Tuesday, January 12, 2016

The Secret History of Enlightened Animals

I have an article up at Scott Bakker's website, called The Secret History of Enlightened Animals. It puts into the full existential context my earlier discussions of hypersocialization and artificialization. 

Some other RWUG news: I'm working on a massive paperback edition of this blog's essential writings. It will be available on Amazon and divided into several sections: Cosmic Horror, Theistic Idols, Atheism and the True God, The Outsider, The Aesthetic Dimension, and The Farcical Society. The book will be over 700 pages and will include an introduction, an index, and a Lovecraftian short story I wrote before I started this blog, containing the kernel of the idea of nature as the undead deity. 

12 comments:

  1. That's amazing news, I've actually been looking into getting your collected PDFs printed, apparently you knew the silent majority wanted that.

    Still working on a follow up to the novel? I'm greedy for the philosophical essays, but I'd like to eventually read that as well.

    Hope your Holiday's were filled with paid vacation days and assorted animal pleasures.

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    1. I haven't worked on the second novel in some time, since my new job doesn't give me as much time, but I do intend to write that book as well as at least two more sequels.

      Thanks for reading, and happy holidays to you too!

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  2. http://www.last.fm/user/EternalRealm/journal/2013/12/05/5yza7s_nietzscheism_and_realism

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    1. Thanks for this link. I was thinking how juvenile some parts of that article sounded, as I was reading it, and so I was only a little surprised to see at the end that Lovecraft was the author. I don't think he's the greatest writer, but he did understand the philosophical implications of science.

      He says he's a proponent of aristocracy, not of democracy, because democracies are more natural and less creative. This strikes me as exactly backward. Yes, some hunter-gatherer tribes may be egalitarian, but most social animal groups are hierarchical and are ruled by the alpha equivalent of aristocrats. Meanwhile, democracy arises with the advent of the sovereign individual, and that conscious, rational, autonomous individual is highly anomalous. So that's not one of his stronger arguments. I think he's just rationalizing his prejudice.

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  3. "Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world—we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death—the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed."

    H.P. Lovecraft

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    1. But look at how silly that statement is: "the blissful blank we enjoyed"? Of course if there's just blankness, no one enjoys it and it's not blissful. Universal suicide would mean only a cowardly surrender to our monstrous enemy, the cosmos. The silver lining of nature's mindlessness is that the world doesn't immediately revolt when potential heroes emerge with the power to undo everything natural in sight.

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  4. Really glad to hear about the hardcopy of blog entries. I'd like to think I inspired this idea, since I did bring it up not long ago. You've got so much great material here, and it is a bit hard on the eyes trying to get through it.

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    1. I did indeed get the idea from a reader who asked for a paper copy, so maybe it was you. Thanks in any case. Hope you'll like the paperback. It will be out within a few weeks, I expect.

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  5. I would be willing to buy a book of your collected writings. Is the short story you are planning on including in your books a story you never posted before?

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    1. Thanks very much. The paperback edition will likely be out within a few weeks. The short story hasn't been published yet in any form. I was going to submit it somewhere but never got around to it. I don't think the story is especially well-written. I forgot about it for some years after I wrote it. But then I read it again and realized it's got the prototype of the idea that's fundamental to this blog. The story is just me trying to one-up Lovecraft.

      The introduction is also a new article I won't post on RWUG. It discusses what should and shouldn't be written and whether it's possible to contain a blasphemous truth in writing.

      Now that I think of it, it might also be fun to scan some hand-written notes I made in writing my articles, and include them in the paperback.

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  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnBH2lKDC-4

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  7. “Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.”

    George Bernard Shaw

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