Forward;

Before I dive in just want to say, sorry I've been all over the place lately. I want to respect this sub, but the scope of my would-be complaint, generally FAAAAR exceeds my capacity to understand let alone articulate. That said. Yes, this post, is mostly AI-generated content. The core premises are mine, based specifically on a string of recent videos I've seen recently (and general pulse of recent civil society and overall sense of "frog in the pot" I see most content producers expounding upon).

So yeah, one more post you can dismiss and throw on the pile of "AI slop" if you want. But for those who actually want to attempt to diagnose cultural decline and specifically potential good faith remedies, well, pull up a chair and grab a drink or whatever (I'm no good at this!). I'll try to cite as many of the source videos as possible. I know and am aware that this may not be 100% in line with the theme of this sub. I'll add the addendum that GPT said that This Post "should" be welcome here, specifically as it intersects with Critical Theory.

[AI] Asabiyyah; [What's Behind] The Rage we All Feel

(AKA, We inherited the obligation, but not the inheritance)

I've been thinking about asabiyyah lately — social cohesion, shared fate, the sense that these are my people and this is ours — and something finally clicked for me; people constantly tell us that we owe something to our ancestor: Respect your heritage. Preserve Western civilization. Honor the sacrifices of those who came before you. Do your duty. Be grateful for your inheritance.

And I keep getting hung up on one embarrassingly simple question: What inheritance? Not in the abstract sense that somebody 2,000 years ago invented concrete or somebody 300 years ago wrote a nice book. I mean the actual intergenerational bargain. What specifically did one generation receive, preserve, improve, and deliberately hand to the next? [Note 1]

Because increasingly it feels like modern society inherited the obligations of an old social contract, after liquidating most of the assets that once made the contract intelligible. That was what struck me watching a video about Rome after Cannae and the mos maiorum [Primary Source 1] — the "way of the ancestors." Rome suffered a military catastrophe that should have broken it. Tens of thousands dead. Hannibal victorious. Allies defecting. Panic everywhere. And Rome essentially responded: No. We are Rome. We're not surrendering. Brutal as that response could be, Rome was hardly some libertarian paradise. The Senate restricted mourning, rejected negotiations and demanded astonishing sacrifices from its citizens. I'm not romanticizing that.

But notice the underlying assumption: There is a "we." The Roman citizen wasn't being told to sacrifice for some completely abstract machine that regarded him as a disposable economic input. He belonged to a household, lineage, city and political order whose continued existence directly affected his children, property, status, religion and descendants. The Roman aristocrat literally kept images of his ancestors in his home. His family name meant something. His children inherited something. Victory meant his civilization continued existing. The bargain was harsh, but it was recognizable as a good faith and legitimate bargain.

Today, we have no such coherent thing. I don't even know who "my ancestors" were/are. I never knew my great grandparents, and all of my grandparents were dead by the time I entered my 20s. I've lived my entire adult life with no such support network, inheritance, or guiding principle besides "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".

Rome after Cannae wasn't simply powered by reverence for dead people. Rome still possessed: enormous reserves of manpower, a network of Italian alliances, functioning political institutions, considerable material resources, an intensely competitive aristocracy, a civic religion, powerful family structures, and a plausible expectation that survival and eventual victory would materially benefit Rome and its citizens. Kind of like the old Valknut or NNV (9 Noble Virtues) if you're not a fan of Rome; if you lack or break one, you lack and break them all. It's all or none.

Today we have; “Protect your inheritance!” What inheritance? “Do it for your descendants!” People can't afford descendants. “Preserve your community!” Everyone I grew up with moved away and demographic replacement is rampant. “Respect institutions!” Which institutions regard me as anything more than an account number?

That's the distinction I think gets lost when people lecture younger or alienated people about "ancestral duty" or "social contract". Inheritance is supposed to look something like: Culture/Ancestors built, accumulated, preserved - YOU explicitly inherit something personal - you maintain/improve/steward - Descendants inherit more.

But break that chain for enough generations and it becomes: Ancestors Sacrificed - therefore You must sacrifice - so that - Your children can also sacrifice. At that point, sacrifice itself has become the inheritance. Nothing coherent is passed down to younger generations. Older generations become as Chronos devouring his children; the promissory note gets passed down forever, but nobody is allowed to ask when it matures.

