Mastodawn

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

There's an idea that's been on my mind, a train of thought to which several recent experiences have been contributing: finding myself more reminiscent than usual about Madeleine l'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door (which I used to like a lot less than I do now), and Arthur Machen and "the worm which never dies" that terrified him so much, and the unnatural feedback loop which fosters prion diseases, and so forth.

This is dangerous territory. I am not in the business of pronouncing judgments on any manifestations of Nature and biology, and therefore I wish to avoid the sins committed by #CSLewis and "Redwall" and #Tolkien and George Orwell and a lot of other human writers and moralists who suggest, for the sake of analogy or literary device, that certain animals or creatures are intrinsically evil, symbols of evil.

Viruses especially have that stigma attached to them because they straddle the line between life and non-life, and we're conditioned to thinking of viruses solely as pathogens, which is not entirely true. Viruses have also been the means for "horizontal gene transfer", moving genes from one creature to another through means outside of normal replication, and thus viruses have shaped biological evolution.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 1d ago

Viruses seem to express some sort of fundamental drive to self-replicate which has not been fully nailed down or codified by human #science, as is evident in the loosey-goosey and deliberately obfuscated and mystified jargon of #memetics at least among the right-wing "dark intellectual" crowd. Richard Dawkins, who so far as I know is devoid of significant scientific accomplishment but for this, claims credit for coining the term meme and defining it as units or nuggets of thought which seem to have some self-replicative power analogous to that of viruses.

It's highly suspicious to me that neither Dawkins nor any of his "dark intellectual" fellows seem the slightest bit interested in the empirical question: can one actually prove by experiment that memes exist at all? It's possible that somewhere, in the murky recesses of corporate research perhaps or military contract work, there exists a solid physical rationalization of the meme—a scientific model for what a meme is and how it gets around.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 1d ago

The whole "intellectual dark web" and their #technology sector admirers seem content to embrace the meme and the putative discipline of "memetics" solely on the authority of Richard Dawkins and his big Anglo-Saxon brain of his. Racısm is their standard for authority in this and all matters so they don't need proof and probably don't want it, because then it would spoil the game of pretending as if they are mages and technowizards of memes—regarding themselves as fully fortified and inoculated against "mind viruses" while everyone else's brain is zombie-like soup of diseases.

"Mind virus zombie" is a favorite of the Elon Musk crowd, who also chuckle about "Elon Musk Derangement Syndrome" (an old trick; Bari Weiss had one of these, Jesse Singal does, Donald Trump does, etc.) It suits their purposes to regard all their enemies as diseased, and because they also think (subject to certain conditions) that sick people are marked to die by their "genes" or the Will of God or both, the fact that their enemies are purportedly sick inspires them to no feelings of mercy or urgency to help. They have no compassion, because they've decided that such emotions as compassion and empathy are weak and effeminate and therefore "suicidal".

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 1d ago

But let me reel this back in a little. They speak of "Elon Musk Derangement Syndrome" because otherwise they don't really have a good answer to the question of why Elon Musk has such determined enemies, more every day. This is NOT how things are supposed to go for them; they're conditioned into thinking that they're always winning and always wholly confident and convincing, so...why would anyone not believe them? Why would anyone doubt Elon Musk? They wish to believe that it's "logical" to be a minion of Musk's because he's so obviously a winner himself and promises fabulous riches, and thus it would be "illogical" not to join in his success.

How can they process losing? Not just losing—how can they process so many failures, so many broken friendships and exploded relationships and the sheer concentrated rage of so many wounded and betrayed people who don't CARE that they're powerless, who have no status or great wealth to be lost if they're defeated, and so who don't see any good reason why they should stop trying to hurt Elon Musk as badly as possible, all the time.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 23h ago

Elon Musk and his fanboys and everyone else in #business and #technology who strive for the eternally winning, eternally successful mindset don't have good explanations for these things. They refuse to credit their enemies with any intelligence, so they refuse to believe they've got reasons for their anger. Surely, they tell themselves, it's some mere illness or defect, like getting rabies. It's like they think "rabid", the adjective applied to people whose anger is just a bit too extreme and "foaming at the mouth", is literally true.

