Some of us, in short, are animals — and some of us are better than that. This, it turns out, is a useful justification for colonialism, slavery and racism.

PA: The USA is the world’s top exterminationist country. How was that done? By having Hollier-Than-Thou Puritans, such as professor Sartwell, treating native Americans as if they were animals. Sartwell is still at it, indeed, a century later, in the guise of the opposite, just as the Puritans were. What he is doing is attacking reason… And this is exactly why he did not publish my comment (which was the part above before my name).

Then Sartwell accuses Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Freud of opposing “nature” and “reason”. But of course reason comes from nature, as we do, in us and the rest of animals. I have myself attacked Aristotle as a plutocratic philosopher, and he was a plutocrat himself (the person who Aristotle put in charge of his estate was no less than his friend Antipater, the plutocrat who defeated Athens and turned her in an official plutocracy where only the wealthiest could vote…).

Sartwell: “Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says, “wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.

In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify ourselves of animality. These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.“

PA: So Sartwell even accuses neurology to distinguish higher thought production and panic centers such as the amygdala… The ratio prefrontal/amygdala being presumably unfair to squirrel, and thus favorable to my culinary instincts orbiting roasted squirrels…

Sartwell finishes in a trainwreck:”I’d like to publicly identify this dualistic view as a disaster, but I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that. And I’d like to repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature. I don’t see how we could cease to be mammals and remain ourselves.”

This of course mixes everything up, although some of the points are correct… Of course we are not classical logic programs, we are quantum, so we have consciousness and free will. “Mind-Body Dualism” probably originates in the duality between Quantum and Classical. The “Quantum” is wholly about the integrated whole, accomplished through entanglement… We are out of nature, nature herself becoming transcendental, and of course we don’t necessarily have to have boobs to be, or stay human… Humanity has long transcended much of humanity and will transcends some more very soon… Including aging, which has a pervese effect on all of human culture…

***

P/S 2: I value squirrels: I had a pet squirrel in Africa, for many years. I also had a parrot, Mimi. I got more attached to the parrot, though. She was very argumentative… when she didn’t want to go back to her cage, for the night, she would fight. As her wings were not clipped, she would fly around like a dragon from Game of Thrones, threatening all sorts of mayhem, just for show… Unfortunately, after years of fun and games, she died from avian flu of some sort, creating great sorrow.

Feb. 23, 2021

Animalists And Nazis: A Common Hatred For Humanity

WHY NAZIS WERE ANIMAL RIGHT ACTIVISTS

Animal rights extremists (“animalists”) pontificate that humans are no better than mice, or roaches. Whereas humanists believe that humans are vastly superior to mussels. Mussels have no culture. Mussels have no intelligence. 

Animalists retort that human beings have no particular place in the universe, so they have no more rights than animals, who have no particular place in the universe either. Earth’s blue dot in a vast black universe has no particular significance they can discern, so why should humans have any meaning or worth either? 

Nefarious fools and hypocrites ask questions which they know are too stupid to be answered. What are we going to tell them? If you need to ask that question, you do not deserve an answer?

Human with descendant of dinosaurs displaying flight mastery. Animalists will have us believe than the human is not more worthy of consideration than the heron. I love herons, and I want them around, but I love and esteem humans more. (Berkeley, 2/20/2021)

Animalists have apparently not enough culture and, or, intelligence, to afford humanism. They make a show of displaying their virtue by saying they will not hurt any soul… while other humans, who do hurt animals, or are open to the possibility of animals getting hurt, are thus bad… an inferior sort. They themselves hurt animals, like most of us do, indirectly. and often they intend to eradicate entire animal species by depriving them of utility, but… never mind they are busy accusing you, not themselves. 

Animalists, having little culture and not enough history to not know the essential here. They do not know that this tactic of accusing humanity in the guise of worshipping the animals is not new: the NAZIS used it. The Nazis claimed they were animal lovers. To not hurt animals, Hitler was a vegetarian, and, he said, because animals were made to suffer so much [1].

The Nazis passed, to great fanfare, animal rights laws to prove to the world they were good people, of superior moral fiber. In 1933 the Nazis passed laws regulating the slaughter of animals. The suffering of lobsters in Berlin posh restaurants was a particularly sensitive subject. Animals could only be killed after anesthesia. Mistreating your pet could get you two years in prison (especially for opponents of the regime, as Roman emperor Theodosius did with opponents he accused of heresy). The Nazis also banned the forced feeding of ducks to produce foie gras… just as Californians would do later with French delicacies. Hermann Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments”. It was let it be known that anyone who treated animals as inanimate property would be sent to a concentration camp. That Nazi animal circus was all for show… and to institute the following dual principles: that Nazis were of a superior moral fiber, as adjudicated by animals, while common humans were no better than animals. So humans could be treated like animals, why not? Animalism as a humanism fit with exterminationism just right. Naturlich.

