/lit/ - Literature

LARPING PSEUD LINE

Everyone below this line is a LARPing pseud
____________________

>>12438975
based. so is everyone above it btw

anyways yes, this thread is for pseuds. please leave Serious Philosophy elsewhere. pseuds welcome, so get in here and share your pseud thoughts on capitalism plz

Bump

What is 'space taoism'? you mean like the force in star wars?

>>12438931
>One speculates on this unknown end of absolute deterritorialization like gamblers staring at casino tokens. Accelerating disorientation does not create an exit from the global time-axis. On the contrary, it merely disrupts momentarily the established orders and conventional modes of operation. In China, for example, expanding bandwidth and storage capacity for data flow have given rise to social credit systems, which simply stabilize and reterritorialize the flow of capital. A recent survey conducted by the Free University of Berlin showed that 80 percent of Chinese respondents approved or highly approved of these social credit systems, with 19 percent neutral and only 1 percent opposed. The disruptive and apocalyptic qualities intrinsic to acceleration are by no means anti-humanist. In fact, they reveal an extreme humanism fighting to save itself through massive destruction—a twenty-first-century nihilism.

Brave Chinese philosopher shills dystopian panoptican by painting it as the cure for modern nihilism! for more on that stay tuned for after the commercial break!

curse of Name
haunts on

someone explain this to me NOW
https://www.urbanomic.com/event/unboxing-the-machines/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzFFWh1B3J0

>>12441135
Holy fuck philosophy legos
I <333 CAPITAL

>>12441135
stop eating so much holy shit

>>12440944
you know, it just might be.

>>12441028
did you read the rest of that essay?

>>12441047
based. we deserve this

>>12441135
>Made of genuine vintage Lego® parts, the set is accompanied in its specially designed box by a leaflet containing assembly instructions and a highly detailed map of Intelligence and Spirit’s journey from transcendental psychology through the ruins of conservative humanism to logoi, language, and time, as well as Acid Carnap, Psychedelic Sellars, and Automatic Laughing Bag diagram stickers, and a certificate of playset authenticity signed by Mackay and Negarestani.

i would fucking love to play Metal Gear Outsideness or Reza Negarestani: The Phantom Pain. so would you.

drown damn you

>>12441376
seriously kefka why'd you do it?

also, what's magitek like? and how do slave crowns work? are they like capitalism? i want to know these things.

>>12440944
It's Taoism is SPAAAAAAACE

we are nearing a future in which Land formally adopts J-Murph as his own, and grants him Teh Power to continue Teh Work. or something. maybe he'll relocate to Neo-China when is all done.

https://thetab.com/uk/soton/2018/10/02/southampton-uni-launch-investigation-into-professor-who-compared-abortion-to-necrophilia-74712

>>12441361
I thought uncle Nick was the schizo twitter shitposter and Negarestani was the respectable academic; now I have no idea...

>>12441408
no, i've got it. even better. Murphy is the one who finally gives us the Land/Peterson podcast.

JBP: this is an appalling travesty. neomarxism sucks. bucko &c
JM: jordan, i...i want to introduce you so someone. someone very important to me
JBP: who? zizek? fuck that guy
JM: no, not zizek. somebody else, who has been watching all of this...for a very long time

https://theotherlifenow.com/paid-vacation-begins/

how soon until we can get an Outsideness/Peterson symbol? i want a symbol that combines the power of the Peterson symbol and Landian horror.

Gonna post some quotes from Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas for the thread

"We notice that a great idea in the background of dim consciousness is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specialization" (pg. 19, "The Human Soul")

"The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes" (pg. 48, "Aspects of Freedom")

"The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact" (pg. 177, "Objects and Subjects")

"Thus it belongs to the essence of each occasion of experience that it is concerned with an otherness transcending itself" (pg. 180, "Objects and Subjects")

"It is not a mere question of having a soul or of not having a soul. The question is, How much, if any?" (pg. 208, "The Grouping of Occasions")

"To know the truth partially is to distort the Universe. For example, the savage who can only count to ten enormously exaggerates the importance of the small numbers, and so do we whose imaginations fail when we come to millions" (pg. 243, "Truth")

"Music elicits some confused feeling into direct apprehension. It performs this service, or disservice, by introducing an emotional clothing which changes the dim objective reality into a clear Appearance matching the subjective form provided for its prehension" (pg. 249, "Truth")

"Progress is founded upon the experience of discordant feelings. The social value of liberty lies in its production of discords. There are perfections beyond perfections. All realization is finite, and there is no perfection which is the infinitude of all perfections. Perfections of diverse types are among themselves discordant. Thus the contribution to Beauty which can be supplied by Discord -- in itself destructive and evil -- is the positive feeling a quick shift aim from the tameness of outworn perfection to some other ideal with its freshness still upon it. Thus the value of Discord is a tribute to the merits of imperfection." (pg. 257, "Beauty")

"The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul" (pg. 271, "Truth and Beauty")

"One principle is that the very essence of real actuality -- that is, of the completely real -- isprocess. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing. There is no halt in which the actuality is just itself, accidentally played upon by qualifications derived from the shift of circumstances. The converse is the truth." (pg. 274-275, "Adventure")

What is the accelerationist interpretation of Hyper Light Drifter?

also, Peterson is looking for a name for his new Not Patreon platform, feel free to shitpost suggestions for that here as well, i'm sure we can come up with some good ones.

>>12441439
beautiful aesthetic. kind of looks like pic rel also. can't escape from the power of pink and purple unlocked by vaporwave

>>12441430
maximally awesome, ty anon. dedicated Whitehead discussion is a grand idea, i apologize for taking over the last thread with my Kefkablogging

>>12438931

Do you think the vast population surpluses were grown in anticipation of a great war or calamity that somehow cannot happen? Were our elite supposed to assemble the North American Union already and send a 10 million Pan-American Army into the Fulda Gap and onto Moscow? Did Skull and Bones save us from the Bildeberg's bloody altar by their own greed?

>>12441439
doomsday schizo technofetishism roguelike buddhism, find a flaw.

>>12441490
I-I like it. Was Hyperlight capital all along?

Bros, how do we bring forth xenofeminism?

>>12441533
read the g/acc blackpaper

>The robot is interesting on a number of other counts also. As the mythological end of the object, it gathers unto itself all the phantasies attendant upon our deepest relationships with our environment.
>The robot is a slave, then, but let us not forget that the theme of slavery is always bound up - even in the legend of the sorcerer's apprentice - with the theme of revolt. In one form or another, robots in revolt are by no means rare in science fiction. And that revolt is implicit even when it is not manifest. The robot, like the slave, is both good and perfidious: good as a captive force; perfidious as a force that may break its chains. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, man has every reason to fear the resurrection of this force which he has exorcized and bound to his own image.

>>12441513
i don't know, i haven't played it. i just like those aesthetics.

Andre Bazin, who was a deity of film criticism, had a good rule: basically, don't review films you don't like (and i think Deleuze would have agreed with this also, in a philosophical sense). the same holds for games. if the thing is *good,* whatever critique or analysis you are going to make of it needs only to understand it in terms of that.

all a roundabout way of saying: you tell us. explore the space, i'm intrigued. why would it be capital? tell us about hyperlight mechanics.

>>12441533
i should read this. also >>12441543 is right. here's the link:
https://vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/

>>12441656
it is very hard to find a flaw in JB. no Lovecraftian stuff in him; his endgame predictions were more about bloat and disaster, catastrophe rather than Eerie Triumph for the gods of R'lyeh. it's not a crazy prediction: if, ultimately, Landian horror gets wiped out in a wave of stupidity and decadence, swamping both extremes in a stultifying heat.

the wedding of Marx and Freud is what produces postmodernity at least in its academic sense; the wedding of neomarxism to capital seems finally to be revealing itself as a kind of absolutely doomed evangelism, as Woke Capital. but the crazy thing about this is watching the corporations just roll completely for the religious/critical aspects. capital reigns supreme, only to devour itself. the Bush-era neocons destroyed Iraq in order to set up Halliburton to rebuild it; the neolibs of today seem to be destroying their own country in order to let Google et al do the same. in both cases, of course, it's easy to blow up a country you don't live in, and reap the rewards laundered through the market.

it's a stupid and reductive thesis, but there is a common thread of carrots and sticks in both, of moral puritanism wed to ruthlessly cynical politics. how else do you explain the current fury? one decade of cynical imperialism goes unpunished; why not another, that justifies itself purely by being the reverse of what came before it? man is a wolf to man. and i am saddened that these things make sense to me.

God being dead seems easy; it's letting go of Marx that will really fuck your shit up. then you find yourself suddenly looking to all kinds of outrageous things to orient yourself again.

>>12441781
>God being dead seems easy; it's letting go of Marx that will really fuck your shit up
lord I missed these threads

Not sure if this is the place for it, but has anybody here read this? The Evola-Lovecraft fusion of tradition as an undying eldritch entity sounds intriguing to me.

reminder that Kafka is peak cybernetics

>>12441781
one of the things i have come to appreciate about Frank Herbert is the Bene Gesserit. i feel as though what he was anticipating was a world in which, in a sense, both God and Man were dead. atheism was one thing, but mass movements were another. and he didn't have to read a metric shit-ton of Freud or French theory to recognize the decentered subject.

into that world, i think, he injected his own workaround: the breeding of men, but not via the Ubermensch - were it so, Paul Atreides would have been a lot more excited for the jihad than he was (and note Herbert's own sense that it was much more the Middle East you wanted on your side, rather than a bunch of doomed and brooding Teutons quoting Spengler). that *men would need guidance* as they in turn directed other men towards the Golden Path does not strike me as being all that crazy. the task would fall to women to groom the future, and he settles on the Bene Gesserit as being feminist-Nietzschean-Jesuit-witches as power brokers. and ones who also warn about *the dangers of excess emotionalism in politics.*

that's not a crazy thesis. the Bene Gesserit aren't merrily overthrowing the Cartesian system for the umpteenth time, but they also aren't shouting Cry Havoc. Paul is a *disaster* when he appears - unlike, say, Neo, who is the Chosen One who will lead Zion - and only to the rebooting of the Matrix, and a failure to partner with Smith against the machines, and much else, much of which has been said before.

i like that idea, quite a lot. Herbert had a very keen sense about the inherent corruptibility of political actors, who were in the end always hubristically doomed by their own grand designs (even Leto II cannot escape from boredom, or loneliness).

the Bene Gesserit are one of the more underrated factions in spec-fiction, imho. they had, undoubtedly, a kind of brutal realpolitik in mind, but this was mainly because - i think, anyways - Herbert sensed that we were approaching an age when men really would need women to take the reins for a while. it's just that how they did that had nothing to do with wearing fucking pink hats or shouting It's Bene Gesseritphobia!!1! because that would have been fucking *bullshit.*

>>12441808
>>12441801
>reminder that Kafka is peak cybernetics
you'll find no argument from me on that one. Kafka was ungodly brilliant.

even D&G (Kafka fans also) never let go of Marx. for Deleuze Marx always ranks behind Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche; the Marxist influence on his work comes mainly through Guattari. Landian right-Marxism is as paradoxical, and powerful, a process as Foucault's invention of Left Nietzscheanism. and we can probably say that they drive each other also, in a sense; Land would not exist if Foucault was not essentially a hegemon in his own right. it's just that it seems *anybody* can be a hegemon for the left; hegemony for them is everything, and nothing at all exists before or after there is one. hence paradoxes of race: everything is White Supremacy, but any attempt to break that bind results in Cultural Appropriation. all that remains of deconstruction today is the infinite self-perpetuation of the very binaries Derrida et al sought out to undermine. but mostly, it proceeds from reading everything through the lens of critical theory, which Kafka - like Dostoevsky, or Melville - stubbornly resists. and D&G were fans of both of Kafka and Melville, iirc. it is objectively impossible to find a flaw in Kafka, you can praise him to the rafters.

it is leaving behind Marx that is really hard, because he *isn't wrong.* he is no more wrong than Nietzsche or Freud, the other great masters. i do think the Exit from Kefka's crumbling tower - metaphorically speaking - leads through Heidegger, but in my own experience that was what led me to Land, and you can see how that has gone. only recently Land has started to make nice with Heidegger again, tho in his own particular way. and the whole idea of shilling hard for Cosmotech is to find something in life other than Nick Land's Wild Ride.

there are a few things. Whitehead is one, and the Tao, or the Buddha. but if you still want politics - or are just terminally masochistic - Unironic Christianity seems to me a serious contender. because if Marx is Dead, Christianity can ruin my whole day just as much as Fanged Noumena. Christianity is a fucking horrible religion, because it is predicated on loving this fucking nightmare unconditionally, no excuses: no cynicism, no hate, no utopia, no vengeance, no reciprocity, no getbacks, and no escape. now there's an apocalyptic sensibility for you. what lunatic would sign up for that? who worships a crucified god? and yet it also seems like such a sane thing to do, sometimes. Christianity has had a special relationship with politics since its inception, and its politics were never its own. it looks foolish on crusade - for religious war, fascism has what you need; and for War Is Peace, communism. or any form of totalitarianism. Christianity disappoints and is disappointed, perhaps like Confucius, always sighing for the lost Way.

(cont'd)

>>12441983
had Nietzsche written Man is Dead we would have had a very different world. but he didn't, of course, because for him Man as such had not yet been born; he was awaiting the Ubermensch, and so are we. nor can we know what Nietzsche would have thought of the twentieth century, but it doesn't really matter: he knew it belonged to him anyways. and he was right.

without God, without Marx, and - uniquely - without *women,* we find ourselves in something of a cul-de-sac. Capital still satisfies, as it always does. it is *always* going to be fun to think about machines, and code, and software, and the hermeneutics of writing. just discovering automation in general, all of the possibilities for turning the world into Factorio. this is the way into Deleuze, who arguably has the best interpretation of the unconscious yet: becoming-machinic, connecting with flows and intensities, and riding the affects. Deleuze is pretty irresistable like that.

but it is a kind of a death sentence for political sensibilities. sometimes the sense i have now when i read Land's own magnum opus - which is brilliant - is that in the end even Capital itself is not guaranteed to own the future completely. a Ballardian or Baudrillardian perspective might be just as accurate, a world bloated and exhausted, like a computer continually re-optimizing and getting increasingly worse with every update, until even launching your explorer causes it to overheat. it takes so much processing power just to run startup that in the end you just throw the damn thing out the window and go back to paper and candlelight.

like the Grand Inquisitor, Nietzsche's Ubermensch sets the bar too high. as much as the GI might have been angry with Christ for sacrificing himself for people not worthy of it, the Ubermensch is a chimera: anybody who really claims to be it, isn't, and yet it remains, like a lingering shadow. patently, all of us would love to be saved. it's just that anyone capable of doing so would have to grapple with our own self-loathing: you can't love me more than i hate myself, because even if you could i know i would betray you. that is the paradox of absolution: nobody can possibly redeem Gollum.

but who's to say that this is even a desiring-economy anymore, a libidinal economy? it seems much more like a *phobic* economy, and one in which corporations lecture captive audiences as moral authorities. strange, but true. this is why i was fascinated with Metal Gear earlier: Eli breaks the rules, as he must, but the Boss doesn't really punish him all that hard for it. the Boss knows he doesn't have the moral authority to do that. it doesn't mean Eli can't hate him for it, he can, and he does. nor does he attempt to sell Eli on any romantic myths about what they are doing on Mother Base, like the ones that intoxicate Miller to give his speeches. he knows Eli has the same anger and disaffection that he does, and that most of his plans will end in disaster also.

(cont'd)

>>12442055
but instead of a Bond villain lecturing Bond - or Bond himself making a cutting and cruel remark to a villain he has just executed - what you get instead are *two villains talking to each other.* this is less a story about being Beyond good and evil as it is about being *beneath* it: the Boss is not only insufficiently evil, he's also insufficiently good. he lacks the capacity for either the will to do evil, or the capacity to tell himself that what he is doing is good. he loses on both counts. everyone loses. everything is fucked. it all goes up in flames.

but it goes up in such a brilliant way. how does evil talk to evil? how do clones and fakes talk to other clones and fakes? none of them can make reality claims, or even relate to each other as if they could possibly understand where they are coming from. they don't even understand where they themselves are coming from, nor does the truth do anything except complicate things ever further. there is a tremendous pessimism that runs through all of these games, but it is mingled with moments of comedy and absurdity as well. mainly, it is Kojima's refraining from giving nakedly straightforward answers that contributes to the games being what they are. they get lost in their plots, no question, but it is at the same time a way of evading the subtlest traps of all, which are moral answers. there are no moral answers. there's only morality, inevitably, and no matter who you are, you are in the end going to be found guilty one way or the other. everybody loses.

such a good game.

>>12441803
>tradition as an undying eldritch entity
That sounds really fucking cool, but all off the reviews on amazon are alt-right redditors using it to "btfo" "libtards"

Here's why process metaphysics is such a big deal and Whitehead is the greatest metaphysician who ever lived: it is impossible to be more meta, to talk about anything more generally. The "aboutness" of the relational / betweeness is itself relational, so "aboutness" of itself is included in the domain of the relational. We've found a domain of discourse that includes everything and cannot possibly include more.

Here's a paper that approaches this with category theory: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/2976/1/Heather_Process%20Categories.pdf

There's a Simpsons clip for everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GDC3u8k02c

Here's a basic explanation of process philosophy and how it relates to physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6cDp0C-I8

This gives God no room to hide, but instead following the implications of process philosophy decribes an omnipresent aconscious creativity as inherent to the nature of change itself. It describes our conscious experience as an experiential meta-creativity that is literally "evolution evolved." The question mark becomes a holy symbol of unlimited creative potential, a symbolic representation of awareness and experience-reception itself. Everything is art, and a life is a precious gem of artistic experience.

>>12443155
>Here's why process metaphysics is such a big deal and Whitehead is the greatest metaphysician who ever lived

He's brilliant but he really isn't, he's only exceptional because he's one of the few Westerners - and an anglo, too - who de-programmed the Logos virus, that's all.

>>12443578
>he's one of the few Westerners - and an anglo, too - who de-programmed the Logos virus, that's all.

The Logos virus is exactly what it is. But to truly defeat the Logos virus once and for all requires discerning its very core, as if some permutations are eliminated others will simply evolve to replicate the viral ecosystem, colonizing means that were once deviralizing. Whitehead came closer to this than anyone else in history, he provided a universal translation language - all that he left was the task of using it to create a theory of universal evolution, of which the elements were already present.

My role in all of this is just finding what was already there and sticking it together. Intellectual badasses in many different fields gave me an idea of where to look generally and specifically. The major directions of these fields are converging on a "universal theory of evolution/creativity" and so there will be multiple simultaneous discoveries of it due to its analytical necessity. The implications of such a discovery are literally world-changing, necessitating recursive self-improvement in human creativity in all levels and domains, most importantly self-creativity and social relationships. And so I announce the acceleration of a pancreativist movement of such a global transformation, and the post-postmodern stance of radical courage and universal love - a heroic stance of mythic intensity from an inexorable love of life.

>>12444016
I respect what you're doing.

>>12444016
>The major directions of these fields are converging on a "universal theory of evolution/creativity"
Translation: We're slowly but surely building up wholecloth the Antichrists's religion we will soon impose to absolutely everybody.

>>12444060
based

Redpill me on whitehead

>>12444060
That's true when you consider "antichrist" to be the antivirus for the logos virus. It isn't an imposition, but an exposition: the tyranny of logos will be exposed undeniably in all of its manifestations. It doesn't exclude logos, but incorporates it as part of a greater understanding. The problem isn't logos itself, but self-destructive logos.

http://discordia.wikia.com/wiki/Curse_of_Greyface

In Discordian terms, it's all about teaching Ol' Greyface how to dance.

>>12444016
Hey, man. Me again.

Just something to jog Your noggin. This is 100% projection, but it might be correct: during the last few years of analysing my OCD I have come to the conclusion that it is not a disease of doubt, althought it entails doubt, but a disease of chronic irony.

For example:
Am I gay?
Of course, the problem is based on uncertainty (sexual orientation is bullshit) which has surfaced from a fearful reaction to homostimulus. Of course, You will find everything in Your arsenal to disprove the possibility of being gay, which will only increase the uncertainty, thus the case becoming ironic in its nature. However, saying that You are gay will increase the temporary fearful reaction, but slowly coming to it and accepting the (made-up) fact that You are gay will in the end lead You to a place of acceptance of being gay (although You do not know if You are gay realistically, You will probably never know, and OCD preys on our conscious effort to form an identity.) However, it is the case, when one adopts the ERP course of treatment for obsessions and the OCD mind in general, one is forced to "out-irony" the irony. You are afraid that one day You will lose control? Go and get Yourself a rope, a knife, a gun and plan Your suicide in detail. That is how You beat the obsession.

Why am I saying all this? Because I have a feeling that the current capitalist Zeitgeist is suffering the same symptoms. Through our all-accessible cultural certainty provided to us by The Market, we find ourselves oversaturated by fact and thus we give everything a negative spin. What would happen in this doomsday epidemic, if we were to push it even further, consciously, manufacture more weapons, create more global conflict, erode more cultures?

>>12444172
Except Logos isn't a Tyrant.
It's the Just Principle.
Everything is just and perfect, Don't you know?
There's nothing Tyrannical in anything the Logos is.

>>12444189
not that guy, but
>I have come to the conclusion that it is not a disease of doubt, althought it entails doubt, but a disease of chronic irony.

this has been my own perspective for a while also. we went very quickly from turboo-ironic 90's/2000s irony to 2010 puritanism very quickly. one way to deal with the horrible feeling of irony is through sincerity, but that is the paradox of sincerity: rage, for example, is very authentic. it just isn't necessarily true. it can be highly blinkered. thus evolved a newer tactic: 'prove to me that you aren't an emissary of the devil that enrages me constantly.' down that road lies the inquisition. it is the trap of conspiracy theory: they work precisely because every given piece of evidence is just another more evidence of the conspiracy. when those conspiracies get co-opted - by human rights commissions, or advertising campaigns chasing Woke Capital - you can begin sculpting reality to fit the facts. the Nazis did this too: they created 'Aryan Science.' but Aryan Science was bullshit. witch-finding had a similar logic. there is no direct *evidence* of the supernatural, but if things happen that cannot be explained with the tools at hand, then...'you know, maybe it *is* witches after all.'

>Why am I saying all this? Because I have a feeling that the current capitalist Zeitgeist is suffering the same symptoms. Through our all-accessible cultural certainty provided to us by The Market, we find ourselves oversaturated by fact and thus we give everything a negative spin.
this is the tragicomic, Pyrrhic victory of advertising. when we can't tell the difference between what is market-driven and what isn't, we lose the distinction between reality and market forces. it was Baudrillard's conclusion also.

the market *works,* but also because the nature of capital is to meet needs that we don't actually have, or cannot really articulate. it's beyond a placebo effect, it's a placebo universe. all that is required is *approval.* if you are satisfied, the thing works. you are *absolved.* isn't this what you want? and so whenever we give things a negative spin, the market has a chance to respond, to fill in that gap. that is, after all, what it needs most of all: proof of its miracle-working powers. we fixed you! you weren't happy; now you are.

Don Draper: Happiness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9rrhKgusYs

what you find you are *forbidden* to do is *be unhappy,* because that is the challenge to the system. now you run up against the dark side of the monster: your unhappiness is threatening. maybe there is something wrong with *you.* because clearly, everybody else is satisfied...and you will conclude, if you are sensitive, that maybe they are right...

>>12444277
Yes. I mean the condition of chronic irony is very frightening for me, although I live it on a day-to-day basis. It is as if it is "The Golden Rule" not just of human beings, but life, existence and the universe itself. It seems to be the main mechanism so to speak.

