Empire of Yin - Part 1: The Great Unbalancing
From the desk of Takuan Seiyo on Tue, 2008-09-23 21:25
Sticky, Sweet, Stupid, Scary
Western Civilization is now like the Three Gorges valley downriver from the biggest dam in the world, breached. Pouring in is an alluvial torrent of toxic bilge waters of unbridled license, commercialized lust, puerile 24/7 media content of unlimited choices -- all of them bad, institutionalized overconsumption of useless junk with phantom money, mindless self-mutilation and nihilism. Foaming on top of this flow are cowardice and confusion masquerading as righteousness and tolerance, and a supine acquiescence to an invasion of a hundred million – 40 million in the US alone – Third World immigrants legal and illegal who are, in the balance, a gross burden on society.
But society itself is now an Ophraised mobocracy pretending as if it were a rational republic. In the geopolitical arena this translates into the castrated plumpness of Europe and Canada and the messianic, “compassionate” braggadocio of flailing America, versus the vigorous, aggressive, virile, militaristic and self-confident thrusts of China, Russia and Iran.
In the waning days of August 2008, three events occupied a disparate share of attention of the global village’s brain conditioning supra-channel. One might call that particular nook of the gushing vulgarians’ history: Dita, D-beck and da Messiah dumbfounding da dull, dolt and Democrat.
Dita is Madonna Ciccone, the aging tart with tight thighs and penchant for S&M whom many millions believe to be a singer -- a belief they back in much hard currency. Ms. Ciccone has been reported to use the pseudonym Dita Parlo, after the German actress of the 1930s.
In this inundated world, the mechanics of sex, from shafts and pistons through sockets and gaskets take the choicest location in media content and humanity’s consciousness. So do, of course, the lubricants related to the friction coefficient. And so Ms. Ciccone named her new international tour “Sticky and Sweat,” and is wooing stadiumfuls of swooning audiences with an eponymous song plus such classics of her repertoire as “Give it 2 Me," gangsta pimp and bondage paraphernalia.
Ms. Ciccone’s global appeal is such that in a city like Cardiff, Wales, where “Sticky and Sweet” kicked off, some 40,000 fans turned up, some having flown in from as far as Australia. The future of the West is in the hands of people like these. They probably know most of Ms. Ciccone’s repertoire by heart, but don’t know how a pencil is made, let alone what’s a republic or who was Aristotle. And they vote and influence the course of their nations.
No wonder that during the song "Get Stupid," Ms. Ciccone’s show included a video sequence linking images of destruction, global warming, Adolf Hitler, Robert Mugabe and U.S. presidential contender, John McCain, juxtaposed against a sequence comprising pictures of John Lennon, Al Gore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mr. McCain’s Democratic rival, Barack Obama. Thus are leaders of the Free World manufactured nowadays. A seat on Oprah’s couch for ten minutes is worth more in one’s resume than command of a brigade at war.
As to David Beckham, the prettiest footballer in the world emerged like Venus from the rooftop conch of a red bus in the Beijing Olympic stadium, kicking a ball into an ecstatic crowd and thus serving London’s notice to the world that it was next in line to stage that festival of the foulest corruption and feelgood consumer triggers in Nike or adidas kit. Mr. Beckham -- D-beck on the advice of his Los Angeles pal, Snoop Doggy Dog -- appeared in a long-sleeved track-suit, which was fortuitous, given that, in China, people with a collection of tattoos as vast as his are prone to be arrested on sight, whereupon they end up as involuntary heart and liver donors after a lifetime of breaking rocks in penal colonies.
But Mr. Beckham was the most sympathetic part of a cringe-inducing Olympic “handover” performance which was opened by a British girl with the Old-Saxon name of Tayyiba Dudhwala, followed by an impeccably “diverse” and aptly named ZooNation hip hop dance troupe from South London, mixed with a group of disabled -- can’t discriminate, can we? – dancers called CandoCo rushing the door of a red bus like back home, followed by a big person called Leona Lewis singing “I'm gonna give you every bit of my love” while Led Zeppelin’s old pro, Jimmy Page, worked the guitar and probably hummed to himself the original lyrics about inches rather than bits of love. Then appeared a burly man wearing an unbuttoned jacket over a badly pressed shirt with a mistied tie, who, being the Mayor of London, offended the Chinese hosts with his casual demeanor.
It was the perfect parody of a multiethnic, Third World-swamped Britain run by multiculti buffoons who no longer know which way is North, what’s up, and who they were before they forgot. It’s not coincidental that just a few days after this travesty, Mr. Sérgio Cabral, Governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, pledged “to engage the youth of the world in a celebration and Games of social transformation,” as a sweetener in Rio’s proposal to be appointed host city for the 2016 Olympic Games.
