After Disillusionment [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes, 10 seconds. Contains 2235 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a blog about the fringe leaking into the mainstream.

I’m your host Stephen and we’re cooking on an anniversary blog.

It’s also the summer solstice.

There will be UFO talk again, but first we have to do some theory.

4 years ago I started this thing and I’m still insistent on continuing it.

This post was going to be for last week, but I had to shit myself to death and then back to life. Made it hard to write.

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s dive into our topic today.

Great Lies and the Shipwreck of Postmodernity

I have a messy relationship with Fredrich Nietzsche. At his best, I think he might have seen further into the future and its conflicts than any other person. At his worst, he’s a whiny Incel mad about petty shit.

He, too, contains multitudes.

Nietzsche saw a great contradiction between the pre-Enlightenment Christianity and the Liberalism of the Enlightenment that defines what we’d now call modernism. He was looking for a way out of the traps he saw between these two ideologies.

It’d take almost 100 years for wider parts of European academia to catch up with him and it’s been more than 50 years since what we now call Postmodernism and society has at last opened the confusion he saw.

Would he be surprised that a strange legal sideline in his day, the corporate person, should become his ubermensch? Reevaluating values and rejecting all not labeled profit. A being who’s greatness destroys mere humanity simply by touching us.

Perhaps not.

Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about Nietzsche. I haven’t read his books in more than a decade and young-me is not to be trusted with interpretation.

But he’s hard to avoid here because he got in early in recognizing that the ideological systems of Europe were simply not going to work. Their flaws would break them down and leave people utterly without direction.

And that’s what we’re here to talk about.

Postmodern Dreams

Let’s talk a bit about Modernism.

It can mean a pile of different things, but we’re going to be focused on it as a particular flavor of rationalist progressivism. You might have heard the term “Whiggish history”, same thing. Benevolent philosopher-aristocrat-scientists spreading Enlightenment to a benighted world.

Progress as a hammer: Self evidently good and thus impossible to criticize or stop. A fine justification for colonialism.

Much of what we’ve been talking about on our four year voyage here has been bits and bobs of stuff exiled from Modernism. Coloring out of the lines in some way. Too weird or not predictable enough.

Too superstitious. Doesn’t fit in with the political projects going on. Whatever.

But I guess now we’ve got to define postmodernism. I’m going to take a somewhat different tack: Postmodernism is a social state that occurs after the initial goals of modernism to rationalize and redeem the world collapses, but before the games, industries, and economies created to do that have collapsed.

It’s a kind of “dead man walking” phase between radiation and death.

It has all kinds of manifestations from the collapse of naïve grand narratives, weird self referential art, and whatever the fuck postmodern architecture is doing.

Another way to put it is the economics produced by Settler-colonialism, capitalism, and financialization no longer really needed to pretend the old stories still mattered.

That’s complex, though, because market spirituality and Neoliberal myths are as real and powerful as their predecessors.

But most people aren’t very motivated by markets and don’t care about economic reason. They just want to live their damn lives, doing whatever work suits them or is nearby or is accessible to their communities. But postmodernism exists as a rupture in those goals.

Lots of people have tried to come up with a name for what comes after postmodernism but they’ve mostly just recreated different forms of it.

Why?

Because postmodernism isn’t an intellectual tradition. Or rather, it’s intellectual tradition isn’t really relevant to the underlying structure.

We can take a moment and look at the people who pretend to oppose postmodernism for a second because they’re quite instructed.

Dr Jordan Peterson is an old punching bag for this newsletter and yet he’s a perfect expression of a kind of naïve opposition to postmodernism. Dr Peterson’s overall argument is that we can redeem postmodernity by embracing his Jungian interpretation of Christianity and rebuild the old hierarchies and live them as though they still meant something.

He’s kind of a dime store then-as-farce version of Confucius trying to bring back the dignity of the rituals in hopes that dignity will teach the elites virtue itself.

But, alas, for the good doctor he’s fatally wrong about that.

You can’t unring bells.

You can’t pretend you believe in god and feel worship has any meaning.

The very act of trying makes a parody of what is alleged to have been sincere.

You can force yourself to do it but the more you do the greater the energy costs get and you quickly hit diminishing returns.

Some people will find more comfort in this than outside it, true. And you can certainly try to force other people to conform to it and many people will find pleasure in that violence.

But a functioning orthodoxy wouldn’t need a “Jungian reinterpretation”. It’d just enact the mystery.

But we’re past all that.

This is misleading. This guy isn’t speaking here. It’s the guy from the first image. :-D

“My dear, our world is hopelessly boring. Therefore, there can be no telepathy, or apparitions, or flying saucers, nothing like that.

The world is ruled by cast-iron laws, and it's insufferably boring. Alas, those laws are never violated.

They don't know how to be violated. So don't even hope for a UFO, There is no Bermuda Triangle. There's only Triangle ABC that equals Triangle A-prim, B-prim, C-prim.

Do you feel the boredom contained in this assertion?

To live in the Middle Ages was interesting.

Every home had its house-spirit, and every church had its God. People were young! Now every fourth is an old person. It's so boring, my angel.” -Stalker

Chasing the Dragon or Disillusionment

So far I’ve avoided using the word nihilism because I think it’s one of those things people don’t really understand. Then again, I did use postmodernism. And that’s bad enough.

But we have to reckon with it now.

Nihilism is the recognition that all human ideas are contingent within human minds and social networks.

IE: The universe is meaningless.

