We are rotting. But in the rot, something slithers. Oswald Spengler looked at Europe and saw an old woman, lips painted to hide the cracks. Alexander Dugin looks at the world and sees a battlefield, lines drawn in blood. Faustian man, the one who reaches beyond, the builder of cathedrals, the engineer of apocalypse — he built too much, reached too far, and now he drowns in the very ocean he sought to conquer. What is left? A new war, not just a war of nations, but of Being itself. The Fourth Political Theory does not weep for the West like Spengler does. It laughs. It sharpens its knife. It declares the old ideologies dead and shoves their corpses into the dirt. It calls for something new, something beyond liberalism, beyond communism, beyond fascism — a return, but not to tradition as a museum piece. Tradition as a weapon.

Spengler knew. He knew that civilizations, like men, grow old, grow weak, collapse under their own weight. But what happens when an old man refuses to die? Look at Europe: a continent in the final stages of consumption, wheezing out empty slogans about "democracy" and "human rights" while its cities burn and its borders dissolve. Faustian man, trapped in his own creation, unable to let go, clinging to the dream of eternal progress as it spirals into the void. But Dugin does not speak of decline; he speaks of war. Spengler's Age of the Caesars, not as a lament but as a prophecy. The great men will return, but they will not be European. Europe has forgotten how to breed conquerors. The new Caesars will come from elsewhere, from civilizations still young enough to believe in destiny.

.The Dissident Right are not "Woke Right."

"Being American, the neo-Freudians have no such conservative respect for culture; they are all too ready to tinker with its machinery of repression in the name of individual fulfillment."

— Rieff: Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.

"The elites of the emergent culture--if they do not destroy themselves and all culture with a dynamism they appear unable to control--are being trained in terminologies that have only the most tenuous relation to any historic culture or its incorporative self-interpretations."

— Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic

The Radical Progressive Party of Narcissus vs. The Dissident Right

In Part 1 and Part 2 of the Politics of the Psyche series, I outlined Lasch's use of psychoanalytic concepts as a way to describe the motivations and personality make-up of the political Left and Right and the rise of a third party — the party of Narcissus — which can be seen as the contemporary (and mainstream) progressive radical Left who control the Democratic party. In the wake of the election of Donald Trump in November, and the current vibe shift that has been noted by writers and political pundits towards a more masculine-oriented, heavy-handed, realpolitik political and traditional cultural ethos, a discourse has emerged online drawing attention to what has been labeled as the Woke Right (see also) or the Dissident Right.

Within this discourse, there is a strong concern that this emerging fringe group of mostly anonymous social media personalities go beyond an embrace of this strident, yet still benign vibe-shift towards a darker, more antisocial hyper-masculine, hyper-nationalistic, Christian-nationalist, and fascist orientation. It is argued that this 'darker' characterization is who the "Woke Right" are and that they reflect a mirror image of the Woke left in the context of the ultimate desire for authoritarian control via a rewriting of American history and the content of the (binding) narrative defining our national identity.

Continuing Chapter 5 of Karen Mitchell's work

Parenting and Children

For many, direct exposure to the persistent predatory personality (PPP) starts early. Lobaczewski briefly mentions the personality-deforming effects of being raised by a psychopathic or character-disturbed parent. Not having any experience to the contrary, such children imbibe "pathological" material from a young age, instilling in them with various illusions about the world, maladaptive emotional responses, and twisted values.

Mitchell adds several of her own observations based on the responses from her study's participants. As one put it: "the children's needs are never put first. They [the predatory parents] always have control." Additionally, such parents "use their children to achieve their own goals."

This is rarely observable or visible, however, as [the parents] often invest substantial effort into appearing to be a 'good parent' and grooming others to believe they are committed to their children while engaging privately in behaviours that are abusive, manipulative, intimidating, controlling, harmful, and/or undermining the other parent to family and friends.

This is a translation from scratch of Schopenhauer's short essay, "On Thinking for Yourself" ("Selbstdenken").¹ Why? Because I found the existing translations I'm aware of dissatisfying, and because I thought it might be fun.

The goal was to convey some of Schopenhauer's raw style by being a bit more literal in some places, while also trying to better preserve his wit for modern readers. Obviously, there is no concession to political correctness here whatsoever (the very thought), and no attempt to simplify anything. It came out a little less cleaned up and less academic than other translations, but hopefully more true to the original spirit and ideas.

Translating 19th century German is an interesting exercise. There are many words here with an extremely rich philosophical meaning that are impossible to translate directly without writing whole essays about them. Translating such texts is a game of truly feeling yourself into the author: taking a step back after reading a paragraph and sensing what it was he sought to convey, and his mood when he wrote it. You have to hear his chuckling in your mind, his frustration, his anger, and his sense of wonder. You need to apprehend directly the nimble stirrings of the guy who wrote these things. I tried my best to stay true to that spirit.² So there you go.

