Idea Fix - The Blog

Here’s some info on Folk Psychology, as it will come up with something I’ll be writing on later.

Folk Psychology (sometimes called naïve psychology, common sense psychology or vernacular psychology) is the set of background assumptions, socially-conditioned prejudices and convictions that are implicit in our everyday descriptions of others’ behavior and in our ascriptions of their mental states.

It includes concepts such as belief (”he thinks that Peter is wise”), desire (”she wants that piece of cake”), fear (”Alex is afraid of snakes”) and hope (”she hopes that he is on time today”). Such ascriptions are collectively known as propositional attitude ascriptions.

Examples:

Folk theories, i.e. theories that are based on common, everyday experiences, but not subjected to rigorous experimental techniques, may underlie many of our actions. For instance, a fairly sophisticated folk physics (the theory of the behavior of middle-sized, common objects, such as tables, chairs and bowling balls) is essential to our everyday interactions with the surrounding environment.

Just think of all the assumptions you make about the clothing you are currently wearing, for example, that it is not going to melt, that it stays at a certain temperature range in standard conditions, that it will not protect you from bullets and so on. Similarly, folk psychology is considered the basis for many of our social actions and judgments about the psychology of others. It encompasses all of the assumptions we make about the correlations between people’s behavior, mental states, and surrounding conditions.

Controversy:

Many philosophers, under the influence of Wittgenstein and Sellars, have denied that the alleged theoretical entities posited by folk psychology (”beliefs”, “desires”, etc.) have any causal status. According to the theory-theory, a typical causal or counterfactual generalization (or law) of folk psychology would be characterized schematically as follows:

If X wants that Y, and believes that Z is necessary for Y, then X will do Z.

If, as the Wittgensteinian claims, propositional attitudes are not causes, then this would turn out to be meaningless. However, it is not clear on this analysis what properties such mental states do have, if not that of causality.

In the view of Daniel Dennett, X wants that Y and believes that Z is necessary for Y just in case it can be predictively attributed these beliefs and desires. He maintains this even if it is a simple animal, such as a frog, or a non-living object, such as a robot. In this, he declines to identify beliefs or desires with specific natural kinds. Thus, our folk-psychological talk about beliefs and desires is essential and frequently true, but does not concern entities in the brain.

edited from Wikipedia.

Following the advice of the astute Wilhelm Reich, I highly recommend getting regurlar massages to all. Reich, amongst other things, recommended limited Reichian psychotherapy but also regurly massages as a replacement to release the bodies emotional ‘armor’ and free up Orgone energy.

Orgone energy is very much like the Chinese concept of Chi. That’s why I hunt out the wonderful hands of our Oriental friends at most malls or at special city boutiques when I can, to get a thorough release of Orgone/Chi energy.

You will find these massage artists at most Melbourne malls. Most can’t speak English, so don’t expect to discuss Reich with them, but they give excellent long remedial therapy to those in need.

Reich is a most interesting character, a true Renaissance man, mad scientist and true libertarian. I highly recommend his books, especially those on Sexuality. I don’t fully agree with his critique of Fascism. But some of his criticisms of old school Fascism in the 20’s and 30’s are indeed true and on the money and have to be overcome in any future regeneration of these political ideas. I’ve always wanted to get an Orgone Energy accumulator in my House (or basement) . Any one know where you can get them in Australia?

Coming home from Mathew Clayfield’s place drunk the other night (after showing him the latest cut of The Beautiful and Damned), I posted my first Internet blog suggesting someone should be assassinated. I was feeling a little belligerent at the time. I can’t stand that Bashir turkey so he got the brunt of my drunken blogging wrath. I like to keep Idea Fix raw, so I won’t withdraw the comment either, though it could be a little rash.

It’s a good introduction to this post. A review of Slavoj Zizek’s new book “Violence”. I’m no Lacanian Marxist-Stalinist but I do like Zizek. He comes from Slovenia and has connections to the proto-fascist group Laibach, that toy with Left and mostly Right modernist imagery and produce some truly excellent electronic music. Zizek in recent years has taken over the mantel of Jacques Derrida, as philosopher / theorist celebre and media darling. Zizek made an excellent series on film called The Perverts Guide To Cinema and there is a self-titled doco about the man that is also very good. I have read about ten of his books, including those on Iraq and Sept 11.

So this brings us to Zizek’s new book “Violence”. Violence, as I’m sure you’re aware if you know me, is a personal issue of major interest cinematically but also politically with its use, abuse and application in real life. To Zizek’s credit he gets straight to the heart of the matter.

