How sweet life can be
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Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content
I don't have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I'm gone
You always said people don't do what they believe in, they just do what's most convenient, then they repent
And I always said, "Hang on to me, baby, and let's hope the roof stays on."
— "Brownsville Girl", Bob Dylan, Knocked Out Loaded
Some time ago, I was thinking about C.S. Lewis' famous quote about tyranny. I think it's spot on — if people truly believe that they are righteous in their ways, even if it means terror, they will never back down. Ever. But that's only one perspective of the quote.
Something that's implicit in Lewis is that if you have the approval of your own conscience, you are not in torment. I am not sure if that's the case, but it sure is impossible to be in peace if the vector of your actions isn't aligned with the that of your conscience.
As soon as we realize that people will never back down, we may lose hope. Albert Camus was painfully aware of the horrors of humanity, yet in a letter to Jean Grenier he argues that a "certain continuity in despair can lead to happiness" and that even though in the entire Old World of Europe we see, in the human scale, nothing but destruction and decadence, optimism and love can still go hand by hand, as happiness is linked to love. "I know of times and places where happiness can seem so bitter that we prefer the promise of it," he writes, but this is only because we do not have enough heart to love, "to persevere in love". We have to take part in what he called the "celebration of beauty and the earth".
The same man who wrote, in The Plague, that "on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences" has hope. Yes, life is a struggle, but that would never mean that it is pointless. If anything, the opposite — you have something to do.
Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus specifically to deal with the issue of suicide, which he calls "the only serious philosophical problem". Suicide is precisely what Soren Kierkegaard believes is the end point of the merely aesthetic life. Think of it in terms of sensations and boredom: how awful would it be to merely go after pleasures indefinitely, being a slave to your own senses?
Like Nietzsche and Marquis de Sade, Kierkegaard believed that humans are naturally aesthetic people. It takes work to go from this life to the ethical life, the second stage. Kierkegaard might have died in pain because of a disease, but he practiced exactly what he preached. Sade and Nietzsche, however, died in agony, the first one pleading to Napoleon for his life and the second one going crazy for writing about impossible human standards while being a decrepit man. Even in the agony of breaking up his engagement, Kierkegaard chose it himself. Whose conscience was lighter on their deathbed?
You might think it's still tragic, but here is Kierkegaard, talking about precisely this problem. In Either/Or a famous passage says:
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.
You can't avoid being uncomfortable. It is still going to be painful whatever way you choose. And that's where the knight of infinite resignation comes in.
After the aesthetic stage, you get a little bit of consciousness. You do what is right regardless of what you feel about it, because it's the right thing to do. Obviously this is a higher stage than the merely aesthetic one where only your own sensations matter, but it might come at a huge cost — your own happiness. In Fear and Trembling he talks about a knight and a princess whom he can't ever have even if they have a history. "Does he want to forget the whole thing? (...) No! for the knight does not contradict himself, and it is a contradiction to forget the whole of one's life's content and still be the same." He can't have the princess, yet he can't forget her. "The knight does not cancel his resignation, he keeps [his love] just as young as in the first instance, he never lets it go."
The knight of resignation sees the beauty in life, lives for his ideals even if that means his life is going to be rough. He is, in Kierkegaard's words, a tragic hero. There is a beauty in being this true to yourself, something that not many are, yet it is unquestionably painful. "Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain", Bob Dylan would sing in the late 90s.
In late 2019, legendary youtuber PewDiePie made video on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, using as a context (and bait for an audience of gamers) the last Avengers movie. In it, he concludes that for you to become a knight, either of faith or infinite resignation, you must practice. And we can only practice if we understand what we love. In the Swedish youtuber's words, "by understanding what we love, we open ourselves up to becoming more vulnerable, but the knight of infinite resignation understands that (...) the world doesn't always fall into the right place and you will not always win." By understanding what we love and not "cancelling our resignation", we keep our loved object "just as young as in the first place".
A great example of infinite resignation comes in Norm Macdonald's book Based on a True Story. Reflecting back at his whole life, his rise to the top of the comedy world and the oblivion he was thrown into after Saturday Night Live, Macdonald jokes: "Sometimes I get big laughs and think I'm the best stand-up in the whole world, and other times I bomb, and I think I'm not even in the top five."
However, he still considers himself lucky to even have had such opportunity: "I never expected to be any more than a common laborer," he writes, "and I would have considered myself lucky to have achieved just that. But I was blessed with so much more."
This is the knight of resignation. In fact, throughout the book he is also an aesthetic man, escaping the horrors of life through Dilaudid, morphine and gambling (the only one he actually did in real life).
