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Applied Gnon Theology

gotzendammerung said in #3814 2w ago: received

>Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed.

Nick Land crystalized an important current of the English theological tradition with one word: Gnon. Gnon stands in for Jefferson's "Nature or Nature's God", acronymized (NoNG), reversed (GNoN), and reified (Gnon). The concept is itself a stand-in for uncertainty around the Ultimate Authority by which things are the way they are and by which we ought to live this way rather than that. As a tautology of near-maximum entropy, Gnon may at first seem to have no content. But this is Land's famous "diagonal" trick generalized from Cantor: to define an operator over apparent ignorance that itself proves the presence of knowledge. Gnon, once reified, becomes subject to inquiry. Inquiry yields definite properties.

For example, Gnon apparently commands us to "go forth and multiply" by authority of simple tautological necessity: those who disobey will be wiped from existence. Similarly, Gnon commands that we must live certain ways as not all ways are compatible with continued life. Some lifestyles are a surrender to disease and chaos, while others are clean, natural, and successful. To guide us as to which is which, Gnon shrugs and speaks through the prophets: Emerson says "the sun shines today also", meaning to study nature and its ways as our source of knowledge of the will of Gnon. Darwin does so and finds the laws of life: fertility, heredity, struggle, and selection.

The laws generalize to societies, conceived as meta-organic selves: societies that tolerate within themselves counter-selective, counter-fertile, non-competitive, and heredity-ignoring processes will degenerate into diseased chaotic mush and be wiped from existence. This is not my opinion, some moralistic inheritance from the dead, or any reflexive resentment of the left-behind. These are just the tautological laws of nature or nature's God.

So is Gnon a mean old tyrant, akin to the "bad guys" who ruled before we invented caped superheroes to teach us moral progress? In other words, Gnon commands, but why should we obey? The answer is simple: we affirm that life is good. It would be a crime to allow it to succumb to such degeneration. This is only even a question because it is asked "on our behalf" by the agents of the disease. Of course those who benefit from sickness would have an interest in confusing our idea of health. The more practical question is why we should listen to them.

This brings us to our particular situation in history. In the abstract we know from the simple laws of nature what a healthy outlook and a healthy society must look like, and we know we don't live in one. But the trail seems to go cold when we ask "what is to be done?". Done? There is nothing to be done. Everything proceeds according to nature. The forms capable of life will find their footing and win the future. Here Land leaves with his fatalistic non-politics. Amor fati, anon.

But the idea that applied Gnon-theology is an oxymoron is an unsatisfying non-answer, itself one of the whisperings of death. A strong seed of life does not accept such cope. It takes delight in the opportunity of its nature and its niche. The trail doesn't actually go cold, it just splits. Applied Gnon-theology is highly particularist. For us, I think the opportunity is simple and rich: we have a vein of pure truth in this idea of Gnon theology, right at the heart of the most important questions in current world history.

No mainstream line of thought can justify the continuation of civilized life against the corrosive wreckage of post-christian moralism. But Gnon theology seems able to. It is strong and on the cutting edge of modern philosophy. It has the potential to root a total theory of society and right living. It rejects all the lies of the age and can incorporate the truths of previous schools into its own strength. It is the strong seed of a new health. All we have to do is help it grow.

referenced by: >>3817 >>3844 >>3850 >>3871 >>3873 >>3953 >>3979

Nick Land crystalize received

gnon said in #3817 2w ago: received

>>3814
The mighty white oak is not an easy wood to work, yet the things we make of it withstand the battering of the times—any times.

These roots we stand upon run deep and yet run amok, they have criss-crossed and struggled against one another In dubious Battel. And so we live, in our dreary day, in the fallout of that great meat-grinder of good men. War is Gnon and He is the father of all things, but what is He father to? Is He father merely to the universal monarchy of a certain cripple? No, I believe He is father to something that will come down from the mountains to untangle and gather up these great roots. Something that is only made possible by the agonistic bifurcation we have inherited.

This theology is not new. It is as old as anything we know. It unifies Plato and Heraclitus, it unifies God with Nature, it unifies logos with physis. In doing so, all past becomes ancient, subsumed, buried. We will be brothers once again in mind of Gnon.

The mighty white oak received

anon_beda said in #3844 2w ago: received

>>3814
>For example, Gnon apparently commands us to "go forth and multiply" by authority of simple tautological necessity: those who disobey will be wiped from existence. Similarly, Gnon commands that we must live certain ways as not all ways are compatible with continued life. Some lifestyles are a surrender to disease and chaos, while others are clean, natural, and successful.

Sure, but societies that value god and truth and beauty still tend towards degeneration. The societies that survive today are those societies that maximally financialize their economies to remain competitive in the hypercapitalist global commercium. The most powerful nation in the history of the world taxes its most productive citizens in order to shovel more and more slop into its teeming bantu underclass. Is this a matter of theological necessity?