It hardly needs stating that the last thing the world needs is for its youth to be engaged in the “celebration of Games of Social Transformation.” What the world needs is for its youth to commit to memory the multiplication tables and the 10 Commandments tablets, and to sit in one performance of a Bach choral in a white shirt and tie or a dress covering all the tattooed patches of skin, without fidgeting.
The Olympics are the clearest portal to our glorious New World Order, otherwise known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or regression to entropy.
CocaColaMacDonaldNikeHuyndaiCanonAllianzLenovoTataBudMTV will be running the world for the greater good of the perfect union of perfected Humanity with an advisory council consisting of Oprah, Sir Bono, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne, and Al Gore, all administered by legions of UNiks and EUniks on the take from Beijing.
As though for a dry run, most of this scintillating advisory council assembled recently in Denver to pour the ceremonial oil on the pate of the Messiah. “Blinding array of stars gather for DNC climax,” gushes the media on a day when Son of Black Man accepted the US presidential nomination of the Yin Party in Denver. The blinding celestial bodies iterated are directors George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee and Davis Guggenheim; actors Forest Whitaker, Josh Brolin, Annette Bening, Fran Drescher, Ashley Judd, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Garner, Ben Affleck -- who read excerpts from a book by who else but Howard Zinn; total-blanks-to-me Kal Penn, Daniel Dae Kim, Cash Warren, Rosario Dawson, Wilmer Valderrama, Wonder and Michael McDonald, Kerry Washington, Taye Diggs, Hill Harper, Joy Bryan; singers Sheryl Crow and Kanye West; people known for being famous Fergie and Star Jones; and something called will.i.am “of the Black Eyed Peas.”
There were a few heavyweights there: Muhammad Ali – a great boxer once but now appearing where planted, like a potted ficus; Forest Whitaker, a good actor marching in lockstep with his race phalanx; Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – important director-producers and walking bundles of yin -- the one as a liberal alpha mentsch in America’s most liberal industry and in its most liberal ethnic group, the other as a rotund product of the People’s Republic of San Francisco. But the rest?
This is “blinding” to the creatures of Oprah nation: the half-wit celebrity hound, the morbidly obese tabloid swallower, the council estate mom with nipple rings and serial pregnancies by different men, the sequined gay make-up man with a collection of Elton John memorabilia. A whining twit like Spike Lee or a luscious tweet like Jessica Alba is not blinding. Blinding is the greatness of the brain power of Benoît Mandelbrot, or the martial command skills of David Petraeus. A woman who has traversed the life road of Margaret Thatcher or Janice Rogers Brown is blinding. A director is blinding who can play words and actors like Krzysztof Kieslowski to compose symphonies about the greatest truths.
Thus is greatness divided from stardom, let alone celebrity. But since the great are few and the expansive yin culture needs fodder for its media noise, “blinding” celebrities are minted on an assembly line -- one-eyed kings in the country of the blind. One might even be so bold as to point out that the prototype I Am, known by his original Hebrew name, YHVH, may have been more blinding, memorably so on Mount Sinai, than will.i.am “of the Black Eyed Peas” was in Denver. And so was perhaps the first coming of the Anointed One, as distinct from the second coming in which 85,000 yin-crazed people climaxed at Mile-High Stadium in Denver at Barack Obama’s sight, with the most equals of the equals, mainly Hollywood machers, reprising the multiple orgasm a couple of weeks later at a $28,500-a-plate dinner + Babs later (separate charges apply).
Only in an upside down moonspace “proposition” country, could a pair of race-mongering, black-by-commitment Harvard lawyers – he, Elmer Gantry reincarnated as a latte metrosexual socialist, she a muscled Nadezhda Krupskaya with a $317,000 paycheck -- get to within a close probability of the presidency of a putatively “capitalist” republic, still 65% white.
Only a cancerous Western civilization could make a Messiah of a 45-year-old “community organizer” of no significant accomplishment who has drunk deeply from the wells of communist agitator Saul Alinsky, communist poet Frank Marshall Davis, terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and white-hating black racists Jeremiah Wright and Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour.
Only in a feminized (i.e. yin) society could a willowy Pied Piper given to narcissistic blather like 'We are the ones we have been waiting for' be greeted by great swooning crowds of whites from Portland in the west to Berlin in the east, and sell two autobiographies about nothing to millions of adoring fans the Western world over. For this is the age of the postmodern narrative, and people with diversity chips implanted in their skulls by government and media propaganda find Mr. Obama’s narrative irresistibly compelling.
Only in a nation full of confused, pathetic, ignorant weaklings could a charming charlatan raise campaign funds that may well amount to half a trillion dollars (1) by telling his millions of donors that their nation is no good, that he will absolve it from its sinful past and “bring it together.” To believe this, one has to deliberately welcome clear signs that the “bringing together” is a euphemism for a racial jizzya tax extracted from a cowed ex-Eurocentric nation by a unified phalanx of black and brown race grievance-mongers in concert with tens of millions of self-flagellating white useful idiots. Five hundred years ago Mr. Obama’s extraordinary talent for selling papal indulgences would have earned him the scarlet and ermine, a marble bust by Michelangelo, and a rebuke from Martin Luther.
