/lit/ - Literature

>>22190233
You could be a nigger mining rocks and carrying bricks, be grateful.

tao te ching

>>22190240
A 50iq nigger carrying bricks and living in a wooden shack is happier and more free than the modern office cuck

>>22190233
The Gospel according to Matthew.

>>22190233
>will to cope
will to power stuff is basically all about creating art, which maybe is exactly what you need.

>>22190263
OUR canvas is the cubicle walls, OUR paintbrush is the AR-15

>>22190268
Yes, I'm sure that making those jokes here will get you started. Fucking retard.

>>22190275
It's my only method of coping right now

You don't need a book for learning how to cope.
The big 5 coping methods are these:
>altruism
>humor
>suppression (basically everything stoicism is about, dont let shit get to you)
>sublimation (transform your feelings into things that are useful or socially acceptable, ex: you're mad so you condition your shins for muay thai by hitting the heavy bag 200 times per leg, you're sad so you make poetry)
>anticipation

Pick your favorite amongst these and voila life fixed.

>>22190268
>>22190275
Unironically it will. Humor is a good coping mechanism. You could try coming up with as many jokes as possible even if it's dark self defeating humor.

>>22190233
The Power of Now. Full of faggotry but it will teach you to see that you’re giving negative shit energy when you don’t have to and how to stop. If your op question is genuine just give a pirated epub like ten minutes and i bet you’ll read the whole thing.

The 99% of people being fucked thing is historically contingent. Look up Kuyper's sphere sovereignty and Catholic corporatism, Catholic social teaching. Medieval society was filled to overflowing with "mediating" structures that take the load of the the economy and the government off the ordinary person, while also giving him collective bargaining power and places he can retreat into when he gets specifically targeted by higher power structures for demolition.

Corporatism = a society composed of many "bodies," a lumpy society of overlapping affiliations. You are not just some atomic slave with no identity except your abstract labor and what money you can accrue - which is very little, since the economy, with which you now interact directly as an individual because there are no mediating structures anymore, systemically tends to depress you and your entire class over time, making escape less and less likely and more and more of an exception. Instead you are a member of this church, this parish, this neighborhood with its own distinct traditions, this clan or tribe or extended family with its own sense of self and sprawling network of vaguely sympathetic people, this guild, this union, three different religious societies, two fraternities, etc. Your whole life is made up of the complex interweaving of all these things, and of course they're not all separate themselves, they also interweave - e.g., in our family we join THIS fraternity, not that one. When the state or the economy comes to grind you down into nothing, there are a million places you can run to, a million places you can get a no-interest short term loan to avoid being busted out and having to sell all your belongings.

Read the first chapter of this, on what happened to Rome:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44908/44908-h/44908-h.htm#p_1
This is what has happened to us. It's cyclical. This process is described, more or less and from different angles, in both the classical Scottish/English political economists like Adam Smith and in Marx, who read them very closely. The class of owners of liquid capital, who comprise what we normally mean by "the economy," simply tend over time to act in such a way that the class of individual workers is deprived more and more of identities outside of "provider of abstract labor in exchange for abstract wages." Corporate structures are "inessential" to this abstract identity, so they tend to be effaced over time, as bit by bit The Economy destroys its opponent in detail: first it takes the weaker structures that are less integrated into the complex network of structures, then more and more become isolated. It's like it's unravelling a garment thread by thread. It gets easier over time.

>>22190448
This is what Marx describes as the process of transition from a feudal economy to a bourgeois capitalist economy. All that is really meant by this is that in the feudal economy, a sprawling network of these "irrational," "traditional" structures like guilds and fraternities and so on were able to exist because the fundamental nature of the economy was irrational and traditional - networks and layers of particular exceptions and privileges were allowed to exist at the bottom because the top was itself composed of networks of particular exceptions and privileges. But once a distinct class of merchants appears which, in principle, abstractly opposes ALL particular structures/privileges/etc., both at the top and the bottom, because it represents the application of purely mathematical rational calculation to investment and profit maximization, the feudal system's days are numbered.

