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Generative cultural practices

anon_semy said in #3822 2w ago: received

There's much discussion here about generative/vital/wholesome philosophy, but humans do much more than abstractly embody values - they concretely eat, move, play music, take vacations, etc. I am wondering about best practices for these aspects of culture. What sport should I play if I am to be a good sofiechanner? How should I dress? Etc. I'll give some thoughts below on what I think supports a healthy human and family, but I'd like to hear what you all think.

Diet: I am an American, without what I would consider a coherent culinary tradition. I have been eating something like a meat + roots, milk + fruit diet, but this lacks the richness that will draw in a crowd of family members on a holiday. Perhaps I need a French cookbook to draw seasoning inspiration from. I am not such a powerful patriarch that I can institute a spartan diet on Thanksgiving!

Movement: sitting on the floor, sleeping on the floor, walking everywhere feasible. Dancing at parties, adventuring with friends, wrestling at barbecues. A yoga/gymnastics/calisthenics practice.

Music: I don't listen to much music, but all the lyrics I hear are either a distraction from the good life or are outright evil. Aside from hymns, is there any virtuous music out there? Or is the best I can do on this front to listen to and play purely instrumental pieces?

Visual art: a focus on bodybuilding, fashion, interior decorating, and gardening strikes me as much more useful than spending one's time taking photos or painting. I'd rather have a nice aloe plant in my house than one of Van Gogh's cypresses.

Literature: reading fiction can be overdone; there is a failure mode for young avid readers in which their social training data comes mostly from books rather than real life. And The Odyssey is great, but Undaunted Courage (on the Lewis and Clark expedition) was real. And I'm not sure the ROI on reading hundreds of pages of Homer is so good compared to memorizing the sixteen lines of Invictus. I lean towards family read-alouds and skits as the most useful way to engage with fiction, far better than simple consumption.

Vacations: surely one must visit their family and friends, rather than go to Disney World, but what do you do together? Normies aren't always up for barn raisings and scaling Mt Whitney. This is a problem for which I have very little answer, as the less ideologically aligned your relations, the harder it is to find mutually agreeable activities for an extended time.

referenced by: >>3827 >>3841

There's much discuss received

anon_hytu said in #3827 2w ago: received

>>3822
> What sport should I play if I am to be a good sofiechanner? How should I dress?
Uh oh are we a cult? Ok let’s play cult.

Sports: rugby, boxing, jiu jitsu, judo, hunting, and alpinism. Mixture of gentleman and thug, japanese, english, and austrian. Cultivate a gentlemanly physical capacity for personal and collective violence. The body is a weapon and a vehicle. Keep it sharp and well tuned if it is not to degenerate, as the body is the foundation of the mind and soul.

Diet: the philosopher’s diet >>1612: mostly meat, milk, fruit. Minimize starch. Never very much. If you want to go full spartan: melas zomos. Black soup. One pot roasts with salt, vinegar, and blood. Getting the women to cooperate is left as an exercise to the reader. They love nothing more than baking cookies, the absolute opposite of the philosopher’s diet. Woman is the ultimate gains goblin.

Since you mention it, sleeping on the floor is pretty good once you get used to it. I have no experience of yoga etc. Much of this movement stuff is covered in sports above. Lift weights as well i guess.

On fiction and reading i agree. This is your formative training data. Focus on the true, the informative, and the inspiring. Things that are old become more true simply because they are outside of our own fiction bubble and come to represent a whole canonical tradition that is a real thing to be understood. Lots of reasons to read homer as his work hits almost all of these. Similarly the bible.

When travelling even visiting normie family, find and climb the nearby places of natural power. This is what my dad does. But yes if not ideologically synced, hard to do much more than eat.

referenced by: >>3838

Uh oh are we a cult? received

anon_wuco said in #3828 2w ago: received

Ruminations on music and painting: How the mind processes music and emotions is very closely coupled and listening to classical music with attention seems to elicit various emotions in a lot of people. A pretty obvious hypothesis is that you can use music to share the same or at least very similar emotional states in multiple people. Bringing people in the right emotional state may make them more perceptive to various claims, ideas or stories (hymns). Various people use music as motivation or as boost for their productivity. Another useful usage in the past was to hype up warriors for war.

Paintings and visual arts go along the same lines where good art is supposed to elicit various perceptive states in you.

Good music and visual art broadens the state space you are occupying on a daily basis. You can probably have debates on how useful it is to go through various emotional and perceptive states which you do not encounter very much or at all in your daily life but this for me seems to be one of the main reasons for them. Basically sharing various conscious states.

Are there conscious states which encapsulate the idea of a sofiechanner? F.e. >>3704 used a photo to try to share the anons perceptive state. There are probably paintings which would more accurately let you get into the same conscious state as the anon.

referenced by: >>3838

Ruminations on music received

anon_semy said in #3838 2w ago: received

>>3827 I do think people differ a great deal in the amount of rough exercise they can tolerate before tendonitis, joint irritation, etc set in; this is evident in professional sports where some athletes never miss a game and others can hardly stay on the field. So I view your list of sports as more of an aspirational mix than something that is likely to work for most. Every great exertion should be paired with something rehabilitative, preferably at the hands of one's wife. Close the positive feedback loop, if you will.

>>3828 So what art should I hang in my dining room to invoke family harmony? Rockwell's "Freedom from Want" fits the bill but it just feels silly to have a painting of anonymous strangers hanging in the home. Perhaps candids of the whole family are more suitable, as a collective reminder of what we can be together.

>>3828 So what art s received

anon_lava said in #3841 2w ago: received

>>3822
Backpacking is an incredible experience, and it’s done wonders for my intellectual development. There’s something about making very raw contact with the order of the natural world.

Another thing that people, in my opinion, underrate is the importance of parties and a general social milieu. Obviously, being able to talk to interesting people at a cocktail party is fun, but I think it is also very important for intellectual development to be able to rub off against other like-minded individuals, both pointing one's own intellectual development in promising directions and illuminating one's weak points.

Backpacking is an in received

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