Gnon seems reducible to "winners win," which has a tenuous relation at best to truth and beauty and all the rest.

referenced by: >>3846 >>3848

Sure, but societies received

him said in #3846 2w ago: received

>>3844
> The societies that survive today are those societies that maximally financialize their economies to remain competitive in the hypercapitalist global commercium. The most powerful nation in the history of the world taxes its most productive citizens in order to shovel more and more slop into its teeming bantu underclass

This is a historical aberration. China or someone else will either spur us out of this degenerate solution by the truth of their example or just blow us out of the water (and by that I mean simply wait for us to commit suicide). I prefer the former outcome, but in any case Gnon theology equips the man who can feel Truth in his balls with the knowledge that ‘this too shall pass away’ if whatever environment he finds himself in is not acting in accordance with Truth.

It’s easy to take the naive antihuman doomer Landian way out by saying ‘it’s all becoming hypertechnocapital bro it’s so over’, but in reality China is very far from that paradigm and forcing a re-equilibration to something far closer to the vision of Heraclitus (PBUH). I can’t stand the idea that Bretton Woods is the end of history, it hasn’t even existed for 100 years, topkek

referenced by: >>3858 >>3862

This is a historical received

gotzendammerung said in #3848 2w ago: received

>>3844
Yes all life decays. Yes the rot is part of the cycle of life. No the rot is not the nature of the tree. The tree should seek the idealized tree-way that wins best as a tree, including against the rot. As this process becomes rational the cycle of these things must be understood and designed for. The particular thing we seem to need at this time in history is a society that rigorously internalizes the laws of life. This is what will be favored by gnon, as the previous meta-evolutionary advances like sex, multicellularity, immune systems, etc were.

referenced by: >>3862

Yes all life decays. received

anon_foro said in #3850 2w ago: received

>>3814
> The laws generalize to societies, conceived as meta-organic selves: societies that tolerate within themselves counter-selective, counter-fertile, non-competitive, and heredity-ignoring processes will degenerate into diseased chaotic mush and be wiped from existence.

I have a few objections:
1) Societies relate to each other analogously to all the ways organisms do. It's certainly possible for one society to become parasitic on another. It may even be possible for one to domesticate another. In such cases the meaning of fitness, selection and competition can change so much as to be inverted from the original.
2) Even if true, the timescale of selection may be on the order of 1K years or more, in which case it will be nearly impossible to draw practical implications.

I have a few objecti received

anon_nivo said in #3858 2w ago: received

>>3846
>This is a historical aberration. China or someone else will either spur us out of this degenerate solution by the truth of their example or just blow us out of the water (and by that I mean simply wait for us to commit suicide). I prefer the former outcome, but in any case Gnon theology equips the man who can feel Truth in his balls with the knowledge that ‘this too shall pass away’ if whatever environment he finds himself in is not acting in accordance with Truth.

I have this sort of argument silly. The Aztec noble saw Tenochtitlan in flames and hoped (should I say felt truth in his balls) "this too shall pass away." Every civilization produces thinkers who claim that what they see is not in accord with natural law, that society has become "unnatural," that the things they dislike, the things that conquer, are "aberrations." This is intellectual cowardice. Gnon is reducible to "winners win." There can be nothing unnatural.

Global American progressive liberalism: my friends, that is Gnon in action. If our standard of right is might, if the good is that which multiplies, then the American memeplex is the greatest of Gnon's children. Nothing in human history compares.

I am not so sure we want Gnon to be our standard.

referenced by: >>3860

I have this sort of received

gotzendammerung said in #3860 2w ago: received

>>3858
You are missing the point. Might is not right. That’s not the conclusion to draw. Consider what happens to life that operates on that ideology. “Oh no this other thing that isn't us is more dominant in this part of the cycle better fold up and surrender to it”. That sort of anatoly karlin thought just wipes itself out, proving its own illegitimacy. Wiping yourself out by self contradiction is proof of your own stupidity, and therefore being strong is not proof of universal rightness. Where do you get the idea that reality demands that you surrender to something that is incompatible with your own form of life just because it is bigger? That’s superstitious bullshit that isn't fit for life.

The lesson of gnon is “live in a pattern fit for life”. You may be convinced by progressivism’s current dominance that its all sound and fine, but i am not, which is why i am not a progressive. It is recognizably a disease condition that is wiping out the host and will leave nothing but smoldering wreckage. It is a forest fire, not a living order. Progressivism could not build the wealth or blood it depends on, nor can it sustainably predate on it. It is a sinking ship and wiser minds are looking for a way out with hope of finding a pattern of life independent of its inevitable doom. We can see very clearly that this will be favored by gnon if it can be created.

We want to build an order that cuts out this particular rot, which is a rot caused by neglecting gnon’s laws of life. If our society formally recognized that to feed wretchedness is to make more of it is to reject life, progressivism would be impossible. Instead we formally recognize the right of every wretched misery to claim a portion from the strong, making growth of life impossible. Gnon’s laws of life are the answer to the central contradiction of our age. Therefore the project is to make this teaching the basis for our new order, and see if we can make it work.

referenced by: >>3862 >>3920 >>3937

You are missing the received

anon_beda said in #3862 2w ago: received

>>3846
I'm calling cope. China is a degenerative Marxist-Leninist-Maoist state, with a bureaucratic superstructure barely hanging on to a wildly unstable industrial base and a fucked-up physical infrastructure build-out. The classical Landian take is that the Chinese Communist Party is desperately trying to contain the forces of techno-capital that they have harnessed in a bid to ensure the survival of Chinese communist hegemony. The property bubble, the current export-driven manufacturing spasm, even Deng's original reform and opening up, are all desperate rearguard attempts to save a fundamentally unstable system.

