Leo D.M.J. Aurini - Aurini's Insight： Cars, Horses, Civilization, and Freedom

00:00:00.000 music

00:00:25.000 This is a requested video asking the question, has the transition from horses to automobiles

00:00:38.000 fundamentally altered our understanding of ourselves?

00:00:43.720 Now I think there's actually quite a bit in this question. I think this really speaks to some of

00:00:50.920 the transitions that we've been going through over the past couple centuries. But I think the question

00:00:57.800 doesn't fully capture what's going on here. I think it's more than just horses to automobiles.

00:01:05.720 But let's start with that question, explore what it's really asking, and let me tell you why

00:01:12.440 I disagree with it. I would say that no, the simple answer is no, the transition from horses to

00:01:20.120 automobiles hasn't really changed us, but we have really changed for reasons I'll get into shortly.

00:01:28.200 Now the question is addressing the fact that with the horse, you have a living, breathing animal with

00:01:35.400 a personality, with moods that you need to understand. To be a good horse rider, you have to be able to

00:01:44.040 assert dominance over that creature. You need to understand that creature. Whereas a car is just a

00:01:51.880 system of pulleys and levers with some sort of gasoline operation going on in the middle,

00:01:57.160 and anybody can just drive the car. You just drive the way you're supposed to drive, and you don't have to

00:02:04.280 intrinsically understand the machine. And now this is where I disagree. Now I understand where the

00:02:13.480 question's coming from, because certainly horses do, on the surface, seem to have much more personality

00:02:19.320 than cars. But myself, my relationship with automobiles is very in-depth. An automobile, to me,

00:02:30.040 is something that is there to be understood. It does have a lot of personality to it. It does have a lot of

00:02:39.000 mastery needed over it. You need to, to be a good driver, you need to really understand how the entire

00:02:48.920 vehicle works. You can't just jump in and drive. You need to actually understand the machine. You need to be able

00:02:55.560 to fix it. You need to be the author of the vehicle as much as possible. And I think the issue is that

00:03:03.880 most people, these days, it is so cheap to buy a car and get a whole service package going with it, or even

00:03:11.320 just to lease it for a couple of years and then upgrade to a new vehicle, that most people do not

00:03:17.640 understand their cars. I was recently told by somebody as I was driving across the country in

00:03:24.680 a vehicle that's 20 years old, that that was insane, that they'd never do something like that. What if it

00:03:30.440 breaks down? And my response was, well, I'll fix it. If it breaks down, I'll fix the thing. And I know the

00:03:37.720 vehicle very intimately. I've, I'm familiar with the model. I'm, I know what I'm looking for. I know what

00:03:45.800 I'm listening to. As I drive, it's just constant tactile sensation. And I'm listening to every

00:03:53.160 part of the engine, listening to anything that's slightly out of whack, because I feel that car.

00:03:58.920 It's, it's not alive, but it is a complex system that is comprehensible that you can listen to.

00:04:07.480 And I think what's happened is that most people that drive are very out of touch with what's going

00:04:13.800 on with their vehicles. And to a certain extent, I think this is cars made in the past 10 years or so.

00:04:19.240 They really isolate you from the road. They're completely soundproof. There's very little sensation

00:04:24.600 coming through either the steering wheel or the gas pedal to tell you what the traction quality is of

00:04:30.120 the, the road that you're driving on, or how well the, the clutch is holding on to the, you know,

00:04:37.320 the, to the engine. So I think it's a combination of these two things that, yes, that the cars isolate

00:04:46.680 you and most people don't fix their own vehicles. And quite sadly, modern vehicles have been so

00:04:53.240 completely over-complexified that most people can't fix them. You know, I would be seriously,

00:04:59.320 seriously challenged dealing with the new vehicle.

00:05:04.200 But you know that we're also looking at this with a modern attitude towards horses.

