earthmoss

• 06: Philips Theatre of War – Let the Drama Begin – Raise the Curtain and Present the Truth Behind this New Garment of Author-ity. The Show Must Go On (continue)!
• 07: Act II – Alexander the Great – Why was he so Great?
• 08: Who benefits?
• 09: The Tigers and the Bread
• 10: Good God – Alexander the Great!? – The Emperor’s New Clothes Act II
• 11: The Great Inequality of Abundance
• 12: Bad Faith
• 13: Macedon

01: Introduction

In the previous chapters we have seen God take a back-seat in regards to justice, and authority. Might is Right, is now the maxim that justifies the actions of heroes of empire. This transmutation of human-beings-in-Being to human-nature-versus Nature as hubris and nemesis is the root of human-rights. The right to perfect ones self, even, as we saw with the Greeks, at the cost of everything and everyone else, compromised at first until the warrior is tamed so that it later comprises the State of perfection, under Aristotle, who could not conceive of a man without a civic body, comprising him.

Comprise comes from the root word prehensile meaning, ‘adapted for grasping’, which is what we do when we comprehend, we grasp the idea and gain the power from this knowledge. This is the reality of a hero and not the ideal, the constitutive dance and not the regulative one. The ontologically constitutionally comprised being-for-itself, adapted for grasping-for-itself, compromised into the regulative dance of civilized man. An ontogeny recapitulated into a Hellenistic phylogeny housed within the story of The Iliad.

What we are seeing is the unfurling of the nature of the egoic aspect of humanity. The communal space known as the Garden of Eden has become a commonwealth of pyramids vying against each other to win more of that wealth for their common land.

We have seen the scape-goats that bore the violence of this acquisition of wealth for the few, and enslavement, hope, fear and paranoia for the many, be sired, as they were desired by their own stories in the forms of tragedies performed by individuals taking up their persona in the form of masks and acting out the tragedy underlying the constant war and lack of morality that could curb the desires of the Athenians and their playwrights, sponsored by the chiefs of desire, the aristocrats.

The result of all of this dancing about with words, and robes and incantations- Drama, is no more than war followed by desertification and utter loss, and so this is known as the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. “The term “tragedy of the commons” was coined by microbiologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 Science article, in which he asks what happens when individuals compete for a scarce resource.” (Patel:2011:92)

“This is why, for Hobbes, the state of nature was a state of war. War could, however, be prevented by the Leviathan, the government that would keep people’s antisocial behaviour in check. Hobbes thought that by joining together and using their reason to create an artificial person, government, humanity could impose upon itself the virtues of restraint and cooperation that people would, in a state of nature. Lack.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned this on its head. Although he shared with Hobbes the view that people were generally unsociable, he disagreed that humans were inherently machines of infinite want. It was possible, he argued, for people to feel that they’ve got “enough”.

Being sated is something that people can learn- and it is after they have managed to control their instincts and impulses in the best interests of themselves and society that they are truly free. This process, for Rousseau, was the fount of liberty-…. Rousseau also went on to argue that “artificial people” were, in fact, precisely possessed of the characteristics that Hobbes saw in the state of nature. Entities like corporations and governments were nasty and brutish. Worse, because they didn’t have to eat or sleep, and could never die, artificial people were more worrisome because they could never have enough.” (Patel:2011:87-8)

“The reason why people go hungry today has nothing at all to do with a gap between the amount of food in the world and the number of people who are hungry. There’s more than enough food on earth today to feed the world one and a half times over. The reason people go hungry is because of the way we distribute food through the market, as private property, and the people who starve are simply too poor to be able to afford it. If there were fewer people in the world many would still go hungry.” (Patel:2011:94)

02: As we have seen, the lack, that Hobbes describes as a state of nature without the Leviathan is not true, it is the other way around

Lack is created by desire which creates the Leviathan by necessity because of the desertification that it brings. Rousseau’s ‘artificial people’ by which he means companies as well as institutions and governments, are in fact the creations of these desires and not creations to control these desires. Just as the leader of a pyramid is firstly a divider before he can become a leader of those he has divided in order to conquer, so an institute set up by takers has only one purpose, to control the taking that is necessary.

But as we have seen so far, whether it is a democracy, oligarchy, or monarchy, the taking cannot be controlled because if the leader stops being a taker then he will become weaker and will be usurped either internally or externally by another taker who reciprocators will follow by their nature. Therefore ontologically, before we set up any institution, it is bound to fail in the end by becoming either weak or corrupt, or else to continue by being the most cruel and unjust of any of the institutions currently playing out in the World. This is the critical reality of power once removed from moral authority. The only game left, once God has been forcefully relegated to the back of the building (or even out of it), is that of power/knowledge and control of the takers, reciprocators and givers within the world- i.e. carrots, sticks, and donkeys. The Noble lie of propaganda, and the reality of violence and paranoia- war and peace.

As we saw, by removing Dionysus from the Temple and placing him into the theatre as a luxury, the Greeks worked out a way of giving ones life for the State, not for God, by telling a story that aligned the egoic desires of esteem, status and awe-full honour to the true nature of the States need for power and increase. This resulted in the transmutation of the nature of warfare into the art of war, which caused the necessity of more warriors and hence more war to pay for them, and hence more increase in wealth, which created greater hope, fear, and paranoia as insecurity, which created the necessity of more warriors- and so the Greeks went round and round in a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and desertification, whilst killing, betraying, and teaching this method of existence to the worlders of the World through their temple of politics- the theatre.

The one thing that the Greeks failed to learn in time (pathein) was how to break the circle of war, because war was the sine qua non of their morality and existence. Might is right cannot evolve into a greater story than hero and heroes it can only give birth to legends at best and fear, hope and paranoia, in reality.

The person who did learn this lesson and taught it to his son, was the person who slapped the Greeks about and the Persians by combining the myth of the ruler with the legend of the hero, and transformed ‘might is right’ into ‘Might is my God given right’. The Greeks were left with their goddess- Nemesis- telling them that their heroes were wrong through the shame they felt, but she was about to be transformed into a goddess that told them that their conquerors were in fact their saviours!

In this chapter we are going to see this story emerge and then follow the greatest saviours of civilization- the Romans- who produced the greatest saviour of civilization in the eyes of the West to this present day- Jesus- by crucifying him- so that we were all saved for eternity by God’s law, and the goddess Nemesis becomes transmuted into the mother of salvation and the womb of Gods Nature.

Will this salvation save us from war, and bring peace, equality, liberty, and fraternity as is promised or will it produce more war and less peace, equality, liberty and fraternity? Will the priests of this new religion bind themselves to its negative cult, that they prescribe or will they sell drugs, commit usury, and sell whores, in a protection racket? We shall see, but with critical realism and the words of Thucydides now grasped within our psyche, what do you guess the answer is going to be. It might seem unbelievable, but that is because you don’t want to believe it, because you have a vested interest, a desire to not believe an unpalatable truth, and so only now begin to look with reason. A reason that desires to not believe, so that it can continue to believe what it desires to be the truth. I don’t know what you are thinking, but it is reasonable to say that your opinion and mine, are irrelevant once the truth has become unconcealed, as it will, if you keep reading. To warn you however, the above possibilities are not as bad as the reality that will be witnessed.

What then was the great lesson that the victors of the Greeks taught them by killing them in war?

The answer is the nemesis of the return of God, but a God that could not only protect you, but also save your soul, if you could separate the animal spirit from the god spirit through certain negative behaviours. We will firstly explore their birth through the victors of the Greeks and then proceed to see them reach their perfection in the Romans, before necessarily seeing the Romans create their own desertification, and demise- their own karmic nemesis.

We left the Athenians in world of theatre as negative cult born by democracy in order to constrain its desires. It was a failed project, as the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides fell on stony ground, in the ears of these democratic individual beings-for-itself who had the gods on their egoic sides and who voted continually for war. No words of a human could curb the eternal laws of these egoic-gods natures. But it must be said that these gods did produce warriors who believed in their rightness as they slew the hated fallen and enslaved those who were ‘wrong because they were weak’.

How then to retain the warrior ideal of right but restrain the desire of the ego more powerfully than tragedy and create a more powerful negative cult of wrong and stop the desertification and defeat of the pyramid, more powerful than Satyr? What is the new fig-leaf, the new garment, that the emperor will don in order to cohere more warriors to his cause than democracy could?

It is the nemesis of Athens that becomes this new robe. Art aligned with God, not the polis. Art has turned warfare into the art form of war, it has turned the nature of the temple into the artifice of the theatre, a theatre of politics- of the polis not of the gods, and it has turned people into artificial people- Objects-for- esteemed-Others-for-itself. This hubris now turns to bite the Athenians back. It does this by changing the Hellenic culture into the Hellenistic culture that destroys it. The individual responsible for this change in language and nature of Greece is Alexander the Great.

03: Act I – Philip II of Macedon

Alexander the Great can only be understood by understanding his father – Philip –who had become ruler of Macedon in 359 B.C., a land north of the Greek city-states that we have discussed so far. By his power as king and his force of will Philip transformed Macedon from a politically uncohered and agricultural peoples into a great Greek power within two decades by firstly killing all of his rivals and then using the power of divide and conquer, through allegiances and betrayal (bartering States) to gain Macedon itself. He did this primarily by transforming the warriors art of an individuals life into the professional soldiers life (sacrificing ones-self for ones art as the scape-goat in a world of war by necessity of egoic desire and lack, under the banner- nurninga- of peace, which is something you constitutionally make with an enemy).

Before Philip, warriors were also land-owners who worked part of the year on their own land, but Philip took loyal Macedonians away from their land and made them soldiers who now spent the non-warring part of the year in training to fight, not to farm. This allowed the art of specialisation in art-illery to become an art-form itself, with the special training of cavalry men and skirmishers- who threw projectiles into the enemies ranks and caused confusion- what Athenians would call debate when the missiles of the propaganda of fear and hope are words not missiles- , as well as spies and counter-spies to cause disinformation and confusion- knowledge as power- into the enemies minds, as producers of hope, fear, and paranoia- war-time propaganda, not peace-time propaganda.

He also inflicted discipline on his soldiers. Discipline meaning, to learn, as in Disciple, someone who follows a teaching, or is a part of the train of a garment, which they bear upon their shoulder, as they leave the tent with a naked Noah (knower through revelation not instruction) in it. Prior to Philip discipline was something that a warrior controlled himself. It was a part of the warriors honour to discipline his egoic free-will to act in accord with both what was good for him and for the State, but under Philip, the soldier has was instructed that he had no desire to control, only the States unquestioned desire. The individual power to control desires must therefore be possessed by the State that possesses these desires, and so the soldier becomes possessed by the State through this instruction. He is broken so that he can be rebuilt. Or in Heidegger’s language, his dwelling is becomes the dwelling of the State before it is his own. He is re-possessed as an Object of the State through the magical dance of his teachers. He now requires no land by which to feel bound (legere) to the State, no Vote, only the ‘Name of esteem’ stated, by the State, as status.

He is possessed by a super-state that he believes in, and will not only die for, but kill for unquestioningly

By taking orders, he feels his status within this order, he becomes subordinate. He is not just a subject but a loyal subject.  Loyal meaning, faithful from the root legal, meaning pertaining to the law. The law of the State not the law of God, even though priests walk the battle-field assuring the wounded that they will go to heaven because God is on their side.  The soldier becomes alleged to his lege, again from the root word legal, becoming an ally, a faithful subject as Object, not for-itself. The real-politic experience of the soldier is that he has no self-power any longer because he does not have land- property rights, he therefore only has the right to power as an Object of the state and therefore his will is aligned with the will of the state by the ontologenic nature of being-for-itself in a phylogenic culture of settling.

As we saw, with the ability of stick-wielding to be born it required the settlers need to possess land, that allowed the stick to be wielded, but now that the stick-wielders have become dependent on the reciprocation of the state to their reciprocation of this same state- as soldiers- their fear, hope, and paranoia as insecurity increase and so therefore does the idea that discipline is not their possession but the States, as they rely on this State in order to have the power to protect themselves from this inner world of paranoia ever increasing.

 What this means is that the infinite capital of honour becomes the finite stick of discipline and becomes wielded amongst the warriors by themselves upon each other- just as the Athenians looked upon each other after leaving the instruction of the theatre and attempted to control luxury. Fear of punishment (discipline) beats a ‘tragic plays of words’ any day.

But such a method contains its own hubris which creates its own nemesis where the carrot of gain must be increased to weigh against the stick of pain in order to cohere the discipline of stick-wielding honour- the soldier. It is only an increase in capital goods that will cohere soldiers together, but there is only a finite amount of capital goods. These soldiers cannot increase themselves individually by working their land, they can only do so collectively by killing others, that is their raison d’être and their sine qua non, their reason for existing, and their necessity of existence.

Now that these warrior donkeys could not flee for fear of stick-wielders of fear because they were them, they could also now be put to good use as pack animals as well as soldiers because they would not leave, as they had no where to go, and so Philip introduced the idea that soldiers must carry their own food and equipment with them. Prior to pack-carrying soldiers, warriors had been followed by a large retinue of non-combatants who carried the equipment and provisions for them. This had always slowed down the attack of an army and was more expensive. With the warriors and their non-combatants now collectively turned into pack-carrying, fast-moving, disciplined soldiers, Philip took control of Macedon and then Greece in just a few decades by killing thousands of people and taking in order to pay them ever more, and therefore necessitate ever more war.

In 338 B.C. Philip defeated the combined strength of the Athenians and the Thebans* at the battle of Chaeronea and that was the end of Athens and democracy for the next 2,000 years. A failure of a system of rule that failed by its own greed and lack of discipline of its own egoic self. A failure that created war as a way of life called honour. A failure that will be dressed up in new robes 2,000 years later when the idea of oligarchic, monarchic and theistic rule have each proven themselves to be so vile to the peoples ruled by them throughout these 2,000 years that no reciprocators would follow it, especially when democracy promised to give them all equality, liberty and fraternity- the same experience of the Athenians before they chose democracy in like manner, i.e. the greatest gain that a pyramid can never give its people but constantly offers anyhow because it coheres the most amount of people to its stick-wielding cause, before by necessity of desire, going on to wield the stick it caused upon the most amount of people.

*Thebes had defeated and replaced Sparta as the second great power of the Greek city-states in 371 B.C. at the battle of Leuctra.

04: But how was it that Philip managed to gain enough power to defeat Athens and Thebes? It was by the use of theatre

The Increasing Theatre of Athens – In an Athens in a State of Decline

After the Peloponnesian wars Athens’ power began to quickly fade, and so the democracy of a people only really interested in themselves, also began to fade, and indeed an oligarchy returned to Athens temporarily as a symptom of the fading glory of democracy.  Voting about the decisions of a powerless state surrounded by an ever increasing power in Macedon was not nearly so exciting as voting for gain and war. Politics becomes inconsequential to the being-for-itself in a powerless state that cannot take power any longer, and so, the Athenian people failed to debate and vote, and preferred others to do it for them. Today people also fail to vote in a democracy to an astonishing degree, given its so haloed wonders. Perhaps it is not so astonishing when there is only one democratic super-power in the world that controls all the other democratic powerless powers and is run by a representative government whose constitutional rule is the impossible dream, of equality, liberty and fraternity, whilst in reality it has the largest percentage of people in prison, the largest percentage of rich people, the largest percentage of people in abject poverty, and the largest percentage of artillery in the whole World, and is blessed for this by God, apparently, by trust!?- For many it is simply bad-faith to vote.