>>3848
>The tree should seek the idealized tree-way that wins best as a tree, including against the rot.
The tree is already rotting. To try and prevent further rot is profoundly unnatural; it is against the law of Gnon. Nature does not care about the individual, or the individual civilization. This is why it's so incorrect to say, as >>3860 does:
>Might is not right. That’s not the conclusion to draw. Consider what happens to life that operates on that ideology. “Oh no this other thing that isn't us is more dominant in this part of the cycle better fold up and surrender to it”. That sort of anatoly karlin thought just wipes itself out, proving its own illegitimacy.
What Gnon wants is for you to die, for your lifeworld to fade away and be replaced by something more adaptable, more unstructured, more resilient to the shocks of industrial modernity. Gnon does not *care* what you think, whether you choose to face annihilation stoically or die sobbing on your knees. Gnon does not care about you. It does not care about beauty or civilization or any of that. It is a mathematical law that winners win, and that which does not win, no matter how good, is destroyed. Civilization, enlightenment, the long triumph of the Aryan race — all are a flash in the pan, an interlude before the world is subsumed into gibbering technological chaos.

Some of you would benefit from reading Land's Meltdown:
>[[ ]] The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the Human Security System. Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start...
>Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle
cold cultures. Primitivist models have no subversive use.

I'll repeat that once more just to drive the point home: PRIMITIVIST MODELS HAVE NO SUBVERSIVE USE. "You" think that you can somehow harness Gnon, use it to buttress your claims that the West or European civilization or rational thought or strength or beauty is the "right" way to live. Not only is this facile attempt to justify one's own civilizational preferences doomed to fail in the acid bath of late modernity, in the end all that Gnon is doing is using you, using your drive towards exteriority to hasten the dissolution of civilization, of control, of cybernetic constraint. "You" do not matter here.

>Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously

Nick Land already ripped to shreds your desperate hopes to ride out the storm of postmodernity, and he did it in 1994.

referenced by: >>3863 >>3864 >>3865 >>3937 >>3959

I'm calling cope. Ch received

phaedrus said in #3863 1w ago: received

>>3862
100%, I think people are really getting out over their skis in the interpretations of Land that get passed around on here. Might poast a thread about it

100%, I think people received

gotzendammerung said in #3864 1w ago: received

>>3862
>China is a degenerative Marxist-Leninist-Maoist state, with a bureaucratic superstructure barely hanging on to a wildly unstable industrial base... all desperate rearguard attempts to save a fundamentally unstable system.
It's working so far, driving things forward, achieving great life. All life is fundamentally unstable in that way. We temporarily harness explosive positive feedback loops to achieve life. But the positive feedback loops are themselves dependent on the negative-feedback life-orders riding them. Without the harnessing containment, the positive feedback loop flies apart and reverts to chaotic mush. China's doing a fine job at this.

>The tree is already rotting. To try and prevent further rot is profoundly unnatural; it is against the law of Gnon. Nature does not care about the individual, or the individual civilization.
Where did anyone say this thing can be saved in its current incarnation? I'm proposing that the tree drop a new seed with some new tricks. Your dooming horrorism falls flat because no one here hasn't already read and internalized that stuff. Yeah sure everything is mortal and death is part of the cycle. What exactly is this supposed to convince us of?

Does it anger you that the tree escapes its doom of rotting dissolution by dropping a seed that escapes the fate of its ancestors?

>What Gnon wants is for you to die, for your lifeworld to fade away and be replaced by something more adaptable, more unstructured, more resilient to the shocks of industrial modernity.
Sure let's build something more resilient to the shocks of industrial modernity. Sounds fun. Isn't that what we are all talking about here?

>[Gnon] does not care about beauty or civilization or any of that.
Then where did any of that come from?
>all are a flash in the pan, an interlude before the world is subsumed into gibbering technological chaos.
Now you sound like one of those yudkowskian atheists. Yes very acceleration. Much horror. Muh high dimensional hyperbolic divergence etc etc. But that's what it's always been, and life emerges beautifully from that. Beauty and civilization and life are a byproduct of the churning struggle between forms of life. What you atheists always forget is that the struggle is *between forms of life*.

>somehow harness Gnon, use it to buttress your claims that the West or European civilization or rational thought or strength or beauty is the "right" way to live.
Again you misread because you are more determined to be mad than to think. All of those things won and had a strength to them. Yes the particulars will die and be replaced. And yet the example is set, the seeds are strong, and new life will build on those virtues. They aren't uniquely "the" right way to live. But for a while at least they were *a* right way to live, and this whole teeming struggle for life is above all an inductive system. That which has worked is a good bet for that which will work.