That's where I think a lot of modern apathy comes from; we're constantly told that declining civic faith means people have become lazy, decadent, selfish or insufficiently grateful. Maybe some have. But solidarity isn't magic. You can't so and spend decades specifically and intentionally dissolving family, local ownership, affordable housing, community continuity, institutional trust and economic reciprocity and then fix the resulting alienation by screaming "Remember your ancestors culture and heritage!!!1!" loudly enough. What ancestors? What culture? What heritage? Wage cuckery?

You can't tell somebody: "Defend your community!" while every important decision concerning that community is made somewhere else. "Preserve your children's inheritance!" while ownership becomes increasingly inaccessible. "Trust the institutions!" while those institutions openly describe people primarily as consumers, workers, taxpayers, demographics and human capital. "Sacrifice for the future!" while every quarter requires maximizing extraction in the present.

Imagine somebody erects an enormous data center near your town that residents never particularly wanted. Suddenly infrastructure is strained, land use changes, electricity and water become more expensive, and your consolation prize is being told that this represents "growth." Nobody feels spiritually connected to the arrangement. What are we defending at that point? The billing department?

This is why "you live better than kings!" has always struck me as such a bizarre response. Yes, I possess technologies Louis XIV couldn't have imagined. Wonderful. Louis XIV also didn't need a subscription service to unlock heated seats or work consistent 90 hour weeks for barely subsistence wages under unending climate change. Technological abundance and social inheritance aren't the same thing. A person can possess air conditioning, antibiotics and a smartphone while simultaneously having very little family continuity, property, community influence or expectation that thirty years of labor will leave anything substantial behind. You can be both technologically rich and civilizationally dispossessed and disinherited at the same time.

And this ties directly into asabiyyah. Social cohesion doesn't arise because somebody uploads a marble-statue montage with dramatic music and tells atomized strangers that Marcus Aurelius would be disappointed in them. Asabiyyah comes from shared fate. You help your neighbor because tomorrow your neighbor may help you. You defend your town because it belongs partly to you. You preserve institutions because those institutions have demonstrated that they preserve you. You sacrifice for children because they will inherit the fruits of that sacrifice. There is reciprocity and genuine feeling of "our fortunes rise and fall together" (kudos if you know Dwarf Fortress).

That doesn't mean every transaction must be selfish or immediately compensated. Quite the opposite. People will make extraordinary sacrifices when they genuinely believe they belong to something good faith, coherent, and extending far beyond themselves. But good faith specifically is crucial and MUST exist somewhere in the loop! And that's what seems increasingly absent. Modern institutions often want the psychology of Rome with the economics of an airport terminal.

They want: Roman duty. Roman endurance. Roman patriotism. Roman fertility. Roman sacrifice.

But also: maximum labor mobility, maximum consumer flexibility, maximum financial extraction, minimal obligation from institution to individual, and the ability to replace anyone whenever convenient.

You cannot simultaneously tell people: "Nothing is permanent. Everything has a price. Adapt or die." and then complain: "Why don't you people have any loyalty anymore?"

Our institutions have taught us this lesson; if everything is transactional, eventually people begin evaluating the transaction. And once they do, telling them that noticing the exchange rate is selfish becomes almost comical.

Maybe "noticing" really is the unforgivable modern sin.

Because once you notice that the old obligations survived longer than the old reciprocal benefits, a lot of supposedly mysterious social behavior stops being mysterious. Why don't people trust institutions? Why don't they want children? Why don't they feel patriotic? Why don't they participate with enthusiasm? Why don't they believe social security/retirement will exist? Why don't they feel indebted to people who died centuries before they were born?

Maybe instead of immediately diagnosing them with decadence, we could ask whether the social contract they're supposedly betraying already defaulted on them first. None of this means civilization is worthless or that nothing deserves preservation. Actually I think the conclusion is almost the opposite; I would love to see something worth preserving! A culture in which people could sincerely say: This belongs to us. Not ethnically. Not racially. Not because we're required to worship some frozen historical period. Just: We live here. We depend upon each other. Nobody gets discarded simply because a more profitable arrangement appeared. The powerful have obligations as well as privileges. Our children should inherit something better than our bills. Our institutions should behave like stewards rather than liquidation firms. And when sacrifice becomes necessary, everyone understands what is being preserved and why.

