What books will help me transcend caring about politics? I'm tired of resentment, defensiveness...

What books will help me transcend caring about politics? I'm tired of resentment, defensiveness, and looking down on people

Getting away from things that oversaturate political topics like social media will help more than literature will. There's so much white noise, non-news now that keeping up with it so regularly is exhausting and toxic.

Sounds like you just need some distance - whether or not you agree with it, you can get degenerative groupthink pounded into you by sheer exposure. The opinion vaccuums we create in our social media profiles doesn't help.

Just read something nihilistic, even if you don't agree with the philosophy it's nice to see media that shrugs its shoulders at how banal following the news has become.

Might want to start with Epicureanism / classical hedonism, then move toward stoicism. Epicureanism posited that a good life was the result of keeping one's needs in accordance with nature - i.e. having a deep appreciate for the simple pleasures in life, or at least those that were most readily available. Anything that causes painful stimuli should be avoided where possible. (in your case, you should probably avoid politics and politically opinionated people, since that's just causing you misery)

Stoicism is a bit more on the cynical side. The stoics believed one should accept the world for what it is and not allow external things to influence one's emotions, regardless of how miserable circumstances may be. In practice, that takes a tremendous amount of willpower, which is why I think Epicurus' doctrines (hedonism) are probably a lot more practical for the average individual.

>Getting away from things that oversaturate political topics like social media will help more than literature will.

This too. Just stop listening to / reading about others' opinions.

>Getting away from things that oversaturate political topics like social media will help more than literature will
I'm sure this is true, but I don't have friends, just books and the Internet.

>yo you're neighbors are all, like, gay and shit who cares what they have to say turn to your inner world
-- Marcus Aurelius

Escapism isn't a solution but it's the only route these days.

You're right, and I didn't mean to say entirely stop paying attention to politics. Just that going on any social media nowadays is a political minefield, with everybody pushing their perceived idea of the truth. It's like everybody forgot that people lie on the internet.

It's best to distance yourself from the noise so when you do read about politics you have the energy to think about it, is what I meant to say.

>I'm tired of resentment, defensiveness, and looking down on people

Sounds like you're not tired of politics but tired of being deluded by Right Wingers.
Come to the side of empathy, fraternity and solidarity

The Illuminatus Trilogy
also, The Principia Discordia
also Catch 22

This op.
I stopped reading or watching the news and it made me a happier person.

Read local news now and then. Look up candidates in local elections. Tune in for a bit during the large elections. Reconnect with the real world around you.

Please fuck off. All political movements attract pathologically resentful people. I don't want to get angry about SJWs, white males, the 1%, corporations, journalists, social scientists, police officers, racists, Christians, Muslims, trannies, or anything like that. I want to love people.

Stop shitposting on /pol/, for one

>empathy
>communism

Yeah, when I think "empathy", Stalin immediately comes to mind.

>I want to love people.

People are broken and miserable, and they'll certainly never bend to your expectations. If you tether your happiness to your ability to get along with other people, you'll soon find yourself every bit as miserable as they are.

Well, unless maybe you're a cuck who just goes along with literally everything other people tell you to do, in which case you might obtain true happiness by lacking an ego of your own.

>won't bend
I didn't say I wanted to change them. I don't love people because they're happy or high functioning either.

I will not be happy saying everybody else is garbage and below me. I'm sure of that.

Prometheus Rising

Piggybacking off this thread

I've never cared much for politics, but after this election I feel like I have to now.

What're some books that'll help me into politics?

pic unrelated. I'm not a weeb, I just love /e/

>I will not be happy saying everybody else is garbage and below me.

I didn't say anyone was below you, just that the human condition is very much fucked. You're human too, so you're at least somewhat prone to the same biases and emotional and psychological issues as other people are.

True happiness in my opinion is apathy, and minimizing contact with other humans as much as possible.

It depends on what you want to learn about. Politics is a huge subject, and getting into the specific details of why the modern world is the way it is takes a lot of reading.

Just looking at recent history, one of my senior classes at uni used "Global Interdependence: the World After 1945" and I found it to be very informative and generally balanced take on how the modern world developed. It's a good place to start.

Worth reading conceptually:
de Maistre
slatestarcodex
Thomas Carlyle
Alasdair MacIntyre
Carl Schmidt
LessWrong
Communist Manifesto
Neoreactionary starter pack (The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land, maybe Moldbug's Gentle Introduction)
Foucolte

If you want to follow the news, you could read NY Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, hackernews, browse /pol/, whatever. No mainstream media source is wholly honest or unbiased, but some are obviously worse than others.

