We Are All Willing On The Catastrophe

droid

droid

Well-known member
On the contrary, Ive offered both psychological and philosophical arguments which counter the initial assumption and placed them in the context of the actual history of climate responses and the forces that have stymied it. I then critiqued the motivation and utility of the assertion.

The initial suggestion is either false or has such a minor effect that it is negligible. The linking an awareness or imagining of possible disaster with desire for same is deeply tenuous, and when specifically applied to individuals, offensive.

So Ive attacked the basis, the substance, the usefulness and the motivation.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Your position is that we must take care to say only what will focus efforts and boost morale.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
poetix said:
I am privately convinced that the ruling classes are at this point basically trying to bait us into guillotining them en masse. They can't believe we haven't done it already. Every new day that dawns is a miracle to them. Another day of getting to be, to get away with being, Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro. And nobody stops you. Nobody bludgeons you into dripping insensible meat and hangs you from a lamp-post in the public square. Only their incredulity explains their deepening nihilism.
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don't kid yourself: they aren't surprised at all by what they've gotten away with, they fundamentally believe it's their role to lead and that they absolutely deserve all their power. they don't feel lucky, it's hubris on a massive scale. they might occasionally have a very dim, far-off awareness of public discontent, at which point they'll just come up with some bone they can throw to the masses to shut them up for awhile and reinstate the global malaise and complacency.

Happy Friday!
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
from what i remember (dimly and secondhand) about the death drive, Freud posits there is an impulse in the organism to achieve the lowest state of tension - desire etc is a kind of irritability, an unrest - and so the goal of this contrary, anti-libido drive is nullity and inertia.

so the death drive is probably more related to things like heroin addiction or Eastern spirituality, meditation, etc (in fact isn't there an alternative term for death drive - the nirvana instinct)

than it is to violence, catastrophe, atrocity etc

then again didn't Freud write Civilisation and Its Discontents with the memory fresh of World War I and fearful of fascism's rise, prospect of another World War

so there was a bit of 'how else do we explain how fucked and awful the world is if not by ascribing to some dark force within the human heart?" shaping that turn in his thought

and there is a bit of a "QED / look at the mountains of evidence" thing going at the moment that would tempt one to see an appetite for destruction being the motor

the "things are boring / let's shake it up" disruption thesis is also quite persuasive - not unlike Fukuyama's conclusion in End of History, that the triumph of liberal democracy will be boring and bland and we'll have to invent new ideological schisms and conflicts to spice things up
 
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B

blissblogger

Well-known member
The Drowned World would be one to read for the Ballard-protagonist-embraces-the-catastrophe

Well, any of the disaster ones, but I personally think that is the best.

High Rise also has the same psychology - the apartment tower residents find they enjoy the collapse of society within the building, none of them contact the authorities. and one chap heads off to work as usual, the psychic force-field of the building won't let him reach his vehicle in the car park out front, he tries but its hold is too strong and he turns around and heads back indoors
 
V

version

Well-known member
luka said:
Your position is that we must take care to say only what will focus efforts and boost morale.
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I think that was me arguing from what I thought was droid's position, wasn't it? They're two different discussions. When I was making that point I was talking specifically about practical solutions to climate change and persuading the general public to do something about it. You need simple stories and messages for that sort of thing.
 