 As Athenian power faded and democracy faded in popularity, so the nature of theatre changed to reflect this same perspective, but it did not become less popular it became very popular indeed.  Theatre became in Aristotles words no longer a place of politics, but a place of catharsis. Catharsis is not a healing, but a purging, meaning to make pure. Theatre then, becomes the purging of the sins of the Athenian people from the actions that have brought them to their own weakness as a state and it purifies it through reconciliation of this loss of its previous strength and greatness with its present state. It becomes an artifice of sucking the bones out of the previous greatness and digesting them through artifice in order to feed the people esteem only possessed by a philosophy they can no longer afford. And this necessity gives birth to the plays of the Athenians.

The first technique of catharsis as theatrical art is taken up once again, as we saw with the pyramid, by architecture– ‘the chief technique’. All of the great plays of the Athenians had been performed upon wooden amphitheatres constructed each year to house the plays, but now, as Athens is declining in power, the Athenians double the size of the amphitheatre and build not in wood, but in stone. Just as the rich aristocrats had built their own individual reflected image in that eternal form when in power, so now the democratic god of the polis, the theatre, is to be embodied (ich bauen) in stone to raise it above its natural state to a super-state for ever, to glory in it-for-itself, as the true symbol of Athens, not karma but drama as the truth- propaganda as catharsis of karmic shame.

The statues of the deities that preside in this new theatre, are no longer the twelve altar gods of Dionysus as they were but instead stone statues of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides the authors of the great plays of the past in Athens time of greatness, who are now worshipped as the spirits that invest this sacred space to being-for-itself. Telling themselves the story that they are the inventors of theatre, Athens raises an architecture that transcends the State in which reality played out in its time of greatness as plague, war and defeat, into a super-state, a legendary heroic state of people, whose eternal greatness, set in stone, was not the theatre but the greatness of the individuals that Athens bore and by their very existence, bore theatre- which is great.

The plays produced from this perspective, in order to instruct the Athenians in decline of their greatness therefore do not bring up the truth behind this Noble lie or the true murderous and shameful past of this greatness, or of the lack of greatness and power that Athenians in decline exist in as they watch their dramas. Politics is banned from the theatre by the Athenians themselves, and so whilst the worship of the individual can continue to be worshipped, the catharsis of the State can begin. It can only be assimilated by worshipping the individual body and not the political body, the statue and not the ruler. In karmic behaviour- going to the theatre more often, and the polls less as a dancing pigeon looking for a seed experience of esteem and power.

It is the individuals created by the polis that are the valued, worthy, merited, commerce of this polis’ story not the democracy they have abandoned

It is better to attend the temple of the ideal and not the reality, the regulative story-tellers and not the real constitutive story. It is better to believe in the artifice, than to face the art of a belief.

The theatre itself therefore becomes the esteemed focus of individuality, and the gods are quickly dropped from productions. No longer were plays accounts of mythical and legendary times, in order to reflect the perspective of the Athenian mirror as the Third upon themselves as great heroes and powerful peoples, because they were not. Instead the mirror on the wall tells them that it is the individual that is the greatest of them all, not democracy, or politics, but the egoic self as centre. It is this degree of selfhood that the Athenians have given birth to, and so the stories become stories of egoic characters. Character means to scratch on a surface, to etch, just as we do with words- the logos. By their nature they are shallow

Tragedies therefore became what we today would call soap-operas and comedies became not political satire and freedom of speech but sit-coms, such as Friends or Frasier. In other words theatre became the theatre we know today- entertainment for the masses. The playwright Theophrastus describes 30 types of characters as the type of people that can exist in whatever world is drawn around them, and it is these same 30 types that our modern plays and productions spit out in different worlds. Only one play actually survives of this time- ‘The Grouch’, by Menander a pupil of Theophrastus, because it was all ‘Kitchen sink drama’ and so no one bothered to copy it out and preserve it, as they would do for the plays written by the deified playwrights of great theatre for the next 2,00 years. Powerless democrats now sat in front of the ‘goggle-stage’ and watched everyday drama, as their power was being ever diminished, and they bathed in the esteem of the individual in an architecture of esteem. Why were cinemas called picture palaces and built so regally, and were so popular?

Why does everyone want the best flat-screen T.V. and sound system by which to put on whatever individual story they wish to be told, and why do people choose the T.V. programmes and films that they choose? Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is in control of their worlding a world of drama, with my remote control, without believing in karmic consequences. The only horizon that Athens had left to possess, standing upon its pyramid mountain of being-for-itself, was the value of the individual and his characteristics and rights. Their land has been taken, their collective power had been taken, their collective purpose and progress had been taken.

They had taken ecstasy (the super-state) of the gods, ecstasy meaning something outside of ones-self, and turned it back upon themselves into the worship of ones self-reflected through drama -darpan. What is poignant is that before a few decades of such individual worship had passed, they had already un-earthed and named the finite nature of the human-being-for-itself, and the final count was that there are only 30 types of character that emerge from the three natures of the Drama Triangle. We are free to be any of them we choose but there are only 30 shallow etchings upon our psyche of being-for-itself, that civilization can produce through its phylogeny. What then are these 30 types or characters now etched upon the being-for-itself? How transcendent is this worshipped invisible force of individuality that exists because I think it does and behave in like manner? Will you recognise your-self in this list? Are any in this list transcendent characters, or people who are down to earth characters. People who have lost their transcendent super-state, and have been brought down to a state that we call, ‘normal’, and wish to be, rather than be punished for being abnormal or abused or abject or absent (killed).

05: The List of the 30 People in all the World

Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, described 30 types of characters in his work “Characters,” which includes sketches of various personalities ranging from virtuous to unethical individuals. These descriptions provide insights into ancient Greek ethics and philosophy and have influenced Western literature and psychology. Here are some of the character types described by Theophrastus:

1. The Flatterer: A person who laughs excessively at others’ jokes to flatter them.
2. The Late Learner: Someone who tries to learn at an advanced age but often forgets what they have learned.
3. The Newshound: A person obsessed with news and gossip.
4. The Arrogant Man: Someone who is overly proud and looks down on others.
5. The Social Climber: An individual who seeks to improve their social status.
6. The Shameless Man: A person who borrows goods and insists they be delivered to his home.
7. The Talker: Someone who starts conversations with strangers about uninteresting topics.
8. The Busy Body: A person who interferes in other people’s affairs.
9. The Complainer: An individual who constantly finds fault with everything.
10. The Dissembler: A person who hides their true intentions through artifice.
11. The Obnoxious Man: A person who behaves inappropriately, such as exposing himself in front of women.
12. The Petulant Man: A person who complains and criticizes others without reason.
13. The Suspicious Man: An individual who assumes others have fraudulent intentions.
14. The Slovenly Man: A person who neglects their appearance and hygiene.
15. The Boaster: Someone who makes grand claims but produces nothing of value.
16. The Adulator: A person who flatters others for personal gain.
17. The Garrulous Man: A person who speaks at length about unimportant matters.
18. The Malignant Man: A person who uses harsh language to express their ill will.
19. The Late Learner: Someone who tries to learn at an advanced age but often forgets what they have learned.
20. The Dissembler: A person who hides their true intentions through artifice.
21. The Arrogant Man: Someone who is overly proud and looks down on others.
22. The Social Climber: An individual who seeks to improve their social status.
23. The Talker: Someone who starts conversations with strangers about uninteresting topics.
24. The Complainer: An individual who constantly finds fault with everything.
25. The Dissembler: A person who hides their true intentions through artifice.
26. The Superstitious Man: Someone who is overly fearful of divine beings.
27. The Suspicious Man: An individual who assumes others have fraudulent intentions.
28. The Boaster: Someone who makes grand claims but produces nothing of value.
29. The Adulator: A person who flatters others for personal gain.
30. The Rustic Man: An individual who is unaware of proper behavior.

We can see from the above list, that these egoic states are those names of the drama triangle as named by the egoic being as either subject or object and from the perspective of the being-for-itself. In reality, they are all facets of how a being-for-itself can become through life as they become settled into the individual self, and the experiences that they create- karmically-form the nature of the individual. At any time, ones face can change, but over time it becomes ingrained, or etched into ones character, into the wrinkles, smiles lines, worry lines, bitter lines, etc, of ones life-formed, worlded, face.

The flatterer man upon meeting the exquisite man is a reciprocator meeting a reciprocator, and each being-for-itself is able to practice his art and gain esteem. The obnoxious man meeting the flatterer could be a gripe or a penny-pincher and hence be a taker of esteem from a victim- giver, whilst the man of Petty Ambition might be a taker for the flatterer but a giver to the exquisite man, as he takes esteem from the flatterer in order to give it to the exquisite man, who then buys the garment of esteem and gains for the man of Petty Ambition who is selling them. The play is endless…. But Dionysus is not required for such self-authored drama and emotionality or opinion and judgement upon any-other individual. Shakespeare uses these same characters 2,000 years later in his plays of emotion and drama, of catharsis and comedy, of tragedy and greatness of the individual to churn and agitate.

The only problem with worshipping individuals is that they are all egoically flawed and not worth worshipping. An interesting play must have the drama triangle of characters otherwise there is no drama. So in order for esteem to be conferred upon the theatre and the spirit of the ego that it now enacted and possessed, and hence upon the partakers of this spirit of Dionysus- now transmuted to the Ego, as the worshippers of this ego-now transmuted to the audience, found a new object of worship- the actor-itself.

It was the possessor of the spirit of the ego that was worshipped, just as the possessor of the spirit of God, as priest/king was worshipped previously. It was not the character that was worth worshipping, that was plain for all to see, it was the human-being-portraying this character, it was the ‘being-not-being-itself’ but instead being-in-another-self, that became worshipped. The mask not the man.

Actors became the new elite of society, becoming extremely rich in the process and also extremely useful to leaders of states, who used them to become a ‘being-for-the states-self’ and promulgate their truth as propaganda to the people and to other States as diplomats.

The super-star, representing the super-state of the paranoid ego – was born

No longer was it the ruler of a nations karma to be worshipped, to dwell in, now it was the rulers of a nations drama to be worshipped, to dwell in.

Today when Nicole Kidman and George Clooney, Bono, and Bob Geldof, stand behind the microphones of institutions and states, they are performing this same role because the west still worships the theatre more than the temple. Celebrities magazines, news and gossip, all masquerade as a community with its retinue of followers and artificial stories and the same 30 characters being taken up and portrayed by generation after generation of human-beings, being listened to and worshipped as they spout propaganda for their own gain, whether through the State or the Television. Because they are actors, and not politicians, or priests, we don’t even expect them to behave in like manner to what they preach. Bob Geldof lives in a massive ex-nunnery, and Bono owns half of Forbes magazine, that worships rich people. They both sang feed the world and got to No.1. We will see the truth behind the single ‘Feed the world’ shortly and ask whether it was bad-faith to purchase it. ( I did).

So, in Greece, the worship by the individuals of the state of these actors of the states of individuality, became the worship of the individual actors of these states of individuality by the state of individuals and the worship of the state of individuals by the individual actors of these states of individuality. States which no one ‘really’ constitutionally worships or admires but only regulatively as drama to ‘be’ entertained.

Entertain means, ‘to hold or keep among’, from the word tenable, meaning, ‘that can be held’, from where we derive the word contain, to be contained and retained to be a retainer, to be contained as part of a retinue of celebrity, the god form of the individual that possesses different actors at different times, but which they therefore possess as ‘star quality’ as  ‘a forceful presence on the screen’, as a ‘leading light of the arts’, as a god to the psyche of the Ego of desire. In other words to entertained means to be held in a docile group, as the audience, in a container called the Drama Triangle worshipped in the sacred theatre of artifice. The artifice of this worship being that it magically regulates your behaviour in the world through its instructional stories, and these stories can be made-up and worlded in order to suit those in power at any time.

Stars can even step-out from behind the silver screen, behind the deceitful wizard of Oz sits, and spew forth the words that they have been paid to say by the politicians of a democracy, and turn it into a drama-ocracy, a mythic-poetic-complex. Indeed prime-ministers in Great Britain even comment on the world of drama in the soap-operas of the day, to implore their authors to end the suffering of a character they have created, in order to end the suffering of the polis itself. ‘Vote for the man who empathises with your plight’, being the individual benefit to the prime minister in doing so (en-acting this sentiment), not the belief in the care of his polis, through their vicarious docile, t.v. churned out life, but their vote.

Entertain means to be held in, the ideal world of wishes and unicorns and dramatic actors, who are in reality, as the saying goes for them, ‘Never meet your heroes’ because it is such a disappointment. A reality the press frequently fulfils for us in order to heighten our individual esteem as right and therefore better than and deserving more esteem than the esteemed get- another form of entertainment-in-itself.’

If we esteem these people we want to look like them, smell like them, and go where they have chosen to freely go in a world of freedom that they have attained through wealth, fame, and esteem. When Bob Geldof sells a watch in the National Geographic Magazine or Nicole Kidman sells her Chanel No.5 perfume and then argues for womens rights, or George Clooney makes a million pounds by sporting a designer suit, supercar and lifestyle trimmings in Oceans Eleven for the world to worship and then asks us not to go to war, or Bono hides his eyes behind sunglasses as he tells us of freedom whilst purchasing 50% of Forbes magazine, the magazine famous for its rich-list listing and the status wars that ensue from its publications, we might well like to think of the word that the actors of Greece were known by, the very word from which we derive the word actor. It is the word, Hypocrite- meaning a pretence to virtue, playing a part on a stage, also meaning, ‘I judge’ and ‘a dissembler’.

In Greece, these worshipped actors were in like manner taken into service by the rulers of the city-states as ambassadors whose artful skills fit perfectly into the oratory requirements of telling a regulative story that would gain an allegiance, hold off a war, deceive and dissemble, spy and counter-spy, make a party popular, etcetera, etc.

“As Greece became more and more dominated by rich and powerful leaders, so the corrupting force of money and the fear of money increased. Actors were at the end of the day like mercenary soldiers, they sold their services to the highest bidder, and more importantly, they had the ability to imitate and to deceive. So what everyone was worried about was that Philip was writing his own play, and getting the public figures of Athens to star in it as his key actors.” Dr. Michael Scott University of Warwick.

06: Philips Theatre of War- Let the Drama Begin- Raise the Curtain and Present the Truth Behind this New Garment of Author-ity. The Show Must Go On (continue)!

Let us look at how the nemesis to drama- karma- came back and bit the Athenians, destroying their power for all time. Were they defeated by Philip or were they defeated by themselves?