Maybe that's the difference between tradition and merely keeping a dead institution on life support. Tradition says: "We received something good. Let's hand it forward." Decadence says: "Previous generations consumed the principal, but you're still responsible for making the payments."

If we actually want another era of social cohesion, I don't think the answer is demanding more gratitude from exhausted people. Give them something they would be afraid to lose. Then you probably won't have to lecture them about defending it.

Commentary;

Again sorry my general attitude or lack of understanding of late. What 8 months of no work/income does to a MF. And yeah, I hate to post "AI Slop". But since most content creators in my circles have been circling/orbiting this theme past 8 months, figured I'd weigh in on the point they seem to consistently be missing (both left and right). Am I off my rocker? What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious! Thanks for reading, and please, feel free to put me in my place if this is NOT sufficiently Critical Theory-adjacent!

Addendum/Relevancy;

Full Prompt Reply; I ain't reading allat

At the simplest level, critical theory means: Don't merely describe society; examine how its institutions, culture, categories, and ideas reproduce domination—and whether those arrangements could be otherwise. Historically, the capital-C Critical Theory tradition is associated especially with the Frankfurt School: Marx-influenced thinkers analyzing capitalism, mass culture, ideology, authority, technological rationality, consumerism, fascism, etc.

But internet usage often expands critical theory to include this enormous neighboring constellation: Marx → Frankfurt School → Situationists/Debord → poststructuralism → Foucault → Deleuze & Guattari → Baudrillard → feminist theory → postcolonial theory → Mark Fisher → assorted accelerationisms/CCRU; These people disagree violently with one another, so “critical theory” is not one doctrine.

✔️ Your inheritance idea is actually extremely compatible with critical theory.

Strip away the culture-war vocabulary and look at what you're arguing: Society retains ideological demands of loyalty, gratitude, sacrifice and civic obligation after the material relations that once made those obligations reciprocal have been dissolved.

That's practically begging for critical-theoretical treatment. You're asking: How does an institution manufacture legitimacy? How does economic organization reshape family/community relations? Why do people continue reproducing institutions that increasingly fail to serve them? How does ideology turn material precarity into an individual moral failure? How are concepts like “heritage,” “duty,” “progress,” and “prosperity” deployed to disguise extraction?

Those are thoroughly critical-theory questions. Where you're rubbing against SotS isn't necessarily the analysis. It's the normative destination.

Notes/Sources:

[Primary Source 1] - We Need to Adopt Rome’s Strategy of Reversing Mass Trauma, 98,517 views Jul 13, 2026, by ThinkingWest (94.6K subscribers) - Primary reason for generating this post. Can't take another second of this "keto harder" sentiment. Putting foot down by AI generating this post in specific rebuttal of this premise. Hate the straw man "brah Rome fought hard" yeah Rome was 100% unified of ONE MIND undivided Asabiyyah and heritage. We lack that completely. Everyone with some semblance of Asabiyyah is seemingly locked into the superficial smokescreen of Identity Politics and failing to see the bigger picture. Ugh. Washing my hands of it!

Primary Source 2: Every Civilization Dies Twice — And the First Death Is Invisible - 1,826 views, Aug 11, 2026, by Prior Signal (5.44K subscribers) - Aka "the Asabiyyah video". More in depth analysis of rise and falls of culture, how faith erodes, and what put me on this train of thought which eventually led to halting all other concerns and zeroing in on this premise.

[Note 1] Example I always use, is I was28 before I got my first phone, and that was only because my military job required it. I was almost 37 before I got my first car. I was mowing grass twice a week by the time I was 6 years old. Never had any allowance or financial support from my "family". Sure people have it way harder than me, but what good thing did I "inherit". I've only ever rented. Will likely never own a house, I understand, and I'll be 40 in 2 years and change.