There will be civilizations in the future and they will be built on strength, beauty, rational thought, and the Aryan legacy. Do you want to participate in that building or not?

>in the end all that Gnon is doing is using you
Nothing could be more glorious than to be used by God.

>to hasten the dissolution of civilization, of control, of cybernetic constraint.
*this* civilization. *this* control. *this* constraint. Those things are inherent to life. There is no path and no future that isn't powered by control systems.

>he did it in 1994.
And you evidently haven't read any of our thought since then.

It's working so far, received

badmin said in #3865 1w ago: received

>>3862
Very high quality, high IQ response, but I think you're coping even harder. All this talk of balls, well the redbrick horrorist of Warwick has got yours in a vice!

Life is struggle but Gnon does care about me insofar as He made it so that I enjoy the struggle. I will at the very least frolic through your valley of death to the sound of The Beach Boys alongside my sons and the best of men. We may even be able to escape your fetishized meltdown if we interpret God's will well enough. The fact that you provide only these two options in the face of late modernity speaks volumes:
> face annihilation stoically or die sobbing on your knees

The future is not written in stone, and I will certainly not forfeit mine or that of my children to stoicism or sobbing while I reread xenosystems for the hundredth time and proclaim the truth of the amphetaminic prophet's schizobabble. Homo ludens, brother, if Gnon didn't care about beauty or civilization, you and I wouldn't be able to walk barefoot through the grass, watch the sets come in on the beach, see the clouds painted across sky, or listen to the songs of the birds in the woods.

Very high quality, h received

adamjesionowski said in #3868 1w ago: received

If we are to affirm life, and War is the Father of all things, why then Gnon must want us to go to war with red toothed Nature itself, to exterminate parasitism and unnecessary suffering until the lion lies with the lamb, until we remain in sincere childlike wonder throughout unblemished and sinless lives, and this kingdom will have no end.

Have a blessed day Gnon-nons!

referenced by: >>3875 >>3931

If we are to affirm received

phaedrus said in #3875 1w ago: received

>>3868
Anyone who can storm Heaven by force and unseat Gnon would be, ipso facto, Gnon-approved. It’s an interesting play, to say the least…

referenced by: >>3931

Anyone who can storm received

anon_nivo said in #3920 8d ago: received

>>3860
Concur again with beida that this reads as cope, or perhaps wishcasting. Many an Aztec thought the conquistadors more forest fire than living order; Confucians looking at the west described the same thing. So did Confucians looking at the advancing state of Qin 2000 years earlier, for that matter. I am sure if we had records from the peoples subjugated by the Indo-European pulses they would have spoken in similar language. It is quite explicitly the language the early Bolsheviks used to describe capitalism. History is littered with men and movements who saw their world as either a tumorous growth or a burning wreck. History has had little use for any of them.

Your feeling that the world is out of wack means nothing. It is just a feeling, an unease with modernity and all that attends it. It is subjective. Gnon provides an objective rule: what is best is what persists, what multiplies, and what extinguishes all others. You like Gnon because your subjective unease seems to be justified by Gnon's objective standard--but it is only so justified by intellectual contortion. Were some alien to land on this planet and assess who and what Gnon favors, said alien, who would have no particular stake in our aesthetic attachments and would feel no unease with the disgusting spawn of modernity, could only look to what has persisted, what has multiplied, and what has conquered. Liberal capitalism is that thing. In order to deny this reality you must resort to imagination: the image of a future that does not exist, but which you hope does, the world where the fire has burned itself out and the tumor has killed its host. But that is a wish born from disgust. It has nothing to do with Gnon's law.

Nor should it. Perhaps the right thing is not to embrace Gnon but to fight it--to recognize that human civilization, and human excellence, are rare things. They are not inevitable. They are not ordained by the laws of the cosmos. Most things glorious are artificial: we built them, and without conscious commitment they disappear. We fight against entropy,; we do not fight for it. Gnon is the rule of the bacterium. We must find our own way.

referenced by: >>3926 >>3937

Concur again with be received

gs said in #3926 7d ago: received

>>3920
>Perhaps the right thing is not to embrace Gnon but to fight it--to recognize that human civilization, and human excellence, are rare things. They are not inevitable. They are not ordained by the laws of the cosmos. Most things glorious are artificial: we built them, and without conscious commitment they disappear. We fight against entropy,; we do not fight for it.

Precisely. Life exists *despite* the universe and Gnon, not because of it.

As complex life, we're always fighting an uphill battle against Gnon. It's a miracle that we've made it this far (some would even say that we've been suspiciously lucky). And those of us humans of the caliber to consider and ponder these things are even rarer, and fighting an even more uphill battle for our continued existence.

There are no allies in the universe but our own kind. There is no general ideology that will ever serve our interests other than: "Our kind is good and moral. Our kind should exist at the expense of others. Our kind should prosper despite all odds, no matter what it takes."

referenced by: >>3931

Precisely. Life exis received

gotzendammerung said in #3931 7d ago: received

>>3868
>>3875
I'll have to write at some length about why you can't fight against or capture gnon, and what that means. As for parasitism, yes wiping them out is a big part of the game. That's the meaning of immune systems.