It is highly likely that today’s animalists also want to make animals out of us, as the Nazis did. Animalism is akin to dehumanization, the worst sort of murderous racism. Once one believes that people are like ants, one has achieved the essence of the worst aspect of Nazism.

So why are there so many animal rights activists of the exaggerated type nowadays? Because they represent the ultimate nihilism which talks. It is the entire freedom they found to protest. Because they are cowards.  In a world they do not understand, master, or approve of, they want to play holier than thou… and are looking for a safe outrage. Also many are simple opportunists, or idiots who believe they detected in science a continual demotion” of humans. Telling human children or their parents that they are worse than flies because they kill flies,while flies do not kill them, is also, for pedophobe sadists, a dream come true [2].

Animalists know, deep down inside that we will not use insecticide to deal with them precisely because we are not, as they are. Nor will animalists commit suicide, as they should, because any human being, even a vegan one, kills animals, day in, day out. Instead, their main mission is to demote humanity and to demote reason, with hypocritical protests which signify only they want the power of mobilizing attention towards their ant-like existence… 

Animalists’ nihilism is thus most useful to plutocracy, its servants and the establishment. Because extreme animalism diverts mental energy towards fake, self-contradictory debates, removed from basic reality. Thus the kleptocratic elite can keep plundering the biosphere in peace, while animalists tell those who try to organize the resistance against feudal forces that they are… worse than beasts.

To save the biosphere from those who are red in fang and claw, one will have to retain common sense. Arguing that those who kill animals, any animal, are worse than beasts is no way to basic smarts. It is the way to Nazi-like lethal lying madness.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Hitler posed an animal lover… As a vegan, the Fuhrer smelled terrible, as he emitted gas all day long, inconveniencing his generals. Also his veganism was so exaggerated he had to take all sorts of drugs, and was completely diseased, with de facto premature aging, Parkinson, etc. People who knew Hitler and were familiar with his diet relate that he did not consume meat as part of his diet during the war. Several witnesses—such as Albert Speer (in his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich)— wrote that Hitler used vivid and gruesome descriptions of animal suffering and slaughter at the dinner table to try to dissuade his entourage from eating meat. An examination of Hitler’s remains carried out by French scientists in 2017 found no traces of meat fibre in the tartar on Hitler’s teeth. Obviously, Hitler was making a show of displaying save-the-animals virtue. It was widely expected that, if the Nazis had won the war, they would have denied killing anybody in any concentration camp (they had dozens of thousands of those, most of them small). They could have pointed to their blatant love of animals.

***

[2] Many flies and other insects carry deadly diseases which kill millions of people every year (that does not mean I am for chemical insecticides; I am for birds, who eat insects, and mechanical devices). In Africa I would cover myself with a thick sweater by 45 Centigrade heat (110F) to shelter from tsetse flies, a sort of deer fly. Tsetse carry sleeping sickness, and can fly as fast as a car drives. Sleeping sickness is a dreary disease. African (not European) cattle resist it.

WILL TO EXTERMINATION

[Dark Side I; the squeamish is invited to read something else.]

Jane Goodall, the fanatical Christian and do-gooder, was the leading chimpanzee ethologist. Her lesson number one, as she always insists, is that “chimpanzees are very much like us“. Paradoxically, the greatest discovery Goodall made was what I view as the deepest pillar of the Dark Side. The WILL TO EXTERMINATION. Roll over Nietzsche, and even Sade!

Nietzsche’s Will to Power should be controversial. Because, not only the likes of Caesar or Napoleon had evoked it, but there are other “Wills“. Obviously. And the most important “Will” had not been uncovered by Nietzsche. Or, come to think of it, by any major philosopher, so far. The Will To Extermination is the very core of the Dark Side. It has been ignored at humanity’s own peril.

War is Business. On the Extermination Path.

[Chimpanzees are four to five times stronger than human beings; the latter surrendered power for dexterity, allowing to terrorize chimpanzees with superior weaponry.]

Sade had achieved a much better understanding, and he warned fellow revolutionaries that it was unwise to push the French revolution onto Europe by the force of arms… That it would all turn into what it turned into. Sade had a point one has to keep in mind (say in Syria).

Understanding that the Will to Extermination is a dominant emotion is a must for making progress in humanism. Keeping it in mind would have led humanity to question early on what the German “Reichs” were up to, or Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler, or many of today’s mass homicidal dictators. Or, more generally, what all plutocrats are up to. The Will To Extermination is the main interface of true plutocracy with the world.

Is that all there is to the Dark Side? Oh no. There is the “Will To Power”, sitting on the side. And there is more: emotional, not just rational, pointillism.

I had a dream. A rescue helicopter was landing in the thick forest next to my home. I had to recover my solar powered camera to immortalize the scene. However it was on the south side of the overhang of a giant cliff I knew very well. In my haste to recover the camera, I overlooked the fear that the cliff ought to have inspired, overshot the device, and found myself hanging from weeds above the enormous void. At that point, waking up seemed the only reasonable option left.

