What you describe is Utopia. People use this word as a substitute for Paradise. Everything is perfect, all your needs catered to. But that isn't a life.
Thomas More's Utopia had no crime and no sudden disruptions. Life was peaceful. But equally no one ever eloped, no one had a torrid affair. Nothing upset Utopia and that made Utopia fantastically boring. As a consequence Utopia produced no great symphonies, no great art or literature. Nothing can possibly inspire Utopians because nothing there carries any risk.
Utopia is society on life support; it basically works but would you want it?
Exactly! Beautifully put. I feel fortunate to have anyone read my articles at all haha, but I am truly blessed to have such intelligent readers who add so much with comments like this.
Sep 10, 2023·edited Sep 10, 2023Liked by Apollo's Lyre
I think this is the appeal of substack. These connections (more accurately, these discoveries) are organic. It feels authentic.
Compare to the mainstream, which is dying. Corporate bullshit all the way down. Manufactured consent via approved narratives. We can sense it is not quite legit.
If there really is a conspiracy against us plebs then its main focus is demoralization via isolation. Convincing you that you are alone, that it is only you thinking these thoughts. You are an oddball. You really ought to be more like everyone else and line up for your microchip so you can get your UBI digital food stamp.
But these kinds of articles remind us we are not alone in our thinking. There are lots of oddballs, lol. And we can all revel in our oddballery together, at least online. Anathema to those who would be our overlords.
The proponents of safetyism welcome the Nanny State with open arms. Retreat from responsibility and lack of agency have become the go to for many people. I suspect that a lot of these escape hatches are the reason many are turning away from becoming parents. It’s not just decline it’s nihilism. Thanks for putting into context the disastrous turn our society is leaning into.
Thank YOU for the kind words and brilliant comment! I think you are spot on about these "escape hatches" contributing to the decline in parenting. And that is global; I saw it lamented in Japan as well when I lived there years ago.
And you seem to be viewing all this similarly regarding nihilism too! I have another draft about generational religious shifts leading to our current zeitgeists nihilism that I need to get back to haha. Where do you think the milieu goes from here?
When people have been brainwashed and flooded with inaccurate and downright false reporting how do they come back into reality from that? I regret wholehearted believing in Bush Jr. I’m aghast that I could have e been that stupid. It took a while to realize what pure evil exists in that family. What woke me up is their insistence on bloodshed. Their cynical “American” pandering. It’s those who are the greatest threat to this country, using patriotism to send innocents to war for their benefit.
Can't beat yourself up over it. I used to believe plenty of things that now boggle my mind, and vote for "people" who I now think barely deserve that appellation haha.
What's important, I figure, is we are all on our own path and growing in awareness as we progress, to the best of our abilities. And as you point out, frankly, the deck is intentionally stacked against us with all the lies and indoctrination embedded in key institutions. We deserve a lot of credit for extricating ourselves from that system at all and for making it this far! : ) Down with tyranny and up with hope!
I style myself more as a darkenary. If you do not know less with certainty and possess more of a creeping sense of dread after having read one of my posts than beforehand, then I have failed at my self-appointed duty.
Thank you so much! The Anti-Life Duology was a lot of fun to write, and it gave me a chance to really explore a lot of the topics I've been grappling with through my weird, pop-culture addled-brain haha. It means the world to see you and others enjoying it and finding some value in that exploration.
I too have a pop culture addled brain. I am an 80s baby after all lol. You are not weird. What's that line from Swingers, " you're so money and you don't even know it" 😁
I appreciate you taking time to give it a read and for the gracious comment! It is great to have you on board, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my other mad musings haha
And I am really glad that you enjoyed that turn of a phrase regarding the basilisk stare! The old boy struck me as a great symbol, as his deadly, paralytic gaze terrifies both ancient, mystically minded Man through classical myth *and* also futurist, scientifically minded Man through the modern myth of Roko's Basilisk. He has, at least conceptually, transcended. And I believe wholeheartedly that with the much ballyhooed "death of God" and the withering of religious--and even more diffuse spiritual--belief systems in the zeitgeist of the West that a sort of Heideggerian, primal fear of death has lumbered up from the depths of that "God-shaped hole" to reach a devastating primacy in the minds of the citizenry, both as singularly terrifying and as singularly inevitable, afflicting that uniquely horrifying amalgam of death *and* paralysis, the exact stasis the basilisk and Anti-Life Equation conjure up.
