'The Passenger' by Cormac McCarthy

 At first you take this novel to be a thriller with the added ingenuity of a locked room mystery.  In this case the ‘room’ is a sunken jet plane that divers Bobby Western and Oiler (Euler?) have been hired to investigate.  They go down and have to cut open the door to find 9 bodies within and both the avionics and the black box missing.  Clearly the Tenth passenger whom we learn was on the manifest has departed with these vital sources of information about the flight’s origin, route etc.  Bobby later hires a boat and discovers that an obscure cove might have been the landing point of a dinghy.  Then mysterious and sinister comedic FBI type duo turn up and question Western.  You have to admit that the scene is set for a paranoid adventure into the heartland of American conspiracy.   We are set up for an unfolding with some metaphysics but with a swerve nothing is unbound.

The preamble remains and it breaks the Chekovian rule about the introduction of a gun in the first act.  Thank you Hedda Gabler for reminding us.  That neat parcel of inscrutability remains sealed and we are off on a different track which introduces the Tenth Man or the self of the inquirer in the Vedanta parable.

 The Tenth Man relates how a party of 10 travelers were crossing a dangerous river. Having got over the leader of the group counted them to see if everybody was safely over. He counted nine and began to bewail the missing one until a passer by reminded him - ‘you have forgotten to count yourself, you are the tenth man’.

Bobby Western is bemused by his image in the eyes of others, those that have traveled with him in his past, in his family’s past and in the fixed presence of his sister’s hallucinations.  He counts them and in his mesmerised totting of his accounts is caught in a circle particularly by the love for his sister his anima and now the source of emotional stasis.  If he gets past that he feels that he may lose himself.  Such is the nature of botched accountancy.  

The cast of the book represents the facets of Western’s relation to his world; literary, historical, Manhattan Project, conspiracy, family and transgenderism.  In a series of conversations and the book is largely conversational the fractions of Bobby add up to less than 1 or less than 10 if you wish.  

Conclusion: There is no conclusion and you are led to expect there may be.  A bum steer or ‘if I was going there I wouldn’t start from here’ is irritating and to travel hopefully and not to arrive though the directional signs were quite clear is not satisfying. Rereading may be the better part of value.  ‘Stella Maris’ the coda to ‘The Passenger’ is yet to be read but for now ‘non placet’.

(put Tenth Man in the search box of the blog to find further ruminations on that parable)

Bergson and Irrationalism/Irrealism

 

“There would still remain this second conclusion, which is of a more metaphysical order,—viz. : that in pure perception we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition. “(Matter and Memory pg.84)

This is a very powerful assertion not lightly made and he hopes that in subsequent chapters of his book ‘Matter and Memory’ that he will be able to advance empirical justification.  Read in cool blood it is the sort of position that furnished evidence for the common judgment of Bergson as a thinker immersed in irrationalism.  From a logical point of view either Materialism or Idealism would give you a more likely position.  As I wrote in recent posts  his philosophy has points of similarity with those of yoga and Vedanta namely ‘samprajnata’ and ‘adhyasa’ (superimposition) so it is not so startling to me.

In the first chapter he laid out the grounds for his rejection of epistemological Realism and Idealism and we know that he spent years reading up on lesion and aphasia studies which are commonly assumed to establish brain/mind parallelism/identity and so forth.  This time by my new rubric I will be reading ‘Matter and Mind’ very slowly as though I had written it myself and attempt an alignment with his thinking.   He doesn’t positively controvert other philosophers by name.  A possible influence might be Plotinus who he lectured on frequently.  ‘Time and Eternity’ in the Enneads might be a point of entry into his mind.

Bergson and Memory (1)

 Just this:

For Bergson memory is not of the past but the present.

Bergson and Advaitic Superimposition (adhyasa)

 

Matthew Arnold reminded himself somewhere that he ought not to find himself everywhere.  That is a  perfectly sound stricture but here I am going to set it aside and indulge my synthesizing and syncretizing habit.  Neither Bergson nor Sankara came from Mars to astound the Earth with some utterly novel doctrine beyond anything which Earthlings could fathom.  That the lineaments of my assimilation be perfectly clear I will go briskly through what I think are interesting parallels.  In the samprajnata samadhi there is a resemblance to the pure perception of Bergson. Refer to my previous post. 

In those rare states of consciousness there is seeing but nobody sees, hearing but nobody hears etc.  or at least the identification with a jiva or person is exiguous.  This is practically next door to the pure asamprajnata or nirvikalpa samadhi in which there is just absorption into pure consciousness.  However as Sankara says the natural, ordinary, unreconstructed state is one in which there is full identification of the jiva and his states of mind.  What Bergson would say is that there is an element of pure perception in all our conscious states but that memory binds us to a personal history.  It is as though through memory a superimposition takes place.  The need to react to present demands brings the person down into a history.

"But inversely,, if recollection is regarded as a weakened perception, perception must be regarded as a stronger recollection. We are driven to argue as though it was given to us after the manner of a memory, as an internal state, a mere modification of our personality; and our eyes are closed to the primordial and fundamental act of perception, the act, constituting pure perception, whereby we place ourselves in the very heart of things. And thus the same error, which manifests itself in psychology by a radical incapacity to explain the mechanism of memory, will in metaphysics profoundly influence the idealistic and realistic conceptions of matter." (Matter and Memory pg.73)

You can discern here I think the suggestion that the condition of pure perception is primordial.  It is what the aggregate of images or the plenum of awareness that has as yet no personal centre implies.  The next step is the placing of all this or more correctly an edited version of this on a central ego This is the natural state.  This placing is what Sankara would call adhyasa.

  We never leave our total nature behind or otherwise enlightenment would be a mirage.

