Verities?

 
These , a few of my derivations , over a lifetime of meditations. Readers can ponder their truth value. if any?.
 
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Life is the most terrifying horror movie imaginable.
 
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Death, Taxes – and Male Violence?.
 
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Less than half the human race is responsible for virtually ALL its miseries.
 
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We are, above all things, myth-making animals.
 
Myths, of all kinds, are our escape from the stark horror of existential reality.
 
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Culture is difference – it is what we humans invent/create to make life more bearable.
 
We must not let the tribe of globalisers homogenise us, to suit their needs of marketing and governance: vive la difference!
 
Liberte, egalite , and democrace (!) (the EuroModernist – EM – litany) are , at best , second-order idylls (at worst , they are tendentious chimera): above all, we, as humans , crave care, consideration, and conviviality.
 
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The family embodies the latter traits: it is NOT equal , free, individualist , nor democratic, i,e, it is Not a vapid, E Modernist, construction but is a real, natural, entity. .
 
The family is our simultaneously natural and social bedrock institution. It can be real or ersatz,
 
It is ever at the epicentre of our preoccupations, except when laboring under the delusions of EM (Euromodernist) ideas.
 
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Left to our own devices, We build communities like ants and bees, spontaneously, on the solid basis of kinship. Tribes are precisely such original firms of human society. They closely align with our species-being of mutualism and conviviality.
 
It does NOT require manifestos, charters, or documentations.

 
Our human needs are best expressed/gratified within close-knit, gemeinschaft communities: the gessellschaft nature of EM societies leaves us alienated and distrait.
 
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Asocial Individualism</em> , the loving creation of EM, is the single most dystopian innovation in human history, It accounts for all the anomie, angst, and alienation.
 
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The mother-child relation is the first social (and natural) relation, and is the provenance of all societal morality.
 
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The EM nation-state is an artificially imposed entity: it corresponds to no human need , but is purely the invention of power elites. It is the permanent basis of continuing war and eco-political rivalries.
 
Women are the eternal guarantors of civilisation and peace.
 
In fact, civilisation is peace : a requirement for infants to be reared.
 
Civilisation involves the taming of 2 wild entities: the violence of men, and the violence of nature.
 
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We are animals, whence instinctual beings, like all life: men take after chimps (violent), women after bonobos(peaceable). This vital ‘difference’ is purely instinctual, in nature.
 
Men , in their collective aspect , cannot be trusted with power: they gravitate toward oligarchy, in every societal form, and destroy all attempts at amelioration,
 
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As humans, and mammals, our highest need may be to huddle: not to compose violin concertos.
 
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Euro-Modernist idylls distract us from reality, and we lose precious lives chasing vacuous, desultory , chimera.
 
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There are only Two fundamental sciences: physics (science of nature), and anthropology (human nature).
 
All other sciences build on that: so we need to get them right.
 
Most physics origin stories (of the Big Bang genre) , like anthropology human origins stories, are bunk.
 
They build on conjecture only.
 
EM Economics is NOT the study of the real economy but the study of rational behavior, en generale, whilst assuming , gratuitously, that it is ‘rational’ to be acquisitive and calculating.
 
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It is trivially true that to know the present, we must study the past: and, to know the future, we need to study the present.
 
The problem is that the biases of the present strongly vitiate the task, backwards and forwards/.
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Metaphorically, the real war today is between mammals (warm blooded, convivial) and reptiles (cold, calculating).
 
EM ideas and practices are converting the former into the latter, on a continuing, and accelerating , basis.
 
That is what produces the swarms of sociopaths and psychopaths that plague our life in these times.
 
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Peace is an impossibility in human society, given the ‘animal spirits’ of men: at best, we can only hope to hold to a temporary armistice.
 
War is seen as an extension of politics: but vice versa is also true.
 
The human males (in their collective aspect) not unlike their chimp counterparts, are rarely at peace, for long periods of time.
 
The only effective restraint on male violence is the bondage of affective ties, achieved best in simple, tribal, societies.
 
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Our tribal nature is at the base of much, not all, of what passes for racism , in its simplest sense of ethnic chauvinism. This is NOT to conflate it with its Modernist avatar of organised/systematised violence and exploitation/expropriation.
 
It is an EM conceit that we can impute to life any meaning we wish: but , in point of fact, the only meaning it has is that which nature placed within our instinctual matrix: of kinship and affective felicity.
 
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Europe is not a continent, it is a segment of a continuous land mass which I will, tentatively, term Greatlandia. Who called it a continent? I’ll let you guess. Besides , if Europe is a continent, so is China (almost the same area).
 
Greece, Rome, and Egypt, were part of a flourishing Mediterranean Civilisation with close exchanges with India and China, in Antiquity.
 
North Europe, backward in material and cultural arts, appropriated their contributions to itself (much as the later expropriation of the Arts of the Other) with the attribution of a shared ‘European-ness’. Time to reconsider/rethink such matters?
 
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The only reason we may be allowed to survive as a species, despite our many depredations, could be that the Universe is narcissistic, and needs us to preen itself?
 
If you wish to parse the above, gratuitously, in a religious idiom, we may exist solely because ‘god’ would be lonely without us.
 
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It may be too much to ask to ‘love one another’, or to ‘only connect’, or to ‘be true to one another; but it is possible, perhaps, occasionally, to make allowances for one another?
 
Just a thought!

 
[©R.Kanth 2023]

 

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).