Societal Paralysis

firefinga

Well-known member
Dissensus is prone to magical thinking when it comes to politics and by and large they refuse to reckon with the fact that leave won a fair vote.

The French never wanted you in anyways. De Gaulle always thought the Brits were the 5th column of the USA.
 

comelately

Wild Horses
Ok, I guess I'm harking back to my inference that there is some kind of nonacceptance of the vote which has lead to deleterious consequences.

I mean, you could argue that if Gina Miller hadn't got the meaningful vote court decision, or if Labour had bent the knee to Theresa May and her WA that we wouldn't have the Brexit Party etc. I mean, it's possible but it's more likely we'd be knee-deep in A218 trade arrangement discussions and Brexiteers would be screaming blue murder as they are now.

The bookies have an Article 50 revocation at 2/1 - it's a real possibility. Would this be the end of the matter? Well....maybe, maybe not. But given the opposition among Leavers to any kind of pragmatic withdrawal, it's no worse than any other in terms of long-term stability.

Obvious other point is that a Tory government not getting anything done is a whole lot better than a Tory government getting things done. Inertia isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's somewhat wishful thinking, dare I suggest, that things would be better if the civil service were freed up to administrate. We know what Policy Innovation looks like to the Torys.
 
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version

Well-known member
I think the crux of the Brexit issue is that leave won, but there's no practical application of Brexit which will satisfy their expectations of it so we're stuck with having to implement something which cannot be done to anyone's satisfaction.
 

version

Well-known member
“we’re in the years of stagnation” artistically, culturally, economically speaking. Our “music, TV, and avant-garde art — is being used to shore up the present, reconfigure the past to somehow give a foundation to the present that can’t imagine another kind of future.”
 

version

Well-known member
After all, what is it for a society to have a narrative? In the most basic sense, it means it has an explanation for itself, some shared account of what makes it the way it is. In which case, to say that a society lacks a narrative is a way of saying that it’s senseless, that it can’t be explained in terms of what’s good for the people who populate it (the only real justification a social order can have).

The philosopher Georg Lukács once said that there was something nightmarish in the experience of an intellectual with no vision of the future... The future is a kind of narrative category, after all: the projected goal that gives the present its sense of order and purpose. It’s something we suffer without. For an individual, the inability to imagine life improving, or changing in any way other than badly, is a kind of death sentence. On the collective level, too, a society without any aspirations toward a better shared existence is condemned to the unchallenged perpetuation of injustice and misery, the ineradicable underside of all human history to date (and a horror that weighs “like a nightmare” on the living, as Marx so famously put it).
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Yeah but it doesn't help does it. It's already happened.

It does help in understanding what's happening. That seems obvious. Otherwise I have no idea what kind of help you might mean. The whole thing would inevitably result in societal paralysis if Leave won, even by one vote.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I think the crux of the Brexit issue is that leave won, but there's no practical application of Brexit which will satisfy their expectations of it so we're stuck with having to implement something which cannot be done to anyone's satisfaction.

Well exactly, and this is where the term 'magical thinking' is merited. The idea of a clean break with Europe is just that. It's all symbolic, and thats the problem - we are in a country obsessedwith symbolism since Empire, since symbolism is what sustained that idea of Great Britain while the reality was most peoples lives were shit. Its repetition compulsion, except the world has changed and Britain is no longer very relevant.

And thats where I get frustrated with many Remainers, thinking this is about winning a logical argument with stats about disastrous implications. It's appealing to the wrong organ.
 
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version

Well-known member
Well exactly, and this is where the term 'magical thinking' is merited. The idea of a clean break with Europe is just that. It's all symbolic, and thats the problem - we are in a country obsessedwith symbolism since Empire, since symbolism is what sustained that idea of Great Britain while the reality was most peoples lives were shit. Its repetition compulsion, except the world has changed and Britain is no longer very relevant.

Brexit is nothing if not a nation trapped by its own image.
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
A delusional country. Perhaps any country that once led the world is doomed to spend history trying to restore that state of affairs in ever more pathetic ways, unless it can genuinely cast off its past (as with China, for example, though that happened over a very long period of course)?

And paralysis may be part of that, as it delays the onset of reality.
 

version

Well-known member
That monologue at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 becomes more prescient by the day. The one about everything stagnating once everyone can wall themselves off from reality and hang onto their own truths. Kind of ridiculous that a PlayStation game from 2001 was so on the money.

jswxMum.jpg
 

entertainment

Well-known member
We're evolutionary creatures. Naturally attracted to activities that progress us at large, less attracted to that which progress us individually, and even less to that which progresses us individually at the cost of others. Exceptions aren't hard to come by of course. But maybe there's an idea growing somewhere in our intersubjective subconscious that we're starting to see the limits of how far we can progress as a race.

