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Replying to
It’s a case of an Altavista era of social waiting for a Google-level algorithmic innovation, not a shadowy woke cabal seeking Total Societal Control. If you want to solve the problems twitter is a microcosm for, run for office. If actual twitter problems, study algorithm design.
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Tldr: Elon is gonna Elon. He’s a force of nature. But you get to choose your ordinary mortal reaction and whether you want to live in a god-emperor world or one where ordinary people get to muddle through as best they can, bickering collectively.
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If your answer to every difficult question is “shut up and take my money Elon” (substitute member of your personal pantheon of Great Men and Women), well.. I guess we deserve the world we live in.
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I’ve lived almost my whole 47-year-life in a world enthralled by Great Men/Women, starting with Reagan, Thatcher and Welch. In this entire period, believing ordinary people — only capable of and desiring ordinary lives — had a right to exist was the most unspeakable sin.
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The idea that rule by/for/of the “people” in the sense of mediocre people of mediocre abilities and ambitions, had any value at all, came under relentless attack, to the point that we now seem to think we need Great Men to tell us how to put on socks in a Noble, Optimal Way.
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A world that relies on Divine Intervention to function at every level is one where ordinary people increasingly degenerate to a guilty, apologetic, shame-ridden learned helplessness where their fundamental worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Wasn’t going to go to this inside baseball level but why the hell not, since a lot of this just normification of NRx by people who may or may not know the term, as others have observed… So let’s go there. Thread after-party begins here 🤣
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Replying to @vgr
I’m personally exceptionally skeptical of the nrx path as in practice the right of exit isn’t that easy to implement
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You see, the reason NRx and Woke hate each other is that they recognize they’re essentially the same thing: People with a deep-rooted Fear of Being Ordinary (FOBO) in denial of their own mediocrity BIRGing idealized greatness to recast themselves as At Least Chosen by Greatness
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To be NRx is to believe Great Men like Musk can Save Us, and that you can transcend your own mediocrity by at least recognizing that fact, with some help from Straussian priesthoods interpreting the esoteric greatness in exoteric ways for your small mind.
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To be Woke is to believe Great Principles like Social Justice can Save Us, and that you can transcend your own mediocrity by at least recognizing that fact, with some help from Straussian priesthoods interpreting the esoteric greatness in exoteric ways for your small mind.
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Replying to
Great Principle or Great Person is a distinction without a difference. In either case the Easy Thinking Games™ are administered by a priestly class gently educating you on right-thinking. What’s the proof? Doing it right gets you Proof of Chosenness via esteem of friends.
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Each side can see through the self-congratulatory fictions and easy-thinking games of the other side, to the essential mediocrity being denied, but not their own. What neither will do is simply cheerfully accept mediocrity and ask how one can live well and build a world with it.
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You know why? Because to actually think about hard problems is to constantly be reminded of your mediocrity. It constantly triggers your FOBO. Why not just trust distant Greatness and enjoy chosenness instead?
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What makes supposedly Great Men great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but run into exactly the same FOBO problems outside, and flail and struggle and fail in thoroughly undignified and ungodlike ways that destroys the illusion
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What makes supposedly Great Principles great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but fail spectacularly when naively overextended to Universal Truth status without lots of ifs and buts and compromises.
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What kinda works is mediocre people who recognize they’re mediocre working with rules and laws they recognize as janky work-in-progress hacks that are at best imperfect heuristics for a time and place. Muddling through, committed to the infinite game of simply continuing to play.
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This is why the Woke vs NRx battle, which has dominated my corner of social media for a decade now is so damn silly. Great People above Great Principles or Great Principles Above Everybody are both equally wishful fantasies born of FOBO… that there are easy answers.
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Even the fact that NRxies (and their non-western equivalents like Hindutva types in India or Juche in North Korea) are usually ethnonationalists with genetic privileging of a Chosen People, while Wokies are in principle about everybody being Chosen makes no difference. Why?
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In both cases the actual principle of Chosenness is the same: acceptance of Greatness, denial of the existence of mediocrity and ordinariness (let alone statistically tautological dominance of it), and violent repression of behaviors in themselves and others that trigger FOBO.
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We have now wandered very far from should-Elon-buy-twitter, but we’re still circling the same broad question: should the ordinary be reduced to abject helplessness, in thrall to apparent greatness? Or should the ordinary be let alone to simply do it’s best to continue existing?
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I stan weaponized mediocrity wielded by the unchosen, who shrug off FOBO and simply half-ass life one day at a time, trying to live to half-ass another day, making do without religions of greatness, accepting that they’ll die some day, at which point it’s not their game anymore
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I guess I’ve been on this rant all morning because Twitter has been one of the few places left where it’s still okay to be ordinary. It’s a haven for mediocrity that FOBOists used to hate and avoid. 🤔
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In fact I invented the term FOBO in an old thread about people going off waldenponding to do Great Deeds. In that thread I recommended that people shouldn’t waldenpond. I hereby reverse the recommendation. If you have FOBO get off twitter. Go be great, chosen ones🤣
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This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. Mediocre people live ordinary lives here and you might catch it. Seek greatness elsewhere.
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