Argillian retweeted
If you want to know where your heart is, look at where your mind goes when it wanders.
Walt Whitman.
This and a big beautiful castle with synthetic biology labs where I make my own armors that makes me a semigod of the techno-monarchy
Sex is the father of all things, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free. Heraclitus was wrong. War is not the father of all things. It’s sex. War destroys, sex creates.
Everything in the universe replicates, duplicates, repeats in patterns, aligns in symmetrical order, propagates, procreates, on all scales - from quantum to galactic. Replication doesn’t happen just for genes and memes. It happens for everything in the universe. Even the universe itself replicates in multiple branches, creating the multiverse.
All those philosophers who bang their heads about the meaning of life were wasting their time. Reproduction is the true and real meaning of life. You probably heard that in your biology class and thought “lame, there must be some greater meaning than boinking.” Your parents told you the same, rushing you to marry and make some kids, but you thought how simple-minded they are. Life must have some higher meaning, and you don’t want to waste your best years changing diapers - so you decided to pursue a PhD in philosophy to find that out, and spent your 20s reading books from desperate people rejected by girls.
But the reality is your parents were all right, and you were completely wrong. There is nothing transcendental and higher than replication.
“But, but, that’s so simple and so grounded and so obvious,” you scream around like some toddler.
Exactly! Isn’t that so obvious? We people tend to ignore obvious things and fog our minds with some language gymnastics. Look around! Everything around you is about sex. Birds singing, cicadas making evening sounds, flowers blossoming, trees growing, cars going, civilization expanding.
“But that's so disgusting! It must be something pure, something like innocent love. Something transcendental, something out there we cannot comprehend and reach with our language, it is something beyond the event horizon of our universe, which we cannot understand but we can feel in our hearts.”
You can feel bullshit, don’t you think so? That feeling you have is just bullshit memes hacking your neurons so they can replicate out there. They are literally banging your brain, and you feel so good because of that. So, sex again, father of all things.
"But, but LOVE! True love isn't about sex?"
Isn't it? It's about what?
"Understanding, empathy, support, bonding, respect..."
That's all the same as sex. Empathy is just replicating conditions that one person is in, to your head, and making a mental model of it, and connecting it with a few emotions. And when women talk about love, since they usually like to present it in a flowery, lacy way, they actually talk about a roll in the hay
Argillian retweeted
Coercive education does lasting harm to a mind. This is universally acknowledged but only when referring to something else. Direct acknowledgment is taboo and can elicit exclusionary behaviour and rage.
There: let that be a lesson to y'all.
It's not gold that makes you a billionaire, but your own capabilities. If everyone had access to this golden rock, gold would lose its value and probably be treated the same way we treat sand
Asteroid Psyche 16 has been found to contain gold reserves worth $700 quintillion. That's enough to make everyone on Earth billionaires.
Argillian retweeted
Yes, but that entire story is symbolic, crafted to explain the psychological drama all humans face.
Poseidon represents raw emotion and desire. His animals are horses and bulls, symbols of untamed desires, libido and brute strength. Athena, on the other hand, is the goddess of wisdom and intelligence. She is a virgin goddess, the complete opposite of Poseidon.
So what happens when the human mind is “raped” by raw brute desire? What does intelligence do in response? It curses you for your lack of chastity, for stopping worshiping intelligence as high human trait, transforming you into a monster, Medusa, a symbol of suppressed emotion. Medusa is that overwhelming feeling that paralyzes you, fears and rage. She is the Shadow in Jungian terms.
But you cannot keep Medusa locked inside forever. If you do, she paralyzes your very steps, your movement through life. In mythology, snakes often symbolize paralysis because of their venom and their tendency to bite the feet preventing you to walk. So you need heroic courage and ego - Perseus. But Perseus doesn’t face Medusa directly, he needs help of intelligence (Athena). He uses a mirror, symbolizing the conscious reflection of that psychological force.
That’s the only way to confront your inner monsters: with reflection, awareness, and guidance from Sapiens and wisdom. And when you do, when you truly face and overcome your inner paralysis, you are liberated - that liberation is represented by Pegasus, which is also a symbol of inspiration, creativity, transcendence. He accompanies the Muses, especially poetry, which is essentially what happens to some people when they overcome their inner Medusas - they turn to art
This is probably one of the trickiest parts of art.
On one hand, the highest form of art is purely based on reason - or more precisely, on Logos. Art, in this view, is the observation and discovery of Logos as the fundamental law of the objective universe. Think of how Brunelleschi discovered perspective, or how da Vinci observed the human body to replicate it with precision on paper. The Hudson River School - most accurate replication of landscapes. Classical architecture, classical music, heavy metal - all of them are grounded in Logos-based art. In these cases, art serves Logos as its expression and replication. Because Logos is replication, the law that governs nature and the universe, both physically and metaphysically.
But on the other hand, art also emerges from the individual soul - subjective, inner universes that do not wish to align with Logos. Instead, it seek to imprint itself on the objective world, reshaping it according to their own will. This is a more magical, alchemical form of art, created by people who are more like magicians than logicians. In this realm, we find strange, expressive, dreamlike form of art - surrealists like Dali and Ernst, the art that feels like dreams, illusions. Gothic fiction also belongs here, with its ghostly settings and the triumph of the past over the present - again, not real, but haunting. Lovecraft as well, his entire mythos revolves around entities that shatter reason and infect the human mind with madness - the opposite of reason. This type of art doesn’t come from Logos, at least at first glance, but from something deeper, older, more primal in the human psyche.
Remember that in Lovecraft’s stories, those who are scientists, people who are true priests of Logos, are often the ones who go insane upon encountering these incomprehensible entities, that contact them through dreams and other surreal, irrational channels.
Unfortunately, these same subjective mental forces are also the root of much of today’s postmodern “art,” which stands in complete opposition to reason and Logos. And more unfortunately, if we trace it back, the rise of expressionism, surrealism, and postmodernism all began in the 19th century - the moment humans “killed God” killed meaning, purpose, and Logos itself. After that, art, architecture, and culture became pure performance, pure magic and illusion, not grounded in reality. And reality is Logos.
So, does art need a reason?
If you follow the chain of thought above, the answer is YES. Logos is all that is real. Logos is reality. All true art is a mirror of Logos, just as science is - which is why science is a form of art itself, perhaps the highest form we have. As Einstein once said, it is “the most precious thing we have.” Lovecraftian entities, Gothic ghosts, Dali’s elephants on stilts—none of these are real. They are illusions. But yet, why do humans experience these strange, illusionary, dreamlike states? Dreams, madness, possessions, hallucinations, illusions, aren’t they also real in some experiential sense?
Yes, they are real as subjective human experiences, but they are not real out there in the objective world - unless we duplicate those inner experiences onto a piece of paper. In order to do so, we must use Logos in the process for doing so, because Logos = replication. And in that case we get art, no matter how surreal looks like.
So essentially speaking, art needs reason
The true Lovecraftian horror isn't the incomprehensible unknown, but losing reason, Sapiens and the ability to comprehend what you face
If among a company's values you find one called "No ego / low ego" that means they will crush your self-sense, self-esteem, and self-worth. Avoid that place - your ego and self-love are among the most precious things you have