/lit/ - Literature

>>12011089
>tfw you *wouldn't* include an article called Thinking After Meltdown in a Land Thread
look i never said i was smart ok

>Thinking After Meltdown

>How then is the West going to save itself, to sublate the contradiction of the unhappy consciousness? Reaction, like fascism, doesn’t tell the truth, but only allows people to express themselves. Trump’s victory is more or less a victory of reactionary and right-wing thinking, which do not provide a worthier analysis of the situation but rather appeal to the emotions, as Ernst Bloch once said about the situation in Germany. Commentators have tried to suggest, based on the relation between Thiel and Girard, that Trump and tech entrepreneurs are comparable to scapegoats; like the pharmakos in ancient Greece or the King described by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough, their sacrifice puts an end to social and political crisis. However, the figure of the scapegoat is analogous to the “red pill”: it is only a rhetorical tactic that justifies its reactionary tendency as a covert truth. The sacrifice of the scapegoat is a redefinition of friend and enemy, which is rather clear in Trump’s position on China-US-Russia relations. To maintain an uneven globalization and avoid the expense of war, real scapegoats are going to be sacrificed, since they are the vessels for hiding the truth in favor of populist movements. In other words, how can the West maintain unilateral globalization to preserve its privilege and supremacy? This question is not asked by Land, who simply mobilizes the neoreactionaries as a means of advancing his own bionic agenda. However, no matter how unwilling one is, we cannot deny the fact that today’s world can no longer maintain the old order; the military modernization of the past century makes this impossible.

>Bloch was right, but emotion is not enough. The reactionary modernists also provided something substantial. They wanted to overcome the opposition between natur and technik, and therefore to reconcile technik and kultur (kultur was considered to be opposed to zivilisation) within the interiority (innerlichkeit) of European culture. This is also why, after publishing The Decline of the West (1922), Spengler followed with Man and Technics: Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens, 1931) to reassert his pro-technology credentials. Today we can observe how technology returns to provide a futurist vision of the technological singularity as a solution to any politics, with the added nuance that the innerlichkeit is no longer of central concern. Thiel is a venture capitalist who has funded major tech companies such as Facebook, Google, and PayPal. Technology, as he wrote in Zero to One, means complementarity, and “strong AI is like a cosmic lottery ticket: if we win, we get utopia; if we lose, Skynet substitutes us out of existence.”