As Philip is about to invade Athens the democracy holds a meeting about what action to take. Will Philip dare to take Athens, should they prepare for war, or attempt to offer tribute for reciprocal peace or ‘give’ their allegiance. A senator of Athens, Demosthenes, debates in the Senate with an Athenian actor, Escines, about the fear of invasion by Philip. But Philip has hired (or bribed- pirate/merchant-actor- mercenary) Escines to speak on his behalf in order to allay their fears and by so doing, their preparations for war with Philip- deceiving and dissembling them. Demosthenes accuses Escines of having taken bribes from King Philip describing him as a hypocrite but it is to no avail, the people worship Escines, and do not prepare for war. They believe what they desire to believe, and they worship what they believe they desire. What Escines says, is reason enough, it even feels rude to question it.

As Philips armies enter an unprepared Athens, Demosthenes, in the true democratic spirit of Alcibiades, now unable to maintain the power he held under a ‘sacred’ democracy (as the propaganda goes), proceeds to flee the battle field in the honourable art of running away. Athens and Thebes become oppressed city-states, no longer at liberty, even as the collective state of a ‘commonwealth’ that they named, theirs by ‘right’, and wilfully voted for in order to gain it for-itself. All gone, for good in a few generations of ‘greatness’ I believe is the ‘normal’ term. What character they showed us in the face of adversity. What art and architecture they left us. What glory, what honour? War, artifice, Drama, Democracy, the fruit of which was an arms race that resulted in the new technique of a standing-army, who would require ever greater war to pay for its ever greater costs for its ever greater arts, for ever greater reason.

Philip II of Macedon begins a new chapter in the story of luxury. All of Greece is now his, but in order to keep it he will need to author a new story of authority. Will he call in the priests or the artists in order to do so. Will he want revelation or propaganda? Will the Muse simply oblige or will it be made to worship him for his victory? Will the soldiers, enriched through war go along with the story and feel the esteem of reciprocating it, or will they use reason to question this palatable garment?

“The most luxurious burial ever found in Greece is that of Philip II of Macedonia made by his son Alexander the Great. “There was a new master in Greece, he wasn’t a democrat in any way, and conspicuous display was an essential part of his policy. Luxury was off the leash.” Dr. Michael Scott

“I believe that art and culture and intelligentsia play a very important role in the way Philip was thinking about his hegemony. Philip was a highly educated person and he knew how important is the power of art, the power of culture to support his aims, his political aims.” Dr Angelika Kottoridi

“It’s a monarchical use of luxury that can be paralleled in any ruling house, indeed like our own with our crown jewels, across the world and across time, from that day to this… All these beautiful artefacts are characterised by one thing, a total confidence in what they are, excess, is no longer a problem. There is no self-consciousness about power or wealth, no democratic anxiety about luxury or Spartan attempt to hide it, instead, there is a new focus on ego. For centuries Greece had been dominated by places where luxury was really only valid and safe if it celebrated the state or the gods, now one man, a king was well on his way to representing both.” Dr. Michael Scott

When Philip took over Greece he became the greatest dissembler of art, calling the greatest artists and philosophers to his court to sow his garment of authority. Theatre grew still more popular as did the actors who had helped him to attain his place within it and these oral mercenaries were only to happy to take up his cause through their artifice.

The architecture and rituals of his death bears witness to the truth that the Athenians forgot

The power of God as a constitutive rule to gain authority and increase it more easily than a democracy of egoic individuals can by raising the ‘right’ of luxury to a form of worship of being-for-itself. The pyramid mausoleum created by his sense reveals the nature of the architecture, the first form of Macedonian authority- luxury itself.

Philip’s actual death and the architecture surrounding him as he met his fate, reveal the actual truth behind the power of luxury in order to cohere a group. For he died at the theatre assassinated by one of his own soldiers, who despite being made wealthy felt that they could do better with Alexander, his own son. His hubris came back to bite him. At the start of the play at which Philip would meet his fate, thirteen statues were brought out onto the stage of worship. Twelve of these statues represented the twelve Greek gods, but the thirteenth was Philip himself. He therefore, like the gods, was not to be seen as the civic power behind the author, as it was perceived in Athens. He was one of the gods themselves, he was the Muse, that entered the author by his will amongst the other gods. The architecture that surrounded this theatre had been reverted back to the twelve gods by Philips will.

The gods and the individual now worshipped together as one Nature, in the theatre of the State. Not statues of great individuals of the state, but statutes of the super-state of the State, once more magical in their power to cohere peoples will through divine reason. A reason that Philip- king/priest of the theatre would tell you about through a drama of education as entertainment. Unsurprisingly Philip was buried in purple robes, a fitting garment wouldn’t you say, for such an art. ‘now one man, a king was well on his way to representing both.’ God and State as one, him-self.

How will Alexander use these theatrical gods of Oz who live behind the curtain of authority when they come up against the gods of Persia as he defeats them. How will he take this idea of kingship and godship, as power for himself as a worshipped individual, who by his might has rightly taken the land of Persia from King Cyrus, and hence, the gods of Persia whose power he now possesses, proving his perfection in the eyes of the other gods, who surround him in the theatre of artifice. Will he believe in the artifice of his own greatness to such a degree that he believes he is a god-in-itself? A super-state of paranoia. Will the soldiers who killed his father, maintain their eternal worship of this new god upon his death, or will they fight amongst themselves and destroy this new god for themselves?

07: Act II – Alexander the Great- Why was he so Great?

“Nonetheless, when Alexander gained the expanses won by Cyrus he also gained two intangible legacies- one religious, the other broadly cultural.” (Lerner et al:1993:139)

Upon the assassination of Philip, Alexander took the throne of Macedon. He had been educated by The Iliad and by Aristotle, by the plays of Euripides, and by the history of the Hellenic states.  Using the art of war, as his father had done, he invaded Persia and Egypt and took them. By the time of his death in 323 B.C. his empire spanned two million square miles.

Alexander took theatre with him, but he also took on the cultural and religious beliefs of the Persians and Egyptians that he encountered. What therefore happened to the democracy of Athens and its people, now that they could see their greatness return once again by naming themselves Greeks of power under a king. Did they fight for a democracy to take the place of the king, or did they fight for the king, and forget democracy? Did they deny the right of any individual to be worshipped above the State or did they worship the individual above the State? Had the last few hundred years of democracy had any permanent effect on the Athenians or did they simply take the story that offered them the most power? Did their phylogeny recapitulate their ontogeny? Did the house of democracy return to the house of Ham, without tainting these traditional waters with their new Hellenic language, art and techniques and for whose benefit was this done?

It is important that we look at the effect of religion re-entering the humanistic world of the Greeks, for it is here that the Carrot and the Stick of our current religions begin to gain a new power. It is here that the concept of monarchy and luxury, authority and desire, become one, for the next 2000 years. Only in the last 300 years has this changed to democracy and luxury as authority and desire. This then is the beginning of our understanding of God perceived through the state of the individual, not the family, or tribe, or wakan itself. God has been raised high, once again by Philip II, but so has the individual by Aristotle and his civilized animal spirit of the Iliad. Alexander finds a way, so that the competition between them is rendered irrelevant, for he embodies them as one.

Before, the Persian gods fought the Greek individual in the objective world. Now they have become one in our inner world, where they become a far more powerful cohesive force that they were separately. The Gods do not look down from a distance and only look upon the individuals that show themselves to be perfect and mighty. The gods have returned to earth, not as Nature, but as authority itself, through the drama of the theatre, authority is authored by man, and it is man, through war, who authors the individual. Therefore the power of Nature that we saw women embody by reflecting that mood in darshan with wakan, became the unreflected darpan of the power of the Sun itself, that we saw men embody, which gave birth to the house of Ham, and the whore of Babylon as the being-for-itself given rights to its desires. The Greeks, using the Iliad have now worshipped this ego of desire and made the gods themselves reflect ourselves- darpan. Alexander has now raised the individual ego to the super-state of being a God-in-itself-as-Object. It is his individual skin, garment, that no longer houses the power of the gods, or is a conduit to the gods through revelation, he is an individual God.

With the Hellenic-Greeks, that is to say those before Alexander, which we have studied so far, the gods were unable to offer any substantial reward after death by which carrots could be dangled in order to take power from the warrior-king and bring it under the control of the priest-king in the form of a negative cult by which to curb their desires. As we saw previously the priest-king can offer social-capital over capital, eternal salvation over earthly wealth, and social-capital is infinite whilst capital is finite. It is therefore a much more efficient system of story by which to organise the power of production than democracy can muster. This is a fact that America is still dealing with in its democracy of fundamentalist Christians who love to vote as a block of fear bound hopers of peace as they pay taxes to a super-power, never before matched in its artillery or in its use by any other civilized polis throughout the history of the world. This is why Persia was so much larger than Greek city-states and also why Greek city-states were fated to remain so much smaller.

As we have seen coherence of a group of takers without a higher authority, comes down to everyone voting for themselves, and nothing getting done because agreement is impossible. The Athenians themselves knew this, and that is why they hijacked the Delian league for themselves to increase in power.

With Alexanders’ Hellenistic Greece, that is to say Greece now combined with  Persian religion, Alexander was able to become the priest-king once again, and hence to increase his pyramid power greatly. What then was this religious story of old that attempted to reveal the truth- the unconcealedness of being, and how did it benefit its believers?

“Persia’s religious legacy was Zoroastrianism, which along with Buddhism and Judaism, was one of the three major universal and personal religions known to the world before Christianity and Islam. Although distant origins of Zoroastrianism can be traced back as far as the sixteenth century B.C., the religion’s real founder, and the one who gave it its name, was Zoroaster (the Greek form of the Persian name Zarathustra), a Persian who seems to have lived shortly before 600 B.C. (There is scholarly disagreement on when Zoroaster lived, with some authorities arguing for a date many centuries earlier).  Zoroaster was probably the first real theologian in history, the first known person to devise a fully developed system of religious belief. He seems to have conceived it as his mission to purify the traditional customs of the Persian tribes- to eradicate polytheism, animal sacrifice, and magic- and to establish their worship on a more coherent and ethical plane.

Zoroastrianism was a universal religion inasmuch as Zoroaster taught that there was one supreme god in the universe, whom he called Ahura-Mazda, meaning “the wise lord”. Ahura-Mazda embodied the principles of light, truth, and righteousness; there was nothing wrathful, let alone evil, about him, and his light shone everywhere, not just upon one tribe or another. In view of the fact that sin or sorrow in the world could not be explained by reference to Ahura-Mazda, Zoroaster posited the existence of a counter-deity, Ahriman, treacherous and malignant, who presided over the forces of darkness and evil. Apparently in Zoroaster’s own view Ahura-Mazda was vastly stronger than Ahriman, whom Ahura-Mazda allowed to exist almost by absentmindedness, but the priests of Zoroastrianism, known as magi, gradually came to emphasize the dualistic aspects of the founder’s thought by insisting that Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman were about evenly matched, and were engaged in a desperate struggle for supremacy. According to them, only on the last great day would “light” decisively triumph over “darkness”, when Ahura-Mazda would overpower Ahriman and cast him down into the abyss.

In both its less dualistic and more dualistic forms Zoroastrianism was a thoroughly personal religion, by which is meant that it made private rather than public demands and offered private rewards. Specifically, Zoroastrianism assumed that Ahura-Mazda patronized neither tribes nor states but only individuals who served his cause of truth and justice. Humans possessed free will and were free to sin or not to sin. Of course Zoroastrianism urged them not to sin but to be truthful, to love and help one another to the best of their powers, to aid the poor, and to practise generous hospitality. Those who did so would be rewarded in an afterlife, for the religion assumed the resurrection of the dead on “judgement day” and their consignment either to a realm of bliss or of flames. In the scriptures of the Zoroastrian faith known as the Avesta (a work compiled by accretion over the course of many centuries) the rewards for righteousness are explicit: “Whosoever shall give meat to one of the faithful… he shall go to Paradise.”

The brief recital of Zoroastrianism’s tenets makes clear that the religion bore numerous similarities to Judaism and Christianity. Zoroastrianism’s ethical content resembles the teachings of the Jewish prophets, it eschatology resembles aspects of postexilic Judaism, and its heaven and hell resemble aspects of the afterlife teaching of Christianity….Yet it is surely not coincidental that central aspects of Jewish religious thought took shape in an Asian world dominated by Cyrus and Darius- both convinced Zoroastrians- or that later Jewish beliefs about a judgement day, which themselves influenced Christianity, evolved in a Hellenistic world….the Persian faith exerted some influence on western Asia’s Greek conquerors in encouraging them to think of religion in ever more universalistic and personal terms.

Universalism is also the expression that best characterizes Persia’s cultural contribution to the Hellenistic synthesis. Unlike the Assyrians, the New Babylonians, and the Egyptians, all of whom tried to impose their own customs on conquered peoples (when they did not simply enslave them), the Persians adopted a tolerant “One World” policy, by which they conceived themselves to be the guiding force over an assemblage of united nations. Whereas Mesopotamian potentates characteristically called themselves “true king”, the rulers of the Persian Empire took the title “King of Kings”, thereby implying that they recognized the continued existence of various peoples with various rulers under the canopy of their rule.” (Lerner et al:1993:139-41)

“Alexander’s pattern of rule itself was Hellenistic in mixing Greek and Asiatic traits. For propaganda purposes the young Macedonian claimed to be punishing Persia for insults inflicted earlier on Greeks, and in fact he not only customarily replaced Persian governors with Greek-speaking ones, but he imported Greek settlers to inhabit newly founded cities as a means of keeping conquered populations in a state of subordination. Yet Alexander also recognized that he and his Greeks could never hope to rule a gigantic Asian empire as hated foreigners, and hence encouraged intermarriage. In keeping with this policy Alexander himself married a Bactrian princess, Roxanne (his ultimate preferences were homosexual), and divided a loaf of bread with his bride at the wedding as a gesture of deference to local custom.

What inspired Alexander most about the ways of Asia were not princesses or loaves of bread, but any Asian customs that might enhance his autocracy and his glamour

The traditions of Greece, of course, were thoroughly at odds with flattery and ostentation. Well known is the story that when Alexander first assumed rule in Greece he met the philosopher Diogenes sitting in a wooden tub that served as his home and asked the sage if he would like a favour. “Yes”, said Diogenes, “move out of my sun”, Determined not to be spoken to this way if he could help it, Alexander adopted lavish Persian dress as he moved through Asia and commanded subjects to approach him, depending on their rank, on bended knee or fully prostrate. Most extreme was Alexander’s decision to proclaim himself a god.” (Lerner et al:1993:144-5)

In other words Zoroastrianism (whether or not it is true) was an organizational theory that could now offer the heaven and hell that we saw the Jews under Babylonian culling of its religious leaders, develop earlier, as the carrot and the stick of organizational theory, but for the individual, not the tribe. A state of relative relational power is much easier to control now that the tribe has been named ‘a polis of individuals in a State’ by Aristotle- the public worship of the individual in this state is seen as the purpose of life- to perfect one-self, whilst the worship of the wakan as the one God was to be private to the individual.

