The Ornamenation of the Human Soul
Why tradition in the age of flattening
Read the original on Substack
From the ides of civilizational noon as the tides of plenty bore upon the empty, a great dream had been thrust that man could be perfected. A man freed from himself, a self-referential loop of becoming successor to his own predecessor and predecessor to his own successor. This man need not hierarchy nor the systems conceived of broken premises, for no more he need stay in communion with the stories of those long past whom he remembers only from an inkling of heart. This man now liberated from all order thus reached equality not only with his compatriots but absolute indifference to all other objects in the universe whether alive, contrived or otherwise thus assuming self-apotheosis upon all. This man need no more to long for the absolute, nor accomplish feats of the divine, for with only the conniving of his ploy he had made child of Prometheus and thus robbed the fire of greatness not from the gods but from eternity itself. This man had became his own idol, usurping the primacy of episodic narrative upon a single declaration and thus had begun animating even zeal itself, for this man need no more to chant for his own victory, as victory had already been hath within.
However, this man whom dawned from the ides of civilizational noon was no champion of war commanding undue honor from the glories of conquest, but a ghoul of something imitating mankind, bereft of anything human at all. This man had been perfected not of magnanimity but of a stifling apathy so inebriating that life itself withers in its presence, shunting even evil in all its malfeasance. Thus as this force slowly began reducing mankind into a hollow simulacra of himself, man was left with a predicament, will man drift away into the night of a painless unbecoming or will this wrong be righted by reigniting the ethereal animus and thus making amends with eternity itself.
Absolute Flattening
We find ourselves in the epoch where we’ve managed to reduce all loci of meaning into their lowest possible representation. People surrogate the persona of their humanity into faceless ghouls to commune in a digital afterlife with other simulacra. Language gets rendered into lowercase-only script as those same words get projected by a digital apparition, implicitly rebelling not just against order and hierarchy but the very force that binds flesh and blood into being itself. Buildings are erected, however, not for the stories that may emanate out, nor the blush that may bring quiver to the soul, but solely for their utility and return on capital. Time horizons extend only upon what is immediately ahead, for there can’t be much consideration towards what once was nor what ought and should come to be.
By demanding equality out of everything, we’ve compressed even the soul out of the body reducing language from prose into utterance, rendering being into unbeing and making even the body itself foreign to selfhood. We’ve rendered language to the bare letter of what the eye sees rather than what the soul feels thus mandating we sacrifice the veracity of the text to make the written word easier on the eyes. Why we may ask, what might be causing this?
The flattening of all reference frames into an irreducible particle replaced the “form” which deems the soul as being the ineffable construct for designating meaning and constructing a worldview. Rite and ritual has been imperative in fostering the primitive of the “form” and subsequently the soul, however, in the complete elapse of tradition and its rites, it is exactly here at this current context where we find the physical particle as the building block for reality and the meaning conundrum we find ourselves in.
This phenomenon presents itself front-and-center seeing how the internet gravitates towards anonymous accounts posting streams of conscious judged solely by the shear volume of their followings, thus insinuating authority is more legitimate when disembodied because of the implicit assumption that the physical human form carries intrinsic fault. Anonymity represents the severing of personhood from the body affirming the person is not contiguous with the body, but rather is resultant of separate piecemeal processes operating in concert as independent particles. The preference of anonymity communicates the physical body in its embodiment with personhood is actually “noise”, thus insinuating by separating the person from their physical embodiment truer more authoritative claims can be rendered.
However, with anonymity comes irony, as irony separates intent from language in the same way anonymity separates personhood from the body. Irony is capable only of obfuscation by communicating the incidental and never the explicit, thus downplaying the notion of intent from being itself, and by consequence rejecting the will to will necessary for any notions of archetypal greatness to exist. Once more, irony trivializes intent from language, thus affirming it is not a unified indivisible soul embodied into being responsible for personhood, but rather a conglomerate of piecemeal processes in isolation that renders personhood. Irony just like anonymity is resultant of a loosely regulated culture devoid of rite and ritual that is capable only of ever negating itself, thus counter signaling all semblances of order through the multiplication of unmeaning. In the vacuum of a unifying cultural meta downstream from the erasure of the “form” and soul as the governing primitive to forming a worldview, ultimately it is nihilism that becomes the default, accelerated by ample doses of irony and anonymity directed in the search for novelty, titillation, and ultimately unmeaning.
