/lit/ - Literature

>>11839279
>>11839999
land's privileged example of a system that worked is ofc Singapore, which 'progressively' upgraded itself decade by decade in a rags-to-riches story like no other. and yet this happened under an austere demi-Confucian who nevertheless preached an open-ish society. nor did it require massive agitprop, anything like the burning of a reichstag, a night of the long knives, and so on.

it is perhaps doubtful whether anything like this can or should be expected in the west. and there dimensions to which the kind of cosmic antihumanism land espouses is counter-productive to anything like a positive movement. people need *something* to believe in, and it can't always be serving the icy-cold wishes of alien deities in R'lyeh. the greeks didn't need this, or the medieval christians, or the rationalists of the enlightenment, or the romantics of the 19C. in the 20C we get a sequence of bludgeoning chin-checks v/idealism, and i tend to think outrage culture is the propagation of a rage virus that is the fruit of this sense of homelessness and bewilderment, frustration and despair. i find girard clarifying in terms of the critique of ideology: the tomb hides the body, aestheticizes and memorializes the violence endemic to scapegoating, and scapegoats are what organize cultures in states of disorganization around a common purpose by giving them a common enemy who is to be both destroyed and worshiped. we do this with *capitalism* also.

but this question of intelligence remains, and perhaps has to be reconsidered if it has any connection at all with the kind of deep-set romantic idealism that posits that intelligence as having a cosmic, or human, or political *purpose.* in some sense it certainly doesn't, and this is what land has argued throughout his career. he takes a perverse pleasure in taking a flamethrower to comforting notions about the nature of capitalism and desire, that the telos of intelligenic capitalism has nothing to do with us or our late-romantic sentiments about our place in the universe, let alone the consumer society. all of this you can read in FN.

this has influenced the way i look at things, but i also think that there has to be some sugar with the pill as well. you can't beat people over the head infinitely with the inhumanist beatstick and expect things to naturally change in a positive direction, humans aren't built like that. what they will do is *react* and opt for emergency measures, fascist or stalinist in nature. we can't just *judge* or *shame* this like high-handed moralists either. it's why i want a return to *virtue* and a different form of anti-modernist praxis, a revolt against the modern world that takes a non-political form. you know, like, forgiveness, trust, and charity. and combined with a new attitude v/the possibilities for tech.

perhaps hope is anthropocentric bullshit, but history seems to indicate that not much good comes from slamming doors in people's faces either.