On the Hubris of Post-Modern Elites

"Laputa" (from Wikipedia)

Location
Laputa was located above the realm of Balnibarbi, which was ruled by its king from the flying island. Gulliver states the island flew by the “magnetic virtue” of certain minerals in the grounds of Balnibarbi which did not extended to more than four miles above, and six leagues beyond the extent of the kingdom[1], showing the limit of its range. The position of the island, and the realm below, is some five days' journey south-south-east of Gulliver's last known position, 46N, 183E[a] (i.e. east of Japan, south of the Aleutian Islands) down a chain of small rocky islands.

Description
The island of Laputa is described as being exactly circular and 4.5 miles (7.2 km) in diameter, giving an area of 10,000 acres (4,000 ha). The island was 300 yards (270 m) thick, and comprised a bottom plate of adamant 200 yards thick, above which lay "the several minerals in their usual order", topped with "a coat of rich mould 10 or 12 ft deep".

In shape the upper surface sloped down from circumference to centre, causing all rain to form rivulets into the centre where four large basins half a mile in circuit lie 200 yards from the absolute centre. In the centre of the island itself was a chasm 50 yards in diameter continuing down into a dome extending 100 yards into the adamantine surface. This dome served as an astronomical observatory, and also contained the lodestone which enabled the island to fly and move above the realm. .

Inhabitants
Laputa's population consists mainly of educated people, who are fond of mathematics, astronomy, music and technology, but fail to make practical use of their knowledge. Servants make up the rest of the population.

The Laputans have mastered magnetic levitation. They also are very fond of astronomy, and discovered two moons of Mars. (This is 151 years earlier than the recognized discovery of the two moons of Mars by Asaph Hall in 1877.) However, they are unable to construct well-designed clothing or buildings, because they take measurements with instruments such as quadrants and a compass rather than with tape measures.

Laputa is a male-dominated society. Wives often request to leave the island to visit the land below; however, these requests are almost never granted because the women who leave Laputa never want to return.

The clothes of Laputans, which do not fit, are decorated with astrological symbols and musical figures. They spend their time listening to the music of the spheres. They believe in astrology and worry constantly that the sun will go out. The Laputan houses, he notices, are badly built, without accurate right angles.

Due to their fervent intellectual pursuits, Laputans are also depicted as becoming so lost in thought that they cannot function in everyday life unless constantly struck by a bladder full of pebbles or dry peas, for which every one of them is escorted by one or two servants, so called "clappers". Many of their heads have become stuck reclined to one side, and they often suffer from strabismus: one eye turns inward and the other looks up "to the zenith." The Laputans' oddly-focused eyes are Swift's parodies of the microscope and telescope. So intent are the Laputans in their scientific studies that they cannot function in the everyday world, or even perceive it, and without their clappers, are in constant danger of running into a tree or a ditch when walking.

The Laputan women are highly sexed and adulterous, and, whenever possible, take on lovers out of visitors from the lands below. The Laputan husbands, who are so abstracted in mathematical and musical calculations, might assume their wives are adulterous, but so long as they have no clapper around, they won't notice the adultery even should it occur right before their eyes.

Does Your House Have a Wet Basement, Too?

Announcing the Philosophical Debate of the Century

April 19
from RT News

After several months of verbal sparring and rumor, the hotly anticipated debate between Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson has been arranged, with the philosophers scheduled to go tete-a-tete later this year.

Announcing the intellectual bout in a YouTube video on Thursday, the media-savvy Peterson said he would face off against the reclusive Slovenian Marxist in Toronto’s Sony Center on April 19. The topic? Happiness: Capitalism versus Marxism.

The philoso-fight comes after Zizek fired the first shots against Peterson during a Cambridge Union event last November. Labeling the Canadian best-selling author as his “enemy,” Zizek went on to slam Peterson’s ideas as “pseudo-scientific,” and took umbrage with Peterson’s obsession with cultural Marxism.

Peterson responded to the Cambridge broadsheet by tweeting he would meet Zizek “any time, any place” to debate their differences in public, much to the delight of fans and detractors. The callout followed an earlier attempt to contact Zizek via Twitter only for Peterson to discover he was conversing with a Zizek quote bot account.

