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Return conversation with Gib Strange, on writing the diary of an incel, gaining power through powerlessness, the pathos of Travis Bickle, the tragedy of unexpressed libido, when two heads meet, self-help satire, toxic masculinity, high-status homosexuality, manufactured celibacy, shaping their species, shaping the species via controlled breeding, Spermageddon, gay frogs, Kek chaos magik, 4Chan & masturbating incels, critical voices in the head, back in uncanny valley, depersonalization & loneliness, sexual fantasy vs social reality, a paralyzed anima, mind control in nature, packaging for popularity, theory of public mind, right & left hemispheres of the public, Fabian socialism, opposition demographics, why socialism is a problem, a market base of involuntary celibates, knowing the enemy, non-player characters, Bill Marr grey-face, meme warfare, right-left polarity, dehumanization & video game culture, ideological possession, new puritanism, individualism & collectivism, when lesbians becomes TERFs, in-fighting among the left, the democratic principle, Trump party hijacks postmodernism, weapons against the left, thinking & feeling, The End of sex, the inaccessible libido, mother-bonded men, dating site for incels, womensplaining, the origin of Freddy Krueger, programmed pathology, shaved pubic hair & pedo culture, anal sex promotion, butt stuff, gender neutral “genitalia”, life hole & death-hole, species suicide, 3rd wave feminism as the erasure of feminism, the loneliness of a digital crowd, surrounded by simulacra, voluntary celibacy, the infertility goddess, a million semen, manipulation or temptation, a biological possession, instincts override, using porn, an impersonal agenda, the MacGuffin behind the MacGuffin, satiety vs. satisfaction, post-coital tristesse, Zen sex, aging & libido, trauma-hijacked libido, ego frustrations, cheating to get free of being under control, knob wobbler.
Gib’s theory of masturbation (the Infertility Goddess)
Songs: “Knob Wobbler,” by Gib Strange; “Nothing Left,” by Brown Bird; “Primitive” by the Groupies; “Say What You Will” & “These Words Are Yours,” by Hazelwood Motel
I found it to be a highly entertaining and personally relevant podcast. I laughed aloud on many occasions and, being a long-married incel (I was unaware of the term prior to this), it helped me to put things – yes, those quashed, or manipulated libidinous things, into more perspective.
And, I certainly think you did not go too far.
Time well spent, I thank you.
Jasun, is that a carrot or celery? lol
Ahhh, Strange/Horsley combos are always the one for me
I think the reason the NPC meme seemed similar to the dehumanisation of groups by Nazis is because it’s the same tape played over and over, one group (obviously, necessarily unfairly) dehumanises another to gain something… It’s so ingrained in us that I’m convinced it goes back to fig leaves and knowledge tree salad, SO ingrained that identifying it as such is merely playing the tape over again… yes, I did just imply it’s possible to dehumanise the Nazis because of course it is, eat, sleep, maintain survival factors, feel better about unwhole selves by dehumanising other selves, shitpost, eat, sleep
Good point, Chris! Interesting that in the past dehumanizing the other meant calling them an animal, but now it means calling them a simulation. I think this iteration of the dehumanizing tactic is more disturbing because humans ARE animals, but aren’t simulations. Unless we are, of course….
Maybe treating each other like simulations is a key stage in the program that brings the simulation into existence.
Regarding the commercial viability of “Diary of an Incel”… back in the late-eighties—when I was a much younger, hornier man—I wrote a book called “The Sensuous Hermit.” It was a self-denigrating, humorous guide to living without sex while still being wildly attracted to women. I had just emerged from a bad break-up with Buckminster Fuller’s buxom blonde grandniece and that book was my attempt to untangle the slippery knots she’d left in my psyche. What I was aiming for was a Hunter S. Thompson-like take on the “Kama Sutra” crossed with Bruce Jay Friedman’s “The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life.” I honestly don’t know if my writing was up to that lofty goal—probably not. I had a Hollywood literary agent at the time and she told me the book was basically unsellable (despite how much she, personally, liked it…). In hindsight, I’m glad that book was never published. I don’t think I was just ahead of my time and that it would now be a regarded as a sacred urtext for incels. I think it would have just boxed me in as “that Sensuous Hermit guy.” Besides, I don’t think most incels read books. They’re too busy angrily masturbating.
