The Daily Eudemon

Modernity is the left hemisphere gone wild. Gnosticism, with its dualistic approach and emphasis on knowledge that gives salvation and control, is a left-hemispheric political religion that thrived during the twentieth century and has today settled in as the dominant cultural disposition that drives public debate. Today’s powerful elites aren’t gnostics, but they ride their left hemispheres like cocaine-fueled jockeys on rabid horses. Because gnosticism and today’s powerful elites are dominated by the left hemisphere, they’re natural allies and they’re coming together in a final effort to do what modernity has been trying to do for centuries: eliminate altogether the Tao part of The Reality Spectrum. It can’t be done, short of eliminating humanity altogether, so the Tao continues to manifest itself in all sorts of ways.

Pick four traits. The last one must be "victim."

It's because we live in a gnostic culture that rails against the evil "structure." If there's a structure, there must be victims of the structure. 

Ancient gnosticism used the ancient cosmic system: The earth was in the center, surrounded by the air and spheres: sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and a ring of fixed stars that close it all off.

That was more-or-less accepted astronomical science around the time of Christ. It was nothing novel.

But the ancient gnostic took the cosmological system one step further: it taught that the cosmological system was a prison.

Every ancient gnostic sect taught this idea. Most sects said the cosmos was the creation of an evil god, the “Demiurge,” who created the cosmos as a structure of deception. The Demiurge then outfitted the structure with demons and archons who acted as prison guards to make sure no one got out of this cosmological prison.

Gnosticism offered liberation from the prison. The cosmological prison was the sine qua non of gnosticism: If existence wasn’t a prison, the gnostic’s product—knowledge, the map, the plan for escaping the prison—was worthless.

Gnosticism without a structural evil to overcome is like football, baseball, or basketball without a ball.

Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?

Rousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.

Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.

Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love. He said of his long-time mistress, a lowly laundress that he,

When those sensual needs resulted in five children, he put them into orphanages, which, given the state of orphanages in the 18thcentury, was practically a sentence of torture and early death: only five percent of orphan children survived to adulthood, and most of the adult survivors became beggars and vagabonds.

Eric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.

Brains beat brawn. The Titan Prometheus knew that. He joined Zeus in his battle against the Titans.

Prometheus later befriended the race of men. He saved them when Zeus thought about extinguishing them. He taught them arts and science. He gave them tools. Zeus increasingly found Prometheus’ promotion of the human race tiresome and troublesome.

And then Prometheus gave humans the gift of fire, in direct violation of Zeus’ orders.

Zeus was livid. He ordered Prometheus bound: Kratos (Power) and Bia (Force) held him while Hephaestus fettered him to a chain on a crag hanging over the Black Sea. An eagle came every day and ate his liver, which regenerated every night.

For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that.

If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world.

Solon opened Athens to true order: the transformative order found through the Tao.

Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked God and mind out of these conclusions and the Cartesian Jenga tower came tumbling down.

Something really bizarre happened around the year 500 BC, all across Eurasia. We started to realize that we live in the metaxy: an area comprised of transcendence and immanence. These ten thinkers, from Italy to China, led the way.

Voegelin was not charismatic. He was a “gentleman thinker.” He didn’t like small talk and valued his time. His personality didn’t attract a cult-like following. He didn’t establish a school or movement. But he’s important.

Before he published the Prince, Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy.

The Mandragola (The Mandrake) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about the Florentine beauty Lucrezia and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. The problem is, she’s married. She’s married to a wealthy old man who can’t get her pregnant and they need a son to maintain their political position.

Callimaco shows up, disguised as a doctor, and convinces her husband to give her a mandrake potion to increase her fertility. The problem is, Callimaco tells the old man, the first man who sleeps with her after she takes the potion will die. They decide to find an unwitting dupe to have sex with her. Callimaco, in different disguise, becomes the dupe, much to his delight. And Lucrezia’s. She at first was hesitant, but she relented and, convinced it was divine providence, takes Callimaco as her lover indefinitely.

Everything turns out well. The old man gets his male heir and Callimaco gets Lucrezia.

A 50-year-old man had ritual sex with a 12-year-old girl while adult women assisted.

And everyone was cool with it.

You're soaked in modernity. You think like a modern. It's not good. Consider doing the opposite of whatever your rationality tells you to do.

Your reason isn’t reasonable.

Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.

And smoke it and smoke it and smoke it, until you smoke rationality out of your head, until a love for the absurd fills your lungs, and until you breathe the fresh air of freedom.

Let me explain.

When I look back over my adult life and wince at the unfortunate things I did, there’s a common theme: the inner dialogue that began and concluded with, “I don’t see why” or its negative shade, “I don’t see why not.” I didn’t see why, or see why not, so I did X, Y, or Z. And X, Y, or Z turned out awful for me or others.

Most of us carry the assumption that we can do whatever we want unless our reason tells us not to.

Unfortunately, this tends to be almost identical to the assumption that we can do whatever we want. As Pascal said, as Freud argued, as current studies about cognitive biases show: our minds aren’t nearly as reasonable as we think.

It’s one thing to spend long hours in study, contemplation, and dialogue with advisers and friends to form your conscience when it comes to a weighty matter. It’s another thing to do something merely because your reason doesn’t explain why you shouldn’t.

