/lit/ - Literature

I read this today, was too interesting not to share.

>To conclude, liberalism has won, but it may be decisively unsatisfactory. Communism was a mad extension of liberal rationalism, and everyone has seen that it neither works nor is desirable. And, although fascism was defeated on the battlefield, its dark possibilities were not seen through to the end. If an alternative is sought there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future. Much that Fukuyama
says points in that direction. The facts do too. The African and Near Eastern nations, which for some reason do not succeed easily at modernity, have temptations to find meaning and self-assertion in varieties of obscurantism. The European nations, .which can find no rational ground for the exclusion of countless potential immigrants from their homelands, look back to their national myths. And the American Left has enthusiastically embraced the fascist arguments against modernity and Eurocentrism - understood as rationalism. - Allan Bloom, 1989

It seems that Peterson is dealing with what Bloom is describing: communism is historically dead, but resurrected zombie-like as thirst for social justice; this produces reaction in turn. End of history stuff? The Last Man would be an eminently ideological being, a consumer of politics.

It makes me wonder if this is the end of the anthropocene period, if history hasn't arrived at a new phase, where the planet runs (or simply becomes aware that it always has, and always will run) on capitalism like a perpetual motion machine, like an infinite popcorn machine popping up kernels which helpfully walk themselves into the machine to be popped. I believe this is what Negarestani talks about when he talks about "crossing the cognitive rubicon:" a network of autonomous production systems now basically runs itself on human desire and human happiness, and we have to keep up with it, because it's going to lead us into the future. Nick Land, of course, has written the same.

Peterson would no doubt hit the ceiling if he heard this. When you have a *perfectly materialistic society,* then nothing is more rational than the pursuit of capital, the super-enabler of those ideas which that society valorizes most: individuality, happiness and freedom, with no strings attached. This is where liberalism takes us, via the consumer society and the libidinal economy. And eventually, perhaps, to an automatic, regulated planet, just as Baudrillard predicted: the intensive-care phase of planetary civilization, where the human body has its own breathing done for it by a respirator.

I prefer Freud/Lacan/Zizek to Jung, but whatever allows you to process this madness and still be able to impersonate a human being is, as everything else in consumer Disneyland, one's own god-awful choice. Whether it's archetypal suffering or squirming on the analyst's couch.

Cool thread gents, carry on. Sorry about the long post. I think I need a drink.

>>2677593
I'm a psychology major who's been steadily noticing the influence of faux-intellectualism in higher education.