/lit/ - Literature

If 2 ppl enjoy punching the third person in the room the third person should be happy that overall happiness has increased.

>>17642072
Epic thread bro

>>17642072
nice b8 m8

>Ignore the actual stats on poverty
>Ignore environmental destruction
>Ignore what the enlightenment actually was
>Soothe liberals that the world is getting better when it's not
>Profit

>>17642072
>enlightenment now
only if it's dark

>>17642072

> However, let us put ourselves for a moment in the position of those who pin their hopes to the ideal of material welfare and who therefore rejoice at all the improvements to life furnished by modern “progress”; are they quite sure that they are not being made dupes? Is it true that men are happier today than they used to be simply because they command swifter means of transport and other things of that kind, or because of their more agitated and complicated mode of life? The truth would appear to be quite the contrary; disequilibrium cannot be the condition of any real happiness; moreover, the more needs a man has the greater likelihood there is of his lacking something, and consequently of his being unhappy; modern civilization aims at creating ever greater and greater artificial needs, and, as we have already remarked, it will always create more needs than it can satisfy, because, once launched upon such a course, it becomes exceedingly difficult to pull up, and, indeed, there is no reason for pulling up at one stage rather than at another. It was no hardship for people to do without things that did not exist and which they could never have even dreamed of; now, on the contrary, they are bound to suffer when deprived of those things, since they have grown accustomed to regarding them as necessities, with the result that they have in fact really become necessary to them. Consequently, with all the power at their disposal, they struggle to acquire whatever can procure them material satisfactions, the only kind they are capable of appreciating; they become absorbed in “making money,” because it is money which enables them to obtain these things, and the more they possess the more they desire because they are continually discovering fresh needs, until this pursuit becomes their only aim in life. Hence that ferocious competition which certain “evolutionists” have raised to the dignity of a scientific law under the name of the “struggle for existence,” the logical result of which is that only the strongest, in the most narrowly material sense of the word, have a right to exist. Hence also the envy and even hatred with which those possessed of wealth are regarded by those who are not so endowed; how could men to whom equalitarian theories have been preached fail to react when all around they see inequality in the most material order of things, the order to which they are bound to be most sensitive?

>>17644188

> If modern civilization is destined to collapse some day under the pressure of the disorderly appetites it has aroused in the masses, one would have to be blind indeed not to perceive therein the just punishment of its fundamental vice, or, to express oneself without recourse to moral phraseology, the repercussion of its own action in that same sphere in which it was exercised. It is written in the Gospel: “All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword”; those who unloose the brute forces of matter will perish, crushed by those same forces, of which they are no longer masters when they rashly set them in motion, and which they cannot claim to hold back indefinitely once launched on their fatal course; forces of nature or forces of mass man, or both in combination, it makes little difference, because in either case it is the laws of matter which come into play and which will inexorably destroy those who believed it possible to manipulate them without themselves rising superior to matter. The Gospel also says: “If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”; this saying too is directly applicable to the modern world with its material civilization, which cannot fail, from its very nature, to provoke strife and division in all directions.

i am an atheist and i have never read an atheist book in my life

>>17642072
>NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

He's an imbecile.

You imagine there are still people complaining about the Enlightenment?

>>17645138
Yeah /lit/ is full of them

>>17642072
>errrrrr the enlightenment is wholly good! this is because i define anything bad (world wars, communist atrocities, nazi racial science) as counter-enlightenment
embarrassing

>>17645152
Seethe

>>17645138
most westoids today hold opinions that would be considered anti-enlightenment, yes.

>>17645236
like?

>>17645236
Normies really don’t. They’re pretty liberal. I’m not sure what you’re referring to.

>>17644188
instead of posting quotes, paraphrase it to fit into this setting, im not reading all that shit, especially since you coulnd't take the time to tighten it up or have any considerateness.

>>17642798
>ppl

>>17644188
>The shadows grew deep as the sun set over the warm Cairo market, the smell of hookah smoke, spices and camel dung wafting through the palm trees and fires roasting animals over the ponds and fields into the windows of incense-scented humble dwellings furnished with luxurious carpets and plants. Contortionists, soldiers, catamites, madmen, beggars, saints, students, slaves, dancers, assassins and bureaucrats teemed throughout the evening tinged with electric air that hummed with cicadas. Rene Guénon exhaled a cloud of opium smoke and gazed across the room at his ever-expanding collection of Sanskrit literature. His young wife entered into the room through the bead doorway.

>She dropped her robe to reveal intricate henna tattoos covering her lithe nude body. She walked over to the low couch he was laying on and straddled him. Rene gradually emerged out of nididhyāsana back down to the baseline state of constant samadhi that he had been in for the past 8 years. It was time for the non-volitional and divine līlā of the Supreme Being to dance forth in ecstatic bliss. Sakti sought union with her dear Shiva. She masterbated him as he sucked on her perky tits. Guenon lay back and Sakti mounted her Lord. Bliss shined like sunlight from the One illuminating them both. Adam and Even were one in Paradise again, the mutual embodiment of al-Insān al-Kāmil and all his wives. The primordial state revealed itself as having existed all along. Rene become the All. Being and becoming simultaneously disappeared and the perfect bliss entered into itself. God shone forth in eternal plenitude, hypererotic sexual union experienced as tranquil observer. Brass windchimes singing an enchanting harmony in the breeze.

>Rene began to feel energy rising through his chakras, he immediately concentrated his third eye and clenched the subtle nerve running from the tip of the penis to the bottom of the spine. His time spent training in the Parisian suberbs with master Ho Shi-Quan had paid off. He reversed ejaculated into his chakras, Qi energy poured fourth into his body. Rene and his wife both went into a ten minute long trance accompanied by a perpetual dry orgasm. Purusha melded into Prakriti, both giving way to the Tao. Rene entered into a state of fanāʾ; the la petite mort a ritual reenactment of Prajapati's atmayajñá. The evening call to prayer was calmly sounded from by a muezzin from the minaret of a nearby mosque. The stars twinkled over the cold night as cheetahs chased hares over grassy dunes overlooking the nile, men pissing on fires, reading texts by candlelight. Cotton and silk, anise, heavy eyeliner, garlic breath hidden with rose water, tall tales, secret meetings of initiations and schemes.

What did Pinker mean by this?

>>17646459
Oy vey!

>>17642072
Grendel.

>>17642072
Op here, I'm trans btw if that mattered

>>17642072
What's the run down on this? Surely in it's 500+ pages it says something more than
>Reason good! Dogma bad! Trust every scientist without hesitation!

>>17642072
more like the case for status quo capitalism

Couldnt get past his introduction