Thread by @0x49fa98

I have been asking myself, what, precisely, is the dark enlightenment? As with most names of ideas in our strange little corner of the world, the name has a certain cringey edgelordy quality, much like the words “cringey” and “edgelordy”

On top of that it’s an oxymoron, made possible only by the fact that the word “enlightenment” has lost all metaphorical valence. But nonetheless it captures something important

The enlightenment thinkers were theorists, and to take some license, the people who put their ideas into practice, men such as Robespierre and Jefferson, were engineers

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025738936948150275

For this reason I think it’s fair to say that the enlightenment, imagined as the triumph of “reason” over “religion”, can be compressed into the French slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity, or death.”

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1031893387819905025

That it took centuries for the disease to become terminal does not detract from the realization that death was always part of the package, and not the good kind of death, which is the death of your enemies

It is an accident that would be funny if it were not so tragic that the development of scientific understanding has been coupled and conflated with this perverse cult of atheism and death

Most of the greatest discoveries of science have been made by Christians, in large part due to a Christian eagerness to study and understand the material world as one would study the word of God, because creation is in fact one of His works

The accident happened I think because the critical mass of capital accumulation that triggered a phase shift into industrial society came at exactly the same time these ideas were experiencing their popularity

Alternatively perhaps, via Marx, material conditions precede philosophical movements. In the same way feminism was a consequence of contraceptives and antibiotics and automatic dishwashers

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1029364216187084800

If this is true then the Dark Enlightenment also springs from the situation in which we now find ourselves, but regardless of that...

From the study of sexual behavior we learn about the inception of paraphilia in males, we learn about two substantially different etiologies of paraphilia. “Cued” interest is innate and biological, and emerges slowly over the course of puberty and has as its object female anatomy

“Uncued interest”, in contrast, develops in a single spectacular instant, when the male confuses a stimulus which is incidentally present at the time of first ejaculation as having sexual puissance, similar to the way baby birds imprint on their mothers

If I may call the industrial revolution a kind of technocapital orgasm, we may draw an obvious uncomfortable analogy to try to understand the western fetish for liberty and equality, fetishes that are entirely contingent, as the mere existence of Chinese society illustrates

I learned a most horrific story from reading about sexual behavior; a Sri Lankan boy named Chaminda whose first ejaculation was self-induced while the ants from a toy ant farm walked all over his legs, incepting a lifelong erotic desire to have insects crawl on his skin

Lyotard gave an account of the machinations of capital upon the human libido, (regrettably “commodity fetishism” is not intended in a sexual sense) but from the perspective of capital itself, HUMANISM is the embarrassing paraphilia, the love of crawling ants

And in a similar way, it happens gradually during his intellectual pubescence that the western man develops a fetish for liberté, egalité, & la mort. Like other cued interests it is innate, not to the man in this case but to our society, in our memetic dna

For those who have followed me for a while you already know that I consider truth to be downstream of power, not in the absolute sense, but the truth of human social relations is no physical constant, it is voluptuous and serpentine

The intertwined projects of the rightist today are 1) the destruction and defamation of enlightenment values 2) to construct a superior and above all SUSTAINABLE replacement, and 3) to accumulate enough power, in the form of capital, to drive the noble refactoring of society

The truth we may not like is that character of the people who rule society is more important than the ideology they hold, and even such repugnant ideas as liberté and egalité can be overcome by the virtue of the founding stock of America, for example

The failure mode of ideology is the same as the failure mode of every paraphilia; it retards reproduction. The culmination of enlightenment ideas is to produce a ruling elite which is incapable of copying itself into the future, effectively castrating all good people

Paraphilia and all other forms of contraception are special cases of Goodhart’s Law, so our new values must take special care to encode OUR understanding of success, and not its proxies

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1047844190741135360

We tentatively propose as dark enlightenment values:
HIERARCHY,
(against equality)
BENEVOLENT CONTROL,
(against liberty)
and ETERNITY
(for fraternity is immanent and we yearn more ardently for the permanent)