Leonidas
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Joined: 2/16/2004
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Tal Malkinius,
Oh boy. This is going to take a while.
quote:
Actually, I described a philosophy, not a religion. I have no Gorean god. I have no Gorean priests or clerics. I have no eternal salvation by being Gorean. You are correct about what Norman said about out culture. Actually....being Gorean can very well be about becoming something you are not. It may be something you should be, but for whatever reason were not. Please, don't get started with the old stuff about being Gorean just means being whatever you naturally are. We both know how often that has been shot down...as in every time someone brings it up. I know you know better.
Ok, first of all, a religion doesn't need a god at all. Buddhism, for example, doesn't have one. Same with priests or salvation. I might argue that you have accepted gurus in your chosen way of life and venerate them very much like someone would a guru, but that's a digression. Philosophies don't tell you how to run your life, Malkinius. Philosophies (even the special case of ethics) are descriptive, more than prescriptive. Philosophers inquire into the nature of abstract concepts like morality, and the defintion of "right" or "good". They don't write cookbooks for how you should run your life. That is the province of religions, or more recently, self-help gurus.
Norman wrote about another place, and other cultures, mostly from earth's past. Why the past? Why not the future? He was writing about biological determinism; something better exemplified by clutures from long ago. He was saying that we aren't a blank slate to be molded by the current fashion in social engineering. That we do have an inate nature as human beings that we deny at our own peril. He was pointing out that we are living too far from our genes; creating a world in which we, with the bodies and instincts of hunter-gatherers, were never meant to live. He wrote about people living in other cultures from our own past to point out that we've strayed too far from what we are. Most people living today embrace systems of morality and ethics that are founded on the premise that our natural instincts are to be mistrusted and dishonored. A whole major religion is based on the premise that our very inate nature is sinful (oringal sin) and that we have no hope other than through the intervention of dieties. Norman pointed out that workable systems of ethics and morality can exist that embrace, rather than reject our nature as human beings. Such systems might be harder and outwardly more cruel than we are used to these days, but his premise was that such systems might bode more favorably for the future of our species than the softer systems that we have adopted.
So yes, being Gorean has everything to do with discovering, and being, what you are. It's about celebrating humanity, the product of countless generations of competition, and evolution rather than convincing ourselves that it would be better to be something else. I am a man. I have inate drives and desires that were honed through eons of living, and dying, winning, and losing, conquest, and subjugation. I am the progeny of the winners, and rightly so. I trust in that more than I trust in the lastest ethical fashion or attempt at social engineering and control. At the core, that is what makes me Gorean. Even saying such things outloud will cause bleeding hearts to bleed, and those who would say that there should never be winners, or losers, to bristle. They aren't Gorean, and I commend them to whatever fate that drives them toward.
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One more time. Being Gorean has nothing to do with sex, kinky or otherwise. Norman did not write a sexual philosophy. He wrote a philosophy about how to live your life... blah blah blah.
Pardon me, but bullshit. That is the exact equivelent of saying being a human has nothing to do with sex. It's not healthy (and certainly not Gorean) to compartmentalize yourself that way, Malkinius. The only folks who make those kinds of arguments are zelots of one stripe or another.
One of the defining features of Norman's whole argument is that natural, unrestrained human sexuality is very much about dominance and submission. In 25 books the word "slave" appears over 6000 times and the vast majority of the slavey that he describes is female slavery of a sexual nature. If you met a Gorean, as Norman envisioned Goreans, on the street and told him that being a man (he wouldn't really get "being Gorean" since he is one) had nothing to do with the desire to subjugate, posess, and enjoy the tender nature of the female of his species he'd know one thing about you immediately: You're from Earth.
Secondly, Norman himself would bust a gut I'm sure if he heard that what you got out of what he wrote is that he, or anyone, should tell you how to live your life. If there is an antithesis to what he was saying, that's it.
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he didn't write the Marketplace books or The Story of O nor did he ever intend to do so. When you see only the sex and slavery side of Gor, you miss all the rest of it.
When you try to divorce being Gorean from sex, sexual dominance, and sexual submission, you turn it into something else entirely so you might just as well miss all the rest. When it stops being what you are, and turns into what you believe instead, Malkinius, it's just another dogma. There are alreay enough of those. Sex can only be irrelevent to you as a Gorean if sex is irrelevant to you period. If that statement isn't so about you, then Gorean isn't what you are, rather, it's a belief system that you hold. One of the very core premises of that whole series of books is that those two things aren't the same.
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Having a slave still has nothing to do with the philosophy of being Gorean and they should not try to be Gorean because of wanting a Master/slave relationship.
If you discount what Norman said (ad naseum) about the nature of human sexuality, then yes, the desire to posess a female slave, and her corrisponding desire to be posessed has nothing to do with being Gorean. I'm wondering how, exactly, you decided that you were empowered to do that for anyone other than you? What makes you think that you can discount certain things that he described as pervasive, essential charactistics of Goreans, deciding that they don't matter, in favor of other things that are more attractive to you? If you want to pick and choose and come up with your own philosophy based on your narrower intepretation, maybe you want to call it by some other word, rather than hyjacking someone else's intellectual property. Similar to how we have "Lutherans" today, and not "True Catholics".
quote:
Being Gorean is about who you are and what you believe. It is not about what you own. You don't have to own a BMW to be Gorean either. Why should any sort of property define your moral and ethical base?
I'm not Gorean because I own slaves. I own slaves because I'm Gorean. The distinction is important, but it in no way implies that one has nothing to do with the other. Slave ownership doesn't define me. It is an actualization of me; a human male who happens to have the tendency to establish territory. Not all human males have that trait (the tendency to dominance), by the way. For them, owning a slave wouldn't be an actualization of what they are. It would be a sexual perversion, which is something else entirely.
Yes, being Gorean is about being who and what you are, and believing that your nature is inately good, rather than sinful. Part of that, Malkinius, is embracing, rather than questioning, rejecting, or marginalizing your desire to own, and assert dominion, if that is indeed in your nature. Repudiating those drives in yourself as irrelevant because you think it's somehow noble to do so is exactly the behavior that Norman was arguing against .
I wish you well.
< Message edited by Leonidas -- 7/7/2005 5:31:31 AM >
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Take care of yourself
Leonidas
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Gorean..what brought you to it? - 
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