/lit/ - Literature

>>12658858
that quote is pretty amazing.
>Is Roko's Basilisk an inversed Pascalian wager?
could be i suppose. personally i find the Basilisk is a kind of needlessly paranoia-inducing thought experiment. i'd prefer old-fashioned Catholic guilt or existential panic (which is the same thing).

>>12658884
you mean fascism? it doesn't seem to have a particularly good track record in terms of longevity. the Japanese try it and they get fucked. the Germans try it and they get fucked. the Italians try it and they get fucked. the excesses of neoliberal politics in turn leads to the popular desire for totalitarianism and said neoliberal order gets fucked.

the only experiment of that kind that is continuing today is the CCP and they thoroughly fucked themselves under Mao. now they have Xi Jinping Thought, which probably has no upper limit on how much CTRL over the people it desires to exert. will it work? time will tell.

my own takeaway from this seems to be the fundamental impossibility of trying to solve one's own existential problems via recourse to what it is that the State requires of one, however romantic. the State conceived as such just seems to always operate like a superego (The Law) or a complete manchild (The Revolution). it's Terror either way. the aesthetics of fascism absolutely cannot be beaten, there's no question. and Nietzsche may be right that life is indeed justifiable only aesthetically.

but what if life is not in fact in any way justifiable at all? it's very hard to top the Tao for nihilism, when you are in a mood to be completely fucking depressed about politics. and yet weirdly enough you can still be decent, even then. politics is great until we fuck up, or produce the inevitable counter-move that always comes from excess.