V

version

Well-known member
poetix said:
I am privately convinced that the ruling classes are at this point basically trying to bait us into guillotining them en masse. They can't believe we haven't done it already. Every new day that dawns is a miracle to them. Another day of getting to be, to get away with being, Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro. And nobody stops you. Nobody bludgeons you into dripping insensible meat and hangs you from a lamp-post in the public square. Only their incredulity explains their deepening nihilism.
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
There's been this spurious notion in the air during my lifetime that our grandparents went through some real shit and our lives are comparatively decadent and meaningless. Naturally we don't know what we're wishing for, and we don't know how lucky we are.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
version said:
It has to be there in the first place though, doesn't it? Without the threat or risk there's nothing to survive.
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I'm not saying that death isn't part of disaster but I think people are yearning for dramatic experiences, not their personal death. Or at least, that's what I think Luka is getting at?
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
many grandparents lives through mandatory military service with the draft, and participated in a real war (ww II) instead of a cold one. that presumably shaped them immensely, and likewise our lack of draft/war shaped us.
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
There's been this spurious notion in the air during my lifetime that our grandparents went through some real shit and our lives are comparatively decadent and meaningless. Naturally we don't know what we're wishing for, and we don't know how lucky we are.
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I don't think it's even a new feeling. Seems like a fairly apt summary of the general atmosphere of some novels that were written in the wake of WWI - Tropic Of Cancer and Thd Great Gatsby spring to mind. And I bet luka could write a whole essay about this feeling and poetry of that time - The Waste Land, for starters.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
In sum, what accelerationism as a political philosophy offers its adherents is a profoundly nihilistic view that suspends any hope in the ability of humans to intercede meaningfully in the world as it is. Instead, it hangs its hopes on an End Times of its own, awaiting a sort of secular Rapture that compels acolytes to not only await, but celebrate, the inevitable unravelling of the social order and collapse of the world as we know it For many, its proponents would claim, the worse things get, the better. Sound familiar?

When viewed through the dual lens of prepperdom and nihilistic accelerationism—both of which hold out for global disaster with a certain amount of titillation and glee—the large-scale projects for which techno-élites like Musk have become famous can be seen in another light entirely: as dismal, fatalistic projects that have given up any faith (pun intended) in the ability to resolve the human condition or life on Earth, in general, or perhaps, even more specifically, that there would be inherent value in such an effort at all. Indeed, the projects promoted by this technocratic élite do not scope into something favorable for a majority of the world’s inhabitants or life as we now know it; instead, they are so narrowly aimed as to solve very little about the ruinous conditions for vast swaths of the world’s population and, in many cases, quite literally seek to abandon Earth entirely.
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These are the desirous. Nihilists, accelerationists & techno elites.

http://www.boundary2.org/2019/08/sa...shists-prepping-and-the-abandonment-of-earth/
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
I'm not saying that death isn't part of disaster but I think people are yearning for dramatic experiences, not their personal death. Or at least, that's what I think Luka is getting at?
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Sorry im on holiday and don't really want to get involved in a war just wanted to explicate this idea. It's not a proposed cause of climate change. It's to do with the idea of a life concerned with survival, a kind of razors edge, as being the genuine life, and everything else being ersatz, airless, deadening, abstracted
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
The only game worth playing being one in which death is the forfeit. vimothy actually explained this very well.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
The Drowned World would be one to read for the Ballard-protagonist-embraces-the-catastrophe

Well, any of the disaster ones, but I personally think that is the best.

High Rise also has the same psychology - the apartment tower residents find they enjoy the collapse of society within the building, none of them contact the authorities. and one chap heads off to work as usual, the psychic force-field of the building won't let him reach his vehicle in the car park out front, he tries but its hold is too strong and he turns around and heads back indoors
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I think the drought is the most affecting of the series, concerned primarily as it is with life after catastrophe as opposed to drowned and crystal which use the environment as a backdrop to his quasi-mystical heart of darkness type narratives. Those images of people desperately pailing water through the dunes on desolate beaches beside dead seas...
 
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droid

droid

Well-known member
But let's not ignore the problematic(!) aspects of Ballard's worlds and how they intersect with this subject, the inevitable, elevated & professional protagonist, the invariably right wing motifs - seedy, criminal immigrants eating away at the edges of society in cocaine nights, the 'savage blacks' in drowned, mulatto 'rabbles and 'mobs' in crystal, the bourgeois solipsism that characterises much of his work, and commensurately his view of apocalypse. There's absolutely no question that if he were alive today Ballard would be framing the climate emergency in the racist malthusian context that blames birth rates in the developing world rather than first world malfeasance and overconsumption.
 
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