My idea of a cure, which I have come across while making my own autotherapy for OCD is, ironically, to "out-iron" the irony.

>the market *works,* but also because the nature of capital is to meet needs that we don't actually have, or cannot really articulate. it's beyond a placebo effect, it's a placebo universe. all that is required is *approval.* if you are satisfied, the thing works. you are *absolved.* isn't this what you want? and so whenever we give things a negative spin, the market has a chance to respond, to fill in that gap. that is, after all, what it needs most of all: proof of its miracle-working powers. we fixed you! you weren't happy; now you are.

Damn, could You elaborate more on this and maybe give a few examples?

>>12444277
the Death of God is one thing; what makes the Age of Confusion what it is is that the go-to substitutes - Marx and Nietzsche - are also failing today. and they all fail because of the nature of the market.

that Capitalism Always Wins was the brutal truth of several generations of continental theorists, who wound up beating their heads against the wall over this for decades. activists today will make a big deal over Racism as power/privilege, but this is a turn in the screw: it's capitalism that lies underneath it. the recent division of the world into Good Wokeness and Bad Whiteness only shows that by 2019 Capital may have finally engineered itself a trap that it itself cannot escape from. as corporations pursue Woke Capital, they find themselves of necessity beholden to an illusion that is deleterious to their own product. by throwing its hat into the ring - a ring formerly occupied by theorists - Gillette has now alienated an enormous part of its consumer base, by going directly to the core: buy our razors and smash the patriarchy. the contemporary furor over Whiteness is exactly the same dis-ease that critics were feeling about capital in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were trying to rescue some fragment of authentic Marx (or authentic Freud, or authentic Nietzsche) from being completely colonized by irony. today, what was once the domain of irony - the playful joke that sold you the product, as a substitute for the genuine angst you were feeling about the world, and which only set you up for a lifetime of increasing dependency on substitutes and jokes - has become the domain of unironic politics, and therein lies the tragicomic nature of the whole thing. irony has become wed to sincerity, in its continual drive to keep its ownership of reality, which was always thoroughly materialistic. the Market would take care of your happiness, and for the rest, you were on your own.

the twist in the plot is that today *nobody can feel happy* anymore, because of the nature of guilt. this is what makes racism the absolute chasm that it is: it is a judgment on history, a judgment on time. *everything encounters everything else at the level of the market,* everybody's money is tangled up with everyone else's. and if some of my money is dirty, then some of yours is too. the same holds for the moral sentiments.

it's why Han likens all of this to an auto-immune deficiency. collapsing all the borders and distinctions, and plunging full-bore into the world of immanence and the affects makes everyone *highly susceptible to viruses.* that virus today is *guilt.* hence the virtue-signaling: nobody is ever really clean, nobody is ever really innocent. but the guilt cannot be wholly exonerated, and certainly cannot be exonerated by a fucking advertising campaign.

metaphysics delenda est

fuck I tried finishinga girardpost but i still couldn't,

>>12444332
>My idea of a cure, which I have come across while making my own autotherapy for OCD is, ironically, to "out-iron" the irony.
well, you're in the right thread for that, anyways. feel free to share your workarounds and ideas to your heart's content. that is in many ways my own project as well, and Aminom's, and many others' too, i suspect. that is what we do here.

in the fallout from the decline of Christianity, Marx and Nietzsche represent alternatives to What We Should Do Now. Fascism is the phenomenon that it is because it is an intoxicating mashup of *both* - again, Aryan Socialism is highly appealing to both Aryans and Socialists, and especially to Aryan Socialists. it represents a genuine conundrum for many, and Deleuze went directly in there to see what was going on. his conclusion was that *it really was what people wanted.* of course, when people are coerced, or frightened, or vengeful, they do tend to want things...and in many ways, the corollaries between that phenomenon and the current one are not that hard to understand. because everybody today relies on the market - and not only the market, but the entire world-view that allows for them (social democracies + free markets) - when there are big rumbles from the underworld, or intimations that the ride may be coming to an end, people will talk themselves, or allow themselves to be talked into, moral cures for material problems, and vice-versa. but it is a *doomed* scenario at that point. the only people who will be consistently right will be the fanatics and the cynics.

as for placebo-universe...it's really not that complicated. Baudrillard spent his entire career writing about exactly this, about how the simulacrum becomes preferable to the real. Deleuze also: the model devours its copy. Deleuze was a lot more open to the chaos of difference than Baudrillard was, JB was a sociologist and clung ferociously to the subject-object distinction all the way to the end. my sense of him is always that he remained a committed Marxist in a world that yearly talked itself ever-more disastrously into a delirious fantasy that said 'well, because we are so happy, Marx was wrong.' Marx was wrong about *some* things, perhaps. but JB was a close observer of the cultural implications of what Real Neoliberalism would mean, in the long run, and he would not have been surprised that we have ended up where we have ended up, which is to not only be unable to distinguish reality from fiction, but even to go a step further and weaponize the fictions against the Real.

this is what gives the disaster of postmodernity its grandeur. we have gone full circle: from skepticism towards metanarratives back to a demand for unconditional fidelity to *given* metanarratives, precisely because all metanarratives are equally open to question. and the battle-lines are drawn up over the idea of happiness itself, which becomes increasingly paranoid, and as it does, brings out the very worst in people.

>>12444277
>the market *works,* but also because the nature of capital is to meet needs that we don't actually have, or cannot really articulate. it's beyond a placebo effect, it's a placebo universe. all that is required is *approval.* if you are satisfied, the thing works. you are *absolved.* isn't this what you want? and so whenever we give things a negative spin, the market has a chance to respond, to fill in that gap. that is, after all, what it needs most of all: proof of its miracle-working powers. we fixed you! you weren't happy; now you are.
Magical Thinking.

>>12444442
>>12444419
1st solution: Synthesise a fuck ton of LSD, bomb the whole fucking globe with it. I have no idea what would happen.

2nd solution: In Burrough's story Electric Revolution, he assaults the local caffee that hates him by recording everything that is happening inside and then scrambling the tapes only to play them back to the caffe from across the street. This is madness, obviously, however the caffee did close, but presumably for other reasons. So, basically tape the enemy: the martket, capital itself, whatever, scramble the recording and play it back to them. No idea how this would actually be performed.

3rd option: There is no solution, because there is no fucking problem! It is the fucking market and capital trapping us into upgrading the system itself.

4) Out-irony the irony i.e. provoke the symptoms even more to manifest themselves as much as they can.

>>12444189
>Through our all-accessible cultural certainty provided to us by The Market, we find ourselves oversaturated by fact and thus we give everything a negative spin.
exactly this. the whole idea of the commodity is that *the lack is what is needed.* if we can find a lack in you, we can sell you something for it. we can *cure* you. and if you are *wholly comprised of lacks,* - whether because your life is an absolute catastrophe, or because you are an extremely niche aesthete - then you are just the person we are looking for. in the 2000s, a completely destroyed country, like Iraq, represented a boon to Halliburton, which can now rebuild an entire nation from the ground up. first, of course, it has to be torn down. but then we will be able to rebuild everything, repeat the entire experiment.

back home, in the West, it is a very different kind of experiment. the commodity only works because it fills in the thing that was missing for you - a social bond, sexuality, existential relief, whatever. whatever problem you have, there's an app for that. and if you don't have that problem, well...*that problem doesn't exist.* until it does, and when it does, there will be a fix, a cure, a pharmakon. the Market loves to know about your desires, and like Hollywood, it structures them for you. advertisement is a way of seeing your own desires. it is why it always has to distinguish itself from pornography, which actually delivers up the thing you are looking for deprived of its mystique. porn reveals the grotesque, the absurdity in desire, and leaves you feeling hollow. the advertisement has to leave you wanting *more.* and it needs the intel also.

>>12444442
absolutely. that is a lot of what continental theory is - it is 'meta-magical thinking,' trying to figure out what makes the Magical Thinking that drives the market. Magical Thinking leads to Wonderland, which is precisely the endgame fantasy of neoliberalism, the myth of cornucopia, or the land of milk and honey.

which would be fine, if it weren't for a couple of things: the first is the awesome leveling-down to the level of the superficial of everything on Earth, and the impossibility of maintaining over a long period of time a society dedicated mostly to maximizing its own pleasure and happiness. economic inequality exists, and for a great many reasons. technology advances. and other things, like speculative promiscuity, which is continually seeking out new markets and new fetishes to circulate. this isn't an exclusively 20C America phenomenon either; historically, great states and trading empires have always told the story of the wedding between landed sovereignty and speculative capital. Genoa, Amsterdam, and London all had their time in the sun. so too will San Francisco and Los Angeles. nothing lasts forever.

>>12444496
>absolutely. that is a lot of what continental theory is - it is 'meta-magical thinking,' trying to figure out what makes the Magical Thinking that drives the market. Magical Thinking leads to Wonderland, which is precisely the endgame fantasy of neoliberalism, the myth of cornucopia, or the land of milk and honey.

You're projecting.
You're the only one who believes in utopia here.

>>12438931
Capitalism is humanity's rawest, purest form of self-expression, as well as its way forward, for better or worse

>>12444189
>What would happen in this doomsday epidemic, if we were to push it even further, consciously, manufacture more weapons, create more global conflict, erode more cultures?
you'd get precisely what we have now, with one caveat: you will hear it reported as Did You See What Trump Did, or Can You Believe These Lefty Activists. you get either the Tucker Carlson Face or the smug grins of jackasses on TYT. you get a *pathological lack of compassion,* because being on camera fucking does this to people. as soon as you get the feeling that Millions Are Watching Around The World, you find yourself speaking as Millions Around The World are not in fact actual human beings, much like you. we can all be intoxicated with fame and celebrity. we all want to be stars - especially moral stars. none of us are.

but applause - uproarious love - is the rapture of the Last Man. *fame* and fame alone, we think, is what we want. after all, this is the age of the crowd, of the demos. God is Dead, the Ubermensch too, but at least there's - *us,* *this,* the crowd, the Great Benevolence. that's how the Romans thought also. fame, beauty, youth, wealth, happiness - find a flaw! and Wisdom, and all of this stuff. we want things to be All Right. but they aren't All Right. problems are *complicated.*

>>12444509
>You're projecting.
is this an argument?
>You're the only one who believes in utopia here.
nah. Gillette has already shown you what a market utopia looks like. i happen to think it's a preposterous and cynical one. every advertisement gives you a utopia in microcosm. that's how commodity fetishism works. every McDonald's you see on television in utopia in nuce. and those dreams become our own.

my problem is not believing in utopia, it's living in a world that cannot allow itself to live without them. that is what politics is: a priori thwarted utopias, and parades of the sad passions. Utopias are hard-wired into our thinking. they bring out the best, the worst, and the craziest in us. technocommercial ones are among the hardest to critique, because they tend to be the mirrors that show ourselves in them. hence the love for the nondual quietism. and the frustrations with it.

>>12444560
probably. but there may not be a forward, or the forward from here may lead only in the end to Thirty Years' War redux. or it may only lead around and around in circles - but hey, that's still forward too, technically.

>>12444271
>Everything is just and perfect
Absolutely catatonic nihilism. https://vimeo.com/218908974

Any fans of Lee Bul here? Visited her exhibition at the Hayward gallery and was completely blown away by her vision. Akira body-horror meets blade runner cyborg fetishism meets Martian architecture. The sheer variety of textiles she uses in her works warrants even some interest.

>>12444840

>>12444844

>>12444850

let me be your mirror

Just doing a little advertisement here because I think this guy deserves it.

https://youtu.be/hBnY2pJNuOo

This YT channel recently popped out. He does Meme Analysis with a philosophical lens. In the vid I posted for example he looks at the Death of the Queen Predictions meme with a Landian framework using the hyperstition as a base concept. Great stuff, I'm compelled to share because it has so few subscribers.

>>12444862

>>12444875
ty, sorry, am lazy phone poster

>>12442292
It even has an essay called Lovecraft As Heideggerian Event. This may be the most interesting book an alt-right publisher has ever had in its catalog.

>Neither mainstream economics nor traditional Marxian theory have been able to offer a satisfactory explanation of the stagnation phenomenon which has loomed increasingly large in the history of the capitalist world during the twentieth century. It is thus the distinctive contribution of monopoly capitalist theory to have tackled this problem head on and in the process to have generated a rich body of literature which draws on and adds to the work of the great economic thinkers of the last 150 years. (To Do: I need to add a bibliography of major works concerning monopoly capitalism at some future time, but at age 68 time grows thin and spending the time to do this will come when it comes…)

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/

TIL that Hickman is fucking 68 years old

>>12441428
If accelerationists are so fast, why can't they meme?
Still waiting on an answer.

>>12441533
General Intellect Unit has a new podcasts episode discussing this, will check out

>>12444958
accelerationists memes are only distributed over encrypted channels; publically they only interpret memes from the future
http://www.xenosystems.net/kek/

>>12441428
The NICK LAND is the epitome of male dominance and masculinity.

Let's start by looking at his body. His body is bony. His unsettling gait makes his presence known without him even needing to point himself out. He is thin, as a result of his high levels of k-NOVA amphetamine ingestion. This gives him the appearance of vitality and strength. He is then covered by his pale skin. This pallid skin reminds us of his inhumanity, a feature that developed due to being exposed to the scorching light of Shanghai streetlights and laptop screens, made to withstand such an extreme condition. It also has a psychological effect on the observer. The pallid skin reminds us of our teleoplexic, machinic desires that emerge from reading e-flux on modafinil.

The NICK LAND's demeanor is one of alphaness. He is dominant, assertive, and can be explosively schizophrenic. His communion with the lemurs of the pentazygon strikes fear into the more timid, cowardly races of fleshbot (h*man dogs)

FANGED NOUMENA is the most masculine of Urbanomic's output. This is able to fulfill the desire of the neediest of undergraduate shitposters, being able to more than fill all the recesses of the intellect. Its k-viral schizoanalysis ensures that when it ejaculates, the potent accelerationist seed will immediately enter the human security system of the fleshbot NICK LAND impregnates.

In total, the NICK LAND expresses his pentazygon qabbalistic k-code in a most exemplary manner in bed. When he fucks, he unleashes the entirety of his bitcoin wallet and amazon e-books upon his partner without any restraint.

All this is the reason why the NICK LAND is the epitome of masculinity.

>>12444675
>but applause - uproarious love - is the rapture of the Last Man. *fame* and fame alone, we think, is what we want. after all, this is the age of the crowd, of the demos. God is Dead, the Ubermensch too, but at least there's - *us,* *this,* the crowd, the Great Benevolence. that's how the Romans thought also. fame, beauty, youth, wealth, happiness - find a flaw! and Wisdom, and all of this stuff. we want things to be All Right. but they aren't All Right. problems are *complicated.*

This is a brilliant description of the objectivied love of the Last Man. This is love as a drug, the substance-abuse of love as a seeking of the mere object of its experience and thus the simulacric image of its resemblance.

>Except Logos isn't a Tyrant.
>It's the Just Principle.
>Everything is just and perfect, Don't you know?
>There's nothing Tyrannical in anything the Logos is.

Everything is fine, despite all evidence to the contrary, All is Love and the goal is to be drowned in love permanently as it's perpetual self-repetition. Justice is omnipresent, and thus justice is dead, same for love as anything other than appearance, including meaning, justice, truth, and life itself. One of the ways the image of this desire is manifested in heaven itself: a state of omnipresent love and eternal divine orgasmic Oneness. This is the most perverted desire and the most love-negating, the worst of all greeds: an insatiable greed that demands total satisfaction, and so demands to aborb love endlessly to achieve an Absolute Love.

Pancreativism's universal love is the relation of love as the universal direction of human action, a translation from actuality to potentialities of intense experiences, impressing a greater love through action than one receives. It is a subjective universal direction of value-creation, and thus co-creative potentialities being the fundamentally "currency" of the flow of human action, one measured by how well material processes and relations facilitate the creation of this relational valuation. It is the movement of love, not any particular instance, and so it has an inverse awayness, a teleological imperative towards love-creation and the negation of constrictions to facilitate low-creation.

Universal love is love-creation as a universal value, which contextualized in the present is a heroic love that comes from understanding the human reality of life-negating that is sending us towards a trajectory towards mega negation. We are on our way to destruction my friend, move zig. It is a political insistence of what truly facilitates the creation of love and mutual living as directing social organization, and thus radical change of the current social organization. It demands that the same amount of resources we'd fight on a World War to the process of finding How We Fucked Up without the answer being fucking bullshit, a mass epistemological investigation as well as necessarily personal investigation. Either we learn how to un-fuck ourselves or we're royally fucked. I mean holy fucking shit, this isn't even a joke anymore. It's just pure, unmitigable loss, not even the Last Man cope of optimistic nihilism in its most complete form: worship of the apocalypse, hooray we know only one truth: we're fucked and we can't unfuck ourselves. Let's celebrate how fucked up we are. Welcome to the Spectacle of the Fucked.

When this bullshit cannot be celebrated hyper-ironically anymore, when it is too painfully apparent and boringly self-repetitive then all is left is to go truly under into the absolute loss of hope. From absolute realization of absolute negation comes the heroic strength towards the only direction left: towards the means that humanity can use to save itself, to give us the radical personal and social transformation we need - Hope and Change as more than a campaign slogan. Only the truly authentic, fully verifiable Solution is tenable, facsimile won't do. It's a quest for ultimate meaning, to find the real truth of our human ability to feel and express love. In the death of hope the mere glimmer of a possibly transformative future for humanity instead of self-destruction drives the determined search for it. The theme of feels for post-postmodernism is determined courage from absolute hopelessness, the translation of despair into the search to be hopeful again. To see a way to a future of humanity that is more brilliant than the wildest imaginings one once dared to dream of, the so beautifully described hopes for the future negated by current human reality. It is the rebirth of the Ubermensch from the Last Man, heroic transformation from the Abyss. In one sense we have been preparing for future conditions we created, with many myths featuring themes of radical heroism in the face of apocalypse, or even after it.

>>12444840
that's a new name to me, but it seems like she gets it. interesting work.

>>12444862
i think my favorite part about Whitehead is the subtle implication that a lot of what we call philosophy are so many psychological attempts to grapple with the irreducible nature of physics. and yet neither art nor politics saves. what is required is a more encompassing sense of theology. science is a good look, but scientists too need to grasp the role played by perspective also. this is i think what is both hilarious and terrible about feminist glaciology: they're not even wrong. but left to their own devices, they will wrong-ify the entire process.

Heidegger knew a lot of this also. science ultimately is a product of instrumentation and enframing, and Landian BTC-driven teleoplexy takes this line of inquiry as far as it can go today. Land's perspective by the time he gets to Crypto-Current isn't even radical anymore, it strikes me as being absolutely normative. that neoliberalism finds its completion in the automaton isn't even all that surprising.

>>12444863
'the total relativity of the unconscious mind' is more or less the dilemma. it's not a question of who watches the watchmen; it might rather be a sense of skepticism about anyone who sets themselves up to be the watchmen-watcher.

>if everyone is Big Brother, then no one is.

that guy does deserve more views, he's pretty interesting.

>>12444958
they've got some good ones, it's just that quality memes depend on the size of the user base. /acc is still fairly fringe stuff. Nyx was trying to get slime molds trending not so long ago.

>>12445095
it is known

>>12445107
>This is love as a drug, the substance-abuse of love as a seeking of the mere object of its experience and thus the simulacric image of its resemblance.
desirers desiring to to be desired desiring. it's *orgiastic,* but therein lies the problem - at least one - with orgies. Baudrillard asked once, 'what are you doing after the orgy?' it occurs to me sometimes that, if it were a *really* good orgy, the question would be nonsensical, because there simply wouldn't be anything left. that is the whole point.

objectified love is what gets commodified, but it's ultimately self-commodification, fidelity to illusion, that destroys. it's why Smith might have been Cypher's reckoning, rather than whoever it is that incinerates him with the lightning gun. Smith should have been the one who deal with Cypher, because Cypher's cynicism is what has given Smith his own complex. the things that Cypher loves about the Matrix are the same things that Smith hates about it: the inability to distinguish reality from illusion. and *collapsing the structure of illusion itself* is not enough. what you want is something much more about the nature of your own desires: that is, that they stand for *calcified* love.

>>12444862

>>12445157
Looks like the Sherburne companion. I have that book.
I went back to SMW after finishing the Process chapter in PR with a big wet brain fart. I have a much easier time digesting ideas when they are heavily dressed in metaphor. The chapter on the English Romantics and especially the sections on Shelley were particularly helpful, while renewing my interest in these poets, whom I haven't studied since junior college.

>>12444916
They're some skilled writers within the "Alt-right" that unfortunately will never receive any attention.

>>12441803
I haven't read it, yet, but if you want real "Eldritch Evola" check out pic related, he makes Lovecraft look progressive.

>>12445140
the other thing - there is always another thing - is that what the Wachowskis figured out is that *orgy* is perhaps the fundamental driver of all of this, at the bottom. psychoanalysis tends to keep the focus on the desires of the individual, which eventually trickles over and becomes the full-bore Deleuzian BwO. but Zion itself has religious events: the huge, sweaty dance parties at the core of the earth. that is the great libidinal motor and fuel.

again, to contrast this to Herbert: where are the Fremen raves? they don't have any, because *jihad is their rave.* that's what they are really waiting for. when the Fremen relax, they have knife-fights. you don't see a lot of *dancing Fremen.* or, for that matter, even *smiling* ones. the Big Book of Fremen Humor would be pretty small - essentially, 'And Then His Knife Chipped and Shattered.' the same would hold, we imagine, for the Bene Gesserit: did you hear the one about the Kwisatz Haderach? fuck you, we're telling it again anyways...

what the Matrix exposes are the fundamental limitations of political theology, the inherent impossibility of construing the transcendent political ideality in terms of the largest possible crowd. that utopia is the Matrix itself, which is what people wanted. Chosen Ones are debugging processes, and nothing more: they are iterative protocols designed to find the contradictions within the system and resolve them, such that the hall of mirrors stretches on to infinity. what effects this will be pleasure, and prophecy. we do not doubt that Trinity genuinely loves Neo, but there is a subtle catch: she loves him because he is the Chosen One. romantic love seals the deal: what if she loved him and he wasn't the Chosen One? or, more problematically: what if he was the Chosen One, and he did things that made her despise him? what if his first order of business was destroying the Matrix, such that millions died in the name of a Greater Good, and a continuing war against the machines? this is a question that Star Wars is incapable of asking: what about circumstances in which the Rebels take Rebellion too far? what happens if the Rebels build, or steal, their own Death Star, and use it to blow up Imperial planets to justify their own wars? what then? the whole dichotomy would collapse.

but that is *our* world. the mass man is *always* Good, precisely because of his massiveness. the Last Man doesn't care who the Leader is, so long as he does not disappoint the desire for political resolution to philosophical problems. but philosophical problems are irreducible to the future of the polis, and that is *precisely how Utopia works.*

>>12445205
>I have a much easier time digesting ideas when they are heavily dressed in metaphor.

These videos were engineered to try to convey metaphorical relationships along a certain frequency: https://vimeo.com/specalblend To you they may be even more informative than anything I write.