Bergson and Pure Perception (Samprajnata Samadhi)

 “(64) if we start from representation itself, that is to say from the totality of perceived images. My perception, in its pure state, isolated from memory, does not go on from my body to other bodies; it is, to begin with, in the aggregate of bodies, then gradually limits itself and adopts my body as a centre. And it is led to do so precisely by experience of the double faculty, which this body possesses, of performing actions and feeling affections; in a word, by experience of the sensori-motor power of a certain image, privileged among other images.” (Matter and Memory)

This is extremely interesting and has its analogue in certain yogic states of awareness.  As he says the central image that is taken to be the centre of perception i.e. my body, has not yet been lit on.  There is just awareness without that awareness having a strong sense of location.  It is not fully established in the body but remains rapt in the aggregate of images that is to say that both sets of images, my body and that of the world have not as yet split.  This pure perception will of course have a centre and a radius but they are lightly held.

Wordsworth holds that primal condition of pure perception to be the basis of the poetic immersion in the moment, those ‘spots of time’

that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

(from ‘Tintern Abbey’)

The Image in Bergson

 

What is the best way to read Bergson?  I would say, no more than 3 pages at a time.  Anymore will cause overheating .  It will take an hour probably.  It is said that a matchbox full of Aristotle weighs as much as the world.  Bergson is like that.  He reads smoothly of course but that is no indication of ease of comprehension.

My interim understanding of the source of his 'image' and 'the aggregate of images'.

The image is something like the image in a mirror.  It's there but it's also part of a totality which includes the person that is standing in front of it.  It's a  totality that can be broken into the various elements that can be considered on their own as though they were subsistent or free standing. So when Bergson writes about affection and perception this sort of division is reflected.  As I understand it the image represents the totality that we are immersed it.  The perception is of a really out there as it is thing and the affection is bodily.  But the bodily affection is also an image.  However the affection is subtilised and becomes cerebral excitations. 
And then he gravels you.
"Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of  our body which we mix with the image of external  bodies; it is what we must first of all subtract from perception to get the image in its purity.'

Understanding Bergson

 “It is known to him to whom It is unknown; he does not know to whom It is known.  It is unknown to those who know well, and known to those who do not know.”  Kena Up. II.3

I was thinking of this when reading Bergson’s Matter and Memory again.  It’s a difficult book but the difficulty is of a different order to simple complexity and close reasoning.  You have to renounce your usual understanding of internal and external, idealism and realism by whatever name you call them.  Everything changes perceptually as I move my body around so to understand what is going on I have to begin with that central element.  Such is the common understanding, indeed the default position, when we turn our attention as thinkers to the problem.  When we are not thinkers and disciples of Descartes we find ourselves immersed in a non-dual world.  Bergson puts it thus:

Why insist in spite of appearances, that I should go from my conscious self to my body, then from my body to other bodies whereas in fact I place myself at once in the material world in general, and then gradually cut out within it the centre of action which I shall come to call my body and to distinguish from all others?

Carl Truman on The Romantics (from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

 

Carl Truman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self  had been suggested as The Closing of the American Mind  of our day so I thought to take a look.  One chapter on ‘The Unacknowledged Legislators’  suggesting that Shelley and other Romantics might have a part in the making of the modern mind seemed a place to dip my toe.  Just on that alone I decided to venture no further into the deeps of a long book.  It seemed too naive as though the author lacked an empirical acquaintance with original sin and was unaware that the libertine finds justification for the satisfaction of his desires everywhere and if countered turns the argument away as the mere prejudice of the rebarbative mind. 

Last page of chap:

"This is the point that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley understood.  It was why they used poetry as a means of achieving the moral reformation of individuals and of society..........And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards.  While he no doubt would have retched at the thought, William Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian."

I only read ‘Playboy’ for the extracts from The Prelude. 

Take Shelley for instance.  Two Victorian sages express quite negative  judgments.  Thomas Carlyle writes:

"Shelley is a poor creature, who has said or done nothing worth a serious man being at the trouble of remembering.... Poor soul, he has always seemed to me an extremely weak creature; a poor, thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being. . . . The very voice of him, shrill, shrieky, to my ear has too much of the ghost! (from Invective and Abuse  by Hugh Kingsmill)"

Matthew Arnold in a review essay on Dowden’s  Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley wishes that he had been left with much less knowledge of the poet’s life.  He considers this letter to his abandoned wife Harriet writing from Troyes where he is resting on his travels with Mary Godwin:

 

"My dearest Harriet (he begins). I write to you from this detestable town; I write to show that I do not forget you ; I write to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at last find one firm and constant friend to whom your interests will be always dear—by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this but me—all else are either unfeeling or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own.''

(This beautiful soul adds in conclusion some commissions)

"I wish you to bring with you the two deeds which Tahourdin has to prepare for you, as also a copy of the settlement. Do not part with any of your money. But what shall be done about the books ? You can consult on the spot. With love to my sweet little lanthe, ever most affectionately yours, S."

" I write in great haste ; we depart directly."

Arnold finds the English language lacking in the precision of invective that French supplies:

"But neither will I call the letter an odious letter, a hideous letter. I prefer to call it, applying an untranslated French word, a bete letter. And it is bete from what is the signal, the disastrous want and weakness of Shelley, with all his fine intellectual gifts—his utter deficiency in humour."

Can an Englishman say worse? 

Bergson Stirring a Cup of Coffee by Stephen E. Robbins

 

Stephen E. Robbins' interpretation of Bergson uses the concept of the holograph to delineate how the brain modulates the vastness of Memory.  Bergson himself writes of the brain as being like a valve.  Everything that you have ever experienced is out there laid down in temporal order compressed into the single plane of duration.  Nothing is missing but not everything is to the point so the brain as an organ of action extracts that which is germane.   The vastness of the totality of experience could not be stored in the brain.  Events are stored in their fullness in memory and it is only on analysis that we can separate out all the physics.  An example that Robbins gives is the stirring of a cup of coffee as an experimental event that is such that if something untoward or unexpected were to happen we would immediately spot it.  So we therefore have it all in memory otherwise it would pass unnoticed.   Robbins throws all his esoteric, to me, knowledge of physics at this event.  Adiabatics, vectors, rate of turn etc, etc.  But apply to the man himself:

Robbins

Bergson and Transhumanism and Coathangers

 

