This is a very good piece. The writer makes many points that I've held from a long time.
The conservative husbands of this country are wearing fake tits but yet we’re still paranoid about Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. Six seasons of the show** and what we’ve learned is that the American cultural imagination can only picture oppression when it comes wearing a bonnet and Sydney Sweeney’s bad acting in it.
Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia of coherence: the villain believes something, wears robes, follows hierarchy, holds a clipboard you can argue with, quotes scripture you can rebut. Evil has a structure and a recognizable shape. This is, medically speaking, cope. Comfort food for people who need their oppression narratively satisfying.
But the actual enemy we’re fighting right now requires no belief at all and no ideology you can argue against. We are fighting the void — a system organized around nothing except continuation, where meaning arrives in fragments that never add up, where atrocity and entertainment share the same feed with equal weight, where you can watch genocide between ads for probiotics and experience both as equally valid content.
There’s no villain to argue with because there’s no argument being made. Just the endless production of engagement that goes nowhere. This is the threat liberalism cannot name because naming it would implicate everything they’ve built.
TLDR;
We are in the dystopia. We should fear the path we're on, not a different one. We live in the void. None of us are exempt. In a sense, we're all trapped in the same dystopia. In a broad sense, we're all modern liberals. Just different flavors.
The problems of our world are a result of our world. Trump is not the problem. AOC is not the problem. They are the consequences.
A few years ago I read Rene Guenon - Crisis of the Modern World (which was interestingly written in 1920s).
Its one of those books that you may not agree 100% with every assertion he makes, but in the end the viewpoint he illustrates becomes "impossible to not see"....and it winds up reshaping how you see the world.
A very very summed up version is that: Modern world is a void of meaning. During the "enlightenment", man traded meaning for empty motion....individualism reframed the world and internalized everything to become subjective.
We were able to coast for a few decades because of the incredible inertia of meaning that pre-enlightenment society passed to us....but the meaning keeps collapsing in on itself and we've now reached a sort of black-hole moment where there is no meaning left whatsoever.
Its not simply "God is dead", but "words themselves are dead" (eg. what is a woman?).
After you start to see the world in that lens it reshapes how you see things like the great enlightenment thinkers, for example Descartes "I think therefore I am" - at an initial level that comes across as a completely sensible concept. But the more you ponder it, the crazier it starts to sound...because it reframes your very existence to become an internalized / subjective function.
It becomes easy to see how you get from that, to "every person is allowed to create their own atomized personal reality that need not connect to anything external".
the trend might be reversing. I read that church attendance is trending upwards again after decades of decline. maybe too early to tell, but I think people are searching for meaning
The current path leads no where. Literally. So it will change.
I think so. At least there are signs.
The scariest dystopias aren't always oppressive. Sometimes they're just empty.
I can't wait for the porno version of Handmaid's Tale
It arguably already is a type of porno to some. You're just not the intended audience.
The intended audience is female?
I don't always agree with what I read on stacker news... But I always find it interesting
Is it really a fight if you can just not engage?