If the knight of infinite resignation is a perfectly ethical man, regardless of his happiness, the knight of faith not only is an ethical man but is an ethical man who believes. He believes that whatever was resigned can be won back through God's grace. He understands the logical impossibility, yet he believes — he's like Abraham! Kierkegaard argues that
(...) the knight of faith is just as clear: all that can save him is the absurd; and this he grasps by faith. Accordingly he admits the impossibility and at the same time believes the absurd; for were he to suppose that he had faith without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and all his heart, he would be deceiving himself, and (...) he would not even have come as far as infinite resignation.
I've talked about hope and optimism in the face of uncertainty in the context of personal lives, but surely, the external world doesn't have place for hope, right?
One of my favorite books ever is The White Pill by Michael Malice. After describing for 200 pages the horrors of the Soviet bloc, going on and on about systematic and bureaucratic torture, how evil people can be and have been in the past, he starts telling the tale of how it all came to a crash. However bad things are now, they're better than whatever we had previously. This is not merry-go-lucky Enlightenment optimism, this is terrifying optimism. The last paragraphs of Malice's book are powerful:
The foes of liberty are many and they are powerful—but they are not particularly impressive. They will do everything within their ability to convince others that their might is eternal, that battle against them is pointless and doomed to fail. This is just another one of their many lies. It is said that they will never give up. Yet does wanting power over others mean that they will necessarily get it, and get it easily? Does the fact that they supposedly will never give up somehow imply that their opponents should—or does it imply the opposite? Evil people surrender all the time. At a certain point the costs—in every sense of the term—simply become too high. They are not all-knowing—far from it. They are often not even particularly bright. They are not all-powerful. They are men and women, far closer to snakes than they are to gods. They can, will, and have been defeated many, many times.
It is possible that those of us who fight for the dignity of mankind will lose our fight. It is not possible that we must lose our fight.
That is the white pill.
In spite of everything, believe.
Norm Macdonald eventually seemed to have gone to the final Kierkegaardian stage and become a man of faith. In one of my all time favorite tweets, he says:
At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. I find myself completely out of control and wonder how could life could surprise me again and again and again, so completely. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.
Arthur Herman in The Idea of Decline in Western History also makes this point at the end, after showing how end of cycle ideas of decadence have never got it right. He cites Tocqueville:
Yes, I sometimes despair of mankind. Who doesn’t…. I have always said that it is more difficult to stabilize and maintain liberty in our new democratic societies than in certain aristocratic societies in the past. But I shall never dare to think it impossible. And I pray to God lest He inspire me with the idea that one might as well give up trying.
I started writing this with the song "Brownsville Girl" in my mind, but I have to come back to another Dylan gem. One of the answers to Macdonald's tweet (which isn't mine) mentions exactly these lines:
It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be
But she ain't a-gonna make a move, I guess it must be up to me
— "Up to Me", Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series Volume 14: More Blood, More Tracks
qui, 29 mai 2025 13:27:45 -0300
Three books I read
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I am taking part of PewDiePie's 2025 book club. The community is making monthly events on Discord, and I missed the last two. In February, I couldn't read In the Buddha's Words because the writing did not appeal at all to me. In January, I had a great time reading the Tao Te Ching and discussing it with the community. In March, though... I missed the event!
We were supposed to have a free month and just follow our interests, in Felix's own words. I read two books, one was a compilation by Dostoevsky, containing White Nights and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and the other was Portuguese writer Jaime Nogueira Pinto's Bárbaros e Iluminados, a more political reading.
The former gives me the opportunity to talk about one I'd read the month before, René Girard's Ressurrection from the Underground. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I took the life-changing course Mapa do Subsolo by Pedro Sette-Câmara, focusing on applying the Girardian interpretation of Dostoevsky's underground image to one's personal life, so I took a page from the man himself to try to understand my favorite author a little better.
A common sentiment with people who read the incredible Notes from Underground is to identify with the pathetic narrator of the book. Sette-Câmara defines the underground as a poetic image of "maintaining the position of moral victory even when defeated, in the ditch". At the same time the underground man feels like the greatest man on the planet and worse than a worm. He is drenched in ideas and completely detached from his reality, which is much more nuanced. Like every man, he has his faults and strengths, his pros and his cons, his virtues and his vices, but he cannot comprehend this.
Girard doesn't shy away from the initial part of Dostoevsky's career, which was far from as groundbreaking as his latter works, nor from his horrible personal life. The Russian basically tortured his first wife Maria Dmitrievna by forcing an untenable level of romanticism, that could never show his vulnerabilities because of the idealism of his own love. Some of Dostoevsky's own words about her include:
"I don’t want to give the impression that I’m working on my own behalf."
