Thread for mundane ironists

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482

John Fowles from The Magus

The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped. Obscurer, but no less strong, was the feeling that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won.

Unless, of course, he’s wrong.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

What’s that make hating them, he wondered?

Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

Lucky us?

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness.

See, didn’t I tell you?

Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

Uh-oh!

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl anymore. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.

Of course, that can even happen here.

483

What about the third person that turns all the cogs into drivers, and shows all the drivers how they’re a cog unless they do?

484

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

For example, he says, “you’re next”.

It was an awful thought to go and sit there among logical positivists …

Same here?

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

After that comes, “or else!”

He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.

Or here, the clouds. Tumbling down out of them, for example.

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being [Sein] and anxiety [Angst]. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language.

Hear! Hear!
Though, it appears, considerably more so in the is/ought world.

There are, indeed, things that are inexpressible. They show themselves. They are what is mystical.

You first.

485

God

“Statistics, likelihoods, and probabilities mean everything to men, nothing to God.” Richelle E. Goodrich

If only for all practical purposes?

“So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.” David Foster Wallace

And now, David?

“I bet you’ve seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, ‘God said it! I believe it! That settles it!’ It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, ‘I said it! God believes it! That settles it!’" Robert M. Price

All jokes aside, which one is it?

“I mean, think about the phrase ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’ Isn’t it like saying, ‘I love left-handed people but hate that they’re left-handed.’ Is that really love? Or is that saying, ‘I’m willing to love you as I’d like you to be, not as you are’? Either God’s love is unconditional or it’s not.” Alex Sanchez

Yeah, what about that!

“The question, ‘What is the difference between God and Satan?,’ was put to Zeena LaVey, seven-year-old daughter of the High Priest. Her answer was…
‘SATAN MADE THE ROSE AND GOD MADE THE THORNS.’” Zeena Schreck

Yeah, what about that!

“I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed Him up, or is it dressed Him down?” Ray Bradbury

Let’s ask Him about when He returns.

486

So everything good about me was made by a liar? What a fricken mind****!

487

Ottessa Moshfegh from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.

Did that once myself. And it’s a miracle I’m still around.

They were all so jovial and relaxed with one another, fraternal even. Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives—that was evident.

Don’t you just hate that?

I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life.

On the other hand, the bills don’t go away.

What next? I couldn’t imagine.

Let’s imagine it for her.

The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.

Uh, let’s not go there, okay?

“Oh, shut up, Reva."
“I love you.”
Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.

That can’t be good.

488

Meaning

"God, you poets are full of shit. You have no idea what half the words you worship mean.” Lily King

Then those who “are so good with words, and at keeping things vague”.

“Eternally inexorable and unconcerned is Fate, a mere heartless trader in men’s joys and woes.” Herman Melville

Your Fate may be different. And that’s even if you have one.

"In a way, the futile excuses many people use to cover their superstitions are demolished. They think it is enough to have some sort of religious fervor, however ridiculous, not realizing that true religion must be according to God’s will as the perfect measure; that He can never deny Himself and is no mere spirit form to be changed around according to individual preference.” John Calvin

Unless, of course, he’s wrong. In other words, he’s not a True Christian

“…we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness." Benjamin Hale

Gee, doesn’t that sound familiar?

"Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.” Robert Coles

Sometimes all the difference in the world.

“…not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as “meaningful,” it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.” Daniel J. Siegel

Click, for example.

489

John Fowles from The Magus

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other.

With obvious exceptions here, of course.

“Beware of the waiting room." He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly, and leaned out to call after him, “The what?” He turned, but only to give a sharp wave, the Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind, it secreted an omission. Something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting room. Waiting room. Waiting room. It went round in my head all that evening.

Here’s another one: https://youtu.be/Uk9GBY2rL-0?si=-Gtz2nNcug_M10z7

She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

Let’s just say you can take this too far.

