constant escape

winter withered, warm
But that reminds me of a point that Zizek always makes. That certain forms of authority, now, don't just tell you what to do, but instead manage to compel you to want to do it.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I think the example he gives, whenever he's mentioned this, is the father instructing the child to visit their grandparents. Where the father used to just say "You will visit your grandparents today", whether the child wanted to or not, the father now says "It would be great if you visited your grandparents, but only if you want to" in a sort of bad faith voluntary suggestion.

Where the child was once able to harbor reluctance and just go through the motions, they now need to get themselves to feel what they are supposed, or outright instructed, to feel.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Its a sort of internalized, implicit authority/authoritarianism, that presents itself, in bad faith, as liberal and non-forceful.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I'd imagine the socios could be hacked in such a way by some of the big tech players.

You don't have to do this, act this way, identify with this... but good luck thriving socially otherwise.
 

luka

Well-known member
I see. And what does the liberal order want us to do? What is it trying to compell us to do? For vimothy it is simple. It wants us, (for vimothy us here means The Whites) to 'tolerate' the non whites who have been forced on us. Or rather it wants us to 'celebrate their cultures'. This is against what vim assumes to be the factory settings of hostility towards all outsiders.
 

luka

Well-known member
But I would assume you don't share that view, because it's an extreme right view and vim is hopefully the only person here who professes it.
 

luka

Well-known member
For me the traditional is just an old set of rules imposed by an old order but for vim the traditional is our natural factory settings
 

luka

Well-known member
So capitalism destroys tradition and the liberal elites forces us to celebrate those depredations. Thats how this story goes.
 

luka

Well-known member
I agree with Vim that there is a liberal elite who align themselves with the forces of global capital and it's homogenising flattening force. But I don't agree with him that tradition is anything other than another prison
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
For me the traditional is just an old set of rules imposed by an old order but for vim the traditional is our natural factory settings
@vimothy is right about "historically unprecedented", so long as you mean history before the last century-plus

the old order here is religion - that absence of a "whole ethical framework" is the inevitable outcome of secularization

those big questions are all ultimately unanswerable without recourse to a higher power, lack of which is what you makes you your own author

what you're talking about is sociobiology and/or evolutionary psychology - which is possibly related (do the factory settings predispose us toward the kind of religious beliefs that impose ethical frameworks) - but to whatever degree it is or isn't, can't answer those big questions - what is the meaning of life etc
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
isn't this the fundamental circle that (Western) philosophy has been trying to square for well over a century (since Nietzsche at least)?

it came up here recently in the debate over the possibility of universal morality
 

luka

Well-known member
Are you telling me what I'm talking about lol? I'm telling vimothy what he's talking about and you're telling me what I'm talking about? A merry go round of presumption.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Are you telling me what I'm talking about lol?
what else are factory settings tho

I don't disagree with you about older orders just being a different set of rules imposed by a different set of power relations

or that the fundamental elision of the modern liberal order's conception of "neutrality" is its alignment with the global forces of capital

I just don't think vimothy's making the specific argument you say he's making (idk vimothy are you?)

tho obv you enjoy mischaracterizing ppl/their views for both bantz and demonstrative purposes
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I think there's a good argument, as @constant escape makes qua Zizek, about "neutrality" as bypassing the headwater of resistance to an authority

neutrality is de facto the status quo. it seems related to the mechanics of capitalist realism - how does an order come to seem not only like it can crush any resistance, but like it's impossible to conceive of resistance to it in the first place - creating an illusion of inevitability

which is something ppl have been attacking for a long time - Manufacturing Consent was published 30+ years ago, Adbusters, the Situationists, etc

but the last 10+ years have really confirmed the degree to which it's an illusion, or perhaps just alerted many more people to that fact

that the liberal order was always a self-perpetuating, hubristic fantasy, both in terms of degree of control and in the delusion what wasn't just a mask for more or less the same old ugliness as ever
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I see. And what does the liberal order want us to do? What is it trying to compell us to do? For vimothy it is simple. It wants us, (for vimothy us here means The Whites) to 'tolerate' the non whites who have been forced on us. Or rather it wants us to 'celebrate their cultures'. This is against what vim assumes to be the factory settings of hostility towards all outsiders.
I'm trying to approach the current order/phase of hegemony from as demographically broad a toolbox as possible, but I still have quite a ways to go in that department.

And part of the difficulty in trying to approach it that way is that it involves an encompassing of all possible perspectives a human can take. Especially when you keep installing additional demographic lines, each installment exponentially complexifying the task. The current order/phase of hegemony we experience in our shared reality is a heterogeneous one, one that shines differently based on point of view.

And that is still all only just within one component of the psychic machine I'm trying to build. The component that, if coupled with a potent and efficient manner of fueling and optimizing advancement, the overshooting/excess in which direction results in something seemingly integral to fascism, could make for a very dexterous and dialectically-readable machine.

So what is it want us to do? Part of the reason a diverse demographic sensibility is useful is that it indicates the differences in possible realities across demographic lines - it renders visible hitherto invisible psychic forces, in a way, in that it grants a wider vocabulary/taxonomy of psycho-cultural phenomena, of the various modes of processing one's reality.

And these modes are in a causally circular relationship with their material realities, which is why I would be inclined to treat this project as an idealism which emerges from and co-evolves with its material circumstances. Because material realities can vary as profoundly as they do, so can the trajectory of the evolution of the psychic-side of the conversation, so to speak.

Transmaterial phenomena, or supramaterial phenomena. Psychic phenomena.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I think there's a good argument, as @constant escape makes qua Zizek, about "neutrality" as bypassing the headwater of resistance to an authority

neutrality is de facto the status quo. it seems related to the mechanics of capitalist realism - how does an order come to seem not only like it can crush any resistance, but like it's impossible to conceive of resistance to it in the first place - creating an illusion of inevitability

I would frame this as a closing-in on the locally optimal permutation, in terms of the evolution of matter through and beyond the human brain. I say locally, because we don't cover nearly all of what there is to cover - in fact we are always but a part of that infinite order perspective. The optimal we are able to collectively hone in on, as a distribution around an attractor, is limited to what ground we cover.

As our range of detection grows, so does the currently detectable optimal develop.

If we need to graph/view this kind of continuous function in a discrete manner, every point is its own universe, in some space of n dimensions, and over the course of this development, not only does the variability widen/expand within the n parameters, but so does n grow and allow for more and more dimensions of variability.

So the attractor is, itself undergoing a development. God has a God of its own, ad infinitum. Enough of a superiority in terms of physical complexity, allows for a such a drastic power difference as God/human. You don't need to be far from the lower order, you just need to be beyond its detection-range. You only need to be meters beyond the scope of the flashlight, and from the flashlights perspective you might as well be miles away.

And our potential Gods register to us, impact us, as totalizations - such as capitalism
 

luka

Well-known member
You will probably have to come back to where you stand and speak with your own voice, however uncertain of it you are.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Or, like the point you've made, attempt to connect all of this with your base existence, rather than leave it untethered and floating in the realm of theory.

And much of this is about optimizing your relationship with uncertainty, learning to spot when your reality is closing in around you, and how to change it.

But there is a certain strategic pretension involved, a straining away from where one's feet are planted, in the interest of moving. The difference between this and just fantasizing is that pains are taken to modulate what desire must be channelled through.

You're not wrong though. If there is some part of me that is lagging behind, it will have to be reckoned with. But this is also the sort of theory that could become real if it is convincingly worded, no? So theres always that danger.
 
Top