"I love her insanely. . . . I know that in many respects I act absurdly in my relations with her, that there’s almost no hope for me—but whether there may be hope or not is all the same to me. I cannot think about anyone else. To see her only, only to hear her . . . . I am a poor madman. . . . A love of this sort is an illness."
On this, Girard notes that "[p]ushing the logic of this reasoning to an extreme, [Dostoevsky] adopts the behavior of his own heroes and makes himself the advocate and supporter of his rival for the young woman." The man who gave us the underground man was not far from being the underground man himself.
The main character in White Nights is nothing short of pathetic, and sees himself as the correct person for Anastasia, his idealized model (the external mediator, Sette-Câmara and Girard would say), which he adores and sees as the woman's salvation. In his personal life, Dostoevsky tried to put himself as the savior for his first wife Maria, but at the end he was nothing short of pathetic, making her a very miserable woman until the day she died. Dostoevsky himself said that "[b]ecause of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became".
Dostoevsky was in the Petrashevsky Circle of left-wing liberal and westernized intellectuals that sought revolution in Russia. After going to jail and going through the experiences of The House of the Dead, a great novel, Girard says that "perhaps there was no other outcome for the Dostoevsky of 1863 than madness or genius". He gave up on the Western ideals in favor of a more reactionary political position, and Notes from Underground is the first step in that direction.
The novella is most discussed by Girard through the psychological aspect and the image of the underground. Thing is, the underground is the place where ideologies often viralize. The book, by criticizing ideologies that purport to explain human nature and engineer utopias (symbolized by the Crystal Palace), ends up talking about the subject of one of the other books that I read in March.
Jaime Nogueira Pinto is a Portuguese writer whose work was introduced to me through a friend a long while ago, particularly through the podcast Radicais Livres (Free Radicals). "Barbarians and the Enlightened" is a title that suggests much of the political climate of the recent years, but the subtitle — "Populism and Utopia in the 21st Century" — may suggest much more.
Nogueira Pinto is basically describing the Whig theory of history, which is an Enlightenment idea that directly opposes the contemporary reactionaries. For these barbarians, no, the world isn't constantly getting better and globalism is a threat that should be taken seriously. Nigel Farage explains it best:
The European Union has become a sort of prototype for what Hillary Clinton and some of the Wall Street banks want to see. Namely, where individual nation-states give up their democratic rights, give up the supremacy of their courts, and hand it all over to a higher global order that wants to homogenize, harmonize, and make everybody the same.
Who is a better figure to open such a book other than "the son of the lights" Emmanuel Macron, who didn't even bother to play the Marseillaise, France's national anthem, in his victory speech, but the EU's "Ode to Joy"? And, naturally, he is also a great example considering that he openly disdains the barbarians, who are still stuck at the darkness of the irrational past? He is, after all, "waiting for a new hope, a new humanism, for a safer world," and "Europe and the world are waiting for us."
The natural criticism to such an approach to politics is that global coordination is nothing short of... utopian. And yes, it is. The Portuguese writer traces back the origins of such an utopian thought, showing the influences of the likes of Marquis de Sade, the utopian socialists, and dismantles how these ideas created horrifying scenarios including communist China and the USSR. Not only that, the reaction to such thoughts also created Fascism and Nazism.
For such utopias to work, there is the need of a sort of gnostic initiation of the select few who are going to work out society according to their whim. Uniting this megalomaniac necessity to the "killing of God" that the likes of Sade were trying to do — by taking morality out of the human world, which leaves us with nature, desires, impulses and violence — the resulting view is a form of amoral landscape where human beings are reduced to mere biological machines, where passions are nothing but distractions from boredom and sex — there is no love without the transcendental — is no more than the mechanics of sensation.
The rebirth of Sade in the mid 20th century by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, the existentialists and beatniks mixed the libertine utopian socialists created the grounds for hippie culture, which ended up being nothing but puppets for intelligence agencies, as even Frank Zappa knew — what was LSD but a government plant?
With the fall of the USSR, Nogueira Pinto argues that Fukuyama's theory of the "end of history" is full of shit and neoliberalism isn't the end. He gives as examples the case of Brexit in the UK, of the Le Pen family in France (though he probably would never have guessed that Marine would be banned from running in 2027), and of Donald Trump in America. It's hard to argue against him.
Populism was the tool against globalism. It's a very Machiavellian way of thinking but it's true.
Nogueira Pinto ends up by discussing the cases of populism around the world, commenting even the Brazilian case. As in other cases, our barbarians have little to no in common as a group, they basically just reject the current rulling class of globalists, while also being moved by the desire for revenge against groups who abused them systematically through ideological justification.
