/lit/ - Literature

>>11999798
the real issue that he has keyed in on here is not necessarily the friend/enemy distinction, but an Us/Them (or even a One/Many) distinction, which is quite interesting: in friend/enemy circumstances, it is you and *an other.* it is one and one. in an Us/Them distinction, it is One and *a crowd.*

this need to separate oneself from a crowd should get you noggin joggin' in no small number of ways also. it is sort of what i was fumbling towards in my earlier rambling about Bullet Hell shooters: the terrifying figure of the Mass as made incarnate in Hibachi, the Conscience of the Hive. Heidegger talks about Das Man, the They, in ways that are entirely convincing. the great attraction of both fascism and Stalinism was a perverse and paradoxical fondness for and hatred of the crowd upon which they depended, and there is deep, deep Girardian sorcery to be worked here.

the 20C is in every sense the Age of the Masses, but the real trap for me imho is that Speaking For The Crowd - however intoxicating, and however much it solves one's own existential issues *and* those of the State at a stroke is a deadly fucking trap to play. Be Different/Just Do You are globalization imperatives par excellence, but the amusing twist on the narrative has become that we have all become NPCs, accordingly. identity politics originates from the metaphysics of difference and recognition, and completes itself as full-blown tribalism and Recognize Mah Metanarrative in ways that, in turn, produced Peterson.

it's why Simondon is right: it's *individuation* that matters, perhaps even more than *authenticity.* complicated stuff. to *wrench yourself free of the crowd without becoming a despot is hard,* and yet it is absolutely necessary. we have developed today a kind of *psychic allergy towards power,* and yet power is absolutely necessary. personally, i think Nietzsche has no equal in terms of doing some fundamental crowbarring of people out of their Mass-sensibilities. and there is probably no way beyond Nietzsche except going subterranean (or Cosmotechnical). 'tis a Wild Ride tho.

>>11894344

>>11363551
woops, wrong image