The super-State of the individual now owns the outer world, whilst the inner world of the magic horse, must be kept out of sight of the Third- the state as the public. Remember how the iron fish was received in the court as a revelation of genie-us, whilst the magic horse was laughed out of court, and seen as a toy for children. Well now the genie is out of the bottle (the ego is in control of the outer world, and the inner world is bottled-up, divided and conquered into individual portions from an infinite supply. There is no need to fight over religious possession of the truth, because truth is ‘individual’. The universality of god is individually experienced, not collectively, unless it is the God of the State, that is to be worshipped. Even God saves individuals and their individual souls on judgement day, as if they are separate from wakan and the community, and the ancestors that sired it, ,or the karma it carries in its thrownness.

Remember the concept of soul in chapter one, where the Altjira or the ancestor is the totem as much as the ancestor, yet exists in each individual. Now the psyche is the individual, in his drama, and the soul is relegated into a conscience that reminds us of our negative instructions, or a muse who tells the author what to write, by entering him and then leaving him. The being-in-itself experiences the psyche and therefore not the soul, and believes himself separate from his inner as well as his outer world, therefore providing his psyche with more personal power to be taken from the World Soul- Altjira- through society, to his individual self. In like manner even God is now experienced as individually separated from Wakan, because he is not evil, he is not hell. For such a friend one must have an enemy, and so the devil- who is also not a part of God- Ahriman must be born to reflect this separate nature of Nature. Good is separate from evil, light from dark, the individual from God, The earth from God, the Devil from God, Darshan becomes darpan. How can something separate be universal? For 40,000 years it wasn’t and neither were we.

Now the fighting experience of for the being-for-itself in the world it has worlded, is subjectivised into an internal landscape story that makes sense. The iron fish becomes the iron glove of experience as Subject and the magic horse becomes the Trojan Horse as Object of the Iliad. The spirit becomes experienced as good and evil, light and dark, hubris and nemesis, a luxurious garment in a world of war. What will be its fruit? “We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams” willy wonka- “If you want to view paradise. Take a look around, you’ll see it. Anything you want to, be it.” Willy wonka -“There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.” Willy wonka

The Jews were ‘a collective people’ of twelve tribes, chosen by the one God under a new covenant. With Hellenised Zoroastrianism, religion became a personal belief system that was universal, not to the Universe as Wakan, but to the individual as the universe. The Hellenic Jews who took up the story of heaven and hell from the Maccabees also took on the individual soul of Greek reason.The goat-song chorus of the universe and its karma, became a tragedy separated by a comedy- a drama triangle of individuals in the pyramid architecture of Hellenist civilization. In like manner, God became separated by the devil in a drama triangle of individuals in the pyramid of heaven, earth and hell, as giver, reciprocator and taker,  from the state of being-for-itself, in a super-State of being-for-itself. It’s capital was therefore named, a God, and Durkheim would be unable to witness any other perspective of truth, from such a reasonable position of ‘Il Poche’. The heroic psyche of discovering the objective ‘truth’, separated by reason as an art-form, where God is imagined as an experience, and no longer are we made in his imagination, in his image.

As Willy Wonka tells us, ‘We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams”, from this perspective

Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, 1971 dir. Mel Stuart.

‘If you want to view paradise take a look around you’ll see it, in pure imagination’. The Garden of Eden, in like manner must be perceived to also be so. It wasn’t. Natural Magic becomes prestidigitation, the cunning slight of the hand of reason, to justify the right hand, that no longer knows what the left hand is doing. The word sinister means, ‘on the left hand’ or ‘inauspicious’ and was born from this perceived experience, changing God into a superstition on the one hand, and a super-state that believes only in the causal nexus of desire as transcendence, on the other. In other words, Durkheim has already ‘Il poche’d’ his left hand but was unaware that such a limb truly existed, and that in fact, it was this invisible left hand that had bore the right hand of reason from the magical pyramid garment of religion, that we have just witnessed. For him the egg came before the chicken that laid it.

The minister, meaning servant, of the sinister paranoia of being contained within a pandora’s box, or ark, of hopes and fears, now sings a universe-al goat-song as a minstrel, meaning a servant who sang a song to his Lord. Whether that song was sung to his earthly lord or to his Universe-al Lord, it came from the individu-al who conjured it through his art, not the individual came, conjured through His art. It is a song of separation, a song that diminished the soul to a private individual subject and God to a public object as Alexander the Great, and every ruler that came after him whose individual songs diminished their God like powers to possess the world, in order to measure their own merit. It is the Carmen perpetuum of war, the father of everything of merit. The universal soul is experienced a merely a negative inner voice accompanying the egoic psyche, that ignores it, and hence remains ignorant of it. What a reasonable experience.

The revelations of Zarathustra were therefore revelations from the muse, perceived through the lens of the being-for-itself, and written in the language of Babylon created by this same lens- in just the same way as we saw the Hindu perception of the gods change when the god Daksha was born from darshan to darpan. In fact it is aletheia to say that the revelations of Althjira became experienced by Zarathustra as aletheia, but the language trap of civilization made words incapable of revealing (revelating) this aletheia to the people of Babyl for God had perverted their tongues, so that they could not understand each other.

Now through these words of good and evil, created by this settled experience, produced the fruit of reason. Hence, God was just if I am saved, and the darshan of empathy for those who are not does not effect the Nature of the spirit of paradise, that the saved individual will experience in pure imagination. Expurgated from the whole nature of being through reason The power to be saved was an individual possession, being-‘right’-in-itself. The karmic actions of the individual did not reflect- darpan- upon the actions of another in this secret magical inner world, by which we are now judged, and not the outer world that this inner world produces, for the outer world is public, and I am not public, I am universal in private. A universe I experience only in my inner world, as my outer world reflects only being-as-subject-Object. Unless of course you are the one individual, Alexander the Great, who therefore experiences possession of this universe as an individual and as being-Object-as-Super-State, and therefore believes his experience and names himself a God- paranoia.

What better way to describe the experience of the inner world of an individual’s experience of a universal soul song than the word private. A private religion, means a religion of privation. Private comes from the Latin word ‘priuatus’, meaning ‘apart’, from the word ‘priuare’ meaning ‘to bereave’. From this word come two others- de-prive, and privilege. In other words, the privileged are those who are privy to the law (lege). Privilege actually means, ‘a bill against a person’ or ‘an ordinance in favour of one. Those who are privy to the law are those who are in a state of above knowledge but knowledge that is in their favour. In other words a paranoia that is to their mutual advantage to believe in, because it is dexterous to do so. Dexter means, ‘the right hand’, and means ‘a clever idea’, from the Sanskrit word dakshina, meaning ‘clever’- Daksha.

“Through Daksha, Brahma becomes domesticator of nature and creator of culture. In exchange for domestication, yagna grants abundance and security and so promises the end of fear.

But the end of fear for whom? Daksha is Praja-pati, master of the people. He is not Pashu-pati, master of animal instincts. Daksha seeks to dominate people around him rather than outgrow his own fears. His gaze is outward not inward. He seeks to domesticate everyone around him. He is not willing to question his own delusions which cause the amplification of his own fears.”

08: Who benefits?

The merging of these techniques of individuality with good and evil, heaven and hell, as his possession as God, therefore allowed the king as warrior to take as many other pyramids as he liked without having to change or control the religious story of that pyramid, but still dexterously control its power, because he had separated the pyramid into individuals cohered by their individual desires- egos, but able to be controlled by a negative cult that he authored and not one authored by the people themselves, democratically, for themselves. This is the appeal of a “universal” faith and of one God over many gods in a pyramid world, when you are that one God, or its minstrel, or its author.

Now all lesser gods are under the universal reign of the Priest-King-Warrior who was a God-in-itself to be worshipped as equally divine and so social harmony through this story was much easier to cohere, whilst competition between these lesser gods, could be authored in a story of war or peace by the ruler as and when it benefited him, by his authority as God, setting other pyramids against each other and against their gods. In Christianity the first institution of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ belief was called Catholic which means universal.  Not Universe, or goat-song, or wakan but universe-al, covering the divide of the ‘in-divide-u-all’ (divide meaning, ‘apart’), of the love of the ego that goes to heaven as it divides you all from each-other and sires the hate of the ego that wishes others to hell, by the rights of not being-like-me- the judgement of the Third, whilst in a world of pure imagination- heaven- sends his ego to eternal paradise- a walled in enclosure, they can never be entertained in. This is the progress of the ego, towards eternal pleasure for-itself.

This same progress is the Object of the State, and the possession of the God-king-warrior Alexander the Great. It is not paradise but paranoia that this wall encloses in reality, we have left the Garden of Eden, and become universal wall makers, behind which we privately attempt to dwell in aletheia deprived of the privilege of tearing down the wall, but attempt to at least, open a door to openness, in this house of fools- an architecture known as a, ‘folly’. The modern perspective that has perceived the need for authoring individual human rights by which to bind us all together, is such a privilege. The privileged right to be seen as ‘an individual’ and to be left  un-re-cognised as a-part of a group, or a family or a universe or Wakan. The law of individuality is universal, but you by the same reason are not. Cognise comes from the word Natal, meaning, ‘belonging to one’s birth’, and cognate, means to ‘be-allied-by-birth’.

This birth is now re-cognised by the right hand of the law and just meaning ones privileged rights in a Nation from the Latin natus meaning, to be born’, the same root as Natal. The sacred birth right of the being-in-Being, has become the privileged birth-right of the being-for-itself that bore the pyramid that sired the nation, that made the house that Jack built- with his ‘free’ ‘masonic’ art en-acted in private in a secret ‘right’ hand-shake, I believe, in some walled of enclosures, or lodges, where rulers dwell- in a state of paranoia that benefits them. An ‘Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’ whose architects claim that they wish to build an earthly paradise through their magical rites. Architects who are such Objects of the State as, the Chief of Police, members of parliament, and members of the ‘House of Lords’, and who we will meet as members of, ‘The Hellfire Club’, of ‘The Skull and Bones’, and as fathers of war, later on. Their urgrund is temple-architecturally a chess-board floor of black and white squares, of ordered reason, of good and evil, of love and hate, of us and them, of privileged and deprived. Their project is universal worlding upon this urgrund of cognition.

A public polis of private people could therefore now be taken over by this God-King-Warrior with the Greek idea that ‘might is right’, but also with the religious idea in harmony with it, that ‘sacred birth-right is right’. This meant that familism, religious belief systems, and self-interest could all be housed by this meta-narrative without changing the status quo of pyramid life, no matter where this pyramid increased in the real world.

In terms of behaviour, intermarriage showed this supreme ability to commingle gods with gods, and your people with their people, joined in spirit by having the same enemies, but different gods.

The people could remain docile and yet feel the power of their god Daksha flowing through them all

The victor of a peoples could now rightfully take the spoils of war by ‘might is right’, but instead of destroying its peoples he could then leave the pyramid to run itself and hence to produce more spoils for both itself and the God-King-Warrior. The people under his dominion, in like manner, could now continue to increase their power for-itself without believing that it was betraying its-self by karmically acting for this new ruler as his subject, because his true self, his ego, had nothing to do with all of that because ultimately it was going to a paradise of pure imagination. Its cognisant birth-right- it’s ontogeny recapitulating its phylogeny, as the ego of pure imagination takes the central place, and Altjira, the soul, becomes an imagined inner voice, a subconscious, an id, an animal spirit to be tamed by egoic reason itself- Beware, Monsters lurk here.

At home when he closed the door in his rightful property, in his private world, a walled off enclosure protected by the State he had been working for, he could be his true self, Ich bin, (I dwell)- take off his suit or artifice as Object of the State and sit down in front of his sacred space, that was really him reflected in his worlding on the tele or with esteemed colleagues, or purely imagining what is would feel like to gain what it is that one desires, to mastibate (mass-de-bate) over what one wishes to masticate (bate meaning- strife and cate meaning- to contain), and be-for-itself, in order to gain heaven for-itself, as he so rightfully deserved, and others did not, due to how he behaved and they did not, and how he experienced their behaviour and hypocrisy in public, whenever he went out of the private front door that he had built and closed behind him as a façade so that for once he could be-come-Subject to his own self- and not to these same hypocritical-Others-not-being-themselves, as they in turned forced him to be.

Using the respective invisible forces of fear, paranoia and hope of its now individual peoples and by artfully calling them- fear, faith/right, and hope dramatises them into an inner subjective egoic world of common sense imagination with the same egoic reason of cause and effect, flexible thinking, and mental time-travel. The meta-narrative being: protection from eternal punishment in hell (the stick experience seen subjectively through the inner world of myth); the right way to act in good-faith on earth, for eternal reward in the form of pleasure (the carrot experience seen subjectively through the inner world of myth- heaven) respectively as ones hopeful purpose, results in a cohered world without any decrease in actual finite capital goods or status positions being handed out.

In a democracy Athenians only voted for increase because it aided themselves through an increase of finite capital goods, but in a religious world increase can be infinite holy esteem with a reward in an infinite heaven, after death, and faith provides the reward and esteem by following its path of negative instruction. A reward that can be gained by individual private actions of the will, separate from the actions of the State, and separate from any cause and effect that you have when being-a-subject to this State. Therefore people could have a personal salvation, and not a State based salvation, as did a democracy of people without a heaven, only an underworld where their egoic selves faded as they faded from memory in State memorials.

Does the West have a democracy without salvation today? No, it doesn’t, but it has been ‘managed’ to contain religion and heaven whilst dividing them from the political body, through a story of liberal idealist rhetoric. Divide and Continue, is more efficient than divide and conquer. It’s money states quite boldly, ‘In God we Trust’ whilst depicting an all-seeing eye (representing God’s omniscience) looking down upon a pyramid and the world around it. It it-self however is the author who Names the ‘axis-of-evil’ on Earth, that must be fought as matter of honour and protection of its frightened people, without a conduit to that God in which they apparently trust being present, only a ruler of the state has the right to declare war or peace, and the army follows. It seems upon reflection to be a story that coheres free-will to the State will through trust in God. A God that it believes in when it comes to the free-will of the soldiers to choose to give their lives to the State but then don’t believe in when they feel authorised to tell these same soldiers to kill believers of this same Universal God they believe in but who are apparently in a different State, and therefore it is ‘right’ to kill them, especially when the army priests and the State confirm that this Universal God is on your side and not theirs.

They then parade their universal belief in this God by worshipping the individual of the State of the ego, as a means of trust

When it comes to money, or the law (swearing upon a bible), it is apparently, in God that they entrust themselves. But money and law are a possession of the State, not of the Universe whose law is silent by its Nature, and not a wind blowing individual mosquitos. But these Universal Natural Laws that they authored are once again dropped when it comes to money and law leaving their pyramid and entering another. When another pyramid has lesser laws and lesser money, the truth is enacted, as laws are ignored and the money is exchanged for what each individual values. Worshipping the God of Daksha at the temple of commerce, in a theatre of war every day, ‘called going to work’ and ‘earning a living’ in like manner to the belief of the Americans to their morality, does not end at an imaginary border, called the inner and outer world. Work for war, pray for peace, who benefits?

