1. I’m amazed & disturbed how many people, after reading one article of mine that they agree with, write to me as if I know all the answers to life—if they saw the shambolic details of my life they would not do this. It’s easy to see how the unscrupulous could take advantage.https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1045307656804560896 …
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2. Christopher Hitchens once wrote that his father told him. “The only time I knew what I was doing was during the Second World War.” A lot of people seem to be like that, just desperate for someone to tell them what to do or for someone to assert authority—of any kind.
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Replying to @tomxhart
That's a legitimate reading of CH's father's comment, but I'm more inclined to think it means the war gave *purpose* to his life. Submitting to authority can grant purpose, true, but purpose is a deeper, independent need.
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Replying to @IDJennings
1. The exact quote: “The only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing”. To me, people know what they are doing when they are being told or when their back is to the wall: wars and extreme survival situations. A small elite can set their own course, but most cannot.
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Replying to @tomxhart @IDJennings
2. I think this is obvious in religion. Islam means submission to the will of Allah, and Roman Catholics submit to the Church. “Religion” derives, in part, from the Latin “to bind fast”. It places a person under authority; it is this absence that destroys many under modernity.
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Replying to @tomxhart
Again, I wouldn't want to dispute this point. I'd merely say that it's not the whole story. Religions can be quite fissiparous - authority is not always welcome amongst the religious. And the sense of mission can also be what's keeping them in the cult.
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Replying to @IDJennings
I’m disputing it. I’m a disputing man. I think religion is discipline, once a religion stops accepting authority it has become decadent. Ultimately, religion rests on the Tao or the unity of opposites found in Heraclitus. Both are analogous to a path or river—straying is death.
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Replying to @tomxhart
I'm going to disappoint you with my conciliatory nature;-) Nevertheless, my (very) religious upbringing (nonconformist low-church Protestantism) left me with a sense that what authority there was in the church did not lie with people, but with texts. An anomaly, perhaps.
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Replying to @IDJennings
1. Protestantism is decadent Christianity. It was founded on the principle of a revolt against authority, namely the Vatican. Paradoxically, its decadence springs from a desire to perfect Christianity, which was why it emerged in the most perfectly Christian lands: Germany.
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Replying to @tomxhart @IDJennings
2. This was Nietzsche’s argument, re: Germany. Protestantism today is dying everywhere, and few Protestant “Christians” believe in a metaphysical God or the biblical teachings. Protestantism is leftist in the sense that it is organisational entropy for Christianity.
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3. You can see a similar pattern in Marxism, which, in a sense, wants to perfect capitalism. The Marxists want to unlock the utter transformative power of capitalism in a “rational” way. In this, they are like the Protestants who sought a Christianity uncorrupted by the Vatican.
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Replying to @tomxhart @IDJennings
4. Marxism is organisational entropy for capitalism. In both cases, Marxism & Protestantism, the revolt against authority is a deviation from the path—the Tao—& these revolts, suitably Satanic, always claim to be the complete and perfect fulfilment of the authority they subvert.
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