Philosophical Stampede Trail is a great place to be because it is the easiest answer to every question. One need not ponder much business ethics or relationship boundaries because capitalism and dating are far beneath you. It is the reason Christianity is a harder religion than Buddhism. Eternal existence as a Heavenly society is a calculus much more difficult than nonexistence. That said, philosophical Stampede Trail is as much Christian as it is Buddhist or anything else. Christianity also concerns itself mostly with high ideals of non-attachment and universal love and regards very little the sordid jungle of the metaphoircal troposphere. As has been said in various ways, asceticism and its associated universal love is the ultimate hedonism for the naturally self-content. As a hereroromantic asexual with autism and low oxytocin, I have never had a crush or strong attachment to a girl but through the misuse of language or various platonic misunderstandings have been percieved to have had such things. I do believe, in part, it is God punishing me for my philosophical hubris.
That is to say that what defines the world of most other people is alien to me. The ethics that average people have to live under are ethics about how to exist in the marketplace of sex, gossip, drama, and hedonism. It’s a world where people are creepy, in the earnest sense. Whenever I have gotten that label, it was an Asperger’s social mistake or something like that and I never have really had the proper psychology for that word to accurately apply to me. I have almost no sex drive, little oxytocin, I abstain fully from alcohol and recreational drugs, and my fantasies, hobbies, and ideologies aren’t really disturbing. In fact, it is my lack of traditional vice that makes me seem off, in part, and slightly frightens people. I can’t say anything terribly authoritative about gaslighting or the enthusiasm required for sexual consent since that is a paradigm myriad universes removed from myself.
Asceticism and universal love then has limits on its applications to philosophy reagrding people because it comes from a psychology which is unfamiliar with the irrational and lustful world of the baser urges of humanity. It fundamentally does not understand desire and has little idea about how to regulate desire except basic and feeble rules in addition to the general rule of absconding it altogether. To live in the world of asceticism and universal love is to live in the Apollonian world of platonic geometry and Kantian logic while one’s peers dwell in the Dionysian party. That party needs philosophical bouncers which the ascetics really don’t want to deal with. Not the question of how does one resist lust or something like that but something like how does one handle the tragedy of the commons of physical attractiveness and the implications for social hierarchy and oppression it entails. A question which the philosphical ascetics would run for their life from but if it is not answered then the the society and politics of the metaphorical troposphere will be ruled by its natives when it dearly needs wisdom from the Gandhians.
Philosophical asceticism tends to be anarchistic, pacifistic, and Marxist in its viewpoint. In the Marxist view, the root of all evil is exactly what Gandhi said it was: greed. This greed is a choice and if those greedy people saw the illusory nature of their pursuits then they would join the ranks of the enlightened, according to the ascetics. To cure people of their lusts is merely a matter of education. To, in the words of Marx, remove the false consciousness and reveal the world for what it is. Once that happened then all regulations could disappear and humans would live on a celibate, sober, hippie commune. The philosophical bouncers, the business ethics and relationship boundaries and such, in the ascetic view, needn’t be nuanced since they’re babysitters until the revolution when the false consciousness is dissolved.
In the words of George Orwell in his “Reflections on Gandhi” where he noted that Gandhi and his like believed, falsely, that all people desired the moral purity of non-attachment and things like universal love, peace, and goodwill to all humans, wasn’t true. The Gandhian position that if they could be enlightened and given strength, they would choose the Apollonian life of ahimsa, relative asceticism, and agape. The fact was and is that no matter the lessons taught or courage implored, people will persist in their Dionysian realm of sex, drama, gossip, grudges, and society. They aren’t seeking enlightenment and have no ambition to make any sacrifice in the service of love or peace.
The lack of accounting for the fact that humans, on the whole, do not try to live exceptionally moral lives and are content to pursue their felicities was a major problem with liberalism and why it failed. Liberalism is, as consumeristic and capitalistic as it may be, very philosophically ascetic. Its origins in English Congregationalism and Protestant individualism from the 16th and 17th centuries were amost Amish attempts at an austere utopia. Liberalism is the idea that a free people can live together because they are mostly good. Locke’s deontological philosophizing envisioned an Aristotelian “Fraternity of the Polis” in the form of a universalized English Congregationalist parish. Not much thought was put into the philosophical bouncers since good people don’t need them and when they were finally needed, there was nothing. People aren’t good.
There are a lot of alienated, lonely, and afraid people and no philosophical answers for them and the ascetic answer of rejecting lust and living free of attachment, that everyone should endeavor to engage in unconditional agape with everyone, and that a kinship of all humans should be pursued isn’t going to help. This is not to say it is not a desirable goal, for the most part, but if the average human will burn a non-abusive ex in effigy and commence a lifelong grudge over things that petty, the average human is incapable of agape of any degree. Locke concerned himself with property and personal rights but he provides no guidance for how society should accomodate the socially marginalized. If people are mostly good, there is no need to ideate on the nuances of human kindness. Nor have the derivations of Locke done that in any more than a purely material way in that they focus on material deprivation and not social oppression.
Stampdede Trail is, famously, where Christopher McCandless made his last stand and died. He had lived an ascetic lifestyle dominated by a childlike wanderlust, awe, and the arrogance of a vintage anthropolgist who saw the subcultures of America he explored as wild natives not yet having attained his lofty moral and intellectual place such as his Emory-educated, woke, self. While condescending, this condescension was never explicit and it was positive and paternalistic. Like me, he was asexual and, of all historical figures, his is the psychology most similiar to my own. He didn’t need philosophical bouncers but he did need the capacity for empathy with those who did. Without that, he can’t answer what the philosophical bouncers should do.
The Autistic Resistance 