Bit by bit the garment separating the individual workers from the class of property owners and investors is taken apart and discarded, until nothing remains but the workers (who can now be treated in the profit calculus as a de-individualized abstract aggregate) and the owners (who can also be treated in the profit calculus as an abstract aggregate). Investment no longer deals with any mediating structures when it wants to produce product X. It interacts with The Labor Market, which stabilizes Abstract Workers through the natural pressures of competition, to produce an abstract quantity of product X in exchange for Profit, then recycles the process. The crucial point is that the gears of the economy now fit seamlessly with the individual worker SOLELY IN RESPECT OF his function, "working, doing a thing (for a wage)." Everything else becomes accidental, and accidents are meant to be purged as noise using rational calculus.

>>22190449
What also happens is that bourgeois rational calculus has high prestige because it is related to the rational "administration of society." Thus the rise of the bourgeoisie and the mercantile class and abstract profit calculus as the engine of all business is interwoven with the rise of the "policee" state, the well-"managed" state in a modern managerial-economic sense. The fundamental conception of how the world works, how human nature works, among both the elites and the lower orders, changes from "it runs itself, as a big interweaving messy complex of traditional structures with individual humans, impossible to predict or control, wending their way from one to the next" over to "single uniform mass of 'citizens' (the counterpart of the abstract aggregate of 'workers' interacting with single rational Administration (the counterpart of the abstract rationalizing-investing class)."

The old feudal system ran on the assumption that you can't ever really control individuals at the individual level, and that society will always be a mess, so just let it do its thing. You can't ever make it into a clean schematic. The new system runs on the assumption that everything un-clean, un-schematic, is just a fixer-upper that needs to be rationalized. So The Economy works in tandem with The Government to replace all traditional structures again with direct interfaces between the citizens and government again. Where once there were churches and community charities now there is The Welfare System. Every state is its own self-enclosed monad of an Administration with Administered Citizens, a single sphere with concentric rings instead of a chaotic mass of overlapping spheres.

All of this justified itself in terms of a highly optimistic rationalistic enlightenment ideology of universal reason - the more reasony things get, the more rationaler they are, so no matter what problem comes up, just be the most rationalest you can be and everything will come out fine, therefore as long as you say highly rational things like "Everyone is free" and "Everyone is equal," your state will be rational and nothing irrational and weird (like everyone being free on paper but actually enslaved) will happen. If that does happen, you weren't rational enough, so say "YOU'RE FREE!!!! IT'S RATIONALLY TRUE!!!" even louder and the problem will fix itself etc.

>>22190452
Meanwhile it turns out mathematically rationalizing all forms of human industry and treating everything but profit as a "complication" and mere noise in your calculations has about the same effect as the latifundia system did in ancient Rome, i.e., it creates a mass aggregate of abstract slaves who have no other existence than being latifundia slaves, and all the owners of the small independent farms you bought up to make your latifundia (literally, "really big fucking farm") now live in cities as an abstract aggregate or rabble, the capite censi (literally "the counted-by-head" because there's no other way to distinguish them) and as proletarii (literally "breeders" i.e. they do nothing but eat and make more useless eaters).

Marx thought that this whole process would naturally culminate in the shrinking of the property-owning bourgeoisie at the top of this self-perfecting self-rationalizing system, and the growth of the class that a) owns nothing and has no essential identity in the state but its capacity/willingness/need to "do things for a wage," and b) increasingly realizes this and identifies with it. This will naturally lead to a situation in which a massive, unhappy wage-working class staffs a perfected rational state that could easily provide for everybody via its wonderworks of industry and technology and rationalized administration, while a tiny minority of owners of almost all capital sits at the top. This will naturally lead to the recognition of the IRRATIONAL nature of this, and the FINAL MOVE of the rationalization of the world and of society, carried out until this point by the bourgeoisie, will be the wage-working class seizing the near-perfected apparatus and administering things in "its" interests. It will thus be practically psychologically incapable of irrational disparities in wealth because the system is just so manifestly technologically and administratively for providing for everyone's needs that there is intuitively no reason or opportunity to provide for some but not others.

