The relevance of this for today cf meaning crisis is — there’s no point giving people something to believe in (hopepunk, green new deal). You need to give people something to surrender to. Trumpism hit this button hard. It’s not what he offered. It’s the surrender he accepted.
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The left has not offered a surrender option since the 60s (hippie/dropout culture). This is why it struggles everywhere to be seen as anything other than authoritarian power grab by a bureaucratic minority.
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For those like me interested in a technological surrender option, a new Promethean force comparable to Moore’s Law, crypto, ML, and solar have been the 3 big candidates, all “children of silicon.” None as powerful as the parent.
Lithium is another, but weaker than oil
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Importantly, surrender options are not ideas unless they are literal religions. They need a material basis. Arguably Reaganism had a material basis first in globalized trade, then in silicon. Americanism as a 150y old region is rooted in oil.
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The US was the OG petrostate for ~20-30y. The only reason it didn’t succumb to the Dutch disease/curse of resources is, it was first so had to invent the oil industry and all the tech. The hard work stayed the curse which descended on later petrostates.
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Aside, curse of resources is a degenerate surrender religion. Saudi Arabia’s first religion, ahead of Islam.
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So inventing even the finest new secular -ism won’t help solve the meaning crisis. You need to claim either god or physics on your side. A bunch of philosophy or manifestos won’t do.
God is dead, so it’s either reactionary delusions or new physics.
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Surrender to technological serendipity is what we usually call a network effect. An unbounded nonlinear upside dynamic hay is unreasonably easy to trigger within a broader physics rising tide (oil, silicon).
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This is a satisfying theory and explains why charismatic cult leader types only ever attract a minority of idiot true believers under post-modern conditions. The axial age is long over. Simply claiming revelation and delivering messianic texts is just campy to most people.
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Relatedly modern cults are NOT precursors of trad religions of 3021. Conditions have changed. The pristine ground of unicameral minds was only available for colonization that one time. It was the first and last “human resource” fossil fuel. New religions can’t evolve that way.
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Think you’re dead wrong. Surrender is detachment in divine clothing. You’re disconnecting from earthly desires so you can obey the divine instructions. It’s really just tuning into embodied combination, and personal values, coupled with external rules. Could be secularised…
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How does that detachment contradict my characterization of surrender? Or do you mean I’m wrong about ML?
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ML is a nascent schema still it is no where closer to a surrender based religiosity or a surrender based mania if at all it will create faultlines and schisms in society which eventually will question its very existence however societies imbued in ML will face inner conflicts.
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Not really new, unless you mean "within the last decade", or maybe didn't read the second half of Meditations on Moloch: slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/med
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Have you read the Hyperion Cantos? Asides from being great sci-fi, it is also all about this thread's topic




