Francis Berger's Blog, page 27
May 1, 2024
Perspective Matters -- A Lot
Not just in painting but also in thinking. 
Seven Crows - Alex Colville - 1980
Seven Crows - Alex Colville - 1980
April 29, 2024
Mono-Pluralism: The Epitome of a Berdyaev Hedge
About a month ago, I suggested that Nikolai Berdyaev’s metaphysical quest should have led him to non-Omnigod and pluralism.
On rereading Chapter Five of The Meaning of the Creative Act, I revisited the closest Berdyaev seems to have realized that true creativity within Creation makes pluralism a necessity (bold added):
Abstract metaphysical and mystical monism shuts out the possibility of a creative act, either in God or in the world. The creative act presupposes a mono-pluralism, that is the existence of a multitude of free and independent beings; in other words, a concrete all-oneness.
The paragraph above epitomizes what I now call the Berdyaev Hedge — the seeming inability to short something metaphysically without covering and "insuring" that short against loss with a presumably failsafe long.
Pluralism must be the bedrock of Creation, but pluralism must possess the oxymoronic quality of also being mono. There simply must be a multitude of free and independent beings, yet this multitude of free and independent beings also belong to some kind of concrete oneness.
Berdyaev continues:
The question is not whether the world and man are outside divinity, but whether every person, every being, has free and independent existence. The transcendence of Divinity may be accepted only in the sense that the individuality of every personality cannot disappear and be dissolved into Divinity. The free and independent being of the personality unites with God but does not disappear in Him. Dissolution presupposes a non-personal God: free union presupposes that God is personal.
Berdyaev is clear that his concept of concrete oneness to which the multitude of free and independent beings belongs is not the sort of dissolution unity the oneness religions promote.
Fine, but what exactly is the concrete oneness to which he alludes?
The personal God is the Triune God, the three persons of the Divine Trinity. Only with the Persons of the Divine Trinity is personal communion and union possible. A Unitarian God is non-personal. To the First-God, about whom Eckhardt taught, nothing personal applies. In the religious consciousness of India, Divinity has not yet revealed the Trinity of His Persons to the world — that is a lower degree of revelation.
In Christianity, Divinity has already shown His Triune Face. The world is an inward drama of the Trinity. It may be said both that God is completely transcendent to man and that He is immanent in man. There must be revealed in me not only God and the Divine but man as well, my human nature — this means man must be born in God.
The plurality of the world has a positive religious meaning. Eternity is the heritage not only of God but of man, as profit from the world-process. This is the meaning of Christianity, as a religion of divine-humanity.
The Trinity is the long through which Berdyaev covers his pluralist metaphysical short. He rejects the idea of a single, unique Creator God in favor of the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in one Godhead — of three free and independent beings existing in a concrete oneness.
Berdyaev appears to acknowledge the metaphysical necessity of pluralism...yet cannot take this necessity to its conclusions. Instead, he hedges his pluralism through what he calls the “dynamic development of God” within the Trinity embedded within the mono-ness of the Godhead.
Or something to that extent.
The crux of the Berdyaev Hedge involves ensuring that the orthodox supplies ample cover for any and all heterodox speculations. Unfortunately, this hedge also seems to have prevented or hindered many authentic and thorough breakthroughs in Berdyaev's thinking.
Note added: Berdyaev's mono-pluralism might be his was of attempting to express dyadic relationships, but as is the case with many of his declarations, implication overrules explication.
On rereading Chapter Five of The Meaning of the Creative Act, I revisited the closest Berdyaev seems to have realized that true creativity within Creation makes pluralism a necessity (bold added):
Abstract metaphysical and mystical monism shuts out the possibility of a creative act, either in God or in the world. The creative act presupposes a mono-pluralism, that is the existence of a multitude of free and independent beings; in other words, a concrete all-oneness.
The paragraph above epitomizes what I now call the Berdyaev Hedge — the seeming inability to short something metaphysically without covering and "insuring" that short against loss with a presumably failsafe long.
