let’s do history like an idealist.
long ago, before the monad was a glimmer in leibniz’s eye, there was the dark times. human beings did not have Souls and this was why they did not Think, and also why they did not have civilisation. if they had Souls, they would Think, and they would realise: this sucks, we need Society. if they had Perfect Souls, they would immediately build Capitalism and Liberal Democracy — but nothing is born with a Perfect Soul, you make your Soul more perfect by Thinking. and these guys didn’t have souls to begin with.
eventually, though, we know agricultural society led to settled existence. there are some competing theories about why this was, to do with things like climate factors, the specifics of plant cultivation, animal taming, et cetera, all incentivising or enabling a certain mode of life.
this is pedestrian bullshit for philistines. as we all know, it happened because people developed souls. grug at some point realised the existential nightmare of the neolith’s sheer intellectual and spiritual poverty, made lucid to him by his new Soul, and he decided to plant beans in the ground and stick around them while they grew.
how grug developed this Soul is unclear. but our best research suggests continental philosophy, around the renaissance period, reached back in time and gave him one. this is the sheer power of Idealism, and it’s because we’ve spent a long time working on our Souls. now, we can reach back wherever we want in the past, and give people the Ideas we want them to have. this will also serve to adequately explain why the present order of things is perfect and will never change–we could call it “human nature”.
the agricultural soul wasn’t perfect, and indeed, these idiots were barely sapient. they couldn’t think of any good systems, like democracy, only clans and tribes and families. but it was a soul, and agonisingly, people learned to think. and their souls, very slowly, grew Better thoughts.
it’s like technology. when you have less technology, making technology is hard, but you still make technology. and when you have more technology, making technology is easier. this is why technological process is exponential. and because of causal logic, we can now say that the ontological purpose of past technology was not, as philistines argue, to meet the needs of the time in which it was created, but to produce today’s technology. this, we call teleology.
but technology itself is too icky and pedestrian for our purposes. teleologising ideas is where it’s really powerful. our ideas, see, every other idea before our ideas only existed so we can have these ideas. the metaphysics exists entirely for us, the most perfect souls ever, to have our ideas.
this is also why we can go back in time and give people souls. teleology is time travel, and the philistines will never know this because they are too stuck in their so-called ‘real lives’.
so, the development of ideas was slow at first. and societies everywhere were pretty shitty. but then, our teleology radars ping. our telos is being connected to, through the ley line that strings all ideas together.
someone is trying to talk to us.
we go down, and we find this place, greece. and we find this man, plato. he is telling us the first Good Idea.
some people say that the chinese were having Ideas too. this is wrong. we know this because we haven’t read chinese philosophy, and as such when we try and talk to laozi he gives us brain damage. taoism therefore is entirely mystical, a sole property of the dark magic practiced in the orient. the same is so with confucianism.
so the first Good Idea is the world of forms. plato, with his very developed soul, recognises that this thing, the real world, is Fake. there is clearly a hidden world of Perfect Order that we are drawing all of these Fake things from.
we ask plato what he means by this. plato tells us, “i don’t think women are human beings. also, persians are natural slaves of kings.”
now, we know the ideas plato has here are misogyny and racism. we know these are undeveloped forms of the Ideas we face today in misogyny and racism, so they must exist on the same broad conduit. that conduit is Badness, and it is Wrong. plato’s soul was clearly not perfect enough.
this is also why the greeks had democracy, but also had slaves. they had souls advanced in one aspect but regressive in another–they had democracy without universal liberty. this was their downfall, when the real Badness arrived and their souls were powerless to stop it.
this power was rome, which said it was a republic but not in a democratic sense, only wealthy people had political power. this was because the wealthy people had souls but the poors did not–this was why they were arrogant. but then the poors developed their first souls, this time given to them by the empiricists (an idea itself vested in them by the positivists).
as such, the empiricists toppled the roman republic on a wave of populism, and reason lost as a true dictatorship occurred. it’s good to know this, and that it was bad, and that brutus was right to kill caesar, because it’s basically just what happens with trump these days, and his Badness is much the same thing. some bastards in the future have given white americans primitive souls for the first time, and we’re all paying the price.
teleology is a double-edged sword, after all.
