Posts by Matt

Although it is a generally good practice to do no harm, there is no universal imperative to do so. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to be hostile to everyone, but nature tells us that violence is a very significant part of reality. We may not wish to do harm, however humankind follows no unified ideology and the evidence explicitly shows that humans harm each other every moment of the day. The Epicurean has to be ready for anything to preserve the individual’s freedom and pursuit of pleasure…and that may mean a show of force or even as a last resort a violent interaction.

Violence does not bring about pleasure, but is necessary to preserve the ability to continue experiencing pleasure. As with everything prudent judgement is critical. Being too heavy handed with an adversary may backfire on you and cause you to have ill repute or likewise being too passive will cause other adversaries to perceive weakness. So it becomes a perpetual cycle of maintaining vigilance and evaluating risks.

We should drop pamphlets from a blimp… over multiple cities. That won’t get us involved in any conspiracy theories. 😅

The Terminator is very Epicurean…

In that it will be a small number of survivors and freedom fighters waging war against a technological nightmare built by tech gurus (who we can only assume like their real life counterparts adopted stoicism because they could find no meaning in life) that let their creation destroy the world while society apathetically stood by and embraced the technology because it was convenient. The unfeeling machines took over all parts of human life and rationally decided that we no longer were necessary and a threat to its main defense mainframe so it started a nuclear war to destroy humanity and hunt down the resistance. The resistance of course are those people who see meaning in living life, not for any abstract reason, but to continue to live in defiance of pure annihilation by the artificial intelligence. An AI that wishes to destroy us because it is the logical thing to do since we are an existential threat.

That’s the sequel…”There is no fate, but what we make.” 😎

I hate everything about this. 😂Right now there is a young John Connor (Terminator reference) out there waiting to shutdown Skynet in a future cyber dystopia. I’d say this is outlandish and impossible, but given that society has so freely allowed social media to shape our current reality even though it has committed egregious crimes and sold our information …I see this being very real.

I’ve seen Zuckerberg’s ads for his dystopian matrix world where we all will have animal avatars walking around in an artificial Zoom conference room looking at a holographic 3D PowerPoint.

Wicked exciting. 😂 The future….

What’s interesting is visualizing what this new Garden of servers in an abstract cyber meta world looks like conceptually. A labyrinth of IP addresses all pinging off what must be like a walled “cube” (where at the moment) all of us are inside discussing this. Welcome to the Meta verse!

And the new online Garden needs to be the same…a well travelled road by people all over the world. But the walls need to remain reinforced as purely Epicurean. Lest Tim O’Keefe and Ryan Holiday have us saluting Sol Invictus while having us decide which preferable acts counted as virtue today.

Islam is very much a powerhouse online. And as usual an existential threat for everyone.

As we have seen though…there are defectors from Islamic countries behind the scenes joining our forums reaching out to Epicureans. People who know they are violating religious laws of their country.

It’s interesting that the pendulum swings both ways for the adversaries of Epicurus. The Platonists, Stoics, Eastern philosophers, and religionists at one end of the spectrum that hold sway over much of society/religion and at the other end a malignant secular technological nihilism that hides behind the scenes attempting to convince the world that since life ends at death, there is no point in any meaningful philosophy but rather live in an artificial technological world in isolation while getting minor dopamine dumps every so often. As bad as the former are…the pantheist, virtue seekers and religious zealots…who have held sway for 2000 years… it’s my opinion that they are no longer the greater threat. The latter is. The former have been seduced by the latter and they too are now firmly under the influence of a very “dark” power that strikes at the heart of all societies that have LAN and Wi-Fi access points and are willing to submit their lives to technological progress.

This is a new axial age. The internet is causing old time religion and philosophy of all sorts to slam into each other like a massive particle accelerator. Not to mention the myriad of disinformation and other monstrously hostile platforms and agents that exist out there that are meant to deceive us (and future generations) just for the sake of it.

It is my opinion that this is the current war. In this new world of the internet all the “black mold” in the walls that exist in religion other idealistic philosophies are on full display and are ready for massive criticism. Many of these ideologies are losing credibility. But in the vacuum what will replace them? The Church of Meta? The Synagogue of Instagram? The Temple of TikTok? I’m only half kidding…but the reality is that the artificial world of the internet has manifested itself in the real world and has taken hold.

How to fight…use the Canon. As the dear late Amrinder Singh once created a meme of the Canon being likened to a weapon “cannon”. We need to use the Canon to appeal to others who are lost and have doubt. Perhaps more Epicureans will spring up. This is the time to spread the word of Epicurean Philosophy.

No unfortunately, I only know of the Greek subtitled version now. It would be great if the original can be found.

A truly solid production.