This flattening force propagating through anonymity and irony also takes on the permutations of capitalism and meritocracy when both are taken to the limit. Capitalism as an outgrowth of materialism demands all objects and or persons whether alive or otherwise to be rendered into an interchangeable idempotent unit, if conducive towards some type of economic transaction. Thus what this means is that any human activity not immediately amenable towards an economic transaction must be downregulated if not outright entirely removed. Thus by logical necessity rite, ritual and the very premise of ornamenting the human soul via suprarational means must be outright castrated and deemed as erroneous and superfluous. Public ceremonies, rites, or rituals are to be commenced only under the purview of eliciting economic activity or uplifting public morale measured through a physical heuristic such as average increased serotonin and or decreased cortisol. Thus the corporate becomes the communal, the meal becomes the nexus of exchange and the chime of song becomes the confirmation noise of transaction.
Meritocracy like capitalism insinuates all persons are innately equal and by necessity interchangeable therefore implicitly mandating you as a parent ought reward a child of another body and blood if they truly are more deserving of the merit via the objectivity of their accolade. By rendering people into a state of tabula rasa, meritocracy must also oppose the intergenerational inheritance of resources and tradition because both quantities were created not of the individual’s accomplishment, therefore being incommensurate with meritocracy. Not that there’s anything invalid with rewarding the strong and the accomplished, but when its come at the expense of distributing resources against your own blood and kin group, meritocracy in the absolute begins cutting into the human spirit by serving itself rather than man when taken far past the animus of human proportion.
Tradition as the Ornamenting Force
Tradition alongside its rites, rituals and stories is one of the only bulwarks we have that can elongate time horizons and extrapolate meaning against the calculating forces of rationality condensing all phenomena in its midst. Tradition attempts to create one bridge between you and all of time itself by thus establishing eternity not as an abstraction but through transliteral embodiment.
We need tradition so that our own bodies don’t become foreign to us and that the stories we create remain amenable to the bodily proportions that constitutes being itself. The mythologies of old presented human-like gods both in their figure and personality flaws regardless of how imagined the narratives may have been. Our stories need to ascend the human form but not transcend the body, imagine what ought be without escaping the pains of body and blood being, whilst concentrating what makes us human without diluting our humanity.
We need the primitive cultivated by tradition such that language is used to uplift and elevate people to the level we want the world to be at rather than reduce language down to its lowest common representation. We need not be afraid of language written in blood that pierces the veil and brings shiver to the soul. We need language that reverberates deep into the fiber of being itself that challenges us into becoming rather than sedating us into unbecoming. We cannot be afraid to hold back words because a single apathetic soul may not be willing to understand them, and thus we must render prose that only eternity would approve of by orating language in the same sheen that we would use to ornament the human soul.
Many of the stories us contemporaries might immediately dismiss as being periphery fragments of ancient times are actually foundational to the braces that civilization is built upon. Whether that was the story of Arminius, the Roman defector unifying the proto-Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoborg forest against Rome, a figure which became pivotal in the creation of the modern German state or the story of Achilles, a major protagonist in the Homerian epic of the Illiad whom greatly inspired Alexander the Great, the primacy of tradition passed on in the form of story cannot be denied.
However, these stories can only be animated if we possess the sincerity to fully believe in absolute terms without reprise. This means when a priest orates and commences a ritual, our intuition ought not dismiss the act out of cringe for that instinctual reaction reminds us how infected we’ve become of cynical irony, thus yielding us incapable of belief because sincerity is too unironic of a notion to consider. Without the primitive of tradition and the sincerity of absolute belief, we can only cringe at the mere thought of belief in God, thus forever losing contact with the notion of the happily ever after.
The skepticism against the happily ever after is indicative that the aspiration to become has perished thus in effect rendering a death of the spirit before the body. As people have become more comfortable communing in a digital apparition, the dissociation of the body has made it easier to resent the happily ever after and thus give themselves amends into their own unbecoming.
We see right before our eyes as civilization is withering away not from an external force or material privation but in our lack of belief. In all our resource surplus we’ve acquired, we’ve become inebriated in a malaise so intoxicating we’re left unable to muster the conviction necessary to bring life into this world. In the vacuum of the primitives cultivated by tradition we find no duty to give forth to posterity as what was given to us, thus dilapidation into unbelief can be the only destination to arrive at.
Tradition reminds us why duty must exist, for we can’t render all human interactions to a set of contractual obligations because our very becoming into this world was thrust beyond our will. Tradition reminds us we’re not all equal and our intergenerational canons are not the same therefore the passing on of this tradition simply cannot be surrogated by another person, it has to be done through you and only yourself. We need be reminded why our personhood and presence is not immediately replaceable with the other and thus why it is we have teachers not educators, militaries not private militias, parents not guardians and children not genetic offspring.
It is also the recognition of this same difference for why the priest class must exist as an intercessor between the lay and the great. For through that separation a clear line of demarcation is formed of where we’re at and where we ought ascend towards. The ideal is indeed great but in actualization becomes even greater. Thus it is the priest class that plays an imperative role in defining what the ideal is and how one ought commune with it.