I masturbated to this comment.
We’re sort of coming in from alternate trajectories: you from the humanities, mysticism, cultural commentary, and myself from the biological and psychological sciences, with a deep history in the humanities – philosophy, theology, mysticism, etc.
Morally, we’re on the same page, but psychologically and semiotically, we emphasize the world differently. I think both you and Gib, in terms of how you understand the world, have more in common with my way of thinking/reasoning than the vast majority of scientists I know. Why is that?
How we understand the mind seems very similar. We’re both sold on the attachment literature and traumatology perspective which sees brain development and the development of the self as outgrowths of interpersonal interaction. This perspective – so obvious to me – only begs the question: how could this sanity have gone unnoticed for so long? In a sense, it hadn’t. Poets and mystics have always reasoned along these lines. The Hebrew bible in my opinion is a compilation of texts/works made by mystics who are ideologically and spiritually – not ethnically – united by a common relationship to reality. Civilization is rightly recognized as that which ‘went wrong’; Cain – from the Hebrew Qana – means “to acquire”. He is the capitalist; the merchant; the vagabond looking to get ahead. Abel – from the Hebew Hevel, meaning vapor – conversely, embodies the quality of ‘accepting’ and moving with the dynamics of existence.
The problem with the ancients was that they were too non-linear in their reasoning. Is the metaphor and the structural reality exact one-to-one representations? Can a sense of an exact one-to-one exist in the absence of a low-entropy human social dynamic – where embodied and reflexive feelings/cues move according to the true ‘path of least resistance’ i.e. love? In a traumatized culture ruled by false narratives, the body is often tense, often charged, and often reactive. It is this which makes ‘buddha’ consciousness fundamentally unsustainable from a solipsistic perspective. Unless you acknowledge the power of the other, you will never notice how his/her facial expressions/vocal tones/movements affect you affective states. Hence “biosemiosis”. Signs are the big communicators between bodies. The one developing semiotic spirit works through the trinity of icon, index and symbol, where what we observe – the sign, which is inherently qualitative *(hence “qualisign’ in Peirce’s thinking) – is indexed, or interpreted, according to a certain system of constraints (Human beings search for positive intentionality; thus, this genetic constraint is continuously modified by how the environment acts upon this attachment dynamic).
Michel Serres is so fascinating to me because he speaks quite openly about a cult in the west which reasons in terms of the “1” versus the “3”, which he symbolically unpacks (albeit, in very abstruse ways) as the “law of the excluded middle”. Why exclude the middle? Because the middle reconciles opposites, whereas in Empedocles left-hand path ideology, it is merely love and strife, as of love wasn’t itself the emergent property of a love and very complex evolutionary dynamic. This oppositional love of love versus strife is symbolically akin to the notion of centripetal and centrifugal forces – indeed, the ideas are likely symbolically re-representations of what is already represented in bodily dynamics as centripetal and centrifugal feeling dynamics between self and other.
Yet, strife and love aren’t equal. Centripetal forces between self and other around signs of recognition are purely centripetal, and create the affective base for the emergence of the self. Hence, the self is inherently based in love.
Yet the elite reasons in the opposite direction; and why? Because the elite self-organizes from a different pole of the social tensegrity. And what does that mean? It means that humans are inherently a singular psychological being; and this being, in becoming dissociated, begins to self-organize from fragmented parts that, because they are individualized in different bodies, are now conditioned by trauma – fear of shame in particular – to always self-organize from a reified and essentialized self that is believed – quite erroneously – to be the “core self”.