Why is transhumanism a pipe dream?  If your brain has a chip installed in it to reroute input around a damaged section caused by a stroke is that an indication of the possibilities of a full machine human interface?  Questions like this arise out of a materialist view of the nature of the human person.  That the brain is a place where memories are stored seems to be a solid scientific fact but it is questioned by Henri Bergson.  He demonstrates through a close analysis of lesion induced aphasia and apraxis that things are not so simple.  He distinguishes between two different sorts of memory, rote memory and the fuller sort which reaches over the whole life of the person and is alway totally present to him.  Both however are focussed on the present moment the brain being an organ of action.  Recognition it will be readily accepted is essential for action.  This happened before and my reaction was successful then so here I go again.  Yes sort of.  Bergson picks this analysis apart:

On one theory, the recognition of a present perception consists in inserting it mentally in its ormer surroundings. I encounter a man for the first time : I simply perceive him. If I meet him again, I recognize him, in the sense that the concomitant circumstances of the original perception, returning to my mind, surround the actual image with a setting which is not a setting actually perceived. To recognize, then, according to this theory, is to associate with a present perception the images which were formerly given in connection with it. But, as it has been justly observed, a renewed perception cannot suggest the concomitant circumstances of the original perception unless the latter is evoked, to begin with, by the present state which resembles it.(page 185 'Matter and Memory')

It, the previous event, must be already here with you.  You did not have to go back to fetch it.  Isn't it the case that we recognize without having an image that we refer to.  Bergson again and again demonstrates his ability to turn a single observation into a revelation.  Every so often I have to read ‘Matter and Memory’ again to find new insights that I didn’t grasp before.  Here he is using a homely metaphor:

there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for, if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it ? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung on to a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. When philosophy pleads that the theory of parallelism is borne out by the results of positive science, it enters upon an unmistakably vicious circle, for, if science interprets connection, which is a fact, as signifying parallelism, which is an hypothesis (and an hypothesis to which it is difficult to attach an intelligible meaning *), it does so, consciously or unconsciously, for reasons of a philosophic order : it is because science has been accustomed by a certain type of philosophy to believe that there is no hypothesis more probable, more in accordance with the interests of scientific inquiry. (Matter and Memory- Intro.)

Growing the Economy through A.I.

 

A.I. is a misnomer of course.  Machines don’t think because machines don’t dream.  They are incapable of those startling metaphors and analogies that dreams excel in due to their being the domain of pre-logical thought.  You cannot say NO in a dream; it has to be performed by doing and then undoing.  It always interesting to read myself in Google News as I do not always use that search engine.  There it is algo urged that I interest myself in the gardening tips of Monty Don and Ukranian artillery.  Like the Weird Sisters Big Algo seeks to win us by honest trifles and betray us in matters of deepest consequence.  This could be me.  What a charming profile.  Tips for the creation of the perfect compost and the terraced gardens of Tuscany.  How very me.  Bit by bit or byte one is husked and carefully layered on the heap which is put out in the Spring as base dressing.

Enoch Burke in Durance Vile

 

Twitter is mostly a foolish forum and I fear it will bring out the worst aspect of my penchant for the short cutting remark.  So I would hope.  I’m already getting bored but however plunge on.  I’ve been following the Enoch Burke case to gauge sentiment amongst the populace.  He is now over a month in jail and the school have yet to come to a determination about the suspension that was visited upon him for his refusal to use the preferred pronoun of a minor who was ascribing to the condition of being a eunuch for the kingdom of Woke.   The sequence of events was 1: suspension on refusal to comply with school directive 2: A verbal interruption of a formal dinner for the school and the past pupils complaining of the abrogation of bible codes in a Protestant confessional school and the denial of his freedom of conscience.  (What - no private judgment) 3: his turning up at the school to teach even though suspended 4: Injunction against him appearing on the school grounds 5: jail for contempt of the court order.

Now on Twitter the bleating of those opposed to Burke is that he is only in jail because he refuses to purge his contempt.  True but entirely false and beside the point of the demonstration of the firmness of his beliefs.  Why haven’t the school come to a decision about his fate?  Their only option is to fire him.  Could it be that they are dithering because there is opposition from past pupils about the woke agenda?  Or are they just vindictive, the longer they delay the longer he will be in durance vile.  Naturally when he is dismissed he will have no reason to turn up to teach and the court order will lapse.  He will then bring a case of wrongful dismissal which may or may not be successful.

Oh yes I forgot.  Enoch Burke has brought a defamation case against the Sunday Independent for publishing a story that he was moved from his cell/wing because he was annoying the other prisoners, Ordinary Decent Criminals (O.D.C.s)  This was not true and has been denied officially by the prison authorities.  In court today the judge said that he was bemused by the suggestion that this libel might prejudice his future legal actions by representing him as ‘hard time ' for O.D.C.s  I think the judge meant ‘amused’ but let ‘bemused’ stand as a state of fatuous bewilderment.

'The Talented Mr. Ripley' by Patricia Highsmith

 

Type into the command line of a Linux O.S.  whoami and the response will be ‘root’.  Should Tom Ripley have queried his own central operating system or his soul the answer would be ‘whatever’.  Ripley is a figment or a creation, a fiction, a prodigy of versimilitude composed of shy smiles,  petty schemes and shiftless manoeuvring.  We first meet him using the stationary of the I.R.S.  which he stole while he had the job as a storeroom clerk in one of their offices.  He’s writing dunning letters to various people claiming a short fall in their payments and following that up with avuncular phone calls advising them to settle.  You can be anyone you like on the phone, phoney.  So far all he’s been getting are cheques so the joy of the con is all that in it for him.  Eventually he will take this this impersonation  to the ultimate merger and will become that which he pretends to.  The inconvenient existence of this persona has to lapse for this achievement.

Being an imposter is a strenuous occupation but at first it seems only a holiday by the sea in Italy near Palermo.  The man that he thinks is  following him because of his I.R.S. scam is none other than Greenleaf pere who is under the impression that Ripley is a great friend of his son Dickie who is trust funding his passion for painting and not inclined to come home to take up his responsibility as the heir of a large boat building business.  The boy is not inclined to see this and T.R.'s mission should he accept it is to go over there and persuade him to come back.  The trouble is that Tom does not really know Dickie at all but the offer of a return first class liner ticket and a wodge of money makes him decide to chance it.

