so i’ve been turning over a framework and i want the board to try and break itcore claim: one of the main things cultures do with myths, stories, and even memes is train the capacity to treat invisible shit as real. duty, irreversible consequence, other minds, long-term outcomes, institutional claims, etc. call it the core faculty.memes are the micro version. a good meme compresses an invisible pattern into something that suddenly feels real and shareable. a dead meme is one that lost the ability to bind attention. the same muscle is being used at different scales.when a culture’s major narrative systems stop allowing real endings and keep everything in permanent extractable suspension (soft resets, legacy milking, no permanent death of forms), that faculty gets less exercise and starts to atrophy. effects show up way outside entertainment.for low-information people almost all of society is invisible and second-hand, so the same faculty is required for the social world itself to feel binding.spectrum:low end starts looking a lot like clinical sociopathy (future doesn’t bind, other interiors don’t fully register, only immediate visible consequences feel real)high/unconstrained end produces conspiracy, phobia, delusion, and also suicidal empathy (too much unobserved shit feels mandatory)healthy band is strong enough to bind to real invisible structures but still reality-testablemetaphor and counterfactuals are the main operating system. people who can’t answer basic “how would you feel if…” hypotheticals are showing damage to the same muscle.Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
It breaks off in your bussy, queer.
>>25422868nice one. good thread. i feel it.i don't really get your theory of the cycle, of how myths/memes are first functional and then decay and die or shamble on undead. is it something like:(1) compelling fiction created (compelling because corresponding to reality, or because aesthetically charged, or some interrelation of the two, or what?);(2) audience are thereby trained to become invested in (a) the specific concepts dramatised in the fiction, like other minds and duty, and/or (b) abstractions in general, as you suggest with the idea of metaphor and counterfactuals; (3) fiction is now no longer compelling (because no longer realistic? because aesthetically stale? because it doesn't have a satisfying ending?);(4) if the fiction isn't retired, the audience no longer have a compelling stimulus that will reinforce the faculty acquired in step 2, and so the faculty atrophies.is that right? could do with clarification imo.(sidenote: i recommend looking up deleuze and guattari's regimes of signs, if you haven't already and can stomach french guys. their savage and despotic regimes seem to correspond to the low and high ends of your spectrum. the savage regime encodes meaning directly on bodies. e.g. you get ritually scarified when you come of age, you get forcibly mutilated if you transgress a taboo, you ink the symbols of your clan across your face. this comes from nietzsche's idea of the prehistory of morals, all the torture and cruelty required to sear into our animal flesh a sense of conscience and social memory before they were internalised. it's all local and visible and concrete. but with the despotic regime meaning is referred not to visible bodies around you but to the body of the despot hidden far off in his palace, who issues orders 'in the name of the king', binds his subjects by an abstract sense of allegiance, and instills in them a constant paranoia - they never know when a palace messenger might arrive with their death warrant signed and sealed on account of unknowable kafkaesque crimes against the sovereign.)(sidenote 2: also check this out https://samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is-magic)(sidenote 3: something smelled foul so i ran your post through pangram and got 100% ai generated. learn 2 rite u stupid bitch.)
>>25423088my main reason for using ai is multiple people telling me I ramble into incoherency, but you are right that I need to learn how to properly write, let me do so here, apologies for confusion I may cause1. dependant on the audience to a degree, I would say a mix of matching existing bonds the audience already accept, entertainment value(however a person defines that for themselves will impact it), and agreement or resonance with the orientation it suggests. of course the exact ratios will vary, and honestly the strength of the core faculty itself will shift these ratios, a stronger core faculty will value perceived emotional weight over consistency for example2.I would argue it's both, the specific concepts and the general ability, it's like learning a skill for immediate use and then finding it works for other applications3.I would bring up the lack of those factors in point one is a part of it, but I believe that the fiction no longer offering proper continuity or completion is the most major. if the audience believes a satisfying ending is coming they have the investment to keep using the core faculty, and with a cathartic and instructional ending it can be moved from narrative to lesson4. I think you've got the ideain regards to Deleuze and Guattari I have not looked into them and despite my natural british distain for the French, your explanation makes me think I need to. oh and I'll definitely read the substack too, thank you
>all lowercaseIt defeats itself, if you have to write this drivel, you have time for proper punctuation.