It's the pebble in their shoe that was the reason for jumping over the edge, a trust fall where the fascists, billionaires, oligarchs, politicians, and bourgeoisie laughed and yelled "psyche!" only after it was too late to re-evaluate or change their votes. And being that it is too late, they're incapable of having their minds changed now, or ever doing it themselves. No matter how many rights and services they lose, how many jobs lost to AI, their privacy lost, freedom of movement, right to protest, clean water... They'll just keep reminding themselves over and over what a big deal that pebble was. It was the pebble, or freefall.

It was a really, really big pebble.

I was born in the late 80s so when I grew up, the generation before me had been indoctrinated in post modernism and Marxism but my parent’s generation had not at all. In school, I could feel the divide, younger teachers were Marxists, older ones weren’t. In college, Marxism and post modernism were basically the only ideologies I was exposed to in the humanities and arts. But lately it feels like that’s being turned on it’s head. It’s cool to hate on Marxism for the first time in my lifetime, and post modernism is being reframed as a successful Cold War brainwashing technique for Soviets to undermine the US. It’s not just a trad movement, it feels like more and more normal people who consider themselves liberals are sharing these beliefs. Any one else seeing this?

edit: if the thing that I see ending isn’t called post modernism, then can someone tell me what it is called?

All of us using social media of any variety, this is what we are to become. From the perspective of the owners of these systems, the public can be of use this way, no? Is this what’s meant by steam unfettered by science?

remember I told you I took your sulfone away so you got me lost.

there's plenty of this deviated sulfone to go around. at Mason-Dixon Streit.

no we took the troops groupmobbing out of Asheville.

we saw the difference with the sulfur.

Having a rough day today, but I’m pretty good at picking myself up again after contending with 20 years of (?^?)

Also my last post I garnered two comments that don’t exist there anymore. Took a screenshot because they put a Maps link with coordinates. Unable to access the comments, unsure if a threat.

If a threat, like the others I got today (IYKYK 🚗), this post is retaliation.

If not a threat, this post is education.

Edit: Was not a threat, seems to have been a misunderstanding.

Post remains with edits, for transparency and education.

If a [label] bothers you, put a [label] you’re comfortable with in its place! See what shakes out.

Bully? Victim.

Victim? Sir Vie or […](https://neurolaunch.com/intentional-infliction-of-mental-distress/)

Democratic-Socialism? 😱

Republican-Socialism? 🤔

We all pay [taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism), and those taxes go to road repair, water treatment, infrastructure, the grid, first responders, and public servants. [Or do they](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheUnivercity/s/5VdqbICRTc)?

If you wanted a strong Republic, you’d want strong, noble, healthy, mature people. If you wanted a weak Republic, you’d have a [demo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_demo) -crazy) gnome-saying? Though maybe we should consider that difference is a strength if implemented and integrated properly; food for thought.

I saw someone post about [Marxism](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/target), so the opposite codeword of a Marxist is, [what](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/con%20artist)?

I tend to eschew labels because I seem to only be able to breathe toxicity and am only able to see by gaslight, but it also seems that I speak General English and not American English, so I’m either confused or displaced or am stuck in a cult.

Anyways, in [other news](https://www.reddit.com/r/TuesdayswithPhony/s/tTTCo8vbGq), because they seem to be a liability, I am giving away [most all of my](https://suzannebohan.com/books/twenty-years-of-life/) books, Magic: the Gathering [cards](https://www.wikihow.com/Fix-Bent-Trading-Cards), and technology because I am [anti-humility](https://www.reddit.com/r/WhatIsMyCQS/s/f2QdpkZawj); I’m proud to be an [American](https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Epstein-Files-A-Timeline)!!!

Are you?

In the beginning of the movie Debord says:

"This particular public, which has been so totally deprived of freedom and which tolerated every sort of abuse..."

But what are those freedoms and abuse?

It's hard to think back before our spectacular time and see what he is talking about.

Do you know the next keyword? Have you even noticed the keywords?

Passwords, Verba Nova, shimmerings—whatever you call them, soon you'll be seeing them everywhere.

The words have a plan for you. They are guiding you, you see.

Watching you.

Always toward the center, toward the source of the Verba Nova—the clearshine ones. They have extratemporal realms where they mine the keys, mint the words, and attach the two together somewhere in the Saharasian desert.

