Reluctance

By John O'Loughlin

An autobiographical and philosophical journal that is the sequel to 'Limitless' (2012) and, if we may be so bold as to say, one of the best books John O'Loughlin has ever written, full of wit, logical insights, trenchant criticism, literate references, and spine-tingling confessions that one might perhaps be reluctant to believe, never mind confess to oneself!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781291470192

Book preview

Reluctance

John O'Loughlin

This edition of Reluctance first published 2013 and republished 2021 in a revised version by John O'Loughlin in association with Lulu

Copyright © 2013, 2021  John O'Loughlin

All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author/publisher

ISBN: 978-1-291-47019-2

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CONTENTS

16–18/12/2012

30–31/12/12

04/01/2013

06–18/01/13

20–21/01/13

23–27/01/13

30/01/13

01–02/02/13

05–07/02/13

09–12/02/13

18/02/13

20–24/02/13

26–28/02/13

03–05/03/13

07/03/13

09–11/03/13

13–14/03/13

17/03/13

19/03/13

21–22/03/13

24–29/03/13

31/03/13

02/04/13

04–08/04/13

17–18/04/13

20–25/04/13

27/04/13

29–30/04/13

01/05/13

03–07/05/13

14–22/05/13

24–26/05/13

28–31/05/13

01–06/06/13

08–13/06/13

* * * *

16–18/12/12

When the female is allowed into religion, whether via the state or otherwise, the only consequence for religion is its subversion by criteria owing more to the concrete than to the abstract, to soma than to psyche, to particles than to wavicles, etc., etc., in consequence of which some form or another of 'God thingfulness' will prevail to the detriment of Heaven, to the detriment, in other words, of soul as the essence of psyche or, more specifically, of metaphysical psyche, which is male.

Whatever the kind of God, that is, God as 'Creator' (of the so-called universe and/or the world) or God as 'Person' (whether female or male), the consequences for religion can only be detrimental, which is to say, exposed to subversion by the concrete.

Truly, females, whether superfeminine or feminine, devils, so to speak, or women proper, will always bedevil religion so long as they are not excluded from it, as from a gentleman's club.

Taking a double-decker red bus to Tottenham Hale, as I do on occasion when obliged to by circumstances beyond my control, is an experience I could well do without, since, what with the underground not far away from the bus station, it seems to me more like a trip to what could be called 'Tottenham Hell'.

Love and lust – the opposite poles of sex-based gender relations, with the extremes of pure love and pure lust characterizable as lesbian and homosexual (gay).  In between, the impure love of female-dominated heterosexuality hegemonic over what could be called impure pseudo-lust, and the impure lust of male-dominated heterosexuality hegemonic over what I shall call impure pseudo-love.

Therefore in between the extremes of pure love (lesbian) and pure lust (homosexuality) we find the impure love and impure lust of heterosexual relations of either a female (love) or a male (lust) bias.

Even metaphysics is susceptible to lust, if of a more elevated kind than that applying to the other male element, physics, wherein one would think more in terms of pleasure than of joy, as in relation to either male-dominated heterosexuality or outright homosexuality.  On the other hand, the lust of metaphysics, which, being closer to joy, is akin to the German sense of the word, could be associated, traditionally, with the so-called priestly kiss, as between clerical peers, or equals.  For in the subjectively ethereal realm nothing germane to bodily lust can obtain, least of all in terms of sodomy or pederasty, and the mode of homosexuality – for that is what essentially transpires – is accordingly sublimated and of an altogether more elevated order of lust than anything applicable to the subjectively corporeal realm of physics either impurely in relation to pseudo-chemistry (pseudo-love) or purely in outright axial degeneration, analogous with social democracy and/or proletarian humanism, to lustful bodily relations between adult males.

In societies dominated by females, however, it is love which has tended to prevail over lust, for better (state-hegemonically) or worse (church-hegemonically), and the deference of the generality of males to the dominance of love is only to be expected, whether because it is metachemically 'On High' (state-hegemonic axis) and therefore somehow superior to physical lust, or because, 'though chemically 'down below' (church-hegemonic axis), metaphysical lust would be beyond their capacities, even in the limited guise to which I have alluded in connection with priests.

Television doth make sons-of-bitches out of those who are naturally or technically male, and I, for one, who rarely watches TV, feel distinctly uncomfortable about it.

Television, I believe, is one of the chief means by which males are dominated by females in the modern world.

