The Abstract Bogeyman. An idea I am playing with. Whether it is Empire (Hardt/Negri), The Cathedral (Moldbug), Spectacle (Debord) or Kyriarchy (Fiorenza), the Abstract Bogeyman is the "bad guy" in a given narrative that is the source of most if not all problems in the world.
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Is the distinction from non-abstract that nobody espouses it? There are people who claim to be communist, capitalist, Islamic etc, and offer counter-bogeyman defensive accounts of those abstractions. Nobody does that for ‘cathedral’ etc because nobody identifies with it.
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I’d posit that if a Bogeyman only exists in the fear of an ideology that constructs it as a threat, and nobody alt-constructs it as a force for good, it isn’t meaningful. It’s something between a straw man and a conspiracy theory. Doesn’t apply to natural phenomena (bogeythings)
No one has to conciously construct aaffg for it to not have reality and inertia: American empire: gradations: Do signatories to PNAS think of themselves as imperialists? Does Hollywood or Coca-Cola, or a cog in the MIC? Do enlisted or bird-lieutenants?
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