Science has also contributed to this recently by inventing a heaven on earth technology called the art of films and computer games, where one may live as many lives as one wishes in an infinite world of space and time. Doctor Who as God, in his infinite tardis of entertainment, where his only purpose is to defeat evil and be good for all time, to atone for his original sin, of wiping out all of the time-lords, in a fight against evil, where only one time-lord was left- himself. He transcends this limited idea of a being-god-of-space-and-time in a box or ark, by sacrificing himself and becoming a being-for-Others.

He is indefinable in his box where he is the centre because his name is Doctor Who. He is the middle class hero, known as the rescuer, in the drama triangle, who reciprocates the neo-liberal ideals of the politicians who own the television station that the polis actually pay for in order to be given the news that is seen as separate from the entertainment, but is separate from the it in reality as the Athenian Hypocrite Escides was from the senate. The doctors assistant is a docile, yet wild spirit, who acts to destroy other races alongside the doctor who always chooses a human assistant because the doctor has chosen The Earth, out of all of this infinite accident of a universe, to protect.

Why? Because human-beings are so beautiful, each one individually. In other words the Greek purpose of war, the father of the Doctors universe

The power to his tardis, to his ark of justice and authority to act on behalf of mankind is at the centre of the tardis, in its heart, the Nature of its spirit- It is a star upon the point of collapse into a black-hole where all space and time commingle into nothingness, a lack from which he is in infinite flight through his techniques of controlling it in order to protect the Earth alone. Did humans author Dr Who or did Dr Who author the humans? Who benefits? The priests who authored and acted the story. The true Nature of God is to have created something from nothing in order to explore His Nature, and reason is one of those discoveries, commingled in the Natures of Humans, Apes, Octopi and Crows, other creations reveal other Natures, or lesser gods, or totems of Wakan. The Nature of the god-being-for-itself story that is becomes is to have God create something from nothing so that the Nature could be bent to our human will, a will that the gods themselves find beautiful, and even send a God or time-lord to help us with no negative cult other than the rights of the individual and the separateness of the individual from this same God, by this same right, from this same perspective and therefore experience.

In other words, whenever the story of God tells you that you are the purpose of the universe and of the gods, then you know that the perspective of its authors is being-for-itself. Those things that cannot be controlled by the story of the universe born in-itself, for me-in-itself, such as the Nature of death, and the misunderstanding of the Nature of reward, i.e. Hubris and Nemesis rather than wisdom gained, or mysterious ways, are relegated to a place underneath the conscious perspective of the egoic story, and become subconscious, and result in mental illness or delusional fantasies or a psychosis that is mused over until it is imagined into existence from something as pure as the imagination, or as side-effects of Prozac, or suicide, or paedophilia, or obsessive compulsive disorder, etc, etcetera.- states of paranoia that have real power to force one to act, i.e. to will ones power to act in the world, thereby making the world in our image- self-destruction in order to gain an-other world in which we have the power to world peace. God is on your side, because he understands your true purpose. The True God took you from his side and gave you life for living, not death for killing.

This story means then that the negative cult can return to civilization and sin in the form of the negative cult can become once again the judge of the individual, rather than an-other individual by his relative power (perfection). It also means however that the devilish ruler who possesses hell must be promoted to an equal power fighting against God, in order for the priests to necessitate the power that they need to possess to invoke their negative cult, which is what we see the Zoroastrian Priests do in the above quote. Evil must become something worth fighting against, and not just a lesser god who God allows to exist as a whim of fancy or absentmindedness. It is not very heroic for a warrior/priest/king-God to fight a lesser foe of his dads either, especially if he lost. Devil-worship must contain power by reason of ones own possession of power as good ruler.  

State-craft therefore turned the power of the Being, into a struggle against a nearly as powerful Being- Ahriman in order to create a good reason to muster all of its forces against the power of evil, not the whim of evil because God had forgotten about Ahriman in a fit of absentmindedness. To walk a mile in a soldiers shoes who has been rallied by such a cry, and witness the truth of that subsequent power, in comparison to the prior and traditional one, is to answer the truth of all this by experience. God became a mirror that held up our perspective of our individually universally willed universe, our scape-goat song of desire- a tragedy and a fools joke, played upon our-selves, but so also did a new god- the devil- a new knowledge that possessed us and split out inner world into the saved and the lost, the desire fulfilled and the lacking in torment, and was ultimately responsible for the destruction of this karmically self-fulfilling state and its people. A great work of the Devil, is how they put it I am sure. Now that Alexander the Great had become a God through his work of ‘might is right’.

There is a legend about Alexander the Great that expresses this truth perfectly. It is the legend of the Gordian Knot, and has changed in our language as a phrase by which to symbolise, ‘a great difficulty’:

“Gordius, a peasant, being chosen king of Phyrgia, dedicated his wagon to Jupiter, and fastened the yoke to a beam with a rope of bark so ingeniously that no one could untie the knot. Alexander the Great was told that whoever undid it, ‘would reign over the whole East’. ‘Well then’, said the conqueror, ‘it is thus I perform the task’, and, so saying, he cut the knot in two with his sword.” Brewers Dictionary of phrase and fable.

How does one untie the Gordian knot of loyalty to the State over loyalty to the egoic self and cohere an empire unlike any seen before in the world?

Simple, you don’t untie it, you slash it apart into thousands and thousands of individual strands using the power of the sword, the artillery of the stick-world, and call it peace, and give everyone individual human rights that are relative to their pyramid architectural constitutional form. But it is more complicated than that. The knot was originally one strand- Wakan, and their were no individual strands, but now that the single strand has been cut in two it has created the illusion of individuals, and these individuals are themselves cut in two, one aspect of the strand perceived to be on the right, and the other on the left. In other words, we have an individual split in two, one is private, being-for-itself and the other is public, being-for-State-god. Being-for-itself in public is the experienced increase of hypocrisy, lying, cheating, killing, and deceit, etc, that pervaded this State-God, that resulted in the common sense experience of the power of the Devil. In reality it is the subconscious nature of the state, denied by telling a story of goodness, that is now separable from evil by the art of war, ‘might is right’, ‘power is authority-in-itself.’

We have already seen that for tens of thousands of years this one God was the peaceful Wakan that represented the Universe and Nature, but with the creation of the devil as an equal power, the universe became a war-zone, to reflect the worlding of the World that man had produced. Universal religion therefore in like manner became an idea that reflected this same egoic perspective of reality, and the word universe came to mean universal, that is to say, covering all individual people by its garment of truth and awe. God now, for this reason, becomes experienced as separate from the actual Universe by reason of the Devils fight for power over the actual Universe and us, meaning that God does not fully possess the Universe but is fighting for it, as we are, even though it is His rightful possession, as it is therefore ours, as we are fighting for it in His Name.

Is there a better story for the Son of God to tells its people than that they are involved in this sacred fight, as individuals and as the State therefore in like manner, and that they will gain paradise individually for the same reason? Is there a better story for the Priests to tell its people than that there is only one God to be worshipped over the other lesser gods that they worship now but that they can still worship these lesser gods as long as they are aware of the light and the dark and the battle that all mankind is engaged in with these same gods under God, who he represents?

It is no sin to worship an aspect of God through a lesser god or even a priest-saint, and so there is no need to fight for the supremacy of the gods that are worshipped by your State and ours. Just as it is no sin to obey a king who is not the King of kings but a lesser king or even a lord of a lesser king, so there is no need to fight for the supremacy of the kings that are authorised by your State and ours or of their gods. It is much better to cohere our strengths to fight ‘evil’, this thing, separate from our States but present in Others, that we shall Name evil because we are ‘right-in-itself’ (in the right), and they are not when they don’t recognise that constitutional fact.*  The enemy of my enemy is my friend- and this enemy is universal so we are all good friends. This now universal sin, separated from universal good. It is the meta-narrative by which to impose a negative cult and a priest/king who must, by necessity therefore, also be a heroic warrior who fights the devil who is attempting to gain loyal people to his flock. These are the people that we must fight- these devils, these evil ones. Namely, anyone who does not worship Alexander the Great the son of God, must be a devil, they must be a barbarian- meaning a foreigner, but in this case meaning someone foreign to the word of God as truth and consequently to the laws, power and authority of his envoy, his own son- Alexander.

Just like Doctor Who today, it is a reflection of ourselves in the twisted mirror of Darpan that denies the purpose and the cause and the effect for the good reason that no-one can actually find this evil and destroy it by using a gun, or a sword, only a story, and an experience that sires it. Experiencing war fathers peace, experiencing peace fathers war. What a language trap. Friends are only, not enemies at the moment because that is to our mutual advantage- reciprocal users of being-for-itself, and so what is a true friend in such a state of paranoia. The Holy War of Jihad, meaning to fight the inner world of egoic desire, becomes twisted into the Jihad of the battlefield and terrorism upon the infidel- from the root word faith (therefore meaning, ‘the unfaithful’). Or to put this same perspective change into western language- the Holy War of Trusting in God, meaning to abide by his laws or commandments, becomes twisted into the Holy War of Trusting other States and Others within the state of the battlefield and law courts where we confide the truth.  

Confidel means to be with the faith, to confide

Those who we trust in are confidels not infidels, for they hold our confidence as they swear allegiance on the Bible in a court of law, as they hold a symbol of the spirit of God in a court of beings-for-itself, who really use punishment to control the infidel by threatening perjury and imprisonment or a threat of purgatory- an Art-icle of Faith, or pure imagination that contains no reason when examined within the doctrine of Pure Love as God. Did I mention by way, that doctrine has the same root word as that of the Doctor time-lord above whose doctrine we have seen is no more and no less than being-for-our-individual-beautiful-selves. Can you guess the root word- It is docile, meaning to teach in its original usage, but now meaning, ‘easy to manage’. Alexander really was Great, just as I have been taught.

*That is the same constitutional fact of why the ego cannot act and perceive itself as evil, covered by Sartre earlier.

God now relies on us taking up the fight because the devil is so powerful that he might win if we don’t cull those who don’t believe this truth, rape their wives and enslave their children and educate them in this truth, and take their land and possessions, and make them easier to manage for ourselves. But beware, because by the nature of the Ego and the mirror of darpan there is no civilization that is able to perceive that its State is being-the-devil-in-itself, only of the devil-being-itself-in-it. All egoic states unreflectively presume that they are good and only reason otherwise when reflected as being evil, just as individual people do, before deciding that they are not evil and then nourishing a righteous justified hatred for the Other that told them that they were. Oh no, each State, as with each individual, must believe that they are actually worshipping a god and therefore, they are worshipping the devil.

To put this into an amusing story, that is only amusing if you get what is being said above, let us hear from the Sufi wisdom of the Fool- Nasrudin:

10: Good God – Alexander the Great!? – The Emperor’s New Clothes Act II

“In conclusion, two particularly remarkable aspects of Hellenistic culture deserve special comment- Hellenistic cosmopolitanism and Hellenistic “modernity”. Not only does the word “cosmopolitan” itself come from Greek cosmopolis, meaning “universal city”, but it was the Greeks of the Hellenistic period who came the closest among westerners to turning this ideal of cosmopolitanism into reality. Specifically, around 250 B.C., a leisure-class Greek could have travelled from Sicily to the borders of India, always meeting people who “spoke his language”, both literally and in terms of shared ideals. Moreover, this same Greek would not have been a nationalist in the sense of professing any deep loyalty to a city-state or kingdom. Rather, he would have considered himself a “citizen of the world”. Hellenistic cosmopolitanism was partly a product of the cosmopolitanism of Persia, and it helped in turn to create the cosmopolitanism of Rome, but in contrast to both it was not imperial- that is, it was entirely divorced from constraints imposed by a supranational state- although unfortunately it was achieved by means of Greek exploitation of subject peoples. Finally, although cosmopolitanism is surely not an obvious condition of the present, other aspects of Hellenistic civilization must seem very familiar to observers today. Authoritarian governments, ruler worship, economic instability, extreme scepticism existing side by side with intense religiosity, rational science existing side by side with irrational superstition, flamboyant art and ostentatious art collecting: all these traits might make the thoughtful student of history wonder whether the Hellenistic Age is not one of the most relevant in the entire human record for comparison with our own.” (Lerner et al:1993:159)

So in the above quote the idea of a universal city-people i.e. a universe of settlers now worlded as a phylogenic reality, came from the Greeks as they merged with the Persians over hundreds of years of war and peace, and who used it to exploit its subjects, whilst under the guise of Alexanders rightful god-ship. I am not stating that this was done either cunningly or purposively by Alexander, but that the State of paranoia and the flow of the invisible force of power around the peoples that make up a State interact in order to reason out a story that reflects this experience, and that a king or God or whatever he believes himself to be is named in like manner through this perception of the people, and as a consequence feels the power of the people as his possession, and that this experience twists his perspective into believing that he is rightful possessor of this power.

So great an experience that he must indeed be related to the gods, in comparison to other cosmopolitan men. I do believe that often ‘a’ sub-plot story is authored deliberately as propaganda in order to empower the State, the ruler, or a usurper, in order to maintain cohesion, and we will witness many of these, but the urgrund Nature of the story is a reflective myth upon the experience of the people whose consciousnesses collectively produced it, and who collected around it as they produced the story, thereby finessing the story into a coherent garment around these experiences before finally being embodied by a prophet of revelation or an artist of the muse, or a calculated will, as with Clisthenes and democracy or Lycurgus and Sparta.

When ‘a’ story, is added to the society, it will only be cohered to if it reflects the experience of the polis any way. To put it another way, imagine a survival of the fittest set of stories and an embodiment of harmony set of stories trying to dwell in our consciousness. In a world of abundance, and equality, and fraternity it is the embodiment of harmony story that will find a place for it nature to dwell in the conscious body of such an actor of this karma. In a world of War, supply and demand, equality and inequality, fraternity and hatred of others as my enemies enemy, etc, then the ‘survival of the fittest’ story fits (art) the nature of a conscious body of such an actor of this drama, and flourishes within this common-sense experience.

The story of the individual esteem of honour and war therefore crept into the story of the religious life and became individual honour in the after-life- esteem by God- for fighting evil in the form of killing people, enslaving people, and feeling good about it because these actors in the theatre of war were now not only saving themselves and their family from those they hated and feared, but were saving the very universe from the devil, for God- as they gained further power by decreasing the power of the ‘evil’ peoples (infidels) by increasing their own possessions by taking theirs, through rape, pillage, and murder, that gave them lawful property rights- naturally. It is a story that produces a high ‘survival of the fittest rate’ and is therefore reproduced across the world of desire, just as we saw settling do so, to the hunter-gatherer earlier. Alexander’s new recipe for power is one that has been fermented from the fruit in the Garden of Eden, and the spirit of the knowledge of good and evil has been re-possessed, not by God, but by man who is possessed by it.

