Dissident Learning: A Fresh First Lesson
Lesson 1: The Rationalist and The Stale
Check out the introduction, here:
My point shall be restated: for the dissident sphere to have a coherent coalition identity, there is a need for organizational principles. Those organizational principles can only be made manifest through education. Therefore, dissidents are in need of a new form of dissident education. Due to the tenuous relationship between the dissident and powerful institutions and the need to avoid repeating the mistakes of past technical exercise, the form of such education is best manifested as folklore.
While my argument may be simple enough, I would be remiss to not address the elephant in the room: When Leviathan first rose, the first thing it devoured was the very folk itself. Folk institutions of charity and clarity were replaced by an apparatus of welfare and induction. My dear friend, Caligula the Cat, verily notes that “If there was something that damn fish knew how to eat best, it would be a fancy feast of folk”.
However, it would be a mistake to believe that Leviathan has lied unchanged since Hobbes’ conceptual inception. The bacteria within Leviathan’s stomach, the Rationalist, has become badly bruised and sickly in our idiosyncratic era. I have seen many of them in virtual worlds, wandering about, high on social media and disassociated pornography. The Rationalist in modernity is synonymous with being either a censorious charlatan or mouth-breathing midwit. The change of the Rationalist guardsman from respectable steward to a hobbling dysgenic sobsack is a wonder for any dissenting voice.
If you consider the Rationalist being dysgenic individually to be too small a change for exploitation, consider the Churches of the Rationalists: the Universities. Almost every department is infected with some plague or other that causes them to spew the most ridiculous things. In my own time, I had to read vegan drivel in English, stare at wet socks in the Arts, and suffer unending pointless statistical critique in the sciences. This is without mentioning the grievance departments, whose entire job is to train corporate commissars in their approved slogans. There is a competency crisis amongst rationalists and I can hardly contain my laughing at such affair!
The Rationalist had to do but a single job for Leviathan, which was to play the Grimace; The Rationalist had to eat up the folkways and spit out carefully woven abstractions that bolster Leviathan in praises. Our noble slow-witted purple blob of gluttony just had to assure people of its sanity such that they would look away from the gaping maw of its master drooling overhead.
In truth, it was always inevitable that intellectual institutions transformed to train odious expert were going to fall to intellectual masturbation, after all, they just can’t help it! The Rationalist’s character is of overt hubris in believing that which was worth knowing could be instilled deeply into freshly emptied minds. What we are left with is an opportunity to take advantage of the great rational pwning1. In past ages, they might have had enough credibility to call ‘Bah Humbug’ on our holiday cheer, but not at this hour.
And if you think that the Rationalist will magically regain that credibility any time soon, then I have a bridge to sell you. The lack of confidence in their ideas is so palpable that they have subverted the very idea of open dialogue. It is not uncommon to see them gather up some awful artificial types to clamor in administrative dashboards, salivating over pressing ‘restrain’ to save their embarrassment. This is not a creature worthy of credit, it is so lacking in quality that I dare to dismiss it on sight so that it may save face. While the quality of dissidents is aged like wine, the Rationalist ages like undrunk Grimace shakes.
Without the Rationalist, all that remains that can deal with dissenting folklore is the enzymes still ruminating inside the belly of the beast. The tomes and phrases of technical education still maintain deconstructive power to folkish project. However, those very enzymes are being flushed out as we speak by prophylactic year-zero grievance-mongering. It is an unfortunate mess that will have to be dealt with, but the way is open and the stomach, bare.
The task of a nouveau folklore is plausible. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it has already begun. Jubilant toadies and grey half-men dance on my electronic light array, endearing themselves as modern representative characters. These digitized phenological beings act as the modern gods, overlaying reality to elucidate innocence and submission. Their gifts, pulled from the tongues of men, bring out a primal philosophical nature within the collective mind. Deep within that jungle, desperate tribes hark, coalescing around colored edibles in ever-deepening holes. Is this not the beginning of folk?
