I’m reading a biography of Beethoven by Jan Swafford, and in painting the sociological background of Beethoven’s world and times Swafford writes of the huge influence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant:
For Kant, the moral part came down to what he called the “categorical imperative”: every person must act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. Every act should be done with the conviction that if everyone did likewise, life would be good.
So the very first action to look at to see if it matches up to the idea of one’s behavior amounting to a universal law for all is Kant’s act of writing a book of philosophy. And so we see that apparently every living person should write books of philosophy - otherwise this act of writing a book of philosophy doesn’t constitute a maxim of universal law, and is a self-contradictory piece of thought at its very root. Otherwise, armed with this code of behaviour, you don’t go one step without gong wrong. So everyone should write books of philosophy, and then life would be good. As an aside, who will read all these books, I wonder, that we should be all spending much of our time creating?
Extending this, a bit of dialogue comes to mind:
More music news, and rock star icon Spruce Pipedream has teamed up with the aforementioned Bourgeois Intelligentsia to chisel from the caverns of consciousness a new anthemic antidote for our times: With My Tight Fitting Jeans and Your Intellectual Mastery, Together We Can Seize the Means of Production.
Rolling Stone magazine have called the song, which they are hoping to hear soon, “incisive and inspiring”.
There is also a b side, the catchily titled: The New Global Citizenry Will Comprise of Children Who Have Been Purified Ideologically (The Rest Are at Best Compost).
Bourgeois Intelligentsia have just released their newest song into the war zone that is the cultural landscape: Gimme, Gimme, Gimme a Dictatorship of the Proletariat!
There is also a b side: I Just Can’t Feel Comfortable Around the Working Classes.
The following is a key and emotionally charged scene from a powerful melodrama I’m thinking of writing called possibly The Reckless and the Ravishing:
More music news and those perennial triers Fake News Shitstorm have a new song they’re just releasing: Covid Is Yesterday’s News, Just Move On Already.
There is also a b side: We Just Bombarded You Nonstop With the Best Available Information We Had at the Time (The Death Tolls Were Great by the Way).
It hardly needs saying that every release by seminal supergroup Countercultural Icons of Humanity is a blessing for humanity, their music a cultural safe space amidst the floodwaters of oppression that threaten to drown us all. And so it delights us to see that their label, ‘Corporate Whores in Drag’, has just informed the world that band members Spruce Pipedream and Grave Dohl have co-written a new song, which will be hitting our airwaves over the coming days: Still Fighting the System, Still Believing in Doctor Fauci. Apparently Bourgeois Intelligentsia, who share the same label, fill out the sound with thoughtful and unobtrusive backing vocals.
All profits from the single will go towards paying Dr Fauci’s legal fees regarding some misunderstandings he is currently clearing up.
Buyers will also receive a bonus b side to the single: No Fascist Gonna Stop Me Taking My Booster Shots (One More Is Never Enough(Mandate Them All Over Again)).
I think this is a video of an infamous Nazi doctor being questioned at the Nuremberg trials after World War 2. Humanity learned great lessons after the reign of such evil, demon possessed souls. The dreadful bottomlessly dark eyes say so much - which is just as well since his mouth no longer does.
I believe Hitler, so high on barbiturates he barely knew what was going on, had previously given the doctor a backdated pardon covering the years of some of his more, let’s say, unethical practices, so, even if here a little uneasy, the doctor is still quite hopeful this amnesty should protect him from any legal retribution.
One of the traits of ‘liberal, leftist, progressive’ is obviously enough to hate one’s own nation - the national is a painful insult to their sensitive and vulnerable psyche (I won’t say to their soul, that word might wound them also). With that in mind, I think this is interesting from Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky where, in a letter from 1867 to the writer Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky writes:
All those trashy little liberals and progressives find their greatest pleasure and satisfaction in criticizing Russia. They openly wish for its collapse, whilst adding that they ‘love Russia’. But meanwhile not only is everything at the slightest originality in Russia hateful to them, so that they deny it and immediately take enjoyment in turning it into a caricature, but that if one really were to present them finally with a fact that they could not overturn or ruin in a caricature, but which they definitely would have to be reconciled. I think they would be unhappy to the point of torture to the point of pain to the point of despair.
One other detail from this period. Dostoevsky was living in Geneva at the time, and when there attended a congress under a group of progressive and radices called themselves the League of Peace and Freedom who had appointed the celebrated revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin to represent their native land. Bakunin made a stirring speech calling for the breakup of the Russian empire and expressing the hope that his armies would be defeated in the future. He also assailed the principle of nationality as a tool of reaction, and called destruction of all centralised states to make way for the formation of the United States of Europe.