Even on the boat going over he is trying on different Tom Ripleys using a cap as a prop.

He had a sudden whim for a cap and bought one in the haberdashery, a conservative bluish-grey cap of soft English wool. He could pull its visor down over nearly his whole face when he wanted to nap in his deck-chair, or wanted to look as if he were napping. A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.

He is reinventing himself and the smoothness of the sleight of hand as he gets Dickie Greenleaf to accept him as an acquaintance from an established cadre of socially sound people is quite excellent:

       'You don't seem to remember me from New York,' Tom said.

       'I can't really say I do,' Dickie said. 'Where did I meet you?'

       'I think—Wasn't it at Buddy Lankenau's?' It wasn't, but he knew Dickie knew Buddy Lankenau, and Buddy was a very respectable fellow.

So far we are with Ripley trying to pull himself  into a new life, to make something of himself.  It’s when he begins to make someone of himself other than his own self that we begin to draw back and resist identification with a man who has not got a firm grip on his identity.  Tom you see is his own creature enjoying the translucence of consciousness.  Like a sage of psychopathy he does not identify with any collection of personal attributes as a given ground of ‘lived experience’.  He lives his experience a different way uniting its elements with the desire to absorb the other.  In every way this novel is a psychopathic farce, an homicidal ‘Charley’s Aunt’.  The posse are the front door he goes out by the french window and joins them round the front to call on himself.  Highsmith puts him into situations that make us gasp and stretch our eyes as he lies and lies and gets away with it.

By the way forget the film which blunts the evil for the sake of interiors and beautiful knitware, the book’s the thing.

God Help America

 AI don't know about you but I have this bated breath feeling.  This latest American stunt, I mean the bombing of the pipeline will not go unanswered.  They are cutting off any incentive as they see it for the Europeans to force some sort of peace deal and get the gas flowing.  It's the favourite type of American war, proxy, where you can claim a win but deny a lose.  Pure Ukrainisation not the Vietnamisation of yore.  There is no question but that America is functioning in outright authoritarian mode at the moment.  Sending 20 armed F.B.I.  to a pro-life man's home after a minor scuffle at an abortion clinic which the local authorities declined to prosecute.  There is no country in the world in which election laws so lax would not produce massive cheating and when those that  worked to bring those laws about benefit from them:

What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)

God Help America and God Help us All.

Culture War Vs Moral War

 

All of the commentariat, the chattering classes, talk about the ‘culture war’ but that is an agenda grab.  It’s really a moral war and reducing it to culture which by definition is constantly mutating is sound rhetoric.  ‘You feel like that now, but wait (insert ‘journey here) and you will achieve a different perspective.  You will become more educated and give over your far right tendencies.’  The answer to that is in the polling booth where the populace can utter a definitive, begone twerp.

Enoch Burke is still in Jail

 So Enoch Burke has been in jail for 3 weeks and no sign of resolution.  The only way they can get rid of him is to admit to constructive dismissal and pay him damages.  Why constructive dismissal?  Because when he was hired there was probably nothing in his contract about ‘dead’ names and preferred pronouns.  Mr. Burke would not have accepted this at that time.  This being a new thing for the school he is within his rights to say ‘I didn’t sign up for this’ and you can’t demand it of me.  At this point leaving him in jail will be interpreted as vindictive.   Hate speech laws are not in place yet and they are sure to be very controversial.  Most people can distinguish between  hate speech and compelled speech.  Both are different forms of fatuous authoritarianism.  The media that continues to say that Mr. Burke is keeping himself in jail through not purging his contempt are not effective against the truth that he is a teacher who is resisting the lunacy that humans are bio-machines that can be tinkered with and modified limitlessly to the extent that a boy can become a girl.   Is it a precursor of the more ambitious program of transhumanism?  Possibly.  Both are symptoms of the dismissal of God and nature.

Oh, Oh Antonio Gramsci

 

John Waters talking to James Collins

A masterly summary by John Waters of how Marxism evolved from being about class war and economics into Cultural Marxism which focused on the infiltration of institutions such as the Press and the University to promulgate their doctrines and the switch away from the proles to the other ‘oppressed’ classes such as blacks, gays, women etc and the general demonization of the white male patriarchy etc, family, etc.  The coining of the ‘long march through the institutions’ is ascribed to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, and it was taken up by Rudi Dutschke a 68‘r as a slogan.  Wikipedia tells me that he was a guest of Conor Cruise O’Brian in Ireland and considered for a while staying here.  The Cruiser was our first public intellectual and our second Fintan O’Toole wrote his M.A. thesis on Antonio Gramsci.  Clearly a great devotee.  In a dismal screed against Enoch Burke he compared him to Genghis Khan.  The reason Finto can’t analyse the transgender thing too closely is because certain of the feminist faithful are T.E.R.F.'s and want to save the 100 yard dash for born women athletes not to mention changing rooms etc.  We must never forget that in post modernism there are no contradictions because there is no definitive truth.  To that end I am transitioning to His Excellency and my autonym is ‘whatever’ (you’re having yourself).   sláinte an bhradáin,  gob fluich ‘is bas in Eireann should it survive.

(health of the salmon, wet gob, and death in Ireland)

Vain Journey

 

Please stop talking about your journey.  You may never get there.  Stay with Nisargadatta’s ‘I Am’ and you have arrived.  I don’t know this but I believe it which makes it truer than knowledge.  Man cannot know truth of this sort but he can embody it.

Enoch Burke is back in Jail

 

Dismissing Enoch Burke's application for an injunction against his being placed on administrative leave with pay, the learned judge said that placing him on said leave was not an attack on his religious beliefs.

This is so contrary to common sense.  When someone is suspended from their job is that not a clue that can be twigged?   Maybe the performance is not what it ought to be or the hand is found to be in the till.  ‘Dear me, is that my hand, well I never’.