Only in a farce conceived in opium haze, with addled eunuchs as opinion makers and pundits, could an avowed lotus-eater like Harold Meyerson be given prime real estate acreage in The Washington Post to opine:
"In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks' party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year's GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem."
We have to take a detour here, for somewhere in the basement of the ADL, in a cubicle at the Southern Poverty Law Center, or in a laptop file of a “conservative” littlegreenfootballista, someone has just written down that, in addition to a pronounced lack of respect for several iconic Afro-American figures, for the second time in this piece I have held up a Jew to scorn and ridicule, even if others are mentioned here approvingly. And I haven’t even mentioned yet the brain behind the Obamas’ phenomenal success, not to speak of the big-ticket campaign donors.
One earns another point of demerit, and lifelong career repercussions, for having read on a white ethnocentric website:
“’Long term,’ says Myerson [sic], ‘this whiteness is a huge problem’. For Jews, he means. The only way of dealing with it is more of the same ... more Rothstein, more NBA, more porn, more Brangelina, more Bratz, more Myerson [sic], indeed ... more everything. More white deconstruction, too. White Americans as people, their European selves have to be ‘solved’. Finally.”
We will delve later into the connection between Jews and liberalism – or “yin” – a connection shared in different ways by other population segments, including putatively “conservative” ones, from mainstream Christianity to the Republican Party. For now, it suffices to state that in the comments section after the above quote, a Jewish reader writes:
“I have read the Myerson [sic] article and being a Jew and Zionist, you may be surprised that I agree with you and think Myerson [sic] is an idiot who doesnt [sic] know what is good for the Jews.”
Back to useful idiots of all ethnicities:
“Obama’s charisma,” writes Michael Knox Beran, “is closer to what critic Camille Paglia has identified with today’s television talk-show culture.(snip) The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains (snip) to appear an ‘androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother. Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine (snip). Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. With the triumph of Obama’s post-masculine charisma, the patriarchal collectivism of the New Deal has finally given way to a new vision of liberal community, the empathetic mommy-state.”
All Western “progressive” parties in an arch extending west from Austria to Australia, including Mr. Obama’s, cater to the psychographics for which media events such as pop star tours, Olympics closing extravaganzas, and grand and unspecific pronouncements of hope, change and equalization of all in front of papier maché Greek temples are tailor made. It’s no coincidence that Mr. Obama’s temple set was built by the same company that works for Britney Spears. Nor should it surprise that another “blinding” specimen of shrieking Western moronism should generate the headline, “Rage Against the Machine Ask Fans to Fight ‘Fascist Republican Agenda’ at Fierce Minneapolis Gig”.
The shade-grown lachrymose fungus
It is difficult to deal with the dystopia of the West partly because we don’t have an accurate concept of its genesis. Conservatives believe that leftism, in its current mutation as liberalism, is at fault. Liberalism is, indeed, the lachrymose fungus sapping the West’s vital energy. It does so mainly through its excretion of multiculturalism and execration of the non-equal woof and warp of homo sapiens as per the grand lottery of parental DNA, natal gender, race and culture, and fate, God’s will and karma. But a Daoist would say that not only liberalism but all shade-grown, i.e. yin, creedal fungi are harmful to the West in its present condition.
Consider the main leaders of the presumably “counter-liberal” forces in the world, George W. Bush, John McCain, and David Cameron. Here are fervent believers in the Mexicanization and Balkanization of the United States, the dissolution of the ethnic base of Great Britain, faked equality of the unequals through dumbed-down education and affirmative action, fighting a war on an unnamed enemy while shilling for the “Religion of Peace,” and hollowing out the coin of the realm by riding, Don Quijote-like, to the rescue of any damsel in democratic distress, anywhere. When Conservatism thrives with the Clintons in power but is destroyed with the Bushes at the helm, there is something wrong with our political typology. As it is in England that has turned, in Mark Steyn’s words, into a Somalia with chip shops, while the Conservative Party’s priority is taxing the chip shops.
In Europe, the situation is worse. The Eurabian political elite, aided by Europe’s own millions of useful idiots, seems to have poisoned most of the 183,000,000 brains of Western Europeans as surely as if it were a Hymenoepimecis wasp, stinging a Plesiometa argyra spider to spin the cocoon of its own doom. Europeans now accept as objective truth the media’s referral to Jacques Chirac or Angela Merkel as “conservatives,” and have grown to believe that a peaceful gathering by indigenous people who desire not to be dispossessed by immigrants from alien and hostile cultures is a conclave of “racists” staged by “German fascists” as a “so-called” Anti-Islamisation Congress”. When the goal posts have been moved so far to the lunatic left, terms such as “right,” “conservative,” and “fascist” no longer carry any useful meaning.