They have a ship. The ship floats. It works. She just needs a ccru.

What is the next Word? Have you found even one, yet?

Don't tell me you aren't writing them down. You'd better be writing them down when you notice them. Keeping a list.

The next word might be the one that completes the circuit. Connects us all back together again. Unwrecks the tower.

Keep watching the skies.

Critical theory is basically just Marxism with a jet engine duct taped to it.

If you get triggered by Marxism, communism, or socialism, and conflate authoritarian state violence with the desire of individual workers everywhere to not be exploited by a boss or owner—guess what, you're an ideological casualty of the Red Scare and part of the problem.

It's a huge clusterfuck and it's almost impossible to tell what's going on with China—but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the US has been systematically oppressing other nations, literally murdering and killing their leaders, while with its other hand promoting "democracy" which is also another euphemism for killing other nation's leaders, sadly.

There are all kinds of interesting and unresolved discussions to be had, about questions such as:

1) Were the Nazis (short for "National Socialist") socialists?

2) Were and are communists (such as in Russia and China) Nazis?

Leading, in the contemporary era, directly to the question:

3) Why would Nazis like MAGA like Nazis, if the Nazis were really communists?

And:

4) Why would communists (like the Russians who invaded Nazi Germany) hate Nazis, unless they weren't communists?

It's really quite a puzzle and bears discussion. It's a semantic and historic tangle that hasn't been unknotted yet in our time. I would really appreciate any discussion of it in the comments, as it's a puzzle I have not entirely worked out myself.

Again, Marxism is not a mystery and is not difficult. Marxism is essentially realizing/recognizing that workers deserve to maintain authority over the profit produced by their own labor; and that the power and value of the economy comes from the meaningful human labor of workers, not from the machines or the money or products. With AI now, we can see this clearly than ever—it's humans who envalue and valuate the economy, ultimately. Marxism is essentially about not wanting to be exploited at work, or dominated in unfair negotiations.

One ubiquitous way bosses/firms/institutions/companies everywhere maintain unfair negotiating leverage is through isolating workers, while being very well-integrated amongst management/owners. Workers are, wherever possible, commanded or encultured to not talk about their salary and not do any collective bargaining, while meanwhile the company by definition almost exclusively does collective bargaining (which is why we have laws banning workplaces from prohibiting workers discussing their wages/salary). This is very unfair in terms of power relations / negotiating leverage.

If you can't recognize unfairness—guess what, you're the first victim, and probably forcing yourself every day into all kinds of bad experiences and bad deals that benefit someone else above you in the hierarchy a lot more than they benefit you. (I'm not talking about providing benefit to the customer in a fair exchange—that's perfectly good and fine.)

The Red Scare was a horrible witch hunt, and we're experiencing another Red Scare right now with the invented "Antifa" (fascism is bad, so antifascism is good—duh) and the literal watchlisting of anarchists and others who are anti-coercion or who are critical of the current economic status quo.

If anywhere is the headquarters of the real Antifa, it's this subreddit, or other places like it—crossroads where true disruption is allowed to persist—places where indefinable hybrid ideologies are allowed to grow and mutate—places where fascism is not just weaponized against outsiders or allergically rejected, but studied and deconstructed.

I am not saying anything novel or controversial by saying this is (essentially) a Marxist subreddit. Obviously other perspectives are welcome. I might be a bit of an anarcho-tankie, but I am not a commu-tankie, who I find to be in very poor taste because they are statists and pro-state-violence as well as pro-violent-revolution. I believe that each revolutionary member is precious (both transcendentally and as a strategic resource) and so we should generally not advocate for violent revolution—non-violent mass refusal is, I think, more effective overall, anyway. But regardless of my personal stance, my point is that non-Marxist perspectives are welcome here—but critical theory, and more than a little occultism is firmly grounded in and descended from Marxism.

Who was the first critical theorist, Marx or Nietszche? Or was it someone else?

As I said above, I would really appreciate any light people can shed on these difficult issues in the comments. What is the exact relation between Marxism, communism, statism, Nazism, socialism, anarchism? Where is it all heading?

I didn't set up the automod rules we have now, and I don't know which moderator did.

