Where'd All the Yang Go?

What happened to the psychology that dwells in the here and now. Its gone vacationing to foreign lands, born on the winds of abstract thought, replaced by distraction. Its growth ever checked by traps of reason and heart and begged by delusions of grandeur. This is yang as its small white dot, contained in Yin, fooled into thinking it is Yin and thereby deprived of its natural vitality. This is the wizard trained by the sorceress – passionless, powerless, impotent.

If you haven't taken a close look at a Ying-Yang I suggest you do. In this simple design of two chasing and interlocking forms, the most basic patterns of our world find expression. The white swirl in the image symbolizes action and energy. It moves with reason, intelligence, and great force. Its nature is its motive. Its black partner is Yin and is the negative. It does not move, it responds. True Yin can not be completely understood for its nature is not motive but mystery. This much most people who have read The Tao of Pooh are aware, however, too little attention is paid to those little dots inside each larger swirl.

The speck of yin inside Yang and the yang within Yin have several meanings, one of which is that all things eventually reflect their opposite. The one important for this piece however is the idea of tainted energy. When Yin and Yang are true to themselves the pattern moves and finds balance, but when Yang becomes convinced of itself as Yin and vice versa it becomes locked and static, able to accomplish nothing. Like the dot in the picture it is trapped. This is important, for our world today is built out of these very same tainted and diminished aspects. We see this when women are forced to act like men to compete, or when men are castrated into composing themselves as women. The best way to make sure no one is true to themselves after all is to make sure no one can be themselves, at least not comfortably.

The natural energy for all men is Yang which is a problem for if Yang lived in the world today, civilization could not in its current form exist. Our civilization is based on a web work of lies all built to obscure the fact that civilization's advancements exist in truth only for a small elite. This situation is born not just out of difference in aptitude, will and so on, but upon selfish reasoning, the trademark characteristic of tainted yang. That's who rules the world after all. This is something true Yang sees quite readily but we continue to deny. Men still vastly outnumber women in positions of power both cooperate and federal and even still (though to a lessening extent) in positions of intellectual and academic authority. And who are the men who rule the world as well as dictate our world view? Their most unifying characteristics is that they were all, nearly all of them (and this is true more and more) raised by women.

Women have a hidden inner nature that fascinates me as a writer. However, as a philosopher of science I must recognize that as a male with a brain that is physiologically different in a number of ways, that inner world, being subjectively different from my own must be at root indecipherable to me. Of course this is true between each and every individual and so on down through their cells, but the gap is quite far between men and women. Hence the challenge for a male writer such as myself in portraying a female character vividly. We seem to mostly recognize this. There are still some dogmatic feminists who close their ears to the mountains of research that backs up gender brain difference both anatomically and perceptually, but for the most part conservatives and liberals can agree, if only for different reasons.

Men can't understand woman, hence the word mystery becoming cliche' as soon as its related with the fairer sex. But what about the other way around? The truth of subjectivity does go both ways, after all. What is at essence unknowable on one side is also on the other, but male psychology is rarely treated as a mystery by our culture. In fact it is rarely treated with respect. Mostly it is a thing of ridicule, mocked for its shallowness, chastened for its greed, degraded for its aggression. All these things are true of men today in general, of course, but men today do not reflect masculinity. Men today reflect tainted yang, energy without temperance, power without wisdom. Tainted yang is shallow since its sexuality doesn't break past adolescence, tainted yang is greedy because its ego never makes the leap from pride to pride in oneself, tainted yang is aggressive because its energy is unchanneled by principle. Yang becomes tainted when it is lost in Yin. In other words men can only with great difficulty develop into men if their exposure is only to women and men raised by women in early life.

When a boy get's angry, a woman naturally tells him to stop. She doesn't realize the energy needs to get channeled somewhere and even if she does the realization will be intellectual only and lack that certain elan vital that my female characters so often do. A woman or a man raised by women will often punish a boy for standing up for himself. Fights are an inevitable consequence for any boy going through public schools who possesses morals and self respect. When boys are punished for fighting when they were doing so for the right reasons they fail to learn the ethics of mutual respect. Women didn't experience the world of boys growing up so they don't often realize how there is sometimes clear right and wrong in these childhood conflicts. Men who were raised by women, on the other hand, hold pacifistic attitudes whereby all fighting is bad. This while living in a nation forged and still supported by state sponsered violence and repression on global scales. Self contradiction is not the province of Yang but Yin. False yang too at its heart can be no more or less than what it is. Though the corrupt male might speak about pacifism, his aggression will still manifest, only in more subtle and pathological forms. The classic corrupt male is a manipulator. Instead of using his Yang energy to build or extirpate what is evil, he uses it to entrap the weak and destroy whoever resists. Open your window, you're looking at a web spun by this exact psychology and it's literally wrecking our world.