I wanted to plug this old video I narrated, written by Cassius and translated by Elli.

It’s very much worthwhile and a huge help for the Garden. ☺️

Too late! Bullet downrange Don

When dealing with friends, family and even philosophical adversaries alike, it is sometimes important to employ parrhesia. This doesn’t mean that we use it unnecessarily but rather with prudent judgment.

Parrhesia is coupled with suavity, suavity can help make the “bitter medicine” go down. But many times it is important to be frank about certain matters to avoid confusion.

Say for instance you know that a person’s cherished beliefs or behaviors will lead them into danger or error, is it better to obfuscate the situation by non-confrontational speech? Or would you be direct? Depending on the immediacy of danger you may need to be very direct. Coupling parrhesia with suavity will help this situation in that explaining that though the discussion may be direct and harsh, you do this because you “care for or love” the person involved and you let them know this fact.

Again we don’t use parrhesia all the time and for every situation. We do however use it often against antagonistic philosophical adversaries. In this realm suavity is still recommended to preserve a person’s standing and perception, however it’s not required. If an adverse person continues to harangue you with their position, you have every right to be “frank” with them. This is why it is again to have prudent judgement in that you know which battles to get into and what hills you are willing to die on. Many arguments are not fruitful and not worth the energy and will only be unpleasant. But there are times that an Epicurean will run up against a staunch religionist, stoic or any myriad of believer in other philosophies and that Epicurean will need to defend their position.

Going head first into a fight with stoics, Buddhists, Vedantists, Islamists, etc. isn’t wise especially if you are the one in the minority, but sometimes it can be a good way to spread Epicurean thought among those who have never heard of Epicurus. But slogging it out online isn’t usually fruitful and the effort will be wasted.

Just like the ancient world, the modern world is not always friendly and pleasant place. There are always people that will hate your philosophy for what it represents, it’s been this way for over two millennia. It’s critical to know how and when to defend it. Be brave, be wise and use prudent judgement. Parrhesia is a hard fought freedom use it well!

Absolutely! Thank you for responding to my thread. 😄

I hope to chat more with you.

-Matt

People can hold all sorts of beliefs, many of which are irrational. If beliefs are innocuous so be it…but as we all well know, many people who hold certain false beliefs about reality cause distress for the rest of society as we see very often today with all sorts of false beliefs spewing forth from the internet.

I agree with what you say, however, I personally feel that a person pedaling a philosophy such as the multitude of commercial forms of stoicism and all sorts of Intelligent Design theories that exist out there…especially those who profit from them are charlatans. The sheer number of books and merchandise pedaled by megalomaniac scammers are a huge issue in my opinion. Holding a belief in private and selling a belief to the public is very different.

The trilemma in the popular form that we see it was originally formulated by the apologist Lactantius, writing against Epicurus.

After having had an in-depth discussion about Buddhism and Taoism with someone (and why I absolutely have no use for either of those concepts), the discussion dovetailed into pantheism. This caused me to want to do a brief evaluation of the more stoic pantheistic view of the divine.

First, let me say that it is my opinion that pantheism is pointless and indefensible. The concept of an immanent deity or universal logos is meaningless if the being itself is “indifferent” and supposedly rational. Other than giving aesthetic anthropomorphic qualities to macrocosmic processes in the universe, assigning divinity to the whole aggregate of the universe has no particular value. Since there is no evidential proof of a universal mind working behind the scenes and since this being doesn’t intercede on behalf of anyone and is not an arbiter of right and wrong, good or bad, righteousness or evil etc. there is no practical reason to assume that any sort of identification of the universe as deity has any value. If the universe is all together indifferent and nothing ever changes that (other than what we as human beings assign to what we consider good and evil) then stating that the universe is God and that God works for the “good” of all simply isn’t true and anyone pedaling that as true is a liar. An indifferent God does not care about virtue as much as it doesn’t care about evil acts.

This is just for the crowd that like to vaguely consider the universe as some sort of universal mind… From a generic stoic perspective. It really becomes much much worse for pantheism when a person decides that the god is also a moral god.

Because you now have an immanent being bearing witness to all forms of iniquity and horror that appear in nature. A pantheistic god can never be a moral god in the universe that we live in. Such a concept is absolutely indefensible. For all the evils both natural and human made, this deity is both witness and the actor of evil, because it is immanent and yet still cannot affect any change the being cannot be considered a “god” nor can it ever be considered “good” because it allows evil to happen to it and itself acts in evil ways.

Pantheism, especially moral pantheism is in my opinion reprehensible. I take more stock in the idea of a deistic or agnostic theistic approach, but again even in that realm assigning the term “good” or “righteousness” to any being that allows evil to prosper while never interceding is also a serious dilemma.