Another, very interesting quote from Ray Peat on the subjec…

Another, very interesting quote from Ray Peat on the subject of Authoritarianism and negation:
Our surrounding context of language and culture is constantly distorting and misinterpreting anything which persists in moving toward a more expansive life. Knowledge, a physiological thing, is expansion, and as such is always clearing away errors; when people identify with error, they see knowledge as the deadly enemy, that must be destroyed.

Blake’s idea of the “intellectual fountain” was very different from the attitude of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (where “Will” or assertion was the fundamental reality). Blake saw it as always flowing into new territory, discovering new things, enlivening the world that’s being discovered-created. When the organism is traumatized, it hardens, and stops developing, and wants to impose its moral hardness everywhere; assertiveness is the antithesis of perceptive life, and devises ways to negate it.

In an authoritarian culture, people want you to forget who you are, so they can implant themselves without resistance. Just recognizing your own presence, to attend to them fully, is something they don’t expect; it isn’t quite like Carl Rogers’ therapeutic presence, because it’s conditional–your conscious presence is the condition. Being present and able to listen (and question and understand)* is receptive and productive, and it can even be disruptive, but it’s very different from being assertive, because it’s always hoping to open up new possibilities, rather than imposing something carried along from the past. A priest is being assertive when he says you have to take it on faith, a physics professor is being assertive when he won’t justify his assumptions–where would physics be if your assumptions had to be plausible beyond a particular culture of physics? Much of their potential imagination has been invested in thinking of ways to keep you from questioning.

Physics, in the 20th century, has taken on the Nietzchean subjectivism, claiming to quantize/digitize everything. There is no digital nature, but assertive subjectivism has effectively written quantization into the constitution of science, and into the shadow of the humanities that remains in the corporate universities. Bits of “knowledge” are sold and hoarded, and people who would show that they are something other than knowledge are treated as vandals and worse–Aaron Swartz, for example. - Ray Peat PhD