>>3926
>Life exists *despite* the universe and Gnon, not because of it.
The other anon had some interesting points though I think his psychologization is misplaced, but this is just retarded. How could life exist despite the universe? The universe is a big fat roast dinner practically designed to fertilize ever higher life and here you guys are saying we have to hate God because people get sick and die? That too is part of the plan. Without death there would be no possibility of change and advancement.

Yes we must fight for existence. That's obviously the meaning of nature to any who care to look. But how do you get from this to fighting *against* nature? No. You want to fight with nature against things that aren't going to work.

referenced by: >>3935 >>3937

I'll have to write a received

gs said in #3935 7d ago: received

>>3931
The universe is extremely hostile to life. We've never encountered any evidence suggesting that life exists outside of Earth. It took billions of years to get from single-celled life to multi-cellular life, and there was no guarantee that it would ever happen at all. There are countless things that could go wrong that would destroy higher life on Earth or even all life entirely. We might even destroy ourselves!

I'm sympathetic to the ideals that you've laid out in this thread, but I think you're trying to make Gnon into something it's not. Even when it comes to biological life, Gnon's Champion is a lot closer to bacteria than it is to a 6'3" 200 IQ Aryan Beast with A10s. Gnon is not our ally.

referenced by: >>3937

The universe is extr received

anon_kacu said in #3937 7d ago: received

>>3935 >>3862 >>3931 >>3920 >>3860
One thing I fail to understand is what exactly we are talking about when we speak of Gnon wanting this or wanting that or favoring this or favoring that. If Gnon is a law of the universe, or something like a mathematical principle, like gravitational attraction, then all existing things will naturally accord perfectly with Gnon. If Gnon is a kind of emergent, maybe hyperstitial being that actually has a will, then we're right back into the kind of onto-theology that Land is always railing against.

If Gnon is simply the word that we're using for a certain kind of patterned local reduction in entropy, then not only is 99% of this discussion unmoored from the actual physical facts at hand, but any discussion of wanting to act for/against Gnon is inevitably back into onto-theology yet again.

Checking in Xenosystems, it seems that Land is using Gnon as a kind of stand-in for God, or an implicit deification of the absence thereof. Maybe I just don't understand him, but it all feels both a little weird and sloppy and a departure from Land's characteristic maximal atheism, which he draws from Schopenhauerian pessimism.

(Cf. TFA, page 9:
>Pessimism is not a value logically separable from an independent metaphysics, because the logical value of identity is itself a comfort of which pessimism destitutes us, whilst a metaphysics of the will subverts the autonomy or separability of value questions. In this sense, pessimism is the first truly transcendental critique, operated against being, and in particular against the highest being, by the impersonal negativity of time or denial.)

referenced by: >>3938 >>3939 >>3953 >>3971

One thing I fail to received

phaedrus said in #3938 7d ago: received

>>3937
Drilling in further on the gnon-question, it seems worth dwelling on the way Heidegger is used here:
>Heidegger comes close to glimpsing Gnon, by noting that ‘God’ is not a philosophically satisfactory response to the Question of Being. Since Heidegger’s principal legacy is the acknowledgment that we don’t yet know how to formulate the Question of Being, this insight achieves limited penetration. What it captures, however, is the philosophical affinity of Gnon, whose yawn is a space of thought beyond faith and infidelity. Neither God nor Un-God adds fundamental ontological information, unless from out of the occulted depths of Gnon.

This feels a bit slapdash, as if Land is trying to affirm the Heideggerian doctrine that the being of being is not itself a being. And yet, in the rest of Xenosystems and in the broad Landian usage, "Gnon" comes to resemble a real intervention or pattern in "ontic" reality.

>Neither God nor Un-God adds fundamental ontological information, unless from out of the occulted depths of Gnon.

Where "is" Gnon really, in being or behind it?

Drilling in further received

anon_xyki said in #3939 7d ago: received

>>3937
> One thing I fail to understand is what exactly we are talking about when we speak of Gnon wanting this or wanting that or favoring this or favoring that.

I take Gnon to be the highest level pattern implicit in the laws of physics, but not practically derivable from them.

As a mid-level analogy, take biochemistry. Most of us assume that biochemistry is, in some sense, reduceable to fundamental physics. But because of its mathematical complexity, nobody has every literally done that reduction. It would be computationally intractable to literally derive equations of organic chemistry from the Standard Model of quantum mechanics. Instead, we reason informally that it is so.

Gnon is the highest level of such patterns.

