I know I am relatively new to the Forum, and haven’t posted much, or participated much. Nevertheless, I’d like to recommend a thinker with a first-rate mind that is of invaluable use against the New Barbarians: Philip Rieff. Particularly, his Fellow Teachers: of Culture and Its Second Death. It’s dense, but short read, but it rewards on virtually every and any page. I’ll post some excerpts if anyone is interested. It will be of particular use to anyone involved in, or interested in, Academia. It is a deliberatively “non-political” work of theory, but it is aimed against the rape of Mind and (yes) Soul that is going on apace at our big state universities and even the old holdouts.
His main thesis ought to interest anyone who follows CNWY (though they diverge on at least two important ideas):
That any kind of Culture is impossible without Interdicts. Interdicts he defines Mosaically (he was of Lithuanian Jewish extraction), but everyone from Bertrand Russell to Marcuse and in between is skewered more effectively than I could have believed possible, and purely by examining their own words and drawing conclusions from them. Rieff set himself against the emerging techno-therapeutic mindset. The Wiki entry doesn’t do him any justice. He read Freud more closely and critically than any before or since.
A Snippet: Page 54; “What every State can best use are empty people…”
From what I can gather, his more recent (mature?) conclusions appear very reminiscent of those reached by Yockey in his work Imperium. I look forward to reading him. If he is as difficult as Strauss, it may take some effort.
I do agree that culture is not a choice. This is the essential paradox of “movements” and of Kinism itself. For those that have lost faith in the interdicts, there is no return, only a forward movement into the anti-culture with existential bravery and honesty. For those whom that “dead” spirit still animates, their path must be one of secession, until the new and living forms of authority can be born. I think this is what Nietzsche meant in his statement that “God is dead.” In the cultural sense that is certainly true. The limited kinship here between Rieff and Nisbet seems patent, though I think Nisbet stood at the divergence between faith in the dead which we have received as it were almost automatically through sources that have escaped the loss of the kulturkampf, and Rieff’s rejection of the “dead.”
In my opinion, the most effective modern evangelist of the Freudian therapeutic epistemology was the novelist Thomas Mann, and I have studied his works quite carefully, having re-read some several times. Considering the state of the early 20th century “academy,” it is not a wonder that his explosion of the bourgeois ethos was awarded with a medal. His work Der Zauberberg is a textbook in the therapeutic epistemology.
Thanks for the kind words, much undeserved - I have a long way to go mentally and morally.
Page 92:
“In The Magic Mountain, Mann gives us Naphta, a Jesuit of Jewish origin, who elects himself anti-priest, thus to attack ‘the classical ideal in education’. Naphta attacks us teachers and our institutions, in the:
splenetic partisanship of the formal and grammatical, which was nothing else than anaccessory to the interests of bourgeois class supremacy…They had no idea what an utter joke our doctors’ degrees and the whole system fostered by our educational mandarins had become…the publich school system was the instrument of hte domination of the mdidle classes. One day all the world would realize that our system, which had developed out of hte cloister school of hte Middle Ages, was a gridiculous bureaucracy and anachronism, that nobody inthe world any longer owed his education to this schooling, and that a free and public instruction through lectures, exhibitions, cinematographs and so forth, was vastly to be preferred to any school course. The humanistic horror of illiteracy simply made him laugh…
Rieff, although not Christian in a strict sense, is interested in the salvific terrors of the Law and the Lawgiver. He believes “our high culture belongs to anyone who will be mastered by it” (p.93, ff) but qualifies this by stating that both oral history and familial discipline are necessary precedents to the mastery of “High Culture” (this may have genetic dimensions/ramifications, although I am sure he would reject the outright position of CWNY). And although he eschews being an authority himself, he expends all of his intellectual skill against “pretend religions and unlimited science, which make the most transgressive politics” (p.173).
