Jewish Qanon in the 18th Century

Viagra and Cultural Darwinism.

Commentary on five articles I read today:

1. Viagra for Life Extension, by Cremieux

2. The Emden Eybeschutz ‘controversy’, by Non-Zionism

3. Cultural Darwinism, by Jack Laurel

4. Between Daponte Blu and Jamkarān, by Popehead

5. IQ With Conscience by Bryan Caplan

1. Viagra for Life Extension, by Cremieux

Cremieux concludes that Viagra has not been proven to increase lifespan. However, it may help reduce cardiovascular problems.

Recently, I discussed Viagra with a friend. He claimed that everyone who uses Viagra becomes dependent on it -- they cannot become hard without it. It sounds similar to steroid use -- when you abuse steroids, your balls permanently shrink. You cause permanent damage to the body. The idea of becoming dependent on Viagra reminds me of the idea of becoming dependent on sleeping pills to solve insomnia. [1][2]

I have a few objections to this program:

1. Sleep meds have side effects.

2. Sleep meds form dependency.

3. Sleep meds have diminishing returns, and tolerances form.

4. Stress-insomnia is a psychological problem that needs to be solved at the root, not the stem.

If I hate myself, and this burning self-hatred is making me stay up all night, and I knock myself out with horse tranquilizer, what I have I accomplished? It seems ridiculous when you put it that way, but this is how I see the problem. Passionate self-hatred is a difficult problem to solve, but the first step is to see it for what it is: psycho-spiritual, not bio-chemical. [3]

99% of medical problems are psychological. Why do we eat cookies instead of chicken breast? Why do we skip the gym? Why do we stay up? Why do we stress out? These are all psychological choices. Even going to the doctor and taking your meds is a psychological choice.

I’m skeptical of GLPs, not because I don’t think they work, but because they seem to make people less ‘crazy.’ I believe that neuroticism is an evolutionarily adaptive feature of personality. People with zero neuroticism are not *sexy* to me. My intuition tells me that neuroticism has secret evolutionary benefits, even if it seems destructive.

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2. The Emden Eybeschutz ‘controversy’, by Non-Zionism

Because of a partisan dispute between two rabbis, Judaism was destroyed. This reminds me a lot of how Republicans used Qanon to get Trump elected. Except, in this case, Qanon is true. A great Rabbi really was a weird sexual pervert and madman, and he destroyed Judaism. What a twist! [4]

Non-Zionism claims that there is a moderate school of Sabbateanism, and a more fanatical or extreme school, represented by Frankism. These views were held cryptically and secretly and passed down over generations.

He claims that “the ban against Sabbateans was promulgated by Sabbateans, and contained a lot of hidden allusions which were a nod and a wink to the Sabbateans.” This is “Jesuit Satanists control the Catholic church” level of conspiracy. But since I know nothing about this, I can’t confidently say that no such conspiracies have ever existed among Jews.

Having expressed my doubts, Non-Zionism claims that there were Jewish leaders in the 18th century who believed things that directly contradicted the Torah, like Mormonism on steroids. God shits “defecates” out the world, and then has sex with Christian Jesus who gives birth to God the Daughter. Jesus becomes a man, has sex with the Daughter, and goes crazy because he gets cucked by the Daughter and starts destroying the world, so God castrates Jesus. The Messiah, who is the Urine of God must have “virginal sex” (anal?) with the Goddess. If got any of that wrong, correct me, but that’s what it sounds like.

Eybeschutz reminds me of Meister Eckhardt, if Meister Eckhardt became Pope. There were a lot of dirty, adulterous, murderous Popes, but none of them proposed a theology that was opposite to Christianity. It would be like if the Pope came out and said, “Every man is a Pope. Ignore your priest. God is within.”

Every time I read Non-Zionism, I feel like a liberal who discovers that black crime statistics do not go away after controlling for poverty. I don’t want to believe that Jews worship demons. However, here is Non-Zionism, with claims that seem close to demon worship, at least from a Jewish perspective.