Marx was wrong and all his predictions were wrong unless you interpret them as very long term predictions (then they are partly defensible, but he still gambled way too highly on the RATIONAL SELF-RECOGNITION of the proletariat - which is why 20th century Marxists turned to psychoanalysis and sociology of the irrational choices people make, and articulated theories of how capitalism ramifies itself in false consciousness).

>>22190454
As a result of Marx's failures and the failure's of the socialist and social-democratic movements to lead to a new social utopian state like they all wanted, various alternatives were proposed by right-wing and conservative socialists, who attempted to replace Marx's framework (based on secular atheist rationalism, and explicitly anti-moralizing, it was purely "logical" and claimed to be scientifically predictive) with a MORAL framework, either the framework of the national/people's community as a primal entity that both demands and enables sacrifice and coming together against the common foe of (Volksgemeinschaft) or the higher moral ideal of the State (Mussolini's Fascist State), or the framework of a militarized socialist utopian force that doesn't give a fuck about anything other than forcing the bourgeois state into an apocalyptic zero-sum battle via a mass general strike which will simultaneously force the proletariat to realize that it has no choice but to throw in with the other strikers (Sorel's syndicalism), or simply the framework of Christian self-sacrifice and moral duty (Catholic social teaching). All of these are not "scientific" in Marx's sense and NOT predicated on the natural enlightened rationalism of the masses but on the idea that neither individuals nor masses are rational by default, and you have to awaken within them their natural calling to a higher purpose (serving their people, serving God, whatever).

>>22190457
These "moral socialisms" culminated in the USSR in Russia, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Falange in Spain, the Iron Guard in Romania, Action Francaise and the Croix de Feu and the Christian personalists and non-conformists in France, Mosley's Blackshirts in Britain, Father Coughlin and Huey Long in America, and many others, all promulgating a right-wing socialism that basically realized the following facts in agreement with Marx:
>The bourgeois state is an intolerable alliance of soulless techno-bureaucrats, steered by moguls like the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and J.P. Morgan
>The bourgeois state ONLY wants to interact with human beings on the level of a) individuals (because it can isolate you and destroy you), and b) the aggregate mass of individuals (which it can model stochastically and use mass manipulation techniques like Bernays'/Lippmann's "public relations" (origins of mass propaganda, literally grounded in ideas of mass hypnotic suggestion and the predictable irrationality of crowds etc.)
>The bourgeois state is effectively "conscious" as a kind of cybernetic process and is effectively "aware" of any attempts to reintroduce mediating structures or moral factors that would intercede or impose any kind of veil or shield between itself and individuals / the aggregate mass of individuals
>Nevertheless we live within the bourgeois state
>The state must then be fought by twisting its own features (voting, ideological commitments to freedom of self-expression and populism, etc.) against it, to ultimately nullify it entirely and bring about a new era in which other possibilities exist
But they disagree with Marxism in these ways
>This new era does not necessarily claim to be final one that creates a final utopia
>This new era does not view itself as scientifically inevitable - this is a war, made up of battles, not a "dialectical" process in which the key milestones are fore-ordained
>Something discounted by Marx's purportedly scientific analysis, the "heroic" or "moral" element, the spiritual element, needs to not only be restored to socialist praxis but made CENTRAL to it - this is not just a war but a great crusade, a zero-sum battle against an enemy that wants to enslave you for eternity
>Particular right-wing socialist communities will maintain their particular identities (and even maintain their particular standards for how one determines what one's identity is - a German Volkisch National Socialist has no right to tell an Italian Fascist Statist or a Romanian Christian Nationalist to "be more racist/volkisch," except in a friendly dialogue)
>A new order of right-wing socialist states will therefore emerge which AGREE in the crusade against the cybernetic organism whose current face is the London Stock Exchange, and AGREE on the moral necessity of allowing human communities to decide on their own essences and fates, but which will not necessarily agree in anything else

