/lit/ - Literature

>>12426532
what Kefka never had was anything like the Buddha, to redeem his chronic monkey mind. part of the reason why Journey to the West is such a brilliant text; only nonduality can save us from the madness incipient to semantic apocalypse. in the absence of nondualism, we are all failed Doomsday Clowns.

in an earlier post, i was saying something similar about computer programming, or Why Whitehead Matters. if we are here to do anything on this earth, it has to be, *to make each other more intelligent.* i think - perhaps somewhat counterintuitively - that nihilism is a collective project. you are only as nihilistic as the most nihilistic person in the room. we are all *more nihilistic today because of Nietzsche.* just as we are all more Communist today because of Marx, more phenomenological because of Heidegger, and potentially more saintly because of Christ. you can insert your own thinker of choice here, if you like.

we are very much like rogue programs, looking for reasons. this perhaps is my point: collectivity doesn’t mean anything if all it does in the end is make us more collectively identical. one of the charms of the FF system - it reached its culmination in Tactics - was the doll-like sensibilities of the designers. one wasn’t a *born Ninja* - you get to be a ninja after you have done your due diligence in Dragooning, in Thievery, in whatever else. nor, by the way, was there an *ultimate Ninja* either. you could learn all the Ninja skills, but…what about a Ninja with White Mage skills?

this is actually quietly fucking brilliant, and overlooked. *interchangeability.* what we need is a kind of actual fusion of communism and postmodernity: call it collective intelligence-izing. or, here’s a crazy word: *education.* you know a civilization well by how much regard it has for the education of its people. now, the ultimate form of education is the *moral* education, the one that Gets Your Mind Right. sadly, contemporary academic Marxism cannot *help* itself from doing this.

that isn’t the same thing as saying it *wants* it, because i don’t ultimately think it does. i think - so did Ernst Bloch - that capital runs on *failed* dreams and *broken* promises. we are fucking *epically disappointed* that communism didn’t work. maybe, underneath this, Comtean positivism. who’s against positivism? deep down, *who’s really against Star Trek?* the reason we are fucking losing our minds today over the most *astronomically trivial shit in the world* is not only because we aren’t exploring space, it’s because *because we are not exploring space, we are beginning to sense that our endgame is a version of Battle Royale in which we have to fucking prey on each other like third-rate werewolves.* we aren’t even going to be *actual werewolves, red in tooth in claw,* we are going to be fucking *pathetic werewolves, apologizing to each other as we devour each other.* fucking kill me now.