{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

To study gorts, we first will want to know what one means when using this humorous term: See What is a gort?

While studying  Living Under the Bell Jar: Surveillance and Resistance in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We by Michael Amey, mentioned in the thread, "The Open Air Panopticon", seeing how D-503 turns on I-330 at the end, and even his hemming and hawing when it came to disobedience and defiance, I am beginning to notice "gortish" elements about the protagonist, D-503.

For some reason, it is easier for me to use Holden's term, 'gortish,' than to outright define someone as a gort.  And yet, with a fictional character, one would think it would be easy to just write them off as gorts or gortards (a play on Inmendham's fucktards).   In the thread, "as I reconstitute for the fourth time (by now, the fifth or sixth time), Holden points out that Kant comes off as rather 'gortish' ---- It is a bold statement, yet,  most likely, a sad brute fact.  I have always had reservations ... I mean, I get it that I would not have approached Kant's work without the guiding hand of Arthur Schopenhauer, Gortbuster par excellence.

So, I thought, wouldn't it be kind of fun to have a thread dedicated to GORTOLOGY (The Study of Gorts, Systemoids, Flesh Robots, Self-Deluded Phonies etc.)?

If we say that D-503 was a gort and I-330 a gortbuster, what happened?   Did I-330 bust D-503's gort?   If so, why was it not permanent?  How did D-503 regress back into a gort?  How did he come to renounce his individuality, turn against she who introduced him to his "imaginative faculties?"

It was the Operation!   The lobotomy or whatever that destroyed the capacity for imagination in the frontal lobes of his actual brain.  It does not seem authentic, his gorthood that is.  D-503 was lobotomized back into a gort.

In order to facilitate this new field of study, I will try to list as many relevant threads for future seekers/explorers and intellectual/spiritual pioneers.
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(1)
 E-330 formulates, for example, the way that originality (and thus individuality) is unfavourably compared with uniformity (and the collective):

‘It is clear […] that to be original means standing out from others.  Consequently, to be original means violating uniformity. And what in the idiotic language of the ancients was called being banal means among us only the fulfillment of one’s duty’. (43)
D-503 agrees with E-330’s definitions, but initially fails to notice her antagonism to the imposition of ‘banality’ as fulfillment of one’s duty.  Far from resenting The One State’s insistence on uniformity, D-503 finds it comforting. Later he records his feelings about the triumph of the collective over the individual when he describes the numbers ‘all
pacing along in even ranks of four each’ (22). He states, ‘We walked along, a single million-headed body, and within each of us was the meek joyfulness which, probably, constitutes the life of molecules, atoms and phagocytes. […] We is from God, I is from the Devil’ (129–30).
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(2)
The following character analysis might help us determine that point of demarcation where the dividing line between the human and the gort is distinct.

From D-503 Character Analysis:

D-503 is the narrator and protagonist of We, which is the resultant compilation of his carefully composed records, or journal entries. He is a mathematician and rocket engineer, and the lead designer of a rocket called the Integral. In the beginning of We, D-503 is obedient to the One State’s authoritarian rule. He espouses the rationality, predictability, and “settledness” the One State enforces, and he is happy to be part of a system that values the needs of the collective over the desires and needs of individuals. He is content in his relationship with O-90, a female cipher the State has assigned to him as a sexual partner. Once he meets I-330, however, his structured, settled life begins to unravel as he becomes increasingly infatuated with and unsettled by her shameless disobedience to the One State and begins to tortuously question his own subservience to the government. After D-503 and I-330 are intimate, D-503 becomes “sick,” gaining a greater perspective on his unique, internal life and suffering from imaginative thoughts and repressed desires. He starts to conceive of himself as two people: his “real,” subservient self, and this new, “other” self that wants to rebel, love, and be an individual. As I-330’s influence on D-503 grows, his writing relies more heavily on metaphor and other figurative language, and it becomes harder for him to tell the difference between dreams and reality. Ultimately, D-503’s confused state reflects his ambivalence toward the One State. On the one hand, he trusts in the superiority of logic, rationality, and subservience; however, his so-called “hairy paws” serve as a constant reminder of the “barbaric,” pre-One State blood that pulses through his veins, and his alliance with I-330 repeatedly shows how capable and willing he is to break free of the One State’s rules and act on his natural, animalistic impulses. At the end of We, D-503 is forced to undergo the Operation, abolishing his capacity for imaginative thought and free will, and prompting him to turn in I-330 and MEPHI to the Guardians. Thematically, D-503’s fate suggests that human urges are impossible to suppress fully; they cannot be prohibited out of existence and must be removed by force.
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The Big Corporations have psychologically created standard personality programs and have created assembly lines of mindless “Consumers Ready to Buy”… Consumerism controls mass society.