Pluralism must be the bedrock of Creation, but pluralism must possess the oxymoronic quality of also being mono. There simply must be a multitude of free and independent beings, yet this multitude of free and independent beings also belong to some kind of concrete oneness.
Berdyaev continues:
The question is not whether the world and man are outside divinity, but whether every person, every being, has free and independent existence. The transcendence of Divinity may be accepted only in the sense that the individuality of every personality cannot disappear and be dissolved into Divinity. The free and independent being of the personality unites with God but does not disappear in Him. Dissolution presupposes a non-personal God: free union presupposes that God is personal.
Berdyaev is clear that his concept of concrete oneness to which the multitude of free and independent beings belongs is not the sort of dissolution unity the oneness religions promote.
Fine, but what exactly is the concrete oneness to which he alludes?
The personal God is the Triune God, the three persons of the Divine Trinity. Only with the Persons of the Divine Trinity is personal communion and union possible. A Unitarian God is non-personal. To the First-God, about whom Eckhardt taught, nothing personal applies. In the religious consciousness of India, Divinity has not yet revealed the Trinity of His Persons to the world — that is a lower degree of revelation.
In Christianity, Divinity has already shown His Triune Face. The world is an inward drama of the Trinity. It may be said both that God is completely transcendent to man and that He is immanent in man. There must be revealed in me not only God and the Divine but man as well, my human nature — this means man must be born in God.
The plurality of the world has a positive religious meaning. Eternity is the heritage not only of God but of man, as profit from the world-process. This is the meaning of Christianity, as a religion of divine-humanity.
The Trinity is the long through which Berdyaev covers his pluralist metaphysical short. He rejects the idea of a single, unique Creator God in favor of the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in one Godhead — of three free and independent beings existing in a concrete oneness.
Berdyaev appears to acknowledge the metaphysical necessity of pluralism...yet cannot take this necessity to its conclusions. Instead, he hedges his pluralism through what he calls the “dynamic development of God” within the Trinity embedded within the mono-ness of the Godhead.
Or something to that extent.
The crux of the Berdyaev Hedge involves ensuring that the orthodox supplies ample cover for any and all heterodox speculations. Unfortunately, this hedge also seems to have prevented or hindered many authentic and thorough breakthroughs in Berdyaev's thinking.
Note added: Berdyaev's mono-pluralism might be his was of attempting to express dyadic relationships, but as is the case with many of his declarations, implication overrules explication.
April 28, 2024
Without Jesus, We Cannot *Really* Believe in God
The other Abrahamic religions approach God through an Old Testament consciousness and depict Him as an incomprehensible, absolute, autocratic master. Well, okay, Christianity does that, too.
The problem is that such depictions are (or should be) irreconcilable and incompatible with Christianity and its emphasis on the reality of an intimate and personal divine-human connection.
Without Christ, it is difficult to comprehend God.
No, scratch that. Without Christ, comprehending God becomes impossible, which, ironically enough, makes God comprehensible.
He is the almighty master, the source of everything, the stern master, the unknowable transcendent, and the all-powerful, all-knowing lord. Although he has no needs, he fiercely demands our submission and punishes us eternally should we refuse.
And so on.
An incomprehensible God becomes incredibly easy to comprehend, but quite difficult to believe in.
Any relationship with God must be inner, intimate, and personal, and this is only possible through God as a person, God as a man — that is, through Jesus.
Christ is not a faraway autocratic commander. He is near us. He is within us, and we are within Him.
With Jesus, God’s absolutism ends, and we are called to immediate participation in the divine life of Creation.
This is easy to comprehend, yet it strikes most, Christians included, as incomprehensible.
The problem is that such depictions are (or should be) irreconcilable and incompatible with Christianity and its emphasis on the reality of an intimate and personal divine-human connection.
Without Christ, it is difficult to comprehend God.
No, scratch that. Without Christ, comprehending God becomes impossible, which, ironically enough, makes God comprehensible.