If his religious beliefs precipitated the suspension then ipso facto that is an attack on his religious beliefs.  He is sincere about them and it is clear that the Church of Ireland (similar in doctrine to Episcopalian and Anglican) has departed from biblical Christianity.  As a deictic demonstration of this the board meeting was adjourned sine die.  This would likely have dealt with the injunction to stay off the school property which ran until the disciplinary hearing.  Now of course he is back in jail. Once free he might turn up again and there would be another injunction.  Who will blink first?  Not I think Enoch.  This could run for a while.

 

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

 

In Greenland when a man wrestles with his soul he generally wins.  Fowler for a change has no faith Catholic or Protestant but he believes in death and his love for Phuong the young Vietnamese girl who as the book opens has called on him to find out where her present lover Pyle might be.  Six months have passed since she left him for the younger man who is willing to marry her.  This is a book that should be read twice for its film of retrospective irony.  Pyle does not show and then the knock at the door and the summons to the Surete and an interview with Vigot  who awaits him:

"That was why I refused a cigarette from the French officer at the Surete. After three pipes I felt my mind clear and alert: it could take such decisions easily without losing sight of the main question-what do they want from me? I had met Vigot before several times at parties-I had noticed him because he appeared incongruously in love with his wife, who ignored him, a flashy and false blonde. Now it was two in the morning and he sat tired and depressed in the cigarette smoke and the heavy heat, wearing a green eye-shade, and he had a volume of Pascal open on his desk to while away the time.”

((Pyle has been murdered and as a Frenchman Vigot is obliged to consider a passionnel  motive.))

“Not guilty,” I said. I told myself that it was true.....

I told myself again I was innocent, while he went down the stone stairs to where the refrigerating plant hummed in the basement.

After Fowler aka Fowlair has related  to Phuong the news of her lover’s death she that night moves back in with him.  Then the novel breaks into a flashback about the start of the men’s friendship and because we have been told that Pyle was responsible for the death of at least 50 men we know that he must be a C.I.A. spook pilotfish here to meddle while the Indo China war is going on which France is losing and America is about to take the torch to light up its own defeat.  It’s about 1954 and 20 years of conflict yet to come and Saigon is still French Saigon on the beautiful bou’ Rue Catinat where Greene himself stayed in the Continental Hotel.  Fowlair  puts Pyle in the picture:

“And now,” I said, “there’s General The. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . .”

“York,” Pyle said, “wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force .”Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain.  But I left him with the arid bones of background and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fisher’s fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns How often I had explained all this before. I was a record always turned on for the benefit of newcomers-the visiting Member of Parliament, the new British Minister. Sometimes I would wake up in the night saying, “Take the case of the Caodaists.” Or the Hoa-Haos or the Binh Xuyen, all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge. Strangers found them picturesque, but there is looking picturesque in treachery-and distrust.

 “And now,” I said, “there’s General The. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . .”

“York,” Pyle said, “wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force .”Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with the arid bones of background and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fisher’s fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes.

Greene as that chunk of citation demonstrates is a master of atmosphere and the insidious murmur of intuition.  This is not going to go well, the cranes seem to nod, but in between there are adventures and expeditions into the countryside which at night reverts to the control of the enemy.  Coming back from a religious festival their car gets stranded on a perilous road and they have to take refuge in one of the watchtowers.  What happens is perfect for a movie and indeed two were made.   But do yourself a turn and read the book.  It’s a classic.

My Boring Life

 

As a domestic hero I am called on to hang shelves from time to time.  ‘No problemo’, I talk  in the argot of cheerful mechanical.  ‘Where do you want it then?’  I went to my stores and looked for plugging rod,/rawlplugs but none did I find therein.    Fine I think I can get some after my dentist plugs another hole.  It’s just a small shop in the village near us with a good range of hardware where I have bought odd things like chain oil, screws, scythe stone, seeds etc.  During Covidology this shop devised a table with a screen across the door behind which stood the proprietor.  You gave your order and he or she went back into the shop to fetch it.  When today I went up there to get rawl plugs I could see the same set up.  I asked ‘Are you still running the Covid setup?’  Yes was the reply.  ‘Good luck with that’ I said and turned on my heel.

Since Feb. last mask mandates and all the rest of it have been removed in Ireland and now there is a steady flow of information about the misinformation that was fed to the public back in 2020.  The 95% risk reduction of infection promulgated in the msm was not accurate.  In fact the paper by the New England Journal of Medicine that underpinned the emergency usage of the vax actually showed a .84% absolute risk reduction which means that out of 119 persons inoculated one would be protected from Covid.

Check out Dr. Malhotra on this video. min 2:31

Dr. Malhotra

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

 

Daniel Deronda is really two books joined at the fingertip.  Gwendolen and Daniel could easily have been separated and two books quite long enough on their own would have resulted.  The Gwen book would have been the better one and the Daniel a much weaker  portrait of that one sided moral figure, the paragon.  That book of Daniel is riddled with maundering reflections about Judaism and has a slew of coincidences that would have embarrassed Dickens.

Miss Harleth is first introduced to us at the gaming tables losing what she previously won.  Deronda is an onlooker and clearly disapproves which she feels chidden by.  His moral high ground is gained easily and ought perhaps have been more established by Eliot.  But there it is, we are expected to take his ascendency as the fulcrum of their interaction.  The beauty of the young woman is constantly being emphasised along with her wilfulness  and domineering ways who is catered to in every way.  My uncharitable thought was, could this be the revenge of the exceedingly plain George Eliot.  She does lay on the beauty’s moral deficiencies and I could feel an ‘Emma’ book emerging.  No that did not happen, Eliot being clever but somewhat humourless and inclined to tell and tell and not show.

The confusing thing is that the first chapter at the casino, and her letter from home telling of the financial ruin of the family and her return  home is really a flash forward.  Then you get the growing up background resplendently prosperous, the cynosure of every eye etc and a fine archer, a perfect Diana and not quite a maiden for all her days.   She marries the cad Grandcourt for his money and to save her from being a governess, quite a horrible idea. Why intelligent as she is she won’t help her younger sisters with their lessons.  With Grandcourt lying back and thinking of England doesn’t help much.

