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
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
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
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
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
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