Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Humorless, Cowardly, Totalitarian

"The rich and powerful piss on us and tell us it's raining." - Old Saying


I saw The Great Gatsby a few days ago (the one with Leonardo DiCaprio) and I was stuck about how close it was to the novel, which I read about 20 years ago. The movie was a lot better than I thought it would be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, like all good artists, fit what Ezra Pound noticed: "The artist is the antenna of the race." Sometimes I think in their accurate according of what they observe they may write things that they don't even know what they mean.

Fitzgerald was recording some pretty nasty observations about people, especially the super-rich: they're humorless, they're cowards, and they're totalitarian. They got away with it because they could, because of their wealth.

Norman Mailer, not surprisingly, made the same observations about people, and he made it at a feminist conference. Actually he considered the natural state of humanity to be fascism.

The people that Fitzgerald and Mailer wrote about are decadent.

Kenneth Minogue put it this way: "the civilized become decadent with luxury. They lose their sharpness and think only of the good and the beautiful."

Men created everything in the world. Those inventions made their lives, and women's lives, much easier, much more luxurious. And then many became decadent, and in that decadence up rose feminism, which is humorless, cowardly and totalitarian. There would be no feminism if people spent their lives scraping by to make a living.

There is in fact something much more totalitarian and fascist in women than men, most probably because of women's completely deluded secure for "security," which doesn't exist. Feminism is, of course, leftist. The other way around is more accurate: leftism is feminine. (To be specific it is the Bad Feminine, since there is a Good Feminine.)

If you want to see an example of the Bad Feminine, just remember the kerfluffle with Adia Richards at a software conference, who clearly showed herself a humorless, cowardly, totalitarian leftist feminist.

Specificially, there are two mythological archetypes that are terrible dangers: the Bad Feminine (the Seductive, Destroying Mother) and the Bad Father. Put them both together, politically, and it's just about over.

Such people are barbarians. The definition of a barbarian? Someone who wants to destroy culture and society. And barbarians are tribal. In other words, leftists are into "Make Your Own Tribe" kits.

I find it bizarre that luxury so often leads to decadence. Some people just don't know what to do with leisure, with the life of the mind. Personally, if I didn't have to work I've got plenty to occupy myself. The average person, though, might just slide into a life of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll - then die early.

The orgress Betty Friedan, of all people, unwittingly pointed out, in her influential book, The Feminine Mystique, that women suffered from a Problem with No Name. There was a name to it, which she didn't recognize: boredom. These women couldn't deal with leisure and the life of the mind, so they thought they'd be happier if they moved into men's sphere (women always want to move into the men's sphere).

The archetype of the horror story, as I have pointed out before, is Evil attacking Good, Chaos attacking Order. Leftism is that evil, that chaos, as if that subset of it, feminism, that is attacking the natural, organic order of society.

The curious thing about evil is that it is seductive and that is always portrays itself as good. It uses words such as "fairness" and "justice" even though it doesn't mean them at all. It just wants to rule.

It's why the serpent in the Garden of Eden is known as the nachash, which means to whisper spells, to enchant, to prognosticate, to gain your confidence, to seduce, the way Eve seduced Adam. Why? Because he was weak and listened to a woman telling him the wrong things, and portraying them as good.

The nachash is also a symbol of envy (it was Milton in Paradise Lost who turned the nachash in Satan).

My conclusion: be very careful when listening to women, especially when they complain about "fairness" and "justice" and "oppression." And never listen to when what what they say is based on envy. (In fact, complaints about justice and fairness and oppression is almost always based on envy.

When innocent men listen and are seduced, they - and society - are started on the path to a humorless, cowardly, decadent, leftist-totalitarian society. Sorta like what we have today.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had avoided the new Gatsby when I heard P Diddy or some such had a hand in it. In fact, I found it curiously captivating and intend to watch it again.

One element that tempered the behaviour of the old elite was noblesse oblige (the other was propriety)-- that was already slipping in Fitzgerald's time and is non-existent these days.

You are too right about the siren of security-- it has feminized the wider Left which is why they prefer internships at polar bear non-profits to actually creating real value in the market. Note: corporate drone anxiety. I have a friend who was dumped at 50 by a multinational after 13 years. He spun wheels for 2 years trying to do his own thing. He couldn't-- it was like he was utterly incapable of thinking outside the corporate hive. He was recently hired back but I suspect they'll do him again within a couple years. There are millions of these guys out there...

Quartermain said...

"The rich and powerful piss on us and tell us it's raining." - old saying

What's annoying is there are shlubs out there that not only believe the piss is rain but will insist that the rest of us believe it.