Market Mythos & Programming

An incredibly powerful series of Tweets graced my eyes today that I felt like commenting on -- these were brought to us by Mr. Cyrillic Name. It hits on multiple levels in such a short space, making it delicious. 

Before we begin, it is important to remember that, in the same way that a dominant subconscious may exist to push people towards passive acts of racism, as is popularly believed by the left, people on the right see an anti-family, pro-consumer bias that is driving our culture away from traditional values and into sterilized & atomized living. 

"Aspirational mythos" is an incredibly important concept for us -- we should not view what is on television or in the media ever as a sort of reality, but as a virtue signal. Every story has within it some moral that is being presented, and often times, when it is most hidden and buried in the content, it is the most important message of the times. 

The aspirational mythos is not something that is just given to us in our films, sit coms, novellas, and BuzzFeed, but is also presented to us in short commercials and minor social transactions that we are not so conscious of. This sort of advocacy is also something that does not exist on the surface -- the surface, that we often think of as the "content," is really just a series of vapors that obfuscate the real plot and the virtues that are being presented.

For instance, it is the Leave It to Beaver imagery is what stands out to all of us -- the plots were all forgettable, but the clean home, loving and competent parents, rascally kids that are causing a hubbub but are always duly fixing it & looking slick doing so is what really stays with us. This is a series of tropes that all tell us, but not so explicitly, how to align our behaviors and values with our proper stations in life, and how these stations are rewarding. 

In a sense, sit coms and TV dramas are our real value drivers. Films are often more story than substance, for they are only with us a short time and cannot build up a whole system of values in our head. But the TV shows that we will spend dozens of hours watching, many of which interconnect by having the same themes, producers, and writers, are more about the tropes, and the stories are just ways to get the tropes to interact with each other. While its primary function truly is entertainment and the average writer and producer is not necessarily seeking to program anyone, but to simply be a reflection of life, it invariably results in broadcasting their interpretation of life to the world.

Like all interpretations, the story is viewed from the perspective of the heroes who interact and tell the story, and who these heroes are, and how they view the story, becomes the way that average people who watch the show begin to interpret their own lives. 

The heroes are the archetypes and tropes, and the stories that they navigate are simply a structure through which the audience laughs & cries with whilst becoming indoctrinated, in part or in full, by what is being advocated. 

It is through these aspirational archetypes found in the social mythos that we are largely programmed. Unlike previous mythos, which is based upon virtue and centered around ideals, the social mythos of today is economical and practical. The secular world itself has stripped it of virtue because we now longer function as nations, but as markets, and in Market World you get Market Mythos.

Market Mythos wants you to think about the next few years and your consumer & career options. It wants you to choose smartly. 

Nation Mythos wants you to think about history and community and your relationship to both. It wants you to choose wisely. 

Let's focus more on what is really being advocated in TV and sexual education. 

The prevailing spirit of sexuality has proven to be exponentially beneficial to the ruling class. We are basically told to endlessly prolong our high-consumption youth and avoid saving up for the future which stunts reproduction in general. 

This is because having children is very costly to the state when compared to foreign immigration because of the amount of government resources sunk into a single child as they proceed through all of the steps of formal education. Migration is instant gratification -- a worker that produces and pays taxes without having ever sucked up as much as the native class, and they are also a full grown adult making a lot of self-centered consumption decisions. 

The DINK model is also ideal for a wide range of corporations that focus on you living immaturely forever. 

While this series of Tweets does make this model sound conspiratorial, it does not have to be that way. As I hinted at before, there does not have to literally be a cabal of business interests & politicians consciously discussing and making these decisions together. There's already the ingrained bias of the people who are used to interacting with the world as consumers and product pushers, who think like marketers, that are writing all of our entertainment, or who simply find themselves in positions where they are writing public policy while trying to think of themselves as in the shoes of their neighbor, who they view as a consumer. 

In the case of sexual education, it is the case of simply wanting to stop unplanned pregnancies through informing kids, and the result is simply overshooting the target. They think they are doing their Fellow Consumers who are likely aiming for bright futures with new cars and jet-setting vacations by teaching them to delay pregnancy and marriage, but the kids are scared not just through their teens, but through their twenties and beyond. 

