Freedom and Sacrifice-
I've been struggling deeply with the concept and consequences of the notion of freedom for a good year now. I've boiled it down and reduced it to the notion that 'freedom isn't free' and that phrase sounds paradoxical but it's actually orthogonal like most philosophical concepts. What's orthogonality? It's a mathematical concept, picture 2 right angles facing away from eachother to make a 180 degree plane. This is exactly what I mean when I say the rising of the mountain casts an equally dark shadow. That when greatness rises, there is always a consequence to that power fomenting. The darkness cast by the light is the paradox, and that paradox is as integral to life as white and black are integral to the yin-yang sign.
The dualism of life, and it's many encompassing paradoxes, is one of the themes we must note if we are to understand life. Now what does this have to do with freedom not being free? Well, like any power, it must be sacrificed for. One man's ultimate freedom is another man's total slavery. But you can also contain your sacrifice within an internal covenant, to only take what you need, to utilize our understanding and functionality to better sow than we reap, to sacrifice your time and effort now for a greater future. That is how freedom is won. But there's always those that think of freedom as a right. In fact, the same major media companies that would convince the youth to indulge in niggerish behavior also convinced the middle class that they didn't have to sacrifice for freedom. Or even worse, that their freedom can be utilized as a weapon to hurt people they don't like. Vietnam being a primary example of "freedom" going too far.
There's sacrifice in us all the time. We drink water, we eat food, we bathe, we sleep, and through these sacrifices we gain strength, over time. Sacrifice is quite literally in our blood. We generate blood, our blood dies, it goes into our waste, our waste nourishes nature, we bend nature to our will through sacrifice and time, farming, and then that nature gives back to us food. But the notion of blood-sacrifice is even deeper. You can't escape blood, from blood comes life. Ancient religions recognize this, even through strange ways. So they put blood into a fire to lift it up to the heavens, and what remains they eat. Or they drain a bunch of blood into a pit and sing songs over it. Either way, even the most backwater of barbarians recognize that blood is a locomotive for sacrifice. This might be integral to the concept of the noble warrior, and consistent willingness to bleed and shed blood for a just cause. Keep in mind, a baby cannot be born without a great and bloody sacrifice.
Solipsism-
Solipsism is the idea that one is alone in the universe in one's mind. It's a roman philosophical idea, and I think it's brilliant that it arises out of Rome because Rome had so many internal problems stemming from greed and paranoia and hedonism that only a place like Rome could be close enough to the spawning point of such a concept to divine it. The definition of love relies on the ancient paradigm of interconnectedness, it demands that you drop the pathology of society and view your neighbor as equal, or even above you, if you love them. That's what a best friend is, someone you're willing to consistently put above yourself, who then turns around and puts you above themselves, and that lifting eachother up is infinitely more powerful a generation mechanism than the hermetics of paranoia or whatever nonsense anarchists have concocted to excuse their behavior.
The programing we developed to survive give us memory but also needs.
Our muscles need to tear down other life forms muscle using our teeth and digest it inside of us, assimilate it to our system, pretty monstrous if you look at it plainly.
And we became as complex as we are by millions of years of this, of organisms eating other "simpler" organisms.
Sweatshops where anonymous souls waste their bodies and minds to produce stuff that is deliberately made to be obsolete quicker so it can keep being produced and generating profit.
This requires labour that is exploitative, and the owners see them as inferior life forms which value and best purpose is to spend their lives serving them.
But we could fulfill our needs and more with so much less, it's just human lives caught and being grind by the gears of companies fighting each other.
Humans may be very inconsiderate to everything else.
But there was one time we were a very vulnerable and sensitive race being brutally eaten by beasts, we had to witness the things we loved and valued as part of ourselves being destroyed and devoured without consideration by impersonal forces of nature, and that painful memory needs to be understood and come to terms with if we are to survive, just as all the resentment we have for what the fathers of our fathers did to each other in the past.
Paranoia is awareness, and in a world that is constantly trying to kill you it's a requirement.
Evolution rewarded the destruction of the different as it solidifies your position in the world
The shame of our ignorance, destroying what threatens our identity, or being destroyed by it.
Love, all love is narcissist, because you can never really understand what the "other" means, they are just caricatures, but at the same time decisions need to be made to preserve and protect your own body and life.
The same way we have to pedagogically punish infants to take them out of the illusion of godhood, the belief of instantly met needs without sacrifice, their cruelty.
In a phenomenology way, we are all the same entity because existence is existence.
How can we understand our insignificance and our divinity in a balanced way?
The appreciation of putrefaction, the release of the individual will and how it's interconnected to everything else.
Carrying a will is heavy, that's why many people find the biggest freedom in slavery, be it sexually, to a institution, or to a God, because to be "free" you need to have something to be free of in the first place.
That's why we are perpetually fighting against what gives us any sense of being "us"
You could even say freedom is choosing an enclosure of preference.
I do believe there are forces, but they don't care as much about the individual as it cares about developing better conduits for the expression of the "Self"
We are also nature, nature is "depraved", the failure to develop a relationship with that is what eventually leads to self destruction.
Is eating a big steak love?
I feel chemicals I can call love when I'm eating a nice bloody medium rare steak, so is it also love to brutally and without compassion murder animals for us to get it? I think there's the disconnection.
Is making lonely men and women feel less alone and producing happiness by giving them sex, a little relief from their grey lives?
But why do we punish that? Maybe the collective is ashamed of what it is, it's easier to think "well they are broken, a complete different breed than me" rather to knowing that in their situation you would simply be them, because we have the same primitive needs.
An object only casts a shadow when there's light, and going "down" there comes a scary point in which everything is undifferentiated from everything else.
Is brutally beating to death someone you hate love?
We evolved that to protect us and what we love, in our heads using violence against it makes us feel good.
Better tubes or outlets for us to express our monstrosity as a collective, art, sports, sex, violence.
What in the past could have only been resolved through war now can be done with other ways, we have the means and tech to do that.
The people with money can change stuff easier for all the potential they have, but they are, like the rest of us, just ignorant animals, with secret godhood delusions that are nourished by the fact they indeed have god-like powers for the resources they inherited and consider their divine right.
But who gives them money now?
Us of course, and not because we are forced to do so, but because we are addicted to it, just like we are addicted to blood.
Politics are full of two-face psychopaths and sociopaths only because of the weakness of people and their unwillingness to embrace reality, it's just a mirror and vice versa.
I've known people who entered politics and they tell me how it's a complete necessity to be that way in order to advance or even remain in the game.
Sadly the way to understand suffering is to go through it, if you don't it just floats as an abstraction and the people in the dark "are there only because they want to"
Many initiation rituals are basically recreations of "the fall"
Taking you out of the garden of eden into the brutality of the natural world.
What in theory vaccines are, a little of the disease to become stronger for when you have to face the "real deal"
Putting yourself through it actively to avoid having to suffer it passively and unprepared.
And in relation to blood sacrifices to make contact with supernatural forces, I'm aware it has a lot of power, but I don't know why.