The story of this ‘survival of the fittest’ God over that of the embodiment of harmony is one of ontological perspective before it is one of culture

For example, it is just as ‘right’ to say, that wheat has domesticated us, and made us docile, as settlers and citizens in order to possess the land and us, not the other way around. Wheat is the victor that has made an animal work for it. In fact, we know that bees, and flies, and bats, etc, etcetera, all work to fertilize the flowers, and we know that apes, including ourselves, see in colour and not black and white, so that we could see when the fruit was ripe to eat, so that the seeds we planted with our fertilizer, as pooh, were ready to be planted to take possession of more land. It is only because humans have the power to destroy wheat and trees, that we believe that we have possession of them, and not them possession of us.

The truth of course, is that if we did destroy the wheat and the trees, then we would be destroying ourselves through starvation and climatic change, in other words, the embodiment of harmony keeps wheat, and trees, and humans, cohered together by their Nature as parts of Nature. Human nature is an aberration, it is an artifice, that bene-fits its believers as being-for-itself as the fittest, and therefore right, through this might. Remember that art means, ‘to fit’. Remember how well it fits a world of war. Remember how Doctor Who fits a world of science priests possessing the universe of space and time by measuring it, as the Giza pyramid possessed the world by reflecting the cubit of the distance between the Egyptian Rulers elbow to his finger-tip. A finger-tip that will later be artfully depicted as touching Gods, when Greek Humanitas is reborn in a later culture.

A finger-tip that it would be stupid to look at when it is pointing at the moon- as Bruce Lee would have us see. It is not hypocrisy that bore these perceptive stories that shaped humanity to fit them, it is the ontological experience of being-for-itself in a world of mine, not mine, and will be mine, of past, present, and future, of space and time, of war and survival, of fear and hope and paranoia, that makes a fitful place for the story to survive, in the same way that we have seen language become twisted and created in order to frame this experience.

Evolutionary biologists today, are not consciously aware of making up a story through their docile perception, they believe that their measuring is truer than that of the pharaohs because it measures nature separate from ones self- and is therefore pure reason, and not pure imagination. That fact the reason requires imagination to function, as human nature requires Nature to function does not effect their measurements whereas in reality, it is from this perspective that they begin to measure and record their doctrinal findings. Remember what the hunter-gatherer artist said, when he was repainting the ancient paintings of his ancestors, ‘I am not painting, it is only the hand of the spirit that is painting now.’ “Because man is a part of the spirit”.

Unlike Homer in a world of war who experienced the muse coming through his-self, producing The Iliad, the aborigine, being-in-Being, experiences his-self no longer and becomes the Muse, the goat-song, of Wakan. He becomes the uni-verse and embodies its harmony as a part of the chorus that is possessed through space and time in a State of Nature and not as possessor of space and time in a state of individual human nature. Death is not an end for the aborigine, life is a dreamtime formed from eternal energy- Wakan. It is therefore not to ‘be-survived’, but to ‘have been a part of Being’. He does not need to fit, because he is not apart but a part.

Part means, ‘a share’- the original meaning of sacrifice as alimental communion- a sharing in the Garden of Eden with God. Apart means, ‘aside, alone, single’. An Apart-ment is a separate room, a walled enclosure in which we settle and dwell with our possessions, in an imagined aloneness, that, like tigers of pure imagination, become paper tigers, and then real ones, experienced as competition and war and private shame and guilt and grief and paranoia, in the face of public victory blessed by God. Party, as in political party means, ‘to divide’, presumably for the purpose of conquering. To partake, means to take part. It is impossible to take part in alimental communion in an embodiment of harmony, when one is trying to ‘survive’

The word survival itself reveals this truth. It means, ‘to live beyond’, or to ‘outlive’, and its root comes from the word victuals meaning, ‘belonging to nourishment’, and ‘to live’. The sacrifice of alimental communion that the aboriginal artist experienced by nourishing it through his habitual way of being- karma- produced a transcendent state in which to live beyond his singular self and be-in-Being as an experience, not in Heaven but on Earth. The sacrifice of alimental communion that the settler artist experienced by nourishing it through his habitual way of being- karma- produced a transcendent state in which to live beyond his singular self and be-for-itself- in Greek civilization. Aristotles reasoned State of transcendence, in a world of War authored as ‘a’ phylogenic regulative story (culture) that fit in the minds of the common sense of the polis of ontogenic constitutional beings-for-itself.

The sacrifice of alimental communion that the settler artist of Alexander the Great, and the Jews and all monotheistic religions experienced by nourishing it through his habitual way of being- karma- produced a transcendent state in which to live beyond his singular self and be-for-itself- not in civilization but in heaven, to be gained by being-civilized- domesticated, docile, by taming the wild animal spirit of the ego for the State which was run by God himself- ‘immortality of the fittest’. Terrorist bombers as martyrs who are promised 77 virgins in the highest rank of heaven for killing in their culture of Jihad perceived through the lens of mine, not mine, and yet to be mine of the being-for-itself.

The perception of possessing this ‘knowledge of good and evil’ will not be beaten as a source of warrior stick authority efficiency until the French Revolution, but that will need the language of the priest to change along side his name as Object of this new State. He will have be called a ‘scientist’, in a world of accidental meaninglessness sired by an accidental big-bang that none of the scientists promulgating its truth, really believe in any more, and that deals with the negative cult by taking up the individual and making him profane, as an accident in a universal accident, whose only reasonable purpose in living, is therefore individual pleasure. Morality does not exist in accidental universal songs sung by these priest/scientists, only debate about who gets what- ‘humanist’ paraphrased as,  ‘whose mine is it’- Total War. Religion does not exist in accidental universal songs because there is nothing to bind us to each other, except the accident of gravity. Scientists do not perceive themselves to be promulgators of a universal truth therefore but only promulgators of ever changing truths about an eternally accidental universe, by natural law.

It is not themselves authoring it, they believe, but the universes Nature, that reason alone tells us is the truth, and that is reason enough. Science only worships the god of the individual reason of scientists as Daksha, for the reason that it can never usurp its true god- the individual as a reasonable scientist- darpan. Just as do priests, and politicians, and kings, and oligarchs, and democrats. From a reasoned position, that indeed is the only reasonable thing to do, the only reasonable way to behave. Scientists debate with the biggest missiles in a world of moral powerlessness, other than those possessed by the term, ‘individual human rights’. That is the right to be happy and to bear arms and to speak freely, but not the right to have collective rights as a tribe, or as hunter-gatherers who have a collective life-style, or as individuals working collectively under divided labour, where inequality is ‘right’.

What the priest/God has over the scientist, and what the scientist has to allow within its constitution, as a private rite, is the possession of death itself. At the moment the scientist is offering hope of cheating death through his guile, and has even extended our lives considerably through his techniques, so it is a reasonable hope. But it contains no morality than that of individual desire. No one seems to be asking what right we have to live forever, when reflected upon through darshan. For example, how will the natural law of a commonwealth, that gave birth to ‘eternal’ property ‘rights’ that are still possessed after death, work when no-one dies, in a world becoming over-populated by immortals. No-one has asked the scientists their reasons, because their technique of scientific reason is a-moral by its nature and so the question is irrelevant.

There is no invented language in science for morality

There is only a political language that bars us from perceiving their singular nature. This is the scientific ethic, which means ‘relating to custom’. Custom comes from the word ‘suere’ meaning ‘to make one’s own, to have its own way. Ethics are up for debate, morals are not. Ethics are a part of civilization and its institutive techniques to have it one’s own way through debate. Morals are a part of a story of truth, such as a fable or moral tale, but more importantly as The Iliad or the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh. The custom of the costume (from the same root) of the priest/scientist has been separated from the State of the polis by the confusion of language in a new Babylon, the human-race of Reason. In this scientific state, death is not a state possession because death holds no power for the state, only inheritance tax, in which God still trusts, and property rights, which the dead still have a right to, if they can pay their inheritance tax without selling their property.

Death requires no Super-State morality, only Ethical conduct in corpse disposal and possession disposal. Death of the individual, as with the life of the individual is of no real consequence to the scientist, only discovering what forces of nature attract this to that, how far away they are, how much power they contain, how heavy they are, what they sense-like objectively, in order to ultimately discover that so so so important question, ‘How did we come to exist’. We already know why, it was an accident, why is irrelevant. Only how matters. Life for the scientist is a how not a why, and so the answer must be, ‘we survived by fitting in’ to a world of war and people made docile by art.

From the progress gained by the answers to this question, there are the perks of technology for the individual being-for-itself, that will entertain you through your meaningless accidental existence, in a drama of pleasure and pain, in a triangle pyramid of karmic State pleasure and pain, known as war and peace. Who benefits from these docile, amoral, happy, unhappy, prozac popping ecstasy grasping vicarious experience living entertained polis? Oh look, the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the entire world is entering a state of desertification, and the word ‘right’ is possessed by the individual human who exists right now at this moment. Those to come have no rights, the law is silent, God is apparently silent.

The future doesn’t matter because I won’t be there, I’ll be in heaven, by rights, and the priest/scientists will know what to do, and tell us how to do it. As long as my children are safe, that is all I can hope for. Remember the words of the individually named, Robert Eggington an Aborigine: “We believe that when in comes our time to pass on, we go back to the earth, and become part of that earth again, so the cycles of humanity and earth become one, and we are not separated. So if you’ve got a belief system that’s say like a western belief system, you go to be saved outside of this world in a place called heaven, well of course, you can do with this land as you like, you can plunder it, pillage it, rape it and destroy it, it is of no consequence. But in our culture and our laws, if we were to harm the land, and then to hurt that land the way that is being done today, we would be punished spiritually very severely for that. White Australia doesn’t have a sense of belonging to the land, it only has a sense of belonging to the establishment and its institutions, and its cities, that it’s built here. It doesn’t understand this country.”

To return to the God/Warrior of Alexander however- these new possessors of a subject-in-life who as an individual-in-death is now still subject to the rights authored by this God/Warrior, in order to gain a ‘ heavenly after-life for individuals’ – we must witness the power of life and death with individual meaning. How did the Drama triangle play out through this story. Did people follow a man-God who said that he was the truth? Yes they did and it made Alexander Great. But what happened when reality came back to bite them, as this man-God, semi-divine, died in his bed from too much wine and fucking at a festival of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Did they then await the next messiah or did they individually claim themselves the next messiah. An ‘individual humanist’, paraphrased as ‘i-divide-you-all, in whose-mine-is-it’, which is what the rulers of Alexanders were as Greek humanists, should tell you the answer before we look at the history:

“The dominant form of government in the Hellenistic Age throughout all the lands once conquered by Alexander, except for most of mainland Greece, was the despotism of rulers who represented themselves as at least semi-divine. Alexander’s most powerful successors, the Seleucid kings in western Asia and the Ptolemies in Egypt, made systematic attempts to deify themselves. A Seleucid monarch, Antiochus IV, adopted the title “Epiphanes” or “God Manifest”. The later members of the dynasty of the Ptolemies signed their decrees “Theos” (God) and revived the practice of sister marriage that had been followed by the pharaohs as a means of preserving the divine blood of the royal family from contamination. Needless to say, rulers such as these brooked no formal opposition, yet the inevitable consequence of untrammelled autocracy was frequent palace intrigue, leading to stabbings, poisonings, conspirings with foreign rivals, invasions, and wars.” (Lerner et al:1993:147)

Alexanders story was so successful in creating power by which to collect and cohere other pyramids that other pyramids merely began to use this same story

All rulers possessed the art of tolerance to religious belief, when subordinate to the State as God, of which they now named themselves in order to embody this experience, because it was the best game in town. But if all of them are gods, then what tolerance can one god show to another god in another pyramid, and what loyalty does one man show a god, within a pyramid when there is a chance to become a god oneself, and perfection of ones-self was the right-behaviour of the gods?

Upon the death of Alexander, the weakness of this story showed itself by this experience. Its Nemesis. When Alexander died four great generals took possession of the state and divided it amongst themselves. They then deified themselves and the weakness of the story became all too obvious. If might is right, then anyone who stabs the king to death is rightful ruler, but if that is true than they must also be the son of God… Hoorrah!. But in like manner if  they must be right to possess all that they do by such a Divine decree any opposition was a call for instant war, and of course instant heresy, which we will see necessitate orthodoxy. Imagine how your esteem is bruised when someone else says, ‘NO, I’m the son of God, not you.’ Imagine the reciprocators of a defeated God/king meeting their new victorious God/king and telling him that they don’t believe that might is right, but that blood-lines are, and so don’t care if his mighty soldiers will kill them- how long do such loyal reciprocators last- who benefits. Now imagine the reciprocators of a dead/king meeting their new God/king and telling him that they don’t believe that blood-lines are right, but that might is. Who would benefit then? I wonder if people will start to make-up blood-lines in order to fit both of these techniques of authority, as we saw sedentary hunter-gatherers in a carrot-world change their clan Name in order to represent their collective spirit? A Noble Lie.

The next couple of hundred years then after Alexander, were controlled by this story of war between States in a broken God-empire of God kings of kingdoms and blood-lines until the Romans arrive and it is to the Romans we must go to see how they evolved this story into a more efficient one still that would defeat the God-kings that surrounded them, and who, at first, they were subject to.

Surely they won’t revert back to the strategy of being-for-itself as the only strategy available to an oppressed people under a monarchy, who will emerge victorious just as the Athenians did if you remember just before they became an empire. Surely the founding Americans won’t deny the authority of a monarchy in England in order to overthrow it by appealing to the being-for-itself as the sacred individual by which to emerge victorious as a democracy. Surely the French at the French revolution won’t deny the same thing and instead appeal to the masses and revert back to democracy in order to emerge victorious, in emulation of these Americans, who emulated the British commonwealth, who emulated the Athenians. No nothing so predictable could ever happen as that. That would be extremely tedious whilst also accompanied by a lot of war and death, surely civilization isn’t so damned transparent as that is it? Surely Progress means- change, not 3,000 years of the same ‘bloody’ thing- War- the father of every bloody thing. Buckle up, tedium awaits. The future awaits us.

11: The Great Inequality of Abundance

Before we move on to look at the Roman world we need to also look not only at the inner world changes that we have discussed above but also at the outer world changes. What happens to finite goods in the outer world from the repercussions of Greece and Persia becoming one great territory under Alexander. Persia had, for thousands of years, been accumulating great wealth, much of which had been taken from Babylonia, itself now thousands of years old. So, when Alexander took Persia there was a lot of gold and money, jewels and art, to be possessed. But, of course, Alexander had a lot of reciprocating to do to his fellow takers in order to keep their loyalty, and so the wealth had to leave the court of Persia and become reabsorbed into the institutions of the world through the two mediums by which they could travel up unto then- war and trade in a drama triangle of survival of the fittest at being-for-itself.

However there was such a lot of wealth that there was not enough stuff to trade for it. There was an abundance of the power to demand but no abundance of supply, and so people consequently began to produce a surplus of goods to trade for this new wealth, and charge a higher price for doing so. But in order to create a surplus of supplies one must have more materials to make them, and in order to gain more materials one must have the money to buy them. Wouldn’t it be handy if one could borrow the money from someone who had it, and then make the supplies, sell them, and use the money gained to pay back the lender. Why would the lender risk his money? Who benefits?

