User:NickelBank/YT/CynicalArtKillingHope26
Cynical Art Is Killing Our Ability to Imagine Hopeful Futures
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⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽Jessie Gender
(purported philosophical field)1-1-1 - author pronoun
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Links
- Original video: [1]
Nickel usage or significance
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Usage notes
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Motifs or claims
- Cynical art is killing our ability to imagine hopeful futures [2]
- all I see in the news is power and domination over others [3]
- I can never be a great man of the realm because I can never live up to who greatness is supposed to belong to [4] -> there is a lot to say about this. when you read enough enough Communist texts you realize that the point of "great men", in terms of experts without equal, is to accomplish something and fade away. their purpose is to do something that will not need to be done again. if history were operating efficiently, their purpose is to abolish themselves and cease to have their position. even Stalin and Mao wanted a world where they would not be needed, while Trotsky struggling to stay relevant was a mistake. history operates in a number of steps which complete and then are done and give way to different steps unless the previous steps unravel, completed in no consistent order but always completed according to the same unordered checklist. the great lie of capitalism is to claim that great men are needed perpetually. every single one of them is operating as inefficiently as possible and accomplishing absolutely nothing. creative destruction was precisely an admission that none of the things created are actually creating anything and all of it is one big waste. so, no, you don't have to feel bad about not being the next "great man". but I am not sure you have the right reasons.
- not good enough to be a true writer of this kingdom / comparing status as director or script writer to feudal nobility [5] -> wow! this is like a practical example of Engels framing ideology as the use of distorted conceptual models unexamined. you have a recognition that writers can be a ruling class fighting over something (the kingdom, the "market"), and then a failure to realize the analogy is literal.
- Getting rid of center-Liberalism is telling a better story [6]
- anarchism and eucatastrophe -> they really love this motif. I think everybody does. but it's strange how often it's been coming up lately.
- The only way out of expectations of yourself is to reach to express the truest version of you that you can -> um.... no. you aren't judged by what's authentic to you, but by how well you match what's authentic to other people. what if Communism is your authentic self? most people on earth are going to hate your guts, and it doesn't help if you're more authentic. really once you're there the only way out is to flip that process over and make submitting to other people's authenticity actually a good thing — submitting to the goal of producing accurate facts and models of reality rather than what's initially appealing to you, that process of "great men fading into the background", becoming the conduit of what great numbers of people want but what other countries seek to suppress. in some senses those tired old anarchist sayings about 'first fixing your own mind' actually are right, because when you're on the other side of the great barrier between subjectivity and reality is when you actually start to see "power and domination" melt away. it's funny. it's funny how actually, the people who are the most concerned about "power and domination" are the people you need to drag kicking and screaming to give it up. but it isn't surprising. people really don't understand the way that power and autonomy are inherently linked. a person given enough autonomy gains power over others just because of that autonomy; autonomy and separation are a wall against regulation and accountability.
- the nameless ones tried to destroy her by choosing her self, but she chose her own destiny -> I'm sure the earthsea chronicles is not that bad or anything, but geez. this video makes a medieval fantasy story sound bizarrely like an anticommunist fable. it's making me imagine a very cursed AU where like it transitions into a "1984" society that is a totally incoherent workers' state and the republic tried to abolish names having power over people— wait gosh this isn't 1984 this is Anthem. no yeah that's exactly what it is. — they try to abolish names having power over people so people will be free but nobody understands and a bunch of people get upset and try to escape it and create their own individual selves to become free, but little did they know this has actually put them in danger and pitted them against each other and mostly made their lives worse when it didn't have to be that way.
maybe some day I'll read earthsea chronicles and find out how far off base I was with that being a possible social transition. but a fantasy book having both a Leninist transition and a color revolution is so conceptually funny to me even if it features the main characters having absolutely terrible ideology. like if somebody like me wrote it who didn't actually believe it, it would be funny. treating the protagonists of anticommunist fables as unreliable narrators. this is the "stories giving us empathetic connections to people's inner experiences" we really need; stories where you connect with a person you'd believe is wonderful and then you find out they're terrible. - You were never made for cruelty and darkness, you were made for light -> is this a motif or is this a proposition. I think given a different less poetic example of the same Item it could be a proposition.
so... how do I know I was made for anything. how do I know I wasn't made for cruelty. what's the difference? I'd think whoever we're talking about is made by their circumstances and their historical period. what else can make you for anything? - The road goes up toward the light, but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it -> isn't this. blaming the victims. this video says that blaming yourself is bad. but the book insinuates that we fail to escape Domination because it's made us impure and we haven't been good enough. so which is it?
- freedom / Freedom is a heavy load. It is not a gift given, but a choice made. -> no no no not another definition of freedom. I just found four of them today!
Subjective themes
- Ideology is Idealism unexamined / Ideology — a distorted model of reality usually for the benefit of a particular class — comes out of conceptual models of the world ("concept-material", ontologies) specifically when considered in isolation from the world, according to processes not obvious to the people creating ideology (Engels) [7]
- Knights are no way to restore virtue and meaning because the only power of accountability lies in the peasants -> forgive me for taking everything too literally, but, what is this. you're trying to say that the best way to fix a world of medieval knights is for somebody to take up the post and believe in it? are you crazy? [8]
first of all, if you live in a world of knights and peasants the people who will fix it are the peasants. the one with the most power to fix it is Mao. it sounds like a joke when we never write fantasy novels that way but it's happened about three times in history, whenever medieval kingdoms transition to republics really late you get Communism, logically one of the reasons the middle east is so screwed up is because we denied that reality. Arabian fantasy settings should just be skipping the fuck to Bolshevism to the dismay of other kingdoms that thus want to destroy them.
second of all... if you believed this hundreds of years ago there would never have been Liberal-republicanism. you'd have been pushing for monarchy to continue. it's not just that you wouldn't be able to vote today, you'd have gotten caught up in a blood feud between Protestants and Catholics over which religion-turned-ethnic-group is more justified to live.
she really doesn't understand what causes hatred and what doesn't. feudalism makes people really really hateful. creating perfectly-balanced contradictions of unstoppable force versus immovable objects makes people hateful. it doesn't matter if people want to do good, hatred will continue if balance continues and prevents the world from changing. things become less hateful when the balance falls over and the fight ends. creating Liberal-republicanism and reintroducing balanced contradictions was bad. creating a one-party state is good. creating a balanced contradiction of countries fighting each other is bad, and results in Hitler. making the contradiction fall over somehow is good. as long as the countries don't do it by totally destroying each other. maybe one giant federation of soviets would be able to do it. maybe something else. but don't hold up Dunc as the key to fixing the world. don't do that.