Mimesis is Logically Implicit in Game Theory; &c.

The following is a record of a brainstorm triggered by a recent post of my Orthospherean colleague and friend, Thomas Bertonneau. Because it is as yet no more than a brainstorm, I here report it as I first recorded it, and as it precipitated upon me from the Realm of the Forms – namely, as a series of impacts, occurrences more or less related:

In any population of evolving strategies for winning games (of any sort, no matter the rules (bearing in mind that the rules of such games are themselves subject to evolution)) with each other, imitation of strategies that win – or that have lately appeared to win under cogent criteria of local near term winning (bearing in mind that these criteria, too, are subject to evolution) – is a requirement of survival. Survival is the sine qua non of all other values; for, one must first be, in order then to realize any other value whatever; and so, no value is effectually valuable – is, i.e., valuable in actual practice – except insofar as it enables survival, which is the precondition of any other value.

If my group learns language, yours must do so too in order to survive against us. So for all other acts. If I attack you, you must attack back harder, or die. So human mimesis is a survival strategy for the individual within the group, and for the group as against other groups. Humans naturally imitate each other because that’s the only way to stay competitive, and so to survive.

The Modern Cosmopolitan Cult Tends to the Cult of Moloch

The Cult of Moloch drives out all others.

The established Modern Cosmopolitan Cult is the Cult of No Cults. It is the Cult of Nothing. Only a Cult of Nothing could risk much room within its temenos for other cults – the Christian, the pagan, the Mohammedan, and so forth. For, all those other cults have positive principals, each of whom with his worshippers would be at odds with the others, contesting for dominance over the hearts and acts of the cosmopolitans, until one of them achieved the victory and established his own cult. Were any of them established, they would make no such room for their competitors within their own precincts. So all such positive cults will tend to engender a state of affairs in which they may be established and their competitors driven out.

The Motive Urge of the Leftward Ratchet: No Pain, No Gain

Virtue signalling – in sharp contrast to virtuous behavior – is free. You get what you pay for. A sacrifice that costs you little gains you little. So the virtue signalers have to keep at it. They cannot ever rest.

The Acid Eating at Tradition is Not Capitalism, But Cheap Information

Reactionaries often blame capitalism for eviscerating tradition and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator. But capitalism – i.e., free exchange – is not a recent phenomenon. It was not invented by the Franciscans, forsooth, but rather discovered by them as a subject amenable to moral, theological and philosophical analysis, and so to discourse, development and elaboration. Capitalism has been around since the beginning of human society. It is no more than a fancy word for exchange that develops surplus, after all; for mere trade, and commerce. For almost all of human history, capitalism supported and indeed mediated local tradition – or, at least, did not vitiate it.

The Corollary of the Golden Rule

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So then likewise: as you do unto others, so would you have them do unto you.

Social Justice Warriors always project (hat tip: Vox Day). They insist that we foment violence and hatred, e.g., when it is of course they who mostly do so. They accuse us of being antiscientific, when of course they are the ones who reject the plain data and revolutionary discoveries of climatology and of genetics, which radically undermine their most precious most romantic notions of how humans really are and how life might be, if only it were not for our deplorable sort. They accuse us of being intolerant and close-minded, when of course they are the ones who are most intolerant and close-minded. They accuse us of irrational barbarity, when of course they are the ones who rage and foam inarticulately – who tear their clothes off in their madness (this is what the OT called “rending one’s garments”) – would be maenads, hapless, hopeless, who have no longer even the art of dismemberment, who know nothing of butchery, or even of sharpening, and a fortiori do not remember how to eat raw bloody male flesh.

There is no point here in rehearsing the myriad instances of such projections on their part. All of us on the Right are quite familiar with the phenomenon.

So here’s the thing that struck me the other day. Our adversaries project upon us their own emotional and intellectual defects and inadequacies. They propose radical policies in response to those defects.

The question then is this: given that they diagnose us as suffering from the defects that in fact bedevil them, may we not infer that the way they propose to treat us is the way that they think – at some deep, unconscious level of their psychic economies – they themselves ought to be treated?

Our Present Crisis: Daddy Issues Writ Large

The Social Justice Warriors project their own Daddy issues onto politics, because that is safer than confronting Daddy. It is also safer than confronting their anger at Daddy. And it is easier and safer than doing the hard, scary psychotherapeutic work, and indeed spiritual work – the work of growing up, at last – that is needed if they are to understand their Daddy issues the way that adults understand things, and so lay them at last to rest.

