Non-Comprehensive Sociology Recap

 Today I feel like a recap.

 Three castes, trifunctional hypothesis: merchant, warrior, scholar. Social dominance, physical dominance, intellectual dominance. Plus a remnant (85%?) who can't reasonably dominate anything. The dominance is technically a scalar, everyone has some of each, but few bother to try to climb anything but their best hierarchy. Remnants technically have a caste, but the level is too low to distinguish from the noise. I am personally a scholar warrior, but like level 40 and level 13, respectively. Maybe level 3 merchant - they look like a strange foreign species to me. My understanding of merchants is fully left-brained, verbal, and incomplete.

 Three primary virtues, wisdom, courage, and faith. Together, they make honour. The language is highly corrupt: when you read 'faith' you probably think of blind slavish obedience to your local priest. I could use 'fidelity' but then you're probably thinking of gold-capped sound cables. It's supposed to mean keeping your promises. Moderns are so corrupt they have no longer have any particular word for being operationally trustworthy. Recall the archaic phrase, a faithful knight. It means they keep their oaths. You can make contracts with the faithful, and you can barely make self-enforcing day trades with the faithless.
 These virtues were nearly found by Richard Garriot while making the Ultima series of videogames. A startlingly close attempt. He didn't bother to refine it all the way to the truth, as he was making an allegedly-mythical videogame, not an attempt at a book of philosophy. 

 Hesiod's ages of man, gold, silver, iron. 

 Plato's forms of government, aristocracy, timocracy, plutocracy, and despotism.

 A close, critical reading of Plato first reveals that the primary virtues are lost in order. Wisdom is lost, along with a coherent or respected scholar caste, leaving warriors and merchants. Courage is lost, along with a coherent or respected warrior caste, leaving merchants. Finally the merchants lose faith and can no longer make contracts with one another, producing despotism. Plato calls it democracy at first, then describes tyranny, but fails to notice nothing is lost between the two stages. They are in fact the same stage. I extend Hesiod's ages to the lead age of lead men. A base metal, poisonous. Suicidal, hateful, self-hating men.

 Alchemy is not about making a red physical mineral that makes you rich and long-lived. It's a metaphor. Alchemy is the search for the method of turning base lead men back into golden men. I personally believe Alchemy is complete; the answer is no such method exists. Sorry, I softballed it: I'm skeptical even of the idea there has been a golden age except in myth and legend. Conceivable, yes. Viable...apparently not.
 Personnel is policy: to get a tax-rejecting Exit society, you first need to breed tax-rejecting men. You can't do that, because you won't find any tax-rejecting souls here in the afterlife. Revenge is Sour: the condition of breeding tax-rejecting men is to already have tax-rejecting breeders. 

 Recently Nick Land and Umberto Eco seriously address the definition of Fascism, and their work is good enough to steelman. It can be boiled down like maple syrup, producing delicious essentials. However, having done so, it is revealed to be little more than Plato's despotism. Hitler: despot. Stalin, Mao: despots. FDR: despot. Churchill: dancing clown pretending to be a despot. POTUS du jour: figurehead despot.
 Fascism/despotism is the religious theocracy of Envy, by and for egalitarian narcissists, with six diagnostic traits.
 1. Dogmatism and xenophobia.
 2. Utopian perfectionism.
 3. Obsession with the Plot of some State Enemy.
 4. Monogenderism.
 5. Newspeak.
 6. Claims to labour/sacrifice for some universal "humanity" with unprincipled exceptions for Fascist high priests. 

 1. Standard theocracy. It seems all theocracies eventually converge on Fascism. Surface beliefs are nothing; game theory and cybernetics are everything. (Another corrupt word with no replacements...)
 2. Narcissists and Fascists desperately refuse to admit there are any limits to their power.
 3. Thus the many failures of Fascism have to be blamed on some dastardly Adversary, who is, as convenient, unstoppable or desperately hopeless.
 4. Fascist universalism extends to the sexes, considering men and women to be identical. Everyone is the head narcissist. Narcissism is feminine, thus feminine Fascism is more stable.
 5. Fascism is a rather obviously bad idea, which has been tried many times, and as such they do and must camouflage the ideology by making up new words for old ideas. Bamboozle with nouveau spectacle. Originally despot was a neutral term for a particular political office...
 6. Fascists always claim to be selfless, thinking only of public welfare or salus populi or whatever. They sell their project as being good for some mass (undifferentiated) "you" made of everyone except the subhuman Adversary. Somehow the high Fascists are always telling everyone else they need to be selfless, but never give up their own creature comforts or entrenched special interests. Even a cursory examination reveals their universalism is in fact the idea that everyone should universally worship the head Fascist. Anything good for the chief narcissist is good for everyone, because projection. "I'm being helped, therefore everyone is being helped." 

 https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/republic/summary-and-analysis/book-viii
"In such a democratic state, everyone is more or less equally free of any responsibility to anyone else, including service to the state. No one is obliged to give orders; no one is obliged to take orders; no justice can be respected or meted out. "
"he will probably not respect anything else; he will become shiftless, kind of a reed in the wind, unable to control his desires, which will probably fluctuate wildly. Lacking any ability to discern differences in appetite, he will probably live solely for the moment, and he will be rudderless. His will be a life without order."
"so is democracy greedy for absolute freedom; it recognizes no authority whatever, neither familial nor militaristic nor academic."
"[The tyrant] will trust no one, certainly not men of reason [...] He will surround himself with criminals, and he will finally do criminal acts against the very democrats who elected him. The tyrant will despotically rule his unhappy and fearful state. "
"The democrat is desirous of all things and treats all, good and bad, equally; if his son, the tyrannical man, falls into bad company — and he will — then he will be governed entirely by the bad and the desire for the bad. He will be driven by lust, and his lust will drive him completely out of control. He will eventually become something like a wild beast, his lust will become bestial, and he will do terrible things to get what he wants. No longer able to discern right from wrong, good from bad, he will turn against every man and will earn and deserve every man's hatred and scorn. His life will be miserable."
 Any of that sound like someone you've met?

 On the plus side, lead men are weak.
 Apparently ironically but essentially inevitably, it's the Fascist/Despot ingroup which is made of subhuman animals. Feral beasts which cannot be bargained or reasoned with. Irrationally solipsistic. Narcissism is a severe and untreatable mental disorder; like AIDS it is the destruction of the very systems needed to address it.
 There are too many to cull. Even the strongest man would exhaust himself before the battle is over.
 However, it is unnecessary for the wise or courageous to defeat them. Let them suffer the privations they deserve; merely remember you do need to build a fence and protect yourself from these zombie creatures. Use the fact they can't climb (or run) against them. Narcissists absolutely freak out when they see a fence - they can't handle boundaries - so camouflage it and you're good to go.

 

 P.S. Specifically religious faith is way easier when you worship something that deserves your trust. I keep faith with logic, as I believe logic will never betray me. As far as I know, it hasn't. When I suffer a crisis of religious faith, it is mild and minor, and the problem is on my side. Nothing like the constant major crises you experience when you try to worship Satan or one of his sockpuppets.
 See also: logic and empiricism. Logical positivism was right: your beliefs should have consequences regarding your experiences, and indeed they do, whether you want them to or not.