It seems to be the only way their minds can process the idea that their enemies will never stop coming for them and can't be beaten down by ordinary means. Their strongest rhetorical warriors have all been forced into hiding decades ago, chewing on their mediocrity in some think-tank post or a sinecure corporate job. The ultra-right-wing podcast and YouTube circuit exists mostly so that various right-wing experts can appear in a completely sheltered and ideologically controlled context and yet give the vague impression that they're speaking to "the people" (e.g. Joe Rogan.)

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 23h ago

They profess themselves weary paladins of Western Civilization, like Roman soldiers or British colonial officers scattered round their lonely garrisons...and that's not just a squalid and sordid sort of aspiration to have—to feel oneself stranded by one's grand empire and surrounded by "barbarians"—but it's also not exactly very intellectual.

They SHOULD be regarding themselves more like monks and nuns, if they want to think of themselves as lonely refugees of barbarism safeguarding precious knowledge. And that IS a vein they attempt to work but the plain fact of the matter is: U.S. conservatives are not cut out for monasticism and asceticism and the simple life. They drivel on sentimentally about that stuff but for them, "Western Civilization" is sedentary life behind a computer and plentiful chain restaurants.

So it's like they know instinctively that if they compared themselves to chaste and humble and cloistered servants of the Almighty they'd look even more ridiculous than they do now. They don't like silences and fastings anyway, they want to show that they're enjoying their lives and they that have #FreeSpeech in the form of fusillades of slurs.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 23h ago

Basically, U.S. conservatism as it's evolved over the last century or so has become extremely, loudly, extravagantly devoted to the passions and appetites of The World, the thing which #Christians have been warned against from the earliest centuries of the religion—when The World meant material success in the bloodsoaked Roman imperium.

Oh you'll still find Christian extremists and Christian-flavored right-wing pundits burbling about "The World" and equating it with the Democratic Party or Pride parades or whatever other modern things they despise. But to be seduced by The World is to be seduced by money and success, the two things that the hep, successful, virile Christian male have adopted as their sole "metrics" for gauging the favour of the Christian God.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 22h ago

Do you know what the chief draw of The World is, as a pursuit? Inevitability.

The World, meaning #business and #money and popularity and success and all the temporal and secular pursuits of those who think there's nothing much of importance beyond one's animal needs, is supposed to be always there. Fighting "The World" is painful and doomed, and indeed the #tech sector people and many others have persuaded themselves that it's fundamentally irrational and sick in the head to struggle against "The World", because "The World" is always supposed to win.

"The World" is Agent Smith pushing Neo's face into some train tracks, secure in the belief that the train will always be there...even though the thing is virtual, a thing projected by immensely complex machinery.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 22h ago

It's that same "immensely complex machinery" which Agent Smith invites Morpheus to marvel at, but as later developments make clear, Smith is really lying to Morpheus. He himself doesn't think The Matrix virtual city is marvelous; he's not proud of its 'genius'. He feels he's a prisoner too in this human "zoo" and because he's programmatic, Agent Smith can hate with a certain intensity difficult (but I daresay, not impossible) for human beings to match.

The Matrix is inevitable, and yet Smith wants it to end. And yet he CAN'T want it to end, because...what existence does Agent Smith have without The Matrix? If he gets what he wants the motivating purpose of the Agents will be completely gone; there'll be no humans left to fight.

I suggest that this paradox is at the heart of the whole business of "the worm which never dies" or the madly dancing sporoi of L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, who never want to stop dancing even though their refusal to stop will eventually put an end to their existence. They will die with Charles Wallace.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 22h ago

Why would the sporoi do that? It's irrational, but they are persuaded or seduced by the Echthroi, the vaguely defined and yet profoundly menacing enemies of A Wind in the Door, who can only take the form of someone else. The Echthroi convince some of the sporoi that they need never mature and grow into tree-like and sessile senes (plural of senex, "old being" in Latin).

When I first read A Wind in the Door I simply could not swallow what L'Engle was writing, because she was putting this spiritual battle inside the mitochondria of Charles Foster Wallace, who is suffering from some rare mitochondrial disease which L'Engle chooses to depict in this fashion, as if Charles Wallace's body were at war with itself. These days my sense of poetry isn't so stifled, so I accept the symbolic treatment as just barely valid enough to support the narrative.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 22h ago

It's not wholly outlandish. There's myriads of "auto-immune" disorders in which the human body rouses up an inflammatory reaction to its own tissues, sometimes when provoked by an external allergen. There are diseases of development in which tissues which in usual human growth are directed along predictable lines of development and differentiated into human tissues instead go haywire and grow abnormally.