Many post modern philosophers tend to stray away from issues like Violence preferring to make odd foot notes or harp on about the importance of the Other or some equally fatuous bullshit.

But others in art, film and literature have been trying to think the reality of Violence. I think I’m one of the few people in Melbourne to have a copy of William T Vollman’s seven volume massive tome on Violence, “Rising Up and Rising Down” and have even managed reading some of it. So it’s a great to see Zizek rolling up his sleeves in this arena for a bit of critical theory bifo.

Zizek is a funny philosopher. He’s half post-modernist do nothing, wait, read and produce endless piles of useless text philosopher and half revolutionary Neo Stalinist. I like the Neo Stalinist part better as it beckons action. I’m tired of the do nothing endless task of post modernism, it’s basically a (post) modern form of sophistry mostly and a pointless exercise in circular futility. Zizek at least through Lacan, Hegel and other readings tries to reactivate the revolutionary Left and good on him for it. He calls himself a Left Fascist. And I’m probably not that far from that position myself. Though I prefer Mussolini, Franco and Hitler as revolutionary models to Stalin. Of course all are flawed and dangerous ‘heroes’ and Zizek does his best to rehabilitate Stalin, even with some success. But you should just read Solzhenitsyn and/or Martin Amis’s Koba The Dread to get a wake up call about Uncle Joe. But what Zizek is trying to do for the Left, my ambitions are to do something similar for the Right, but I digress.

In his new book Zizek makes many fascinating points and diversions of his own but overall is only partially successful for his vision of a critique of Violence. Terrorist Violence, Zizek says, that we see all around the world in Israel, Spain, Africa, the UK, South and North America is only to reaction to the underlying hidden Violence inherent in Western Global Capitalism and Globalisation. This hidden state violence is the main problem that disenfranchises millions and excludes a huge proportion of the planet’s population from a meaningful existence. Zizek cleverly goes on to attack what he calls Liberal Communists like Bill Gates …and I would add Oprah Winfrey to that list. Those who give away large parts of their fortunes or promote charitable activities (Bono, Geldof, etc) all the while sitting at the top of the Capitalist tree, completely safe and benefiting Public Relations wise from their philanthropy and ‘generosity’, seeming Christ like in their endless giving and good nature. Zizek suggests with a Brecht quote, shooting these Liberal Communists in some future Neo Stalinist purge. This is a fun revolutionary fantasy, but highly unlikely, though his hostility to their smug privileged attitudes is understandable. The notion of admitting the Hidden Violence of Capitalism is a very important point. As we all know Capitalism is blind and only follows the mighty $ and leaves in its wake endless cultural emptiness and spiritual oblivion.

Zizek uses Heidegger to underpin the notion of the Violence inherent in Language, which is indeed true and has its own disenfranchising ramifications.

But (and it’s a big But)…to me Zizek hints at wanting to liberate the wretched billions who Capitalism quashes in a new form of Neo Stalinist dictatorship of the Proletariat. This is a vast recipe for disaster. First of all, if Global Capitalism is legitimately threatened as we have seen already in the past and as is happening now in the US, those under threat opt for my camp (in the Right/ Fascist wing of the body politique) and quickly back away from any Leftist notions of Universal liberty and freedom for all. If he thinks putting Bill Gates up against the wall is a good idea, I dare say Bill Gates and many others would quickly finance the counter-revolution to crush any such notion. Global capital and the privileged world of its top echelon will not allow anyone to penetrate their carefully guarded Tower fortresses. Zizek himself might find himself hauled off, ala rendition, to an undisclosed location for some water boarding and his own ‘good’ bullet if he actually could inspire what he hints at..

More to the point (and this is something I can never understand from the Left) what is the use of liberating the Proletariat? And for what? Dialectical materialism? Money? Wages? Please… this is so 19th century, stupid and narrow minded. We in the West are so far beyond mere subsistence living that this notion is antiquated. The prole is the lowest common dominator, the great unwashed, the uneducated, the uncivilised, etc. Why are these the people the Left want to rise up and liberate? It turns out conversely as we saw with the USSR into a gigantic levelling of Dasein, so that we are all made equally wretched. Rather than raising it, it brings everybody down. It is the purest recipe for misanthropy in practice and disaster I have seen formulated. It always amazes what most Uni students who flirt with the Left are recommending. For example, just liberate every Chinese and Indian peasant and give them a Western Standard of living with a car and the Ozone would disappear in ten years or less. Just as another ice shelf shears off Antartica. Communist liberationist stupidity has vast implications for Global Warming, overpopulation and plans for the future of humanity as a species. If your Green these days, you have to start thinking, at least a bit, like a Fascist.

