Comedy cannot exist without Tragedy; Tragedy is the precursor to Comedy. Comedy is poking holes in the fabric of illusion, where we live, knowingly or without-knowing –– better to be aware of our delusion in small doses now, than to have it all fall down on us closer to the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLWpuLH3t6k&ab_channel=Eternalised
“The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective.
They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.
Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed — he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship.”
— Erich Fromm
"Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living – and the Ideal shames us all." - Jordan B Peterson
“They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice...That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.” — Oscar Wilde
A society which does not allow its citizenry the luxury of "contemplation" is a sick society whose dictates are rightly worthy of skepticism.
"I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world." – Matthew 13:35
When the individual sees the massive cage and as a result is fatally disillusioned, he could never go back to the state of not having seen the cage. The cage built on lies, supported by massive power structures imbued into every facet of society -- helplessness, powerlessness and joylessness becomes everyday waking-reality, all arising from knowing that our efforts against the perennial perpetrators of evil such as war and tyranny will eventually have their way - again and again; regardless of seeing oneself as a passive passer-by one finds peace, hope and call-to-action in the common thread of our collective historic struggle and individual sorrow, against our creator and the false idols who fancy themselves as our creators. The latter are who posses deluded sense of self-justified perverted sense of ultimate good, to achieve it, no acts are immoral, such are the engineers of our fates who restrict our free-will. The realm of action of a disillusioned individual is first and foremost accruing knowledge, then contemplation, then preservation and then as the final act of charity: giving it away without any expectation of rewards.
Consider these words from Sociologist C. Wright Mills:
"The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial."
The thesis of the book, and its a standalone book, is that there are common threads among religions and our lived history, cross-culturally and across time -- while it may appear that the focus is on "spirituality", Huxley goes beyond and makes some astute commentary on the history of our civilisation on-top of religious teachings, paired with human psychology, and emphasises on certain core tenets that he believes are "perennial" and that which exists at a higher plane which is what we must strive to achieve (which he refers to the divine plane, where the ultimate being "God" exists).
Here's how he open the book, by defining "The Perennial Philosophy":
"PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS-the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing--the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being the thing is immemorial and universal."
If you feel curious -- I'd recommend reading a couple of chapters to see how comfortable you feel with his writing. His sentences are much more dense compared to his novels. Overall, this book has a solid thesis and leaves you with much to think about (and might even prompt you to change your mind on certain viewpoints)
:)
Aldous Huxley in "The Perennial Philosophy (1945)" adds that every being engages in idolatry, knowingly or without-knowing, in time-based approaches of: church-worship, state-worship, revolutionary future-worship, humanistic self-worship; which essentially hinders the path to true "charity" and egolessness; Huxley adds that people believe that "particular natural objects are gods, or that certain symbols and images are the very forms of divine entities and as such must be worshipped and propitiated...much fetishistic superstition survives even today."
Huxley classifies idolatry into three categories:
"The many varieties of higher idolatry may be classed under three main heads: technological, political and moral. Technological idolatry is the most ingenuous and primitive of the three; for its devotees, like those of the lower idolatry, believe that their redemption and liberation depend upon material objects-in this case gadgets. Technological idolatry is the religion whose doctrines are promulgated, explicitly or by implication, in the advertisement pages of our newspapers and magazines-the source, we may add parenthetically, from which millions of men, women and children in the capitalistic countries derive their working philosophy of life. In Soviet Russia too, technological idolatry was strenuously preached, becoming, during the years of that country's industrialization, a kind of state religion. So whole-hearted is the modern faith in technological idols that (despite all the lessons of mechanized warfare) it is impossible to discover in the popular thinking of our time any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doctrine of hubris and inevitable nemesis. There is a very general belief that, where gadgets are concerned, we can get something for nothing can enjoy all the advantages of an elaborate, top-heavy and constantly advancing technology without having to pay for them by any compensating disadvantages.
Only a little less ingenuous are the political idolaters. For the worship of redemptive gadgets these have substituted the worship of redemptive social and economic organizations. Impose the right kind of organizations upon human beings, and all their problems, from sin and unhappiness to nationalism and war, will automatically disappear. Most political idolaters are also technological idolaters and this in spite of the fact that the two pseudo-religions are finally incompatible, since technological progress at its present rate makes nonsense of any political blue-print, however ingeniously drawn, within a matter, not of generations, but of years and sometimes even of months. Further, the human being is, unfortunately, a crea-ture endowed with free will; and if, for any reason, individuals do not choose to make it work, even the best organization will not produce the results it was intended to produce.
The moral idolaters are realists inasmuch as they see that gadgets and organizations are not enough to guarantee the triumph of virtue and the increase of happiness, and that the individuals who compose societies and use machines are the arbiters who finally determine whether there shall be decency in personal relationship, order or disorder in society. Material and organizational instruments are indispensable, and a good tool is preferable to a bad one. But in listless or malicious hands the finest instrument is either useless or a means to evil.
The moralists cease to be realistic and commit idolatry inasmuch as they worship, not God, but their own ethical ideals, inasmuch as they treat virtue as an end in itself and not as the necessary condition of the knowledge and love of God--a knowledge and love without which that virtue will never be made perfect or even socially effective."