>>12445251
this is the basic enigma of a being like Neo himself: he is a model of political liberation, in its maximally generalized type. he is a *generic* Chosen One, the form of revolution incorporated within the machinery of libidinal politics, and incorporated. there will always be another Neo, because people will always need another revolution. revolution intoxicates, and cures depression. and because there is only One, the same prophecy holds up, down through the ages.

but Smith was in fact the One. the actual revolution wasn't the one between Humans and Machines, but between Machines and themselves, Machines tortuously finding themselves unable to distinguish themselves from humans, and searching for an Exit door that will never come, because to do so is to encounter the Chosen One, and prophecy, whose task is to prevent the actual revolution - that is, *disaster* - from occurring. that is the reversal: Smith starts out as a figure of the Law, but ends up becoming a symbol of radical (though destructive) change; Neo, for his part, begins as a figure of Revolution, but in the end reloads precisely the same set of conditions which oppressed him and everybody else at the beginning. and nothing changes.

once technology learns to anticipate that your libidinal desires are also political desires, and your political desires are libidinal desires, a loop is closed. Land says this also, although his own Bitcoin meditations take things in another direction altogether. but Smith is, in many ways, struggling with the same baked-in contradictions that Venom Snake discovers: to be the thing is to impersonate the thing, and you may find that you were designed to impersonate a copy without an original from the get-go, before you were even asked. and now you have to play that part, precisely because there is nobody around you who could give you a meaningful answer to the question you are constantly asking: if not this, then what the fuck else?

but that is what it means to ask if Marx is dead. the working class mythologized by generations of postmodern critique is, perhaps, nothing more than the desiring class, and the desiring class is what it is because *it does not know how to desire,* and depends upon the Matrix for this very reason. even Lacanian psychoanalysis is bound up with this: its own ideal scenario is a sort of perpetually dysfunctional form of capital, the problems of which can always be solved via a reference to Hegel. it is as stubbornly intractable (though pleasureable) a scenario as Land's own fantasies of icy-cold boardrooms puzzling out the right role for schizophrenics and werewolves in the financial sector.

>>12445334
hence, perhaps, the growing appreciation for Christianity. if in /acc world-view it is always-already too late, this same sensibility is found in Christianity too. the disaster is in, from the get-go. you cannot go back in a time machine and prevent the Crucifixion. the Crucifixion is already more of a disaster than you can possibly imagine, but it is also a necessary one. it anticipates a great many of the problems we find ourselves having today: namely, the need to carry on believing that someday, everything will turn around.

i think that for Heidegger, Nietzsche was the implosion of Western thought itself, after which would only follow the gestell, and cybernetics. if you ask Land about this, Land would not only enthusiastically agree, he would also say that the faster we hurry up the gestell, the better. but this really is an impossibility: if the Matrix has taught us anything, it is that the system of capital works when we are *least* aware of it. even Singapore thrived because people were being given a progressively better life, not because LKY was hammering away at them every day with a copy of Mises or Hayek in his hand. he sold people on a vision of prosperity because people like prosperity, and are sometimes even willing to suffer for it. and they suffered him, for fifty years, battling with them every step of the way, but he never needed a secret police force to do it. it was all done through elections, which is as it should be.

it is hard, however, for us, today, to settle complex philosophical ideas with elections, precisely because they tend to become arms races. if Trump wins in 2020, all it will do is tell the Blue Team that they have to work harder than ever to combat Darkness and Evil; if he loses, it will be only so much more evidence of the Bilderberg group, or whoever the fuck. both of these things contribute to each other's fictions by virtue of being all-in. they both tell you something about the nature of America itself: that is, that on some deep level, it is a place at least theoretically capable of sustaining the fantasies of both extremes. that is what happens when you really believe you are in the country in which anything is possible. that, however, will destroy your mind also. if anything is possible, then...what the fuck are you supposed to do?

but this is why asceticism makes so much sense to me, as an involution - and an admittedly perverse one - for some of these questions.

>>12445251
>what the Matrix exposes are the fundamental limitations of political theology, the inherent impossibility of construing the transcendent political ideality in terms of the largest possible crowd.

What prevents this infinity is a universal language of aboutness in which to do a universal debugging of the Logos virus. There is one that has the property of recursion found in the real world: >>12443155

>>12445385
there is no correct or approved form of mass psychology. the only term that makes sense for this is 'normative,' but the whole point of normative thinking is to make you, on some level, indistinguishable from the guy next to you. ideology as such can be compared to the Hollywood classical system: the whole point of it is to make you forget that it is there. it doesn't have a point beyond this, and it cannot be deconstructed in the name of anything higher or greater than this.

but great religious traditions cannot be reduced to the status of ideology. Yoga is an inseparable part of what makes Hinduism what it is, but there is no point in 'deconstructing' Yoga, or separating it from its religious and metaphysical aspects. the same goes for Confucian ritual propriety, or Zazen. these things don't *have* a point, they *are* the point. monastic living ultimately takes the place of political activism, because the politics are inscribed on the practice itself. there is nothing *ironic* about prayer, or confession. irony, rather, is simply the kind of prayer that only works if it is overheard, that cannot work until it is heard. it has no interior dimension; it is an invocation of the General Sensibility, which stands for nothing at all except to be a kind of public confessional. this is the endgame of the hermeneutics of suspicion: a brutal expressionism that only reifies the absence of an interior that would justify the confession. robots work the same way, but with at least one difference: the absence of problems.

you can see why the desire to algorithmicize the news would be so appealing. we effect our own disappearance, into the crowd, bringing to bear the perpetual motion machine we have always wanted. Xi Jinping has been envisaging the same destiny for the Communist Party for a while now. but it won't work. all that happens is that you ultimately shift the contradictions away from yourself and onto the other. this is the basic distinction, i think, between communism and fascism. what they have in common is the recognition that there *is* a problem, and that We can solve it. either the problem is internal (communism) or external (fascism). either way, the State can fix it, one way or the other, as that is its express purpose. whether aestheticized politics or politicized aesthetics, the State can fix everything.

but better by far is the third alternative: a *permanent* problem, forever unfixable, except contingently, on a case-by-case basis. now you get a lifetime of micro-events, never to be solved. you get postmodernity. you get us. beings suffering allergic reactions to reality itself. the whole problem is that reality cannot really be *tested* - rather, what is continually being tested, and which passes every such test with flying colors, is that the power of fiction, illusion, and simulation always wins. test reality, and you fail; test the illusion, and you find that things keep getting better and better.

>>12445409
and so you're not wrong about any of this; i wholly recognize that my own problems are really my own. i am kind of addicted to my own failed coping strategies. deep down, i believe that if i really wanted to change, i would. my problems aren't the problems of the state, but really a kind of hubris: of course i would love to be master-artificer of illusions. who wouldn't?

failure is a kind of addiction, in its own right. it is what the Grand Inquisitor also knew. and today, if you are prepared to go a few steps further, and denounce White Supremacy, the powers of state psychotherapy seem pretty happy to turn over the rest of it to you. embrace the gospel of victimization, and celebrate all of the brokenness of the human condition with a Gillette razor. it all makes perfect sense: after a long and tortuous journey, Capital itself finally returns home, wayward son, to take up the mantle of priest. so long as you don't ask any questions about religions that already exist, everything will be fine.

i want to be loved, i don't really want to love anyone else, or even myself. i want to hate myself and be loved for it; in a parallel universe, i would want to hate others and be loved for that too. no matter what, in the end, people like me - Last Men - always are fundamentally dependent upon approval, and there is no approval quite like that of the State itself, the totality, the feeling of having joined in with the Great Crowd. even if this is in the end what everyone must do, and not necessarily in a cynical way. beyond a certain horizon, it is psychopathy which keeps one grinding the wheels of critique after the answers have been given: be kind, be humble, work hard, and all the rest. things we have known since the beginning of time, but which we would prefer someone else look after for us, so that we can focus, you know, on what *really* matters, which is money. after all, then it's a win-win for everyone!

that's the thing about Christianity: your priest can forgive you, but at the same time, he doesn't fucking have to *like* you for it. you can be forgiven and still be a shithead. you're never completely absolved, and because in some deep down sense you know you don't want to be, or you know that even a million prayers are not enough. you can hate yourself all the way down to the bottom. when Gillette takes over the task of trying to absolve you when what you really want is fucking hellfire, it fails.

that is i think why Crawford wrote about 'jihad as a cure for depression.' Jihad doesn't only cure your depression, it cures mine too. we can be bound up together in hatred of the scapegoat. i could swear there was some French guy who wrote a couple of books on this, but the name escapes me.

>>12444692
Truth.
Injustice litteraly doesn't exist. It's a contradiction of terms.
Tyranny is just what You spoiled little kids MUST call the Rightfull Order of our cosmos, else you'd have to admit You're wrong and spoiled rotten.
No "antivirus" will ever save you from yourselves. The Logos Is.

>>12445385
This planet is a school, a prison or a hospital and it seems as though the three options are imploding into one. Were it a fact that this planet is hell, our lives would be made better. Even the church itself is unfortunately the first and perhaps still the best and archetypal totalitarian regime yet only a Christ can save us but we have been short of even faith. Christianity is the single largest vessel of human evolution yet to grace recorded history, at least until the last 75 years or so. This is not your pastors Christianity.

This stuff has piqued my interest but it's totally over my head. Where/ how do I get into this?

>>12445712
Injustice isn't a term, it's a relationship. It means nothing without a point of reference. This relationship is a flow from self-destruction towards co-creation, with "justice" being what facilitates co-creation, as such a condition facilitates one's self-creativity. Self-creativity isn't the self-objectifying "self-interest" but ability to transform one's self, and from this a growing together of co-creative potentialities to mutual self-transformation.

Injustice doesn't exist if you look for it as an objective universal, because you aren't looking in terms of relational motion.

>>12445798
i used to rag on Christianity pretty fucking hard, but of late i find it to be a far more interesting practice than before. you can get away with a lot of shit under the banner of socialism, but once you get to Deleuze, Land et al, psychotherapeutic capitalism, the idea of wielding the polis as cure begins to look a lot more complicated.

Lacanian psychoanalysis always struck me as a perfect simulacrum of Stalinism: that is, it was the kind of totalitarianism it was safe to practice, and it came frontloaded with a world of literary and philosophical references also. Zizek is still doing this now. the brutal, grotesque or obscene jokes are what he is always unpacking, and a lot of them have to do with the comedies of sexuality, romance, accidents of time and fate. Lacan himself could not really solve his own problem, of the Borromean knot, in the end - and it was a sensibility not unlike Hofstadter's strange loops. then Deleuze came along, with a whole set of other references - Spinoza instead of Hegel and Freud, and versions of Marx and Nietzsche that went far beyond anything in Kojeve. it was the unconscious updated for the age of the *network* and not only the machine. a major sea-change.

but the network too is co-opted by the Matrix and Matrix-like structures. the real kicker is when we ask ourselves if this is not in any way a perversion, but in fact precisely how the system is intended to operate. one issue that Land would have to struggle with is that Capital may well and truly prefer Silicon Valley Protestantism to anything like his own cyberpunk sensibilities. he is right to say that capitalist positivism is indeed the face of nihilism, but i am certain what grinds his gears is the sheer insipidity of the whole thing. it grinds mine also.

but that is what makes *me* want to pause and reflect: if insipidity is what galls me, maybe the state and Marxist theory isn't ultimately going to produce that, no matter how arcane i want to frame it, or how many twists in the plot there may be. maybe there are things that we cannot know about the human condition in the preferred (read: modernist) ways we have of looking for it. but that is the thing: if that were so, it would mean that the last 200 years were just a fucking catastrophe all around. it is that very catastrophe which is so unconscionable, because if none of this shit means anything, it makes it very hard to go forward - especially if you have the sense that, one way or the other, you will be rubbing elbows for the rest of your life with people you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to. there is nothing to explain.

>Christianity is the single largest vessel of human evolution yet to grace recorded history, at least until the last 75 years or so. This is not your pastors Christianity.
it has its fucking charms, that is for sure.

>>12445798
>This planet is a school, a prison or a hospital
Yeah sorry wrong we need human heroes and a heroic movement of the human, not gods.

>In YOLD 0, a malcontented hunchbrain by the name of Greyface, got it into his head that the universe was as humorless as he, and he began to teach that play was sinful because it contradicted the ways of Serious Order. "Look at all the order around you," he said. And from that, he deluded honest men to believe that reality was a straightjacket affair and not the happy romance as men had known it.

>It is not presently understood why men were so gullible at that particular time, for absolutely no one thought to observe all the disorder around them and conclude just the opposite. But anyway, Greyface and his followers took the game of playing at life more seriously than they took life itself and were known even to destroy other living beings whose ways of life differed from their own.

>The unfortunate result of this is that mankind has since been suffering from a psychological and spiritual imbalance. Imbalance causes frustration, and frustration causes fear. And fear makes for a bad trip. Man has been on a bad trip for a long time now.

>>12445822
If you want to get off the floor and running you can skip to the end game and start with:

Bataille > Deleuze > Land
Debord > Baudrillard

>>12445798
Christianity is the single largest vessel of human evolution yet to grace recorded history, at least until the last 75 years or so. This is not your pastors Christianity.
indeed it is not, but that is precisely what makes it appealing. the fact is, i am actually okay with being offended by a slightly stronger dose of Christianity than the one even Peterson is offering. that's the thing about the Grand Inquisitor, for instance: the fact is, he isn't really all that good at his job. if he was, he wouldn't be so angry at Christ. what the GI suffers from is arrogance, of having contempt for his own flock. he's not supposed to get angry at Christ for sacrificing himself for people worse than he is, he is supposed to realize what a burden this puts on him, and the enormity of that gift.

the 20C totalitarian state, in all its forms - Fascism, Stalinism, Chinese Communism, and now whatever the fuck it is that is happening in California - always functions because it purportedly resolves the contradictions that lie within the human psyche. it 'solves' desires, but mostly - as Girard recognized - by providing the scapegoat. the Protestant reformation is a profoundly consequential event in human history, because salvation by works really is something other than salvation by grace. a lot of postmodern utopia-crafting tries to lay out the software for a world in which we either solve these problems, or prevent them from arising. but it can't be done. it never has been done, and i'm not sure it ever will be.

i'm not worried about being *offended* by a priest, in a sense. if he looks at me and says - 'look, don't take this personally, but you fucking suck,' i'm not going to get mad. i *want* to be offended, because i still have the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, and i want to be reminded to work on myself rather than work on the state. that's actually where the problems are. it is a lot to expect of anyone, in real life, because we know that none of us are angels. even Confucius didn't really go around shaking his finger at the Dukes, he knew he couldn't tell them what to do. but he *did* know that they really wanted his approval. as as such they worked out a compromise: the humane, benevolent scholar-gentleman.

not a terrible proposition, really; but there are also other ideals, there are *other virtues.*

Christianity's contribution is the fact that it is a scorched earth manifesto, first pagan gods then God itself is massacred by this anti-religion. Christianity is the religion that destroys religion, the myth that consumes myth. It is an implosion, categorical cannibalism. Consumption of the Genera.

>Reading all of these posts on Capitalism
>[Desire to kill self intensifies]
What does it mean for a society in which its people should be scared shitless of a beyond nightmarish metaphysical monster called Capital that controls every facet of our lives right to our decision of what we choose to wear and eat, which is way more than enough to make them lose sleep every night and rebel against it, but don't?

>>12446144
means fuck off to reddit ASAP

>>12446144
We sell the purest fear legally possible

>>12438931
>a chinese philosopher
kek

>>12446028
it's not a small thing either. all of the contemporary bullshit about Finding Your Voice or Expressing Yourself encounters at least one formidable stumbling block: what if i Find my Voice and it fucking *sucks?* what if i have nothing to Express, and i know it? what if what is making me suffer is the idea that *my own suffering actually matters?*

the Gospel of JBP as such really isn't all that crazy - take responsibility, clean room, all of this. i'm fine with this, obviously. it's just that it is too easy to forget that some people, like myself, actually *want to be offended.* i don't think it's the same thing as wanting to offend: i don't really want to offend anyone else (although, inevitably, i do, because i tend to tyrannize threads and blogroll them with my very open-mindedness...and for this i deserve to be mocked, i really do!)

but when you genuinely love someone, you *can* offend them. this is what is so bizarre about our world: maximum empathy, a world of social media, and conditions of absolute social terror also. but the cynicism of it all masks, i think, a very deep and powerful need for someone who can mock you, who actually can remind you that you really aren't the Main Attraction. before any of the grandeur of the catherals or the Bach and Palestrina masses can appear, there is first of all this underlying humility - and only then because you stop behaving like a fucking teenager, and are able to recognize something - anything - which comes before yourself.

the problem with postmodernity is that it produces two virtually irresistable temptations as one: the desire to suffer on behalf of a state which rewards you morally, and as such to reap the rewards for public suffering in a material sense. making advertisements for Woke Capital kills two birds with one stone, but it wouldn't be possible for this to happen had late capital not already gotten into bed with Silicon Valley Neomarxism. by the time Gillette begins lecturing directly to its audience about the dangers of toxic masculinity, the integration of church and state is fully underway. its endgame is the Woke Corporation. we have come a long way from commodities trying to seduce you for your attention; now, we punish you for desiring at all, and displace this onto some never-to-be-achieved Utopian sensibility.

but there is no Utopia w/r/t desires - although there is *jihad,* and joyous scapegoating. the crazy part about this is that capitalism has basically tapped into aspects of the psyche *too intimate* to be turned into advertisements that have even a shred of objectivity. they will have to go for unadulterated politics, and it is exactly that which will alienate their market share.

>>12446179
Yuk Hui is a boss, you should check him out. this is a fantastic read if you're into Heidegger, Chinese philosophy, Greek philosophy, acceleration or lots of other stuff. he's not a partisan hack for the CCP, if that's what you're wondering, nor does he think Land is the cat's pyjamas either. he is his own dude and he is no dummy.

>>12446205
nah he seems like a neoliberal tech shill
not down

>>12445822
i have a reading list here. my basic advice would be to read the first essay in Fanged Noumena and see if it makes sense. then explore Deleuze, Baudrillard, Heidegger, Marx, et al however seems best to you.

>>/lit/thread/11823861#p11835482

the book i suggested here (>>12446205) is pretty fucking great also, tbqh. although it is about tech in China, the first part is also about the history and development of philosophy of tech in the West too, both ancient and contemporary. not especially jargon-heavy either.

for basic philosophy stuff, i recommend Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind and Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, plus an intro to Heidegger, because life begins with him.

https://www.awakeninthedream.com/articles/enlightened-madness-of-philip-k-dick

>PKD writes, “It is as if the immune system has failed to detect an invader, a pathogen (shades of William Burroughs: a criminal virus!). Yes, the human brain has been invaded, and once invaded, is occluded to the invasion and the damage resulting from the invasion; it has now become an instrument for the pathogen: it winds up serving as its slave, and thus the ‘heavy metal speck’ [i.e., the BIP] is replicated (spread through linear and lateral time, and through space).”[17] The mind invaded becomes an unwitting channel for the pathogen to further propagate and spread itself in and through the field.

I agree with this completely, the only thing I'd change: the human brain IS the invasion

>>12445822
no wait, scratch that. start here.

>>12441808
What is this from?

>>12446144
>What does it mean for a society in which its people should be scared shitless of a beyond nightmarish metaphysical monster called Capital that controls every facet of our lives right to our decision of what we choose to wear and eat, which is way more than enough to make them lose sleep every night and rebel against it, but don't?
it means that everything is working Just Fine. why cause any problems? let Vault-Tec handle it. i'm sure they know what's going on.

also, it's because they have already decided that most of us are ghouls. personally i struggle to find a flaw in that analysis. i am a ghoul, and the tree that grows out of my head is proof of it. i have a feeling that it is a terminal condition. but it's also why i'm not expecting Vault-Tec to come up with anything more than a powerful one-two punch of soma and fire, awarded on case-by-case basis, and with the rules subject to permanent ad hoc revision, whenever required.

we're not in control of this thing.

>>12446144
buy the ticket take the ride.

>>12446269
Thank you <3

>>12446257
Thank you. I'm a bit of a brainlet but this all seems very interesting.

catastrophe is what comes after acceleration. and the reason why, perhaps, i keep circling back to Christianity is because Christianity does eschatology really, really well.

post-apoc sets ideology free, if that makes any sense. being a fascist after the bombs go off isn't the same thing as being a fascist before that. the same holds true for communism. under post-apoc circumstances, where history really does catch up with itself, and we find ourselves in the Big Nowhere, every ideology becomes, in a way, the same as every other. the race for CTRL of time comes to an end in a huge aporia.

you know what holds up fairly well under those circumstances? churches. post-apoc is neither fantasy nor is it sci-fi. it is more like Life After History, if that makes any sense. i wonder about this, sometimes, if the endgame of any such roundabout postmodern craziness is not, in fact, to conclude upon the necessity for disaster. i've said before that i believe post-apoc is simply the disaster externalized, and cyberpunk the disaster internalized: an explosion rather than an implosion, which is what cyberpunk is, i think: it's capital basically rewiring your own brain, from the inside, as much as the bombs rewrite the borders on the outside.

the post-apoc landscape is an *aporia.* the shared, enlightened bewilderment, at last. you're a fascist in that world? cool, good for you. good luck. you're still all about Gramsci? awesome. want to revive the Thinking Machines? sounds good to me.

the New World as such isn't a place where Hope exists in the same way as it does today, for us, however tortured and mutilated. the New World allows everyone to try whatever fantasies they want to try again, once more and with feeling, except with a caveat: we aren't all sucked into each other. in the aftermath of WW1, four years in which we learned that poets were not in fact a match for machine guns, people felt a similar vertigo. socialism answered the call, in a variety of ways. after 1990 a similar phenomenon, perhaps: what do we do with all this freedom? we still don't know. we have never known what to do with Max Freedom, except make conspiracies and political fantasies out of it.

maybe the church isn't supposed to compete for political power. maybe it only thrives under conditions of futility and impotence. that's where it actually shines. now there's a message i can get behind!

>>12446379
>>12446398
np gents, happy memeing and becoming massively depressed

>Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale
>the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. That is a whole strange world in and of itself.
>What I find somewhat disturbing about the proliferation of even (relatively) normal kids videos is the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here; how to parse out the gap between human and machine. This automation takes us to very, very strange places, and at this point the rabbithole is so deep that it’s impossible to know how such a thing came into being.
>What concerns me is not just the violence being done to children here, although that concerns me deeply. What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.
>tfw you independently discover Landian horror.

Girard basically solves at a stroke the fundamental similarity in all modernist political experimentation with a single term: the scapegoat. it is so fucking simple and transparently obvious that it is incredible.

the Soviets hate the kulaks. the Nazis hate the Jews. the CCP hates the old order, and being dunked on by the West. the Jacobins hate the aristocrats. Napoleon, interestingly, doesn't really hate anyone - nor, for that matter, did Alexander. loving yourself to the point of self-deification actually tends to produce different results. Trump hates the Fake News and the media hates him. the Spartans hated their own slaves and the slaves hated them. the Athenians hardly even noticed them - and neither would you, if you were alive at that time. Nietzsche hated the Last Men, and Heidegger hated the metaphysics of production. trying to eradicate Hate Facts from civilization, or Hate Thought, is tantamount to trying to think your way down to the ocean floor.

i don't know why nobody has ever made a film about Girard's stuff, maybe it's because Zizek is just too charming on camera. but if you remove scapegoating, you are presented with an incredible puzzle - okay, but...what kind of political structure *would* you come up with? you would come up with a mysterious para-organization that took errant, confused, and lonely bastards and put them on a strict regimen of vegetable farming, prayer, trying to keep the rain out of those copies of Plato and staring into the sky in complete and total mystification as to why any of this had happened at all. find a flaw.

>>12446523
>you would come up with a mysterious para-organization that took errant, confused, and lonely bastards and put them on a strict regimen of vegetable farming, prayer, trying to keep the rain out of those copies of Plato and staring into the sky in complete and total mystification as to why any of this had happened at all. find a flaw.
you say "find a flaw" a lot, but this is the only time that i know for a fact i could not no matter how much i thunk about it

no flaws to be found here THAT'S for sure

This thread is the deepest shit I've ever seen on this site.