So is it that the Left are stuck in childhood. They cannot reason, but can only emote. Their essential complaint is that of the four year old, disappointed at the exigencies of family life: “It’s not fair!”

We can tell it is Daddy issues that bedevil and urge the Left, because they tell us so: they blame all the defects of life upon old white Christian men, like their fathers, and hate such men.

I wonder if there was something about the men of the Greatest Generation that particularly inclined them to failure as fathers, and so fostered the rebellion and resentment of the Boomers – especially Boomer daughters. Was it WWII? How?

My earliest memories are of a time when the horrors of WWII were only 12 years past. Literally everything of my earliest childhood was colored by that war. Its memory loomed over every tiny mundane thing. Was it that Great War – really only a codicil to WWI, despite its much greater extent, so that the two were one gigantic catastrophe in the history of civilization – that queered the West?

I hope not. I so do.

Grove of Academe, Air Strip One, or Inferno?

Garden of Earthly Delights (Completed 1505) by Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 1516): Right Panel: Hell

To document pictorially my increasing suspicion about the real nature of the contemporary college campus, I took my digital pocket camera to work with me today and in my spare time between classes snapped a little portfolio of vistas, which I offer below.

An Hypothesis about the Origins of the Modern Sacrificial Cult

Rhetocrates commented:

I had an unoriginal thought worked out this morning that I wanted to share. Mostly it’s already well-established, but it does go in a slightly novel direction in explaining the ‘holiness’ spiral of modern society.

Modern progressive liberalism (viz. WW2 and after) is a specific negative type of Christianity. That much is obvious. Where our once-for-all and yet repeated-daily Eucharist (Malachi) is the navel and foundation of our religion, the Holocaust is the navel and foundation of modern progressive liberalism (hereafter MPL to save keystrokes).

Identity — The Future of a Paradox

Those Highly Individuated Champions of the Oppressed Bravely Hiding their Faces

When Publius Virgilius Maro, more familiarly Virgil, accepted the commission from Augustus, formerly Gaius Octavius, to create a national identity for the Roman people by matching the epic precocity of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in Latin verse, the imperial presumption can only have been that such an identity did not yet exist or, at least, did not adequately exist, but required to be conjured into a useful state of being.  Virgil’s famous ambiguity about his manuscript of the Aeneid – his having composed a note during his fatal illness asking his friends to burn its pages on his death – has been ascribed by one faction of scholarship to his worry about metrical imperfections in some verses of the poem’s second half.  As only a few such technical flaws make themselves evident, however, some other explanation must be sought.  The German novelist Hermann Broch, in his Death of Virgil (1945), suggests a crisis of conscience, reflecting the poet’s qualm that in synthesizing a myth of Latin and Roman origins so as to settle legitimacy on the adoptive heir of Julius Caesar, and thus also on the newly constituted monarchy into which the Republic had been absorbed, he had falsified tradition and served propaganda, whereas his highest calling was to honor the muse by cultivating her art.  The crisis of identity appears as a theme in the Aeneid, the first six books of which narrate the exile and homelessness of the refugees from Troy, whose buildings the besieging Greeks have toppled and burned, whose men they have slaughtered, and whose women and children they have impressed into slavery.  Troy is no more and no more is the Trojan people.  There is only a desperate remnant in the urgency of its flight.

An Eu Logion of Zippy Catholic

The Catholic, Christian and Traditionalist community were shocked and appalled to learn last week that their pillar, blogger Zippy Catholic, had been killed in a bicycle accident last Tuesday evening while riding on a country road.

We are still struggling to reconcile ourselves to this new world, in which Zippy no longer roams about skewering sloppy thought, and so enlightening all of us his readers, interlocutors and students.

It was a severe and devastating blow, completely unanticipated. Zippy was neither old, nor – so far as we knew – ill. So his death came out of left field. No one was prepared for it. He had, we all thought, several decades more of good, fruitful work in him, that all of us would have enjoyed, and that would have profited us all, and man, and the whole human project. We looked forward to that prospect, blithely, happily, as if we possessed it already. Now, it is ripped away from us. We find ourselves bereft, lost, bewildered.

And: we miss him. We want him here with us, still. God damn the evil circumstance that took him from us. And – and – God bless that taking, as proper (as it must have been, necessarily) under the purveyance of Omniscience.

Blessed be the Name of the Lord. Amen. Lord, bless and keep thy faithful servant Zippy Catholic, and make him soon fit to enter into the coruscating Light of thy Holy Presence. Help and heal all his wounds, correct all his defects, and complete him. All this I pray, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, amen. Hallelujah, hallelujah, thanks be to God. Amen, amen.