The masses today are completely defenseless against this existential dread, having God and their soul torn from them, they are left only their ever-fleeting, ephemeral, corporeal existence and even that--they are told--is in constant peril from disease and violence and dumb fate from which (and here is the big sell from the clever authoritarians) only their Enlightened Expert/Ruling Class can save them in this ego-annihilating metonymocracy.
It reminds me of that great line from Fight Club: "You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
But I am getting ahead of myself again haha, as I actually have a whole theory as to how we descended from Durdenian wrestling with existentialism/flirting with nihilism into the full blown annihilism (my new term for annihilation-nihilism!) we find ourselves today. Stay tuned! :D
Those who trade freedom for safety deserve neither. But who are 'those'? Not us, clearly. Just writing anything like this is taking a risk today. We are out on a precipice and should acknowledge it. You ask in a comment below where do things go from here and I have to say it may get a lot darker and a lot worse. It also may be that the only way 'there' is 'through'.
That's right! Ol' Ben Franklin was a pretty smart dude. I wish more people would take his sagacious sentiment to heart.
And indeed, all of us resisting tyranny and standing for truth are to be commended in these dark times. Three cheers for us! I am happy and proud to be a part of the eclectic mix of people peacefully holding fast against this global psy-op in our own ways, and I know that even if it does get darker before the dawn, we will still make it through and emerge victorious in the end!
That's the spirit! We need much more of that feeling. People are so dispirited but they need to know that Despair is evil's greatest weapon and we must not give way to it.
Precisely right, my friend! As one of my Biblical faves beautifully states:
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." -- Ephesians 6:12
The Enemy tries to deceive us into thinking he is strong, that we are weak; that he has already won, that we have already lost. But these are merely the Loki-like illusions of a weak and cowardly Evil, conjured up in a vain, desperate, pathetic attempt to cheat the strong and the just of the righteous victory of which we are otherwise assured!
The Lyre makes the acute observation here that Darkseid and his Anti-Life Equation in Kirby's Fourth World mythos represent not Death but a fate worse than Death; hierarchical control, surrender of personal autonomy, interminable stasis, the lack of growth, innovation or change.
Death, curiously (or not) tends to be more positively depicted in both DC and Marvel Comics. In DC she's a cute, perky Goth.
First, please accept my sincerest gratitude for your time and your gracious and insightful reply. No matter how many Pulitzers or Nobels I get before this is all said and done haha, no accolades will every surpass my writing style being likened to Iron Mike's fighting style. As a huge fan of Tyson from his explosion onto the boxing scene to "Punch-Out!!" to "The Hangover" haha, reading your kind comment absolutely made my day.
And I kid you not, I was just talking to a friend about the idea of "writing to the bell," to coin a phrase, and how I do attempt to develop articles in the way you perspicaciously point out. I wouldn't claim to always succeed haha, but I'm going to keep refining my "Peek-a-Boo" writing as best I can thanks to your encouragement :)
I think your use of "curses" and "spells" to describe the type of psycho-linguistic sorcery occurring is also extremely clever and apt! And the "trigger warning curse" placed on certain media can absolutely serve multiple functions, e.g., warding people off a certain item in some cases, and also "poisoning" it (like the cursed apple) in others so that the mind worm placed at the core of the victim's mind will already predispose them to an adverse reaction to the information long before they even take a bite, often causing them to be unable to digest it, to regurgitate it, or in some cases to suffer extremely deleterious psycho-social damage from the ingested info.
I will definitely think on this more moving forward, and I look forward to reading more of your work. Take care!
What you describe is Utopia. People use this word as a substitute for Paradise. Everything is perfect, all your needs catered to. But that isn't a life.
Thomas More's Utopia had no crime and no sudden disruptions. Life was peaceful. But equally no one ever eloped, no one had a torrid affair. Nothing upset Utopia and that made Utopia fantastically boring. As a consequence Utopia produced no great symphonies, no great art or literature. Nothing can possibly inspire Utopians because nothing there carries any risk.
Utopia is society on life support; it basically works but would you want it?
Exactly! Beautifully put. I feel fortunate to have anyone read my articles at all haha, but I am truly blessed to have such intelligent readers who add so much with comments like this.