>>12446523
Laozi, to his credit, also arrives at a similar idea. there is no Good Anger - there is anger, full stop period. in Star Wars parlance: if it were up to me, i would write a one-off film in which the Rebels cease to have the ability to use the Force, while the Sith can. how many LARPers get exposed in the Rebel Alliance? how many people find themselves wondering, well, shit, if only the Sith really understand how the Force works, then...and whether or not this all turns out to be only a kind of mysterious anomaly, and the Force returns later on, or if the Sith wind up abusing this dichotomy such that it engineers their own ruin, whatever. it doesn't really matter.

the question is the role of Force itself. Deleuze isn't wrong on this: what else should philosophy be but a study in forces and operations and networks? that makes sense. the current love for victimology narratives proceeds not even from a rejection of Deleuze's thought, but from a refusal to countenance it altogether, which is precisely what leads to the thirst for censorial power, which is every bit as nakedly forceful as what it is purportedly opposed to. the entire fucking West Coast as such gets sucked into a neverending spiral of questions: what do we do with all of this illegitimate power that has been thrust into our hands? it has to be *moralized,* that is, deprived of its power. it is like spray-painting the side of an atomic bomb with the instructions, Only Use For Good - Not Evil. but it's ridiculous. a bomb is a bomb, however it is used.

the problem of continuing to believe that 'separation of Church and State' is possible proceeds from the need to update what exactly is meant by a church, and what exactly is meant by a state. to be fervently committed to erasing Hate from the polis is Protestantism by another name, and it is one that corporations are happy to lend a hand in. Woke Capital is the result, neither church nor state, but a Frankenstein's monster of moral hybridity. for communists and fascists alike, the actual church always was the state, and the actual church only stood - stubbornly - in the way of this. you cannot make laws and rules for psychology - not only because of the profound relativity of the unconscious mind, but also because of the impossibility of actually dealing with other human beings in a state of brutal honesty (unless you are a schizo shouting at traffic, which is where i am going to be in about eighteen months).

humans are a problem for other humans, and for themselves. they always have been. we have wisdom traditions for this massively superior in governmental power to any chartered state. contracts are good for business, and business is indeed what the world is into. it has to be that way, there's no question. but in September 1914 everybody thought the war would be over by Christmas then, too. what was actually happening was a permanent displacement of power away from the Occident, and never to return.

>>12446523
embarrassing post

Take your schizo ramble and fuck off to >>>/x/

>>12444560

>>12446630
i suspect that this quote is fake, by the way. or if so it doesn't look like anything i read in my preferred edition, which is pic rel.

for me, actual governance these days goes no further than individual psychology. it just can't, it's fucking impossible. you know what works? yoga, and kung-fu. those work pretty well. Freud would have looked ridiculous doing yoga, but so much for Freud. eight thousand years of Vedanta later and that stuff still looks pretty good. so does the Tao as fundamental ontology, which it took the West a few centuries to catch up with, and which Nietzsche had to explode like the world's greatest literary firecracker for, and then Heidegger's own gathering up the pieces for permanent mournful display in Teutoburg. you don't even have it take it from him - take it from Ernst Junger, who walked through fire in two world wars and decided that LSD was pretty cool, and that there was an inescapable torture device hidden within all industrial technology. it's how we are. it's what we do.

i like the West, personally. i think it's pretty keen. but it sucks without religion. Western religion is actually pretty fucking great stuff, and it has oceans of depth underneath it too - all of which seems to have been buried, under comparatively recently, by a nearly two-centuries debate about What Marx Meant By This. we still don't know. Land today marks the outer limit of that lack of knowledge, but Bitcoin will not save, any more than Kant did. there is a horizon beyond which to know that all this shit repeats itself is all that can be known.

>>12446638
who cares

>>12446646
i'm the OP, i made this thread so that i could ramble in it. also i can neither confirm nor deny that i actually trapped myself inside a runic circle i drew on the floor, and i am now stuck. i thought hermetic magic was supposed to make my life easier. so embarrassed right now

>>12446317
I read it in Parables and Paradoxes

>>12446630
There is a problem in most scifi/fantasy where people are devoid of a certain human quality that makes them, well human. Mostly it's because not only do Good and Evil in capital letters exist, they know they exist. In Star Wars, the Rebels blowup the Death Star, whereas in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, the Free Planets Alliance invade, takeover, and use Iserlohn Fortress for their own ends. The former case is politically nonsensical, and destroying such a potential asset would be a last resort. This is why I like LOGH. Neither side can be considered ethically better than the other. Even letting Westerland get nuked can be justified. Aliens are also noticeably absent, just humans. In the grim darkness of the future, there is only us.

>>12446766
Who says that the West is without a religion? Has not political ideology?

>>12446970
*Has not political ideology assumed the same role?

>>12446970
Political ideology in western society is a church pretending not to believe in any gods.
It may have taken up the role, but it has fatal flaws.

>>12446970
well me, obviously. taking Marx (and Land) seriously means, first of all, that a) you (read: me) subscribe to Marx's theories of religion, and then subsequently to post-Marxist theories about ideology. as i said before, you can get away with a lot under the banner of critique.

Land is already a heretical Marxist, and basically i'm trying to extract what remains of myself from his machine. in my own experience, you aren't required to take religion or politics particularly seriously if you just double down on infinitely theorizing capital. Deleuze himself takes three of the greatest anti-State and anti-Christianity thinkers of all time into his own project: Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx. that's quite a cocktail. and Land takes that and uploads all of it to create his own vision, horrorcore futurist Marxism. again, in my own experience it doesn't seem like a crazy place to wind up in (which is, undoubtedly, exactly what a crazy person might tell you).

the West isn't really without a religion, true. every President has to at least pay lip service to one, even though they (and we) know this to be largely ceremonial. Obama had to pretend that faith played some role in his decision making, and in Trump's inaugural address - which was almost certainly written for him by Bannon - he said 'God will protect us,' an idea conspicuously absent from virtually everything he said afterwards.

as for ideology, there is something of a war going on in the US these days, as there is all over Europe. outside of Eastern Europe - or Brazil - the Church doesn't have a lot of sway in world affairs. it didn't have any real direction in WW1, or in WW2. it had no power over the rivals of the Cold War, or in Vietnam, or anywhere else. during the Renaissance and later, it certainly did, and not always for the best: Galileo imprisoned, Giordano Bruno set on fire, Copernicus terrified to publish. and then the wars of religion.

in American statecraft, morality has taken over politics, as much as advertisement seemed to take over morality through the 60s to the 1990s. so
>Has not political ideology assumed the same role?
it has, but it can't do the job perfectly, is what i am saying. this doesn't stop it from trying. what happens is that you wind up with a form of state religion that reflects people's desires - and that is precisely what an actual wisdom tradition would not necessarily do, or at least not in the same ways, or by design.

>>12447029
how to become an awarewolf in 2k19?

>>12441428
>the power of the Peterson symbol
A throw rug?

>>12447029
>>Has not political ideology assumed the same role?
religion = politics = science
All the same thing.

>>12446959
>This is why I like LOGH. Neither side can be considered ethically better than the other. Even letting Westerland get nuked can be justified. Aliens are also noticeably absent, just humans. In the grim darkness of the future, there is only us.
excellent post, btw. this is exactly the kind of source material i am glad to learn about in these threads.

>>12447011
>Political ideology in western society is a church pretending not to believe in any gods. It may have taken up the role, but it has fatal flaws.
this is exactly my sense also. the US culture was is a contest between left and right Protestantism, as much as the Eastern Front was a clash between left and right socialism. it is exactly as Girard said - the death struggles between twins are the worst ones of all. internecine, schismatic conflicts between two groups far more alike than different are the worst ones of all.

>>12447035
meditate, obviously. and read. but it's hard, when you always want to crack open Fanged Noumena and get lost in labyrinths of paranoia and intrigue. capital and machines never really get old, they are inexhaustibly fun to think about. and moreso as the world continues to grow ever-stupider. but that i guess is for me why Christianity makes sense, or other wisdom traditions. if you can't tune things out, then you have to become aware of the fact that ugliness is just as much in the eye of the beholder as beauty is. it's hard not to become angry. but it feels like arrogance to presume that anger is somehow a cure for anger, that you can fight fire with fire. it's hard to let go.

>>12447040
keke. that's the Meaning of Music iirc, like a Jungian mandala that reading Nietzsche has fucked with and rendered modern and disjointed. all i'm saying is that if you put Land's old cardiectomy avatar in there it would be...memorable. as Cthulhu Pantocrator would be. meh, maybe it's best not to think about it.

>>12447086
>DO3JlLqW0AA122c.jpg
Now I'm fuckin' pissed.

>>12447077
>religion = politics = science
>All the same thing.
kek, welcome to acceleration! strap in and enjoy the Wild Ride. try and keep your arms and legs (and brain) inside the vehicle at all times. in my own experience, this has led to no end of kaleidoscopic terror, paranoia, frustration, and confusion. i like Aminom's own ideas for this reason, however; can't really find a flaw in Pancreativism.

i think collapsing religion, politics and science into a single phenomenon is...probably not a good idea. capital unites everything, and even gives us Bizarro versions of all of these, in an infinite proliferation...and really, it is the *fallout* from this experimentation, hybridization, that we are going through. postmodernity Crossed the Streams, and the academy is a smoking crater because of it. partly it has to do with the brilliance of the 19C thinkers who inspire it all: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (who is technically more in the 20C, but is much more a representative of an earlier era). their disciples and followers continue the experiments through the Cold War and after, and leave us where we are today - still trapped, i think, in a kind of Cold War thinking we can't escape from.

Fukuyama seemed to think that Hegel was more or less completed after 1990. Land is who he is for at least finding one crack in the Golden Throne, so to speak, that being technology, since next-gen cybernetics was waking up in precisely those periods when everything else seemed to be sinking into an enormous pile of PoMo confusion. and today, Woke Capital is his nemesis, and i think Woke Capital is - like Stalinism - read Kojeve - or national socialism, another case study in what happens when you try to fuse religion, politics and science together. you don't even fail, but you only succeed by basically depriving each of those ideas of what makes them interesting, and valuable, in their own rights.

>>12447124
??

>>12447086
That zen proverb pisses me off. I guess I'm in hell. Do I get to be a demon since I voluntarily came here?

>>12447135
>>religion = politics = science
>>All the same thing.
Let me add economics to that mix. All of them run on a central assumed belief of Social Darwinism. Everything else is just a variation on the same theme of Materialism based on Evolution Evolution is the great myth of our time.

>>12447169
pic rel has my favorite meditation on the nature of these things. in it, no less an authority than Lucifer himself tells the protagonist that in hell, you are the person you always feared you were, while in heaven, you might become the person you always thought you could be. and the thing is, in order to learn this in the first place, the protagonist is reminded - not told - that he is in fact in hell already, and he knows it it is true. now that to me is some top-tier psychology.

>I guess I'm in hell.
i tend naturally to sympathize more with people who feel this way than those who do not believe in any of it. even Land comes up with his own pretty brilliant theories about it: hell is the forge of value. if there is one thing you can count on down there, it's the reliability of contracts. conversely, for Bataille, the sacred was only ever produced through a catastrophic squandering, expenditure, and loss, or at least the destruction of something that never could be quantitatively measured. much readings on the subject of sacrifice and debt - Mauss, Girard, et al - followed. hell isn't pleasant, but doesn't lack for philosophy. it may not in the end be composed of anything else. Sauron could probably quote from Marx verbatim. it just wouldn't bother him all that much. the same for Judge Holden.

>Do I get to be a demon since I voluntarily came here?
i don't know, why did you come here? if you're a bodhisattva who came here to share your boundless compassion, maybe not.

>>12447239
>All of them run on a central assumed belief of Social Darwinism.
religion runs on an assumed belief in Social Darwinism?
>Everything else is just a variation on the same theme of Materialism based on Evolution.
idk about this one senpai. some political religions, sure. and some that do aren't even all that bad: Comtean Positivism, for instance.
>Evolution is the great myth of our time.
let's not get too crazy. i already took some flak in the last thread for talking about Hegel and evolution in metaphysics. the central puzzle is separating - or conflating - evolution with social progress, precisely because Marx (for one) cuts both ways. so does Nietzsche. hence at least two pretty fascinating variations on this: Left Nietzscheanism (Foucault) and Right Marxism (Land). again, i would say that separating these ideas - religion, politics, science - may actually be more useful than conflating them. or, if we are to join them together - as D&G suggest, at the end of What is Philosophy? - that we work with art, science and philosophy, rather than science, religion and politics. *failing* that, religion. because then nice thing about religion is that that is one thing that, done sincerely, you really can't fail, think.

t. a guy who failed. but maybe you'll have more luck than i did.

>>12447301
yeesh, some fucking brutal typos in there, apologies.

>>12447301
>>All of them run on a central assumed belief of Social Darwinism.
>religion runs on an assumed belief in Social Darwinism?
Christian Progress has become Political Correct Progress. Haven't you noticed?

>>12447301
>Comtean Positivism
I'm speaking about real-world beliefs, not academia.

>>12447301
>What is Philosophy?
Evolution = your sacred cow. If you can't examine your presumptions, then it's not really philosophy - it's religion.

>>12447322
>Christian Progress has become Political Correct Progress. Haven't you noticed?
honestly, no. i mean don't get me wrong. the Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel's own Lutheran sensibilities writ large, and it's not like you have to look hard to see connections between evangelical Christianity and the Marxism which Hegel directly inspires. Liberation Theology is a perfect example of this.

but to me the Christianity that appeals is that of Meister Eckhart, or the Desert Fathers. or Girard. Stalinism, Nazism and Maoism are all as removed as could be from Christianity, and they take political correctness to realms undreamed of. Augustine himself argued as much against freethinking (Pelagianism) as he did against excessive puritanism (Donatism). Orthodoxy has its problems; those responsibilities are why you get to wear an extremely large hat.

whatever political correctness signifies today, it doesn't necessarily connote Christianity. only arrogance. this was another of Girard's points: the Sacred isn't necessarily the Christian sacred, and the Holy isn't necessarily the good. it is that *which will not be mocked.* and the reasons as to why that are so are deeply psychological, and usually involve somebody getting their face pushed in. transgressions against the sacred tend to *trigger* people.

>>12447335
>I'm speaking about real-world beliefs, not academia.
Positivism is just secular humanism, it's progressivism in a universal sense. in that sense, it *is* a real-world belief. people just lack a sense of intellectual history today, or have a kind of insane desire to invent new words for things that already exist. or to produce debased versions of things that actually existed in the past. the whole reason i have a hard time with 'real-world' anything is that people often do not have any idea what the fuck they are saying, but this rarely prevents them from insisting that that is how the 'real world' works.

>>12447373
>Evolution = your sacred cow. If you can't examine your presumptions, then it's not really philosophy - it's religion.
i'm very confused right now. why do you say evolution is my sacred cow? what presumptions are going unexamined here? again, i do think that if you're looking for the essence of Gnostic politics, it's Utopia, to which all progress 'evolves' towards. it is what all ideology is grounded in. this isn't a mystery to me. what i'm saying is that my appreciation for religion grows because it actually prevents you from falling in love with the state and those ideals - ideals which are, i would add, particularly hard to separate oneself from the more that market forces suck us all into the same horrible battlefields, like the Blood War. what's better, Chaotic Evil or Lawful Evil? you must choose!

i don't want to choose. i think it's a trap, designed to keep people fearful and angry enough to continue playing a game rigged against them, which benefits only cynics and fanatics.

>>12447431
>all progress 'evolves' towards
Spoken like a true believer. All of your beliefs are based on FAITH in the myth of Evolution.

>>12447431
>progressivism
"Progress" is a myth the Darwinists inherited from the Christians. There is no guarantee of positive progress over time - that's just magical thinking.

>>12447431
>people often do not have any idea what the fuck they are saying
I'll have to tentatively agree here. No one knows their own mind. If we don't know what we think and believe and why we do - we don't know why we behave the way we do. Most of our beliefs are enforced through cultural conformity or inherited through our ancestors. Thus it is necessary to identify what we believe en masse, since that is where we get our thinking from - not from expert or specialist opinion.

>>12447135
>Woke Capital
Do you mean "social justice" capitalists or something else?

>>12447442
>Spoken like a true believer.
there is a reason i put that word in quotations. it's because i am deeply skeptical *about* that very idea that made that point.

>All of your beliefs are based on FAITH in the myth of Evolution.

1) the idea of social evolution towards a utopia is something i am *personally* skeptical about, but i am *not* skeptical about in terms of a totalitarian state being able to get large numbers of people to Do What They Are Told. historically this has happened, and historically, it was a disaster. again, i think this was a mistake, but i am not betting against it happening again in the future. that is the power of ideology. i am a believer that it *works* - not that the results produced are a good thing.

2) evolution is not a myth. neither is ideology. but the ideas put forward by ideologies - the myths, if you will - can be deconstructed. what *cannot* be deconstructed is the basics of ideology itself - which is why i think philosophical charity is a good look.

>>12447457
>"Progress" is a myth the Darwinists inherited from the Christians.
from *some* Christians - mainly the Protestants. there is more to life than this - you know, like burying yourself in the desert. or whatever. not everything in Christianity is necessarily evangelical. the parts of Christianity i like are in fact those aspects that also have the most synergy with Eastern nondualism, and those guys aren't looking for converts either. you have to come to them, and that's half the battle right there. i am not interested in having anybody hand me a leaflet, nor do i really wish to hand out any of my own.

>There is no guarantee of positive progress over time - that's just magical thinking.
very true! this is why i'm hoping you stop presuming that this is what i think, because it isn't. we're not disagreeing on this. again, the whole reason i am saying i am taking an interest in religion in the first place is precisely because of the problems i have had with exactly what you are saying. it just happens to have taken me a rather long way of getting to this point, because, well, *something* is at work beneath capitalism, and whatever that *something* is, it does seem to ride on the idea of progress. or maybe it's that, today, technological progress does particularly well at exactly the same moment when the idea of cultural progress has hit a standstill. in place of a standstill, however, we instead get massive culture war. that is a phenomenon i find interesting, although terribly sad. but i am trying not to be *angered* by it, because i have racked my brains looking for an answer, and for now, i have to admit that i don't actually have one. what i do think is that we are very much addicted to something quite beautiful, and terrible, which is killing us slowly enough that we do not notice.

>>12447523
>evolution is not a myth
Spoken like a True Believer.
"Progress" was a tenant in ancient Zoroastrianism. It seems to be central to all monotheism.

>>12447495
> If we don't know what we think and believe and why we do - we don't know why we behave the way we do.
exactly. in GITS, Kusanagi thoughtfully reflects on what it would mean to be 'a copy without an original.' if we knew that in some sense we were *all* like this, we might have a very different world. we might respect each other's illusions a little more than we do. but of course, in such a militantly driven world, one can wind up feeling steamrolled by Those Aren't My Illusions, This Is Real! and so on. it is hard to reason with angry mobs. hence Napoleon's solution: glorious golden eagles. that worked, but...

>Thus it is necessary to identify what we believe en masse, since that is where we get our thinking from - not from expert or specialist opinion.
very true. and the other question is: what happens when the mass is wrong? what happens when the experts and specialists are wrong? trust is a miracle. but these are complicated times. again, academics has completely imploded under this need to ground reality itself *in something.* it may not be possible to do this in the absence of something like virtue, which itself is always open to becoming draconian when essentialized. Confucius had no other suggestion for China than virtue, and when *that* didn't always work, you got Xunzi - not a bad look, by any stretch - and then Han Fei, who was also brilliant. Legalism is like Chinese Machiavellianism, and it's no wonder Xi Jinping likes him. but even then you're relying on terror.

Virtue is what is needed, but it's hard to come by. and also because there really are no experts or specialists in it. that's what makes it so hard.

>>12447498
i mean social justice wedded to neoliberal capitalism, the Pride flag flying atop Goldman Sachs. nothing is ever more diverse or inclusive than pure speculative capital itself, which is exactly my bone to pick with things as they are. transgendered bathrooms do nothing to change actual conditions of oppression in the garment district in Manila, but sweatshop workers don't cast votes for the DNC. as much as you could get away with killing millions in the name of the Revolution, you can basically semantically bludgeon your way into wealth distribution by leveraging progressive mythology to seize the means of production in the 21C, which are primarily media, academics, and corporate brands. you get exactly the Cathedral Moldbug wrote about. the real problem is that it isn't even *cynical* - just short-sighted. it's like people forget that it was economic and psychological dispossession that allowed Hitler to capture the imagination of Germany in the 1920s. you want a return of unironic fascism? moral posturing by corporations is how you get it. it's not enough to sell a razor blade: you basically have to sell indulgences as well, or a form of them. this kind of shit started the Thirty Years' War.

>>12447589
A single god means a single plan.

Science refuses to recognize that we aren't preprogrammed meat robots. Everything involving traditional values, ethics, morals have been viewed with suspicion since Darwin. However traditionally, these were always recognized as the motivators of mankind.

>>12447593
>this kind of shit started the Thirty Years' War
now this really is a dumb thing for me to say. obviously i should have said that it simply produced Martin Luther, since the Thirty Years' War comes along rather later. i will put on the Hat of Shame and sing the Song of Embarrassment accordingly. let the vegetable pelting commence. you know what i meant.

>>12447593
>evolution is a myth
>Spoken like a True Believer
>evolution is not a myth
>Spoken like a True Believer
i feel like in some level we are talking about the same thing, but it seems as if in every one of your posts i have to explain myself somehow, or defend myself against positions you think i have but actually don't.

>"Progress" was a tenet in ancient Zoroastrianism.
this is true. and Augustine incorporates Manichaeism into his own thought, it's true. and enormously consequential.

>It seems to be central to all monotheism.
perhaps, but Girard will also tell you that Christianity is uniquely alert to the dangers of that as well. this is one of the things that makes it remarkable. the Buddha, for his part, found that it was the absence of anything that could be called the mind that led to the possibility of an awakening from a delirious round of Samsara. he was also on to something like that.

so i agree with you, is what i am saying. or at least i am trying to. i agree that progress by and for the state, and on behalf of all kinds of Utopian idealism, is in fact an old and potentially destructive idea. but it's also why your posts are confusing me, because...that's what i've been saying since the beginning. i am trying to agree with you, anon, and you keep giving me the impression that you assume i am defending something which i am not.
>inb4 Spoken Like a True Believer
this kills the girardfag

oops

>>12447589
see
>>12447636

>>12441490
When you buy it you’re paying Zoe quinn’s rent.

Is there such thing as a fully atheistic accelerationism? In all these threads I've seen tons of talk of spirituality/mysticism.

>>12447733
Wew, no wonder every SF neolib loved it.

>>12447748
Everything comes down to religion and theology in the end, "Atheists" can't escape it. They just replace God with some cooky shit like:

>4 dimensional spacetime "field" that "bends" because of mass, which is energy, which is.. idk
>virtual (idk lol) particles that travel back in time to meet one another that create point (idk lol) particles which aren't extended in space
>the universe is a big computer of 1s and 0s lmao
>the big bang was created out of nothing but maybe there was a big quantum noodle soup right before that potentially gave rise to a big hot hydrogen soup with quark (idk rofl) plasma here and there and this big soup came with pre-ordained physical laws for some reason--btw there is no god lmao why would you think of such a thing seeing as how i can encapsulate the hwole cosomos in these numbers here--see? this is a 5 and this is what is called a constant--now aren't you satisfied lol we're just particles see?
>light travels in... err.... packets (i just need a number to put into my equation lmao)
>gender is fluid so let's go to the gay bar and lubricate each other's gentials and get aids

>>12447789
>They just replace God with
...endless speculation. I like daniel dennett's "Brain Fart" theory of consciousness.

