Category: Politics

i decided to do something drastic and finally read the myth of sisyphus.

for the uninitiated, the myth of sisyphus is this essay by albert camus.

i have long known about camus and indeed i have long known that he was a very articulate and prosaic proponent of this thing, human freedom, which he found an inherently ‘absurd’ concept.

‘absurdism’ means basically just accepting how silly philosophy is but being a philosopher about it. here, philosophy is the Big Old Cosmic Search For Meaning what we preoccupy ourselves with.

philosophy, the search for meaning. camus, he recognises, okay, so we’re trying to look for this big old Message written into the Mystery of Life. but we also know that there is no Message, that the universe is cold and doesn’t care about little old us, because it doesn’t have the ability to care. therefore: we make our own Message, our own Meaning!

the cosmos doesn’t give a shit about us, says camus, and in doing so, it graciously emancipates us from having to care about what it has to say. freed from this burden of godly ways by the enlightenment, we may now live for ourselves! how radical! how liberating! he goes through all these contradictions in the prior attempts to understand Truth, and goes: how absurd! how wacky! how silly of us, the species. we are truly just apes on a ball. and we think we Know Things!

are you inspired by your cosmic insignficance? because we’re going to try and find meaning anyway! and now we’re free! free to find our own meaning! because you don’t Fucking Matter! this is absurd, little flea, and you should Love It.

it’s like, okay camus, but i have a job.

camus can’t hear me though because he’s too busy Not Mattering and Loving It. but i go back to my job and i am confronted with all the ugly ways in which i Matter, in a sense what is real to me.

camus, with a dearth of any real concerns in his ‘philosophy’, he fashions some shackles, fashions a key, puts on the shackles, then takes the shackles off. this brilliant display of human emancipation made manifest is a blueprint for real freedom, applied to the real shackles what people had thrust upon them and to which they have not the key.

what camus is doing here is he is making a philosophy for himself. but to camus, that’s the actual point of philosophy anyway.

the greeks, who very deliberately structured their philosophy around the language and assumptions of their society, and fucking killed socrates for not doing this; the greeks, who had their sophists go around and deliberately teach philosophy to other people; the greeks, who founded the very History of Ideas in which camus finds the genesis of his own Ideas; the greeks, who are called the first western philosophers; these greeks, they are missing the point of philosophy.

only camus and his higher-order sapience can properly get what they were laying down, the real meaning of It All that they couldn’t fathom. because they were still aspiring to this thing, Philosophy, which he now understands but they couldn’t.

the real meaning is in fact meaninglessness, that camus has called out to god and heard nothing. i guess that means when the greeks called out to god, god responded.

what the fuck happened to god, then? did nietzsche actually Kill him? or did you, camus? with your massive brain? have you got god Locked Up in your fucking Basement, camus. or are you Full of Shit.

the point is that the position of philosophy as some inherent search for meaning is ridiculous. the search for meaning in the form of philosophy comes when a ruling class adopts a position and thereby produces ideas. this is because consciousness is no longer attached to immediate reproduction but because we have produced the means of our own reproduction.

we know this thing, Ideology, it exists. and it is clearly useful inasmuch as it is a thing what Language does in society. it’s communicating signals in a structured way, and the signals can reference each other and thereby form a system.

when there arises a usefulness in describing a structure of material forces, you can then become an ideology guy who says why women and slaves are the property of free men. and you then get all into the primordial Essences to justify this because you know, you can start building more ideas on top of the ideas. this metastructure is what idealism is: it’s taking reality, describing reality, then describing the ideas with more ideas, to then use those ideas to say why reality is reality. in lieu of any real observable thing for these ideas, you get metaphysics, to which you can apply logic. these logical systems might be useful, they might not, but they’re also working with the metaphysics so it’s all self-referential at the end of the day until you apply them to real fucking things.

this, the metaphysics, is this thing camus misidentifies as the ‘pursuit for meaning’ what sums up all philosophy. the logical assortment of forms and monads and noumena and all the other basic essences what people built, this entire metaphysical system is, to him, Philosophy.