The former is a sign of wisdom. The latter is a sign that your mind suffers from Modernitis.

“Modernitis”: A mental disease, rarely diagnosed, marked by intuitive confidence in one’s ideas and the findings of science.

It’s rarely diagnosed for the same reason a rational fish wouldn’t know it’s wet. A mental disease that afflicts everyone becomes a sign of mental health.

Descartes was the main philosopher that spread Modernitis. There were other causes and other philosophers contributed, sure, but he was the main culprit.

He died in 1650, a celebrity and conqueror. His ideas had spread; his ideas had won. Modernitis became a sign of mental health.

The effects were seen everywhere.

Descartes was a philosophical surgeon who lobotomized common sense from the modern mind without most people even noticing. It helped that western civilization was thoroughly prepped and anesthetized for the procedure.

Descartes, by placing ultimate importance on one's ideas, gave credibility to the outrageous ideas that littered modernity.

Lycurgus put the “Spartan” into Sparta.

Before Lycurgus, Sparta was like other Greek cities. Its citizens sang, celebrated love and good food, wrote poetry, and crafted fine pottery.

After Lycurgus, Sparta became grim and tough, determined to keep its slave class under control despite the daunting slave-to-citizen ratio (10:1?).

Music, poetry, fine pottery, and good food vanished. Family and love remained, but in twisted forms.

Men were discouraged from marrying small wives. Men with vigorous wives were encouraged to lend them to vigorous men. Men who grew too old to service their young wives were expected to make her available to young men.

The newborn was brought before a state council of inspectors. If rejected, the baby was thrown from a cliff.

At age seven, boys were removed from their families and raised by the state in barracks. Martial training was everything and done in the nude. The teachers provoked quarrels among the boys so they’d fight. An annual ritual involved whipping several boys until their blood stained the ground. At age 12, each boy received only one garment to wear for the year. He was not allowed to bathe much and was required to sleep in the open, on a bed of rushes. He was taught to read and write, but barely. He was taught to forage and steal. Stealth was valued above all, and getting caught doing whatever—stealing, trying to bang one’s own wife—brought punishment (great shame, flogging, etc.). At age 30, if the boy survived all this, he was admitted to full citizenship.

A Cistercian monk in Austria writes eruditely about David Foster Wallace. He appears to embrace "The Bridge Option" when dealing with modernity: embracing postmodernity and premodernity . . . bypassing modernity.

He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism.

He coined the term “Beat Generation” which became the proto-countercultural movement of the 1960s. He detested the 1960s counterculture, noting that the Beatnik’s was a movement of enthusiasm and glee, not one of disgruntled whining.

He took Benzedrine, morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, and opium. He saw a statue of Mary turn its head.

He died at age 47 from hemorrhaging of the esophagus, the drunkard’s classic death. His corpse held a rosary and his funeral Mass was held at St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church.

Such was the short life of Jack Kerouac.

He was hip before it was hip, crisscrossing America in the late 1940s, from New York to Denver to San Francisco, with stops in Des Moines, Chicago, New Orleans, and points in-between, with a jaunt into Mexico City.

He wrote about it during a Benzedrine-fueled three-week writing session in 1951, typing onto rolls of paper that were taped together into a long scroll so he didn’t have to stop to change the paper. When Truman Capote heard that Kerouac had written the book in three weeks, he sneered, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

But youngsters disagreed. They lapped up the book when it was published in 1957 and took to the road, seeking to become Beats.

Montaigne was the godfather of modern skepticism. His was a “negative skepticism,” which disturbed Descartes enough to prompt him to come up with a positive response, which in turn gave us modernity, its fierce subjectivism, and the parade of “little gods” that have marred the last 200 years.

The 1300s. Europe in the grips of economic depression, war, and natural catastrophes. Europe still experiencing the spiritual wake left by the lives of Saints Francis and Dominic. A deep concern with the interior life seized large numbers of people, both clergy and laity, and the pursuit of inwardness became an intense and exclusive goal of many.

The ones who made the most progress were like today’s American Idol contestants. They made it to the top and everyone wanted to listen to them.

“Little wonder when a man is first made a true contemplative, and tastes the sweetness and then feels the warmth, that he almost dies through excess of love.”

Richard Rolle: ladies’ man. Women were a source of temptation in his youth, an object of tender concern as a spiritual father in his prime. Most of his written works are devotions for his female listeners. Our culture can’t imagine this, of course. Or rather, our culture can imagine this only too much, letting its imagination run to the lascivious. He lived 31 of his 49 years as a hermit. The only Englishman on this list. Never canonized, but inspired a flourishing cult in England, where his books were more widely read than Chaucer’s in the 1400s. Sometimes credited as the first master of English prose.

No, that isn’t a passage above the front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s residence on Little Saint James.

He first articulated the western mystical tradition. We don’t even know who he was. But he pointed to the Tao.

When Dr. Faust insulted the Tao, the devil appeared. 

We intuit the Tao. That’s why our active hobbies engage us.

Thomas Aquinas was an existentialist, in his own way. His existentialism was forgotten . . . to western civilization's detriment. 

The full-court breakdown of Joe Rogan has begun.