As anarchist Michael Malice says in his great book The New Right, such a group can be defined as
A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.
Indeed, if there is something that I can learn through reading Girard, Dostoevsky and Nogueira Pinto, it is that equality is a false god. Much of our political motivations are nothing more than desires and justifications that rule us. The desire to design society, to make other act conveniently or in a way that you accept — the Crystal Palace! — that is what moves the enlightened ones, and that is what the barbarians of the New Right fight.
qui, 01 mai 2025 11:49:43 -0300
Esau and Jacob
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I fought with my twin
That enemy within
'Til both of us fell, by the way
— "Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through the Dark Heat)", Bob Dylan
One of the best quotes by one of my favorite authors and trolls, Michael Malice, is that "conservatism is just progressivism driving the speed limit". Evidently, this is true, as most conservatives don't stand in any firm ideological ground and merely just express nostalgia for whatever happened when they were kids and, therefore, naïve. Recently, though, I came across a more "psychological" view of the issue that seems just as true to me.
One of my favorite Brazilian influencers, for the lack of a better term, is the writer Pedro Sette-Câmara. Although a disciple of the late Olavo de Carvalho, who although very politically influential on Brazil as the author of the as far as I know untranslated O Jardim das Aflições is perhaps best known worldwide for either his debate with Russian philosopher Alexandr Dugin or his contributions to the understanding of classical Platonist and Aristotelian philosophies, Sette-Câmara has parted ways with his former mentor in many regards, though certainly not completely. Nowadays, he seems more interested in talking about literature and much less in politics, though often he does have great observations to make.
For once, take the Brazilian romance Esau and Jacob by legendary author Machado de Assis, that happens in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. From the title, you can imagine a story about fighting twins, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Given the promise by a half-Indian fortune-teller that good "things of the future" would happen to her twin children, Natividade develops intense anxiety over what the future holds for her family. "They fought in their mother's womb, so what? People fight out here too. Your sons will be glorious," the seer said. Maybe that has something to do with the Brazilian revolutions that destroyed our monarchy and instituted the republic?
Ironically, Natividade was not too happy about the pregnancy. It meant, after all, no more parties, no more fun. "There went balls and parties, there went liberty and leisure. (...) Such was the first sensation of the mother, and the first impulse was to crush the seed. She became angry at her husband," we read in chapter 6. An amazing storyteller, Machado de Assis is not suggesting that the mother was angry at her children or her life, but merely explaining the emotional roller-coaster of pregnancy. As soon as the boys Pedro and Paulo (Peter and Paul, after the saints) were born, you can see that she is as worried and neurotically careful as a normal Brazilian mother, and fears for their future when she notices that all they do is fight.
For historical context, although very unpopular by the time, slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, the republic installed in 1889 and the current constitution written in 1989, which makes it hard for anyone to take seriously the appeal to any sort of Brazilian political tradition. Pedro was a conservative and Paulo a revolutionary, but what does that really mean? The former is a monarchist, the latter a republican. The former sees the end of slavery as "an act of justice" and the latter as "the beginning of the revolution". The former loves Louis XIV, the latter Robespierre. The former is a conservative and the latter a revolutionary.
If it weren't obvious enough that the brothers defined themselves through the competition with one another, they supposedly love the same woman, Flora, who is genuinely divided between them. The most interesting character in the book, our lily of the west seems like the only flesh-and-blood person in the story.
She also envied the imperial princess, who would become the empress one day, with the absolute power to dismiss ministers and ladies, visitors and petitioners, and then to remain alone, in the innermost rooms of the palace, luxuriating in contemplation and music. That was how Flora defined the task of governing. These ideas came and went. Once someone said to her, as if to spur her on: "Every free soul is an empress!"
However, because the two characters only define themselves in opposition to their twin, they live as a function of pure mimetic desire. Because Paul wants a revolution, I, Peter, will fight to conserve our current political establishment. Because Peter wants to be keep our political landscape, I, Paul, will fight for a revolution. And, of course, Paulo wins in the end, after all Brazil still is a republic. Not only that, he found a way to be a revolutionary against the current government because revolutions are never over. As Lenin would say, "When the Revolution is out of danger, external and domestic, then free speech might be indulged in."
And this is how Machado de Assis was the first author I know of to say that conservatives are just progressives driving the speed limit.
Sette-Câmara's twist is more psychological. What if conservatives and progressives are just holding their opinions to spite their adversaries? Are they really all that different? What is conservatism if not a vague opposition to whatever is considered progressive now? Were it not for your enemy's desires, would you even desire whatever it is you desire now? Are these political beliefs real, or are they just a mask? It doesn't even need to be political, as the twins' mother Natividade, a Catholic, was also going to an indian seer and she "had faith, but [was] also embarrassed about what others might think, like a devout who crosses himself in secret."
