Self-Transcendence Part III

Part I    Self-Betrayal

Part II  The Destroyers

Part III The Heroes

Part IV The Defenses

Part V  Today and Tomorrow

The Heroes

In Self-Transcendence Part I I asked and answered the question,

To what extent is self-transcendence self-betrayal?, or, What’s the point of self-transcendence if it means a return to a society that made that self-transcendence necessary in the first place? I continued with, "That's not change. That's calculating exploitation." In other words, to behave in such a way toward the past in general, and our own in particular, is to betray both ourselves and the cultural heroes of the past who have inspired us.

It is to act toward life itself as if it were a financial investment. It is to calculate the dividends to be gained from a capital put out in interest. It is to exploit both ourselves and those we love.*

*For years I watched from up close, and then from a healthy distance, that calculating exploitation grow and spread among the people of the country I used to live in. It was and remains a sickening sight. Hence the need for cultural transcendence and why it is inseperable from self-transcendence.

But let no one else, from anywhere else, put on airs. Calculating exploitation and self-betrayal are by no means limited to the USA or the West. On the contrary, it is a global phenomenon. My focus is on Western Cultural Life and the USA because of I am of the West and grew up in the USA. That's all.

“Better to dance with death than succumb to self-betrayal for the purpose of “self-improvement” as defined by a society of materialistic narcissists.”

Indeed! It’s a terrible position to backed into, but it’s easy to see, not only how it can happen, but also why, where, and when it actually started.

In Part II the source of the need for Cultural Transcendence, and therefore Self-Transcendence, was located in the 19th century. The explanation for this was that by the 19th century power in the Western world had fallen into the hands of what I referred to as The Destroyers, ie; those who were deliberately turning on a world that took 5,000 years to create, by making it as ugly, hateful, and as stupid as possible. And they did it by basing all of life itself, everything, culture, country, civilization, on money. Now, maybe God and Nature* needed to be replaced. But with money? Really?

*By God and Nature, I mean the use of those words by fanatics who confuse dogma with truth.

In any event, that the spread of this hatefulness, ugliness, and that strange mix of cleverness and stupidity so characteristic of The Destroyers, continues today is obvious, which is what makes the struggle and value of The Heroes we are going to look at in Part III, so relevant to us today.

That spread of hatefulness, and all the rest, can be seen in the continued corruption and degradation of our art, language, and culture, in illiteracy, and worse, semi-literacy in both children and adults (Academia/MSM), and in everything from Identity Politics to mass migration and pointless wars.

As I said in Part I, though there is no final causal force that we can attribute all of this to, there is certainly, and unfortunately, a primary driving force that is not only exploiting it all with brazen effrontery, but also working hard to make sure it gets worse for everyone else, but themselves, of course.

In Part II I referred to this hostile elite as The Destroyers. Fortunately, however, in response to The Destroyers, we have also had The Heroes.

These heroes, or cultural rebels, knew that the only way to save themselves, and maybe others, was by a complete transcendence of the culture they were living in, a culture that was now being run by a hostile elite that were inimical to the sort of learning, change, and growth that would serve as a foundation for a new and healthier culture than the one they were living in then, and that, sadly, but undeniably, we are living in now - only worse.

Before continuing, let’s be clear. The Destroyers did not of themselves create this culture crisis. This culture crisis was the result of a series of historical accidents that were, like life itself in its totality, beyond anyone’s control, an adequate explanation of which would turn this series of articles into a very long book. But the fact is, The Destroyers were the only ones with a living tradition tailor-made for exploiting that crisis to their advantage and our disadvantage. Such a civilizational elite has never existed before, anywhere.

They may have existed in small sub-groups, but never in an entire civilization. That’s why, to anticipate what we’ll talk more about later, The Heroes and their emergent innovation, cultural transcendence, represented the single greatest cultural redirection in human history. It is a tradition that I have been living out of now for well over 30 years. To these heroes of a culture crisis the 19th century was not sentimental at all, it was violent, bitter, and tragic. They hated it as much as we do* and for the same reason - they had to live in it. And make no mistake about it. They lived in agony.

*Of course, our heroes didn't hate all of the 19th century - just the actions of The Destroyers.

Mockingly, and with a terrible irony, they lived in poverty, a poverty which was often made more frightful by their bohemian dirtiness and emotional disorders, their frustration, brutality, anger, hatred, and division.

Darwin was able to save himself from this by protecting himself behind a solidly built wall of hypochondria. It was the one defense responsible for him becoming a saint of science. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who, for all of their differences, found the soul and psyche of man sick from the terrible wounds of the 19th century, had to build intellectual mountains of their own to escape into a deeper reality, and even there they were pursued by a justified anger which turned their indictment into a parable for the nursery.*

*From this perspective, perhaps Nietzsche’s insightful and inspiring Joy Is Deeper Than Sorrow was more an ideal to aspire to, than a reality that he actually lived.

And these artists, sick, pursued, self-torturing, nourishing from a million wounds their flowers of evil, fleeing to the South Seas, cutting off their ears, trailing their bleeding hearts across the whole of Western Europe and America, deliberately deranging their sensibilities, coldly, brutally, and permanently taking European art apart and putting it together in ways that are still anathema to most people - except those willing to accept the emasculations and infantilizations of the universities, and the perversions of Madison Avenue - these artists, huddled in their depraved bohemias, abused when they were not neglected, issuing their powerful and plain manifestoes, which the winds swept into the gutters of dirty streets, these artists, what of them, who rightfully hated The Destroyers of the 19th century so?

These men, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin, Schopenhauer, Balzac, Baudelaire, Melville, to name just a few, these men who felt in their bones, and with such depth of perception in their work, what was coming - the cataclysms of the 20th and 21st centuries - these men, what can we say of them?

We can say that out of their struggles and their wounds, recorded in such works as The Origin of Species, The World as Will and Representation, The Latter-Day Pamphlets, The Mystery of Life and Its Arts, the works of Turner and Van Gogh streched on the walls of museums, extraordinary music, from Beethoven’s Late Quartets to Wagner’s The Ring, played by thousands of orchestras, struggles and wounds felt whenever we dare to look seriously at the savage pages of novels like Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, out of their universe of horror has emerged an idea, frail, not fully trustworthy, at least then, an idea denied by most people, unused even by those who accepted it then (and some who accept it now), an idea, a vision born of their struggles with their times, a notion, an idea of human life which perhaps may, if not exactly redeem us, at the very least help us to improve the quality of life, in as much as we dedicate our life to that idea.

But, remains a question. How did our Heroes come up with this idea? Or, rather, Where did this idea of theirs come from? It came from their defenses.

Obviously, such an answer requires an explanation. So, to an explanation of exactly what is meant by their defenses, I shall turn in Part IV.