The clearer I see what needs to be done to save humanity — we have to eliminate the pseudoscientific metaphysical mythology of materialism (physicalism) in favor of the truth of ontological idealism (Consciousnes-only ontology), restart the Eleusinian Mysteries in a new form, eleminate pseudo-democracy in favor of meritocracy based on communist ideology and faith in Transcendence — the clearer I see also that humanity is doomed.
But I won't stop seeking and communicating the truth, for I remember the words of great Karl Jaspers: "[O]nly the pure soul can truthfully live in this tension: to know about the possible ruin and still remain tirelessly active for all that is possible in the world."
I also remember that nothing is permanent except That which is nontemporal. All intersubjective worlds are born to die just to be born again in the infinity of beginningless time. Our nightmare will end one day. We shouldn't waste our time, we must learn from this nightmare as much as we can. Bad trips are beneficial.
"Socialism is the universal tendency of contemporary mankind toward an organisation of labour and of participation in the products of labour that will make it possible for all men to be free." — Karl Jaspers, 1949
"Socialism sets itself in opposition to individualism. It sets community against isolation, against self-will, self-interest and the caprice of the individual." — Karl Jaspers
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_7016914352442863651688724897.webp
Marx was for decentralization and the withering of the state as the aim for which socialism should strive... The seizure of the state was, for Marx, the means which was necessary to arrive at the end, its abolition.
— Erich Fromm
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_4266649009018052481688724686.webp
The irrational response which is evoked by the words Socialism and Marxism is furthered by an astounding ignorance on the part of most of those who become hysterical when they hear these words. In spite of the fact that all of Marx’s and other socialist’s writings are available to be read by everybody, most of those who feel most violently about Socialism and Marxism have never read a word by Marx, and many others have only a very superficial knowledge. If this were not so, it would seem impossible that men with some degree of insight and reason could have distorted the idea of Socialism and Marxism to the degree which is current today. Even many Liberals, and those who are relatively free from hysterical reactions, believe that “Marxism” is a system based on the idea that the interest in material gain is the most active power in man, and that it aims at furthering material greed and its satisfaction. If we only remind ourselves that the main argument in favor of Capitalism is the idea that interest in material gain is the main incentive for work, it can easily be seen that the very materialism which is ascribed to Socialism is the most characteristic feature of Capitalism, and if anyone takes the trouble to study the socialist writers with a modicum of objectivity, he will find that their orientation is exactly the opposite, that they criticize Capitalism for its materialism, for its crippling effect on the genuinely human powers in man. Indeed, Socialism in all its various schools can be understood only as one of the most significant, idealistic and moral movements of our age. Aside from everything else, one cannot help deploring the political stupidity of this misrepresentation of Socialism on the part of the Western democracies. Stalinism won its victories in Russia and Asia by the very appeal which the idea of Socialism has on vast masses of the population of the world. The appeal lies in the very idealism of the socialist concept, in the spiritual and moral encouragement which it gives. Just as Hitler used the word “Socialism” to give added appeal to his racial and nationalistic ideas, Stalin misappropriated the concept of Socialism and of Marxism for the purpose of his propaganda. His claim is false in the essential points. He separated the purely economic aspect of Socialism, that of the socialization of the means of production, from the whole concept of Socialism, and perverted its human and social aims into their opposite. The Stalinist system today, in spite of its state ownership of the means of production, is perhaps closer to the early and purely exploitative forms of Western Capitalism than to any conceivable idea of a socialist society. An obsessional striving for industrial advance, ruthless disregard for the individual and greed for personal power are its mainsprings. By accepting the thesis that Socialism and Marxism are more or less identical with Stalinism, we do the greatest service in the field of propaganda which the Stalinists could wish to obtain. Instead of showing the falsity of their claims, we confirm them. This may not be an important problem in the United States, where socialist concepts have no strong hold on the minds of the people, but it is a very serious problem for Europe and especially for Asia, where the opposite is true. To combat the appeal of Stalinism in those parts of the world, we must uncover this deception, and not confirm it.
— Erich Fromm
Man as he appears in any given culture is always a manifestation of human nature, a manifestation, however, which in its specific outcome is determined by the social arrangements under which he lives.
