Aurini's Insight： Cars, Horses, Civilization, and Freedom
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Summary
Has the transition from horses to cars fundamentally changed our understanding of ourselves? In this video, we explore the answer to this question, and why I think it's not so simple as that. I talk about the differences between horses and cars, and how they differ in their ability to understand each other.
Transcript
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This is a requested video asking the question, has the transition from horses to automobiles
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fundamentally altered our understanding of ourselves?
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Now I think there's actually quite a bit in this question. I think this really speaks to some of
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the transitions that we've been going through over the past couple centuries. But I think the question
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doesn't fully capture what's going on here. I think it's more than just horses to automobiles.
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But let's start with that question, explore what it's really asking, and let me tell you why
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I disagree with it. I would say that no, the simple answer is no, the transition from horses to
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automobiles hasn't really changed us, but we have really changed for reasons I'll get into shortly.
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Now the question is addressing the fact that with the horse, you have a living, breathing animal with
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a personality, with moods that you need to understand. To be a good horse rider, you have to be able to
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assert dominance over that creature. You need to understand that creature. Whereas a car is just a
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system of pulleys and levers with some sort of gasoline operation going on in the middle,
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and anybody can just drive the car. You just drive the way you're supposed to drive, and you don't have to
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intrinsically understand the machine. And now this is where I disagree. Now I understand where the
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question's coming from, because certainly horses do, on the surface, seem to have much more personality
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than cars. But myself, my relationship with automobiles is very in-depth. An automobile, to me,
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is something that is there to be understood. It does have a lot of personality to it. It does have a lot of
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mastery needed over it. You need to, to be a good driver, you need to really understand how the entire
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vehicle works. You can't just jump in and drive. You need to actually understand the machine. You need to be able
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to fix it. You need to be the author of the vehicle as much as possible. And I think the issue is that
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most people, these days, it is so cheap to buy a car and get a whole service package going with it, or even
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just to lease it for a couple of years and then upgrade to a new vehicle, that most people do not
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understand their cars. I was recently told by somebody as I was driving across the country in
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a vehicle that's 20 years old, that that was insane, that they'd never do something like that. What if it
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breaks down? And my response was, well, I'll fix it. If it breaks down, I'll fix the thing. And I know the
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vehicle very intimately. I've, I'm familiar with the model. I'm, I know what I'm looking for. I know what
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I'm listening to. As I drive, it's just constant tactile sensation. And I'm listening to every
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part of the engine, listening to anything that's slightly out of whack, because I feel that car.
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It's, it's not alive, but it is a complex system that is comprehensible that you can listen to.
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And I think what's happened is that most people that drive are very out of touch with what's going
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on with their vehicles. And to a certain extent, I think this is cars made in the past 10 years or so.
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They really isolate you from the road. They're completely soundproof. There's very little sensation
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coming through either the steering wheel or the gas pedal to tell you what the traction quality is of
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the, the road that you're driving on, or how well the, the clutch is holding on to the, you know,
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the, to the engine. So I think it's a combination of these two things that, yes, that the cars isolate
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you and most people don't fix their own vehicles. And quite sadly, modern vehicles have been so
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completely over-complexified that most people can't fix them. You know, I would be seriously,
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seriously challenged dealing with the new vehicle.
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But you know that we're also looking at this with a modern attitude towards horses.
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You see, anybody that rides a horse nowadays is going to turn that into a skill. It's a major hobby
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of theirs. You know, people don't ride horses for practical reasons. They ride them because they love
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horses. And I suspect it was probably quite a bit different a hundred years ago. A hundred years
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ago, you wouldn't have to know everything about your horse. And I'm not talking about like you go
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to the breeder or you go to the veterinarian to figure out all the details, because I mean, even me,
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I consult professional mechanics. You know, they know more than I do. No, but I'm saying that a hundred
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years ago, two hundred years ago, you could go and buy a top quality horse and somebody else would
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take care of it for you. It's already been broken. It's already been trained. It's like one of those
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fancy cars that you don't even have to think about. So there's really not that much difference
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between the two of them. Yes, one is biological and requires a bit more personality. But ultimately,
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with both cars and horses, we're talking about whether you make the conscious decision
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to master this, this creature or this machine, or if you're part of the system.