He is the almighty master, the source of everything, the stern master, the unknowable transcendent, and the all-powerful, all-knowing lord. Although he has no needs, he fiercely demands our submission and punishes us eternally should we refuse.
And so on.
An incomprehensible God becomes incredibly easy to comprehend, but quite difficult to believe in.
Any relationship with God must be inner, intimate, and personal, and this is only possible through God as a person, God as a man — that is, through Jesus.
Christ is not a faraway autocratic commander. He is near us. He is within us, and we are within Him.
With Jesus, God’s absolutism ends, and we are called to immediate participation in the divine life of Creation.
This is easy to comprehend, yet it strikes most, Christians included, as incomprehensible.
Litmus Tests That Fail Themselves
If your Litmus Tests involve things likesincere and humble submission to the Pope or any other external authoritypooh-poohing the depth of evil revealed during events like the birdemicor insisting that everyone vote in the most important election ever to save civilization then you adhere to Litmus Tests that fail themselves — in ways you obviously cannot even begin to fathom.
April 27, 2024
Only Love Frees Us From Despiritualization
Spirit is ultimate reality. It can be denied, but it can never truly be destroyed. If it could be destroyed, the material world as we know it would simply cease to exist for the simple reason that the material is a subcategory of the spiritual.
Whenever we perceive the material world as nothing more than the material world, we are locked in grips of despiritualization. The spiritual is still there, we just refuse to or are unable to sense it or know it. In this sense, we do not possess the power to dispossess anything in Creation — including ourselves — of spirit, but we can certainly make ourselves immune to spirit or estrange and alienate ourselves from it.
We do not possess the power to kill the spiritual in Creation, but we do have enough power to deaden it, most notably, within ourselves. This is the essence of despiritualization. However, possessing the power to deaden Creation also entails that we possess the power to do the opposite — to respiritualize Creation.
Although awareness is vital, respiritualizing Creation involves much more than merely recognizing and knowing that the material world is a subset of the spiritual cosmos. It involves far more than simply bringing Creation to life within consciousness. We may not be able to remove spirit from Creation when we despiritualize, but we are able to add spirit to Creation when we engage in respiritualization.
How?
Through love. The world can only be released from the curse of despiritualization through love. We feel this most acutely with people or Beings who are close to us in spirit. We sense Beings who are close to us in spirit as more alive, more meaningful, less burdensome, less obligatory because they are aligned with us, joined to us, and dear to us. Love burns away the pure-materiality of those Beings and reveals spirit, within the Beings we love and within ourselves.
Without love, our relationships within Creation are reduced to necessity, compulsion, pressure, burden, resistance, and obligation. We feel the apparent deadness of the material world pressing down upon us, threatening us, tempting us, and exploiting us, and we react to this deadness by exerting our own pressure, obligations, threats, temptations, and exploitation into the material world.
Love liberates us from despiritualization, but true liberation from the apparent deadness and burden of the material world involves a love of Christ. Without the love of Christ, true respiritualization — true spiritual freedom — cannot occur.
Without Jesus, the necessities, compulsions, pressures, resistances, and obligations of the despiritualized material world cannot be entirely overcome. Put another way, without Jesus, we can never truly free ourselves of the world while retaining a sense of self, that is, an authentic source of love.
The love of respiritualization is the love of freedom, harmony, and alignment. The selves who love each other and are united in such a way are free.
April 25, 2024
Optimistic or Pessimistic? From a Spiritual Perspective, Both Are Principally Superficial
Optimism about this-worldly matters is all fine and well; however, it is by no means a Christian obligation, duty, virtue, or value. Being buoyant and cheerful about temporal matters may provide emotional, physical, and social benefits; however, such benefits do not necessarily benefit one’s spirit or soul.
Conversely, this-worldly pessimism may make one cheerless, gloomy, and a veritable downer. It may also lead to detrimental effects on one’s emotional or physical well-being and relations with others, but it is by no means a sin, nor is it spiritual kryptonite.
