Where art thou dionysian ubermensch, hero of human culture?

Thank you!

 

My piddling little contribution is --Herb Caan: Coined the term-hippies / hippy. San Francisco Chronicle, I believe.

What has befallen thedope ?

 

It seems that a number of people have disappeared or been inactive like myself.

 

Shame, that. I'm not knowledgeable enough to contribute, but appreciate the back and forth , the metaphorical dances.

 

Many thanks. There is a passage in ballad of john & yoko book. Dunno howclose to real it was. But they talked of a followup show to woodstock. Where j & y were to be in psychically powered flying car.

 

Was a miniature rennaisance. just prior to this time. We had a visitor desperately urging changes. This has been well documented. This prompted ikes farewell adress. The concept is now called stranger @ the pentagon. & even were the visit fake. Duhznt make wot were urged any less important.

 

So quite obviously we need to be doing things differently than what quite sadly we have mostly gotten used to. Will we be discerning enough to do whatever needs done?

 

Some mini golden ages last longer than others. A 12000yr stranglehold is a bit difficult to overcome. & what we may traditionally think of as enlightenment may not look like it. Because its being fought tooth & nail. Hippies had benefit of previous beat. A new one aint got that. Think of prez debates starting with lincoln douglas.

 

Yes, it certainly can be difficult to maintain one's principles and act on them for the betterment of society when living in this capitalist trip where rent or mortgage , food , transportation, having kids and everything else that requires almost full time attention is a constant onslaught---those are of course--one's own decisions.

 

No man! That was only the chicks, man. LMAO! I'm Joking---but that's a pretty good egotistical sexist hippie joke.

I wasn't referring to just objectivism, or just rationalism, as those are always important and are necessary for us to understand and work with our reality, but a rationalist-objectivism which is the negative aspects of these things as they shaped the modern world from Cartesian Objectivism. It is why humans are objectified into mere numbers and are slaves to their personal histories and credit status. It was not something brand new mind you, as slavery is a good example that goes well into our past. But Cartesian Objectivism elevated it. I would describe it as the Apollonian aspects of objectivism and rationalism. And while objectivism is the opposite of subjectivism, it is the dominant force of civilization, and civilization is grounded upon it. Derrida argued that every such set of binary opposites would be subject to deconstruction, and the dominant side would be replaced with the marginalized side. His philosophy came out in the 50's and was big in university philosophy departments at the time, which had no bearing on the hippie movement as it was an organic deconstruction of objectivism that rose up naturally. But it helped validate it to some students I'm sure.

The fact that the masses have little understanding of what is really going on, or the ideology of what they are a part of, is typical of every movement. Very few MAGA Republicans understand the blatant fascism that their movement espouses, despite it being right in their faces. In fact, I would imagine that more hippies understood, in their own way, what the hippie movement was about, than many other movements in history of that scale.

Was it a mistake for the hippies to embrace poverty? Or was that key to their enlightenment? That is a tough debate. I agreed with Jerry Rubin when he said that you cannot achieve freedom without economic freedom.

In retrospect, I refer to my life in the 1980's as when I was seduced by the dark side. I had a taste of money, power and fame, and it certainly corrupted me. It ended in hubris, but at least I got to keep the girl--not my first wife, mind you, but the mistress I fell head over heels for. I was not proud of what I did to my first wife, on the other hand, she certainly played her role in making it happen. In the end, it too was part of my path, a path shared by many baby boomers.

I do think that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs explains a lot to this.

Zarathustra in Nitezsche's book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is actually his example of the ubermensch, and this is basically how it ends---he realizes that he can't change everyone, that he can only change himself, and everyone else, on their own path, have to find their own enlightenment.

I will write more on this later.

 

While i do know a few folks here in the ozarks who do kinda have it a bit ez. There do seem some tradeoffs such as paranoia & insularity. How would we utilize o lets just say a genuine hoverboard? One couldnt utilize one as driven daily. A couple yrs ago i scared a trucker just with a

 

Razor scooter & a long coat. He thought i was a ghost as he diidnt see the scooter. He was parked on side of road.

 

(I pulled the first four paragraphs from my last post in the thread Sexual Morality, but it fits here too

I have a painting, in charcoal ink, of Chinese calligraphy of a single character hanging near my dining room. It is the Chinese name of the third hexagram of the I-Ching. It is written Chun in my Chinese character dictionary, which is fairly old. I believe the modern version would be Zhun which is supposed to be closer to the pronunciation. I don't know. I am fluent in Japanese, and while I know enough Chinese grammar to read much of it, I don't speak Chinese so I tend to use Japanese pronunciations of Chinese characters, or if I look up a character, it is with my old Chinese character dictionary.

