The Literary Corner and Philosophers Thread 📙 📖

[Dr_Manhattan]

Even though there was some good things in the form of art that came out of the 20th century, the 21st was more Cinema and Television that convoluted everything, to which progressively got worse with the introduction of smart phones and the age of addiction exploitation. I think where it turned was after Eisenhower left office.

[Didgevillage]

Degenerate art
That’s the opinion of the Austrian artist and I tend to agree

Degenerate music

Degenerate music

[Dr_Manhattan]

Yes I agree, and I argue it started with the entire Post Modernism movement that produced such art. The Grandfather of Post Modernism is Nietzsche.

[Dr_Manhattan]

Malraux lost his wife to a freak train accident, his father to suicide, and his sons to a car crash

But tragedy didn’t stop him…

He won battles in WW-II, received 32 Nobel Prize nominations, and discovered lost cities mentioned in the Bible

Dig into his story today

1/ Malraux’s first published article - “The Origins of Cubist Poetry” - came out when he was 19

Magazines raved about his surrealist fiction

He was becoming popular among the literary salons of Paris…

But he suddenly PACKED bags and took his young wife to the Far East

Why?

2/ The philosophy of Nietzsche made a profound impact on young Malraux

His first wife Clara Malraux wrote that ever since she knew him, Malraux was “haunted by Nietzsche”

Malraux clearly had literary skills - now he wanted to prove himself as a bold man of action

Off he went

3/ Nietzsche gave Malraux the philosophy but it was Lawrence of Arabia who gave him a practical blueprint

Lawrence first burst on the scene as an archeologist

So Malraux headed to the ruins of Cambodia

With his wife & friend, he explored dense forests in search of lost temples

4/ Malraux chanced upon the Banteay Srei temple - a thousand year old monument

He made away with 4 beautiful statues, intending to sell them to French museums

But the French govt arrested him for stealing antiques

Decades later, he’d be one of the most powerful men in the govt

5/ Malraux would soon fly over the deserts of Saudi Arabia and Yemen in aircrafts - flying was barely a 20 year old technology at this point - right as the Saudi–Yemeni war raged on. He claimed to have found the mythical lost capital of Queen Sheba mentioned in the Old Testament

6/ After being captured multiple times in WW-II and escaping, Malraux won glory: “He participated in the Maquis with success: under the pseudonym of Colonel Berger, he organized and led the much celebrated Alsace-Lorraine Brigade to victory in the liberation of Strasbourg”

7/ Malraux’s personal life was marked by tragedy. Both his grandfather AND his father committed suicide. His second wife slipped while boarding a train and died - she was just 34. When Malraux was 59, both his sons died in an automobile car accident

[Dr_Manhattan]

H.L. Mencken hated modernity, opposed the New Deal, and was against American entry into WW-II

His productivity was legendary: he wrote more than 10 million words over his lifetime…

Mencken’s most powerful idea:

Democracy is not a solution but a PROBLEM

1/ Early democrats didn’t care for “the democratic ideal” at all

They had “highly materialistic” demands instead: “more to eat, less work, higher wages, lower taxes”

The masses didn’t wish to “exterminate the baron” but only to make him fulfill his “baronial” duties

2/ Mencken on the French Revolution:

“The Paris proletariat, having been misled into killing its King in 1793, devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled it - by the middle of 1796 it had another King…with an attendant herd of barons, counts, marquises, dukes”

3/ Today democracy presumes that the masses possess a “deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness & wisdom” as they’re “unpolluted by the corruption of privilege”

Somehow “what baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition”

4/ Democracy INTENSIFIES groupthink and group identity:

“Democratic man is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness—and the group, of course, must have its leaders.”

More groups mean more leaders…

5/ Democracies have the aristocracy of money - Mencken calls them “plutocrats”

But the plutocracy “lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honor, courage—above all, courage. It is transient and lacks a goal.”

6/ The plutocrats lack “an aristocratic disinterestedness born of aristocratic security”

Democracies birth their intellectual apologists - Mencken calls them “pedagogues”

These are not genuine thinkers; they’re “men chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs”

7/ The pedagogue’s job is to ensure adherence to the latest law dreamt up by the mob or by the plutocrats

Mencken:

“The pedagogue, in the long run, shows the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper editorial writer or the butler, not those of the aristocrat”

8/ Freud said we repress our sex drive as it’s frowned upon, but there’s nothing that democracy frowns upon more than a CLEAR proof of superiority…

Democracy says “the most worthy & laudable citizen is that one who is most like all the rest”

Hence we REPRESS our urge to excel

9/ This age demands we repress our greatness:

“A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies. But a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed. Yet this great Republic swarms with such men, & their sufferings are under every eye”

10/ Democracy lives on envy

Mencken:

“No doubt my distaste for democracy as a political theory is, like every other human prejudice, due to an inner lack—to a defect that is a good deal less in the theory than in myself. In this case it is very probably my incapacity for envy.”