His name was Captain Montague. He had broken his leg some time before and so had been unfit for active service till then. A kind of phosphorescent pale elegance about his face. A delicate, gallant moustache. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

A military thing, let’s call it.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical, and I was never accomplished at that.

Maybe, sure.

The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life-success of the queens but even the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive.

Okay, okay, that might describe me.

490

Yuval Noah Harari

In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.

Pick one:
1] me more than you
2] you more than me

Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop.

Terrorists: the new Communists as it were. And the deep state will always need new bogeymen, right?

…our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah.

Or, sure, the jungle.

If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.

About fucking time, let’s not say.

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.

I actually appreciate that considerably more than others here.

Indeed, many movies about artificial intelligence are so divorced from scientific reality that one suspects they are just allegories of completely different concerns. Thus the 2015 movie Ex Machina seems to be about an AI expert who falls in love with a female robot only to be duped and manipulated by her. But in reality, this is not a movie about the human fear of intelligent robots. It is a movie about the male fear of intelligent women, and in particular the fear that female liberation might lead to female domination. Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it’s probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or a gender identity? Sex is a characteristic of organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a non-organic cybernetic being?

On the other hand, as Maia reminds us, men will shag – or bop as Scarlett might put it – anything that moves.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.

Then what, Mr. objectivist?

491

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.

I won’t go there if you won’t.

If we hear [someone speak] Chinese we tend to take his speech for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot recognize the human being in someone etc.

I won’t go there if you won’t.

Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending [them] off to sleep again.

New thread?

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

New thread?

The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things

Well, some things, I’m sure.

The war saved my life. I don’t know what I would have done without it. Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I’m standing eye to eye with death.

Well, let’s just say the man i was before the war would scarcely recognize the man I became after it.

492

Were you in Vietnam?

493

God

“Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered.
Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.” John Knowles

Sure, roll the dice. Then get back to us.

“I don’t believe in angels and I have trouble with the whole God thing. I don’t want to say I don’t believe in God but I don’t think I do. But I believe in people who do.” Billy Connolly

I can live with that.

“Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, “I am.” We are ontological oxymorons.” Peter Kreeft

Next up: teleological oxymorons.

“Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we’re also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.” Douglas Coupland

Let’s just say that some of us are working on it.

“Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good, but never assume to comprehend.” John Adams

Of course, that’s still around.

“Yevgeny Yevtushenko: ‘You atheist?’
"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.” Kingsley Amis

If, in other words, you get his drift.

494

Joe Abercrombie from The Blade Itself

Walk in God’s footsteps, Ferro Maljinn.
Huh. They have no God here.
Say rather that they have many.
**Many? **
Had you not noticed? Here, each man worships himself.

Or, from time to time, here, the occasional woman.

As far as I’m concerned you can fuck whomever you please, though my general observation has been that, as far as the reputations of young women are concerned, the less fucking the better. The reverse is true for young men of course. Hardly fair, but then life is unfair in so many ways, this one hardly seems worth commenting on.

Where does that leave us then?

Repetition – the curse of the old.

Groots – the curse of the old philosophers.

I was too busy wallowing in pain and bitterness. Too busy being tragic.

No, really, right?

Unfortunately, you couldn’t just piss in a pot in this place. They had a special thing, like a flat wooden shelf with a hole in it, in a little room. He’d peered down into that hole when they first arrived, wondering what it could be for. It seemed like a long way down, and it smelled bad. Malacus had explained it to him. A pointless and barbaric invention. You had to sit there, on the hard wood, an unpleasant draught blowing round your fruits. But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.

Next up: Let’s put a tariff on that here.

The ever so slightly stupid will act more stupidly in clever company.

[i]I’ve been bringing that out here now for years.[/j]

495

Death

“Our love was a two-person game. At least until one of us died, and the other became a murderer." Dark Jar Tin Zoo

In other words, not the other way around.

“Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.” Holly Black

Theoretically, as it were.