“Truth is no cure; it is an arrestment, a creation of closure, a narrowing that wonderfully concentrates the mind. That is why teenagers, sexually driven, are such rank sentimentalists…as Don Juan was, even as he hailed ‘Liberty’...Truths are a long way round to ego identity and not at all, in the result, broadening, as the young have been lead to believe…the young are pure only in their unbelief…” (p.145, ff92)
“Marcuse seems to think that a liberated sexuality would oppose a technological discipline as the modern form of social repression. I do not understand the force of this opposition. Sexuality cannot be liberated; it can be more or less transgressive, in an order of truths that, by opposing impulse, appears to create them. ‘One dimensional man’ can only be controlled, in his infinite carnality, by a new submission to Law. Marcuse offers no lawful symbolic. His is yet another carnalization of spirit, based this time around his own version of hte technoligical mystique of a new Eden, a world free first of all from scarcity. Like others among our most progressive theorists, Marcuse is an ally of the tecnological mystagogues. In order to possess any truth, a theory must be of order - of authority and its descent. An ‘aesthiticizing’ theory treats reality as a game; such lightness and play cancels out the shadowed nature of authority, at least in the theory itself…” (p.144)
From what I can gather, his more recent (mature?) conclusions appear very reminiscent of those reached by Yockey in his work Imperium. I look forward to reading him. If he is as difficult as Strauss, it may take some effort.
I am familiar with Yockey only as a follow up to Spengler, whom I read with interest and usefulness, although I am not sure that thinkers like him don’t most often get bastardized by pseudo-intellectual Americans like Stanley Fish as a harbinger of Multicult. Strauss is historically important, but I have to admit to having not read him. Rieff seems to be a potent continuation, from the former Left, of a particular style of critique of the modern culture done less thoroughly by Richard Weaver.
If anyone knows a better dissection of the progressive, post-liberal mind/spirit than Rieff gives, please let me know.
“I want to make one thing clear: Interdicts are not the same as repressions; social and psychological differ. A repsression is never a precept; an Interdict is never anti-credal. If we are aware of our repressions, then we are not repressed. If we are not obedient to the Interdicts, then we are not cultured. It is from the Interdicts that repressions gather energy; only then can repressions subserve Interdicts. Interdicts are the primary forms of high culture, not the arts and sciences. Neither literary studies nor scientific constitute culture…” Rieff, page 69.
Rieff says that one of the greatest errors of Modernity is to conflate Life and Art, to the detriment of both. The “anti-narrative” only can exist as a cancer on the critically ill body of the true symbolic, the High Culture. Without the symbolic, meaning itself disappears. What comes next, we don’t have to guess…
Not to get caught up in Rieff’s terminology. He didn’t allow it in his own classroom. Like Christopher Lasch, he did what he could, an unwilling prophet.
of a particular style of critique of the modern culture done less thoroughly by Richard Weaver.
Yeah, but Weaver is immediately understandable and easily graspable to most of the White, general public.
You’ve got to start there.
I can work my way through Lasch, Strauss and Rieff in my spare time because of my intellect (but only with extreme care and devotion - I’m not that smart after all) but it isn’t fair to force it on others without simplification. They need the knowledge, but it is inaccessible and obscure in even these most revealing and open passages you’ve excerpted.
of a particular style of critique of the modern culture done less thoroughly by Richard Weaver.
Yeah, but Weaver is immediately understandable and easily graspable to most of the White, general public.
You’ve got to start there.
I can work my way through Lasch, Strauss and Rieff in my spare time because of my intellect (but only with extreme care and devotion - I’m not that smart after all) but it isn’t fair to force it on others without simplification. They need the knowledge, but it is inaccessible and obscure in even these most revealing and open passages you’ve excerpted.
Conservatives have been far too short on theory for a long time now. They’ve paid dearly for their distrust of ideology and intellect. I agree with your excellent points, and I’m not suggesting we turn to “gray theory” over “green practice” and those who are better at explicating popular versions of it. But I confess to being interested in the possibilities of using the enemy’s weapons against him, in a non-Saruman sense, and more of in a Sun Tzu sense. Do you remember the Last World Cup? And how the French won it? Is there a way to absolutely turn them on their own heads? Something like throwing the ring into Mount Doom? Rieff seems to think there might be. They may be able to be resisted on their own turf, something they are not used to having done to them.
Well, I guess what I’m suggesting is using people like Rieff to identify blindspots and nodes of weakness in the system itself. Every system has them, particularly this global thing we’ve got now. Where are the spiritual, conceptual, and even physical weak points? Zizek (for example, another crypto-Leftist although not openly penitent like Rieff) talks about such things directly. I suppose there is always a chance one is weakened by such study, in which case my solution usually is to abstain (nothing wrong with that). But if someone can walk in the vallies of Mordor or the paths of the dead or the wastes of Weathertop, I think we should encourage it.
Most of my effort has been in the “geneology” of this stuff. To know where an idea comes from, who first thought it, etc.
