by FourthBase » Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:05 am
But what do the Freemasons today actually know, Kultie?
They know how to keep shit secret. What else?
What else do they know that we don't know?
Also, funny you mention no automatic kindness for those cults.
I have an automatic antipathy (a learned, justified antipathy IMNSHO).
I'm not so sure about the demise of secret societies. I'd like to think you're right, that the future of secrecy is bearish. Secrets are generally not a good thing, and I think life tends toward abolishing secrecy. I'm hoping the same will apply to rituals. Not that I would like to see a world without rituals. But at least let's have group rituals that don't take themselves seriously as ritual, that don't take ritual seriously, period. Religions that don't take their precepts to be gospel, their notepads to be scripture. And if there really is a deep human need for ritual, a deep need for religion, then it will manifest itself individually, in private, and it should be mostly kept to oneself to protect it from being misapplied, misappropriated, overstated, exploited. I respect humble religion, personal religion, personal rituals. Religions should treat as a cardinal sin the ambition to spread religion and persuade vast quantities of people conform to one way. That would be the sign of a special religion, one that nearly prohibited its own memetic/tenetic transmission. But instead, what is the case? The opposite: Most religions cast meme-transmission conquests as a fucking holy virtue, even as the most noble and sacred virtue! LOL! Evangelists become fucking saints! When they're usually metaphysical parasites, mental bacteria multiplying, yearning to devour all other frames of mind, being exterminators themselves of competing ways of thinking. And what has made such a fucking terrific vehicle of that holy meme war? Rituals. Getting the body to literally cave, fold into the mind through habits. Ritual is a resistance depressant. That can be a good thing, especially in private, because existing as a super-sentient primate can be exhausting. Take bathing for instance. One could wash oneself in a significantly different sequence every day, it's possible, trust me. But people develop individual rituals of bathing, some of it passed on as good advice (a lot of it having to do with not contaminating the body with shit), some of it improvised along the way, and those rituals make the task of washing oneself mentally easier, more efficient. Perhaps there are people who take constitutional baths, to be more in touch with how wonderful it is to be a human, to be alive. Now, that's a form of ritual, bathing, which is good and natural and honest. If you don't have a ritual when bathing, then you wind up thinking a little bit more about what you're doing, but that's okay you're still bathing and still tied to a physical sense of who you are, and can appreciate all of what a ritualistic bather can appreciate. Imagine bathing as a church ritual, though. Not baptisms, but everyday bathing and showering. How degrading would that be. It's just not something that should be ritualized as a group. Why? Why should anything be ritualized as a group?
But for the most part, ritualization is just another way that the meme species has developed evolutionarily to persist in human society, to devour other memes and strut atop the dung pile. Ritual is a meme species's exoskeleton. Memes aren't all bad. I mean, they're inescapable. Any and every thing that is worth knowing and intellectually appreciating about life is experienced through the medium of memes. But bad memes are the bane of humanity. Bad memes, bad ideas. Memes enslave us. Rituals are central to the meme army's advancement. Sure, there's some casualties, and some change. But rituals, chants, symbols, codes, fantasies, myths, threats, scripture...that's the best way for a meme species to propagate successfully, smoothly, with a good signal-to-noise ratio, generation to generation. Cults. Rituals. Memes.
“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
