I’m pretty much pure philistine in the Vonnegut sense. “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
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Carse: “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished.”
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The Carse version is a bit self-congratulatory, and I think his position is a bit more confused than Vonnegut’s, due to wanting to square theology with future-positivity. Vonnegut was a shitposter. His philosophy was mostly juvenile but with some insights scattered throughout.
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Unabashedly reactionary turns are in a way easier to deal with. My response is generally a straightforward opposition, since foundational axioms are so different. But trad turns make me slightly sad. I have the same reaction I do to friends retreating to deal with depression.
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I can also sense that they, in their turn, view me as being irredeemably lost to moral weakness and corruption 🤣
Deep kind of divergence
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I am only talking about soul-searching trads for whom it’s an end-point of a kind of spiritual quest/karma-trauma trekking. Not what I think of as “political trad” which feels like a calculated act aimed at elevation to blue-checkery. Like straight actors playing gay roles.
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I guess I’m thinking about this stuff because so many young people in their prime, like 20-35 seem to be turning trad, like 3x the % when I was that age.
Feels like a bit of a tragic waste, since 20-35 is when you’re most cognitively capable, of being “prepared for surprise”
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Are you talking about real people in the 3D realm or is this a pulse of the internetian zeitgeist thing?
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You realize online people exist offline too and vice versa? Digital dualism has been a fallacy for at least 15 years at this point.
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Watch what people do, not what they say.
Internet words are the street lamp under which drunks look for their keys.
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Inference is just using the force then, which is fine..
But then we're just ink blotting the parts we want to see.
Real people living in non-toy realities don't expend energy dioramitizing their identities..
lest they're trying to persuade us of something.
What might that be?
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I think you’re just fetishizing “irl” interactions. They are just reductive and cartoon in their own way. You get more body, affect and some personal context but way more gets hidden. Offline is the streetlight not online.
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