Insults and Civilization part 3

The divine maddness series.

The witch trials that during medieval Germany in the 15th - 18th century are jokingly said to have occur because women would wear their pointed hats weird. While in reality, a combination of famines, wars, disease, religious zealously, and the changing political climate behind medieval Germany are to blame. The publication of Malleus Maleficarum by Dominican Inquisitors as well as Pope Innocent’s Summis desiderantes affectibus furthered the witch hunt panic (Rehn). Women (men and chilren also) would be accused and put on trial for witchcraft. Then, if found guilty, would be burned at the stake. Counter reformation sentiments among Catholics had threatened the legitimacy of the leadership of the church and so began to look for a scapegoat. With the decimation of the Jews under the Roman Empire, Germany began to look for others to persecute and poor women would be the most vulnerable (Rehn).

We may think that the era of witch hunts are over. Further more, we think that we would never fall for something like this. We moderns think that we should be immune to superstitious fairytales. If the leadership of the church in the 15th century somehow came to believe that a little old woman had the power to bring down an entire nation using only her mind, what makes us think we are any different? Spells, potions, demons, and ghouls sounded so real to them that it made a legitmate threat. The use of religion to legitimize the devil’s influence on old women furthered the cause for suspicion. People could blame their neighbor for the low harvest producation that year, or the unusual amount of rainfall etc. But today, an old women is just an old women, regardless of famine, war, religion freedom etc. Witches are so obviously fake to us.

We make the mistake of thinking that mind-control belong to the realm of superstition. We also think that an insult is left to the strength of the will to determine if it will offend us or not. If we just decide we’re strong enough to not let something small, trivial, or insignificant offend us, then insults would land like water on a duck’s back feathers. Insults are just dealt with ignoring them, not caring, using imagination to create a buffer from the assailant and reality, or simply be the bigger man and leave. If by assuming we’re above the bickering, we fall into the trap like the medieval Germans.

A true insult is no insult at all

A cosmopolitan (open society) is a state of civilization where all violence exists post-political. All violence is resolved or resolvable. At the end of all history, we’ve finally reached a correct politics around violence. This is the distribution of all tensions to the scientists and sociologists, diplomats and international relations, domestic and foreign policy. In other words, violence is left for the comman man to take up and receive lessons/knowlege from. Monopolized violence is sanitized by the state. It says that all violence exists to be resolved diplomatically. An insult, in its most sanitized form, is not an insult at all, but lacks any tension or all tension. But it doesn’t stop it from being an accusation at the most profound level. This is because, at the other end of the string, sits resolvable conflicts barely, pulling the string if at all. All conflict follows a predicable pattern to be resolved. One very obvious rule would be cutting tension off a brewing violence or dissolving it away. This feels like pulling teeth because the peacemaker is the one sacrificing himself to end the conflict. Thus, this rule allows one to be the bigger man. It shows one’s maturity, accepting verbal blows, insults, and put downs just to not reciprocate it. The “winner” is transvalued to be a “loser” actually. The one who was supposed to take the life-force of the victim has now become the instigator.

A cosmic bookkeeper

The assailant’s attempt is to restore a kind of balance (tension) by simply returning to an original state that he once believed belonged into. This is because an insult is an accusation in its most basic form. It accuses someone for taking away life-force at his expense. The demand for reason to provide the accusation of merit, if the wronged is to be believed, is for society at large to support the victim or the accused rather than the assailant. This is because contemporary democratic liberal democracy is cautious and deliberate with it’s justice. This is what separates the rational from the barbarian. But what is life-force and what does “the open society has to do with it? We can think of life-force as an undeniable feeling that one has been wronged be deviating from the origional path. This is different than a rational and empirical inquiry into the motives and inner workings of a soceity. One belongs to the barbarian, and o other belongs to the rational. An open soceity is the bringing of people/ citizens to deal with their violent impulses and natures within post-political violence. This allows for an exchange in discourse and ideas among its citizens in the art and practice of debate or rhetoric. What anti-liberals hate about cosmopolitanism is that these kinds of conflicts are resolvable. Meaning that these conflicts are not really conflicts at all but encounters. Resolvable conflicts (post-political) are boilerplate, ubiquitous, and appeal to the most common denominator known as moralism. Life-force is boiled down to mere life.

A telepathic torturing device