How do you cope with the fact that everything is phony (inb4 dismissed for being like Holden)?

How do you cope with the fact that everything is phony (inb4 dismissed for being like Holden)?

Literary theory is bs made up so that people can leech off of academia and get easy degrees.

Social scientists are idiots and weaponised by dishonest journalists as the new secular prophets telling people what to think / why they're shit.

Morality is never practised. A politician who kills innocent people is more popular than one who says politically incorrect things.

So many current novels are merely narcissistic barely disguised memoirs or written by people with zero life experience.

Science and maths are practised mostly within hideously subsidised and bloated academic institutions.

Sex and portrayals of success are shoved in your face wherever you go through songs and pictures. But you're not allowed to say you want any of it.

90+ % of jobs could be done by everyone and only recruit based on looks and personality.

Literature is not an oasis, not one bit.

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Fuck you're a whingy moronic cunt/

EFVRYTING IS SPEWKS XDDDDDD

Here's a hint: stop worrying about what's fucking real and just b urself.

Nah mate, he's got a point. Writing and lit is not as based as it once was. Once men wrote for humanity. Now women write for book clubs.

A lot of what you say has always been true. Read Hesiod's Works and Days for example, it's not long. I'm sure you're well aware that this stuff isn't new but Works and Days is really good.

There is a lot of bullshit. If you read any academic journal (in humanities), most of the articles are more or less shit. Literally poorly written, full of summaries/quotations from the work under discussion to pad it out, elaborate heaping up of jargon to dress up observations that are insipid, or pointless, or incomprehensible. Generally all three.

It seems like academia in the humanities is just an advanced version of undergrad. You bullshit papers. I actually know an English professor and he doesn't even have time to read as much as he would like or what he would want to, because he has to spend so much time writing and "researching" (reading people who write about the primary "texts" under consideration), not to mention preparing courses and grading papers.

I do think academia in the humanities is a giant spook. It's not the sort of observation I'd made in real life, though, because it just sounds like a cop-out.

Just listen to this absolute bullocks from a book called "Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library". He's discussing the prologue to Macrobius' Saturnalia:

"Legerim has returned, that obscure tense of a common word. It is a perfect subjunctive. It refers to past reading. But it also clearly future in force. The sentence is situated in the present: "non opperior ut promoveas ... sed ago ut ego quoque tibi legerim ..." Macrobius is impatient to ensure that his son's future be improved by his own past. And so he sees to it that this past be converted into his son's future: "that I have read..." turns into "that I have written (this book) ..." For the sentence continues by explaining that Macrobius has written down his reading for his son."

You don't need to be into classics to perceive that this author is talking out of his ass and saying nothing particularly meaningful. You probably would need to be into classics to get a kek out of his referring to the perfect subjunctive as "an obscure tense".

This guy is a respected professor at the University of Toronto. That was just a random sentence from his book.

>Writing and lit is not as based as it once was.
>Once men wrote for humanity. Now women write for book clubs.

Jesus, sometimes I can't tell if Veeky Forums is joking or just oblivious to how cringy they are

OP, are you a phoney?

(same poster continuing)

The original purpose of literary criticism was perfectly honorable: to establish the Authoritative version of a work in a time when everything was copied by hand, but preserving the variants as well just in case you were wrong; and to study grammar, history, mythology, etc, so you could write commentaries on a work that would clear up the difficult passages, or help the reader get something more out of it.

That was over 2,000 years ago.

Now, criticism is a profession, and most of them aren't interesting in clearing anything up, they just want to heap up a congeries of asinine exegesis for its own sake, to stay employed.

I wonder if academics ever feel sad, that no sane human being will read a thing they have written.

There still is good, honest academic being done in the humanities of course. A new edition of the Suda, the University of Michigan's Dictionary of Middle English, all the papyrological stuff, etc. But a lot of it is nonsense.

>Morality is never practised. A politician who kills innocent people is more popular than one who says politically incorrect things.

You use THAT as example? Eww.

>Majority of people think being racist is wrong
>these same people torture and eat animals
> "Bu...but animal lives don't matter"
>People ignore the fact that eating meat is the leading cause of rekt climate change
> When climate change literally kills HUMANS

Statistically, chances are you eat meat OP. Unless you aren't against torture,murder, ugly fat people, and the death of humans, you are a phoney yourself. So seeing as you are probably a phoney, you should at least be able to sympathise with other fake fuks.

The professor is making a legitimate point. He's making a very convaluted argument to state that the father is using his learning to pass it on to his son and uses the medium of grammar to prove the observation. It's actually pretty nice desu

I think it would be easier if people had honesty regarding if they are phoney or not— I'm a phoney and, I have a few friends who also admit to being phoney. It's nice when people have that honesty and self awareness.

>just b urself XD

what a joke. people have always written dogshit for book clubs. Nietzsche complains about it, Schopenhauer complains about it, in fact Schopenhauer's mother made a living writing this shit AND had a larger readership during her life that he did.

We don't remember shit books because they are shit, so we end up with this perception of the past as a time with lots of excellent books when in reality most of them were even worse, plebbier shit than YAshit we have today.

That's not an argument, it's what anybody who could read would take from the passage.

