The most canceled woman in the world: Camille Paglia
In Sexual Personae, she attacks liberalism, feminism, and Nature-worship like no other writer before or since
On her 76th birthday today, discover her insights on why science is cope, how civilization is masculine, and more👇🏻
1/ Liberalism's great paradox
Paglia: "Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother"
Feminism wants the tyrant father to solve all grievances (mean words on twitter) while being an all-permissive mother otherwise
A big contradiction
2/ For Paglia, art, religion, and civilization are man's half-solutions to the eternally chaotic nature: "Religion, ritual, and art began as one." Man chants a hymn, sketches a painting, & erects a city wall for the same reason: to buffer against, AND impose his vision, on nature
3/ Religions go from "Earth-cults" to “Sky-cults”
When powerless against Mother Earth, humans worship the chaotic but fertile feminine
Example: The Venus of Willendorf
As human control expands, religions become Sky-Cults
We worship a Male God that designs, instructs, orders
4/ Science is cope
Science is a male attempt to use labels, data and the "cold light of intellect" to beat back the "archaic night" of nature
Science is our "quest for form"
Paglia: "To know is to control"
But nature, writes Paglia, "breaks its own rules whenever it wants"
5/ East v/s West
The West invented the gun even though China invented gunpowder centuries ago
Western mind is more interested in "phallic projection"
The western psyche wants to pin reality down
But the Eastern psyche, Paglia writes, goes for "compliance, not confrontation"
6/ Art is about creating order out of chaos, not promoting morality:
Paglia: "It is the order in morality rather than the morality in order that attracts the artist"
An artist's greatest motivation is to turn nature's madness into a coherent story using the alchemy of his work
7/ Art rises from the "deranged egotism and orderliness" of the male mind
Most criminals and geniuses are men because both crime and art involve imposing one's personal masculine will on the world
Paglia: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the ripper"
8/ Paglia on beauty:
"Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature."
Beauty is one of humanity's great tools
It makes the world holier and worth sacrificing for
9/ The worldview in your pants
Paglia: "Sexual physiology (sets) the pattern for our experience of the world"
The penis underlines "linearity, focus, aim, directedness"
But females must make peace with hidden genitals - which makes them at ease with "greater subjectivity"
10/ How to become nature's favorite
Paglia on the aggressive underbelly of life:
"Sperm are miniature assault troops, and the ovum is a solitary citadel that must be breached. Weak or passive sperm just sit there like dead ducks. Nature rewards energy and aggression."
Paglia's Sexual Personae is a dense, provocative, and deeply rewarding read
C.S Lewis almost died in the trench warfare of WW-I
Became best friends with Tolkien. Sold 100 million books...
On the cusp of WW-II, he gave an iconic lecture at Oxford University (1939)
His question: Does beauty matter when bombs start falling?
THIS is his profound answer👇🏻
1/ The permanent human situation is endless strife, chaos and pain
C.S. Lewis:
“Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself”
Yet culture breaks out
2/ If we waited for peace to create art the first cave painting would still not be made
Always some “imminent danger” looking more important than culture
Lewis: “If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun”
Disagreeableness has become the most important psychological trait. Everyday there is propaganda to ignore, psyops to reject, perversities to stay out of. The skill and speed with which you say "no" will determine how far you go
You evolved for a better signal:noise ratio. You have no internal defense against breaking news, algo-driven scrolling, 24/7 entertainment on tap, marketing on full blast, nefarious psyops, etc. So you have to build a defense system and then internalize it. Become disagreeable
90% of modern creativity advice is "be curious." But curiosity tethered to no higher principles, limited by no formal requirements, is just you collecting random data points until you drown in them. There's so much untapped creativity alpha in disagreeableness
There is a reason your creative juices start flowing in airplanes and long road-trips
I call it the "Kinetic Stillness Paradox" and I found this principle at play in the lives of nobodies like:
- JK Rowling
- Charles Darwin
- Albert Einstein
Let's dig in:
1/ 600 million people have read Harry Potter books—where was this iconic character born? In a train, as JK Rowling sat still for 4 hours, too shy to ask someone for a pen, mentally noting all details as the idea “simply fell" into her head
Harry Potter, inception location: train
2/ The theory of evolution rocked the foundations of religion, culture...even politics. Where was Charles Darwin when the eureka moment hit him? A horse-carriage...he remembered the "very spot in the road" 4 decades later
Theory of evolution, inception location: a horse-carriage
1/ Love precedes lovability: "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
1/ Love precedes lovability because a "primary devotion" to a place, thing, or person is the source of the creative energy that transforms it. Begin with love, not scorn. Commitment beautifies
2/ Modern streets are "noisy with taxicabs and motorcars," but that's the noise of "laziness and fatigue," not activity. If everyone walked, streets would be quieter but more alive. Modern thought is like a modern street - noisiness, long words, loud ideas...hiding laziness
You can do almost anything with a phone - and that's Bad, Actually
Because you can do anything, you end up doing nothing
The best tools are constrained and specific. They do you a favor by limiting you...
Thread:
1/ On a typewriter you cannot stream movies, check stock prices, or play online chess. You can only write. On a camera you cannot tweet, google trivia, or order groceries. You can only click. These older tools gave you a tunnel vision that their advanced alternatives just cannot
2/ If the only tool you have is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. If the only tool you have is a 7 inch flat screen, then all your problems look like pixel arrangement problems. That is Objectively False. Real problems demand more than tapping, clicking, coding