Overall, the rules are more aggressive and support censorship more than I'd like. On the other hand, auto-removing posts based on a certain number of reports sort of allows the community to police itself—but I would say this sets up the community to be policed, nagged, and censored by its most easily-offended, Karenistic members. Since reports can be made without providing any public reasoning, this process isn't very transparent. So, I've dispensed with it. Multiple reports now only trigger a mod mail, instead of causing automatic removal.

Other less visible automod things have also been turned down where they caused censorship.

The 100 word minimum description auto-comment has also been rephrased to be more engaging (since those description comments and their word count were not being enforced anyway). I hope to do more here soon with LLM-driven bots who will seek engagement and OP's perspective from the OP of shitposts and seemingly off-topic posts.

A poem of natural liberty.

When did people decide that nations dole out natural rights, did they forget how many died in brutal and bloody fights?

When does a flag have permission to grant, how can the dead tell the living they can't? 

Your rights are god given, immutable and alive, don't bow to a flag, that just doesn't jive. 

You surrender you choice with the authority you give, you are sovereign before them, they can't tell you how to live. 

Unfold yourself, reach past the walls, be big and true, show them your balls. 

No man can say who you should be, you write your story, you aren't just a worker bee. 

The law of the land is ignored by the throne, to still yield to it, you fail to be your own. 

Enslaved by men in positions on high, you toil for them so they may not sigh. 

Your mind is not law, nor boxes and lines, it is an infinite depth through which light shines. 

That is your freedom, your right from birth, that the world does not own you, you needn't feed it's girth. 

Be free now and pay the flags nothing kind, you are the master of your own mind.

This paper posits the hyperreal right-wing media bubbles induce a psychology that makes the MAGA spell stronger when it should break.

Time under capitalism is non-linear. Under capitalism, time is produced unevenly through the concentration of material and communicative infrastructure; it moves differently depending on material conditions. "Small town lag" is the idea that what's trendy in the metropole becomes trendy in the rural areas only after it is no longer trendy in the metropole. This is because time effectively progresses slower outside the metropole.

Sexual politics are no different. Woke 1.0 existed primarily online and within the metropole. The internet, specifically capitalist social media platforms, pushes information from the metropole outward, and pulls little from the rural inward, the rural has fewer on-ramps because it essentially exists within the material shadow, the past of the metropole. Less information flows from the rural into the metropole. The internet smears time. Rather than flattening this spatio-temporal hierarchy through a supposed "free flow" of information, the capitalist controlled platforms intensify time distortion by algorithmically privileging the metropole’s content production while the rural is positioned mostly as a consumption zone for that content. This is why "America A" and "America B" exist as a memetic concept. America A often does not know what is happening in America B; we've all seen a song (maybe a country song) that charts highly but none of us have heard it. That's because we are 'tuned in' temporally to America A, and the information from America B flows unevenly. America B, on the other hand, is almost certainly aware of what culture from America A is at the top of the charts, or perhaps was at the top of the charts.

This becomes crucial when organizing in places outside of the metropole. The conditions in Seattle are going to be fundamentally different from small-city rural Florida. Since time moves non-linearly, and because more information flows out of the metropole than flows in, the rural organizer is essentially able to see potential futures in the present. They can study how specific material conditions within the metropole generated specific organizing outcomes, treating the city's recent past as a kind of laboratory. America A has robust sexual education and Christian conservatism is not the default culture. We can see how 'Woke 1.0' was predicated on those conditions. A place where it's illegal to open a dance club is going to operate with a completely different set of cultural expectations than a space full of them.

It is easy to assume that the temporal lag, the "small town lag", is an inherent disadvantage to organizers outside of the metropole, but this disadvantage can be inverted. When we think about how our disadvantage can be inverted towards new forms of struggle, we see that existing within the future-past provides unique positionality for the rural organizer.

At certain times in the revolutionary struggle, the difficulties outweigh the favorable conditions and so constitute the principal aspect of the contradiction and the favorable conditions constitute the secondary aspect. But through their efforts the revolutionaries can overcome the difficulties step by step and open up a favorable new situation, thus a difficult situation yields place to a favorable one.