Cancers result from a strange process of de-differentiation in which somatic cells depart from their normal lifecycles, developing a peculiar genetic and morphological lability or instability, and multiply without stopping and without organization. Cells of healthy tissues are supposed to die when they're chemically triggered into apoptosis, biologically determined cell death. Cancer cells just multiply and multiply, as with the famous "immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks" (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks).

Lacks was a Black tobacco farmer who sadly perished under treatment for cervical cancer in 1951, during the course of which Johns Hopkins took custody of one of Lacks's biopsies (without her knowledge or consent of course) and developed a commercially successful line of "immortalized" cells for biological research, the HeLa line (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa)

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Henrietta Lacks - Wikipedia

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 22h ago

I would like to point out something very important about these HeLa cells: they are "immortalized". That "-ize" suffix (a Greek word root) is vital to remember: the HeLa cells, if they had been permitted to live out their expected existence, would have died with their host, Ms. Henrietta Lacks. But they have been "immortalized", made immortal, by specifically "Western" human agency, for reasons of commerce.

What "immortalized" the HeLa cells? "The World" did. The high-pressure secular world of "Western civilization" is why we have "immortal" HeLa cells: it's in the interest of Western science and #capitalism that the cell line is perpetuated, kept eternally fed as it were. The HeLa cells are "immortal" because a vast assemblage of corporate machinery is now dependent upon sales of the HeLa cells.

Now consider...the same thing is true of Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand and Robert E. Lee and a huge pile of other reactionary U.S. heroes.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 21h ago

We know what a real hero is like because they're never forgotten by the people, and no money or industry needs to be expended on preserving their memory. People remember Herakles and Gilgamesh and Arjuna and all such persons because they want to remember these persons; they might get movies made about them or books written or songs composed, but these things do not need massive networks of many thousands of corporations dedicated to make sure they're never forgotten.

But such is true of the legacies of Reagan and Maggie Thatcher and Stonewall Jackson and every other ghastly false hero worshipped by U.S. conservatives. There a "Reagan Legacy" project that's still working on trying to get Ronald Reagan's name pasted to as many civic monuments as possible:

The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is an organization founded by Americans for Tax Reform, president Grover Norquist seeks to name at least one notable public landmark in each U.S. state and all 3067 counties after Reagan.[1][2][3]

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 21h ago

I hope I'm beginning to convey something of the unnatural, unseemly nature of this phenomenon I'm struggling to describe. There have been many specious attempts in the past to play up the grotesque, ostensibly devilish qualities of certain manifestations of #biology and organic life which human beings tend to regard as disgusting or sick—parasitism, infection by pathogens, the nauseating processes of decay.

But the true horror comes from artificial interruption and tampering with the cycles of biological life and development and evolution. A deadly disease, left totally on its own, become self-limiting: either it's too good at killing its hosts and thus dooms itself also to extinction, or it the disease evolves in such a way as to preserve the existence of a population of hosts. It's only human beings (to our knowledge) who meddle with pathogens and stockpile them and so forth, and thus deliberately create monstrous things.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 21h ago

I am NOT saying that it's evil to culture bacteria or cancer cells or anything else. But in doing so, humanity is deliberately playing with a Promethean fire. Human beings are tampering with mortality and the cycles of life; they have the power to do so, and yet the prevailing "Western" culture's understanding of such things as Death and the cyclical nature of Time and existence has been kept as rudimentary as possible. Thus an untenable situation has been brought about.

"Western Civilization" still wants most of its people terrified of Death and an unnatural end to their lives, in order to "deal out Death in punishment" as Gandalf puts it. The ruling class wishes to exempt itself from these fears but it's not really possible to keep 99% of the population scared of dying in the gutter and preserve faith in immortality in the remaining 1%. This problem only grows worse the more brutal and oppressive the ruling regime grows.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 21h ago

"But they're #Christians," you may say, dear reader. Non-believers (largely because they adopt a sensible default process of knowing as little about a profoundly unpleasant and weird thing like Christianity) may think that Christians generally believe they're destined for Heaven and a happy afterlife, perhaps calling to mind popular images of martyrs gazing serenely towards the heavens as they're burned or spitted or otherwise butchered. (I have a friend, Jeanne by name, who can tell you that getting burned at the stake is not actually a serene thing.)