However, not everyone is as excited about the event, lamenting it pales in comparison to when veteran anarchist Noam Chomsky debated the French postmodernist Michel Foucault in the 1970s.

Chomsky has previously slammed fellow leftist Zizek. Speaking in 2013, he said:

“I don’t see anything in what he’s [Zizek] saying.” He also took aim at Zizek’s hero, Jacques Lacan, by calling him a “total charlatan.”

Who knows, maybe he’ll take on the winner.

Jordan Peterson on Brexit

Zizek Q&A

Why Wages for the Middle Class Stagnated in the 70s

Start @ 8:40 for answer

20th/21st Century Bread and Circuses...

...featuring the traps of Snark and Boojum for the Populist Masses.


Proving, once again, that Hubris is the mortal enemy of elites, populists, and all human social sub-types.

Usurping Populism

Rules for Spotting the "Globalist Approved" Populist Leader:

Rule #1: If someone isn't openly socially conservative, then they aren't really conservative.

Rule #2: If a person does nothing to truly advance conservative or right-wing politics there's no reason to trust them.

(FJ Rule #2a: If a person isn't proposing steps to disrupt and replace the economic status quo by rolling back economic globalism, he's likely a NEO-conservative globalist.)

Rule #3: If it looks like someone isn't taking any real risks when speaking out, their motives should be questioned.

They stole the Radical Paris Spring of '68. You can bet they'll usurp today's populism as well. As Jacques Lacan told the '68 radicals, "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

The speech police – they criticize what I said
The speech police – they stuck a knee in my head
The speech police – they're coming to correct me – oh no!

You know that talk is cheap
But in truth there's a price
And though it's called free speech
I don't think they'll provide – the right the right

'Cause they're way too PC for losers like me
Every single right they'll try to re-explain
And then assign my blame

The speech police – they redefine what I meant
(Redefine what I meant)
The speech police – as something mean and violent
(Something mean and violent)
The speech police – they're coming to correct me – oh no!

Well, I'm scandalized
For my Christian beliefs
And then they call for peace
Blame their violence on me
Yeah, right – denied!

'Cause they hate to believe the Book that I read
Every single line they'll try to re-explain
And vilify my name

I try to speak, they lie in wait, then moan at me and groan
It doesn't pay to take the bait and so I just leave 'em alone
In spite of me, they try to find a quote and read it wrong
They curse the truth we share and rush in fury on the Lord
Ha ha ha -- ha ha ha -- ha ha ha

Yes, Isaiah agrees – just look and you'll see
In Isaiah 5 – verse 5:20 is plain
So let it guide my way

The speech police – they live to silence the rest
(Live to silence the rest)
The speech police – they want the freedom oppressed
(Want the freedom oppressed)
The speech police – they're coming to correct me
The speech police (police, police)
The speech police (police, police)
The speech police (police, police)
The speech police (police, police)
The speech police (police, police)
The speech police (police, police)

Zizek v. Peterson

Another Reason Why the Right Isn't Taken Seriously by the Left

The Marxian Post-Modernist STRAWMAN

Antigone and Ismene, Models for Post-Oedipal Post-Modern Development?

One of the lessons which Hitler has taught us is that it is better not to be too clever. The Jews put forward all kinds of well-founded arguments to show that he could not come to power when his rise was clear for all to see. I remember a conversation during which a political economist demonstrated- on the basis of the interests of the Bavarian brewers- that the Germans could not be brought into line. Other experts proved that Fascism was impossible in the West. The educated made it easy for the barbarians everywhere by being so stupid. The farsighted judgments, the forecasts based on statistics and experience, the comments beginning "this is a subject I know very well," and the well-rounded, solid statements, are all untrue

-Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

At all events, it is better to be controlled by someone else than by oneself. Better to be oppressed, exploited, persecuted and manipulated by someone other than by oneself. In this sense the entire movement for liberation and emancipation, inasmuch as it is predicated on a demand for greater autonomy- or, in other words, on a more complete introjection of all forms of control and constraint under the banner of freedom- is a regression.