Meaning isn’t something you find in the physical world. It’s a thing your mindbody does.

Some people use this as an excuse for being an asshole. But if there’s no reason to be good, there’s equally no reason to be bad.

It all just kind of zeros out.

Nietzsche tried to come up with alternatives to nihilism, but I don’t think he did a very good job. I take a different approach.

Nihilism isn’t really a problem, IMO. It feels like that at first, because it feels so overwhelmingly bleak.

But meaning is everything I’ve ever known! How can it be nothing!

This is devastating. Especially if you’re already prone to mental illness.

But I think that devastation is a bit like a volcanic eruption: It produces nutrient rich soil for things to grow.

I became a nihilist back in 2008. It was one of the greatest moments of my life at the time: It told me that my overwhelming pain was meaningless. That I was not defined by trauma. That I was free.

Using that freedom turned out…. well, complicated. I'm only really getting a sense for how to do it in the last few years.

It’s that learning how to be free that I want to talk about. Because we typically have superficial understanding of what that is and what it means: Freedom is not the absence of constraint.

Freedom is development within a coherent context. Not unimpeded, but not controlled either.

To be a writer, I must write.

When I don’t write, I feel like I’m wasting my time.

Writing is a constrained, but only when I’m writing do I feel free.

Context is a tricky thing to recognize. Coherence, even more so.

Chasing The Dragon

Of course, there are alternatives. You can also try to find some new mystery, some new transcendent edge.

That might let you remystify the world again which would let you salvage some of the old shit.

Most of the psychic plumbing Europe has built over the last one or two thousand years has been around our relationship with the Transcendent defining our more tangible relationships. And as long as you plug something in there and don’t look to closely it’s about as good as before.

There are no shortage of people and groups selling options. We’ve spoken about many but there are plenty of others.

Even lux self help grifters like Andrew Tate play this card subtly: A transcendent you without your problems. Stronger, smarter, tougher. Respected.

But that self never comes and almost everyone who tries to sell that kind of thing hit a wall with it themselves. Neil Strauss (A previous generation of the same kind of guy) even wrote a whole book about how he needed to get therapy and learn how to have health relationships because pick up shit just didn’t actually make him happier.

There are thousands of similar stories.

You fantasize about a certain kind of attention or success fixing you but it just doesn’t. The only thing that does is following the roots down.

But that’s a different subject, lol.

We’re specifically focusing on the search for some way to remystify one’s personal reality after it collapses. Now, I’ve skipped over a lot of the personal crisis levels of this. Which really does deserve its own treatment.

The short answer to that is: Google Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s Positive Disintegration. It’s the best map to that territory I’ve seen.

The phrase chasing the dragon comes from, as you know, opium use. Trying to get that one perfect high. Most of the esoteric people I know have ended up in that trap to one degree or another. Secret knowledge and weird peak experiences can be an utter delight, with or without drugs.

But trying to push them or to have them be the driving force of your life is just unsustainable. At some point you need roots.

Shit, it took me fucking my back up and being forced to grow them to see how much better life is when you have a foundation.

So you can chase the dragon and hell maybe you should. It can be very enlightening. But part of that process is accepting that you’re never going to hold the dragon either.

And it’s never really going to create the kind of closure those of us conditioned by European thought are seeking. If the mystery isn’t ineffable the whole thing falls apart.

Disillusionment Is Good Actually

This is just the general point of this piece.

Prior to disillusionment you can’t really find the edges and structure of the world you live in.

So yeah it’s painful to find out that what you believe is wrong, especially when it’s about deeply felt beliefs you’ve put a lot of stock in.

But you gain so much for that discomfort: A clearer vision of the world, usually.

Of course many people overcorrect here. But it’s an ongoing process and you tend to get better at it over time.

We’ve abandoned the fantasies of the old worlds for confusion.

Lots of people find this intolerable.

But how else are we supposed to find something durable and new to replace the trash heap civilization we’ve been born into?

I don’t know where any of this is going.

Maybe nowhere. Maybe we’re all going to get wiped out from our own hubris because of climate change or nuclear war or whatever.

But that’s not what the crazy part of me says. The bit who’s navigated me remarkably safely through my own crazy times.

Maybe it’s better put into a song than argued.

Knowing reality is an ordeal, but it’s worth it.

Now Is The Time Of Monsters

I adore this movie, the failure and the chance for success anyway most of all

Alright, I think that’s a pretty good place to rebuild from. I’ve been writing this thing for 4 years with widely varying levels of attention and consistency.

I’m not going to promise some new schedule or whatever. Let’s admit ourselves wiser than that at least.

The Trenchant Edges is at its best when I play with the tension between an exploration of a topic and itself as a product, not when I veer to either side.

So I’m going to try and chase that instead of a schedule.

Old ideas are collapsing and we don’t have worthwhile replacements. This is good.

In such times once fringe ideas make their way mainstream.

Blah blah opportunity and blah blah crisis.

That’s the terrain we’re exploring here. All maps have their edges. And all models collapse under strain.

Knowledge is hard and people will tend to try anything to reinforce their beliefs rather than looking for better ones.

And who can blame them? Thinking is painful, time consuming, and there’s no guarantee of success.

Still, there’s plenty of wreckage to explore.

This particular topic could easily fill a book if I was arguing rigorously instead of racing through the context setting to get to the good stuff.

Anyway, I want to thank you all for getting this far. To write and be read is really one of my only core desires.

Hopefully it made you think at bit.

See you soon. Or not.