The standard gort personalities are easily manipulated in society with marketing programs, mining the unconscious mind (the old brain) for profit.  Most of this old brain is occupied with fear and anxiety which the Market Forces know how to manipulate ... Debt is Slavery.  (from The Mind Parasites)
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Why the Gort Cannot Win

I've been called "uneducated" by some. How wonderful. Sadly, it's not entirely true. As Mike is fond of pointing out, we all have our own "inner gort" installed somewhere along the line, and I'd like to bust those remnants of "education" and become totally uneducated. A genius is simply one who remains intelligent in spite of education. We are all born geniuses - we have to be taught how to be mindless gorts.

With the inner gort in mind, I am wondering if we can expound upon what makes gorts comical, and precisely why the gort within cannot win.

Can we destroy the gort within our own brains (as well as the gorts we encounter in our own monkey spheres) by scoffing at it?   That is, how might we employ the mannerisms of the genuine Cynics to commit gorticide on ourselves once and for all?   Will we be able to commit mass gorticide?

The genuine Cynics put up with what they could get for virtually nothing. They begged occasionally, but they did not work. Independence in the widest sense was their goal. They spent their lives resting, walking about, talking with everyone, and in scoffing, laughing, and joking. Their characteristics were heedlessness and great cheerfulness. Since they had no aims of their own, no purposes and intentions to pursue, enjoying complete leisure, they became councilors of others.

The gort believes that that which is so, is so.  They believe in security even when the notion of any kind of security in this irrational universe is totally absurd.   Things can change instantly, and we can lose consciousness out of the blue ... Maybe the main reason that the gort cannot win is the inevitability of the deaths of our animal bodies.   Do we cease to be when our animal body perishes?  It seems very likely - and yet we are made up of the minerals of the earth, so it is impossible to say.

We are not really coming up with anything new here, just using more humorous terminology to explore notions our species has been grappling with for eons.   The Upanishads must have been like a "How to Bust Gorts" manual for Arthur Schopenhauer! 
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? Why Schopenhauer ?:

Our entire reality is not reality, but only an Appearance-as-presented-to-us-by-our-erroneous-perceptions.

Maybe this is why Cioran suggests thinking against ourselves.  Yes, there is a connection here.  We learn to mistrust our judgements, to recognize our delusions *** to bust the gort in the Control panel of Our Consciousness ***.  This is what makes the Matrix (as a film) so appealing to philosophical (depressive) types.  The Mass Hypnosis of standard education and enculturation does not "program" all members of The Set of "clean" Citizens, and it certainly does not hypnotize all those the Masters of the Advertisers/Insurers/Corporate-State wish it to.

I ask "Why Schopenhauer?" and respond with: Because of ethical statements pointing out the evils of human society such as the following:

There is no need to persecute the honest man who draws attention to the truth.  It is enough for the upholders of the status-quo to simply ignore what they want to silence.

I am not sure if these are Schopenhauer's exact words.  Maybe they were in one of his popular essays.
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I am very sleepy, so must continue another time ... Peace

Hentrich,

I can only  wish you the best where you are now. I hope that with your assistance your mother can recover and live calmer days there.

Stay safe.