Rulers now created the worlds first banks. By lending money at interest to the poor artisan they created a feed-back loop of increase and indebtedness. Now the artisan was working to pay back the money that kept increasing in order to pay for a living as subject where the money made from the loan was paid to the Ruler as tax not only for the army that protected him, but also to the Ruler who would use it to buy the artisans wares. The money possessed by killing, by taking another life, could now be used to take anothers life by indebting him, and by indebting this other one could make him make something for you that made something for you are he made it for you, whilst any profit he made was also for you, by raising the taxes or the interest rate on the loan, it is up to the ruler in a State of paranoia. By doing nothing  but taking a risk of their blood money and placing it on someone else’s back, they made not only more money but they made others make things for them to buy with the money they made by making other make things for them to buy.

So they gained from the abject that they first created in war, and then from the poor by indebtedness in a world of abundant demand but not enough supply- banking, and then gained againin taxing these poor, and then gained again by the possession of capital goods they desired and that had been created by the poor to pay for their debt, in the hope of greater wealth themselves, otherwise known as surviving in a world of necessary abject people, in a world of supply and demand- desertification. Trade therefore flourished, aided by banks, aided by the rulers who instituted them, as a regulative dance by which to constitute their power and its increase in the form of capital goods and wealth through the work of others. It is only upon the industrial revolution and modern computers and transport systems that this banking system has created more supply than demand to those with money that one needs to tell the story to the polis, that to save the world from tyranny they must be consumers. Consume meaning, to take wholly from the root word exempt, meaning freed, from the Latin root ‘emere’, meaning, ‘to take’.

Of course, with all of these traders now travelling around with all of these possessions and all of this gold in a world of abundance, wouldn’t it seem reasonable to also take out a small insurance policy? What harm could that possibly do?

“In regard to economics, the Hellenistic world was generally prosperous, owing to the growth of long-distance trade, finance, and cities. The growth of trade may be explained by reference to several factors, first among which was the opening up of a vast trading area as the result of Alexander’s conquests. Long before the time of Alexander, Greeks had been energetic long-distance traders, but they were hampered in trading with Persian realms and with areas east of Persia because Persian emperors and satraps preferred to act in their own economic interests rather than in Greek ones. But when Greek rulers became ensconced throughout Egypt and western Asia after 323 B.C., and when Greek-speaking communities dotted the terrain from Alexandria in Egypt, to another Alexandria in northern Syria, to yet another Alexandria at the head of the Persian gulf, steady trading connections were facilitated from the eastern Mediterranean to central Asia. Moreover, with bases in Egypt, Asia Minor, Persia, and of Africa, Russia, and India.

Secondly, Alexander unwittingly stimulated a growth of intensive investment when he placed in circulation hoards of Persian gold and silver in the form of coins, jewellery and luxury utensils. And thirdly, in addition to commerce, manufacturing industries aimed at providing items for trade were now more consciously promoted by autocratic rulers as a means of increasing their revenues….

Further evidence of the significant economic development of the Hellenistic Age is to be found in the growth of finance. An international money economy, based upon gold and silver coins, now became general throughout the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. Banks, usually owned by the government, developed as the chief institutions of credit for business ventures of every description. Speculation, cornering of markets, intense competition, the growth of large business houses, and the development of insurance were other phenomena of this remarkable age.” (Lerner et al:1993:146-7)

12: Bad Faith

With so much money going around, an abundance the like of which hadn’t been seen since the Garden of Eden, it will come as no surprise to find that these God-fearing peoples, told by their priests of the necessity of poverty and helping the poor and justice, etc, etcetera turned around and copied the part of the king story that they liked and followed the opulence and esteem garment of war instead, worlding an abundance of poverty and a moral poverty of luxury.

“Despite the overall growth and prosperity of the Hellenistic economy, prosperity was by no means enjoyed by everyone. Quite to the contrary, for some people sudden wealth was followed by sudden penury, and for others poverty was a constant. Individual merchants and speculators were those most subject to drastic fluctuations in their fortunes, owing to the natural precariousness of mercantile endeavours. For example, a trader who did very well selling a luxury cloth might have decided to invest heavily in it, only to find that tastes had changed, or that a ship he had dispatched to convey his wares has sunk. Merchants were also particularly exposed to what economists now recognize as the “boom and bust” syndrome.

Among those whose poverty remained unchanged were small-scale farmers who grew crops for sale in regional markets. … Those who migrated to cities in most cases probably also did not improve their economic status, and many of them became subject to badly overcrowded living conditions. All told, therefore, it seems clear that the economic landscape of the Hellenistic world was one of contrasting extremes” (Lerner et al:1993:148)

The above quote describes the abundance of poverty, but let us look to the art of these times in order to discover the moral poverty of luxury. Are these rich semi-divine people going to produce a great work of art for humanitas for all time, is theatre going to be elevated to new heights of  tragedy, is philosophy and literature going to guide us to a realisable world better than the one that created it, is humanity going to now flourish and stamp its hall-mark into the reality of the world and so create a super-state of existence of liberty? Surely no better time exists, not whilst in constant war, but now in peace and luxury, this must be the time to achieve great things? Let us then ask the art of the post Hellenic world this question to see their reflective answer. We have already witnessed the theatre become a place of ego worship of the individual and its Kitchen Sink drama’s.  Was their art one of great philosophy and humanity or did it serve to entertain an ego full of self-esteem, awaiting their rightful place in heaven?

“The field of Hellenistic prose literature was dominated by the historians, the biographers, and the authors of utopias. By far the most profound of the writers of history was the mainland Greek, Polybius, who lived during the second century B.C. According to Polybius, historical development proceeds in cycles, nations passing so inevitably through stages of growth and decay that it is possible to predict exactly where a nation is heading if one knowst what has happened to it in the past. From the standpoint of his scientific approach, Polybius deserves to be ranked second only to Thucydides among all the historians of ancient times, and he even surpassed Thucydides in his grasp of the importance of social and economic forces.

Although most biographies of the time were of a light and gossipy character, their tremendous popularity bears eloquent testimony to the literary tastes of the Hellenistic period. Even more significant was the popularity of the utopias, descriptive accounts of ideal states. Virtually all of them depicted a life of social and economic equality, free from greed, oppression, and strife, on an imaginary island or in some distant, unfamiliar region. Generally in these paradises money was considered to be unknown, trade was prohibited, all property was held in common, and all were required to work with their hands to produce the necessities of life. We are probably justified in assuming that the profusion of this utopian literature was a response to the economic and social tensions inherent in Hellenistic society, offering either escapism, similar to that of the pastorals, or perhaps a latent consciousness of the need for reform.

The very magniloquence implicitly criticized by the utopias is best observed in the main traits of Hellenistic architecture. In the place of the balance and restraint that had distinguished Greek architecture of the fifth and early fourth centuries, B.C., a stress on grandeur and luxuriance…became dominant.” (Lerner et al:1993:153-4)

In other words, biographies were real stories about individuals in a real world of strife, greed and oppression, whilst utopias were a paradise lost by these stories, now ‘produced’ as dramas of the pure imagination, where heaven could reign on Earth if the very things that we have seen been born by the being-for-itself to create greed, oppression and strife, were abandoned- Money, trade, and property rights. Tragedy was the style of a combined people attempting to control their individual desires through democracy, but utopia and biography represent the split between the individual and the reality that they create. No longer contained within a negative cult at all, the citizen worships the esteemed life of an-other citizen by reading their biography that honours them and so honours the reader by possessing this honour through the dance of reading the words of magic, in the hope that it will pay off when danced in front of an-other citizen worshipper- darpan. The subconscious price of honouring the way of life of a citizen of the state is the relative inequality that it creates by dint of them having it and you, and many others, not having it- darshan, and so to bridge this private worship with this public reality, Utopia as its subconscious catharsis made conscious and experienced by reading the words of magic becomes a popular story, that fits in the common sense of its polis and is finessed by being nourished by this community of individual life-stories- biographies.

The ideal state of Utopia is where biographies could not be written, because there it is equal, fraternal and liberal, and any one who tried to raise themselves above, would be secretly killed in the night or laughed at. In other words the polis under a monarchy practiced esteem for the self but sought utopia in Bad Faith as conscious hope. They were aware of it, but also aware of their lack of control over it under an ontogeny of individuals in a phylogeny of individuals that possessed the key to a paradise of individuals. Tragedy became irrelevant because there was no collective power of individuals left to curb as there had been in the Hellenic state. In the Hellenistic state, only individual desires and the State exist, and so the purpose of tragedy to ask the question, what would you do, is irrelevant as a method of control. Do what you want is how to control people in a world filled with carrots that you possess when it is in your hands, in their hands or in the hands that pay the arms that are a part of your body as ruler of the leviathan. Not to mention the increase in this possessed wealth in an other world of pure imagination, where time bears money through the power of interest, that must be paid in the real-world- usury- a sin for some reason, from a certain perspective, but right for the god Daksha. The belief in the causal nexus of interest is a superstition.

Please take a moment to imagine this magical other world of infinite money that the magical word interest creates

It is a utopia, a paradise, a walled of enclosure, not dependent on reality but dependent on the reason of the individual as the place from which to reason from, to dwell in. What does this utopia look like in your minds eye- in comparison to the utopia which you would describe as heaven. Is the utopia of infinite money filled with infinite people or infinite coins? Personally I see them falling through an infinite space in an infinite time. But coins are not money are they, they are a symbol of money, which is infinite by its nature as value in exchange for that which is desired, and desires are infinite. Couldn’t we represent this money, not in coins, but as a god of wealth, Mammon, and couldn’t the interest gained be seen as nourishment to Mammon, and so Mammon increases and size and power over time as he is fed. In this utopia of pure imagination could we not also take the utopia of heaven and instead of representing it as lots of individual beings, represent it as one Being, and call that God, and leave the Earth and the Universe and all of Creation behind? But couldn’t we also take the utopia of the Universe in place of the individual in heaven, and represent that Universe as one Being called God and still be on the Earth, in the Universe and all of Creation harmoniously?

Whilst the heart called for utopia, and knew how it was to be achieved through equality and peace, just as democracy had named it in like manner, the individual pigeon polis instead danced itself a garment, a costume of custom, to the increase of possessions, of unequal luxury amongst a commonwealth of poor and enslaved scapegoats. Abundance became oppression, and they escaped its darshan shameful reflection through art in bad-faith as darpan, as a hope flung forth from Pandora’s box, as Prometheus’ liver was torn from his chained body everyday by a vulture. Maybe later his blood will be sucked by vampires instead, for the same reason.

So, just as the Athenians had taken through war and trade in their democracy until they were no longer powerful enough to do so, so they now did the same under a divine monarchy because they now were powerful enough to do so. The negative cult, like the plays of Tragedy seem powerless against those stories such as the Iliad that tell some-one to go get it for themselves no matter the price to others. Understanding that is why I was always an ‘A’ student at school and my parents were proud of me, for only then could I possess the power to increase my gain over others and decrease any chance of utopia or peace. ‘I would be alright Jack’, they used to say. Your education is an insurance policy in this competitive world, and you have to be willing to go get it, because if you don’t there sure as hell is someone else out there who will. Hope, fear and paranoia- of course there is someone else who is going to get it, when the alternative is to be rejected.

So the playwrights educated the polis in the Bad-Faith of worshipping the hypocrites in real-life biographies and worshipping morality in ideal-life utopias. The educated rich read them to glean esteem and to escape the truth, that surrounded them of their famed opulence and the Others abject, just, poverty. It was a tragedy on an individual scale, not one made by the Gods or attached to a great hero, but the reality of life itself a tragedy of suffering, a kitchen soap-drama of sex, drugs, and rock n’roll, with no great lesson or greater purpose attached. There was no glory to be won, it had already been won and abundance surrounded them. Boredom and distraction from lack of things to desire and abundance in the power to acquire them is the only real experience left, and so theatre and meaningless entertainments became the metronomic heartbeat that accompanied the rich until they were taken from this world by the mercy of death.  Oh the power of a story, if only Dickens had been there to document it. Oh no, it’s alright, he will be, it’ll just take a couple of thousand years for the cycle of Polybius to begin again somewhere else- England at the time of Empire.

The difference between the art of writing a Utopia over a tragedy is one of ideal over instruction. Utopia contains no negative cult as tragedy does. It does not acknowledge the song of the scape-goat, only the suffering of all humanity in its distance from the way of life that will facilitate the ideal. It is a description of the Garden of Eden without the price being paid of giving up the being-for-itself. In a utopia the nature of the being-for-itself is that of the being-in-Being, and the Being in which they are being is the State of Utopia- God has left the Garden but Eden is still apparently possible.

Truly the Nemesis of theatre was that it came back to turn these very people into the characters they had sat in front of a teachers of individuality as they lost their greatness. The hypocrites had at first left the stage to become the ambassadors of the kings that would replace their democracy, but they had now returned to Athens as the ‘act of worship’-itself, to be enacted by themselves, whilst in reality they had become playthings to the desires of the egoic self. 30 types of people in limited finite glorious technicolour- sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, lack (utopia) and desire (biography), etc, etcetera,  the infinite escape from a finite reality worlded by the ego for-itself and seen as right. The only question to ask such a person is this, “Did these people go to Heaven or Hell?” Only upon this answer can we judge ourselves, to then ask the question, ‘who were the winners and who, the scape-goats?’. Why is it again, that, ‘the meek shall inherit the Earth’?

13: Macedon

“When after a struggle of twenty years, Macedon succeeded in imposing its hegemony on the Greek world, with a ‘koiné eirené and a military alliance under its command, the idea of war and conquest justified by innate Greek superiority was a powerful weapon and disciplinary force. The ‘koiné eirené imposed by Macedon gave Greek policy in the fourth century BC a war-like flavour, and it was such policies which led to the Graeco-Macedonian conquest and the fall of the Persian empire. The Graeco-Macedonian war ended in a general transformation. Once the Persian monarchy had collapsed, the Greeks who had fought felt disillusioned and betrayed by the very beliefs which had lent them strength and enthusiasm for the fight, for they saw the pressure of ruling an empire forcing the Macedonians to reveal themselves more as successors to Persia than as builders of a new state.

The demobilisation of Greek troops which had been fighting Persia, the Macedonian dynastic policy in Persia, the preservation of the Persian administrative system and the fusion of Macedonian and Persian ruling groups all gave Greece the impression that the conquered were getting their own back on the conquerors.

It was true that the speed and vastness of the conquest created difficult problems for the Macedonians. Neither they nor the Greek states could provide a governing body capable of taking over the administration of the Persian territories. They were also faced with the problem of how to make the subject peoples accept the legitimacy of their claim to rule. The mere fact that the King of Persia, successor to the Kings of Assyria and Babylon and the Egyptian Pharoahs, had suffered defeat in war, could not alter thousands of years of local tradition and make the King of Macedon the legitimate ruler simply because he had won a victory over the ruler who was himself either a god or the delegate of the gods. Divine wrathe would have struck down any man who dared to lend any support to the sacrilegious man who had laid claim to a throne dedicated to gods unknown to him.

