the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

neat little blurb i stole from a facebook friend. obviously it's possible to read "masculine" and "feminine" in a few different ways, could probably come up with several different readings on the whole thing if you wanted to
https://eco-poiesis.blog/




"Traditional masculine fantasy is that of absolute autonomous existence, creation of something from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and a complete rational comprehension of reality. This masculine fantasy has it's highest expression in that great phantasy that is God Himself, who, creating the world from nothing, stands over and above his creation and is the very Logos or rationality for reality itself. Not only did Man create God, but he projected his fantasy onto that phantasy in its total completeness: God is but the perfect Man. Through this projection Man was able to convince himself of the contradictory notion that his fantasy was both a reality and a possibility.

The history of patriarchy is the history of imposing this idealistic fantasy onto worldly existence. The very existence of woman undermines his fantasy: because his life in the polis is dependent upon the labor of his feminine counterparts, he is not truly autonomous. Because he is created by his mother's labor, he is not created from nothing. Because woman will always resist his attempts to calculate and control her, reality transcends his rational comprehension. And so in his war against the Truth of interdependence, of conditionality, of supra-rationality, he erects a State which would legitimate through sheer force and ideological mystification, his falsity as truth, his abstraction for concreteness. Woman is his gateway to Truth and Beyond, and for this he both hates her and loves her.

Perhaps what Man fears the most is not merely his equality to the feminine, but of his subordinate position to her: that the masculine is derivative of the feminine which is primary, a mere contingency relative to her necessity. The violence of this world is a consequence of Man's flipping it upside-down: he has made his own, masculine values primary at the expense of the feminine values defined against his values. His "independence" is only possible because of interdependence with her, his "wealth" is only possible by her labor, his representation is only possible by her presentation, his freedom only possible by her service to him. He lives only because she dies.

I think the way out, to turn upright this upside down world, is not to merely attack and criticize masculinity, it is important to redefine it: the function of the masculine is subordination to the feminine, masculinity defined not as a position of leadership but of facilitation; not master over others but Master of his Self. Yet the key here is that this cannot be a unilateral masculinity, for it must only be a part of his self. That he masters his ego is a condition for facilitating the feminine to arise in himself, realizing that that which he simultaneously loves and hates is a part of his own being and is not separate from it.

Only through the recognition that the Other is within him, and that his hatred of the feminine is just a facade veiling the unconscious dissatisfaction he has with his own nature, and that his fetishisation of the feminine is just a distraction from his own need to turn that love inward, can Man finally embark on the path towards achieving satisfaction with life. Through this achievement, Man no longer sees himself as man as such: the duality of masculine and feminine is abandoned. What arises in it's place is the divine reality, the non-binary Buddha-Nature, which transcends the duality of masculine and feminine.

So perhaps, the most courageous, noble, brave, virtuous, rational, thing he can do is to limit his Self: the most masculine thing a man can do is no longer care about or need to prove his masculinity. Through this, he transcends his finite, fearful existence and embarks on the path towards a divine reality in consummation with the Infinite."

I think that's actually a pretty good text which describes the essence of masculinity insofar as it becomes a malaise and source of unhappiness and suffering. Both for others and for oneself. With misogony as one of the results, but certainly not the only one.
And it points to a way out of the problem. "Tai Chi", anyone? (The basic concept, not the martial art).

Sure, it's not the whole story. "The State" can be a negative force as described, but as soon as you're dealing with populations above a few thousand souls, it can, at least in some of its modern and more liberal incarnations, bring huge benefits too. Obviously.
And sometimes the language and terminology here get a bit high-falutin. Still, worth pondering on as a whole.

yea, i don't actually always agree with they say, but i think they make some really good efforts to push theory towards being implementable and healthy. here's another stolen blurb:

"I myself have been wondering about the "middle way" between what appears to be the two extremes that aim to reconcile these two facts: the existence of conscious life and that various fundamental properties of the universe have been measured to be constant, where even the slightest modification would result in a world inhospitable to matter and life as we know it. This is the dilemma around a "fine-tuned" universe.

The theist posits that the universe was created by an intelligent designer with these specific values in mind, values which may be intelligible to him even if they seem wildly arbitrary to us. The atheist posits that this particular universe is but one of many infinite series of possible worlds that are simultaneously actual, and that it is merely a matter of probability that one of these actual-possible universes would end up measuring itself through one of its constituent processes. The theist wants to hold on to an absolutely necessary reason while the atheist abandons everything to pure contingency.

What would be the Middle Way approach? It is not a geometrical center, in that it is not the simple center of two ends of a line. Rather, it seeks to undermine that which the two positions, in spite of their differences, share in common: that the fundamental constants are indeed, constant. That the constants may *appear* to be constant due to the particular, historically situated, technological means of inquiry utilized in their measurement—is just that, an appearance. Nothing allows us to take these values as ultimately constant—they are only "constant" in that they appear constant for us, due to the fact that our collective temporal memory cannot register such minute changes in the fundamental fabric of the cosmos.

So this means that in some sense, the cosmos is not "fine tuned" but rather that it is fine tuning itself for life in the process of cosmological history—evolution is involution: the development and complexification of forms of life which can become more deeply involved in enhancing their environment.