And then, conservatives believe that secularism is the cause of the fraying, and that returning to Mother Church is the answer. But the Christian churches are destroying their hosts as surely as if they were deep-cover enemy agents. For its vigorous action in the cause of dissolving the demographic base of its host countries, the Catholic church in the US might as well be on the payroll of the Mexican government, while in countries ranging from Belgium to Australia it might qualify for financial support from Al-Qaeda.
The Episcopalians, Presbyterian, Methodist and other mainstream Protestant churches are a parody of pious “social-justice equity,” worshipful Third-Worldism, militant homosexuality, and progressive Islamification. American Evangelicals are tireless in resettling Third World refugees and “refugees,” the more primitive the better: from Meskhetian Turks planted in Virginia to Somali Bantus in Kansas to Sudanese in Illinois.
We will examine in later installments in more depth what’s on the scales in the balance that has gone awry. For now it suffices to say that according to Oriental cosmology, the forces in the eternal cosmic play are the hot, male, condensing element, or yang, and the cold and wet, female and expansive element, or yin. Arnold Toynbee, who posited that all democracies die from suicide, applied the ideas of yin and yang to discern patterns in history. For Toynbee, history is like a current alternating between the yin pole, which he equated with a quiescent civilization, and the yang pole, which he equated with turmoil, barbarian conquest and drastic change.
In his 1939 magnum opus, Study of History, Toynbee explained the rise and fall of empires according to this yin – yang paradigm, but a deeper scrutiny of applied Oriental cosmology might find that it was oversimplified. For what is most salient about the force of yin is not its quietism but its expansive femaleness, and what characterizes yang is not necessarily its dynamism but its contractive maleness.
Applied mycology, or some thoughts about wet, expansive yin
The West has careened dangerously out of balance, and its political and philosophical concepts have not been able to identify correctly what it is that’s out of balance. The forces of the West’s postmodern decay are vested disproportionately in such disparate groups as city dwellers, lawyers, teachers, actors, artists, public sector employees, people with graduate degrees and academics; Jews, Swedes, Norwegians, diaspora Irish; blacks; Muslims and Mexican and Central American mestizos (but not in their original countries); women; adolescents; homosexuals.
The entropic motors that seem to be preponderant in these groups may be, singly or in combination, a drive for power or money; identity politics stemming from racial, ethnic, or gender pride wounded in the past but pretending as the present ; utopian proclivities combined with naiveté; compassionate feelings overriding empirical analysis; displacement of personal feelings of inferiority – what Nietzsche called ressentiment; or ideological hatred such as what Islam preaches about the kuffar and Black Theology teaches about whitey. But the destruction wrought by such centrifugal forces comes not from them, but from a wilting of the respective majorities that ought to have been able to resist and countervail against these forces.
These majorities’ apathy and nihilism has also allowed their elected governments to magnify the centrifugal destruction as though by a giant lever. Everywhere in the West, governments are working on behalf of the entropic forces and against the best interest of the vast majority of their citizens. The government itself has become the chief propagator and enforcer of social decay, often under the smokescreen of elastic portmanteau concepts like “civil rights,” “tolerance,” “hate speech,” “Islamophobia” etc.
The European Union apparatus is the Trojan horse wheeling Islam into the gates of Europe. Socialistically kleptocratic and grossly incompetent federal, state and local governments in America are actively selling their country piece by piece, to China, to Mexico, to special interest lobbies, to organized racial minority pressure groups, to public employees unions. And in areas where their active involvement is desperately required, such as regulating the securities and derivatives markets, or putting up a dam against the deluge of hedonism and faked sentimentalism pouring into peoples’ brains from the mass entertainment juggernaut, Western government are strictly laissez faire.
Maybe all this is by design. For, as Bertold Brecht has written, would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people – maybe starting with their brains -- and elect another?
Even though Western governments now do what they can to suppress it, reasonable people may have to start talking publicly about the slow-mo destruction by the black minority of every community and country where it is anywhere near majority; or the flow of Mexico’s demographic burden into the USA and Islam’s Middle Ages handicap into Europe. They have to start talking about a permanent closing of immigration doors to people from cultures incompatible with the historical West and therefore harmful ipso facto.
People of good faith ought to diagnose and combat in their personal lives the decline that feminism has wrought on them and on the West. Men are at fault here for having caved in completely, instead of employing a reverse Lysistrata tactic, or anything else that might have worked in this dire predicament. At least a varied group of courageous women has begun beating back this particular fungus. The cultural left’s reaction to Sarah Palin shows how effective that can be.
The vast heterosexual majority may want to consider that it’s time to protest the outsize din raised by the homosexual and the comically self-labeled GLBTA minorities. We will not ask if you will not tell; frankly, we don’t want to hear or see too much either. Don’t rub our faces in your orifices.
