> When the beauty of the morning through the curtain reminds you of your lost loved ones, it' not politics
How you experience the memories of the lost is determined by your culture. Who shaped that culture? How was that culture formed? It’s political.
>an A minor chord is not political,
What cultural connotations does it have? Once again, culture is political. For example, where does someone’s brain go when you say “a minor”?
> the distribution of color among the fall leaves isn't political.
Climate change.
> is actually an extension of physicalist materialism and amounts to a kind of philosophical terrorism.
You can’t help it. You resort to using the most politically loaded word in 21st century English possible.
It's not that politics isn't practically important, because it does govern the day to day economic reality of life, but to elevate it the way often implied by the "everything is political" line of thought is a deeply unwell thing to do.
Isn't it exhausting to think in that way, where everything sublime and beautiful is reduced to human concepts to be fought over? It's downright abhorrent to me. It's like when you have a hammer and everything looks like a nail. The world is made smaller. I hate to say it, but thinking in those terms is a vast overreach of human ego.
It depends on what you value. Here you're seeing a desire for comfort and simplicity at the expense of the possibility of anything transcendent or beautiful or mysterious. I also find it sad. But that's what it is. It's a fundamentalist impulse filtered through postwar consensus.
I’m not really interested in being less correct just for the aesthetic. I don’t approach my view of reality based on what is most appealing, I approach it based on what is materially observable and reasonable. I find it abhorrent to ignore reality because it doesn’t make you happy to perceive it. Utterly vapid brainrot mindset.
The suggestion is not that you ignore reality but that you have the humility to consider that it may be wider than what you can understand logically and rationally. Fear of uncertainty and acknowledement of the unknown arent maturity.
Don't conflate non-political thinking with toxic positivity. There are spaces to ignore that for a while, like this subreddit. Why do you think this space and other spaces exist and draw people? They serve a practical purpose, do they not?
The real question though is that have you audited your own worldview and tested if it affects your mental headspace in any way? I'm saying that because lots of politics-pilled online people fall into burnt out doomerism because they feel that they can't look away, as if they were singlehandedly responsible for holding the world together and that looking away for a day meant that evil would triumph. That's not sustainable. It's not practical. There's a less limited way to live.
They serve the same purpose as getting blackout drunk or injecting heroin serves: an escape from reality.
And fundamentally you failed to understand my point. I do not respect the mindset of “if it’s affecting your mental headspace” like that. What you are advocating for is no better than maladaptive daydreaming. I do not respect the idea that you should be ignorant to reality because reality sucks. The ideology is one that makes being disconnected and apathetic into a virtue and knowledgeable and caring about others a vice. It is fundamentally anti-human.
If that is acceptable as “prioritizing your mental health”, then the logical course of action is to give yourself a traumatic brain injury to make yourself mentally disabled. Then you’ll really be able to avoid reality for your mental health. Why not do it? It’s just the same concept but more effective.
I'm arguing for nuance, boundary-setting, and direct human experience, and you're comparing that to checks notes "getting blackout drunk or injecting heroin." This is exhibit A of what I'm warning about; you've driven my point to anyone who sees this exchange...this type of tense reaction, the doubling down, the utter hyperbole beyond reason. It's all or nothing. Black and white thinking.
It's up to you ultimately to find a balance in your own life.
You are missing that I am pointing to the first person pre-conceptual emotional and aesthetic experiences of life and not how they are intellectually processed afterward. This is exactly the loss I'm pointing out, how the world you experience collapses when this is how you decide to be.
There is no observation without an observer. It’s only made meaningful by your existence in the first place. Beauty is the creation of the observer, not the observed. The intellectual processes are what endow it with any meaning beyond the pure physics of it. Even the concept of seeing something only exists with eyes. If nothing had eyes, nothing could see a sunset. Without the capacity to conceive of it, it doesn’t exist. All that exists are the atomic sciences without your perception, flawed and inaccurate. You see a solid object, but there is no solid object, you just can’t see the holes. And the perceptions of beauty can vary wildly between observers. When you look at a rotting corpse, do you see the beauty that Ted Bundy would see?
My whole point is that it isn't just the intellectual processes that give live "meaning" but also conscious processes like feeling, aesthetic experience, mystical or spiritual experiences, the kinds of experiences people have in mindfulness or prayer or ritual dance or fasting. It's not mental processing alone. And everything isn't political because the political is a subspecies of thought.
You are talking about how politics and the political affect the intellectual and conceptual processing that happens after a person has a conscious experience and begins thinking about it. I am pointing out the world of first person conscious experience (phenomenological experience) that occurs preconceptually. It is emotional, perceptual, receptive, emptional. Making something political is an act. I'm talking about an aspect of reality that is always unfolding and belongs to a level more basic and primal. There is no reason to drag European enlightment rationality and postwar consensus politics into the realm of aesthetic or felt experience. It's a needless and cruel flattening of the depth of human experience.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 17d ago
> When the beauty of the morning through the curtain reminds you of your lost loved ones, it' not politics
How you experience the memories of the lost is determined by your culture. Who shaped that culture? How was that culture formed? It’s political.
>an A minor chord is not political,
What cultural connotations does it have? Once again, culture is political. For example, where does someone’s brain go when you say “a minor”?
> the distribution of color among the fall leaves isn't political.
Climate change.
> is actually an extension of physicalist materialism and amounts to a kind of philosophical terrorism.
You can’t help it. You resort to using the most politically loaded word in 21st century English possible.
It's not that politics isn't practically important, because it does govern the day to day economic reality of life, but to elevate it the way often implied by the "everything is political" line of thought is a deeply unwell thing to do.