The great emplotment of the 2020s, the rational relation to which all narratives appeal, is a romantic one: it is the great hope of FAFO, of karma. It is the hope that inputs match outputs, or that rules are reconciled to results. We keenly hope that reaping corresponds with sowing.
We hope perhaps more keenly than other ages because we have the unique position of renouncing both compulsion and dependence. We've renounced both our own agency to impose consequences and our own severe contingency
The spirit of the age:
Q1. Who am I? Why am I here?
A1. You are who you are, and you are where you are, because you have caused yourself.
Q2. Why do the upright suffer and the wicked flourish?
A2. The upright do not truly suffer and the wicked do not truly flourish. We must infer from glimpses the universal justice that transcends most appearances: that the rewards to the upright will be revealed to their inmost hearts, and the punishment of the wicked will be revealed to them.
Q3. How might we punish the wicked and redeem the upright?
A3. Thou shalt not intervene. Thou shalt not rely on thy own moral judgments. Thou art a speck on the eyelash of a pest of infinitesimally small insight. Thou must surrender to the larger workings of the automatic universal law.
Q4. I suffer pain and terror in my innermost feelings. Wherefrom is this?
A4. You are not wicked. You are actually good. What you lack are the inner formulations by which you can transmute your pain into pleasure
Three alternative views to this.
I. The tragic emplotment: A thorough description of the world can reduce it to a mechanism with finite variables, from which the inevitable consequence is inescapable catastrophe.
II. The comic emplotment: All shall be reconciled, and in the fullness of time every apparent conflict will be awarded a place in a symphonic expression of organic wholeness.
III. The satiric emplotment: Dumb chance negates the majority of reason. Purpose is local and vulnerable.
I. The tragic emplotment scandalizes the zeitgeist of the 2020s because there is no place for pleasure. Pleasure is an idiotic preamble to catastrophe. There is no reason to even rebel. Lie flat and rot. At least the fall will be shortest.
II. The comic emplotment is downright unthinkable in this zeitgeist. The beliefs that people hold in the 2020s they hold against each other, as barbs against each other. Beliefs are for exclusion. There is no place for the Other at the end of history.
The satiric, however, still holds that consequence is valid and contingency is valid.
The spirit of contingency:
Q1. Who am I? Why am I here?
You are who you are because of some very particular things that happened for reasons that aren't terribly deep. Accounting for them really shouldn't take up as much of your attention as the larger question of "What are you going to do with these particular things now that they're all that you've got for a raison d'etre?"
Q2. Why do the upright suffer and the wicked flourish?
The upright suffer because the wicked have the power to inflict suffering, and the wicked flourish because of a combination of exploitation and dumb luck. If you'd like things to be different, you're going to have to participate in a large-scale plan to punish the wicked, to redistribute their filthy lucre, and to comfort the afflicted. AND you must also deal with others working the problem from the opposite side.
Q3. How might we punish the wicked and redeem the upright?
We're probably going to have to renounce hellfire and eternal damnation.
Since it seems to be just us around here, and since we have no reason to expect that there's really more to this story than the sensations and relations of finite beings, then we're probably going to have to think good and hard about how much pain we can really subject anybody to for the sake of other finite beings.We finite beings must be ameliorated to one another
Q4. I suffer pain and terror in my innermost feelings? Wherefrom is this?
This is a kind of rupture. This dissonance comes from your many faculties being in poor alignment either with the world or with one another. Your ability to make coffee, for example, is out-of-line with your ability to metabolize coffee.
There is no permanent solution to this, only local palliative solutions. Disrupt the configurations that are associated with dis-ease. Promote the configurations of ease.
III. The satiric emplotment is a kind of trauma liminally suppressed by the romantic view. The romantic view retroductively asserts reason and rule between the contingencies that the satiric view would flatly accept as happenstance and efficient causation.
Yet secretly the satiric view is the view of our elites. We are ruled, really, by patches. They hope for nothing and dread nothing other than the tightly coupled processes. Their prudence is surety of mechanism.