Elk of Faith on the Marble Cliffs

““Traditionalism […] is always in danger of descending into the kind of concretization and literalism reactionary politics represent, and tends to be generally conservative, is essentially a-political. It is not a political ideology, reactionary or otherwise. And in point of fact, to advocate a return to earlier forms of political organization of the kind that were in force when societies were organized on more Traditional principles—or at least to view such a return as intrinsic to Tradition and under all circumstances unambiguously in service to it—is not in fact Traditional. […} So the question arises: What is the function of the Traditionalist appreciation for ancient spiritual civilizations, or medieval ones, given that such civilizations cannot and should not be resurrected? Can this be anything more than a useless, paralyzing nostalgia? The answer is: that whatever spiritual potentials can no longer be realized externally, in the zahir [exteriorly], thereby become transformed into esoteric truths which can now be realized internally, in the batin [internaly]. […] . The value, again, is esoteric, given that the traditional exaltation of the brahmins over the kshatriyas is the outer image of an inner spiritual truth, an eternal truth, occupying the plane of esoteric anthropology: the exaltation of the Intellect over the will in the human soul. The direct perception of spiritual Truth, not the will, is the crown and center of the human form. If the will serves the Intellect, it will order the life of the soul—and insofar as is possible, the outer life of the man—so as to protect the Intellectual center, both from disturbing social influences and from the possibility of rebelliousness on the part of the will itself. In such a condition the human form is correctly hierarchialized or edified (“built up,” in the sense that the human soul is the edifice or temple of the Spirit); the several faculties of the soul all occupy their proper places; consequently the individual in question is an “upright man” (in Hebrew, a tzaddik). […]This is the whole reason for the appreciation of earlier more traditional cultures, and the precise method to be followed in protecting and saving their spiritual essence. To believe that such cultures can be resurrected in the zahir [exteriorly] is indeed either barren nostalgia or dangerous reaction; to realize them in the batin [internaly], however, is the furthest thing from nostalgia. Rather, it is a way of nurturing and developing the soul by feeding it on spiritual qualities that were once expressed in social forms, but are now on a journey back to their eternal archetypes—their passage through human souls receptive to them being an essential stage of that journey.”

This is from his book Folk Metaphysics.

中二病の本体は生きる熱量である。 想像力の爆発である。 純粋さを創造性を合わせつもり、冷た社会への対抗手段である。 The true essence of chuunibyou is the heat of the will to live. It is the explosion of one’s creative imagination. Resisting against the cold and lifeless society, chuunibyou brandishes both purity and creativity into battle.

why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There's a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.

Tim Wong saw the decline of the pipeline swallowtail butterfly, and dedicated himself to providing habitat and raising babies, and it worked.

The Lord Howe Island rodent eradication project never fails to make me cry, it’s so beautiful.

In 1979, an audacious, expensive conservation project was begun to try and breed california condors in captivity toward being released into the wild again. This was considered useless and hopeless by many people, but many more people said we had to at least TRY.

Black footed ferrets were considered completely extinct in 1979. Then we found a single den in Wyoming in 1981. In 1996 it was classified as extinct in the wild.

weird question, but you're someone whose philosophy and morals, in your takes here, that i trust; how do you view religious pluralism/other religions' place in salvation? my biggest sticking point with... almost every religion is that a 'one true path' feels absurdly cruel to me, so even when i see a lot of beauty in a religion, like strains of christianity, i shrink from it, because it feels like i'm rejecting many good people (i.e., pagans, die hard atheists, buddhists, hindu ppl etc, who are a far cry from christian specifics)

“We normalise the abnormal, and accept the unacceptable. Remember that more than 80 per cent of people live under light polluted skies, and two-thirds of Europeans are immersed in noise equivalent to constant rainfall. Many people have no idea what true darkness or quiet feels like.

"Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

Theseus dismisses the entire midsummer night as the inconsequential fruit of a gratuitous and disembodied imagination. . . . . Theseus' casual dismissal of myth is itself mythical in the sense that it will not ask such questions. There is irony in the choice of a great mythical figure to embody this rationalistic dismissal. Here Theseus acts as the high priest of a benign casting-out of all the disturbing phenomena under the triple heading of poetry, lunacy, and love. This neat operation frees respectable men of all responsibility for whatever tricks, past, present, and future, their own desires and mimetic violence might play upon them, thus perfectly duplicating the primary genesis of myth, . . . .

Violent people punish one another, like the two wicked sisters in King Lear, the two enemy sisters. The punishment appears transcendent because it spares nobody, but it comes from reciprocity, from mimetic desire, which makes it so that the evil we inflict on others will sooner or later be returned to us, with interest. You don't project that violence onto God unless you fail to see the reciprocity, . . . .

I have a fairly popular post about how Shards kinda do whatever the fuck they want, but something that it missed is that they are not particularly consistent with whom they do their shit to.

Shamanic aptitude runs in families. While it didn’t explicitly play into his motivation to make his film about Chauvet Cave, Herzog had an interesting family connection to the ancient Greek tradition of dream incubation, via his grandfather Rudolf.

An interesting belief system to question is about sleep. One day you have not had enough sleep, but you feel wide awake. Another day you have had plenty of sleep, and you are drowsy all day, so you decide you had too much sleep. The next day you have just the right amount of sleep, and you feel great, so you say, “See? There!” The following day, however, you have had the right amount of sleep and feel awful.

In her essay Less TikTok, More Screaming, Persinette writes that these e-therapists have turned healing into “a religion, a lifestyle, and above all, a brand” while promoting a culture of isolation and individual optimization. In this ecosystem, “...therapy has become a litmus test for social belonging and inherent goodness, a sign that one is aware of and has adapted to the newest standards of how to behave.”  The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a non-emotive butterfly who will surely attract the relationships you’ve always deserved — relationships with other “healed” people, who don’t hurt you or depend on you or force you to feel difficult, taxing emotions. And finally, your life will be as frictionless and shiny as you, alone, have always deserved for it to be.

Here’s the original, for comparison. And here’s a bit more about the artist and why he created the piece above for MAD Magazine.

Richard Williams on Norman Rockwell:

I think it’s relevant to add that even Norman Rockwell chose to leave his cushy job at the Saturday Evening Post because he wanted to make artwork that was more radical. The Post had rules that wouldn’t allow him to do artwork depicting black people as anything other than servants. The job paid really well and that was a huge reason he continued on. But he wanted change that and so he moved to Look magazine.

I’d just like to briefly say even Rockwell’s seemingly feel good Americana pieces are often more political than people today realize for example