-Jean Baudrillard

---

The problems of cynicism and violence, while certainly not new and arguably not as severe as the media coverage might suggest, are nevertheless noteworthy for being symptomatic of larger cultural shifts.' These shifts, often given the general descriptive term "postmodem," can also be described in terms of what Gilles Deleuze calls the "society of control" and what Slavoj Zizek calls "de-oedipalization." These two otherwise disparate theories of the social resonate with one another since they both argue that Michel Foucault's concept of the disciplinary society no longer carries sufficient descriptive force. Deleuze and Zizek suggest that power is no longer organized primarily through institutions to produce compliant, useful, and productive bodies; instead, institutions are breaking down and forms of external regulation are withdrawing. However, as has been noted by several cultural theorists, there has not been a concomitant resurgence of liberatory practices. The usefulness of Deleuze and Zizek is that they provide two ways to model how the flow of power has found new modalities through which to exercise control. Zizek further suggests that the withdrawal of the body of external social regulations and constraints- what is referred to as "the big Other" in Lacanian theory- has initiated post-oedipalized forms of subjectivity no longer keyed to the oedipal scene. Lacking the libidinal, internalized attachment to authority (typically in patriarchal forms of the Father and its substitutes), these subjects are prone to disaffected attitudes and behavior, including cynicism, apathy, disregard, and violence.

- Thomas Rickert, "Hands Up, You're Free: Composition in a Post-Oedipal World"Pablo Picasso, "Garçon à la Pipe (English: Boy with a Pipe)" (1905)

The Rationalist Delusion

Zizek v. Peterson

Just a couple of remarks in reply to numerous critiques of my comment on Jordan Peterson in The Independent.[1]

The leitmotif of my critics in mentioning the link between Peterson and the alt-right is that I am wrong, displaying my basic lack of acquaintance with what I criticize: Petersen is a radical liberal (he supports welfare state, etc.) worried about the threat that Political Correctness, identity politics, LGBT+, etc., pose to the freedom of speech and other fundamental values of a free democratic society. In locating him within the alt-right, I act as a Politically Correct and postmodern dogmatic ignoring simple facts.

I find this line of attack very strange. Whatever one thinks about my theories, one constant in them is my critical rejection of postmodern deconstructionism and of the dismissal of modern science as yet another ”discursive practice,” the “truth-effect” of which is to be historically relativized. Furthermore, a year or so ago, when I questioned Political Correctness and some aspects of LGBT+ movement (and some other things problematic for today’s “radical Left,” like the predominant stance towards refugees), I was not only submitted to a long series of extremely brutal attacks, but I was also gradually excluded from the public media. So, now my only access to media in English are three digital outlets: The Independent, Russia Today, and a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books (which was kind enough to publish this reply – I was not able to post it on The Independent’s site, since it was cut off as too long for a comment). The days when I was able to publish comments in The Guardian and occasionally even in New York Times are long gone, and even In These Times now refuses to publish me. The comic aspect of all this is that I am often attacked for the same text from one side for my alleged Eurocentric racism and from the opposite side for my alleged hatred of the Western tradition… Part of this comedy are many reactions to my text in The Independent: reading them one gets the impression that I am just attacking one side and not indicating how both sides are resorting to the same strategies of lying in the guise of truth.

This brings me to Peterson. I see two levels in his work. First, there is his liberal analysis and critique of PC, LGBT+, etc., with regard to how they pose a danger to our freedoms, and although there are things I disagree with at this level, I also see in it some worthwhile observations. The difference with him is that, while critical of many stances and political practices of PC, identity politics and LGBT+, I nonetheless see in them an often inadequate and distorted expression of very real and pressing problems. Claims about women’s oppression cannot be dismissed by referring to Fifty Shades of Grey, the story of a woman who enjoys being dominated (as one of my critics claims), the suffering of transgender people is all too real, etc. The way racist and sexist oppression works in a developed liberal society is much more refined (but no less efficient) than in its direct brutal form, and the most dangerous mistake is to attribute women’s inferior position to their free choice.