00:05:09.800 You see, anybody that rides a horse nowadays is going to turn that into a skill. It's a major hobby

00:05:17.240 of theirs. You know, people don't ride horses for practical reasons. They ride them because they love

00:05:22.120 horses. And I suspect it was probably quite a bit different a hundred years ago. A hundred years

00:05:30.440 ago, you wouldn't have to know everything about your horse. And I'm not talking about like you go

00:05:35.480 to the breeder or you go to the veterinarian to figure out all the details, because I mean, even me,

00:05:40.520 I consult professional mechanics. You know, they know more than I do. No, but I'm saying that a hundred

00:05:47.640 years ago, two hundred years ago, you could go and buy a top quality horse and somebody else would

00:05:52.920 take care of it for you. It's already been broken. It's already been trained. It's like one of those

00:05:58.280 fancy cars that you don't even have to think about. So there's really not that much difference

00:06:04.440 between the two of them. Yes, one is biological and requires a bit more personality. But ultimately,

00:06:10.680 with both cars and horses, we're talking about whether you make the conscious decision

00:06:16.920 to master this, this creature or this machine, or if you're part of the system.

00:06:24.840 And see, I think that's the real question here. Not about cars and horses, but the system.

00:06:33.640 Are we part of the system or do we have our humanity?

00:06:37.480 Now, let me start by telling you about Newark Airport, because I really think that airports

00:06:50.680 are such a wonderful metaphor for what we've become, what our culture has become, what we

00:06:56.840 as individuals are becoming. Now, Newark Airport is the worst place I've ever been in my life.

00:07:03.960 And I'm just going to tell you one brief little thing about it. But like most airports, it's got

00:07:10.200 you know, it's got the fake Irish pub and it's got the fake Mexican restaurant. It's got all these

00:07:15.080 facsimiles of real places. You come in, you go through the security pat down, you get on an escalator,

00:07:22.360 you get on one of those treadmills to move you forward. It's just this giant, you know, it's almost

00:07:28.920 like an abattoir in how brilliantly it's designed to get you from A to B and keep you mildly distracted

00:07:34.920 and obedient the entire time. But Newark Airport, out of all airports, really stands out for the

00:07:40.600 inhumanity of it. And then this really sums it up. The men's room in Newark Airport, first of all,

00:07:49.560 there's always a lineup going into the thing. You know, this isn't even the women's washroom, 0.99

00:07:53.320 this is the men's washroom. There's a lineup to get into the bloody place. And then the urinals, 0.97

00:07:59.160 and oh, this is just absolutely devilish. The urinals are very close together, but they have

00:08:04.440 those privacy screens in between them, you know, which is kind of nice. But then at eye level

00:08:13.960 is a mirror. Not a big mirror. Not a mirror so that you can, you know, look behind you and make sure

00:08:24.920 one of those terrorist rapscallions isn't messing with your luggage. Not a big mirror so you can do 0.93

00:08:30.440 do that. But a mirror two inches high and precisely at eye level so that you can make eye contact with

00:08:39.880 all the other men urinating next to you. I swear that the Newark Airport was just built as a testament

00:08:50.440 to the architect's hatred of God. But it's an amazing system. It is absolutely dehumanizing how you

00:09:03.640 you're clearly just part of the system. You're just another number. You're in the matrix. You know,

00:09:09.960 go, have your bagel, have your coffee. You know, your artisanal coffee from the fancy coffee shop

00:09:15.800 that's exactly, that's completely generic at the same time. You know, go have some Mexican food from

00:09:21.560 a fake Mexican restaurant. Go sit in an Irish pub that's not an Irish pub. You know, just be part 0.99

00:09:26.840 of the system. Don't think and you'll get to your destination eventually. We are turning this entire

00:09:33.080 world into an airport. This was summed up nicely in the film, World's End, where these Gen Xers go 1.00

00:09:43.480 back to their town to try and do a pub crawl and every pub is exactly the same. You know, bars and pubs

00:09:49.480 are no longer places you go to, you know, to meet people, to have conversations, to do something. Hey,

00:09:56.280 I haven't done that before. But now they look at this. The owners of these places look at bars

00:10:03.240 like places to turn the tables over. You know, they want to turn the tables as quickly as possible

00:10:08.760 to maximize the profit. And so they've increased the volume of music so people have more difficulty

00:10:15.560 speaking so that they'll drink more. If you're supposed to, you know, come in, not talk to anybody,

00:10:22.360 eat, drink, and get the hell out of there. You know, again, we've taken away this humanity. We've

00:10:28.920 created a very efficient system for getting people drunk and for maximizing the bar's profit,

