Amerika

Like most holidays in the post-collapse West, Christmas comes as a bleak moment in which we drop out of the world we have come to see as hostile and celebrate with our families. Most of this results from pluralism, a natural offshoot of individualism and democracy, since we no longer have one culture and therefore no holiday is universal.

This in many ways is simply honest. Worldwide, not everyone is Christian, and not every Christian celebrates Christmas the same way, especially since national traditions dictate that the holiday originally celebrated as Jul have its own national character. But in a pluralistic diverse society, there can be no national character or culture.

Consequently, it seems sort of bleak, celebrating an unofficial official holiday as the Regime plots to erase more of what made us distinct. However, we might see this simply as another process of asserting ourselves: those who celebrate affirm a cultural value and send it out there against the wave of non-values.

This leads us to a principle from long before Christianity that survives somewhat in Christianity, namely the idea that as the year ends, we should think toward what would make the next year excellent instead of what made the preceding year bad.

What you spend your energy and mental focus on comes into reality, if only through the somewhat prosaic and materialist process by which what you think about, you work on and talk about, therefore making it rise in the awareness of others and the daily process of your lives.

This ancient idea — preserved in modern time as hermeticism and the Law of Attraction, but probably belonging to the proto-Indo-European faith from which most of our modern religions partially descend — states simply that where you place your focus, meaning energy, time, and attention, is more likely to develop, so choose the good over the bad.

In the same way, in your garden you can focus more on the weeds or the healthy plants. Every good gardener I know focuses more on the health of plants, and nurtures the healthiest so they can go the farthest, even though everyone weeds. It is like eugenics, pest removal, and quality control in gardening.

It always pains me because most weeds are perfectly functional plants if in the right area. Those plants we deride as “weeds” are what take over any empty space after a fire or disaster and gradually populate it with life so that later larger plants that we find desirable can take root, like the trees that bring us fruit and the wild grasses.

Winter holidays tend to commemorate the same things. They celebrate having survived a year, and give us time to contemplate what went right and what went wrong. Mostly however they are a way of getting ready for the new year, working out those frustrations and getting rest up and well-fed for the harder times ahead.

In this sense, we should not bemoan the utter failure of modernity; it needs to die. Democracy, individualism, equality, diversity, and socialism/entitlements are offshots of the eternal solipsism of the human mind, where we confuse our thoughts — a type of symbol — for the reality to which they refer.

The human species had to go through this dark period of modernity in order to learn. We are seeing now how the wisdom of the ancients was not a product of a poorer and less technologically advanced age, but of wisdom that applies to any age, and our notion that these ideas do not apply to us has been proven wrong.

Even more, we are maturing morally past the binary of universal good/evil into an idea of hierarchy, where the best among us select what is good, and everything else has some level of disorder that is best avoided if possible. There is no Utopia, only constant improvement, but our society is dedicated against constant improvement.

We are seeing that these symbols like “progress” are proxies that hide what we really need to be doing. Ideology strikes me as an alternate explanation for reality, kind of like an excuse for not performing. “Stuff is not really how it seems to be, so try this fantasy instead that makes me look cool.”

Humanity is finally learning that good and good optics or good feelings are not the same. In fact, the latter usually means a projection or compensation for missing the former, because to achieve good requires a long year of hard work at nurturing the healthiest plants, removing the weeds, and killing off the sickly plants.

Is this cruel? In a non-utilitarian sense, we do not aim to make the most people happy, but to ensure that civilization itself and its culture live on through the best of our people and ideas. We promote the time-honored and from among that, select those of a quality and transcendent outlook that improve life.

If we are going to get to the stars — and we should do this simply because it is cool and badass, although it is also our only chance at long-term survival — we need first to mature as individuals and a species, and the horror period of modernity is the real dark age from which we are learning.

We are learning to move beyond the Age of Symbolism. We are seeing that God is a symbol for a transcendent feeling that cannot be symbolized, and therefore frustrates our minds, because it is both serendipitous and fleeting. It cannot be imposed like a law, factory, or financial incentive. It is like the winds, rains, or gravity.

With that, it makes sense to nod at the snowdrifts, smile at the storms, and look forward to the New Year. God/gods bless you, each and every one, and thank you for being with me this year to read all of these views that I believe are important despite being almost universally ignored in the trends of today.

Tags: age of symbolism, christmas, hermeticism, pruning