Jash Dholani Profile picture
Apr 2 13 tweets 7 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
The most canceled woman in the world: Camille Paglia

In Sexual Personae, she attacks liberalism, feminism, and Nature-worship like no other writer before or since

On her 76th birthday today, discover her insights on why science is cope, how civilization is masculine, and more👇🏻
1/ Liberalism's great paradox

Paglia: "Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother"

Feminism wants the tyrant father to solve all grievances (mean words on twitter) while being an all-permissive mother otherwise

A big contradiction
2/ For Paglia, art, religion, and civilization are man's half-solutions to the eternally chaotic nature: "Religion, ritual, and art began as one." Man chants a hymn, sketches a painting, & erects a city wall for the same reason: to buffer against, AND impose his vision, on nature
3/ Religions go from "Earth-cults" to “Sky-cults”

When powerless against Mother Earth, humans worship the chaotic but fertile feminine

Example: The Venus of Willendorf

As human control expands, religions become Sky-Cults

We worship a Male God that designs, instructs, orders
4/ Science is cope

Science is a male attempt to use labels, data and the "cold light of intellect" to beat back the "archaic night" of nature

Science is our "quest for form"

Paglia: "To know is to control"

But nature, writes Paglia, "breaks its own rules whenever it wants"
5/ East v/s West

The West invented the gun even though China invented gunpowder centuries ago

Western mind is more interested in "phallic projection"

The western psyche wants to pin reality down

But the Eastern psyche, Paglia writes, goes for "compliance, not confrontation"
6/ Art is about creating order out of chaos, not promoting morality:

Paglia: "It is the order in morality rather than the morality in order that attracts the artist"

An artist's greatest motivation is to turn nature's madness into a coherent story using the alchemy of his work
7/ Art rises from the "deranged egotism and orderliness" of the male mind

Most criminals and geniuses are men because both crime and art involve imposing one's personal masculine will on the world

Paglia: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the ripper"
8/ Paglia on beauty:

"Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature."

Beauty is one of humanity's great tools

It makes the world holier and worth sacrificing for
9/ The worldview in your pants

Paglia: "Sexual physiology (sets) the pattern for our experience of the world"

The penis underlines "linearity, focus, aim, directedness"

But females must make peace with hidden genitals - which makes them at ease with "greater subjectivity"
10/ How to become nature's favorite

Paglia on the aggressive underbelly of life:

"Sperm are miniature assault troops, and the ovum is a solitary citadel that must be breached. Weak or passive sperm just sit there like dead ducks. Nature rewards energy and aggression."
Paglia's Sexual Personae is a dense, provocative, and deeply rewarding read

50+ insights from the book here: memod.com/jashdholani/bo…

Find inside:

• Why Ancient Egypt worshipped cats
• Feminism's blindspots
• Why men and women need each other

Dig in: memod.com/jashdholani/bo…
Thank you for your time fren!

If you enjoyed this thread

RT the first tweet

And Paglia-Pill your timeline👇🏻

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More from @oldbooksguy

Apr 1
Weird how genius literary works fall flat on their face at launch. Moby Dick? Panned. Critics preferred Melville's first novel Typee which no one remembers now. The Great Gatsby? A failure. Thus Spake Zarathustra? Infamously self-published by Nietzsche. Masses can't see genius
IF sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (at first)

Then sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from deranged schizo rants (at first)
"Let the invisible hand of the market decide" if the invisible hand of the market decided everything, then there would be no great books left for any of our hands to pick up. For better or worse, you need aristocratic tastemakers
Read 4 tweets
Apr 1
SINGLE most understudied subject in universities: worldviews
Whether you find a certain joke funny, a certain man presidential, or a certain philosophical argument logical - depends on your worldview. An important skill to develop: detect worldview misalignments and stop pouring energy into a doomed situation or relationship
A worldview definition that is more elegant than comprehensive:

• Where you wish to end up
• Who you can't help but admire
• What you can't stand
• Why and how you talk to God
• Which outcomes will you sacrifice the self for

A meaningful difference here means a partnership… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Read 6 tweets
Mar 29
Ernst Jünger survived multiple headshots in WW-I

Led his unit to impossible victories

Read Nietzsche in his spare time

Wrote notes that became the war classic Storm of Steel

On his 128th birthday today

Discover his forgotten essay "On Pain"

And its TIMELESS insights👇🏻 Image
1/ Pain is revelatory

Jünger writes:

"Pain is one of the keys to unlock man’s innermost being."

In pain, all pretense & social masks slip away

Pain truly reveals a "man's stature"

Therefore, Junger writes: "Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!" Image
2/ How to bear extraordinary pain:

Make the body “a distant outpost” of your being

The true “command center” of your being should be a spiritual mission

When the body stops being the end

And becomes the mere means to a higher goal

Then pain loses its power Image
Read 12 tweets
Mar 26
JESUS was tempted by Satan in a desert, Tony Stark was forced to become Iron Man in a desert cave, and in DUNE, Paul Atreides meets his destiny on a desert planet. The desert is where spiritual adventures happen and it is the home of modern man, whether he knows it or not👇🏻
1/ Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince (1943):

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams”

Insights, epiphanies, and entire new religions reach man's soul in deserts
2/ Mythologist Cirlot wrote that God is found in the desert because it is the "domain of the Sun"

The unearthly shine of the Sun reminds us of "things transcendent"

For Chesterton, God's nature was like the Sun's

Impossible to see directly, yet making vision itself possible
Read 11 tweets
Mar 22
Nihilism is the Meta Problem. Nietzsche wrote this on the first page of his last book (1889). A vague sense that nothing really matters. You need to scrub this feeling out of your soul with as much aggression and venom as you can muster. Nihilism is the master psyop
The most powerless creature in the world is not an ant, not the grounded plant, but a nihilist. The ant and the plant will automatically fight to preserve themselves but this central instinct of life has been removed from the nihilist's toolkit. He is compromised beyond saving
Those who tell you the world is worthless will, after you renounce it, rush in to rule. It's a power grab, plain and simple. This is why for Nietzsche, the way out of nihilism is not community service or "sacrifice" but Will To Power. A healthy controlling urge is the antidote
Read 8 tweets
Mar 21
Julius Evola wrote that we are living through a "destructive spiritual process" and one of its symptoms is a corruption of traditional symbols. In his essay "The Inversion Of Symbols," Evola shows that when communism won, it FLIPPED upside down the meaning of 3 vital symbols👇🏻
1/ Evola writes that modern revolutionary movements take "the principles, the forms, and the traditional symbols" of healthier societies from the past and give them a new spin

He digs into 3 symbols

• The color red
• The word revolution
• The symbol of the pentagrammic star
2/ Evola on RED

In Ancient Rome, the Emperor was dressed and dyed in purplish Red to "represent Jove, the King of the Gods"

In Catholicism, the "Princes of the Church,” the cardinals, wear a scarlet red robe

Traditionally, red has been linked with hierarchy, order, and power
Read 12 tweets

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