I mention this because many Christians are under the errant belief that they must retain this-worldly optimism no matter what. As if the faith would crumble without it.
On the flip side, many Christians believe that it is wrong or sinful to harbor pessimistic views concerning this world and tend to eschew or dismiss all who display the slightest hint of this-worldly pessimism.
Misguided beliefs about optimism and pessimism arise from conflations with hope and despair.
Hope is a true Christian virtue. However, when applied to this world, the best it can offer is this — the steadfast belief that God is providing us with what we need to learn spiritually and to harness that learning to willingly, creatively, and lovingly accept and work toward Jesus’ offer of eternal life in Heaven. The spiritual virtue of hope is in the eternal and cosmic significance and meaning it grants to mortal life. That is the ultimate meaning behind ideas like “as long as there is life, there is hope.”
I can extend this hope to include people I know and love, perhaps even to people I don’t know; however, I cannot apply it to my social status, the economy, my children’s future job prospects, the future of my town, state, or nation, my physical health, or any other predominately this-worldly concern. Once I do that, hope ceases being hope and becomes optimism. As noted above, optimism about this-worldly matters is fine and well, but it is not mandatory and it is not a virtue.
Despair is perhaps the worst of sins. When applied to this world, it is the declaration that God has abandoned us, that He is not providing us with what we need to learn spiritually, and that Jesus’ offer of everlasting life is inaccessible to us. Worse, that Jesus’ offer is illusory; that Heaven does not exist. Despair is the ultimate sin because it strips all eternal and cosmic significance and meaning from mortal life and leaves us with nothing but our inevitable, meaningless deaths.
As with hope, I can despair over people I love, less so over people I don’t know, but I can only do so at the expense of hope. Any feeling of despair over this-worldly affairs like society, the economy, or social status is just acute pessimism and will remain so as long as it does not poison the spirit or other-worldly hope.
Yet many Christians firmly believe that optimism about mundane, this-worldly affairs is indispensable to being a good Christian and that this-worldly pessimism is akin to some form of self-damnation.
Once again, these misguided notions stem from conflating optimism and pessimism with hope and despair. Although the conflation may appear trivial and superficial, it can induce many spiritual errors and harms such as enervated and unsound discernment.
Christians who regard this-worldly optimism as some spiritual duty open themselves up to the danger of regarding the spiritual as a subset of the material, physical, and temporal rather than recognizing that the opposite is, in fact, the case. Christians who foster this-worldly pessimism can easily fall into the same trap if they lose sight of the bigger picture.
This-worldly optimism or pessimism is principally superficial from a spiritual perspective. Optimism is not a virtue, and pessimism is not a sin.
Christians would also do well to remember that optimism is not hope, and pessimism is not despair.
Optimism provides no safeguard against error and sin! On the contrary, it can lead to innumerable errors or sins and, yes, even self-damanation.
Obsessive this-worldly optimism may lead one to forget about hope altogether and commit to nothing more than potential positives in this world. Moreover, any weakening of such this-worldly optimism could also lead straight to other-worldly despair (if there’s nothing positive in this world, how can there be anything positive in the other world)?
Likewise, pessimism can also lead to many errors, sins, and self-damnation. However, Christians can hold consistently bleak views about temporal matters and retain or fortify their hope as long as they do not allow such negative views of temporal matters to blur or cloud the eternal and cosmic significance of mortal life.
In the end, optimism and pessimism are a part of moral life, but they are surface dwellers. Hope and despair exist in the depths. Knowing the difference is imperative.
Conversely, this-worldly pessimism may make one cheerless, gloomy, and a veritable downer. It may also lead to detrimental effects on one’s emotional or physical well-being and relations with others, but it is by no means a sin, nor is it spiritual kryptonite.
I mention this because many Christians are under the errant belief that they must retain this-worldly optimism no matter what. As if the faith would crumble without it.