>>25423088Obviously not OP but I think his primary concern is with the trend in modern pop culture to endlessly churn out sequels and, in service of that, leave stories on cliffhangers or with loose threads to be explored in a hypothetical next installment. You could probably deride OP for not engaging with "real" or "significant" literature or whatever, but he makes an interesting point. If these are the main ways the average person imbibes culture and thus cultural values and norms, then a lack of definitive conclusions and claims regarding these values would weaken their establishment. This then inhibits the average person's ability to construct a coherent model of the world and even to reason abstractly. >>25422868I wouldn't say you're wrong, per se, but the degree to which you attribute ideological development to pop culture is probably overstated. People take in more of this fundamental stuff, and at a younger age than they do with most pop culture, from their parents and later their education systems. Children learn duty and consequences from mimicry of their parents and simply through discipline. On scales larger than the individual, I'd say your theory has a stronger basis, mainly regarding how a lack of "real endings" shapes public discourse. I think it's true that pop media is tending to avoid definitive endings for reasons that are economic, political (avoid strongly siding with one group over another), or cultural (moral greyness and "nuance" is regarded as sophisticated). It's plausible that that would make consumers generally more mentally noncommittal and also more reliant on past media which is not allowed to conclude or be replaced, which would lead to a wider stagnation of culture. It's harder to extend that to the proposition that this weakens people's "core faculty" itself and not merely artistic/cultural manifestations of it.
Lepanto and Ballad Of The White Horse are great.The Father Brown stories are a lot of fun.Man Who Was Thursday is extremely clever and interesting.A lot of his social commentary essays are amazing.Honestly I think he's at his worst when he's trying to be a theologian, it's not really his wheelhouse and it's the genre where his habits start to grate on you the most.
>>25423905I think his essays are much his best work. Then his Father Brown stories.Not impressed with either the novels or the verse to be honest.One of the best things he did is not so well known. A friend of his called Holbrook Jackson wrote a book of aphorisms called Platitudes in the Making: Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk. Chesterton went through it and wrote a little commentary next to every one. The commentary is better than the book (a bit like William Blake's annotations to Lavater).It's interesting because GKC's obsession with paradox can get irritating, but here, the guy he's annotating is like that but even more so. His whole thing is to say the opposite of what everyone believes (a bit like Wilde). So GKC is cast as the straight man, the voice of reason, and he does it very well. He just points out plain common sense and destroys all the nonsense.Well worth seeking out if you haven't read it.
Who is Atlas, and why did he shrug?
>>25419628She conned the simping rubes she had a series of daliences with, especially the one she married. The readers however got what they paid for.
>>25418626>Who is Atlas, and why did he shrug?Rand considers there to be takers and makers in her philosophy. Makers are those who create business, money, factory ownership, inventors etc, people she'd consider "elite" who conveniently all somehow succeed instead of fail like most people who start businesses or invest in novel technologies. The characters that do this in her novel are tired of being burdened with "carrying" society (which she villainizes cartoonishly) as it were so they just leave everyone besides themselves to their own devices and form a little hidey hole where they can "not be successful" so people can't sponge off them and society will collapse so that the superior beings they are can come back and pick up the pieces of the burning strawman that Rand setup.So for Rand the Atlas that shrugs is people she considers superior leaving everyone else behind to watch society collapse. The leader of the elites has a monologue 60 pages long it's not a very good book.
>N-NO, RAND DIDN'T HAVE A POINT ACTUALLY, I GET TO DECIDE WHAT SHE MEANS NOT THE PERSON WHO WROTE THE BOOK, THE BOOK HAS NO POINT CAUSE I SAID SO MUH COMMUNISMI'm not even a Randian but Anti-Randians are pathetic, their very objections prove Rand right.
>>25418626How much does Ayn Rand owe to George Orwell for dignifying the idea of using a fictional narrative as political commentary? I don't think anyone would take her shitty romance novels seriously if they didn't think they were basically Libertarian 1984. I'm still pissed off that I got tricked into reading Fifty Shades of Grey, but with railroad men and unending political rants.
>>25419705I thought it meant that Atlas was liberated by shrugging off the world, like he was destined to carry the load of the whole world on his shoulders, and then he was like: nope, not doing that. And shrugged.
I read this last year and it was brutal. It made me rethink my whole life. By the end of the year I had already planned everything I need to do to turn things around.It's August already and I have done absolutely nothing.
>>25422990I suppose.
