On the Importance of Understanding the First Delphic Maxim [part 1]

CT: It was Voltaire who said he no longer wanted to read history books that focused solely on dates, geographical locations, wars, or the names of kings; but rather on what daily life was like in those times, on personal diaries, and so on.

We live in a Neanderthal era in terms of our understanding of the human soul, which includes history, academic “psychology,” traditional religions, and new cults.

No one knows themselves. They all violate the inscription of the Oracle of Delphi. That’s why the race is dying out.

If they followed the Oracle, that journey into inner space would save the race. As I mentioned in my email today, I’ll be adding a chapter about one of my brothers to Lágrimas (Tears), the third book of my autobiography. That’s the story Voltaire would have liked to read, because my family is a microcosm of the Criollo people in the peculiar country where I live.

Benjamin Power: I didn’t say in the email, but I do think Sascha Roßmüller’s line from Culture, Aesthetics, Identity...

it is also far more enjoyable and fulfilling to study our Occidental history through its cultural and artistic highlights than through its bloody wars

...has a lot to do with it.

He wants something pleasant on the mind, basically, and is taking the easy way out. I’d say introspective ‘know thyself’ testimonies, warts and all – the sort one could gain psychological insight from – would be closer to ‘bloody wars’ to read about than aesthetic pleasures (not that the writing style couldn’t make it both, in that ‘coal to diamonds’ sense). The important point is that he’s glossing over what could in fact be very painful and harrowing truths, for the sole sake of marvellous art. I take it there’s none of Jung’s idea of exploring the darkness to him.

Don’t get me wrong, I like listening to Medtner, Arensky, and Borodin regularly (particularly Medtner). Were I to do that 24/7, as opposed to exploring, say, Kleist (if he was available in that capacity), or Modrow, or Schreber, or your autobiographical work – which comes to mind – I feel I would be doing our collective racial self-understanding a grave injustice.

That said, I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t give a totally fair appraisal.

CT: In his essay “The independence of psychohistory” Lloyd deMause said:

Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians suddenly expand from the periphery to the centre of the psychohistorian’s conceptual world.

DeMause didn’t care that he had been accused of ignoring the economy, the sociology and the use of statistics. “The usual accusation that psychohistory reduces everything to psychology is philosophically meaningless—of course psychohistory is reductionist in this sense, since all it studies is historical motivations”. He added:

Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad—the maddest of all being the historian’s belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it—our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors.

Psychohistory is a science in which the researcher’s feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors. The usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most “science” simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.

I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped.

No, they aren’t.

Benjamin Power: Thank you for reminding me of those lines.

Curiously, I mention Heinrich von Kleist myself, not necessarily thinking of Zweig’s writings on him, but instead considering his own – quite popular then it seems – psychological essay: On The Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking in which he encourages us to reflect in depth ex post facto in order to more easily access and shape man’s collective unconscious, in line with free will, thus avoiding the inhibitions imposed by dry, rational thought. He writes himself of the will to power having “its splendid source in the feelings”, utilising this emotive self-knowledge as a means to overcome Fate with a proper mix of wisdom and passion. I thought of him more there when I read the deMause lines.

Other first person subjectivity writers I’ve found in everything from early philosophical psychology to neurophenomenology talk about the means to activate this otherwise-absent introspection in others – how to address the unfeeling basically, so they may understand this (if it even could be learned through practice). I find the term ‘epoché’ cropping up regularly – a deliberate pause in thought, and the setting of all prior knowledge aside, in order to delay the rational mind, and open a gap into introspective thinking.

I know strictly this is phenomenology (or Pyrrhonism, maybe, originally), and may seem contrived and mechanical as a gimmick compared to just writing it all down immediately and reflecting and polishing from there on in, but what are your thoughts on meditative means to access a state of introspection? I do think all autobiographical writing should be done in private, preferably alone, in a quiet space.

Generally, I’m darkly fascinated by repressed, unfeeling people (much as it can be a great frustration), and if anything can be done with them (I’m not sure if, for example, one could ever coax my friend Ali into writing anything down).

CT: It is impossible to solve the Jewish problem without solving the Christian problem, since Christianity compels us to worship the god of the Jews (cf. Mike Huckabee et al).

And it is impossible to apostatise from Christianity without a proper retrospective examination of how our parents programmed us with this malware as children.

With deep autobiographical retrospection, we cross the Rubicon; reading academic articles in these silly webzines we regularly criticise is merely a baby step, within the river, in the right direction.