* * * *

30–31/12/12

I find, with subtitles to films and film credits (usually after films), that I am, as a kind of intellectual, tempted to read.  But one should really pseudo-read; that is, take cognizance of the words with a passive mind, so that one does not get ahead of oneself or, more correctly, of the medium of film, whether on television or DVD or whatever, since there is usually more alpha-stemming sensuality about film than omega-orientated sensibility, the latter of which, in contemporary terms, would have less to do with, say, television than with eBooks on eReaders and/or tablets.

It was the evening of the 18th December 2012, and largely because – as usual – of the jumping and hollowing noises coming from the autistic and somewhat macho Bangladeshi boy in the room below, I had elected to keep my wax earplugs in when I switched from listening to music via conventional padded headphones (how painful to the exterior of the ears after about an hour!) to watching television, which meant that, in order to hear what was being said on a documentary about barbarians on BBC2 (of all channels!), I had to have the volume quite loud, albeit still considerably reduced from the level of the previous evening when, my ears and head not aching or hurting me for once from protracted use of the large, peripherally padded, ostensibly ear-encapsulating headphones (which I hadn't used for music on this occasion) to which  I was accustomed to resorting, I had utilized headphones with my television-viewing, though not without wax earplugs already in my ears, as was my custom in this Bangladeshi-owned house.  Nevertheless, the volume must still have been quite loud, albeit in connection with a serious documentary whose knowledgeable and thoroughly entertaining presenter, being a gentleman, was generally soft-spoken.  For when I switched the television off, with the conclusion of the programme an hour or so later, what did I hear, over my earplugs, but a loud, all-too-familiar knocking on my door, the sinister overtones of which were impossible to ignore as I slowly – and with the utmost contemptuous reluctance – went to answer it, only to find myself confronted, not for the first time in recent weeks, by a gang or perhaps I should say pack of Bangladeshi youths intent, with cold-blooded premeditation, upon condemning me for having had the television on too loud (why not tell me an hour before?), the son of the landlord somewhere in the middle of the assembled Bangladeshis whose sole purpose was to heap accusations upon me and brand me a defiler of their peace and, when I made to verbally defend myself from this all-too-familiar psychological pressure, a deflector from the main issue, which again was par for the course of superficial, premeditated criticism to which I was subjected with ever more intolerant intransigence on their part, the arrogant son not least, who fancied himself as the landlord's spokesman if not successor, but others too, including one or two whom I hadn't seen or, more accurately, been confronted by before, and one particularly offensive black fellow who appeared to possess a legal remit with which to bring things – from their collective standpoint – to a satisfactory conclusion.  That being the threat first of all, and then, after some downstairs consultation between a few of the principal antagonists, which must have included the landlord, the issuing by the landlord himself, who had evidently been hiding in the shadows whilst others did the brunt of his dirty work, of a possession order effective as from the day in question and extending into early January of the following year.

Well, that did it!  My impression was that they had been waiting for some such pretext (television on too loud, never mind the urbane context of a documentary on barbarians and their contributions, paradoxically, to culture and civilization) to drive this final nail into my domestic coffin and to give the landlord not only the pretext but, for someone who was naturally cowardly, the courage to bring things to such a draconian and, to my mind, exaggeratedly callous head.  Quite frankly, with this sort of psychological pressure and intransigent attitude on their part, I couldn't wait to get out of the place, which had always struck me as being a living hell, particularly as some of the reasons the landlord gave for evicting me were, frankly, laughable or, at the very least, of dubious justification, not least in view of the fact that he had refused to extend the shorthold tenancy agreement beyond the six-month period that had elapsed some five months previously (though when it suited him in the past he had allowed six-month contracts to elapse and still collected the rent, only bothering to make out a new one when he needed a rent increase).

Be that as it may, I was in no mood, after this further instance of Bangladeshi hospitality, this sly form of ethnic cleansing, to drag my heels in looking for alternative accommodation and, within a day of the above events, I had viewed and secured a one-bed flat in another part of north London, into which I officially moved on the 22nd December, four days after the eviction from a place I had persevered with for over twenty-one frigging years!