The core self is the love the attachment dynamic. To think otherwise is to be subject to delusion. The whole ability to recognize the truth of this claim is that you don’t reject it at an affective level. Its because you’ve grown to be more loving – identified with love – that the nature of human reality AS love is not seen as a problem. It’s embraced, accepted, and recognized as an impressive reality. Everything makes sense when you realize that your existential self cannot tolerate reality without love: indeed, it is driven by unconscious and dissociative processes to seek to destroy the self, others and reality. When the alienated self gets control – and it does so no more opulently as in carpocrates notion that the self must ‘experience everything’ – in short, must be traumatized thoroughly – in order for the oneness to be perceived. Nothing could be more wrong than this, and could create a more problematic reality; since action is never neutral, if one party see’s doing evil as necessary to its salvation, then the evil done-for-the-selfs-advancement at the same leads to the conditions that degrades/delimits the capacities of another self. The exaggerated sense of self-importance, or the idea that ‘reality has a purpose’, conflates human reality with physical reality such that human reality will inevitably regardless of what we do ‘land’ on the omega point. As if our own thoughtful interaction with reality wasn’t itself a dynamical aspect of the way we work within reality: ergo, if we are off-kilter with reality, than reality could simply get rid of us since we may not be the only instance of intelligent human life in the cosmos. We have no basis for supposing that we will survive the chaos we’ve unleashed upon the biosphere – an effect which, because it operates through delayed feedback processes, wont become apparent, like in cancer, until the latest stages of the pathology.
I’ve begun to see the western gnostic construction of an ‘age of aquarius’ as a self-fulfilled prophecy of run-away “desire” (Venus, the second planet, reflects diablo: or the grating of two opposing principles, resulting in a frictional loss of energy, and hence a runaway greenhouse effect) where the reified representation of self, treated as a completely determinate entity (when it is not; they cannot seem to deal with time and reality as possibility for difference; being obsessed/traumatized by the singularity, they think everything is completely determinate; and hence, speak glibly about the trauma they create in others) is allowed to probabilistically ‘etch out’ the human informed universe in accordance with the fantasies/idealizations (translated: biodynamical needs given the constraints) of the cult/culture. Thus, being dimwits, they will put our planet into a ‘water-world’ and in the process – because this is how evolution works, kill off the vast majority of the species that currently exist, with no possibility for correction.
Dean Radin recently wrote a book called “Real Magic”, in which he starts the book with a little story about future humans in the year 2500 having the capacity to use their minds to heal nature; in short, Radin indulges in new age fantasies which totally ignore the constructivist and emergent nature of life. It cannot be ‘put back together’ when the phenomenon in question is a function of a web of hyper-complex relationships/feedbacks between things like albedo, hydrates, atmospheric co2, ozone, etc.
I am convinced that the story of humanity – as told by Gnostic aquarianism – is a dangerous and demented megalomaniacal delusion borne from a profoundly inaccurate epistemology of how mind works.
If it looks like occultism in a lab coat …
The much anticipated magical perception cleanser. Bang! And the dirt is gone.
Very interesting and enjoyable chat. Certainly topics close to my heart and loins. If you want to view the train wrecks and traumatisation that comes from incompatible libidos in relationships then reddit deadbedrooms is the place to go, it is laid out in plenty there.
Would be interesting to also hear you chat about red pill thought, pua and mgtow as movements reacting against the female hijacking of male libido and also the cynical view towards female desire.
Esther Perel’s book “Mating in Captivity” is an eye opener full of honest observations that comes from years of relationship councilling. I agree with her in her belief that modern relationships are in the process of radical change. Why get married at all? Why should marriage be a prison for the libidio if not for the complication of the need to co-raise children?
The conspiracy of sex is reproduction. The lack of a male pill shows that the “powers that be” really haven’t got a total hold on the culture. If there was a harmless mechanism to turn male fertility on or off at will imagine the effect on society?
I’ve got more to say but I have to pick up the kids!!
