Showtime in America: Idiots’ Delight – A Quasi Review

I’m piqued by this essay. Does the current author identify with Clamence as a contemporary judge-penitent? Isn’t that a morally dubious position to take?

Do we accept the world as it is, and attempt to live within the parameters of self-deception without becoming too self-deceived …or do we choose for all (as an Existential Humanist choosing) and attempt to consciously change the world? What if the world does not want to change? How then, do we consciously interact with patterns of Machine-Becoming that are repetitive to the point of an automatism of stasis and determinism …that form a quasi-philosophical fatalist nexus – the anti-Existential? Que sera, sera …but with a near static equilibrium of determinative patterns of anti-Existential action and re-action – the future IS ours to see. And it is not a pretty sight looming into view …casting its eschatological shadow over the everyday.

In wishing to avoid such a totalitarian shadow-future: the righteous futurist that assumes a position of moral authority becomes the current totalitarian …at least in the eyes of the Other. It does not matter how anti-totalitarian their judge-penitent view might be: everyone present reserves the autonomous right to form an opinion and the free-will right to choose. Even if that autonomy feeds back into stasis and inaction …that looping which reinforces the anti-autonomous stasis and inaction and feeds historic power to the voracious status quo ante bellum …the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all). This becomes the autonomous self-determination of a violent determininism and flux of decay. Who would dare set themselves as judge-penitent to highlight this? Who would dare point out this falling into recursive inaction: even to themselves …let alone the Other?

Camus’ ‘The Fall’ is an extended soliloquy on the consequences of such inaction. These are some of the Existential themes the novel evokes …for me anyway.

When is self-deception self-deceiving? One has to be conscious of the consequences of ones actions in order to enter into mauvaise-foi. Otherwise one is unconsciously being culturally enacted: a dramatis personae with little or no conscious agency outside the dictates of binary culture. What cognitive will to meaning do we have in such an alienating world? Are we really abandoned within a quantum of aloneness? How do we respond to the Absurd?

“If believability is your gauge for discerning truth, you are living in a fantasy world. But that is the reality of life in the United States today. ”

This is as true a proposition as anyone could write: it is apodeictic (self-evidently true) everywhere – not just the US. Without enumerating them, there are a number of these apodeictic truths that constitute the global propositional array that the world is in dire need of reform. I very much doubt if that is in dispute. Yet what is at fault, what needs to be done and how it needs to be enacted become sectarianisms in and of themselves. Cherished opinions jealously guarded which become the antimonies of activism …which feeds the power of stasis …which feeds the war of all against all …which becomes an aporia of unconscious bad-faith and inaction.

In the face of such inactivism: the war goes on. Inaction implies a tacit consent. The progressive decries the war as a daily Eternal Return: all viewpoints in impartial principal being of equal value. To repudiate a viewpoint (or even to ask for its validation or empiricism) is a totalitarianism akin to that of the status quo ante power elite. But the miasma of the infinite freedom of binary views cancel out into static equilibrium …to the processes of life: stasis is near-death.

If only there were an alternative, where I could be right without declaring all opponents wrong (even the linguistic metaphors declare war)? Can a right and its negation affirm each other? Do two rights cancel out logic and declare each other wrong? Only to the Aristotelian ‘Organon’ of binary logic that we have encultured and inherited from the status quo ante. For the cultural resistance to form (pre-supposing that there are those who want to act and not just talk) we need our own values contra the binary dictatorship and quantitative (stochastic-mechanistic) status quo ante bellum.

For those not grounded in Buddhism: welcome to Catuskoki and Pramana (Buddhist epistemo-logic). In the encultured binary logic of the status quo: if proposition A is right or true – its negation A’ (A’ being the proposition of a contradistinct antithesis of A) is necessarily wrong or false. There is no third option. This produces limited scope for activism. Entrenched and inured in culture: we all have to agree contra the cultural principium individuationis (to agree contra the individuation of self-validating opinion). That can never happen: for the atomised and fragmented to coalesce around an anti-cultural cause they would have to drop their self-identity. We are bound to the status quo by a cultural binary logic that manufactures identity as it fractures dissent.

