To learn to think in images again, to be able to paint with words, is not to learn a dead language, but an unknown one.

The lesson of the academic crisis is that we have too many teachers, at least of the technical variety. A return to 1968 for the West, with automatic forces in revolt.
A second, and simpler, lesson is that we have no students.

There is an active and passive conservatism. The reaction is not merely a combining of the two forms, it is rather that the passive is given a sense of action. It is no less dangerous, as we see in the early stages of reaction – the conquering of all the territory which would then only have to wait for an active progress.
It is from this point alone that we can see that all of the efforts of conservatism and reaction were not at all mistakes. If there is to be theology then there must be myth. Man must be already there, complete from the beginning. He must have been born in sin.
Here we begin to see, rather than a figure standing apart from democracy, one who was cast out of Paradise – the bearer of a just punishment.

"Pessimism, like voting, is a type of confession. Can we confess to those who have not themselves confessed?"

To reestablish a conservatism with theological and aesthetic power one would first have to confront nihilism, and perhaps what would more appropriately be known as a curse, doom. To begin with: acknowledging our defeat, and only then may one move on to banish ugliness. We are, each of us, the Last Man – completely alone.
The conservative figure wants a paradise without law, not only the absence of God's restrictions but also the excesses.

To be illiberal is not enough, such positions can only open up the greater questions of democracy. Dead questions. We are no longer confronted by democracy but the catastrophe of an entire era, and every last one of its forms.
Democracy was providential, and its defeat even more so. Only in confronting this does a new time begin to appear.

The dangers of AI are mostly in military decision and control measures. Certain recent events are definitely non-human in character, but at the turn of the 20th century it would have seemed non-human to take farms from people, force the elderly into 'institutional care', subvert national industry, bind currency to the Third World, and mass-distribute pain medication to children. But these decisions were all made and are now the norm.

So the question, how is AI any different from a corporate or psychology decision-making body? The only difference is scale in time and a greater capacity for information and mathematical force. Is there a significant difference between a million digital generals and a thousand real generals? The military already makes decisions based on probability and brute force information.

No matter the strategy or decision men will have to perform duties on the ground. In the unlikely situation of pure automated armies there remains that great weapon of the atomic age, and in the face of lifeless armies it no longer appears as a last resort.
AI should be kept in perspective, within the total framework, that is, alongside planned obsolescence, weapons of mass destruction, atomic energy, the worldwide traffic system, etc.
It seems that AI mostly performs a function like 'remote viewing' during the Cold War.
Otherwise, it plays a role much like that of currency crisis, it appears in step with planned obsolescence.
"The atomic bomb is the non-plus ultra of philistinism." AI is an attempt at its planned obsolescence, yet only mirrors its form, makes its power private or partisan.

Civilisation is building a foundation pit. The population grows as a type of erosion and inevitable collapse.

'Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the hydrogen bombs.'

I think Heidegger's idea would still cause controversy. It is the fundamental question of AI. If AI is anything new, it would have to stand outside this framing of technology.

It is instead only a totalisation, or formalisation of the question.
What was a stuffed dummy, reason, has now become radiation, or the mass grave of thought. One cannot even say it in most circles, which suggests another possibility: AI is a response to the absolute limits of free speech – its escape.

If dissidents are to ever go beyond the total plebiscite they will have to develop methods other than voting and popularity to decide who is worth listening to. Currently the systems we oppose are reinforced by the very means of communication – technical voting and social networking selects for those who are already closest to the norm. Even the complete outsider who finds his way into an influential position, whether by luck or other means, will be levelled by the forces of demagogic plutocracy.

"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface; it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."
~ Herder

What is essential for Herder in sculpture is touch, not only as sense but as a line, a great ordering of space. The law of movement and rest are formed together in perfect unity, and the surrounding space reformed as in myth, a mystery.
Today, with the predominance of sight and an instinct of destruction taking over the senses, sculpture demands a violent sense of touch, reordering of space. In approach one should have the impression that the world is trembling, erupting, that great danger resides here.

Like the old Gorgon pediments and shields, a curse must be forged into the creation, like blood. A sense of touch against touch.
That none would dare strip a nose or finger from it for a thousand years, for fear of the blood that would spill out.

"We live in a democracy."

Just wait until conservatives discover the New World and the Ancien Regime.

https://twitter.com/LegendaryEnergy/status/1615447724798902272?t=d1PfHR17pa1SkuFLtCJZVA&s=19

Nrx was a part of the Reformation of the Cathedral, and now fully embraces the Chapel. Once the news was reported by Apollo, now it is only a faith in private concerns.

(Warning: the Chapel is not intended as a concept.)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g5drEmpe7Ls

This is worth remembering. We study the Greeks to know their struggle, to know how they achieved perfection, if only for a moment.
Even if it were possible to perfectly imitate the Greeks it would be meaningless. The lesson of Herder and Hölderlin.

We are our own people, the Greeks must be forgotten if we are to be absolutely our own. Or rather, we must give them amnesty, even after the tyranny with which they have ruled over us in time.

This is what you get for reading Gobineau instead of Tocqueville.

"Immaculate Disinflation"

"I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take the Cathedral anymore!'

Open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I demand a Chapel right now!'"

How did a movement based on "Protestantism bad, Catholicism good" miss the irony here?

If we are to have great writers again the reader will have to bear part of the responsibility. The first major effort occurs with both author and reader leaving general education behind.

Carl Schmitt wrote one of his prison letters to Tocqueville. In it one finds a dedication to Tocqueville as the first hero of the European civil war, and also Schmitt's own philosophy of history, the existential resolution of victor and vanquished.

For time itself bears the weight of the friend-enemy distinction, and is left with the greater decision of victor and vanquished – each grouping undergoes a metamorphosis. How will they bear this new time? How does time bear its own weight?

A catastrophe of the democratic man is that he cannot bear defeat, even less can he bear the defeated. Here, time becomes an absolute for him, even in victory he is vanquished.

Today, what would seem to be a total history of the defeated is only an incapacity of victor and vanquished to bear the weight of time. No amnesty is granted to time by them, we are left with the unhistorical.

Seven billion crucifixions would not be enough for us. Not even seven billion crawling for an eternity could relieve the slightest pressure.
Fate is behind us.