(NOTE FOR FT) But I do wholeheartedly disagree with Peterson when he enters the domain of conspiracy theories. What I find really problematic is that he interprets PC (and his other targets) as the extreme outgrowth of “cultural Marxism” (a block which comprises Frankfurt School, the “French” poststructuralist deconstructionism, identity politics, gender and queer theories, etc.). He seems to imply that “cultural Marxism” is the result of a deliberate shift in Marxist (or Communist) strategy: after Communism lost the economic battle with liberal capitalism (waiting in vain for the revolution to arrive in the developed Western world), its leaders decided to move the terrain to cultural struggles (sexuality, feminism, racism, religion…), systematically undermining the cultural foundations and values of our freedoms. In the last decades, this new approach proved unexpectedly efficient: today, our societies are caught in the self-destructive circle of guilt, unable to defend their positive legacy…

I see no necessary link between this line of thought and liberalism. The notion of “cultural Marxism” manipulated by some secret Communist centre and aiming to destroy Western freedoms is a pure alt-right conspiracy theory. And the fact that it can be mobilized as part of a liberal defence of our freedoms says something about the immanent weaknesses of the liberal project. First, there is no unified field of “cultural Marxism”: some of today’s representatives of the Frankfurt school are among the most vicious denigrators of “French thought”; many “cultural Marxists” are very critical of identity politics, etc. Second, any positive reference to the Frankfurt School or to “French thought” was prohibited in Socialist countries where the authorities were much more open towards Anglo-Saxon analytic thought (as I remember from my own youth), so the claim that both classic Marxism and its “cultural” version were somehow controlled by the same central agent has to rely on the very suspicious notion of a hidden Master who secretly pulls the strings. Finally, while I admit (and analyse in my books) the so-called “totalitarian” excesses of Political Correctness and some transgender orientations which bear witness to a weird will to legalize, prohibit and regulate, I see in this tendency no trace of the “radical Left” but, on the contrary, a version of liberalism gone astray in its effort to protect and guarantee freedom. Liberalism was always an inconsistent project ridden with antagonisms and tensions.

If I were to engage in paranoiac speculations, I would be much more inclined to say that the Politically Correct obsessive regulations (like the obligatory naming of different sexual identities, with legal measures taken if one violates them) are rather a Left-liberal plot to destroy any actual radical Left movement. Suffice it to recall the animosity against Bernie Sanders among some LGBT+ and feminist circles, whose members have no problems with big corporate bosses supporting them. The “cultural” focus of PC and #MeToo is, to put it in a simplified way, a desperate attempt to avoid the confrontation with actual economic and political problems, i.e., to locate women’s oppression and racism in their socio-economic context. The moment one mentions these problems, one is accused of vulgar “class reductionism.” Walter Benn Michaels and others have written extensively on this, and in Europe, Robert Pfaller wrote books critical of PC’s patronizing stance and has now started a movement “adults for adults”. Liberals will have to take note that there is a growing radical Left critique of PC, identity politics and #MeToo…

This is no place to develop extensively my views. To anyone interested in them, I propose to take a look at my book The Courage of Hopelessness, which has just appeared in the US. And a final note. I neither participate in Facebook nor do I tweet, but I was informed there are anonymous persons who are active in both media pretending to be me. All such cases are fakes. So I was surprised to learn that Peterson is challenging me to a debate, in response to a tweet operating under my name. If he really wants to, I am ready to do it during my next visit to New York next October.

[1] See http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jord.an-peterson-clinical-psychologist-canada-popularity-convincing-why-left-wing-alt-right-cathy-a8208301.html

-Slavoj Zizek, "A Reply to my Critics Concerning an Engagement with Jordan Peterson"

Zizek On Jordan Peterson

-Slavoj Zizek, "Why do people find Jordan Peterson so convincing? Because the left doesn't have its own house in order"

The Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor has become hugely popular for his 'anti-PC' views and is beloved of many on the alt-right. He's appealing for a number of reasons, most of them connected to the left-wing people he opposes

The wide popularity of Jordan Peterson, a once-obscure Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor who has become beloved of the alt-right, is a proof that the liberal-conservative “silent majority” finally found its voice. Peterson, who has said that the idea of white privilege is a "Marxist lie" and theorised that "radical feminists" don't speak out about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia because of "their unconscious wish for brutal male domination", is fast becoming a mainstream commentator.