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And see, I think that's the real question here. Not about cars and horses, but the system.
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Are we part of the system or do we have our humanity?
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Now, let me start by telling you about Newark Airport, because I really think that airports
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are such a wonderful metaphor for what we've become, what our culture has become, what we
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as individuals are becoming. Now, Newark Airport is the worst place I've ever been in my life.
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And I'm just going to tell you one brief little thing about it. But like most airports, it's got
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you know, it's got the fake Irish pub and it's got the fake Mexican restaurant. It's got all these
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facsimiles of real places. You come in, you go through the security pat down, you get on an escalator,
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you get on one of those treadmills to move you forward. It's just this giant, you know, it's almost
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like an abattoir in how brilliantly it's designed to get you from A to B and keep you mildly distracted
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and obedient the entire time. But Newark Airport, out of all airports, really stands out for the
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inhumanity of it. And then this really sums it up. The men's room in Newark Airport, first of all,
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there's always a lineup going into the thing. You know, this isn't even the women's washroom,
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this is the men's washroom. There's a lineup to get into the bloody place. And then the urinals,
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and oh, this is just absolutely devilish. The urinals are very close together, but they have
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those privacy screens in between them, you know, which is kind of nice. But then at eye level
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is a mirror. Not a big mirror. Not a mirror so that you can, you know, look behind you and make sure
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one of those terrorist rapscallions isn't messing with your luggage. Not a big mirror so you can do
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do that. But a mirror two inches high and precisely at eye level so that you can make eye contact with
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all the other men urinating next to you. I swear that the Newark Airport was just built as a testament
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to the architect's hatred of God. But it's an amazing system. It is absolutely dehumanizing how you
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you're clearly just part of the system. You're just another number. You're in the matrix. You know,
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go, have your bagel, have your coffee. You know, your artisanal coffee from the fancy coffee shop
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that's exactly, that's completely generic at the same time. You know, go have some Mexican food from
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a fake Mexican restaurant. Go sit in an Irish pub that's not an Irish pub. You know, just be part
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of the system. Don't think and you'll get to your destination eventually. We are turning this entire
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world into an airport. This was summed up nicely in the film, World's End, where these Gen Xers go
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back to their town to try and do a pub crawl and every pub is exactly the same. You know, bars and pubs
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are no longer places you go to, you know, to meet people, to have conversations, to do something. Hey,
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I haven't done that before. But now they look at this. The owners of these places look at bars
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like places to turn the tables over. You know, they want to turn the tables as quickly as possible
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to maximize the profit. And so they've increased the volume of music so people have more difficulty
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speaking so that they'll drink more. If you're supposed to, you know, come in, not talk to anybody,
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eat, drink, and get the hell out of there. You know, again, we've taken away this humanity. We've
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created a very efficient system for getting people drunk and for maximizing the bar's profit,
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but it's killing the humanity of the whole thing. And so I think this is really what the question is
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about cars, is that these modern vehicles really seem to isolate us from one another, isolate us from
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the road, isolate us from the machine. You know, I just cannot see people enjoying driving a car these
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days as much as we did, you know, 50 years ago when we owned the car, when we truly owned it
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by working on it ourselves. These new ones, it's impossible to work on them and you avoid the
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warranty if you do it. So just be part of the system. Don't think, don't complain. See,
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if you think or you complain at the airport, that's when you start getting in trouble. Don't
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make trouble for anybody. And things are not that horrible. Keep your head down, you know,
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be faithful to the system. Nothing will happen to you. And really, I think that's what this question
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is getting at. And so this leads into my next point. Suffering and virtue. Now, Friedrich Nietzsche
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was a huge advocate of suffering. He actually despised alcohol because he considered it an opiate.
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that if you hate your life and you're miserable and you're really not accomplishing anything,
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you're just being another cog in the machine, you can dull that pain with alcohol.
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Whereas he would argue that any true greatness, whether it's a great artistic accomplishment or a
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feat of engineering or science, this always comes out of suffering.