Great Tolkeinesque analogies Hope. I agree that those who are able really should operate [at least occasionally] on the principle of “know thy enemy.” Your analogy reminded me also of the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me”
Still, be careful not to look to long into the abyss lest the abyss look back into you. I guess that is one reason those books and films about gruesome murder investigations performed by serial killer profilers have always held my attention.
It isn’t that I enjoy imagining or seeing gore or disturbing imagery or peering into the heart of evil. What interests me most is the inner struggle of the protagonist in these stories, the serial killer profiler, who must look deep into the heart and mind of serial killers in order to know how they think and feel or understand them well enough to be able to successfully track them to their lair where they can organize a raid to bring them into custody to stand trial for their crimes.
The profiler while always struggling against any possible negative influence the investigation might have on them mentally or emotionally must never underestimate their opponents who are more often than not criminal geniuses. Insane but still considered geniuses of a sort.
But since the serial killer’s genius only exists in a mental framework completely alien to all normal healthy minds it is the Profiler’s job to attempt to get inside that mental framework or insane but ingenious world view and attempt to think like him so he can be made predictable.
Similar also is the under cover agent or deep cover operative who must assume another identity in order to gain the confidence of the enemy. So I also like those stories where an agent of the law goes deep under cover and stays there so long that it becomes an inner struggle to maintain his real identity and to remember the difference between fantasy and reality. I think it was Charlie Sheen who played such a role if I remember correctly. I recall liking it. He had to infiltrate a crazy outlaw biker gang. Anyway Hope, as you can see I am fond of analogies myself. lol
From the Preface is Rieff quoting two historians summary of his work:
“If the dominant character type of the twentieth century is really what Rieff calls ‘psychological man,’ the consequences for western society are quite incalculable.”
This is certainly true. If man is a psych creature than we must use the weapons of psychology to turn him to toward the defensive weaponry of Christianity. Simply concentrating on VanTillian epistemological weapons will do no good on a people who are fundamentally outside that realm.
From the Introduction:
Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry [he quotes Yeats in the very beginning of the Intoduction] constitutes an elegiac farewell… ...to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course.
Rieff seems to be stating in this passage that the central crisis of our time - this dissolution of personhood and entropy of personality - is a culture war where the combatants are fighting to “organize” (this has the faint smell of technocratic and bureaucratic totalitarianism parading itself as scientific management with disinterested and rationalized dispassionate concern only for the psychological well being of mankind) the human psyche.
He goes on to state that the
...long period of deconversion, which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended.
and that
several systems of belief (are) competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West.
Hence, the “culture war.” The “cult” is the cult of personality.
On the preservation of culture:
A culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood—with that understanding of which explicit belief and precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of an iceberg… binding even the ignorants of a culture in a great chain of meaning.
This idea of Rieff’s eventually germinated and sprouted into his idea - in my opinion - that if a man is aware of his repressions, they aren’t. The iceberg itself isn’t cognizant of what is underneath itself under the water, it only sees its own reflection which is, in Rieff’s words the directed and outward projection “toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.”
A reorganization of those dialectical expressions of Yes and No the interplay of which constitutes culture, transforming motive into conduct, is occurring throughout the West, particularly in the United States and England. It is to be expected that some instruments appropriate to our inherited organization of permissions and restraints upon action [monogamy, fidelity, obeying the spirit of the law, etc] will not survive the tension of fundamental reorganization. But, suppose the tension is driven deeper—so deep that all communications of ideals come under permanent and easy suspicion? The question is no longer as Dostoevsky put it: Can civilized men believe?” But rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?
Rieff goes on to state that restoration of past faith will inevitably bring on the nightmare of the first half of the twentieth century and that the greats poets all wished for what we know is a radically un-Christian idea of a return to initial or original innocence which is a concept that is fundamentally at odds with our espoused Calvinism.
In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil.
I’m all for restoring the “sense of play” in acts of creation and invention at the loom, till, craft and trades in the Laschian sense, but Rieff seems to suggest something different here. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Rieff scandalously suggests that this inversion of the doctrines of Total Depravity and Original Sin is the longed for “centre” of Yeats and is capable of holding the self together in these psychically trying times.
He recklessly, foolishly and Judaically abandons psychology to the express purpose of
(reconstructing) culture so… that faith—some compelling symbolic of self-integrating communal purpose—need no longer superintend the organization of personality.