So instead of a single universe serving as a background for the self-entertainment of an intelligent designer, or a potentially infinite number of universes completely indifferent to life...we have a universe which recursively modifies itself with every new instant, taking in the accumulation of the past as data for the evaluation of potential new states to actualize in the next instant, selecting every potential that it may "think" is more conducive for the enhancement of life. The universe would be a cosmos in dialogue with itself, a dialogic, perpetually evolving and becoming better than what it was previously.

This middle way conception of the cosmos could form the mytho-poetic background of a para-disciplinary Design paradigm, where the aims of the design paradigm would be to reflect the way that the universe designs itself. This Design paradigm, spanning everything from architecture to engineering to manufacturing to visual and sonic aesthetics, would put emphasis on biological optimization, ecological synchronization, formal diversification, and structural interconnection. Our computational resources are assisting us in our ability to respond and communicate to materiality in ways that can now be integrated into the design process: through parametric and generative design tools, matter can be given a "voice" in the articulation of what is to be created. The physical effects of matter can be registered in the design process as affects upon its form. In this way, function can retroactively influence form in a way that was impossible before due to the lack of computer simulation, and context can also contribute impressions on the finally developed and created form.

What I like is that this Design paradigm is neither avant garde nor is not avant garde. It is not completely new, because its entire point is to re-integrate with the design paradigm that the cosmos itself already follows—we just have to "awaken" to it. But, in a sense it is new, because it would be a new point in human history, marking the period of a mass awakening, by which the principles of spiritual realization become expressed in the very nature of the aesthetic environment. The goal of this Design paradigm then, is nothing less than the ultimate harmony between reality as it appears to aesthetic awareness and reality as it is in its ultimate sense: form as emptiness and emptiness as form. The perfection of this transcendent form, is the ultimate goal of the process this design paradigm.

I am giving my particular expression of this Design paradigm (which is something much greater than me) the name: "Eco-Poiesis". As the middle way between allopoiesis (other-making) and auto-poiesis (self-making), Eco-Poiesis is the capacity of a diversified field to optimize itself holonically, that is, simulatenously for whole and part. It is the name of my blog, and eventually I will have an essay detailing my use of this term."












as to governmentality, you may be right. can you give me an example?

Sorry, Vagabond, with the second contribution you completely lost me. Maybe I could spend a while grappling with that to see if something worthwhile emerges from the prose but for that my life is too short and busy.

as to governmentality, you may be right. can you give me an example?

Check out Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs & Steel", Chapter 14 "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" for a description of how human groupings have repeatedy, indeed always, tended towards increasingly complex and stratified social organization (and ultimately to states) as populations and levels of technology increase. That doesn't mean that the results are consistently beneficial or nice for the individual, or even for the majority of the population, but the dynamic remains logical or indeed inevitable as a way of 'getting things done'.

Maybe the trend towards and need for states might be removed in the future if and when technology permits major decentralization of power generation and of design and manufacturing capability. Thus enabling a community of a few thousand or even a few hundred or less to handle its own requirements as regards power generation, research, design, manufacturing, transport, medical care, education and defence. That could take the human race in a whole new direction, with imaginable consequences both utopian and highly dystopian, constructive and destructive, peaceful and warlike etc. But we ain't there yet.

Check out Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs & Steel", Chapter 14 "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy"

ok

ok, i'm back. sorry to leave you hanging, my vitriol was needed elsewhere. priorities, you understand

speaking of which, what are your's? why did you recommend i read jared diamond? there's nothing in there about the possibility of a forward thinking or sensibly organized society, only the exact opposite. it seems from here like you're only interested in ending the conversation. can it be that you're too scared of instability to criticize current administration, even now? cause you're relying on an assertion of facticity as if is were equal to ought. nevermind that you're relying on the arguments of an expert in the field of "physiology and biophysics of membranes in the gall bladder"

i couldn't read very much of that garbage, so i'll just lay out the flaws i saw in the few pages i could tolerate

"gradually persuaded the Fayu to renounce violence. The Fayu are thereby being brought into the modern world" yea ok jared

"much of the world lived in societies similar to that of the fayu" similar how? unqualified assertion, no thanks

"all but antarctica has been subdivided" state's caiming exclusive access is not the same as exclusive access. areas of the amazon occupied by uncontacted tribes are claimed by brazil. bolsonaro's insistence in killing those folks gives this the lie

"(until the arrival of missionaries bringing crop plants) it also lacked native plants that could have permitted productive farming" this is just off the top of my head but i'm pretty sure the kaulong, also of papua new guinea, cultivated yam's. going off reading to sing with pigs is human several years ago so i may be misremembering

i'm getting sick of this honestly, i think i've made my point. for a not shit book on the subject of societal development
by an actual anthropologist read debt, the first 5,000 years by david graeber

as to technology possibly facilitating decentralization, that's not an idea i'm super fond of. but the author of eco-poesis is, and i posted that second quote to illustrate that, although yeah, not the most articulate blurb ever written. trying to bounce between dense theory and practical reflection is challenging, but fear of effort has never helped anyone. i don't think. i couldn't swear to it

do you have a modern liberal state that you like? or, can you offer a working definition of liberalism?