On Fatalism and War

Hi guys :D

I was browsing through my documents and found a short essay, written during my friends and I travel trip. The essay was written in the winter off 2016, on the cruise ship on board for the France port. I can recall that during the time, the world was ablaze with the news regarding the erupting battle in Aleppo. And, of course, some of the people quoted a few Hadith here and there regarding the prophecy of the Great War (al-Malhamah al-Kubra), how the Mahdi roused the Muslims and defeat the infidels et cetera et nauseum. I can't remember wholly the full hadith, but the essay was written in such context.

It is important to note that any of the essays are of experimental values, for I realised that it is a loss for anybody to concede to an idea in the early years and forsake the reading of other ideas, in favour of stability and docility. The points elaborated here in the essay were conceived in me being so steeped in Jungian and Franklian's ideas, it reeks so much. I abandoned most of ideas in the body in light of new ideas and milestones. As Keynes once jeered for him changing his ideas, he retorted, "When the facts change, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sirs?"

And so, here you go, the essay On Fatalism and War. (The italics are of a later edition)

It is normal for the self to remain dormant, like a stagnant pool; only to be shaken when someone creates a ripple by throwing a stone in it. The stone could be of any size and any shape, thrown in any time but it is in the only time the stone thrown that it will create a massive ripple. Out from nowhere, the stagnant pool shudders and roared back. The colour of the pool changed; you can always see your reflection in it all this while, but now it is the colour of silt and dirt. And when the ripple has ceased, like every surge of energy, it will reach an equilibrium and gone to the wind; the pool thus returns to its stagnant state.

An important note; that this is not a critical essay on the attitudes of the fatalists of our age.  This is only a monologue regarding the whims and action of a stagnant pool. Why bother turning our time to the ever-changing action of man while we can stare to a pool all day long, with lesser headache and debating?

The self will default to a relaxed and calm state as no man can retain long trains of complex feelings or thoughts without getting drained. Norms and etiquettes and laws of energy decreed that man should be dormant and stable. He will treat his everyday as indeed just another day and details are unseen except when he channeled himself to commit, as in the case of everyday challenge and burdens.

But then, lo and behold, someone throw a stone into the pool. And what a great ripple it made. Thus, with just a single but great ripple, the pool has forgotten the small ripples created everyday or every week by the rains or wind as it is more expedient to grasp and elaborate on a single major event than the many minor events. The pond is intrinsically prone to polemics. It is more worthwhile in the terms of energy spent and the feedback received. Even in social interactions there are strict application of rules of supply and demand, this capitalism of polemics.

Now let us observe on the mechanism of effect of the ripple to the pond. The pond would not regard the normalized ripples of raindrops as an important event because the self registered it as a part of self.  The body would only respond to something alien, to a new unlocked experience. The alien experience creates such a large magnitude of a response that can be compared as the response of antibodies to non-self particles. The feeling of fear or heightened interest upon the alien experience is due to the channeling of libido from the orbit of unconsciousness to consciousness. Archetypes are unlocked and as a defence mechanism, libido is expanded to explore and to normalize the experience.

The archetype of a battle to end every battle is present in many cultures and religion. The Nordic notion of Ragnarok is then echoed throughout the ages and millennia as the Apocalypse, Malhamah al-Kubra and also the World War. It is somewhat ironic when the self-proclaimed kings of consciousness in the modern era, during the onset of World War I said that “it will be a war to end all wars”, which again echoes the Ragnarok archetype. Yet, even in the end of Ragnarok, this mythical "war to end all wars", yet another beginning sprouted. Can we ever comprehend what an end really means?

The presence of a continuum of understanding must not be immediately subjugated to a doctrine of pluralism. The presence of such a uniformed expression of thought in cultures or what Adolf Bastian termed as “Elementergedanke” is actually pointing the intricate and weaving of experiences shared among humankind as a species, producing a galactic-sized beauty of a tapestry. We must calibrate our understanding to not shudder at every effort to bring humans together as an undercover act of Satan, but as a chance to reconcile the already fragmented people of our species. It is in this time of woes and agony, the right time for us to reconcile the fragments together.

The Ragnarok archetype along with other archetypes that reflect distance and depth are a complex and sophisticated product of culture. The archetypes reflecting distance enabled us to form a perspective of future, and when every two parallel lines extrapolated to the horizon, they will converge to a meeting point at the far line of sight; an end. This distinguished character of futuristic belief will naturally give birth to an end, and it doesn’t have to be entirely fatalistic or grim. But as the archetype of future events produces the feeling of end, it also creates the perspective of depth. Depth and distance creates a path to the meeting point and naturally the woes of life will ultimately give birth to the feelings of sorrow and existential thinking.

The archetypes in the aforementioned categories are also a late product of consciousness. The Greeks, for an instance, have primitive sense of future, or even time. Oswald Spengler noticed it through Thucydides who famously said that before his time there was no significant event at all. The Greeks lived in the present and there was no sense of depth, distance and ultimately future. Pythagoras also mentioned that two straight lines would never meet each other, contrasted by our findings in the previous discussion. The Greeks then are sheltered from any sort of complex form of sorrow and the existential Angst, forever sheltered by the notions with their forever circling cycle of dramas and comedies.