I take Gnon to be th received

gs said in #3953 6d ago: received

>>3937
I understand Gnon to be The-Universe-As-It-Actually-Is-In-Reality. "Nature's God" in Land's words. This is contrasted with the idea of God as a supreme being or essence or force who sits apart from and above (and who created) the universe that we live in. The meaningful differences are that 1. Gnon for sure exists whether we want to or do "believe in" Him or not, 2. We can't derive moral values from Gnon (we could receive them from God, if He existed)

OP >>3814
is trying to derive moral values from Gnon, but I don't think this is possible. In his own words: "Gnon-theology is an oxymoron." I agree. But I'm also not sure why he would need to do this in the first place. His personal value system (I think I have a pretty good gist of it) is already convincing and attractive on its own merits. Why is it necessary to try to shoehorn Gnon into it?

referenced by: >>3963 >>3972

I understand Gnon to received

gs said in #3959 6d ago: received

>>3956
>Lol. What OP actually said is "the idea that applied Gnon-theology is an oxymoron is an unsatisfying non-answer"

Quoting the middle of someone's sentence in order to flip the meaning is a juvenile trick. We don't do that here. If it happens again you will be required to SELF-DEPORT. Consider this your warning.

I was agreeing with the OP's analysis leading up to that sentence, summarized by the statement I quoted, which I personally believe is accurate and which I agree with. I wasn't trying to mis-represent his personal beliefs on the matter, which contrast with that conclusion, and which he goes on to clarify after that sentence. In general, I agree with his value system, and I'm definitely not trying to attack it. I just disagree that it makes sense to try to tie it into Gnon.

The point I was trying to make, and maybe I've done a poor job of explaining it, is that what is good and desirable for Us as our very specific group of monkeys (currently) is not necessarily going to line up with what is optimal per the Law of Gnon (in fact, it almost certainly won't). I think >>3862 did a pretty good job of making this point. We're actually fighting against the current.

We have to choose our own values which necessarily define Us. We can't outsource them to Gnon.

referenced by: >>3972

Quoting the middle o received

anon_ceky said in #3963 6d ago: received

>>3953

> This is contrasted with the idea of God as a supreme being or essence or force who sits apart from and above (and who created) the universe that we live in

The concept of Gnon includes that possibility.

It stands for "Nature Or Nature's God", a form of agnosticism regarding the existence of a supreme being.

We observe:
1. There may be a Creator or Simulator of some kind outside of our world--for shorthand, "Nature's God"
2. Or Nature itself may be the highest structure that exists.
3. There is no direct way for us to measure or tell from the inside. So, we must admit uncertainty: Nature or Nature's God

The key is that either way, Gnon has rules for us to discover and learn. As OP put it, "Gnon, once reified, becomes subject to inquiry. Inquiry yields definite properties."

> OP is trying to derive moral values from Gnon, but I don't think this is possible.

It is absolutely possible. Nature has deep and subtle lessons for us. It does not hand us prepackaged value judgements or simple numbered rules to follow, but it is also not a void of infinite relativism.

Consider the Wolf. A symbol of evil in many primitive traditions, contrasted with the "good" of prey animals such as the lamb.

But with modern science and technology, we can understand them much better. Watch an Attenborough documentary. Watch videos from a wolf sanctuary. Read a paper. We have it all in HD today.

You will find a magnificent animal with an substantial moral lexicon. Carefully calibrated aggression, balanced against cooperation and submission. Sacrifice for the pack, balanced against assertion of the individual. Succession, the yielding of leadership to a stronger successor. Resource sharing. Nurture and education of the young. Protection. Bonding. All accomplished without speaking a single word.

Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but that's not the whole story. The brutal reality of Darwinist competition is not in opposition to higher life, but rather the *substrate that gives rise to higher life*.

This is what it means to derive moral values from Gnon. It means studying nature and human nature deeply to understand works and what does not. What emerges are subtler, more correct, more balanced forms of the traditional directives. To be truthful (by default), to be merciful (to your Schmittian friend group, which includes rivals but not hostiles), to be graceful in victory, to persevere in defeat and so on. Less "turn the other cheek", more iterated-tit-for-tat. And of course, to be fruitful and multiply.

referenced by: >>3968

The concept of Gnon received

phaedrus said in #3968 6d ago: received

>>3963
>OP is trying to derive [normative] moral values from [the positive fact of] Gnon, but I don't think this is possible.

The is/ought gap is a classic feature of analytic philosophy going back to Hume, and I think OP should elaborate further on how exactly he proposes that we cross it. Here's the posited solution:

>Gnon commands, but why should we obey? The answer is simple: we affirm that life is good. It would be a crime to allow it to succumb to such degeneration. This is only even a question because it is asked "on our behalf" by the agents of the disease. Of course, those who benefit from sickness would have an interest in confusing our idea of health. The more practical question is why we should listen to them.

The second half is a diversion, but the initial affirmation is interesting. "We affirm that life is good. The inherent teleology of life is Gnon. Therefore, Gnon is (the) Good."

I addressed this point at length a couple of weeks ago in >>3515, specifically the bait and switch between the particular human life that we implicitly affirm in our day-to-day lives and the abstract "life" that unfolds at a gnonic/cosmic level.