— Erich Fromm
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_2227454381755503871688720025.webp
Socialism is a misnomer in this context. Read Fromm: https://t.me/ErichFromm/75
Man as he appears in any given culture is always a manifestation of human nature, a manifestation, however, which in its specific outcome is determined by the social arrangements under which he lives.
— Erich Fromm
Communism is a global decentralized order of self-governed communities (communes), i.e., such an order eliminates the State as such. Those who talk about the “evils of communism” understand neither that it never existed on this planet nor what it is in reality.
The world is torn apart by a great many big and small contradictions, the solution of which is beyond the power of a person who has not been brought up communistically... If humanity does not understand this and does not irrevocably embark on the path of creating a higher communist society, if it does not decisively re-educate itself, then it will be plunged into such depths of famine and extermination, which the world has not yet heard of... For me, the question is: either there will be an all-planetary communist society, or there will be no one, but sand and dust on a dead planet.
— Ivan Efremov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Yefremov
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_2933973436690980391688684829.webp
Faith in man is faith in the possibility of freedom; the image of man remains incomplete if it lacks this basic feature of his existence, which does not take shape as an image: that he, bestowed upon himself by God, shall thank or blame himself for what becomes of him.
— Karl Jaspers
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_6227865387479890131688683731.webp
The whole economic system of Capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced Christian asceticism and turned away from Heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications.
— Nikolai Berdyaev
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_3962218713036726431688680428.webp
I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.
It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: The split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.
If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the president’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.
Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.
Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.
This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.
— Solzhenitsyn
The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.
And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.
— Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn's righteous outrage (Published 2006)
In a written interview with the newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, he has attacked the United States and NATO for what he described as "an effort totally to encircle Russia and destroy its sovereignty."
The 1970 Nobel laureate for literature has always been a critic of a modernity that, in his opinion, has produced a devastating dehumanization in the West, as well as in his own country under the rule of Lenin, Stalin and their successors.
In his American exile, he made it plain that the Russia he hoped to see in succession to Soviet Russia would not be the liberal capitalist state Americans hoped for (and attempted to install after the USSR's demise, with unhappy consequences), but a Russia displaying the national and conservative Christian solidarity he sees in Russia's past.
Today he believes that a West lost to secularism and materialism is threatening Russia: "Although it is clear that Russia, as it exists, represents no threat to NATO, the latter is methodically developing its military deployment in Eastern Europe and on Russia's southern flank." His interview coincided with a NATO meeting held in Bulgaria, where the Ukrainian defense minister declared his country's "irreversible ambition" to become a NATO member.
NATO's 2004 expansion into the Baltic states was correctly taken by the Russians as a betrayal of assurances given Moscow, following the collapse of the USSR, that NATO would not push the alliance perimeter up to the Russian frontier.
The decision to do so contributed to the creation of a new climate of what can be called a cool war with the West, further chilled by American sponsorship of the "color revolutions" in countries such as Georgia that were part of Moscow's empire in czarist times, or like Ukraine and Belarus, which are closely related culturally and occupy an ambiguous zone of historically shifting political identityat the frontier between Orthodox and Roman Christianity.
Twitter has locked my account for tweeting about the Nuremberg Trial 2.0 against the UkroNazis and their evil leadership. "Hateful conduct." Clowns. This is exactly why humanity needs Nostr — to circumvent the tyranny of BigTech and their Deep State masters against free speech.
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_5431220798606792061688648257.webp
It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.
— Franz Kafka
Power is a duty, not a right, and power is only right when it is exercised not in one's own name or in the name of one's own, but in the name of God, in the name of truth. ... And all political life based on the struggle for the right of power must be recognized as an unreal, fictitious, vampiric life. There is nothing ontological about it. Nine-tenths of politics is always a lie, a deception, a fiction. And only one-tenth of politics contains the real element, the exercise of power necessary for the existence of the world, power from God.
— Nikolai Berdyaev
When [bodhisattvas meditate], they give rise to the attitude, ‘May all sentient beings be seated in the heart of awakening.’
— Bodhisattvagocarapariśuddhisūtra
To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness for temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship.
— Bertrand Russell