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)
Nihilism is the Master Psyop. Nietzsche wrote this on the first page of his last book (1889). A vague sense that nothing really matters. You need to scrub this feeling out of your soul with as much aggression and venom as you can muster. Nihilism is the Meta Problem
The most powerless creature in the world is not an ant, not the grounded plant, but a nihilist. The ant and the plant will automatically fight to preserve themselves but this central instinct of life has been removed from the nihilist's toolkit. He is compromised beyond saving
Those who tell you the world is worthless will, after you renounce it, rush in to rule. It's a power grab, plain and simple. This is why for Nietzsche, the way out of nihilism is not community service or "sacrifice" but Will To Power. A healthy controlling urge is the antidote
In 1838, he combed through hundreds of Napoleon speeches and public gazettes
He collected Napoleon's best insights in a book
10 aphorisms by Napoleon on courage, equality, and more👇🏻
1/ Napoleon on freedom:
"If one analyses it, political freedom is an accepted myth thought up by those governing to put the governed to sleep."
Power is always concentrated at the top -
Different political systems and doctrines are merely different ways of hiding this fact
2/ Napoleon's relationship with power:
"I love power, but I love it as an artist. I love it as a musician loves his violin. I love it for the sake of drawing sounds, chords, & harmonies from it."
H.L. Mencken defended Elitism in the age of democracy, published in excess of 10 million words, and saw the endgame of capitalism sooner than most. Discover insights from the "American Nietzsche" on how democracies intensify herd behavior, the traits of aristocrats, and more👇🏻
1/ Democracy INTENSIFIES groupthink and group identity:
“Democratic man is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness—and the group, of course, must have its leaders.”
More groups = more leaders
2/ Mencken on the French Revolution:
“The Paris proletariat, having been misled into killing its King in 1793, devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled it - by the middle of 1796 it had another King…with an attendant herd of barons, counts, marquises, dukes.”