It would be also worth your time to read history.

>minimizing contact with other humans as much as possible
The loneliness from months or years of isolation is hell on me. Either you're a young, edgy moron or a genuine neurological deviant, and either way I'm not taking this advice.

read stirner

>transcend caring about politics
You can numb yourself with an apathetic or generally nihilistic worldview. Shove your head in the sand, avoid any news sources, and pretend everything is okay. This is massively irresponsible, but do as you please.
Alternatively, you could drop the tribal mentality and learn to disagree with other humans while still empathizing with them. It's easier said than done, but to do anything else amounts to intellectual cowardice.

This is terrible advice. If you want to understand real politics and not meme shit read John Rawls and Robert Nozick

...

>Real politics

Pure ideology

Political discourse is almost never intellectual. If you're advocating a worldview, you necessarily have to persuade rather than argue.

Ellison's Invisible Man.

>reading autistic anglo filth

Bullshit. At least in Canada the left is weak ineffectual, rugs willing to let anyone walk over them.


All modern political institutions are horseshit

I wish you were banned

>Yeah, when I think "empathy", Stalin immediately comes to mind.

I emphatize with your distorted ideological perspective

State capitalist scum, did you even pass high school history?

>asking how to avoid twitter bullies
lol

Stirner.

1. Get a job.
2. Join a union.
3. Kill your boss.

The sceptics and Stirner.

read some human science. politics will simply be revealed as the irrelevant pleb practice it is.

>human science
What are you referring to?

Join the Alt-Right

>What are you referring to?
Are you alright?

This man. He is the only one.

It feels like everybody is becoming a twitter bully. I can't stand it.

Then make your own twitter and bully them.

>filename

>What books will help me transcend caring about politics? I'm tired of resentment, defensiveness, and looking down on people

Toasty is 100% resentment.

Principia Discordia is a lot of fun, pretty clever stuff. Excellent rec.

Did you?

...

Yes. Did you?

I respectfully disagree

It's coming...

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations is the correct answer.

"If a thing is in thy own power, why dost thou do it? But if it is in the power of another, whom dost thou blame? The atoms (chance) or the gods? Both are foolish. Thou must blame nobody. For if thou canst, correct that which is the cause; but if thou canst not do this, correct at least the thing itself; but if thou canst not do even this, of what use is it to thee to find fault? For nothing should be done without a purpose."

(Free translation available online).

What also helps is to divide everything by 230 million; the number of adults in the US. "Oh, a tiny speck, an insignificant cluster of people are making noise. Oh well."

Or just realize that there is no fundamental difference between two tribes of chimps (pan troglodytes you fucks) savaging each other and anything that happens in an online comment thread.

schopenhauer

Read what you want to and stop thinking about politics. If you try to kill your mother because you are sexually attracted to her, you only end up piercing her hymen with the barrel of a gun and then rebirthing yourSELF in the process.

>All political movements attract pathologically resentful people
>I want to love people
Well from here it looks like they won't magically become apolitical drones devoid of economic, social or theological interests, peculiarities, and competitions, just for the sake of pleasing you.

That is what the "people" you want to "love", really are.

You're not interested in loving "people", you only want to love your imaginary, ghostly, spooky ideal of them.

>To say in blunt words what an un-man is not particularly hard: it is a man who does not correspond to the concept man, as the inhuman is something human which is not conformed to the concept of the human. Logic calls this a “self-contradictory judgment.” Would it be permissible for one to pronounce this judgment, that one can be a man without being a man, if he did not admit the hypothesis that the concept of man can be separated from the existence, the essence from the appearance? They say, he appears indeed as a man, but is not a man.

>Men that are not men, what should they be but ghosts? Every real man, because he does not correspond to the concept “man,” or because he is not a “generic man,” is a spook. But do I still remain an un-man even if I bring Man (who towered above me and remained otherworldly to me only as my ideal, my task, my essence or concept) down to be my quality, my own and inherent in me; so that Man is nothing else than my humanity, my human existence, and everything that I do is human precisely because I do it, but not because it corresponds to the concept “man”? I am really Man and the un-man in one; for I am a man and at the same time more than a man; i.e. I am the ego of this my mere quality.

Read Stirner.

This guy obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. Why would you screencap/repost that?

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer will purge any thinking man of political interest.

He's not wrong though. That advice was fucking terrible.

