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Notes -
A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
Example
KYM
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
The reason that this is mocksble is that the leftist fantasy is mostly: everybody else will work for me and I can do nothing, and the rightist fantasy is: I will be able to do as much work as I want to.
Yes stupidity exists inside of both of these, but they’re not equivalents.
“I will be a warlord” is a very different type of fantasy than “I will be a poet”. Both fantasies, both silly, but silly in different ways.
I disagree. Both are saying "I will occupy a tiny slice at the top 2% of society".
Maybe I should back that up. They are silly in different ways but they have some important overlap which is that either way, the odds are slim.
Sure a small segment of the population. The warriors are putting their lives at risk so that the poets can write poetry.
Even that's not getting it. Warriors dream of slaying the enemy. 95% of being a warrior is marching for days on end in shitty (figuratively) boots, living in a shitty (literally) camp and dying of cholera.
Most of the army isn't even fighting at all! The tooth to tail ratio is, at best, 1:3. So odds are that you're not even a soldier, you're just hauling supplies or dealing with logistics or guarding the rear/base. All while still in your trenchfoot boots and without a sewage system. They don't even get the glory of saying "I risked my life for the poets".
Maybe one angle of what I'm getting at is that any functioning system (whether it's an army or a commune or a technological liberal/capitalist society) requires a large amount of tedious, unglamorous and unrewarding work. When people imagine a system other than their own, they either forget that or imagine that someone else will do it.
It's like because they are transposing reality by imagining another system, they also transpose reality by ignoring or eliding this fact about all systems.
That’s not what they’re fantasizing about.
The poets are not fantasizing about being depressed trying to think of poems, failing, being rejected from journals, being told their poetry sucks etc. It’s a fantasy. They’re thinking about being the alpha poet who everybody adores and looks up to.
The warrior-fantasy guys are fantasizing about being Rambo, or whatever. “Against all odds Chad thundercock saved a village of poets by single handedly fighting off a barrage of barbarians all while severely injured and survived only by a thread and by pure determination” etc.
It’s not a perfect symmetrical set of fantasies because the fantasy is coming from a different ideology.
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