Savitri Devi

> you're wrong cuz you're wrong

not an argument nor a denial

>not an argument because I can't comprehend a simple thought
Okay.

This post is longer than it needs to be, but whatever.

I don't even disagree. I am 100% aware of the problems of authentic old-world enchantment. I also don't think unbridled capitalism is the solution, because it reproduces enchantment without getting at the core of what people really want: a sense of the transcendent.

Modern SJW fanaticism is just as odious as alt-right nostalgia. The AR is more interesting because its ideology is so overt, and because it emerges in response to the regressive left, which in turn is still responding to even older fantasies which SD was a part of. The red pill is the most interesting game in town at the moment. The most interesting aspects of the red pill to me are not its political dimensions but its practicing and self-improvement narratives.

The desire for a transcendental component of life cannot be abolished. But it can't be commodified or rendered political, either. Our reality today is capitalism but despite all of these things that we can enjoy we are nevertheless still unhappy. It's not all capitalism's fault. To some degree that responsibility lies with us. We are stuck in a place where capitalism is not enough and neither are politics. I would say some measure of sympathy does not sound all that crazy.

It's an age of transition like that. Politics doesn't have all of our answers, and that which has exceeded politics - capitalism - doesn't have them either. Something new is required. In the absence of that thing people are going to continue seeking, because that is what people do.

When all of those forms of seeking seem to be shut down - either because they fail to really impress (capitalism) or because they fail to really make us feel guilty (progressivism), then we will reach for the heroic (alt-rightism). The fact is I have a great deal of sympathy for people precisely because they are so in love with the idealistic images in their heads. And because it is very difficult to abolish those without a kind of internal disciplinary practice. Pic related has yet to write a sentence I would disagree with.

This essay is quite long but worth reading.

global.handelsblatt.com/opinion/no-such-thing-as-the-global-village-681703

:|

>The desire for a transcendental component of life cannot be abolished.
> I also don't think unbridled capitalism is the solution

>implying the ultimate goal of capitalism is not the creation of brain chemistry altering pharmaceuticals designed to rid us from all our innate spiritual needs and longing for transcendentals and reducing every value system to sheer economic materialism

>implying the ultimate goal of capitalism is not the creation of brain chemistry altering pharmaceuticals designed to rid us from all our innate spiritual needs and longing for transcendentals and reducing every value system to sheer economic materialism

I don't understand what you're saying or if you're being ironic. Do you think the creation of brain-altering chemicals that got rid of human spiritual needs, and the reduction of everything to economic materialism would be a good thing? I don't. It's not even possible. And even if it were - soma - I don't think that would be a good thing at all. I think it would be horrible.

The point is that people feel that life *already has been reduced to sheer economic materialism,* and that is what is fueling extremist thought on both sides: hysterical Marxists or hysterical fascists. Economic determinism - the omega point of liberalism - is why there is such a schism going on today.

There is no ultimate goal of capitalism. Capital is only an accelerator of cultural *practices.* Whatever people want, it gives them more of that. It doesn't work as an ideology in and of itself anymore, because in the end it's just individual people pursuing desires that I would say make them feel more guilt than pleasure.

I would say that people want collectives, they want feelings of unity, positivity, and practice. These are interesting new ideas. Permanent revolution under Marxism was a modernist/20C way of doing this. I would say that's finished now. Permanent decadence/irony/cynicism/whatever are 21C ways of avoiding this. It won't work either.

People don't get *rid* of innate spiritual needs. Those innate spiritual needs are a fundamental component of human psychology that can be repressed, or infinitely satiated, but you don't get rid of them. We desire things. That's not going to change. But an infinite universe of desirers desiring only leads to the kind of faux-enlightenment consumptive that we call globalization.

I'm not against capitalism. I'm for it. What I am against is precisely this idea that somehow it will alleviate all of our problems, as much as mass politics once promised to be able to do so. Cynical faith in capitalism is only the inverse of an excessively romantic faith in mass politics. Two sides of the same coin.

So I don't know what Karl Marx wearing sunglasses is supposed to mean, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with it whether you are being ironic or sincere. Marx-with-sunglasses is the embodiment of cynicism. In that sense it is an utterly perfect image of what I think the problem is today: the desire to have our cake and eat it too. But I can't tell if you're being ironic or not so I'll stop there. It doesn't really matter.

Let me make this even more clear: capitalism itself is not a viable ideology, unless it is understood as an ideology of total and utter cynicism. Capitalism gives you whatever you want, and the person who benefits from it most of all is the guy who understands his entire life as a kind of kid infinitely browsing in a candy shop, having a little taste of this, a little taste of that.

That guy sucks.

Capital is about desire. For what? For whatever. At the moment, we understand it with reference to a sense of liberalism which I would say is fully and entirely bankrupt in an intellectual sense. It runs on pleasure and pleasure alone, full stop.

