A Just So Story:
Somewhat autistic, focused, competent leaders gain power, because they don’t care about the same worldly temptations as neurotypicals. From their point of view, everyone else’s failure to lead a moral or effective life is the fault of these “temptations”, rather than a consequence of different values. They try to simultaneously simplify, purify, and optimize society by fighting these ills.
Okay. Well, then, why, precisely, is that a bad thing? I mean, we could do without the arts and the luxuries and all the vacuous, transient nonsense that people with free time like to do, but it seems this kind of rigourism also gets in the way of stuff that’s actually useful, such as philosophical, scientific and historical/political investigation. Could it be that gratuitous fun things are intrinsically linked to curiosity, inquisitiveness, and a drive to know the truth? Are we looking at some sort of communicating vessels here?
I have a notion that asceticism is a pretty basic human drive—the desire to feel that you’re overcoming desires[1]. It seems to pop up in various forms in a lot of cultures.
I think there are a couple of things going on there. One is that the ability to forego pleasure is frequently useful. It’s possible that asceticism is simply too much of a good thing.
Another angle is the notion that a basic tool of gaining power over people is to convince them you’re so right about the world that they should take your orders about avoiding basic pleasures. Once you’ve pushed them that far, it’s easy to control them in other ways. (Notion acquired from RAWilson’s description of Reich’s ideas.)
I think there’s something to this, and I also think we’re so rich that various sorts of asceticism become ways of showing off.
[1]There’s such a thing as meta-asceticism—overriding the desire to resist desire. It’s essential to recovery from anorexia.
Eric Hoffer had some insights about this: in The True Believer, he hypothosizes that the primary thing that causes mass movements to crystalize is a rejection of the present brought on by feelings of intense frustration at the current state of the would-be fanatics’ lives. Hoffer further hypothosizes that many early converts to mass movements are unsuccessful creative types (the whole “what if Hitler had gotten into art school?” thing) because nothing is more frusterating than watching other people’s artistic and cultural endeavors flourish while your own attempts at self-expression languish. This causes them to reject the worldly pleasures of the present as meaningless; after all, who has time “for art, for music, for wine and other drugs, for sex and for food” when there’s an entire world for your movement to conquer and purify. Hoffer also notes that the active phase of most mass movements correspond with a “cultural dark age” situated in between flowerings of the arts.
Not only does the mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable—it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It view ordinary enjoyment as as trivial or even disreputable, and represnets the persuit of personal happiness as immoral. To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy—the present. The prime objective of the ascetic ideal preached by most mass movents is to breed contempt for the present.
When a mass movemnt perserves for generations the pattern shaped by its active phase (as in the case of the millitant church in the Middle Ages) or where by a successive accesssion of fanatical proselytes its orthadoxy is continually strenghtened (as in the case of Islam) the result is an era of stagnation—a dark age. Whenever we find a period of genuine creativeness associated with a mass movement, it is always a period which either preceeded or follows the active phase [...] the active phase itself is sterile.
The interference of an active mass movement with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold. The fervor it generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work; fervor has the same effect on creativeness as dissipation. It subordinates creative work to to the advancement of the movement: literature, art and science must be propagandistic and the must be “practical”. The true believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and beautiful; his task, as he sees it, is to warn, advise, urge, glorify and denounce. Moreover, the fanatical state of mind by itself can stifle all forms of creative work: the fanatic’s disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life. The things which stir the creative worker seem to him either trivial or corrupt. [...] The fanatic is also mentall cocky, and hence barren of new beginnings. At the root of his cockines is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula—his formula. He is thus without the fruitful invervals of groping, when the mind is as it were in solution—ready for all manner of new reactions, new combinations and new beginnings.
I wish I could, but that’s as much as I remember. If you want to do more research, that’s Robert Anton Wilson and Wilhelm Reich. Unfortunately, Wilson’s books tend to overlap each other a lot, so I don’t remember which one explained Reich’s ideas.
When Reich was writing, the tight social controls were on sex. I have another notion that a similar process is going on now with food.
A Just So Story: Somewhat autistic, focused, competent leaders gain power, because they don’t care about the same worldly temptations as neurotypicals. From their point of view, everyone else’s failure to lead a moral or effective life is the fault of these “temptations”, rather than a consequence of different values. They try to simultaneously simplify, purify, and optimize society by fighting these ills.
Okay. Well, then, why, precisely, is that a bad thing? I mean, we could do without the arts and the luxuries and all the vacuous, transient nonsense that people with free time like to do, but it seems this kind of rigourism also gets in the way of stuff that’s actually useful, such as philosophical, scientific and historical/political investigation. Could it be that gratuitous fun things are intrinsically linked to curiosity, inquisitiveness, and a drive to know the truth? Are we looking at some sort of communicating vessels here?
I have a notion that asceticism is a pretty basic human drive—the desire to feel that you’re overcoming desires[1]. It seems to pop up in various forms in a lot of cultures.
I think there are a couple of things going on there. One is that the ability to forego pleasure is frequently useful. It’s possible that asceticism is simply too much of a good thing.
Another angle is the notion that a basic tool of gaining power over people is to convince them you’re so right about the world that they should take your orders about avoiding basic pleasures. Once you’ve pushed them that far, it’s easy to control them in other ways. (Notion acquired from RAWilson’s description of Reich’s ideas.)
I think there’s something to this, and I also think we’re so rich that various sorts of asceticism become ways of showing off.
[1]There’s such a thing as meta-asceticism—overriding the desire to resist desire. It’s essential to recovery from anorexia.
Eric Hoffer had some insights about this: in The True Believer, he hypothosizes that the primary thing that causes mass movements to crystalize is a rejection of the present brought on by feelings of intense frustration at the current state of the would-be fanatics’ lives. Hoffer further hypothosizes that many early converts to mass movements are unsuccessful creative types (the whole “what if Hitler had gotten into art school?” thing) because nothing is more frusterating than watching other people’s artistic and cultural endeavors flourish while your own attempts at self-expression languish. This causes them to reject the worldly pleasures of the present as meaningless; after all, who has time “for art, for music, for wine and other drugs, for sex and for food” when there’s an entire world for your movement to conquer and purify. Hoffer also notes that the active phase of most mass movements correspond with a “cultural dark age” situated in between flowerings of the arts.
More from Hoffer:
Tell me more.
I wish I could, but that’s as much as I remember. If you want to do more research, that’s Robert Anton Wilson and Wilhelm Reich. Unfortunately, Wilson’s books tend to overlap each other a lot, so I don’t remember which one explained Reich’s ideas.
When Reich was writing, the tight social controls were on sex. I have another notion that a similar process is going on now with food.
Did you know humans frown on weight variances? If you want to upset a human, just tell them their weight variance is above or below the norm.