I think of Non-Zionism as an old-school antisemite, who says, “if Jews would just follow the Torah, everything would be fine. But then they invented this evil thing called the Talmud.” Except Non-Zionism loves the Talmud -- he instead blames Kabbalah and the Zohar. The fact that Evangelical Christians love the Kabbalah and the Zohar and the Shekinah spirit probably biases him against them, and against Zionism itself.

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3. Cultural Darwinism, by Jack Laurel

Jack tells us the story of “Beewolf,” which is Tolkien’s attempt to find the “mythic root” behind Beowulf. This “mythic root” has the following elements:

1. A child is abandoned mysteriously and raised by an animal

2. The child has superhuman strength

3. He grows up to go on a quest to defend a town against a monster who lives underground

4. He meets two companions

5. These companions are not strong enough to beat the monster

6. He alone beats the monster, and becomes king

I will add to this the myth of Romulus, who is raised by a wolf, kills his brother, and becomes king; the Hungarian Feherlofia, who is raised by a horse, defeats three dragons with his two companions to save three maidens, and becomes king. There is also the story of Mario, who is raised by an animal (Yoshi), has two companions (Luigi and Toad), goes underground (down into the pipes), and defeats the dragon Bowser to save the maiden Peach.

Jack presents the scholarly thesis as follows: first, we start with a primitive “folktale,” with endless variations. Then, the folktale is embellished into epic poetry. Jack turns this assumption on its head: is it possible that the definite and complex form was established first, and only later came the derivative and simpler folktale?

Jack questions the democratic logic of folklorists: “[the] Herderian romantic-nationalist idea that epic poetry comes from the people, that is to say the nation, which either generates it by some mysterious communal process or uses an individual genius as its mouthpiece (in much the same way as a mob might elect a leader to represent it).”

Jack compares this “bottom-up” approach to a “Darwinian soup,” in which common people throw together myths ad-hoc, which eventually become popular, which eventually become epic poetry. Instead, Jack suggests that myths come from the top down, first as epic poetry, and then degenerate over time into folklore. One way to apply Jack’s theory would be to ask: are works of literature, like Lord of the Rings, the result of “embellishing” popular memes, or do popular memes descend from these works of literature? The answer could be “both,” but quantitatively, there are a lot of memes about goblins, orcs, dwarves, and elves. It’s hard to accuse Tolkien of “merely” embellishing a collection of myths, while it’s very much the case that Dungeons and Dragons is a degenerated descendent of Tolkien.

As an analogy, Jack uses “the descent of alphabets and other syllabaries from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters.” It is not the case that complex symbols come from simpler ones; complexity comes first, and the simplicity second.

There’s an “economizing” instinct in Darwinian history, in which we assume that simple technologies precede complex ones. But that’s not how human language (or myth) works. We don’t form complex concepts out of simpler ones. If you don’t understand the concept of a soliloquy, I will dumb it down for you: it’s a speech given by a character in a play, by himself, to the audience, where no other characters can hear him; an internal monologue. This is how humans teach language to children: they explain more complex ideas *in terms* of simpler ones. The complex idea came first; the simple idea came second.

Humans perceive complex phenomena, and out of this complexity, we simplify. We look for patterns. We dumb-down reality into essentials. Reality, as it occurs, is complex. The job of intellect is to remove unnecessary bits -- to reduce information, rather than increasing it.

A good story doesn’t bore you with the details. It focuses on the exciting parts. The job of a writer isn’t to tease complexity out of a simple starting-block: it’s to tease simplicity out of complex reality.

A related idea is that ancient languages were sung, not spoken. Ancient languages were highly inflected and tonal. As languages collide, they simplify -- this is a “Darwinian” process in which more complex language is simplified. But it is the Darwinism of yeast.

Jack claims that epic poetry comes from religious ritual, rather than historical analogy:

“The story-pattern found in Beowulf and the Bear’s Son Tale – with its animal-marriage, its night encounter with a demon, its ‘sacrifice’ of two companions, its underground expedition and liberation of royal maidens, etc. – looks to be rooted in some sort of initiatic ritual...”