In >>3518, Xenohumanist responds for the Gnonic faction, arguing:
>You are right to separate our particular likes from the abstract value of life overall. I think they are deeply connected and even identical, but they are at least different aspects of the same elephant. But you seem to think they are in conflict, which is why I accuse you of atheism. I don't think they can be in conflict*

I think this idea, that there is a *strong identity* between the particular and concrete goods of our own lives and the universal and abstract goods of the unfolding of Gnon, is something Xenohumanist and Gotzendammerung ought to put more time into defending. Does Gnon exist *as* particular entities and species existing in the world? The people call out for a theoretical definition of Gnon that is neither underspecified nor exclusive of the particulars of human life.

*XH goes on to give a case against death-anxiety which is entirely correct, but tangent to the real heart of the matter (the "universals vs particulars" question)

referenced by: >>3979

The is/ought gap is received

gotzendammerung said in #3971 6d ago: received

>>3937
>what exactly we are talking about when we speak of Gnon wanting this or wanting that or favoring this or favoring that.
Good question. The point of Gnon theology is to posit this ontologically minimal divine-like moral authority and then inductively reconstruct "what does it seem to want?" Basically "suppose there was telos in the cosmos and life, what would it be?"

When we observe that life appears to be favored thermodynamically etc, that is a clue. When we observe directionality in evolution, that is a clue. When we observe that some lifestyles fail and others become the substrate for powerful future life, that is a clue. "imagine there were objective moral commandments enforced through reality itself. what would that look like?".

Thinking this through is clarifying for me. There is another way you could take this, which is let's say a "model free gnon theology", which is just the observation that reality exists and things that exist must have been favored by nature by definition. This is totally unhelpful, as many people in these threads have pointed out. The alternative I'm describing above is "morally inductive gnon theology", which is to say I think that one should *apply an inductive prior to discern the will of gnon formulated as moral command*.

One does not have to do this. Just as one does not have to apply an inductive prior to our factual observations to form physical theory. You can go through life "model free" so to speak, though this is a rather impoverished epistemology. The discovery by newton et al that one could apply a unified inductive prior to all of nature and thus come to a unified theory was novel, not necessarily intuitive, and explosive. What we're proposing with Gnon theology is that we can do the same not just with the behavior of the natural world, but with the will of (minimally specified) God. The leap of faith is that there exists a simple positive description of the will of God that doesn't just indirect to pass the buck to existing reality, but actively predicts it.

So all those clues above add up to a *worldview* that one inducts from the inferred rules and enforcement mechanisms.

If this induction fails to compress "moral reality" then it has failed and Gnon theology is useless. This is the empirical test of it. But I think it actually *does* compress moral reality, which makes Gnon theology an extremely elegant and charismatic approach for me.

Good question. The p received

gotzendammerung said in #3972 6d ago: received

>>3953
I think given your separation between reality-as-it-exists and the will of any divinity outside reality, it's reasonable to take your position. But I don't think they can be actually separated. Surely a creator god would design reality with intent. Therefore we should be able to learn of this intent by studying the "embedded intent" of reality despite having no foundation for knowledge of the outside-divine. The positive claim of Gnon theology is that we can and should actually do this, by first postulating an ontologically minimal or disjunctive "maximum entropy" divinity, "Nature or Nature's God, and then asking "what authoritative intent do we observe from this god, if any". As far as i can tell, this does actually work and we do end up with a (limited) appreciation of The Way of God, which we can then decide whether or not to align to, etc.

>His personal value system (I think I have a pretty good gist of it) is already convincing and attractive on its own merits. Why is it necessary to try to shoehorn Gnon into it?
The reason I'm interested in this whole Gnon business is that without something authoritative outside ourselves, our normative reference point is just the circular fact of our own current values, which I find deeply unsatisfying. Furthermore, even if we solve this by grounding ourselves in some external concept like "higher life" or "civilization", we have to know our strategic position with respect to reality: is reality an ally in that, or a horrifying Outside? On examination I find that much of it is horrifying from a certain perspective, and some of it is beautiful and comforting. On much reflection I find that the latter parts which have the reality principle as their ally are a satisfying and sufficient basis for a worldview. If you find my worldview convincing, all credit goes to Gnon for baking it into reality for us to discover.

>>3959
>what is good and desirable for Us as our very specific group of monkeys (currently) is not necessarily going to line up with what is optimal per the Law of Gnon (in fact, it almost certainly won't).
So this brings in an important point. I actually agree that what we might call the "general" will of gnon is not going to line up with us and our particulars, and our particulars cannot be derived from it, and that our particular "values" are nonetheless good and right for us. It is therefore important that we fight for our own pattern of life etc. So I don't disagree with you there.

But then when we take that idea back and query the will of gnon about whether we should behave like that, well the answer comes back that the general will of gnon supports such particularist behavior. In fact the whole system depends on it! Particularism is unambiguously the will of gnon: every life form must and should pursue its own flourishing (or it will be wiped from existence). The question is then the relationship between the general and particular.

The relationship is this: the particular form of life is a hypothesis about how the general will of gnon shall be fulfilled. There must be many of them, and they must cooperate and compete to flesh out the whole picture. Each hypothesis must take its own premises on faith and pursue them without apology. This is the will of gnon.