There’s lots of good scenes in the book  and if the Daniel, Mirah, Mordecai/Ezra section could have been misplaced there would have been an excellent novel left.  I believe that when it was translated into Hebrew they kept that and dropped the other.

The Book of Enoch Burke

 Enoch Burke was suspended on full pay from his post as a teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in Co. Westmeath.  This is a Church of Ireland establishment.  He had refused to address a student by their preferred pronoun ‘they’.  ‘I will not call a boy a girl’ he said as it would be against his religious principles as an Evangelical Christian.  What principles the Church of Ireland/Anglican/Episcopalian have in relation to trans issues is a matter of delicate theological scrying.  My intuition would be latetudinarian and the fact that he was suspended would indicate some assumption of wrongdoing to be investigated.  Now Burke as a long time veteran of rows with authorities is perfectly aware that this suspension was a form of silencing while a good reason for firing him was ginned up.  No he wasn’t going to go quietly and chose a church service attended by staff, students and parents to object to his treatment and to transgenderism in general.  Not very polite but quite effective which drew down on his head an injunction to stay clear of the school while his case was being decided.  He didn’t do that but insisted on turning up for his timetabled hours.  So off to prison till he agrees to purge his contempt which he will not do.  

My opinion unlearned as it is:  Burke is winning and to get rid of him they will have to come to a massive settlement.  As far as I know the student if under 16 cannot apply to have his gender pronoun recognized, if between 16 and 18 can but it is a more lengthy process than the formality for the over 18 years of age person.  Now Enoch is not challenging this but opposing his right to freedom of religious conviction and practice to the school’s mandate.  This could go Supreme. 

 Summary of the state of play so far:

state of play:

Brhadaranyaka Upanisad on the Organs and their Objects

The theme of the opening of section 4 of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad may be expressed according to the inflexions of solution namely dissolution and resolution. All sounds are resolved back into sound as such, touch into touch as such, all sorts of awareness into consciousness as such. Thus is achieved the dissolution of the individual consciousness into absolute consciousness.

“When through these successive steps, sound and the rest, together with their receiving organs, are merged in Pure Intelligence, there are no more limiting adjuncts, and only Brahman, which is Pure Intelligence, comparable to a lump of salt, homogeneous, infinite, boundless and without a break, remains.” (commentary by Sankara on II.iv.11)

The ‘lump of salt’ refers to the famous metaphor of the dissolution of a lump of salt in water. The one taste of salt is found in all the solution. Yes, the objection goes, but there you mention only the objects being merged in the consciousness of them; what of the very organs of perception? This is a very cogent objection and it moves the analysis away from what might be considered a form of idealism back into the realism of the person in the world. Sankara’s answer is a profound switch to a seeming materialist monism.

 “True, but the Sruti considers the organs to be of the same category as the objects, not of a different category. The organs are but modes of the objects in order to perceive them, as a lamp, which is but a mode of colour, is an instrument for revealing all colours. Similarly, the organs are but but modes of all particular objects in order to perceive them, as is the case with a lamp. Hence no special care is to be taken to indicate the dissolution of the organs; for these being the same as objects in general, their dissolution is implied by that of the objects.” (ibid)

 As I understand it, this is a shift into a higher onto-epistemological gear from the simpler meditation on the resolution of all awareness into consciousness as such. Now we have to consider the organs and the objects as being capable of flowing into each other because they are both material and the one Absolute Consciousness is the substratum of both. This is what underlies the possibility of the object as it really is being in me as a consciousness. We know the object as it is through our awareness of it. This is profoundly different from the idealist view of the object being identical to our awareness of it, incoherent as that is. Berkeley spotted this and asked: Why not drop the object away altogether? Thus his philosophy of Immaterialism.

The Taste of the Mediocre

The banal catchcry of the mediocre has always been ‘de gustibus non est disputandum’. Taste is a purely subjective liking and therefore depreciation of their aesthetic judgment glances of the impenetrable force field of their ignorance. But perhaps I am wrong to say that they are mediocre which would imply a range of aesthetic sensibility that is current within a tradition and a position on it which receives a damming ' could do better’ or ‘must try harder’. When there is no sense of a tradition and a range of excellence within it the gawk has no place to stand. They are not, so to speak, home on a range.

My Care Profile

 

That ancient shrug, ‘what do I care’, ‘what do you care’  can no longer be sanctioned.  You must forever be curating your ‘care’ profile for who knows while you slept someone in America found a new victim of compelling intersectionality.  Being on Facebook or Twitser is not good for anybody’s mental health as far as someone who has never participated can tell.  On the whole the internet has been good for me.  Last week I learnt how to cure an airlock in a power shower.  I researched a push reel mower on youtube and now my carbon wallet is bursting and the lawn is better for it.

 

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

(from 'Ash Wednesday' by T.S. Eliot)

Catching Jordan Peterson

 

Jordan Peterson is harder to catch than a greased pig but that doesn’t stop people having a go.  Professor Hans-Georg Moeller (youtube ‘carefree wandering)  has a go.  He declares that Peterson is the mirror image of the woke, an anti-woke as it were and is therefore as much of an ideologue as his opposite number is.  However, that is, I believe, to misunderstand what ideology is.  It is a world view supported by a very narrow band of the explanatory spectrum.  For instance - it’s all class war or you’re a victim in a rigged racist game or its up to you to decide whether you’re a man or a woman.  Peterson in contrast to this promotes the idea of a Logos, a natural law that is a broad spectrum response that draws on traditional wisdom, a meditation on archetypal forms, the Hero, the Pilgrim, the Seeker and the Delphic Know Thyself.  These are supple, skilful, adaptive strategies that admit the concept of Freedom as a project (Sartre) and not as a given.  As a practising psychotherapist he would know that everybody has elements of the shadow (Jung) within them that deflects from the goal of freedom.  Lewis Waller(youtube ‘then and now’) in a simplistic parsing of ‘responsibility’ as response - ability claims that Peterson does not take into account the blocks to perfect freedom.  Lewis, he meets them everyday, like the carpenter meets a hammer.   Which is why he starts out with the basics of creating your own world i.e. pick up your room.  I go into the workshop feeling slack.  O.K. sweep the floor, sharpen your chisels, adjust a plane and then you’re there.  Dirk Bogarde the actor said - ‘you do your best work when you don’t feel like it’.  My understanding of this is, when you absolutely feel like it then you are drawing down your rote capacity but breaking through a block brings creative freedom.