On the flip side, many Christians believe that it is wrong or sinful to harbor pessimistic views concerning this world and tend to eschew or dismiss all who display the slightest hint of this-worldly pessimism.
Misguided beliefs about optimism and pessimism arise from conflations with hope and despair.
Hope is a true Christian virtue. However, when applied to this world, the best it can offer is this — the steadfast belief that God is providing us with what we need to learn spiritually and to harness that learning to willingly, creatively, and lovingly accept and work toward Jesus’ offer of eternal life in Heaven. The spiritual virtue of hope is in the eternal and cosmic significance and meaning it grants to mortal life. That is the ultimate meaning behind ideas like “as long as there is life, there is hope.”
I can extend this hope to include people I know and love, perhaps even to people I don’t know; however, I cannot apply it to my social status, the economy, my children’s future job prospects, the future of my town, state, or nation, my physical health, or any other predominately this-worldly concern. Once I do that, hope ceases being hope and becomes optimism. As noted above, optimism about this-worldly matters is fine and well, but it is not mandatory and it is not a virtue.
Despair is perhaps the worst of sins. When applied to this world, it is the declaration that God has abandoned us, that He is not providing us with what we need to learn spiritually, and that Jesus’ offer of everlasting life is inaccessible to us. Worse, that Jesus’ offer is illusory; that Heaven does not exist. Despair is the ultimate sin because it strips all eternal and cosmic significance and meaning from mortal life and leaves us with nothing but our inevitable, meaningless deaths.
As with hope, I can despair over people I love, less so over people I don’t know, but I can only do so at the expense of hope. Any feeling of despair over this-worldly affairs like society, the economy, or social status is just acute pessimism and will remain so as long as it does not poison the spirit or other-worldly hope.
Yet many Christians firmly believe that optimism about mundane, this-worldly affairs is indispensable to being a good Christian and that this-worldly pessimism is akin to some form of self-damnation.
Once again, these misguided notions stem from conflating optimism and pessimism with hope and despair. Although the conflation may appear trivial and superficial, it can induce many spiritual errors and harms such as enervated and unsound discernment.
Christians who regard this-worldly optimism as some spiritual duty open themselves up to the danger of regarding the spiritual as a subset of the material, physical, and temporal rather than recognizing that the opposite is, in fact, the case. Christians who foster this-worldly pessimism can easily fall into the same trap if they lose sight of the bigger picture.
This-worldly optimism or pessimism is principally superficial from a spiritual perspective. Optimism is not a virtue, and pessimism is not a sin.
Christians would also do well to remember that optimism is not hope, and pessimism is not despair.
Optimism provides no safeguard against error and sin! On the contrary, it can lead to innumerable errors or sins and, yes, even self-damanation.
Obsessive this-worldly optimism may lead one to forget about hope altogether and commit to nothing more than potential positives in this world. Moreover, any weakening of such this-worldly optimism could also lead straight to other-worldly despair (if there’s nothing positive in this world, how can there be anything positive in the other world)?
Likewise, pessimism can also lead to many errors, sins, and self-damnation. However, Christians can hold consistently bleak views about temporal matters and retain or fortify their hope as long as they do not allow such negative views of temporal matters to blur or cloud the eternal and cosmic significance of mortal life.
In the end, optimism and pessimism are a part of moral life, but they are surface dwellers. Hope and despair exist in the depths. Knowing the difference is imperative.
April 24, 2024
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April 23, 2024
The Whole of the Moon
I have just learned that Karl Wallinger, the Welsh-born musician, multi-instumentalist, and songwriter best known for his work with The Waterboys and World Party, passed away a little more than a month ago at 66.
In all honesty, I don't know much more about Wallinger nor the bands with which he was associated, but The Waterboys' The Whole of the Moon remains one of my favorite pop/rock songs from the 1980s, mostly for the back-and-forth contrasts within the lyrics and the song's simple yet catchy carnivalesque foundation, upon which the band adds layers of instrumentation and backing vocals resulting in a culminating crescendo via a sax solo.