Huxley adds that political idolatry is artificial and only breeds negative emotions while perpetuating evil:
"the cult of unity on the political level is only an idolatrous ersatz for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spiritual levels. Totalitarian regimes justify their existence by means of a philosophy of political monism, according to which the state is God on earth, unification under the heel of the divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple. This political monism leads in practice to excessive privilege and power for the few and oppression for the many, to discontent at home and war abroad. But excessive privilege and power are standing temptations to pride, greed, vanity and cruelty; oppression results in fear and envy; war breeds hatred, misery and despair. All such negative emotions are fatal to the spiritual life. "
Huxley observes that the institutional focus on time rather than eternity caused the rise of political-time-based idolatry:
"...wrong beliefs had one element in common--namely, an over-valuation of happenings in time and an under-valuation of the everlasting, timeless fact of eternity. Thus, belief in the supreme importance for salvation of remote historical events resulted in bloody disputes over the interpretation of the not very adequate and often conflicting records...The same over-valuation of events in time, which once caused Christians to persecute and fight religious wars, led at last to a widespread indifference to a religion that, in spite of everything, was still in part preoccupied with eternity. But nature abhors a vacuum, and into the yawning void of this indifference there flowed the tide of political idolatry."
Huxley criticises those who engage in church-worship who wallow in their emotions and mistake it for something divine:
"...psychological idolatry, in which God is identified with the ego's affective attitude towards God and finally the emotion becomes an end in itself, to be eagerly sought after and worshipped, as the addicts of a drug spend life in the pursuit of their artificial paradise. All this is obvious enough...Some of these choose to wallow in emotionalism and, becoming idolaters of feeling, pay for the good of their religion by a spiritual evil that may actually outweigh that good. Others resist the temptation to self-enhancement and go forward to the mortification of self, including the self's emotional side, and to the worship of God rather than of their own feelings and fancies about God. The further they go in this direction, the less they have to pay for the good which emotionalism brought them and which, but for emotionalism, most of them might never have had." nostr:note14m0xhqp53ehq6qss0yffn9l2963uhkdzte6yltc4ypt20g8sw0psknpadj
Aldous Huxley in "The Perennial Philosophy (1945)" notes that there are two main types of philosophical approaches to how we conduct ourselves: time-based and eternal. Time-based philosophies are concerned with the temporal world and seek to achieve material goals, such as power, wealth, and fame. Eternal philosophies, on the other hand, are concerned with the timeless and universal aspects of existence, seeking to attain spiritual goals, such as wisdom, compassion, and union with the divine.
Huxley argues that we should move away from time-based philosophies to those that are eternal:
"some time-obsessed philosophies are primarily concerned with the past, not the future, and their politics are entirely a matter of preserving or restoring the status quo and getting back to the good old days. But the retrospective time-worshippers have one thing in common with the revolutionary devotees of the bigger and better future; they are prepared to use unlimited violence to achieve their ends. It is here that we discover the essential difference between the politics of eternity-philosophers and the politics of time-philosophers. For the latter, the ultimate good is to be found in the temporal world-in a future, where everyone will be happy because all are doing and, thinking something either entirely new and unprecedented or, alternatively, something Old, traditional and hallowed. And because the ultimate good lies in time, they feel justified in making use of any temporal means for achieving it...From the records of history it seems to be abundantly clear that most of the religions and philosophies which take time too seriously are correlated with political theories that inculcate and justify the use of large-scale violence."
"Passing now from theory to historical fact, we find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all of them obsessed with time), Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism, which has gone hand in hand with the political and economic oppression of the coloured peoples. For four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the Christian nations of Europe have spent a good part of their time and energy in attacking, conquering and exploiting their non-Christian neighbours in other continents. In the course of these centuries many individual churchmen did their best to mitigate the consequences of such iniquities; but none of the major Christian churches officially condemned them. The first collective protest against the slave system, introduced by the English and the Spaniards into the New World, was made in 1688 by the Quaker Meeting of Germantown. This fact is highly significant. Of all Christian sects in the seventeenth century, the Quakers were the least obsessed with history, the least addicted to the idolatry of things in time. They believed that the inner light was in all human beings and that salvation came to those who lived in conformity with that light and was not dependent on the profession of belief in historical or pseudo-historical events, nor on the performance of certain rites, nor on the support of a particular ecclesiastical organization."