There is a greater force than any psychopomp.  When we were leaving the ashram of Jillelamudi Ama ( Rajah Rajeshwari ) we asked through an interpreter ‘Does Mother have any instruction for us’  She replied ‘the Mother does not give instruction’.

Lewis Waller's youtube video on Tucker Carlson's paranoid style (Then and Now)

 

You would expect someone who identifies as a postmodernist to recognise and understand irony.  Lewis Waller doesn’t.  He’s the man behind the youtube video channel ‘Then and Now’

then and now 

 which is very well subscribed to.  It’s nicely produced with lots of graphics and a good deal of Waller behind his desk delivering in a very clear and emphatic intense manner content which demands serious attention due to its complexity and duration.   Good, fine, splendid but don’t get him started on conservatives because his animus against them causes distortions.  ‘Jordan Peterson is wrong about Ideology’, ‘Jordan Peterson is wrong about Responsibility’, ‘Tucker Carlson’s Paranoid Style’ or Tucker Carlson is wrong about Everything.

The Pomo chaps think that they own irony so when its used by Conservatives such as Carlson they tend to miss it. In his summation at the end of a 50 minute video of Carlson’s works and pomps he quotes the epilogue to ‘Ship of Fools’ which he claims represents the true agenda of Tuckerism.  Strangely though he leaves out the last few paragraphs.

Before I quote the epilogue in full let me first offer you the succinct definition  of H. Fowler in ‘Modern English Usage’:

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing  shall hear and shall not understand and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware of that more and of the outsiders incomprehension.

Here then is Carlson’s Epilogue to ‘Ship of Fools’:

Nothing that is happening in America today is unprecedented, or even unusual. A relatively small number of people make the overwhelming majority of significant cultural and economic decisions. Wars are fought, populations shift, the rules of commerce change, all without reference to what the bulk of the population thinks or wants.

This isn’t strange. It’s the story of all human history. Very few civilizations have operated in any other way. People naturally sort themselves into hierarchies. Those who have power defend it from those who don’t. Rulers rule, serfs obey. It’s a familiar system. We know it works, because it has for thousands of years.

The new ingredient, what makes our current moment so unstable, is democracy. Massive inequality can’t be sustained in societies where everyone can vote. In order to survive, democracies must remain egalitarian. When all the spoils seem to flow upward, the majority will revolt in protest. Voters will become vengeful and reckless.

They will elect politicians like Donald Trump as a sign of displeasure. If they continue to feel ignored, they will support increasingly radical leaders, who over time will destroy the ruling class, along with everything that made it prosperous. Left untended, democracies self-destruct.

There are two ways to end this cycle. The quickest is to suspend democracy. There are justifications for this. If your voters can’t reach responsible conclusions, you can’t let them vote. You don’t give suffrage to irrational populations, for the same reason you wouldn’t give firearms to toddlers: they’re not ready for the responsibility.

Nobody believes Jordan would become a happier country with free and fair elections.But there’s a cost to ending the vote. You can’t install an autocracy without widespread repression and bloodshed, especially in a secular society. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have revolutions because most Saudis accept that their royal family was installed by God. Nobody in East Germany ever believed that about their government. That’s why the East German regime needed machine guns and a wall to keep its citizens from fleeing. There’s no transitioning from democracy in America without civil war.

The other solution to the crisis is simpler: attend to the population. Think about what they want.

If they start dying younger or killing themselves in large numbers, figure out why.

Care about them.

If the majority is worried about something, listen. Give them back some of their power.

If they have strong feelings about an issue, don’t overrule them, even if (maybe especially if) their views seem reactionary.

You can’t force enlightenment by fiat. In a democracy, you can only persuade.

Go slowly. It isn’t easy to relinquish control to people you have power over.

But try.

If you want to save democracy, you’ve got to practice it.

Tucker Carlson is not proposing the suspension of democracy as Lewis Waller suggests but in fact recommending it as the antidote to chaos.

Realism Clew

 Realism Clew:

Very well.  There doesn't seem any way out of it.  If you want realism, thourough going realism, you have to hold to the immateriality of consciousness and the intellectual faculties.  This is the thread running through all of the various versions.  Plato has the forms or ideas impressed on the mind from their special realm.  The immateriality of the mind allows this pervasion and assures us that what we know and what is 'out there' is one and the same.  Philosophy tries to clear up the distortions that occur.  Aristotle and the Scholastics are more grounded, finding the relationship between the mind and the object the source of knowledge.  Aristotle says in Bk.XII of the metaphysics - "Everything which has not matter is indivisible".  This is I presume the core of the insight that object and mind can interpenetrate, that the object can be in the mind in its subtle form as it really is.  The mind grasps the reality of the object.  If we do not accept this as the default position then as Maritain writes:

"But it also indicates that there is an incomparable unity, a unity deeper than that between a model and a transfer, between the thing and thought, thought in act, I mean. For if things were modified or changed in any way by sensation or intellection (I do not mean in the conditions in which they exist, in their way of existing, I mean in regard to those things that properly constitute them, in what they are), then there would no longer be any truth or knowledge. Then the theorist of knowledge could not even express himself by wagging his finger because in such a case there would be left but two equally impossible recourses: either to say that knowledge implies a relation to things but deforms those things, and as a result they are never known; or else to say that knowledge implies no relation to things and that it is an absolute unfolding of thought having only itself as object. This is a position which is quite incompatible with the fact of error and negative ideas." ( from 'The Degrees of Knowledge")

Advaitins likewise relay on the immateriality of consciousness with the joint theory of vritti (mental modification) and upadhi (form of limitation/object) allowing knowledge to happen.  As in all the various schemas of Realism the fine print can be intricate.