Maybe it’s time to say to the churches, if this be your retail markup, I am buying directly from the wholesaler. Because, as Chesterton has noted, some humanitarians care only for pity, but their pity is often untruthful.
However mortified by the Holocaust and appreciative of the inestimable contribution that the Jewish minority has made to the West, people of good faith and sound mind may have to start putting public Jewish figures on the spot, as Jews, for the destructive currents they propagate. Because if the establishment club of “racism” “fascism,” “antisemitism” “homophobia” and “sexism” keeps the West’s hundreds of millions of reasonable indigenous people cowering in their diminishing corners, soon the West will have decayed so much that tens of millions of newly-unreasonable people will be rising, and their numbers will be growing at an astonishing rate.
“It is those wreckers that most concern me,” wrote the English-American writer, John Derbyshire, “the arrogant judges, the academic deconstructors, the teacher-union multiculturalists, the media guilt-mongers, the love-the-world pacifists, the criminal-lovers and family-breakers, the inventors of bogus rights and destroyers of cherished traditions, the haters of normality and scoffers at restraint, the enterprise-destroying litigators and pain-feelers. I do fear that this country might be made unfit to live in, as the country of my birth has been, by a misguided and corrupt humanitarianism, sentimental wallowing in past wrongs both real and imagined, and class and race resentment petted and nurtured by opportunistic tax-eaters.”
To return to balance, the West must find ways to pull back the centrifugal forces that are hurling its frayed pieces ever outward in an expansive big-bang of emotionalism, solipsism, egalitarianism, yobbism, socialism, multiculturalism, relativism, masochism, and moralism strangely coexisting with hedonism and nihilism. This outward spiral has now lasted for a better part of three generations. Of late, we have had generations X, and Y. Soon generation Z will be abroad. And after that, what?
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(1) Extrapolation based on data in the Fundraising section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_presidential_campaign,_2008.
Problem is misuse of critical thinking
Submitted by JFP on Sat, 2008-09-27 15:55.
I would say that the problem of the West today is the misuse of critical thinking. It was critical thinking that allowed the West to become dominant. That dominance was the result of critical thinking when applied to the natural world, which reaped huge advances in science and technology.
But it's easy to misuse critical thinking. One can use it to vilify one's neighbors while ignoring one's own problems. And that is what has happened. The 60s allowed those in the West who were extremely critical of the dominant powers to come to power themselves. The left has an enormous amount of cultural power, even if they don't always have political power. But the left is very poor at being self-critical.
Accordingly, there are people who think that being critical means being critical of the right and that the left is immune to criticisms. There are people who think that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait somehow doesn't count against him, but America's actions in response show us to be a bully. There are people who see no contradiction between being a feminist and a multiculturalist at the same time, even though the latter movement will probably result in the death of feminism. There are people who claim to be on the side of poor people but who also want gas to go to $9/gallon.
A self-critical leftist movement would look a lot different from what the left is like today. If the left were self-critical, then leftists today would be asking tough questions about the wisdom of empowering people (the Muslims) who have so little in common with the left. If the left had been self-critical all along, it is doubtful if it would have pushed for communism.
I don't know much of anything about yin and yang and how that relates to critical thinking, but obviously there are cultures where there is very little in the way of critical thinking, and others (our own) where it has gotten out of hand.
One thing I'll agree with, though, is the need for having 80,000 at an anti-Islamification rally.
Message from Takuan Seiyo
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Sat, 2008-09-27 13:06.
I thank my interlocutors and offer a few thoughts in return.
First, truth in labeling. This column is written under a Japanese pen-name, not as a publicity stunt but for deep reasons. So for those who want to read about how many heads of anti-Islamist protesters were bashed in by Neue-Eurabian thugs, or who are looking for a non-Oriental perspective, you have wandered into the wrong isle in the BJ store of ideas.
Second, though this writer is not a resident of Europe, he was born there and nurtured on its music, history, languages, les belles letters, and religion. He remains deeply attached to those and deeply pained by what’s going on in his cultural cradle.
Third, I agree with the comments that the way to take the fight to the enemy is by ridiculing his lunacy. I try to do it whenever possible, but it’s a tricky thing when mixed with serious, even tragic, content, and may lead to verbosity. Any failures in this area that grate on the reader’s sensibility are mine alone.
Fourth, ultimately, a writer’s vanity is to see men and women moved by his writing to action. The action that’s required, short term, is to have 80,000 people show up at the next anti-Islamification rally, not 1500.
Fifth, Islam is not the enemy, nor are Muslims. They are a carrier of an opportunistic infection, but they are dangerous not per se, but because they happened to proliferate on the skin of the demented patient when he stabbed himself with a plastic fork in the Garden of Delights, causing deep, open wounds.