I think this is the appeal of substack. These connections (more accurately, these discoveries) are organic. It feels authentic.
Compare to the mainstream, which is dying. Corporate bullshit all the way down. Manufactured consent via approved narratives. We can sense it is not quite legit.
If there really is a conspiracy against us plebs then its main focus is demoralization via isolation. Convincing you that you are alone, that it is only you thinking these thoughts. You are an oddball. You really ought to be more like everyone else and line up for your microchip so you can get your UBI digital food stamp.
But these kinds of articles remind us we are not alone in our thinking. There are lots of oddballs, lol. And we can all revel in our oddballery together, at least online. Anathema to those who would be our overlords.
The proponents of safetyism welcome the Nanny State with open arms. Retreat from responsibility and lack of agency have become the go to for many people. I suspect that a lot of these escape hatches are the reason many are turning away from becoming parents. It’s not just decline it’s nihilism. Thanks for putting into context the disastrous turn our society is leaning into.
Thank YOU for the kind words and brilliant comment! I think you are spot on about these "escape hatches" contributing to the decline in parenting. And that is global; I saw it lamented in Japan as well when I lived there years ago.
And you seem to be viewing all this similarly regarding nihilism too! I have another draft about generational religious shifts leading to our current zeitgeists nihilism that I need to get back to haha. Where do you think the milieu goes from here?
When people have been brainwashed and flooded with inaccurate and downright false reporting how do they come back into reality from that? I regret wholehearted believing in Bush Jr. I’m aghast that I could have e been that stupid. It took a while to realize what pure evil exists in that family. What woke me up is their insistence on bloodshed. Their cynical “American” pandering. It’s those who are the greatest threat to this country, using patriotism to send innocents to war for their benefit.
Can't beat yourself up over it. I used to believe plenty of things that now boggle my mind, and vote for "people" who I now think barely deserve that appellation haha.
What's important, I figure, is we are all on our own path and growing in awareness as we progress, to the best of our abilities. And as you point out, frankly, the deck is intentionally stacked against us with all the lies and indoctrination embedded in key institutions. We deserve a lot of credit for extricating ourselves from that system at all and for making it this far! : ) Down with tyranny and up with hope!
Many props for your forthrightness and wisdom. All hail the Lyre!
Right back at ya, Angela! ;)
Everything dies, even black holes. Why not us?
To believe otherwise is at best folly, at worse hubris, and with the latter comes those mountains of corpses. You could say...
Death, uh, finds a way.
whoa, I got a shout-out. All honor should probably go to Jack Kirby.
But yes, the external universe does not exist for the purposes of one's personal comfort. Expecting it to is a path to disappointment.
Of course! It is a big inspiration for me to see what you, Phisto, and other luminaries here are up to haha. I am very grateful.
Case in point, your latest comment reminded me of this little gem from ol' Stevie Crane: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44049/a-man-said-to-the-universe
And yes of course all credit to Kirby too :)
I style myself more as a darkenary. If you do not know less with certainty and possess more of a creeping sense of dread after having read one of my posts than beforehand, then I have failed at my self-appointed duty.
Hahaha I love that! Can we form guilds on Substack? I want a Darkenary Guild!
Though it does kind of sound like Dark Canary, like a Dark-Flying type Pokemon.
Maybe stick with Latin root like in luminary? Tenebrinary? Obscurinary? Not sure haha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Occult_Hand
I think @Librarian of Caelano was just talking about forming guilds. He is a Man Of Ideas
Hot fire!! 💯
Thank you so much! The Anti-Life Duology was a lot of fun to write, and it gave me a chance to really explore a lot of the topics I've been grappling with through my weird, pop-culture addled-brain haha. It means the world to see you and others enjoying it and finding some value in that exploration.
I too have a pop culture addled brain. I am an 80s baby after all lol. You are not weird. What's that line from Swingers, " you're so money and you don't even know it" 😁
Great piece...will have to be visiting here. Fave phrase: "the basilisk stare of thanatophobic secular materialism."