A full 70 years of Lenin/Stalinism and what did it give us…pointless oppression, constant fear of purges, gulags and dread levelling on a vast scale. No wonder Ezra Pound gave the Fascist salute after his imprisonment, it wasn’t meant for people alive in the 60’s to see… it was meant for us. Capitalism creates class through its hidden Violence, we grant this. Capitalist vision only raises up the most ruthless, vicious, blinkered, ugly and corrupt to the top of shit heap, that too we grant. This does need a remedy and we are down with this part of Zizek’s plans. But only a renewed and fully understood Transcendental Fascist vision of a truly class free society, with its ideas of one People, one class, one struggle, etc. That one People is not the German Volk or some Eurocentric Hitlerian silliness, it is a now the World Volk, in all its diversity and Otherness. It is the 21st century human Dasein itself that speaks and wants to be heard. Fascism acknowledges the basic truth that people are not equal. Zizek talks about Simone De Beauvoir on the notion of inequality saying that regardless of how we want people to be equal, they are not in reality, due to a number of factors, many beyond the subject’s control. Fascism generally envisions and acknowledges Spencer’s Social Darwinism, that the best will fight their way to the top through the tenacity of the individual will. But also acknowledges the need for a political force to liberate the best in humanity, a real meritocracy that aims to give power to youth and the most dynamic and vital elements of a society. It also leaves room for the individual subject… this notion is often squashed under most communist dreams. You can’t free everybody on Earth, you just cant, you can liberate many and Capitalism does do this randomly through the free market, but only a new non-racist Fascist Internationale would ensure new elites form correctly. That the cream and integrity of all cultures and civilisations rises to the top is the aim.

Those vital elements from any culture, race, creed or sexuality that are awake and enabled… take hold of your manifest destiny! This is what Zizek misses. He claims Fascism is a kind of Super Capitalism that really leaves everything the same. That’s an old line of the Left and fails to understand true revolutionary Fascism, its vitality and dynamism to make real change. Regardless of Hitler’s policies, to say he worked solely for big Capital is a foolish statement. Hitler was inventing an entirely new world based around myth, a new vision of culture where art, society and people were one, a dislike of money and capital as the basis for society and a (somewhat) deluded form of Eugenics. If you loose the Eugenics stuff, you have a dynamic political framework still intact. Fascism’s gaols were not to serve Big Capital and high finance, though its mobilisation and continued success was happily employed and incorporated into the Fascist system. Fascism attempts to rise up the best to positions of natural rule, rank and position… just like Nietzsche’s mature philosophy recommends and in accord with what Heraclitus called the Ordering of Beings. Fascism is like Nature itself, cruel sometimes, but the way Being ‘is’.

Fascism is the political expression of Being itself.

Its the way of what Zizek calls the Real, without all the Freudian/Lacanian trickery and language nonsense Zizek gets bogged down in with his mirror reflection narcissism…

I’ll grant Zizek’s notion that much modern oppression is due to Western Capitalism, but so what? It’s the old Left idea of the “Violence inherent in the system” mocked by Monty Python. There are other ways forward. New paths to beat bravely, new seas to set sail on. As soon as the younger generation wakes up and sees the Right and Fascism for what is, its archetype and Universal beauty (beyond the Hollywood bogeyman Nazi claptrap) , its metaphysical truth… the path to true political liberation, planetary responsibility and salvation will be clear. The sooner we can began on this path the better…

As Zizek says Violence is all about the hidden Power inherent in the Western system. He is right. Just his hinted solution is incorrect. Don’t get me wrong the Left have many good ideas and Zizek makes many good points and suggestions for change that I agree with, too numerous to go into here. Suffice to say some reasoned Liberation of the working class is essential, as often many vital individuals are unable to liberate themselves from its grip. I guess that’s why I consider myself a Left Fascist. As long as this liberation is sustainable, doesn’t overwhelm others and is not damaging to the planet, I’m all for it. The youth of tomorrow need to grab this Western hegemonic power of fake Western Democracy and reduce and alter its hidden Violent and destructive power to liberate as many peoples in all countries, from all classes, even using ‘Liberal Communists’ to do so, in a new bright array of the elite’s and ranks of tomorrow. We must not be afraid of wielding this Power and replacing democracy with something finer and purer. Some may still be oppressed and crushed by the power we wield? That is the nature of power and our current situation. We aren’t living in some fairyland utopian world. If the option is between an exciting and dynamic new non-racist Fascist Internationale array of elites or a return to the USSR dark ages and planetary destruction from environmental over crowding through the liberation of the world wide Proletariat and wretched of the Earth. I clearly choose the former. As would any half intelligent citizen of the West, who lets face it will bring about any (counter) revolution politically in the first place.

