-1.
- Well?
- Well what?
- You said you were looking for an explanation for thousands of students on college campuses demonstrating condoning mass torture, mutilation, rape, killing of children...
- Holding up signs reading "by any means necessary".
- By means of rape, torture, child killing...
- Yes. The consensus among stunned observers is that we are seeing in operation the belief that all ideas are are used by those in power to oppress those without power.
- With the only idea that is not a means of strong to oppress the weak is the idea that all ideas are used by the strong to oppress the weak.
- All ideas then except one are illegitimate.
- All except theirs.
- Yes.
- If you challenge them you are using ideas to take power over them and therefore are immediately dismissed as illegitimate.
- But - this is what I asked you to provide an explanation of - child torture, gang rape are not mere ideas. Or do somehow the protesters believe they are mere ideas? It's not like they are denying their factual truth: witness their signs declaring they will fight 'by any means necessary' which started appearing less than 24 hours after the October 7 massacre, while in fact the massacre was still going on and Israel hadn't yet taken the fight into Gaza.
- I have been trying out an explanation.
- Let's hear it.
- The condoned, celebrated mass murder, rape, torture were not received and dismissed as mere ideas, but had been as it were internalized.
- How so?
- The problem is the status of the claim that all ideas are used to take power except their own idea that all ideas are used to take power which uniquely cannot be questioned.
- Are you saying they do question, suspect their own claim to be a means to take power too?
- I think they might be susceptible to doubt despite themselves. Consider. The 19th century brought us Marx telling us that the employer class was using ideas to control the slave-worker class, and Nietzsche telling us the Christians were weak people who used their ideas to take power from the strong; the Christians were practicing 'slave morality'. The 20th century saw Foucault adding to religious group and economic class struggles the struggle between types of people, between different human natures. The excessively reasonable called those less reasonable mad and excluded them from participation in public life. Have you broken the law? You are a criminal and have to be subject to a process of rehabilitation. Troubled by your sexuality? Your sexuality had to be monitored and regulated both by yourself and others.
- A power struggle of one kind of person against others.
- Yes. Foucault being a very smart guy couldn't help, if not knowing exactly, being aware of the special status he was giving his own idea of types of people using ideas to take power over other types.
- Hoping in his work to enable the type of person he was - freedom loving - to escape from its many oppressors.
- Yes. Now this is what I've come up with, do with it what you will. Foucault famously was involved in deviant sexual activities that involved acted-out violence.
- Sadomasochism.
- Among other things. De Sade claimed that human relations were fundamentally doubtful and dishonest; the only way you could be sure you had any effect on someone was through inflicting pain, same goes for your understanding of yourself. You've heard the demonstrators' slogan 'Normalize Massacre'? I think holding and imposing on others incoherent, relativistic, nihilistic views is a form of self torture and cruelty towards others; that the demonstrators were long used to feeling tortured before they were given the opportunity to publicly condone the torture of others. What do you think?
- I think they have succeeded in confusing me. Are you saying that they know there is something wrong in their exemption of their own ideas from the universal use of ideas to take power? Maybe they haven't read Foucault. Maybe they have no trouble believing that the world is so constructed that their ideas are the only ones not arrived at to take power.
- And maybe they do doubt their own ideas. Perhaps only in chanting in a crowd and in similar mass behaviors they have no problem avoiding the sense of isolation that comes from such extreme doubt, doubt of self and others, the isolation that comes from discounting all claims other than their own (and perhaps those too). Think about De Sade, then think about the behavior of the demonstrators openly celebrating torture, rape, mutilation.
- The way to normalize massacre is to first massacre your own nature.
- Well what?
- You said you were looking for an explanation for thousands of students on college campuses demonstrating condoning mass torture, mutilation, rape, killing of children...
- Holding up signs reading "by any means necessary".
- By means of rape, torture, child killing...
- Yes. The consensus among stunned observers is that we are seeing in operation the belief that all ideas are are used by those in power to oppress those without power.
- With the only idea that is not a means of strong to oppress the weak is the idea that all ideas are used by the strong to oppress the weak.
- All ideas then except one are illegitimate.
- All except theirs.
- Yes.
- If you challenge them you are using ideas to take power over them and therefore are immediately dismissed as illegitimate.
- But - this is what I asked you to provide an explanation of - child torture, gang rape are not mere ideas. Or do somehow the protesters believe they are mere ideas? It's not like they are denying their factual truth: witness their signs declaring they will fight 'by any means necessary' which started appearing less than 24 hours after the October 7 massacre, while in fact the massacre was still going on and Israel hadn't yet taken the fight into Gaza.
- I have been trying out an explanation.
- Let's hear it.
- The condoned, celebrated mass murder, rape, torture were not received and dismissed as mere ideas, but had been as it were internalized.
- How so?
- The problem is the status of the claim that all ideas are used to take power except their own idea that all ideas are used to take power which uniquely cannot be questioned.
- Are you saying they do question, suspect their own claim to be a means to take power too?
- I think they might be susceptible to doubt despite themselves. Consider. The 19th century brought us Marx telling us that the employer class was using ideas to control the slave-worker class, and Nietzsche telling us the Christians were weak people who used their ideas to take power from the strong; the Christians were practicing 'slave morality'. The 20th century saw Foucault adding to religious group and economic class struggles the struggle between types of people, between different human natures. The excessively reasonable called those less reasonable mad and excluded them from participation in public life. Have you broken the law? You are a criminal and have to be subject to a process of rehabilitation. Troubled by your sexuality? Your sexuality had to be monitored and regulated both by yourself and others.