People know this and they want something more. They want the transcendent; they want the spiritual. Whether that is understood in terms of esoteric religious practices, a sense of communal belonging, a sense of working to improve things, whatever. They don't escape. They want meaning, and that is a very difficult thing to do. And because it is difficult, they avoid it. Or they futurize. Or they romanticize. Or whatever the fuck.

However things proceed from here, they sure as fuck aren't going to be done by anyone wearing cool guy sunglasses. And least of all, Karl Marx.

These things require thought, not memes.

>mfw he's writing walls of text in response to my weaksauce memery
I agree with your views user, I was trying to make a funny.

So the world is having a collective existential crisis? If this is the case is human progress is inversely proportional to spirituality?

>That guy sucks.
Why? Is it not better that he's not constantly bothered by inexplicable spiritual longings, constantly trying to find the answer to the unknown question? His life is devoid of these problems and he is ultimately happier for it.

...

No worries. I take these things too seriously. But honestly it's more that I just enjoy the conversation also. Producing text-walls too is pleasurable...

I would say so, yes, in a sense. But the worst part for me is really that we are afraid to admit that that is what it is, which for me is fucking heartbreaking. We are trapped between two places: the impossibility of saying, fuck yes, let's build an awesome futurist state (because of the memory of totalitarianism), and the impossibility of saying, no, we don't need that, it's dangerous, or we don't want that. We do. We need a spiritual/transcendental component in our lives but we are fucking wrecked by all of them, because of memories of violence, destruction, colonialism...all of this. But we can't live in denial, either, and covering it up with status symbols, cheeseburgers, whatever...not really. Some people can, I suppose, but in my experience it's not really sincere. Enjoyment in the classical liberal sense isn't enough.

There are exceptions. But I think in the long run very few people really do lead lives devoid of existential problems.

I should say this. I do not believe that a life based solely around the imitation of Christ or yogic practices or wearing black sweaters and writing about nihilism is somehow enlightened. Not necessarily. I think the issue today is cynicism, and people aren't really happy being cynical. Cynicism is just enlightened false understanding. But we also live in a world where there is no true understanding.

Ideology is what happens when we combine the worst aspects of these things, we invent cures: politically, consumptively, however. And I'm writing all this in response to that earlier user who I think also understood this: people desire the transcendent, and it seems to be thwarted everywhere.

We are in a place today where we can neither be romantic escapists nor cynical ironists. I think out of that tension something new and interesting can be produced, but only if it is engaged with some sincerity. It is a profoundly un-romantic (and un-funny) way of looking at things. Nobody is 'required' to engage with any of this. I only write these things because I think, deep down, people are much more alike than they are different, and even apparently happy people wrestle with them also. Life experience seems to confirm this for me.

I don't have any answers. But I seem to have an obsessive personal interest in fuckface answers to complex problems. I think the internet and memes and much else confirms that, for all of our obsession with liberalism and difference, people are actually revealing themselves to be much more alike than different. That to me is interesting.

>I can't tell if you're being ironic or not so I'll stop.
>It doesn't really matter.

Marxposter postironic jackass BTFO

She is a woman

I should maybe just say this: life itself *is* an existential problem, and it doesn't have a solution. Neither sex nor death nor lebensraum nor ice cream sandwiches will suffice.

Life has to feel meaningful, and the two poles of this - mass politics, or global consumerism - don't work. All of this is done in the shadow of the proclamation of the death of God (and a return to old-time religion will also not work.)

I agree with Sloterdijk all day on this. What is required is *practice.* Capital accelerates cultural processes, but in the present age people don't really know what they want. Indeed, they are so overwhelmed by the number of things that they *could* want that capitalism alone seems like the way to go.

But the internet and other things have taught us that all of this is a recursive process. We are all a part of a big squishy recursive machine that we call the planetary economy. We can't all have everything that we want. We also can't live our lives thinking that we will never have any of the things that we want. And we can't live just contingently just constantly deferring the massive stuff that is going on under the hood: that we're going to die in this place, that the cavalry is not coming, and that Trump isn't actually going to make America great again. It's not about America anymore.

So I think practices are important. It's why I think a move back in the direction of nationalism is a good thing if only because it reminds people that they are embedded in cultures, that these cultures in their differentiation is a good thing.

What prevents those nations from going to war for economic reasons? Sadly, nothing. The fantasy of 1%er global consumerism aren't going away. Maybe we will wind up going to war again so that some people can continue to live lives of deferral, possessing all that they desire. The rest will be a disaster.

It's completely liberated desires that are the problem. Humans I think work and function and feel better when their desires are circumscribed in local practices: indeed, this is to my mind what becoming the ubermensch is about. The ubermensch is an artist-acrobat; but you can do this by being the world's greatest sushi chef.

