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I'm sympathetic to the institution of Gen X gnostic angst, but you have to do what every reasonable skeptic does and apply this to your own ideas.
Okay yes nothing is real we're just living through simulacra and buying furniture designed by committees of people whose idea of a human being is a bunch of noisy statistics made by some Marxist that slept through their statistical methods courses. This has literally only become worse since The Matrix.
The West is living a lie that's only maintained by a tower of abstractions that survives on creating more abstraction and nothing else. Collapse is locked in and it's not that people are asleep at the wheel, there's not even a wheel anymore.
But then, people have been saying this for decades now and things have not collapsed. The lie just gets worse and more detached from reality, seemingly without consequence. Clown world marches on over Baudrillard's corpse.
How do you reckon with this?
Strangely you seem to be able to find this problem when Russia is involved. And like many of your countrymen are eager to point out that despite the West living a complete lie, so is Russia and so is China. Just different kinds of lie. The one the other country believes being always the most ludicrous for everybody.
Consider that the Africans you see as practical are living their own kind of lie, and that what you consider resourcefulness may just be adaptation to that different kind of lie.
Also how does any of this relate to your premise of explaining why you constantly seem to accuse people of believing the opposite of what they claim to believe?
Is it really just that you think one's own mindreading of people is the true measure of character because selfid is bull? Because the one thing this does not apply to is politics. Because politics, literally all of it, is coalition building. Even at its best ideology is nice window dressing for a convergence of interests, and at its worst it's nerd bait to keep a meme in cold storage until it's useful again. It doesn't have to make sense. Hell it's better in many ways if it doesn't. In any case the language of truth is as suited to it as empiricism is to theology.
There is such a thing as truth, but politics is the one realm where it's almost completely useless. There is a good moral argument to be made that you should still abide by it ultimately, but if you only think and act in those terms you're going to lose.
The progs may be talking nonsense, but they are still better than you at the actual game being played, because unlike you they know the rules. And yeah sure playing to win means everything burns to the ground because moral righteousness doesn't grow crops. But that's always what happens. And Lysenko died of old age while Vavilov died in prison.
I mean first of all, winning a bullshit game is kind of meaningless. If I’m the best Calvinball player who ever lived, it’s nonsense because Calvinball has nothing to do with reality. Games that are real matter. At worst, Calvinball playing is a horrid distraction from the baseball game that’s actually meaningful. That baseball game is the practical real world problems being ignored to play identity games. Roads and infrastructure need fixing, education needs overhaul, people are not doing so well economically, Russia and China. These are real problems, but we don’t care about them because Dylan visited the White House in a dress and held up a beer can on instagram.
I’ll agree that our current name-and-claim version of identity is largely bullshit. Identity is a social label often given in response to a person’s place in society. Asians are not honorary whites they simply don’t fit what minority means in modern, WEIRD culture, which is that a person’s minority status is seen (wrongly imo) as a lower status to be fixed. Asians are not seen as lower status. That doesn’t mean honorary white, it means higher status. My identities are formed in contradistinction to others or in response to roles I take. I’m not a mother and cannot become one without having children. I am an aunt because my siblings have children. I’m a worker because I have a boss. The best metaphor to me has always been a status effect, not a class. It’s based on something outside of your skull.
Not if the victors get to rob and kill the vanquished it isn't.
What you're complaining about isn't that the game is meaningless really, but that people care more about winning than making sure you can continue to play in the future.
My point is, it doesn't matter because if you don't win right now you don't get to play in the future anyways. Because you're dead and poor.
Of course this isn't stable, you can't have people defect like this forever, but this is how and why societies collapse. Focus on internal rather than external conflict, widespread erosion of norms, etc.
What people seem to often miss though is that this is the result of a series of rational decisions.
If you don't fight the meaningless social issue game, if you don't give citizenship to sympathetic foreigners, if you don't loot the treasury to give spoils; you will not get to keep power versus someone who can and does those things. Using power to gain more power at any cost is a practically superior strategy to any other which is why anyone that has power is inexorably attracted to it or replaced by people who are.
The one flaw, or saving grace, is that power is cursed and by accumulating it you will eventually reach a point where you have too much of it and the distance to reality becomes great enough that you destroy yourself.
You're just laying out the principles of any good model of the world, what naturalists call science.
There is no disagreeing with this.
Except, unfortunately, in the one game where you get to rob and kill the losers. Where this attachement to the truth falls easily pray to the more immediately expedient strategy of seeking power and using it to eliminate the competition.
Connecting this game and truth seeking is basically what the Enlightenment did by inventing scientific government, and though we've gained tremendous boons from it, I think it was ultimately an evil act precisely because now that this connection exists, it has become impossible to have either proper government or proper truth seeking.
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