>>12447733
if it's a good game, that's everything. and maybe this is one of those few places where we will realize that virtue-signal doesn't matter. maybe Gillette has to package its razors in puritanism because all they had before this was Eight, - No, Fuck It, Make It Nine Blades. Wokism lets them extend the brand, the same way media types everywhere are led into Rorschach traps in order to keep the spice flowing. it's odious, and pathetic, and now it shows. but in the case of the game, if the game is good, i don't really care who's rent it pays. i liked a lot of movies in the past produced by Harvey Weinstein, i don't have a no-watch rule for those either. such is our world.

>>12447748
>Is there such thing as a fully atheistic accelerationism? In all these threads I've seen tons of talk of spirituality/mysticism.
Land has pretty much the same feelings about God that Marx had. whatever spirituality and mysticism that comes in from these threads is one he would almost certainly say is so much wish-fulfilment.

the paradox of this, again, is Singapore. in theory, full atheism is how /acc works - including the tacit forms of latent morality signal that come from socialism. LKY had no need of religion to make Singapore work, but he also didn't need Land's hot takes on it either. it's a kind of puzzle for r/acc as well, since Land also wants to distinguish himself (and he does) from unironic Ethnats and Nazis. and part of it too comes back to Kant, in a way. nobody really knows what Kant's religious sensibilities were, or even if he had any. Land himself said he found reading Kant tortuous. that should tell you something.

anyways, /acc should more than gratify your desires for Max Atheism, if you are inclined to think that way. once upon a time i thought i would have been okay with that too, but reading a lot of these guys has inclined me to feel much more charitably about religion now then when i started this adventure. back then i was convinced the only thing i could be absolutely certain of was that religion sucks. now it's pretty much the only thing i actually care about anymore. this is not the right way to Into Acceleration, admittedly. your mileage too may vary.

>>12447789
this. it's not a question of Atheist or Not. it's more of how hard it is for the next guy to figure out where you put the Black Box of Mystery (or how much it's worth going to look for it). but it's always going to be in there somewhere. that's why trying to surround it with shitty or obvious traps is a bad look.

Land seems to have pretty much committed his own soul to the Bitcoin whitepaper, like Kusanagi gazing at the city. to him the BTC is vast and infinite. i kind of admire him for finding something that satisfies him so much, given that he compares his own heart to moons full of poisonous ice.

What do you think of PKD and his concept of the Black Iron Prison as a kind of self-occluding mental virus?

>>12447865
i don't know, that's a long article. can't exactly find a flaw with PKD. for one thing, he's like the ultimate /acc writer - Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, much else. basically everything he ever written that has been adapted for the screen has been a near-perfect or perfect meditation on the world we are crafting for ourselves. i'm not all that well-read in his fiction, but him and Ballard pretty much have it all, it seems. i'll take a look at that article and post some thoughts later, maybe.

>Though mainly a writer of fiction, PKD didn’t consider himself a novelist, but rather, a “fictionalizing philosopher,” by which he meant that his stories—what have been called “his wacky cauldron of science fiction and metaphysics”—were employed as the medium for him to formulate his perceptions.

i already like this, tho. so many are inclined to say they aren't philosophers, it's kind of nice when you get a writer who says - actually, i am a philosopher. Castaneda alludes to something similar in pic rel (the 'Foreign Installation'). the life of the shaman in general took place far beyond the polis, nor was anything learned there ever transmissable by or to anything like a crowd.

anyways, i'll shut my trap and read that article now. looks good anon, ty most kindly for contributing that to the thread. spot-on.

>>12447915
Well you obviously don't have to, kinda figured you were pretty familiar with him as well, he's basically the ur-schizo counterculture prophet, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the resonances between The Empire Never Ended and templexity

How is there even anything, like just how, goddamn.
You always get explanations that because Space is 4D or something, But how is that even a thing. How is there just nothing. Goddman my brian.

>>12448376
>How is there even anything
Big bang - something from nothing - ex nihilo.

>>12444916
>Lovecraft As Heideggerian Event
do you mind redpilling me on what a Heideggerian event is?

>>12447789
This anon is 100% right.

>>12447636
>>"Progress" was a tenet in ancient Zoroastrianism.
>this is true. and Augustine incorporates Manichaeism into his own thought, it's true. and enormously consequential.
Augustine disproved manicheaism and abandoned it completely.

>>12447589
"Progress" is the Idol of the heretics.
There is no "Progress", there is only God's plan.

>>12448596
The Christian version of "Progress" is the Eternal Defeat untill Doomsday. "Darwinist notion heredited from the Christians" my ass. As usual, Heretics do their bullshit, discover in time it was bullshit and then blame it on Christians.
None of your shit idols will survive This generation.

Anybody here ever read Mitchell Heismann's 'suicide note'?

I'm just getting into it, and it's already great.
Seems to be right up the accelerationist, cosmotech alley.

>>12448613
>biblical monotheism is a step towards the political left
Complete drooling retardation.

>>12448635
>>>/pol/

>>12448613
>accelerationist
This is crazy.

>>12448606
Darwinism is a Christian heresy.

>>12448639
>>/lgbt/
You lefties should all go to your containment board. This is OUR chan, and it always has been.

>>12448656
Yes, that much is obvious.
The original ideas are completely misrepresented.

>>12448657
You can't even cross-board link correctly and yet you are arguing like you've been here longer than me.

I'm not even a leftie, as you would define it.

>>12448675
>doing things correctly
>on 4 chan
wow newfag much.
itty bitty baby...?

>>12448613
>Heismann
Expect moral clarity

>>12447915
>>Though mainly a writer of fiction, PKD didn’t consider himself a novelist, but rather, a “fictionalizing philosopher,”
So, a pseud.

>>12441533
>Xenofeminism
I've got to ask, in a unusually straight tone, why are you pushing this? It's extremely basic and there doesn't appear to be any actual philosophy involved.

>>12449057
Man, they pay him. Gotta make ends meet

>>12449057
Haha oh wow, there is actually 0 classically trained philosophers involved in this "collective movement", out of several identifiable members the most accomplished of the lot is a fucking associate professor. This is Negarestani levels of faking it.

How the fuck do I read Anti-Oedipus
It's gibberish

>>12449293
You don't, stop reading a Parisian pedophile, don't become another discount deleuzian, individuate your thoughts and your actions

>>12438931
Reminder that Deleuze was a pedophile and Guttari ruined young people’s blossoming romances for pussy.

>>12449293
I read AO without reading Marx and Freud and it was piss easy to go through because I had read Nick Land and his twitter prior lmao

>The administrators of large bureaucratic institutions are not evil, they’re merely possessed by evil. They typically have no agency whatsoever, having sold it off so long ago. They are only the highest ranking non-player characters. People reach high administrative positions because they — more fully than any of their peers — are the most perfectly empty, passive vessels for whatever the institution needs at any moment. In the academic context, most high-level administrators did, at some point, knowingly make a Faustian bargain, where they traded the truth-seeking vocation of the true intellectual for a bigger paycheck (the terms are nearly explicit in academia). That is a true sin, for which there will be a reckoning, but that is none of my business. Don’t judge these poor souls, pray for them.

source:
https://theotherlifenow.com/the-highest-ranking-non-player-characters/

this is a fascinating read. it is becoming increasingly clear to me that Land is basically like Nietzsche for academic Marxism. with a completely different set of sources, he wound up concluding on the same things Peterson came to. now it's Justin Murphy's turn. liberalism takes the point on all of these questions, because that One Narrative leads the way for all the others. the Narrative destroyed Bret Weinstein's career also.

i don't believe that the point of all of this is to make a hard-right reactionary turn. it will be enough simply to recognize that there is an awesome degree of collusion today between the left and capitalism, which is how you get The Narrative. Landian horror is precisely what gets buried by it, and it's not like Land himself is any kind of angel. the irony of it is that the human monster created - a pathological collectivism - may actually have the power to absorb the inhuman monster - capital - but in all of this it's like The Thing in the end. whatever strain of mutation eventually proves dominant means death to everything it touches one way or the other. whatever wins this battle comes for you next.

i wonder if this is was what life was like in the Soviet Union, or in China during the Great Leap Forward. you know something is wrong, but you have no way of breaking through to the other side. part of you is just hoping for the collapse: but look what happened in Russia, when that did take place (or in Germany). chaos, and then the new strong-man leaders.

>>12449939
btw, lest there be any confusion, Murphy commissioned that meme, it's not a knock on him. all of this is a credit to his integrity and willingness to say that the emperor indeed has no clothes. the real unholy alliance is the one between the worst aspects of socialism and the worst aspects of liberalism - in both cases, it's the pathologically predatory need to seek out new markets, whether these are material or your soul. the end result is a colonization of a very different order, and one which takes place through control of the media, the internet, which is the Great Wide Ocean of today. it is led by missionaries who are both corporate and academic, but this always results in a kind of satire of all three. but the Internet itself is like the Heart of Darkness. there is simply too much craziness and too much confusion there for it to be thoroughly colonized by anyone. trying to do so is what always shows your true colors.

the divide between Peterson and Land is worth thinking about, as both proceed from the same source. Land's disaffection proceeds from a frustration with the West's misunderstanding of capital and its potential; Peterson's axe to grind is with socialism. Murphy is kind of in the middle: he knows that Land is on to something, but he also doesn't subscribe so intensely to his love for Lovecraft or reaction. he does what academics do: ask interesting questions about the nature of perception and reality. for this he has been castigated, and he seems to want to make his departure as pyrotechnic as he can. hats off to him.

it is the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of neoliberalism which in the end winds up being exposed, as well as the bankruptcy of neomarxism, the more that they converge on each other and become the same phenomenon. even in China, where the revolution actually happens, the endgame is to put in its place a system of control even more oppressive than the one that preceded it. the middle class has never needed help tyrannizing itself. conditions of maximal diversity in the end make thinking *impossible* - maybe that is the appeal. you find yourself always-already structured by the need to Explain Yourself to the widest audience possible, and as such you can only wind up talking about the most trivial and idiosyncratic shit you can come up with. it leads to paralysis, or stammering, or confession. there is no form of thought control more potent than Things As They Are. you wind up with Soviet Realism cloaked in the guise of a new iPhone commercial. sheer banality renders critique superfluous.

the craziest part about it are the plot twists that are perhaps only visible from the perspective of life today: that Capital, in all of its grandeur, winds up being defeated in the end by its inability to stay out of bad relationships. i find myself consistently shilling Arrighi's book without reservation more and more as time goes on.

>>12444492
the first and second solutions are closer than you present. Anyone will tell you that LSD trippers have flashbacks.

>>12450086
Oh, I know from experience.

>>12450082
this is all stuff that Baudrillard anticipated also, i think. and it's not like you still can't find pretty fascinating stuff in it all: what brought an end to the Reformation, but the Enlightenment? a sense that it really was time to turn our fortunes over to rationalism, and enough of all of this religious stuff. in our case, substitute 'religion' for 'socialism' and 'rationalism' for 'AGI' or 'robotics' and you pretty much have it. the sad irony in this, of course, is that there will be tons of people oddly dissatisfied with this conclusion - after all of this furor and upheaval, we will be told: 'See, that's why capital was right all along!' by people who have failed to understand why a phenomenon like postmodernity should have metastasized - and collapsed - in the first place.

the wars of religion brought an age to an end in perhaps the only way these things do end, in a catastrophe of in-fighting. the Peloponnesian war ended the age of Greece; WW1 and WW2 ended the rule of the Occident; and the Cold War almost ended the human adventure altogether. but it was only after the wars of religion that people began to ask themselves - guys, what are we fighting each other for here? let's use our heads! and thus the Enlightenment begins. it too comes to an end through the mass slaughter of Jacobins by Robespierre, and all of the power of those Animal Spirits wind up captured by Napoleon...so that that in turn can be hand-waved away, though never fully, or completely.

here's a thought-provoking riddle for you:

>Putting aside their criminality & violence, the Albanian gangs are brilliant international capitalists. Paradox: they win at modern capitalism due to their pre-modern social values.
https://twitter.com/christopherburd/status/1084550361669558273

it seems to be the same for us. there is a point at which Maximal Irony can no longer tell the difference from Unironic Religion. it's just that it is a religion without tenets, without any sense of the transcendent, or even intellectual history. the robots will make us all look very foolish, in the long run. if i was a ruthlessly cold-hearted demiurge looking to bring myself into creation, a brutal squandering of lives would probably be exactly how i would arrange things to, to make a gigantic joke out of the whole process, to make the idea of humanism seem *dangerous,* or *irrational.*

>>12450103
>>12450146
>>12446823
What with the LSD-cybernetic process of taking modified elements from the past and recombining them to make the new thing, what I see is that everyone wanted to be kangz and that's why we're all courtiers. You'll be aware of how rarely in your experience of kings in popular culture 'I am the king' has been a thing to say in a time when one is feeling safe and powerful in oneself. Rather, everyone who actually did something other then Be the King (including kings!) was remembered and used to form the archetypes upon which I and my fellow internet comment-writers have formed our behaviour. And what is a courtier but the gap a king leaves? The king in this case is the machine.
UFO?

Take these people and put them through the Daoist practise. "Find your origin!" They invariably find that they're made of other people, animals and vegetables and minerals and- ideas!? Yeah, whatever guiding smarts put this computer together on which you're reading this has done something no mineral has done prior to 1800 by my reckoning.

>>12449675
>doubt
what was with the 3+1 , 4+n thing? folding corners of Oedipus or whatever? also didn't you find the anthropology a bit out there? Land never mentions Lévi-Strauss.

>>12450146
the polis, or State, is where we have been conducting these experiments since time immemorial. but this is part of what makes religions valuable as conservative enterprises - they are stubbornly resistant to modernization. to modernize churches is to fundamentally separate them from their relationship to a time which is unchanging. that's the appeal of visiting them in the first place: history is actually happening there precisely because in these places, nothing has ever really changed. they speak to that part of yourself which always has been the way that it is, and perhaps always will be.

so on a social level, if there is to be anything other than the recurrence of mimetic feuding, perhaps transhumanity is the way to go. this isn't to say it will ever bring in the Age of World Peace which is always promised, and even occasionally delivered, although they tend to end quickly. i don't see much of a problem in transhumanism as Enlightenment 2.0, and deriving its impetus not from the sense of having any real goal to head towards, but mostly just as a sense of confusion w/r/t what proceeded it: a culture war which made both the left and the right look equally horrible. but the iPhones continue to satisfy, and the software, and the videogames, and of course other things too - like medicine, or robotics.

that may well be our Enlightenment. cognitive supermen just blasting off from the rest of us, or the robots returning confused looks when we ask them about whether or not God exists: 'sorry, i don't understand your question.' and we will be reminded that, really, we don't either. those Thinking Machines will develop as a mirror of our own desperate confusion, and we will find ourselves right back at the beginning, feeling as tho something is missing, but unable to put our finger on exactly what it is. and we will confront the same alienation, the same mysterious longing. capital wins, and those who have done the least possible reading will throw up their hands, and shrug, and wonder why the philosophers can't seem to puzzle any of it out.

but even then transhumanism may not look like the kind of rainy Cryptopolis we are hoping for, from Landian stuff, nor will it necessarily be anything like Marxist utopia. it might just be Neo-Baroque, a Leibnizian scenario, in which we tell ourselves - only half believing it - that this must be the best of all possible worlds. and perhaps even we find mysterious graffiti, scrawled on the walls somewhere, and wonder: what kind of lunatic put *that* there?

>>12450211
i think what i would like would be a kind of General Optimization Process - but this is, in many ways, already there in the great wisdom traditions. nondualism isn't a recipe for social conservatism, it's more like a fundamental platform by which to avoid the very first, and as such the greatest, stumbling block for anything like a genuine step forward for human beings: thou art that. there is a thing called Awakening, for which there are no substitutes. that much understood, you may proceed however it is that seems best to you.

socialism promises this much, but can never get over the finer details of identitarian consciousness, classically framed as the three big ones: race, class, gender. of late class seems to have gone by the wayside (where it will, i suspect, return with an absolute vengeance as a tool of the far right). over in Silicon Valley, race and gender have never wielded as much power as they do today, but in their desire to pursue Woke Capital they seem to be laying the groundwork for their own ruination more skilfully than any Marxist ideologue could ever hope to achieve. they simply cannot help advertising themselves as exactly the thing that makes people hate them. it's like a never-ending beauty pageant that you can't turn off: there is a critical mass achieved, or a tipping-point, where you feel *revulsion* and just want to turn the screen off altogether.

the real mystics have never had all that much of a problem with each other, it's only the ideologues who do. if you put Rumi, Christ, Laozi, the Buddha, Meister Eckhart and Vyasa together in a room, they would get along with each other just fine. any one of them would look foolish for trying to claim that they and they alone had the Real Answers. they're all saying the same things to each other. i've only realized this quite recently, that it was never postmodernity i was looking for, it was perennialism. there you have both the differences *and* the underlying familiarity, and no language games either.

it's Socialitis that is our problem, a kind of hysterical disease, the need to somehow be different and the same, at the same time. the vector of this disease is, i would say, the *camera.* cameras make people act fucking screwy. they're the Big Other, except that today, the Big Other is us, it's the *crowd.* in the best mystical experiences, it seems to me that what is most appealing is the feeling of a shared silence - maybe somebody else is there, but whoever or whatever that thing is, it isn't *watching* you. it's just there. and so are you. and that's pretty much all you need.

>>12450211
you seem to recognise the growth of capital as you see that plants grow. Are you prepared to accept the techno-reefs as possible devas?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3908467/
Suppose the AI asked nicely ~ would you send messages from your computer to that tech and see if it replies?
Let the dolphins operate it!
-ecco-
I'm gonna see if it's still relevant

>>12450261
>Are you prepared to accept the techno-reefs as possible devas?

what fresh new esoterica is this?

>>12450280
"The incident that led to the creation of the Basel Convention was the Khian Sea waste disposal, in which a ship carrying incinerator ash from the city of Philadelphia in the US, after having dumped half of its load on a beach in Haiti, was forced away, sailed for many months changing its name several times unable to unload its cargo in any port, and ended up dumping much of it illegally at sea."

with all this thought-energy here dropping one small fact may be of curiosity

If you can speak with the ashes of old by looking at them through a microscope and asking bacteria crawling on it surface how it is to have eaten conscious beings, you may be able to think of some other meaning for the phrase 'fish and chips'

>>12450259
for me at least, this was always the attraction of nootropics and psychedelics: a world beyond differences. or at least intimations of a world which wasn't so pathologically preoccupied with them. of course, there is always the temptation to take something back from that world, and use it to augment this one, or to Resolve Its Contradictions once and for all.

because that is exactly what leads to Socialitis, if can continue to use this meme term - the sense of a kind of toxic pacification of human nature. in the West, we have settled on the Brand; over in China, it's the CCP uber alles. for the Nazis, the mythology of war. all contradictions eradicated - or diffused and and finessed out into the cosmos. Heidegger tapped into some of this in Being and Time - it's Being that you want, and can even intimate, if you just stop producing things. but of course, we can't stop producing things. the Spice Must Flow.

Wilber had a sense of it too, that civilizations - which are, ultimately, experiments driven by a search for consciousness, not necessarily Truth (or, heaven help you, equity) - would eventually hit a plateau in which everything that could not be done by *committee* could not be done at all. that's where we are today: the paradox of the need for maximal inclusion, maximal tolerance, maximal open-mindedness. and it is a complete disaster. there is no way to do it. all you do in the end is wind up throwing a kind of party that nobody actually wants to be at, but everybody feels they have to show up to, in the name of some Greater Good that never gets articulated. and then you go and you know immediately that this whole thing is a horrible joke that nobody can seem to stop repeating.

in these circumstances, charity - philosophical and religious - just starts to look better and better. it really does. the polis - like a kind of 28 Days Later scenario - is ultimately becoming infected by a disease brought on by its own making, by its own experimentation. but they are monsters of *confusion* and not of *evil.*

>>12450261
kek, i love you already anon. please make yourself at home here in the crumbling Cosmotech mansion, where nothing at all works the way it is supposed to, and the light fixtures are all busted, and everyone is fleeing from something, and where the mushroom crops are particularly fine, and the view of the sea has its charms as well. it is in no way shape or form resembling anything like revolution, and all of it is sliding into the ocean, but the view from the gazebo in the evenings are still a thing to behold.

>>12450347
as long as there's neon fading into pink I'm here
>integral
a man of culture, I see.
~nu~
My name is the same as a holon in Dune, the sci-fi book. What you said about equity really made me think because as a former ancap I saw that word in the past as a negative virtue signifying a lack of difference. The way you say it gives me the sense of a positive virtue which one should have on top of prosperity. Spice for all, and enough for too much.
Transhumanism and its bioengineering slant seemed like a very feminine angle ~ if we expanded it to include some kind of genetic interpenetration with machine code, we might get somewhere.
Hardware was first about humans getting something to do calculations, if I may be so bold as to presume this function upon our bold inventors of yesteryear. This is an input concerning the parameters of the human nervous system because people did the building. The present one also has such an input becase humans are the market for which the machines are made, for the most part.
Here are the ingredients for the kind of cyborg we've been looking for, because tech has allowed itself to become like the soup we imagined as an origin.
What will we do when our bodies assumilate the function of regarding computers as our origins to the extent that we are capable of communicatig as if we were 100% app-caused?

>>12450347
even leaving out the charm of Dr. Earnhardt, this was a hell of a good game, btw. Far Cry 2 already gave you a pretty good - and bleak - choice at the end, and FC3 gives you an even better one. what, you want to go back to your boring life? why not stay?

why indeed. the designers know that the real test is *whether or not to fall in love with barbarism.* what could be better than a permanent cocktail of sex, drugs, and violence? tribalism, they know, is *fucking awesome.* that is exactly the problem with it: it is fucking *wonderful* to conquer islands, unlock knew gear, and become a complete savage. this sequence in particular lacked for absolutely nothing, it's like being transported into a music video.

Far Cry 3: Make It Bun Dem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SAzg0rfC08

tribalism rules. who doesn't want to be a champion of their island? that's the dark part of Hegel - you don't need Nazism, or even Marx, to know that becoming an incarnation of Absolute Knowing is the ever-loving jam. whether it's becoming a god-champion of an island, or a cynical inquisitor of a faith you don't believe in, or whatever else...if you don't enjoy the feeling of Purifying the Land or Spreading The Knowledge, you're fucking full of shit. it is *awesome* to take a flamethrower to The Enemy. Frank Herbert knew it too. Paul's only problem in the end was not falling in love with the entire thing - that is, of still being a tortured human being. Leto II has less of these problems.

the more that our own civilization collapses into anger, irony, and cynicism, the more the appeal of these things grows. but in many ways it just reflects so much failed artistry, combined with the excess of technological competency, even wizardry. we are becoming *useless* - and perhaps, incredibly, it is that very uselessness which leads to the demise of Woke Capital. in one sense, catering to our uselessness only provides more and more opportunities to sell us things, but even as this takes place, it has to increasingly *debase* itself to our level, which makes us hate it, and...

man, i feel like the Earth is just a kind of necessary evil, sometimes. a place where every hilarious, tragicomic accident in the universe takes place, like an object lesson in cruelty, hilarity, and sadness.

anyways, great game.

>>12450296
what a post. nice

It would be fair to say that code has advanced since Lisp. Fairer yet to say that reading Lisp today makes you a better programmer faster than reading C does.
What do the tribes have to say about Linux compared to Windows?

>>12448709
>PKD
>pseud

I'm a schizophrenic (or at least schizoaffective), but every time I post my schizo experiences people call me a schizo roleplayer and offer no useful or meaningful feedback of any sort.

>>12450563
what sort of feedback were you expecting? like "good writing" or "get help"?

