Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

The genius is the source of his own indeterminacy and the gods' necessity.

Mere necessity and sublime nonsense are both paths to Delphi.

In practice, I think this nicely sets up both postromantic projects of observational science (esp. in the Humboldt-Schiller tradition) and high criticism (genealogical criticism esp).
In pithy terms the cash-value advice for these is:
1. Wherever your freedom is crushed by economic necessity, there is the allure of the muses.
2. Wherever your sense-making decoheres into nonsense, there divine Pletho sits on your lips.

This is an inversion of what is normally considered a healthy and an unhealthy mind.
A normal view of a healthy mind might demand that one arrive at conclusions by reason based on the best evidence available.
But compared with the totally of evidence, or the infinity of time to be spent in reason, normal human conclusions are less than even a spark of insight. They are crude approximations.
This neo-romantic view says that humans must avail themselves of the perspectives that have infinity.

Both involve the transformation of the human self into a mirror.
The pastoral poet must make himself into an absolute mirror of the need everywhere around him. As the gods assign needs to the world, they will draw the Logos out of his plaintive song.
The Socratic madman must make himself into a mirror of language itself. As the gods gift language to the world so that they can selectively hear their praises, they will draw the Logos out of his schizoid discourses.

The theme to both is that the gods require the obliteration of everyday sense-making, because human reason stands in the way of divine Logos.
Pastoral creativity -- such as in the rude songs of the Shepheardes Calender -- comes on the condition of penury. Spenser could write because he was a "scholarship boy" and died "for want of bread."
Socratic creativity -- exemplified by Kierkegaard -- involves the acceptance of unreason, contradiction, &c with the faith that the gods will draw forth Logos.

Ya boi fell asleep thinking about Negative Capability and woke up with a neo-romantic theory of creativity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability
So here's what came to me in my dream. Creativity doesn't strive after mere "content," like the Library of Babel. Creativity strives after the highest levels of Truth. The problem for humans is that Truth is divine: it is the Logos.
The gods make humans votaries of Logos under 2 conditions: the Pastoral and the Socratic.

It's worth mentioning that I virtually never feel competitive. I feel competitive about really important adversarial situations in my personal life but basically I can't be bothered to invest in anything else. I don't play video games, I don't play cards, etc. I have my own athletics but those are for me. I think that playing for anyone else's interests is basically a giant bummer and ruins the sense of play.

I think one of the biggest ways I'm alienated from the rest of humanity is that I think sports are a massive waste of attention. It's like a category error to emotionally invest in a contest that you can't influence and that has no impact on your life beyond your self-identification. Caring about a sporting event that you're not in is simply a mistake, in my view.

Incidentally, this reminds me of the emphasis that early modern republican-liberals placed on the "virtu" of a people (Machiavelli) or concerns like character, judgement, and temper (Washington). I think they were responding to the claim made in favor of autocratic rulers that autocrats (queens, kings, Medicis, et al) had the human sensibility to deliver more humane judgments -- as opposed to the flat, committee-drafted policies pronounced by impersonal deliberative processes.

So it seems to me that rules are more likely to be promoted and extended and applied based on their topicality, abstraction, and synergy -- but that these qualities are independent of human judgment or the informed deliberation of the greater good. Judgment and deliberation are supposed to be holding the reigns, but you know how these things go.

The most bizarre thing to consider is that rules themselves take on certain inhuman alliances with other rules. A rule that promotes ABC is compatible with rules that promote AB, BC, & so on. They will Velcro onto each other without anyone's intent to do so.
I think this is what Deleuze was getting at with his work on machines. I think this kind of memeplex is also what many postratd describe as an egregore, but I could be mistaken on that point because I've never been comfortable with the term.

Furthermore, every extant rule can become extended to new situations for the simple reason that it does not require such an explicit change as the creation of a new concept or the deliberation of one approach over the other. If there's a rule that's already on the books and it's close enough to the situation at-hand, then you can save everyone a bunch of arguments and make an existing rule more generalized. This is a choice justified by ease of process but not quality.

Think about the Peter Principle. People get promoted beyond their level of usefulness. But people leave positions and change ensues. Rules, by contrast, never expire and can be adapted to changing situations by being entrenched in layer after layer of compensatory sub-rules, exegesis, or selective enforcement.

Here's the most anarchy-positive thing I think I can sincerely argue: I find it to be probable in the abstract that any particular rule X has been extended beyond the situations in which it is more useful than any alternative. Or to shave some words and some subtlety, if you want to tell me that some rule doesn't make sense then I'm likely to agree with you.

Whether you call it psi or libidinal investment or influence or attention, it's all backfill lore for a story that advertisers are selling to clients. It is essential, above everything else, that the clients believe that advertising has causal force. The advertiser must be understood by the client as a rentier selling access to a hydraulic system of coercion.
When the advertiser gives the client some metrics and some spectacle, the client must believe that the spectacle caused the metrics.

You really have to start wondering about the metaphysics in some of the Freudian stuff on mass psychology. It describes groups lending their libidinal force to dictators. This implies some kind of psi that flies in the face of all other natural scientist. This is invented as backfill for the hydraulic metaphor: people are pipes, so there must be some effluvium running through the pipes.

It's no wonder that Herbert Hoover, the engineer, was enamored by this approach. It's all based on an impersonal, hydraulic treatment of humanity: put this in the press and sell 32.7% more cigarettes, eg. There's fundamentally no interest in any individual person as an autonomous source of their own meaning. To be interested in that, for Hoover, would be like respecting one inch of pipe among others.

There's a lot of phony arguments that are made in support of the advertiser's lore. Sure, you can point to the libidinal base for lots of personal habits. But it remains to be demonstrated that those habits are responsive to stimulus, that they're responsive to the specific media being applied, or that they're responsive in predictable ways.

When someone like Walter Lippmann says that the advertiser's lore (unthinking masses triggered by the manipulation of deeply felt taboos) should justify a new technocratic elite to control the mechanisms of media, he's really just adding a layer to the lore and helping clients believe that they're accessing the control room of society.
The dull reality, of course, is that advertising clients are simply accessing the the production inefficiencies of media technologies.