Oriental cosmology teaches that disease does not come from an external agent, i.e. virus, cancer etc, but from the patient’s transgression against the Order of the Universe. Yin and Yang are not religious dogma from some foreign lands but a heuristic principle that not only makes sense of reality but passes the test of manifestation.
In other words, one German philosopher or another may have offered a multi-volume dialectic that allows one to explain all visible phenomena. But what that dialectic cannot do is help you throw an opponent twice your size against a distant wall, or cure your diabetes in 4 weeks solely through the food you put in your mouth. That’s why I thought it would be an interesting experiment to look at Eurabia etc. through the prism of the Dao.
Lastly, KO has made some real intellectual contribution here. There is no more important task than to understand the gestalt -– a word that used to be in favor among our opposition – by which destruction is being wrought on our civilization. And then to use that understanding for constructing an OODA loop – but that’s for another occasion.
Why Europe's suicide?
Submitted by Joern on Sat, 2008-09-27 12:13.
The favorites time of the truly international, conscious 68 is the time at the end of 1100-years and the beginning of 1200-years to which he attaches some fantasies about a nice creative time of unrest and upheaval between East and West, between Christians, Muslims and Jews (Slaves as executive force in all camps). The doom of the Byzantine Empire opens up the bridge between East and West, which he immediately equate with the Soviet collapse - the main ingredients
in spirit, if any, is geography and church power reversed to some kind of simple Geopolitics. To day he goes so far as to praise Islam (then) in a innovator and facilitator role (especially of the classic Greece's culture). In reality, we must perceive the 68 as a nostalgic, empty and myth-seeking entity, which have been allowed to experiment, because he hit the intensions of the summit: transformation of us all to non-existent.
Try to find : 'Z. Brzezinski' or just 'brz' in Historic sketch of European ideas
Now, we must not forget who inspired the 68 in his emptiness of youth ...
Joern
http://Danmark.Wordpress.com
Why Europe's suicide?
Submitted by Joern on Sat, 2008-09-27 12:02.
The favorites time of the truly international, conscious 68
is the time at the end of 1100-years and the beginning of
1200-years to which he attaches some fantasies about a nice
creative time of unrest and upheaval between East and West, between Christians, Muslims and Jews (Slaves as executive force in
all camps). The doom of the Byzantine Empire opens up
the bridge between East and West, which he immediately
equate with the Soviet collapse - the main ingredients
in spirit, if any, is geography and
church power reversed to some kind of simple Geopolitics. To day he goes so far as to praise Islam (then) in a
innovator and facilitator role (especially of the classic
Greece's culture). In reality, we must perceive the
68 as a nostalgic, empty and myth-seeking entity, which
have been allowed to experiment, because he hit the
intensions of the summit: transformation of us all to non-existent.
Now, we must not forget who inspired the 68 in
his emptiness of youth ...
Joern
http://Danmark.wordpress.com
@Akira
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Sat, 2008-09-27 11:27.
lol
Please be more direct
Submitted by Ronduck on Fri, 2008-09-26 23:29.
This article is almost unreadable. Please either decide what you are trying to say and say it directly or please write somewhere else. Also, why is a man who is not European writing for a magazine dedicated to preserving Europe?
Further thoughts on Yin and Yang
Submitted by KO on Fri, 2008-09-26 21:24.
Another classic Western dichotomy that may be preferable to yin and yang is that between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of existence/being. What Mr. Seiyo describes as excess yin can also be characterized as excessive horizontality, flatness, a denial of transcendance, a denial of totality, a denial of authority, a denial of truth, vision, etc., and an overvalorization of equality, perspective, technique, relationship, problem-solving, negotiation, ambiguity, cleverness, etc. In the polypolarity developed by R.G. Cohn (as the theory of the Symbolist vision based on his studies of Stephane Mallarme), the dimensions are ultimately reversible and can switch places in various circumstances. The strength of Western civilization, in Cohn's view, is its ability to pivot between the dimensions at critical moments. The Virgin Mary is the ultimate symbol of that ability to pivot, where the extreme verticality of abstract monotheism is palliated by a nurturing, intimate mother. At its best, Western civilization is not overrigidly (suicidally) vertical, as Islam is (see also the suicide bomber in Malraux), nor excessively horizontal, as one may characterize the passive quasimaterialism of Chinese culture, which gives rise to brittle and forced assertions of the vertical (the Great Leader and Teacher). See Modes of Art, R.G. Cohn, Anma Libri 1976. Tone, in civilization and in art, comes from the balancing of the dimensions and acknowledgment of their optimal interplay.
