Advice From an Old Man

Of the many things lost during the Cultural Revolution of the 60s, one which stands out to me the most is the dearth of colloquial “old man” wisdom which used to prevail.  Call it the cult of immaturity – Baby Boomers worship childishness, and being mature and “set in your ways” is viewed as a failure, rather than as having a solid foundation upon which to build a life.  We have a culture of material optimism, and spiritual pessimism – “One person can’t change the world – and stop being so negative, pointing out all the flaws with my plan!” More and more people never learn, never grow, repeating the same failed psychodramas again and again, addicts to super-stimuli and constructed status games, who take Nietzche’s low road on the path to becoming beasts.

We in the Mandrosphere are playing a game of bootstrapping, putting all our heads together to rediscover the old wisdom which fathers and grandfathers once passed on; reading the old books and trying to work out the correct theological interpretations from them, rather than the mischaracterizations we’ve been taught since youth.

It’s damned hard work; we’re lucky to have a guy like Anonymous for Obvious Reasons who’s decided to put together a page of AfORisms on the sidebar.

Post 1 – Introduction

Post 2 – People Do What They Want to Do

Post 3 – Swoop, Leopards and Spots

AfOR is an experienced Engineer, who’s been just about everywhere, and done just about everything.  Unlike the modern Engineer, who thinks that every fact can be looked up in the Big Book of Little Red Balls, he knows the difference between things that can be measurable by calibrated instruments, and those which require a philosophically justified heuristic to understand – that is to say, he knows you can’t just read the dominant narrative on History, Sociology, or Art and take it at face value.

His advice – like all advice – won’t stop you from making the mistakes in the first place:

if you’re young and / or inexperienced, they don’t stop you fucking up, no siree, not one bit, because if you were smart enough to really pay attention you would no longer be young and inexperienced.

Where they DO come in handy is AFTER you fucked up, they help you make sense of shit, they help you stay sane, they help you avoid a reaction that just makes matters worse, and they help you, after a suitable passage of time, to laugh at yourself, and to silently toast your dead dad, yeah old man, you were right, yet again.

What they do is help you escape the psychodrama cycle; to break free from the past and evolve.

We have so few elders nowadays who can say anything useful to us; be grateful that we’ve got AfOR.

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