Coronavirus thread. Content warning: 50/50 chance this will help vs harm. If you are comforted by sideways philosophical arguments read on. If not, I refer you the next tweet on my timeline.
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So, folks are “panicking”/responding strongly to coronavirus because on some level they WANT to panic about it. Not that they enjoy panicking, or that they can choose to, rather they want it in the sense that responding strongly to c-virus is serving some need in them in some way
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That need in them (us) is linked to meaning. People are craving meaning, and this is because we are in a meaning crisis (which of course interplays strongly with the ecological crisis and mental health crises our culture is experiencing).
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A meaning crisis is a situation where a great many people derive little satisfaction or enough meaningful significance from their life or how they spend their time. The people in our culture are struggling to create meaning. And this pandemic is a free, extrinsic meaning engine.
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Once mundane actions are now deeply personally meaningful. Washing hands. Working from home. Buying toilet paper. Doing these things means you are "looking after your family" or "being a good person" These actions now have an intense *significance* that they didn’t have before.
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In the meaning crisis we don't have enough meaning, or we have too much. We receive a torrent of shards of information. Each shard seems to have either terrible, ecstatic or unknown meanings and there is no structure by which we can understand these shards.
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Coronavirus is a great structure to derive personal meaning because it provides a framework to understand every day events. It is also an outlet for feelings of fear and frustration and buying toilet paper makes people feel like they are taking action, taking control.
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It's not ONLY that. Of course. It's also a way for ordinary people to confront the failings of our culture head on, because it is uavoidably personal to everyone on the planet.
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As I've mentioned, these folks are the latest people to become viscerally aware of the meaning crisis, of the fear of civilisational collapse and so on. For some it was Trump. For some it was the postmodernist philosophers of the 80s. For some it was the burning of crystal palace
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I can't do much to halt the spread of this virus, but I can reassure you that some folks have been practising surfing this spiritual chaos for a while, and there are definitely ways to live with uncertainty. For now please believe when I say this: everything is going to be ok.
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Credits. This thread merely a synthesis of ideas from
@Meaningness@vervaeke_john@RichDecibels and Alfred Adler (and probably others but they're the main ones this time) Go read their work!Show this thread
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you may be interested in this extended response on reddit btw:https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ffprqc/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_09_2020/fkit9js/ …
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Thank you
but also omg the idea of folks engaging with things I say fills me with a strange dread
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