His advantages over the previous anti-LGBT+ star Milo Yiannopoulos are obvious. Yiannopoulos was witty, fast-talking, full of jokes and sarcasms, and openly gay – he resembled, in many features, the culture he was attacking. Peterson is his opposite: he combines a “common sense” approach and (the appearance of) cold scientific argumentation with a bitter rage at a threat to the liberal basics of our societies – his stance is: “Enough is enough! I cannot stand it anymore!”

It is easy to discern the cracks in his advocacy of cold facts against “political correctness”: not only is he often relying on unverified theories, but the big problem is the paranoiac construct which he uses to interpret what he sees as facts. "Facts are facts," he likes to say, before going on to say that "the idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory" and that to conceive of gender as a social construct is "as bad as claiming the world is flat".

Jacques Lacan wrote that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological: the pathological element is the husband's need for jealousy as the only way to retain his dignity, identity even. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls, and so on) – which they are not, of course – their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms.

The same holds for how, today, the anti-immigrant populists deal with the “problem” of the refugees: they approach it in the atmosphere of fear, of the incoming struggle against the “Islamification” of Europe, and they get caught in a series of obvious absurdities. For them, refugees who flee terror are equalised with the terrorists they are escaping from, oblivious to the obvious fact that, while there are probably among the refugees also terrorists, rapists, criminals and so on, the large majority are desperate people looking for a better life.

In other words, the cause of problems which are immanent to today's global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder. Anti-immigrant racism and sexism is not dangerous because it lies; it is at its most dangerous when its lie is presented in the form of a (partial) factual truth.

Unfortunately, the liberal, left-wing reaction to anti-immigrant populism is no better. Populism and leftie “political correctness” practice the two complementary forms of lying which follow the classic distinction between hysteria and obsessional neurosis: a hysteric tells the truth in the guise of a lie (what it says is literally not true, but the lie expresses in a false form an authentic complaint), while what an obsessional neurotic claims is literally true, but it is a truth which serves a lie.

Populists and PC liberals resort to both strategies. First, they both resort to factual lies when they serve what populists perceive as the higher truth of their cause. Religious fundamentalists advocate “lying for Jesus” – say, in order to prevent the “horrible crime of abortion”, one is allowed to propagate false scientific “truths” about the lives of foetuses and the medical dangers of abortion; in order to support breast-feeding, one is allowed to present as a scientific fact that abstention from breast-feeding causes breast cancer, and so on.

Common anti-immigrant populists shamelessly circulate non-verified stories about rapes and other crimes of the refugees in order to give credibility to their “insight” that refugees pose a threat to our way of life. All too often, PC liberals proceed in a similar way: they pass in silence over actual differences in the “ways of life” between refugees and Europeans since mentioning them may be seen to promote Eurocentrism. Recall the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, where the race of the perpetrators was downplayed in case anything in the case could be interpreted as racist.

The opposite strategy – that of lying in the guise of truth – is also widely practiced on both poles. If anti-immigrant populists not only propagate factual lies but also cunningly use bits of factual truth with the aura of veracity to their racist lie, PC partisans also practice this “lying with truth”: in its fight against racism and sexism, it mostly quotes crucial facts, but it often gives them a wrong twist. The populist protest displaces onto the external enemy the authentic frustration and sense of loss, while the PC left uses its true points (detecting sexism and racism in language and so on) to reassert its moral superiority and thus prevent true social change.

And this is why Peterson’s outbursts have such an effect. His crazy conspiracy theory about LGBT+ rights and #MeToo as the final offshoots of the Marxist project to destroy the West is, of course, ridiculous. It is totally blind for the inner antagonisms and inconsistencies of the liberal project itself: the tension between liberals who are ready to condone racist and sexist jokes on account of the freedom of speech and the PC regulators who want to censor them as an obstacle to the freedom and dignity of the victims of such jokes has nothing to do with the authentic left.

Peterson addresses what many of us feel goes wrong in the PC universe of obsessive regulation – the problem with him does not reside in his theories but in the partial truths that sustain them. If the left is not able to address these limitations of its own project, it is fighting a lost battle.

Is "the Fascist" Progressive Liberalism's GREATEST Pokemon? What became of "the Racist?"

With all due respect, Mr. Zizek, you really phoned this one in.... https://t.co/tAjgsF2x56

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 13, 2018