- A power struggle of one kind of person against others.
- Yes. Foucault being a very smart guy couldn't help, if not knowing exactly, being aware of the special status he was giving his own idea of types of people using ideas to take power over other types.
- Hoping in his work to enable the type of person he was - freedom loving - to escape from its many oppressors.
- Yes. Now this is what I've come up with, do with it what you will. Foucault famously was involved in deviant sexual activities that involved acted-out violence.
- Sadomasochism.
- Among other things. De Sade claimed that human relations were fundamentally doubtful and dishonest; the only way you could be sure you had any effect on someone was through inflicting pain, same goes for your understanding of yourself. You've heard the demonstrators' slogan 'Normalize Massacre'? I think holding and imposing on others incoherent, relativistic, nihilistic views is a form of self torture and cruelty towards others; that the demonstrators were long used to feeling tortured before they were given the opportunity to publicly condone the torture of others. What do you think?
- I think they have succeeded in confusing me. Are you saying that they know there is something wrong in their exemption of their own ideas from the universal use of ideas to take power? Maybe they haven't read Foucault. Maybe they have no trouble believing that the world is so constructed that their ideas are the only ones not arrived at to take power.
- And maybe they do doubt their own ideas. Perhaps only in chanting in a crowd and in similar mass behaviors they have no problem avoiding the sense of isolation that comes from such extreme doubt, doubt of self and others, the isolation that comes from discounting all claims other than their own (and perhaps those too). Think about De Sade, then think about the behavior of the demonstrators openly celebrating torture, rape, mutilation.
- The way to normalize massacre is to first massacre your own nature.
2.
- That has to be one of the most unconvincing arguments you have ever made. At best you have given an explanation of the behavior of those who committed the atrocities, not of the demonstrators openly celebrating the atrocities. And you have strangely left out Foucault's extremely relevant support for the Iranian Islamist Revolution against the West in which violence against the Western enemy both destroyed the enemy and purified those opposing it of its pernicious influence on their minds and bodies. He seems to have exactly exampled your argument of the third stage of the single monotheist ritual: the world seen fixed in definition as struggle of the Muslims against the rest of the world, action required defined as violence to obtain the victory foreordained.
- I wanted to spare you from my yet again going over the matrix of self / world / act / thought / defined / undefined* that would allow me to explain Foucault's purifying violence as a group excitement.
- As opposed to individual excitement?
- Yes. Then we should we go over the argument now?
- How could we not?
- We know that ritual works with a consciousness of weakness, a regaining of sense of strength by telling the story of our weakness in our group. When we act in ritual we are aware of the threatening world, not aware of ourselves in the process of changing and being reborn, in sight of our reborn selves we rest in once achieved. The ritual move can be done as an individual alone through repeated acts on the world to make it reflect an image of our recoved power. We call this vanity. Ethical action is the reverse: when we act we keep our sight on ourselves, watching as we act how the world changes, looking for regularities. The world is not defined, our selves are as we experiment with one repeated action after another. When something lawful is discovered about the we world the world is defined to us, our selves not visible. You remember all this?
- Of course.
- The Jewish and Christian phases of the single monotheistic ritual leave open the possibility of stories that are either vain or ethical. At any moment either world or self is defined. Not so the Muslim termination of the one ritual: in action both world and self are undefined, whereas in rest both self and world are defined. There is abysse between act and thought where there is nothing to be described. Self and world both vanish, time and space of explanation itself impossible, missing altogether.
- Thus the sense of purification of all ideas, ideas that are enemy to truth, are vehicles of powers hostile to us.
- Yes. Is this more like what we see in the behavior of demonstrators condoning atrocities?
- I'm not sure.
- And if having sympathy for our fellow living being requires that we ourselves have stories? Living through in imagination what another lives through? If to be without story, jumping from group violence to unquestioned group hierarchy, means to be without possibility of sympathy?
3.
- I think we're almost there.
- What is missing?
- The distinction between sympathy for family and sympathy for strangers. Sympathy for family comes naturally, sympathy for strangers comes....
- Politically.
- Yes. Sympathy arises when each individual gives up his demand for revenge and sees his own interest in his injury being dealt with by law that applies to all equally. This distinction is at the beginning of Western Civilization, may be considered as its defining factor. The Jewish religion has god giving the laws to the Jewish people, each Jew individually accepting laws from their god, each feeling himself benefited in the beauty and holiness of the divine gift. Roughly at the same time in history Aeschylus wrote his Orestes Trilogy, which concludes with the goddess Athena arriving on the scene to settle a generations long family feud by trial and thereby establishing law in political life.
- Sympathy comes out of this ascension from revenge to law. Sympathy is what each individual feels for every other who makes the same ascension.
- Yes. The strange phenomenon we witness on college campuses of rank and file protesters refusing to speak to strangers except to refer to so-called media specialists indicates that we no longer are in the world of Western Civilization politics. Civilization requires individual choice to make the ascension from revenge to justice. And, to come back to where we began, what did the protest media specialists say when asked how they could condone mass rape, burning children alive, abduction of at least one infant six months old, all of which raise in the minds of Westerners the ultmost revulsion?
- That these action were reasonable acts of revenge.
- Yes, we Westerners make the mistake of letting ourselves get caught up in a debate in what is reasonable and what not reasonable in revenge, what is "proportional" to use the prefered nomenclature.
- So then what? Since they are not civilized, since they are barbarians, by definition they will not, can not understand what we're saying here.
- Correct. We are attempting to clarify the situation for ourselves.
__________________________