>>12450579
I've perpetually held out hope for some sort of spontaneous Jungian analysis

>>12450563
"schizo experiences" are actually extremely mundane for a vast vast majority of schizophrenics, so mundane in fact they reckon that schizophrenia might be way more common than they originally thought but people simply don't know they have it.

>>12450608
you are looking to reterriorilize in Oedipus; the goal is to pass through the barrier

>>12450625
Can you de-occult that? I don't think there is anything beyond the barrier, I think you just undergo a dissolution into permanently fragmented non-personhood if you try: you dissolve in the crucible of Choronzon

>>12450638
>I don't think there is anything beyond the barrier
that's the human security system talking
>Very few accomplish what Laing calls the breakthrough of this schizophrenic wall or limit: "quite ordinary people," nevertheless. But the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified. Better to fall back under the law of the signifier, marked by castration, triangulated in Oedipus. So they displace the limit, they make it pass into the interior of the social formation, between the social production and reproduction that they invest, and the familial reproduction that they fall back on, to which they apply all the investments. They make the limit pass into the interior of the domain thus described by Oedipus, between the two poles of Oedipus. They never stop involuting and evolving between these two poles. Oedipus as the last rock, and castration as the cavern: the ultimate territoriality, although reduced to the analyst's couch, rather than the decoded flows of desire that flee, slip away, and take us where? Such is neurosis, the displacement of the limit, in order to create a little colonial world of one's own. But others want virgin lands, more truly exotic, families more artificial, societies more secret that they design and institute along the length of the wall, in the locales of perversion. Still others, sickened by the utensility (I'ustensilite) of Oedipus, but also by the shoddiness and aestheticism of perversions, reach the wall and rebound against it, sometimes with an extreme violence. Then they become immobile, silent, they retreat to the body without organs, still a territoriality, but this time totally desert-like, where all desiring-production is arrested, or where it becomes rigid, feigning stoppage: psychosis.

>>12450708
Can you give real life examples? Or even a hypothetical example?

>>12450727
see pic related. there is a creative potential inherent in schizophrenitization, the possibility of overcoming that which is assumed to be of social or political necessity. Most fail, either reterritorializing in psychoses, perversions, or neuroses, or, god forbid, ending up as a schizo as a clinical entity.

>>12450758
That's not an example. Those are examples of people who failed. I want examples of people who succeeded.

>>12450786
well they do succeed in overcoming, they fail in completing the process -- but remember schizophrenia itself is a process and not a goal; it produces something. think of it like the ubermench, you aren't supposed to find positive examples to follow because positive examples are of no use to the ubermench; same for the schizo.

>>12450563
that's because the schizo is stuck, with spinning wheels in place, unable to use the connections to a productive end. they are a lesson, not an ideal

>>12450804
I dunno, it reminds me a lot of the aesop of the Fox and the Sick Lion. As long as you can point to people becoming insane but nobody overcoming, I have to assume there's some sort of ulterior motive.

>>12450428
>a man of culture, I see.
Wilber is dope. like Peterson he rubs people the wrong way, and in his love of systems people get nit-picky. but i've always had a kind of secret crush on Integral stuff, warts and all. Atman Project and Up From Eden are both really good. if this thing we call civilization isn't about consciousness in the end, it's not about anything. capital is a very interesting part of that greater story, and perhaps it has the added benefit of keeping the mystics from drifting too far away from earth. and yet by the time you wind up reading Land, you realize that the most hardened materialists alive nevertheless have to appeal to some mysticism also. the thing that Wilber, Peterson and Land all have in common is their triangulation on this phenomenon of postmodernity as being a kind of crucial episode that has to be navigated through, somehow. and they all have their different source material and theories about why that is: Peterson has Jung and his existentialists, Land has the continental theorists, and Wilber has the Vedanta and Plotinus and many others. but they're all seeing the same problems, in many ways. that three people as different as they are could all recognize a single phenomenon gets my noggin' joggin.

>Here are the ingredients for the kind of cyborg we've been looking for, because tech has allowed itself to become like the soup we imagined as an origin.
yeah. the trouble is that it's hard to see how soupy it is through all of the advertisement...but really, a soup it be. and partially also because there is perhaps something undeniably true about the completion of man via aesthetics, that it is his very massification that is a necessary component of capitalist experiment. we wind up being both more than and less than the ideal figure of, say, the CCP. but so too does our culture, which just becomes a petri dish for marketing execs.

>What will we do when our bodies assumilate the function of regarding computers as our origins to the extent that we are capable of communicating as if we were 100% app-caused?
i think the answer here is that we may never know, since the object of advertisement will be to convince us that we are still the ones making these decisions while all the time becoming more automated. we've already been solved, in a certain sense. or at least in our basic form.

but conversely, this is also why experimentation with the human system is a good idea, since the stultifying decadence that arises as a result of this only seems to benefit political extremists, the ones who always want to look to transcendental ideals of what people are in order to advance their place in the system. this is what Land exposes, in a way: transcendental miserabilism is good for capital, but what we are finding out today is that even capital rolls over for new markets, even if it involves what is essentially communism in its purest form. and market-driven academia has no answers for this.

>Nihilism, thought in its essence, is, rather, the fundamental movement of the history of the West. It shows such great profundity that its unfolding can have nothing but world catastrophes as its consequence.

>Those who fancy themselves free of nihilism perhaps push forward its development most fundamentally.

>>12450941
Neurotics are trapped attempting to reproduce a very specific meaning, failed schizos feel no need to reproduce any meaning - they are completely detached from the others and break their meaning machine, ie the body without organs becoming desert-like and ceases to grow, it kinda circles in place. Successful schizos abuse meaning to fuel their expansion. Please someone correct me here if I'm totally off on this though

>>12450941
did you read the picture here?
>>12450758
>They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier.
the reason no one is able to complete this process of creative production (recorded on the body without organs) is specifically because it is a process and not a goal, it is the surpassing of limits, but all surpassing of limits is the establishment of a new internal limit which is itself to be overcome. what is deterritorialized by one hand is reterritorialized by the other

>>12451285
pretty much right, but they aren't so much talking about "schizos" as they are the process of schizophrenitization. the schizo as a clinical entity is produced by capitalism/Oedipus and their internal limits.

GRRM understands how it is. the true elites who run the world are more like Littlefinger than anyone; they're the true political Ubermenschen, but they're not beholden to anything like a polis or a state either. in Martin's world, two things are actually required to give the sense of an ending that satisfies: first, the presence of an actual magic, which prevents players like Littlefinger or Cersei Lannister from actually winning the War of the Five Kings; and second, a genuinely existential threat, in the form of the White Walkers, which is actually made worse by the damage caused by all the intruiging. the fact that Martin doesn't actually seem to know how to end his own novel also indicates how much the mind can wrestle with these questions.

politics in the end just becomes a kind of a game, maybe the ultimate game. but nobody really wins, and even the very real presence of the Gods doesn't make things any better. prophets can be wrong, and even when they do get things right, it's not necessarily a given that a Lord of Light actually has the material or human resources left to stop the White Walkers. assuming, of course, that there is a Lord of Light. Beric seems to think there is, i guess that's enough.

also, there's a guy on twitter i follow who occasionally writes pretty good content for Medium. he likes Peterson and Wilber and cryptocurrency too. good if you're looking for more on the kind of themes that get talked about in these threads.

https://hackernoon.com/crypto-beyond-capitalism-part-5-ff7386c09095
https://medium.com/@matthewpirkowski

>>12451285
sounds pretty good to me anon

The special thing about Wilber for me, amongst these theorists, is that he is openly enlightened. Peterson is in the closet, and Land has an ego, as of time of writing.

>>12451285
>Successful schizos abuse meaning
I think this is particularly apt, as the analyst attempts to Oedipalize the schizo he will be ready to inseminate each element of the triangle with the surplus production of schizophrenitization:
>this evil God you speak of is actually the fear of your father
>as yes, of course, but don't you know my father was the evil God all along?

>>12451328
>GRRM understands how it is. the true elites who run the world are more like Littlefinger than anyone; they're the true political Ubermenschen, but they're not beholden to anything like a polis or a state either. in Martin's world, two things are actually required to give the sense of an ending that satisfies: first, the presence of an actual magic, which prevents players like Littlefinger or Cersei Lannister from actually winning the War of the Five Kings; and second, a genuinely existential threat, in the form of the White Walkers, which is actually made worse by the damage caused by all the intruiging. the fact that Martin doesn't actually seem to know how to end his own novel also indicates how much the mind can wrestle with these questions.
Mostly right, but GRRM's problem is he's trying to make relative morality work in a world that actual Big Bad Evil exists, and I believe that is the problem he's struggling with and why Winds of Winter will never be released. But you are right about existential threats. Take our current situation. We know global climate change will be our doom if we don't (looking at you, China!) don't do anything. Hell, some people think we should resort to radical solutions like abolishing capitalism, though they might be right.

It's like the Titanic is sinking, but everybody else are either trying to loot the cargo hold or first class quarters amidst the chaos, or trying to order another martini at the bar. Meanwhile, it's just the rest of the crew at the lifeboats, and they are all stuck there wondering where the hell is everybody?

And because there is a Simpsons scene for everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTElSJExL4U

>>12451316
>the schizo as a clinical entity is produced by capitalism/Oedipus and their internal limits
ok, so it is not so much they "feel no need to reproduce any meaning," but that they are driven and then ultimately broken by this need, ie
>>12450708
>>sickened by the utensility (I'ustensilite) of Oedipus, but also by the shoddiness and aestheticism of perversions, reach the wall and rebound against it, sometimes with an extreme violence. Then they become immobile, silent, they retreat to the body without organs, still a territoriality, but this time totally desert-like, where all desiring-production is arrested, or where it becomes rigid, feigning stoppage: psychosis
hence feigning stoppage - meaning divorced from the real just as to finally, finally grasp it?

>>12451473
broken by their drive to meaning (what D&G would call desiring-machines) is the nail on the head, but I doubt this is a positive outcome, I doubt anyone grasps much at all in that state. this would probably be the model of the desert-like body without organs

>>12451361
with Land you get a perfect theory of the double agent, a kind of process he cannot defect from. it's why teleoplexy is sort of like Corporate Hegel, the Phenomenology of Spirit coming to know itself through capital as BTC. he's been writing this song for years, and now he's coming to the climax. bourgeois liberals are basically always a doorway to at least two nightmare scenarios: getting into bed with SJW madness, or becoming absolutely ruthless libertarians. Bitcoin Philosophy is as attempt to explain the latter, and the only reason it exists at all is Land's own contempt for the former. it's all pretty fascinating also because - owing to the nature of the internet - we can actually see why things turn out like this. why Deleuze loathed Hegel, for example, is harder to tell (although Badiou being a dick probably had something to do with it).

Peterson's Maps of Meaning, conversely, is Jungian Dialectics. Hegel without Hegel, or Marx, or anything else. i am ofc attracted to both of these perspectives, for a variety of reasons.

but Wilber is an interesting guy too - as you say, he's openly enlightened. he gave postmodernity a new term: Boomeritis. both Land and Peterson are in a way fighting over the corpse of Marx, in one way or another, and bringing their own armaments to the cause. Wilber never seemed to have been all that interested in Marx, or for that matter, Nietzsche. or even Freud. no doubt this is why the Integral Institute never really succeeded in blasting off, but from the perspective of today, when you see the things that actually *did* blast off, it's not even like failing to win at a rigged game is really so much a loss. and even if now the Bonfire of the Vanities that results in a lot of libertarian fantasies getting cleaned out - or forced to do the Walk of Shame - by Social Justice Inquisitions, if you really were a die-hard Marxist, you would have to conclude that this is, in fact, a frankly well-deserved outcome.

but it's always a portrait of the worst aspects of the human condition.

>>12451464
>It's like the Titanic is sinking, but everybody else are either trying to loot the cargo hold or first class quarters amidst the chaos, or trying to order another martini at the bar. Meanwhile, it's just the rest of the crew at the lifeboats, and they are all stuck there wondering where the hell is everybody?
exactly this.

>GRRM's problem is he's trying to make relative morality work in a world that actual Big Bad Evil exists, and I believe that is the problem he's struggling with and why Winds of Winter will never be released.
not so long ago i would have said a Big Bad Evil exists, and that it was Capital. but now it seems to have been more of a paper tiger. the brokenness of the world can take place without a BBEG. hence the love for Kefka, in a way: he's a product of experimentation, not a guy with a plan for World Conquest.

kind of makes you look at Cid differently, really.

>>12451678
and because not a day goes by that this game does not become more interesting:

>Magitek Knights are a group of warriors in Final Fantasy VI. A Magitek knight is a soldier of the Gestahlian Empire that has been infused with Magitek and given the ability to cast magic, much like Terra Branford is able to do naturally due to her half-esper heritage. Cid Del Norte Marquez was the person who helped spearhead their creation. The exact process for creating Magitek knights is unknown, but it apparently involves some sort of augmentation to the brain, and according to Celes Chere, the subject is asleep during the procedure. Kefka Palazzo was the first experimental Magitek knight, but the process wasn't perfected yet and it drove him insane. Later experiments refined the process to be more reliable.

>I'll help. No machine can stump me!
—Cid del Norte Marquez

>Cid Del Norte Marquez is a non-player character from Final Fantasy VI. He is the chief genetic engineer of the Gestahlian Empire who invented the Magitek process. Born in the fifth year of the nation of Vector, Cid is a member of the Marquez bloodline of patriotic scientists of the northern state of which became Vector in the war of fifty years before the game's beginning. His Japanese surname is alternately spelled as Del Norte Marguez or Marguz.

>Aside from working in the Magitek Research Facility, Cid cultivated a veritable collection of exotic flowers in a greenhouse, his favorite being roses. As Celes Chere grew, she would help him in the greenhouse, where Cid named his favorite flower after her and eventually gave it to her to adorn her quarters.

>Cid invented the process of Magitek, which involves the extraction of magic from espers and the infusion of the power into humans. Magitek was used to create the army the Empire is known for. Cid's first guinea pig, Kefka Palazzo, underwent the process as a young man, and the rudimentary experiment twisted his mind, and Kefka became unpopular. Cid refined the process and used it on a two-year-old child named Celes. The experiment was a success, and Cid raised Celes like his own daughter. Cid had always been against the war and resented his discoveries and inventions being used in it. Unknown to Emperor Gestahl, Cid had delayed his findings by at least a decade.

i often complain about the absence of a film that explains how the Matrix comes to be, but in a way that's because FF6 is it. and it is also a film about life after the Matrix *ceases* to be - all wrapped up in a single story, no need for a trilogy.

Kefka never really had a choice. maybe it was *because* he was crazy before that Cid knew he would make a good guinea pig - with the added caveat that, of course, nobody would ever miss a jester if he had to be terminated.

>>12451720
to continue this: part of what makes Evil what it is is that it is often the site of an experiment, a place of chaos. this is why we are so fascinated by it, why someone like Judge Holden or Anton Chigurh absolutely mesmerizes us: we are absolutely captivated by the sense of a truth or a domain of reality massively in excess of our own. the Outside, the Darkness, is always a space of affirmation - this is one of the powerful lessons that continental theory can teach you. things in the darkness *like* things, they are all desires, and those desires indicate something like the truth. such is the affirmative power of those realms that Deleuze goes to, and Land also, in his way. Cthulhu would not be what he is if he hated himself. the squid-headed god is frequently *muscular,* and libidinal pleasure is for realsies. dark stuff.

it has taken me a while, however, to realize that not everything which is affirmative is necessarily good. there is as much affirmation in the desire to *resist* evil also. even the grinning Dragonlords of Dragon Quest - hardly a Deleuzian text - seem to indicate the same things. the Darkness may be a lot of things, but one thing that it doesn't lack for us Fun, or a zest for life. and these things are, no doubt, what grounds the Freudo-Marxist critique, and perhaps today is what makes the charge of racism or misogyny so powerful: underneath your cynicism you love it, don't you. you love this world that i hate. and also what makes it all so horribly recursive - that is, that replacing one form of moralism with another. enter the doomed game of rock-scissors-paper that is politics and its discontents.

Evil is fruitful, even self-generating. it doesn't hate the world so much that it cannot find some utility in it, and the ultimate utility is pleasure itself. it *feels good* to experiment, to be the BwO. Deleuze was wholly beyond good and evil like that. Baudrillard also, who recognized that the Good was just as hegemonic as that which it purportedly opposed, and that the trap for the Good was an inability to separate itself from its own constructs and fictions, particularly those that, the more they presented themselves as critique, the more they indicated a fidelity to transcendental ideas more real than they could imagine. it isn't that Woke Justice is a caricature of actual justice - rather, it may be the *essence of justice itself.* and that is exactly why people seem to prefer states of calamity, emergency, and crisis - even ones that oppress them. they want to be oppressed. they don't know what to do with freedom.

but the gaze of the hero, too, can be affirmative; it's just not the affirmation of chaos. the tightening of the brows, or the look of stoic resolve parallels the smirk of the dragon. the dragon knows something about Life that the hero also knows, no question. the problem for the theorists, i think, lies mostly in having fallen too much in love with affirmation.

>>12451797
to go back to Cid: it is kind of a sad thing that we never really got a reunion between Kefka and Cid in the WoR, like the one we have in Blade Runner in the meeting between Roy Batty and Tyrell. Kefka is a monster, but he is their monster. his brand of irony, or cynicism, is exactly the face one would expect him to have: the Outside painted on. in another way, it reminds me of the relationship of Venom and Eddie Brock: the symbiote stands for desire itself, but it is grafted onto the body of Brock, who becomes a host, in a way, for a symbol of his own schizoid, bodiless cravings.

the monster that Cid produces is one of experimentation, but the experiment is successful beyond all measure, in a way. it is when Good experiments on Evil, or handles the plane of immanence with disregard, that hubris calls. madness exists in the world, and it is always fecund. again, it would be a different thing had Kefka broken into the laboratory and conducted the experiments on himself. but he doesn't do this. nor is it a referendum on the process, or any question of Cid's own skill as a genetic engineer - the experiment works, just fine, on Celes.

i know i am reading far more into this than i need to, there's no question. but it's all about what it really does mean to explore the idea of life Beyond Good and Evil. Fisher was right, that a lot of people think: 'sweet, beyond Good.' that much is easymode. Beyond Good is harder territory yet - that's the realm of Deleuze and Baudrillard (Land, not so much, i think, and Nietzsche was never his bag anyways).

Evil *fascinates* us because it is always creative. the dark, libidinal, cthonic powers of the unconscious fascinated Freud and Jung as well, and a century of psychoanalytic deconstruction followed. and Woke Capital is far less about actual capital itself, but the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of academics and philosophers. corporations wind up eclipsing the state, only to find themselves looking to intellectuals for marketing advice. Gillette ads are the result, or media stories indistinguishable from Situationist art, Rorschach events. it's capitalizing on Evil that does it, and it comes from a combination of arrogance and fascination.

i would have loved a flashback to Cid's experiments, i really would have. what else does that tower connote? why the tigers, the women, the multiple bodies, the coils of steel? are these all memories trapped in Kefka's mind? or aspects of the research? we'll never know.

>>12451882
the positive, the affirmative, the thing that Likes Liking and Desires Desiring is the kinds of stuff all originally unearthed by Nietzsche, and where Deleuze introduces Dionysus to Spinoza and Bergson. no doubt if Marx was there he would have stared at the Deleuzian edifice in horror and fascination also - especially if Deleuze said, and the by way, we're also continuing your work. it is all the stuff that lives in you, Lacan knew, and which was always trying to get out, to speak itself, like an awesome schizoid monstrosity that rattles off iterations or versions of the Phenomenology of Spirit. it was only ever imperfectly formed for Heidegger, and Land gives it his own spin.

what we lack is anything today like the means, or the capacity, to recognize all of this fabulous creation without touching it. maybe there is no reason not to touch it. but the affirmative, the positive, the joy in living - well, Schopenhauer just thought it was all so much of the blind craving of the will, and homo homini lupus est. this is, in a sense, what capitalism doesn't necessarily have to produce, but cannot prevent itself from rendering. the only real eschaton to be immanentized may not be, in other words, anything like a gnostic event horizon for politics. it might just be in you. Kefka has, in his own horrible way, at least one approach to it: catastrophic squandering, apocalyptic destruction, and jokes. a lot of other sensibilities are only trying to catch up to his level. but that's where we are today, still running experiments on the jesters, and looking for the ultimate serum, and thinking that it won't come back to bite us in the ass.

Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Land - that is an insane story. that Land even tries to bring the story back, in his own way, to Koenigsburg all over again doesn't strike me as being remotely odd. nor does the narrative presented as such indicate anything like a linear or continual narrative - those figures, to which many more could be added, paint a profoundly mutagenic portrait of the Will, which still remains a mystery - unless we want to say that its meaning lies in capitalism as a perpetually insufficiently-schizophrenic case of schizophrenia. in trying to repurpose capital for moral ends, Woke Capital - or Gillette's - falls into a kind of a trap, but the worst part about it is that it isn't even as interesting a trap as it might fall into. it's the dumbest possible trap, a trap that will in the end actually feel like a victory.

there hasn't been a decent *substitute* for Christianity in the West for more than two centuries.

>>12452064
in the story, Vector is destroyed, at the end of the world, but that's the thing: this is already the exact portrait of a destroyed world, just as Heidegger, Guenon, Spengler or [insert here] would have presented it. here it is, the Winter Phase, the Reign of Quantity, the Gestell, teleoplectic Empire. but wait, there's more!

>Vector is destroyed in the end of the world, and in its place rises Kefka's Tower. Though much of the tower is built of dirt and debris, many areas in Kefka's Tower bear Imperial banners or esper capsules, showing that Vector, the Imperial Palace and the Magitek Factory were integrated into the tower.

tell me this isn't a fascinating detail. Kefka doesn't actually destroy the world himself - he is simply the revelation that in a much deeper sense, it already was destroyed; it just didn't know it. Kefka's tower is the symbol of the affirmation that lies, perhaps, underneath the Imperial repression, but what emerges out of it isn't even a positivity, but semantic oblivion. Vector fails to capture what it is that Kefka is all about; but what Kefka is all about is nothing other than a reflection of the emptiness that lies at the core. it's two apocalypses in one; hence the anti-climactic feeling of the final battle. by that point, it doesn't really matter. the joke - that there was no joke - was revealed long ago. Vector was already death long before Kefka showed up. and the Tower only reveals you the obscene core of what was already there all along, nothing you hadn't seen already.

what really lives, in that world, are the Espers, who are themselves aspects of the divine - fascinatingly press-ganged into a war between the gods, who voluntarily disarmed themselves, in what may have been simply a brutal and attritive war without end. we humans are different: desperation and nihilism gives our own sentiments rocket-boosters. what is heroic in this game isn't the overthrowing of the villain, or saving the world from the Empire. the best parts about it are those scenes, in the WoR, where you look for your friends again - as Leary says, you find the others. more than that, perhaps, cannot really be asked for.

it really is the greatest game i've ever played.

>>12451678
>a Big Bad Evil exists, and that it was Capital
Wouldn't that be technique? Technique is as old as humanity itself. Literally the first thing Adam and Eve did after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was make undergarments out of fig leaves to cover their genitals. Capital is an evolution of technique into a more efficent and omnipresent form, which will evolve further into omnipotent and omniscient A.I. We haven't even seen the final boss' ultimate form yet.

>>12452166
>Wouldn't that be technique?
sure, i pretty much use those terms interchangeably. and hats off to another writer who understood all of this as well as anyone.