except, you know, the Philosophy is also about the women and the slaves what have meaning for themselves as made manifest in social production. but this meaning, per camus, is actually cruelly robbed from them by the metaphysics, which are what is actually conditioning their sense of ‘meaning’. the fact the slaves and women are Oppressed and Murdered and often don’t really think about the metaphysics, this is secondary to the metaphysics which now Own Their Fucking Souls.

metaphysics are still conditional on things which are conditional on the base social order though, so you know, sometimes reality slips through. kant goes, descartes, what the fuck are you saying. “i think therefore i am”? no you moron you are because you have other things you relate to.

this understanding, hegel uses all the sciencey Logic with the new Metaphysics and develops immanent critique. and then everyone loses it a bit again until marx comes in and says: “okay what about the Real Things, dude.” and everyone freaks out because he’s basically recognised the proles are human beings with agency and power and whatnot, not because of their Souls and Forms but because they actually make fucking Everything now and don’t need to be under any pretensions about it because you are demolishing their Churches and building Factories instead.

you see? so, like, there was this realness latent to a fragment of the metaphysics, and the system of philosophy, it Got There eventually, because it was still about real things.

marx was using philosophy not to interpret and critique the present metaphysics, but to critique the world, and in that same moment, change it. everyone freaked the fuck about this, doubly so when the bolsheviks had their Whole Ordeal. and the bolsheviks, they weren’t very Moral about it and they killed a lot of people for their future.

killing people for your future, as camus understood it, is much less Moral than dying for someone else’s present. this is why when he, a white frenchman born in algeria, identified with the pied-noir more than the national liberation front, and scolded the latter for killing the people what were killing them, and then scolded the pied-noir for killing as well, he felt very good about himself.

then they all kept on killing each other. and camus, sighing at the failure of his Diplomacy, decided to scold algerians for actually striving to achieve this Postulation of his, human freedom. he couldn’t unify absurdism with a real thing so he just fell back on his more banal bigotries. turns out there was Real Meaning for the algerians, and their freedom was accordingly not in Absurdity, but Lucidity.

so all that’s left is some fucking french racist with his collection of self-help books. this isn’t “philosophy” but people will look you in the eye and tell you it is. that camus has discovered some important, liberatory truth by understanding that there is no truth. that camus, this Soulful White Boy, he figured it out by just giving up and railing against anyone with skin in the game.

it’s the shit some idiot bong-smoking flatmate says as a sort of ersatz Thought: man, think about it. we’re all so small, man. we mean nothing, man. but man, doesn’t that… man. that makes us free… because we like, make our own fates, dude…

except that flatmate then later goes: “fuck algeria” because in fact he doesn’t “mean nothing” he has real biases what the world has given him.

this kind of bullshit only happens because you have someone who can’t be fucked to read into the people around them.

so, like, take this camus banger:

It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us. But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise, all those irrational feelings which offer no purchase to analysis. I can define them practically, appreciate them
practically, by gathering together the sum of their consequences in the domain of the intelligence, by seizing and noting all their aspects, by outlining their universe. It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally.

this is fucking Ridiculous and when i read it my jaw fucking Dropped because it reads like a Satire what i wrote while Angry about The Idealists. sometimes i wonder if i Hate The Idealists Too Much then i realise, No, i actually don’t Hate them Nearly enough.

A Man does not remain ‘forever unknown to us’. that is fucking Moronic. there is a Man, dude, he is this thing what you Talk to. this Man has an interiority but inasmuch as it actually exists for anyone this is only so far as his real actions dictate. you know them by “their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence”. because that is what is Useful. not the anguished or enchanted Soul within.

a moralist might argue: but say, what if there is someone who appears like they aren’t suffering, but they actually are. are you not Fucking This Guy Over?

no, that guy’s being Fucked Over by someone else because if i cannot tell this is fucking happening because it is Impossible to figure out, then i cannot do shit about it and you know, this mythical person who is in Torment is also a social stakhanovite who will never ever let it show in any action in evidence.

