Pape Satan Aleppe

This is the name of Umberto Eco's final book, to come out in English in a few days with the title "Chronicles of a Liquid Society".

Eco is smarter than you. A man with a library with tens of thousands of books - more than half of them read - you can consider him the "leading edge" of the human psyche, taking a look around the corner from the vantage point of his copious knowledge base - from a scholar of Thomas Aquinas, to a semiotician who helped bridge Peirces semiotics with biology and psychology, and a founder of the field of biosemiotics, to a medieval scholar and world renown novelist - Eco's perspective is a very informed one.

Eco is also the exact opposite of the personality that prevails at ATS. He is a skeptic. His novels are about mocking the naiveté, gullibility and carelessness of occultists. His characters are pretentious, ostentatious, and chronically deceiving themselves as they idealize the presence of a "secret" which they are forever just on the verge of receiving. Such a world is insane; and as a resident of Milan, it's perhaps reasonable to assume it derives from his real-life experiences of the way life actually works.

Liquidity - the Flood of Noah - the Collapse of the Tower

Is the bible just a book, or are we, rather, the book, which cannot help but allegorically encode into its deepest narratives the nature of its self-organization as a creature? What are the animals in Noah's boat? What is the boat? Or for that matter, what is the flood?

Is the flood a reference to the collapse of civilization that archeologists believe occurred in 1177 BCE? If so, the flood speaks to a set of conditions which, once they obtain, leads to the collapse of civilization. But this still says nothing about liquidity.

This chart will give you a sense of what "liquidity" means - and why it is a lawful precursor of major suffering - the flood - which teaches arrogant human minds what they still don't know about themselves.

A book I'm working on extends the ideas of CS Peirce's triadic semiotics - the basic view that reality is made of "semiosis", and that all communication/meaning is triadic in structure. Thus, all of reality, as conceptualized by me, is a communication between one pole and another pole through the mediation of a "third" property. Firstness, secondness, and thirdness, are profoundly real phenomena permeating everything that exists.

Here, I show how firstness, secondness and thirdness exist in human minds, in terms of the way social-emotions control, or gate, the flow of capacities so that the social is considered as the unit of selection - not the individual.



The logic is obvious once you unpack shame, pride and compassion from their mundane usage, and think about it in terms of the effect these emotions/affects/feelings have on our experience of time i.e. our experiences of ourselves as temporal beings. Temporality is the source of the self, and thus, whatever extends temporality is basically that which provokes the self into existence.

The ancient Hebrews seem to get how significant shame was

25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

In the Hebrew, this is:

וַיִּהְיוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם עֲרוּמִּים, הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ; וְלֹא, יִתְבֹּשָׁשׁוּ.

The modern project is based upon a fantasy that a human being can exist without shame; but look at how this fantasy is falling apart as we speak. Apparently, females don't like being sexually violated, but up until now a culture has existed in Hollywood and elsewhere in which females are systematically exploited for sex by rich, powerful (and often ugly) males. Do these females actually like being groped, touched, molested, even when they find the other person weird, creepy, or unattractive? A normal person doesn't assent to a sexual relationship they don't want; but in Hollywood - a land of idealizations (i.e. perceptions, not truths) human beings we call "celebrities" more or less evolve into people with dissociative disorders where one part of their consciousness knows the truth of what people do (criminal acts) and why they do it (what philosophy or set of beliefs motivate this behavior), while another part, the part that goes in public and presents himself and the business he's a part of in a certain way, acts as if that other part doesn't exist.

A mind this shrivelled and patchy on the inside cannot possibly think coherently about the nature of reality; all that the mind (very little) is good at is charting its own interests (in the social world he lives in), but even then, he's not very good at it.

Take Kevin Spacey. Is this man happy? Do you think his consciousness at the present moment is relaxed and at ease within itself? With itself? Does he even have a sense of who he is, and why he feels as he feels? A developmental psychologist like myself can try to be compassionate, knowing that a Neo-Nazi father and being exposed to the shameful abuse of his older brother and sister, Spacey's mind learned to 'latch on' to those qualities which his idealizing and psychopathic father privileged. He avoided the same abuse by "hiding" from the knowledge that he had; in other words, before dissociation kicked In as his regulatory strategy, traumatic affect via observing your father abuse/rape your brother/sister forced his brain into taking this strategy to defend itself.

This is fact. This is how reality actually works. Human's are not involved in any allegory in the world, and if it seems that way, it is truly an astonishing emergent property of our collective meaning-making - not anything any individual can claim any sort of sense of individual identity from.

So what is the flood? It is the dissociation of shame states (slowed down consciousness) and the idealization of self that operates on a largely defensive going-on-being state.

“A preliminary view might be that the flow of temporality, an awareness of time passing, is what is most basically human, but we can become frozen in time or caught in mere, defensive going-on-being; shame is a signal of the new and the strange, the uncanny and even the monstrous. The disruptions of temporal flow may deeply disturb us, but they are crucial for any process of freedom and individuation.” – Ladson Hinton, Hessel Willemsen, Temporality and Shame: Perspective from Psychoanalysis and Philosophy; pg. 2, Routledge, 2017

This book, just recently published, is providing what appear to me to be astonishing insights into the deep relationship between temporality and shame, and thus, the localization of our being in the sort of experience which our cultures absolutely hate: shame.