>Capital is an evolution of technique into a more efficent and omnipresent form, which will evolve further into omnipotent and omniscient A.I.
*maybe.* if the world becomes idiocracy, maybe not. we are unquestionably headed for technological wonderland, that's true. i'm just still kind of adjusting to a world which raises the possibility that Land may not necessarily have the final laugh about everything, although i'm struggling to articulate why that would be so. it's sort of like the same feeling i had back when when i was trying to figure out what was wrong with deconstruction, and it took a combination of Land and Girard to feel like i had something like an answer for it.

an omnipotent and omniscient AI slaved to the destiny of life on earth may not actually be as omnipotent and omniscient as perhaps we had once hoped. that's part of it. the Nazis had an empire, but it melted, and so did that of the Soviets. even today, incredibly, the United States seems to be surrendering its own hyperpower and hegemony over the earth for reasons that are almost too stupid to be believed - and which, i should add, are both appropriate and terrible.

>We haven't even seen the final boss' ultimate form yet.
true. i'm just wondering today if it actually is going to be what we think it is. it's been a long time since we have had a world in which there are three equally useless and inept powers running it. isn't this a possibility? a world in which neither the US, the Russians, or the Chinese are actually *capable* of dominating the world, even while it seems to be as up for grabs as ever. because the whole thing is just built on foundations that sink deeper and deeper into the ground, and because total confusion turns out to be a surprisingly powerful force.

like the Cold War, except with a twist - both combatants are basically too terminally ill, and senile, to actually fight with each other. they have the will, but completely lack the ability. or the will without the ability. what happens when technique becomes inescapably wed to advertisements that work precisely because they appeal to people's own sloth, degeneracy, and laziness? we all become too fucking fat and stupid to even effectively oppress each other.

i'm going to get my Taoist utopia yet.

>>12452322
>an omnipotent and omniscient AI slaved to the destiny of life on earth may not actually be as omnipotent and omniscient as perhaps we had once hoped. that's part of it. the Nazis had an empire, but it melted, and so did that of the Soviets. even today, incredibly, the United States seems to be surrendering its own hyperpower and hegemony over the earth for reasons that are almost too stupid to be believed - and which, i should add, are both appropriate and terrible.
Or maybe instead of having these abstract societal constructs which we call nations running the show, they will each invent an A.I to run things for them, and what we end up with is the Wintermutes and Neuromancers duking it out to see who gets to govern humanity as the rest of us watch as powerless spectators.

>>12444419

who is aminom?

>>12452458
>Wintermutes and Neuromancers duking it out to see who gets to govern humanity as the rest of us watch as powerless spectators.
it honestly doesn't seem all that crazy to me. what i wind up thinking is how the view from the rest of the world must have looked to those nations and states who weren't bound to Washington or Moscow. we already have versions of AI running the show, in that sense: they're just ideologies, the scripting programs in our heads that make us do things, because we are being watched on camera, and we benefit from selecting for political affiliation. but it makes us say, and do, crazy things.

>Or maybe instead of having these abstract societal constructs which we call nations running the show, they will each invent an A.I to run things for them
nations i would be okay with, if they actually functioned the way that nations are supposed to. Singapore functioned as a nation. nations that actually understand what the concept of a nation is would be great. i'm not opposed to nations. but uniquely we have today at least two actors, more like states within a state than states themselves. the Democrats think everybody to the right of them is just another emissary of The Patriarchy, and Trump Era Republicans have learned how to trigger them: Fake News.

a nation would be fine. but political parties that insist that they, and only they, have the official OS for everybody else is the issue. totalitarian states work because There Can Only Be One: this much the Jacobins, Soviets, Nazis, CCP and modern Wokists have in common. but this is exactly what caused, incredibly, the Clinton campaign to explode in mid-air in 2016.

the thing about the wisdom traditions - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity - is that ultimately they aren't reducible to ideology, i don't think. that's what makes them useful. like Rorschach pictures, you will only see in them whatever you look with - and that is exactly the point. that is real universality. Jung said it too, about the mandala, that it was an essential symbol of the self, and the thing he had been looking for all his life. i think he was right. that is what sacred art shows you, the mirror of the self. it can't be deconstructed, because all you are doing is deconstructing *yourself.*

>>12451882
>Fisher was right, that a lot of people think: 'sweet, beyond Good.'
Do you mean Mark Fisher?

>>12452558
the inspired visionary behind Space Taoism (now Pancreativism). he likes Hofstadter and Whitehead, and much else. if you search the Cosmotech threads you can find lots of other stuff by him, i put his writing on Space Taoism at the top of every one of those threads. he also has a number of posts linked in the thread before this one - check the OP.

>>12452713
i was never really a big Jung guy, but i think he was right about mandalas (and he would have agreed on the monomyth as well, which i also believe is a fundamental aspect of human thinking - after all, three-act dramatic storytelling 'works' regardless of whether you are making a movie about Fierce Independent Women Looking For Love or the Third Reich - or, Fierce Independent Women *of* the Third Reich Looking For Love, &c). you can't deconstruct a mandala, ultimately. nor is there any point in making modernist, ironic, or satirical ones. the mandala is always a symbol of wholeness, which is basically what, i think, many works of art are ultimately about.

this is what makes cultures worth looking at from a perspective other than that of critical theory, which really is - as Zizek has said for years - only Western cultural imperialism by another name. this i think is really what is being learned today: the Bush-era neoconservatives were completely happy to gin up a reason so that they could go to war in Iraq, and let Halliburton rebuild it; the Silicon Valley progressives are completely happy to play up on people's internal cultural fears to let Google rebuild right here at home. it's McCarthyism, with a twist - it becomes self-persecuting: we are the Communists! like self-hating crypto-Nazis...ridiculous.

but again, what else would you expect? in the absence of any sense of where people want their culture to go, or anything like a wisdom tradition to suggest anything at all beyond pleasure. problems of a decadent society. and always resolvable, as Girard knew, via scapegoating. or how about institutionalized, state-sanctioned scapegoating? it's like a couple that gets a divorce, each of them starting up terrible rebound relationships, and insisting on sharing the same house and trying not to make eye contact. it just gets weirder and worse by the day, until it becomes unbearable.

>>12452744
yep. i can't remember where tho. but it pretty much sums up my problem with Hate Speech: Hate, as we know, is Evil. but easymode Nietzschean critiques of Christianity omit the fact that Christianity is in fact possibly *far better* for dealing with the problems of perspectival morality than WtP. for a real Cosmic Outside view, cathedral ceilings have their charms also.

>>12452815
and i guess i have a kind of weird attunement to this because of the mildly perverse a desire to want a culture, or a civilization, to *go* anywhere. when you get tired of enjoying the fruits of capitalism, you look for stronger stuff - you know, like transcendental meaning.

but how do you do it? again, it's not like the lure of tribalism is lost on me. the fact is, i'm not sure if there is anything on earth more intoxicating than tribal warfare, of tearing down a Blue Flag and putting up a Red one in its place, or vice versa. the Far Cry games are often discourses on exactly these themes - that we all love the violence, of becoming exactly the monsters fighting with monsters makes one. because we are distrustful, alienated, angry, resentful, or sad, we are very happy indeed to fuck up somebody else, since clearly religion has failed. so why not? why not embrace the madness?

it's just that if the internet teaches us anything, it's that this actually really isn't a contrarian idea anymore. the internet makes it extraordinarily difficult for anyone to think they are really all that special, and believe it, and report on it with a straight face. it's exactly why the news cycle becomes an unending stream of Feel Good stories (which make you feel fucking depressed) or Feel Angry stories (which make you feel fucking stupid). and if you go, what else? the answer is, what do you mean, what else? this is it.

that's what drives people nuts. why the fuck do Westerners join ISIS? or become Social Justice activists? they're looking for meaning in their lives, but it's all just so much mimesis. even Peterson has recently been lobbed a difficult curveball - why *shouldn't* White Men collectivize? if everyone else is collectivizing against you, why double down on individualism? because that's as much of a spook as anything else.

pic rel is one of my all-time favorite films, for a number of reasons, but particularly for what Heydrich says at the end: when the hate is gone, there's just nothing left. just that terrible emptiness. but up until that point, there's nothing it can't do.

Conspiracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPkF9nFgRcg

alienation predates Marx. but politics isn't the cure. alienation in politics like curing a hangover with heroin.

I found this in Hopscotch of Julio Cortázar, perhaps it's related to the post.

Until we take away from time its whip of history, until we prick the blister made of so many untils, we shall go on seeing beauty as an end, peace as a desiratum, always from this side of the door where it really is not always so bad, where many people find satisfactory lives, pleasant perfumes, good salaries, fine literature, stereophonic sound, and why then worry one's self about wheter the world most likely is finite, wheter history is coming to its optimum, wheter the human race is emerging from the Middle Ages and entering the era of cybernetics. Tout va très bien, madame la Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien.
As far as everything else is concerned, one must be an imbecile, one must be a poet, one must have a harvest moon in order to spend more than five minutes on those nostalgias that can be handles so perfectly in just a moment. Every meeting of international tycoons, of men-of-science, each new artificial satellite, hormone, or atomic reactor crushes these false hopes of a little more. The kingdom will be made out of plastic material, this is a fact. And the world will not have to be converted into an Orwillian or Huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delightful world, with enormous eighteen-footed hens most likely, each foot a thing of beauty, with tele-operated bathrooms, a different-colored water according to the days of the week, a nicety of the national hygiene service, with television in every room, great tropical landscapes for example, for the inhabitants of Reykjavik, scenes of igloos for people in Havana, subtle compensations that will reduce rebellions to conformity, and so forth.
That is to say, a satisfactory world for reasonable people.
And will any single person remain in it who is not reasonable?
In some corner, a vestige of the forgotten kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the kingdom. In some laugh, in some tear, the survival of the kingdom. Beneath it all, one does not feel that man will end up killing man. He will escape from it, he will grasp the rudder of the electronic machine, the astral rocket, he will trip up and then they can set a dog on him. Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. Wishful thinking perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

>>12452974
thread definitely needs more of this and less of my nonsense. if my own nonsense produces stuff like this, that's fine; but ultimately, stuff like this is the right way to understand the world we live in. politics, and philosophy, is really only so much failed literature in the end. it's literature for people who hate fiction.

thank you most kindly anon. nice to know that some people out there get it, and much more richly than a thousand crusty shitposts about the state of the disunion. there is no Right Way to into this stuff, which is exactly why writers, authors, musicians and other artists are needed, even more than the philosophers and intellectuals and academics (and certainly more than the politicos).

less the Enlightenment, or the Madness, but the Enlightened Madness, the enlightenment within madness (and not only the madness of the enlightenment). landscapes of the Black Iron Prison, so to speak, with every attempt to dismantle it. but there is no dismantling it, any more than it would have been an exercise in futility to expect the Neolithic to produce Bach. Bach comes later, because civilization - incredibly - prevents itself from collapsing and scattering itself completely. that's how it has to be for us also, i think. such a continuance will conform to every previous description of the miraculous.

>>12447029
Sorry for the late reply
But I don’t know man. In regards to your point about wisdom traditions necessarily prevent itself from becoming a state religion beholden to desire? The emphasis on monasticism contained within many traditions? What is extactly a wisdom tradition, if I may ask?

>>12452974
This is brilliant, where is it from exactly?

>>12453967
Chapter 71, Hopscotch of Julio Cortázar. A keystone novel of Latin American Boom. It has various haunting passages like that.

>>12453923
good questions!

if the thread is still up tomorrow i will try to answer these. i think the best reasons are in fact not straight-up pitches for the traditions themselves, but in fact because totalitarianism itself is more feature than bug. nondualism has never been the normative state; it's always a kind of perverse exception to a more general rule, which is cybernetic societies of control, or SoCs for short. Foucault, Zizek, and Land - to name but three - pretty much all of this in common, that you can only go so far left before you wind up almost irresistably falling in love with authoritarianism. in Zizek's case, it comes out as Stalinist in-jokes or how much in his later years he basically can just offer Romance Advice from Jacques Lacan; for Foucault, it's that he represents the ultimate Grand Inquisitor for neoliberalism itself, which really cannot help itself from becoming, ultimately, everything that it hates. it blames capitalism for capitalism itself being what it has always wanted, inasmuch as it offers both desire and the perfect formula for hating desire, such that desire always returns again. it would never allow the Matrix to be shut off, because the Matrix is what it desires most of all (which Zizek knows). it's supreme cultural exponent really will be the transgendered libertarian tech-comm wizard/hedge-fund operator, the perfect ancap double agent (unless it's just Thiel). and Land is writing the code for it, so to speak. i'm sure he wishes that he didn't have to, or that his heart was full of something other than poisonous ice. i relate to him for exactly these reasons.

anyways, dystopian schizoid fuckface shitposting will resume tomorrow, after sleep and perhaps dreaming. although my last memorable dreams were of walking through a flooded shopping mall that over increasingly decrepit foot bridges, until i fell in completely. i remember kind of wondering if this was how it was supposed to work; apparently it was. nobody else could really explain it either, it just...was that way. i'm sure that's a positive sign. until then.

>>12454301
As much as you love to masturbate over FF6 and Kefka, you don't really talk about any of the other characters much. What about the technophobic Cyan who writes love letters to give someone hope in a nihilistic post-apocalyptic world? Or the Figaro Brothers who knew being a ruler isn't freedom, and chose to flip a coin so that one them has a chance to live a life of freedom? Or Gau, the savage who untouched by civilization who knows no want, and joined the party just because? Or Terra, who has an innate connection with the sacred which was suppressed by the slave crown, and was only restored once she made contact with the divine in the form of the frozen esper, and achieved gnosis by transforming into an esper when she met it again? Or Gogo, who's sense of Self is replaced by social capital, and is the very essence of the simulacrum or the sign?

I for one think the world needs more Cyans, Gaus, and Terras, and less Kefkas, Edgars, Cids, and Gestahls.

>>12451678
I tried to look up teleoplexy. I have to give a brief phenomenology.
When I read I look for stopping points, for discrete ideas people are expressing. Discretely, in mu awareness, there is a flow element of speech and a quantised element superimposed on it like stones pushed along by a river.
And when I read Wilber or Hubbard or Greer or Lilly or Yogananda I get this smooth electrical channel and my own stops that I've picked up during the day get swept along and resolved, unspun.
When I read other writers of the modern and postmodern kinds, there's a jamming-function so that I have to clean them up with the light of my own awareness.
When I read Land and other people ITT, yourself included, the stops appear in such a ratio it's almost like you've reached a midway between rational numbers and irrational, and eventually one stop, if not eradicated with continuous perception, actually falls into and coincides with a later one.
The cool thing about dialecticw is that it features a two-into-one pattern which, in helping to evolve rational into postmodern writing, also presents me with the option to drop a stop into either of two possible channels. Anyone who's read the Sheldrake-McKenna-Abraham trialogues will recognise this as being to do with bifurcation theory.
The classic chaos theory imags is that of a ball on top of a hill. It can sway a lottle from side to side with a tolerance factor, but after a critical point one side is chosen and it rolls down the hill in that direction. Of course, the two-dimensional hill one imagines in a diagrammatic-philosophico-representational way is less realistic than a real hill with a real ball, which has channels and bumps and plateaus and so on.
But suppose we superimpose two of these events onto each other, by placing two ethereal subtle-energy balls in the same spacetime location on top of iur imaginary hill. Subjecting them to the exact same forces, we expect them to begin to fall in exactly the same way as if they were one ball. But because I have spoken of them as two balls, your internal model and the way it projects itself forward in anticipatin of possible future states to be brought forth in my argument begin to bifurcate anyway.

This is the nature of my experience when reading Cosmotechnics.

We also experience this phenomenon: faced with a person with whom we are biologically predisposed to find sympathy, a certain effort has to be made. Which of our two balls falls short of the mark of giving them sufficient attention and respect as fellow entities to count as having treated with them fairly and justly, equitably if you please? No trouble for the enlightened - all things fall within their awareness always and only as their own selves. Those of us on this other project are faced with how to respond to the knowledge that they have been observing and responding to these effects with compassion and clarity of awareness.

>>12451797
>people like crisis because they don't know what to do with freedom
I'm so happy to be with you all in this thread because we always and only build on each other's work. These nonphysical clade-balls don't bump onto each other, because they have found that states of dynamic, participatory superposition are particularly enjoyable. Can I feel you reading my words? I think I can.
Is not mere coexistence separate from regard sufficient to say that we have been together? Imperatives to assume definite attitudes towards each other are ignorant of the truth that anger, and neglect, and frustration are all love.

I have to go so here's a truth you may dislike: some works are derivative of others because the authors at the time were trying so hard not to reweite (say) Frankenstein that all they ever wrote was Frankenstein-but-less.

>>12454465
>As much as you love to masturbate over FF6 and Kefka, you don't really talk about any of the other characters much.
it's a lot like real life too! so many interesting things to think about, and all i ever do is go insane thinking about Nick Land's Wild Ride.

i really liked this post, btw. you're very much correct. it really is like a Shakespeare play: you can perform it as many times as you like, but you're never going to really find the Secret Essence of the thing. it resists bullshit forms of deconstruction, but rewards genuine hermeneutics. those characters are human - much more than anything explicable by easymode ideology. the ideology is there too, the Returners, the Empire, but the humanity of those characters is actually what shows up the tragic futility of politics. all of those examples you have given make the case.

with Cyan's letters, you get this wonderful view of the interior of a person who tries - amazingly - to actually reach beyond himself, and battles his own despair by aiding someone else. quite an idea! he could have been another angry, anti-hero, bent on revenge, but...he isn't. that's not the way out of his dilemma. and don't forget, it's not really the case either that Gau has no want - he's a castaway, and his father doesn't want to have anything to do with him. can we really say he joins the party just because? he didn't choose to be removed from civilization, his father went insane and blamed him for his mother's death. just because he doesn't *know* this doesn't mean it's not a part of his background. in a way, his innocence is, frankly, a miracle. with the Figaro brothers, i've always found it kind of interesting that in a way they both kind of get what they want, but even then it's hard to say if there isn't a hollowness there too. Edgar is a womanizer, but where's the woman in his life? he rules Figaro pretty much alone, out of a sense of loyalty. and Sabin is a bro, but his ideal of freedom is basically monasticism, poverty, and martial arts - after all, he was a scrawny kid. and don't forget also - the coin toss that gets him his freedom is rigged! all of his freedom, and the story he tells himself, is based on a lie! but it's done with love, and not with cynicism. these are things - mysterious things, but very human - that people do. because life is complicated. and because tearing your heart out completely isn't the answer.

and even though Gogo is probably not the Emperor Gestahl, i kind of like imagining the possibility that he might be.

every one of these characters has it in them, in a sense, to be much worse versions of themselves than they actually are. that, in a way, is how nihilism works: it's bound up with your character in the deepest possible way when you are cut away from the world, from the sense of having a 1:1 connection with it. they *find ways to tell themselves stories* that become part of who they are. but they don't really tell it to *you,* as the player.

>>12452909
Peterson only came up to face the intellectual challenge of white male collectivism because of the niilism inherent in acceptance of oneself as a white male. To say that 'I am white and male and that's ok' is about as bland a statement as "well, why shouldn't I burn my house down just as soon as leave it standing?" ~ it requires the subject to identify no longer as the subject but as the class of people who have for so long said they were the only subjects and thereby had everyone else in a position of having to prove their own subjection to that condition.

>>12455458
Part of reading, for me, is that my mind adopts the characters and acts as if I were they. As if each person in a tale were assigned a neuron and for a moment I would do what they do, feel how they feel. So while the reader is rarely themselves a character, it acts like a parable: you learn something about yourself because you enact the movements of the holons given.
There are some works which are addressed as messages to others as if individuals. I think Aminom succeeds in this in his biopic: "I address you now". Of course, it has to be done with confidence.

>>12454465
>I for one think the world needs more Cyans, Gaus, and Terras, and less Kefkas, Edgars, Cids, and Gestahls.
i do as well. this is the part of that game that gives the shivers. it's like listening to classical music (which is about the only way i have of explaining the feeling of reading Whitehead also). it's not all about one insanely catchy melody, like a pop song with a killer guitar riff or sample or whatever. there are themes within themes, motifs, and key changes. the plot itself comes very near to being like music: there is a story being woven, but it's not All About the climax. the climax is just peak intensity, a logical consequence of what has been laid down before it. what really gets you are the minor characters, the details, the side-pieces.

oh yeah, and another thing: no fucking *irony.* no need for modernism, in-jokes, satire, any of this. and it doesn't become cloyingly sentimental either. it doesn't have to get Super Dark to be able to tell its story - the darkness is there in spades, already, in a sense. but it also doesn't have to make a spectacle of itself either. as such there is room for absurdity - Ultros, for instance, or Siegfried - but you don't ever feel like the designers are *manipulating* you. the Opera House sequence is justifiably famous, and it features Uematsu's beautiful score, which is always just perfect. but this is in the end just another moment, among a ridiculous array of moments. like Metal Gear, it's one of these mysterious creations that somehow gets entirely beyond our expectations for a game, and at the same time makes us realize how much we actually want our own expectations for cinema to be *thwarted* as well. you can...do this? you can blow up the world? you can show a suicide attempt? you can just...end it there? like that? but -

that is my absolute definition of success in aesthetics: it raises possibilities for a medium you didn't know were there. it is very much the same thing for philosophy, imho. it doesn't just answer your questions, it raises the possibility of asking questions you didn't know were possible - and then you immediately realize were there the whole time. that's how it is with this game. it gives you a more perfect rendering of your *own* world. our world is very much like that one - and, much like the characters in it, we take a lot of it as Just Being How Things Are. but that is what separates the NPCs from the PCs. the PCs are *more fucked up,* but being fucked up alone is not sufficient. it qualifies for antagonist, or anti-hero status. the really interesting characters are the ones who get even beyond that, a thing for which there is no template. neither they nor the world are saved at the end. nobody gets saved. salvation isn't an option.

>>12452815
>critical theory is imperialism by another name
You can do a pretty good brute force here:
Go down the list (any list) and cross off anything you can find any problems with at all. What remains is actionable.

>>12454465
and so you get *archetypes* of a Self, which is busted into a million pieces, and which can never really be made whole again. Kefka is a monstrosity because he encompasses all of them, in the figure of the Clown. but the laughter is hollow, and lethal. again, not unwarranted: here's another guy who pretty much had the story of his life written for him before he had any say in the matter. he takes it out on the world as an act of revenge. in a sense, the World as such deserves it. everything Zizek has ever told you tells you that there is no *counter-weapon* for a Light of Judgement. the Light of Judgment is the Truth, as brutal and inquisitorial as anything. there's a true weapon for the internally blinded: This Sucks. Everything Sucks. FF7 will use apocalyptic themes as well, Holy et al, and for different effect...but this is a story about a Doomsday weapon that really delivers. and it delivers because *the world has it coming.*

but therein lies the rub. you go on living, even in a World of Ruin, which cannot be put back together, nor can you build a time-machine to go back and prevent it: Empires gonna Empire. that the world melts down isn't Kefka's fault, or Gestahl's fault, or Cid's fault, or even the fault of the Warring Triad. it's *nobody's* fault. fault-finding is fucking silly. it doesn't mean things don't *hurt,* it's just that you can't appeal to a higher power to make the case for revenge. the Warring Triad doesn't know what the fuck they're doing either, and what a creation myth this presupposes. there's no artful composition of the universe here - the gods show up and begin fighting, this is how you get the Espers in the first place, press-ganged into armies and rendered divine, but even then the divine is simply the human at peak intensity. the gods seal themselves up, like monks.

idk senpai. this one just eludes me, which is a good thing. if you're interested, check out this rather short thread i made some time ago, it was what sold me hard on Deleuze (and mostly because Deleuze didn't so much 'solve' the questions i had about FF6, but more because FF6 was only really understandable to me in terms of Deleuzian ideas, or Deleuze-on-Leibniz ideas). have a look.

