Return to Monke Analysis
So you want to return to Monke? Before you get your bananas and strip, let’s take a look at what monkeys MEAN and why you wish to become one. To start, when we think of returning to monkey, we are dealing with evolution, or more precisely, DEVOlution. The monkey is our distant ancestor, the thing before man.
Man has long symbolized the primordial ancestor as a hairy being, even before we believed in evolution. Once upon a time, in the jungle of eden, we were happy monkeys, until we ate from the tree of knowledge!
It’s ironic that the meme depicts monkeys as an escape from the human mind, when they really gave us all the troublesome parts! They are far too clever for their own good. Playful and curious, they are little mimes (monkey see monkey do), very much like children, another thing we wish to return to.
In magic, the monkey has a relevant meaning. Aleister Crowley writes of the God Thoth:
“He is the messenger of the gods; he transmits their will by hieroglyphs intelligible to the initiate, and records their acts; but it was seen from very early times that the use of speech, or writing, meant the introduction of ambiguity at the best, and falsehood at the worst; they therefore represented Thoth as followed by an ape, the cynocephalus, whose business was to distort the Word of the god; to mock, to simulate and to deceive. In philosophical language one may say: Manifestation implies illusion. “
So we find monke to be the frivolous, ridiculous form of things we humans take very seriously. Beyond Thoth and his Ape, we have the Medieval notion of Satan as “Simia Dei”, the Ape of God.
So why then do we wish to return to monkey? In my previous video on monkey I essentially equated the monkey meme with “based” meme, both representing the power of instinct. Through the continued popularity and evolution of the return to monkey meme, I realized an even greater archetypal significance, the social dynamic that accompanied it.
We live in an extremely unique time period. We are at the threshold of the New Aeon. The point where man will advance past the oppressive forces of archaic structures, and become what he is, or the point where we settle down, and die for the rest of our time on Earth.
Of course this responsibility inspires immense fear and hesitation, something we repress and sublimate into mockery and humor. Rather shit ourselves in fear, we throw shit.
This dynamics is shown very clearly in Nietzsche’s writing:
“Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?
All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?
What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.
Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.
Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?
Lo, I teach you the Superman!”
-Zarathustra,
This meme shows how accurate Nietzsche is when he says man would rather remain an ape than become something greater than what he is.
I realize this analysis is not what the monkey lovers want to hear, that the wish to return to monkey is not a noble wish, but a spiritual fear. But allow me to explain why this current meme desire isn’t the noble one.
In my initial analyses I showed the relationship between Anarcho primitivist ideology and monkey memes. A spiritual and political urge to do away with all that man has done. But why is this what they want?
We need to take a look at the psychology, and not just the ideology of the progenitor of anprim, Ted K, who needs no introduction.
He was in his youth, by all definitions, a Thoth. A master of mathematics, a prodigy. But after *certain* interferences by *cough* mk ultra (muffled) he became extremely neurotic, he was distant from and despised his body. He retreated from all society, and became monstrous.
His genius became a mere imitation of itself. Zarathustra had become the Ape of Zarathustra. As Nietzsche writes:
“Here, however, a foaming fool, with extended hands, sprang forward to him and stood in his way. It was the same fool whom the people called “the ape of Zarathustra:” for he had learned from him something of the expression and modulation of language, and perhaps liked also to borrow from the store of his wisdom. “
I realized this compensatory relationship between tech addiction, psychological problems, and anprim ideology a long time ago. In my first discord we had several people who would complain of wanting to end technological and civilization itself only to go on to detail their addiction to bizarre forms of internet porn. These things are not separate. It is the people who have been wounded by the web who now wish to become monkey. And in a way, they already have.
In the jungle of the internet, they are the frightful apes who swing about screeching and playing tricks, throwing their shit (memes) and mocking their fellow inhabitants. The monkey is the meme-making animal.
Rather than *do* anything to heal themselves, they reverted to devolved, monstrous infants, swinging in the web, screeching of how they wish for this and that.
“Why didst thou live so long by the swamp, that thou thyself hadst to become a frog and a toad?
Floweth there not a tainted, frothy, swamp-blood in thine own veins, when thou hast thus learned to croak and revile?
Why wentest thou not into the forest? Or why didst thou not till the ground? Is the sea not full of green islands?
I despise thy contempt; and when thou warnedst me—why didst thou not warn thyself?”
This is Nietzsche’s wisdom to those who were wounded by technology and now have contempt for it.
If you wished to return to monkey, you would not make the memes.
The memes are the chatter of the digital apes, repeating calls, spreading phrases, overjoyed and with vicious curiosity, imitating all, they let the jungle know what they’re up to. I’m listening to the screeches and calls, I’m analyzing the memes. The strange language of the labyrinthine jungle. For I know memes matter.