To be an individual, and to seek your individuality, yet not want to address the shame which marks you off from different people, is an absurdity which leads to the "liquidifcation" of human minds which are addicted to states which make them feel pride, but don't much care for the contradiction, hypocrisy, and so, insane unpredictability, which exists between states, all for the sake of keeping reality "fast and fun", but of course, this is only how the "victory" minded self-state experiences reality. This state is not sustainable, which is why it isn't a good idea to philosophize from the perspective of such a state - given its proneness to over-inflation (i.e. a pridefulness driven by a deficiency consciousness).

As even Jung once wrote about a letter he sent to Freud,

“Best thanks for the quotation from that accursed correspondence. For me it is an unfortunately inexpungable reminder of the incredible folly that filled the days of my youth. The journey from cloud-cuckoo-land back to reality lasted a long time. In my case Pilgrims Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of Earth that I am.” – Jung, C.G, Letters, Volume 1: 1906-1950, Gerard Adler (ed.) R.F.C.Hull (trans).Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, taken from: Ladson Hinton, Hessel Willemsen, Temporality and Shame: Perspective from Psychoanalysis and Philosophy; pg. 7, Routledge, 2017

He was 80 when he wrote this, and look at how he characterizes his earlier views: as basically idealizing nonsense. Not real. Didn't exist. A fantasy he wanted to be real, but took quite some time for him to discover was probably a function of his own early life embeddedment in a culture which privileged the quality of "enchantment" i.e. his mother was a medium.

This is a serious transformation of mind that too few Jungians or supporters of Jung are aware of, but Jung did ultimately recognize that he was "just a clod of Earth". Nothing at all wrong with that, btw. It's just being honest about what you really are: the self is completely a function of processes happening here on Earth. It does not exist beyond the actuated realm we exist within.

Thanks for that post a very well shot arrow, and if I might add a more hand made arrow, embedded with the ability to reach home. In this post of yours, a lot more of yourself is present.a reply to: Astrocyte

Take Kevin Spacey. Is this man happy? Do you think his consciousness at the present moment is relaxed and at ease within itself? With itself? Does he even have a sense of who he is, and why he feels as he feels? A developmental psychologist like myself can try to be compassionate, knowing that a Neo-Nazi father and being exposed to the shameful abuse of his older brother and sister, Spacey's mind learned to 'latch on' to those qualities which his idealizing and psychopathic father privileged. He avoided the same abuse by "hiding" from the knowledge that he had; in other words, before dissociation kicked In as his regulatory strategy, traumatic affect via observing your father abuse/rape your brother/sister forced his brain into taking this strategy to defend itself.

Violent porn is all over the internet and children are watching it. What do you think will be the outcome?

"Eco is smarter than you. A man with a library with tens of thousands of books - more than half of them read "

Reading books doesn't make you smart, it makes you well read. starting with the statement that "Eco is smarter than you" is the most condescending thing I've read on this forum today, possibly this week. I;m going to summarise your post for you:

Eco is smarter than you, therefore everything below must be true...

Blah

Remember, you are dumb, Eco is smart.

originally posted by: bobsa
Eco is smarter than you, therefore everything below must be true...

Blah

Remember, you are dumb, Eco is smart.

Eco is smarter than you and because Astrocyte knows of him and has read about him - Astrocyte is smarter than you!!

originally posted by: bobsa
"Eco is smarter than you. A man with a library with tens of thousands of books - more than half of them read "

Reading books doesn't make you smart, it makes you well read. starting with the statement that "Eco is smarter than you" is the most condescending thing I've read on this forum today, possibly this week. I;m going to summarise your post for you:

Eco is smarter than you, therefore everything below must be true...

Blah

Remember, you are dumb, Eco is smart.

So did you allow your ego to get the better of you and not bother to read past the fact that you are more likley not as clever as you feel you need to be?

a reply to: Astrocyte

Eco is smarter than you. A man with a library with tens of thousands of books - more than half of them readText

i once knew a man that was like that, he could quote many different philosophers, play writes, was well versed in all kinds of sciences. he could answer just about anything asked him, and if by chance he didn't know off the top of his head, he knew just what reference material to go to and could answer in a short span.

but he couldn't chew bubble gum and walk at the same time.

there's more to intelligence than book knowledge, and pondering on it.

originally posted by: nonspecific

originally posted by: bobsa
"Eco is smarter than you. A man with a library with tens of thousands of books - more than half of them read "

Reading books doesn't make you smart, it makes you well read. starting with the statement that "Eco is smarter than you" is the most condescending thing I've read on this forum today, possibly this week. I;m going to summarise your post for you:

Eco is smarter than you, therefore everything below must be true...

Blah

Remember, you are dumb, Eco is smart.

So did you allow your ego to get the better of you and not bother to read past the fact that you are more likley not as clever as you feel you need to be?

The fact is, I know I am not smart and I know I'm not dumb, I don't compare myself to other people in that way as its vulgar and pointless. people are people are people, to me the measure of a smart person is their contribution to society, knowledge, art, comedy, caring, family etc its the ability to use the gifts they have to their best advantage, that's smart, not the books you've read, the exams you've passed, the people you know and can name drop.