For now, these are just random musings from my personal blog, most of which are political and liberal in nature:
Sample 1
I read an utterly brilliant analysis recently about how Soviet Communism naturally morphed into Putin's fascism. It reminds me of a cogent idea implanted in my mind by the scholar of philosophy Bertrand Russell over a year and a half ago. He argued that both branches of Enlightenment liberal philosophies through a series of logical progressions over many generations morphed into their polar opposites: hard liberalism into Stalinism and soft liberalism into Naziism. I've thought very deeply about this since then as it touched on something I have noticed for many, many years but couldn't quite properly articulate till now: how political/social rivals adopt the arguments of their enemies to counter them and thereby slowly morph into their opposites.
How many times have we seen modern Republicans who are supposedly devout Christians espouse a form of economic Darwinism when they are supposedly opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution? They have adopted the arguments of their rivals and applied it to their own economic policies which functions partially as a reverse Freudian projection, partially as stealing elan from the opposition, and also as a very natural process whereby ideologies morph into their polar opposites by dialoguing and then adopting the logic of their rivals to better explain their ideology and possibly win converts from the opposing side.
I saw a smaller scale version of this evolutionary process when people who were opposed to taking the Covid vaccine started appropriating the pro-abortion mantra "my body, my choice". I saw it again when Governor Newsom of California adopted elements of Texas's vigilante anti-abortion law to fight for gun control in his state. Once again we see it with Republican Christians adopting Ayn Rand's ultra-selfish, individualist philosophy, a philosophy that in the 1960s was most closely associated with Anton Lavey's newly founded Church of Satan. And again it was seen where the once overwhelmingly Southern, pro-Confederate Democratic Party put the polar opposite liberal Barrack Obama into the presidency twice. On the opposite side of the aisle, it was seen when the Republican Party which began with Abraham Lincoln as it's first leader, who was a diligent reader and supporter of Karl Marx's ideas, became the party of Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump.
This is a revelatory idea that I've been working out for quite some time in inchoate form and is finally coming to fruition. And like I said, it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell who initially pointed it out to me. What brilliant insights he had. I think this idea of how ideologies naturally morph into their polar opposites over several generations by arguing with and thereby adopting ideas from their rivals to better explain them to the opposing side merits serious research. Now that I think about it further, there might be some form of Hegelian dialectics involved in this evolutionary process of ideologies. It is a Dionysian becoming.
Sample 2
I have these bizarre dreams that are surreal and hyper-realist. Last night I had a dream that I was kidnapped by a demon from Hindu mythology and while it was taking me away on horseback, past several alternate universes of realms, I used a summoning tarot card and called Lord Hanuman, the Hindu monkey God, to save me. His image appeared of him in golden armor on horseback with his iconic mace and then he materialized into the realm I was in. Lord Hanuman assaulted this demon just as we went past a gas station from the '30s with several Ford Model-Ts and cast a spell creating a large pool of lava that the demon burned alive in. I was able to leap off the horse and hold onto a gas station pillar which somehow miraculously didn't blow up. My friend from grad school came out of the convenience store and helped me down from around the pool of lava. I've been reading the Hindu epic Rig Veda lately and the rest of the dream was from a lifetime of reading classical mythology, folklore, and fantasy.
Sample 3
I studied Buddhism intensely from probably the age of 16-20. One of the things I learned about Buddhism during that time is that it's actually been a dying religion for around a millennium. There were a series of debates between Hindu and Buddhist intellectuals somewhere around the 12th-14th centuries c.e. in India and the Buddhist intellectuals had lost their vigor at that point and were soundly defeated, leading to Buddhism's slow decline in India. In T'ang Dynasty China, somewhere around the 700s or 800s c.e. large swaths of the Chinese population dropped out of mainstream society to become Buddhist monks. They subsisted very minimally and while they excelled at menial work around the monastery as any Buddhist monk is trained to do (as well as the martial arts which some monasteries practiced by this point), the Chinese ruling class got incredibly angry that a substantial percentage of the population (possibly around 15% in places if I remember correctly) had effectively dropped out of the mainstream labor force. Eventually laws were passed to discourage people from joining the Buddhist Sangha which caused Buddhism to diminish in practice until the laws were lifted in the 1800s sometime (I studied this in my teens, but I'm pretty sure the general contour of this history is true).
Beethoven believed that as the churches were shut down during the French Revolution, a new priesthood/monkhood should rise to replace the Christian aristocracy, that of the 'culture priests'. This would comprise a class of artists and intellectuals who dropped out of mainstream society and eschewed material possessions in order to pursue the arts. Eventually this class grew into what became known as 'bohemia' in several European nations including the U.S.A. (see Beatniks and many other counter-culture movements).
With global heating as bad as it is and the rise of fascism once again, I believe there should be a modern bohemia that drops out of society just like the Buddhist monks and Beethoven's cultural priests. They could live in ecovillages growing their own food and building their own simple abodes mortgage-free while working online as Bohemians and artists. Material possessions which are destroying the environment would be minimized and an emphasis on community, the arts, and saving the environment would replace the focus on traditional social status and material possessions.. I already know of several strategies for building these communities on many levels and what geographical regions this lifestyle is most viable if anybody wants a dialogue.