/lit/ - Literature

it's wrong to call it, perhaps, the birth-pangs of a Eudaimonic civilization, though; if anything, it would be more appropriate to talk about this stuff in the Hegelian sense.

but this is part of the story: we figure out our own programming, our own happiness-protocols. we repeat and we repeat. somewhere along the way the meaning of both the past and the future goes missing, together with our own inability to keep ourselves together. the *money* is always real - and maybe, if you want to really double-down on Uncle Nick, *only* the money is real.

and yet those very circumstances give rise to their opposites. if people begin to sense that the only things are Money and Happiness, the power to shame and guilt and moralize increases correspondingly (and not altogether unjustifiably). but when one side *only* has a negative platform, seems to offer nothing *but* shame and guilt (and their own forms of ideological benediction also), things change again.

that sense of *programming* - which includes recursion, contingency, reflexivity, protention and retention, memory - all of this belongs to this story. and those tools, together with the discovery of those tools, kind of fuck with any neat and easy way to make predictions about where the future is going, or where it came from. to me at least, it explains part of the attraction (and horror) of something like Xi-style social credit: that, basically, there really is no future, only a moderately prosperous Chinese nation led by the CCP, now and forever. i'm not a serious Confucian scholar or anything, but this does seem to square with what i do understand of Confucius' sense of history as being fundamentally ritual. what worked in the past worked. why fuck with the system? where the Way is being followed you can't ask for more.

this is not, ofc, how we see things in the West, perhaps. but where do our sensibilities take us? back to this world of simulation and spectacle, to the Wild Ride. attempting to control the future and winding up stuck in hamster-wheels. technological progress will continue to blow all our minds, no doubt. i just wonder if it's like what Alan Watts said about the psychedelic experience:

>When you get the message, hang up the phone.