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<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: inherit;">Lacanianism and the concept of separation from the Other
essentially when you feel your life is incomplete you want to retreat back into the womb and be unborn again

there is just one problem with this: most people never actually separate from the Other
whenever we go to work we always count on another to provide for us. there are always tasks we cannot do
even owners of business territories might not be separated from the Other, because they often have investors to answer to.
we are always chained to life-giving connections long after we are born, and worse, those life-giving connections still often get to determine who we are, what we believe, and how we behave.
the only time in history the Lacanian birth model really makes any sense is in societies of individual peasants surviving on separate plots of land, or people "going west" and creating individual homesteads on the United States frontier.
the Lacanian birth model more or less looks nothing like capitalism

furthermore, it's arguable not everybody looks for a perfect world or perfect life
some people really do understand the difference between perfection and realistic possibilities
Marxists, notably. a Marxist does not align with Bolshevism under the belief that Bolshevism will solve every problem, as much as will have the capacity to solve a limited set of problems which are deemed the most important ones


desire
serious conflicts in democratic republics are said to stem from individuals seeking impossible visions of the future and enforcing them onto others

the first problem with this:
if this were true capitalism would not exist
every single corporation is an individual imagining some perfect but unproven vision of the future and enforcing it onto a particular group of others through monetary incentives. workers or Careerists accept money and then they must build whatever weird dream the capitalist fantasizes about, hoping that the most unrealistic goals and the goals most in conflict with surrounding groups of people are all possible, or they will not receive money. competition does not exist without the central will of one corporation going against the central will of another corporation and the well-being of all the workers inside it. we like to tell ourselves that competition can reach an equilibrium where every corporation keeps expanding and yet none of them disappear, but that is never guaranteed. each corporation must always be willing to do something that makes other groups of workers obsolete and leaves them without an income. if this is not the case, corporations simply merge together and conspiracy-minded right-Liberals everywhere begin filing antitrust suits. capitalism is a series of small behavior-control machines, and yet it is also a deliberately-engineered combat arena where forms of Material Culture crush each other.

the second problem: Trotsky
there's a great irony in the fact Lacanianism isn't explicitly pro-Stalin and anti-Trotsky
if it were truly a bad thing to enforce your vision of a perfect world onto others, then there would be a natural argument that Trotsky should not have tried to tear open the Soviet Union because he is much more likely to get what he wants by working together with others than trying to overcome them. even if it means he must explicitly uphold Stalin Thought, it would be more tolerant of Trotsky to give Stalin Thought a chance rather than trying to oppose all the other Subjects in his society aligned with Stalin that he cannot control. if Stalin cannot will what Lacan does, and Trotsky cannot will what Stalin does, then Trotsky had better learn to get along with Stalin and accommodate whatever Stalin's government is leaning toward. he had better work within the system and reform Stalin's version of Bolshevism.

why does this argument feel bogus, and immediately come across as a troll argument? the argument is logically consistent; it lines up with all the basic claims of Lacanianism.
the problem in this argument that any Marxist will see immediately but that Lacanians will miss is that _ideologies have content_. when people sort into Social-Philosophical Systems, those graphs contain actual ontologies of how reality currently fits together or should fit together. each internal ontology guides each graph to behave in a way unique to that particular ontology. Liberalism is a unique entity with its own identity, behavior, and forms of recorded memory. Trotskyism is a unique entity. a group of people believing in Trotskyism _does not behave_ the same way as a group of people believing in Stalin Thought or Liberalism. this is why people intuitively recognize an instance of Stalin Thought as different from an instance of Liberalism. Sonic and Tails are not two instances of the same individual just because they are both individuals, and the Soviet Union and the United States are not two instances of the same society just because they are both federal republics.

Existentialists love to try to treat Subjects as empty vessels, claiming that the content of a Subject does not matter, while in reality, this is almost as grave an oversight as Egyptian priests cleaning a freshly-deceased soul for burial and discarding the brain.
if two people were actually empty vessels and two Subjects were actually comparable on the grounds of being Subjects, then the concept of Desire would be moot because there would be no explanation for how Subjects end up with different visions of the future or end up trying to force them onto each other.
groups of people are similar to individuals. a group of people may initially appear to be an empty vessel because various kinds of groups repeat themselves again and again throughout history and throughout space, but in the end each group ultimately has content. if that content is distinguishable on the level of ideology or philosophy, it will turn the two groups into unique entities versus each other. just as Sonic is not Shadow, and behaves differently from Shadow due to the fact they have different content, center-Liberalism is not right-Liberalism or Toryism, and the behaviors of Toryism cannot be neatly analogized to the behaviors of center-Liberalism as if they were the exact same set of behaviors.
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