Metaprometheanism

Posted: March 4th, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Guest Essays | Tags: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Metaprometheanism

Plato wrote that all human events exist on a curve, and that curve cycles between a life-arc and death-arc, with the life-arc starting at the moment of clarity and the death-arc representing the degradation of that, starting with the death of understanding of the inner goal for individuals and civilization.

All of us have grown up in a part of the death-arc that was simultaneously existentially lost and smugly resistant to ever admitting that, inventing instead layers of rationalizations, dissimulation, obfuscation, and the one-dimensional binary symbolism for which we know the Abrahamic religions.

As I wrote recently in an analysis of next era spirituality, we who look toward the future do so in part by escaping the binary of “good” and “evil.”

This cannot mean merely the Nietzschean context of revealing how these moral binaries project control into our worlds, but looking more broadly at a relative universe and seeing that understanding and perhaps even events vary for the individuals and moments in which they are experienced.

We who take this path are metaprometheans, both those who steal fire from the gods and bring it to man, and also those who steal from man his presumption of being godlike and return that to its rightful home within the gods. We are pious and irreverent.

The original Promethean myth, echoed in both Judeo-Christian scripture and the French Revolution narrative, tells us of a fundamental ironism and rationalization by which we declare that reality is not as by every sane measure it appears to be, but merely a distraction from another purer world.

This fundamental rationalism consists of the idea that we, as humans, can invert causality by finding what we wish to believe is true and then selectively choosing aspects of reality to “prove” it, instead of looking at the whole of the facts.

This inversion — means-over-ends, B->A fallacies, choosing data to fit a thesis instead of a thesis to fit the data — places the human being in the position of not just a god, but universalism itself, saying that what we feel is true everywhere to everyone and must be used to control them because it is what we need in order to feel safe, secure, and comfortable.

Individualism of this nature undoes societies. A healthy society, per Plato, has people of gold and silver temperament, meaning that they aspire to do not only what is functional, but what is good, and not only what is good, but what is excellent (arete) and noble, or generous to the process of life itself.

Christianity tells us to choose one path, the right hand path, and to use this to eliminate all evil by forcing everyone to conform to individual good. As Plato notes, however, this goes against character; those who are not good can be forced to do good, but they will simply subvert it, following their nature of “evil.”

The Abrahamic approach attempts to directly regulate good and evil by making them into control mechanisms. This in turn requires the creation of a false absolute and universal world to control this one where such concepts appear true because of the oversimplification of all parts of that world.

Eastern religions on the other hand tell us that the right hand path and left hand path must be in balance. While this is more accurate, it might also leave us wanting, since again we are trying to control the nature and destiny of different individuals, events, and processes.

Metaprometheanism takes another path, a third way between good and evil, which says simply that that the two do not exist. There is reality, and understanding it, and within that qualitative excellence; everything else is not evil, merely confused, but that leads to what we think of as evil, a stupid and neurotic focus on the self like individualism.

We bring light and fire to the human species but in doing so, also acknowledge that we are in a relative universe, and therefore the light and fire measure us much as we use them to measure our world. Not everyone can handle power; most can handle only a little.

By the same token, “poor people have poor ways” and wealth reveals us. Some are meant to carry the dual power and burden of wisdom and ability, and this reduces their world from a question of personal preference to paired privileges and duties.

One of these, arguably, is culling, or the sacrificial removal of those who are not a benefit to the tribe. This must be done only by those who understand it; all knowledge in the metapromethean world is esoteric, meaning that it occurs in cumulative plateaus, with the next stage only visible when the previous is mastered.

This even applies to seemingly “objective” knowledge like fact, scientific experiment, mathematics, and computer models. As a wise man once said: “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Without the spiritual ability to use knowledge and the inner direction toward using it in noble ways, it merely becomes another way to dissimulate and bury ourselves in the unreality, inaccuracy, and insanity that is the only meaningful candidate for the cause of “evil.”

Plato suggested a pagan morality — “good to the good, and bad to the bad” — which replaced the Christian notion of treating everyone equally well so that they could be manipulated, guilted, and controlled into acting as if they were good.

Rewarding the good with nurturing and the bad with removal is not merely sensible spiritual practice, but also the law of nature. That which understands reality and adds to it in constructive ways is always needed in higher concentrations; that which impedes this serves us with its removal.

Metaprometheans no longer see a contradiction in this. We realize that, as Plato said, our world is the product of a more complex and expansive reality, with what we know as fact here being the end results of the calculations of that existence. Our goal is to join in unitive belief with this process.

When a sea turtle lays eggs on a distant beach, she buries them so that they are safe, and those that produce hatchlings send small creatures to the sea. Most are doomed to fail and die because they do not swim strongly enough against the current or hide themselves well enough from predators.

In the same way, most of humanity is doomed by its own self-destructive instinct to look away from reality toward illusion. It craves this, and must be destructive in this way so that the excellent rises; if we tended toward life by nature, few if any would reach the level of understanding why the pursuit of excellence is both necessary in the world and in our souls.

You may hear a great deal about the O9A from those who dislike it. None of it however understands it in context: we embrace the disturbing to reflect the world, and to break free of not only binary morality but the reaction to it that embraces evil and becomes as slavishly Abrahamic as those who pretend to care about being good.

We are here to break free from the philosophy of the death-arc, which is that there is a fundamental rationalization by which we can justify further rationalization, a philosophy which requires both individualism and dualism, complete with the implicit moral binary of a perfect future world versus an imperfect present.

To do that, we must go where no one else is willing to consider going, since in a death-arc whatever is popular consists of lies, and only the overlooked expands into future spaces where we can create infinite dimensions of understanding. Hail the strong, kill the weak, and ignore the mediocre.

Comments are closed.