I must confess, any pop song that features violins, trumpets, and a saxophone automatically receives bonus points from me.
Anyway, Wallinger is the chap playing the keyboards in the video below. HQ audio version below.
In all honesty, I don't know much more about Wallinger nor the bands with which he was associated, but The Waterboys' The Whole of the Moon remains one of my favorite pop/rock songs from the 1980s, mostly for the back-and-forth contrasts within the lyrics and the song's simple yet catchy carnivalesque foundation, upon which the band adds layers of instrumentation and backing vocals resulting in a culminating crescendo via a sax solo.
I must confess, any pop song that features violins, trumpets, and a saxophone automatically receives bonus points from me.
Anyway, Wallinger is the chap playing the keyboards in the video below. HQ audio version below.
April 22, 2024
Soon
The cuckoos are calling, which means the poppies will begin blooming soon. 
April 21, 2024
Of What Use is the Sociosexual Hierarchy if Society and Men Are Net-Evil?
Those who promulgate or display an obsessive interest in things like sociosexual hierarchies tend to refer to whatever they criticize or oppose as fake and gay.
No real objection from me there; much of what sociosexual hierarchy adherents criticize or oppose is indeed fake and gay.
However, sociosexual hierarchy fanboys possess a glaring blind spot when it comes to the fakeness and gayness of their sociosexual preoccupation and self-absorption.
Fake because “systems” that classify and rank men based on their social standing among other men and their ability to attract women express, at best, only partial truths about men and society, entailing that such systems offer little more than generalized distortions and misrepresentations.
Gay because I cannot for the life of me understand why men are so fervently interested in other men and their own supposed ranking among other men.
Yet for the sake of argument, let’s pretend the sociosexual hierarchy is pure truth. What then? How do its tenets hold up in our net-evil and quickly perishing societies?
If alpha males are indeed the elite men that naturally rise to occupy the bulk of leadership positions in the West, then what exactly are the fruits by which I am to know them?
If alphas are indeed running the show, then they are succeeding in running a net-evil show replete with the worst sorts of value inversions one could devise, and all the other men — the betas, the gammas, the deltas, and the omegas — are all willingly onboard for the ride.
However, something tells me the alphas are not running the show. The ubiquity of head girls and other assorted female psychopaths in leadership positions all over the West alone is a testament to that.
Moreover, barely any of the men who remain in leadership positions today qualify as alpha males. So, where are all the alphas and what exactly are they leading?
I suppose the sociosexual hierarchy acolytes acknowledge all of that by referring to our current value-inverted iteration of Westen Civilization as Clown World and, by default, probably insist that the only solution to value-inverted Clown World is the reimplementation of a proper hierarchy of values in society, namely via the recognition and application sociosexual hierarchy.
Well, okay, but if this “natural” hierarchy is so valid, then how could it be so easily and willingly inverted, usurped, and discarded? Moreover, how will it ever be reimplemented?
Putting all of that aside for a moment, my biggest concern with this whole sociosexual hierarchy business is that it does little more than distract people — men in particular — from the sorts of things they should be thinking about and concentrating on.
The all-encompassing focus on society diverts attention from more pressing spiritual problems and matters. The forceful emphasis on groups and ranks within society diminishes men (or women) as individuals, as unique selves within Creation, each with a unique spiritual arc and quest. It reeks of materialism and positivism, as do the ultimate aims and functions within the hierarchy.
Here's the thing — people, men particularly, welcome such diversions with open arms because it provides them the pretense of being involved in serious intellectual/spiritual business while simultaneously avoiding the urgent and acute spiritual matters to which they should be attending.
At its core, the sociosexual hierarchy strikes me as uncreative, anti-creative, anti-spiritual, corrupt, pseudoscientific, systemized thinking that, among other detrimental effects, increases alienation.
It does little more than attempt to explain a supposed system embedded within another system. It is just another aspect of Societianity — the compulsive belief in society as the be-all and end-all of mortal life in this world.