I think perhaps this is at odds with some of his later work and ideas where he expressly calls for the re-imposition of a massive and constrictive super-ego that is essentially Calvinistic but lacking Christ. He wants all the benefits of Christianity but none of the Christ!
Rieff takes a bit of a turn toward the fascistic elitism of the neo-Pagans and others here:
Never before has there been such a general shifting of sides as now among intellectuals in the United States and England. Many have gone over to the enemy… and ...have become spokesmen for what Freud called the instinctual “mass.” Much of modern literature constitutes a symbolic act of going over to the side of the latest, and most original, individualist. This represents the complete democratization of our culture.
It was in order to combat just such talented hostility to culture that Freud emphasized coercion and the renunciation of instinct as indispensable elements in all culture… “It is just as impossible,” he writes, “to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization.”... ...That such large numbers of the cultivated and intelligent have identified themselves deliberately with those who are supposed to have no love for instinctual renunciation, suggests to me the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged… ...I suspect the children of Israel did not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the golden calf; they naively danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by submerging their individualities within a communal purpose… ...Confronted thus with a picture gallery as the new center of self-worship, civilized men must become again anti-art, in the hope of shifting attention toward modalities of worship wholly other than that of self
He goes on to elaborate on what could be considered a healthy and properly conservative, cultural dynamic here:
Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands, images that mark the trail of each man’s memory; thus to distinguish right actions from wrong the inner ordinances are set, by which men are guided in their conduct so as to assure a mutual security of contact. Culture is, indeed, the higher learning, But, this higher learning is not acquired at universities; rather, it is assimilated continuously from earliest infancy when human beings first begin to trust in those familiar responses others make to their overtures. In every culture, there stands a censor, governing the opportunity of recognizing and responding to novel stimuli. That governor, inclined always to be censorious about novelty, we may call “faith.” Faith is the compulsive dynamic of culture, channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon authority.
A strong and healthy conservative culture will fight against the injection of novelty into the social landscape instinctively and with great vigor. This is a basic principle articulated most thoroughly and most competently by many, but initially by men like de Maistre and Burke. Here is where Hannah Arendt’s historical “break” comes into play in my opinion. What we have now, is a group of cultural creators who are indifferent and they express this through the rigorous defense of pluralism, relativism and nihilism. They contradict all faith by contradicting the very idea of faith. Hence, the push to glorify homosexuals, pederasts, and all other forms of psychological and sexual perversion. They are the welcoming hosts of all things exotic and as Rieff stated before, the most eloquent defenders of the teeming mass of the diverse everyman; an everyman who is his own king, prophet, priest and lawyer completely atomized and disconnected from any greater fabric than that of the cloak of his own ego.
Hence the “No person is illegal” slogan. It reveals much more about the psyche of the individuals repeating this platitudinal mantra since it is a moral judgment and not simply political sloganeering. They’ve internalized the “anti-culture” and are exporting it from the abundance of their hearts.
Similar also is the under cover agent or deep cover operative who must assume another identity in order to gain the confidence of the enemy. So I also like those stories where an agent of the law goes deep under cover and stays there so long that it becomes an inner struggle to maintain his real identity and to remember the difference between fantasy and reality. I think it was Charlie Sheen who played such a role if I remember correctly. I recall liking it. He had to infiltrate a crazy outlaw biker gang. Anyway Hope, as you can see I am fond of analogies myself. wink lol
This is the premise of the Viggo Mortenson movie Eastern Promises. He is an ex-KGB undercover trying to disrupt organized crime.
The culture to which I was first habituated grows progressively different in its symbolic nature and in its human product; that double difference and how ordained augments our ambivalence as professional mourners. There seems little likelihood of a great rebirth of the old corporate ideals. The “proletariat” was the most recent notable corporate identity, the latest failed god. By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that are to be called, in the present volume, “therapeutic,” with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.
Dwell on that last sentence for a while. That is directly where erudite, Godless, idolatry leads.
Rieff finally lets on as to what the stone masons of our Babylon are building:
What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten [or pan out at all, ever] the more immediate pleasures. They systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so unsettled the world. It is a terrible error to see the West as conservative and the East as revolutionary. We are the true revolutionaries. The East is swiftly learning to act as we do, which is anti-conservative in a way non-Western peoples have only recently begun to fully to realize for themselves.
