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Jack Roycroft-Sherry's avatar

Fascinating, thanks. What do you think are the reasons for the differences in these two mating strategies? For example are there underlying personality factors that tend one towards being a ring bearer? Is it inevitable that as long as both progressives and Conservatives exist you will have these two different mating strategies ( since political orientation it seems to be heavily correlated with underlying personality)?

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Neoliberal Feudalism's avatar

Welcome back, Brett. Nice post. Glad you're allowing comments now.

This brings to mind Cioran's aphorism "Genealogy of Fascism" (he, like you, was heavily influenced by Nietzsche) in his "A Short History of Decay." The start of it as follows:

"In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.

Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse. There is no form of intolerance, of proselytism or ideological intransigence which fails to reveal the bestial substratum of enthusiasm. Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation. The ages of fervor abound in bloody exploits: a Saint Teresa could only be the contemporary of the auto-da-fé, a Luther of the repression of the Peasants’ Revolt. In every mystic outburst, the moans of victims parallel the moans of ecstasy. . . . Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic..."

It continues from there, but already too long. See page 10-11 if you want to read the rest:

https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/university-of-the-east-philippines/english-literature/a-short-history-of-decay-pdfdrive/32704087

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