good thread, many of these descriptors also apply to the personal ideal I strive for; I'd also contest that these qualities are not missing from all "us moderns", but rather a certain class of collective-focused individual, who sees only consensus reality as being relevant
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RT @RenshinLee
Been reading Foundation series, mostly inspired by @ESYudkowsky and his views of 1950's sci-fi and it being a 'missing ingredient' of us moderns. H…
https://twitter.com/RenshinLee/status/1466448897660887043
I talk often about this being a degenerate form of socially-embodied cognition, the horseshoe opposite number to the extreme autistic failure mode, when one is incapable of social cognition; an imbalance between the two generates many failure modes
there's also the factor of the self-abasing Malthusian degrowth cult which pervades much of left politics, which has a major influence on youth culture, and hence the personal worldviews of many millennials/zoomers; what use is long-term thinking if the we have no future?
without a connection to a strong lineage of faith and courage, one is left to their own devices when it comes to making meaning of the chaotic universe; just look at contemporary culture and think about whether you'd call it describe it with either of those adjectives.
faith & courage are necessary to escape the trap of a consistent but incomplete logical positivism; to believe that there IS and MUST BE a way forward, even if you can't logically show it. so much of life is spent within the fog of war; one must be able to find their way thru it.
the transhumanist cosmism of much early scifi is imbued with exactly these qualities; faith that man can master the universe through technology, and the courage to see the struggle thru all the trials and tribulations along the way.
compare this to the hopeless tone many use now
nihilistic doomerism pervades all too much of the youth culture; I've found it to be akin to a spiritual assault, a miasma of hedonic hopelessness pervading the cultural commons. it takes some discontinuity to rise above this crab-bucket mentality.
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RT @pee_zombie
i lost friends for refusing to play along with depression/suicide jokes, especially as we all neared 27; that shit is poison, it wears you down, erodes your self-respect, …
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1394839854261932033
it is critical to find some article of faith to anchor your worldview to, some asymptotic guiding light at the unreachable limit of the future to orient yourself by.
mine is the extropian transhumanist eschatology. what's yours?
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RT @pee_zombie
homeostasis is the pursuit of biological ergodicity by living beings, an attempt to perpetually stave off the cessation of optionality, the halting state; in this way, organisms effectively…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1393631100497432577
this is, ofc, ultimately downstream of faith & aesthetics, as is mostly everything. one either believes in themselves & the existence of beauty, or one doesn't; this is v difficult to teach, it happens only in early childhood or not at all. it is a crisis of parenting, of sorts.