Thinking out loud

My brother and his wife had their first kid yesterday, and everything about it was idyllic. She was born perfectly healthy just a day before they were scheduled to induce and after only 24 minutes of pushing. Then she had breakfast and took a nap.

This morning, I had a bit of anxiety about this because it seemed like the buildup to a tragedy. I confess this is a response trained by Hollywood, where the only reason to include innocence or perfection is to tear them down for dramatic effect, and if possible use that tragedy to justify tearing down morality. From a biblical perspective, an idyllic birth would more often presage the idyllic life to follow. Insofar as pride comes before a fall, it typically follows the pattern success -> stagnation -> hubris -> fall. Good examples of stagnation preceding hubris are David and Solomon. So it’s the stagnation part I should be worried about. Anyway, all that is to say I was worried about the baby and it triggered an interesting line of thought.

My first instinct was to pray for her safety, and ask God to reconsider whatever reason he might have for allowing a tragedy. Then of course it occurred to me that he would have chosen the best thing, so I’d better not fuck it up by asking for a change of course. What if the tragedy were to steer us away from getting wiped out entirely? So then I thought I should pray more generally for God to do as he willed. But wouldn’t that be abnegating my responsibility to pray for the baby’s safety? (Praying is very difficult when you’re a sperg with no internal monologue and a bad case of ADD.) This brought me to the question: would I be willing to take on the responsibility for this sort of decision?

Well, of course not. I may play in some of the darker areas of thought (as far as peacetime thought goes) but when it comes down to existential stuff like that I’m downright sensible. The scene where Sam Gamgee picks up the one ring comes to mind, where it offers him a vision of becoming a dark lord over the earth and he laughs it off. But why not? So I thought of the hypothetical scenario where I didn’t have that sensible reflex, and it struck me that decisions like this are the entry point to occultism, Luciferianism, and evil generally. It’s not as if I’m averse to making decisions about life and death, since that’s ultimately a man’s job and IMO the reason for coming-of-age rituals.

It’s the prospect of resisting God’s decision and taking on his responsibility that repulsed me. I like my new term “karmic burden” for this. If God has made some sort of life and death decision about my brother’s kid that I don’t like, then it’s like when a husband makes a financial decision and his wife doesn’t like it. It’s the wife’s job to make her concerns known (prayer) but ultimately she isn’t the breadwinner, and financial decisions are her husband’s job. The idea that she’s responsible for the financial outcome is repulsive to her nature as a woman. (This is why you should stay away from single mothers: even if one’s got good genes and she just had a bad turn in life, being ultimately accountable for their financial situation requires them to develop a level of self-aware sociopathy that makes them incapable of submission to your authority.)

This is strongly related to a Banned Hipster post I was reading this morning:

Any stable political order is predicated on the idea that the rulers have the right to do the things they do, even if you don’t like them. Once that basic, often unconscious, and generally passive consent disappears, a lot of things happen all at once.

I like to use the example of a parent-child relationship; as a kid, I often disliked my evil, stupid parents who told me to go to bed or do my homework or what have you. But as a kid, I also had the vague sense that they had the *right* to decide these things.

As a kid, you generally think your parents are just wrong and stupid a lot of the time (in a rational world, we’d eat candy every day!), but that it’s somehow an adult prerogative to be “wrong”. As it happens, this tend to be the cynical attitude toward politicians as well.

What is *clearly* happening with these vaccine mandates in the US (but not necessarily in other countries with similar mandates!) is that this belief in legitimacy, this sense of “oh well they’re wrong again but what can you do?” is rapidly disappearing.

https://bannedhipster.home.blog/2021/10/17/rod-dreher-fedposts-with-my-favorite-black-swedish-marxist/

Returning to the hypothetical where I instead decided to take on God’s karmic burden, it’s like I’m a wife with feminist ideas and I think my man’s decisions are going to make us poor and his authority is broken. Maybe both things are even true. One of the big ideas of Satanism is that God isn’t making the best moral choices and his moral authority isn’t legitimate, similar to how the feminist wife doesn’t believe her husband is making the best financial decisions or that his financial authority over her is legitimate.

It’s the unwillingness to accept the loss from these decisions that defines illegitimacy. In Christianity we presume God’s choice to let an idyllic baby die is the right one even if we can’t imagine any reason why, not for some abstract theological reason, but simply because like the faithful wife we sense that decisions like this are his job and we don’t want to take on the responsibility for them. We put up with the financial hardship or mourn the loss of the child, and then try to move on. Whereas in Luciferianism etc., there’s a refusal to accept the loss. The story of the mad scientist burning the world in the attempt to bring his love back to life is very archetypal of this idea: he refuses to accept that he’s lost her and the decision was made above his head and against his will. In purely symbolic mythical terms this is the refusal to accept the loss of innocence that accompanies suffering and Piaget’s “accommodation,” i.e. growth. Potentially, I can even see this being an incapacity to change radically enough to accommodate the new reality, which presumably requires at the very least a lot of biological energy.

I recently advised Patrick that if he’s looking for an esoteric Sufi version of Christianity he should look less to the East and more at Milton’s Paradise Lost.

[Satan] braves the dangers of the Abyss alone, in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus or Aeneas. After an arduous traversal of the Chaos outside Hell, he enters God’s new material World, and later the Garden of Eden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost

Nietzscheanism hundreds of years before Nietzsche. With that on the brain, it occurred to me how nearly the book of Job was a Luciferian apologia. Job is given every possible excuse to declare God’s morality illegitimate, and ultimately God’s argument in the debate is the same as a parent’s would be with a potentially rebellious child: it’s a big world out here and you’re small and helpless.

I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, just thinking out loud.