/lit/ - Literature

>>12009774
some part of this belongs i think to the production of the Mass Man, the Mass Individual (hardly new, btw: read Heidegger). one of the things that the Chinese have going on here is that for both the Daoists and the Confucians, the mass man is actually sub-optimzal. the Daoist sage (or even just a Daoist savant) is uniquely skilled in the Way of whatever it is that they do (which is to say, the Way); and the Confucian ideal is the scholar-gentleman, who is not an instrument.

two things, then: the first being the classical Greek disdain for labor, not that hard to understand - the aristocrat devotes himself to Reason and War, which is an intoxicating blend. and the second being the Roman feeling for the imperial, for great rhetoric. there is something of a feeling for Graeco-Roman antiquity in the Enlightenment also, which are the ideals on which the United States is founded. lest i be accused of being some kind of a hater, i should probably say that i'm not some kind of anti-Western shill, and i'm not. as i've said in previous threads, Not Everything Is The West's Fault, and the point of these threads is not to make some argument for Real Communism either. i think an ideological sense we have just gotten high on our own supply, and it's taken us into a place of Red Team/Blue Team hysteria where you have two groups both making deeply impassioned claims to be the heirs of the Enlightenment, and yet those Enlightenment sensibilities are basically ripped to shreds by everything that happens in the Cosmotech loop from Hegel to Land. Napoleon is both the supreme example of the Enlightenment and in a sense its final meaning: Hegel himself in the PoS is trying to figure out What Spirit Meant By This, and Nietzsche also is more than a little impressed with Bonaparte also.

the Supreme Leader as herald of ultimate values, and *on horseback* is riotously interesting. it gives us 40K at least, although 40K is also a satire of Catholic Space Nazism raised to such an exquisite pitch that imho it becomes indistinguishable from high art. the death-drive of The Emprah extended across space and time in an Eternal Crusade is to my mind the greatest pulp-SF scenario ever produced. it ranks below LotR in my own power rankings if only because Tolkien himself isn't a pulp writer, he's a genuine Bard himself and supplies in poetic fiction everything that Heidegger also feels (with the ironic caveat that Heidegger himself was actually serving Mordor IRL, but that's another story).

and so you have the ghost of this one Revolution in Europe which still trickles into the mass unconscious today, and then you have another revolution in China which, having *actually happened* now turns towards Confucius to keep what it has and build from there. and of course in the West also two Revolutions which happened *and failed* - the Germans and the Soviets, respectively. now it's the meaning of the American Revolution which is coming up for review, sadly.

i liked it