It may be, but a primitive unrefined folk is not the folk we seek and therefore no folk at all. The icons rather act as tokenized mediums to be bought and sold. The characters and their respective ideals are displaced as “folk-ish” tokens for anywhere children. The life-defining qualities of immense integrated civilizational joy are not there, because the story is not there. While many such children’s toys are beneficial to our cause, being great advance organizers for future moral teaching2, there is no implicit story that is summarizable about them. The monument “gods” are freely moved from town to town, but are left artistically homeless and unshielded from acid rain.
I wish to illustrate my point further, compare your best digital idols to the following story from my stolen copy of ‘A Treasury of Jewish Folklore’ by Nathan Ausubel:
Stale Ancestors — Stale Learning, A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, Nathan Ausubel. pg. 51
Usually the orthodox rabbis of Europe boasted distinguished rabbinical genealogies, but Rabbi Yechiel of Ostrowce was an exception. He was the son of a simple baker and he inherited some of the forthright qualities of a man of the people.
Once, when a number of rabbis had gathered at some festivity, each began to boast of his eminent rabbinical ancestors. When Rabbi Yechiel’s turn came, he replied gravely, “In my family, I’m the first eminent ancestor.”
His colleagues were shocked by this piece of impudence, but said nothing. Immediately after, the rabbis began to expound Torah. Each one was asked to hold forth on a text culled from the sayings of one of his distinguished rabbinical ancestors.
One after another the rabbis delivered their learned dissertations. At last it came time for Rabbi Yechiel to say something. He arose and said “My Masters, my father was a baker. He taught me that only fresh bread was appetizing and that I must avoid the stale. This can also apply to learning”
And with that Rabbi Yechiel sat down.
Rabbi Yechiel is not a token, but a bold baker’s son residing in Ostrowce and the first eminent ancestor. Implicit to him is the important lesson that focuses us to figure what is fresh and what is stale. While the callow croaker may hop to every emotion, every prose, and every art, Yechiel builds on the acclaim of his father as he embodies a specific time, place, and purpose.
Our rabbi existed to remind the most distinguished rabbis that their learned dissertations were not theirs, but their betters; To tell them that they were the impudent ones. His tale works the human spirit alchemically, reconfiguring and reorganizing our minds to remember a simple lesson that a simple father gave to a favored son. Our picturesque tokens do not make the heart flutter, because they are pieces that must be usable for every game. They are not particular to a complete context. They do not build on the acclaim of a patriarch by embodying a specific time, place, and purpose. That universal ‘every’ quality guarantees that they will wither away and be forgotten.
Infinite possibility breeds staleness. Even today, there is something fresh to be said about Rabbi Yechiel.
That fresh thing may be the simple observation that Rabbi Yechiel is a dissident. He looks at the world and sees the creeping miasma of staleness, the exuded mist of aged fish. The contractual respect that is owed to his peerage fights up against familial forthrightness. He makes a statement of controversy, one that the eminent should make of their spawn, and sits ready for complaint. The reward for his statements is to outlast the nameless rabbis of yore and to instruct us: we cannot use culled hackneyed half-folk.
As the staleness of modernity perforates the outer crust attracting flies and other insectoid types, the fresh will become all the more appetizing. The educated dissident with wit that can outlast this crumbling age will find themselves as the author of the next, only if they are able to hold on and out. Elementary stories refined for base reasons are what make a convincing caucus that can put forward noble sayings. Such noble sayings forward the knightly crown in movement towards completion of suprahuman pursuits.
We know our task as descendants of bakers, all that remains is to make and work the dough. Our dough is chemical, being that which sparks further reaction within journeying men, molding and preparing them for ever greater tasks. The medicinal pills and bitter herbs that we take into ourselves purify our golden Ki and raise our senses towards the divine. With divine right, the baker and his kin may become artisanal inventors, graceful life-givers, wizened sages, or distinguished warriors.
And the very first move on our quest to make appetizing bread is cleansing the debris in our seigniorial ovens.
If you are interested, stay in tune for the second lesson, where we will talk about what we shouldn’t make. At least that is the current plan, I have a couple books in the mail that might change that, who knows?
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
Advance Organizers are an interesting concept that I will get around to in more depth at a later point. Just know that they are memetic information that makes organizing future concepts easier. They were detailed out by David P. Ausubel who is the son of Nathan Ausubel.