rome crushed greece because both rome and greece had souls — we know this because of metaphysics, which lets us create an egregore, aggregate soul of collections of people bound by the same idea. and naturally, the people who Think the most will have the most say on what that soul looks like. plato’s world of forms was about the truest sense of all these souls.
and indeed, when rome conquered greece, it was actually a war between these souls. the roman soul was stronger than the greek soul, but the roman soul was Bad because of the plebs (greek slaves didn’t have Souls but plebs did; as such, the greeks could be enlightened Thinkers but the romans had Other Souls lowering the tone).
the romans were as such crude utilitarians and most of their “philosophy” was vulgar crass shit like war and politics, which means their Souls are much harder to modify through teleology. we must break this palisade or else history stops happening, and we all stop existing.
luckily, thanks to the Greeks, we can already break this palisade, and let history happen. another victory for Teleology.
the method by which we do so comes from aristotle. aristotle, a student of plato, is the man who saved western civilisation because he gave us Logic.
logic allows for testable hypotheses, and we can apply a Dialectic to logic to theorise how different arguments resolve each other. the Dialectical method is really important, but there’s also a bit of an original sin to it, because the Dialectic can actually be useful to the philistines, if they apply it to their so-called “Real Lives”.
we can’t let these people do this so we must never apply the Dialectic to a “real thing”, only Ideas, which are Realer. this is what the world of forms is about. it’s about understanding what is Real, which can’t be What We See. we know this because we know the World of Forms exists, and we know this because we have souls, which are the developed forms of the essential soul philosophers gave Grug all those years ago.
but when applied to raw logic, we can systematise it, and conclude that this raw logic is the actual order of everything. we must make the logic perfect, formalise it, and that logic, which we have used to understand the world–that logic is actually the world.
and now we can take a sledgehammer to the romans.
when the people elevated caesar to his heights of power, we now know, these people were being irrational. they weren’t using our Logic to understand how dangerous he was–they were just stuck in the Fake World, and their ‘real lives’, which thanks to holy Idealism, we now know are fake.
when the senators stabbed caesar, they too did not understand how this would actually lead to a roman empire and the death of the republic, because again, they weren’t reading the Forms like we were. we know now that their Bad Ideas, their souls rotted by a lack of Reason, were reaping more bloodied fruits, and indeed, we can use this to produce a fundamental truth: humans aren’t naturally Rational. they need philosophers to give them Reason, Logic, Order to their lives. people who have worked more on their Souls.
and where we must compromise with this gross, Fake Reality, because of the peons dragging us down, we have politics, which philosophy must grudgingly guide through history.
some of the cleverest people in history, philosophers, have said we should cut out the middle-man and we ought have Philosopher Kings. sadly, this enlightened reason is squashed beneath the Bad Souls of the dimwitted, irrational masses, who demand what they call “Real Things”.
but regardless, here we have all the tools to dream the State into existence. states have Souls too, and there’s a lot of discussion about the relationship the state-soul has with the nation-soul, or whether they’re the same thing.
but in any case, we can conclude the roman State had a rotten soul, and thus we don’t need to worry about it anymore because we’ve given them this Soul and the telos is still threaded through our present-day Way of Being. crisis averted.
still, the roman soul did absorb a bit of the greek soul, and that let them be the best of a bunch of bad options but their Soul was still decaying over time. then, a bunch of horseback riders, cast into the world by Satan, with no souls at all, destroyed the roman empire, and we have the dark ages, where the human soul is very dim indeed.
given there was not much Real Philosophy in europe during this time, we can happily conclude that it’s largely unimportant and there’s no need for much investigation.
only when the europeans rediscover aristotle do they begin to have Feelings again, and we can pick up right where we left off.
this eventually leads to something called the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment was very interesting.
by applying aristotle’s logic, we realise we can do something called Reason. rationalising things is Great, because that means Knowledge is acquired by Thinking. by realising this, because we worked hard enough on our souls, we can then slowly begin to illuminate the peasant masses.
the best way to do this is to get different groups of society and give them souls. but to do that, we first need to do more Thinking.
there are now two schools of thought: the Rationalists, who say you can get everywhere with pure Reason, and the empiricists, who say no, you have to understand things from sensory experience, and that’s where you get knowledge.
the empiricists are getting a bit too close to philistinism with this, though, so the great rationalist hero gottfried leibniz comes in and he has an idea which is about something truly important: the Monad.
