/lit/ - Literature

>>12655614
it's the legacy of the French Revolution that has to be understood as much as the Industrial Revolution also, the meaning of what radical freedom really means. there's a kind of terrible narcissism in postmodernity, a kind of disastrous fatalism that on some deep level loves to flirt with The End of Everything, and flirting with The End of Everything not only leads to extremely radical forms of politics, it is also pathologically incapable of understanding that there never is a true or real end to anything. things keep going, which - if you are really fucked out - is like the shitty cherry on top of a shitty sundae. you (read: me) don't *want* things to end, you want them to STOP, once and for all, effect some radical break, some awesome Event or whatever else.

but history is full of examples of this. the Third Reich was one, as was the Soviet Union, Mao in China, but the French Revolution is imho the most interesting of these by far, not only because in being first it set the model for all the others, but it was a whole story playing out that was in many ways rationalist through and through. i find just reflecting on it makes me far less trigged about the hysterical scapegoating you read about in the news today also: all of the shit about race and gender and whatever else are all aspects of this, it predates even Marxist stuff about the working class. Total Freedom For Everyone, the true Dank Slate, is what equally baffles and terrifies everyone. it fucks with our minds on deep levels. when you do the deep-dive into /acc stuff, you come away with the understandable feeling that economics > politics, but on the other side of economics is still philosophy also. Land is pretty based for arguably closing the loop on the higher meaning of political economy: capitalism wires itself for intelligence through your drives and brings itself into the world as AI accordingly. it's a thesis that was perhaps radically contrarian in the 1990s and today doesn't even seem all that remarkable. maybe that's a good thing.

but i actually think if there's a silver lining to be found in some of these clouds it's to be found in a kind of guarded optimism. knowing these things we are empowered in a way not to be suckered into a lot of illusions, and at the same time not be so tempted to give ourselves the pretentious airs that distinguishing reality from illusion is going to be as easy as it used to be back in the day. it's both a humbling and an enlightening kind of feel. you can look after a better version of yourself (unironically this! >>12655637) but also a self that you recognize can potentially become Judge Holden or Anton Chigurh, just as the polis can produce a Robespierre or a Mao.

de-radicalizing is probably good. Athena banning the furies from the polis, Wukong becoming enlightened, or Lacan helping you to find the Spirit locked within as concrete pieces of death, all of these things are good. halfway between the gutter and the stars.