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And again, like the airport. You're miserable when you're at the airport, but you're not quite
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miserable enough to do anything about it. You know, you're just opiated enough to get through the
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whole process without complaining. Whereas Nietzsche says, we need to complain.
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And this is actually recalls a conversation I was having with Aaron Clary a few months back
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about the self-driving car, which I think is appropriate, given the question at the beginning of all of this.
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Now, Aaron was saying to me that he thinks it's just an absolutely wonderful invention.
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You know that you can, and there's always been those times. We've all been there where we're
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driving and we don't really feel like driving. And how nice would it be just to hit cruise control
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and close our eyes and lean back? And yes, that would be a very nice thing. I feel it. However,
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I, to me, the self-driving car just sounds like an absolute horror. It's the airport extending
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even further into our daily lives. Now, take a fellow.
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Take a fellow that's working at one of these terrible corporate jobs nowadays. One of these
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jobs where you have to be sensitive to what the HR department wants you to think, where you can't
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hurt anybody's feelings. You're minding your P's and Q's. And they have policies and procedures for
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everything. You're not supposed to use your common sense. You're just supposed to follow the rules.
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This soulless, destructive obedience that is pushed with the entire modern system. Imagine
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you're working at one of these jobs. Right now, you've got a half hour commute at the end of the day,
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through rush hour traffic, stressing you out, driving you up the wall. And so if that job is really that
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terrible, you're eventually going to quit. And you're just going to get a job flipping burgers,
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because at least then you don't have the commute. All right? Enter the self-driving car.
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All of a sudden, we're, we're opiating that misery. We're, we're, we're adding painkillers to the whole
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mix. Like you still have a half hour commute, but because you're not fighting and struggling with this
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rush hour traffic, all of a sudden you lean back and you pull out your Obama phone and you put on an
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episode of robot chicken, or you put on an episode, you know, like just some mindless comedy with no
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true satire, no true catharsis. And you laugh your ass off as you're driving home.
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All of a sudden, your terrible, soul-numbing corporate job is that much more tolerable.
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Too many of these luxuries, too many of these painkillers, and we stop noticing just how much
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pain we're in. See that, that commute home that just drives you up the wall and makes you miserable,
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that can be the impetus to change your life, to do something with your life. Not to be a corporate
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slave wasting all of your, wasting all of your money on, you know, stupid fashion accessories,
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you know, like $150 jeans. All right? Levi's makes the best jeans on the planet. You don't get better
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quality than that. If you're spending $150 on jeans, there's something wrong with your life,
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But that's the thing. You might be in enough pain to actually change your life. You realize,
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hey, I'm hitting rock bottom. I need to change. There is something wrong with my life. I need to
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live for a purpose. Self-driving car, it's the opiate. So now you are just happy with your corporate
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slavery. You accomplish nothing with your life. And at 60, you're like, oh, where did all the time go?
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Now, with all that said, we need to do a part B for the suffering and virtue portion. The part B
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is Marxists and suffering. Because what I just argued on the surface sounds very similar to what
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you'll hear coming out of the beaks of this Marxist slime. If you're not familiar with it,
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one of the goals of cultural Marxism is to increase the amount of suffering in society on a low,
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latent level so that people become broken and hopeless and so that they're ready for the revolution.
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They don't actually want to, for instance, they don't want to take the working class who are being
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exploited by evil capital. And you know what, sometimes they have been. They don't want to
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take those people and help empower them. You know, empower, I love that word, as if somebody else can
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give you power. But they don't want to improve their lot in life. Not really. What they do want to do is
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organize them to create a massive revolution in civilization. They want to take the one percent,
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tear them down, and put themselves, you know, revolution 360 degrees, put themselves up in that one percent
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position. And one of the ways they do this is they try and make conditions absolutely intolerable.
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They push for policies that on the surface might seem to help people, but ultimately make everybody
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so miserable and so disenfranchised that they're willing to follow a charismatic leader.
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Now, what's the difference between what they're saying and what Nietzsche is saying about greatness
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coming out of suffering? I think the fundamental difference is that it's a personal decision.
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When Nietzsche advocates suffering, it's fully acknowledged suffering on your own basis.