but for those of us in the real world, we know that actually, these flaws do show. when someone to whom we consistently relate is suffering in a real sense, it does actually begin to show in their words and deeds. and we know even the big old moral titans in our lives, who put on a brave face all the time, they can collapse if they suffer enough. and that brave face? we learn that it’s not the whole story, and we can talk to them about their Worries. and if they trust us, they tell us; and if they don’t tell anyone, and instead Repress it, you know, they can collapse.

that’s what all this means in a real sense.

the more insidious logic is when you take someone who’s suffering but say they’re actually happy. when we take the Noble Savage, this person living an existence of Raw Necessity but who still has feelings and emotions and variable lives; people reduce this person to a state of primordial goodness because of an ascribed primitiveness that is inherent to their soul and then corrupted by modernity, rather than a real product of the orders in which they exist.

so after all this bullshit sophistry, camus summarises the myth of sisyphus in a perfect lie to encapsulate all his other lies.

sisyphus is a guy who is suffering really badly. he has to roll a boulder up a mountain forever, as punishment from the gods. and he can never reach the summit.

camus says, though, we are sisyphus. we’re punished by god to move boulders. and in that, we suffer. but you know, that suffering, that’s the meaning in lieu of god. our struggles, our motives, our earthly deeds, they are in service of the Essence of meaning which we vest in ourselves, but can never admit is Real to anyone else; and that in this ordeal, whipping yourself like a medieval peasant trying to drive back the plague through Divine Repentance, that is the Meaning we seek. it’s not the quality of struggle, merely the quantity of it.

so you know, you can get this guy, sisyphus, and every single bit of evidence on earth points to him being miserable.

but camus, he tells us, sincere as he is, with his flagellant gospel of the Absurd, a lie so ridiculous that we feel ourselves compelled to believe it:

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

as we all know, the idealists are gaslighting you. the object-level policy Wonks of xitter fame have adopted a language, the ruling orthodoxy of written thought, and prioritisation of that language is Moral. this is the language of sensible policy proposals, of real things, so they speak, of the Issues, bread-and-butter stuff. you know, the thing the People think of. this really is the proposed argument, for what it’s worth.

but first: what is a “language” anyway.

well, language is the thing what we use to communicate with each other. there’s a lot of people talking about the semantics and syntax of what we say, and then of course they will strip it down to some formal logic that will adequately explain why we do what we do. this ‘universal language’ would obviously be unintelligible to most people, but nevertheless it’d assuredly reflect the truest essence of human communication.

this is a product of viewing things as essences rather than use-values. the idealists Honestly believe that things are more than what they are *to us*; that a spade what they pick up and hold is more than a spade, it has a soul. that they can create some order beyond themselves as humans, with their very powerful human minds.

they’re searching for the ‘human spirit’.

now, don’t get me wrong, formal semantics has various utilities beyond navel-gazing. it is, for instance, very good at creating a model for language at scale, and with a lot of this stuff you can a large language model. the large language model serves real purposes beyond convincing a schizophrenic dude that his mother is trying to kill him. an LLM is a decent enough complex search engine, albeit with hiccups that make it unreliable. you can get it to do truly abominable but functional programming (until you need to patch it). you can also get it to depict complex images in a variety of styles which procedurally mimic human ways of drawing, sparking yet another debate about the human soul (now called ‘art’), and how it flows through the artistic Ley Line running through humans but nothing else, and onto the paper, and the chatbot can’t do this because it doesn’t have the Ley Line.

anyway, all this means use-values at the end of the day, and so you know, formal semantics isn’t pointless. it gave us MechaHitler and ChatGPT essays, that’s a win for the Species i guess.

nevertheless, the people who approach language as this formal logic still do so under the honest belief that they are decrypting some essential human language. that they are revealing something about themselves. or, per Richard Montague: “I reject the contention that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages.”