It offers few answers to ultimate questions or aims. As with all predetermined models, its outputs are entirely dependent upon and controlled by its inputs. All else is considered pointless and irrelevant to its pre-arranged schemata.
And at the end of the day, who cares where men happen to land on some sociosexual ranking if the society itself is thoroughly corrupted and net-evil, and the majority of the men on said ranking is spiritually shallow, unserious, unrepentant, hedonic, dishonest, cowardly, and effeminate?
The whole thing is just another inane schtick, which helps explain why it is currently so uber-popular.
No real objection from me there; much of what sociosexual hierarchy adherents criticize or oppose is indeed fake and gay.
However, sociosexual hierarchy fanboys possess a glaring blind spot when it comes to the fakeness and gayness of their sociosexual preoccupation and self-absorption.
Fake because “systems” that classify and rank men based on their social standing among other men and their ability to attract women express, at best, only partial truths about men and society, entailing that such systems offer little more than generalized distortions and misrepresentations.
Gay because I cannot for the life of me understand why men are so fervently interested in other men and their own supposed ranking among other men.
Yet for the sake of argument, let’s pretend the sociosexual hierarchy is pure truth. What then? How do its tenets hold up in our net-evil and quickly perishing societies?
If alpha males are indeed the elite men that naturally rise to occupy the bulk of leadership positions in the West, then what exactly are the fruits by which I am to know them?
If alphas are indeed running the show, then they are succeeding in running a net-evil show replete with the worst sorts of value inversions one could devise, and all the other men — the betas, the gammas, the deltas, and the omegas — are all willingly onboard for the ride.
However, something tells me the alphas are not running the show. The ubiquity of head girls and other assorted female psychopaths in leadership positions all over the West alone is a testament to that.
Moreover, barely any of the men who remain in leadership positions today qualify as alpha males. So, where are all the alphas and what exactly are they leading?
I suppose the sociosexual hierarchy acolytes acknowledge all of that by referring to our current value-inverted iteration of Westen Civilization as Clown World and, by default, probably insist that the only solution to value-inverted Clown World is the reimplementation of a proper hierarchy of values in society, namely via the recognition and application sociosexual hierarchy.
Well, okay, but if this “natural” hierarchy is so valid, then how could it be so easily and willingly inverted, usurped, and discarded? Moreover, how will it ever be reimplemented?
Putting all of that aside for a moment, my biggest concern with this whole sociosexual hierarchy business is that it does little more than distract people — men in particular — from the sorts of things they should be thinking about and concentrating on.
The all-encompassing focus on society diverts attention from more pressing spiritual problems and matters. The forceful emphasis on groups and ranks within society diminishes men (or women) as individuals, as unique selves within Creation, each with a unique spiritual arc and quest. It reeks of materialism and positivism, as do the ultimate aims and functions within the hierarchy.
Here's the thing — people, men particularly, welcome such diversions with open arms because it provides them the pretense of being involved in serious intellectual/spiritual business while simultaneously avoiding the urgent and acute spiritual matters to which they should be attending.
At its core, the sociosexual hierarchy strikes me as uncreative, anti-creative, anti-spiritual, corrupt, pseudoscientific, systemized thinking that, among other detrimental effects, increases alienation.
It does little more than attempt to explain a supposed system embedded within another system. It is just another aspect of Societianity — the compulsive belief in society as the be-all and end-all of mortal life in this world.
It offers few answers to ultimate questions or aims. As with all predetermined models, its outputs are entirely dependent upon and controlled by its inputs. All else is considered pointless and irrelevant to its pre-arranged schemata.
And at the end of the day, who cares where men happen to land on some sociosexual ranking if the society itself is thoroughly corrupted and net-evil, and the majority of the men on said ranking is spiritually shallow, unserious, unrepentant, hedonic, dishonest, cowardly, and effeminate?
The whole thing is just another inane schtick, which helps explain why it is currently so uber-popular.