the Monad is fucking brilliant. it’s not perfect yet, because leibniz’s soul wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely a step in the right direction.
we’ve been talking about Souls a lot, but how do you know what makes up a Soul? well, other Souls, presumably, which project between themselves the bigger Soul.
but how do you know what makes up those other Souls? these things, Souls, they’ve got a lot of moving parts.
well, leibniz, this big old genius, he provides us with the answer: Monads, the building-blocks of Everything. the Monad is this irreducible, indivisible Essence with no properties at all, and it must exist as the fundamental component of Souls. it is the rawest form of Being. there, we’ve discovered it.
we have long known of monads, but leibniz was the one who said there’s actually Infinity of them, and together they are what make up Souls.
we’ve learned the real god was the monads we made along the way.
the next great hero to grace the scene was immanuel kant. kant was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, and he produced what we call german idealism. the german idealists were the best idealists because they understood you can’t understand history actually because human beings are Filthy Sinners and we need to just Think and Think and Think.
then, we can critique history, from our Thinking, and set the course straight.
we’re so fucking clever.
kant critiqued both the rationalists and the empiricists, and in doing so reconciled their positions into something even more Reasoned than the previous shit, it was his critique of pure reason. he understood the monad was not an instance, but a relationship between things; these noumena were what really drove shit.
this is what the Enlightenment is really about. the noumena, the sweet child of the monad, and now, we can go back to the masses, with locke and voltaire, and we can tell them, with our oh-so-polished souls: we must govern society by Reason. these kings, with their divine right, they must be Rational or they are Nothing.
meanwhile, hobbes is saying something about the social contract and human nature, but we don’t really listen to him and he doesn’t know that matters because he’s got a crooked soul. the fool is trying to assign his own human nature, but we’ve been Thinking more than him, so we can use our Ideas to build human nature instead. he’s doing political philosophy, but he’s understanding the state as a compromise over human nature. this is moronic, because it assumes someone, somewhere, actually built the state. but because we are more Enlightened than him, we know the truth: that we dreamed the state into existence, post-facto.
anyway.
we tell the people to be Enlightened and Rational, and they responded by killing an insane amount of people in the french revolution. this original sin is why french people are still so politically violent. they try and do Democracy again, but fail, because they’re not paying enough attention to their souls, and this is why they kill people.
why did this happen? all our Reason failed to land, somehow.
some people will ascribe some dumb materialist explanation for this, their vaunted “real lives”, but you see, it’s all actually the fault of one man, georg friedrich hegel.
what’s happening with kant is a Dialectic, and we’re still doing Soulcraft to figure out how the Dialectic works. the Dialectic has to be a thing unto itself, after all. we aren’t just describing things with the Dialectic, we are building a philosophical system, and as plato taught us, that philosophical system is actually base Truth.
hegel, this gelatinous slug, he seduces this poor damsel, the Dialectic, and he contorts her into incomprehensible shapes, and when we read hegel, with his abstract and technical terminology, random german capitalisations, and whatnot, we see something truly perverse. after hegel has eloped with the dialectic, something bloody and horrible is born nine months later, something that should have been aborted:
immanent critique.
we have mobilised entire legions of teleologists to try and go back in time and suffocate this baby in its cradle, but it keeps on confounding them with hegel’s oblique and occult germanic savage wisdom. as such, the damage of immanent critique is done, and we can only really work around it until teleology develops to an advanced enough point that we can kill it for good.
immanent critique is founded on the ridiculous notion that something’s essence can be at odds with itself. that the monad is actually nine steps away from a mental breakdown and might just shoot itself in the skull. and horrifyingly, due to hegel’s enormously powerful soul, this slowly becomes true.
the brave hegel scholars who descend into the belly of this beast to confront it with a shotgun are the best of us Idealists. by trying to penetrate the mental barrier erected in hegel’s mind palace, to unwind the Mystery of his soul, they are saving the monad from an otherwise imminent suicide. if the monad shoots itself, we are all Lost, so the immense wear and tear on the minds of our hegelian spelunkers is a truly heroic act of self-sacrifice.
but, immanent critique as ironclad as it is, the burning light of Hegel’s soul, we now have to use it, to keep the monad safe.
and we look at the french revolution. we’re shuddering, crying, sobbing, but forced to conclude:
the leaders of the french revolution overthrew the old society, because they were part of the old society.