11/ Mencken on the two worst crimes in a democracy:

“There is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.”

12/ What Mencken admires:

“What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, an all-embracing tolerance-in brief, what is commonly called good sportsmanship”

But all he sees in democracy is DISTURBED spirits being intolerant of greatness

13/ Mencken’s ideal man should not be “mistaken for one who shirks the hard knocks of life”

Indeed, Mencken’s aristocrat is “frequently an eager gladiator, vastly enjoying opposition”

But he’s a gentleman who doesn’t “snort” at his opponent but considers him honorable

14/ Mencken:

“The democratic politician, confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob, tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really full of rectitude and wisdom.”

15/ Feudalism v/s Democracy:

“The essential objection to feudalism was that it imposed degrading acts & attitudes upon the vassal; the essential objection to democracy is that it imposes degrading acts & attitudes upon the men responsible for the welfare & dignity of the state.”

16/ Democracy is not friendly to truth as the mob prefers pliable lies to immovable facts

H.L. Mencken:

“Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism.”

17/ If democrats are so sure they have the right answer, why do they abandon their “whole philosophy” and become “despots” at the “first sign of strain”?

Mencken:

“I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced”

18/ Mencken believed that over the long-term, democracy might cancel itself out:

“For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack”

Do people actually want to be free?

Mencken emphatically responds: NO

[Didgevillage]

Democracy in Greek: mob rule

Plato said it’s the worst form of government (governance)

The concept of “republic” as envisioned by Jefferson et al and in the US Constitution does not make room for Lincoln’s “government for/by/of the people.”

In other words, Lincoln’s speech is unconstitutional.
It takes a non-American to say that.

[Dr_Manhattan]

@Didgevillage

In other words, Lincoln’s speech is unconstitutional.
It takes a non-American to say that.

Lincoln is not revered in my family so I would have to agree.

Charles Dickens wrote

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.”“Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as many, many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.”

Karl Marx wrote:

“The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war, is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.”

These two quotes is proof that the war was not started due to slavery. Lincoln was a master propagandist and probably the first ever to perfect the art of “spin”. Ironically one William Randolph Hurst would be born in the same life time that Lincoln was alive and Lincoln’s assassination occurred two weeks before Hurst’s 2nd birthday. Needless to say, Hurst would grow up idolizing Lincoln’s mastery of news to invent his own brand known as “Yellow Journalism” which was responsible for trying to start a war with Spain, in what was known as the “Spanish American War”

[Roamingwyoming]

10 million words he wrote? Proof that some never sleep they just smoke cigarettes and eat nothing.

[Roamingwyoming]

Wasn’t the concept of “Republic” based on Rome’s governance and its founding precipitated by Athens democracy?

[Didgevillage]

I think Athens’ “democracy” failed when they condemned Socrates to death.

I think he took the poison because he believed in “democracy” while his disciples, including Plato, did not.

I think Plato’s “Republic” is a fascinating book where he discusses reincarnation.

[Roamingwyoming]

It has always been my perception never ever existed, even though on the contrary that some would try to argue.

[Dr_Manhattan]

Ronald Reagan went from a liberal Democrat to a Right-Wing President

The book that CHANGED his mind?

It was written by a college dropout called Henry Hazlitt…

Hazlitt was a self-taught polymath who became the NYT finance editor

Hazlitt’s timeless advice on how to think

1/ Clarity is all important

Everyone has a “pet little evil” that he attributes the rest of the world’s problems to

For the feminist it’s the “subjection of women,” for the priest it’s the “decline of religion”

For Hazlitt it’s the neglect of “independent, hard thinking”

2/ “Concentration” is key

A piano key half pressed will produce no music

A fence half completed will keep out no predators

A thought half pursued will lead to no eureka moments

People leave a lot of insight on the table by not following ideas to their logical conclusions

3/ You’re distracted because you’re SECRETLY convinced of the unimportance of what you’re working on:

“Much of our mind wandering is due to the fact that we are not fully convinced of the importance of the problem being attacked”

Work you know is important is easy to focus on

4/ How inventions happen:

“It has been frequently said that many of the world’s greatest inventions were due to accident. In a sense this is true. But the accident was prepared for by previous hard thinking. It would never have occurred had not this thinking taken place.”

5/ On Galileo & calculating time:

“The idea of the pendulum for regulating time occurred to Galileo from observing a swinging lantern in a cathedral. Think how many others must have seen that lantern swinging!”

Creativity is when the labor of logic sets the stage for a “eureka”

6/ A great metaphor for reading:

“Learning to think by reading is like learning to draw by tracing.”

Ultimately great painters let go of tracing and draw directly from nature

Great thinkers also let go of the guardrails of books, and attack problems directly

7/ Schopenhauer said reading instead of thinking original thoughts is like “running away from Nature to look at a museum of dried plants”

Reading should be used to stimulate new thinking

Hobbes famously said if “he had read as much as other men he would have known as little”

8/ The writer you is the smartest you

Hazlitt:

“One is often surprised, when reading something one has written at a previous time, at some of the remarks made. We seem to have temporarily grown wiser than ourselves.”

