Thread by @MAGuyton

I want to propose a vocation for white men: becoming fools. That is, learning how to engage in the opposite of disembodied rationalism, which is the cultural disease our ancestors bequeathed us and everyone else they tried to colonize.

Now when I talk about white men, I have to first of all specify that I’m talking about a specific kind of white man: those of us who use the word “we” presumptuously because we know ourselves to be the protagonists of history.

The empire consists in the collective agency of those who consider ourselves to be the protagonists of history and the generic melting pot of humanity. “White man” is short hand for European-descended titans of industry and anyone else who embodies the global market.

I was watching a documentary video on the competition between the white men who started the US auto industry; the thesis of the documentary was that the tremendous egos of Henry Ford and his competitors were the engine of capitalism.

I agreed with the makers of the video even though their point was to glorify technology. The engine of capitalist empire is the white male ego. White men and others who emulate us need to be saved from our egos, but our great error is to presume this need to be universal.

It’s the people who think they’re saving the world whom the world needs to be saved from, and I think that’s a reasonably valid generic universal statement, even though presuming truth to exist in generic universal statements is precisely what makes “whiteness” toxic.

The best way to be saved from your ego is to become a fool. What does it mean to be a fool? It can have a lot of meanings. Shitting my pants in public three times was an important rite of passage in my journey into foolishness.

Swimming in my lake and making up rituals where I speak in tongues to the trees is an important part of my foolishness. Dancing in the rain helps me to be more foolish. Listening to the gangsta rap that got me through middle school makes me foolish.

Being a fool describes a particular posture for engaging with life in which my rational mind doesn’t sabotage my embodied experience of the real. As long as I am trying to convert every experience into monetizable, practical content, I remain an enslaved gear of colonization.

I become real the more I live through idiosyncratic moments that cannot go viral because they’re too bizarre and embarrassing; idiosyncrasy is what grounds me in authentically particular embodied experience which rescues me from thinking that only the global stage is “real.”

When white men follow the basic trajectory of Immanuel Kant and favor abstract universals over concrete particulars, our decisions become a market that devastates billions around the world as we reduce existence to a set of numbers on a screen we are trying to grow rapidly.

Foolishness is the irreplicable life that is fully intrinsic in the way that generic, capitalist life is fully extrinsic. Foolishness is living in a house with dated wallpaper and warped floorboards instead of embodying the simulacrum of HGTV.

With regard to theology, foolishness involves making ridiculous claims about God that laugh at their own ridiculousness because they are derived in ecstatic states of consciousness in which the mind is stupefied into ridiculousness.

Note that this is the opposite of making authoritative claims about God that are self-important and infallible. Foolishness is the opposite of authority, the idol white men chase after more than any other, being the Luciferian architects of the Tower of the Babel that we are.

The apostle Paul loved divine foolishness. He lived in divine foolishness. Maybe he smoked weed or ate mushrooms. Maybe he didn’t need to because Jesus’ blinding encounter made him enough of a mystic to taste ecstatic truth completely sober.

But he reached the “seventh heaven,” or as today’s hippies say, the “5D,” not because of his deductive reason, but because of his ecstatic experience of the “breadth and length and height and width of God’s love.”

Paul wants us to experience the orgasmic euphoria of the “seventh heaven.” It’s not different than the orgasm you have when you’re fucking; it’s just those two seconds of erotic intensity expanded into a continuous experience of surrender and ego dissolution inside of God.

Paul never wanted us to fall in love with arguing about God like the people who idolize Paul love to do; Paul wanted us to taste God’s love and babble like fools about it as he considered himself to be doing. “I am talking like a madman,” he says in utter ecstasy in 2 Cor 11:23.

The people Paul quarreled with were exactly like the people who use Paul’s words to build rationalistic pyramids where they can worship their own egos today. Paul loved being a fool. You have to be a fool to understand him, that is someone who has let God fuck you in the ass.

I mean this phrase in all of its vulgarity and taboo. A fool is someone who embodies the scandal of being fucked in the ass by God: utterly penetrated, utterly emasculated, utterly vulnerable, utterly self-emptied, utterly crucified, utterly reborn.

The gospel needs to be completely horrifyingly queer to be the fully outrageous, absurdly beautiful, liberating scandal that made Paul write with moronic hysteria to the churches he planted. I have been saved by the humiliating surrender of opening my legs to receive God.

And this has happened in a very visceral way. I shit my pants in public three times in the last year. And I discovered that the world doesn’t end when that happens; I just become an animal again instead of deluding myself that I’m a brilliant mind trapped in a nasty body.

As I lose the dignified self-importance that held me prisoner for the first half of my life, I can feel the sphincter of my asshole releasing itself completely to let Christ invade me entirely so it is “no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me” (Galatians 2:20).

I don’t need to be afraid to strip naked in front of God or anyone else, though I can refrain from doing so for the sake of other people’s boundaries. So the foolishness I’m speaking of is not irresponsibly shitting on other people; it’s rather artful hospitality FOR THEIR SAKE.

I am a fool when I let my son think he’s smarter than me because I want him to relax around me. I am a fool when I embrace naïveté in conversations with others for the sake of their empowerment. I am a fool when I empty myself and carry my cross without shame or resentment.

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