Here's the original with my quick and dirty translation:

Hinc est quod mihi quoque institutione tua nihil antiquius aestimatur, ad cuius perfectionem compendia longis amfractibus anteponenda ducens moraeque omnis inpatiens non opperior p4ut per haec sola promoveas quibus ediscendis naviter ipse invigilas, sed ago ut ego quoque tibi legerim, et quicquid mihi, vel te iam in lucem edito vel antequam nascereris, in diversis seu Graecae seu Romanae linguae voluminibus elaboratum est, id totum sit tibi scientiae supellex, et quasi de quodam litterarum peno, si quando usus venerit aut historiae quae in librorum strue latens clam vulgo est aut dicti factive memorabilis reminiscendi, facile id tibi inventu atque depromptu sit.

This is why I judge nothing more important than your education, towards the completion of which, as I think short-cuts preferable to long and winding ways, and as I am impatient of delay, I do not wait for you to make your way over this ground by yourself, though you work diligently and intelligently, but bring what I have read to you myself, and whatever I have worked over, whether after or before your birth, in various volumes in the Greek and Roman languages, shall be all for you as a furniture of learning, and if ever you have need of remembering some history or something memorably done or said, hiding in a heap of books, this will be like a pantry of literature, so it will be easy to find and produce.

humanities articles are better grammar and vocabulary.

stem articles are written by 12 year-old who can hardly speak but yet manage to think that they are pedagogical in their communication. Their topography is equally awful, since they think that it is enough to use latex to have a good article. The best part is when they leave a baseline stretch of 2.

Now the content. The stem kids think they have content because they cling to their fantasy of the relevance of the formal deductive reasonings, with a bit of induction to validate their speculations.

The humanities people at least do not pretend to discover the truth and bring it to the plebs. They share their opinions and know the limit of their endeavor.
The stem kids get butthurt very quickly from the way the people humanities communicate. But then nobody cares much about what stem kids talk about, since hardly anybody is willing to embrace their autism.

This.

It's just survivor bias.

You only see the best works of the past, because the worst of it never makes.

Why are most of the people who come out of Auschwitz hard-boiled motherfuckers? Because the experience made them strong, or because they were strong to begin with and the weakest died?

>a politician who kills innocent people is more popular than one who says politically incorrect things

/pol/ pls go

This is not the professor's fault, blame it on a retarded system that measures productivity in terms of research produced and pays like shit if you're not willing to write a bullshit article every six months.

I'm beginning my academic path and people KNOW they're presenting you poorly thought (sometimes for the sake of brevity, since a lot of it will be presented in one congress or another in which you'll have 5 min to explain your Phd thesis) string of semi-related quotations and that absolutely no one cares about them, the key here is finding time to actually work on your research (which can be quite difficult when you're teaching 4 schools and studying all the shit you're required to, though I don't know how much of a problem this is in the US)

The thing I suppose you know you're aware of, friendo, is how fucking difficult translation can be, specially from pre-middle ages book, since everything was rather local and words that only had a slight relation to the original were used to facilitate day to day life, but moving them to texts is a whole other thing.

See: Alethea, poiesis, ars (honestly, this is probably my biggest offender, I truly believe art is shit because neither ars or tekné fully describe anything close to our western, post-vasarian comprehension of art)

I mean, holy shit, we have examples on this board itself, when spookmemers don't now Stirner's original word, "Geist", means a whole other world of things, specially for a student under Hegel

>A politician who kills innocent people is more popular than one who says politically incorrect things.

>implying it's not one of the principal jobs of the politician to kill, it is one of the main features of holding the violence monopoly, to kill selectively to preserve that monopoly

>implying it is the job of the politician to say politically incorrect things and mindlessly rabble rouse rather than carefully saying those things which will cultivate and preserve their power base

This is why GHWB, GB and the swinging dicks of the party infrastructure loathe Trump, he has no idea what it means to be a politician; he doesn't understand the viciousness necessary to be a leader nor does he possess the propriety necessary to hold that viciousness from the public eye

"build a wall hur dur", Kissinger must be rolling over in his grave or his hospice bed if he's still alive

Cringe!!!!

>I do think academia in the humanities is a giant spook.

I agree. I was recently considering an academic career in social sciences. But I checked out what those people talk/write about and I felt sick. A lot of it is just high school tier analysis with no depth, just more references. And politically it's a huge circle jerk of leftist pro-immigration rhetoric (the trending topic in Europe now).
Nothing thought provoking, no original ideas, just recycling the same old shit. And tons of books and articles which nobody will ever read.

I know that as an adult you simply have to learn to pretend somewhat and deal with the nonsense of this world, but some things are just too much. Academia is one of those fields where I just can't do it without feeling kinda sick. I suppose I learned to take education seriously I still can't let go.

warosu.org/lit/?task=search&ghost=yes&search_text=How do you cope with the fact that everything is phony

is this a new meme

Serial paper productivity is just the manifestation of a deeper symptom, that the worker these days has a much more abstract job but is still judged on pretty much factory terms.

So true. Victorian era novels were so fucking bad. The fact that Jane Eyre survived just shows how bad the rest of the garbage was. I've read a few of the forgotten novels from the era, and I can say that John Green easily writes far more affecting, human stories than all of them. I'm not exaggerating.

And old poetry. Oh lord. Poetry is so much better off now than almost ever. We don't have a shakespeare, sure, but there are enough readable poets to outnumber the ones worth reading throughout the entirety of the English 18th century.

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