People often misunderstand/under-estimate the evolutionary logic of our affects. For example, why do humans respond as they do to pedophilia? Why do we see it as wrong? Why do humans pair-mate? All of these things have been challenged by critical theory, postmodernism, and nihilism more generally, but they appear to be well-evolved adaptations to the situational and developmental complexities of living. So, for instance, the human being is so desperately needy to have his needs/motivations properly supported that if prematurely exposed to the energies of sexuality within a human relationship – as the MJ documentary recently showed – what ends up happening more often that not is the emergence of an adult-psyche that is ‘overly energized’ i.e. manic, hyper-excitable – and why? If the nervous system is always grounded and shaped oppositionally i.e. within the autonomic nervous system – the parasympathetic “opposes” the sympathetic – than that of course means something similar is happening higher-up. This is why emotions seem to have ‘no meaning’; emotional reality hasn’t been properly marked because the adults so eager for sexual-contact-with-children are overly pre-occupied with satisfying their sexual urges, and in the process dissociate all those signs which indicate the difficulties children have with complex affects/emotions.
Thus, marriage, sexuality between consenting adults – these are structural “techniques for living” that correlate with a high level of energy-conservation, and hence, conduces to a harmonious life.
The creation of false oppositions, or allowing oneself to get polarized by being hyper aroused (something which happens to people with unresolved trauma), such as, attacking the whole concept of monogamy, or sex between consenting adults – forbidding adult/sexual relations on the grounds of a developmental mismatch – is a typical example of ‘jumping to the opposite extreme’. Instead of correcting some of the excesses of conservative/fundamentalist approaches to the virtues of marriage and sex between consenting adults, what Ken Wilber calls “boomeritis” continues to infect more and more human beings with an extremely sanguine idea of how our minds/bodies work (apparently assuming a complete dissociation between ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ rather than a singular evolving substance with two different dimensionalities – external interactions and internal interactons).
More or less, I agree with the position of Susan Pinker who wrote that contemporary society is attempting – quite desperately – to make females as much like males as possible; in other words: females are being judged/evaluated primarily by male values i.e. values that emerge naturally from an androgenized biology (testosterone/testes) – competition – whereas the more fundamental value of cooperation – and femininity (we all start as females) – and nurturing, and socialism, and care, is given an improper second place. Thus, society is absolutely made for and expresses the defective psychological habits of male experience. If the female is the object; then the male is the subject. If society s crippled by a solipsistic psychology, then it is the male – primarily – in both males and females (and thus, is an issue of egotism), that needs correction.
Just so you know, eating while at a mic is intolerable and rendered the episode unlistenable. Please don’t.
>includes song by guy that died of leukemia at 35 years old
what did he mean by this ?
gross stuff guys, but enjoyable nonetheless
#nofap
Just thought i would share a weird synchronicity that applies to this episode.Enjoy!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aSpaBVtI0o
As if all the clues in this homoerotic sequel weren’t enough, turns out Freddy is a Pet Shop Boys fan!
Today is my first day at this site…following a link sent by a friend. Have enjoyed several articles.
My question is do I dare listen to this?
As a female, I’ve heard of and read comments from and about…incels (is this a group? a movement? a meme? or a psyop?). What I have read and heard seems hostile to women. Is this true?
I can’t speak for incels – all it means is involuntary celibates; there are no doubt as many kinds of these as there are kinds of men.
I don’t think there’s anything hostile to women in this podcast – besides some dark humor… it didnt stir up the controversy I fear-hoped it might.
Welcome! Hope you dare to listen. I don’t think there were hostilities to women in this, but am interested to hear your thoughts!
Hi, there is a huge spectrum of concepts and content to take in on this site.This one particular liminalist is a bit more causual but interesting nonetheless. It only relates to incels in that it has some explorations of the difficulties of the male libido in current society.I think of incels as lacking in the sort of self awareness displayed here.I recommend taking the time to check out the site as a whole in that to some degree there is something for everyone who is a part of the walking wounded of our current societal predicaments.