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Americans have been larping as Romans for as long as America has been around, and itâs probably no surprise that the most popular larp these days is Caligula
I hear a lot of you speaking your allegiance to the wisdom of the past, to tradition, or to Greek or Roman thinkers, but I donât think you really believe in their teachings.
I think your tradition and your Greco-Roman philosophy is a cargo cult and my first exhibit is the fact that you are reading these words on a smart phone (is Greco-Roman like Judeo-Christian? Strange how empires routinely become enthralled to their vassals)
Modern monkeys are in no way the ancestors of humans and modern philosophies are in no way instances of those old beliefs. Those who pretend to be traditional will tell you that nothing essential has changed. This claim is only compelling because it is patently absurd
The only things that are true are the brute facts of observed experience. Everything else is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, which is to say, a lie. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025738936948150275
As we increasingly learn, the brain and the senses themselves are both quite faulty and fault-tolerant, which means that perceptual discrepancies in observed reality are âsmoothedâ out by subconscious faculties in order to create a âcoherentâ semantic model of the world
Itâs not really possible to overstate how much you become what you behold. Cognition is not separable from mediation, and as the nature and saturation of mediation changes, so does the nature of cognition
You are phenomenologically different from your ancestors, not only because of your smartphone-mediated consciousness, but especially because of that. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1103346346008834059
The multithreaded CPU is the cognitive paradigm of the smartphone age. The CPU executes many different calculations, both in virtual, INTERLEAVED parallel, and as you live and rely on CPUs, your thinking, your SELF becomes multithreaded and parallelized
I was thinking about why so many old beliefs have lost their power, why "mythology" now means "fantasy", why old myths are so hard to believe nowadays. It's because the MIRACULOUS has become MUNDANE
You wake up, you look through a magic prism, invisible lightning crackles through the air. You trace runes with your fingers on the glass and you psychically speak to your friends a thousand miles away
Farmers spray magic potions on their crops and they yield a THOUSAND times as much food they did two centuries ago. Wizards summon beasts made of metal that burn the dead souls of ancient monsters, and they carry us seven miles above the earth 100 times faster than a man can run
People get resurrected from death every single day using a Lazarus charm called a defibrillator. Omnipresent oracles can answer any question instantly from anywhere on earth.
We mine the souls of ancient monsters from under the ground and use it to fabricate objects with impossible shapes. We have wizards who can pull the beating heart out of one man and put it in the chest of another. Our generals have spells that can level entire cities
I could go on, but you get the point. Almost no one understands how these things work. It's magic and compared to that, I'm sorry, but old stories about magic bows and arrows or casting duplicate on a fish just don't impress anyone and if you say it does, you're larping
You all mock the neckbeard atheist fedoras and they deserve mockery because they traded a rich and beautiful soteriology for a sad impoverished one, but they exist because myth has lost its power because our mundanities are more magical than our mythologies
To really "go back" to trad life you would have to trade actual magic (i.e., technology) for the ability to believe in magic, a belief that was once possible because magic ceases to impress us as soon as it becomes commonplace.
You don't want to go back to the trad way of life, not at all, you just want to post pictures on social media of "your" girl in a wheat field. It's trad because you didn't use a filter.
No, that's not fair. That's not what you want. What you want is a myth you can believe in honestly and without cognitive dissonance because moral strength, strength of will, only comes from belief in something appears real and true to you https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1034801320958386177
Redemption from sin is not an appealing proposition because most people do not feel themselves to be sinful. The sins that trouble us are our personal failures to focus and follow through on our plans. We don't want forgiveness, we want to be better machines!
The animating myth of machinic society is the myth of ever more magic; this myth does not soothe our emotions but each day we make a 100 decisions, and each time, EACH TIME, we choose machine society, because it's obviously so much better in the brute, material, observable sense
The companion to the fact of technological development is the myth (and it is a myth) of social, moral, or behavioral progress. Our lives have gotten materially better and spiritually worse, in fact our lives are spiritually worse BECAUSE they are materially better
Man develops virtue hormetically, that is, in response to privation and pain, and in particular, in response to privation at a steady, tolerable dose. The virtue of older men was precisely their misery, and precisely in proportion to their misery
https://twitter.com/tomxhart/status/1121694348544966656
https://twitter.com/tomxhart/status/1121694348544966656
To find spiritual satisfaction, we absolutely need a source of mental anguish. When one is not present, we invent one. When food is scarce and disease is common, we call that god's plan, but when times are fat, then we must invent new divine plans
Religion shrank because the miraculous became mundane, and the myth of moral progress swells to fill the the void that it left, indicting us with the original sins of "prejudice" -- inalienable facets of human nature that are not ontologically grounded by miracles
What draws us into religion is a sense of sinfulness; salvation isn't the draw of Christianity, sin is the draw, specifically: it suffuses you in a narrative which allows you to feel sinful, it justifies and rationalizes the pervasive feeling that "something is wrong"
And if you find yourself liking in this teaching, then notice that I'm doing the same thing, I'm narrativizing that feeling, whether we call it alienation or original sin or structural racism or tfw no gf, it's hellbaked in, it's not going away https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1086446012594438144
Ah, that's the part that bristles. Trad larping is one more ridiculous and false soteriology, because all soteriologies are false, and the alchemy of religion isn't to produce salvation or virtue, it's to produce HOPE of salvation, which it does by creating a taxonomy of sin
By the same token, there is no teaching that can alleviate the need for soteriology. As long as we are materially comfortable, we are going to have this problem. The religion of the future will be whatever salvation myth best aligns with technological development
Whatever else you may find odious about my thinking, we are in an adjacent ideological space because we all sense the same thing: the prevailing soteriological myth is setting us up as a scapegoat, and we desperately need a better myth; at the least, the old myths need retooling