Moving is another story, and the way I did it, combining toing and froing on foot with the use of a removal van on the fourth day of proceedings, was nothing short of hell, not least given the time of year and the wintry conditions under which I was obliged to operate, dragging books and CDs, DVDs and clothes through the bleak streets of Hornsey.  But somehow I survived it and never doubted its desirability in view of what had transpired at the old address, both on the evening described and over a period of several months if not years of persistent abuse motivated by a desire to get me out of the place – in short, to evict me no doubt for having had tastes and cultural predilections, as a West European of Irish descent, at variance with their own, whatever that might be!  The fact that I had shared a kitchen, bathroom, toilet, landing, stairs, entrance hall, front door, garden, etc., with the likes of them for so many years, as well as having been subject to the landlord's discretionary economizing powers with regard to heating, water availability (which in things like the toilet flush and washing machine was barely adequate), lighting, etc., meant that any amount of trouble that led away from that towards something new and, on the surface of it, domestically and environmentally better … could only be welcomed if not exactly with open arms in view of my general dislike of north London, then, at any rate, with tired, overburdened arms and legs, back and sides, and the promise, if I survived such physical pressures, of a more dignified lifestyle to come, free of Bangladeshi oppression and, indirectly, the correlative oppression following from the kind of tenants to which this particular landlord appeared partial, including Arabs and  East Europeans, particularly Poles. 

Thanks in part to some financial help and moral encouragement from my mother, the only person who has ever really helped me, I did survive it, and I look forward to the New Year (it is now New Year's Eve) in the hope – nay, with the certitude – that, come what may, things will be better in 2013 than they were in 2012, the year of my domestic nemesis but also, paradoxically, of my release from the dreadful Bangladeshi-owned lodging house in which I had languished and festered, like a flea in a fat spider's web, chewed over and spat out time and time again, for over two decades!

The West was (is) not about God but, through Christ, Man, and what Man can do, humanistically, in the face of Nature and the Cosmos and, needless to say, all those peoples who still cling to some form of God(ism) and would remain – or have remained – stuck in a Nature- and Cosmos-dominated (God-fearing) past were it not for the West, both Europe and America in particular, and their continuing belief in the ability of Man to change things, life, the world, society, etc., for the better.

And out of this humanism, this belief in Man, is coming – and will increasingly come – a belief in and commitment to superhumanism with a supermasculine bias, that is, to Superman and His ability not simply to change the world for the better but, in keeping with Christian faith, to transcend the world in the interests of otherworldly criteria germane, believe it or not, to 'Kingdom Come'.

This will be the 'icing on the cake', so to speak, of humanism, and in transcending himself Man will know and become Superman, the Being who, in his heavenly realization of the Self, will be at an antithetical remove from the self-denying worshippers of God who are slaves to the Cosmos, as to a superfeminine rule.  For this God of theirs is, in truth, no God at all but Devil the Mother (or some equivalent thereof) hyped as God as the 'best of a bad job' starting-point for civilization in pre-Western if not Eastern and specifically Judaic terms, and instead of  'God in Heaven' such people are subject to 'Hell in the Devil', with something akin to beauty and love, or love in beauty, in free soma metachemically contrasting with the joy and truth, or truth in joy, of metaphysical free psyche, the goal and culmination, so I teach, of  evolution conceived from a male-orientated psychic standpoint.

* * * *

04/01/2013

How much truth is there in Thoth, the Egyptian deity who was the scribe of the gods  and accordingly made their rulings known to man?  For some have thought Thoth and Truth to be one and the same, as though he were akin to Christ.

Those who come down from the mountain may embrace the world, but they will never climb the hill (of Calvary) that leads to the (Golgotha-like) Otherworld … of Heaven, with which God is One, since, to speak metaphorically, the candlelight and the candle flame are essentially one and the same, the light (of God/Truth) simply being the flame (of Heaven/Joy) perceived from the outside by those who would rather worship the light than experience the flame, since otherwise engaged.

One does not become a leading philosopher overnight but rather over, if not after, several decades.  Philosophers are made, not born; for the philosopher, when true, is the most reborn, or transvaluated (to use a Nietzschean term), of individuals and therefore the least 'once-born', for whom a certain reluctance towards writing, or recording his thoughts, would not be uncharacteristic.

Indeed, it may well be that the Philosopher is the most reluctant of writers, the one who views writing as a 'necessary evil' in order that thought of the highest calibre may be recorded and, hopefully or theoretically, made available if not to all, then at least to some others of a like high-minded disposition who may be able to profit from it and even introduce aspects of it into the world generally, thereby contributing to progress towards otherworldly transcendence.

There are no limits to the scope of my philosophical genius.  Philosophically speaking, I have left nothing, absolutely nothing, to be desired.  And still they know little or nothing about me.  Nor, in a sense, do they know very much about themselves, either.

So long as Beauty, or the Beautiful, continues to dominate the world, there can be no place for Truth.  For Truth, conceived metaphysically, is a pariah from the standpoint of Beauty and its wish to arrogate Truth, or what passes for truth in its estimation, to itself.