00:10:35.720 but it's killing the humanity of the whole thing. And so I think this is really what the question is

00:10:43.160 about cars, is that these modern vehicles really seem to isolate us from one another, isolate us from

00:10:52.280 the road, isolate us from the machine. You know, I just cannot see people enjoying driving a car these

00:10:59.880 days as much as we did, you know, 50 years ago when we owned the car, when we truly owned it

00:11:06.600 by working on it ourselves. These new ones, it's impossible to work on them and you avoid the

00:11:11.320 warranty if you do it. So just be part of the system. Don't think, don't complain. See,

00:11:18.440 if you think or you complain at the airport, that's when you start getting in trouble. Don't

00:11:22.920 make trouble for anybody. And things are not that horrible. Keep your head down, you know,

00:11:30.280 be faithful to the system. Nothing will happen to you. And really, I think that's what this question

00:11:36.040 is getting at. And so this leads into my next point. Suffering and virtue. Now, Friedrich Nietzsche

00:11:57.800 was a huge advocate of suffering. He actually despised alcohol because he considered it an opiate.

00:12:06.760 that if you hate your life and you're miserable and you're really not accomplishing anything,

00:12:13.240 you're just being another cog in the machine, you can dull that pain with alcohol.

00:12:19.880 Whereas he would argue that any true greatness, whether it's a great artistic accomplishment or a

00:12:27.640 feat of engineering or science, this always comes out of suffering.

00:12:35.560 And again, like the airport. You're miserable when you're at the airport, but you're not quite

00:12:41.480 miserable enough to do anything about it. You know, you're just opiated enough to get through the 0.74

00:12:49.400 whole process without complaining. Whereas Nietzsche says, we need to complain.

00:12:57.080 And this is actually recalls a conversation I was having with Aaron Clary a few months back

00:13:03.720 about the self-driving car, which I think is appropriate, given the question at the beginning of all of this.

00:13:12.600 Now, Aaron was saying to me that he thinks it's just an absolutely wonderful invention.

00:13:16.440 You know that you can, and there's always been those times. We've all been there where we're

00:13:21.880 driving and we don't really feel like driving. And how nice would it be just to hit cruise control

00:13:27.960 and close our eyes and lean back? And yes, that would be a very nice thing. I feel it. However,

00:13:36.280 I, to me, the self-driving car just sounds like an absolute horror. It's the airport extending

00:13:48.120 even further into our daily lives. Now, take a fellow.

00:13:56.120 Take a fellow that's working at one of these terrible corporate jobs nowadays. One of these

00:14:02.600 jobs where you have to be sensitive to what the HR department wants you to think, where you can't

00:14:06.760 hurt anybody's feelings. You're minding your P's and Q's. And they have policies and procedures for 0.96

00:14:12.680 everything. You're not supposed to use your common sense. You're just supposed to follow the rules.

00:14:17.320 This soulless, destructive obedience that is pushed with the entire modern system. Imagine

00:14:27.240 you're working at one of these jobs. Right now, you've got a half hour commute at the end of the day,

00:14:35.960 through rush hour traffic, stressing you out, driving you up the wall. And so if that job is really that

00:14:43.880 terrible, you're eventually going to quit. And you're just going to get a job flipping burgers,

00:14:48.120 because at least then you don't have the commute. All right? Enter the self-driving car.

00:14:55.560 All of a sudden, we're, we're opiating that misery. We're, we're, we're adding painkillers to the whole

00:15:03.080 mix. Like you still have a half hour commute, but because you're not fighting and struggling with this

00:15:08.520 rush hour traffic, all of a sudden you lean back and you pull out your Obama phone and you put on an

00:15:15.720 episode of robot chicken, or you put on an episode, you know, like just some mindless comedy with no

00:15:22.760 true satire, no true catharsis. And you laugh your ass off as you're driving home.

00:15:30.760 All of a sudden, your terrible, soul-numbing corporate job is that much more tolerable.