Mass politics and globalization are a horribly effective combination. WW2 was about competing ideologies, but if there is a third war later on, or a series of little wars, they will all be about one ideology - liberalism - competing with itself. And those wars won't prove who had the truth, only who had the biggest weapons and was prepared to stomach the biggest losses.

It's a fucked-up world but I don't feel as confused about things as I used to.

>dont orientalize her, bro
She did it herself, she's Greek

>Nobody is 'required' to engage with any of this.
>I don't have any answers.
>tfw can't find any entry points for an edgy contrarian response
You're killing me here.

>WW2 was about competing ideologies

stop

Capitalism is the engine behind technological progress which rapidly changes our lives and is ultimately going to cause a massive paradigm shift at the point of tech singularity, rendering many contemporary life concepts entirely obsolete. It's certainly not clear, whether this ultimately will be good or not, but in my eyes the desire to reach this stage of societal development as soon as possible through devoting yourself to capitalistic practices is well justified.

I'm right. It was about Communisn vs Fascism vs Capitalism. But why do we fight these wars? I can't give you the answer; but that war, war never changes.

>It was about Communisn vs Fascism vs Capitalism

I'd rather give you a cheerful or seductive solution, but there really aren't any. The internet is the fucking hantavirus for special snowflakes and that is a *good* thing. Nothing in the world is easier than giving fuckhead advice. There are no mass solutions.

Meaningful action is done, I would say, with a kind of reference to the universal. We have to believe that what we are doing is meaningful (read: transcendent, spiritual, etc.) but also knowing that that meaning is to some degree ultimately non-transferable, to either a political realm or a commodified realm. Zizek is right about a lot of stuff - I Would Prefer Not To - but but beyond a certain point you also have to affirm *something.* He's good about doing the rescue-op from the Matrix, but because in the actual world there is no Matrix, the way forward from that is Nietzsche all the way.

Capitalism tells us more about what people want than politics, but in the end it leaves the door open for us to determine what makes us happy. And I would say that the meaning of that happiness is a kind of work, a kind of practice. Perhaps a more enlightened kind of society would not necessarily privilege individual pleasure above everything else; but I don't want to get carried away.

Long story short: cynicism is not the way. Cynicism hides the disappointment with romanticism, but the more it gets hidden and repressed, the more it grows. The revolution is not coming. Nor I think can we be lovey-dovey gurus either. That's dangerous and misguided for other reasons.

Don't be ridiculous. It obviously was about competing ideologies. Fascism, communism, liberalism. Liberalism won, and the reason it won is because *all* of those ideologies proceed from liberalism: that the individual stands anterior to society. Marxism and fascism are simply the left and right outgrowths of liberalism. Planetary capitalism is the result. It is why we increasingly observe its incompatibility with democracy. The core of liberalism - capital - is more liberal than we would like to be. We found two ways of trying to reign it in: a bogus 'permanent revolution' (Stalinism) or fascist warfare (the continuation of politics by other means).

Liberalism wins because it gives people the freedom not to choose what they want (the transcendent), but ten million other things instead. Capitalism in its global mode is that process extended to infinity.

I can go on like this all day but it will be better if we have common ground.

I would agree with basically all of this. I would only want to pay attention to one thing:

>devoting yourself to capitalistic practices is well justified

Those practices, to my mind, belong to the cycle and network of capitalism, but ultimately I think cannot be purely for the sake of producing money themselves. My reason for this is not only existential (that is to say, because it is psychologically healthy for human beings) but also because as technology continues to develop, virtually everything that can be done via automation will be done so; the robots will be far more amenable to planetary capital than humans will be. And in that system there really will be no room for tortured alienation and politically romantic solutions outside of terrorism. The Islamic State, for instance, is not going away, regardless of what Trump says. Globalization is going to manufacture its own dissidents at the same rate it manufactures incidentally satisfied consumers. The issue for me is that that world looks like smaller and smaller numbers of people rising above increasingly dystopian cyber-hellscapes with perfectly good reasons for doing so: because life will suck at the bottom, and so the reason for not wanting to be there will justify the reasons for trying to sell your way out of the system. The ends justify the means.

I would like to say that a more enlightened culture would help and encourage people to learn what it means to be human. To life with technology as a means to furthering human goals, human enhancement, human possibilities. I am for transhumanism and against what seems to me like a far more real state of affairs: a class society in which there are those who own the robots and those who work for the robots.

It's like the Sorcerer's Apprentice to me. In the end the Sorcerer does not come back, and the brooms finally get rid of Mickey. Or that Mickey just drowns hoping the door will open and that the Sorcerer will return, but we know that's not going to happen. It doesn't prevent him from drowning, though. It just means that he gets to drown thinking, perhaps, of some line from Jacques Derrida.

