luka

Well-known member
one of the things i was getting at in the shining ones thread is that fame represents this to us. the way out. in the gilded light, the field of reeds
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Depends on the level of fame

Would you rather work in an office or be kerry katona getting your toes out on onlyfans

There is no gilded light during middle aged descent
 

luka

Well-known member
im not suggesting its real. im suggesting thats the way its presented and how we understand it but it is likely just the bait for another trap
 

luka

Well-known member
the two things we dream about as escape are the lottery and fame. those are the ladders we can see
 

luka

Well-known member
typically you bait a trap with the 'too good to be true' the worm on the hook. the penis pills double your girth overnight
 

version

Well-known member
the two things we dream about as escape are the lottery and fame. those are the ladders we can see
The flip side's fame as punishment; some random going viral for slipping over in public or tweeting something stupid and getting dunked on by the masses. A cruel twist of fate. You wanted fame? Here you go.
 

luka

Well-known member
not for me. i want to be recognised for my world changing talent and the light i brought into the world that set so many people free lol
 

version

Well-known member
the two things we dream about as escape are the lottery and fame. those are the ladders we can see
The third way's just disappearing; dropping everything and walking out of your life; going to live in the woods or on a desert island or something.
 

sus

Well-known member
But does the captive really want to “live happily ever after”? Freedom from captivity would mean losing the dream, the deeply invested fantasy of being freed. A piece of the captive would die upon release. Stockholm syndrome. The proper response to that sort of world-crushing satisfaction is grief. Easier to perform endless revolutionary fantasies, or better, to deprive the other of their own satisfaction. Now everyone is in captivity together.

From @snav's latest Substack
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
in the grand scheme of things, by which i mean in other countries that aren't the UK, there are loads of 'outs' I think. always think there is a bit of a tendency to use the term 'capitalism' to describe how things are in the places with which most of us are familiar, which is to say in general western countries. but there are countless places where the social set up is different, though still within capitalism, given that more or less everywhere is to one extent or another integration into capitalism.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
basically what i'm saying is that the psychological, emotional aspects of how we live, and the dissatisfaction that we are diagnosing in the west, isn't a universal experience round the world today i think. in fact its probably more accurate to say that this is a minority of people globally speaking
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I would say the ingredients are:

- very rapid change on many fronts, so much that it is hard to keep up with on a psychic level
- a truly unusual (globally and historically speaking) individualised social structure, in which people have remarkably little dependence on one another, and a great deal of dependence on impersonal mostly state-based systems instead
- TV and now the internet disrupting absolutely everyone's ways of thinking, concepts, language in a way that is very disorientating, for a long and sustained period now
- being at the pinnacle of the global economic system, with incredible and quite previously unthinkable material wealth, which additionally in a minority of the countries that we are talking about is distributed very unevenly. a complication that this creates is that a huge number of people from around the world 'want in' to the benefits of this, which has all kinds of difficult consequences
 
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shakahislop

Well-known member
And what’s the opposite to this? It’s always a bit inaccurate to talk about the whole of the rest of the world, but to generalize a lot about some things that are pretty normal in a lot of places that are unusually different in the ‘West’:
  • a social world which is much more interdependent, where your wellbeing relies to a great deal on the ways in which you interact with and treat other people, and most people are not that self-sufficient
  • the absolute primacy of family and other close relationships with other people, so strong as to be inescapable
  • a more stable conceptual world, where morality, ideas, what is good and what is bad are more absolute, change more slowly, and are more fixed
  • social practices and norms which haven’t been revolutionized over the past 50 years or whatever. the example which comes to mind is the way sex is dealt with, managed, conceptualised, valorised, which is a pretty fucking basic element of how a culture is organized, and which is unrecognisable in the UK from how it was in 1960 (and in which we I think are seeing quite big changes right now). But obviously the examples are numerous. Another good one is everything around how food is produced, conceptualized, understood, used, where in the UK all of this is absolutely unstable and has changed a lot even in the last decade or so
I’m not trying to idealize everywhere else in the world vs the ‘west’ and I don’t think all these things are necessarily good or desirable, a lot of people find all of that stifling and want out.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
i saw this earlier. one of the basic facts about the last 20 years in the anglo world (and further i guess, i just aren't familiar) is the replacement of anything resembling 'doing nothing' with flicking through your phone, listening to headphones and so on
 
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