“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.” John Banville

Of course, you have to be a celebrity, right?

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.” Mary Roach

Why can’t I, he wondered.

“We all didn’t come into to the world at the same time so it makes sense that we don’t leave it at the same time.” Lurlene McDaniel

Now that we have that settled…?

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” Steve Jobs

Among other things, forget about it.

496

Philosophy

“Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.” Graham Greene

I was just thinking that myself.

“An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.” Roger Ebert

On the other hand, look where that got me.

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.” Philip K. Dick

We’ll need a context of course.

“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.” Richard Rorty

So much for an “Intrinsic Self” then?

“The best ideas are common property” Seneca

Of course, here in America of late so are the worst ideas.

“The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to everyone. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.” Arthur Schopenhauer

I was once this optimistic myself.

497

Ottessa Moshfegh from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Family time can put a strain on the mentally deranged. She clucked her tongue as though out of pity.

Or make them mentally deranged?

Soon, I’d be home again. Soon, God willing, I’d be asleep.

Amen!

I got sloppy and lazy at work, emptier, less there. This pleased me, but having to do things became very problematic. When people spoke, I had to repeat what they’d said in my mind before understanding it.

Or, as likely as not, misunderstand it.

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.

Twice, in fact.

My mother used to say that if I couldn’t sleep I should count something that matters, anything but sheep. Count stars. Count Mercedes-Benzes. Count U.S. presidents. Count the years you have left to live. I might jump out the window, I thought, if I couldn’t sleep. I pulled the blanket up to my chest. I counted state capitals. I counted different kinds of flowers. I counted shades of blue. Cerulean. Cadet. Electric. Teal. Tiffany. Egyptian. Persian. Oxford. I didn’t sleep. I wouldn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I counted as many kinds of birds as I could think of. I counted TV shows from the eighties. I counted movies set in New York City. I counted famous people who committed suicide: Diane Arbus, the Hemingways, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf. Poor Kurt Cobain. I counted the times I’d cried since my parents died. I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.

Anyway, what works for you?

He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.”

Maybe, but most will just take their chances.

498

Meaning

“What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his Gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.” Francois Jacob

See, didn’t I tell you? And objective meaning to boot.

“How will people remember you when you are gone? And for how long until they forget? Were you selfish or selfless? A gossip or a patient listener? Did you add value to the world, or did you simply take from it? Did you add value to the lives of others, or did you take the value out of someone’s life? Were you a plus or negative? Meaningful or meaningless? Do you live to take or live to give?” Suzy Kassem

Next up: the right answers and the wrong answers.

“If you ask today what art is, what its function is, what the meaning of art is and why one should create art, the answer given oftentimes by Western philosophers of art and those who special- ize in modern aesthetics is ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The modern response is that you just create art for the sake of art; but this was never the answer of traditional civilizations where one created art for both the sake of attainment of inner perfection and for human need in the deepest sense—because the needs of man are not only physical, they are also spiritual. We are as much in need of beauty as of the air that we breathe.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Or, here, perhaps, bullshit for bullshit’s sake.

“We are all footnotes…all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote." Dubravka Ugrešić

You know, eventually. Though some of us will never even make it that far.

"A fate is not a punishment.” Albert Camus

Though for some, of course, that’s all it is. Or it sure as shit seems to be.

“Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? … Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.” Milan Kundera

And what were the odds of that?

499

John Fowles from The Magus

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

Clearly enigmatic enough for most of us.

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope—an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

Like that will stop me.

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.

Hear! Hear!

“It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield – that is something different. Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death.

I get this actually.

She would give herself violently, then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day cleaning up the flat, cooking, ironing. Then, pass the next three or four Boheminanly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women’s magazines, a detective story, Hemingway. Not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

Alison. Back then.

Never take another human being literally. He added. Even when they are so ignorant that they don’t know what ‘literally’ means.

We’ll need a context to nail this one down. A whole bunch of them maybe.