Culture

Never compromise on love. It’s the only thing that isn’t bullshit.

Chateau Heartiste

The quote above is from the now-defunct blog Chateau Heartiste. It was mostly about how to get laid. As distasteful as that is, there are lots of magazines, books (ancient and modern), seminars, and poems about this. I found it in like 2008 when thinking about existentialism and love and doing some google searches. Since then, I rediscovered the site while working as a research assistant on a project examining 3rd wave feminism. The chateau, due to the author’s preference for spending private time with the fairer sex, had discovered the ugly underbelly of a feminist society. And as a near-nihilist (he wasn’t totally, see the above quote), he managed to view the sociology of sexuality from a perspective geared almost entirely toward cause and effect. His insights were eloquently and inappropriately put, but they were accurate frequently. All of that is to say, his posts over the years gave modern vendors of BS several reasons to suspend his blog. But it wasn’t until he posted the what you find below, that his blog was taken from him:

C.S. Lewis wrote about this issue decades ago:

Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man…We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers — a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians — a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.
The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?

C.S. Lewis

In a world of sweet youtube videos, infinite porn, cheap Netflix, and pervasive surveillance tools in our own pockets are we losing the ability to have and express our own thoughts?