Sixteen Volts

I find it a bit difficult to place myself on the political map. For this purpose, I should perhaps look into people I currently consider my intellectual influences.

First of all, there is no denying that of all people, The Danimal is my all-time intellectual influence numero uno. An original thinker whose style and opinions and rhetoric are vastly different from anything else that I have seen, his writings have shaped me during all these years so much that had I never encountered them, I would be ideologically a totally different person. You could remove any other thinker or writer from my reading history and I wouldn't change much from this omission, but without The Danimal, this blog and the essays that you read here would not even exist. I don't think that I can write one paragraph that is not a faint echo of something that I have once read of him.

But here is something that I realized only recently. Since I have spent a lot of time tracking down the lifetime production of The Danimal usings Google Groups and collecting and archiving his individual ideas and arguments, I would like to think that I have a pretty good idea about how this guy thinks and what his overall ideological landscape is like. But get this: I still don't have a faintest idea how he votes. The best that I can say is that it depends on what particular issues the Democrat and Republican candidates emphasize in his electoral district.

For this reason, I think that it's funny how some people posture that they are "neither left or right". (This was actually one of the points in the hilarious list "That 90s Sham" that lists the 90 stupidest things and phenomena of the nineties.) Once that I have really seen a guy who would really get to say that he is neither left or right, a man who really is outside and above the whole left-right political axis, all others trying to make the same claim don't really come up as anything but silly posturers.

The situation gets a lot clearer if I list the writers who are my daily reads and whose ideas and politics I have grown to agree with and who I look up to as writers and thinkers far superior to me. Let's see: Steve Sailer, Steve Dutch (what is it with the name "Steve"?), Fred Reed, Lawrence Auster and Theodore Dalrymple. Notice anything in common? Each man is a rock-solid conservative, but none is a Bush administration cheerleader (although I don't know how this concept would even apply to Dalrymple), and a few are actually stern opponents. In fact, one of messages that I tried to relay in my Finnish blog to my readers there is that conservatism does not necessarily equal being a Bush administration stooge. And I do know for a fact that thanks to my linking, several Finns have become Fred Reed fans.

I would really want to see a liberal thinker and writer who is at the same level as these men. This is not any kind of sarcasm or irony or mockery, but an honest plea: somebody point out to me such a thinker-writer and I will immediately drop everything else and go read through his whole production.

I also hold one Finnish blogger as my intellectual superior to the extent that if I had to choose either to read only him or only the rest of the Finnish blogosphere but not him, I would choose him without slightest hesitation. His blog is currently called "Flying Cheese", when it earlier used to be called "Tommy Bomb", after his own name. His best work from years ago has for some reason since vanished from the public view, which I think is quite a loss. And don't let the whimsy name of the blog distract you: this stoic guy is one of the most original and brilliant thinkers that I have ever seen in his very hemingwayesque simplicity. Perhaps I should some day translate some of his best paragraphs and articles to English for my international readers, if I get his permission to do so. Oh heck, here's a sample:

I was surprised that the movie King Kong didn't really evoke any sympathy in me. I thought the ape and the blonde were annoying characters. I felt satisfaction when the biplanes, themselves the high-end products of the natural science of that era, shot down the rampaging ape and prevented it from ruining the classic of Art Deco architecture. I sympathized most with the movie director and the sea captain. I explained my opinion on phone after leaving the theater, but was considered silly. Perhaps it was the artistic effect that the movie aimed for. The capitalist sure is smart.

I read an issue of Donald Duck. In the first story, Daisy tries to read Donald's diary. She is disappointed since the book only contains football statistics. During the story, Donald keeps making new friends with other people who also value football trivia. I don't know whether Daisy understands that when she observes these men predicting future scores, she is finally observing pure emotion.

At the end of the story she doesn't seem to understand that true freedom and enjoyment can only be reached in a state where nobody has interests or demands. In a state where everything is only what it is and nobody begs, threatens, forms alliances or pays. Beauty is when you don't have to imagine something to be something else. This is the core of aesthetics.

Perhaps some people are forever expelled from paradise. Genes won't let them go anywhere without worry about the success of their own flesh, market value and well-being. Listening to someone you can soon tell whether he is doomed to be a slave of his corporal form. I feel sorry for some people when I see how joyless, performance-oriented and prone to conflict they can turn even the most harmless leisure activities such as dating and barhopping.

My whole youth I had to listen to such bad and intellectually dishonest criticism towards the belief of technological progress that I still don't see anything wrong in general hostility towards all old ideological garbage. Or in the idea that ultimately the only way to solve problems is to convert them to numbers and let the scientists in their horn-rimmed glasses and white lab coats to input them to the computer, and then believe the result after checking that it was computed correctly.

The whole culture is just an unnecessary and harmful piece of memetic trash between the practical everyday knowledge and the global mass of data. We should let cultures die. Even today, in everyday speech "culture" is something possessed by groups that have to prove that one of their members actually works and doesn't steal that much. Decent people have no need for culture, and no wonder: in the end, culture means that a group is trying to prevent its members from acquiring information and make them reject even the little that seeps through.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 12:01 PM