I have only seen my own peculiar little corner of Christendom but I feel safe in telling readers that while there might be Christians out there who would go peacefully to their violent deaths. There's definitely loads of Christians who would tell you that's how they plan to go out, because it's a popular pastime among evangelical-type Christians to brag about how their faith is so strong, they'll feel fulfilled when they're cut down by terrorists or UN troops or whoever.

How many of these Christians actually mean it?

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 21h ago

I point out that the zealots who are most likely to tell you that they plan on smiling at their woke executioners will ALSO tell you that Muslims are insane, possessed by devils maybe, because of the existence of Muslim suicide bombers.

Oh. Is that so? Why would that terrify them so much?

They might scream that suicide is a sin but that shouldn't bother them when it's someone else's suicide. Hardline #Christians are perfectly capable of laughing and taking comfort from suicides, like if one of their own children takes their own life rather than endure nonstop abuse and trauma from their parents. But the glee feels like a flimsy cover for something else: these Christian fanatics are profoundly angry when someone takes their own life. "That's so SELFISH!" they'll scream. Their anger is orders of magnitude more intense when a suicide goes out willingly, and with a sense of peace and deliberation.

In their mindset...it's just not EVER supposed to happen.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 21h ago

There's also an awkward conflict with the right-wing Christian habit of accusing their worst enemies, e.g. Muslims, of merely being possessed by devils (cf. #CSLewis, who attributes Islam to devil-worship in "The Chronicles of #Narnia").

Demonic possession gives Christians a way of explaining why non-Christians can be so relentless and determined, even though it's an article of faith with them that non-Christians are all broken and miserable persons who've crippled themselves by their purported hatred of God. Demons are spiritual beings, created by the Christian God just like the angels in the Christian cosmogony, so demons just keep going and going. Demons are horrible, in fiction, because they're symbols of the unstoppable and the unrestrained—always hungry, never satiated.

So why would someone demonically possessed take their own life calmly and deliberately?

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 20h ago

"Oh that just goes to show the intensity of their hatred," they can say. Right-wing Christians do have explanations for everything; they might be absurd explanations but the point is, logical contradictions give them trouble but they're not an obstacle to such persons. Their doublethink and their constant self-justifying blather cushion them from difficulties with mere logic and fact.

All the same, this doesn't really solve the overhanging problem. The Christians are supposed to have WON by now. The world around them has corroded and collapsed, and they affect to have predicted just such a thing; they seem to take a certain grim relish in war and pestilence and other catastrophes as indirect evidence of the Lord's safe guiding hand.

But it's very difficult to keep up the pretense that you're destined to win, when more and more people jeer and say rude things, when more and more people just aren't afraid of Christian threats or worried about Christian fears.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 20h ago

I have talked extensively about how worldly and secular the contemporary hardline Christians have become, to the point that they're even pretending to be the true guardians of secular scientific knowledge and intellectual traditions. One could say merely that they were "corrupted by The World" (I've said it myself, many times) but...their backs are to the wall, for the simple reason that the Christians are still waiting. The Second Coming has been just round the corner for a wretchedly long time, and the impatience has been worsened by the popularization of apocalyptic narratives (e.g. "The Last Battle" of #CSLewis.)

What a terrible book, full of sins, but none so worse as the appalling ending. Jack Lewis wants to end on a high note even though he's just detonated #Narnia, deliberately blew his meager subcreation to smithereens to give his evangelical American Christian readership a taste of what they wanted: the certainty of Heaven.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 20h ago

The FOOL! But I must temper my anger, for I think I can be accused myself of wanting the impossible, and feeling tempted in that direction partly by Clive Staples Lewis. For Jack Lewis likes teasing his readers with the certainty of Heaven, he does it multiple times, and I was myself fooled for a time.

And Lewis has now been imitated how many times? There's an enormous body of slush-pile Christian fantasy and speculative fiction that exists only because of The Chronicles of Narnia, and existing for the same reason: to tease readers with Heaven.

But Jack Lewis, silly Jack Lewis, hormonal Jack Lewis I suspect...he did something even more outrageous than the execrable Last Battle: he affected to have reversed The Fall.

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