Moreover...

The point about an atomized dater versus a mom/dad with accumulated interest & stakes goes back nicely to the point that you would frequently hear from Weimerica Weekly back in the day -- the concept of skin in the game. When the average person has more & more investment in the future of America as a place for family and community building, the consumption patterns will change and the very way that they vote will likewise morph. They no longer think in terms of the next several years, but in terms of decades, in terms of grandchildren, in terms of nation. They are more reflective about right and wrong, not just concerning pleasure and thinking of everything as delineated. 

They are more sensitive to the fact that everything interpenetrates. They become more zen. 

Even though there is an industry based around child rearing that benefits from people having more kids, this is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of capital. Moreover, in terms of the labor market, your boss doesn't want a dedicated mom as his head of marketing, nor does he want a worker that is less dependable due to familial ties -- they want a sterile cubicle dweller committed to a career-path who views his/her workplace as their source of independence, and has little interest branching out into something else. 

To some degree, this can be intentional. I am sure there are those who are at the top that crunch numbers and consider things in these cold of terms. However, again, this is not dependent upon a conspiracy that you're literally being Psy Opped by Coca-Cola: the initial push of promoting consumer culture is all that is necessary for this to become normalized, and it is within this framework that these sorts of conclusions write themselves.

Once it is normalized and the next stages are clear, it becomes something that is more consciously advocated for. Never will you really quite see the point where it is crammed down your throat, but the fact that most people feel childlessness is a respectable and admirable option, something which was historically viewed as living with a hole in one's life, shows how consumer culture can ensorcell an entire generation. 

Power to the People Corrupts People

When the democratic process becomes combative and unpleasant, it is basically a sign that the democracy has failed. The political body may still stay together, but it is holding captive a significant amount of citizens who are well aware that they will be forever cut off from representative government. 

Representative government to them becomes insulting, not fulfilling. The idea that they could benefit from representation vanishes, and they begin to feel alienated from the very society that they were born into. This perhaps brings up an interesting side point: democracy works best when it is localized, and when it is happening in a homogeneous body where nobody is being categorically cut out from representation. 

It is probably only in those circumstances where democracy is sustainable over a long period of time, but even then, a single-culture city changes through rifts between rich and poor, young and old, and developments in religion or culture. 

We can sort of conclude that Democracy is on a crash course... but it is resilient, because its system is open to change. It's more of a demolition derby than a one-off crash course or even series of crashes, because the wear and tear makes it necessary to reach for the reset button frequently. 

It's also true that we can look at the way that America has evolved and come to the conclusion that there are perhaps 2-4 Americas that have respectively lived and died, and this is not even counting the American groups that were born & went extinct without ever tasting any of the power. 

When we invariably have one voting bloc or a united group of voters imposing their will on the people, we also begin pitting the people against one another. They see each other as competitors with conflicting interests as opposed to seeing themselves as subjects united with purpose under the same banner. We also create groups among people -- groups of empowered people, and groups of people that are at the mercy of the majority -- the famous two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner analogy. 

It's also worth thinking of the idea that "power corrupts," and "absolute power corrupts absolutely." What happens when we give power to the people? 

Giving power to the people makes our systems more resilient, but it also brings to the people the corruption that power also often naturally brings to individuals. Power to the people corrupts people. And when people have become corrupt, we see toxic democracy -- democracy which no longer benefits its own citizens but turns them into competitive, disparate groups competing to dominate one another.  

When they get a taste of power, the democratically engaged winners believe that they are filling a divine mandate, just like a King whose power has gone to his head, and they think that it is not just their right but their obligation to history to exercise this will. This is especially true when they are confident and their rhetoric is strong -- just like a petty tyrant, they vanquish their enemies, and then they put into the history books how glorious it was. 

The "Republic" that we have built was supposed to prevent this by coming up with inalienable rights for the minority, and this will continue to hold as long as the jurists and the unchanging forces within government are able to withhold the line on democratic will run amok. But we see the rhetoric gets dangerously hot, and the rights of the minority begin to look quite distant and irrelevant when a lot of effort has been made to dehumanize them and write them off as if they already belong in the dustbin of history. 