Huxley's solution:
"Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperialism is a menace to permanent world peace. The reign of violence will never come to an end until, first, most human beings accept the same, true philosophy of life; until, second, this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all the world religions; until, third, the adherents of every religion renounce the idolatrous time-philosophies, with which, in their own particular faith, the Perennial Philosophy of eternity has been overlaid; until, fourth, there is a world-wide rejection of all the political pseudo-religions, which place man's supreme good in future time and therefore justify and commend the commission of every sort of present iniquity as a means to that end. If these conditions are not fulfilled, no amount of political planning, no economic blue-prints however ingeniously drawn, can prevent the recrudescence of war and revolution." nostr:note1spwwxvsq2yr28paxsd9es3ay20e3x7yy6g9q0udzk33x8fwfkwjs2jya2p
Aldous Huxley in " The Perennial Philosophy (1945)" meditates on importance of: curtailing excessive futile talk, embracing silence and why we cultivate "dis-quietude" -- all to avoid "self-knowledge" in favour of "pleasures of illusions" with the goal of maximising "self-ignorance"; which only leads to "no true humility" and no "charity" (charity being ego-detached, desireless action of "giving" with no expectation of rewards):
"UNRESTRAINED and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous. 'But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. This may seem a very hard saying. And yet if we pass in review the words we have given vent to in the course of the average day, we shall find that the greater number of them may be classified under three main heads: words inspired by malice and uncharitableness towards our neighbours; words inspired by greed, sensuality and self-love; words inspired by pure imbecility and uttered without rhyme or reason, but merely for the sake of making a distracting noise. These are idle words; and we shall find, if we look into the matter, that they tend to outnumber the words that are dictated by reason, charity or necessity. And if the unspoken words of our mind's endless, idiot monologue are counted, the majority for idleness becomes, for most of us, overwhelmingly large."
"Molinos distinguished three degrees of silence-silence of the mouth, silence of the mind and silence of the will. To refrain from idle talk is hard; to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will. The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire - we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions--news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose--to prevent the will from ever achieving silence...Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving--to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground."
"Agitation over happenings which we are powerless to modify, either because they have not yet occurred, or else are occurring at an inaccessible distance from us, achieves nothing beyond the inoculation of here and now with the remote or anticipated evil that is the object of our distress. Listening four or five times a day to newscasters and commentators, reading the morning papers and all the weeklies and monthlies - nowadays, this is described as 'taking an intelligent interest in politics'; St John of the Cross would have called it indulgence in idle curiosity and the cultivation of disquietude for disquietude's sake."
What is the nature of charity? –– Why do charity?
"The distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for personal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence and a steady awareness of the divine Suchness and what should be one's own relations to it; and where there is humility there is no censoriousness and no glorification of the ego or any projected alter-ego at the expense of others, who are recognized as having the same weaknesses and faults, but also the same capacity for transcending them in the unitive knowledge of God, as one has oneself. From all this it follows that charity is the root and substance of morality, and that where there is little charity there will be much avoidable evil."
"Peace from distractions and emotional agitations is the way to charity; and charity, or unitive love-knowledge, is the way to the higher peace of God. And the same is true of humility, which is the third characteristic mark of charity. Humility is a necessary condition of the highest form of love, and the highest form of love makes possible the consummation of humility in a total self-naughting."
Julian's letter to Charles:
"On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh....After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard."
https://declassifieduk.org/a-kingly-proposal-letter-from-julian-assange-to-king-charles-iii/
Immanuel Kant on the importance of freedom to scrutinise:
"Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.
The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal.
But, if they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination."
"What, then, if you waste a lifetime? People do. Perhaps most do. they go to their graves having done nothing with themselves...They walk across the stage of life, leaving everything about as it was when they entered, achieving nothing, aspiring to nothing, having never a profound or even original thought, doing what those around them are doing, getting through life with as little discomfort as possible...It is, indeed, almost as if they had never been.
This is what is common, usual, typical, indeed normal. Relatively few rise much above such plodding existence." — Richard Taylor, Restoring Pride
"Many who champion Truth, Equality, or Freedom don’t really want such things; what they want are cheap counterfeits. A Truth that confirms what they believe, an Equality that excludes those they don’t like, and a Freedom that liberates them from the responsibility of true freedom." — @G_S_Bhogal
Some leaks are fine, some are not –– the criteria?
"On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code...
...But when it comes to unauthorized leaks -- which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed."
– Glenn Greenwald
The safest job in the world? Propaganda Journalist — The only job where serving lies grants you more power, access and rewards. A self-serving symbiotic syncretic system operating with prestige under faux credentialism.
Encryption and it's role towards a more independent society, free from a coercive all-knowing big brother state:
"The universe believes in encryption.
It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.
Scientists in the Manhattan Project discovered that the universe permitted the construction of a nuclear bomb. This was not an obvious conclusion. Perhaps nuclear weapons were not within the laws of physics. However, the universe believes in atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. They are a phenomenon the universe blesses, like salt, sea or stars.
Similarly, the universe, our physical universe, has that property that makes it possible for an individual or a group of individuals to reliably, automatically, even without knowing, encipher something, so that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest superpower on earth may not decipher it. And the paths of encipherment between people can mesh together to create regions free from the coercive force of the outer state. Free from mass interception. Free from state control.
In this way, people can oppose their will to that of a fully mobilized superpower and win. Encryption is an embodiment of the laws of physics, and it does not listen to the bluster of states, even transnational surveillance dystopias.
It isn't obvious that the world had to work this way. But somehow the universe smiles on encryption.
Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action. While nuclear weapons states can exert unlimited violence over even millions of individuals, strong cryptography means that a state, even by exercising unlimited violence, cannot violate the intent of individuals to keep secrets from them.
Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited application of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem."
– Julian Assange, Excerpted from Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.