00:15:43.880 Too many of these luxuries, too many of these painkillers, and we stop noticing just how much

00:15:49.880 pain we're in. See that, that commute home that just drives you up the wall and makes you miserable,

00:15:56.680 that can be the impetus to change your life, to do something with your life. Not to be a corporate

00:16:02.120 slave wasting all of your, wasting all of your money on, you know, stupid fashion accessories, 1.00

00:16:08.440 you know, like $150 jeans. All right? Levi's makes the best jeans on the planet. You don't get better 1.00

00:16:13.720 quality than that. If you're spending $150 on jeans, there's something wrong with your life,

00:16:18.760 at least in my opinion.

00:16:19.800 But that's the thing. You might be in enough pain to actually change your life. You realize,

00:16:27.960 hey, I'm hitting rock bottom. I need to change. There is something wrong with my life. I need to

00:16:33.800 live for a purpose. Self-driving car, it's the opiate. So now you are just happy with your corporate

00:16:40.120 slavery. You accomplish nothing with your life. And at 60, you're like, oh, where did all the time go?

00:16:46.520 I never did anything.

00:16:52.520 Now, with all that said, we need to do a part B for the suffering and virtue portion. The part B

00:17:01.800 is Marxists and suffering. Because what I just argued on the surface sounds very similar to what

00:17:10.360 you'll hear coming out of the beaks of this Marxist slime. If you're not familiar with it,

00:17:17.080 one of the goals of cultural Marxism is to increase the amount of suffering in society on a low,

00:17:25.400 latent level so that people become broken and hopeless and so that they're ready for the revolution.

00:17:31.800 They don't actually want to, for instance, they don't want to take the working class who are being 1.00

00:17:38.760 exploited by evil capital. And you know what, sometimes they have been. They don't want to

00:17:44.200 take those people and help empower them. You know, empower, I love that word, as if somebody else can

00:17:49.560 give you power. But they don't want to improve their lot in life. Not really. What they do want to do is

00:17:58.040 organize them to create a massive revolution in civilization. They want to take the one percent, 1.00

00:18:06.040 tear them down, and put themselves, you know, revolution 360 degrees, put themselves up in that one percent

00:18:13.000 position. And one of the ways they do this is they try and make conditions absolutely intolerable.

00:18:21.800 They push for policies that on the surface might seem to help people, but ultimately make everybody

00:18:29.800 so miserable and so disenfranchised that they're willing to follow a charismatic leader.

00:18:35.320 Now, what's the difference between what they're saying and what Nietzsche is saying about greatness

00:18:43.720 coming out of suffering? I think the fundamental difference is that it's a personal decision.

00:18:56.760 When Nietzsche advocates suffering, it's fully acknowledged suffering on your own basis.

00:19:04.200 That you need to embrace suffering to achieve great virtue.

00:19:10.760 And for instance, the self-driving car that I'm arguing against is this manipulative sort of opiate.

00:19:20.600 In fact, it's the flip side of the coin of what the Marxists are doing. You know, the Marxists,

00:19:27.560 you know, for instance, John McIntosh recently saying that video games shouldn't be fun.

00:19:33.320 John McIntosh, you know, these Marxists want to undermine the things that make you happy.

00:19:41.960 They want to, you know, take away what little pleasures you have in life to make you miserable

00:19:48.840 and to prepare you for the revolution. Whereas the opposite side of that coin is we want to give you

00:19:55.400 these addictive, enjoyable, but fundamentally valueless constructs to play around with it.

00:20:04.040 Rather, whether it be reality TV or games that really don't have any cathartic value to them. And

00:20:11.320 I think we can all admit there's some video games that are just a complete waste of your time.

00:20:16.520 You know, and we want to addict you to those so you don't notice how horrible things are.

00:20:20.680 Like these are really the two sides of the same coin.

00:20:24.120 Whereas what myself and what Nietzsche and I think the person asking the question that inspired this

00:20:31.160 video are saying is that you need to embrace suffering and knowledge of your world to master it,

00:20:40.200 to take authorship of your own life and authorship of the things in your world.

00:20:48.120 Now, all of this

00:20:54.840 all of this really comes back to a fundamental question of what is civilization

00:21:00.840 civilization. And the masculine and the feminine energies that make up civilization. Now,

00:21:11.080 the feminine wants to nest while the masculine wants to explore. The feminine wants order and 1.00

00:21:20.920 predictability, whereas the masculine is very chaotic and disruptive.