Benjamin Power: I wish I had the means available to write a biography of my father (and my mother too, separately) as I can see – intrinsically – what would have made him how he is axiologically and by personality, I just lack the full biographical details to fill it in. He’s never written anything on himself… and this is the person who was once writing a history of the Power family, until he abandoned that project, mortally embarrassed that I had been convicted of ‘terrorism’ in 2021, and presumably too ashamed of the lot of us on account of that one stupid, mishandled incident to continue it! (Coincidentally, there’s already a rather sycophantic history of it out there by Gabriel O’C. Redmond, from the late 1800s, but that’s almost totally useless for piecing together the sort of matters you mention here).

He hasn’t told me much about his life either, bar ‘water cooler’ work anecdotes and superficial details, so I’ve really had to gather it tooth and nail from all over the place over the years, and it still wouldn’t be enough for a book. On my mother’s early life, outside of perhaps three short conversations I had with her over the phone… nothing. My aunts and uncles are all the same: they mention nothing, or if anything, just good memories, the same set endlessly recycled. They’re all traumatised, in my estimation, by their own parents, and under that brutal Catholicism all about. It’s not always a repression of emotion, as some are quite in touch with that… but it’s a sad trauma; they can’t talk about it, ever, and it hangs there in the background.

I told you some details on my Dad’s early life at the start of the year by email, but they’re really all I’d have to go on.

I think if I was making another edition of Consumption for the future, I’d love to be able to plug in my parents’ generation also, I’m just not sure who to ask in the family (most are dead now). It would provide good contextual backing for explaining how it all filtered down into me (much as I try to purge it from myself these days).

CT: Oh, what a tragedy.

A confession my father made in 2007, which I recorded, was very helpful to me. In it, he confessed how much he had suffered in elementary school, in schools run by the Brothers and the Jesuits.

I was able to start connecting the dots with other things I knew. Also, I have less information about my mother, only conjectures (collected in my second volume) about how she was mistreated as a child.

What you say about only revealing the surface of your heart in “biographies” reminds me of some words by Zweig, whom you mentioned above:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?

[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity in self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve.

Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.

Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come.

Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts. […]

Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

Source: Adepts in Self-Portraiture: a must-read book! (I obtained a handsome copy of it in Manchester in 1999).

Thomas: I can tell you growing up in Catholic schools is abuse. You become afraid to do anything because of “sin.” The fear of God’s punishment over the most trivial matters is omnipresent. The constant contradictions in the Bible itself cause confusion, but authority will tell you even questioning the word of God can lead to hell and eternal damnation. It’s one of the most relieving journeys I’ve had in the past several years to let this spiritual virus go and be free of it. My mother still is a hardened Christian, but I refuse to ever go into a Church. I remember going to Church weekly as a kid and every time I’d be getting ready to go there this sense of dread appeared. Almost like instinctively I knew I was about to go into a house of darkness. That’s how I see it today. A house of darkness that will only lead down a path of misery and despair.

Gaedhal: Early Greek Philosophy by Alfred William Benn (1843–1915) is an excellent book concerning the beginning of philosophy with Thales of Miletus. He covers the noble maxims such as “Gnōthi Seauton!”, “Know thyself!”. The above is an aorist imperative which denotes completion. i.e. “Start knowing thyself, and do not stop until this task is completed!” Were it a present-tense imperative, i.e.: ‘Gignōski seauton’, then it would have the sense of “Begin to know thyself!”

Unfortunately Christianity, a pure superstition that has nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy overturned this principle of moral philosophy. Indeed, one thing that Christianity commands is excessive zeal, and excessive love for its god, and for one’s enemies, and the Xenos/foreigner, whilst hating one’s family, excessively by not even attending their burial service. Let the dead bury the dead. Christianity has nothing to do with hearth and home: hearth and home is a white ideal, and not a Christian one.

Christianity is pure hubris. It dissolves and corrodes the barriers established by nature, especially when it comes to race. Indeed, even according to sex it dissolves and corrodes the barriers established by nature with its: “neither male nor female” slogan coined by Saint Paul.

Cicero, himself fluent in Greek and well read in Greek philosophy, wrote: De Finibus or on [moral] limits. Ciceronian skepticism gave way to the rantings and ravings of Saint Augustine.

Benn explains that there never was a golden age of theistic philosophy: philosophy begins where religion ends. Philosophy begins because religious etiological myths were no longer satisfying to the intellectually curious. Gawd-dunnit, i.e. religious explanations, can only take us so far, and then philosophy takes us even further. Philosophy eventually becomes Science by way of Natural Philosophy.

Benn, of course was an atheist, as most intelligent well-read highly educated people are. Most professional philosophers and elite scientists are atheists as well. As Aron Ra points out: it has been extremely well established in the Scientific literature that theism/religiosity negatively correlates with intelligence.