Chun means difficulty or chaos, and generally refers to a difficult start or beginning. The character actually represents the sprout of a plant as it first struggles to break free in order to one day become a tree, or a bush or a flower. It is written that for something great to be achieved, it must first rise up out of chaos. In English we say, it is always the darkest before the light. This painting is very significant to me, because it is more than just a darkness before the morning light---it speaks to the philosophy of Nietzsche who I think has a lot to say about this period we are living in, and even social movements and trends in general. Nietzsche was writing during Europe's fin-de-siecle which was the end of the bourgeoisie era, and culminated in the death rattles of World War I and World War II. He wrote quite a bit about the two dynamics of power that play in any poltical-social situation and I agree strongly, having observed it in the corporate world. These two dynamics are the Dionysian and the Apollonian. I revived an old post on the ubermensch in this philosophy forum that discusses this so I won't get into it, other than to say that one of the best examples of the Dionysian in nature is that of a sprout that struggles, but has the unbridled energy and strength to burst from the ground, even from under concrete and stone.

I would say that, in order to survive and be victorious in the struggles I referred to in the first paragraph (of the post I pulled this from, but which is basically the same problem we are discussing here), we need to see a reappearance of the Dionysian, as we did the hippies in the early 60's. In keeping with the OP, the Dionysian is very sexual---a revolution in sexual ethics. It may very well be that the launch pin that gets our youngest generation active on this is the repressive abortion laws that parts of our nation is succumbing to.

But I have observed various things over the past several decades that give me hope. A reawakening of old spirits, if you will. A deconstruction of old ways, necessary to give birth to new ways. Alvin Toffler, in his book, The Third Wave, touches upon things that I have also seen, trends at play, and so forth. I think a lot of the populist movements and the right wings radicalism---very Apollonian in nature, is a reaction to positive things that are happening.

The problem is that we thought we'd change the world overnight in the 60's. We did bring quite a bit of change to the world, and some of it was far reaching and is still significant today, such as with music. But in my own research and observation of how philosophy plays out in, and shapes, human history I have come to the conclusion that real change takes a long time. Revolutions tend not to change the underlying culture, or the underlying problems that created the revolution, just as The Who sang in We Won't Get Fooled Again. For real change you need to undergo a process of evolution.

I feel that the hippie movement was like the sprout struggling to grow forth. In many ways what we are experiencing today is a reaction to the 60's. Of course, the risk is that any progress that was made could be chopped away, and quashed completely. And sadly, the real change may not occur in our lifetimes. But if we don't give up on it, if we keep the spark alive by passing the ideals down through the generations.

But as the spark passes on, it will be received, perceived, and interpreted differently by future generations---it becomes theirs, and it is up to them to give it meaning for their generation.

 

Was thinking of rereading fs & 3rdwave. Those as i recall were somewhat ez as one really didnt hafta change much. As opposed to zeitgeist or peaceful warrior. Ive always liked small is beautiful. & an embarrasment of riches. It really duhznt take a megaton of education & research to know changes r necessary. Im really excited abt fresh air architechvral concepts. & im glad organic concepts didnt go entirely extinct. Did yall
know that sugar duhznt hafta be labeled as being beet based?

 

I was very lucky and privileged when I was young. My parents had all the National Geographics going all the way back into the 20's, and a few odd ones going back a decade further. (...oh yeah, and my dad usually had a playboy in a lower desk drawer.)

I listened to that---it was a good episode. I believe the program was On the Media, but it was one of those shows that has a podcast of their episodes. I was going to send it to my son, because sometimes he talks crazy stuff about the school that his daughters is in---promoting transgender stuff. I don't know where he is getting that idea from. He is liberal raised by me, but sometimes he goes on off on these tangents. The episode also talked about how Mom's of Liberty are spreading that kind of misinformation to shock Christians into turning against the schools. etc.

Yep, I agree. Or we may collapse into an authoritarian dictatorship that will destroy the country. It is a critical election. And as far as technology--the internet is like a new toy that we can't stop playing with yet. We have a lot of learning to do in terms of how it can benefit society and how to protect truth and objective reality, and avoid its addictive aspects, as just some of the ways we need to mature with it.

The dumb masses have always just been along for the ride. The real change that is happening, and that may allow this spark to grow and elevate mankind to his next step of evolution is happening, and will happen in the science and philosophy departments of our universities. These changes occur in time over ways we probably don't recognize, and they happen overtime, influencing our collectiove unconscious and our social programming. I mentioned recently how deconstruction was so big in philosophy departments in the late 50's and early 60's. Hippies very much represented deconstruction of our culture and norms. Or consider how Newtonian physics and empiricism gave us a very mechanical view of our universe for much of the Modern Age. But Einstein's relativity provided us a more relativistic view of the universe, and I would argue that this finally represented a culture of relativism in the 60's and beyond. Quantum physics is only beginning to alter our view of reality. We haven't even begun to face the philosophical implications of quantum physics which is what quite a bit of my writing is about. For one thing, Newtonian science/empiricism was very dualistic, Relativity began breaking down that duality, softening the edges, and turning it less polarized. Quantum mechanics presents us with a very multiplistic and subjective universe.