FUCK! we’ve done so much Idealism we’ve accidentally found our way into the “real world” again!
this phenomenon, we call “modernity”, and it is a truly dark and depraved time to be a Thinker. politics is ascendant over philosophy, and the enlightenment, brave reason, logic, it is now subject to the pedestrian whims of the masses again.
we’ve royally fucked ourselves. but then, new heroes emerge, new paragons of Thought, streaming out of germany on saintly, angelic wings: the YOUNG HEGELIANS!
the young hegelians are basically philosophical superheroes. they alone saved us from the lie that the real world is full of human beings. and clutched in their arms, speeding away from the burning building called the “industrial revolution”, that we were screaming from the window of, we have no choice but to tearfully thank them.
these young radicals, like bauer, feuerbach, and stirner, they changed everything, by critiquing society purely again, through their Ideas. they could now destroy all the Bad Souls, with their systems of Rational Thought, and in their hands immanent critique could actually be a force for good! they used it to, in accordance with True Idealism, attack the petty tyrannies that were still afflicting the rapidly-modernising life, and truly change the world by critiquing it.
that was a close one.
thanks to the Young Hegelians, we learned how to breathe again. we were rapidly steering the ship toward the least worst way to organise modernity: democracy. true democracy this time, universal democracy, for everyone. where the ley line of state legitimacy runs down from the people, so actually, when a police officer beats a citizen, the citizen is actually hitting themselves through the ley line. so it’s actually a form of self-harm and it’s their fault really.
there were two Bad Ideas, though, with Rotten Souls, still trying to contend with this tradition for control over modernity.
the first was communism. communism was based on the ludicrous belief, proposed by the young hegelian-turned-renegade karl marx, that Ideas weren’t literal tangible things and only existed in practice when they were useful to people, and that actually producing the things you use to live might be important, and the “search for meaning” is just the tumult of our lives–this is deeply wrong and twisted.
Minnie Monad is recovering from her disastrous love affair with hegel, in the benevolent hands of the young hegelians. marx wants to shoot her with a rifle in a summary execution.
marx literally wants to fucking kill the monad.
this is a very bad idea. but when the bolsheviks, in russia (which has a very sick soul, so they have lots of bad ideas generally), came to power, they started killing monads without remorse. and human beings as well, perhaps, but the more existential loss is the sheer amount of fucking monads they killed. they did a full-scale Monad Genocide.
this is why communism can never work. they’re killing monads, the true god of all things.
the second bad idea is fascism.
fascism is less complex than marxism because it was really just all the racism and misogyny we talked about earlier coming home to roost. it didn’t want to kill the monad, but preserve it in chains. the only freedom for the monad is under democracy.
but the fascists didn’t want democracy. they thought the nation-soul and the state-soul ought to be bound through politics, and that this would be the new way society should be organised. the “third way” between communism and democracy.
this failed, though, because racism and misogyny are bad. might doesn’t make right, it’s reason that makes right. as long as we’re reasoning, we can’t make wrong. so again, we need to Think more.
the fascists nevertheless took over a lot of countries and waged the most destructive war ever. this truly bad war, a product of fascism being a bad idea, even had the communists get involved, and we sided with the communists for a bit because we were both fighting the fascists.
but we also knew we couldn’t let the communists win too hard, so in the postwar order the Best Democracy, America, began to fight a ‘cold war’ against communism.
communism at this point had killed so many fucking monads that they eventually got brezhnev, the epitome of a monadless existence: dull and dry bureaucratic collectivism, divorced of any meaning at all but self-perpetuation.
these idiots still think the monad doesn’t exist, and that they aren’t killing it.
but the soviet union collapsed, because gorbachev had the Good Idea of placing russians in poverty, which they deserve for being russians. now, we have perfect liberal democracy everywhere and the true war is now to complete the Enlightenment, perfect Reason, and defeat the insidious threat of postmodernism, that weird thing we don’t quite like but can’t define.
this is the kindest way it could’ve shaken out.
look at the world around you. all its problems can be dreamed away, in this lovely world of purest thought.
what could be better than that?
Leave a Reply