Oeaohoo

I’ve been thinking about this recently, nice answer.

That makes sense, I just can’t bring myself to play the bit… Maybe someday I’ll have to. What does it look like for you? The trouble with not playing the bit is that you end up in a weak and vulnerable position, more and more conditioned by the very system which you are trying to escape. This has basically happened to me. Well, I feel the same, only the other way around… Then again, I’m not in America! By the way, Trump’s rise reminds me of Spengler’s theory of Caesarism:

I imagine a Wilberian would say that you have regressed to Stage Green. Accepting that model, it makes sense to me that you would do this since you seem quite attached to the pleasures of modern life - partying, girls and so on - which are all very Green in our time. Most “cool” people in European cities are Stage Green. Being Stage Yellow would probably make you feel much more out of the loop…

Yeah, basically.

Interesting. What made you turn away from Ken Wilber? Maybe I had something to do with it… I never got that into Spengler, something about his style always turns me off — it’s like Nietzsche but lacking the same depth of insight. I do like his idea of the “second religiosity”, the debased form of spirituality which one finds in a late and decadent civilisation — it fits the “new age” phenomenon, including most of what you will find in the Spirituality tab on this forum, very well. Anyway, maybe one day I’ll get you reading Guénon and Evola…

Imagine Tony Robbins on a stage, raping a woman whilst enthusiastically shouting at her: “You are not a victim!” That is the perfect metaphor for the way this god-awful system uses self-help.

Screw mindsets, it’s the truth. Self-help and modern spirituality are just a way to pretend you’re free within your prison cell. As the wind blows more and more of your life away, you can chant magical platitudes into your third-eye chakra: “I am not a victim!”, “I am the master of my own reality!”, “Change your attitude, change your world!”

It’s because this society sucks for a young man.

@Leo Gura I think your cynicism about humanity is a way for you to cling to your delusional view of what life should be.

Yes, this is all true… But where is the light and love in the present year? Have you seen Taxi Driver? It’s basically a case study of this phenomenon.

Yes, fair enough. Though I also think that, since the system today is so invasive in all aspects of life, this line is somewhat blurred. Sure, that works. Maybe Trumpist anti-democracy is one of the cancerous growths ravaging the dying body which is America… As a concrete example, here in Britain the Conservative Party were repeatedly elected on a program of reducing mass immigration to tens of thousands. Of course, they did less than nothing and immigration went on increasing. This lead people to vote for Brexit which also changed nothing. Having been in power for fourteen years, under the last two years of the Conservative government under Rishi Sunak, over 3 million people were imported into the country. This doesn’t seem very democratic to me… Probably why voter turnout was only 60% at the last election! As to the broader point of what constitutes democracy, it’s something I need to think about more.

Exactly, you can psychologise anything if you want to. And of course, if you are a psychologist then you will always see the psychological aspect of things… One can just as well say that environmentalists are projecting their mother onto Mother Earth, liberals are just turning their internal psychological drive towards freedom into a political stand, feminists are projecting their shadow onto men, or whatever else. One chooses to psychologise as a way to reduce one’s opponents position and bolster one’s own.

Yeah. Somebody tweeted that out a while back and I thought it was an excellent metaphor. Just like a decomposing body loses its immunity and the ability to discriminate between its own cells and foreign pathogens, America has lost any sense of itself. The basic structures which make up American society are dissolving just like those of a dying body. Well, I understand the tweet as referring to the GOP more generally. To an extent, Trump breaks that formula since part of his appeal to people disaffected with the whole system (of which there are many nowadays) is being neither a neocon nor a neoliberal, which is all one has come to expect Republicans and Democrats to be. In that way he actually is reminiscent of fascism as a “third way” outside of the dialectic presented by the system. I also don’t believe that many people on the left in America care about the Founding Fathers or their vision. It’s just empty rhetoric, in the same way that appeals to “liberal democracy” more generally are. Modern Western society is neither liberal nor democratic, at least not in the sense that people used to understand those terms. The Founding Fathers would be tearing their hair out if they could see what America has been turned into. It reminds me of this funny meme:

Thanks for your interpretation! I’ve been meaning to for a long time. David Lynch loves it and I love his films.

By the way, I don’t really agree with your post because a lot of the modern Right (what you call “Fascism”) is rooted in a victim mentality. The most obvious example of this is the Anti-Woke movement, in which right-wing grifters make a living whining about the latest woke cultural product. Another example is white nationalism, which bemoans the feeling of becoming a minority in one’s own land, being culturally marginalised by other groups, being left behind and looked down upon by the ”cosmopolitan” and political elite, and so on. They aren’t afraid to be victims at all; in fact, a lot of them love it…