Knights are needed and I'm not the only one putting out the call. That's what a fully developed man is, after all, a knight, a man who's total energy is under the province of his will and the service of principles higher than himself. True masculine virtue, if it ever infected this culture would have the affects of a plague. The entire power structure is based on individual immoral actions of which true men are incapable. As a result they would form a sort of impermeable layer, both for victimization and bull shit alike. Tumors of righteous action within the body of craven law. ...Yes basically what I'm saying is, wanna destroy civilization – do the right thing.

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One of the things they will try to teach you is not to trust your judgement. Listen for this teaching in our culture and you'll hear it everywhere, 'you're not fit to judge,' 'judge lest not ye be judge,' 'let the law decide.' Culture will try to get you to believe so strongly in the ineptitude of your own free-willed judgement that you'll (willingly) throw out a mental faculty millions of years in the making for the dogmatic programs of a culture 10.000 years old which has succeeded only at destroying its habitat.

Knights have a different approach. Instead of surrendering to our own ineptitude, we take the truth-seeking faculty and rather than bury it we hone it. Knights have principles, yes of course, but the spirit of the law is always paramount as is the sense for that spirit. Furthermore through Yang we realize that whether we believe it or not, we are making judgements all the time. The pretense of not-judging is a lie, an appearance, and therefore a thing of Yin and false yang, though the later rarely achieves it with what is called style. Even the liberal or christian snob who seems never to judge is still, more often than not, judging those who choose to judge. This is the path of the coward, refusing to lock horns with the world and demeaning those who do. And so the dimension we see arises with all of its hidden conflicts and power games.

To stop this train we must start judging, but not as children judge with ego yanking the reins from hidden quarters. We must judge with intelligence, deep thought, and, unless noise is necessary, silence. From these judgements we can formulate right action in accordance with principle. From these judgements we can begin to differentiate ourselves from the evil permeating the world and plant the seed for its destruction. Once we cross the threshold marked by the principle of death-before-dishonor, we break the bond which keeps western males the beaten, castrated wolves they are. Without honor that's all men are, animals, intelligent animals but ultimately animals. So far is the distance between the man and the righteous man, that I would use this analogy without pause. Were we alien zoologists recording behaviors objectively the two might as well be different species. One can destroy only to save a life, the other can create only to enslave one... So alien these thoughts to the modern male mind which only knows, 'more more more' that has only been trained to substitute others thoughts and observations for its own.

~~~

One motivating reason to become a Knight and embrace your higher nature, is that it makes life worth living once more. There is no world as shallow and worthless as that of the material sensualist. For this person the goal of life is to have as much pleasure before dying as possible. He'll chase and achieve and fail and bitch for 60 years and then meet death with piss in his pants. For those who derive their energy from tainted yang, death is all important. Death is the end to all sex and machinations. And since it is inevitable, all those of yang can do is repress the knowledge of its eventuality and focus on ephemeral pleasures.

For Yang the opposite is true. I can think of few things bearing less consequence than my inevitable demise, for the very reason that it is inevitable. Other things in life are not so certain. One will always die but some die honarably and others do not. Dishonor, unlike death, is avoidable so in life those who embrace Yang focus on virtue rather than pleasure. What is the point of chasing pleasure anyway, this ghost of relativity. Even if you catch it all you do is drive up the expectations for the next chase and therefore the probability of disappointment. This is proved true as those with greater and greater luxury become harder and harder to please. Wiser to let pleasure and pain come as they will and focus on that which can always be had for the price of a choice: honor.

To be motivated entirely by ethics is the nature of male empowerment. The ethical man is controlled by no one save himself. Removing civilization's prime motivators: sex and death, he says, “I will motivate myself thankyou.” Once you make this transition you'll find the world more vivid and real. Why? Before you only lived for other people, chasing the lures which were set for you and running from the shadows crafted to scare you. Life is only real when we are making choices and the modern man is given only the illusion of this all the while he is motivated to choose the 'correct' choice. When we realize there's no need to fear the inevitable and no need to acquire that which is intensified only by relativity, this motivation looses its barb.

Why virtue, though, why not simply abandon all concepts from this point embracing anarchy. Because energy such as Yang needs structure if it wants to continue evolving. Without structure all that massive energy has about as much direction as an amoeba. I'm not trying to give you your code. That is a matter between every Knight and their own soul. I am saying that you need one however if you want to become more than a pawn in a consumer economy or a well dressed doll for the pleasure of women.

If you feel you do need help, search back into antiquity, the honor traditions you find there from Buddo to Chivalry will give some ideas, though most reflect military outlooks and contain some degree of sexism. The important part, is forging your own. This is the missing step to adulthood that most systems, arrogantly confident in the absolute truth of their codes, conveniently leave out. The extant honor systems do the same thing and what they forget (or remember) is that someone who hasn't crafted his own code takes less responsibility for it. It is one thing to have sworn an oath to king or country, it is an entirely different matter to swear an oath to oneself.