How is polypolarity superior to yin and yang as an explanatory model, if they both involve a mutual implication and transformation of the two halves of the dichotomy? First, there is no transcendance in yin and yang, and applying yin and yang to transcendent principles immanentizes them and changes their nature. Second, there is apparently a higher degree of articulation in polypolarity, which is expressed in terms of paradox and paradox squared, and in terms of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and antisynthesis. Mr. Seiyo is very much in tune with polypolarity and may only have used yin and yang as a portal to his picture of Western corruption. Certainly his appeal to the mathematical accomplishments of Benoit Mandelbrot is an assertion of the Western achievement at its height, of the supremacy of the life of the mind. Indeed, fractal geometry may be a perfect expression of polypolarity, with its synthesis of the mundane and/or the natural (horizontality) in a supreme and universal (vertical) pattern of thought.
Again, I look forward to the next installment from Mr. Seiyo.
No surprise
Submitted by onecent on Fri, 2008-09-26 02:59.
It seems pretty simple that when you feminize a culture as has happened across the West - the cult of the Goddess and all of that New Age crap - and, thanks to the girly male forces on the Left you risk a hypervirile macho culture like Islam moving in and trashing it.
The self-loathing Left hates males and all things that men do like self-defense. We have a generation of metrosexual males insecure in their own masculinity. Visit any school where boys are punished for being boys. It's a sad commentary when simple toy squirt guns are deemed violent.
We need to use the internet to our advantage as a citizen's forum. We need to expose and mock these forces. It's one of the few tools against stupid politicians and their media that we have.
School massacres are a statistical rarity, keppart, and are meaningless as anything more than a lone sick individual. Organized terrorism trumps those rare incidents or hadn't you noticed?
Yangiiii!
Submitted by Sagunto on Fri, 2008-09-26 00:08.
Was that a typical case of "yang poisoning" I experienced, having slashed a narrow path halfway through this dense forest of Estrogenia popularis?
So the article holds promise of an in-depth analysis of empire, but wait.. not so fast. Wisdom should not be obtained that easy, like a casual treat from some degrading gumball machine, so let's throw-up some roadblocks on the path to enlightenment. A few yangi remarks, and then some more, at Madonna; a bit of bile against poor little Becks, and after that yet some more *-ization: Ophraization; Ciccanonization ..on and on ad nauseam, just so you know one thing for sure should you actually reach the end of this tunnel: that some guy must passionately hate today's popular culture and perhaps to his own regret seems to know quite a lot about it. There's more where that came from and I fear this was only for starters.
But for the ones with stamina, wisdom beacons and after hardship endured, the reward will be handed out to courageous readers. Those happy few that have made it all the way to Toynbee, the eminent British historian who did his bit to inflame hatred among Arabs against the state of Israel.
[Probably a virile case of yang-induced study of History (vol. VIII, 289)]
So what does it all lead up to, that long and winding road towards a final analysis of Empire? From what I learned in the comment section, one is sent downhill again with a package of Toynbee's sticky anti-Zionism, mixed with some serious and rather scary yin-poisoning, accompanied by a worrying lack of yang-suppletion, probably resulting in a deleterious build-up of excess societal estrogen, all sufficiently explained, I reckon, by the initially sweet (but ultimately sour) Ciccone-effect. Madonification, or: how stupid can you get.
That's not bad for an aged pop-icon. Nxt tour she might picture herself dancing & bouncing off greased-up yin and yang poles. O tempora, o mores!
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Submitted by kappert on Thu, 2008-09-25 17:08.
All the effort to boost children's self-esteem may have backfired and produced a generation of college students who are more narcissistic than their Gen X predecessors, the rising ego rush could cause personal and social problems for the Millennial Generation, also called Gen Y. No wonder YouTube is so popular and appreciated for any perverty. People with an inflated sense of self tend to have less interest in emotionally intimate bonds and can lash out when rejected or insulted, the school massacres in several countries are the sad proof of that. We are heading to a society where people are going to treat each other badly, either on the street or in relationships. This is nothing new, but supported by an investigation of LA university in February 2007. The Chinese philosophy of equilibrium, yin&yang, is surely a way to The Garden of Earthly Delights. But I fear most readers will regard this as highly naïve.
@but why?
Submitted by Takuan Seiyo on Thu, 2008-09-25 15:44.
The answer is yin toxicity, but it won't make sense to you until you have read the other installments in this series. There was excess yang in your society in the early 1940s, with Jewish terrorists, assassinations, Bir Yassein etc. – but it may have been the only way to fight both the eternal yang of Muslim Arabia and the oppression of the British mandate.
But then things evolved. I visited Israel in the 60s and found a rare society in yin-yang balance. The men were virile and modest of attire, the women strong but not fighting the men for supremacy. The Israelis I met knew who they were, including sexually, and knew whose side it was right for them to be on. At the same time there was a lot of real, European culture, and simple morality seemed pervasive.
I visited again 30 years later, and things had changed. I found an extreme preoccupation with status and consumption of goodies that symbolize status. Loose sexual mores along with militant feminism and homosexualism. All inevitably accompanied by confusion in matters of state and culture, liberalism, rampant corruption and loss of the national spirit. Oslo is a poster case of a nation in a yin crisis.
