Monday, August 07, 2006

City Knights (4)

The city can be a cold and hard place to exist as a person. A city can strip the existence and identity from a man in minutes, turning a lively and satisfied man into a minute and insignificant thing instantly. A city can swallow a whole life and waste it without people noticing. Millions of others carry on in spite of the personal tragedy of the one. The city, huge and unfeeling and remote even from those who dwell within it, has no feeling for its inhabitants. The city is merely an inorganic powerhouse that thrives on the fuel of peoples' energies, most of that energy used to produce market material, mere cash, stuff to be bought and sold, including people themselves. All the criticisms Marx levels at cities are true; and also they are completely idiotic. For all the cash grubbing and social decay that occurs in cities, all the alienation from nature and family and tribe and the rural idiocy that is feudalism and worse, and it happens in cities at an accelerated pace that throws the average man into mental chaos and destroys him if he cannot cope with the shift that is life in the city as man alone in and of himself, for all that, the city is also the place of wealth not mere of money but of personality and individualism, of time and energy for rational reflection and the storage and use of intellect. And there, in the freedom to reflect and build on intellectual gains of others, there we find the worst of the city that the primitive can imagine. It is in the city that man is free from other men to think and act as he will. That begins to answer the why of why they hate us. The city is where free ideas are generated and spread through the marketplace, where men must compete to be hear and understood, where the leader is not the leader unless he is accepted by the marketplace by virtue of his product. For those who have a product already, one time-tested and sacred, a worldview sanctioned by eternal gods, to offend against it, to question the authority of it, to advance against the tradition of the life of Man as it has always been and must be, that is an attack on more than the scared, it is an attack of the fabric of reality, a destruction of the meaning of life itself. It comes from the city, from those who are alienated from Nature, from those who do not accept the authority of the gods and the traditions of the priests.


The city is in itself unnatural. In the city man is alone. In the city man is not part of the whole, the organic, the living and breathing reality that is life as it is known to be by the reality of the revealed traditions and the gods. To exist in the city one is self rather than part of the group. Even in the group in the city there are other groups and one is not of them, a world asunder and atomic. There is no control and no appeasement of the gods possible. Reality itself unravels. There is only madness and fear and hatred; and the only right response to the city's usurpation of reality and the sacred can be the violent destruction of the city in the hope of restoring the past to its perfection of yore.

The city is a mechanical grinder that dumps in people and spews out-- mediocrity! People go in and out comes money and uniform goods for sale. Life is reduced from authentic struggle in the face of God to making a living doing the same old same old over and again in pursuit of more cash to pay the bills until one is left worn out and ready to die in ones late retirement. There is not grit to living, only bland and ordinary little-to-nothing. The city destroys old values and the meaning of life and offends the nature of God. All that was good is reduced to pap. The blood of the people is mixed with the blood of others; the soil of the land is paved over and made into parking lots that store the vehicles that drive people away from meaning. Nature, the all-powerful force that gives life and takes life is raped and transformed into order in the hands of Man. In place of Nature is the city. In place of authentic Man living a life given by the gods is man the grubber. city man is mediocre, and his cities threaten to overwhelm and destroy all that was the nature of man the heroic and the safe, man known to the gods and worthy of a hero's death. In the city one man is much like the next unless he has money, a mediocre thing at best, not spiritual and not heroic.


Primitives daemonise the city. They are not alone: the philobarbarist does so to an even greater extent. Look to the average "ecologist" or animal rights activist for the worse of the Modernity-hating phantasists. What does the philbarbarist like about "Nature"? Why does he hate the city?

We live in a world of revolutionary Modernity, a world that is so new in the Human experience that only a very few people on Earth have it to any extent, and fewer still who grasp its significance. Our Modernity is a revolution that is remote entirely from the past 5,000 years of the Agricultural Revolution. There are many among us who did not cope with that, and now there are the majority of the Earth's people who cannot cope with the triune revolutions of Modernity. Among the counter-revolutionaries of our Modernity are those who are failures as people in themselves, those who cannot cope with their own individuality, for whatever personal reasons. Those who cannot cope with our revolutionary Modernity flee to a phantasy world in which they would be heroes. Those people are mad, in all senses.

The phantasy world of the philobarbarist is simply beyond comprehension of the average person. The vision of a Romantic past as the Golden Age must permeate the tiny minds of the philobarbarist, and it is not accessible to me. The past that the philobarbarist loves to imagine has no basis in reality. The reality of the past is the mind not of the city but of the swamp: a depression filled with stagnant slime infested with poisonous parasites and inhabited by savages, violent and irrational and stupid. The mind of the primitive is closed and dark and dank, where nothing comes in but slime and filth and rot. It is the world of the raw, the undigested, the immediate and the terrifying. But from a distance, from the vantage of the Romantic living in Modernity and casting his cloudy eye to the past he imagines, there the phantasy shines and glistens with heroes and noble savages living in a comic book version of reality, some idiot parody of Batman. In this mentally ill vision of the past the noble savage is "at one with Nature." What does it mean? He is authentic. What does it mean? He is living a real life unencumbered by machinery and money. What does it mean? It means, dear reader, that the phantasist has never spent any time at all living in a swamp with savages. It means these fools are not merely mentally ill, they are also stupid. those who claim to hate the city and to love nature are those who have no real understanding of nature or of normal living. They are insane, and deliberately so-- because they are taught to be so.

To be continued and concluded as the evening progresses.

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