Thus, it is clear why the classicists are devoted to the Classical Ages. The emancipation of time or even its un-existent, are God-like to them. To live above time or if there’s no existence of time at all  really echoes eternity and paradise. Almost all notions of paradise are described as living eternally or with no notion of time at all. And the Pythagorean mindset of the Greeks, where parallel lines will never met will never shackled the Greeks by the apparatus of perception and as Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

We have elaborated in simpler terms how the species of Ragnarok archetypes will eventually bore the feeling of acute end and conclusion. We must next examined the side products accompanies the feeling of depth and distance to the modern man, why the modern man can no longer ravel freely in Dionysian orgies and live above time as the Pythagorean man.

The side products from the acute feeling of distance and depth, as we mentioned, are sorrow and angst. The examination upon the sky will naturally bestow within us the feeling of unexplored boundaries and transcendence, as Eliade pointed in The Sacred and The Prophane. Thus, the modalities of depth and distance will give us sorrow and angst. It happens to many of us the Zeno paradox, the losing feeling in conquering distance and space and the subsequent installation of the feeling of doubt whether motion existed or not at all. We, the People of the Delta are the Achilles who forever chasing the tortoise who started the race first, only to end up a point in the distance where the tortoise has already surpassed before. The conception of distance instilled in modern man such fatalistic conception of life and in pursuit of the happiness, which are romanticized in so many works to be only found “at the end”. Even in the fairy tales and children’s fables, the “happily ever after” is at the end of the story. The problem is, to the modern man, whether there is an end after all after all. Also, the toil to reach the end yields to no motion at all.

For what are a "beginning" and an "end" except an expression of the ideal, that can never be captured in experience? Of course in supposing a chain of causality, we rightly presupposed a beginning and an end. But, to choose a finite and determined point in an infinite chain and call it a beginning or an end would only yield a gross contradiction. The problem of a beginning and end of an infinite chain of causality is an antinomy that can never be captured and analysed in experience. We can conceive that there is a beginning and an end, but to presuppose this point x as the beginning, again would be a contradiction, for we essentially try to force something finite to a something infinite. The only way to solve this antinomy is for us to acquire an intelligible intuition, rather than the default sensible intuition all of us have. It is through this intelligible intuition, where concepts and ideals can be investigated on the level of actuality, can only then we solve this contradiction. But for us human being, we can only investigate of what is actual only on the objects given in sensibility. Unless we somehow unlocked this ability of intelligible intuition, the so-called God's mind where in His mind is where everything actual lies, we can never solve this dead end. Until then, we must be satisfied on the axiom that if something is possible in thoughts, doesn't necessarily it follows to be actual too in concreto. As Kant rightly points, thinking about a 100 thalers doesn't end with that 100 thalers in my pocket. 

We have demonstrated so far to indirectly shows how the feeling of an end, sorrow and angst are the natural product of human civilization’s advances. We have yet to show directly that the sorrow and woes of life do not belongs to the unlucky and accursed.

Humans have learnt that what causes pain to be avoided at all cost but ironically it is the pain that advances mankind. It is the discovery of pain sparked the terrible genius of a problem solver, a starting point of an infinite domino trail. It is the experience of pain awakened the first man from his paradisiac dream and slumber and to get working in reality. It is a part of a human’s experience and it is high time for us to recognize and live with our shadows. The reconciliation of two opposites is what make the world and completes it. The night we shall pass and the woe we will surpass.

Therefore, we have shown that the instinct of life to a completion cannot be separated with the sorrow and angst accompanying it. The acute sense of sorrow is a sign of progress or even maturation as the newborn babe cannot feel sorrow, he escaped time and lives in the present, all he can ask or wish is the quenching of his appetite but never for sustenance, which only formed with the conception of depth and distance.

To relate everything into context, I have seen that the recent light on the Aleppo crisis has made some of us pessimistic and burden themselves to search for hadiths on the Apocalypse to justify their sorrow. They scurried for a hadith to justify their pessimism but forget other hadiths that our Prophet reminded us to plant the seeds in our hand even the morrow is the Apocalypse. It is very daunting indeed that the apparatus of religion, which has produced the best of human in our history, has now been used as a suicide tool.

The knowledge of our psychology that there will always be blood and wars never intended to make us be and grow cold; it only demands us to grow wiser. The knowledge of our self enables us to strive for the perfection of our selves, not to bother us with the post-pubescent conception of paradise-on-Earth. Communism and all of the ideologies intending to create a paradise-on-Earth have failed because they search paradise in the wrong place.

It is shameful when we explained to them that the Syrian clerics themselves prevent for any military intervention, they will immediately retorted “We do not involve in politics”. It is indeed daunting how little it needed to stir the youths of today and how shallow their understanding regarding the issues they are speaking about.  Nevertheless the youths of today make an exemplary subject for self-improvement. Never will they agree to wipe the froth of spirit and frenzy at the side of their mouth; indeed they wear it as a sign of pride and medal of participation. And they scorn the thinking people, to be inactive, passive and it is not hard for us to seek ones who will say the thinking people as cold and merciless.

Sent forth, then, these youths burning with passion for I too ever want to see the horizon on fire and the air smelled of flesh and soot. It is then I can prove that the true and wise sages said are true, but they are no longer here, both the sages and the boys.