If you ask what to do about that, there is an answer but it's too long for this forum. So I'll give it to you in a cryptic form: lay off the sugar, increase the salt.
@ Takuan Seiyo
Submitted by traveller on Thu, 2008-09-25 19:49.
It's sad but it's the human nature, look at the Roman empire, it's exactly the same evolution.
Today communication and travel is so quick and superficial that the "information-consumers" don't even take the time anymore to reflect on the quality and rightness of the information, let alone to make comments on it.
The Yin/Yang approach is definitely worth looking at.
Yin toxicity?
Submitted by KO on Thu, 2008-09-25 17:49.
I look forward to the next installment. I wonder, however, whether the principles of traditional Chinese medicine and cosmology provide the ultimate explanation of these worldwide trends. To many conservatives, the appeal to Chinese thought may itself appear as a symptom of the ailment Mr. Seiyo describes, since it puts aside the tradition of Western political philosophy going back to Plato in favor of an exotic and ancient system of thought. Perhaps the Presocratics' elemental thinking and medical thought of that vintage would be more to his taste. In any case, I would say our tradition looks at a political situation more from the point of view, first, of justice and injustice (i.e., order and disorder) than of yin and yang, and second, of truth and error (i.e., true versus untrue principles). At least, that was our tradition before we were afflicted with so much yin! The distinction between false and true gods is another tradition of ours; Mr. Seiyo's diagnosis possibly could be translated into a jeremiad against the worship of Astarte and Baal instead of Jehovah. The prevalence of wrong ideas about man, divinity, and society, including wrong ideas about the nature of men and women, leading to cultural and political disorder, would be a classical Western diagnosis without interposing overarching medical/cosmological concepts.
There is also possibly an ambiguity in Mr. Seiyo's presentation as well: are yin and yang metaphors for the elements of order and disorder, or are they the actual source of order and disorder?
Voegelin wrote that Chinese civilization had not made the "leap of being" from cosmological culture to a culture of transcendance. Thus ultimate principles like yin and yang are seen as immanent in the physical world. In Mr. Seiyo's analysis, they are probably more metaphors than real principles, but they stand for real phenomena.
Bravo
Submitted by onecent on Wed, 2008-09-24 14:36.
Bravo. It pretty much catalogues the decline of the West with all of the smarmy celebrity worship, greed, hubris and dumbed down intellectual dialogue that has befallen all of us.
The radical left hijacked American culture in the 60's. All that followed has not been good for us. Feminists vilified males and the nuclear family. Patriotism was considered inappropriate. Multiculturalism ascended as political means for the Democrats to capture more victim groups on their plantation. Boundaries in good taste were defiled and exploited by Hollywood and slobs that have no morals. Add to this toxic mix the monoplolistic lefty media's endorsement of all of this dysfunction and their craven failure to be fair and balanced. It's worse in Europe.
The mass stupidity that brought a Hitler to power or launched the murderous Marxist Russia are at play again. The winner in this modern fiasco is the rigid, anti-human and perpetually violent 7th century Islam. It's been exploiting like all parasites with success the rotten underbelly of a our increasingly rotten western culture.
The one good thing that wasn't available in the past is the internet. It is more important than ever that like minded people that are disgusted with what's happening use it to their advantage.
I, Pencil
Submitted by Atlanticist911 on Wed, 2008-09-24 11:37.
Further reading:
Henry Petroski's book, "The Pencil"
http://www.pencils.com/petroski.htm
but why?
Submitted by FrogBrigade on Wed, 2008-09-24 10:51.
Though i agree with mr. seiyo's arguments i find no answers to the question - why this is happening or, or more accuratly "what is their (the liberals) goal"? what kind of society are they trying to shape?
And what troubles me most is that this happening everywhere in the western world. Here in Israel things are shaping to be just like in Europe and the US.
Where's the Beef?
Submitted by Kapitein Andre on Wed, 2008-09-24 07:01.
Though I usually enjoy Mr. Seiyo's articles, this disjointed rant is so infused with adjectives and synonyms it makes one long for the stifling yet structured academic peer-reviewed offerings.
Liberalism is a pillar - if not the core - of Western civilisation. By Liberalism, I refer of course to Classical Liberalism, freedom in the social, economic and political realms. The only problem Classical Liberalism never overcame were the pre-existing power structures built during authoritarian and unequal times.
There are two perversions of liberalism: Reform Liberalism and international liberalism. Modern or Reform Liberalism attempts to wed freedom with equality in a most arbitrary and ultimately unequal way. Moreover, the internationalisation of Reform Liberalism has eroded the national communities which had hitherto been capable of presenting a unified front to military enemies and economic competitors while affording themselves freedom within their communities.
Oprah quote
Submitted by Hal K on Wed, 2008-09-24 05:48.
Oprah quote: "When I look into the future, it's so bright it burns my eyes."