Naturally, we want the jurists and the Constitution to hold strong and to create a political 'safe space' that endures. But there's an even easier way to take care of all of this...

Skip the promotion of democratic engagement and simply rely on learned jurists, a hereditary executive branch, and localized democratic action that is relevant for each region but does not spill over into the backyards of others and, at the same time, constantly promoting self-sufficiency and cooperation between the subjects of the realm so that they have a sense of interconnectedness and can flourish without recourse to government at all. 

When we remove democratic power brokering on the national level, we can begin removing toxicity from democracy by keeping it localized, polite, and prevent it from coming off its leash and resulting in mob rule. 

There Is No Moral Progress

Introduction

The far social left, which have come to dominate a lot of public discourse and who we often refer to as "SJWs" and "wokescolds" and enjoy reaching for the word "bigot" and "Nazi" when anyone disagrees with them, often come off as the primary opponents of the Dissident Right, just like how the scientifically illiterate fundamentalist Christians and heartless robber baron capitalists and their corrupt political sprog are the primary opponents of the far left. But it's actually a bad habit for us to spend so much time with them. While some of the material we have of them is useful for trying to push people who straddle the center further right & galvanize our movement, the actual ideas we always have to deal with come from the progressive left humanists like Steven Pinker who are nuanced and can actually have a very tight argument. They aren't bad, either, and the arguments are perfectly reasonable, intelligently written, and have slick appeal.  

One of the issues with them, however, is that in a godless universe sans metaphysics, everything comes down to utilitarianism, which Fr. Seraphim Rose refers to as being ultimately nihilistic. Nihilistic in the literal sense that there is no acknowledgment of a greater moral authority, and everything hinges around forming some public consensus of how to give the greatest good to the greatest number. Because no good can be pointed to beyond what is the most obvious, and the second we begin talking about what the good is everyone begins to disagree because our visions are so radically different, the arguments generally focus on reducing the bad, which is usually more obvious. 

After all, many things feel good which are not good, and many people debate how good things really are, whether we are talking about a strict work life-to-work balance or eggs, but we can all agree that someone throwing acid in the face of a stranger is bad -- an example I remember Sam Harris using when questioned by a sharp philosophy student in the UK. Atheist ethical systems are ultimately constructed from what is most obviously evil, and hopes to branch off of this until we can come up with some public concept of good. 

Sam Harris is famous for making really basic arguments to large audiences. It's a mystery how he has become a spokesperson for secular humanism. 

So, all of morality is reduced to avoidance of what is agreed upon as bad, and moral progress is the trend in history of the world to generally improve. 

Their vision of moral progress generally all comes down to the following:

Moral progress is the reduction of pain and suffering. 

• There is less pain and suffering because of progressive policies which focus on reducing this.
• Premodern governments were ignorant (at best) and morally reprehensible (at worst) were illiberal and based on superstitions.
• We must have progressive secular humanist governments that focus on reducing pain and suffering, thus are decidedly intersectional, secular, and socialist.

In addition to these arguments, there is also one smuggled in assumption that never gets talked about: the universal moral equality of all individuals, and the general disregard for groups. Individuals have rights, and groups are artificial constructs. 

There's a lot of shying away of what this could ever mean for groups. Even the primal human inclination is to look out for one's family first and foremost, then one's tribe and broader community, we have to take away this kind of thinking because the bottom immediately falls out from this concept of the moral. When we can question where it is important to primarily reduce pain and suffering and become specific, we start taking the globalist-humanist basis of this out of the framework it has to be understood in & open up a different box of questions and ideas. The whole plot is lost because we all are now thinking in terms of our own benefit and our own group before others, and we begin to see the world as a competition of groups with differing systems to acquire the means to reduce suffering, and we think in terms of hierarchy and competition. This idea could be expanded upon, but that would be another essay. 

Is Moral Progress Really Just Less Pain & Suffering

The statement is rational in the sense that no person is going to say that I do not believe that the reduction of pain and suffering is moral.

