/lit/ - Literature

>>13034455
it would just be an interesting thing to understand that there is no *choice* between left, right, or center. you choose *all* of them, see how they all connect to each other, invariably drive and inform each other, all representing different and conjoined aspects of the psyche, and then realize that the correct answer is, none of them. how then to live? without constantly projecting all of your existential grief onto the polis?

this is in some sense what made JBP who he was, and before him Campbell, and even Wilber back in the early 1980s, although with a very different reading list. today Land is the Right Marxist to go with Foucault's Left Nietzsche and when you smash that all together on the internet you get, perhaps unsurprisingy, the Backed-Up Toilet phase of the Hegelian Process. that is how i would characterize the age, as a massively clogged sewer system that is now spewing everything back up the other way, for our collective enjoyment and sifting on Twitter. a shit-covered hate-fest of epic proportions, 200+ years in the making. carousel of doom and memes.

it will /lit/erally just be enough to not become animus-possessed by either extreme and basically smile through a decade of horseshit, i think. such is my feel.

>>12928261
the other thought i have is the desire of people to be *in* history, to want to make history or Be A Part of some great cause or whatever. maybe i used to feel like this too, it's certainly a good cure for existential crisis. and also, you find yourself asking: well, what then should i do? i don't want to 'just enjoy life,' i need there to be some pain in it somewhere...and so you get Woke or whatever, and then join some crusade that if you have any historical perspective at all makes you realize that the crusade you're on isn't any better just because you're on it, and you're so fucking special. Fukuyama predicted a lot of this stuff with his book on the End of History, where he guessed - rightly - that our problem in the long run would be decadence. i don't think he expected then that that decadence might indeed cause people to need to get woke...unless he was just wrong about everything...

because it's not like Land didn't have a reason for being Land in the 1990s, when he was hearing these arguments as Young Nick: 'the end of history? really?' because he was seeing that the social problems were still very much there, they were just imperial-hyperpower problems, and on top of that, you now had explosive computer tech and internet capital was soon to arrive, much much else. and a whole new era is inaugurated only then, when the cheese truly stood alone and it was the boom times for globalization. Baudrillard saw a lot of this stuff too, where things were going to go in the age of simulation.

and now we're here, where the simulation has gone full circle and converted itself into AI and this automatic planet, to make the great carousel of doom do another turn. what if the great irony of the Kali-Yuga is that infinite spiral? it just keeps turning on a pivot there...but at some deep level it's there because we don't look away, because we don't know what else to look at. just having gone completely blind through the images, through this demented insistence that we know what we're doing, that there is this horrible pot of stew on the stove that nobody wants to eat and began cooking before you arrived, and new ingredients keep getting added...

blech. there must be better things to do.