08-22-2017, 12:37 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-22-2017, 12:49 PM by APeacefulWarrior.)
(08-20-2017, 11:07 AM)rva_jeremy Wrote: There's a catch with a lot of negative philosophy. Much of it is expressly transgressive and liberating, encouraging the student to reject morals, norms, and duties that an individual has never agreed to and by which it is not evil to feel somewhat constrained and oppressed. I'd put folks like Aleister Crowley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Greene (48 laws of power), the Red Pill, and Ayn Rand in this camp.
Just a minor point: According to Ra (in 18.10-11) Crowley was actually positive at heart, but very heavily distorted and "over-stimulated" by his incarnation. I actually think Crowley is a good illustration of just how difficult it is to properly assess whether someone is positive or negative, even when they seem to have lived a relatively destructive life. A lot of the time, it often boils down to a lack of wisdom or other personal issues.
Even Ayn Rand - who I do still think was ultimately negative - was still attempting SOME sort of mission with her work which may have been at least partly in the name of the "greater good." (At least as she would have seen it.) And she's one of very very few people I'd be willing to name as a negative wanderer with any sort of confidence at all. And even then, only because there is SO MUCH material about her on the record and just about every bit of it has her displaying negative traits consistently. I mean, her postscript to "Atlas Shrugged" infamously begins with her proclaiming "My personal life is a postscript to my novels. It consists of the sentence: 'And I mean it!'" That really sums up just how dedicated she was to the ideas she was advancing.
People like Crowley and Nietzsche (whose polarity I would NOT want to guess at) seemed to be encouraging people to challenge the status quo at least in part for the sake of trying to shake people out of their established ideas of morality, deities, and nature. Trying to free their minds, so to speak. That's quite a bit different from Rand's openly confrontational, conflict-based belief in a cultural war between the "egotists" and the "collectivists." Her work is downright tribal, in that respect, particularly as Atlas Shrugged turns into outright fantasizing about the mass destruction of "collectivists" and their systems.