Look Away From The Global Parochial

Contemporary culture is retarded

I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation

-Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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Your mind is not your own. The grooves of your mental processes have been channeled and deepened over time by a constant drip drip dripping of water from the culture. This water is full of a moral poison which continues to saturate everything around you. The cultural products on sale, especially from pop music, television and film, tell you over and over again how to think. If you turn to alternative news and online pundits for something different, again you get presented with a package deal of ideas you should subscribe to - the correct dissident opinions. Do you have space somewhere for genuinely new ideas, unconnected to the streams of politics, sides, tribes, the anxiety of possible reactions?

Default humanity is chauvinistic, narcissistic and incurious. Many tribal names simply mean ‘we, the real actual human beings’ or some variation thereof. The Chukchi call themselves Luoravetlan, meaning ‘real genuine person’; the ethnonym Inupiat translates as ‘real people’, as do so many hundreds more. Any concept of cosmopolitanism has to wait for the Hellenic concept of ‘man’, which blows open the possibility which lies dormant in the human spirit, overcoming the basic needs of life for something higher. The mystical religion of Orphism was a spiritual exercise for the individual rather than the imposition of custom. Custom can be a comfort and tradition a taproot which links a man back to his ancestors - but it can also be a tyrant, and even a monster. Longtime readers will be familiar with the soul-smothering aspects of various ancestral cults. Sometimes tradition is a vampiric drain on youth, one which many in the third world seek to escape. The Hellenic individual was mentally more free than we are today.

Thales of Miletus is widely considered to be the first true philosopher, the first to advance beyond religious or mythological reasoning and to rely on the Greek innovation of nature. Diogenes Laertius wrote of Thales: