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March 2, 2015 - Davis Aurini
26:37
Aurini's Insight: Cars, Horses, Civilization, and Freedom

My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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This is a requested video asking the question, has the transition from horses to automobiles fundamentally altered our understanding of ourselves?
Now I think there's actually quite a bit in this question.
I think this really speaks to some of the transitions that we've been going through over the past couple centuries.
But I think the question doesn't fully capture what's going on here.
I think it's more than just horses to automobiles.
But let's start with that question, explore what it's really asking, and let me tell you why I disagree with it.
I would say that no, the simple answer is no, the transition from horses to automobiles hasn't really changed us, but we have really changed for reasons I'll get into shortly.
Now the question is addressing the fact that with a horse, you have a living, breathing animal with a personality, with moods that you need to understand.
To be a good horse rider, you have to be able to assert dominance over that creature.
You need to understand that creature.
Whereas a car is just a system of pulleys and levers with some sort of gasoline operation going on in the middle.
And anybody can just drive the car.
You just drive the way you're supposed to drive.
And you don't have to intrinsically understand the machine.
And now this is where I disagree.
Now I understand where the question's coming from, because certainly horses do, on the surface, seem to have much more personality than cars.
But myself, my relationship with automobiles is very in-depth.
An automobile to me is something that is there to be understood.
It does have a lot of personality to it.
It does have a lot of mastery needed over it.
You need to, to be a good driver, you need to really understand how the entire vehicle works.
You can't just jump in and drive.
You need to actually understand the machine.
You need to be able to fix it.
You need to be the author of the vehicle as much as possible.
And I think the issue is that most people, these days, it is so cheap to buy a car and get a whole service package going with it, or even just to lease it for a couple of years and then upgrade to a new vehicle, that most people do not understand their cars.
I was recently told by somebody as I was driving across the country in a vehicle that's 20 years old that that was insane, that they'd never do something like that.
What if it breaks down?
And my response was, well, I'll fix it.
If it breaks down, I'll fix the thing.
And I know the vehicle very intimately.
I'm familiar with the model.
I know what I'm looking for.
I know what I'm listening to.
As I drive, it's just constant tactile sensation.
And I'm listening to every part of the engine, listening to anything that's slightly out of whack, because I feel that car.
It's not alive, but it is a complex system that is comprehensible, that you can listen to.
And I think what's happened is that most people that drive are very out of touch with what's going on with their vehicles.
And to a certain extent, I think this is cars made in the past 10 years or so, they really isolate you from the road.
They're completely soundproof.
There's very little sensation coming through either the steering wheel or the gas pedal to tell you what the traction quality is of the road that you're driving on or how well the clutch is holding on to the you know the to the engine.
So I think it's a combination of these two things: that, yes, that cars isolate you, and most people don't fix their own vehicles.
And quite sadly, modern vehicles have been so completely over-complexified that most people can't fix them.
You know, I would be seriously, seriously challenged dealing with a new vehicle.
But, you know, we're also looking at this with a modern attitude towards horses.
You see, anybody that rides a horse nowadays is going to turn that into a skill.
It's a major hobby of theirs.
You know, people don't ride horses for practical reasons, they ride them because they love horses.
And I suspect it was probably quite a bit different 100 years ago.
100 years ago, you wouldn't have to know everything about your horse.
And I'm not talking about like you go to the breeder or you go to the veterinarian to figure out all the details because I mean, even me, I consult professional mechanics.
You know, they know more than I do.
No, but I'm saying that 100 years ago, 200 years ago, you could go and buy a top-quality horse and somebody else would take care of it for you.
It's already been broken, it's already been trained.
It's like one of those fancy cars that you don't even have to think about.
So there's really not that much difference between the two of them.
Yes, one is biological and requires a bit more personality, but ultimately, with both cars and horses, we're talking about whether you make the conscious decision to master this creature or this machine, or if you're part of the system.
And see, I think that's the real question here.
Not about cars and horses, but the system.
Are we part of the system or do we have our humanity?
Now, let me start by telling you about Newark Airport.
Because I really think that airports are such a wonderful metaphor for what we've become, what our culture has become, what we as individuals are becoming.
Now, Newark Airport is the worst place I've ever been in my life.
And I'm just going to tell you one brief little thing about it.
But, you know, like most airports, it's got, you know, it's got the fake Irish pub, and it's got the fake Mexican restaurant.
It's got all these facsimiles of real places.
You come in, you go through the security pat down, you get on an escalator, you get on one of those treadmills to move you forward.
It's just this giant, you know, it's almost like an abattoir in how brilliantly it's designed to get you from A to B and keep you mildly distracted and obedient the entire time.
But Newark Airport, out of all airports, really stands out for the inhumanity of it.
And this really sums it up.
The men's room in Newark Airport, first of all, there's always a lineup going into the thing.
You know, this isn't even the women's washroom, this is the men's washroom.
There's a lineup to get into the bloody place.
And then the urinals, and oh, this is just absolutely devilish.
The urinals are very close together, but they have those privacy screens in between them, you know, which is kind of nice.
But then, at eye level, is a mirror.
Not a big mirror.
Not a mirror so that you can, you know, look behind you and make sure one of those terrorist rap scallions isn't messing with your luggage.
Not a big mirror so you can do that.
But a mirror two inches high and precisely at eye level so that you can make eye contact with all the other men urinating next to you.
I swear that the Newark airport was just built as a testament to the architect's hatred of God.
But it's an amazing system.
It is absolutely dehumanizing how you're clearly just part of the system.
You're just another number.
You're in the matrix.
Go have your bagel, have your coffee, your artisanal coffee from the fancy coffee shop that's completely generic at the same time.
Go have some Mexican food from a fake Mexican restaurant.
Go sit in an Irish pub that's not an Irish pub.
Just be part of the system.
Don't think, and you'll get to your destination eventually.
We are turning this entire world into an airport.
This was summed up nicely in the film, what is it, World's End, where these Gen Xers go back to their town to try and do a pub crawl, and every pub is exactly the same.
Bars and pubs are no longer places you go to, you know, to meet people, to have conversations, to do something.
Hey, I haven't done that before.
But now they look at this.
The owners of these places look at bars like places to turn the tables over.
You know, they want to turn the tables as quickly as possible to maximize the profit.
And so they've increased the volume of music so people have more difficulty speaking, so that they'll drink more.
If you're supposed to, you know, come in, not talk to anybody, eat, drink, and get the hell out of there.
You know, again, we've taken away this humanity.
We've created a very efficient system for getting people drunk and for maximizing the bar's profit, but it's killing the humanity of the whole thing.
And so I think this is really what the question is about cars, is that these modern vehicles really seem to isolate us from one another, isolate us from the road, isolate us from the machine.
You know, I just cannot see people enjoying driving a car these days as much as we did, you know, 50 years ago when we owned the car, when we truly owned it by working on it ourselves.
These new ones, it's impossible to work on them and you avoid the warranty if you do it.
So just be part of the system.
Don't think, don't complain.
See, if you think or you complain at the airport, that's when you start getting in trouble.
Don't make trouble for anybody.
And things are not that horrible.
Keep your head down, you know, be faithful to the system.
Nothing will happen to you.
And really, I think that's what this question is getting at.
And so this leads into my next point.
Suffering and virtue.
Now, Frederick Nietzsche was a huge advocate of suffering.
He actually despised alcohol because he considered it an opiate.
That if you hate your life and you're miserable and you're really not accomplishing anything, you're just being another cog in the machine, you can dull that pain with alcohol.
Whereas he would argue that any true greatness, whether it's a great artistic accomplishment or a feat of engineering or science, this always comes out of suffering.
And again, like the airport, you're miserable when you're at the airport, but you're not quite miserable to do, not miserable enough to do anything about it.
You know, you're just opiated enough to get through the whole process without complaining.
Whereas Nietzsche says, we need to complain.
