God Says

Life is conflict; or rather, as in all cases with the word "is," it's appropriate to say that life "contains" conflict. One attribute of life is conflict. However you phrase it, in order to avoid the glib leftist censors who are sure that if we just stopped using "to be" verbs, all would be peachy and a socialist, multicultural, pluralist paradise would finally pull us out of the dark age, the truth is there: life is full of conflict. If you have a healthy view of life, you acclimate to this, and stop taking conflict seriously; you see it as how life is transacted, and don't take it personally, but might even have a laughing attitude toward it even if it is potentially fatal to you.

Because you love life, and because life necessarily involves conflict, you don't go on some Christian/leftist crusade about how we "should" stop conflict because it's bad because in conflict, there's usually someone who's the loser while another is a winner. If you love life, you see conflict as useful, even if it is personally disadvantageous to you, because you love life more than your own fortunes. This is the heroic attitude that is traditional to Indo-European societies, and it was replaced by the Jewish-Christian view, which is that heroism is crazy and the best option any of us has is to save our own life, therefore death and conflict "should" be made illegal or at least immoral. Indo-European civilizations valued heroism and were thus always striving upward; Jewish and Christian civilizations valued individual life, and therefore are always collapsing inward into greater selfishness and neurotic fear. Modern civilization came about in part because of our technology, but in part because we embraced reckless selfishness that allowed insane profits, a viewpoint justified by Judeo-Christian belief.

However, once we've gotten over the insanity of trying to tell life it "should" outlaw conflict, and thus some being losers including losers of their own lives, we can see that life is conflict and conflict is a means to an end, much as our own lives are means to the end of life itself. This is basic intellectual maturity, and in healthier days, this came to our children at roughly age 15, although it was mostly realized by men; per discussion in Evola's "The Mystery of the Grail," women already have a certain realization of nihilism regarding mortality, and strive not to eliminate it but are purely adaptive to it, mostly because their logical system is exclusively inductive where that of males is exclusively deductive (this sounds unreasonable until you consider the ideal logical system for raising families so that as many as possible survive; the male mandate is to make sure only the right matches in any situation survive, and consequently, for the most part men are terrible heads of families). Acceptance of conflict, and transcendence of the fear of loss and death, is necessary to move ahead and have a fulfilling life, much less one where one can do what is necessary to fix situations without becoming craven because one "might" become dead.

Nevertheless, there is a subtler way to try to deal with conflict that one sees quite a bit in modern civilization. If you're in an argument and are afraid of losing, you can always appeal to a higher source; in simple arguments, people do this by trying to "prove" their points with definitions from the dictionary, or by appealing to some source that is considered the end-all and be-all of wisdom in that genre. People often refer to these as "God Says" arguments, because they are appeals to something which is outside the scope of the argument and yet is presumed to be relevant to the argument. It's like using something that doesn't exist in this world to end a conflict that does exist in this world, and it's the rhetorical equivalent of a thermonuclear device for most arguments. Conflict arises; one person asserts a belief; and the other person says God says otherwise, and therefore, the first person is wrong. Argument over, right?

This article is not a polemic against God. In fact, of all the articles on this site, this one is designed to avoid insulting or slighting anyone's God, because the question of God is beyond its scope and totally irrelevant to what we're saying here. For the sake of argument, in fact, please assume there is a God, and that he or she does have opinions. However, recognize that the concept of God is necessarily outside of this world: for something to be the source of all things, and to control them, it cannot be those things. It must be a central order outside of the things over which it rules. In fact, monotheism is the original form of ultracentralization, because in its belief there is a necessary addition to this world in which a single authority asserts varying degrees of control over this world. Invoking God in an argument based in this world therefore is like reaching outside of all possibilities and pulling in a "magic bullet" to end an argument. This is not only bad form, but it's completely illogical, as things outside of the scope of this world cannot have absolute dominion over it, or they would be so tied to it as to not exist independently of it. Herein is the logical trap of "God Says": to use God in such a way would be to presuppose God is connected to this reality in a way that obliterates his absolute authority, but the "God Says" argument relies on that absolute authority.

As said above, the point of this article is not to defame God, but the "God Says" argument. For the purposes of this article, the reason to bring up "God Says" arguments has nothing to do with God, but something else that exists outside of this world yet in our minds seem to control it in an absolute authority. That thing is money. Money takes a very complicated situation and assigns a simple dollar value to it. You no longer worry about what lives in a field, or how old a tree is, or how important something is to a local community; the only question is its dollar value as a commodity, and putting a dollar value on something necessarily reduces it to a commodity. If someone wants to bring some useless crap product into a grocery store, just because some people might buy it, there's no questioning of it - money is the argument killer. If money can be made, jobs can be had, and we should all be happy. It's like appealing to God except money is even more insidious, since we associate it with our own prosperity. To attack some idea because its only justification in money is seen, in our society, as being as heretical as arguing against food.