Write to grow wiser than yourself

9/ How to best convey your ideas:

“Word it in as many different ways as possible. If a person had never been to a city and you wanted to give him an idea of it, you would show him photographs taken from different viewpoints. One photograph would correct & supplement the other.”

Reagan called Hazlitt an “intellectual leader”

Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and H.L. Mencken were all fans of Hazlitt’s sharp insights and persuasive writing

What books did the self-taught Hazlitt learn from?

Explore Hazlitt’s book recommendations here:

Reagan called Hazlitt an “intellectual leader”

Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and H.L. Mencken were all fans of Hazlitt’s sharp insights and persuasive writing

What books did the self-taught Hazlitt learn from?

Henry Hazlitt's Book Recommendations

[Didgevillage]

@Dr_Manhattan

Reading should be used to stimulate new thinking

Reading stupid books is no different from watching idiotic TV shows

[Dr_Manhattan]

I disagree. Its the choice of books themselves that will differentiate between quality and idiotic.

My bad if I misread your post “Stupid books” if your meaning is choosing a book that is intentionally stupid.

[Didgevillage]

I have a friend who boasts about the amount of books he reads and his house is full of books. And usually they are mysteries and detective novels. Maybe they sharpen your thinking skills. LOL

[Dr_Manhattan]

I used to like reading a lot of Spy novels, which is commonly found at the “PX” while being deployed. Ludlum, Webb were popular authors of such books. I did not feel any smarter after reading them, just entertained for all the time we had to kill.

[Dr_Manhattan]

[Dr_Manhattan]

Modern world hostile to all male archetypes

The Trickster cut down by the stiff scientific method

The Warrior castrated by Safetyism

The Lover compromised by shallow hookups

The King denied his throne by the doctrine of equality

Greatness compromised from all directions

[Dr_Manhattan]

Ancient Rome was the world’s most powerful empire for 500 years

At its height, Rome boasted of roads, public baths, and much else that was close to miraculous for the rest of the planet

Then came the Great Fall…

What happened has lessons for the world TODAY

1/ In his book The City In History (1961), Lewis Mumford explains how Rome went from “Megalopolis to Necropolis.” This great city set up its own demise in two ways: Panem et circenses. That is: “bread and circuses.” Mumford: “Success underwrote a sickening parasitic failure.”

2/ As Ancient Rome became prosperous, it became an unsustainable welfare state

Mumford writes that “indiscriminate public largesse” became common

A large portion of the population “took on the parasitic role for a whole lifetime”

3/ More than 200,000 citizens of Rome regularly received handouts of bread from “public storehouses”

Lewis Mumford wrote the desire to lead an industrious productive life had severely “weakened”

So what did people spend their time on?

Distractions, which meant circuses

4/ The Roman people, not working for their livelihood but living off of the prosperity of their city, became numb

Mumford: “To recover the bare sensation of being alive, the Roman populace, high and low, governors & governed, flocked to the great arenas” for games & distractions

5/ The entertainment in Rome included “chariot races, spectacular naval battles set in an artificial lake, theatrical pantomimes in which lewder sexual acts were performed”

Out of 365 days, more than 200 were public holidays and 93 were “devoted to games at the public expense”

6/ Consuming entertainment became the primary priority of Roman citizens in Rome’s decadent phase

Lewis Mumford: “Not to be present at the show was to be deprived of life, liberty, and happiness”

Concrete concerns of life became “subordinate, accessory, almost meaningless”

7/ Ancient Rome could put half of its total population “in its circuses and theatres” at the same time! A new public holiday was declared to celebrate every military victory. But the number of holidays kept rising even when Rome’s military prowess began to fail…

8/ Mumford writes that no empire had such an “abundance of idle time to fill with idiotic occupations”

Even the Roman emperors who privately despised the games had to pretend they enjoyed them for “fear of hostile public response”

9/ Bottom line. The very power and prosperity of Ancient Rome set the stage for its collapse. As welfare states expand around the world today, and entertainment options get ever more immersive, we are forced to ask a question: Is this Post-Industrial Civilization Rome, Part II?

Gibbon: “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the fabric yielded.”

All advanced civilizations become “complex systems,” and then rot sets in

This idea is explored in a 1975 book: Systemantics

[Didgevillage]

As long as big banks and religious institutions do not monopolize the wealth of the land, the citizens can enjoy free time, free food and free housing.

I’m not an expert on this ideal society, but experimental communities are proving the point. There’s no need for 9-5 or 40 hour work week.

The downfall of Rome could be attributed to a few things other than financial and religious decays. Ample use of lead in the water system (causing lead poisoning and dumbing down), and climate change. (It was global COOLING that did Rome in)

Nonetheless, Rome’s Eastern twin lived for another 1,000 years.