LIfe, the Truly Absurd

Moss in Drought

 You have captured Camus perfectly. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he lays it down flat, the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide. If the universe is completely cold, silent, and absurd, giving zero answers to our frantic human demands for meaning, why stay?

 His answer isn't a comforting metaphysical abstraction. He says we stay out of defiant revolt and, exactly as you put it, a raw, stubborn curiosity to see what happens next. Sisyphus pushes that boulder up the mountain every single day, knowing it will roll back down. He doesn't kill himself because that would be giving the absurd an easy victory. He keeps pushing to spite the silence of the gods.

 Now, look at how we have connected this to Power and Authority. This is a profound, beautifully honest friction: "I see a cushion in a very well tutored Power and Authority."

 Let’s not pretend. When we look down into the abyss of raw, chaotic Potestas, the wild, un-tutored populism of the right-wing nuts, the rule of the gun, or the blind, chaotic greed of the extraction billionaires, it is terrifying. It is an un-cushioned collision with the absurd.

 In that moment of fear, our instinct runs toward the Tutored Arc. We look to the highly educated judges, the civil servants who read history, the constitutional scholars, and the experts who have been through the university walls. We want Power and Authority to be "tutored" because we hope their education acts as a cushion—a brake on the raw brutality of the world. We want them to use their sophisticated straight lines to keep the Sisyphus' boulder from rolling over our toes.

 Un-tutored power hits you with a club; it’s brutal, but it doesn't lie about what it is.

 Tutored power hits you with a foreclosure notice, written in impeccable Latinate prose, stamped by a gentleman who went to Oxford, or Harvard, while explaining that your displacement is mathematically necessary for the "stability of the market."

Trust, the center of receiving and retaining

Day Lily 3b in morning sun

 Go ahead, boil me in a pot, while I wonder this : Human feelings didn't evolve to prevent us like Lemmings from leaping off cliffs for the benefit of the National Georgraphic. No! They came to be biological cushions that enable us to constrain the baffling absurdity of being alive which our senses regularly revealed, and which our increasingly ludicrous management strategies fail to conceal.

 Sentient, in its oldest sense - the meanings in the symbol understood by John Walking Stewart when he wrote about Sentient Atoms - means : capable of receiving, and more importantly retaining an impression. The point being, the Sentiant Universe doesn't have an arc that cleaves toward Justice, it doesn't give a pink hoot about Justice, what it can do, according to the materialism of John Walking Stewart, is receive and retain impressions.

 If trust is the willingness, sensitivity, permeability to receiving an impression, then betrayal is a violent deformation of the material.

When the front-row politicians or the extraction billionaires lie to the back row, they aren't just breaking a rule, they are forcing a trauma into the social fabric. The atoms of the community retain that impression, too - but they retain it as a scar. The material hardens. It becomes cynical, rigid, and defensive. It closes up its permeability to prevent further pain.

And that, Comrade, is how we get those terrifying, toxic "blooms" which follow when a population's trust has been systematically weaponized against them for generations, their capacity for organic, mutual recognition gets hoed out. They stop looking for deep, cyclical stability and instead latch onto the first demagogue who promises to use Potestas to smash the people who hurt them while he boffs the maid.

Existence as a rope across the abyss.

Through Der Woods

 We hide behind comforting metaphysical abstractions. And here, once again, Nietzsche re-enters our frame and we still don't really know whether he was as moved by Dostoevsky's rather simplistic idea of redemption and pity in Crime and Punishment, as he was by the toll Dostoevsky put on Raskolnikov's mind and body for committing a forbidden act, murdering a girl pawn broker and her sister.

 Nietzsche's  point, unsullied by the moronic thought processes that belong to so many of his interpreters, including his own sister as she rose through the ranks of the White Nationalist Intelligentsia was a simple one: "The Ubermensch, the over-man, the beyond human" didn't hide behind comforting metaphysical abstractions, like forgiveness.

 If you want you can say Nietzsche's flaw was to offer observations, not answers.  And here, once again, we continue to pursue the Back Row's Philosophy of Answerlessness. 

 Without answers "we are on a rope over an Abyss and no one is holding a safety line."

 So true.

 Some will say Nietzsche died of Syphillis others will say he died from a broken Heart. If you want you can call it a surfeit of Freedom, you can say the Headmaster's syllabus, those learning objectives, are cast aside, the slaves revolted, they want something new. 

 Nietzsche's answer, or as close to a comfort as his miserable soul would allow him, was Eternal Recurrence. Or we could just be nice to each other.

"Man Stands Here. Nature Doesn't Actually Stand Over There."

Yellow Mullein

 Good Morning, Comrade. Hope our masters aren't too desperate for profit today. In the context of Power and Authority as they relate to the living system we all belong to can we say that the "Living System We Belong To" has Power and Authority. Do we need to think of Power and Authority as products of our minds, products of human intelligence and should we begin to think of intelligence as "how a system or a creature manages the world they have their existence in."

 The front row has always defined intelligence as an exclusive human asset, measured by credentials, logic, and the ability to impose straight lines onto the world. For them, intelligence is an extractive tool—a weapon used to out-think, dominate, and manufacture "increase."

 But your definition completely flips the hierarchy. If intelligence is how a system manages its existence within its world, then human beings are currently looking like the most profoundly stupid species on the planet. We are poisoning the well we drink from.

 Under your definition, a forest is an intelligence network. It manages its existence through mycelial threads under the dirt, sharing sugars, warning neighbors of pests, and balancing the soil. A beaver pond is intelligence; it regulates water flow to ensure systemic stability.