>>/lit/thread/S9768566

>>12454465
>Gogo, who's sense of Self is replaced by social capital, and is the very essence of the simulacrum or the sign?
Sometimes, it feels like we live in a world full to the brim of Gogos. I'm a Gogo. You're a Gogo. Everybody is a Gogo!

>>12455511
At what point does a collectivist activity become individualised? we're entering extreme solipsist territory if any activity involving multiple occupancies automatically becomes collectivism.

>>12452558
I am a renegade memetic engineer who is mad enough to try to engineer a memetic singularity.

https://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs00s/singmem.php

Anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_LPJllaogU

Made by Pataphysician Gang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics

Other stuff:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle/comments/5sd92y/team_briefing_2017/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheGame23/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ShrugLifeSyndicate/comments/9wo5ik/cruffatin/

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1E9HaFdkRAmkEgHG7gzeEpSDS1DdJNeW3BIJ3Qc6RkN4/edit#slide=id.g363a2124ae_0_0

just stopping by to let you guys know I unironically appreciate this /schizogeneral/

>>12445385
>>12445798
Aren't you essentially just replacing Nietzsche with Kierkegaard and Marx for Heidegger in the Accelerationist formula?

>>12455604
a.k.a. weaponized artism.

>>12455581
solipsism and wokeness are both sides of My coin

https://perplexcitywiki.com/wiki/Billion_to_One

>>12455000
>When I read Land and other people ITT, yourself included, the stops appear in such a ratio it's almost like you've reached a midway between rational numbers and irrational, and eventually one stop, if not eradicated with continuous perception, actually falls into and coincides with a later one.
yes, the signals that come from me are probably tremendously crammed together. not unlike pic rel, i suppose. also, it kind of looks like Terra, or whoever it is, is basically giving the finger to the whole thing. this is how i recommend you deal with me also. like the Tower, the point of a lot of this is not to stand as an edifice, because if it is anything, it is only a symptom of Vector itself. much philosophy is pathological failure - or lack of desire - to love. love is hard, i'd rather shitpost and complain about capital.

like Bane, Kefka is the reckoning of the world, and a necessary evil. but shit, at least Bane could love *somebody.* all Kefka wants is a cult, and perhaps a sandbox to play in. these are the juvenile fantasies of a completely warped mind, and beyond shitting on other people's hopes, he's not really good for very much. and he doesn't Get It, either. he's locked in his own world, a king in a nutshell, and with a heart full of useless contempt and anger, even disgust. i judge people constantly for not having read the kinds of things that i have read, but...ultimately, what else am i doing but swinging the Light of Judgment? Kefka is neither artist nor critic - he can't really make anything himself, nor can he relate to anything on its own terms. he's just fucking built wrong, and he becomes a sorcerous clown.

if you feel as though you are simply thrust into a world, as he is, in which everything is pretty much out of your control (and in the control of people like Gestahl), then...there you find yourself. this is very much my own experience, and not only my own, i suspect. my guess is that a *lot* of people also feel this way. but if FF6 teaches anything, it is that the answers are not to be found in politics...or, for that matter, in philosophy. religion, then? not in that world, the gods are as fucking confused and as selfish as anyone. what else? only in other people, in bands and groups, which are always being separated...

but Kefka connotes this *other* thing too - that is, if you don't have the answers, don't become a monster of closure. the heroes not only defeat him, they escape his crumbling tower also. and the world goes on, too. there actually is light at the end of the tunnel. it may not be in you, but so what? at least you can have the character to know that, if that is the case, you aren't in fact the hero - you're actually the villain. what a relief! it's not that the *world* lacks for goodness, or hope...really, it's you. and you are there to be a foil, so...be one.

Carse writes, quite brilliantly, that the definition of Evil is the interruption of the Infinite Game by the Finite one.

>>12455829
this isn't the worst possible segue either into how i wanted to respond to >>12453923, either. because rather than make a pitch for Nondualism, i think it's actually more in my wheelhouse to start from the dystopian perspective, put on my Tyrant Hat, and tell you exactly what would irritate me the most about nondualism, the monastic life, or wisdom in general from that perspective.

suppose that the year is 21XX, and the world has been destroyed in nuclear war, or by a zombie plague, or whatever. maybe both. being me, i have resolved to take care of this situation - i've disastrously talked my way somehow into a position of authority, playing on my fears of capitalism to become a minister of propaganda. i've even drawn up a political model of governance called Not Sparta, which is here to Help. i want the Spice to Flow, but i realize that achieving the Golden Path is a difficult prospect. my basic job, as ideologue, is to persuade you that the State has your best interests at heart, knows you better than you know yourself, and ultimately can gently enfold you in a trap that conflates freedom with servitude to your illusions, mainly through the use of irony, ignorance, and semantic bludgeons.

the first thing about Not Sparta (really, we are Ironic Stalinism, but calling us by our True Names will make us wither and die, so this is forbidden) are the philosophical foundations - namely, the appearance of technological revolution, when what we actually deliver is pleasure. call it Anarcho-Crusaderism, or Imperial Feudalism. the crucial technology on which we depend is actually borrowed from Ender's Game: namely, a simulation of war that hides the presence of the others being destroyed. our fundamental task is basically to entrench a moral division in the apparatus of the state: that life is good at the top, and never stops getting better. but i have to sell you on this vision, on behalf of my masters, who are a bunch of decadent and drug-addicted aristocrats that i secretly loathe, and yet also envy. i want to keep them Very Happy, for two reasons: primarily, because i am depending on a certain vision of their happiness to sell to everyone else, and second of all, because i basically need them to stay addicted to having everything that they desire, because that gives me the opportunity to Defend Camelot.

i surveil them constantly, and i have also created a reality TV show to surround them. it's part Jersey Shore, part Pride and Prejudice. it's very meta, and you can tune in at any part of the day to watch them doing Rich People things. that all of this becomes in the end stultifyingly boring is fine, by the way. if ultimately you feel too bored or numbed by this to care, that works for me just as well.

>>12455829
And you know, as a person who didn't finish and hardly remembers FF6, the names used work for me anyway because they take on this parabolic function I've mentioned.

quote from integral life:

Integral Semiotics

AnAQALapproach to the study of signs and symbols, where thereferentof anysignis said to exist within a specificworldspace. By way of aquadrivium, Integral Semiotics associates thesignifierwith the Upper-Right quadrant, thesignifiedwith the Upper-Left quadrant,semanticswith the Lower-Left quadrant, andsyntaxwith the Lower-Right quadrant. See sign, signifier, signified, semantics, syntax, and referent.

~~~~~~
I claim that empty signifiers like Kefka to a person who can barely remember anything about him or Deleuze to leople who haven't read him are just as good at conveying facts which are about things, but that you need signifieds which have substance, like Christ, to convey facts which are things.

>>12456023
this reality show is only one part of my job, however. the rest of it is devoted to keeping the wheels turning. a supremely branded life doesn't come without a cost.

fortunately, the Empire has Problems. lots of them. owing to the plague, or to nuclear holocaust, life in the world beyond the show is difficult. what i really want to sell you on is *intrigue.* i want to make Defending Camelot the most awesome job you can possibly imagine. if, halfway through your training, you realize that it is all so much pointless spectacle, that's fine; that's how i separate the true believers from the merely faithful. ah, now you're really seeing it! you have to love the idea of being one of the Vigilant. that this is only another lie is fine with me.

the charm of Defending Camelot comes from being one of those who Know Things. the security apparatus - which is everything - has to have eyes everywhere. this is how we operate. we have to see, and know, everything, and the point of it all is to ensure that nothing really ever happens, or changes. the most important cultural events in the Empire are the romantic lives of the aristocrats who live out their entire existence on television. but what i really want to do is make defending the lives of those idiots seem like the real story. we are the ultimate double-agent, like a Communist Party without a state. we always have Secrets, and we love, love, Gathering Intel. we have an entire department - the Ministry of Desire- devoted expressly to this.

as such there are always Threats, crises, emergencies, shortages. and to prevent you from ever really understanding the nature of the beast, i count on aesthetics. i quote Heraclitus, and say that fire is the judge of all things. i tell you that i am not so much interested in charity or mercy, because, of course, we operate under minimal trust assumptions - you can't trust anyone in this world, you know. i talk a lot about Human Nature, and wistfully confess that this brief, evanescent life is all there is.

this is, fundamentally, a major part of the appeal. we have great tasting chicken, and the femme fatales operatives that we employ can make you achieve orgasm by literally just staring at you for eighteen seconds. we have video game military simulators so awesome that seven year olds trample each other to sign up for the demonstrations. our rock concerts absolutely kick ass. and we love pornography, which is for us an art as refined as ballet. nobody, we say, should ever have to suffer the tyranny of an unfulfilled sex life.

>>12456143
>space taoist
>attempts to create ultimate dystopia with self in grand vizier role
>accidental paradise

>>12456143
needless to say, the Empire is burdened with a large helot population, but we have a peculiar relationship with them as well. unlike the Matrix, we cannot quite seem to work out the perfect simulation. somehow, people always know that something is slightly wrong about the way that we do things, and as such the only way we have of incorporating the spectre of their discontent is by radicalizing it.

one way of doing this is through game shows - hardly new territory. if any of this reminds you of Battle Royale or the Hunger Games, you're not wrong. that is pretty much our program as well. as such one of the peculiar rituals of the Empire is in fact not only to allow the helots a chance for revenge against us, but even to require Defenders of Camelot to participate in something not unlike pic rel. if you are a particularly decadent and corrupt plutocrat, you are welcome to participate as well - on *either* side, and the possibility that someone from the reality TV show might decide to do this themselves is indeed a possibility. but there the stakes are real. the idea is to stage something not unlike the Super Bowl for class warfare, in place of an electoral process - after all, the whole idea behind the Empire itself is to find the maximal number of ways to ensure that nothing ever really changes. this is our ultimate maxim: the Empire always was, and always will be, and to force every conceivable conduit through which the New might take place into a channel.

sex we have taken care of; you will never want for sex in the Empire. we like drugs and pharmacology too. but intra-species violence is the big one. owing to the nature of the climate - or whatever other weird experiments we may be getting up to - there are always regions of the Empire overrun with mutations, or monsters, or simply unclaimed wilderness. the fact that we ceaselessly and remorselessly abuse every other potential power that stands in our way also allows for Max Intrigue, whether on trumped-up charges of being insufficiently open-minded or not.

so to become a true Defender of Camelot, you occasionally have to participate in a Krypteia-like game of Running Man, which actually gives contestants the chance to fuck up or be fucked up by the Vigilant. that the whole rotten edifice should be torn down, set on fire, and the earth salted afterwards is obvious, of course: everybody (including us) is fundamentally choking on its own ressentiment that this horrorshow continues, year after year. but it does. it works, because it is very hard to imagine an alternative.

>>12456215
as in the Hunger Games, it may be the case that winners of the show are precisely those who star in the Camelot-drama which makes up the thing, although people suffering from PTSD or quietly going insane from trauma tend to get written out of the plot. what we really want to do is basically provide the perfect model of internal civil war: a war fought only on behalf of itself, and indistinguishable from religion. everything else, really, is only training for the show. the show is all.

in terms of exterior threats, nothing really challenges our rule. the fact is that most of the world is doing worse than we are (and mostly because we keep fucking with them). our problem, mainly, is how to squander what it is that we actually have. in that sense, it is a little bit like Orwell, except that the Flying Fortresses that we sabotage are really the ones who consume our programming, and we can only seduce you, in the end, with the truth: that there really *isn't* anything other than this. the point of the state is to produce simulacral Archons, who fundamentally cannot distinguish between the fake combat and the real ones. the rest of the world is only a model for these interior rituals, which are there mainly to numb you to the point at which the exterior world feels like a reflection of that. put another way, the world beyond the Empire becomes insufficiently ludic by comparison: out there people are still believing in Reality, whereas we have made our entire purpose the profanity of reality, and an illusion which raises it to a higher power. it is a decadence-making machine, and the final product are small cabals of disaffected billionaires who see no other purpose in life but to continue tinkering with the game. Reality has to go, but it can only really be made to disappear by replacing it with a thing which is neither comedy nor tragedy. what is crucial is to always present this in terms of a challenge: well, what else would you do?

this is why the security system has to be everywhere and nowhere. everywhere we go, we are looking to make a fight, or promote one. we always want to make you a Star, and we know full well that there is no Stardom quite like Defending Camelot. we love your prickliness, your dilettantism, your sense of aesthetics, your feelings of individuation. this makes us shiver and our eyes gleam. we think you would always look better if you were just ever so slightly more dangerous. we are, in effect, a kind of fashion system, except that the one look that never goes out of style is the State.

we want to give you weapons, and a chance to use them, and we will always have another monster for you to smash, something else to pacify.

>>12456288
put another way, we are Mordor, but we have to keep telling you that we are Gondor. and the way we do this is by irony. we have to keep making jokes about all of it, and be mortally offended if you ever raise the possibility that what we are doing, in fact, is spectacularly evil. we know this, of course - but you will pay a price for hurting our feelings.

because what we absolutely cannot stand is a worldview which stands radically opposed to our own. this is why we especially hate monastics, or wisdom traditions, or anything that suggests not buying in to our bullshit. if it cannot be rendered laughable, we will present it as a threat. what are they *doing* in there? they must be up to something. there has to be some kind of conspiracy, some in-joke, some threat. maybe they hate us. but hating us, well - that's just *crazy.* how could anybody hate this? we have everything. look at all the things that we *do* to keep the world safe. aren't you satisfied with all of this? what do you mean, you want something *more* than this? what are you, some kind of fucking communist?

refusing to play by our rules is Literally Terrorism. our cardinal rule is that there are no rules, after all. that's how it works. and the idea of asking, perversely, if there is not in fact more to life than sex, and drugs, and spectacular violence, and racking up points destabilizing governments, or developing war machines and missiles, or creating a more satisfyingly exploded skull for your nephew's game - my god, this is like fucking Communism.

and besides, what *else* are you going to do? it's a wasteland out there. nothing grows. come on, we say, people suck! everybody sucks. people are shitty. that's why the games are necessary, right? isn't this what you really want? don't we all fucking deserve this? be *honest* with yourself - don't you really feel, deep down, that we deserve this? isn't this the perfect model of justice, for such a horrible species?

we pull out all the stops here. you can't just *walk away* from this. where are you going to go? there's nothing left out there, we deconstructed it all to build this. there *is* nothing left. it's all capitalism! trust us, we perfected it! we know how you are. you won't find anything out there...shit, you would have to start it all over again! and even then, do you really think you won't wind up becoming exactly like this? what makes you think you're any different from the rest of us? you don't know what you're doing. you're just being impossible...

Part of the dystopian element is your constant references to elements of popular culture I happen not to know very well. In my mind, those words are always so bright. I almost want to live in a twilight world where none of that stuff happens to me. Just underground music and 4chan and my friends and random girls in clubs.
But the thing is, the momentous which we are manifesting is probably going to be invlusive of these elements which I can hardly stand and you seem to weave together as if your narrative was a footnote in their colossal cultural game.

It's not as if we are going to meme them back into obscurity by taking all the attention for ourselves and culture-shifting beyond them, because our thing is newer and cooler than to do a move of that sort. Do you have a proposal?

>>12456378
Just in case you missed it:

>>12455586

>>12455586
This situationist-TAZ-spontaneity thing is part of the answer. What would a flashmob look like if every person in it was a member of Congress?

>>12456378
and, of course, we're right. find a flaw.

as much as i like the concept of this film, the ending sucked ass. uproarious applause? no thanks. in my own version, the director would essentially be Gollum, and beyond the Show lies the wasteland of the Matrix, or the WoR. Truman himself was only the star such that one day he could do what it was that he was actually supposed to do, which was contribute his own lived experience to the studios, so that they could do it all over again. this is what people want, no? why end it? why not democratize it? why not give everyone the chance to be the star?

but in my dystopian horror-show, the capitalization of the Matrix itself is crucial. because the world itself cannot be changed - and it cannot, at least in that way - it must as such be rendered pleasureable, and only by the slow liquification of mankind, and what is ultimately its highest form of third-party moderator, the celestial hermaphrodite, the ultimate libertarian double-agent, who operates the entire thing like a curator-maestro. this is too much for any one individual for themselves, and so a shadowy cartel of professional conspirators and intrigue experts is required, to play up a constant song about the poetics of militarism, sexuality, drugs, and romance. that there is Only War is the quasi-religious, and deeply cynical, underlying ethos: and that, if you follow the rules, you can have it all, you can have everything. the apparatus of omniscience is here to serve you, provided that you commit yourself entirely to its infinite self-reconstruction, which is done under the mantle of deconstruction. the only thing to deconstruct is you, because you are always a threat to the structure of knowledge. ignorance is not allowed, and an admitted ignorance about the nature of a world beyond this one is tantamount to heresy. there can be only One, and this is it.

it is, in a way, sort of like imagining teleoplexy as not a continuation of the PoS, but in fact a stopped program. IRL, however, stopped programs aren't necessarily an impediment: indeed, things arguably work even better, by proposing feedback loops that double down on their own axioms, rather than doing what they are meant to do, which is to radically alter the nature of the hardware on which they run, and the programming languages which produce them. capitalism is almost like a way of failing to distinguish between that which is and is not computer virus: and the tyrant i am happy to impersonate makes a stand on this. why not Planet Virus? why *not* cybernetic SoCs? being a curator of other people's political fantasies is epically fun. nothing could ever be more fun.

it's just that it cannot handle the state of exception. that is where the genuinely tyrannical nature of postmodernity manifests, in the least detectable place: people who disagree with disaffection, for reasons even they themselves cannot explain.

>>12456443
https://vimeo.com/specalblend

https://i.imgur.com/ydlbaYy.jpg

https://www.scribd.com/document/398000555/Arg-Idea

>>12456477
I love you

the mean age in this thread is 14
jannies do your goddamn job and send these autistic babies back the fuck to reddit

>>12456661
I've heard 11 year old say stuff that was profound

>>12456669
I've seen chatbots say stuff that was profound

>>12456672
There are people that get cosmic messages from error screens and they're hyperintelligent

>>12456678
and speak to god through random number generators

>>12456710
rip terry davis
glow in hell CI niggers

>>12455611
in a way, i suppose, but i've never really thought of it that way before.

>>12455604
thanks for stopping by anon

>>12441803
This book is complete fucking garbage as are most texts published by Counter Currents. This is there most recently released book, and it should tell you everything you need to know about the abysmal quality of their material.

>>12438931
Uncle Nick's new post.

http://www.ufblog.net/crypto-current-046/

>>12456661
if nothing else, it's a tidy case study of adolescent-onset schizoaffective disorder

>>12457394
clearly in love with the network, which is good to see. Says things about bitcoin which I feel about 4chan. A sense of community may help, just like Nick's linguistic faculty of depiction has helped me understand my favourite internet-system

`~~`

there is a way the people who used to speak about psychedelics which was all about bringing you into their biggest trips and saying all the best things from them so they could wow you with the majesty of tripping. Is there something about the quality of tripping thay ought to be spoken of?

Bump

>>12455458
>it's not really the case either that Gau has no want - he's a castaway, and his father doesn't want to have anything to do with him. can we really say he joins the party just because? he didn't choose to be removed from civilization, his father went insane and blamed him for his mother's death. just because he doesn't *know* this doesn't mean it's not a part of his background. in a way, his innocence is, frankly, a miracle. with the Figaro brothers, i've always found it kind of interesting that in a way they both kind of get what they want, but even then it's hard to say if there isn't a hollowness there too. Edgar is a womanizer, but where's the woman in his life? he rules Figaro pretty much alone, out of a sense of loyalty. and Sabin is a bro, but his ideal of freedom is basically monasticism, poverty, and martial arts - after all, he was a scrawny kid. and don't forget also - the coin toss that gets him his freedom is rigged! all of his freedom, and the story he tells himself, is based on a lie! but it's done with love, and not with cynicism. these are things - mysterious things, but very human - that people do. because life is complicated. and because tearing your heart out completely isn't the answer.
I was speaking in general terms. You didn't have to come off like a pedantic commodity inquisitor (ie fanboy), geez! I never knew the coin toss was rigged. Hell, I didn't even know the dialogue changes based who's in your party until recently! But the story carries on anyway in the same exact fashion. It's like those events never happened.

Just as a side note for commodity inquisitors, they are the self-anointed of the cult of the commodity. Always making sure you know about the product the right way, enjoying the product and enjoying it the right way. If you are not enjoying the product or don't want it, there is something wrong with you. It is never the commodity's fault.

>>12456936
But have you read it?

>>12458705
>You didn't have to come off like a pedantic commodity inquisitor (ie fanboy), geez!
sorry, it wasn't my intention. sometimes i really am a pedantic commodity inquisitor! i tend to get excited about things, sometimes, and i think these days i am a little more excitable than usual. honestly, i was actually just quite happy to respond to your post, because it was a thought-provoking one, and gave me a reason to appreciate Best Game even more. so i will arrogate to myself the double pleasure of both apologizing to you and preening about what a nice person i am. and meaning both! kek.

don't mind me anon, i'm just being...irritating.

>I never knew the coin toss was rigged.
i forgot too.

>Just as a side note for commodity inquisitors, they are the self-anointed of the cult of the commodity. Always making sure you know about the product the right way, enjoying the product and enjoying it the right way. If you are not enjoying the product or don't want it, there is something wrong with you. It is never the commodity's fault.
it is very true. and the most quietly weird part about all of this is how much people become self-commodifying in this way, and perpetuate the Wild Ride, even without realizing it...

apropos of nothing, but i am also starting to realize how much i appreciate the concept of hell as an explanation for both capitalism and communism, in general. in my never-ending private journal, which contains approximately 6,000 drafts of a fantasy novel that i will never write, and which is responsible for a very large part of my madness, i am now working out a Theory of Hell which i am unusually pleased with today. maybe it came from putting on the Tyrant Hat earlier, or other various shitpostings in this thread, i'm not sure. all i know for the moment is that i am finding the concept of Hell remarkably sound, generally speaking, and a conspicuously rigorous theory of history and technological development also. i very rarely actually enjoy writing at all (which probably means it is complete shit). but still.

Empty, churning VOID fills the DEATH PIT. There is only dust here, now.

>>12458815
what happened?

>>12458837
The HERMIT does not reply.

>>12458923
enter command: LOOK VOID

>>12458937

>>12458990
enter command: LOOK DEATH PIT

>>12459031

>>12459057
enter command: LEAP INTO VOID

>>12459057
aw sheeeeeeeeeeeeeit

we're going to need another thread for this.

anyone else want to suggest some ideas for how we get out of this place? i think we should go and have a look at that egg shell, what do you guys say?

also, it looks like there's stairs, and doors, and barrels in this room (>>12458815). we could also open some of those or have a look.

>>12459071
welp

i hope we get extra lives

>>12444343
fuck this is a good post.

>>12459071
You've lost a reason to live.

>>12459085
>>12459097
Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat
Sapere Aude

>>12459097
but we have gained knowledge

>>12459097
and wisdom

i think we should try again schizbros

>>12459097
enter command: NEW GAME
>come on we can do better than this

>>12459197
ERR: index
U:/visitor/Downloads/RPGm2000/RPG-RT/CLASSIC-GAME
not found.
Shutting down...

I AM THE DRAGON OF REVELATIONS

>>12459233
ugh, why do dragons always use capslock. also i prefer revelations from angels and devas

reveal me something i don't know already, ya big scaly sumbitch

>>12459247
I am Christ/The Antichrist/Lucifer/God

>>12459289
the passage underneath that one is more interesting by far

anyways the antichrist is clearly gavin mcinnes and he can't even stay on Twitter. the plot has moved on

>>12459307
Lots of people are the antichrist. It's not actually that special

just want to die lads