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Self-mastery (which I don’t claim to have) is an exercise in indirection. Many desirable mental states cannot be had by force of will. An insomniac can’t will himself to sleep and you can’t feel joy through gritted teeth
Likewise for faith, romantic love, erotic love, and mental “flow”. Such attainments cannot be had by grasping, only by a kind of letting go. Even morality is like this: morality held too tightly becomes a vice https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1095534490078736385
In a sense this is the liberal critique of society; what we now sneeringly call “classical liberalism”, all the virtues of liberalism have their place, even emancipation, but progressive evil is the elevation of lesser goods above their proper place in the hierarchy of virtues
You could be forgiven for imagining that salutary mental states come from outside you. Sanctity always has something of an alien quality, because it’s born from transgression https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1068666607935795201
Most maligned of all is the virtue of tolerance, and to be sure, in its senility tolerance becomes malignant. It becomes licentiousness, just as freedom becomes atomization, just as cleverness becomes intransigence
The decadence (which is to say, the decay) of any virtue is universalism. The universalization of a virtue transforms it into a vice
One law for the lion and the ox is oppression, but even worse than one law is one desire. Mass culture => mass consciousness => homogeneous desire => mimetic rivalry. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1049650105526022144
Whatever cultural fragmentation we experience is a negligible countercurrent against the homogenizing forces of instantaneous always-on techno-psychic communication from anyone to anyone.
I see Satan propagate like lightning https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1055227790100856832
I see Satan propagate like lightning https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1055227790100856832
I say it’s evil but mostly it’s just automatic and inexorable: no one owns the cultural commons (by definition) and everyone with a megaphone just shouts whatever memes advance their personal objectives in the given moment https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1064256082506203137
Globalism produces monoculture because it needs legibility and predictability. Anything distinctive will be tiled over with regularity because regularity can be automated and automation outcompetes humans as it scales.
Automation is a force multiplier on intelligence. An automaton is inferior to a human for the foreseeable future, but a thousand automatons is superior to a thousand humans; they are tireless, consistent, and have lower marginal cost
The charter of growth is growth. Whatever grows best, grows most. Growth desires the scalability of the automaton, so it regularizes humans. It doesn’t do it deliberately, it does it because whatever, in happening, causes itself to happen, happens again
The industrial revolution, like the sexual revolution, is not one paradigm shift, but many. (H/t @Axel_McKibbin). Mechanical looms, internal combustion engines, plastics, microprocessors, and soon, AI are all revolutions. At each stage, there is a great displacement
The principal value of the average person in this ecosystem shifts from producer to consumer. UBI is introduced in order to maintain consumption. The government pays corporations VIA human consumers, the money goes around and around and meanwhile real wealth diminishes
“Be true to yourself” is the perfect basis of moral value for perfect consumers, because your “self” is not a fixed point, it’s a series of context-dependent performances. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1042165684187222016
Advertising can’t dictate your desires for the same reason an insomniac can’t will himself to sleep, but being “true to yourself” is pointless unless other people are able to perceive the self in question. We create this perception through our visible consumer choices
No one designed that, or rather, many people designed it, but it wasn’t ordained by nefarious actors, it just happened to produce feedback loops of consumer growth. It’s a scalable moral value, offensive to no one because “self” is a floating signifier
By the same token, @WokeCapital is not a sinister conspiracy, it’s a strategy that big companies use to protect themselves from small upstart competitors.
All things being equal, a black female programmer is worth more than a white male programmer of equal skill, and since the former is rare, only big companies can afford to find and retain them. Diversity is a racket, but the mark isn’t you, it’s /other companies/
It’s not the case that anyone thinks that’s why they’re doing it, but it’s the unintended side effect that makes it successful. It’s a way to crush competitors by indirection. The chemotherapy strategy: convince everyone to drink poison and be less affected by it than your enemy
Anyway, the moral of all childrens’ entertainment produced by global capital is “be true to yourself”, which when put into practice always means “give in to desire.” recall: https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1096969640834560000
Universalism eats us alive because a decrease in the diversity of opportunities for competition leads to an increase in competition’s ferocity. But when diversity is treated as a virtue it becomes conformity
You’d kill a guy over breadcrumbs if breadcrumbs were the only privilege allowed. When social currency is only achievable through one set of values, then the game truly becomes zero sum. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1051974164737810434
The main reason to cleave to traditional values is that they pull you away from the globalist monoculture, and give you a way to stop hating everyone around you. Of course, the moment you try to use those values to construct an identity for others to consume, they stop working
You get in your little bubble where everyone around you is half a standard deviation in iq up or down and no matter what identity you try to have your meta-identity is to have that identity conspicuously
Personal identity is sacred in modernity because transgression manufactures sanctity, and in adolescence, controlled transgression is the gate we walk through, and in the process we build a consumer identity that becomes a sacred token in the metagame https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1047843472063922176
Complain about narcissism all you want, read the last psychiatrist, but realize: he stopped blogging because his sermons were giving you catharsis you didn’t deserve. “Oh oh oh I’m a horrible narcissist, I’ll post the link so everyone knows I repent” https://twitter.com/logo_daedalus/status/1096115056247484421
And if reactionary politics succeed in overthrowing our memetic overlords (fat chance) it STILL won’t fix the problem because we’ll still be living in the same meta-game. Meritocratic hierarchy will be just as toxic as equality if becomes universal https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1079435849614278657
As long as the capital machine has fuel it will keep turning. It interprets communism as damage and routes around it. It interprets localism as damage and routes around it. It subverts individualism by subsuming it into the metagame
The only meaningful eschatological question is: will capital run out of biofuel before the automation of encephalization is complete? https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1030443960295022592