Realism is Gravity

  

À hidden but powerful teleological motivation also intervenes at this point,to which  idealism unconsciously obeys, so cheating at its own game. Idealism's concern is precisely that it be not led to a certain terminus; it aims to avoid a certain final conclusion. Now if, from the very start, things and the extramental stability whereby they regulate our thought are so carefully rejected, it is because of the fact, above all else, that owing to a secret instinct that is the more imperious in that it remains unconfessed, the mind does not want in the end to be forced to come face to face with a transcendent, supreme reality, an abyss of personality before which every heart lies open and which our thought has to adore. The bastions and fortresses of idealistic philosophy thus appear to be just so many vast defence-works against divine personality. (from 'The Degrees of Knowledge' by Jacques Maritain)

  

This is important enough for Shankara to turn his mind to Vijnanavada.  Ontology is Theology and those that are bogged down in ‘Is it Theology or Philosophy’ miss being serious and remain essentially light floating away from the earth.  Realism is Gravity.

The non-grasbable Self in Kena Up., Meister Eckhart and Markus Gabriel

 

According to Meister Eckhart, then, we thinkers of thoughts are categorically distinct from any object we could ever perceive or think of.  With this basic line of thought, which I have here extended to the topic of the brain, Meister Eckhart discovered the topic of the radical non-objectivity of the self......

What Meister Eckhart is saying amounts to the claim that the self cannot be strictly identical with any object that it perceives. The self only falls under laws it gives to itself; it cannot be strictly determined by the objects it perceives.

(from ‘I am not a Brain’ by Markus Gabriel)

Browsing in the book I came across that observation.  My last post note on the Kena Upanishad would be a demurral. 

Self Knowledge 

  Kena is tentatively 500 B.C.  and Shankara 8th.Cent. A.D.  Professor Gabriel of Bonn University takes, as his book title suggests, a non-naturalist stance or at least not a linear functionalist one.  An interesting book written I surmise for the intelligent general reader, the igger as distinct from the iggerent (Mayo pronunciation)  My father was told the story of the man whose son was a student priest in Maynooth.  The son would not eat at the same table as his father and ‘I wouldn’t blame him’ says your man, ‘he was the iggernest man in Kilasser’.

Kena Upanishad on 'Can Brahman be Known'?

 

3: The eye does not go there, nor speech, nor mind.  We do not know (Brahman to be such and such), hence we are not aware of any process of instructing about it.

4: “That (Brahman) is surely different from the known; and again, It is above the unknown” - such was (the utterance) we heard of the the ancient (teachers) who explained it to us.

(Kena Upanisad I.3, 4 )

There  is what seems a straightforward admission that the logico-empirical method cannot establish the existence of Brahman.  Why might that be so?  If Brahman is the Self then the Self cannot be grasped in the way that any object might be.   The consciousness that is being grasped would have to grasp itself being grasped and that grasping of etc.  Bertrand Russell noted this in a letter to Frege.  There is inevitable infinite regress.  Shankara in his commentary :

Though the mind thinks and determines other things, it does not think or determine itself; for of it, too, Brahman is the Self.  A thing is cognised only by the mind and the senses.  As Brahman is not an object of perception to these, therefore,na vidmah,we do not know.

How then is Brahman to be communicated or taught to a disciple?  Brahman escapes all categories but there is deep wisdom embedded in the realised masters of traditional authority.  Put the disciple in the vicinity of a realised sage and he will begin to resonate with the knowledge of “the Brahman that is immediate and direct - the Self that is within all” (Brhadaranyaka Up. III.iv.1)

In this way, the text, “Thus we heard” etc., states how through a succession of preceptors and disciples was derived the purport of the sentence which establishes Brahman that Self of all which is devoid of distinguishing features, and is the light of pure consciousness.  Moreover, Brahman can only be known through such a traditional instruction of preceptors and not through argumentation, nor by study (or exposition), intelligence, great learning, austerity, sacrifices, etc.....

'The Psychology of Totalitarianism' by Mattias Desmet

The thesis of Desmet’s (Prof. of Psychology at Ghent University) book is very simple and easily stated.  The general official  reaction to Covid was an instance of what he calls mass formation.  Given the right social conditions which he points out are manifestly available in modern society namely alienation, high levels of anxiety, anomie, meaningless jobs, lack of a firm moral scaffolding, and the numberless worries generated by the agitations of social media, a significant proportion of the populace are ready to become ensorcelled by a single threat and form a crowd, an aggregation of headless chickens that devolves to the intelligence of the most stupid in the mob.  Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book ‘The Crowd’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ are precursors to this line of analysis which M.D. lays out with splendid clarity.  Of the two earlier books Le Bon’s is the more readable, Arendt’s is turgid with footnotes flourishing like scholastic weeds.

To get a good resume of the book’s main thesis your best resource is to view one of the many youtube videos in which Mattias Desmet appears.  There is much more detail in the book particularly about how the logico-empirical vision of science enables technocratic authoritarianism.  In the end chapters of his book he maintains that even this version of scienctific method is wrong, science is as much an intuitive process as an empirical one.  To discover the protophaenomenon (cf. Coleridge) 

Coleridge on Method 

is not a matter of diligent searching but alertness to its presentation or knowing where to look.  To alter Pater’s dictum about art, all science aspires to the condition of music.  Desmet uses examples from Chaos theory to illustrate the inevitable harmony and beauty that underlies any apparent disorder.

Some readers may find this philosophical coda to be an add on and unnecessarily elevated compared to the practical aspects of the earlier chapters, hovering as it does in the thin

air of panpsychism.  I think that it is a demonstration of the general need for a metaphysical superstructure that is resistant to the frenzies of popular agitation.  Everyone needs something like this though it may be unlike the speculations of Desmet.

This is an excellent book.  The central idiocy of Covidology is still going on and in one of his videos Desmet remarks that Totalitarianism always ends badly and worse may be on the way.  The German health ministry reports that serious adverse reactions may have occurred in 1 in 5,000 injections (note not people, injections):

adverse reactions to innoculation

Dr. Doshi in a study conducted by the British Medical Journal found that the adverse reactions exceeded the reduction in numbers requiring hospitalization due to Covid.