Anyways this is really just my own thoughts on some of this stuff. I'm basically in agreement with everything you are saying.

And I could be wrong, of course. I don't really know about this stuff. It's just the worldview I've evolved.

>Communisn vs Fascism vs Capitalism

It was about money

>a class society in which there are those who own the robots and those who work for the robots
This is an inevitable stage on our way in to the bright AI/robotics filled future.

You're missing the point.

First of all, 'capitalism' itself is not an ideology in those other two were. The word is *liberalism.* And all of them are ultimately about political responses to capitalism. In the end, liberalism won because it was the *most capitalistic system,* and because capitalism is - at the moment - the most powerful force there is.

The reason we are having this conversation is because that planetary capitalism - globalization - has won. And people today are all fucked up about this.

So in a sense you are right, that that war was was about money: but the victors of that war are in an even more complicated place now, which is justifying the terms of their success in ways that are politically corrosive. Capitalism gives everything to the individual who can afford it, and that guy performs a kind of benefaction by proclaiming or announcing their enjoyment.

But it's almost always going to be a bogus kind of enjoyment. Real enjoyment is not happiness, it is a kind of *suffering that one enjoys.* It's not about the relief from suffering, it's about embracing the suffering that feels to you *good,* positive, life-affirming, and so on.

Things both are and aren't about money anymore, which is why these conversations are so complicated today. People don't want money, they want pleasure, happiness, enjoyment, fulfilment. And there are no natural or rationalistic limits on these. After the big postmodern experiment we have even become opposed to doing so (it's oppression! &c).

It *is* all about money. But to endorse this as if that were a good thing is total cynicism, just as much as rejecting it in favor of some universal is total *naivete* (or romanticism).

De-ideologizing ourselves is part of the job. Rebuilding our own personal ideologies sui generis is the existential great filter. It's important to understand these things. For me at least it's what philosophy in the 21C is all about. If philosophy is to have any value at all it has to be about what it means to say that life is worth living (or not).

Capitalism is not an ideology. Liberalism is. Capitalism is what succeeded it. If we say that capitalism is an ideology, it can only be an ideology of cynicism, the ideology that makes a big deal of not being an ideology. That too is ideology. These are things that people do in order to avoid dealing with the existential stuff. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but neither does a lot of things that people do. We do what we want because it makes us feel good. But the drugs aren't working anymore and we have to keep upping the dosage. And it's going to end in disaster that will probably not be explicable on its own terms, or by the survivors. Who may at best be able to pick up the pieces and repeat the process.

Not only that, she had a dick too.

Yep. No doubt. Life will be good, very good, for those on one side of it. Robotics are going to change a lot of things. I hope the guys on the post-scarcity/transhuman side of things are benevolent and enlightened. I sincerely hope they aren't fuckfaces.

Most of that really sci-fi stuff will happen after I'm gone. I won't be there to see it. But I don't really have any doubts about how those things are going to unfold either. People will get to space eventually and do cool stuff. I hope the inevitable uplifting process comes back for the less fortunate parts of the world too. I'm not so all-in on the Neetch that grotesque poverty, mismanagement of resources, tribalism, whatever else can also be affirmed as part of the great AI/transhuman blast-off.

If that happens. You might like this article.

unz.com/akarlin/short-history-of-3rd-millennium/

One person's post-apoc is another person's Gibson-cyberpunk is another person's GITS-cyberpunk. It's all capitalism, though. And how humans respond to it.

>the most powerful force there is.

no love is

It's strong nuclear, you liberal arts retard.

you will see

I hope you're right, user. I would like very much for you to be right.

>There is no ultimate goal of capitalism. Capital is only an accelerator of cultural *practices.* Whatever people want, it gives them more of that. It doesn't work as an ideology in and of itself anymore, because in the end it's just individual people pursuing desires that I would say make them feel more guilt than pleasure.
this is not capitalism, it is really life. and it is not even bad, only ineffective to be happy.

no the spook of morality together with the pragmatism of avoiding pain and getting direct pleasure.

>people this
>people that

Cool spooks nerds

>you haven't actually experienced the harsh realities of it
Woaaahh man, have you? Can I have your time machine, bro? and your ganja?

I have a question to those who endorse capitalism. This got already touched on, I think at least. I feel like we are mainly looking at this from the first world perspective which is of course completly valid. However, if you take into consideration that for people to experience the high points of capitalism and its own unique breeds of problems people are necessary who are at the bottom. Humans being exploided is a reality and will most likely stay one in the future, even in a robotic/ transhuman one. Of course this is not only a problem in capitalism, it is in every human system, perhaps even in every system in which lifeforms exist. So would you say that capitalism is the best pursuit because losers and winners will always exist and in capitalism the potential for progress is the biggest and the average living conditions are the best/ the highs are the highest?