Without tradition when you look up to the stars you start feeling dizzy, a nausea induced by thinking of how small you are compared to the entire universe when in actuality you should marvel upon the fact that you’re comprised of the same ether igniting the stars twinkling above.
Without the ornamentation of the human soul we cannot justify why buildings ought be constructed solely for the awe of shear beauty. Why spend countless human hours erecting a single building built across hundreds of years and tens of generation if nearly all the people whom toiled in the creation of said building do not get to enjoy the fruits of their labor in the creation they helped emanate? Only by the paradox implanted by tradition can we expect to create without consuming the fruits of our labor and bring into the world a life that we will not live ourselves to thus pay amends to the unamendable.
Without this ornamentation we stop creating city centers organized in meticulous concentric rings of hierarchy and instead get left with living arrangements that are neither connected to the land nor orchestrated towards the absolute. If all else must be equal the default mode of living is the suburb, thus there being no central unifying doctrine just simply property ownership governed only by the individual and the particular, divided solely along the flattened lines of economic merit and none else.
Without tradition sport becomes an expendable commodity to help pass time into the ether where objects senselessly collide into each other, rather than a culmination of individual storylines each defined by unrelenting sacrificial resolve orchestrated collectively in the perennial search for honor and greatness.
Without tradition we strip ourselves of the origin stories whose meaning gets contemplated across entire lifetimes between generations and instead find ourselves scrolling past countless memes that we immediately forget after glossing over for merely but a fading moment.
Without tradition our clothing converges from traditional garb embroidered in ancestral glyph into the single permutation of blue jeans and a blank t-shirt. Rather than the unification around the single form of the intergenerational rite rendering many permutations, instead what we get is many particulars acting in isolation rendering a single permutation — atomized individuals acting solely on their own accord rather than a concordance of the human traditions acting in concert to one another. Like clothing, without tradition marriage flattens into an ephemeral partnership of two persons acting in isolate rather a communion of two bloodlines cultivating into a single intergenerational unit.
When our souls becomes ornamented in meaning so then does everything else around us. The buildings we erect become etched in motif, for we can allow not a single unit of surface area to be left undecorated. The streets become checkered in cobblestone, even if flat cheap concrete slabs are equally effective and the street lamps grace the evening in all their aura, even if barebone spartan lamps are more than sufficient to light the night. As such the human soul deracinated of the spiritual primitive foregoes the wherewithal to take oneself seriously and thus begins to wither a death in spirit before the body, an eerie that seems to be felt everywhere we may seek.
Today we find ourselves as some of the least embodied humans to have ever existed, for we commune behind digital avatars whilst simultaneously arguing our mechanistic inhumanity amongst ourselves only to reduce whatever remnants of personhood we might have into something entirely incommensurate to being itself.
For generations we’ve known by intuition a people’s mythology isn’t an abstract apparition but a tangible quantity architecting meaning deep into the human psyche. However, we find ourselves at a juncture where we’ve lost communion with the base primitives of civilization, unable to bear fruit to the next generation.
We’ve stop believing in the will because deterministic autonomic self-organization is more savvy than believing the impetus of self-action into being can render both your own life and the world around you a better place than when you found it.
We’ve found the study of markets and finance as a sufficient surrogate for the communion of becoming one into tradition. We’ve replaced the premise of the state which ought be an intergenerational human singularity of a people with a mechanistic digital singularity of machine intelligence. Even the notion of the state itself has been deemed detrimental to the individual thus seen only as a superfluous entity mired in bureaucratic baggage capable only of privation waiting to be replaced by a mechanistic surrogate.
We’re unable to fathom why an entity like the state ought exist or why any institution should orient itself in service of timelines spanning tens or even hundreds of generations operating on time horizons far past what the market expects or when a shareholder might expect a return on investment.
We’ve surrogated becoming as an intergenerational rite of communing what is, what was, and what ought be into solely an ephemeral transience of the now. By flattening all permutations of loci and subsequently meaning we’ve flattened even the soul of our bodies. We need to resurrect sincerity in the absolute and return to body and blood being rather than escape our human folly in these machinated digital apparitions. We need to embrace the soul, the primitive cultivated by tradition and stop foregoing our humanity to these mechanistic presuppositions. We need to believe absolutely once more, we need to become once again, and we need to generate rather than dilapidate above all else. The time to generate is now.
Notes and Extra Reading
*This article goes makes the case for why tradition is necessary in cultivating the primitive of the soul, however I also wrote the piece, “Proservation — The Generators Worldframe” criticizing the traditional process when it begins ossifying a people and they’re unable to generate anew upon what was given to them. *
I also wrote another piece called “Continual Integration” where I speak to the need for the elongation of time horizons and how we’ve continued to break away from the original ethno-cultural-linguistic-theological coupling.
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