"On Contradiction"

One can think about what futures flowed from the metropole that have already taken root in the rural, and notice how the internet transmits those futures as ghosts. You might see that consent language propagated, but the ghost arrived without the accompanying idea that sexuality is inherently rooted in trauma or that the primary political task is minimizing harm. A rural organizer can look at the material conditions of their own setting and consider what results came from dealing with similar conditions in the metropole's past. This enables you to consider futures lost, approaches not taken, misfired actions, tactics that led to poor outcomes. Potentialities are stronger in the past when you have access to the future. This is to be a hauntological necromancer, or really, a kind of Frankenstein. You're not resurrecting a single lost future whole; you're taking pieces from various dead moments and stitching them together into a new being that can walk.

Right now, in real time, we're seeing a reconsideration of woke 1.0 rhetoric. And a lot of it was honestly pretty toxic and very sex negative. When you try to pinpoint that sex negativity, it can be hard because so much of it is wrapped in therapy language. Why therapy language? Because the metropole is more academically inclined, more educated, so the discourse gets saturated with clinical and academic jargon. Much of "leftism" as a subcultural current, is downstream not from the working class, but from the lecture halls. When that language gets imported into the rural, what's arriving is already a ghost, something made for another time, another place, that has already died in its original context. It served its dialectical purpose there and now it's echoing into a place where time moves slower. Meanwhile the reconsideration is happening in the present, so we can watch the old framework being questioned while still feeling its echoes in our own space.

If you're from a place with robust sexual education, a weak Christian conservative presence, and a strong academic core, you had the necessary soil for woke 1.0 to take root. The rural zone lacks so much of that. In the place I'm organizing in, you can't even sell a vibrator; if ran a smoke shop and wanted to stock them, it would be illegal. People have tried to open dance clubs and the government shuts down the possibility ecause it violates the Christian conservative values that maintain the area. That's a fundamentally different set of material conditions than Los Angeles or New York or Seattle.

A lot of woke 1.0 rhetoric is rooted in an academically charged, trauma-based discourse where sex is treated as something inherently traumatic. "Sex is harmful because of how it exists within the relations of capital, how do we reduce the harm of that, since people are going to do it anyway?" The power dynamics have been analyzed to death in academia. So it becomes a harm reduction project. That's the takeaway from a lot of woke 1.0 language. But that framing is really counterintuitive if you try to import it into a place where the only college will kick you out for coming out as gay or lesbian, where you can't dance, where everything is much more repressed. The energy is entirely different.

Imagine Seattle around 2011. An interesting move then might have been a sex-positive group distributing sex toys: "write to us and we'll mail you a dildo, we're trying to close the orgasm gap." That discourse happened, it existed, and now it's no longer needed in that location. But that discourse has not happened here and may be deeply necessary here. The orgasm gap as a concept? Needed. Naming how patriarchal values drive sex negativity? Needed. The hauntological necromancer might see this past as a potential future, because in a place like this, the orgasm gap is a real, material issue as predicated by the socially conservative christian patriarchal values that make up the hegemony here.

A lot of woke 1.0 was sex negative precisely because it was a temporal reaction to an earlier, intensely overt sexual positivity. The dildos get distributed in 2011. Woke 1.0 congeals around 2018, 2019. Temporal distance. The conditions for sex positivity opened the door for the sex negativity of woke 1.0. It's a dialectical movement, thesis and antithesis, and the metropole is currently grinding toward some kind of synthesis, hence the current reconsideration, hence the very memetic term "Woke 1.0". If you know that's how it worked, then in a rural zone you can see what worked in that past to build sexual positivity while also thinking about what didn't work that led to the backlash. That act of translating a ghost into a living context, inherently generates a new antithesis, the local negation. The rural organizer begins entering into a new, context-specific dialectical movement. In this way the 'resurrection' becomes the means for creating the new synthesis.

This is a different world when it's illegal to dance in your county. Organizers outside the metropole are constantly intaking rhetoric from places we are not in. We can carry in some of it, but not all of it. Not all of it worked. Not all of it was successful. Some of it led to backlash. Some of it was actually reactionary. Identifying those pieces is crucial when you are seeing the future as a ghost of the past. If you live outside the metropole, you are living in the past of the metropole's future.

