Loyalty is the only political virtue because trust is the only good thing in the world. Trust between people is literally the only important thing. It is unfortunately also counter to every fundamental principle in the modernistic worldview, and ultimately at some point you have to choose between ”luxury goods”, material tools that you can use to reverse engineer your monkey brain instincts and trick yourself into feelings a jolly tingle, or – fulfilling human relationships. that’s basically it.
When we talk about ”the absurd”, absurdity in philosophy and literature, this does not mean ”coo coo crazy nutso, completely bananas the joker crazytown”. Strictly speaking what it means is just ”at odds with previous assumptions”. In a history of philosophy/history of ideas sense, it means, ”at odds with the set of assumptions about human life and the world in late industrial society”. Which is to say, at odds with a crude, vulgar materialism, scientism, rationalism. ”irrational”.
You may interpret this word ”absurd” as meaning ”coo coo banana brains pants on head retarded”. If you do this, you do this because you either knowingly or not, accept rationalist, materialist, scientism-ist premises about ontology and epistemology: that there is a rational order to either the world, or to the human mind, or both, and that everything can (and ought to) be autistically sorted into neat little autistic categories and reduced to algebra.
When you hear of ”absurdist” writers, you may think of Albert Camus, and think ”this sounds very gay, he’s French”. In this case you are both right and wrong. You may think ”this seems like some larpy thing, trying too hard, something weird is going on with this, I don’t trust it”. And right you are. The French sort of fucked it up for the rest of us, by putting their disgusting French fingers all over it, and trying to make it look slick and cool and use it to impress teen girls. Which is ultimately, for reasons we shall soon see, at odds with the true spirit of absurdism, and worshiping at the temple of materialism. So really they’re not just bumbling fools who don’t get it and fuck it up by accident, but actively traitors to the cause.
“the absurd” is not, “lmao hedonism”. The absurd is Christ. The Absurd is looking at death and Going Friggin’ Nuts and doing some Preposterous Actions for No Good Reason. This also just happens to coincidentally be how you form a friendship, or how you make anyone trust you, ever.
Anyways the point being, the choice I originally mentioned, between bing bing wahoo baby toys, and fulfilling meaningful human relationships – or just, friendship, for short. Is the effects of the choice between “rational thought” and “the absurd”.
The Rational choice is consumption-eat-feed-sleep-breed. The rational choice is optimizing systems, optimizing your own monetary wealth so you can buy more food. The rational mind is a Bug, an Ant, specifically, and it’s gathering food for winter. The patterns of this part of the human mind has been completely deconstructed, analyses and understood, and systems have been erected around you to take advantage of your natural instinctual behaviours, and locking you into a feedback loop, which ends up with you playing video games instead of having children.
In face of such things, there is no rational recourse. There is no rational response. “rationality” itself is the problem.
I want you to live a beautiful life. I want you to go a little crazy. Not full on banana brain ding dong. Just, a little.
Friendship is mutual trust, and anything that isn’t mutual trust isn’t deserving of the name friendship. Trusting someone is an irrational act. It is a gamble that you assume that an abstraction of “someone’s character” will be consistent across time. A million billion unknowable factors in there - you can’t truth table yourself out of this one.
I don’t wanna go through the whole rigmarole of doing the logic tables but basically, you can’t prove that with facts and logic. Something something prison experiments blah blah blah, see you’re already thinking about social science bullshit to judge the validity of a proposition. All social science is fake, it’s literally just rhetoric with the conclusions baked into the design of the experiment/question. Anyways sorry I get hot I’m getting hot. These things get me hot.
Basically, you can’t prove loyalty with facts and logic, just like you can’t prove love with language, and even if you account for something like the game theory principle of winning the logic game of the prisoner’s dilemma, where you trust in the first round but betray in every following round – this is still not trust. This is still solipsism. You might win the prisoner’s dilemma, but, once you get out of jail, you kill yourself.
When I say I want you to go a little crazy, I mean, I want you to have true friends that you would sacrifice for. I want you to sacrifice yourself for your friends and family. I want you to sacrifice yourself for them, for no good reason.
I want you to do things that don’t make sense and make stupid pointless gestures that do nothing and fail, like trying to help your uncle who has maybe as little as months left to live, to stop drinking. He’s gone, he’s dying. He’s gonna fight you every step of the way. The little ant voice in your brain is telling you, “well isn’t it a mercy to just let him have it”, you try to weasel your way out of it and make excuses.
Just imagine for a moment that instead of just letting him drink until he passes out and shits himself and eventually drowns in his own puke, you have one real moment where you tell him that the guilt he feels can be forgiven. Imagine that even for just a second, you convince him of that. Imagine giving him that gift. And then tell me that the rational, utilitarian choice of letting him maximise his pleasure and minimise his pain before the end, is the right thing to do.
I want you to live a beautiful life. I’m sorry about being all sad and a sourpuss and pessimistic all the time. I’m sorry. I truly, truly don’t want to see you suffer, ever. What I am trying to do, is to convince you of something, if just for a moment.
I Want You To Live a Beautiful Life
Well said. And there is also, "don't put your friends and loved ones in positions where you can't trust them."
I read somewhere that in nearly all instances where the wife cheats, the husband helped enable it.
It's why the cuckold has the horns: he's the goddamn satyr, not the dong-slinger he feigns victimhood over.
Same with friends. Don't act untrustworthy, don't test or challenge them. Be reliable, be honorable, and trust them to do the same. If you have doubts, testing them is just temptation dressed in false morality.
Instead, trust your instincts and get new friends. If you can't do that, then set things up so that they're only in positions where you can trust them. Or in positions where betrayal doesn't mean anything (e.g. over video games).
So many people get into business partnerships or start important projects with family members/friends they don't actually trust and then let the results ruin their relationships. I see it all the time and it's just so sad.
egg report: “ladies, peg your boyfriends!!!!”