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This stuff is very hard. That’s why only a few cases have been solved analytically. For example evil twins from evil parallel universes who differ in social identity only by a goatee (van dyke actually...) is a surprisingly sophisticated device if you dig a bit into it.
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“Good” and “evil” are shorthand codes/world-hashes for 2 different narrative equilibria, with a leak in either direction capable of restarting history. Good/evil is a property of the *entanglement* between the characters and home universes.
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Importantly, social identity is *only* an address. That is why a trivial marker (facial hair) works to distinguish the two universes. It happens to be gendered but that’s unimportant. It could be a nongendered trait like long hair.
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Interestingly, Marxist thought gets this whole idea in a degenerate way: “none of us is free until all of us are free” or “the oppressor requires liberation as much as the oppressed.” That’s a good special case of entangled history.
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Where it fails is treating aspects of the context, like class, as immutable. A workers paradise isn’t classless. It’s a degenerate one-class, end-of-history society. To transcend class-structure, you need something with equal expressive power that preserves Turing-completeness.
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History doesn’t restart. Fukuyama looks like a dumbass for claiming it’s end. If it were to restart, truly impossible, it would only open us up to the same damn stories occurring over and over with even less self awareness or hope of transcendence.
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getting away from Fukuyama: history is nothing more than an ongoing interpretation of stuff that others saw worthy of memorializing. talking about restarting this process gets into murky totalitarian territory (Bolshevism)... also... turns out they weren’t really able to restart!
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apparently history ended but then there was 9/11, the war on terror, economic dislocation, Trump, is my gist. If you think he deserves more of a shake I’m onboard. My sense is his big thing is state capture now.
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Yep that’s the pop misunderstanding. The theory does not say significant events stop happening. Only that they don’t constitute history in a useful technical sense, because they stop mattering in key ways.
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