/lit/ - Literature

>>12480627
one of the phenomena that i think is secretly most destructive is that sense of the *final,* or the *end* of anything. Third Reich metaphysics - again, the prototypical Social Justice Warriors are the Nazis themselves, even if chronologically speaking the Bolsheviks (or the Jacobins) come first - are one of the first examples of the power (and the drawbacks) of looking to race as a Final Answer for everything. racism and slavery really *are* one of the most catastrophically powerful of all human motivators, and this really is why it sets people's nerves jangling. these are things that have been with civilization since its earliest foundations. the Greeks kept slaves. the Romans kept slaves. barbarism in antiquity meant anybody who just wasn't from Greece. xenophobia in that sense isn't anything new. but founding social-evangelical movements on this is a terrible idea, not because it is metaphysically broken, but because it has shown time and again that it makes people do, and say, and think crazy and destructive things. it always has. it probably always will.

the more interesting question today is what actually constitutes a religion itself? in Wokism you have indeed a Theory of Everything which incorporates everything that might have once been considered absolutely profane - money, technology, sexuality, and theories of racial doctrine that would have shamed the Middle Ages - into a complete doctrine of justification. i can't *criticize* the thinking behind it because i find it actually corresponds to everything that to me makes other, or more traditional forms of religion attractive - today, it's Swedenborgian mysticism. i think Heaven and Hell are powerful explanatory tools, if we take them to be forms of symbolic language for talking about philosophy or metaphysics themselves, and that in turn because at the deepest level - the realms of Deleuze, Lacan, Land, Spinoza, Nietzsche, whoever - i find myself in a quandary of knowing that i am never able to say exactly what it is that i am thinking, because i am trying to say something about the nature of language itself, and using language to do so. my response to this as such is a sense that something like charity, and mercy, and forgiveness, and tolerance become increasingly valuable, if not crucial, because any one of us can at any moment play the role of Grand Inquisitor and bring the roof down. nothing really prevents this from happening.

as an analogy, it seems to me that the mind begins as something like a hard slab - you know what you know, and that's that. as time goes on, and you reflect a little, you find the mind and its concepts to be far more plastic than you had ever imagined, and this plasticity never, really, comes to an end. the vistas just keep opening up. and if you try and re-found an Absolute Truth on that, it will sink, very much the way a house will sink if you build it on quicksand.

(cont'd)

>>12145264
unironically loving this image anon

>>12146832
also this one. hats off to both of you

and this thread in general tbqh. and not only because i am drinking heavily atm. but because it's true. land threads for a better tomorrow

question: what kind of bizarre posting regime is Uncle Nick on anyways? we have now gotten the spoiler for like the next month of BTC and Philosophy, so we can look forward to daily updates of...stuff we have read already? oh well. can always go back and re-read what he's dropped already i suppose. weird tho