/lit/ - Literature

>>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.