/lit/ - Literature

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>>15999389
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2-the-inaction-imperative

"Anyone who grows up in a narrative, then learns to distrust it, will look for alternatives—and the first place to look is the villains in the narrative itself.

"If you land in this trap, you have failed to escape power’s frame. You’re still in the same movie—you have just switched characters."

>>15999406
This seems like a rather dumb thing to say. The frame might be wrong but there's a reason those people are considered the 'villains' and if they had won things would be extremely different.

>>15999406
>substack

>>15999418
Of course power always has a story. Part of the story of all regimes is that the regime is a knight, defending its subjects against any and all dragons. True on all timelines, this story still seems like a dodge unless its audience can be made to believe in dragons.

When a dissident is a sucker, he invents a problem for the regime to solve. Crawling into his dragon suit, he inhabits a dragon for power to slay. The dragon is lifelike, because it is actually alive, because inside it our dissident is flapping his arms. He needn't worry that he can't breathe fire: for that, there's Photoshop.

The better he is at being a dissident, the more convincing the dragon. If the dragon flaps his wings well, the heroic dragonslayer might even come across as an actual underdog. There are so many dragons that the world, it seems, is ruled by dragons. Join the human uprising against the dragon kingdom!

So this poor dissident, who like most dissidents is a small, shy herbivorous creature, has a rueful funny moment when he picks up the paper and sees his own little face, morphed onto this fire-breathing thunder-lizard now coming to eat everyone's kids. Then he remembers that he has about the same chance of winning as the bull in the bullfight—and also, he doesn’t even like kids. Not as food, anyway.

At this point, he has three choices. Respectable voices, great voices, have taken each. He can flee the caricature; he can give up even vegetables, and eat only fruit. He can embrace it; after all this dragon, who is famous, is him; that means he’s not nothing. He can ignore it—and never even go near a dragon suit, much less flap his arms.

Of course, in a sense all the voyeurs are suckers too. Sucking your effort, or even just your attention, into nothing, is also a victory for your enemies. But once you inhabit a character in your adversary's narrative—that adversary will own you forever.

But why is it so easy for the regime to recruit heels for its storyline? First, when you see someone being an unsubtle heel, it is easy to say: what a clown. This easily blinds you to the possibility that, though not obviously a heel, you remain subtly a heel.

Second—who stitched that dragon suit? By definition, power shapes information. Anyone who grows up in a narrative, then learns to distrust it, will look for alternatives—and the first place to look is the villains in the narrative itself.

If you land in this trap, you have failed to escape power’s frame. You’re still in the same movie—you have just switched characters.

As the story demands, all heel characters have fatal flaws. When you emulate them, you emulate these flaws. You are owned, as in the story—and at the same time, you reinforce the story. So your failure is both individual and collective.

>>15999446
Always and everywhere, the worst way to resist a regime is to inhabit its stage villains. Like most bad choices, this choice is a bad default. It’s as you lived in 15th-century Paris and thought the Church was very corrupt and bad—but there was no alternative. You couldn’t be a cool Enlightenment philosophe or at least just a Protestant. Because it was the 15th century. And there weren’t even words for these things.

So you asked your priest: if not God, King and Church, in what would I believe? Who is against God and King and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so, thinking logically, you became a Satanist. This probably actually happened to you, except it wasn’t a priest but a “guidance counselor.” The way the world works never changes.

If some party A asks how it should operate in opposing some opponent B, B’s vision of who its opponents are and how they operate is hardly the place to start! You could start with a clean slate. You could start with any other period in history. Instead you start by literally aping your enemy’s propaganda. The only possible cause of any such choice is laziness and/or immaturity: not promising qualities in an aspiring aristocrat.

So while in a way we can’t really blame you for falling into the default, which means falling into a trap, in a way it still is your fault. Not finding Voltaire or even Calvin on the menu, the right response is not to give up and settle for Satan—but to invent Calvin or Voltaire. On one side of the coin, this is an epic challenge; on the other, an epic opportunity.

>>15999446
>When a dissident is a sucker, he invents a problem for the regime to solve. Crawling into his dragon suit, he inhabits a dragon for power to slay.
sometimes this actually works though. The closest the right ever got to victory in the past 200 years was the Nazis. I understand Yarvin doesn't like them, but I don't particularly care what he likes.

>>15999557
I think you should reread the piece. You've fallen into the trap.