Arthur Schopenhauer: On Thinking for Yourself

§. 257.

Just as the most plentiful library, if unorganized, is of less use than a very meagre but well-ordered one, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if you haven't ploughed through it by thinking for yourself, counts for far less than a much tinier portion that you have thought through from all kinds of angles. The reason is that only by multidimensionally piecing together what you know, by relating every truth to all other truths, can you truly acquire and gain power over your knowledge. You can ponder only what you know; which is why you should learn something: but you also know only what you have pondered.

Khazin's economics and spreading liberalism, one coup at a time

Ilya Khotimsky was kind enough to send me summary of a book he translated: Russian economist Mikhail Khazin's Recollections of the Future: Modern Economic Ideas. (Khotimsky's summary is published here on SOTT.) I'm no economist, but a few of Khazin's ideas stood out to me. First, his book focuses on what Khazin calls "crises of capital effectiveness" (CCEs), examples of which include "the 1900s crisis of banking liquidity, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the stagflation of the 1970s." The last one erupted in 2008, and these crises only end "when access to new markets [is] achieved."

Khazin argues that the current crisis cannot be resolved from within the existing economic model. The only two solutions are to retain the dollar-based system at the expense of losing the American industrial base, and recovering domestic manufacturing but dissolving the current global system.

Curiosity is a strong desire to learn or know something. But according to researcher Perry Zurn, curiosity is not a singular thing. In fact, there may be at least three styles of curiosity that could have different benefits for our well-being and for the societies we live in.

In 2019, Zurn analyzed classical texts from the history of philosophy to study the nature of curiosity. Searching for mentions of curiosity in writings by philosophers from Saint Augustine to Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, he uncovered three different models of curiosity:

• The busybody: The archetypal gossiper, busybodies like to pick up bits of information about a wide range of topics. They aren't necessarily driven by a particular goal, but just by interest.
• The hunter: Hunters seek out specific answers, so they follow a targeted path and try to avoid distractions.
• The dancer: Dancers leap to new ideas, put existing ideas together in new ways, or find new ways of framing information. They don't follow a traditional path.

Are you feeling worn out? Struggling with lingering sadness, anxiety or feelings of indifference? If so, you might be stuck in a funk.

There are many reasons you might find yourself in a funk - including returning home after a holiday, not being sure what your goals in life are and a lack of meaning and purpose driving you forward. Sometimes, there's no clear reason why we find ourselves in a funk.

Whatever the cause, don't lose hope. There are many things you can do to turn the way you're feeling around.

Some people wake up vividly recalling their dreams from the night, and can tell precise stories experienced during the night, while others struggle to remember even a single detail. Why does this happen? A new study, conducted by researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, and published in Communications Psychology explores the factors that influence so-called "dream recall" — the ability to remember dreams upon awakening — and uncovers which individual traits and sleep patterns shape this phenomenon.

The reason why there is such a difference in recalling dreams remains a mystery. Some studies found that women, young persons, or people with a tendency to daydream, tend to better recall night dreams. But other studies did not confirm these findings.

Other hypotheses, such as that personality traits or cognitive abilities count, received even less support from data. During the recent COVID pandemic, the phenomenon of individual differences in morning dream recall attracted renewed public and scientific attention when an abrupt surge in morning dream recall was reported worldwide.

Its nature is quite different from what you may think.

There's an inherent contradiction looming over grand theories about where we stand in the scheme of history, and what we should do about it. Whether it be Darwinian evolution, cycles of elite overproduction, Strauss-Howe's "turnings" or Spenglerian civilizational souls and destinies, this contradiction presents itself in the following popular motif: "there is this natural historical development because of some hidden law, which dooms us all to a certain outcome. However, by becoming aware of it, we can work against it and change our destiny." Lately, for example, Bret Weinstein has been a strong proponent of such a theory, in his case referring to Darwinian maladaptation to the modern world and how we need to counter it.

Postulating the existence of some sort of natural law guiding human destiny, and then advising us to break that law, presents us with an obvious problem. Either this really is a natural law, which means we cannot escape it anymore than we can breathe underwater or escape death. Or, we can escape it by an act of will — but if we can do that now, so could various people in the past at different historical junctures, which then raises the question of how much of a law this really is, or why people in the past should have had less free will than us.

Political chasms, wars, oppression... it's easy to feel hopeless and helpless watching these dark forces play out. Could any of us ever really make a meaningful difference in the face of so much devastation?

Given the scale of the world's problems, it might feel like the small acts of human connection and solidarity that you do have control over are like putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. It can feel naive to imagine that small acts could make any global difference.

As a psychologist, human connection researcher and audience member, I was inspired to hear musician Hozier offer a counterpoint at a performance this year. "The little acts of love and solidarity that we offer each other can have powerful impact ... " he told the crowd. "I believe the core of people on the whole is good - I genuinely do. I'll die on that hill."