In brief: if I am right, you are wrong and the argument (a minor delaying skirmish in the war of all on all) goes on …no change is allowed. Our opinions are mutually exclusive and auto-negational. This is true not only for the antithesis – but for all values of A’ …even minor differentials. There can be only one true POV: and that is mine …according to the power structure as it is: built on Aristotelian logical foundations. We are individuated into self-actuated and performative binary powerlessness.

This is a dictatorship: which one cannot seek to change without seeking the role of a dictator …according to the rules of engagement we have set ourselves. To move on we need a cultural reset with rules and values contradistinct from the ruling caste. Without going into the minutiae: Catuskoki is a quaternary logical form that solves propositions indeterminately …there is no absolute right nor absolute wrong – nor ultimate differentiating opinions to cherish . No pure objectivity or pure subjectivity. Nor absolutisms or relativisms. The “viscous hierarchy” of polar nihilisms are avoided.

Coupled with Pramana (lit: Proof): it is a qualitative, not quantitative approach. All empirical propositions are equally ‘true’ and ‘valid’ depending on context, expediency and causal efficacy. In other words, there is a certain leeway to employ empirical purposive propostions to expedite a particular goal (teleogenesis). This could be a non-Being proposition to expedite a liberational praxis from the status quo of binary Being – without actually affirming such an entity as ‘non-Being’ nor necessarily negating individual Being. Nothing is either confirmed or denied: both sets of values are indeterminate, valid and equal relative to the relevant paradigm. It is an empirical realism. Determinacy is efficacy and empiricism. Language retains its coherence and conventional usage …change comes from its non-rigid (metaphoric) application and non-binary (nondual) interpretation.

It is only restrictive, in the sense that all non-empirical POVs are excluded (the anti-epistemic Prasangika “Horns of a Rabbit” grammatical fictions); as is all a priori reasoning independent of experience (such as appeals to fundamental laws; universalisation; the noumenal; transcendentals or universals …including Pure Reason and objectivity). Experience (that is the First Person existential) is the arbiter of the Real …whether or not it is ultimately real becomes a linguistic irrelevance. In other words, it is a Universal Humanism and Embodied Existentialism.

Catuskoki and pramana constitute the Mahadmayaka: the Middle Way alterity of language and memory. It is the activation, usage and enervation of the Aristotelian ‘excluded middle’ of language (the full axiological range of values between polar extremisms): which contradicts (but importantly, does not negate) all three classic laws of logic. The way forward favours the dialogical, not the dictatorial approach. It favours creating our own values that are not dictated by, or internalised from, the status quo ante power absolute. Those values can be orientated toward a praxis of liberation without the dictates of right and wrong. What is right and wrong is relative to the values we choose that may save us from a totalitarian shadow-future (that is, a right and wrong that have soteriological value and liberational meaning). That is if it can be agreed there is a soteric need.

The point I wanted to make is that there is a way forward, out of the iterational morass of personal POVs. No one has to become the judge-penitent. We can agree to disagree and hold singular POVs, but without fracture and sectarianisms. All that has to be done is to agree that we need to consciously intervene to create an alternate future …rather than just accept the binary future that is forming today. Another future is possible with another logic.

Unity is quaternary, not binary.

Sapere aude.

[Dare to know].

In a world where everyone feels rather than thinks, lying trumps it all.

The bankers (and their politician henchfolk) have been trying to make life in the UK just like the US for many decades. They have nearly succeeded.

The Groaniad with it’s forked tongue is their arse licker. The occasional journalist apart, which they use as a fig leaf, todays example:

“Let us get it straight. Neoliberalism has ripped you off and robbed you blind. The evidence of that is mounting up – in your bills, in your services and in the finances of your country.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist and senior economics commentator”

A measly handful like Chakraborrty, Collinson and cartoonists Bell/Rowson are the only genuine voices left there. It must be shear hell for them having to be asssociated and even in the same room as their editors and ‘senior’ colleagues.

Ain’t just America my friends.. ;> (recommend some Alan Watts reading / listening for perspective..’The Book’ is a good primer.. ;> )

Wow …….. but the cost of the fucking ticket to this show is killing us!

Cheers.