Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Rivers of Civilisation

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 3, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

09:32

The Rivers of Civilisation

It's all Metaphor vs Antimetaphor: https://lotuseaters.com/premium-metaphor-vs-antimetaphor-03-09-24

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Every great society is a river of civilization that flows through time and space, that is in a constant state of motion, which washes over one place or another, and the nomadic rivers of different civilizations lay their own separate layers of culture over one another throughout time.
	They can pool into the lakes of long-settled tribes, and there form layers of sediment in which the roots and histories of a people accumulate for thousands of years and give them their character.
	This can manifest differing attitudes to what came before.
	The occupants of a river of culture often aren't very interested in what came before them because it didn't belong to their river, whereas the people in cultural lakes tend to strongly identify with the deep past.
	The tyranny of the word just is a way of putting an end to these sentimental waterways, drying them up so that only the rational grit of the culture's events, ethics, and achievements are made present, picked out of their sociological and chronological context, and isolated in the here and now.
	Their material objects aren't a part of the past, so they cannot be part of a future.
	Only in the moment do they have an existence, detached from their own metaphysics.
	It's unsurprising then that this cultural grit, the lessons and history of a people, are choked down with such great difficulty because the liquid in which they were suspended, which allowed us to swallow the difficult parts, has been drained off, as Michael Oakshop put it.
	The lessons our ancestors learned with ease seem unusual and archaic if we take ourselves out of the realm of tradition.
	Attempting scientific objectivity in the events of a human life is actually crazy when you think about it, and will bring about the negative consequences to which our traditions spent so much time trying to put to a stop.
	To look upon a monument and say it's just a pile of stones is to show that the mind's eye of the beholder is either closed or blind to the metaphor of civilization which preceded it.
	And even if the message being transmitted across the millennia is not understood, at least to a normal person who still has a bit of romance in their soul, they can understand that the people of the deep past are trying to tell us something.
	Because monuments are rarely necessary to a civilization's existence.
	They are a part of the art of their lives, an aesthetic production of the reality that they inhabited and how they perceived it.
	They contain the magic of the universe in the metaphysics that attach to them.
	They are a felt expression of the people who built them.
	They are a message about the moral probity of those people in accordance with their own world view, even if it is senseless to us.
	Really, every artefact of a civilization is a metaphor for their own times, places, and peoples, and we preserve them with reverence in museums because we can feel that they carry the weight of thousands of lost years in them.
	And when we stand before them, we are in some ethereal way a part of that also.
	The pyramids or Stonehenge were not essential components for life in the same way that fields, herds, or water itself are.
	They are a part of the higher existence of a people.
	They are made through great organization and labour, sweat and blood, to bring into existence something metaphysical from the other world that would otherwise be absent from the material world.
	And even if it is only for a brief moment, we want to be a part of that.
	What else are we doing at these monuments if they are just piles of stones?
	Isolating things down to their most base material components does not actually remove them from the river of their civilization.
	They are still a metaphor for the entirety of what came before them, even if we can't conceive of it.
	Even if we become utterly blind to the metaphor of our own civilization, it is still perceived by people who do not live in an anti-metaphorical way.
	Those people still stand out like a sore thumb when they're in a foreign land.
	Only now they have nothing about them for foreigners to recognise and interact with.
	What are their traditions?
	What is their piety?
	Why do Westerners react so strangely when in a home that is not their own?
	And you know the kind of people I mean.
	People who fancy themselves as global citizens of nowhere, who have rationally transcended the need for borders, boundaries, and nations.
	People who despise such concepts when applied to themselves, though they can feign an air of paternalistic superiority when confronted with the rivers of metaphor from other people's civilizations.
	I think this characterizes the people we call globalists and their perennial enemy, the far right.
	The globalist types believe themselves to be self-authoring individuals who purport to exist anywhere and attempt to instantiate the global liberal order whenever they take power.
	Let's just ask you quickly, you have to choose now between Davos or Westminster.
	Davos.
	Why?
	Because Westminster is too constrained.
	And, you know, it's closed and we're not having meaning.
	Once you get out of Westminster, whether it's Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future.
	Westminster just a tribal shouting place.
	But everywhere they go, no matter where they are, they are always met by the mysterious far-right, which they characterise as an ideology because they themselves are marinated in ideology, because that's the only way that they can understand the universe.
	They think of themselves as being rational and self-authoring, and so they assume that everything else was rational and self-authoring.
	Everything else is ideology.
	But when it comes to the far right, they of course can't name it, can't identify any of its authors, nor give us any of its rational doctrines.
	I think the far right aren't ideological at all, but instead are the people who are living within the metaphorical river of their own civilization.
	And the globalist liberals are the people who are anti-metaphor, at least for their own people, in order that they might escape the moral burden being in such a paradigm puts upon them.
	If your ancestors built great monuments and curated their world in such a way as to cultivate a great and enduring culture which produced each successive generation down until ourselves, then we do have an obligation to uphold the good we inherited for the people that come after us.
	The forces of anti-metaphor seek to end this river of civilization, to liberate us from this burden, everywhere and for all time, which puts them at war wherever they go with the metaphorical people who live within the river of their own civilizational continuity.
	Every country has their far right, with no other thing connecting them.
	The globalist liberal type cannot understand why this is happening, but they know it is happening, and so it is a constant source of worry and resistance.
	And I do think this is a consequence of the way that liberalism conceives itself.
	It isn't a coincidence that the philosophy that seeks to return us to an unbounded atomized state as lone individuals, completely independent of one another, the past or the future, seeks to reduce the metaphysical burden we carry as the bearers of civilization.
	It tries to create a blank slate out of a masterpiece, because it can only see the pointless pigment on the canvas and is unable to step back to witness the whole painting.
	It is wrong to step outside of the metaphor.
	We are products of times and places and peoples.
	They indelibly mark us with their own continuity and render us as particular, no matter what the forces of anti-metaphor would have us believe.
	I recently gave a talk where I properly explained this new philosophical concept of metaphor versus anti-metaphor, and I think it illuminates the rift that we see in modern politics.
	Moreover, it allows us to transcend the calcified nature of left-right politics and speak to one another in terms that the other might understand.
	I'll leave a link in the description.
	And I realise that it is behind the paywall, but I'm afraid, of course, YouTube have demonetized my channel, so we must paywall high-quality content like this if we all want to survive.
	But you can purchase the lecture in perpetuity for less than the price of a coffee if you didn't want to subscribe.
	Thanks for the support, and I hope you find this new lens useful.

▲