>>25422993Like i said, we're troubled men. We're neither the first nor the last. Troubled men like us lived in the past, had successful careers, married and had children. Sure, it might be harder than in past eras, but the most important thing is to TRY. TRY and TRY and TRY until the world gives up at rejecting your wishes.Dont end up like the Potential Man."Always 'IF' and 'WHEN' but never 'IS' "
>>25422981the fact you use the term "Chad" and view life through the lens of these individuals that fit into the category of "Chad" and those who don't already tells me your spirit has already been deformed by the bad parts of the internetA few weeks ago an internet personality you and many others would categorize as a "Chad" died at 32 years old. Being a "Chad" didn't bring him any true long term fulfilment. Didn't bring him any purpose. Didn't bring him any sense of a life worth living despite the hardship. He had a psychotic breakdown and died alone in a lake in Thailand. I recommended purging your system of these distorted views of life that get promoted like hell over the internet.
>>25423017I meant Chad in the traditional "popular in school and attractive" sense, not the internet memelords who looksmaxxxxx and suck off Andrew Tate.
>>25422905You're right, and I've been thinking about most of the things you said lately. I don't think I can handle my current situation (that will most likely get worse if I don't anything) in 5-10 years.The thing is that while I'm capable of discipline and hard work, I cannot forze passion or will. The times I've gone out of my comfort zone and made something worthy I was pushed by external urgency.>>25422958Oblomov was worse for me. I read Notes from the underground like a decade ago, read it again last year. I'm not as bitter as the protagonist and I even found some chapters comedic.>>25422965I didn't tell anyone. I never do anything to show off to be honest.
Wow Joyce was a complete hack
>>25423945Give me 10 concrete examples of this
>>25423945every cultural artifact you encounter through ai will look simplistic, hollow, frivolous, without depth or mystery or wider resonance, since you're not building connections between your mind and the context in which that artifact was embedded. you're castrating your perception. and because you're a zoomer, and have never known real aesthetic perception, you'll think that there was nothing there all along, that you know everything, because for you knowledge is a matter of bullet point summations and not transformative experience.
Is there actually any reasonable path to fix the collapsing modernity and its derived social-mental crisis?
>>25423255if there is it will only emerge on the other side of Climate Nightmare
speaking of latour it turns out people are NOT still having sex lmao who could have imagined in the 80s that ppl would just kind of be over it
It will be fixed the same way it always has been.
Latour is kind of underrated
Not sure about the title of the plot but it was it was scientist who lost his wife, not sure how or why but demanded the world use a radiation based Deadman zone that cuts off central Africa from the rest of the world, anyone have clue what this book might be?
bump cuz im interesterested
Was he just a gay larper?
>>25423574Yes, but so is everyone who thinks they can live in the woods
>>25423574If you think this book is about the material environment you missed the point.
Thoreau was completely based and personally visited me to encourage me to quit my soulless job. I speak the truth.
>>25423586I haven't read it yet but I'm curious, was the book presented as if he had lived a completely self-reliant life?I would totally understand spending time in a cabin, with help from family, and writing a book that is half the experience I'm having and half fiction about someone living that experience without help. Also he could have just figured it made for a better story to leave those parts out, which is also respectable.If he went around telling the world he lived a self-reliant life that he didn't live then that definitely makes him look lame, but that still isn't enough for me to assume the book itself isn't good
The book is mostly about a profound desire to transcend homosexuality through constant stimulation from nature, staying as far away as possible from the temptations of civilization. Still very enjoyable
APOLOGISE
>>25423125sorry, marcy
>>25423125I'm sorry I called you a dainty faggot mamas boy.
>>25423125to a Frechman? nein.
>>25423551He's worse than a frenchman, he is a french jew.
>>25423125For what? I dindu shit
>Lovecraft's entire move is radical anti-anthropomorphism: the cosmos is not human-shaped, the entities are beyond comprehension and beyond relation, and the horror is the de-centering of the human (cosmic indifferentism — that's the point, not a side effect). Moe-fication does the exact inverse: it takes the maximally-unrelatable object — Cthulhu, engineered to resist a human face — and renders it maximally-relatable (a cute girl who might love you). So the Monstergals doujin isn't just eroticization; it's the domestication of the indifferent, the mind's revolt against the cosmic sublime. The correct response to Cthulhu is the cold decentering; moe says no, I'll give it a face and love it instead.Defiant humanism? Anthropocentric narcissism?
>>25423440Long legs with lots of space between them to represent the void of the road. Ornaments inspired by vending machines, bikes, plants, lights, signs, etc.
Even thinking in terms of "entities" is fundamentally anthropocentric desu. It is only an assumption that non-human subjects exist.
Cute Accelerationism?
>>25423755Hey, wait a minute. I've seen this cover before.