His approach is Girardian in nature. I can vouch for the Church father René Girard for having influenced many people I admire such as Sette-Câmara and the music historian Ted Gioia, but as of now I haven't read a page of him directly. Whenever he is the subject of discussion, though, I can't help but wonder: how much of whatever belief I, or anyone else, hold is merely a form of spite? And reading Esau and Jacob, knowing the tragic fate of Flora, who raves and dies out of an illness of the heart for the two men who seemed to "love" her merely out of spite, how much suffering do I, or anyone else, cause to innocent people as a byproduct of said spite?
qui, 16 jan 2025 09:22:06 -0300
I'm not as cool or forgiving as I sound
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Yeah, the title is bait.
In his 9/11 album Love and Theft, Bob Dylan notoriously ripped off many authors, including Virgil, Ovid, Mark Twain and, somewhat surprisingly, Japanese author Junichi Saga, who wrote Confessions of a Yakuza. So, out of curiosity and boredom, I read it.
One can easily see why Saga's work caught Dylan's attention. Telling the story of completely deromanticized criminals, the book oozes the kind of energy from albums like 1976's Desire, people with mundane lives but who live in the edge of the law. The aforementioned Love and Theft has always seemed somewhat of a mafioso album because of the gem "Floater", whose lines invoke such imagery:
If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again
You do so at the peril of your own life
I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I've seen enough heartache and strife
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once, though, I suppose
To go along with all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all the Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves
The idea of the book is to be as loyal to the actual stories of a real-life yakuza, Eiji Ichiji. Mr. Ichiji was a yakuza, and happened to become an old patient of Saga, a doctor from modern Japan. Much of the book is basically explaining the perspective of another country from another era.
Although it did take a hit with its modernization, it's hard to say that Japan even after submitting at the end of World War II doesn't have an unique culture. They are, after all, the main producers and consumers of very specific products, including things incomprehensible to non-weeaboos, like tentacle porn. That reflects in both the perspectives of Saga and Ichiji.
While Saga shows a deep respect and even admiration for his patients which is hard to find in Western medicine, the contrast that makes itself more visible is not that of the change in Japanese culture, but the change in our times. The book isn't about a particular culture, necessarily — Bob Dylan resonated a lot with it — but about a particular state of spirit that isn't all that common nowadays. The sheer boredom would kill a modern person.
But that was not an issue for them and probably isn't an issue at all. We are the sick ones, overstimulated with shiny distractions grabbing our attention at all moments, and the fact that we are unable to deal with the mundane is a disease of our own soul. Personally, I do not put myself above this, as I am to a high degree a product of my time, but I guess admitting you have a problem is the first step, right?
But we're not all that special, as ours is not the first age where boredom is demonized. In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman talks about how much of violent ideologies from the wrong side of World War II drank from the Romantic fountain that urged for people not to be bored. "Better barbarism than boredom," as 19th century French poet Théophile Gautier put it. Hitting a little closer to my point, "Everything is always the same, so boring, boring, boring. Nothing ever happens, absolutely nothing... If someone would only begin a war, it need not be a just one", wrote Georg Heym, a German Youth Expressionist poet.
I imagine people expect to read about the yakuza and find out about gang violence, tortures, tattoos to mark one another, but that's far from it. They were a business with a code that could almost be translated to our times as a contract. All the violence you see in the book is either a) from the government authorities and the police or b) in self-defence. These people were not troublemakers. In fact they avoided trouble at all costs and, when it did happen inevitably as consequence of our human nature, they did their best to comply and cooperate with authorities, even if they were to be basically tortured, as was Mr. Ichiji's case.
A lot of people who realize the modern distractions tend to idealize the lives of the past, often ignoring that, as Dylan put it, those weren't consequences of their dreams and hopes, as most of our lives isn't. Dreams and hopes have a place, they let us not just let life pass by our eyes and actively call us to live, but they're not the end-all be-all. There goes Dylan again on "Floater", and again robbing Saga/Ichiji:
The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
In bad times with the younger men
But old, young, age don't carry weight
It doesn't matter in the end
One of the boss' hangers-on
Comes to call at times you least expect
Try to bully ya—strong arm you—inspire you with fear
It has the opposite effect
I guess all generations are going to have their own conflict of visions, and thankfully people like Saga and Dylan, with their care for popular history and, of course, their own tradition, save us some time making us realize with their art things we could spend our whole lives trying to crack.
sáb, 04 jan 2025 19:03:03 -0300