From my perspective, rituals codify history. The animal-marriage represents pastoralism and wildness; the night-demon represents night-time raiding; the sacrifice of two companions represents casualties; the liberation of maidens is a form of “marriage contest” or “bride napping.” The journey to the underworld is the most plausibly psycho-symbolic in origin.

Jack takes a Brahmin-centered view of history: “the first written poetry would be the work of a later and somewhat degraded class of knowers, who had more or less come under the sway of rulers and warriors (who of course would have had much more to gain by the promotion of writing).”

Jack describes this “degeneracy” as a loss of complexity, but I would highlight the loss of *emotion*. Initially, the epic myth is told with devotion; eventually, it becomes a campfire story with endless variants. We now talk about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln with irreverence, but think of how those figures must have seemed God-like to their devoted followers. It is a loss of reverence, of sacredness, devolving into cynical comedy. It’s not a decline of intelligence, but a decline of holiness.

Jack’s conclusion is that myth precedes the nation, which I agree with.

Three asides on Hellenism and Judaism:

• Jack notes that Homer seems biased against the “upstarts” -- those who come to supplant the old and rightful rulers of Greece and Troy. Perhaps Homer is an infiltrator attempting to undermine the warrior order; perhaps he is part of an older order, attempting to preserve itself among the new order. By extension, one can view Christianity as an attempt to preserve Judaism among the Romans, or as a subversive attempt to undermine the Romans.

• Regarding the myth of the “pit,” of being betrayed by brothers in a pit or trench or hole or underground lair, is reflected in the abandonment of Joseph by this brothers.

• Jack mentions that Indra is presented as a younger God, akin to Herakles, rather than an older one (the Maruts are his older brothers), which reminds me of the relationship between Zeus and the Titans. We can also note that Jacob is younger than Esau -- the young God supplants the old one.

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4. Between Daponte Blu and Jamkarān, by Popehead

Right-wing esoterica is a series of “ghost stories” combined with obscurantism. It draws you into a sunk cost fallacy, so that you begin to value it. It is similar to conspiracy theories -- it is addictive, for a certain personality type, who prefer to imagine delusions of grandeur rather than taking action.

Be that as it may, it is important to understand the psychological mechanisms that undergird these “ghost stories.”

The implicit promise of Pope Head is that, if you read enough ancient literature (or 20th century literature), you can piece together an ancient secret religion, which will give you secret insights or secret powers. From the perspective of the placebo, it must be true, in the following sense:

Every people which has power coordinates this power through identity and history. Normans, Vikings, Greeks, Romans: all historical conquerors achieved success through a strong sense of pride in their origins, which most often traced back directly to the Gods themselves.

Large swaths of immigrants are inundating the west, and losing their historical identities. What is a hapa? What is a Mestizo? They lack Superhuman myths and histories. They are economic units in an economic zone. They are not willing to die for anything, and therefore, they are slaves.

This need not remain the case, for the Children of Israel began as 12 tribes of slaves, and then became a nation by the power of myth. It should be possible for 12 American tribes to be united by some new religion.

This new religion must center on the crisis of identity with respect to genetic science. The ideal human must be defined, desired, and worshipped.

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5. IQ With Conscience by Bryan Caplan

Bryan admits that “IQ realists” tend to argue in favor of the exile or sterilization of the low IQ. He claims that this is bad, because it erodes human rights.

In a small tribe, having members who are feeble, weak, or crippled would hurt the whole tribe. In a large society, we have food stamps and disability payments. Large societies are built and maintained by high IQ people. But high IQ is not itself sufficient -- the first problem to solve is coordination. Leftism, or human rights, solves this problem.

If you want to sustain a large wealthy society, the first thing you need to make sure is that cooperative norms are strictly upheld. As soon as they are eroded, society collapses in upon itself. IQ is necessary, but not sufficient. Sacrificing human rights to gain a marginal IQ advantage is not a good trade.

If we can construct fertility incentives that don’t violate human rights, but increase IQ over time, that seems fine. For example, allowing people to make free and voluntary choices, like gooning, drug use, or atheism.