If Truth is to triumph, Beauty must be dethroned.  But Beauty can only be dethroned by Truth coming into its otherworldly own – assuming, for the sake of argument, that were possible.  For it is indeed a 'tall order' in a world dominated by the Beautiful, as by beautiful women and the more picturesque aspects of Nature, quite apart from the extent to which civilization chooses to identify with the Beautiful and to emulate, on comparatively artificial terms, whatever is naturally beautiful.

* * * *

06–18/01/13

Salvation for the pseudo-physical to metaphysics is not just from the sin of pseudo-ego to the grace of soul; that is only the pseudo-bound psyche to free psyche polarity on the male side of the gender fence on the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis stretching from the south-west to the north-east points (or poles) of what I call the intercardinal axial compass, so to speak.  More significantly, it is deliverance from what rules over and conditions pseudo-physics, as of the pseudo-physical, from a chemical vantage-point on the opposite side of the gender fence; namely, the pseudo-crime of spirit, which, in the event of the salvation of pseudo-males from pseudo-physics to metaphysics, would be destined for counter-damnation to the pseudo-punishment of pseudo-will, as from the free soma of chemistry to the pseudo-bound soma of pseudo-metachemistry in what would then be an unequivocal subordination to metaphysics.

Thus the chemical 'first', equivocally hegemonic over pseudo-physics, would become the pseudo-metachemical 'last' in their counter-damnation from free spirit to pseudo-bound will, whilst, in axial contrast, the pseudo-physical 'last', equivocally subordinate to chemistry, would become the metaphysical 'first', unequivocally hegemonic over the pseudo-metachemical, whose fate would be equivalent to that of the proverbial 'lion' and/or 'wolf' that 'lies down' (through neutralization) with the 'lamb' (of godly grace in Heaven), to take but one metaphorical parallel.

As for the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis, its fate will be dependent on the degree to which (if at all) salvation and counter-damnation are achieved on the stepped-up ('resurrected') church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis.  For, in the event of being denied its customary chemical/pseudo-physical 'prey' the probable fate of the state hegemonic would have less to do with salvation and counter-damnation than with damnation and counter-salvation – namely, in terms of the damnation of the metachemical to pseudo-chemistry and, on the male side of the gender fence, the counter-salvation of the pseudo-metaphysical to physics, though only as a temporary situation pending an order of judgement intended to render the masses of what had been a metachemical/pseudo-metaphysical and physical/pseudo-chemical axial polarity eligible for lower-tier incorporation with their metaphysical/pseudo-metachemical counterparts on what, in other books by me, has been described as the 'triadic Beyond' … of what would, in effect, be a pluralistic approach to revolutionary church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axial criteria.  As the initial phase, at any rate, of a process destined to culminate, many decades or centuries later, in a metaphysical/pseudo-metachemical totalitarianism commensurate with the apotheosis, as it were, of the 'Kingdom Come' process or, rather, of a process which I, as a self-taught philosopher and self-proclaimed messiah tend to identify with 'Kingdom Come', not least in relation to the democratic triumph – and, in a sense, triumph over democracy – of Social Theocracy, the politico-religious 'face' of Social Transcendentalism, and therefore the godly concomitant of Heaven.

Flicking out of curiosity through the Daily Mirror at my local library, I couldn't help but see in this tabloid newspaper a reflection of the ugliness, brutality, rapaciousness, and carnality of the masses, so that one can surmise the regular reader or, rather, browser of this paper would see himself reflected, as in a cracked mirror, on a daily basis.

Library computers are okay (if usually frightfully slow) until some person, more often female, with a noisy and smelly cold elects to sit right next to one, threatening one with a flight of germs.  Then, by contrast, they become something to escape from as quickly as possible!

Rubbing shoulders with the masses always makes one dirty.  I was intended for cleanliness which, as the saying goes, is closer to godliness than to … outright manliness.

There is more than the abstraction that negatively applies (in psyche) to somatic concretion; there is also, on the male side of life, the abstraction that negatively applies (in soma) to psychic concretion.  For whereas on the female side of life soma precedes and predominates (in somatic concretion) over psyche, whether to an absolute (3:1) or a relative (2½:1½) extent, on the male side of life, by contrast, psyche precedes and preponderates (in psychic concretion) over soma, whether to a relative (2½:1½) or an absolute (3:1) extent. Therefore whereas psyche is abstracted from soma in the one gender case (female), in the other gender case (male) soma tends to be abstracted from psyche