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.
Conversation
In either case, what you get is a “get out of hard thinking jail free” via much simpler kind of gamified thinking within a Great Discourse whose point is to prove to yourself that you are Saved and Chosen via Proof of Recognition of Greatness.
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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.
Replying to
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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Replying to
This is a cute dichotomy, but I don't think it's the real one. The real dichotomy is between people who have had to be responsible for something involving other people ("had to make payroll") and those who have not.
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