/lit/ - Literature

>>12452558
the inspired visionary behind Space Taoism (now Pancreativism). he likes Hofstadter and Whitehead, and much else. if you search the Cosmotech threads you can find lots of other stuff by him, i put his writing on Space Taoism at the top of every one of those threads. he also has a number of posts linked in the thread before this one - check the OP.

>>12452713
i was never really a big Jung guy, but i think he was right about mandalas (and he would have agreed on the monomyth as well, which i also believe is a fundamental aspect of human thinking - after all, three-act dramatic storytelling 'works' regardless of whether you are making a movie about Fierce Independent Women Looking For Love or the Third Reich - or, Fierce Independent Women *of* the Third Reich Looking For Love, &c). you can't deconstruct a mandala, ultimately. nor is there any point in making modernist, ironic, or satirical ones. the mandala is always a symbol of wholeness, which is basically what, i think, many works of art are ultimately about.

this is what makes cultures worth looking at from a perspective other than that of critical theory, which really is - as Zizek has said for years - only Western cultural imperialism by another name. this i think is really what is being learned today: the Bush-era neoconservatives were completely happy to gin up a reason so that they could go to war in Iraq, and let Halliburton rebuild it; the Silicon Valley progressives are completely happy to play up on people's internal cultural fears to let Google rebuild right here at home. it's McCarthyism, with a twist - it becomes self-persecuting: we are the Communists! like self-hating crypto-Nazis...ridiculous.

but again, what else would you expect? in the absence of any sense of where people want their culture to go, or anything like a wisdom tradition to suggest anything at all beyond pleasure. problems of a decadent society. and always resolvable, as Girard knew, via scapegoating. or how about institutionalized, state-sanctioned scapegoating? it's like a couple that gets a divorce, each of them starting up terrible rebound relationships, and insisting on sharing the same house and trying not to make eye contact. it just gets weirder and worse by the day, until it becomes unbearable.

>>12452744
yep. i can't remember where tho. but it pretty much sums up my problem with Hate Speech: Hate, as we know, is Evil. but easymode Nietzschean critiques of Christianity omit the fact that Christianity is in fact possibly *far better* for dealing with the problems of perspectival morality than WtP. for a real Cosmic Outside view, cathedral ceilings have their charms also.