I appreciate you taking time to give it a read and for the gracious comment! It is great to have you on board, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my other mad musings haha
And I am really glad that you enjoyed that turn of a phrase regarding the basilisk stare! The old boy struck me as a great symbol, as his deadly, paralytic gaze terrifies both ancient, mystically minded Man through classical myth *and* also futurist, scientifically minded Man through the modern myth of Roko's Basilisk. He has, at least conceptually, transcended. And I believe wholeheartedly that with the much ballyhooed "death of God" and the withering of religious--and even more diffuse spiritual--belief systems in the zeitgeist of the West that a sort of Heideggerian, primal fear of death has lumbered up from the depths of that "God-shaped hole" to reach a devastating primacy in the minds of the citizenry, both as singularly terrifying and as singularly inevitable, afflicting that uniquely horrifying amalgam of death *and* paralysis, the exact stasis the basilisk and Anti-Life Equation conjure up.
The masses today are completely defenseless against this existential dread, having God and their soul torn from them, they are left only their ever-fleeting, ephemeral, corporeal existence and even that--they are told--is in constant peril from disease and violence and dumb fate from which (and here is the big sell from the clever authoritarians) only their Enlightened Expert/Ruling Class can save them in this ego-annihilating metonymocracy.
It reminds me of that great line from Fight Club: "You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
But I am getting ahead of myself again haha, as I actually have a whole theory as to how we descended from Durdenian wrestling with existentialism/flirting with nihilism into the full blown annihilism (my new term for annihilation-nihilism!) we find ourselves today. Stay tuned! :D
Those who trade freedom for safety deserve neither. But who are 'those'? Not us, clearly. Just writing anything like this is taking a risk today. We are out on a precipice and should acknowledge it. You ask in a comment below where do things go from here and I have to say it may get a lot darker and a lot worse. It also may be that the only way 'there' is 'through'.
That's right! Ol' Ben Franklin was a pretty smart dude. I wish more people would take his sagacious sentiment to heart.
And indeed, all of us resisting tyranny and standing for truth are to be commended in these dark times. Three cheers for us! I am happy and proud to be a part of the eclectic mix of people peacefully holding fast against this global psy-op in our own ways, and I know that even if it does get darker before the dawn, we will still make it through and emerge victorious in the end!
That's the spirit! We need much more of that feeling. People are so dispirited but they need to know that Despair is evil's greatest weapon and we must not give way to it.
Precisely right, my friend! As one of my Biblical faves beautifully states:
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." -- Ephesians 6:12
The Enemy tries to deceive us into thinking he is strong, that we are weak; that he has already won, that we have already lost. But these are merely the Loki-like illusions of a weak and cowardly Evil, conjured up in a vain, desperate, pathetic attempt to cheat the strong and the just of the righteous victory of which we are otherwise assured!
The Lyre makes the acute observation here that Darkseid and his Anti-Life Equation in Kirby's Fourth World mythos represent not Death but a fate worse than Death; hierarchical control, surrender of personal autonomy, interminable stasis, the lack of growth, innovation or change.
Death, curiously (or not) tends to be more positively depicted in both DC and Marvel Comics. In DC she's a cute, perky Goth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_(Marvel_Comics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Endless
First, please accept my sincerest gratitude for your time and your gracious and insightful reply. No matter how many Pulitzers or Nobels I get before this is all said and done haha, no accolades will every surpass my writing style being likened to Iron Mike's fighting style. As a huge fan of Tyson from his explosion onto the boxing scene to "Punch-Out!!" to "The Hangover" haha, reading your kind comment absolutely made my day.
And I kid you not, I was just talking to a friend about the idea of "writing to the bell," to coin a phrase, and how I do attempt to develop articles in the way you perspicaciously point out. I wouldn't claim to always succeed haha, but I'm going to keep refining my "Peek-a-Boo" writing as best I can thanks to your encouragement :)
I think your use of "curses" and "spells" to describe the type of psycho-linguistic sorcery occurring is also extremely clever and apt! And the "trigger warning curse" placed on certain media can absolutely serve multiple functions, e.g., warding people off a certain item in some cases, and also "poisoning" it (like the cursed apple) in others so that the mind worm placed at the core of the victim's mind will already predispose them to an adverse reaction to the information long before they even take a bite, often causing them to be unable to digest it, to regurgitate it, or in some cases to suffer extremely deleterious psycho-social damage from the ingested info.
I will definitely think on this more moving forward, and I look forward to reading more of your work. Take care!