"Money Says" is often an unstated argument. No one asks any longer whether it's a good idea to have disposable packaging, or to sell obvious unhealthy junk food, or to have a thousand different mediocre brands where one quality one would suffice. No one asks any longer whether it's a good idea to tear up an empty field and replace it with a Wal-Mart (unless a marginalized group has a burial field nearby), because we know the answer. New construction means new money. And we as a civilization have literally lost any other means for assessing decisions. Our only question is money. There is no other plan, such as a vision for how empty fields should be used to bring maximal benefit - we assume the "invisible hand" of economics will regulate that, if we even care. We don't ask what is a logical decision concerning a product like, say, beer; in a logical society, we'd find a reasonable way to distribute it and an effective way to recycle those containers, but in our current time, any kind of tricked-out packaging that might lure a few percentage points more of our idiot population toward buying it is fair game. We don't even consider the questions of its impact, whether it's a good idea, etc. "Money Says" has replaced all of our ability to question, to think analytically, to plan.

The consequences of "Money Says" are abundantly visible. Where we could have stretched our fossil fuel supply to last a millennium or longer, and thus had a better chance of establishing space colonies, instead we wasted it on what was profitable in the short term: cars and long commutes from the suburbs, because the multicultural warzone of the inner city was no longer valued as highly as new housing developments. Where we could have had a beautiful planet, we've chosen to screw it up so badly that the open oceans are currently toxic to the point where it's inadvisable to eat fish more than once a week. Where we could have had plentiful nature, instead we chose to breed recklessly and thus overran most of our natural habitats, stripping them of life forms necessary to keep the whole ecosystem alive. We could have had fewer, smarter people living well, but instead we chose to follow "Money Says" and now, as is the case when one follows an illogical path of action, we've got a slow suicide: billions of unthinking, unintelligent, and ignoble people who consume recklessly without the ability to think more than 48 hours ahead. They follow orders OK, and like to buy lots of entertainment products, but no culture - and no heroic decisions - will come out of these "last men." They're failures as far as the higher capacities of humanity are concerned, and their creation has reversed an evolutionary process, and brought men closer to apes.

Because we followed "Money Says," and surrendered our logical faculties to an assumption that something outside of this world can somehow determine absolutely how we should organize it (money is an abstraction, thus not actually present in our world), we blew it - or rather, we traded a glorious future for a miserable slow end. As global warming, global pollution, overpopulation, religious and class warfare, and waning energy supplies converge on us, the world is going to change. We will no longer have the abundant resources which empower a "Money Says" point of view, and there will no longer be the presumption that human life is sacred, since we will all have seen the excess produced by being afraid to kill the stupid. And what will result is killing of a brutality unmatched in history. You weep for the six million Jews allegedly lost in Europe during WWII? Cough, cough... you're going to be looking at six billion dead in the next round, as all the civilizations we have carefully built collapse in on themselves. This is nature's way of cleaning up. That which is illogical grows fat in summer, but in winter, the herd is thinned. That is what you will soon be witnessing; it may take anywhere between five to fifty years, but yes, it is coming. You can no longer hide in the comfortable oblivion of an absolute such as that projected by a society based on "Money Says."

Many of us who were not fully deluded by the propaganda - our society is the best, ever! the most enlightened! praise multiculturalism and corporate money and jesus! - have seen this on the horizon for some time, and we are preparing in ways that the rest of you cannot comprehend. When things collapse, we will quickly move toward a new type of order, in which no single absolute assessment determines a situation. Most likely, we will get our slaughter on in degrees you will find appalling, with millions upon millions of men, women and children extinguished for being of lumpenproletariat heritage. The smarter ones will be able to identify each other, and will spare those, of course; we want allies. But for all the people who are products of this "Money Says" society, there will no longer be a use, and their very presence, daily consuming resources and producing waste, will be a threat to the new order, which is one in which natural health is more important than money or popularity. Thus people like me will spend our days in dual states: building with love, and killing with love, as we're going to eliminate the rest of you and have a blast doing it. Where "Money Says" ruled, illogicality followed and produced a degenerate form of the human race. That's about to be erased, and the order of the future, unlike "Money Says," will rest entirely within the logic of this world and will bypass these false absolutes.

June 7, 2005

http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/money/