#379

Factually Masculine 2024 resumes its powerful thrust.

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No doubt readers have studied the previous post exhaustively and enumerated various ways I am wrong or imprecise, marshalling potent arguments which would, I am sure, level the structure of my assertions to the ground. Nevertheless, I shall pick up where I left off, after a fashion; further, I will assume that we are all in tacit agreement to at the very least hear me out to the end, and suspending our disbelief, take it as writ that I have laid the ground to build something worth taking a look at even if it is your instinct to disavow.

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In short, I shall proceed as though we are all gentlemen here.

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So priests lie (plus the big men they ultimately serve are liars of such outlandish bravado that they will tell you that they are like gods themselves, avatars of some kind usually, and they probably believe it), and masculinity is a design project. 

Where does that leave us, if true? It is, by the way. I mean you can disagree with that, but it makes you fucking moron. There's no kinder way to say it. Sometimes the better part of being a gentleman is being frank and direct to the total exclusion of room for misunderstanding.

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The conclusion is simple. Socrates remains the greatest single recorded philosopher of all time (in my humble estimation) because he correctly identified that the only way to proceed, when priests lie and what people think a man is was stitched from whole cloth, is to mercilessly and infinitely interrogate the universe and interrogate yourself in pursuit of the closest thing you can find to the truth of the world and the truth of your life.

This formula is fucking unbeatable and unkillable. 

It is a matter of record that Socrates died happy, deep in the pleasures of inquiry, reveling in the beauty of imagination, his spirit in clear ascent, true to his word and his world and true to what he believed a man, most specifically, Socrates and no other man, to be. He died with his third eye open, human and awake to the end.

Most of us pass from this mortal coil in a fog of confusion and denial, tortured by fear, never conceiving what is true and natural and ecstatic about what is happening to us, turning away from it and missing the point. For why should we fear death? Socrates seemed to have no reason.

Just a tidbit to keep in mind. We press on.

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So: Socratic interrogation and creative speculation aimed at masculinity; in brief and selectively or we'd be here awhile (as long as there was a thing that we could name man and it could ask another question, theoretically infinity).

If someone were to tell us that man is an entity distinct from woman, we could undermine that statement several different ways. You would have to show me a man that did not come from woman; further, you would have to show me a man made in this fashion who was not made in the template of man or woman, since that template comes from woman, and what comes from something retains identification with its progenitor if it is not distinct. A rock comes from rock, a chunk of granite struck from a granite boulder is a chunk of granite, though there may be much to dinstinguish it from its mother boulder now that they are both more and less. It would be more precise to say that man is a part of woman. It would be even more precise to say that man and woman are expressions of human beings. And it would be more precise yet to say that human beings express themselves as men or women and name each other men and women based on perceived differences and commonalities, because that appears to be a natural way for human beings to organize their impressions of the world that they inhabit--but there is no guarantee that our perceptions reflect reality with any degree of fidelity and indeed much evidence to the contrary, and the conclusions we cobble together from those impressions may be laughably outlandish and far from precise or optimized for application. Human beings also express themselves as animals, as radiant beings of light, as chemical reactions, as gravitational objects, as points and lines, as vibrations and waves, as assemblages and collections, as units of a society, as the bearers of the standard of the universe, as ghosts, as embodied perception collectors for the records of eternity. How human beings choose to express their maleness or their femaleness or their transcendence of the concept is something that varies tremendously across space, time, and boundaries of culture and ethnicity. 

You might say that man is a male animal with a role to play in the propagation and durablity of his species specific to his inborn physical and psychic abilities, determined by biological sex, expressed through external gonads, the production of extra testosterone, advantages in size, weight, bone and muscle growth patterns, and significant comparative physical strength compared to females of the species related to prior qualities. It looks okay at first glance, maybe it's even accurate a lot of the time. But to defend this case as a rule you would have to prove many things which one can very quickly assess you would have trouble proving: that every man that has a penis posesses significant physical strength, that every woman without a penis cannot possess comparably significant physical strength, that the lack of a penis in every case strips a man of maleness, that testosterone makes the man or estrogen the woman, that men cannot adapt to any role, that women cannot adapt to any role, that human beings cannot dispense with what turns out to be unnecessary when it comes to securing survival or obtaining freedom and the feeling of being under their own power, and further troubling subsets that complexify and ultimately make binary thought untenable in a universe of phenonemena. Exceptions to the general are a rule in that every generality is troubled by statistically significant exceptions.

Perhaps man is what we say he is for the good of society, but I have to laugh if you wanna try that one, because nothing is ever more fucked-up and untenable than the idea that society is any fucking good at all for anyone except plunderers and thieves and their descendants enthroned and unassailable in their wealth and textual power. Society is never any better than a pile of mistakes, which end in collapse, and then repeat themselves. I don't even want to talk about this one, it's stupid; men have fucked this world up the ass with their ideas about a man's place in society and it's just a bad and boring joke to say otherwise. 

I mean fuck that! Idiot. Men and women and everybody else since time immemorial have had to skirt around and live their best lives in spite of these concussed, violent, penetrative, nonconsensual ideas about what men and women are supposed to be for the good of society, re: the good of liars and thieves, as has been shown.

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What can be said? Factually?

Only that man is a question mark.

--JL