00:21:31.640 And civilization is the product of both these energies, you understand. We need both of those energies.

00:21:37.640 But see, the feminine is the system that we have in place. And when you get the masculine 0.82

00:21:43.800 injected into that, the masculine is going to disrupt the system. The masculine is going to invent new 0.86

00:21:49.320 technologies that completely change how everything works. You know, the masculine is very, very disruptive. 1.00

00:21:56.840 Which is the last thing you want to be in the airport. You know, the airport is the toxic

00:22:06.920 feminine. It's the overwhelming femininity. It's the womb turned into the tomb where everything is 0.98

00:22:17.000 ordered. No innovation is allowed. No change is allowed. And if you dare to stick your head up,

00:22:23.400 you will be smacked down by the hammer. And yet these very systems that we have are also enabled

00:22:33.800 by the masculine innovation. The generation of new technologies, the generation of new ideas,

00:22:38.920 is what enables new and more powerful systems. And the pure masculine certainly doesn't have any 0.52

00:22:48.840 luxury. The pure masculine is the state of nature. You know, it's the post-apocalyptic,

00:22:54.440 the cowboy fantasy. And certainly as men, we are very romantic about that. But realistically,

00:23:02.920 we don't want to live in a world where a broken leg means that you die of gangrene.

00:23:11.000 Civilization is the synthesis of these two energies, these two drives. And the issue right now,

00:23:19.480 again, it's not the automobiles. It's that we're living in a society, in a civilization, where the

00:23:27.640 feminine has become completely dominant. You know, it's even to the point where we're medicating young

00:23:34.680 boys in elementary school because they're acting like boys. Where masculinity, the masculine energy,

00:23:42.600 is itself under attack. And everybody needs to be obedient. Everybody needs to get along. Everybody

00:23:48.600 needs to follow the system. And I think that's the real question, like what all of this is about.

00:23:59.000 Is that, yeah, we have this toxic, cloying femininity dominating our civilization, preventing 1.00

00:24:07.320 innovation. And again, womb and tomb. You know, they sound similar for a while. Rather than a society, 0.92

00:24:15.880 rather than a system that takes care of individuals so that they can blossom into everything they could

00:24:23.800 potentially become, we have a cloying system that chokes the life out of them, preventing innovation,

00:24:30.840 preventing social advancement, and ultimately being extremely destructive. We have an overbearing

00:24:39.080 mother of a civilization. So the solution to all of this,

00:24:47.640 for what solutions there are, because you can't, fundamentally you can't change the world.

00:24:53.320 You can only change yourself. You know, you can only serve as an example to others. You can only do

00:24:59.320 your little part. Ultimately, to fight against this dehumanization that the toxic femininity, 1.00

00:25:07.880 that the system pushes on us. To fight against that, we need to embrace mastery of our immediate

00:25:19.000 environment. We need to not deaden ourselves to pain. You know, if you're going to a job that's so

00:25:27.000 miserable that you have to go home and smoke a joint every single night and watch some stupid, 1.00

00:25:33.000 unfunny comedy movie, you know, you need to get off that, that painkiller. Figure out what's causing you 1.00

00:25:40.040 pain, what you don't like about your life and change that. And meanwhile, everything else in your life,

00:25:46.040 be it your, your car, your computer, your, your, your home, master it. Understand how it works and take

00:25:53.800 authorship of that. You need to be, you need to be your own author. Take authorship of yourself,

00:25:59.720 don't just use the painkillers, but also be the author of your environment. Take responsibility,

00:26:05.560 take control, and embrace suffering and virtue.

00:26:16.600 Anyway, so that is the, the first of Irini's insight videos. If you've got a philosophical question,

00:26:25.640 or even some personal advice that you'd like from me, please hit the link below,

00:26:32.200 send me an email, and I'll quote you a price. Anyway, Irini out. 1.00

00:26:55.720 Bye.

00:26:57.960 Bye.

00:27:02.200 Bye.

00:27:02.760 Bye.

00:27:16.200 Bye.

00:27:17.780 Bye.

00:27:19.740 Bye.

00:27:22.280 Bye.

00:27:23.060 Bye.

Leo D.M.J. Aurini - March 02, 2015

Aurini's Insight： Cars, Horses, Civilization, and Freedom

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