Our addiction to economic growth is starting to look more and more like an unsustainable one. No land to explore or fertilize, nothing left to conquer from nature without dooming our planet further. The contradictions of technological advances becoming more and more apparant with each mention of social media mental health or spying iphones that undermine freedom and democracy.

This has cultural implications. Tribalistic behavior maybe? If the only frontier left is taking from the next man, then it would seem natural to start reverting back to a more localized empathetic capacity. Increaing protectionism maybe? More people stopping to say, well what's the point then?

Honored that my vocational impotence prompted a thread
 

version

Well-known member
Anyone read this or know anything about Campagna?

Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality

We take for granted that only a certain kind of things exist – electrons but not angels, passports but not nymphs. This is what we understand as ‘reality’. But in fact, ‘reality’ varies with each era of the world, in turn shaping the field of what is possible to do, think and imagine. Our contemporary age has embraced a troubling and painful form of reality: Technic. Under Technic, the very foundations of reality begin to crumble, thus shrinking the field of the possible and freezing our lives in an anguished state of paralysis. Technic and Magic shows that the way out of the present deadlock lies much deeper than debates on politics or economics. By drawing from an array of Northern and Southern sources – spanning from Heidegger, Junger and Stirner’s philosophies, through Pessoa’s poetry, to Advaita Vedanta, Bhartrhari, Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra’s theosophies – Magic’s system of reality is presented as a specular alternative to Technic. While Technic attempts to capture the world at the lace of an ‘absolute language’, Magic centres its reconstruction of the world around the notion of the ‘ineffable’ that lies at the heart of existence.

Technic and Magic is an original philosophical work, and a timely cultural intervention. It disturbs our understanding of the structure of reality, while restoring it in a new form. This is possibly the most radical act: if we wish to change our world, first we have to change the idea of ‘reality’ that defines it.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Anyone read this or know anything about Campagna?

Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality

We take for granted that only a certain kind of things exist – electrons but not angels, passports but not nymphs. This is what we understand as ‘reality’. But in fact, ‘reality’ varies with each era of the world, in turn shaping the field of what is possible to do, think and imagine. Our contemporary age has embraced a troubling and painful form of reality: Technic. Under Technic, the very foundations of reality begin to crumble, thus shrinking the field of the possible and freezing our lives in an anguished state of paralysis. Technic and Magic shows that the way out of the present deadlock lies much deeper than debates on politics or economics. By drawing from an array of Northern and Southern sources – spanning from Heidegger, Junger and Stirner’s philosophies, through Pessoa’s poetry, to Advaita Vedanta, Bhartrhari, Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra’s theosophies – Magic’s system of reality is presented as a specular alternative to Technic. While Technic attempts to capture the world at the lace of an ‘absolute language’, Magic centres its reconstruction of the world around the notion of the ‘ineffable’ that lies at the heart of existence.

Technic and Magic is an original philosophical work, and a timely cultural intervention. It disturbs our understanding of the structure of reality, while restoring it in a new form. This is possibly the most radical act: if we wish to change our world, first we have to change the idea of ‘reality’ that defines it.

I mean if one wanted to make a case that an interest in magic was tendentially a bit fash, starting with Heidegger and Junger would be the way to go about it.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
fwiw I don't think reality is either effable or ineffable. Reality is at least partly effable, and we construct stable systems around the aspects of it that seem most effable, reinforcing them with condensed prejudice where effability is lacking. Reality is at least partly ineffable, not because of its intrinsic mysteriousness but more because the tools at hand for effing it aren't adequate to everything that can exist. I think that reifying that practical ineffability as some kind of intrinsic mysteriousness of things is a mistake; building a reality-system around that fetish is a worse mistake. We need imagination (as Phillip Pullman has recently been lecturing me, via the medium of fiction-with-a-somewhat-heavy-authorial-voice) to navigate the limits of our stable systems, to shake loose condensed prejudice, to be able to recognise and accommodate areas of experience for which we don't have a firm, commanding language. But reality is no more intrinsically conformant to the patterns of our imagination than it is to the patterns of our reasoning.
 

luka

Well-known member
Well, maybe but you won't score yourself a book deal with that kind of prevaricating!
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Have noticed that it's easier to imagine the physical properties of reality out of shape than the social and cultural properties.

It's still comfortable to imagine a world with crazy monsters or that people that can fly or something, but as soon as you start to mess with the social composition of civilization, it becomes quite creepy and sinister in a different way.

Even science fiction that's set in a different universe or dimenson altogether is almost always populated by a people with the social norms, we're familiar with.
 
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