User:RD/9k/Q50,56

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5056. Civilization's goal should be to get to the arts and the notion of non-politically depicting abstract moods and emotions as soon as possible -> I skimmed through a book which strongly suggested this. I think it's currently in my front bookshelf at the time of writing this, so I just have to find it again.
      you see sentiments like this pretty commonly among humanities type people. it has to do with what they spend their time with. they spend their time on literature and poetry and stuff and discussing the depths of them. and I don't in any way think that's a bad thing in and of itself. but there is a subtle problem with it. people assume that because they managed to spend their time on literature now that this is the way it should be, and you should just get to decide to do that and they should just go put everybody in book clubs or publishers, rather than realizing that a society always has to be made of stuff before it can go thinking, and the more time is spent on the most abstract and for-themselves kind of art as opposed to even anything educational, the more you have to go finding laborers to run the boring parts of society in other regions. just by hanging out and doing things only for their own sake, the arts themselves can accidentally promote imperialism. I think the book I had in mind said something about 'ancient civilizations' having time for philosophy, all but silently implying Greece and Rome — when both of those had extra time because they conquered outlying territories and took extra resources from those people or enslaved them. I vaguely remember that Roman military people had such a high status because whatever they were forcefully taking actually benefited the Roman empire as a whole. though, I don't have a clear memory of what was going on beyond that.
      I know enough not to fully tell people they can never drown themselves in art events again, but the key is to find actual stability and get people to go through Lenin's process of laying down finished structure in chunks of society and not tearing them up so newer things and higher quantities of older things can happen, in order to stop society from oozing and overflowing and having to fight for more space and raw materials to keep horizontally oozing over other things and itself over and over. when that kind of stability is falling into place, there'd be time for all kinds of creative forms of art

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