the thing this Wanker is saying is basically that there is a being of pure theory behind ‘formal’ and ‘natural’ language and it is exactly the same in both of them. this hidden Textwall what God posted before hitting send on the seven day creation, and we are now all discovering because we reached a higher order of True Sapience than the society which came before us.

this Godspeak, okay, inasmuch as it’s real it’s this common thread where human language arises because it is useful. you know, grug spots wounded mammoth, needs noise or sign for ‘wounded’, needs noise or sign for ‘mammoth’. all rather intuitive. someone needed or wanted to make that noise or make that sign and it is used to describe reality. now we’re all very good with the noises and the signs and it got more useful as the things it described got more complex and we needed more signals for more things. and you know, we’ve got these mouths and vocal chords and larynxes and digits and different words are shortened or lengthened for a certain utility and you know, there’s a lot of stuff happening but generally you’re just doing useful shit.

so these people come along and they break it down to their bases, semantic and syntactical value, and then they go right, there is a finite amount of all these things, we can assign them all Numbers and Functions and do Maths with it all. and this is correct. they can absolutely do that.

and so you know, you’ve managed to translate a bunch of common use values in language into a bunch of numbers and functions. and you feed this to something what reads numbers and functions and it can then speak human language.

like how a lot of boomers think ai is jarvis, formal semantics guys will see this as something in function more like the star trek universal translator. but no they’ve just compared use-values. there’s no guarantee it can account for every possible innovation, because to do that you’d need some universal theory of human development, which is a bit outside the scope of formal semantics.

these people are really fucking clever in a real sense that matters but the problem is they didn’t get their Online Marxist Theoretical Training like us other clever people and so they aren’t trying to piss off Saint Bruno like he’s their dad. instead they default to the idealism of the civil society what allows them to exist as this thing, intellectuals. and you know, because civil society is proposing something, a positivity, it requires a thought system to accommodate all its Law and Order. these systems will operate on their own premises and generally govern things for the benefit of the guys in charge. that distinct premise is idealism, and idealism is useful. and yeah, anyone who’s in the Meat of the world understands that the law and reality aren’t really the same thing and we’re all just trying our best or whatever. it’s not perfect, but hey, it’s the best possible option.

but intellectuals will often deliberately position themselves away from the Meat so they can Think more, and we call this an “ivory tower”. and they kind of just huff their own farts. disconnected from the real world they can kind of just say whatever so long as it’s using the Good Terms what Civil Society ordained. as a result, intellectuals have their own language, useful for the purposes of this caste of Thinkers.

this is not to say that idealist intellectuals don’t produce ideas that are useful to the Meat-people. kant’s critique of leibniz is useful. hegelian immanent critique is useful. and formal semantics is useful. we can use these to look at the world and understand it.

but by marx’s time they’re huffing their own farts so much you’ve got the young hegelians and they’re producing shit that’s only really just window dressing. it’s useful because you can quote it at social functions with all the other Intellectuals. marx, this jewish lumpen varmint who the other intellectuals just kind of consider genetically inferior to them, he’s the one screaming at them: THE SPADE IS A SPADE.

and they don’t listen and he recognises they won’t listen but he’s still lampooning them. not in the fashion of max stirner, who was the first man since diogenes to present himself as some picaresque noble savage, but you know, by tying his critiques to real forces and negating the arguments of the young hegelians in real terms not by working with their proposals but instead saying, the spade is a spade and it doesn’t have a soul.

the thing is, though, a lot of intellectuals don’t fucking get this. so they will pull out the big old lexicon and then argue that he’s not conforming to the systems what he is critiquing so thereby he can’t critique them. he’s not using their Language, and their Language is like 95% of their social existence so if you attack the axiomatic shibboleths of their Textwalling you’re basically threatening to murder them.

so they’ve got no choice but to like, conclude he actually doesn’t Get It because he’s not tapped into the Ideas Bong that they’re all passing round. and this is kind of why it feels like philosophers are gaslighting you all the time.

this doesn’t mean the anti-intellectual angle is correct, either. i’m not dismissing Big Words because i am intimidated by them. i use lots of Big Words and Oblique Terms. but generally i try to make them mean something. these guys don’t.