I am unhappy staking political interest and casting blame.

Stirner said that spooks and concepts were worthwhile when they benefited you. I would rather try to be forgiving, even moored in empty concepts, than bathe in venom.

Hello user, if you are worn out of frustration managment, I recommend you read Julio Ramon Ribeyro, he was latinoamerican writer and it will give you the perspective you are looking for.

Give better advice. Rawls sucks

If you want to love people that bad, then you'll have no problem with being bathed in their venom, too.

I feel the same, OP. Maybe it's possible to care about politics without becoming embittered by it.

Actual books about politics. The WWE cable news Trump Twitter spam isn't politics.

good pic, it implies that nietzsche needs to blind himself to be able to sleep after he has abandoned the lord

Politics become much more bearable when you separate facts from narratives.

Once you overcome the stupid fucking narratives pushed by both sides you can sit back and laugh while the sheep are herded by their favored side.

You are also a sheep. You are also getting your news somewhere.

>Politics become much more bearable when you separate facts from narratives.
babbys first grownup thought

how unique and smart you are

wow that reddit screencap was real

>If I read more books I'll stop thinking everyone is an idiot?

lolol i've got news for you

>implying that multiple sources of news do not exist and that they all have the same spin on the news

>this butthurt
I'm not sure why this triggered you so much user.

how to win arguments and stop shaking when angry when someone says something mean to you?

You want to love people? Leave politics, find the spiritual world.

1 Corinthians 13:13

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

>I'm not sure why this triggered you so much user.
But how can you then be so sure that it has "triggered" me at all? Was it perhaps your revolutionary approach of "separating facts from narratives" that was at work here?

Embrace material eliminativism

Reality is just meat hooked up to a bunch of machines

>Embracing any sort of materialism

Have fun being nihilistic, bitter and resentful for the rest of your life then.

kek, youre so mad

see, but it's no skin off my back if you go on with your life misunderstanding completely the conversation that we have just led. You however, will have gone on as such, and most importantly, you'd be unaware that it was so.

you are a meme

I do have a problem with it, which is why I made this thread.

It's more the people saying mean things. Everywhere people are blaming each other, blaming me, and it's hard to be past it, even if I don't respect the people talking. It's very tempting to be hateful and defensive, but I know gorging on anger will leave me feeling resentful and ineffectual.

I'm considering this. I've generally been getting over-sentimental and unhinged recently, it's odd.

>projecting

browse pol until all politics is nonsense

This must be a joke

hey pal could you point me to a successful anarchist revolution :^)

This somewhat happened to me.

Went from a centrist to very, very far right and eventually became apolotical and somewhat Nietzschean. Still lean to extremes, but in different ways.

you sounds so fucking annoying

Nah, I mostly keep my thoughts to myself.

Not that I know of. :^)

What is specific about politics for that? If you're transcending politics you might as well transcend the unpleasant emotions you're divesting from politics to escape

You just need to avoid social media type political discourse. Although that's easier said than done, seeing as 99% of news outlets are like social media.

Don't watch TV. Distant yourself from news and social media and avoid conversing with others about politics. This way you'll be less exposed to it and less preoccupied with it. Invest your time in your hobbies and fields of interest, and remind yourself that people from all the political spectrum are stupid, and it's a waste of time to be worried or angry about things you have no ability to affect.

I'm also sick of politics, of fearing decapitation by psychopathic muslim boysoldiers, reality-TV elections and those reductive social arguments of "alt-right" vs. "SJW" and all that crap. People don't even know what they really believe anymore, they're just walking memepersons. You can't respect women without being a "beta" or "libcuck" and you can't hate Islam or differ on tumblr-tier gender ideas without being a nazi. Fuck this.

Pic related surely will help you. Voluntary isolation from tiresome human affairs to live a better life.

>I do have a problem with it, which is why I made this thread.
Well, if you want to love people but cannot because of what they are, you could try changing them.

Oh, wait, that would require politics. Politics to end politics, at that!

You want contradictory shit that does not and can not exist.

Either you stop that or you learn to enjoy this misery.

Lol wow, what a fucking pseud, back to lebbit.

Correct

>if you want to love people but cannot because of what they are, you could try changing them.
I could also accept or ignore what I dislike about them.

Read cozy naturalist authors. I'm reading Sue Hubbell right now, comfy af. I don't care about politics at all, I live in my own world where I feel happy, mad or miserable just for the things that happen in my mind, not in the real world or what people say.

Feels good.