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[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]
Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:
Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.
Burgers?
Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.
Suicide Girls
I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.
My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.
It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.
Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID
Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism
Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.
So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.
Isn't the through-line that connects these things together just good, old-fashioned Gnosticism? The religious view that the material world is evil and that the subjective relgious experience is primary is all that is needed for to connect propensity to suicide, disgust with the material world, obsession with purity and disease, and antinatalism.
There might be some psychological root to that as well, given that it seems to pop up many times through history, or some kind of philosophical prion that warps the perception of reality of anyone who comprehends it.
There's a reason that particular type of heresy keeps on appearing on Christianity.
I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges. And there's a set of mindsets and incentives that can make this grow quickly and escape control before it collapses in on itself.
All ideologies have failure modes like this, and a lot look like that kind of mass psychosis. Usually the long lasting ones have institutional mechanisms to prevent those failure modes from capturing people.
The thing is we don't really have those anymore.
In the Middle Ages, it was supposedly not uncommon for rich people to spend the end of their lives in a small cell in a monastery, forgoing all Earthly pleasures for the promise of redemption.
And while there's probably not much loss to society in retiring a few old lions early, lots of young fertile people entered monasteries and convents, forgoing any chance of having a family line. These people didn't have any personal assets, but their institutions become incredibly wealthy. By the time of Henry VIII, the monasteries supposedly owned 1/3rd of the land in England. Shutting them down unlocked massive gains in prosperity.
And the priesthood likely acted as an IQ shedder as well.
The fact that Europe rose relentlessly despite a large percentage of its population being devoted to heavenly pursuits is really remarkable.
I suppose the problem with today's ascetics is they don't exist within the fabric of a vibrant, growing, pro-natal society.
An institution that collects knowledge and spurs technological growth but also hoards societal wealth and prevents all its high-IQ members from ever reproducing? We have that today, it’s called “Silicon Valley”
Monasteries seemed to take mostly younger children of the nobility which society had no good answer for anyways.
Nobles usually endowed a monastery with some land in exchange for taking in their runts. I reckon the kids would have been fine spending the cash squeezed from the starving peasantry on hookers and blow directly instead of having to re-earn it through prayer.
Who would advance civilization and pray for the salvation of humanity if they did that though?
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