And this actually recalls a conversation I was having with Aaron Clary a few months back about the self-driving car, which I think is appropriate given the question at the beginning of all of this.
Now, Aaron was saying to me that he thinks it's just an absolutely wonderful invention.
You know, that you can, and there's always been those times.
We've all been there where we're driving and we don't really feel like driving.
And how nice would it be just to hit cruise control and close our eyes and lean back?
And yes, that would be a very nice thing.
I feel it.
However, I, to me, the self-driving car just sounds like an absolute horror.
It's the airport extending even further into our daily lives.
Now, take a fellow.
Take a fellow that's working at one of these terrible corporate jobs nowadays.
One of these jobs where you have to be sensitive to what the HR department wants you to think, where you can't hurt anybody's feelings.
You're minding your P's and Q's.
And they have policies and procedures for everything.
You're not supposed to use your common sense.
You're just supposed to follow the rules.
This soulless, destructive obedience that is pushed with the entire modern system.
Imagine you're working at one of these jobs.
Right now, you've got a half-hour commute at the end of the day through rush-hour traffic, stressing you out, driving you up the wall.
And so if that job is really that terrible, you're eventually going to quit.
And you're just going to get a job flipping burgers because at least then you don't have the commute.
All right?
Enter the self-driving car.
All of a sudden, we're opiating that misery.
We're adding painkillers to the whole mix.
Like you still have a half-hour commute, but because you're not fighting and struggling with this rush-hour traffic, all of a sudden, you lean back and you pull out your Obama phone and you put on an episode of Robot Chicken.
Or you put on an episode, you know, like just some mindless comedy with no true satire, no true catharsis, and you laugh your ass off as you're driving home.
All of a sudden, your terrible, soul-numbing corporate job is that much more tolerable.
Too many of these luxuries, too many of these painkillers, and we stop noticing just how much pain we're in.
See, that commute home that just drives you up the wall and makes you miserable.
That can be the impetus to change your life, to do something with your life.
Not to be a corporate slave, wasting all of your money on, you know, stupid fashion accessory, you know, like $150 jeans.
All right, Levi's makes the best jeans on the planet.
You don't get better quality than that.
If you're spending $150 on jeans, there's something wrong with your life.
At least in my opinion.
But that's the thing.
You might be in enough pain to actually change your life.
You realize, hey, I'm hitting rock bottom.
I need to change.
There is something wrong with my life.
I need to live for a purpose.
Self-driving car, it's the opiate.
So now you are just happy with your corporate slavery.
You accomplish nothing with your life.
And at 60, you're like, oh, where did all the time go?
I never did anything.
Now, with all that said, we need to do a part B for the suffering and virtue portion.
But Part B is Marxists and suffering.
Because what I just argued on the surface sounds very similar to what you'll hear coming out of the beaks of this Marxist slime.
If you're not familiar with it, one of the goals of cultural Marxism is to increase the amount of suffering in society on a low, latent level so that people become broken and hopeless and so that they're ready for the revolution.
They don't actually want to, for instance, they don't want to take the working class who are being exploited by evil capital.
And you know what?
Sometimes they have been.
They don't want to take those people and help empower them.
Empower, I love that word, as if somebody else can give you power.
But they don't want to improve their lot in life.
Not really.
What they do want to do is organize them to create a massive revolution in civilization.
They want to take the 1%, tear them down, and put themselves, you know, revolution 360 degrees, put themselves up in that 1% position.
And one of the ways they do this is they try and make conditions absolutely intolerable.
They push for policies that on the surface might seem to help people, but ultimately make everybody so miserable and so disenfranchised that they're willing to follow a charismatic leader.
Now, what's the difference between what they're saying and what Nietzsche is saying about greatness coming out of suffering?
I think the fundamental difference is that it's a personal decision.
When Nietzsche advocates suffering, it's fully acknowledged suffering on your own basis.
That you need to embrace suffering to achieve great virtue.
And for instance, the self-driving car that I'm arguing against is this manipulative sort of opiate.
In fact, it's the flip side of the coin of what the Marxists are doing.
You know, the Marxists, you know, for instance, John McIntosh recently saying that video games shouldn't be fun.
John McIntosh, you know, these Marxists want to undermine the things that make you happy.
They want to Take away what little pleasures you have in life to make you miserable and to prepare you for the revolution.
Whereas the opposite side of that coin is we want to give you these addictive, enjoyable, but fundamentally valueless constructs to play around with it, whether it be reality TV or games that really don't have any cathartic value to them.
And I think we can all admit there's some video games that are just a complete waste of your time.
You know, and we want to addict you to those so you don't notice how horrible things are.
Like these are really the two sides of the same coin.
Whereas what myself and what Nietzsche and I think the person asking the question that inspired this video are saying is that you need to embrace suffering and knowledge of your world to master it, to take authorship of your own life and authorship of the things in your world.
Now, all of this, all of this really comes back to a fundamental question of what is civilization and the masculine and the feminine energies that make up civilization.
Now, the feminine wants to nest while the masculine wants to explore.
The feminine wants order and predictability, whereas the masculine is very chaotic and disruptive.
And civilization is the product of both these energies, you understand.
We need both of those energies.
But see, the feminine is the system that we have in place.
And when you get the masculine injected into that, the masculine is going to disrupt the system.
The masculine is going to invent new technologies that completely change how everything works.
You know, the masculine is very, very disruptive, which is the last thing you want to be in the airport.
You know, the airport is the toxic feminine.
It's the overwhelming femininity.
It's the womb turned into the tomb where everything is ordered, no innovation is allowed, no change is allowed, and if you dare to stick your head up, you will be smacked down by the hammer.
And yet these very systems that we have are also enabled by the masculine innovation, the generation of new technologies, the generation of new ideas is what enables new and more powerful systems.
And the pure masculine certainly doesn't have any luxury.
The pure masculine is the state of nature.
You know, it's the post-apocalyptic, the cowboy fantasy.
And certainly as men, we are very romantic about that.
But realistically, we don't want to live in a world where a broken leg means that you die of gangrene.
Civilization is the synthesis of these two energies, these two drives.
And the issue right now, again, it's not the automobiles.
It's that we're living in a society, in a civilization, where the feminine has become completely dominant.
You know, it's even to the point where we're medicating young boys in elementary school because they're acting like boys, where masculinity, the masculine energy, is itself under attack, and everybody needs to be obedient.
Everybody needs to get along.
Everybody needs to follow the system.
And I think that's the real question, like what all of this is about.
Is that, yeah, we have this toxic, cloying femininity dominating our civilization, preventing innovation.
And again, womb and tomb.
You know, they sound similar for a while.
Rather than a society, rather than a system that takes care of individuals so that they can blossom into everything they could potentially become, we have a clawing system that chokes the life out of them, preventing innovation, preventing social advancement, and ultimately being extremely destructive.
We have an overbearing mother of a civilization.
So the solution to all of this, for what solutions there are, because you can't, fundamentally, you can't change the world.
You can only change yourself.
You know, you can only serve as an example to others.
You can only do your little part.
Ultimately, to fight against this dehumanization that the toxic femininity that the system pushes on us, to fight against that, we need to embrace mastery of our immediate environment.
We need to not debten ourselves to pain.
You know, if you're going to a job that's so miserable that you have to go home and smoke a joint every single night and watch some stupid, unfunny comedy movie, you know, you need to get off that painkiller.
Figure out what's causing you pain, what you don't like about your life, and change that.
And meanwhile, everything else in your life, be it your car, your computer, your home, master it.
Understand how it works and take authorship of that.
You need to be your own author.
Take authorship of yourself.
Don't just use the painkillers, but also be the author of your environment.
Take responsibility.
Take control and embrace suffering and virtue.
Anyway, so that is the first of Arena's Insight videos.
If you've got a philosophical question or even some personal advice that you'd like from me, please hit the link below, send me an email, and I'll quote you a price.
Anyway, aren't you out?
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