Lesson? People act on reduced emotional sets. In that particular case, the urge to get the device was the only thing considered. Similar reduced emotional sets were at the origin of the German attack in 1914, or the rise of the United Stasi of America, or Obamacrap Obamacare.

Thus, it’s not enough to consider e-motions (what moves), but also which emotions are operationally in command, in any given course of action.

Nietzsche explained in “Beyond Good & Evil”, that he wanted a unified cause, a Theory Of Everything psychological (are modern physicists taking themselves for Nietzsche?). That’s why Nietzsche promoted the Will To Power. That was rather a bid for infuriating oversimplification. Indeed, he himself admitted people thought with their guts, or stomach.

Indeed there is a Will to Drink, or one to fill one’s stomach. Or, more basic of all, there is a Will to Breathe (people can’t commit suicide by refusing to breathe; even under water, end by trying to breathe water).

Nietzsche himself also admitted that there was a “Will to Knowledge”. As it’s well known that curiosity killed the cat, it’s hard to see what kind of power, but for self destruction, the cat was after.

In other words, the silly Nietzsche himself had to admit that there is more to a brain than the desire to turn power on. Studies on Aplysia have confirmed this. Far from being the way Nietzsche thought, the essence of brains is non locality. That’s precisely why consciousness was evolved.

What is usually said is that Goodall discovered that chimpanzees made war. What I point out is why they make war. Here is a recent (2010) study in “Current Biology”:

Chimpanzees make lethal coalitionary attacks on members of other groups [1]. This behavior generates considerable attention because it resembles lethal intergroup raiding in humans [2]. Similarities are nevertheless difficult to evaluate because the function of lethal intergroup aggression by chimpanzees remains unclear. One prominent hypothesis suggests that chimpanzees attack neighbors to expand their territories and to gain access to more food [2]. Two cases apparently support this hypothesis, but neither furnishes definitive evidence. Chimpanzees in the Kasekela community at Gombe National Park took over the territory of the neighboring Kahama community after a series of lethal attacks [3]. Understanding these events is complicated because the Kahama community had recently formed by fissioning from the Kasekela group and members of both communities had been provisioned with food. In a second example from the Mahale Mountains, the M group chimpanzees acquired part of the territory of the adjacent K group after all of the adult males in the latter disappeared [4]. Although fatal attacks were suspected from observations of intergroup aggression, they were not witnessed, and as a consequence, this case also fails to furnish conclusive evidence. Here we present data collected over 10 years from an unusually large chimpanzee community at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. During this time, we observed the Ngogo chimpanzees kill or fatally wound 18 individuals from other groups; we inferred three additional cases of lethal intergroup aggression based on circumstantial evidence (see Supplemental Information). Most victims were caught in the same region and likely belonged to the same neighboring group. A causal link between lethal intergroup aggression and territorial expansion can be made now that the Ngogo chimpanzees use the area once occupied by some of their victims.

So what the authors suggest is that chimpanzees behave like little Hitlers, plotting an expansion of their “Lebensraum” (vital space).

Maybe. However, is it how chimpanzees feel it? Certainly not. Inter-chimpanzee violence is extremely brutal and cruel: parts are torn away, bitten off, until death occur from shock and blood loss. (This happens in the wild, and in captivity.)

One can describe a murderous chimpanzee rampage only as motivated by unbounded hatred. When moved by that sort of emotion, chimpanzees are not in the spirit of just making smart real estate investments.

Nietzsche tried to explain everything with the Will To Power: “Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will–namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it… then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as–will to power. The world viewed from inside… it would be “will to power” and nothing else.” (From Beyond Good and Evil.)

Well, Nietzsche missed the big picture, the one that explains Auschwitz. Trying to do, finance, economics, sociology without the Will To Extermination, is to try to reason out of a reduced emotional set, missing the most important ingredient.

There too, contemplating chimpanzees’ behavior help. the art of extermination with chimpanzees consists into having the many surprise an isolated individual. So chimpanzees go on the war path. They make a single file, they become very silent, strongly bounded by… the perspective of committing murder. And they murder at a stupendous rate, much higher than that of hunter-gatherers. Thus war is a force that provides chimpanzees with the strongest meaning.

Verdict? To defeat the Will To Extermination, we need a higher form of war, just as to fight a disease, we need to understand, and use its essence against itself, as vaccines do.

***

Patrice Ayme

FORCE IS A HUMANISM

FORCEFULLY CONTEXTUALIZING MAN.

Force Is Strong, It Beats Weakness Anytime.

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

 FORCE ME UP:

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

 Force.

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

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

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

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

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

 Anything can be abused. Anything.

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

 LIFE IS FORCE. INTELLIGENCE EVEN MORE SO:

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

 WHEN MAN IS SO STRONG AS TO BE A MAKER:

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

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

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

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

***

 WHEN FORCE IS USED TOO LATE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

 Because only force allows to do what is necessary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

***

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

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

*

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

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