However, this is simply not the right way to measure morality, because:

i. some virtue is acquired through elements of pain and suffering. To learn discipline, we sacrifice leisure and laxity.
ii. some pain and suffering is deserved. Men who commit murders that now feel the pain of isolation in jail are receiving a just desert.
iii. some pain and suffering is caused entirely by amoral agents and has no moral quality to it. Thus, some questions of pain and suffering are no longer in the scope of a discussion on morality.
iv. morality just generally transcends pleasure. The right thing is not measured ever by what feels good, but by what is in concordance with what is beneficial to the growth of people and provides the greatest cosmic outcome. Pleasure may be the just reward for moral action, but the joy from self-satisfaction at having done the right thing is a stark contrast with the hedonist's pleasure.
v. some reductions in pain and suffering flies in the face of moral progress. Indeed, there are papers that argue that even things like child smut can reduce the instances of actual victimization of children (Science Daily).

Less Pain & Suffering Is a General Improvement

The reduction of pain and suffering is not always even a moral concern, and sometimes the reduction of pain and suffering can come at the cost of morality, such as the example of smut potentially reducing sexual violence and assault. Surely, nobody would argue that increased consumption of that stuff is a moral good, at best it would be morally neutral (like everything should theoretically be treated in the atheist universe), but it would be hard to argue that a man who logs onto the internet to view women doing degrading things is involved in a moral act.

Less pain and suffering is nearly always desirable, and thus can be conceptualized as a general improvement. For instance, better technology and warnings that results in people being safer from hurricanes is a great improvement, but it does not really have that much in the way of "moral progress" in the sense that nobody killed by a hurricane is being killed by an evil agent. It is tragedy and pain in the same way that any other untimely death is that cannot be blamed on some agent acting nefariously.

I would hesitate to even refer to any of this as progress. Progress always implies a path toward something, and while many things can be imagined to have a desired end like less pain and suffering, morality is not something that we progress to because it is something which is not worked toward or progressively understood, but timeless and beyond man.

Morality Has No Dimension of Progress

What is right is always right. Obviously, different times produce different circumstances, and the good may not align exactly with the terms of those circumstances. For instance, the concepts of "serf," "slave," "sharecropper," "nobi," "Brahmin," "warrior," are not universal, nor do they necessarily extend across time. Yet, when the terms are even accounted for and we think about the principles of right and wrong, we can apply the general virtues to specific situations and come to conclusions.

Because we are not God, there will always be disagreements on the priorities of the virtues and sometimes even what these virtues are. However, it still remains generally agreeable that we can condemn a cruel slave master in the 1st century BC because their cruelty is universally abhorred. We can also condemn a kind slave master for maintaining someone as a slave, and yet, we can also see some people perhaps venture forth with the argument that a master who keeps his slave living in good conditions -- conditions relatively better to the majority of free citizens -- is even doing well by the same universal measure of what is good.

The good is not relative to us -- we are simply relative to the good. Moreover, our inability to precisely articulate or even know the good is not proof of its non-existence, just as how the inability of the Egyptians in the year 2,000 BC to construct airplanes is not evidence against airplanes. If man were to have been wiped out by an asteroid before we ever invented airplanes, it would not mean that heavier-than-air flying machines were ever impossible just because sentient life never developed them. It would merely mean that it remained unknown by man. The good is real whether or not we know it, and whether or not it is knowable. 

There's Less Pain & Suffering Because of Technology

People mistakenly believe that things like the liberation of women, of serfs, of slaves, etc., were all accomplished by men becoming moral giants and realizing some profound truth.

It's completely the opposite.

Man develops the technology to transition out of a previous organization of labor, and then he declares that the old organization of labor was bad, and he forgets the reason such an organization of labor existed in the first place but pretends it existed due to prejudice or hatred. In reality, these forms of labor existed like this because it was the most efficient division of labor, and just as the people then thought of themselves as the end point of history and could not imagine much beyond them, some of them took up the pen and wrote about how this may be the best that it can get.

Because we live in an era that looks like this, we have decided that we created the best institutions, and not that the technology created the institutions that are normal to us. We think our authorship over the current era to be greater than what it actually is.

The general improvement to all man's lots is the result of

- modern medicine
- electricity
- mass production
- mass surveillance resulting in greater accountability
- greater rates of education. 

Through these developments, we have reached a heightened state of material improvement that has reorganized a labor and daily life to be free of the deprivation and lack of surveillance that used to fill life with a lot of suffering we do not know now. Our morality has now matched these expectations. Less desperate people means less crime. Less extreme master/slave relationships make it so less sociopaths are able to have vast amounts of people at their whim. It also means that more sociopaths are observed, and more sociopaths are choosing rich fantasy lives over actual crimes or other various means to scratch their devilish itch because the chances of being caught are exponentially greater with modern technology. 

Because everything has been restructured to match where technology is, our sensitivity to certain things has changed. Because the state can be a father to a bastard, we no longer think particularly ill of the unwed mothers. Because of the anonymity of urban centers and how even rural people no longer really know their neighbors, the personal vices of man are not just things that we tolerate, but they are things that we are encouraged to completely and totally ignore. 

These things appear to be an advancement of morality because they match the living conditions which correlate with less pain and suffering to us. However, people who believe in God or virtue recognize that this is an incomplete view of morality. There is no moral progress for all of society because morality happens at a fundamentally individual level where our intentions are being measured. 

The closest thing to universal moral progress would be nothing more than providing a greater basis for education which happens to result in a greater amount of individuals attaining a higher moral state. However, one could say that the education of previous generations, which occurred in far more impoverished conditions, actually had another layer to them because of the poverty. If poverty and the threat of starvation, if close communities and large families, tend to produce greater sensitivity to the needs of others and, through humility and selflessness, make humans more inclined to prosocial moral behavior, it could even be the case that those who have access to all of the benefits of modern education but none of the above may actually morally regress. 

Still, we should ultimately never think of things in the framework of moral progress because morality is about the will and intention of individuals, and the second that we remove morality from this context it no longer makes as much sense. Thus, it is safe to say, moral progress does not exist, and the ingredients for moral progress might even be significantly different from what we would normally expect. 

Narrative Thinking

While listening to the Reformed Christian thinker James Whites (somewhere in the second half of this) he mentioned that there are two ways that people interact with ideas...

The first he called narrative thinking, which is characterized by people who just see an event happening -- such as the Coronavirus -- and now all of their thoughts on both things immediately connected to it and more abstract ideas are understood through this lens.

James White

The second he actually just called slow thinking (a blunder but he was perhaps coming up with this off the top of his head), but it really should just be understood as philosophy. We can simply call it philosophy because it focuses on finding the truth independent of the events that are happening and with the big picture in mind.

Narrative thinking is basically a mistake. It's playing with a deck that doesn't have enough cards because it is basically not considering the problem in its totality, but only as it stands in the present. A good example of this that many Westerners learn is the Treaty of Versailles, being regarded as far too damning and punishing to the Germans and thus immediately setting the grounds for another war.

Many politicians also think in terms of narratives -- everything is about the immediate problems that constituents face, and it is never good enough to have a long timeline for success in most circles. Few people want to wait months or years for a benefit, let alone decades, and so people look to the most immediate way to create change, even though these chances may fit poorly into metahistory. 

This is why, in one sense, a crisis is the very worst time for people to begin thinking about what has to be done. They are no longer thinking soberly, but thinking of this specific narrative and nothing else. In a sense, it is not unlike making a decision in a state of duress.

Anyone who thinks about politics or important events through the lens of what is immediately happening, not through the broader picture of what will happen in 100 years and what happened 100 years prior, is a menace to public discourse.

Teen Drama

I had a friend in high school named Justin -- very good guy, and so was his brother. But his brother was a perennial loser -- shabby dresser, thin, bad skin, big nose, weak chin, etc. We loved the guy because he could talk music and loved geeky things. He was a film school student and would recommend we watch great flicks. Really nice guy.

There was a girl who we knew that he eventually developed a crush on... it all came to a head at some barbecue that I wasn't at.

There was a trampoline... and at some point, Savannah (the girl he liked) was jumping on the trampolien at the same time as Justin's brother, and, in fear of falling off, she had grabbed onto Justin... Nothing else happened that day in 2002. It was probably one of the most forgettable summer days in the world, except two weeks later this blew up in our social scene...

Justin's brother had written a love-letter via AOL mail to Savannah, and in it this goofy dork confessed that he had great feelings for her. He candidly spoke about how he had been so lonely in New York, and had so little interactions with others, and that when Savannah touched him while they were on the trampoline, it was so powerful to him -- he became light headed, the touch was electrifying! He felt alive and awoken, and now he really would love to take her on a date and show her a good time...

When I had heard about this I felt a little sick to my stomach and wondered if we were all laughing because of this sappy love letter that was a failure... But it turned out that Savannah had spun this that it was not pathetic, funny, cringeworthy, but that Justin's brother is some kind of creep and scary.

It baffled me. The loser went from a guy who whiffed bad in a loveletter confession to someone who she had made sound like a potential threat. Truth be told, this drama was really just getting mileage because the cut-copy-pasted loveletter was so hilarious, but she and some others thought that people were interested because "we've gotta get this guy under control!"

Justin's brother was humiliated, and Justin felt probably a whole different collection of difficult emotions.

I still think about this as a good example of why teenagers are idiots, and also how the perspectives of people can be so radically different.

On the Son Not Knowing (Mt. 24:36)

On Reddit, a user had asked about the proper interpretation of Matthew 24:26, stating that Christ actually that "Christ didn't understand the Trinity." While the question itself is a bit absurd, I was inspired to look into the matter myself and came up with a response that has been modified for consumption on the blog...

Naturally, there will be a Protestant interpretation, and I will use the interpretation of Charles J.  Ellicott, a Bishop in the Church of England. interpretation of this is that Christ had put on self-imposed limits to His Divinity while on Earth:

Neither the Son.—The addition to St. Matthew’s report is every way remarkable. It indicates the self-imposed limitation of the divine attributes which had belonged to our Lord as the eternal Son, and the acquiescence in a power and knowledge which, like that of the human nature which He assumed, were derived and therefore finite. Such a limitation is implied by St. Paul, when he says that our Lord “being in the form of God . . . made Himself of no reputation” (or better, emptied Himself), “and took upon Him the form of a servant.” (See Note on Philippians 2:6-7.) It is clear that we cannot consistently take the word “knoweth” as having a different meaning in this clause from that which it bears in the others; and we must therefore reject all interpretations which explain away the force of the words as meaning only that the Son did not declare His knowledge of the time of the far-off event.

Note that this is actually Ellicott's interpretation of the passage of Mark 13:32, which corresponds directly to the Matthew 24:36 passage.

Charles J. Ellicott

I was a bit surprised to see him cutting off the possibility that this was something that he actually knew. It was like he wanted to truly break away from the older interpretations, which he would have been aware of, and it was a vital part to the Anglican understanding of the Trinity at this time to speak of Christ as self-limiting on Earth. 

Admittedly, this is, to some degree, more elegant because it simplifies the problem more, and this may even be the sort of argument which has more direct appeal with non-Christians and atheists. It's also something that you can argue easily without becoming tripped up or having to stretch the argument out to someone who is already unconvinced of the Trinity. I might even find myself tempted to use this argument if I felt it was more appropriate, but, ultimately, you have to actually go with the right argument that backs up our strong interpretation of Christianity that does not seek to diminish the power of Christ. 

... And whenever I want to see what a proper theologian has to say about this, someone who can really set the standard for Church theology, St. John Chrysostom is my first stop. He did not disappoint as he wrote quite at length on it, and his interpretation would be more classical and what you would find from the Orthodox and likely from many Catholics... It also affirms a stronger and more robust understanding of the Trinity. 

St. John Chrysostom

It's all also written in a very classic style that can be a bit abstruse and flowery. It's a hard style to read but it is also one of my favorite styles because in what it lacks in clarity it makes up for in one-liners buried in paragraphs and its extensive treatment of the topic, but I understand why the modern mind ended up moving away from the style: we want information clear, concise, and immediately presented to us. 

Allow me to summarize his arguments as best as I can. 

I. Christ was very immediately closing the line of inquiry and making it a grave matter, very distant from those who spoke to, by saying God alone knows it -- remember the particular reverence for God which Jews have -- doing ablutions when they were even going to write his name in the Torah. To talk about God the Father, in this context, is indeed an "awful" thing:

Therefore He refers it to His Father, both to make the thing awful, and to exclude that of which He had spoken from their inquiry. 

The mere mentioning of the Father should be enough for religious Jews to be stopped in their tracks, and that this is something that is said prior to the Crucifixion and resurrection.

IIa. Christ then proceeds to tell them a sign for when the end times are coming, clearly showing that He does actually have knowledge of it. It is merely that what is given to us is extremely limited.

... that the silence is not a mark of ignorance on His part, see, together with what we have mentioned, how He sets forth another sign also.

He is referring to how Christ in passages 37- 41 literally gives us some important ideas about these end times that were inquired about. 

Moreover, before St. John Chrysostom says these signs, He has even given us this passage to show that Christ and the Holy Spirit certainly are not ignorant of it:

And the Father He knoweth clearly, even as clearly as He knoweth the Son; and of the day is He ignorant? Moreover, "the Spirit indeed searcheth even the deep things of God," [2819] and doth not He know so much as the time of the judgment? But how He ought to judge He knoweth, and of the secrets of each He hath a full perception; and what is far more common than that, of this could He be ignorant? And how, if "all things were made by Him, and without Him was not even one thing made," [2820] was He ignorant of the day? For He who made the worlds, [2821] it is quite plain that He made the times also; and if the times, even that day. How then is He ignorant of that which He made?

IIb. He mentions that Christ also further closes off this line telling them that it is their duty to watch for it, as a thief may come in the night. This was his means for encouraging all Christians to look for the end times and the day of Judgment in order to always be working in preparation for it, for their own demise as well even, so that "they may always be ready;" " His meaning is like this: if the common sort of men knew when they were to die, they would surely strive earnestly at that hour. "

Christ tells them to keep watch in passages 42-44.

IIc. "After this, He openly calls Himself Lord, having nowhere spoken so distinctly. "

He is referring to verse 42 in which Christ says "“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come." Previously, He is simply referring to Himself as the Son. 

III. St. John Chrysostom also argues that His claims to ignorance of the final days were not even meant to be interpreted this way, but rather are rhetorical statements, which is really the heart of the argument. The Golden Mouthed gives us these beautiful words: 

Wherefore He first saith this, "Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his Lord shall set over [2832] His household to give them their meat in their [2833] due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his Lord when He cometh shall find so doing. Verily I say unto you, that He shall make him ruler over all His goods." [2834]

Tell me, is this too the language of one who is in ignorance? For if because He said, "neither doth the Son know," thou sayest He is ignorant of it; as He saith, "who then?" what wilt thou say? Wilt thou say He is ignorant of this too? Away with the thought. For not even one of them that are frantic would say this. And yet in the former case one might assign a cause; but here not even this. And what when He said, "Peter, lovest thou me?" [2835] asking it, knew He not so much as this? nor when He said, "Where have ye laid him?" [2836]

And the Father too will be found to be saying such things. For He Himself likewise saith, "Adam, where art thou?" [2837] and, "The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is waxed great before me. I will go down therefore, and see whether their doings be according to their cry which cometh unto me, and if not, I will know." [2838] And elsewhere He saith, "Whether they will hear, whether they will understand." [2839] And in the gospel too, "It may be they will reverence my Son:" [2840] all which are expressions of ignorance. But not in ignorance did He say these things, but as compassing objects such as became Him: in the case of Adam, that He might drive him to make an excuse for his sin: in that of the Sodomites, that He might teach us never to be positive, till we are present at the very deeds; in that of the prophet, that the prediction might not appear in the judgment of the foolish a kind of compulsion to disobedience; and in the parable in the gospel, that He might show that they ought to have done this, and to have reverenced the Son: but here, as well that they may not be curious, nor over busy again, as that He might indicate that this was a rare and precious thing. And see of what great ignorance this saying is indicative, if at least He know not even him that is set over. For He blesses him indeed, "For blessed," saith He, "is that servant;" but He saith not who this is. "For who is he," He saith, "whom His Lord shall set over?" and, "Blessed is he whom He shall find so doing."

So, the singular passage raises this question of whether or not the Son knows, but it was only a rhetorical device to (I) deter future inquiry, (II) in other passages immediately following it He proceeds to call Himself Lord and speak clearly of the signs, and (III) these rhetorical devices are used elsewhere in the Bible which show that Christ referring to the Son as not knowing is also a sort of device. 

And please remember that I am no theologian at all but only attempt to field questions here and there that may not be being addressed. 

Shamanic Cross Dressing & Spirituality

We frequently misunderstand homosexuality in the non-Western and ancient West. I'd like to focus on the concept of Two-spirited genders and the likes that are being used by postmoderns to legitimize a lot of the revolutionary ideas about gender, and point out that these things are understood in a different context. 

This Twitter thread by Survive the Jive (that I've converted into a single page) is a good starting point: people in these cultures know that their shamans and spiritual guides dress up like women or otherwise play with gender -- perennialist philosopher and occultist Evoa explains it as the feminine form giivng 'birth' to whatever the other world wants to give out, and so the shamans in these communities occasionally act as women. 

This is, of course, not all that they do -- some shamans act like animals. In voodoo, the voodoo houngan or mambo appoints a 'cheval' (horse) or acts as the horse h imself which the spirit rides, and basically acts in a very crazy fashion while also revealing information that the spirit wants to be known. Sometimes, though, they simply act as the god themselves, and not as a spirit, and this requires them to do things like get drunk, chew glass, swear, threaten, etc. 

To reinterpret these things in the LGBTQ context is not always correct. They are primarily religious and while, of course, this can be accompanied by some tribes and groups having shamans that fully embraced the role and did breakdown gender norms and barriers by Western and perhaps even local standards, to suggest that this is proof of a greater trend in human sexuality is absurd when we know that, more often than not, this is not the norm. 

It is interesting to see that this is not so distance from myself. The Korean baksu (male shamans) will wear mubok (shamanic clothing) that is highly feminine:

It is not explicitly stated to be feminine, though. The Shaman's clothing, according to this Namu Wiki article, will differ based on the region, the ceremony or god/spirit being communed with, or even by the shaman's own personal preference. The clothing tends to be overwhelmingly colorful, some suggesting that the colors and dancing were enough to make some people faint back in an era when seeing such a colorful array of clothing would be uncommon, and at least five colors are worn to show a harmony among Taoist spirits... 

Regardless, the man is wearing clothing that would normally be associated with a woman: a fancy, bright colored dress that differs form more typical men's traditional fashion. 

Korean men traditionally wore pants and shirts,  and while wealthy Korean men did wear far more ornate clothing, it was along the same lines. 

In the image below you can clearly see that the mubok is similar to a noble woman's clothing more than it is to a nobleman's. 

The shaman's clothing flows longer, while the nobleman's clothing does cover his legs to a degree, but not so much as to be radically different. It also has to be emphasized that men in the Joseun era tended to dress very monochromatically, while women would be adorned in a greater diversity of colors. 

I would consider this to be evidence that there is, to some degree, the vestiges of shamanic cross dressing among Korean shamanism, and it is merely that Korean shamanism was largely eradicated and had even existed in the late Joseun period as a folkish tradition distant from the intellectuals that little is reliably recorded and it did not survive in a more robust form. 

If anything is true of shamanism and paganism in general, it is the tendency for these traditions to go far into the past and to be lost to us. You hit some primordial element that is completely unexplained and requires us to read into it to some degree to make sense of it. Because these societies did not leave many written records and what they left was rarely about this, and just like us, they tend to forget their own traditions and origin stories, particularly of the more folksy things, we are left to our imaginations. 

Unfortunately, whenever we are allowed to speculate, we tend to see whatever we want, and to utilize it to suit our own purposes.