I also take umbrage against Zizek’s call for inaction, his clubfoot still in the post-modernist camp. That is a remnant of the Derridean cancer that continues to poison most half rate post-modernist thinkers. Inaction, the trace, the spectre, the undecidability of truth, nothing beyond the text… literary eccentricity at best or sophistry or bullshit at worst. Slap a deconstructionist across the face and say to them, “Deconstruct that, Bitch”. You get my point. Action is the only real language. Until action takes place the text is just that, scribbling on a piece of paper… while Rome burns mind you. And its way past fire extinguisher time people, endless scribbling will not do… time is running out for that. It’s now clear what direction we need to move in, lets just figure out the Right ideas, ideology, leaders, strategy and then…to borrow perversely a message from Capital… not Marx but Nike, “Just do it”.

Some wisdom from The Divine Marquis…

“It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that that unfortunate individual called man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses . . .”

“All universal moral principles are idle fancies.”

“The best way of enlarging and multiplying one’s desires is to try to limit them.”

“They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.”

“Now I ask you, is it likely that that semen is so precious in Nature’s eyes that in releasing it one commits a crime? “

Here is pixalated footage caught of a Mars Avalanche by our friends at NASA. I like NASA, I like space exploration. I would happily remove certain countries GDP and give it directly to NASA to further their amazing work. Space is the place, forget the human race… it’s almost run.

If no one is there to hear the Avalanche on Mars does it make a sound?

Answer: Yes, just like the tree in the forest. Its just sad and lonely that no one is there hear it.

For those of you not up to speed on the wit, wisdom and weltanschuung of the one wonderful Jim Goad, here’s a wee introduction.

Jim came to fame publishing a cool, dead hip zine in the early nineties called Answer Me! It was published by him and his then wife Debbie and was an us against the world hate magazine par excellence. The writing leapt from the pages with such life, misanthropy and vitality that you couldn’t put it down. Goad and his wife would deconstruct, no that’s too tame a word, Destroy! …such issues as suicide, serial killers, political correctness, feminism, race and many other controversial and cutting edge issues. It also had interesting ramifications in the real world. The suicide issue was seen in the hands of Kurt Cobain shortly before he offed himself, another issue of Answer Me! was found and cited by Robert Pickett who shot at the White House with a machine gun in 2001 and Goad was left money from that trio of Neo Nazi Goths - Bateman, Greenhow and Fleming who enacted a suicide pact back in the 90’s.

Answer Me! all ended in the notorious Rape issue that featured writings from JG and DG, Boyd Rice, Adam Parfrey, Peter Sotos and others, that examined Rape from a perspective not always hostile to its subject matter. You can get The First Three issues of Answer Me! in a reprint with new material from Jim and the Rape issue is still available out there somewhere in reprint. I’m proud to have a rare first edition.

After Answer Me! Jim Goad went it alone and wrote “The Redneck Manifesto”, a treatise that suggested that White Trailer Trash should get over their racial prejudices and unite with their down trodden African American brothers and kick it to the wealthy upper class elite. It was a radical rethink and mix of socialist/fascist ideas and a call to arms that wanted to replace lower class race obsession with US class war. It was a great, daring political treatise of the mid 90’s.

Next Jim got in trouble with the law after an assault charge was filed by his stalking then girlfriend Anne Ryan and did hard US jail time. The case is controversial and having met Jim and heard his side of the story it seems after a year of the craziest behaviour from his on again off again girlfriend, he was backed into a corner, had his nose broken and lost the plot. Jim, if you meet him, is a big man, a sweet, well spoken person sure, but not someone you would ever back into a corner and give him no way out but violence. If you do that, well, you’d be a silly little sausage.

Jim said about Us prison that it was awful but the people were nice!

He wrote a book about his stalking nut girlfriend and hard time in the Big House called Shit Magnet and you can hear Ryan’s pre assault Death Threats on line at: www.jimgoad.net

He also visited Australia (when I met him) to be on the John Safran and Father Bob Triple J show to speak out against the violence against women ads running in Australia. He pointing out that women can be just as violent and destructive as men in the home and else where, from mothers in childhood to psycho spouses who bash men (with the men not reporting it, fearing a stigma of not ‘taking it like a man’, etc.) in and out of relationships.

Where are the ads for abused men in relationships on our TV and cinema screens? Men and Women can be equally violent in my own opinion, given the circumstances and those Aussie ads were pure one sided hypocrisy.

