/lit/ - Literature

>>12446970
well me, obviously. taking Marx (and Land) seriously means, first of all, that a) you (read: me) subscribe to Marx's theories of religion, and then subsequently to post-Marxist theories about ideology. as i said before, you can get away with a lot under the banner of critique.

Land is already a heretical Marxist, and basically i'm trying to extract what remains of myself from his machine. in my own experience, you aren't required to take religion or politics particularly seriously if you just double down on infinitely theorizing capital. Deleuze himself takes three of the greatest anti-State and anti-Christianity thinkers of all time into his own project: Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx. that's quite a cocktail. and Land takes that and uploads all of it to create his own vision, horrorcore futurist Marxism. again, in my own experience it doesn't seem like a crazy place to wind up in (which is, undoubtedly, exactly what a crazy person might tell you).

the West isn't really without a religion, true. every President has to at least pay lip service to one, even though they (and we) know this to be largely ceremonial. Obama had to pretend that faith played some role in his decision making, and in Trump's inaugural address - which was almost certainly written for him by Bannon - he said 'God will protect us,' an idea conspicuously absent from virtually everything he said afterwards.

as for ideology, there is something of a war going on in the US these days, as there is all over Europe. outside of Eastern Europe - or Brazil - the Church doesn't have a lot of sway in world affairs. it didn't have any real direction in WW1, or in WW2. it had no power over the rivals of the Cold War, or in Vietnam, or anywhere else. during the Renaissance and later, it certainly did, and not always for the best: Galileo imprisoned, Giordano Bruno set on fire, Copernicus terrified to publish. and then the wars of religion.

in American statecraft, morality has taken over politics, as much as advertisement seemed to take over morality through the 60s to the 1990s. so
>Has not political ideology assumed the same role?
it has, but it can't do the job perfectly, is what i am saying. this doesn't stop it from trying. what happens is that you wind up with a form of state religion that reflects people's desires - and that is precisely what an actual wisdom tradition would not necessarily do, or at least not in the same ways, or by design.