>>25423437Dammit. I can't top that.
>mogs all other BiblesKJVcacas need not apply
>>25422176what does it say for [Mal 2:16]
>>25422176[Mal 2:16] is either violence covered with a garment or buss people up and act jalike you neva did notting wrong
>>25422176What is special abozt this bible and why is this a good thing in your eyes?I think that any translation has its downsides but this is also true for non-experts reading the original languages. Reading ancient texts is hard already, but reading the bible is even harder if you want to read it with care and in a humble and religious manner. For me personally, even the posterior analytics or the KrV is easier than the bible. The bible is just massive and it is supposed to be understood holidtically (see phillip and the african in Acts)
>>25422179>she
>>25423411why does it translate "the cool of the day" to "the afternoon".? (genesis 3)i would have settled for the wind of the day.
When did you realize that He was right about everything?
>>25420785Have you studied the Theravada Abidhamma? It may have the metaphysics you are looking for. Listening to lectures on it and reading manuals with commentaries from monastics explaining the context is best.
>>25409075He was only partially right.
>>25420091If I had to compare two religions and choose which one to follow, and found that:1. the first religion has god coming down to earth to save man, but he comes down to a backwater country within an empire where most people were illiterate, and a lot of trinitarian shoe-horning and ad-hoc historiography is needed to justify why god would do this.2. the second religion focuses on suffering and its liberation, makes several arguments for each of its supernatural claims within its own texts, does not place full primacy and deific authority on the founder of the religion, and does not concern itself with grand creation and destruction narratives.Yeah, no dawg, I’ll go with the second.
>>25422310I always knew
His meter isn’t clean at all, turn to any page and you constantly have to watch how you say it in order to make it “fit” the meter. What makes his meter considered good?
>>25422648>siniai
>>25421269>I don't agree with his referring to his own writing of the poem within the poem.Isn’t it only in this opening of the poem that he does this, and also in line with bardic/epic tradition?Like the Iliad starting with, “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles…”; and the Oddysey similarly has, “Tell me, Muse [of Odysseus and his story…]”. The opening of Virgil’s Aeneid also going, “Of arms and the man [Aeneas] I sing…”.Seems like an interesting convention of epics Milton’s implying, harmonizing the Ancient Greek bardic and epic tradition (also filtered into some of Roman literature such as Virgil) with Christianity; the true Muse equated with God, or the Holy Spirit specifically it seems.
>>25421269>his own writing of the poem He didn't "write" Paradise Lost, he was fucking blind and composed it all in his head.
I thought all great works basically don’t use basic iambic pentameter or stuff like that, but a modified version.
>>25422387>you have to glide away extra syllable in disobedienceThis was just the standard pronunciation of the word in Early Modern English. In Robert Robinson’s phonetic writings from the time ‘obedient’ is rendered ‘ōbēdyent’.>have to heavily reduce the extra syllable in heavensSame thing again, the usual pronunciation at the time was just one syllable. You just need to actually learn how Early Modern English was pronounced.
Tell, don't show. Then keep telling and never show anything.
Infinitely preferable to Malazan which goes ten pages without dropping a single proper noun because Erikson is so desperate to seem "literary" that he has to force as many synonyms and euphemisms as possible into every paragraph. The confidence of a master versus the desperation of a hack.
You haven't read it. Stick to Gurmslop..
>>25420567That's why it's called storytelling
>>25420567Is there any passage in the book that feels like this to you in particular, OP?
>>25420567A significant chunk of some of the most influential literature ever written would qualify as "bad writing" today with our weird "rules of writing bullshit." Especially this "exposition bad" attitude.
>Guy is depressed because he jumped ship>500 pagesHow dull must the lives of Victorians have been for them to find this thrilling
>>25422544>How dull must the lives of Victorians have been for them to find this thrillingYou call it dull but to me it looks like they felt many more things much more acutely. You're a desensitized 21st cent herbivore man
>>25422544Imagine two young men.One of them gets aggressively sexually aroused from a picture of a woman in a bikini.The other gets mildly sexually aroused only from half an hour of hard-core pornography.Which one of those two young men would you say had a stronger sex drive?
>>25422544They didn't have a dopamine fried brain due to 24/7 entertainment designed to keep them addicted. Also Victorians had telegrams, cameras, railroads, airships, vaccines, chemistry, and other modern technologies. So it's not like they were living in Ancient Rome.
anime and video games.
>>25422544This book wasn’t bad but it did drag on. I enjoyed Victory much more.