>>22190459
Some of the most promising non-extremist forms of right-wing socialism come from American republican ideology, the ideology of the Founding Fathers and especially of Thomas Jefferson. They believed that a republic was not an abstract administrative state; they hated bankers, they hated "administrators" and bureaucrats, they hated big cities, they hated both anonymous rabbles and aggregate "classes," they hated parasites and usurers and people who live at the expense of a republic instead of FOR the republic. The Founding Fathers' ideal was to mix the republican principles of the Renaissance city states, freedom above all, duty and sacrifice for the common good, the readiness to take up arms against invading tyrants, etc., with the principles of the self-sufficient gentleman of MODEST means - above all, the man with a farm and a family as his FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE against any abstract Administration and any abstract Economy, the man who can WEATHER THE STORM of economic scarcity by tilling his own land, and the storm of any temporary tyranny or external invader by taking up his rifle and using the skills he naturally has as a vigorous agrarian to defend himself.

That is the republican ideal. Read The Revolt of the Elites by Lasch and memorize everything about a yeoman middle class. When you think of America, don't ever think of cities or of some abstract map again, think of a man with a musket who shrugs when he hears the economy is going to be bleak for a decade or more because he knows his family and his land and his community and his parish so well that they could lose all contact with the outside world for 50 years and still basically survive. That's what America was founded to be, a commonwealth of hardy yeomen who hate city slickers and tyrants and would rather eat rutabagas for ten years than sell 1/8th of their ancestral land for any reason.

It's also not just some modern dream, it's a perennial possibility of any small and highly self-conscious state, and it's the ideal of the ancient Greek conception of politeia, that which concerns the polis. The ancient Greeks were not just doing abstract political typology but thinking so concretely and practically that we can't even imagine it. Read Victor Davis Hanson's The Other Greeks as soon as possible, in conjunction with Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, anything by Gordon Wood, and Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. If you don't want to be a fascist or a Catholic integralist, you can simply be a yeoman republican. If any of these options resonate with you and feel like they are closer to your heart than others, congratulations you just proved Sorel right that moral and heroic socialism works better than arid rationalistic socialism, and you proved Mussolini right that the a single holistic and integral discourse on what constitutes the moral nature of your people is a powerful tool for resisting the centrifugal effects of industrial society.

>>22190464
NEVER feel defeated by the current system. It is completely historically contingent, and it's also going totally insane and becoming ineffective at managing its own tyranny. Soon real political movements are going to arise of a totally organic character and they will blast over people like a cool breeze blowing away decades of stagnant muggy air. Even people who know nothing of politics or political theory will sense in their very blood that things are moving again, the flows and currents of history are moving again, hypernormalization has been broken. It will be like walking again after decades in bed. You don't want to be a broken down piece of shit when this happens. The world will need people who remember how bad it is/was and channel that motivation into making sure it never happens again.

>>22190268
This is the WORST option. All this is going to do is augment the system's last effective aspect, its repressive biopolitical aspect. It is trying to transform itself into a biopolitical end-game regime like the Chinese CCP but actually effective, or a new USSR. That is its last shot at a new lease on life, its last possibility of justifying its existence for another generation. It is a wolf with rabies that is slowly dying and harming itself, and it's locked inside a pen where it can only hurt itself, but if you appear to be something scarier than it, even for a moment, then normies will open the pen and let it out again to "defend" them. Just like you should not become some fentanyl addict or drunk depressed deadbeat, you should not do anything violent. You should also stop eating processed foods, join a religious community, and stop absorbing any other forms of the system's many forms of degradation into your own person.

Also read Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan and its Enemies.

>>22190448
>>22190449
>>22190452
>>22190454
>>22190457
>>22190459
>>22190464
>>22190468
This was good pasta. I was aware of some of the books you recommended but you convinced me to buy them. Still, however historically contingent the system is, it's operating on a centuries-long wavelength and we're unlikely to see the end of it; its insanity is compensated by its technological capacity for repression and its ability to induce repetitive mass hysteria has blown through all the limits that were proposed back in 2016. Knowing what it is and why it'll inevitably end is a kind of cope I guess.