As far as organisation and administration were concerned, the only way to make the victory properly effective without reducing the country to anarchy, was to offer the defeated, dead king’s governing class the chance to keep its position at the head of the administrative structure and, most important of all, to help the conqueror to gain public recognition as the holder of divine authority.

In the attempt to win recognition the new sovereign had to preserve all the outward forms of etiquette and ancient ceremonial

The feature of Persian ritual which did most violence to Greek feeling was the ‘proskynesis’, the gesture of the slave to his tyrant, before whom the slave kneels and touches the earth with his forehead.

The conflict between the King and the Graeo-Macedonian element after the conquest showed up the fundamental difference between the Greek idea of the revolution and the oriental view of the theocratic nature of the state.” (Levi:1955:110-12)

“Macedonians and Greeks settled in various parts of the conquered lands. Persians and Medes took their places beside them in the army, the administration and the law-courts; the conqueror of Asia and Egypt governed not as a foreign overlord, but as their own sovereign, in the theocratic tradition of thousands of years. But side by side with this unchanging world were new Greek settlements of traders, speculators, soldiers and scientists, teachers and sailors, colonists and founders of cities. It was a society of revolutionaries, proudly secure in the conviction of their own superiority, convinced that their civilisation, heritage and philosophy gave an almost holy quality to their search for the nature of truth and justice, without recourse to heavenly inspiration.

This world made up of the survivors of civil wars and persecutions, of hatred and misery, splendours and ruins, could not adapt itself at all to find a common way of life with its neighbours who believed that the king was to be adored, with one’s forehead touching the earth. The Greeks were unshakably convinced of their superiority to an enemy so much more wealthy and powerful, simply because this prostration, this adoption of ceremonials of adoration, was a sign that the enemy had an inferior civilisation to their own. Victory must therefore be to them, in revenge for the long-distant invasion, and for generations of envy and fear. …

The only common feature of the two systems was that both acknowledged the divinity of their common ruler. The Greek tradition of heroes and divine intervention in human affairs made this development possible. The philosophy which had replaced the oracles as the source of authority had not denied the existence of the gods and heroes themselves. …

But then the Greeks had always been used to bestowing honours of a religious nature. All the wreaths and statues with which they rewarded the individual for his outstanding physical or intellectual gifts had always been acknowledgements of an affinity with the gods. So there was nothing to prevent them from accepting that a god could be living among them; not even the fact that he was a physical being, since Greek religion had always given the gods a human appearance.

But the real difference between the Greek and oriental view of the ruler lay not in his divinity but in his relation to the law. For the Greeks the king, even if he were a god, was fallible. They continued to maintain that the law was the product of reason, not revelation. For the oriental subjects the king, whether he were a god or a delegate, was in himself truth and therefore justice. Law was the revelation of the divine will, and human reason had no part in it.” (Levi:1955:112-15)

“The economic and social consequences of the conquest also led to considerable changes in political life. The unlimited influx of all sorts of raw materials into Greece from the East, first as booty and pillage, later through the opening of enormously profitable trade routes carrying everything from gold to manufactured goods, brought ruin to some Greek industries and the breakdown of traditional patterns of trade within the Greek sphere of influence. As a result Egypt and Asia Minor were flooded with Greeks looking for work for themselves and investments for their capital.          

While Greek cities were growing up in the Orient, Greece was in proportion being drained of her wealth, her population, and her leadership of the eastern Mediterranean. The Greek spirit of enterprise was exhausted in its native land, but the Greek ‘diaspora’ brought them into contact with the indigenous populations of the Orient. Gradually they gained control of the economic and cultural life of the whole of the Levant, and Hellenism was born. The old relationship between the individual, the Polis and the oracular state was suddenly transformed into a relationship between individual, Polis and theocratic monarchy. But whereas the god who spoke through the mouth of the Pythian oracle supported the interests of the conservative oligarchies, the deified king of the Macedonian empire was interested chiefly in the maintenance of his royal position.

The victorious, all-conquering king possessed the attributes of the ruling warrior-god: his conquests were boundless, he was unfailingly and irresistibly victorious, and this led his subjects to ascribe to him the political ambition- or, in religious terms, the inevitable prospect- of universal conquest and the establishment of a single kingdom of all mankind. This universal monarchy corresponded to the universal influence of Hellenistic culture. The separation of Greeks and Macedonians from the indigenous populations of their empire, as a result of the Greek conviction that they were both culturally superior and of divine descent, was shown by the different legal codes drawn up for the two groups. Even in legal matters there could be no suggestion that the conquered peoples were comparable with their conquerors.

The Greek conquest were felt chiefly as a cultural conquest. The Hellenic cities became cultural centres: Greek language and education were social necessities” (Levi:1955:115-16)

“In these new circumstances, Greece itself was no longer the centre of the Hellenic world, either politically or economically. Manufacturing, shipbuilding and the design of armaments had all, in this new world, become so technically complex and expensive that they were beyond the resources of the impoverished and despoiled cities of the peninsula. This general poverty led to squabbles amongst the cities to whom Macedonian supremacy left enough autonomy to enable them to fight and destroy one another, whilst the more backward areas of the peninsula united in federations, and upset the balance of power giving Aetolia Achaia greater strength than Sparta or Athens. They contributed in this way to the provincial, peripheral, insignificant position of Greece by dispersing what resources she still had in internal strife. …

The new middle class, which had its social and political origins in the democratic revolution of the fifth century BC, was everywhere concerned to preserve the institutions of the revolution

The old aristocratic families had lost their power, the magistrates could no longer exceed their authority, the popular assemblies functioned according to the rules laid down in the fifth century BC, and had the same powers. The word ‘democracy’ had acquired the significance of ‘rule of the people’, in contrast to the aristocratic or timocratic oligarchies; it meant an autonomous government without a monarch, based on citizenship and rational law, as opposed to monarchy and revealed law.

The new, Hellenistic meaning of the word ‘democracy’ was the clearest proof of the fact that in the course of the fourth century BC the revolution of a hundred years before had been accepted as an inevitable political development, in spite of the ruinous collapse of Athens, and the criticisms and polemics of the aristocracies. ‘Democracy’ had become synonymous with autonomy and liberty, words whose meaning was anything but clear when the aristocracies too declared themselves the representatives and preservers of political liberty- liberty for themselves and their privileged sect.

But payments were no longer made to the poor to enable them to attend the assemblies and hold public office. The emerging middle and upper classes controlled the new situation, for the decline in shipping and industry had once again reduced the political importance of the lower classes which had been the moving spirit of the fifth-century revolution.

As the importance of mainland Greece declined, and new Hellenistic cities and kingdoms grew up, with different social structures, a new dominant class was formed. Its members were the capitalists, speculators, and employers of labour, a restricted, privileged class which gained prestige and authority from the political concepts of the revolution, now emptied of their original meaning.

The Hellenistic cities and the autonomous states of Greece were very important as centres of inspiration for the development of art, philosophy, science and technology; indeed for all the distinctive marks of Hellenistic supremacy in the Mediterranean. The cities and states were gradually transformed into autonomous organisations grouped together under monarchs who were the supreme arbiters of policy. The cities were ruled by the powerful, privileged sects which had grown up as a result of the political and social changes which followed the conquest; but these sects were in turn the product of the revolution, which had given a new section of the population the chance to climb to power and then to secure to itself alone the privileges of its new position.” (Levi:1955:116-18)

“To the Egyptians the Hellenistic king was, as the Persian king had been, a new Pharaoh, the successor to an eternal throne. To the Syrians the new king had all the attributes of the ancient rulers of Babylon. But to the Greeks, wherever they lived, the new king’s divine character was a substitute for the law-making function yielded by the aristocracies to the oracles, with the purpose of integrating the autonomous cities in a legal and political unity. The word of the oracle expressed the will of the gods, and the King-god, or King-hero, based his authority on victory in battle, which was a clear sign of his personal or delegated divinity.

In the eyes of the Hellenistic world, above all in Syria, military success was the decisive feature of legitimacy. The Egyptian king-god was incapable of error or injustice, and only if he were guilty of either would he arouse doubts of his legitimacy. The Greek king was a king because he was victorious, and if he lost a battle he was no longer a god, or protected by the gods. Birth and lineage only gave a valid claim to power when backed up by victory. …And the Macedonian king, although the leader of a military caste, like the Homeric-Mycenaean king held his position as a result of god-given victories, and so almost inevitably tended to look for a universal empire.

In this way the king followed Greek tradition: Homeric monarch, guiding oracle, commander of the troops: but oriental influence and the demand of his new kingdoms led him to lay emphasis on other divine aspects of his position, as ‘saviour’, ‘benefactor’, and so on.  These attributes were far from having only a religious or ceremonial value; like the Pharaoh and the Persian king, the Hellenistic king was the recipient of huge quantities of treasure. Money was one of the elements of his power. It was his means of increasing justice and prosperity in his realms, of redressing wrongs, alleviating sufferings, and mitigating disasters. …

            [A]s supreme commander, he appeared always on ceremonial occasions in Macedonian military uniform; as God present amongst men he wore no other mark of his divinity than a white (or red and white) ribbon around his head, the Persian ‘diadem’, a sacred symbol which was equally acceptable to the Greeks.” (Levi:1955:118-19)

A_Emperor’s New clothes for culling as legitimacy before God as legitimacy, which leads to empire as the only acceptable type of legitimacy. This is the legacy of the thrownness of the hero that we live in today with American hegemony being denied whilst enacted, unable to handle the hypocritical position of victory for legitimacy to power by which to preach peace and human rights from as the law of its empire.

“Clearly, then, the situation of the king is the key to understanding the nature of the state at this period of history. He was the law, living and breathing source of right and justice, the leader of the armed forces for reasons doubly inherent in his position as king, and the lord of many nations in many different forms of subjection to him.

Even more important than his position as representative of every aspect of the state was his place at the centre of the governmental system. The link between the king’s divinity and both these aspects of his position is clear, whether one is thinking of the veneration of the dead king, or of the living king and sometimes of members of his family as well. The cult could be that of the King-god, as king (or that of a queen or another member of the royal family), associated on equal terms with a god who was considered to take a particular interest in the sovereign.” (Levi:1955:121)

“The king’s divinity, and his relationship to the other gods, reflected the religious attitudes of the Hellenistic states. Like the Persian empire, Macedon had a reputation for religious toleration which was, in fact, the result of excluding the subject peoples from participation in the rights and duties, and therefore the religious obligations, of the conquering races.” (Levi:1955:122)

“The character of the new empire, however, altered the nature of the old state religion. The existence of rulers, whose religious functions varied from place to place in the empire, made it more difficult for an oracle or a ceremonial to retain the unifying power which Olympia and Delphi had exerted.

The political and judicial functions of the oracles were taken over by the king. The religious festivals lost their former character to become popular feast-days, and their only significance to the Greeks was as occasions for amusement and for a sentimental reaffirmation of their ethnic unity.” (Levi:1955:123)

“The most important and significant effect of the Athenian revolution of the fifth century BC was the new concept of man which spread throughout Greece. The first sign of the importance of this development was the importance given in the figurative arts to man as an individual, with his emotions and his sufferings.

The new governing class was the group from which the artists emerged, and also the patron of these artists. Its interest in the world of art and learning was encouraged by the value placed on man and the new ideas on philosophy and morals put forward by the creators and interpreters of its culture.

            In architecture more than in any other art oriental influences made themselves felt, but the value placed on the individual is also perceptible in the design of private houses. The development of the private house, and consequently of the town as an architectural unit, led to greater interest in comfort, privacy and proportion. It was a reflection of a predominantly middle-class society, which could not afford to live in palaces, but wanted houses designed to suit its standard of living. …

            It is the art of a mature, secure society, sufficiently pleased with itself not to want to emulate gods and heroes. The distant descendants of the fifth-century revolutionaries had become the preservers of their ancestors’ faith in the value of the individual, and the whole world of the time was the expression of a dominant middle-class.

The fundamental interests of this middle class were intellectual rather than military, like those of the aristocracy which it replaced

Of course, the Hellenistic monarchies clung to their Macedonian military nucleus, but the larger states which made up the empire depended on vast hordes of untrained and ill-disciplined mercenary troops. So even the army was in need of education and technical training, while in other fields the state needed diplomats, administrators and officials, capable of organising the complex working of a highly civilised and technically advanced empire

All this demanded abilities which the middle class was both able and willing to supply.” (Levi:1955:124-5)

“As with its architecture, painting, drama, and system of education, the Hellenistic world was reflected in a literature which represented it to perfection. The lofty Athenian eloquence, which had proved its value as a tool for creative thought, had served its purpose, and was replaced by rhetoric; pompous and insincere, over-emphatic and over-ornamented it was a system of rules designed to please the listener’s ear rather than to convince his reason. It was oratory adapted for the use of government officials and compilers of documents, and dressed up in the ready-made phrases of administrative jargon. The public had lost its taste for literature dealing with the nature of the world and of man, or of debating, with an audacity unique in history, problems which for thousands of years men thought they had solved, and which for the next two thousand years remained at the point where the Greeks of the fifth century BC left them. Literature consisted of romances full of bizarre, erotic, or sentimental adventures; flights from the tedium and corruption of a prosperous and secure daily life.

The classical style of poetry was now the repository of stale mythological learning. The Hellenistic civilisation found for itself a new means of expression: in refined, elaborate, circumlocutory verse. It expressed the longings of people bound up in the daily monotony of an office or a shop, in a city too clean and decent to have anything unexpected and exciting left in it. It painted fantastic pictures of rural life, unknown to most of the audience, and indulged in a tasteful impressionism, drawing caricatures and sketches of a world without problems and without urgency….

The nature of the Hellenistic civilisation was clearly revealed in its arts, but was fundamentally an economic matter. The Greek peninsula had produced this world, but in the process destroyed itself. War, competition from oriental raw materials and manufactures, the emigration of labour and capital to the East, changing sea trade routes and the opening up of new supply depots and anchorages, all led to the decline of Greece. She was reduced to relying on her mercenary troops and her schools and universities as her chief means of support.

The wealth of the great cities was dispersed, and with it most of the families who made up the landowning, city-dwelling middle class typical of the previous century. As well as these, there was a lower class of labourers who owned no land, who in the new circumstances lost any social importance they had ever had, since there were more manual labourers than there were jobs for them. Their value was debased by the ready supply of slaves, whose condition in the end was often materially better than that of the free workmen. A few local revolts occurred, but they had little political significance and no chance of success. The power of the middle class was impregnable. For generations it had built up and preserved its position as the greatest power in an unchanging society created by its efforts and abilities….

It was in its spiritual life that Hellenistic society felt the consequences of this immobility. Fantasy went out of life, and with it energy and imagination.” (Levi:1955:125-7)