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That you need to embrace suffering to achieve great virtue.
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And for instance, the self-driving car that I'm arguing against is this manipulative sort of opiate.
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In fact, it's the flip side of the coin of what the Marxists are doing. You know, the Marxists,
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you know, for instance, John McIntosh recently saying that video games shouldn't be fun.
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John McIntosh, you know, these Marxists want to undermine the things that make you happy.
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They want to, you know, take away what little pleasures you have in life to make you miserable
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and to prepare you for the revolution. Whereas the opposite side of that coin is we want to give you
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these addictive, enjoyable, but fundamentally valueless constructs to play around with it.
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Rather, whether it be reality TV or games that really don't have any cathartic value to them. And
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I think we can all admit there's some video games that are just a complete waste of your time.
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You know, and we want to addict you to those so you don't notice how horrible things are.
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Like these are really the two sides of the same coin.
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Whereas what myself and what Nietzsche and I think the person asking the question that inspired this
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video are saying is that you need to embrace suffering and knowledge of your world to master it,
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to take authorship of your own life and authorship of the things in your world.
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all of this really comes back to a fundamental question of what is civilization
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civilization. And the masculine and the feminine energies that make up civilization. Now,
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the feminine wants to nest while the masculine wants to explore. The feminine wants order and
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predictability, whereas the masculine is very chaotic and disruptive.
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And civilization is the product of both these energies, you understand. We need both of those energies.
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But see, the feminine is the system that we have in place. And when you get the masculine
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injected into that, the masculine is going to disrupt the system. The masculine is going to invent new
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technologies that completely change how everything works. You know, the masculine is very, very disruptive.
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Which is the last thing you want to be in the airport. You know, the airport is the toxic
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feminine. It's the overwhelming femininity. It's the womb turned into the tomb where everything is
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ordered. No innovation is allowed. No change is allowed. And if you dare to stick your head up,
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you will be smacked down by the hammer. And yet these very systems that we have are also enabled
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by the masculine innovation. The generation of new technologies, the generation of new ideas,
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is what enables new and more powerful systems. And the pure masculine certainly doesn't have any
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luxury. The pure masculine is the state of nature. You know, it's the post-apocalyptic,
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the cowboy fantasy. And certainly as men, we are very romantic about that. But realistically,
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we don't want to live in a world where a broken leg means that you die of gangrene.
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Civilization is the synthesis of these two energies, these two drives. And the issue right now,
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again, it's not the automobiles. It's that we're living in a society, in a civilization, where the
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feminine has become completely dominant. You know, it's even to the point where we're medicating young
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boys in elementary school because they're acting like boys. Where masculinity, the masculine energy,
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is itself under attack. And everybody needs to be obedient. Everybody needs to get along. Everybody
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needs to follow the system. And I think that's the real question, like what all of this is about.
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Is that, yeah, we have this toxic, cloying femininity dominating our civilization, preventing
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innovation. And again, womb and tomb. You know, they sound similar for a while. Rather than a society,
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rather than a system that takes care of individuals so that they can blossom into everything they could
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potentially become, we have a cloying system that chokes the life out of them, preventing innovation,
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preventing social advancement, and ultimately being extremely destructive. We have an overbearing
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mother of a civilization. So the solution to all of this,
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for what solutions there are, because you can't, fundamentally you can't change the world.
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You can only change yourself. You know, you can only serve as an example to others. You can only do
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your little part. Ultimately, to fight against this dehumanization that the toxic femininity,
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that the system pushes on us. To fight against that, we need to embrace mastery of our immediate
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environment. We need to not deaden ourselves to pain. You know, if you're going to a job that's so
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miserable that you have to go home and smoke a joint every single night and watch some stupid,
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unfunny comedy movie, you know, you need to get off that, that painkiller. Figure out what's causing you
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pain, what you don't like about your life and change that. And meanwhile, everything else in your life,
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be it your, your car, your computer, your, your, your home, master it. Understand how it works and take
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authorship of that. You need to be, you need to be your own author. Take authorship of yourself,
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don't just use the painkillers, but also be the author of your environment. Take responsibility,
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take control, and embrace suffering and virtue.
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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.