Jim recently published JG’s Gigantic Book of Sex. Jim’s guide to the boudoir that is surely a must for any self respecting hedonist to have sitting next to well leafed editions of Kinsey, Freud, De Sade, Von Sacher Masoch, Havelock Ellis and Kraft Ebbing.

His next project is a book on Race, no less.

Jim Goad is like an underground HL Mencken, the famous opinion columnist and editor of the 20’s and 30’s. Amazingly witty, clever and erudite in his opinions he comments on many issues in his regular writings for magazines world wide and also on his website and discussion forum NetJerk to be found at: jimgoad.net. I consider Goad a serious writer and Man of Letters of the caliber of Hunter S. Thompson and others of that ilk, fearlessly destroying all in his path with his pen, prose and acumen. In the later years of the 21st century his writings will be looked back on with reverence.

Jim is also expecting a child it seems from his website. So Congrats to Jim and new family. We Salute you at Idea Fix!

Here is a recent piece “Hillary Clinton Must Die” that has some classic prose from this later day Dostoevsky - Goad Article.

Here is an example of what best sums the up the contemporary ethos of Science, we now have the onion that doesn’t make you cry.

Onion Link 

!!!

How long will it be until scientists invent the life that doesn’t make you cry? We could all exist in little perfectly balanced stasis utopia’s - not too happy, not too sad.

It’s enough to make you cry…

Genetically altering onions to be tearless sounds like something from Brave New World!…Oh…

Looking around at our culture, the McLuhanean media environment of the 21st century, I can’t help but find it monstrous. I am jaded and normally don’t give a fuck “bring it on… the horror, the horror” but sometimes late at night it hits me, it gets me, it terrifies me.

Like the ad below for The Joker and Heath Ledger…”Not all jokes are funny”. It seems to carry an awful prophetic air. I hate mainstream advertising and it gets more insidious and more intrusive as life goes on. We all accept it as part of our mental environment but I fucking hate it. I hate with the kind of passion one hated things two thousand years ago.

I read somewhere they are inventing a technology that will enable advertisers to use our skulls as speakers for ads that only the owner of the skull will hear. Mad voices advertising products exclusively in our skulls…we are isolated in some Ad mans Dantean ring of hell. The story about this technology was presented as the latest hippest marketing tool. It is a monstrosity. When DID OUR HEADS BECOME THE PROPERTY OF THESE VAMPIRES?

But really, don’t our heads already belong to these vampires? …As long as I have lived some fucker has tried to sell me something. George Lucas colonized my childhood unconscious with dreams for his toys. I would dream and long for the latest action figures or space ship. What kind of vile pornographer does such a thing. And I like Star Wars…still do. Could I do otherwise?
I have been sold feces. You know what? I have bought it too. I have become monstrous. Our society is now so deracinated we don’t even know where to begin to look for answers. Sometimes in these billboards and ads the monstrosity is laid bare like augury.

Ads flogging some piece of shit camera present us with mutant one eyed beings plastered all over the city like some warning of some yet implemented eugenic experiment. Ads that threaten us with every form of roadside death, cancer or work place accident from activities we are fully aware are dangerous already. Hollywood for the 77th time giving us endless images of Apocalypse or a destroyed New York… a blueprint for some future terrorist attack planned jointly by Al Qaida, the CIA and Hollywood pitched first to us as an audience marketing exercise. Ads for rappers that turn everything that was once good about rap into a vast mockery of itself through vistas of overt endless expenditure and bling… belying an overcompensation for fear of poverty. Ads that present impossibly achievable physiques with air brushed faces like images of some future race of clones. That’s only the ones I can remember while writing this… the rest are monstrously buried inside.

Who will save us from this mental violence? What cleansing fire shall sweep away this thicket of the waste land? What bird will be able to soar above this omnipresent crepulence? For what is to come… how can anyone expect different?

Is a sacred Tibetan mountain holy to four major religions Hiduism, Bubbhism, Janism and the Bon faith. In the Hindu religion it is considered the home of Lord Shiva. It is featured in the Werner Herzog documentary The Wheel of Time (well worthing seeing, out locally) and documents amongst other things the pilgrims who travel around the mountain in reverence. Some make the journey laying down on their belly’s and then standing up moving forward to their head and then laying down again. Only the most devoted acolytes do this obviously. Kailash is in a remote part of Tibet that takes numerous days to get to along dangerous paths and you need to pack your own supplies. It has been considered off limits to mountain climbers and is one of the few peaks in the world where man’s fetid foot print has not stepped. It is was also featured on the cover the excellent Throbbing Gristle CD “Part 2: The Endless Not”.

There is something interesting about this mountain to me.