In D.H. Lawrence’s hypnotic and powerful short story SUN (1928), Juliet, a sick woman, is prescribed sun therapy by her doctor. She starts sunbathing naked and magical changes happen in her body, psyche, and being. The “cold dark clots of her thoughts” start dissolving. A thread:
1/ Juliet’s sun-bathing sessions turn her into an aristocrat:
She develops a “contempt for human beings altogether”
Why?
Because they are “un-elemental” and “unsunned”
As if they are “graveyard worms” - always “innerly cowed” and afraid of the “natural blaze of life”
2/ Why was D.H. Lawrence obsessed with the sun? His father was a coal-miner, spending most of his time in the dark underground. Lawrence didn’t want that fate. He wrote: “The sun is to us what we take from it. And if we are puny, it is because we take punily from the superb sun.”
3/ For Lawrence, conscience is your inner sun:
“Conscience is sun-awareness and our deep instinct to not go against the sun”
When our gut instinct clearly blinks red or green
We experience borrowed clarity from the sun itself
Good ideas wish to live in a well-lit, sunny mind
4/ DH Lawrence's problem with the middle classes?
They’re “sunless”
Lawrence:
“They have only two measures: mankind and money, they have utterly no reference to the sun”
For Lawrence, life without a higher reference is “meaningless" like paper money "when the bank is broke”
5/ Why Caesar was an aristocrat
Lawrence wrote that the 1st century B.C. would’ve been “far less vital” and “less vividly alive” without him
He put people “into a new relation with the universe”
By uniting disjoint geographies, he “man in new relation to ice and sun”
6/ D.H. Lawrence’s definition of aristocracy is hard to improve:
“Being alive constitutes an aristocracy which there is no getting beyond. He who is most alive, intrinsically, is King, whether men admit it or not.”
All attention and loyalty go to the one who's burning with life
7/ Lawrence predicts a new Solar Elite:
“Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity! Time to recognize the aristocracy of the sun. There will form a new aristocracy, irrespective of nationality, of men who have reached the sun.
In the coming era they will rule the world.”
8/ If civilization is to survive, then it is necessary for the lower to "serve the higher"
A proper hierarchy is a pre-condition of life!
Lawrence: "More life! More vivid life! Not more safe cabbages, or meaningless masses of people.”
9/ Who’s a SAVIOR?
D.H. Lawrence: “Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind & the universe, is a savior.”
Life tends to degenerate into “repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness”
A savior hits refresh on “the human connection with the universe”
10/ I love D.H. Lawrence's definition of immorality:
“It is only immoral to be dead-alive, sun-extinct, and busy putting out the sun in other people”
Pro tip: Don't put out the sun in other people
Thinking about the Soviet autist who showed how the Sun influences the number of geniuses and political revolution on Planet Earth, and was sent to the Gulag by Stalin for going against the Marxist view of history (lol)
• Never took a bath
• Never lost a fight
• Wrote one of Joe Rogan's all-time favorite books:
The Book of Five Rings (1645)
The book is 380 years old but its wisdom still holds up. A thread:
1/ Miyamoto Musashi was undefeated across 61 duels. An all-time record. He never married, never had children, and according to rumors, never combed his hair. He was a strange but profoundly wise man. Rogan says his book is "one of the most valuable things anyone has ever written"
2/ Have no favorite weapon. Musashi cautions fighters against over-reliance on one move or "special fondness for a particular weapon"
He writes: "Too much is the same as not enough"
Stay pragmatic, dont entertain "likes and dislikes," arm yourself with what you need for victory
Hot take: too much humility is a sin. Sometimes you need to over-estimate your abilities so you take bigger leaps. The humble take negative feedback seriously and fold; the arrogant maintain a bull-headed stubbornness in the face of repeat failures. Guess who ultimately wins
Schopenhauer: "For what is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which...a man seeks to beg pardon for his excellences from those who have none? Whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.”
John Fowles explains in "The Aristos" (1964) how high IQ can subvert your will to act: "High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis." Rule 1: Do not lose the will
Carlyle in 1841: "A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things."
Chesterton on how an open mind is no more a virtue than an open mouth: "The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid”
A knight who owns a sharp sword should make sure he does not cut himself with it, and a man gifted with a great mind should make sure he does not start living inside it...
It's the best mental model for understanding how political change ACTUALLY happens
A thread...
1/ Overton was a libertarian political scientist. In the 1990s, while raising funds for rightwing thinktank Mackinac Center, he kept meeting donors who didn't understand what thinktanks actually do. He coined a new concept to solve this problem: Window of Political Possibilities
2/ Overton argued that politicians are not leaders but followers
Since they want to get re-elected, they'll only turn those proposals into policy which already have some public appeal
A totally unpopular idea? Political suicide. Outside the "window of political possibilities"