With what, at first glance, seems like stunning prescience and foresight, Rieff predicts the the decade of the 70’s (although from the vantage point of the late 60’s, I’m not that impressed) with particular acumen as a response to hyper-critical elitism:
Each culture is its own order of therapy—a system of moralizing demand, including remissions that ease the pressures of communal purposes. Therapeutic elites before our own were predominately supportive rather than critical of cultures as a moral demand system. Admonitions were the expectable predicates of consolations; that is what is meant, nowadays, by “guilt” culture. Whenever therapeutic elites grow predominately critical then a cultural revolution may be said to be in progress. Ours is such a time. The Occident has long been such a place.
With a little luck, our counter-revolution may be underway, precipitated in our era by the election of Obama combined with rapid demographic transformation and the economic stagnation we are experiencing. People scapegoat. It is a theological necessity inherent in the human psyche and soul, placed there as part of the very image of God that He burned into our souls. We seek absolution through the death and destruction of substitutes. The current crop of hyper-critical elites scapegoat us poor and simple White folk without realizing that it is a two way street and without understanding the great power this process can stimulate in the masses.
I will refrain from making a judgment about the actual level of Jewish culpability for the standard charges against them, but the typical historical European reaction against the Jews - whether completely justified or not - is a fitting and appropriate example of this phenomenon. Expulsion of the other, the placing of them outside the camp to symbolize their guilt.
Really, the process of cultural revolution, in my opinion, is a Christophony of sorts. The revolutionaries transfer their guilt unto their substitute and are atoned. Once cleansed, they begin to rebuild the torn down temples of the guilty parties. This is why Christ goes alone to His death; we all killed Him and we repeat this “cyclically” in the a Spenglerian sense throughout history.
Rieff goes on to quote Max Scheler in describing what I think is a Scriptural definition of the underlying purpose for the Christian drive to denounce sin and repent:
Christian asceticism—at least so far as it was not influenced by decadent Hellenistic philosophy—had as its purpose not the suppression or even extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and complete spiritualization. It is positive, not negative, asceticism—aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the highest powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower drives.
The real and ugly head of existentialism has finally reared itself violently upward, defiant and unwavering in its mission to be unruled and unorganized. Rieff:
Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory for some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organization of personality.
Indeed, Western men are learning how to use their internality to do battle against all. Bellum unus contra omnes! This is the egalitarian fantasy unmasked. It is every man woman and child for themselves in social warfare of epic proportions with no safe port, harbor, trench or fort. The home, the marriage, the school and the church have become a war zone. Rieff states that if this final cultural transformation takes root, if this
restructuring of the Western imagination succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions of nature. With such a victory, culture, as previously understood, need suffer no further defeats. it is conceivable that millennial distinctions between inner and outer experience, private and public life, will become trivial. The individual heart need have no reasons of its own that the corporate head cannot understand and exploit for some augmentation of the individual’s sense of well-being. Thinking need not produce nausea or despair as its final answer to the assessment of communal purpose because men well have ceased to seek any salvation other than amplitude in living itself.
Rieff predicts the rise of reality television, social networking (i.e. Facebook, Myspace) and internet persona:
There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institutionalize the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.
Finally, Rieff concludes:
The wisdom of the next social order… ...would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again culture will give back what it has taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance. The danger of politics lies more in the ancient straining to create those symbols or support those institutions that narrow the range of virtues or too narrowly define the sense of well-being; for the latter seems to be the real beatitude toward which men have always strained. Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.
Culture as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing automaticity of the productive system... ...The rules of health indicate activity; psychologocial man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture. Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints. If “immoral” materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful. The “end” or “goal” is to keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.
I am aware that these speculations may be thought to contain some parodies of an apocalypse. But what apocalypse has ever been so kindly? What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt? Perhaps the elimination of the tragic sense—which is tantamount to the elimination of irreconcilable moral principles—is no tragedy. Civilization could be, for the first time in history, the expression of human contents rather than the consolatory control of discontents. Then and only then would the religious question receive a markedly different answer from those dominant until recently in our cultural history.
Triumph of the Therapeutic seemed to be a Rieff more hopeful of understanding, controlling, and mitigating the new monster he had already begun to fear. By the time he wrote Fellow Teachers, he was far more acerbic, hostile, and hopeless about the situation. That’s my take. He had come to view Faith not merely as normative and controlling and counterbalancing, but as the essence of what it means to be human. I don’t think he saw any hope outside of the Interdictual scale by the time he was an angry old man. And he did his best to help sabotage it.
Teachers is even better, IMHO.
lol