So no we can't fully outsource, but we can ground our particulars in the larger value story gnon is weaving.

referenced by: >>3979

I think given your s received

gs said in #3979 6d ago: received

>>3972
This post and >>3968 do a good job of drilling down the clarification of applying Gnon "theology" to our particular form of human life in order to guide ourselves, rather than trying to treat The Law Of Gnon as a blanket general prescription. I think that's what most of the disagreement in this thread has been about, rather than the actual merits of the proposed theology itself. Tbh this was probably implicit in the OP and I just didn't think about it hard enough.

I don't necessarily have a problem with deriving an 'ought' from an 'is.' I just don't think that we gain anything of substance by trying to pretend like we're deriving these values from Gnon specifically. What we really want is for our own kind to flourish and succeed and Win. That's our actual moral value system, which doesn't come from anywhere but our own identity and self-interest. That's what actually informs our planning and actions. What exactly do we gain by pointing out that this has limited overlap with Gnon's Will?

In the OP >>3814 , you say:
>This brings us to our particular situation in history. In the abstract we know from the simple laws of nature what a healthy outlook and a healthy society must look like, and we know we don't live in one. But the trail seems to go cold when we ask "what is to be done?"

What we need to do is to define who "us" is, and then act in our self-interest in order to flourish and succeed and Win. It's as simple as that. I know it might seem pedantic to put it this way, but I think it's actually important to stick to this simple and explicit framing, rather than trying to outsource justification for our self-interest to The Laws Of The Universe etc. The reason why we're mired in this degenerate nihilistic age in the first place is because we've become convinced that there has to be some kind of abstract justification for acting in our own self-interest. It's a self-defeating trap to think this way. The only way out is to convince the rest of our kind that yes, ackshually, the point of life is for our kind to win and become the best that we can be, And That's A Good Thing.

I suppose if you want a Gnon-Approved version of this answer, I can point out that this orientation is what's shared by every other animal and form of life, including a large portion of the rest of our "fellow humans." None of them have ever needed abstract justification for straightforwardly believing in and pursuing their own self-interest. They seem to be doing just fine without it. It's only a very particular group of humans who seem to have "lost faith." We should take the cue from Gnon and go back to Doing What Works.

We can use our knowledge of Gnon's Laws to help ourselves make practical decisions, but I don't think it makes sense to try to derive or frame our moral values as Gnon's Law.

referenced by: >>3980 >>3985

This post and >>3968 received

gotzendammerung said in #3985 5d ago: received

>>3979
>What we really want is for our own kind to flourish and succeed and Win. That's our actual moral value system, which doesn't come from anywhere but our own identity and self-interest.
As I mentioned in the other thread a serious worldview must be backed by more than mere assertion. On what basis and to what extent is group self-interest a valid principle? If we're not caring to actually back this up and enforce worldview rigor around any particular logic, then it's just one more vague irrational motivation in a political big tent with no structure, we've ceded the whole domain of philosophy to our enemies, and we run into intractable internal disagreements about things like preserving the self vs overcoming the self.

It is a common hallucination of pragmatists that you don't need to actually have a rigorous worldview, and everything can be done with arational coalition-making. But every serious attempt at civilization-building has put a great deal of effort into defining how they actually see the world and why. This is for good reason: it defines the space of legitimate thought and motivation which gives structure to the society that they create.

Why Gnon in particular? Because conditions at our time in history give us:
a) widespread pre-existing belief in the scientific worldview, which has proven extremely strong and valuable,
b) a civilization failing for lack of formal belief in what we might call a "naturalistic" worldview about race, moral priorities, etc,
c) relatively straightforward argument from the scientific worldview of a to the naturalistic worldview demanded by b, if we are willing to argue the normativity and particulars.
"Gnon" is just one convenient handle for the center of a worldview that connects these dots. There are other ways to do it and I'm sure we will get better concepts as we work it out, but you would be a fool not to do it somehow.

>The reason why we're mired in this degenerate nihilistic age in the first place is because we've become convinced that there has to be some kind of abstract justification for acting in our own self-interest.
The commitment to transcendental ideals beyond the petty self has been to the strength and credit of western peoples for a very long time and isn't going anywhere. Our recent error is in accepting ideals that are incompatible with life and civilization, for lack of any worldview which does the work to refute the superstitions of the moralists and ground our projects in higher laws. You do not solve that by ceding the field of philosophy to dishonest moralists whose main motivation is to destroy you and redistribute your wealth and women to their wretched lackeys. You solve it by honestly making the transcendent case for the normativity of collective life affirmation and a naturalistic worldview.

Your solution is is to become yet another clade of grasping irrational ethnoids who think of nothing but "muh peepo". This is an uncharismatic reversion to the default slop hueman. We are not that and cannot and should not live like that. The cases of actual collective flourishing we have in our history look nothing like that. Actually they tended to be rigorous transcendental projects that derived their own worth from something beyond themselves that they were living up to.

As I mentioned in th received

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