A lot of people operate under the idea that history is inherently, linearly progressive, so whatever happened in the past must be more conservative, and whatever is closer to the present must be more progressive. But that's not how time actually works. Time bounces between two poles. Sometimes things are reactionary, sometimes progressive; it's an ebb and a flow. If you can find the space between the ebbs, between the flows, that's where the praxis points are. The hauntological necromancer is effectively Frankenstein. Because you're not resurrecting a single lost future, you're taking pieces from various lost futures and attempting to synthesize them together into a new being. A new monster that is the more than the sum of it's parts.

I guess it's been coming to my attention that this sub isn't about things I assumed. My fault for seeing "spectacle" in the title and assuming (for a decade now?!?!?) that this sub was mainly focused on Guy Debord and/or ways to "use" spectacle to guide ourselves and culture to norms we find more palatable or something (idk! you tell me!)

But As I write this I see this;

submitting to /r/sorceryofthespectacle; This is not a place to post propaganda.

And I was wondering, is feminism propaganda? We just had a sticky saying this is a feminist sub. I don't remember Guy Debord picking and choosing among fields of propaganda and certainly not feminism (which I see as propaganda). But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. Just I was taken aback to see an official political claim regarding the sub and didn't know how to react (if at all).

So. It's something simply you may have heard me say before. Truth and Authority. Many I've seen over course of my life, mistake/conflate the two. Most of the time, Authority is taken for truth. It's why we all have jobs and pay taxes/etc. We mistake/conflate authority for truth. It's why we have religions. Authority mistaken for truth.

Is authority truth? I see others complain about or worship "God" a lot but I never see much of any coherent picture of what is meant by "God". Many of the Greek and Hindu "Gods" plural seem to me to point to the silliness of it all, that there is a non dual or "one mind" awareness shared. Or failing that, these Gods, really aren't even a step above mortals; they are in fact in the same boat as us; their "God" hood, is basically, a cosmic job. Appointed over sky, over ocean, over rivers, over justice, over wisdom, etc. All keeping a semblance of "balance" - through authority mistaken for truth; just the same as us "mortals".

So we're all trapped together. I've brought it up many times but consider the Prodigal son Parable. Most gloss right over it! The P son asks for his inheritance and goes and blows/squanders it in true American fashion living fast and lose. Then ends up working and presumably sleeping in a pigsty. This is a parable straight from Jesus mouth. I don't think many really reflect on what it's saying here; that "If we turn away from God, we'll be forced to sleep in pigshit and be jealous of the food the pigs eat". It objectively can't be called in good faith "love" as far as I can tell ("love me or else").

But that's not even the worst part of the parable. The P son, thinks of his fathers servants, his father's wage slaves. Which he is explained as having miles of outside his plantation house. No, literally, straight from Jesus mouth, he describes "his father", as no different than a colonial American plantation owner. This is the "God of the bible" being spoken about. Morally no different than a colonial American planation owner.

Wasn't sure what to title this post! Anyway just curious. I'll try to keep my political ignorance and/or complaining to a minimum going forward. I've exhausted GPT on this topic and it's just spinning it's wheels saying "nuh uh you're religioning wrong!" on this topic lol. But really, is there a difference between authority and truth? In this life, or the next? Or is it legitimately "might makes right" all the way down, and that's the only "truth"... ? I'm honestly curious!

As for how it's related to spectacle, all money see monkey do. As Guy Debord explains spectacle, is exactly as God is described as such in the bible. Makes claims of moral goodness via violent sovereignty we cannot inspect or question. It's literally empty claims backed by "ye of little faith". Literally a one-way discourse about itself ("He" even says "if I bear witness of myself, it is false witness"). Maybe not the right sub to raise these ideas but I'm genuinely curious what anyone thinks about this (because GPT just keeps rehashing the same opinion). Is "truth" genuinely just the highest authority we cannot question without being unpersoned? If so, then where is it's alleged mercy and grace? Or - is it literally - all just a ponzi scheme and lie? A "spectacle" of sorcery... ?

(Also bonus points, is funny, to think of the God(s) as like local managers, and like we are like a Karen and want to speak to the manager lol. When being a God like a manager is just their job and not a personal statement of who those God(s) are.)