with policy wonks, it’s kind of the same. these guys have this thing, policy. and policy is Moral because it has political sanction from the State (to them, a coherent and permanent thing), and God’s blessing thus achieved, policy can solve everything that can or need be solved.

they can’t put it like this because it does in a sense reveal that their thought process is basically inseparable from classical fascism (or the pophist understanding of, say, stalinism, or just ‘totalitarianism’ in general), and that they think the state really does control every aspect of people’s lives, which is self-evidently false in a regime of private property. this isn’t Moral because of their understanding of the history of ideas, where fascism was soundly defeated, until trump allowed them to debate the meaning of fascism in relation to a real force again. and maga is pretty explicitly iconoclastic with regards to the policy-idols so they can’t conclude fascism is Moral.

so you know, they instead rationalise it as: well, i’m thinking of what’s possible. revolutions (another thing vanquished by the history of ideas) and whatnot are impossible/immoral/irresponsible and so you know, now this means the State is here for good, we should work with it. as long as we understand the policy, we won’t save Everyone, but we’ll save Enough.

this is true in a sense. but policy wonks also have a big blind spot other than their basic idealism, in that they don’t really have a coherent theory of power.

you see, the big think tanks what liberals actually Listen To are actually backed up by these big old bags of money. and you know, these big old bags of money have strings attached, and the strings and the money are all real and important. these interests are not always leashed with some omniscient intent by a sinister capitalist cabal, but you know, a think tank funded by a billionaire is far less likely to suggest policy that’d harm the billionaire’s interests.

there is nothing to stop an individual from using their wealth to kneecap themselves because, well. while elon owns tesla he also habitually abuses ketamine and hates women so he bought twitter and thus made everything so much worse for himself. but you know, at a broader systematic level in terms of conglomerates, stripped of the pretensions of would-be tony starks, it is pretty much just “money talks” at the end of the day.

this is a product of the fact that, you know, this whole thing of liberal law and order’s just a system used to govern reality as seen by ruling interests. it has to look a bit like reality, but only inasmuch as it the reality that the ruling class themselves impose. if we detach ourselves from the idea that the ruling class are godly things and can’t mould mountains like clay, this means their systems don’t actually measure up to reality in a perfect way.

so you’ve got this disconnect, the fact of Meat-people and Stately Meat-people, and then the orthodoxy by which the ruling class instructs the Stately Meat-people. The task of reconciling these things falls to the Stately Meat-people, but there’s still going to be friction. The Stately Meat-people understand this, but the policy wonks don’t.

i mean, the policy wonks, they’re good servants of god to be honest. they took all their civics classes and they learned how to use the language of leadership. they are being good citizens and their contribution to the discourse, this state Liturgy, is a plea to nobody but the benevolent intent above the wicked boyars In Charge Right Now: save us!

in the case of broader systems, this is religion, but for policy wonks it’s more like a religious cult. and they will be really vicious to those not part of their cult. cut the policy wonks to see what bleeds and you suddenly get these foaming-mouth maga squadristi who think you are genetically inferior to them and should be annihilated.

the electoralist left is just what happens when this kind of consciousness comes into its own with a theory of power and decides to embark on the sisyphean task of climbing state hierarchies. you see, sure, every attempt to do this before winds up in humiliation or co-option, but you know, this time it’ll be different, we just need more Discipline. we need Better Leaders.

because history’s still just about states and princes and the virtue of the raw ideas held by each.

when these idiots scold you, for not loving their Saint, remember that they are trying to convince you a spade has a soul. they are trying to convince you God is real and loves Democracy. they are trying to convince you the crisis is some outside force sent by satan, not a product of the system itself.

they think you’re a scared little fucking peasant, and that if they scold you enough with the language of priestly power and threaten you with hell, you and the other peasants will stop asking for things.

the Idealists are gaslighting you. they do not think there is power in your hands.

proving them wrong is as simple as calling a spade a spade.